The Crucified Mind: Rafael Alberti and the Surrealist Ethos in Spain (Monografías A)

Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 186

THE CRUCIFIED MIND RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN

ROBERT HAVARD

THE CRUCIFIED MIND RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN

TAMESIS

© Robert Havard 2001 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2001 by Tamesis, London

ISBN 1 85566 075 X

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: http://www.boydell.co.uk A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Havard, Robert. The crucified mind: Rafael Alberti and the surrealist ethos in Spain / Robert Havard. p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías; 186) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 1–85566–075–X (hardbound) 1. Alberti, Rafael, 1902 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Religion in literature. 3. Surrealism – Spain. I. Title. II. Series. PQ6601.L2 Z692 2001 861¢.62 – dc21 2001023349

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix 1. THE CRUCIFIED MIND Surrealism’s three phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Religion and paranoia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Materialism and the transition to political commitment . . . . . . . . 12 Politics and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 The Loyolan imagination: ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place] . . . . . 22 Religion and materiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Alberti’s views on Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 2. UNDER THE JESUITS The sins of the fathers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Straw floors and severed hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the classroom: Matthew, Maths and Marx . . . . . . . . . . . Sobre los ángeles: structure, paranoia and Surrealism . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

39 42 50 72

3. LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY Giménez Caballero and scatology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Maruja Mallo and eschatology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Alberti’s elegy to matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 4. FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY Lorca’s mantic poet in New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Working the oracle: mantic trance or psychic dictation? . . . . . . . 128 Alberti’s oracular imperative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 5. TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS The paradigm of the Eucharist . . . . . . . . . . . . . From mass to masturbation: Dalinian metamorphosis . The dissolve in Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou. . . . . . Alterity in Aleixandre: mysticism or evasion?. . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

152 155 165 177

6. COME THE REVOLUTION Alberti’s sermonic syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Land Without Bread: Buñuel’s surrealist documentary on Spain . Communist adventism: De un momento a otro . . . . . . . . . . The proletarian poet: ‘Capital de la gloria’ . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

191 200 212 222

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Select Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

ILLUSTRATIONS Between pages 116 and 117

1. Detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (top of right-hand panel) 2. Salvador Dalí, The Lugubrious Game (1929) 3. Salvador Dalí, Apparatus and Hand (1927) 4. Salvador Dalí, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1936–7) 5. Salvador Dalí, Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) 6. Maruja Mallo, Espantapájaros [Scarecrows] (1929) 7. Maruja Mallo, Tierra y excremento [Earth and Excrement] (1932) 8. Maruja Mallo, La Huella [The Footprint] (1929) 9. Hand full of Ants trapped in Door; still from Luis Buñuel, Un Chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog] (1929) 10. Bare Feet of Children under Desk; still from Luis Buñuel, Tierra sin pan [Land without Bread] (1933)

ABBREVIATIONS Alberti, Rafael: OCRA Obra completa, vol. I, Poesía 1920–1938 (Aguilar, Madrid, 1988). LG The Lost Grove (University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1959). AP 1 La arboleda perdida. Libros I y II de memorias (Alianza, Madrid, 1988). AP 3 La arboleda perdida. Libros III y IV (Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1927). AP 5 La arboleda perdida, Quinto libro (1988–1996) (Anaya & Mario Muchnik, Barcelona, 1996). Aleixandre, Vicente: OCVA Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 1968). Breton, André: MS Manifestoes of Surrealism (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972). Buñuel, Luis: MLB My Last Breath (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984). UCA Un Chien andalou (Faber & Faber, London, 1994). Dalí, Salvador: UCSD The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí (Quartet Books, London, 1977). DG Diary of a Genius (Hutchinson, London, 1990). SLSD The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Vision, London, 1968). García Lorca, Federico: OCGL Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 11th edition, 1966). Giménez Caballero, Ernesto: YIA Yo, inspector de alcantarillas (Ediciones Turner, Madrid, 1975). Mallo, Maruja: MM Maruja Mallo: 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color (1928–1942) (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942).

FOREWORD My first priority in this book is to shed new light on the poetry Rafael Alberti wrote in his avant-garde period, 1927–38. My second is to unravel the complexities that beset the issue of Surrealism in Spain and offer a pragmatic approach to its distinctive ethos (it being accepted here that a varietal difference between Surrealism in Spain and in France – its HQ – is inevitable for the simple reason that the two countries have two very different cultures). In practice my priorities are complementary, for it should be mutually enlightening to compare Alberti’s work with that of such radical avant-gardists as Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, Maruja Mallo, Gimémez Caballero and Vicente Aleixandre across the genres of painting, film, prose and poetry. My approach is driven by a double conviction: that there is no more luminous star than Alberti in the galaxy of Spanish poets who began to shine in the 1920s, and that his work provides a unique touchstone for appreciating the ethos of Surrealism in Spain. The reasons for this latter claim are outlined in Chapter One, ‘The Crucified Mind’, which serves as an introduction by relating Alberti to Surrealism’s different phases. My own view, polemical as it may be, is that assessments of Surrealism in Spain have tended to be too narrow and too exclusively based on ideas found in Breton’s First Manifesto which, though important, do not constitute the whole picture. The fact is that Surrealism evolved, and so too, in surprisingly close step, does Alberti’s poetry. His disarming self-assessment, ‘Yo me defino como un poeta de mi tiempo’1 [I see myself as a poet of my time], applies especially to his so-called ‘crisis’ volumes. From the personal anguish of Sobre los ángeles (1927–1928) [Concerning the Angels], to the increasingly metaphysical themes of Sermones y moradas (1928–1929) [Sermons and Dwelling Places], to the political turmoil of El poeta en la calle (1931–1935) [The Poet in the Street] which culminates in a moving poetic diary of the Spanish Civil War, De un

1

See José Luis Tejada, ‘Una entrevista con Rafael Alberti’, Gades. Revista del Colegio Universitario de Filosofía y Letras de Cádiz, XII (1984), 19.

x

FOREWORD

momento a otro (poesía e historia) (1934–1938) [Any Minute Now (Poetry and History)], Alberti is undeniably a poet of rapid shifts of focus and strong experimental tendencies. Yet he is no gadfly; rather a poet who imbibes the spirit of his age and who has a gift for assimilating its changes. There is another reason why Alberti serves as a standard for Surrealism in Spain. This, in a word, is religion, which is to say, the distinctively biblical register of his language and his mental constructs already evident in the titles Sobre los ángeles and Sermones y moradas. The point is that Alberti was educated by Jesuits, as was Buñuel, while Dalí was taught by the scarcely less rigorous Christian Brothers, founded by La Salle, another order which had been banned in France.2 Consequently, and typically, Alberti sees religion as a fact of Spanish life, a conditioning ineradicable even in those who, like himself, had long since turned atheist: Esas cosas las conocemos y las tenemos a flor de piel, y cuando queremos ser sinceros con nosotros mismos, esa cosa la encontramos en la masa de la sangre … Son cosas que, sobre todo en España, están en la médula ¿verdad? …Toda nuestra educación ha sido profunda ¿verdad?, y no son cosas que se eliminen fácilmente … Nuestra formación no pudo ser peor … Referente a Buñuel, supongo que ha estado en un colegio tan religioso como el mío, de jesuítas. ¿Y qué? Eso es lo que deja más huella. Luego lo rechazamos y lo protestamos, pero, en el fondo, lo que aprendió allí no se desaparece, ¿comprendes?, aunque digamos que sí. Y surge constantemente.3 [We understand these things; they’re ingrained in us, and if we’re honest with ourselves we’d say it’s in our blood … It’s in the marrow, at least in Spain … The effect of our schooling runs deep. It’s not easily expunged … Our formation could not have been worse … As for Buñuel, I imagine he went to as religious a school as I did, run by Jesuits. And? Well, it leaves a deep mark. We reject it and fight against it, but in the end what we learnt stays with us – you know what I mean? – even if we say it doesn’t. It keeps coming back …]

The thrust of my argument is that religion, the most traditional facet of Spanish life, is paradoxically the underlying reason why the avant-garde movement flourished in Spain and, furthermore, that the pervasive influence of religion is what most distinguishes surrealist practice in Spain from the

2

For Dalí this distinction was decisive: ‘la gran diferencia entre Buñuel y yo es que él estudió con los jesuítas y yo con los hermanos de las Escuelas Cristianas’ [the main difference between Buñuel and me is that he studied under Jesuits and I with the Brothers of the Christian Schools]. See Max Aub, Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel (Aguilar, Madrid, 1985), 531. 3 Ibid., 293–4.

FOREWORD

xi

French model. It is precisely because religion is in the Spanish blood, like a virus, that it is so deeply implicated in the two most characteristic and therapeutic practices of Surrealism, catharsis and transcendence. This book traces the impact of religion on Alberti, principally, as a typical example of his generation, by looking at his personal and artistic formation. Broadly speaking, religion is found to be repressive and neurosis-inducing, as discussed in Chapters Two and Three where Giménez Caballero and Maruja Mallo are considered together with Alberti. In time, however, a more positive, metaphysical tendency emerges which is also strongly rooted in religion. This is discussed in Chapters Four and Five, first in the context of Lorca’s prophetic voice in Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York], then with a view to the Eucharistic concept of metamorphosis found in Dalí, Buñuel and Aleixandre. Finally, Chapter Six takes on board the coming of a new Saviour in Marx and the commitment made in the 1930s by many surrealists – including Buñuel and Alberti – to Revolution. This book grew out of another, From Romanticism to Surrealism: Seven Spanish Poets (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1988), which arrived at Surrealism’s door in its final pages and engaged in a brief discussion of Alberti. Here Alberti is the dominant subject and the fulcrum by which thematic, conceptual and stylistic connections are made with other surrealists of his extraordinary generation. I have not attempted to be exhaustive in my selection of material, but rather focused, concentrating on what I believe to be distinctive about the surrealist output in Spain. Since writing that earlier book I have had the benefit of discussing these issues with a number of postgraduates who invariably sparked insights. Though it is impossible to itemize their contribution fully, I would like to acknowledge the sparks of Jennie Wood, Craig Duggan, Lowri Williams, Thierry Passera and Rowanne Cowley. My thanks are due also to Dr Geoffrey Connell – a fine albertista, if one whose views often differ radically from my own – who was kind enough to send me the tape of an interview he had done with Alberti; also to Dr Bob Morris Jones, for guiding me through some of the intricacies of syntax; to Dr Rob Stone, for advice on film; to Esther Santamaría Iglesias, for help with problematic translations and sundry other issues; to her father, Alfredo Santamaría, for his personal account of schooling under La Salle Christian Brothers in the 1930s; and to Dr John Trethewey, who read my text with care and made many useful suggestions. Parts of certain chapters are based on material that first appeared in the form of articles, and I would like to thank the editors of the following journals for their permission to draw on them when necessary: Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, both at Glasgow and Liverpool, The Modern Language Review, Romance Studies and Anales de la literatura española contemporánea. Finally I would like to express my gratitude for the financial supports I have received, both to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which was ready to fund my research visits to Spain, and to the Aurelius

xii

FOREWORD

Trust, which, through the offices of the British Academy, made available a generous grant to cover both the costs of copyright and the provision of transparencies for the illustrations used in this book. Robert Havard University of Wales, Aberystwyth August 2000

Publisher’s Note The author and the publishers are grateful to all individuals and institutions for permission to use the materials for which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; we apologise for any omission in this regard, and will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgements in subsequent editions.

1 THE CRUCIFIED MIND

The Crucified Mind The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified mind. Norman O. Brown1 Yo creo que es que el surrealismo español tiene unas características diferentes … si usted lee la poesía francesa surrealista, usted verá que, con la española hay una gran diferencia. Yo creo que es más seria la española, y más profunda, y menos charlatana. [The point is that Spanish Surrealism has different characteristics … if you read French surrealist poetry, you will see that it differs greatly from the Spanish. I believe the Spanish is more serious, more profound, and less charlatan.] Rafael Alberti2

Surrealism’s three phases No major creative writer in Spain covers as much ground as Alberti in these critical years from 1927 to the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Equally important is that the sweep of his work matches in all essentials the evolution of Surrealism itself as the movement’s thinking was directed in Paris by André Breton and his circle, notably in the manifestoes of 1924 and 1929 and in the journals La Révolution surréaliste (1924–29) and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33).3 Alberti, for his part, was actively involved in the nearest Spanish equivalents of these journals, first with regular front-page contributions to Giménez Caballero’s La Gaceta Literaria (1927–32), especially in its stridently Freudian early days, then as founder–editor of the pro-Soviet Octubre (June 1933–April 1934) which was banned definitively after the Asturian miners’ uprising in October 1934. But 1

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Random House, New York, 1966), 186. From an interview of Alberti conducted informally in the canteen of the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London, 30 November 1979, by Geoffrey Connell, the wellknown Hispanist and Alberti scholar, who generously supplied me with the full tape cassette. 3 Breton’s Second Manifesto appeared as an article in La Révolution surréaliste, 15-xii-1929, and was published separately in its definitive form in 1930. 2

2

ROBERT HAVARD

Alberti is not only a major player in the Freudian and Marxist phases that demarcate Surrealism’s heyday; he is also acutely sensitive to the metaphysical implications of the surreal that emerged in the late 1920s when, briefly, the Hegelian ideal of transcendence via the union of opposites led to the notion of subject–object integration and ‘the surrealist object’. This theme, central to Dalí’s ‘paranoia-critical method’, underpins Sermones y moradas where, as we shall see, materialist rigour combines with a fervent transcendentalism to create a manic form of materio-mysticism. That Alberti was attuned to this thinking shows his instinctive grasp of French theory, while it also reflects his personal circumstance not only in terms of his religious upbringing but also as regards his artistic bent which brought contact with the likes of Maruja Mallo and artists of the Vallecas school, as well as Dalí. It is this dimension of his work that distinguishes him from writers for whom Surrealism was at bottom little more than a fashionable literary style. It is also the part of his work that has been most overlooked. It has to be said here, parenthetically, that assessment by critics of Surrealism in Spain, despite occasional successes, remains defective. Foremost among their failings is a reluctance to address conceptual issues, an omission not offset by generalizations and endless cross-references that are the typical fare in biographical, generational and thematic studies. Two examples, from among the better critics, will suffice to illustrate the problem. Firstly, Paul Ilie posits the idea of a ‘surrealist mode’ as ‘a broad aesthetic category’ in Spanish literature, which even antedates Surrealism in France, a Christians-before-Christ argument that is unhelpful in a critical context and diluting in its effect.4 Brian Morris, in a purist reaction, states that we cannot even speak of Spanish Surrealism as such, for this pairing is a ‘contradiction in terms’ and as ‘incongruous’ as ‘Welsh gongorismo’.5 Though we may need some convincing about that, Morris’s point is clear enough: France has a patent on le Surréalisme – which centred on Paris and was stamped by André Breton – and if ‘Pope’ André did not give you his apostolic blessing you were not admitted to the inner sanctum, not authenticated as a surrealist. But can we accept this restriction from Breton, a renowned control freak? No such restriction applies to Romanticism, for we say German, French, English and even Spanish Romanticism with impunity. A moment’s reflection leads us to recall that Surrealism came from Dada, the nihilistic movement born of the First World War, or its futility, and Dada had sprung up in several places at once: Berlin, Zurich, New York. When Dada’s battery ran down, around 1920, to be recharged by the more positive surrealist current, it is hardly

4

Paul Ilie, The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1968), 7. 5 C.B. Morris, Surrealism in Spain, 1920–1936 (Cambridge University Press, London, 1972), 160, 8.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

3

surprising that its new energy took it from its Paris depôt out across frontiers again. Recently a more text-based approach to the issue of Surrealism in Spain has come from Derek Harris who argues that language, as distinct from content, is the defining characteristic of surrealist poetry.6 He includes a chapter on French surrealists for ubication and begins in the proper place by reminding us of the seminal importance of Breton’s dictionary-like definition of 1924: SURREALISM. n. masc. Pure psychic automatism through which it is intended to express, either orally, or in writing, or in any other way, the actual way thought works. The dictation of thought, free from all control exercised by reason, without regard to any aesthetic or moral concern.7

Many of the values enshrined here would continue to have relevance, but, as Harris recognizes, it is inadequate as a definition since it ‘equates Surrealism with just one specific technique: the production of text automatically’, it being well known that ‘Surrealism has metaphysical aims’ which, implicitly, are not covered by the definition.8 After this good start Harris sheds no further light on Surrealism’s metaphysics but focuses instead on linguistic strategies, principal among which, he argues, is the way phonemic patterns of alliteration and assonance can generate lexemes and, in effect, the text itself. This argument is circular and contradictory: (i) psychic dictation is not the essence of Surrealism; (ii) the essence of Surrealism is the way the text generates itself; and (iii) textual self-generation – via phonemic concatenation – is the proper measure of psychic dictation and the yardstick by which surrealist poetry should be judged. A syllogism, in fact, but hardly a comment on metaphysics. Ultimately, Harris is as neglectful of conceptual issues as Morris, and his assessment of four Spanish poets on the imitative basis of their closeness to an early French model takes no account of the evolution of surrealist thought, but is, to all intents and purposes, stuck in the groove of psychic dictation. It is imperative to begin, I suggest, by appreciating that Surrealism moved through three key phases: the psychoanalytical, the metaphysical and the political. Putting it another way, it passed successively under the spell of Freud, Hegel and Marx. These phases are not isolated categories, nor are they chronologically discrete; for one thing, Freud was never discarded, and, for another, Marx was there from the start. Yet the triadic scheme serves to

6

Derek Harris, Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights: The Language of Surrealism in Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda and Aleixandre (La Sirena, Anstruther, 1998), 13. 7 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972), 26. 8 Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights, 14, 15.

4

ROBERT HAVARD

indicate when the figures held sway, and it is apt with regard to the intercalation of Hegel whose integrational metaphysic guided Surrealism in its transition from the subjective materialism of ‘the surrealist object’ to the political materialism of Marx. The crucial point is to accept that Surrealism evolved ideologically, that there is a conceptual difference between the 1924 and 1929 manifestoes – hence the need for a second manifesto – and that there was a surrealist rapprochement of sorts with the Communist Party. From this it follows that any assessment of Surrealism in Spain, including those with a linguistic focus, should consider the impact not only of the first, predominantly Freudian wave of influence but also of subsequent waves. It is all the more remarkable that critics have failed to do this when we bear in mind that Spaniards like Dalí and Buñuel played a significant part in generating those later waves, and especially when we recognize that, in Alberti, Spain has a poet who illustrates all three phases.

