Creative Cognition and the Cultural Panorama of Twentieth-Century Spain

C. Gala

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137499868
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This multidisciplinary study focuses on the creative state as the nucleus of the work of numerous poets, artists, and philosophers from twentieth-century Spain. Beginning with cognitive science, Gala explores the mental processes and structures that underline creative thinking, for poets like José María Hinojosa, Clara Janés, and Jorge Guillén.

Chapter 1

Creative Convulsion: José María Hinojosa and La Flor de Californía

José María Hinojosa’s book, La flor de Californía (1928), concludes with the prediction that the air, after flowing around the world, will come back loaded with questions, at which point “nuestros cuerpos se cubrirán de llagas por donde alcanzará su libertad la sangre y el aire meterá sus dedos hasta tocar nuestras entrañas” [our bodies will be covered with wounds through which blood will achieve its freedom and the air will go inside until its fingers touch our entrails] (184). This image of bleeding bodies summarizes the knowledge the poet has achieved at the close of his creative journey. It subverts Christian imagery, which Hinojosa knew well from his Catholic upbringing, because these bleeding bodies do not offer any transcendence beyond suffering for the sake of freedom. The lines predict a future day when “tu sangre y mi sangre y la sangre de todos los hombres” [your blood and my blood and every man’s blood] will gush forth from the Earth “en mil surtidores que inundarán nuestras tumbas y quedará enrojecido eternamente el manantial del aire de donde sólo manará aire rojo” [in a thousand water jets that shall flood our graves and the fountainhead of the air will be forever reddened from which only red air will flow] (184).

Some critics read this image of the reddened air in political terms as a reflection of Hinojosa’s adherence to Marxism during a period in his life. It does certainly predict a collective revolution in the future to liberate blood—the fluid of life and passion—from societal restrictions. And to complete his prediction, Hinojosa replaces the choirs of angels—which on that final day will supposedly sing the glories of the above—with a choir of voices that “por el arco iris” [through the rainbow] will raise the universal voice of blood, announcing freedom in a new and future era. There is a gesture of defiance and denunciation in these bodies exhibiting their suffering so openly, as if they were manifesting to everyone the unjust lot they have been given. If Thomas had to touch Christ’s wound to verify its truth, Hinojosa’s speaker predicts that the air’s fingers will also verify the truth of humanity’s pain, revealing it for everyone to see.

Those bleeding bodies multiply the image of Saint Sebastian’s body pierced by arrows, an icon that so interested Hinojosa’s friends, Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí, for the personal and aesthetic implications they found in the saint’s figure. Like the saint, the extreme situation of these bodies—in a middle ground between living and dying—exposes human pain as the price for freedom. It is the image that expresses the convulsion and rift that define Hinojosa’s creative state. The writing of La flor de Californía articulates the many obstacles the poet faces in his journey to that future freedom and the overall state of division that marks this poet’s creativity.

The fourteen texts included in La flor de Californía trace a creative process marked by the poet’s inner conflict between the opposing forces of erotic desire and religious principles, art and reality, life and death, and, overall, the split of body and mind. For most critics, Hinojosa, in spite of his efforts, fails in his attempt to free himself from his conservative upbringing, surrendering at the end in favor of religion.¹ This sweeping interpretation needs to be reconsidered because, although the restrictions of religion and established cultural values in this collection are undeniable, Hinojosa remains defiant of such principles, denouncing their pernicious effects on human nature. It is his resistance that causes a state of inner convulsion.

The future freedom the poet predicts is not a sudden revelation or epiphany, but the result of a creative process by way of memories and reconstructions from dreams or hypnagogic states. Hinojosa’s image of bleeding bodies may refer also to both poet and reader in their journey of writing and reading the book—both engaged in exploring the real process of thought that André Breton’s First Manifesto identified as surrealism’s goal; that is, the belief that deep inside there are meanings that need to be brought forth (Manifestoes 26). Also in the Manifesto, Breton identified the hypnagogic state, or the state at onset of sleep, as the most conducive to reach surreality when contradictions no longer hold (14). Breton also discussed extended metaphors, attributing them to the hypnagogic state and automatic writing. In the flow of images, Breton noted the need to pay attention to the space that words admit in their surroundings (20-21)—in their tangential contacts with other words—and remarked on the solidarity held by words and groups of words following one another. Breton was describing analogy as a creative and cognitive tool whose value increases the more disparate or distanced the correlated elements are.

