Introduction
The avant-garde movement, in Europe like
in Spain, constitutes a stage of enormous interest, a bubbling up of experiences
that suppose a rupture and leads to one fecund renovation
of the concept of literature and the poetic language. In Spain, the avant-garde was translated to very original,
universal and renovated formulas. The poets of the “Generation ‘27” largely
nourished themselves from avant-garde movements and, without
becoming orthodox in their affiliation, contaminated their
writing with the innovations of diverse “-isms”. A
wonderful example of this process is the presence of the
surrealist imaginary in the writing of the Poeta en Nueva
York [Poet in New York] from Federico Garcia
Lorca.
Making evident the new sensibilities and aesthetic directions, is without any doubt the
greatest profit of the avant-garde. This new sensibility
attacks decidedly the expired modern feeling based on Cartesian
(cogito ergo sum) and Kantian (universal reason)
individualism. Hence, it attacks the concept of the romantic “I” (as
center and measurement of all things). This new sensibility
of the “I”, is influenced strongly by the theory
of relativity and its scientific verification that things
change in relation to the point from which they are being
viewed. When the world is no longer conceived as individual
perception, it is possible to imagine it as fragmented. When
the subject is debilitated, it is the object that acquires
the central characteristics. The objectivization of
the man and the subjectivization of the object are the dynamo
of the new avant-garde aesthetic. Thanks to them, the avant-garde
succeeds in it intense creative exploration and search of
new forms.
The appearance, appropriation and reformulation in Spain of the
different avant-garde currents were developed in a society
that was in crisis, political crisis overall, but also economic,
and social. On the one hand, Spain had
not had a process of industrialization like the other countries
of Europe and North America;
it was forced to confront conflictingly a "delayed modernity".
On the other hand, the loss of its American colonies in 1898
affected terribly its national identity. At the beginning
of the 20th century the
"sociological modernism" of the Republic, characterized by a democratic
parlamentarism, raised the temperature of this contradictory and unstable political
and social climate. In addition, although Spain was
not involved directly in the World War I (1914-1919), the echo of the war,
with all his brutality and violence, did have an effect on it.
However, because the writing of the Poet in New
York is the central subject of this research, it is
advisable to consider the special way in which the surrealist “-ism” influenced
in Spain.
First of all, it must be clear that, at least in literature,
the Spanish Surrealism is not orthodox: the Iberian
poets never arrived at the ends of pure unconscious creation.
Thus neither practiced "automatic writing", nor
affiliated themselves with the dogma of the "Surrealist Parisian School"
presided over by “the Pope”, André Breton. Nevertheless,
Juan Larrea and several other poets from the “Generation ‘27”,
at a certain moment in their evolution, were strongly marked
by Surrealism (e.g. Alberti in Sobre los angeles [On angels], Lorca in Poet in New York, Aleixandre in Espadas como labios
y la destruccion del amor [Swords
like lips and the destruction of love]. The
great profit of these poets, in their surrealist incursion
is that of having released the image, untying it from logical
bases, and with it, the prodigious enrichment of poetic
language. The surrealist contamination means, in
addition, that the crisis of the ideal of
"purity" and "dehumanization" had prevailed during these
years. The human and even the sociological and political, have penetrated
literature again by the channels of surrealist expression.
In the following paper I will discuss the conformation
of a surrealist visual imagery constituted by natural and
cultural symbols (basic material to compose surrealist works
of art). Taking a closer look at Poet in New York, I
will suggest that Federico Garcia Lorca’s writing develops
in this book the montage technique and reiterates some of
the common symbols from surrealist imagery. The montage of
these symbol-words, apparently disordered, has a deep thematic
coherence and a structured poetic logic. The unity of the
book can be seen through the thematic obsessions of violence,
brutality, chaos and horror, which are expressed by the creation
of images such as that of a nightmare.
1.
The conformation of a surrealist visual imagery
This paper will attempt to speak about the existence
of a visual imagery of surrealist type, to make reference
to the set of images, powerfully visual, used in the different
artistic creation fields -cinema, literature, painting, sculpture,
photograph- by where the Surrealism is strained. This
imagery finds its force in the symbolic and numinous character
of its images and as well in the way in which these are related
to each other, in the manner in which they are assembled,
mounted, adapted and un-adapted.
The conformation of this imagery as a historical process
is not limited to the beginnings of the 20th century,
the height of the avant-garde, or to the period between the
two great international wars. Rather, the conformation of
this imagery goes back to the prehistoric times, in which
the primitive man painted the hunting of animals in Altamira,
and passes through the blood tragedies and the mythology
of the Greeks, through the locus amaenus of the Romans,
through the crucifixion of Christ, the stills of the alchemists,
and the symbology of Lautréamont and Rimbaud.