Religion and paranoia The structure of this book is based on the concept of Surrealism’s three phases, but, as indicated, these are interwoven by a further thematic thread, religion, which is thought to be crucial to Surrealism’s distinctive ethos in Spain. In his autobiography, The Lost Grove, Alberti recalls that he was steeped as a boy in ‘an atmosphere of insane Catholicism and exaggerated bigotry’.9 He states unequivocally: I am compelled once more to put in writing the repugnance I feel for this Spanish Catholic spirit, this reactionary and savage Catholicism that darkened the blueness of the sky from the days of our childhood, covering us with layers and layers of gray ashes which only served to muffle any real creative intelligence we might have had. How many arms and lungs have we seen struggling frantically and hopelessly to escape from these depths, without ever having grasped even a momentary fistful of sun? How many entire families drowned or buried alive? What a hideous inheritance of rubble and suffocation! (LG, 29)10

9 Rafael Alberti, The Lost Grove, trans. Gabriel Berns (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), 57. The Spanish original reads: ‘aquella atmósfera de catolicismo loco y exageraciones beatas’, La arboleda perdida. Libros I y II de memorias, first published Buenos Aires, 1959 (Alianza, Madrid, 1998), 59. These texts will be abbreviated as LG and AP. 10 The original Spanish reads: ‘quiero consignar una vez más en mi obra la repugnancia que siento por ese último espíritu católico español, reaccionario, salvaje, que nos entenebreció desde niños los azules del cielo, echándonos cien capas de ceniza, bajo cuya negrura se han asfixiado tantas inteligencias verdaderas. ¡Cuántos brazos y angustiados pulmones hemos visto luchando fiera y desesperadamente por subir de esas simas, sin

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

5

His own torment was acute in his adolescent years 1912–17 when he attended the Jesuit school in El Puerto de Santa María, the prestigious Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga from which he was expelled at the age of sixteen. His subsequent condemnation of the Jesuits for their terrifying methods of indoctrinating children ranks among the most vituperative in a long list of such testimonies that includes James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, in Spain, the accounts of Pérez de Ayala, Ortega y Gasset and Luis Buñuel, who, reflecting on his own childhood, speaks of ‘a repressive and emasculating Catholicism’ and remarks: ‘In the end we were worn out with our oppressive sense of sin.’11 Buñuel, in fact, discharged himself from the Colegio del Salvador in Zaragoza, where he too had been a day pupil for seven punishing years, following a final ‘humiliating’ incident in which one of the Jesuits, the study hall proctor, gave him ‘a swift kick for no apparent reason’.12 Alberti reacted at an early age against the regime to which he was subjected, but so deeply inculcated in him were images of hell and damnation that, years later, they resurfaced with a vengeance and provided the psychic energy that generated his two most subversive volumes in religious terms, Sobre los ángeles [Concerning the Angels] and Sermones y moradas [Sermons and Dwelling Places]. Recalling the desperate state of mind that provoked Sobre los ángeles, Alberti alludes among other things to ‘waves of infantile fears that created even greater pangs of conscience, doubt, fears of hell, sombre echoes from that Jesuit school on the shores of the Bay of Cádiz where I had loved and suffered’ (LG, 259).13 His experience was typical, he says, comparable not only to that of Buñuel and Dalí but also of the poets Dámaso Alonso, who attended the main Jesuit school at Chamartín in Madrid, and the state-school educated García Lorca: ‘Federico tenía terrores nocturnos y era una persona de una formación muy católica’ [Federico was afflicted by night-time fears and he’d had a very Catholic upbringing].14 alcanzar al fin ni un momentáneo puñado de sol! ¡Cuánta familia hundida! ¡Horrible herencia de escombros y naufragios!’, AP 1, 33. 11 Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984), 48, 14. See also Mi último suspiro (Plaza y Janés, Barcelona, 1982). Joyce’s famous account of the bone-chilling sermon that harangued the boys of Belvedere College, Dublin, is found in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape, London, 1964), 123–39. For Pérez de Ayala’s testimony, see his autobiographical work, A.M.G.D.: La vida en los colegios de jesuítas (1910), a title based on the Jesuit motto ‘Ad majorem gloriam Dei’. Ortega confesses to having shared Ayala’s ‘niñez triste y sedienta’ in his review ‘Al margen del libro A.M.G.D.’, Obras completas, I, 6th edition (Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1963), 533. 12 My Last Breath, 30. 13 The orginal reads: ‘los miedos infantiles, invadiéndome en ráfagas que me traían aún remordimientos, dudas, terrores del infierno, ecos umbríos de aquel colegio jesuíta que amé y sufrí en mi bahía gatidana’, AP 1, 291. 14 See Aub, Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel, 300. Of Dámaso Alberti says: ‘tiene una

6

ROBERT HAVARD

Indeed, it was widely held that an over-zealous type of religious education had damaged legions of Spain’s youth, a view put forward by none other than Manuel Azaña, the future premier, in a debate in the Cortes on 13 October 1931 during the heady early days of the Second Republic. In a speech that would secure him the premiership, Azaña lamented the interference of religious orders in the nation’s education system and he singled out ‘la agitación más o menos clandestina de la Compañía de Jesús’ [the more or less subversive activity of the Company of Jesus] which he knew at first hand had done lasting damage to generations of Spaniards: Quien no tenga la experiencia de estas cosas, no puede hablar, y yo, que he comprobado en tantos y tantos compañeros de mi juventud que se encontraban en la robustez de su vida ante la tragedia de que se les derrumbaban los principios básicos de su cultura intelectual y moral, os he de decir que ése es un drama que yo con mi voto no consentiré que se reproduzca jamás.15 [Those of you who have no experience of this should remain silent; but, as for myself, having witnessed so many of my boyhood friends reach the prime of life only to find tragically that the basic principles of their intellectual and moral formation came crashing down around them, I feel bound to say that I will use my vote to ensure that such a drama will never be enacted again.]

The psycho-drama that Azaña saw as a feature of Spanish life is as deeply embedded in the religious iconography and neurotic texture of Sobre los ángeles as it is in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York] or the Buñuel–Dalí filmscripts, Un Chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog] and L’Age d’or [The Golden Age]. Religion for Buñuel, says Alberti, is simply an obsession: Es que ha tenido una formación como yo, de colegio de jesuítas. No sé en qué colegio estuvo, pero esas cosas las conocemos y las tenemos a flor de piel … Y Buñuel ha tenido la valentía de sacársela y mostrarla. Pero la muestra porque la tiene verdaderamente en todas las venas; no hay otra cosa: es una obsesión en él.16 formación religiosísima … tiene su fondo también y su infierno tremendo, quizá más que nadie. Es alumno de los jesuítas de Chamartín de la Rosa y conoce muy bien, porque yo he hablado mucho con él cuando éramos jóvenes, todos los problemas religiosos y de conciencia española. Los conoce mejor que nadie’ [He had an extremely religious education … he feels its depth and its fearful hell perhaps more than anyone. He was a pupil of the Jesuits at Chamartín de la Rosa and I know, because I spoke to him a lot when we were young, that he is well aware, perhaps more than anyone, of the problems concerning religion and the Spanish conscience]. Ibid., 301. 15 See Diario de las Sesiones de las Cortes Constituyentes de la República Española (1931), 1671. 16 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 293.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

7

[The thing is he was educated, as I was, by Jesuits. I don’t know what school he went to, but we understand these things, they’re ingrained in us … Buñuel has been brave enough to bring it out and display it. But he does this really because it’s in his veins and he can’t help it: it’s an obsession with him.]

A certain religious praxis has a marked capacity for creating obsessive psychical disorders that, in turn, require the therapy of catharsis, or what Freud calls abreaction. Creative figures, we know, tend to exorcize their demons in their work and Sobre los ángeles is a classic example of ‘Desahucio’ [‘Eviction’], the paradigmatic title of its second poem. Its third, ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Body’], describes the process: Yo te arrojé de mi cuerpo, yo, con un carbón ardiendo. Vete. (390)17 [I cast you out from my body,/ me, with a burning coal./ – Get out.]

This biblical exorcism, we cannot fail to note, finds a close parallel in psychoanalysis which aims to bring repressed memories and troublesome complexes to the surface for purposes of eradication. Ultimately, the most persistent feature in Sobre los ángeles is its intertwining of biblical and psychoanalytical motifs, the two being all the more tightly enmeshed by virtue of the fact that expulsion is effected via the agency of angels. It is revealing that Alberti should speak at length about the impact of a strict religious education in a conversation with Max Aub in which the primary objective is to uncover the avant-garde characteristics in their mutual friend Luis Buñuel. Alberti advises Aub that if he wants to know what makes Buñuel tick he should study his religious formation: son cosas que, sobre todo en España, están en la médula, ¿verdad? … Creo que bien estructurado, bien pensado, tú, esto, lo debes analizar profundamente, porque vale la pena, ¿verdad? Vale la pena por el hombre y por la figura española que se considera más de la vanguardia, más de todo … Claro, es de colegio, familia, represiones infantiles. Freud y todo lo que tú quieras.18 [In Spain these things are in our marrow, right? … I’d say, properly thought out and structured, this is a matter you should analyze in depth, because it’s crucial, isn’t it? Crucial to Buñuel as a man and because he’s

17

All references to Alberti’s poetry, unless otherwise indicated, are to Obra completa, vol. I, Poesía 1920–1938, edición de Luis García Montero (Aguilar, Madrid, 1988), with the page of reference in parenthesis. 18 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 294–5.

8

ROBERT HAVARD

seen as the most avant-garde Spaniard of all … Of course, it’s all to do with school, family, childhood repressions. Freud and all the rest of it …]

The relationship between religious repression, Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism’s first phase is clear enough, but what of the metaphysical and political phases? Here we recall the change of direction Breton signposted in his Second Manifesto: … considering all this, I doubt that anyone will be surprised to see Surrealism turn its attention, in passing, to something other than the solution of a psychological problem, however interesting that problem may be.19

This concludes a long sentence which began with Breton championing Hegel’s theory of the ‘penetrability of subjective life by “substantial” life’, the clear implication being that source material of a psycho-neurotic type is no longer enough to guarantee the quality of a work: there is a need for conceptual substance and for what Breton calls an ‘artistic gift’ by means of which the artist ‘can, rather than transform his dreams into symptoms, transform them into artistic creations’.20 The most striking example of a purposeful deployment of psychical material for such ends is Dalí’s ‘paranoia-critical method’ which has the additional virtue of being cast in a metaphysical framework. The novelty of Dalí’s approach, Breton argued, lay in the fact that he showed himself to be ‘strong enough to participate in these events [of his unconscious] as actor and spectator simultaneously’.21 In other words, Dalí was able to treat his neuroses as subject matter while maintaining the critical detachment of an analyst towards a patient. From 1928 on, his canvases typically consist of an array of objects that project and itemize his fetishes, the painter having considered these critically before structuring them into an artistic whole. The objects represent his inner life, their symbolic function having been teased out by self-scrutiny and by Dalí’s deliberate cultivation of his neuroses; but they are painted as objects in a naturalistic vein – with no sign of brushwork – to accentuate their concreteness.22 In this way Freudian theory is put to the service of art in a controlled manner and Dalí’s simulated paranoia integrates the subjective and the objective, as Anna Balakian explains:

19

André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972), 139. 20 Ibid., 160. 21 André Breton, ‘The Dalí Case’, in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (MacDonald, London, 1965), 133. 22 Dalí chose to paint, in fact, ‘in the ultra-regressive manner of Meissonier’; see Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, trans. Richard Howard (Hutchinson, London, 1990; first published as Journal d’un Génie, Éditions de la Table Ronde, Paris, 1964), 28.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

9

Dalí’s position was that paranoia, which in its acute stage we call abnormal or pathological, is basically a mental mechanism which can be cultivated or controlled by the artist to extend the scale of analogies and to demonstrate the high incidence of subjectivity in what we call ‘the world of reality’.23

The strong sense we have in Dalí of subject–object integration is enhanced by his fondness for compositions that combine humans with objects: for example, the furniture-woman who sits splayed on a beach in The Weaning of Furniture: Nutrition (1934); the large rock that is also Dalí’s own head in The Great Masturbator (1929). Integration is also the key in his celebrated double or multiple images where a human form emerges out of a configuration of objects, as in The Invisible Man (1929), The Great Paranoiac (1936), Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) (plate 5). In conceptual terms this kind of subject–object integration represents the fruition of an ideal Breton had begun to formulate in his First Manifesto: I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.24

Under the influence of Hegel, especially The Phenomenology of Mind, Breton’s notions of dream and reality crystallized into the metaphysically sounder concepts of mind and matter, the sum of these leading to transcendence and the surreal. Dalí, who had raised his voice ‘against the excesses of automatic writing’, saw himself as the person who redirected Surrealism by inventing ‘surrealist objects’ which ‘very quickly made the old-fashioned seeming dream recitals and sessions of automatism a thing of the past’.25 As for Alberti, there is considerable evidence – in the latter part of Sobre los ángeles and throughout Sermones y moradas – to suggest that he concurs with Dalí in two important respects. First, as we will see in poems such as ‘Los ángeles muertos’ [‘The Dead Angels’], ‘Hallazgos en la nieve’ [‘Discoveries in Snow’] and ‘Elegías’ [‘Elegies’], he has an irrepressible object-orientation. This may owe more, in fact, to the materialist values of the Vallecas school than to Dalí, but it incorporates the same unmistakable 23 Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (Allen & Unwin, London, 1972), 192. 24 Manifestoes of Surrealism, 14. 25 Salvador Dalí, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, as told to André Parinaud, trans. from the French by Harold J. Salemson (Quartet Books, London, 1977; originally published in English by W.H. Allen, London, 1976, and in French, with the title Comment on devient Dalí, by Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1973), 119. Haim F. Finkelstein argues that Dalí was largely responsible for ‘a change of emphasis’ in Surrealism and ‘a movement away from dream and automatism to an active soliciting of the mind to discharge the images hidden in the unconscious’; Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1979), 30.

10

ROBERT HAVARD

emphasis on objects as receptacles of subjectivity. Second, he engages in what amounts to a cultivation of his own paranoia, most typically through a simulated identification with Christ and his suffering. Norman O. Brown elucidates the lines that served as an epigraph to this chapter – ‘The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified mind’ – by quoting Freud: If we throw a crystal to the ground, it breaks, but it does not break haphazard; in accordance with the lines of cleavage it falls into fragments, where limits were already determined by the structure of the crystal, although they were invisible. Psychotics are fissured and splintered structures such as these. We cannot deny them a measure of that awe with which madmen were regarded by the people of ancient times.26

And Brown concludes in his inimitable way: ‘Split the stick and there is Jesus.’27 In Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles a remarkable series of Christomorphic poems begins with ‘Los ángeles mudos’ (418) [‘The Dumb Angels’], where the poet revisits his native El Puerto de Santa María after many years in Madrid and appears to astonished locals like the Risen Christ. It culminates in Sermones y moradas where the poet consistently subsumes his voice in that of a prophet–messiah who, in mock sermons, offers the prospect of salvation through suffering. Here the supreme Christian notion of redemption in the Passion provides an exact analogy for the artist’s triumphant passage through the crucible of psychic pain to salvation in his created work. Needless to say, a subversive irony is at large in the conflation of Christ’s suffering with that of a paranoiac surrealist, not least because the psycho-genesis of the latter’s work is religious repression, but also because the message of his sermons is rooted in an atheism that avows the possibility of transcendence via an alchemical reaction between the self and objects. Nonetheless, as in Dalí, it is precisely through his suffering that Alberti’s poet–prophet perceives the Hegelian truth that matter is a vast store of subjectivity. Both the paranoiac identification with Christ and the quasi-mystical insight into the innate potential of objects for transcendence – transubstantiation, one might say – are readily apparent in ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [Sermon on the Four Truths]: He aquí al hombre. Loco de tacto, arrastra cal de las paredes entre las uñas … No le toquéis, ardiendo como está, asediado por millones de manos que ansían pulsarlo todo. Escuchadle. Ésta es su voz:

26 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures, trans. W.J.H. Sprott (Hogarth Press, London, 1937), 80. 27 Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, 186.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

11

– Mi alma es sólo un cuerpo que fallece por fundirse y rozarse con los objetos vivos y difuntos. (453) [Behold the man./ Mad from touching, he drags lime off walls under his nails./ Don’t touch him, burning as he is, besieged by millions of hands that long to feel him all over./ Listen to him. This is his voice: ‘My soul is only a body that is dying to merge with and rub itself against living and dead objects.’]

And: Para un espíritu perseguido, los peces eran sólo una espina que se combaba al contacto de un grito de socorro o cuando las arenas de las costas, fundidas con el aceite hirviendo, volaban a cautizar las espaldas del hombre … Atended. Ésta es su voz: – Mi alma está picada por el cangrejo de pinzas y compases candentes, mordida por las ratas y vigilada día y noche por el cuervo. Ayudadme a cavar una ola, hasta que mis manos se conviertan en raíces y de mi cuerpo broten hojas y alas. (452) [For a persecuted spirit, fish are only bones that bent on contact with a cry for help or when coastal sands, merged with boiling oil, flew to cauterize a man’s shoulders … Listen. This is his voice:/ ‘My soul is stung by a crab’s pincers and burning compasses, bitten by rats and spied on day and night by the crow./ Help me dig a wave, until my hands become roots and my body sprouts leaves and wings.’]

Alberti’s adoption of a messianic role to preach his truths provides a last point of comparison with Dalí, for this has the effect of exteriorizing his poetic voice in a declamatory, oracular performance: ‘En frío, voy a revelaros lo que es un sótano por dentro … / Voy a revelaros un asombro …’ (451) [Coldly, I am going to show you what a cellar is like on the inside … /I am going to reveal to you a wonder …]. Modelled no doubt on harangues he had suffered as a schoolboy, his performance compares with the simulation, cultivation and clinical detachment found in Dalí who also frequently adopts a Christ mode.28 In short, Alberti’s poems of this second phase present a poet 28

This is discernible throughout his Confessions, for instance: ‘[I am] the greatest intuitive genius of lucid life ever brought to earth … I am the perpetually reborn … Dalí is the most sublime personage there is and I am Dalí … A new consciousness of humanity may start with me, Dalí … And my painting therefore has the character of prodigious revelation. Most human beings have never gotten outside their own bodies … but I come out dripping with the “other” truths … Actually I have no bodily dimensions. My self is Dalí. … Each picture is a Mass in which I distribute the Eucharist of a knowledge … I lived my Passion to the full, like Christ.’ The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 135, 245, 246, 251.

