Lorca's Legacy

Essays in Interpretation

Jonathan Mayhew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429941542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Lorca's Legacy, Jonathan Mayhew explores multiple aspects of the creative and critical afterlife of Federico García Lorca, the most internationally recognized Spanish poet and playwright of the twentieth century. Lorca is an iconic and charismatic figure who has evoked the admiration and fascination of musicians, poets, painters, and playwrights across the world since his tragic assassination by right-wing forces in 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War. This volume ranges widely, discussing his influence on American theater, his much-debated lecture on the duende, his delayed encounter with queer theory, his influence on contemporary Spanish poetry, and other relevant topics. The critical literature on Lorca is vast, and original contributions are comparatively rare, but Mayhew has found a way to shed fresh light on his legacy by looking with a critical eye at the creative transformations of his life and work, both in Spain and abroad. Lorca's Legacy celebrates the wealth of material inspired by Lorca, bringing to bear a sophisticated, theoretically informed critical perspective. This book will be of enormous interest to anyone interested in the international projection of Spanish literature, or anyone who has felt the fascination of Lorca's duende.

1 Hermeneutical Introduction

What is the relation between the knowledge possessed by the literary critic or theorist and the theoretical self-awareness we impute to a figure like Federico García Lorca? To determine what Lorca knew requires considerable erudition, an erudition that paradoxically surpasses the (ostensible) knowledge of the author himself. According to Julián Jiménez Heffernan, “Lorca y Vallejo han sido durante demasiado tiempo nuestros poetas tontos, aplastados por dos losas absurdas, el indigenismo y el infantalismo. Sonoros pero tontos.”¹ [Lorca and Vallejo have been for too long our dumb poets, weighed down by two absurd tombstones, indigenism and infantilism. Sonorous, but dumb.] What this astute critic is denouncing here is the tendency to condescend to Lorca (and to other poets like Vallejo) by conflating aspects of their authorial personae or background with the question of their status as poetic thinkers. He argues that it is a mistake to regard José Ángel Valente, notorious for his theoretical self-consciousness, as fundamentally different from Lorca: “Si Lorca era tonto, Valente es tonto.”² [If Lorca was dumb, Valente is dumb.] Without disagreeing with this insight, I would state it in reverse: if Valente is a “smart,” theoretically aware poet, then why deny this status to Lorca.

The condescension denounced by Jiménez Heffernan is compatible with the equal and opposite tendency to put Lorca on a pedestal. Adulation is also an obstacle to any real critical engagement, since it places the author’s poetic thought out of reach. From one perspective, Lorca’s poetics seems unworthy of the status of literary theory, because of its “dumbness” or naiveté. Yet it is also the manifestation of an other-worldly daimonic power, the duende, beyond the reach of intellectual explanation. In either case, both condescension and excessive adulation forestall a genuinely theoretical encounter with Lorca.

This simultaneous condescension and awe is, of course, the heritage of the romantic cult of individual genius. In many respects, Lorca criticism remains resolutely romantic in its ideology, but the remedy, in my view, is not to condescend to romanticism, but to rise to the intellectual level of its greatest achievements, recognizing the full complexity of romantic hermeneutics. With the term “romantic hermeneutics” I am referring not merely to the contributions of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, but to a broader tradition beginning with Johan Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Hölderlin, among other German romantic poets and philosophers, and continuing with Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, as well as Jacques Derrida and Harold Bloom. This tradition includes the branch of translation theory that takes its inspiration from Schleiermacher and his contemporaries, culminating in Walter Benjamin, Antoine Berman, and Lawrence Venuti. Even more significantly, romantic hermeneutics also overlaps considerably with what is understood as belonging to the category of poetics—that is, both the prose texts that poets write to explore their own art and the poetics implicit in the poetry itself. This tradition, stretching from Hölderlin to contemporary figures Robert Duncan and José Ángel Valente, is the self-reflective hermeneutics of romanticism itself, the means by which romanticism reinterprets and reinvents itself.