Finally, in 1900 the imagery arrives to the avant-garde movement’s
field with a great archive of images ready to be mentioned,
to be reiterated in a way never done until then. This
new way goes directly towards the creation of a
“surreality”, an absolute reality that results from the intersection
of dreams with wakefulness.
1.1. Symbols
It seems opportune, at this point of the research to
remember the influence that the psychological theories developed
by Freud and Jung have had on Surrealism. Let us remember
that to a great extent, it is the height of scientific research
on the operation of the psyche and the process of dreams
which has influenced the basic rules of the surrealist avant-garde
such as the exploration of the unconscious and the liberation
of repressed instincts. This exploration fulfills its
objective when it brings to light symbols that express the
collective unconscious of humankind.
It is not preposterous to have as a frame of reading
for surrealist imagery the conception of symbols that Jung
argued in his book Man and his symbols. For
Jung, the psyche is, first of all, imagination. It is image,
and inside there is a kind of mythological and poetic matrix,
the mythological collective unconscious, which makes use
of dreams to express, by means of symbols, non-conscious
phenomena. Even the Ego, the “I”, emerges
from this unconscious matrix (211-212).
According to Jung, man produces symbols spontaneously
in the form of dreams. Symbols are the clear materials, the
visible components of dreams. The psychic energy of the dreamy
language is extremely powerful because it leaves to the light
the instinctive part of human beings. It wakes up the intuition
and it allows the development of the instinct’s language
(36). One can see the coincidence of these expositions
with the surrealist desire of giving expression to the dream’s
reality making it agree with conscious reality.
Jung distinguishes two classes of symbols. There are
natural symbols that come from the unconscious contents of
the psyche, and which represent an enormous number of variations
in the essential archetypical images [1].
The sign of some of them can still be traced to the most archaic
roots (e.g. ideas and images that we find in the oldest stories
and in more primitive societies). There are also the cultural
symbols that have been used to express
‘eternal truths’ and are still used in many religions. They
became collective images adopted by civilized societies (81-82).
These symbolic images are the psychological inheritance
of humankind that is preserved and transmitted in the collective
unconscious of all men. The surrealist visual imagery
makes as much use of the natural symbols, as of the cultural
ones, allowing the expression of archetypical motifs such
as of father, of love, of mother, of creation, of lost paradise
and of hell.
1.2. Composition and
montage
A surrealist work of art (e.g. a poem, a painting,
a film, a photograph, a sculpture) is always characterized
by the particular way in which its parts (symbols, images,
words, objects) are assembled, mounted, chained, juxtaposed
and mixed. The peculiarity of this composition consists
in that elements pertaining to different layers of the reality
are located in a no-man's land where they had never been
before. These originate a new reality, a “surreality”. The
surprise and the strangeness of the absurdity of this coincidence,
force the spectator and the reader to intuit the meaning
of these symbols by means of association procedures different
from those of reason.
Juan Larrea, one of the most active surrealist Spanish
poets, argues that this peculiar way of assembling takes
place in a plot of contradictions corresponding to the state
of decay of the western world. In one of the conclusions
of his article “El surrealismo entre viejo y nuevo
mundo” [Surrealism between the old and the new world],
Larrea states that Surrealism wants to revolutionize this
world,
participating in many of the defects it tries to
condemn... Its exact position seems to correspond to the tactically
important point which is located between two series of
terms: between antithesis and synthesis, between
appearance and essence, unconsciousness and consciousness,
subject and object, antimyth and poetry, darkness and light,
dream and wake, infrareality and reality, etc [my translation].
(48)
This position, although operated by all those who sometimes
participated in the surrealist tendency, is neither so novel
nor unique to the 20th century. Homer had narrated
the existence of monsters and fabulous beings like the Cyclops,
the sirens, and the Old Man of the Sea. Ovid had rewritten
in Latin about the possibility of metamorphosis. And not
to long ago, a 15th century painter like Hieronymous
Bosch (c. 1450-1516) painted that acute tactically important
point between dream and waking. We can see this in
his composition of "Hell"
from his well-known triptych, The garden of the delights (1504).
In this painting, the approach of distant realities
jumps out at us from numerous monsters such as the tree-man located at the center, the bird-man who has in his beak the
legs of a human, from the pair
of ears crossed by a knife,
from a giant
vihuela, and from a pig
with the attire of a nun. The surprise and the strangeness that these images
cause us, the unusual perspective, and the illogical and
absurd accumulation, show us that the surrealist montage
is not the privilege of the 20th century avant-garde.