12

ROBERT HAVARD

who, far from trying to solve or eliminate his obsessions, is intent, like Dalí, on sustaining and exploring them. That he does so in a manner both metaphysical and sensational – in the Lautréamont tradition – is attributable in large part to religion which, ironically, not only provokes his paranoia but also provides the linguistic register in which it is explored.

Materialism and the transition to political commitment What for Dada had been a simple desire to épater le bourgeois crystallized for the surrealists into political commitment and, spurred by events of the 1930s, alignment with Communism. A conceptual point also linked the surrealists to the doctrine of dialectical materialism, namely: the primacy of matter. This tenet, axiomatic in turn to Hegel, Marx and the communists, was, however, anathema to Dalí for whom the human mind alone was supreme and objective reality merely in its service, as he argued in ‘L’Âne pourri’ (1930) [‘The Rotting Donkey’]: I believe the moment is at hand when … it will be possible … to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality … Paranoia makes use of the external world to impose the obsessive notion … The reality of the external world serves as an illustration and a proof, and is put in the service of the reality of our mind.29

Such egocentricity flew in the face of an ascendant communist ethos and it led to Dalí’s expulsion from the surrealist movement, announced as provisional in January 1934. Dalí, it is true, had antagonized the surrealists by ridiculing Lenin in Composition: Evocation of Lenin (1931) and especially The Enigma of William Tell (1933) which depicted the Russian demagogue with an enormously elongated buttock. But his stance against materialism was in any case unacceptable in the volatile climate that turned a metaphysical nicety into a heated question of political allegiance. In the maelstrom of events that included the collapse of the New York stock exchange (24 October 1929), the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic on the abdication of Alfonso XIII (14 April 1931), Hitler’s rise to Chancellor (January 1933) and the Asturian miners’ revolt (October 1934), Dalí’s incorrigible Narcissism was increasingly offensive to Breton’s coterie.

29

The original reads: ‘Je crois qu’est proche le moment où, par un processus de caractère paranoiaque et actif de la pensée, il sera possible (simultanément à l’automatisme et autres états passifs) de systématiser la confusion et contribuer au discrédit total du monde de la réalité … La réalité du monde extérieur sert comme illustration et preuve, et est mise au service de la réalité de notre esprit.’ S. Dalí, ‘L’Âne pourri’, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, op. cit., no. 1, 9–10.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

13

Alberti, by contrast, had long been associated with the Vallecas group of artists whose left-wing views complemented a materialist orientation in their work. From 1925 he had regularly visited Benjamín Palencia and Alberto Sánchez in Vallecas, then a rural outskirt to the south of Madrid.30 He was struck by the ‘concreta revelación’ [concrete revelation] of Sánchez’s sculpture which he found ‘profundamente poética, no literaria, y cantan en ella las materias naturales con que están hechas’31 [profoundly poetic, not literary, for it sings out with the natural materials from which it is made]. Alberti’s first vocation, we remember, was to art: ‘Yo llegué a Madrid para ser pintor’32 [I came to Madrid to be a painter], on which subject he was fiercely patriotic, referring caustically to those painters who left Spain as ‘l’école de Paris’ and waxing lyrical about: aquellos pueblos y tierras vallecanos en los que soñábamos con la creación de un nuevo arte español y universal, puro y primario como las piedras que encontrábamos allí pulidas por los ríos y las extremadas intemperies.33 [those villages and rural places of Vallecas where we dreamed of creating a new and universal Spanish art, pure and elemental as the stones that we found polished by rivers and exposure to the weather.]

On his almost daily trips to Vallecas, Alberti was soon accompanied by the young artist, Maruja Mallo, ‘la musa de los surrealistas’34 [the surrealists’ muse], who cut a striking figure in Madrid at that time: ‘la primera sinsombrerista, la primera nudista, y una de las primeras mujeres auténticamente libres’35 [the first woman to go hatless, the first nudist and one of the first truly liberated women]. When Maruja began to depict earthy, scatological objects in nearly colourless paintings – La Huella [The Footprint] (1929) (plate 8), Basuras [Rubbish] (1930), Grajo y Excrementos [Rook and Excrement] (1931)36 – their impact on Alberti was profound. His supreme tribute to her is the poem ‘La primera ascensión de Maruja Mallo al subsuelo’ [‘The First Ascension of Maruja Mallo to the Subsoil’], which, as the title indicates, treats Maruja in mock-paranoiac terms as a Redeemer whose transcendence is towards the matter of this world rather than the next:

30

A portrait of Alberti by Alberto Sánchez dates from 1925. AP 3, 37. 32 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 283. 33 AP 3, 33–4. 34 See Anon., Maruja Mallo. La gran ignorada en Galicia (Diputación Provincial de Lugo, 1995), 86. 35 See Manuel Vicent, ‘Maruja Mallo, la diosa de los cuatro brazos’, El País, 12-x-1981, 11–12. 36 See Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color (1928–1942), estudio preliminar por Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942). 31

14

ROBERT HAVARD

Tú, tú que bajas a las cloacas donde las flores más flores son ya unos tristes salivazos sin sueños y mueres por las alcantarillas que desembocan a las verbenas desiertas para resucitar al filo de una piedra mordida por un hongo estancado …37 [You,/ you who delve into sewers where the most flowerly flowers are but sad goblets of disillusioned spittle and who expire in drains that flow into empty celebrations only to be reborn on the edge of a stone bitten by a stagnant mushroom …]

Alberti’s object-orientation compares, then, with Dalí’s as regards the practice of simulated madness or paranoia, but his artistic allegiances with the Vallecas school and with Maruja Mallo led him to a materialism that differs radically from the views of the Catalan painter. His more committed position, prompted by artistic priorities, facilitated an almost seamless transition to the materialist ideology of Communism. Alberti’s political awakening dates from 1928 when student uprisings against Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship began ‘to shatter the tranquility of the streets’ (LG, 271). Suddenly he was aware of another function of literature as the exiled Unamuno became ‘la voz de la protesta contra el jerezano espadón’38 [the voice of protest against the Jerez bullfighter]. In this ‘climate of violence’ Alberti found a new vocabulary – ‘Republic, Fascism, liberty’ – and he was ‘fascinated by it all’: The shouts and protests, which in some dim way had existed within me, eating away at my own defenses, finally found an escape hatch and raced frantically into the streets with the fervent students. We walked along the barricades that had been set up on the boulevards, stood firm against the mounted Guardia Civil and the gunfire from their Mausers. No one had called me. It was my own blind impulse which guided me. The majority of those young men knew very little about me, but suddenly we were all friends. (LG, 271–2)

Almost without him knowing it, his personal crisis was subsumed in a confused notion of the national crisis. New works impacted on his social consciousness, notably films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin and, of course, Un Chien andalou which Buñuel

37 The poem first appeared in La Gaceta Literaria, 1-vii-1929, 1, where it is placed between two illustrations of Maruja Mallo, La Huella [Footprint] and Cloaca [Sewer]. It is also quoted in full by Geoffrey Connell in ‘The End of a Quest: Alberti’s Sermones y moradas and Three Uncollected Poems’, Hispanic Review, 33 (1965), 304–5. 38 Rafael Alberti, El poeta en la España de 1931, seguido del Romancero de Fermín Galán y los sublevados de Jaca (Publicaciones del Patronato Hispano-Argentino, Buenos Aires, 1942), 16.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

15

brought to the Cine Club in Madrid on 8 December 1928, declaring that it was nothing but ‘a desperate and impassioned invitation to crime’ (LG, 272). Alberti rose to the new mood in his nonsensical lecture, ‘Palomita y galápago’ [‘Dove and Turtle’], delivered to open-mouthed ladies of the Lyceum Club on 10 November 1929, and again when he shouted at his audience on the first night of his play, El hombre deshabitado [The Disinhabited Man], 26 February 1931: ‘Long Live Extermination! Down with the putrefaction of the Spanish theatre of today!’ (LG, 289). He had begun his sacrilegious ‘auto sacramental’, El hombre deshabitado, in 1928, the year in which he finished Sobre los ángeles, started Sermones y moradas and conceived his zany tribute to the tragi-comedians of the silent screen, Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos [I was a Fool and what I have seen has made Two Fools of Me]. Much like the feverishly productive Dalí, whose first Paris exhibition was held in November 1929, and the sorely troubled New-York-bound Lorca, Alberti’s frenetic activity was fomented by an ‘inner turmoil’ (LG, 277): ‘I was still confused and not convinced that my horizons had become any brighter. I was still under the yoke of my family’ (LG, 275). Even in his first political poem, ‘Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir’ [‘With my Boots on I must Die’], ‘written in anger’ and published 1 January 1930, he was less motivated by clarity of purpose than by ‘an undefined sense of desperation’ (LG, 277), as the opening image suggests with its jumble of furniture piled high into street barricades. Yet in these same streets Alberti was beginning to identify with the crowds who shouted ‘!Viva la República! ¡Muera Primo de Rivera!’ and in the same month of January he found himself marching on the Royal Palace only for the demonstrators to be dispersed by mounted Civil Guards who drove some to protest in a cinema and others to burn down a kiosk where they gleefully watched the Jesuit slogan – ‘To the Greater Glory of God and the Dictatorship’ (LG, 278)39 – go up in flames. In addition, he had recently met the beautiful and politically committed María Teresa León who soon dispelled the sentimental gloom which had engulfed him since his break up with Maruja Mallo. Events gathered pace in the new decade when Primo de Rivera fell in January 1930 and another general, Berenguer, briefly propped up the monarchy in the so-called ‘Dictablanda’ or soft dictatorship. When two young army captains, Fermín Galán and García Hernández, raised the cry of the Republic in the Pyrenean outpost of Jaca, Alfonso XIII made his ‘worst mistake’40 in ordering their execution on 14 December 1930. Alberti was moved to write ballads on the aptly named Galán, who hailed like himself from near Cádiz, and soon afterwards when he had declaimed them in the 39

The proper Jesuit motto is a little shorter: ‘Ad majorem gloriam Dei’, see footnote 11. Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge University Press, London, 1967; first published 1943), 85.

40

16

ROBERT HAVARD

same ‘city of freedom’ – ‘on the top of my voice, standing on a table of a café’ (LG, 294, 296)41 – news came of Alfonso’s abdication on 14 April. This was the ‘breach’ (LG, 272) through which ardent Republicans poured and which would lead with fatal momentum to the outbreak of civil war on 18 July 1936. Alberti’s first project in the newly declared Republic was to turn his ballads into the play, Fermín Galán, which was staged on 1 June 1931 by Margarita Xirgu’s company. It provoked as stormy a reaction as his first play had four months earlier, for when the scene came in the second act, in which I had the wild idea of having the Virgin appear with rifle and bayonet to defend the battered group of rebels and demanding the heads of the King and General Berenguer, the entire theatre protested violently. The atheistic Republicans objected to the very appearance of the Virgin, and the Monarchists were horrified to hear such criminal feelings expressed by the Mother of God whom I had invented. (LG, 299)

The play enjoyed only modest success, but it decided Alberti on his future: ‘I now clearly and sharply saw before my eyes the common cause of the people’ (LG, 300). Moreover, with El hombre deshabitado, it helped secure for him and fellow playwright María Teresa León a government subsidy to travel abroad and study European political and agit-prop theatre. Within a month the couple left on a near two-year itineracy that took them to Paris, Berlin and Moscow, from where they wrote bi-monthly reports.42 When they moved from Nazi Berlin to the Soviet capital – for Alberti, ‘un viaje del fondo de la noche al centro de la luz’43 [a journey from the depth of night to the centre of light] – they were made guests of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. On their travels they met Aragon, Chagall, Supervielle, Brecht, Ivanov, Svetlov, Pasternak and many other writers, while on their return journey through Berlin they witnessed the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February 1933 as well as appalling examples of anti-Semitism. Alberti’s experience abroad was definitive in his embracing Communism, which, says Enrique Montero with some justification, had a ‘formación europea antes que española’44 [European rather than Spanish complexion].

41

Cádiz is forever associated with resistance to oppression since the proclamation in 1812 of the Constitución de Cádiz, followed in 1820 by Riego’s liberal pronunciamiento against Ferdinand VII. 42 Several of Alberti’s contributions from abroad to El Sol and Luz are gathered by Robert Marrast in Rafael Alberti, Prosas encontradas (1924–1942) (Editorial Ayuso, Madrid, 1973). 43 AP 3, 20. 44 Enrique Montero, ‘Octubre: revelación de una revista mítica’, introduction to Octubre, escritores y artistas revolucionarios (Topos Verlag AG, Vaduz, 1977, reimpresión de la edición de Madrid, Gráficos Carrazas, 1933), xii.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

17

Back in Madrid in April 1933 Alberti and María Teresa León set about producing their new review, Octubre, the first number of which appeared in June that year subtitled Escritores y artistas revolucionarios [Revolutionary Writers and Artists]. There followed a statement of principles: ‘Octubre está contra la guerra imperialista, por la defensa de la Unión Soviética, contra el fascismo, con el proletariado’ [‘Octubre’ is against imperialist wars, for the defence of the Soviet Union, against fascism, for the proletariat]. Its offices were listed as 45 Marqués de Urguijo, the domicile of Alberti and his wife who sold around 2,000 copies in the streets ‘a gritos’45 [shouting it out], all of which added to the sense of struggle. There was a spate of left-wing journals at this time, including Nueva España [New Spain] (1930–31), Nuestro Cinema [Our Cinema] (1932), which championed proletarian German as well as revolutionary Soviet cinema, and Sin Dios [Without God] (1932–33), subtitled Órgano mensual de la Atea, filial de la Internacional de Librepensadores proletarios revolucionarios [Monthly Organ of Atheism, Affiliated to the International Body of Revolutionary Proletarian Freethinkers], to which Alberti had contributed from abroad. Unsurprisingly, a militant atheism featured in Octubre.

Politics and religion As is well known, Church and State have been closely identified in Spain since the fifteenth century when Fernando and Isabel, the so called ‘Catholic Monarchs’, promoted the concept of nationhood by unifying the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and expelling the Moors. Clericalism thrived, most infamously in the Inquisition, and though temporary restraint came with the rise of Liberalism its momentum was restored in the latter part of the nineteenth century when the secularization of education in France led to an influx of Jesuits and other teaching orders into the Peninsula. By 1912 the Jesuits controlled ‘without exaggeration, one-third of the capital wealth of Spain’,46 investing the equivalent of £60 million sterling in diverse enterprises. Gerald Brenan comments: It seemed scarcely in the national interests that one section of the community – and that a militant one – should control so large a share of the industrial life of the country, and then one must remember that a good part of this wealth had to be acquired by cadging for gifts and bequests among the rich and that these favours were not given for nothing.47

45 46 47

María Teresa León, Memoria de la melancolía (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1970), 79. Gerald Brenan cites J. Aguilera and A. Marvaud in The Spanish Labyrinth, 47–8. Ibid.

18

ROBERT HAVARD

In effect, the Church was expected to defend the interests of the rich against the poor, and, at a time when illiteracy was rampant, ‘the colleges of the Jesuits and Augustinians became what the public schools are in England’, telling their pupils, for good measure, that ‘if they associated with Liberals, they went to hell’.48 Brenan concludes: The Church presented in Spain an insoluble problem, and when in the end the majority of the population abandoned it in despair at its political intransigence and burned churches and killed priests in revolutionary – I might almost say in true Catholic and filial – anger, there is surely nothing to be surprised at.49

Octubre’s aggressive anticlericalism was much in the tradition of Goya whom Alberti greatly admired and regarded as a profound influence on the Spanish avant-garde: ‘El surrealismo español viene de Goya’50 [Spanish Surrealism comes from Goya]. Most poignant for Alberti was Goya’s drawing in which a skeletal man hands over his skin to three representatives of the State – a bishop, a government official and a general – with the caption reading: ‘El pueblo entrega lo último que le queda’51 [‘The people hand over all they have left to give’]. Two other prints from The Disasters of War series appeared in Octubre, including ‘Que se rompe la cuerda’ [‘The rope is breaking’], which shows a cleric on a tightrope balancing precariously over people below, a reference to the aloofness of the Church in 1808. Alongside, Alberti placed his poem, ‘La iglesia marcha sobre la cuerda floja’ [‘The Church is Walking a Tightrope’], which depicts the pontiff crudely as a fawn of power: Mis oraciones darán más fuego a sus cañones. Mi agua bendita redoblará su dinamita. Nuestra señora será la dulce cargadora de los fusiles de sus guardias civiles y Dios, el guía de su secreta policía. … Banquero, hermano, sube hasta mí, dame la mano, que si la cuerda 48

Ibid., 50, 51. Ibid., 52. 50 Letter to V. Bodini, quoted by Francisco Aranda in El surrealismo español (Lumen, Barcelona, 1981), 15. 51 Alberti refers to this print in El poeta en la España de 1931, 15. 49

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

19

que si la cuerda se rompe iremos a la mierda. [My prayers/ will add fire to your canons./ My holy water/ will recharge your dynamite./ Our Lady/ will be the sweet loader of the rifles/ of your Civil Guards/ and God the guide/ of your secret police/ … Banker, brother,/ come up here, give me your hand,/ for if the rope/ for if the rope/ breaks, we’ll all be in the shit. (559)52

The elements of buffoonery here – and again in La farsa de los Reyes Magos53 [Farce of the Three Kings] – connect with Yo era un tonto, but Alberti’s humour is far from innocent now. The Pope, we remember, had signed a concordat with Mussolini in 1929 – an act which prompted Lorca’s vitriolic ‘Grito hacia Roma’ [‘Shout at Rome’] in Poeta en Nueva York – and though Primo de Rivera committed a much lesser offence in allowing Jesuit and Augustinian colleges to grant degrees this still caused an uproar and did much to bring the Jerez dictator down. It also ensured that the issue of religious education would be high on Azaña’s agenda when the Republic was declared. Alberti, like many Spaniards, saw the Church as pivotal in the class struggle. One of his uncles, he humorously recalls, was ostracized by his family for holding Republican views with, ‘There’ll be no atheists in this house’ (LG, 79),54 and he reflects: What ideas about liberalism and other democratic doctrines were inculcated by the Jesuits in the minds of the poor students who attended their schools? They were considered infernal … It simply wasn’t elegant or refined to be a Republican. Night-watchmen, coachmen, grocery-storekeepers and even perhaps civil servants at City Hall could afford to be so ‘common’. Naturally, drunks could too. (LG, 79).55

The source of this mentality is attributed squarely to the Jesuits who: confundían y mezclaban en una sola bola las ambiciones democráticas de una burguesía que empezaba a industrializarse, con las lógicas exigencias de un proletariado que esa misma industria iba creando y el grito natural del campesino que reclamaba la tierra.56 52

Octubre, nos. 3, 14–15. Octubre, nos. 4–5, 13–15. 54 Cf. ‘Nada de ateos en esta casa’, El poeta en la España de 1931, 13. 55 Cf. ‘Toda persona que compartiera esta idea olía a azufre del infierno, a vino de taberna, a alpargata sucia, en fin, a ordinariez y falta de distinción. Era muy poco elegante ser republicano. Algún sereno, agún cochero podían serlo. También, eso sí, los borrachos.’ El poeta en la España de 1931, 32. 56 Ibid., 32. A very similar, if slightly less militant, passage is found in The Lost Grove, 79. 53

20

ROBERT HAVARD

[confused and lumped together in one rag-bag ball the democratic aspirations of a middle class in the throes of industrialization with the legitimate demands of a working class that the same industry was creating and the natural cry of peasants reclaiming their land.]