Acknowledging Lorca himself as a theorist of poetry, the critic should engage in theory on the same level, avoiding both condescension and hagiography. Needless to say, the attempt to rise to the level of the object of study requires a healthy respect for the enormous difficulty, if not impossibility, of this task. Lorca’s poetics—as I construe it—informs my own approach to his work. Pragmatically, the solution to this problem might take the form of “mere competence”: in other words, the basic principles of literary theory and criticism—intelligently deployed, of course—might be sufficient for an understanding of Lorca’s place within the tradition of romantic hermeneutics to which he belongs—at least as a first step. Lorca’s own poetics emphasizes both a principle of inspiration (by muse or duende) and an unpretentiously pragmatic knowledge of what it means to write a poem:

En mis conferencias he hablado a veces de la Poesía, pero lo que no puedo hablar es de mi poesía. Y no porque soy un inconsciente de lo que hago. Al contrario, si es verdad que soy poeta por la gracia de Dios -o del demonio-, también lo es que lo soy por la gracia de la técnica y del esfuerzo, y de darme cuenta en absoluto de lo que es un poema.³

[In my lectures I have spoken of Poetry, but what I can’t speak of is my poetry. And not because I am unconscious of what I am doing. On the contrary, if it is true that I am a poet by the grace of God—or the devil—it is also true that I am a poet by grace of technique and effort, and of having an absolute awareness of what a poem is.]

This dual perspective is helpful: the critic does not need to aspire to be a romantic genius, but merely to be astute, well-trained, and conscious of the magnitude of the task.

One of the goals of this introduction, then, is to reimagine the study of Lorca from the perspective of “Literary Theory 101.” What is needed is an elementary awareness of the principles of criticism that we would expect a graduate student to have assimilated in an introductory course: literature is not valuable primarily for its propositional content (Cleanth Brooks’s “The Heresy of Paraphrase”); the meaning of the text is not identifiable with the author’s conscious intention—or even less with the essence of his or her personality as uncovered by a crudely psychoanalytical hermeneutics (the “intentional fallacy” denounced by Wimsatt and Beardsley); the biographical author must be distinguished from the “author-function” (Foucault); sexual desire and identity are not fixed essences, but an epistemological conundrums (Sedgwick).⁴ And so on.

Even taking into account the necessary work of scholars like Paul Julian Smith and Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Lorca studies, in my estimation, is still severely undertheorized. One reason why a large proportion of the secondary literature on Lorca is of questionable quality, perhaps, is because the ordinary principles for literary analysis do not seem to apply to certain canonical writers like Lorca. Most well-trained graduate students are highly resistant to biographical approaches, even as they remain open to every other conceivable variety of historical contextualization. Yet Lorca studies is still plagued by the genetic fallacy in various forms. Critics like Paul Julian Smith, who constructs Lorca as an “author-function,” are still all too rare:

To read Lorca in a Foucauldian way would be to resist the compulsion to erase difference and to make visible the multiple subjectivities confined within the single “individual.” This would not be to invert traditional criticism and claim that the writing subject is wholly absent from the text. Rather, it would be to suggest […] that the proper name “Lorca” arises in the gap or scission between mouthpiece and writer, in the variable space which always separates the two. The ruthless selectivity of the author-function might then give way to a (freer) circulation of meaning.⁵

It does not follow, though, that “Lorca’s dramatic discourse is transparent: that there are no hidden secrets or transcendent meanings,” simply because “there is no absolute subject to have created them.”⁶ The author-function, far from rendering dramatic (or lyric) discourse transparent, complicates hermeneutics by further multiplying the possibilities beyond a naïve grounding in biography.

While the initial goal of reading Lorca with the principles of Literary Theory 101 might seem modest, it prepares the way for a deeper consideration of Lorca’s work from the perspective of a more advanced theoretical consciousness—that of Literary Theory 201, perhaps. Here the task would not merely be the avoidance of naïve simplifications, but a nuanced and intelligent engagement with Lorca’s thought. Setting the agenda for Lorca studies is obviously not a task for a single individual. Since Lorca is not a fixed essence, my own proposals must be open-ended, allowing for the possibility—or rather the certainty—that other readers will build their own models in different ways. That being said, the agenda I propose is not mine alone, since it takes into account a hermeneutic horizon derived from the work of Enrique Álvarez, Andrew Anderson, Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Paul Julian Smith, Julián Jiménez Heffernan, Carlos Piera, Roberta Quance, Christopher Maurer, and Andrés Soria Olmedo—among many others. My perspective, then, is not an idiosyncratic one, but instead reflects a synthesis of the most canny contemporary thinking about Lorca. The common element of this thinking is that it opposes attempts to flatten, domesticate, or otherwise oversimplify the legacy of Lorca’s radically modernist hermeneutics and poetics.