In any case, we are not going to deny that it is the avant-garde
who have systematically developed specific techniques and
sophistications never before made.
The mass media and transportation revolution definitively
mark the high degree of sophistication and technique reached
by the surrealist avant-garde. Modern inventions like
the motor, the cinematograph, photography and the newspaper,
exert influence in the way to compose and to montage. As “the
Pope of Surrealism”, André Breton, asserts,
In painting, Surrealism started from the conviction
that when entirely new factors were raised in the psychic
life (due to psychoanalysis, Gestalttheorie, relativism)
and certain modern technologies were improved (e.g. photographs,
cinema), the persistence to reproduce what is seen with the
eyes expired...[my translation]. (Magia cotidiana,
8)
In poetry, the composition is located at the height
of new technical features which make use of more synthetic
and quick languages like that of the telegram, the newspaper
headline, the cinematographic transition (e.g. fade in, fade
out), and the photographic objective (e.g. perception
fidelity, literal perception). The case of the newspaper
is very interesting; when different events are joined under
the light of the same date in the calendar, it does not do
more than to anticipate the technique of collage composition.
In general one can say that for all the arts influenced
by Surrealism, fragmentation or segmentation is what characterizes
the montage process. In painting, cinema or poetry,
the artists and poets explore the confusion of the human
with the objective through dummies, dolls, and the diverse
mutilations of the human body (e.g. legs, hands, mouth, and
eyes). To illustrate this, let us remember that famous cutting
of the eye at the beginning of the film Un chien andalou [An
Andalucian dog] (1929) directed by Luis Buñuel and
Salvador Dali. The eye is eliminated, it is sectioned. Hence,
the brutality of the fragmented image strikes the spectator
directly, forcing him, in the dark of the enclosure, to open
his mind to unconscious associations. As Sanchez has
written in his essay “Extrañamiento e identidad
de ‘su majestad el yo’ al ‘éxtasis
de los objetos’ ” [Strangeness and identity from ‘Her Majesty the I’ to
the
‘ecstasy of objects’]
The intersection between perception and representation
is located in the eye. For the person who paints, contemplates
a film, or simply ‘sees’, a kind of agency is
raised at the point of surveillance of the correct traffic
between the two worlds that he no longer controls: the one
of reality and the one of conscience…the mutilation
of the eye is the epistemology par excellence that erases
the limits between the subject's exterior and interior, causing
the subject to be invaded by the things which, at the same
time, are advancing towards him and confusing him in their
hubbub [my translation]. (60)
As a result, the composition of a fragmented world
allows on the one hand, violent expression, the objectivization of
the subject and the subjectivization of the object,
and on the other hand permits the encounter of different
realities in a no-man's land. As Sanchez asserts,
In a fragmented world, which cannot be integrated into
a proper perspective due to the weakening of the subject,
the most unexpected encounter can take place, since nothing
has to be ‘in its site’, and everything appears
in a floating and magmatic state [my translation].
(65)
This world, this chaotic landscape, gives us surprise
and strangeness because of the way in which the objects are
directly affected.
The search of the strange tries to break, to crack reality
so that it opens the access door to a global and total “surreallity”. To
unite different things, as in a collage, to separate what is
united, as in mutilations, or to put a thing or idea in place
of another one, as in metaphors, are the most appropriate techniques
to demonstrate this fragmentation.
An illustrative example of this process of fragmented
composition in which everything appears in a floating and
magmatic state can be observed in the painting by Dalí named Hallucinogenic Bullfighter (1969-1970). In
this immense picture we observe the unexpected encounter
of the head’s Venus of Milo with the eye of a face
that is drawn in the sand of a bullring in which the multiplication
of color points and flies gives origin to a bull whose snout
is resting on a lake. We note as well the presence
of a red and a pink rose in a floating state, and the numerous
faces of the statue with phantasmagoric appearance. Attention
should be drawn to the detail in the right inferior corner
in which a boy as large as a statuette of Venus observes
the flight of a fly that seems to be floating in the air.
However, this freedom of montage and composition developed
by the surrealist artists, a clear example of their revolutionary
interests, is accompanied by a particular logic, a logic
that tries to abolish the principle of identity or contradiction,
a logic of the absurdity. As Paul Ilie says in his
book Los surrealistas españoles [The Spanish
surrealists],
The structures of the absurdity have their own inner
coherence. In some cases the distance between juxtaposed
realities allows a consistent system of relations that lets
us speak of a logic of the absurdity…The majority
of metaphorical absurdities are made up of two parts
that seem bounded by the arbitrary will or fortuitous association. This
unexpected association is betrayed, nevertheless, by an implacable
chain reaction that produces a system of different elements
entwined [my translation]. (204)
This fact must be considered when approaching any surrealist
work such as a poem of Aleixandre, Lorca or Alberti, a film
of Buñuel (even David Lynch), a painting of Dalí,
Magritte, or De Chirico. It is the set of the work as a whole
and its tone which provide an internal logic to all apparent
incoherences and irrationalities devoid of immediate sense.