In Octubre, by contrast, everything was put in the clearest terms. A priority was made of education, as in Alberti’s rousing ‘Himno de las bibliotecas proletarias’ [‘Hymn to Proletarian Libraries’] with its theme of ‘estudiar para luchar’ [study to fight], and in ‘Los niños de Extremadura’ [‘The Children of Extremadura’], a region whose poverty he and María Teresa León saw for themselves when they accompanied Buñuel to Las Hurdes as he prepared his shocking social documentary Tierra sin pan [Land without Bread]:57 Los niños de Extremadura van descalzos. ¿Quién les robó los zapatos? … No saben los nombres de las estrellas. ¿Quién les cerró las escuelas? [The children of Extremadura/ go barefoot./ Who stole their shoes? … They don’t know/ the names of the stars./ Who closed their schools?]

Octubre continued the spirit of Sin Dios which had run articles like ‘La próxima guerra imperialista y el papel de la Iglesia’ [‘The Next Imperialist War and the Role of the Church’] (February 1933) and had invited urban and peasant workers to send in any information they had on the malevolent influence of clericalism in their areas.58 Alberti takes up the peasants’ cause in his poem ‘La lucha por la tierra’ [‘The Struggle for Land’] which sees religion in Marxist terms as an instrument of oppression in its advocating stoic acceptance of suffering in this life as a means of attaining salvation in the next. Such deception in the name of one who insists on being called ‘Señor’ [Lord/Sir] – ‘como cualquier propietario o explotador de hombres’ (526) [like any other landowner or exploiter of men] – was now gone for good: ahora combatimos diariamente no por esa patria lejana, ese salario invisible que es la promesa de tu gloria … (528) [no longer do we fight daily for that distant land, for that invisible payment which is the promise of your glory …]

57 58

See Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel, 314. See Octubre, op. cit., x, xvi, fn.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

21

Instead the peasants are disposed to fight only for the land they work upon: ‘la reconocen nuestros pies,/ espera y grita bajo ellos: LA TIERRA’ [Our feet recognize it;/ it waits and cries beneath them: THE EARTH]. In place of stoical forebearance there is only impatience for an improved material circumstance in the here and now, a change to be brought about through struggle: ‘Prepárate en la paz para la guerra’ [‘Prepare for war in peace’] is María Teresa León’s proverbial advice in the second number of Octubre, while Alberti quotes Marx for his title in ‘Un fantasma recorre Europa’ [‘A Spectre Haunts Europe’], the lead poem in El poeta en la calle (523) which appeared in Octubre and in French in Commune. The same imminence pervades the aptly titled De un momento a otro [Any Minute Now], Alberti’s major political work which covers his visit to America and the Caribbean in 1934 as well as the Civil War in which he fought. Naturally, imminence reflects the political ferment and anxiety of the time, but it has religious overtones and is prophetic or adventist in seeing the coming communist revolution as the way to the promised land. Surprisingly, this is Antonio Machado’s argument in an article dedicated to Alberti in the last number of Octubre, ‘Sobre una lírica comunista que pudiera venir de Rusia’ [‘On the Prospect of Communist Poetry from Russia’]. Machado speaks of Russia’s misión histórica, esencialmente cristianizadora … Porque Rusia trabaja para emancipar al hombre, a todos los hombres, de cuanto es servidumbre en el trabajo.59 [historical and essentially Christianizing mission … For Russia strives to emancipate man, all men, from what is servitude in work.]

And he concludes: ‘será necesaria una fe comunista’ [a communist faith will be needed]. That the deeply spiritual Machado could embrace Communism in this way suggests another perspective on the link between religion and politics, for here the latter appears to have assumed the duties abrogated by the former. It also suggests that transcendental patterns of thought – normally associated with religion and seemingly endemic in Spaniards – have been transferred to the Utopian politics of the hammer and sickle. This perhaps explains why surrealist writing in Spain – at least the genre of poetry, in Alberti’s view – was rather more serious than in France: es más seria la española, y más profunda, y menos charlatana; porque muchas partes del surrealismo han quedado en mucho bla-bla-bla, en mucha conversación.60 [the Spanish is more serious, more profound, and less charlatan; for many types of Surrealism have degenerated into babble, so much empty talk.] 59 60

Octubre, nos. 4–5, 4; and reimpression (Topos Verlag AG, Vaduz, 1977), 148. Rafael Alberti, taped interview with Geoffrey Connell. See footnote 2.

22

ROBERT HAVARD

Before we consider Alberti’s own view of Surrealism, however, there is a further positive feature to mention which derives directly from a religious formation and which a number of Spaniards seem to have channelled into their creative practices.

The Loyolan imagination: ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place] My argument so far is that Surrealism has three phases, based on Freud, Hegel and Marx, and that what invigorates each in the Spanish context is the presence – interference, if you will – of religion. A repressive form of religion impacts negatively on the individual, in whom it generates neuroses, and on society at large, where it is deeply implicated in a civil catastrophe that had been brewing for centuries. But religion is not wholly negative, even from a surrealist perspective. For one thing, it promotes a transcendental disposition that distinguishes the ‘visionary’61 Dalí and the materio-mystical Alberti from the French model. For another, it provides a rich biblical register complete with a body of symbols and a prophetic discourse that is well suited to probing the surreal. But where religion and especially the Jesuits may have had most impact is on the creative imagination, in which context, I suggest, they stimulated a practice of what might be called actualization. Anyone who has read Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, the Jesuit manual, will know that the saint’s instructions to his trainees focus on the theme of experiencing things for oneself. The trainee must know hell as an actual reality, Loyola directs in the Fifth Exercise of the First Week, the ‘Meditation on Hell’: The composition here is to see with the eyes of the imagination the length, breadth and depth of hell … To look with the eyes of the imagination at the great fires and at the souls appearing to be in burning bodies … To hear with one’s ears the wailings, howls, cries, blasphemies against Christ our Lord and all the saints … To smell with the sense of smell the smoke, the burning sulphur, the cesspit and the rotting matter … To taste with the sense of taste bitter things, such as tears, sadness and the pangs of conscience … To feel with the sense of touch, i.e. how those in hell are licked around and burned by the fires.62

61 ‘I am essentially a visionary,’ says Dalí, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 143. 62 Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings, trans. with introductions and notes by Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1996), 298–9.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

23

This practice is based on ‘the composition, seeing the place’63 – ‘la composición, viendo el lugar’ – as Loyola puts it in the preamble to the First Exercise, which enables the trainee Jesuit to live the experience of hell through all his senses. Not only trainees, it would seem, but Jesuit schoolboys too, for Alberti speaks of being subjected to ‘horrifying sermons’ and to ‘a fiery lecture on the torments of Hell’ (LG, 32, 84). These were no doubt similar to the one James Joyce recalls in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which frightens the life out of a host of young boys, including Stephen Dedalus, his imaginary self. Joyce vividly depicts a visiting preacher conjuring up ‘the horror of this strait and dark prison’ in a stream of images that focus on the stench of hell, the intensity of its fire and the boundlessness of its torments.64 When the preacher is finished, Stephen Dedalus is left shaking, hardly knowing if he is dead or alive, with voices shrieking ‘Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!’ inside his head. Later that same day the preacher resumes quietly with the words: This morning we endeavoured, in our reflection upon hell, to make what our holy founder calls in his book of spiritual exercises, the composition of place. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the senses of the mind, in our imagination, the material character of that awful place and of the physical torments which all who are in hell endure. This evening we shall consider for a few moments the nature of the spiritual torments of hell.65

Needless to say, when the preacher gets into his stride again his depiction of the spiritual torments that await the young miscreants is every bit as excruciating as the physical ones he outlined in his first session. What is unmistakable in Joyce’s account is the extraordinary stress upon the imagination, the use of which is seen as imperative: Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain foul and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes and nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.66

At the same time it must be remembered that hell is only one, if the most disturbing, of a number of subjects to be imagined. Equally important is the

63

Ibid., 294. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape, London, 1964), 123 et seq. 65 Ibid., 130. 66 Ibid., 128. 64

24

ROBERT HAVARD

life of Christ, especially the Stations of the Cross, which will occupy the trainee’s attention in the fourth and final cycle of his meditations. Again Loyola tells the trainee that he must use his imagination to feel the crown of thorns, the nails and the soldier’s spear; he must be able to taste the vinegar and, in short, he must feel as forlorn in his suffering as Christ was. This practice of ‘viendo el lugar’, of actualizing the experience in all its circumstantial detail, is something Alberti would have been made strongly aware of in the Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga, as would Buñuel at the Colegio del Salvador in Zaragoza. No wonder his poems of torment in Sobre los ángeles are so hellish. No wonder he declaims his sermons with such messianic fervour in Sermones y moradas. In this light we appreciate Alberti’s image-making power in such agonized poems as ‘Desahucio’ [‘Eviction’], Humedad. Cadenas. Gritos. Ráfagas. (390) [Dampness. Chains. Screams./ Blasts of wind]

– ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Body’], ¿Quién sacude en mi almohada reinados de yel y sangre, cielos de azufre, mares de vinagre? (392) [Who scatters on my pillow/ reigns of bile and blood, skies of brimstone,/ seas of vinegar?]

– ‘El alma en pena’ [‘The Soul in Torment’], Sísmicos latigazos tumban sueños, terremotos derriban las estrellas (420) [Seismic whiplashes flatten dreams,/ earthquakes demolish stars]

– and ‘Castigos’ [‘Punishments’], Cuando saben a azufre los vientos y las bocas nocturnas a hueso, vidrio y alambre (438) [When winds taste of brimstone and nocturnal mouths of bone, glass and wire].

All of which points to a hell on earth, as experienced by the boy whom Alberti recalls in ‘Muerte y juicio’ [‘Death and Judgement’] which concludes with the line: ‘Para ir al infierno no hace falta cambiar de sitio ni de postura’

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

25

(434) [To go to hell you don’t have to budge an inch or move a muscle]. The tenor of his language compares with that of Joyce’s preacher: The fire of hell gives forth no light … the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never-ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air … All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer … The brimstone too which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench … the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury … O how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and burning, the bowels a redhot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls … Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead.67

In this light we begin to make sense of the excruciating texture of a poem like ‘5’ with its clear allusion to the five senses as a channel of experience and understanding: Cinco manos de ceniza, quemando la bruma, abriendo cinco vías para el agua turbia, para el turbio viento … … los cinco navegables ríos que dan almas corrientes, voz al sueño. (408) [Five hands of ash,/ burning the mist, opening/ five routes/ for the murky water,/ for the misty air … / the five navigable rivers/ that give voice and common souls to dreams …]

The poem seems to be about a lost self – very likely the ‘tú’ [you] is the poet as a young boy – and a striking feature is the absence of the first person, or 67

Ibid., 123–5.

26

ROBERT HAVARD

the self as ‘I’. Instead there is a sense of the void, suggesting a violated, abnegated personality, which is itemized at the poem’s end when each of the five senses is allocated a stanza: Y no viste. Era su luz la que cayó primero. Mírala, seca, en el suelo. Y no oíste. Era su voz la que alargada hirieron. Óyela muda, en el eco. Y no oliste. Era su esencia la que hendió el silencio. Huélela fría, en el viento. Y no gustaste. Era su nombre el que rodó deshecho. Gústalo en tu lengua, muerto. Y no tocaste. El desaparecido era su cuerpo. Tócala en la nada, yelo. (408–9) [And you saw not./ It was his light that fell first. Look at it, withered, on the floor. And you heard not./ It was his extenuated voice they wounded. Hear it, dumb, in the echo. And you smelt not./ It was his essence that rent the silence. Smell it, cold, in the wind. And you tasted not./ It was his name that was shattered. Taste it on your tongue, dead. And you touched not./ What had disappeared was his body. Touch it in the void, ice.]

The pronouns are typically ambiguous, but we discern the Jesuit practice of experiencing something with all five senses successively. What leaves the strongest impression is the sense of a deliberate, total destruction of personality, which I take to be the poet’s own, as a child, destroyed by Jesuit abuse. Indeed, the theme of stealing away a child’s life is a recurring one, from the ‘ángel muerto’ [dead angel] of the opening ‘Paraíso perdido’ [‘Paradise Lost’] to the terrified boy in ‘Muerte y juicio’ [‘Death and Judgement’]: A un niño, a un solo niño que iba para piedra nocturna … Mirad. Conteneos la sangre, los ojos. A sus pies, él mismo, sin vida. (432) [A boy, a single boy who was going towards night stone … Look. Restrain your blood, your tears./ At their feet, he, the same one, lifeless.]

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

27

It is found too in ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Body’]: Llevaba una ciudad dentro. La perdió./ Le perdieron. (394) [He carried a city within./ He lost it./ They lost him.]

– and most tellingly, despite the puzzling feminine gender, in ‘El ángel mentiroso’ [‘The Lying Angel’]: Y fui derrotada yo, sin violencia, con miel y palabras (400) [And I was destroyed/ me, without violence,/ with honey and words.]

It can hardly be coincidental that the theme of a dead child is so prominent in others who concern us: Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, for instance, has a clutch of narrative poems on the theme – ‘El niño Stanton’ [‘The Boy Stanton’], ‘Niña ahogada en el pozo’ [‘Girl Drowned in a Well’], ‘Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos’ [‘Fable and Ring of the Three Friends’] – as well as powerful internal projections on dead youth in ‘1910 (intermedio)’ [‘1910 (Intermediate)’], ‘Tu infancia en Menton’ [‘Your Childhood in Menton’] and ‘Poema doble del Lago Edem’ [‘Double Poem of Lake Eden’]. For Dalí, the notion of a dead self was starkly represented in his older brother, the original Salvador, who died some time before the artist was born and for whom the new Salvador felt merely a substitute in his mournful parents’ eyes. This complex was decisive in Dalí’s youth – ‘I thought I was dead before I knew I was alive’68 – and it bears strongly on his creative processes, as we shall see. Reconstructing the above with reference to Alberti, we have a curious example of a personality that appears to be abnegated but which is extremely fertile in terms of imagining torment and hallucinating generally. This seeming paradox, I suggest, is the result of systematic indoctrination, a conclusion I am led to by Roland Barthes’ analysis of Loyola’s method. Barthes points out that the use of the five senses results firstly and most obviously in proliferation, for ‘the imagining of Hell consists in perceiving it five consecutive times in the mode of each of the five senses’.69 Proliferation, Barthes then shows, is an obsessive feature in Loyola’s language as a whole, the antitheses, bifurcations and numberings off producing what he calls the ‘continuous arborescence of Ignatian discourse’.70 What this prolificness

68

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 241. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. R. Miller (Jonathan Cape, London, 1977), 55. 70 Ibid., 56–7. 69

28

ROBERT HAVARD

reflects, says Barthes, is ‘the need to occupy the totality of the mental territory’, which means, frankly, that Loyola’s language is a brain-washing tool designed to fill every waking and sleeping moment of a trainee who is even told what to contemplate last thing at night.71 Barthes observes that ‘Ignatius takes as much trouble filling the spirit with images as the mystics do in emptying them out’, and, having compared instructor and trainee with ‘psychoanalyst and analysand’, he relates their dialogue to modern therapeutic theories ‘which define the psychosomatic patient as a subject powerless to produce fantasies and his cure as a methodical effort to bring him to a “capacity for fantasy manipulation” ’. He concludes: ‘Ignatius is then a psychotherapist attempting at all costs to inject images into the dull, dry and empty spirit of the exercitant, to introduce into him this culture of fantasy. In short, the retreatant must be “made neurotic” ’.72 This analysis clarifies the process described by Alberti whose own loss of self through mental colonization and saturation tactics – ‘con miel y palabras’ [with words and honey] – produced a similarly neurotic, depersonalized individual who was ripe for ‘fantasy manipulation’. The Jesuits, it appears, prepared him well for the systematic and manipulative – i.e. paranoiac and virtually self-hypnotic – practice of ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place].