It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which Hinojosa wrote directly from a state at onset of sleep (hypnagogic) or gradual awakening (hypnopompic). His texts are filled with nonlinear associations with some resemblance of plot, quite similar to Breton’s extended metaphors. Critics have entertained the question of whether or not La flor de Californía is a surrealist book, just as they have wondered if it is possible to speak of surrealism in Spain.² The prevailing belief is that La flor de Californía is the first work published in Spain in the surrealist vein. Whether or not Spanish poets adhered to automatic writing, it is evident that this book reflects what Michael Riffaterre calls the “dream effect,” a term related to “automatic effect” (202). As Riffaterre explains, metaphor is a “process of formal word association” in which representation is disrupted since the associated signifiers have signifieds that are incompatible (206, 207). The critic clarifies that instead of “automatic writing,” the term should be “automatic effect” since such images could be the result of a very conscious effort to oppose the appropriateness and semantic harmony of conventional writings by replacing “a word with its satellites and tonal unity with continuous transcoding” (232). While images seem to be arbitrary, “in the reality of the text, they are rigorously determined by the verbal sequence and are, therefore, justified and appropriate within the framework of a given poem” (202).

Hinojosa uses metaphors not for embellishment, but as tools for cognition because they guide the way he constructs his viewpoint (see Colm Hogan 88).³ Rather than approach these works thinking that they reflect unconscious thought, it is better to see their artistic value residing “in their appearance of doing so” (Riffaterre 238-239). Words in surrealist automatic writing become active elements because they are no longer expected to reflect reality, but to “construct” it.⁴ Hinojosa’s flow of images is fast and complex, often marked by foresight and prediction, resorting to working memory and flexibility in rearranging information in new and unusual ways. His prediction of future freedom generates expectations and, as Dietrich explains, it facilitates the dealing with obstacles, which, in Hinojosa’s case, always come from religious and societal prescriptions (“The Mechanics of Thought”). The future freedom of the blood thus works as the image that not only summarizes the search but directs it.

Convulsion is part of this poet’s trademark and creative activity. In surrealism, convulsion refers to the overturning of the conventions, disguises, and masks one is forced to adopt in order to function in society, reach personal and creative authenticity, and reach the surreality level, where it will be possible to overcome contradictions. Convulsive beauty allows one to submerge in jouissance, an experience that paradoxically involves a foretaste of death;⁵ it responds to Breton’s maxim that “beauty will be convulsive or will not be” (at the end of his novel Nadja), revised by Max Ernst, to “identity will be convulsive or will not be” (qtd. in Adamowicz 31).⁶ In the 1929 Second Manifesto, Breton referred to it as a “gleam of light” (Manifestoes 126) or state of revelation. Hinojosa’s book involves this convulsive defiance of values and the author’s search for the truth that lies under the surface.

The framing image for the book is a journey in search of quite an unusual flower from a nonexistent land—Californía (it could be the real California, but is not exactly)—and it is a flower that suggests “fornicar” [fornicate], as in “-Coge la flor de Californía. Fornía, Fornía, Fornía, Fornía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía” [-Pick the flower of Californía, fornía, fornia, fornía, fornía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía, nía] (151). It also rhymes with the poet’s name, José María.⁷ Standing on the boundary between the real and the fantastic, sexuality, and the ideal meaning usually attributed to flowers, the flower of Californía represents a goal: a “new space” of surreality where the outer and inner worlds (California/Californía) come together, with implications regarding the poet’s personal and artistic identity. This search was very personal for Hinojosa, who had to face the conflict between his desire to assert himself as a writer, his family’s opposition, and his strict Catholic upbringing. His trip to Paris (April 1925-August 1926), where he made contacts with surrealism, opened the way for writing as a venue to express his desire for personal freedom and artistic affirmation. Hinojosa must have been very aware of the innovative aesthetic value of his book and the impact it would have on his poet friends and family.

The book consists of two parts with seven titled Narraciones [Narrations] in the first, and seven untitled Textos oníricos [Oneiric Texts] in the second. The narrations are written in past tense suggesting that the poet is remembering some dream or obsessive idea. They tell allegorical stories dealing with the poet’s personal and artistic search, exhibiting the function of the working memory in restructuring thoughts. The oneiric texts are mostly in the present and, instead of stories, their main focus is the poet’s creative process. In his letter-prologue to the book, José Moreno Villa refers to these writings as a “delicious imaginary voyage” in which lines advance and curve around seemingly nonsensical allusions and connections that all of a sudden congeal in a simple but enlightened sentence (“Carta al autor” 148). The book must be approached from a “logic of feeling rather than reason,” because only through emotion is it possible to gauge the necessary sympathy to appreciate this surrealist work: “Perhaps the key to Surrealism is no other than that,” adds Moreno Villa (“Carta al autor” 148). Surrealism appeals to emotion and sympathy in joining the poet as he crosses over boundaries to unknown realms. In the process, images metamorphose, avoiding always the static stance, and producing a “kaleidoscopic effect,” which for Rattray is “reminiscent of the dream experience as well as of the narcotic experience” (“The Hallucinogenic” 164).⁸