The approach to the irrational experience through this
logic of absurdity becomes intense and violent to the reader
and the spectator because the assembled parts have, each
one, deep symbolic meanings. As Ilie explains in his essay “La
metáfora surrealista en Juan Larrea¨ [Juan
Larrea’s surrealist metaphor], the logic of the
absurd is based on the use of a familiar lexicon in forms
that contravene the laws of the reality and the concrete
experience. He remarks:
...the absurdity acquires an own logical force due
to the manipulation of accepted concepts. This forces
us to distinguish between which is reasonable and which is
unreasonable not on the rationale base, but on the base of
the experience. Therefore, to speak irrationally means
to allude to a situation that is contradicted by the experience,
assuming that the expression is grammatically and semantically
correct. It is not relevant if its assertion fulfills
or does not fulfill the linguistic dicta of the reason...
[my translation]. (205)
This way of forced and violent montage is not distinct
from a pathological state of madness, a clinical state like
those described by Charcot (e.g. neurotic mechanisms of jealousy,
paranoia, and homosexual behavior). Without implying that
the surrealist artist is lunatic or mentally ill, one might
consider the presence of scientific research on this topic
as a characteristic of the epochal atmosphere. In fact,
Dali himself aptly named his method of composition “critical
paranoia”. As he expresses in his Diario de un genio [Journal
of a genius]: "I am supporting by the psychoanalysis...the
structure of my spirit is of an eminently paranoid type and,
therefore, the most indicated for this class of exercise..." (75).
This method guides the Catalan painter to discover
in its analogical investigations unusual convergences between
objects. For example, his discoveries on the horn of
the rhino, the granulation of the cauliflower, the rind of
the sea sprocket and the sunflowers, are associated repeatedly
with the most varied objects, and even with human figures. Dali
even affirms in his journal, plenty of “mystic-scientific
ecstasy”, that in all his life he had not done more
than to paint rhino horns.
2.
The surrealist image in Poet in New York
The visit of Federico Garcia Lorca to the United States from
1929 to 1930 at the dramatic moment of the crash in the New
York stock-market,
is a crucial landmark in the life of the Spanish poet. His
contact with New York (the maximum expression of a certain type of civilization)
is a violent shock. In that automated world, which according to Lorca turns the man into
a piece of machinery, the poet is drawn and rebels. With
two words he defines the atmosphere: "geometry
and distress". Topics like the power of money,
the slavery of man by machine, social injustice, dehumanization
and brutality agree with the pain, the lack of affection,
and the premonition of death so characteristic of Lorquian
poetry.
Formally, the spiritual commotion and the protest find
an appropriate channel in the surrealist technique such as
the ample verse and the hallucinating image that express
an illogical-absurd world, and construct apocalyptic and
choleric visions. Lorca’s revealed plastic desire
and necessity to illustrate allow the surrealist imagery
to easily mix with the lyricism and dramatic quality of his
own writing.
In Poet
in New York the Lorquian writing renews. The
presence of metaphors from surrealist nature, such as disperse
images, is a sample of it. Paul Illie has revealed
the characteristics of this kind of imagery in his essay “La
metáfora surrealista en Juan Larrea¨ [Juan
Larrea’s surrealist metaphor]:
…the expanded range of experiences caused by
Surrealism also changes the nature of the metaphor. Its
focal point can spread out to the moment the image cannot
even converge in to a single image. The subject of
the metaphor looses its importance as the descriptive half
of the metaphor, with its irrationality, imposes its rights
and strikes to us. Not even the description of the
metaphor can gather the rest of it towards itself nor become
the structural center of the image. As a result, the
image disperses in several parts [my translation]. (206)
The
dispersion of the image can be seen in the following verses
from a poem entitled "Landscape of a pissing multitude":
They all kept to themselves-
Dreaming of the open beaks of dying birds,
The sharp parasol that punctures
A recently flattened toad,
Beneath silence with a thousand ears
And tiny mouths of water
In the canyons that resist
The violent attack of the moon.