Religion and materiality Alberti, like Buñuel, was a day-boy not a trainee Jesuit, it is true, but the regime they both suffered was structured along Loyola’s militarist principles. Buñuel refers to ‘this heavy dosage of death and religion’ in his youth and recalls playing at Mass as a boy,73 a game that no doubt celebrated the mystery of transubstantiation. Lorca, as Dalí informs, played the same religious games, especially death games – an example occurs in Mariana Pineda74 – and he cultivated imaginative role-play as an adult: Lorca … sometimes acted out his own death. I can still see his face, deadly and terrible, as he lay on his bed, trying to go through the stages of his slow decomposition. Putrefaction, in his version, lasted four or five days. Then he described the casket, his coffining, the full scene of its closing, and the progress of the hearse through the bumpy streets of Granada.75 71

‘After going to bed and wanting to go to sleep, I should think for the space of a Hail Mary at what time I have to get up, and for what purpose, going over the exercise I have to make.’ See article 73, or Addition 1, to the First Week, Personal Writings, 299. 72 Ibid., 69, 41, 69. 73 My Last Breath, 14, 12. 74 See Mariana Pineda, ed. and trans. Robert Havard (Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1987), 76–8. 75 The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 15.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

29

Not surprisingly, Dalí – a neo-Jesuit alumnus in these terms who spoke of his own ‘Jesuitical hypocrisy’76 – provides the most extravagant example of actualizing one’s own death and of extending childhood fantasizing into adult life: My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, gnawed by worms. I close my eyes and, with unbelievable details of utter and scatological precision, see myself slowly gobbled and digested by an infernal and wriggling mass of big greenish earthworms, battening on my flesh. They set up in my eye sockets after having gnawed the eyes away and gluttonously start devouring my brain. I can feel on my tongue how they slaver with pleasure as they bite into me. Beneath my ribs, a breath swells my thorax as their mandibles destroy the gossamer tissues of my lungs. My heart holds out just a bit, for the sake of appearances, for it has always served me well. It is like a big fat sponge gorged with pus, that suddenly bursts and runs out into a magma crawling with fat white maggots. And then there is my belly – putrid, stinking – that pops like a bubble full of carrion, a swarming compost of subterranean life. I fart one last time like an old volcano and tear apart in a dislocation of flesh and cracking of bones burst by the worms feasting on my marrow. I find it excellent training, and have been doing this as far back as I can remember.77

Training, indeed! Dalí effectively cultivates the kind of neurotic fears most adults prefer to repress, and what was the ‘full scene’ in Lorca is an even more detailed or actualized experience in Dalí. The latter’s boyish imaginings, rehearsed at the Christian Brothers’ School in Figueras when contemplating Millet’s Angelus or standing before the ‘big yellow-enamel Christ nailed to a black cross’, are the forerunners of his mature artistic practice: ‘From then on, my wide-eyed dreams are all I need. I can now project my little inward cinema, animate everydayness with the images of my own creation’.78 In Dalí’s case the projection and fantasizing were intimately related to his lack of selfhood, that is, to the ‘dead boy’ complex which derived from his elder brother: My double started by being a dead boy. I had no corporeal image … so I projected myself into bodies to seek out my structure…Having no bodily analogy, I could not judge forms and objects about me. I could only experience them from within … Unable to give a meaning to things, since I had no stable self as a frame of reference, I experienced them by possessing them.79

76 77 78 79

Ibid., 267. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 244–5.

30

ROBERT HAVARD

What is evident in all these procedures of systematic projection and fantasizing is the high incidence of materiality, corporeality or scatology, as Dalí says. We remember that it was ‘the material character of that awful place’ that interested Joyce’s priest in summoning up hell.80 In this connection Barthes is again revealing. Commenting on the Jesuit practice of creating detailed mental images into which the trainee must project himself, he writes: The exercitant is in fact called upon to invest himself in the narrative … He is to repeat what depresses, consoles, traumatizes, enraptures him …; he is to live the anecdote by identifying himself with Christ.81

The thrust of this process, says Barthes, is its materiality, ‘the very materiality of the objects whose representation Ignatius calls for’, such as the food, clothing, light and weather of the given scene, all of which must be turned into ‘image objects’. This is especially true of the body, for the trainee’s constant practice of identification and imitation ‘establishes a literal analogy between the corporeality of the exercitant and that of Christ’. Hence: The body in Ignatius is never conceptual: it is always this body … Ignatius always follows this flow, which attempts to found meaning on matter and not on concept; placing himself before the Cross (placing that body before the Cross), he attempts to go beyond the signified of the image … to its referent, the material Cross, this crossed wood whose circumstantial attributes he attempts, through the imagining senses, to perceive.82

Barthes defines the distinctive Jesuit emphasis in a telling phrase, ‘This upward movement towards matter’ [‘Cette remontée vers la matière’], which, he says, ‘is conducted in the manner of a conscious fantasy, a controlled improvisation’.83 We have come full circle. Remarkably, the Jesuits’ excessive corporeality, their founding of meaning on circumstantial objects, is, in the end, precisely what distinguishes the materialism of Alberti and his contemporary Spaniards. By the same token, what Barthes describes in Ignatius as ‘devout realism’ finds a close parallel in Alberti’s materio-mysticism, for in practice both Jesuit and surrealist seek transcendence via the object world, that is, through the mind’s imaginative working upon objects, their attempt ‘to found meaning on matter and not on concept’, as Barthes said of Loyola. It is, to say the least, curious that the Jesuits’ rejection of the world and its sinfulness – ‘¡Guerra al mundo!’ [War to the world!] (LG, 43)84 – leads to the sensory 80

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 130. Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 61. 82 Ibid., 62. 83 Ibid., 63. See also Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Seuil, Paris, 1971), 68. 84 Alberti quotes ironically, as he says, from ‘a typical product of the Society of Jesus’s most recent poetic outburst’ (LG, 43). 81

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

31

realism involved in their experiencing of Hell and the Passion, that, in short, their other-worldliness is also a movement towards matter. We saw this movement in Alberti’s tribute to the avant-garde painter of the late 1920s, ‘La primera ascensión de Maruja Mallo al subsuelo’ [‘The First Ascension of Maruja Mallo to the Subsoil’], where Maruja’s penchant for junk objects, rubbish-dumps and such basic matter as thistles, weeds, bones and excrement, intimates a triumphant ascent towards matter. There is much play on matter too in Buñuel, for instance in Nazarín, whose eponymous Christ-struck priest comes to recognize the world and material reality in the film’s last scene when he accepts a peasant woman’s gift of a pineapple. However, it is again Dalí who furnishes a superb anecdotal example of this interplay between matter and transcendence. In his Diary of a Genius Dalí recounts that in June 1952, while painting the Assumption, he was troubled by a crack at the corner of his mouth which had come from his habit of salivating copiously while day-dreaming in the voluptuous early morning sun of Port Lligat. As he meticulously painted the brilliant scale of a flying fish, caught some days before, his tongue played with the scab on his mouth whose covering, he noticed, had become silvery, not unlike the fish scales, whereupon a swarm of large flies entered the room ‘attracted by the fetid odour of the corpse’ of the fish. Dalí takes up the narrative: These flies hovered between the nasty mess of the rotting fish and my face and hands … I had to remain impervious to their bites, continuing unperturbed to perfect my strokes, painting the outline of a scale without so much as blinking, while at the same moment a fly clung frenziedly to my eyelid and three others glued themselves to the model … I have not even mentioned still another fly which insisted on settling on my crack. I could only chase it away by moving the corners of my mouth at short intervals … Covered by flies I went on painting better than ever, defending my scab with my tongue and my breath. With my tongue I lifted and softened its outer layer, which seemed ready to detach itself. With my breath I dried it, harmonizing my exhalations with the rhythm of my brush strokes. It was quite dessiccated, and the intervention of my tongue would not have been enough to detach a thin flake had I not helped with a convulsive grimace (made every time I took some colour off my palette.) Now that thin flake had the exact quality of a fish scale. By repeating the operation an infinite number of times I could detach from myself any amount of fish scales. My crack was quite a factory of fish scales which looked like mica. As soon as I took one off, a new one instantly came into being at the corner of my mouth. I spat the first scale on to my knee. By good fortune I had the highly sensitive impression that it stung me as it stuck to my flesh. I stopped painting at once and closed my eyes. I needed all my will power to remain motionless, there were so many hyper-active flies on my face. In anguish, my heart started beating like mad and I suddenly understood that I was identifying myself with my rotten fish as I felt myself going as rigid as it

32

ROBERT HAVARD

was. ‘My God, I’m turning into a fish!’ I exclaimed … Proofs of the likelihood of this idea were immediately forthcoming. The scale from the crack burned on my knee and multiplied itself. I felt my thighs, first one then the other, and then my belly, growing scales all over. I wanted to savour this miracle … Oh! I was covered with shimmering scales … I stayed on my own dreaming till dusk. O Salvador, your metamorphosis into a fish, symbol of Christianity, only came about because of the torment of the flies. What a typically Dalinian crazy way to identify yourself with your Christ while you are painting Him!85

Crazy, preposterous, delusional or simulated, Dalí’s parable amounts to a ‘conscious fantasy’ in which all the trappings of Christianity’s metamorphic symbolism – from the multiplication of fish to salvation through suffering – provide the material circumstance or composition by means of which Dalí transforms himself into the Creator and achieves the ultimate transubstantiation of the created work. These are persistent motifs and patterns we shall need to revisit, but for the moment let us simply note that, in practice, the childhood facility for imaginings and daydream trances was greatly stimulated by the paranoia that comes from religion’s prioritizing of sin, death and torment, while it also seems to have been systematized and brought to a high level of operational control by religion’s meditative focus on circumstantial detail which reaches its apogee in the Jesuit practice of ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place].

Alberti’s views on Surrealism It would seem appropriate to close this introduction with an outline of Alberti’s views on Surrealism, especially Surrealism in Spain, and on his own work in that context, though the issue is a thorny one complicated by the poet’s contradictory comments. What we find in Alberti, as in other Spaniards, is a reluctance to describe himself as surrealist together with a candid acknowledgement that his work was influenced by Surrealism for a period from the late 1920s. The latter comments are more germane to our purpose, but it is also important to consider why Spaniards deny surrealist influence. In the first place it is perfectly understandable that poets like Lorca, Aleixandre and Alberti should resist the label surrealist for, like any label, it tends to diminish originality and highlight borrowed or shared characteristics. Dalí circumvented this threat to his ego by claiming he had absorbed Surrealism into his own person: ‘I am Surrealism,’ he said imperiously to a journalist, mocking attempts by Breton and Aragon to expel him.86 This was 85 86

Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 40–2. See Diary of a Genius, 32; also The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 84.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

33

not an option for Spanish poets whose language excluded them from the Paris hub and whose status could only ever be peripheral in relation to that hub. Lorca, aware of the new turn his poems were taking in 1929, was at pains to keep his distance: Responden a mi nueva manera espiritualista, emoción pura descarnada, desligada del control lógico, pero, ¡ojo!, ¡ojo!, con una tremenda lógica poética. No es surrealismo, ¡ojo!, la conciencia más clara los ilumina.87 [They reflect my new ‘spiritualist’ style, a pure unvarnished emotion, devoid of logical control, but – mark my words! – with an awesome poetic logic. It’s not Surrealism – take note! – they are illumined by the clearest consciousness.]

His new style is akin to the self-searching, truth-revealing mode of Surrealism’s first phase. To distinguish his own technique the poet draws a fine line between its lack of logical control, which smacks of catharsis or a spontaneous outpouring, and its having plenty of poetic logic, which is deemed to be the crucial divergence from Surrealism proper. Lorca, it appears, was either unaware that the movement in Paris had moved on by 1929 or he simply found it convenient to contrast his own with earlier values. Alberti, from a later vantage point, is still sensitive on the issue of automatic writing, which he too sees as the mark of Surrealism. On Sobre los ángeles he comments: ‘No es un libro surrealista, en el sentido de onírico y automático’88 [It’s not a surrealist book, in the sense of being oneiric and automatic]. Yet in his autobiography he describes the manner in which the volume was written in terms that summarize the most widely held notions of what constitutes a surrealist mode of composition: I began to write blindly at any hour of the night without turning on the light in my room and with a kind of undesirable automatism, spurred on by a trembling, feverish and spontaneous urging that had the effect of making the separate verses of poetry literally smother each other so that it was often impossible for me to decipher them the following day. My language became harsh and cutting, as sharply honed as the blade of a sword. The rhythmic cadences crumbled into bits and pieces … But what I wrote was not all that obscure, and the most confused and nebulous thoughts took on the shape and reptilian movement of a flame-coloured snake. External reality became woven into my own state of mind and shook the walls of my hideaway with tremendous force, causing me to hurl into the streets a stream of maddened lava: I was like a comet forecasting future catastrophes. No one accompanied me in my illness. I was totally alone. (LG, 262)

87 88

Federico García Lorca, Obras completas (11th edition, Aguilar, Madrid, 1966), 1654. See Manuel Bayo, Sobre Alberti (CVS Colección Ateneo, Madrid, 1974), 36.

34

ROBERT HAVARD

Feverish spontaneity is the key, with little regard for style or meaning, or even Lorca’s poetic logic, since the pieces disintegrate and are indecipherable to their author. The word ‘automatism’ is mentioned, but in the original Spanish this is ‘un automatismo no buscado’ (AP 1, (292), an unsought or inadvertent automatism rather than undesirable as given above. In other words, Alberti suggests that his style of writing came to him naturally and not from a desire to imitate any school or theory. He then qualifies the indecipherableness of what he wrote by saying it was ‘not all that obscure’, insinuating something alien to surrealist values. His description of how Sermones y moradas was written is also revealing: Cuando yo escribía Sermones y moradas, poco después de Sobre los ángeles, mi estado de confusión aún era más grande. Pasaba unos días del verano con Maruja Mallo, que vivía en Cercedilla, yéndome yo a la noche a Collado Mediano, cerrando los ojos durante el camino que mediaba entre mi estación y mi casa, apuntando con lápiz en un cuadernillo los poemas que se me iban ocurriendo, durante poco más de medio kilómetro que tenía de camino. Luego, al día siguiente, corregía el poema y lo ponía en limpio.89 [When I wrote ‘Sermons and Dwelling Places’, shortly after ‘Concerning the Angels’, my state of confusion was even worse. I spent some days that summer with Maruja Mallo, who was living in Cercedilla, returning at night to Collado Mediano, when I’d close my eyes (on the tram) from the railway station to my house and pencil in poems in a note-book as they occurred to me over the half-kilometre or so ride. Next day I’d correct the poem and tidy it up.]

Torment and its ally, spontaneity, are again the primary characteristics, but the point of revising the written piece is perhaps intended – and would certainly be taken by many – as a sign that the poet has not fully embraced surrealist principles. This distinction, we know, is only valid in relation to Surrealism’s earliest phase and it takes no account of the fact that Breton had virtually abandoned automatism by the late 1920s, largely because he recognized it was impossible to monitor it and identify secondary revision, one of the reasons why Surrealism had moved on.90 89

AP 5, 25. Harris explains the point well: ‘Although … automatism does provide a useful benchmark for the first stages of the movement, it becomes less useful later as Surrealist practice diversifies. Breton himself came to recognise that the automatic technique had its limitations … Nonetheless, the perception that automatism and Surrealism are synonyms has continued to the present day and is one cause of the confused critical history of Surrealism in Spain’; Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights, 14. The erroneous perception also overlooks the impact of Dalí who says: ‘I opposed pure and passive automatism with the active impulse of my famous method of paranoiac-critical analysis’; Diary of a Genius, 25.

90

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

35

Aleixandre’s comments on Surrealism add another dimension to the chronological confusion, for, as Derek Harris notes, ‘after more than four decades of denial and without any really substantial explanation, he recanted’ and published a volume entitled Poesía superrealista [Surrealist Poetry] which collected poems from his earliest days right through to late unpublished poems.91 That Aleixandre denied surrealist influence for so long is partly attributable to the fact that he lived in Franco’s Spain during a period when alignment with Surrealism was an unwise political statement. The same pressure is reflected in the Jesuit-educated Dámaso Alonso who, as a critic living in Spain, consistently opposed the notion of surrealist influence in Spanish poetry, while a political bias is not hard to find in non-Spanish critics either, such as Morris.92 Nonetheless, to return to Aleixandre, we find he rehearses essentially the same objections as Alberti: No he creído nunca en lo estrictamente onírico, en la ‘escritura automática’, en la abolición de la conciencia creadora. Pero he de confesar la profunda impresión que la lectura de un psicólogo [Freud] de incisiva influencia me produjo en 1928, y el cambio de raíz que en mi modesta obra se produjo.93 [I have never believed in the strictly oneiric, in ‘automatic writing’, in the abolition of creative consciousness. But I have to confess the profound impression made on me in 1928 when I read a psychologist of incisive influence (Freud), and the root change this produced in my modest work.]

Opposition to the strictly oneiric and to the implicitly total abolition of creative consciousness is more a rhetorical evasion than a specific argument and we sense that Aleixandre broadly accepts surrealist values. There being no reason to suppose that the most ardent French surrealist would disagree with Aleixandre’s caveats, we assume they derive from the sensitive context in which Spanish poets found themselves vis-à-vis the French as far as originality and cultural difference were concerned. In his London interview with Geoffrey Connell in 1979, Alberti goes into more detail on the issue of Surrealism and the distinction between Spanish and French practices: Eso de llamar superrealista directamente, exactamente, es una cosa que yo no rechazo, que se emplee esa palabra, pero es más bien poesía de 91

Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights, 40. Vicente Aleixandre, Poesía superrealista. Antología (Ediciones de Bolsillo, Barcelona, 1971). 92 With astounding and uncritical sententiousness Morris refers to Alberti’s communist beliefs as ‘his adherence to a particular dogma that unhappily makes clear thinking and good poetry equally difficult’, in ‘Sobre los ángeles: A Poet’s Apostasy’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 37 (1960), 231. 93 Vicente Aleixandre, Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 1968), 1442.