In a generation of poets known for the friendship among its members, José María Hinojosa was certainly excluded from the consideration one would hope to receive from one’s friends. During his life, he was made fun of for his way of reciting poetry—accused of being a poser rather than a true poet—and envied for being rich.⁹ That Hinojosa sided with the nationalists while his friends favored the republicans, must have contributed to his demise from the group’s memory. It is thus telling to read the many names of friends to whom Hinojosa dedicates the Narraciones in La flor—Altolaguirre, Cernuda, Martín Saralegui, Fernando M. Milicua, Fernando G. Mercadal, Joaquín Peinado, Emilio Prados—and the Textos oníricos, dedicated to José Moreno Villa. Hinojosa wanted his friends to know about his writings and hopefully receive their approval. It is likely also that he wanted to “epatar” [shock] as José Bello has said (Sánchez Rodríguez, Este film inacabado 30), although authenticity must have been especially meaningful for Hinojosa since his friends did not value his work, and thought of him as a rich young man posing as a poet rather than being truly committed to his art.¹⁰

His early writings give proof of Hinojosa’s commitment to poetry as a path to knowledge in the midst of self-doubts about his creative abilities. In Poema del campo [Poem of the Countryside] (1924), the poet’s gaze focuses on aspects of the landscape—mountain, sea, sky—­attempting to capture their essence (what makes them be what they are) while, at the same time, experiencing within himself the “panal” [honeycomb] of poetry, but lacking or unable to find the “lips” to articulate it. In “Sueños” [Dreams] from Poesía de perfil [Poetry in Profile] (1925), where Julio Neira traces the beginning of surrealism (Viajero de soledades 145, 217), the speaker asks to “embadurnar” [paint] his body with darkness and silence in order to obliterate the surface appearance of self, and go deeply into his dreams.¹¹ He also wants to penetrate what he calls the “trama” [intricate plot] of nature and of all the voices from plants and insects in order to understand cosmic truth.

As the young poet explores nature, he sees that all is relative since things change depending on the angle of perspective. While perception opens a wide array of possibilities, it also brings a great deal of uncertainty, as reality becomes more and more unpredictable. In “Hacia la libertad” [Towards Freedom] (Orillas de la luz [Shores of Light]), poetic writing is synonymous with freedom—a major goal in surrealism, but a most difficult one to reach for this poet who is constantly struggling with constraints imposed upon him by his Catholic education and conservative family.

La flor de Californía: Narraciones

In La flor de Californía, the main strategy in the creative process is convulsion, by which well-established religious, mythological, linguistic, and symbolic structures are upturned, resulting in a new order of things. To begin with in the first narration, entitled as the book “La flor de Californía” [The Flower of Californía], the mandate for the creative search/journey comes from an unusual looking dark-haired female creature with breasts of zinc and wearing a wax maillot. Obsessively repeated, the mandate appeals to the poet directly: “José María, José María, coge la flor de Californía” [José María, José María, pick the flower from Californía] (151). The identification of the poetic traveler with the flesh and blood person by that name confirms the personal nature of this book, besides and beyond its aesthetic import. The backdrop for this mandate is not only the scene of the Annunciation in Christianity but also the proverbial hero in search of some valuable treasure. Hinojosa’s text upturns both models, for this “hero” goes in search of no Golden Fleece, but of an unusual flower; and instead of the angel Gabriel with his lily, the messenger for the mandate is a female creature with an unusual appearance and an equally unusual behavior.¹²

Furthermore, the church where the announcement is made is filled with strident colors, artificial flowers, popular music, and columns that change shape. This hero suffers the troubles and tribulations afflicting heroes in traditional narratives, except that instead of monsters and mysterious, evil forces, they involve bad smells, dismemberments, and deafening noise. His progress is also impeded by knots around his feet, forcing him to take very small steps. He calls those knots “suspension points” ending in a “resbalón” [slip up]. These allusions to the literary nature of the search are particularly poignant considering the ridicule Hinojosa suffered from his friends.

As part of the tests the traveler has to undergo, he encounters a tunnel with an inscription at its entrance: CRISTO ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  Creative Convulsion: José María Hinojosa and La Flor de Californía
• 2  Creative Dialectics: José Moreno Villa and Jacinta la pelirroja
• 3  Creative Measurements: Plastic-Dynamic Development in Maruja Mallo’s Naturalezas Vivas
• 4  Creative Beatitude: Jorge Guillén and Baruch Spinoza
• 5  Creative Quietude. A Transdisciplinary Encounter: Clara Janés, Eduardo Chillida, and María Zambrano
• 6  Creative Artifacts: Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Post-Poetry Proposal (Sharing Thoughts with Wittgenstein)
• Closing Remarks
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index