(lines 5-12)
We
find, then, that the surrealist image lacks unity and seems
to spill over into the amorphous subject of the poem and
the book: brutality, dehumanization. The absence of
a focal point where the metaphor can turn around, results
from the open and relaxed character of Surrealism. It
has an advantage over other traditional conceptions because
it can easily construct an image of several levels sliding
from one association to another one without having to use
careful links. Through the capricious connection of symbols
and images the metaphor never remains in a single level. The
meaning of these metaphors freely connected is big. It
means that thoughts and feelings never crystallize in delimited
images that totally express what they would have to express
(Illie,
“La metáfora…” 206-207).
The
collapse of the rational image mechanism, that brings with
it the disorganization of the relationship between subject-object
and the freedom of images of the Surrealism, can be understood
through the dramatic lyricism that characterizes the work
as a whole. The association of ideas and images without
apparent logic in Poet in New York finds its coherence
in the book’s subject and the syntax. The power of
free suggestiveness arises from the image relationship because what counts
is not the image itself, but the unconscious mechanisms revealed
by the image incoherence. As a result, the reader of
these poems approaches, if he lets himself be taken by his
intuition, to the state of “surreality” in his
mind.
However,
we cannot forget that the way in which Lorca carries out
this surrealist montage agrees with its plastic-poetic conception
of composition. Remember that besides his writing of
plays and poetry, Garcia Lorca also drew a number of sketches.
The nexus between his poetry and his drawings finds in Poet
in New York the most evident expression through surrealist
language. As Virginia Higginbotham remarks in her article “La
iniciación de Lorca en el
Surrealismo” [Lorca’s initiation in Surrealism]:
...Surrealism had established a nexus between visual
poetry and arts. In fact, as Anna Balakian points out ‘the
concepts of Lautréamont and Rimbaud were illustrated
in art before reaching their own maturity in poetry’. Hence,
it was the strong visual quality of Surrealism which attracted
Lorca... [He] learned to have fragmentary scenes in an evocative
way [my translation]. (253)
We should also declare that the attraction by Surrealism
in its quality of nexus between text and image had been anticipated
in Garcia Lorca’s incursion in the cinema, more specifically
in his never-filmed script A trip to the Moon (1930). After
reading it, one has no doubt in claiming the anticipatory
character of this script with respect to Poet in New York due
to the use of a surrealist imagery and its specific techniques
of montage and composition. The fact that for a film of relatively
short duration in which Lorca elaborated hundreds of planes,
and the way in which they are related, denotes that it is
a work based on the montage, with brief planes of strong
surrealist plasticity, and with a good transition of sequences. As
Higginbotham further states,
the cinematographic techniques Lorca used in A trip
to the Moon ...are surrealist mechanisms which have
been applied to the cinema. The metamorphosis of
the forms, by means of which the surrealists unified series
of unconnected objects, is easily carried out in the cinema
by means of the fade-in technique, that Lorca used not
less than 15 times in the 72 scenes which includes A
trip to the Moon. The double image, used to create
the surrealist sense of inconsistency, is obtained with
the camera by means of double expositions. There are at
least one dozen of those expositions throughout the script
[my translation]. (252)
2.1 Linking words and symbols
The writing of Poet in New York is flooded with
words that refer to symbols reiterated in the surrealist
imagery (cinema, painting, sculpture, poetry, photography).
The encounter with these repeated words guides the reader
to intuit their meaning by opening his mind to the surreality.
Hence, the reader traces links between symbol-words from
different works of art, his/her own personal experience,
and the mythological collective unconscious of humankind.
The parallelism between painting and poetry characteristic
of Surrealism becomes evident by this process.
Let us consider then, the recited, reiterated, and
rewritten symbol-words that can be found in Poet in New
York. There are natural symbol-words like: tree,
stone, sea, sun, moon, clouds, forest, egg, forest and animals
(e.g. lion, frog, turtle,
worm, nightingale, snail, duck, camel, dog, cat, horse, etc)
and cultural symbol-words like: apple, blood, rose
and serpent. To the previous categories it would be
necessary to add a category of body symbol-words (e.g. mutilations,
segmentations) as clear reiterations of the surrealist images
present in the cinema, in painting, in sculpture, and in
photography. These include eyes, navels, hands, mouths, cheeks,
faces, necks, heads, horns, snouts, torsos, and pupils.
Following the symbol-word ‘apple’ throughout Poet
in New York’s
writing I hope to unravel its possible meaning in the context
in where it is located, and, in addition, I will allude
to other works of art in where this symbol has appeared.