36

ROBERT HAVARD

atmósfera surrealista, no poesía surrealista, porque la poesía surrealista francesa tenía sus reglas y sus reglas oníricas y su dejar llevar la mano, y todo eso, y en mi obra, en el mismo Sobre los ángeles, lo mío es muy concreto, todo es dibujar … Soy muy gráfico, muy plástico, y mi obra está toda … A mí me interesa dentro de lo oscuro ser claro. Yo he dicho muchas veces: concretar el fantasma, dar cuerpo al fantasma. Cuando escriben el surrealismo clásico se hace la cosa bajo ese dictado, ¿verdad?, y yo creo que esos son libros más bien de atmósfera subreal que de propiamente dentro de la escuela de la más absoluta heterodoxia, la de Sobre los ángeles, lo mismo lo de Federico del Poeta en Nueva York podía hacer lo mismo. Eso ya ha dicho mucha gente, que eso, es una poesía de la atmósfera de la época, en cierto modo, ¿verdad?, pero no directamente una poesía que obedezca los manifiestos sobrerealistas tal como eran en esos momentos; que los surrealistas eran muy rigurosos. Breton expulsaba a la gente si no eran surrealistas así al pie de la letra, y, retóricamente hablando, que yo creo que es que el surrealismo español tiene unas características diferentes, porque podríamos ir a ver bastantes poemas de Cernuda y muchos de Aleixandre, que pudieran estar bajo esta clasificación, y, sin embargo, si usted lee la poesía francesa surrealista, usted verá que, con la española hay una gran diferencia. Yo creo que es más seria la española, y más profunda, y menos charlatana, porque muchas partes del surrealismo han quedado en mucho bla-bla-bla, en mucha conversación …94 [When people call my work surrealist, in a specific or exact sense, I don’t object to the word, but I feel it’s more accurate to say it’s poetry of a surrealist atmosphere rather than purely surrealist, because French surrealist poetry had its rules and its oneiric stamp and its own way of operating, and all that, while in my work, even in ‘Concerning the Angels’, what I do is very concrete, everything is drawn in … I’m very graphic, very plastic, and my work is all … What I strive for is clarity in the confusion. I’ve said so often enough: to give concrete form to a ghost, body to a ghost. As for classical Surrealism, it’s written to certain dictates, right? And I believe that these books (written by Spaniards) are more the result of a surrealist atmosphere than literally in the mode of an absolute heterodoxical school, which applies as much to ‘Concerning the Angels’ as to Federico’s ‘Poet in New York’. A lot of people have said the same, that it’s more a question of poetry from the atmosphere of the time, so to speak, right? Not specifically a poetry that obeys the surrealist manifestos of the time; for the surrealists were very rigorous. Breton expelled anyone who wasn’t surrealist in the fundamental sense, and, speaking rhetorically, the point is that Spanish Surrealism has different characteristics, because although a number of Cernuda’s poems and others by Aleixandre might well conform to the prescription, for all that, if you read French surrealist poetry, you will see that it differs greatly from the Spanish. I believe the Spanish is more serious, more profound, and less charlatan; for many types of Surrealism have degenerated into babble, so much empty talk.] 94

See footnote 2.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

37

The interview was informal and Alberti’s sometimes halting comments were punctuated by the clatter of crockery, but what he says is clear enough and may be summarized as follows: his own poetry of the period is much indebted to the surrealist atmosphere of the time, though it is not strictly surrealist in the French sense or in terms of Breton’s rules. Most Spanish poetry of this type – including his own and Lorca’s, but excepting some poems by Cernuda or Aleixandre – does not adhere strictly to those rules. The main difference between his own and the French type is that his is clearer, more visual and more concrete, while the difference generally between French and Spanish Surrealism – a term Alberti does not shy away from, we note – is that the latter is more serious. The last two distinctions are vital. In the first place, emphasis upon concreteness and plasticity is precisely what we find in Dalí who described his paranoia-critical method as follows: ‘All my art consists in concretizing with the most implacable precision the irrational images I tear out of my paranoia.’95 This ‘concretizing’, giving body to a ghost, as Alberti puts it, accords with what was said earlier about the facility for actualizing the composition, ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place]. But we might also note that the clarity it brings – Dalí’s ‘implacable precision’, Alberti’s clarity in the confusion – is not to be seen as contrary to surrealist principles. In the same passage Dalí refers to Lacan and his important discovery ‘that is obscure to most of our contemporaries’: namely, that paranoiac delirium was not systematic ‘after the fact’, as had previously been thought, but rather ‘the delirium itself is a systematization’.96 If critics of Spanish poetry noted this point – that the paranoiac or tormented mind is itself highly structured in its articulation – there would be fewer arguments of the type that deny surrealist presence in a work on the grounds that it has shape, form, lucidity and is broadly intelligible to readers.97 The second of Alberti’s distinctions centres on the greater seriousness of Spanish Surrealism. This accords with my principal argument that a more severe degree of trauma is experienced at a personal level by writers and artists who lived in a decidedly repressive society, while it also applies in the large scale to Spain seen as a virtually schizoid nation that eventually tore itself apart. There were elements of playfulness in Spanish Surrealism – not least in Dalí, of whom Freud said after their 95

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 141. Dalí adds: ‘The Surrealist artist–poet must materialize in the concrete the forms of the delirium which is the secret road leading to the unknown world of paranoia.’ 96 Ibid., 140. 97 Luis Monguió, for instance, simply declares: ‘There is not an iota of Surrealism or irrationality in Rafael Alberti’s poetry’, ‘The Poetry of Rafael Alberti’, Hispania, 43 (1960), 163; while Geoffrey Connell is another who argues that intelligibility coupled with a degree of discernible form preclude the possibility of Surrealism, in ‘Sobre los ángeles: Form and Theme’, Spanish Studies, no. 4 (1982), 12.

38

ROBERT HAVARD

London meeting: ‘What a fanatic! What a perfect Spanish type!’98 The main focus of what follows will tend to corroborate Alberti’s view of its more serious intentions.

98

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 120.

2 UNDER THE JESUITS

Under the Jesuits From childhood memories, and from a few others, there emanates a sentiment of being unintegrated, and then later of having gone astray, which I hold to be the most fertile that exists. It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to one’s real life …, childhood where nonetheless everything conspires to bring about the effective risk-free possession of oneself. Thanks to Surrealism, it seems that opportunity knocks a second time. André Breton, First Surrealist Manifesto1 Puerto de Santa María, ciudad maldita, que empieza en el Penal y termina en los jesuitas.2 [Puerto de Santa María,/ a cursed town, starts with the Jail/ and ends with the Jesuits.]

The sins of the fathers James Joyce started his schooldays with the Jesuits in 1888 at Glongowes Wood, a somewhat exclusive boarding school in County Kildare. After a brief interlude with the Christian Brothers on North Richmond Street near his family home in Dublin, he was with the Jesuits again at Belvedere College in the heart of Dublin from 1893, and he finished his formal education with them at University College, Dublin, from 1898 to 1902. A fellow pupil at Belvedere College, Judge Eugene Sheehy, tells the following tale about his famous schoolmate: One day when Father Henry, SJ, the Rector, was taking my class for Latin, Joyce was sent in by the English master, Mr Dempsey, to report that he had been late for school. The Rector delivered quite a long lecture to Joyce, to which the latter listened in unrepentant silence. When the lecture had finished, Joyce added, as if by way of afterthought and in a very bored manner: 1

Manifestoes of Surrealism, 41. I was told this copla or popular verse during a visit to El Puerto in March/April 1999. Its attribution to Alberti is doubtless apocryphal.

2

40

ROBERT HAVARD

‘Mr Dempsey told me to tell you, Sir, that I was half an hour late also yesterday.’ This led to a second telling-off, almost as long as the first, and when it had run its course Joyce took up the running again – this time almost with a yawn: ‘Mr Dempsey told me to tell you, Sir, that I have not been in time for school any day this month.’3

Judge Sheehy, evidently more Jesuit than Joycean, disapproves of his classmate’s ‘impudence’ and shows no awareness that the irritating repetition in confessing his sins is Joyce’s ironic mime of the Jesuits’ own fastidiousness. The latter characteristic will be all too plain to anyone who has read the Spiritual Exercises or the relentless explanations found in catechisms such as Ripalda’s which were Alberti’s fare as a boy (LG, 36). Another example of myopic pedantry is the recent book, Alberti, colegial y marinero, by Agustín Castro Merello, SJ, an ex-pupil himself at the Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga in El Puerto de Santa María who rose to become a Jesuit superior in the Canaries. Merello, a relative of Alberti on his mother’s side, claims not to be interested in vindicating the school’s treatment of the poet they expelled as a boy. Nonetheless, he attempts to answer Alberti’s criticism point by point, though with a lack of success that is as revealing as it is comical. For instance, to Alberti’s charge that the school encouraged a class mentality by distinguishing sharply between rich boarders and poor day pupils like himself and by not allowing any form of contact between boys and the menial staff, Merello answers in simplistic fashion by quoting the school regulations: Les está severamente prohibida [a los externos] toda comunicación con los internos. Una infracción grave de esta ley será motivo suficiente de expulsión’.4 [They (the day boys) are strictly forbidden all communication with boarders. A serious infraction of this regulation will be sufficient reason for expulsion.]

Rules is rules, it seems, and Merello, who clearly didn’t get where he is today by breaking any, goes on to explain that it is wrong to suggest the day boys were singled out since: La incomunicación existía a todos los niveles, no sólo entre los externos e internos, sino también: a.– entre las divisiones de los mismos internos; b.– existía entre el alumnado y personal de servicio y c.– entre el alumnado, el 3

Judge Eugene Sheehy, ‘My School Friend, James Joyce’, in James Joyce, Interviews and Recollections, edited by E.H. Mikhail (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990), 9. 4 Augustín Castro Merello (S.J.), Alberti, colegial y marinero (historia y poesía) (Unión Eléctrica de Canarias, Las Palmas, 1994), 74.

UNDER THE JESUITS

41

colegio en general, y el exterior, la calle, incluido el mismo personal de servicio’.5 [The lack of communication applied at all levels, not only between the day pupils and the boarders, but also: a.– in the divisions between the boarders themselves; b.– between the pupils and the service staff and c.– between the pupils, the school in general, and the outside world, or the street, including the same service staff.]

Well, that’s all right then. If division and classification was the order of the day for everybody under the Jesuits, what on earth was Alberti complaining about? Besides, Merello adds, the divisions were of ‘carácter disciplinar y organizativo, más que social y discriminatorio’ [a disciplinary and organizational type, rather than social or discriminatory], especially as regards discouraging contact with the outside world. School policy on this was of a ‘carácter preventativamente moral’ [moral, preventative nature], designed to exclude such things as newspapers and personal letters from the hallowed sanctuary, not to mention amorous novels and erotic pictures. For the same reason, day boys were encouraged to spend their Sundays at the school, to ‘librarlos de los peligros de la calle’ [save them from the dangers of the street].6 In short, rather than refuting Alberti’s charge of discrimination, Merello proves it on every count, and what we see in his moralistic attention to number, rule and classification is an unwitting corroboration of the same mentality Joyce debunked. Alberti does not mince words in describing the ‘fanatic Catholics’ in his own family or the school to which they sent him with its ‘severe and even cruel teachers’ where, he says, ‘I suffered, I raged, I hated, I loved, I had fun, and I learned practically nothing during my four years there’ (LG, 25, 40, 44). Its daily regime, beginning with Mass at 6.30 am, was harsh even by Spanish standards, having that ‘organización de tipo militar que impera en los colegios S.J.’ (AP 1, 39) [military style organization that rules in Jesuit schools], no doubt a reflection of their founder’s early life as a soldier. Militarism typified a base religious mentality, ‘whose bottom rung, the Jesuits,’ says Alberti, turned Christianity’s generous spirit ‘from the purest gold of the stars to the purest of dry turds’ (LG, 43, 44). Raised on a sermonic diet of sin and punishment, the future poet duly graduated from the ‘pecado mortal’ [mortal sin] of sucking sweets in prayers to the ‘gran pecado’ [great sin] (AP 1, 19, 59) of masturbation, on which subject, like many another boy, he was interrogated by the fathers: ‘ “Have you sinned against chastity, and how often?” Horrors! Horrors!’ (LG, 57). To deny the sin was worse, the fathers told him: If you could see your soul, you would die of horror. Yours is filthy … because if the soul is darkened by lustful behavior, lying makes it 5 6

Ibid., 75. Ibid., 76.

42

ROBERT HAVARD

even blacker. You sin and refuse to admit your error. You are thus committing a double sin. (LG, 56).

But these same fathers often had crushes on the boys and could be over-familiar with them in their private rooms. Indeed, pejorative connotations of the word Jesuit, with its suggestion of hypocrisy, are never far from mind when reading Alberti’s portraits of his teachers: for instance, Father Romero, who was ‘deeply in love with his students’; Father Lirola, ‘who always pressed the student souls that had gone astray against his distraught heart, holding them a bit more tightly than was absolutely necessary’; Father Legumbres [Vegetables], who was wont ‘to masturbate outside in the sun, alongside a secluded eucalyptus tree in the garden’, and Father Hurtado, who pointed his ‘large, long-range telescope’ through the physics’ laboratory window to scour the nearby dunes for miscreants (LG, 44, 45, 54). The sub-text and unmentioned evil against which James Joyce’s preacher rails in Portrait of the Artist is also clearly masturbation, as we glean from his circumlocutory references to ‘those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself’.7 The guilt provoked by these sermons drives young Stephen Dedalus to confession at an out-of-the-way Dublin church: – I … committed sins of impurity, father. The priest did not turn his head. – With yourself, my child? … You are very young, my child, he said, and let me implore of you to give up that sin. It is a terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills the soul … Give it up, my child, for God’s sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. You cannot know where that wretched habit will lead you. As long as you commit that sin, my poor child, you will never be worth one farthing to God … Promise God now that by His holy grace you will never offend him any more by that wicked sin … that wretched, wretched sin.8

Straw floors and severed hands Alberti refers to his early teens as the ‘period of the straws’, since ‘in Andalusia, masturbating is called “tossing a straw” ’ (LG, 57). This was also a critical time for a number of his contemporaries, including Buñuel, who says he lost his faith mainly as a result of the dual emphasis the Jesuits placed on hell and sin, especially the sin against chastity. One summer vacation, spent near Santander, he expressed his misgivings to a teenage friend: Dormíamos juntos, es decir en el mismo cuarto, y yo le hacía partícipe de mi desconfianza de la existencia del infierno, y más por los ligeros pecados 7 8

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 127. Ibid., 148–9.

UNDER THE JESUITS

43

sexuales que cometíamos, porque evidentemente, como todos los jóvenes de nuestra edad en España, nos masturbábamos. ¿Cómo era posible que por algo tan insignificante tuviéramos que pasar toda la eternidad metidos en el infierno sufriendo penas inacabables?9 [We were sleeping together, that is, in the same room, and I confided in him my doubts about the existence of hell, especially with regard to the minor sexual sins we committed, for naturally, like all young Spanish boys of our age, we used to masturbate. How could it be that for something so trivial we would have to spend the whole of eternity stuck in hell suffering interminable torments?]

This perception of masturbation as sinful very likely underlies Buñuel’s fetishistic treatment of hands, especially severed hands. A striking example occurs in Un Chien andalou (plate 10) when a hand is discovered in the middle of the street by an androgynous figure who proceeds to prod it with a stick as though to arouse it. This hand, in turn, is linked to a sexually retarded male who watches from a window above and who shortly has his own hand trapped in a door by a woman he attempts to rape. Of the same ilk is Buñuel’s ‘Léxico sucinto del erotismo’ [‘Brief Lexicon of Eroticism’], a page containing twenty-seven drawings of a male hand – cut at a sleeved wrist – engaged in different techniques of stimulating unseen organs and bearing such titles as ‘Irrumate’, ‘Cunnilingate’ and ‘Masturbate’.10 The hand motif, in conjunction with the theme of masturbation, is prominent in the early Dalí, notably in The Lugubrious Game (1929) (plate 2) which, for Ian Gibson, is ‘one of Dalí’s first representations of the ashamed adolescent’.11 In this painting masturbation is explicit in the hugely enlarged right hand of another androgyny, a statue which covers its face in shame with its normal-sized left hand. Elsewhere in the painting isolated hands are seen in close proximity to female orifices or holding up phallic flesh, while another scratches the fantasizing masturbator’s head. Gibson writes: ‘severed hands and arms first appeared in Dalí’s work in 1926 (the study for Honey is Sweeter than Blood) and pullulated in them over the next three years’.12 Especially revealing is Apparatus and Hand (1927) (plate 3), with its blood-swollen digits displayed on top of an anthropomorphic automaton, which suggests ‘the red hand of the guilty masturbator, surrounded by the components of his fantasies’.13 By the time of The Great Masturbator (1929) – a canvas which, 9

Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 40. This page of drawings and a still of the hand in Un Chien andalou, together with other examples of the motif, may be found in Agustín Sánchez Vidal, El mundo de Luis Buñuel (Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada, Zaragoza, 1993), 58–70. 11 Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (Faber & Faber, London, 1997); see commentary to plate XV between pages 356, 357. 12 Ibid., 194. 13 Ibid., comment to plate X. 10

44

ROBERT HAVARD

according to Dalí, expressed all his ‘heterosexual anxiety’ – onanism has attained unrivalled importance in his habits, themes and thinking: I masturbated frequently, but with great control over my penis, mentally leading myself on to orgasm but disciplining my actions so as the better to savour my ecstasy. Masturbation at the time was the core of my eroticism and the axis of my paranoia-critical method. The prick I was hooked on, so to speak. There was me and my orgasm – and then the rest of the world.14

Fears of impotence and of homosexual tendencies tormented the painter whose most persistent trait – as Gibson convincingly argues – is his sense of shame. Clearly, the act of masturbating connected with fantasy, self-obsession and even paranoia, for the old medical myth that over-indulgence in ‘the solitary pleasure’ drove you insane still prevailed. It emerges as a sub-theme in one of Dalí’s greatest paintings, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1936–37) (plate 4), where a huge ossified hand holding a testicular egg restates the configuration of the stooped Narcissus gazing into his water-mirror. Characteristically, in his paintings, as in his life-style, Dalí gives structure to his indulgence both as theme and as habit, controlling it methodically – literally manipulating his fantasy – until he comes to dominate or possess it: I had … discovered the joys of masturbation in the toilets at the Drawing Institute, but it had not given me any true pleasure yet, supplying mainly astonishment at seeing my penis grow big, then suddenly blossom and spew out its sperm. My hand quickly gained expertise in this caress, and I found more delight in the gestures of adoration addressed to this living part of my body than in the rapid ecstasy that revulsed [sic] me at the termination of the exercise. I was seized with the view of this physical transformation of my sexual organ, as it went from being a soft appendage to being a long hard one, the tip of which turned into a red and then purple glans until its little lips spread and projected their semen. The whole of this process fascinated me as an extraordinary process of possession. I was vaingloriously proud of being able to know and live this phenomenon and also full of consternation at what I was doing, realizing how reprehensible it might be considered.15

It would be facile to draw parallels here with religious motifs – along the lines of transformation, ascension, resurrection, worship and exaltation, not to mention the fears of retribution attaching to sin – but these connections are nonetheless there and not to be underestimated. Indicative of the bearing of religious morality on Dalí’s habit of masturbating is his admission that ‘to enhance the voluptuousness of it … I decided to set one day aside for “doing it”, Sunday’, while he also favoured lofty settings with religious views: 14 15

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 92. Ibid., 68.