The good news is that romantic hermeneutics licenses a certain amount of interpretive “play,” so that even critical gestures that appear manifestly inadequate may produce great insight. Lorca, as I argued in Apocryphal Lorca, is a Protean figure characterized by Keatsian negative capability.⁷ As the young Lorca wrote,

… es imprescindible ser uno y ser mil para sentir las cosas en todos sus matices. Hay que ser religioso y profano. Reunir el misticismo de una severa catedral gótica con la maravilla de la Grecia pagana. Verlo todo, sentirlo todo. En la eternidad tendremos el premio de no haber tenido horizontes.⁸

[It is indispensable to be one and to be a thousand so as to feel things in all their nuances. To be religious and profane. To join the mysticism of a severe Gothic cathedral to the marvels of pagan Greece. To see, to feel it all. In eternity we will reap the reward of not having had horizons.]

In the poética written for Gerardo Diego’s 1922 anthology, similarly, he expresses an attitude of fundamental aesthetic receptivity:

Yo comprendo todas las poéticas; podría hablar de ellas si no cambiara de opinión cada cinco minutos. No sé. Puede que algún día me guste la poesía mala muchísimo, como me gusta (nos gusta) hoy la música mala con locura. Quemaré el Partenón por la noche para empezar a levantarlo por la mañana y no terminarlo nunca.⁹

[I understand all poetics; I could talk about them if I didn’t change my mind every five minutes. I don’t know. Someday I might really like bad poetry, like the way I (we) madly love bad music. I will burn the Parthenon at night so I can start raising it again in the morning and never finish it.]

Lorca, then, exuberantly rejects fixed horizons of aesthetic reception, reserving the right to change his mind whenever he wishes. His poetry remains particularly resistant to unitary interpretations, those that insist on a univocal key that will unlock all the secrets of his work. It is true that his life and work also seem to invite oversimplifications, but the tendency toward interpretative closure must be resisted for as long as possible. The worst way of getting Lorca wrong is to impose arbitrary limits on the interpretation of his work or to insist on facile “keys.”

I have also argued, elsewhere, that Lorca is a theorist of the principle of “receptivity,” defined as the capacity to remain open to a variety of aesthetic experiences.¹⁰ His work thus encourages us to view the reading of literature as transformative experience (or Bildung) rather than as the basis for constructing arguments that conform to the institutionally defined rules of acceptable academic criticism. Following Rita Felski, I also suggested that Lorca poses a challenge to both “ideological” and “theological” approaches to literary criticism—those rooted in an oversimplifying “hermeneutics of suspicion” and those that somewhat naively celebrate literature’s transformative power while pushing intellectual analysis to the side. From this perspective, the task of rising to the level of Lorca takes on a different color: the problem is to define a critical approach that is capable of acknowledging ideological pitfalls (including, among other issues, Lorca’s aestheticization of violence, his Spanish cultural exceptionalism, his orientalism, and his internalized homophobia) even as it attempts to account for the persistent power of his poetry.

In her groundbreaking book The Uses of Literature, Felski explores four categories of response, recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock, proposing a neo-phenomenological approach that calls into question the limited scope of academic hermeneutics. In the short essay “Beyond Suspicion,” Felski argues that “the hermeneutics of suspicion” has led to a devaluing of many forms of readerly response:

Art is the quintessentially mood-altering substance. Broaching questions of aesthetic emotion virtually guarantees surges of animation and spirited engagement in the classroom, as I’ve also found in discussions of the sublime, perhaps the only affective response to have gained a dose of critical respect. Yet a wide spectrum of responses remains unexamined and unaccounted for: trance-like states of immersion o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Hermeneutical Introduction
• 2 What Lorca Knew: A Reading of the Duende Lecture
• 3 Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetics of Cultural Exceptionalism
• 4 The Grain of the Voice: Poetry and Performance
• 5 An Anatomy of Influence: Lorca in Contemporary Spanish Poetry
• 6 New York Variations: O’Hara, Motherwell, Strayhorn
• 7 Lorca on the American Stage (from Prometheus in Granada to Barbarous Nights)
• 8 Sexual Epistemologies: The Whitman Ode
• 9 The Lorca Myth
• Bibliography
• Index