I will concentrate overall in the painting from Bosch,
Dali and Magritte. We should not forget neither the plastic-poetic
will of Lorca, nor that "the drawings and the poems
of Lorca establish intericonic and intertextual dialogue
with texts and pictures of Dalí” [my translation]. (Bou, Pintura en el aire: arte y literatura
en la Modernidad 318)
Let us do a simple linking-apples exercise: the apple
as the prohibited fruit, the apple that a witch gives to
Snow White, the apple that William Tell places on the head
of his son, Newton’s scientific observation of the
falling apple, the apple from the tree of knowledge that
Eve bites. Provocative and fresh, red and round like the
earth, it can also be green like those of Magritte, the apple
of contention, the anatomical apple of all men (Adam's apple: prominentia
laryngea), the great apple, of course (Manhattan, New
York City, The Big Apple), and we cannot forget the
atomic apple of Dali, the one that he explodes.
Some paintings come to mind. For instance there is
the one from Bosch entitled Paradise with clear religious connotations to
the ‘apple’ of sin. Additionally one can
also remember the ‘apples’ painted by Magritte
in Fine
realities (1964), and The
listening room (1952) . And we should not forget
the ‘apple’ that
is not ‘apple’ in This
is not an apple (1964).
Furthermore, this paper will also consider two Dalinian ‘apples’:
one in a detail of The apotheosis of Homer (1944-45) which
while falling, is transformed into an open apple with a clock
inside and a drop ready to fall on the head of a statue.
The other
‘apple’ suspended over a plate, defying the law of gravity in a
detail from Living
dead nature (1956).
Let us now go directly to the Poet in New York’s poems and appreciate
the suggestive visions constructed in the Lorquian writing
with the reiteration of
‘apple’. This word, in some poems, can be related to the
Judeo-Christian religion and that old myth of original sin. The bite of the
prohibited fruit corresponds to disrespect for the order of God and the Fall
into consciousness. As Betty Jean Craige accurately asserts in her work Lorca’s
Poet in New York:
When Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knnowledge
of good and evil they saw that they were naked and they were
ashamed. So they covered themselves with fig leaves. Thus
were they separated from nature, from God, and hurled in
isolation of self-consciousness. Now they are ‘as gods,
knowing good and evil.’ This act is the fall into consciousness
by which man gains awareness of himself and loses harmony
with nature. (4)
Due to the fact that the ‘apple’ represents
the expulsion from paradise (Fall into consciousness), the
diverse visions (hallucinating images) that are composed
by using this cultural symbol-word have a prophetic and religious
connotation. The reader can intuit this meaning in
poems such as "The king of Harlem", "Landscape of a pissing multitude",
“Little Stanton", "Nocturne of emptied space", "Ode
to Walt Whitman" and "Ruin".
Indeed, in "Nocturne of emptied space" the
reader find “half-eaten apples” composing a dramatic
scene:
Look at the concrete shapes in search of their void.
Lost dogs and half-eaten apples
Look at this sad fossil world, with its anxiety and
anguish,
A world that can’t find the rhythm of its very
first sob.
(35-38)
And in "Ode to Walt Whitman" the ‘apple’ is
also eaten by somebody else, in this case a friend:
He’s one, too! That’s right! Stained fingers
point to the shore of your dream
when a friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline
and the sun sings in the navels
of boys who play under bridges.
(60-65)
Composing with an explicit surrealist montage technique,
allows Lorca to take an advantage of the symbolic meaning
of ‘apple’
and as well its intericonic/intertextual properties. By doing
so, he builds dispersed images plenty of psychic energy as
the one in "The king of Harlem":
It is necessary to kill to the blond vendor of firewater
and every friend of apple and sand,
and it’s necessary to use the fists
against the little Jewish woman who tremble filled
with bubbles,
so the king of Harlem sings with his multitude,
so crocodiles sleep in long rows
beneath the moon’s asbestos,
and so no one doubts the infinite beauty
of feather dusters, graters, copper pans, and kitchen
casseroles.
(21- 29)
And the one in “Cry to Rome”, where the attacked
‘apples’ open an image that is almost a nightmare:
Apples barely grazed
by slender, silver rapiers
clouds torn apart by a coral hand
that carries a fiery almond on its back,
arsenic fish like sharks,
sharks like wailing drops that blind the masses,
roses that wound
and needles that lace the lace the blood’s plumbing
(1-8)
And in “Little Stanton" where the ‘apple’ is
humanized having a “chaste longing”:
At twelve midnight,
cancer wandered through the corridors
and spoke with the documents’ empty snails,
cancer springing to life, full of clouds and thermometers,
with an apple’s chaste longing to be pecked by
nightingales.
(7-10)
In all these cases, the ‘apple’ could be
linked to the Fall into consciousness myth, and, therefore,
could represent the separation of the society from any spiritual
reality. Man’s original state has been lost. “Having
once known harmony, man is condemned by his consciousness
to seek it forever…” (Craige 84). The primitive
relationship between man and nature no longer exists, and
because of this, the poet feels alienated. The
‘apple’ in this state of lost paradise is always dark as in "Ruin":
Soon it was clear that the moon
was a horse’s skull,
and the air, a dark apple.