UNDER THE JESUITS

45

Over the Figueras steeple, associated with the memory of my adolescent masturbations, are superimposed the lines of the St. Narcissus church at Gerona and a view of the Delft church painted by Vermeer. The superimposition of these three privileged churches gives my orgasm a new and exalting dimension.16

Alberti, it seems, was less restricted by location, though a similar tendency to exaltation is discernible: ‘There are straws everywhere – on the rooftops, along the seashore and on the stones of every castle’ (LG, 57). In El Puerto de Santa María the cavernous dark of dilapidated wine-cellars also provided suitably intimate hideaways, while the notion of descent implicit in the cellar image naturally suggests a moral decline towards infernal regions with their inevitable castigations. This is perhaps the underlying sense to the following images in the prose poem ‘Sermón de la sangre’ [‘Sermon on Blood’]: La edad terrible de violentar con ella las puertas más cerradas, los años más hundidos por los que hay que descender a tientas, siempre con el temor de perder una mano … (461) [The terrible age of doing violence with it (i.e. blood) on the most closed doors, the most depressed years through which one has to descend groping one’s way, forever afraid of losing a hand …]

To return to the exalted rooftops: these appear in Lorca’s important poem ‘1910 (Intermedio)’ [‘1910 (Intermediate)’], which refers to a year when the poet would have been engrossed in discovering his own sexual identity at the age of twelve: Aquellos ojos míos de mil novecientos diez vieron la blanca pared donde orinaban las niñas, el hocico del toro, la seta venenosa … Aquellos ojos míos en el cuello de la jaca, en el seno traspasado de Santa Rosa dormida, en los tejados del amor, con gemidos y frescas manos, en un jardín donde los gatos se comían a las ranas.17 [Those eyes of mine of nineteen ten/ saw the white walls where the girls pissed, /the bull’s snout, the poisonous mushroom … / Those eyes of mine on the horse’s neck,/ on the pierced heart of the sleeping Saint Rose, /on the rooftops of love, with groaning and cool hands,/ in a garden where cats devoured frogs.]

16

Ibid., 69, 96. Federico García Lorca, Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 11th edition, 1966), 472. All future references are to this edition unless otherwise stated.

17

46

ROBERT HAVARD

Here the jumbled images of genitalia – both male (horse’s neck) and female (orifices of snout, soft protuberance of mushroom) – connect with a decidedly contradictory view of the female as degraded – where the girls pissed – and sublime, the martyrized Saint Rose. The last line quoted above adds another note to the poet’s confusion since it apparently stems from his having been told as a boy that the sound of cats copulating in the garden was really cats eating frogs.18 Whatever the truth of this, it is plain that the groaning and cool hands on the rooftops of love refer to masturbation and that Lorca was deeply disturbed by his own sexual leanings. At school, we are told, he was taunted with the feminine form of his name, Federica,19 while one macho teacher banished him to the back row of the class, a detail recalled in ‘Poema doble del Lago Edem’ [‘Double Poem of Lake Eden’]: Quiero llorar porque me da la gana, como lloran los niños del último banco, porque yo no soy un hombre …20 [I want to cry because I feel like crying, as the boys in the back row cry,/ because I am not a man …]

So acute was Lorca’s persecution complex he was convinced it was he who was being ridiculed by Buñuel and Dalí in Un Chien andalou’s sexually ambiguous youth. His guilt-ridden sexuality is everywhere apparent. We see it in his drawing Manos cortadas [Severed Hands] (plate 9), where two hands dripping with blood evoke the gruesome castigations of Islamic law.21 It is evidenced again in the mysterious poem ‘Muerto de amor’ [‘Dead from Love’] where severed hands are prolific in an apocalyptic sea and leave us in no doubt that Lorca was subjected to the same fearful threats of retribution for sexual misdemeanours: Lleno de manos cortadas y coronitas de flores, el mar de los juramentos resonaba, no sé dónde.22 [Full of severed hands/ and wreaths of flowers, the sea of judgement/ echoes, I know not where.] 18

See C. Marcilly, Ronde et fable de la solitude à New York (Paris, 1962), 17. Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca, vol 1, De Fuente Vaqueros a Nueva York, 1898–1929 (Grijalbo, Barcelona, 1985), 95. 20 Lorca, Obras completas, 499. 21 The drawing appears in Obras completas, 1851, and, for instance, in Helen Oppenheimer, Lorca, the Drawings, their relation to the poet’s life and work (Herbert Press, London, 1986), 35, where it is appropriately treated in the chapter entitled ‘Drawings Concerned with Personal Identity’. 22 F. García Lorca, Obras completas, 450. 19

UNDER THE JESUITS

47

Federico García Lorca, Manos cortadas [Severed Hands] (1927?)

At this point we might note that the motif of severed hands and related images of mutilation bears comparison with the ‘corps morcelé’23 [fragmented body] in the structuralist theory of Jacques Lacan, where such a body is taken as a sign of the personality’s alienation and disarray. For Lacan, the fragmented body represents the earliest phase in the child’s development before it comes to recognize itself in the so-called ‘mirror-stage’ and discovers the prospect of an integrated self in the Other, an ex-centric self to which it will subsequently aspire but never attain. According to Lacan, there is constant tension between the inner dismembered self and the exterior self perceived as whole. Coincidentally – or perhaps not – his view of the disjecta membra is illustrated by reference to a painter whose works, hung in the Prado, were of seminal importance to Alberti and Dalí as well as to many of their contemporaries in Spain: This fragmented body – which term I have also introduced into our system of theoretical references – usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or 23

Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Seuil, Paris, 1966), 96. See also the English translation by Alan Sheridan, Écrits, A Selection (Routledge, London, 1977), 4.

48

ROBERT HAVARD

of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions – the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man.24

Severed hands, together with two huge ears sliced by a dagger, are found in the right-hand panel depicting hell in Bosch’s famous tryptich, The Garden of Earthly Delights (plate 1). For Lacan the paintings of Bosch, with their prevalence of ‘oral and cloacal organs’, provide ‘an atlas of all the aggressive images that torment mankind’.25 The same mutilations are prolific in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York], notably in the opening poem, ‘Vuelta de paseo’ [‘Back from a Walk’]. Here we find such images as ‘árbol de muñones’ [tree of stumped limbs] and ‘animalitos de cabeza rota’ [little animals with broken heads], as well as evidence of the poet’s own dispersed self: Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día. ¡Asesinado por el cielo!26 [Bumping into my face that is different every day. Murdered by heaven!]

This fragmented self makes perfect sense in Lacanian terms, as does Lorca’s striking image of non-self in the same poem, ‘el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo’ [the boy with the egg-white face]. This, in turn, compares with his statement two poems later, comprendí que me habían asesinado27 [I understood that they had assassinated me]

It also connects with his strange admission that, as he made his puzzled way to New York, he had lost sight of his own identity: No sé para qué he partido; me lo pregunto cien veces al día. Me miro en el espejo del estrecho camarote y no me reconozco. Parezco otro Federico.28 [I don’t know why I’ve left. I ask myself a hundred times a day. I look at myself in my cramped cabin’s mirror and I don’t recognize myself. I seem a different Federico.]

24

See ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits, A Selection, 4–5. 25 ‘ Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis’, Écrits, A Selection, 11. 26 Lorca, Obras completas, 471. 27 Ibid., 475. 28 See Carlos Morla Lynch, En España con Federico García Lorca (Páginas de un diario íntimo, 1928–1936) (Aguilar, Madrid, 1958), 43.

UNDER THE JESUITS

49

Lorca’s entire canvas of New York might be seen in Lacanian terms as a representation of the fragmented, alienated self who – for all the positive examples of the negro, the child and Walt Whitman – can find no integrated exterior image of himself to identify with and aspire towards. Dismemberment also applies to the boy–man in Sobre los ángeles, who even at the volume’s end is ‘herido, alicortado’ (444) [wounded, wing-cut]. At the beginning, in various guises of the non-self – ‘cuerpo vacío’, ‘negro saco’ ‘boquete/ de humedad’, ‘funda vacía’, ‘humo, niebla’ (390–5) [empty body, black sack, damp hole, empty covering, smoke, mist] – he was on the verge of losing his identity altogether: Nieblas de a pie y a caballo, nieblas regidas por humos que yo conozco, en mí enterrados, van a borrarme. (392) [Mists walking and riding,/ mists governed/ by fumes I am familiar with,/ buried inside me,/ are going to blot me out.]

So much so that in ‘El ángel desconocido’ [‘The Unknown Angel’], he had asked despairingly: Dime quién soy. (390) [Tell me who I am].

Images of mutilation thus represent not only the castigations but also the psychological disintegration that derives from the kind of repression typified in the Jesuits’ hellish orientation. It is a system enforced with a vigilance that sometimes borders on the comical, as we see in Buñuel’s recollection of the ‘iron discipline’ at the Colegio del Salvador in Zaragoza: We never had a moment’s privacy. In study hall, for example, when a pupil went to the bathroom (a rather slow process, since we had to go one by one), the proctor watched him until he went out the door. Once in the corridor, the pupil found another priest, who kept an eye on him the entire length of the hallway, until he reached a third priest stationed at the bathroom door. Yes, the Jesuits took great pains to make sure there was no contact among us. We always walked double file with our arms crossed on our chests …

This vigilance is confirmed with interest by an acquaintance of the author, Alfredo Santamaría, a boarder at the school of La Salle Christian Brothers in Burgos in the early 1930s. Alfredo recalls that the boys were made to sleep at night with their arms crossed over their chest, so that, were they to die during the night, the angels would instantly recognize them as Christians. During toilet visits they were instructed to tend to the call of nature without letting

50

ROBERT HAVARD

their hands touch their private parts. If a boy failed to accomplish this difficult task – the execution of which required a good deal of bodily contortions and even hopping about – he would be roundly abused at dinner in front of his peers and made to lie on the floor between the refectory tables. Given Alberti’s often scathing comments on El Puerto de Santa María and the ‘hysterical dominion’ (LG, 21) of its religious morality, it is hardly surprising that many portuenses – or local inhabitants – have mixed feelings even today about their town’s most famous son. One whom I met, an ex-pupil himself of San Luis Gonzaga, attributed the copla quoted at the beginning of this chapter to the atheist poet, seeing it as indicative of his perverse bitterness: Puerto de Santa María, ciudad maldita, que empieza en el Penal y termina en los jesuitas. [Puerto de Santa María,/ a cursed town, starts with the Jail/ and ends with the Jesuits.]

Though its attribution is highly dubious, the copla neatly frames a town which in Alberti’s day was bounded to the east beyond the railway station by a forbidding prison, now in ruins, and to the west by what some saw as the equally punitive correction centre of San Luis Gonzaga. Alberti refers to ‘that sad Puerto prison which has torn so many “ayes” from the throats of cante jondo singers’ (LG, 80) and he recalls that on his departure for Madrid, in 1917, Paquillo the coachman remarked with a wink that he would soon see ‘real women’ in Spain’s capital city: ‘I mean! Better-looking and cheaper than the ones in our prison’ (LG, 93). No doubt many inmates at ‘el Penal’ had succumbed to the powerful mix of sex, song and fortified beverages for which El Puerto, like nearby Jerez, was famous. As for the copla, it draws a stark map of the social and moral tensions then prevailing in Spanish society.

In the classroom: Matthew, Maths and Marx This ‘atmosphere of insane Catholicism and exaggerated bigotry’ (LG, 57) inevitably left its mark on Alberti whose youth was further complicated by the virtual absence of his father, a conspicuous failure in business: ‘My father was always away, traveling in the north of Spain as a representative, no longer of his own wines, but of those of another important firm in town’ (LG, 57, 20–1). The paternal penance of banishment was duplicated in the son whose schooldays, under the Reverend Fathers, consisted of ‘a series of humiliations and bitter resentments’ (LG, 40). His poems may be less scathing than his prose about the regime that marked his formative years, but

UNDER THE JESUITS

51

a handful set in a classroom bear on the cathartic process that is central to his crisis volumes. Sobre los ángeles has two classroom poems, including the deceptively simple ‘El ángel de los números’ [‘The Angel of Numbers’], which reads: Vírgenes con escuadras y compases, velando las celestes pizarras. Y el ángel de los números, pensativo, volando del 1 al 2, del 2 al 3, del 3 al 4. Tizas frías y esponjas rayaban y borraban la luz de los espacios. Ni sol, luna, ni estrellas, ni el repentino verde del rayo y el relámpago, ni el aire. Sólo nieblas. Vírgenes sin escuadras, sin compases, llorando. Y en las muertas pizarras, el ángel de los números, sin vida, amortajado sobre el 1 y el 2, sobre el 3 y el 4 … (398–9) [Virgins with set squares/ and compasses, watching/ over heavenly blackboards./ And the angel of numbers,/ pensive, flying/ from 1 to 2, from 2/ to 3, from 3 to 4./ Cold chalks and sponges/ lined and erased light from the open spaces. / No sun, moon, or stars,/ nor the sudden green/ flash and the lightning,/ nor air. Only mists./ Virgins without set squares,/ without compasses, crying./ And on the dead blackboards,/ the angel of numbers,/ lifeless, shrouded/ above the 1 and 2,/ above the 3 and 4.]

Ostensibly the poem depicts the frustration of one who, by his own admission, was a ‘mal estudiante de matemáticas’29 [poor maths scholar]. It offers a stark progression from the cloudless clarity of ‘celestes pizarras’ [heavenly blackboards] in the first stanza to the smudged, illegible numbers – ‘Sólo nieblas’ [Only mists] – on the ‘muertas pizarras’ [dead blackboards] of the final stanza. This motif of gathering turbulence – ‘esponjas/ rayaban y borraban/ la luz de los espacios’ [sponges/ lined and erased/ light from the open spaces] – traces the growing confusion of the young Rafael and his class29

Rafael Alberti, Obras completas, cxxxvii.

52

ROBERT HAVARD

mates as the school day evolves. This point is rounded off in the volume’s other classroom poem, ‘Los ángeles colegiales’ [‘The Schoolboy Angels’]: Ninguno comprendíamos el secreto nocturno de las pizarras … Ninguno comprendíamos nada. (435). [None of us understood the blackboards’ nocturnal secret … None of us understood anything.]

Alberti has often referred to the abject levels of ignorance that came from over-emphasis on religion at the expense of a proper education: What worried my family most was our religious education, our formation within the most rigid principles of the Catholic faith with all its annoying consequences. My parents, aunts, uncles and all the other relatives preferred a perfect recitation of a Hail Mary or The Lord’s Prayer to a decent demonstration of our ability to read or write, skills they considered secondary to the salvation of one’s soul … A pupil would come out of those Andalusian schools, both on the elementary and secondary levels, with his head crammed only with The Lord’s Prayer, the memory of horrifying sermons, and such an accumulation of spelling mistakes and misinformation that even when I reached the age of twenty, having already spent five of those years in Madrid, I would blush with shame when I discovered the elementary knowledge possessed by an eleven-year-old kid who had attended the Instituto or some other respectable educational institution. (LG, 34–5)30

In ‘El ángel de los números’ the narrative is complicated by the motif of virgins who also evolve negatively from ‘Vírgenes con escuadras/ y compases, velando’ [Virgins with set squares/ and compasses, watching] to ‘Vírgenes sin escuadras,/ sin compases, llorando’ [Virgins without set squares,/ without compasses, crying]. The motif of virgins is consistent with the boys’ youth, but we may wonder as to its appropriateness in terms of gender and perhaps feel puzzled at the master–boys hierarchy being rendered in the angel–virgins parallel. Naturally, from his classroom seat the young Rafael would have seen the master at his desk, raised on a dais, no doubt, as a mark of authority and for purposes of the ‘constant surveillance’ to which Buñuel testifies.31 Beyond that stood the blackboard, with perhaps cherubic 30

The Instituto to which Alberti refers is the famous school founded in Madrid in the 1880s by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, a progressive liberal pedagogue who favoured less religious instruction at school. His Instituto Libre de Enseñanza [Free School of Learning] would develop a tertiary level, the even more famous Residencia de Estudiantes [Student Residence] where Lorca, Buñuel and Dalí boarded and which Alberti frequented in the 1920s on an informal basis. 31 Buñuel writes of his school in Zaragoza: ‘At the merest infraction, a student would

UNDER THE JESUITS

53

icons overhead or nearby, ‘velando’ [watching]. Very likely, then, the poem’s visual content depicts what the young Rafael actually saw, with virgins, as a referent to classroom décor, projecting the boys’ ideal rather than real innocence in their transitional adolescent phase. But the virgins have other resonances, notably a biblical one, which suggests a different if complementary reading. Here we note that Alberti, though poor at maths, was a good student of the Bible even by the Jesuits’ demanding standards.32 He would certainly have known Christ’s parable of the ten virgins recounted in Matthew 25: 1–13: Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom. And five of them were wise, and five were foolish. They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them: but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept. And at midnight there was a cry made, ‘Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him’. Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said unto the wise, ‘Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out’. But the wise answered, saying, ‘Not so, lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves’. And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us’. But he answered and said, ‘Verily I say unto you, I know you not’. Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.33 instantly find himself on his knees behind his desk, or in the middle of the classroom, arms outstretched, under the stern eye of the proctor, who surveyed the entire room from a balcony flanked by a ramp and a staircase.’ My Last Breath, 27–8. 32 Alberti achieved ‘dos sobresalientes en Religión de los cursos 1o y 2o según exámenes internos del colegio’ [two distinctions in Religion in the school’s internal examinations for the first and second year courses], according to the painstaking research into school records done by Merello, Alberti, colegial y marinero, 50. But Alberti’s relative lack of academic prowess can be gauged by comparing his marks with two other celebrated pupils of San Luis Gonzaga, namely Juan Ramón Jiménez and Fernando Villalón: % = Sobresalientes notables buenos aprobados [distinctions] [very good] [good] [passes] R. Alberti 20 40 – 33 J.R. Jiménez 42.85 21.42 21.42 14.28 F. Villalón 94.73 – 5.26 – Merello observes that Alberti’s performance at the school declined dramatically from his third year: there is reference to ‘un no presentado en Geometría en los exámenes oficiales de junio 1916’ [an absentia in Geometry in the official exams of June 1916], while things came to a head shortly before his expulsion in ‘aquel febrero negro de 1917 … en el que saca dos 4 en Algebra (2a y 3a semana) y otro 4 en Perceptiva’ [that black February of 1917 … when he obtained two 4’s in Algebra (second and third weeks) and another 4 in Perception], ibid., 52. 33 I cite the King James’ version, The Reader’s Bible, being the complete authorized version of the Holy Bible (Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, London, 1951),

54

ROBERT HAVARD

The thrust of this parable, no doubt, is the need for preparedness, as in ‘lest there be not enough for us’ and especially the last verse, ‘Watch, therefore,’ where the verb in the Spanish Bible, ‘Velad, pues,’ is the same as that used in the poem’s second line, ‘velando’ [watching]. Nonetheless, modern readers may be disconcerted by the parable’s exclusionist tone and the arguably uncharitable attitude shown towards the foolish virgins by their wise counterparts and even the bridegroom (‘I know you not’). One standard biblical commentary refers to ‘the rather selfish complacency of the prudent [virgins] which may not be admirable’ and ‘the strange and solemn repudiation by the bridegroom’.34 That Alberti had the parable in mind when writing the poem is all the more likely in view of the parallel in motifs of equipment: oil in the parable and set squares and compasses in the poem. The wise virgins have their oil, just as the clever or favoured boys have their geometrical instruments, while those who are foolish and ultimately found to be unworthy of entry into the kingdom are wanting in this respect. In this reading it is not a question of progression, or of the same virgins/boys coming to grief as a result of losing their equipment, but rather of possession. Here our attention is drawn to the ‘emphatic pronouns’:35 ‘the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps’ and ‘buy for yourselves’. This suggests two inherently different groups or types, namely, those who have and those who have not, a point which, in turn, accords with Alberti’s view of San Luis Gonzaga as a school riven by the sharp social division it made between boarders and day boys like himself. He would later express this view unambiguously in the poem ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ [‘School (S.J)’] of De un momento a otro [Any Moment Now], which begins:

43–4. I wish to express my thanks here to a former student, Rowanne Cowley, who drew my attention to the parallel with the passage in Matthew. In Spanish it reads: Entonces será semejante el reyno de los cielos a diez vírgenes, que tomando sus lámparas, salieron a recibir al Esposo y a la Esposa. Mas las cinco de ellas eran fatuas, y las cinco prudentes. Y las cinco fatuas, habiendo tomado sus lámparas, no llevaron consigo aceyte. Mas las prudentes tomaron aceyte en sus vasijas juntamente con las lámparas. Y tardándose el Esposo, comenzaron a cabecear, y se durmieron todas. Quando a la medianoche se oyó gritar: Mirad que viene el Esposo; ¡salid a recibirle! Entonces se levantaron todas aquellas vírgenes, y aderezaron sus lámparas. Y dixeron las fatuas a las prudentes: Dadnos de vuestro aceyte, porque nuestras lámparas se apagan. Respondieron las prudentes, diciendo: Porque talvez no alcance para nosotras y para vosotras, id antes a los que lo venden, y comprad para vosotras. Y mientras que ellas fueron a comprarlo, vino el Esposo; y las que estaban apercibidas entraron con él a las bodas; y fue cerrada la puerta. Al fin vinieron también las otras vírgenes diciendo: ¡Señor, Señor, ábrenos!. Mas él respondió, y dixo: En verdad os digo, que no os conozco. Velad, pues, porque no sabéis el día ni la hora.

