The interplay of illusion and reality as the subject matter of literature has, in the modern context, often been considered the particular invention and virtually exclusive province of Pirandello but, as one critic has aptly said in this connection, “it is so far from being a peculiarly Pirandellian theme as to be perhaps the main theme of literature in general.” In the case of Spanish literature in particular the reversible relationship of the real and the imaginative, of art and life, has been responsible for the Pirandellian type of inversion centuries before the advent of the Italian playwright. Américo Castro has written of Cervantes and Pirandello, while Angel del Río traces as far back as the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor of Juan Ruiz “a feature which, if not exclusive, is quite characteristic of Spanish literature … the intervention and even the personal appearance of the author in the work.” Significant, however, as is the appearance of what Joseph Gillet calls the “autonomous character,” the presence in a work of a fictional character who claims equality with his creator or of an author who projects himself into his work as a fictional being is only a symptom, or at best the result, of a general aesthetic which is the expression of a profound metaphysical concept. In short, it is the reflection of a particular concept of reality, the expression of a way of life. This is the conclusion of Américo Castro in the particular case of the Libro de buen amor in his study of which he arrives at the conviction that “the poet's manner of entering into his literary reality and installing himself in it, is characteristic of the Arabic way of life” (p. 406). The functional fluidity of the art of the work is that of the arabesque, of endless open lines alternating between “ins” and “outs” (p. 413). This aesthetic in turn is the product of a vision of the world in which things have no fixed, immutable position—as they do in the Occidental world, constructed out of the Greek idea of the substantial being of things—but are as real in the experience of the conscious person as in the imagination of the sleeper (p. 416). Consequently, in the literature which expresses this interpretation of reality, nothing is thought of or represented as absolute existence, bounded by either a real or ideal limit (p. 439). In the oriental concept of reality, Castro sums up, everything is interpenetrable and interchangeable (p. 439, n. 68).
Menéndez y Pelayo y el Libro de buen amor