(4-6)
2.2. Dehumanization
as a nightmare
The apparent disorder, ambiguity and incoherence of
the symbol-words montage, and the construction of dispersed
images, hallucinating metaphors and apocalyptic visions,
find their organization in the themes of brutality, violence,
suffering, horror and chaos. These themes surround the Lorquian
writing even when it does not present the surrealist characteristics
of montage and composition as in the Gypsy Ballads or
in theater plays. The mysterious and dramatic lyricism,
makes us think that the poet’s writing could never
escape to the tragic, the death’s ghost and the pain.
Even though some of the poems from Poet in New York might
appear to the reader in disorder, scarcely coherent and ambiguous,
the total set of pieces acquires a unit when seen as a whole. “The
irrational, illogical, surrealistic…images together
compose an organic whole expressive of a feeling or idea
(not necessarily rational) in the poet’s mind…”
(Craige 45). And as well in the reader’s mind if he/she
is appropriately and openly prepared.
The thematic unit of Poet in New York, can be
synthesized as an apocalyptic nightmare of social injustice,
dark love and loss of religious faith, plenty of eschatological
references such as those of the vomit and urine. According
to Virginia Higginbotham, "… the nightmare images,
by which Lorca developed the subject of cruelty, were deliberately
developed to be shocking. Probably he learned this
terror imagery from Dalí" [my translation]. (252).
In "Landscape of vomiting multitude" we found great
condensation of that state of nightmare:
There were murmurings from the jungle of vomit
with the empty women, with hot wax children,
with fermented trees and tireless waiters
who serve platters of salt beneath harps of saliva.
There’s no other way, my son, vomit! There
is no other way.
It’s not the vomit of hussars on the breasts
of their whores,
nor the vomit of cats that inadvertently swallowed
frogs,
but the dead who scratch with clay hands
on flint gates where clouds and desserts decay.
...
I, poet without arms, lost
In the vomiting multitude,
with no effusive horse to shear
the thick moss from my temples.
(15-39)
It is also a good example of the thematic coherence
and the negative synthesis of the world-city, the poem "New
York.
(Office and denunciation)":
This is not hell, is the street.
Not death, but the fruit stand.
There is a world of tamed rivers and distances just
beyond our grasp
in the cat’s paw smashed by a car,
and I hear the earthworm’s song
in the hearts of many girls .
(54-59)
The Lorquian writing obtains then, thanks to its plasticity,
the creation of a chaotic and disordered landscape that is
no more than the synthesis of a world-city full of pain:
a dehumanizing civilization, the western modern world felt
by the Spanish poet’s senses. Its visual effect,
as we have already seen, is very suggestive. The images are
moved and simultaneously paused, spilled and simultaneously
contained. This contradictory and paradoxical phenomenon
can be understood in poems such as
"Death":
How hard they try!
How hard the horse tries
to become a dog!
How hard the dog tries to become a swallow!
How hard the swallow tries to become a bee!
How hard the bee tries to become horse!
(1-6)
or
"Jewish Cemetery":
Christ’s children slept,
and the water was a dove,
and the wood was a heron,
and the lead was a hummingbird,
and even the living prisons of fire
were consoled by the locust’s leap.
(4-9)
or
"Cry to Rome":
arsenic fish like sharks,
sharks like wailing drops that blind the masses,
roses that wound
and needles that lace the lace the blood’s plumbing
(5-8)
However, the surrealist image of an apocalyptic nightmare
is not more than a consequence of the Fall into conscious
that we mentioned when talking about the symbol-word ‘apple’.
The nightmare represents the drama of an alienated individual
inside modern world, the lost of Paradise, the
impossibility of harmony. As Craige reveals,
Poet in New York is a vision of a fragmented world deserted by the gods; it is a vision
of dehumanized civilization whose sickness is born of consciousness
and manifested in a material technocracy of empty suits of
clothing. New York is a concrete symbol for a world in which “things
fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (as Yeats wrote
in 1919): there is no longer a center, a god or unifying
myth, to serve as an absolute; and without such a center
human life becomes a meaningless, monotonous, material existence
of ‘imperfect anguish’… (3)
Poet in New York‘s writing creates a surrreality that is extremely liberating and
revolutionary. The brutality, violence, horror and chaos
not only constitute the image of a nightmare, but also are
a form of releasing the reader’s instincts and intuition. As
Menarini suggests in his essay, “Emblemas ideológicos
de Poeta en Nueva York” [Poet in New York‘s
ideological emblems],
...liberation of instincts in the scope of a society
built on a 'perfect' order does not admit its opposite (imperfect
disorder of the senses). It is already a revolutionary act
able to place in danger the whole building from its
foundations...the true revolution raised by Lorca and the
surrealist manifestos: ... to free man from his social bonds
and, if alienated, to bring him back totally to himself...it
does not represent a political alternative or a change of
power, but the complete destabilization from the interior
of the actual world...[my translation]. (270)
Indeed, this writing moves the reader to an absolute
reality that results from the intersection of dreams with
wakefulness. The nightmare, successfully composed by the
symbol-words montage, expresses lyric emotions free of logical
ties. Federico Garcia Lorca “descend[s] to the most
turbid regions of biological being…willing to take
soundings among things from the other side, that is, from
beyond reason, consciousness, and social convention” (Predmore, Lorca's New
York poetry
: social injustice, dark love, lost faith 10).
Without any doubt, the surrealist imagery provides the elements
to achieve this purpose.
3.
Conclusion
In the place where the dream was colliding with its
reality.
My little eyes are there
(Intermezzo 16-17)
In summary, Poet in New York‘s writing
reiterates some of the symbols that conform the surrealist
imagery. For instance, the cultural symbol-word ‘apple’ and
its religious connotations of fall into consciousness, lost
of paradise and forbidden fruit. The montage of these
symbol-words, apparently disordered, has a deep thematic
coherence (dehumanization of western modern civilization)
and as well a structured poetic logic (logic of absurdity).
Lorca finds in the surrealist language and imagery,
the material to express the subjects that always worried
him as a poet and artist. Hence, the violence, the
fight, the battle, the frustration, the brutality, the life
and the death, are expressed in Poet in New York with
such forcefulness and chaos that the unit of the work must
be seen through these thematic obsessions and the set of
the book as whole.
Consequently, the reader who faces a text contaminated
by the surrealist language, such as Poet in New York,
must be prepared to let itself take by the intuition and
the instinct in order to achieve a state of “surreality” (absolute
reality). The reader must be aware that the surrealist imagery
pushes him/her to look for the intersections between painting,
cinema, literature, photography and sculpture. Reading and
linking as weaving a net, is then, the intericonic/intertextual
activity that the reader is invited to play with out rational
bindings.
Works Cited
Bou, E. Pintura en el aire : arte y literatura en la modernidad,
[Painting in the air: art and literature in Modernity] Valencia : Pre-Textos,2001.
Breton, A. Magia cotidiana [Everyday magic],
Madrid, Fundamentos, 1975.
Craige, B.J. Lorca's
Poet in New York : the fall into consciousness. Lexington : University Press
of Kentucky, c1977.
Dalí, S. Diario de un genio [Journal
of a genius]. Barcelona: Editorial Tusquets, 1983.
García Lorca, F. Poet in New York. Trans. Greg Simon
and Steven F. White. New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988.
_____.Viaje a la luna : guión cinematográfico.
Valencia : Pre-Textos, 1994.
_____.Dibujos. Granada: Fundación
Federico García Lorca, 1996.
Higginbotham, V. “La iniciación de Lorca en el Surrealismo”
[Lorca’s start in Surrealism]. Surrealismo,
Ed. Victor Garcia de la Concha, Madrid: Taurus,
1982.
Illie, P. Los surrealistas españoles [The
Spanish surrealists]. Madrid: Taurus, 1972.
_____. “La metáfora surrealista
en Juan Larrea”
[Juan Larrea’s surrealist metaphor]. Surrealismo,
Ed. Victor Garcia de la Concha, Madrid: Taurus, 1982.
Jung, C. G. Man and his symbols. New York : Dell, 1968.
Larrea, J. “El surrealismo entre viejo y nuevo mundo” [Surrealism
between the old and the new world]. Surrealismo, Ed. Victor
Garcia de la Concha, Madrid: Taurus, 1982.
Menarini, P. “Emblemas ideológicos de Poeta en
Nueva York”
[Ideological emblems from Poet in New
York]. Surrealismo, Ed. Victor
Garcia de la Concha, Madrid: Taurus, 1982.
Predmore, R. L. Lorca's New York
poetry : social injustice, dark love, lost faith. Durham, N.C. : Duke University
Press, 1980.
Sanchez, A. “Extrañamiento
e identidad de ‘su majestad el yo’ al ‘éxtasis
de los objetos’” [Strangeness and identity from ‘Her Majesty the I’ to
the ‘ecstasy of objects’]. Surrealismo, Ed. Victor Garcia
de la Concha, Madrid: Taurus, 1982.