La Biblia Vulgata Latina traducida en Español, y anotada por … el P. Phelipe Scio de S. Miguel. Segunda edición revista, corregida y aumentada por su mismo traductor (Benito Cano, Madrid, 1797, reimpreso por Samuel Bagster, London). 34 A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, edited by D.B. Orchard et al. (Thomas Nelson, London, 1953), 897. 35 Ibid., 897.

UNDER THE JESUITS

55

Éramos los externos, los colegiales de familias burguesas ya en declive. La caridad cristiana nos daba sin dinero su cultura, la piedad nos abría los libros y las puertas de las clases. Ya éramos de esas gentes que algún día se las entierra de balde. (OC, 614) [We were the day boys, schoolchildren of middle-class families who had known better days. Christian charity offered us its culture for free, pity opened books and classroom doors to us. We were the sort of people who’d some day get a burial plot for nothing.]

By the turn of the century Alberti’s own family was in ‘economic decline’ (LG, 25) as the poet ruefully notes. His embarrassment at having reduced rates at Doña Concha’s primary school was redoubled at San Luis Gonzaga where he was granted free tuition in return for the protection his ancestors had given to Jesuits after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1868 when the school was closed for some years: In gratitude for that undercover assistance from the rich, the members of the Society of Jesus decided to open a free day school for the children of the Puerto. It was there that my mother took me and it was there that, along with the usual and justified childish horsing around and skipping of classes, I was to suffer a series of humiliations and bitter resentments which I remember to this day with deep feelings of rancor. (LG, 40).36

One humiliation was the school uniform, which was different for the externos or day boys – some 14 per cent of the school roll, according to Merello37 – as ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ [‘School (S.J.)’] describes: No sabíamos bien por qué un galón de oro no le daba la vuelta a nuestra gorra ni por qué causa luego no descendía directo por nuestros pantalones. Jamás vimos impresos los nombres que teníamos, sino escritos a máquina, azules, casi borrados. Éramos los externos. (614) [We didn’t know for sure why a gold braid didn’t adorn/ our caps nor why it didn’t make a straight line down our trousers.

36

Merello protests that Alberti’s schooling was not entirely free: ‘¿Gratuito?’ [Free?], in Alberti, colegial y marinero, 69; but so minimal was the fee it hardly weakens Alberti’s point or the bitter irony intended in the lines quoted. 37 Ibid., 80.

56

ROBERT HAVARD

We never saw our names stamped,/ only typed out,/ in blue, almost erased./ We were the day boys.]

Buñuel confirms: ‘The boarders were entitled to complete uniforms, but we day students only had the right to wear the school cap with its regulation stripe’.38 The issue clearly weighed more heavily with Alberti who details the differences at length: The uniforms worn by those in the boarding school were dark blue with gold stripes sewn on the cap and trousers, but we only had our regular street clothes. Just as in the army, the officials [= ‘officers’] wore stars and clusters on their sleeves, but our official ranks were indicated by various medallions, heavy and unsightly things that hung ridiculously from our necks over our democratic jackets. The certificates or diplomas that we fought for, and won either through industriousness or good behavior, were made of inferior cardboard with our names unevenly typed in, while those earned by the boarding students with evident ease were of parchment decorated with beautiful Gothic lettering. (LG, 41–2)

This virtual stigmatizing of the underprivileged extended systematically to other matters. The day boys, for instance, could not be appointed ‘príncipes’ [princes], the school’s highest rank: The highest honor in the school was to be named Prince; the most modest was to be given the title of second rank-leader. Normally the rank of Prince was reserved for the son of some local aristocrat, political boss or wealthy landowner, the kind of people who might be able to do the Society of Jesus a good turn. Those of us who were in day school, undoubtedly due to our accepted condition as inferior beings, could never aspire to such a post; we were only allowed to attain the rank of Brigadier, Quaestor, Edile, and Rank-Leader. (LG, 41)39

A strict policy of segregation was applied: ‘Those of us enrolled in the day school formed a separate division with our own study room. Our contacts with the boarding students took place only during the hours of instruction’ (LG, 41). But even in the classes they shared with boarders, the day boys were treated differently for the masters only had eyes for the internos: Éramos los externos. Algunos teníamos talento,

38

My Last Breath, 27. The sentence in italics is my own translation of the following in the original Spanish which is inaccurately translated in The Lost Grove: ‘El principado, por lo general, lo alcanzaba únicamente algún hijo de aristócrata, cacique o propietario ricos, gente que siempre pudiera favorecer, de una maner u otra, a la Companía’ (AP 1, 34).

39

UNDER THE JESUITS

57

buena voz para el canto o un pulso firme, bueno, capaz de dibujar de un solo golpe una circunferencia… Tanta bondad (o tanta hipocresía) la teníamos algunos. Pero Claudio, Juan o Francisco Ponce de León … ellos, todos hijos con tierra y ganados lejos, en la provincia. Así ni tú tenías buena voz para el canto ni yo una débil rendija de talento, ni aquél era capaz de dibujar de un solo golpe una circunferencia. Éramos los externos. (615) [We were the day boys./ Some of us had talent, a nice singing voice or a good steady hand, the knack of drawing a circumference at one go … Some of us had just as much generosity (or hypocrisy) of spirit. But Claudio,/ Juan or Francisco Ponce de León …/ they were all sons who had land and livestock/ far off/ up country. So it was that you had no singing voice/ nor I a smidgin of talent, nor so-and-so the knack of drawing a circumference at one go. We were the day boys.]

It is this notion of favour and privilege, together with a literal ignoring of the day boys’ qualities, that is so reminiscent of Matthew 25 and its chilling rejection, ‘Verily I say unto you, I know you not.’ More than a rejection, it amounts to a flagrant denial of the virgins’ identity and it compares in turn with the day boys’ names being ‘casi borrados’ [almost erased] as their merits go unrecognized. We might note, in passing, how this links with the persistent theme of a self that is deceived into a state of abnegation or non-self, ‘Y fui derrotada/ yo, sin violencia,/ con miel y palabras’ (400) [And I was destroyed,/ Me, without violence,/ with honey and words]. As we see in ‘Engaño’ [‘Deception’], this is again based on the deceitfulness of words: Alguien detrás, a tu espalda, tapándote los ojos con palabras … Con palabras, vidrios falsos. (411–12) [Someone behind, at your back,/ covering your eyes with words … With words, false glass.]

To judge by Ortega y Gasset’s recollections of his own Jesuit education, the exclusionist, tribal mentality was ingrained in the Society’s teachers who, he says, conceived of humanity as two types:

58

ROBERT HAVARD

los jesuitos y luego los demás. Y… los demás son gente falsa, viciosa, dispuesta a venderse por poco dinero, ignorante, sin idealidad, sin mérito alguno apreciable. Por el contrario, los nuestros, los jesuitas, son de tal condición específica que, a lo que parece, no se ha condenado ninguno todavía.40 [the Jesuits and the rest. And the ‘rest’ are untrustworthy, dissolute people, who would sell their grandmother for a farthing, an uneducated rabble, lacking in ideals, with no discernible merit. On the other hand, ‘our lot’, the Jesuits, were of such high quality, it seems, none has so far been condemned.]

The supercilious mentality which the Jesuits inculcated – described by Ortega as ‘un desdén apriorístico ante los demás hombres’ [an a priori disdain for the rest of humanity] – was evident in the treatment of day boys who were not bona fide initiates to be numbered amongst ‘los nuestros’ [our lot], and who, like the foolish virgins, received no compassion from their more fortunate peers. Both virgins and day boys experience a singularly physical exclusion, ‘and the door was shut’ (verse 10), a closure that would be definitive for Alberti on his expulsion from San Luis Gonzaga in 1917. Lorca felt similarly excluded, as we know, and his ‘Muerto de amor’ [‘Dead from Love’] concludes on the chilling note of heaven’s doors slamming shut immediately after the image of severed hands awash in a sea of judgement: Y el cielo daba portazos al brusco rumor del bosque, mientras clamaban las luces en los altos corredores.41 [And heaven slammed doors/ on the wood’s brusque murmurs, while the lights still clamoured/ in the high corridors.]

A dissembling charity had admitted selected local boys to the school – ‘la piedad nos abría los libros y las puertas de la clase’ (614) [pity opened books and classroom doors to us] – but within its hallowed confines they were made to feel like trespassers, as ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ [‘School (S.J.)’] shows: Nos dijeron que no éramos de aquí, que éramos viajeros, gente de paso, huéspedes de la tierra, camino de las nubes. (617)

40 41

José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Al margen del libro A.M.D.G.’, 534. Lorca, Obras completas, 450.

UNDER THE JESUITS

59

[They said/ we didn’t belong there,/ that we were travellers, passing through,/ visitors on this earth,/ heading for the clouds.]

Sermonic clichés on life’s transience – enshrined in Ecclesiastes and Jorge Manrique’s Coplas42 – were readily adaptable as reminders of the day boys’ inferiority vis-à-vis the more secure boarders from landowning families.43 This kind of segregation was galling for Alberti whose family had seen the first Osborne arrive penniless in El Puerto only to rise steadily and become their employer. Family relatives who had managed to keep their status were apt to look down on the poet, as did José Ignacio Merello, a first cousin, ‘who changed quite a bit when he enrolled as a boarding student in San Luis Gonzaga and then made little effort to disguise his haughty attitude towards me, something which I found sad and offensive since we had been such good friends’ (LG, 460). These attitudes need to be seen in the social context of a small town which suffered high levels of unemployment and the evils of ‘caciquismo’, a corrupt political system prevalent in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century provincial Spain. The poverty in El Puerto is amply demonstrated in coplas [popular songs] composed for the riotous annual carnival. Some coplas praise the town as a ‘perla del océano’ [pearl of the ocean] with a marvellous climate and superb wines – amontillado, fino and manzanilla – known throughout the world, but others paint an altogether darker picture, as for instance one sung in 1912 by the ‘Coro de africanos’ [African Troup]: Todos tus hijos parados están y el brazo obrero no gana un jornal. El comercio y la industria aquí se acabó … tu miseria es horrible y muy fatal, tus hijos emigran sin cesar.44 42

The transitoriness and resigned fatalism in the Old Testament text is caught for Spaniards in the influential work by the fifteenth-century Castilian poet, Jorge Manrique, ‘Coplas por la muerte de su padre’ [‘Verses on the Death of his Father’]. 43 Alberti recalls the latter with some venom: ‘because of their unpleasantness and provincial vanity, I do remember some of the boarding students, like Jorge and Enrique Palardé from Sevilla – their father was a famous breeder of brave bulls – very well liked and flattered by the Jesuits and unjustly favored in class, although they were no brighter than a pair of Andalusian donkeys; there was Galnares Sagastizábal, also from Sevilla, puny and with his hair already plastered down, but very good in arithmetic; Guzmán, a Roman or Carthaginian emperor in Latin class; Claudio Gómez from Córdoba, sour and dark, with his Riffian face, the son of some political boss from Montoro or Pozoblanco; Sánchez Dalp, Ponce de León, Pemartín, Osborne, Estrada, all of them sons of rich wine merchants or landholders, the future owners of endless fields of vineyards and olive groves’ (LG, 46). 44 See José Ignacio Buhigas, Carnaval. un siglo de historias de El Puerto (1836–1936) (Ayuntamiento de El Puerto de Santa María/Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1983), 22.

60

ROBERT HAVARD

[All your sons are unemployed/ and the worker’s arm can’t earn its pay./ Business and industry/ are dead here … your poverty is terrible/ and killing,/ your sons constantly emigrate.]

Another, sung by the ‘Astrónomos’ [Astronomers] in 1900, is just as blunt and poetically unpretentious in voicing the citizens’ most ardent desire: que quieren que acabe en nuestra ciudad el caciquismo, que era su ruina principal.45 [they want an end/ in our town to ‘caciquismo’, which was/ its principal ruin.]

Against this sort of desperate social background we can better appreciate Alberti’s sensitivity to the discrimination he suffered at San Luis Gonzaga and understand why he and others from the lower ranks soon escaped to the beaches it overlooked. He is often rhapsodic about the school’s setting: The location of San Luis Gonzaga on the outskirts of the city (= town) was truly magnificent. It was bordered on one side by the old San Francisco Plaza with its magnolia trees and araucaria pines, situated close to the bullring from which, on those Sunday afternoons in the spring, the sounds of bugle blasts would reach those of us who were being punished by having to be in school that day; on another side of the school there was a long street lined with wine cellars that led to a common pasture ground where cows and young bulls grazed and awakened in me, as well as in other boys of the village, our vivid bullfighting fantasies; on the western side of the school was the beautiful Bay of Cádiz, where we could see the movement of seagulls and boats through the eucalyptus and palm trees as we stared out the windows during study periods. (LG, 41)46

Juan Ramón Jiménez, a boarder in the 1890s who was not without his airs and graces, recalled the setting in his own modernista way: El colegio estaba sobre el mar y rodeado de grandes parques; cerca de mi dormitorio había una ventana que daba a la playa y por donde, las noches de primavera, se veía el cielo profundo y dormido sobre el agua, y Cádiz, a lo lejos, con la luz triste de su faro.47 45

Ibid., 28. Much of Alberti’s description still applies today, though the school no longer has views of the sea and dunes since the town’s urban dwellings have extended in a westerly direction, while the front part of the school with its imposing entrance has been appropriated for local government offices. 47 Juan Ramón Jiménez, Libros de poesía, recopilación y prólogo de Agustín Caballero (Aguilar, Madrid, 1959), xix. 46

UNDER THE JESUITS

61

[The school was close to the sea and surrounded by large parks; near my bedroom was a window that overlooked the beach and from which, on spring evenings, you could see the deep sky asleep over the water, and Cádiz, in the distance, with the sad glow of its lighthouse.]

It is hardly surprising that a nocturnal view left its imprint on Jiménez, given the full timetable of the school day which, after an early mass, went on to include meditations and exercises as well as a heavy dose of classes before ending with the evening meal or ‘cena’ at 8.15 pm.48 But it was the beach with its shimmering sea and sky that drew the miscreant day boys or ‘proletarian student body’ (LG, 46).49 For them the beach was an escape from the systematic discrimination they endured at school: Tanta ira, tanto odio resuelto inútilmente en morderse las uñas mientras que las pizarras enblanquecían de números o el margen de los libros se hastiaba de borrones, tanta ira, tanto odio contenidos sin llanto, nos llevaban al mar que nunca se preocupa de las raíces cuadradas, al cielo libertado de teoremas, libre de profesores, a las dunas calientes, donde nos orinábamos en fila mirando hacia el colegio. Éramos los externos. (614–15) [So much anger,/ so much hatred/ that generated pointless nailbiting while the blackboards whitened with numbers or our book margins grew weary with blotches, so much anger,/ so much restrained, tearless hatred, 48 Details of the timetable and of the Loyolan spiritual exercises which the boys were expected to do are given in Merello, 291. Alberti mentions that what irked the Prefect at the time of his misdeeds and expulsion was the fact that he was ‘right in the middle of his spiritual exercises’ (LG, 64). 49 He recalls a few of these, for instance: ‘the Bootello brothers, somewhat better treated than the rest of us because their father was the stationmaster in town – the Jesuits could obtain through him as an employee of the railroad some kind of discount during the June examination period, when the students of San Luis Gonzaga daily occupied the trains to Jerez where our yearly examinations were held; I remember José Murciano, who died one afternoon in March – we all went together with Father Fernández to bury him in a cemetery outside of town …; there was Gutiérrez, a rough mean-tempered gypsy type who was not particularly proud of his father’s profession as a veterinarian and horseshoer; and also Cantillo, small and always freezing, with his round starched collar and pink silk cravat, the son of a lieutenant in the Civil Guard’, and finally, Juan Modesto Guilloto, whom Alberti would meet again in Madrid in 1936 as a Republican comrade in arms (LG, 46–7).

62

ROBERT HAVARD

led us to the sea that was never bothered about square roots, to the sky that was unburdened by theorems,/ free of teachers, to the hot dunes,/ where we lined up facing the school and pissed. We were the day boys.]

How well these lines evoke the rebelliousness that a repressive system incited. The acrid feelings vented in the day boys’ defiant gesture are, in effect, the progenitors of what would overflow twenty years later when the poet stood shoulder to shoulder with proletariats in Madrid facing Franco’s onslaught. Far from enlisting another to their cause – ‘Nos educaron sólo para el alma’ (617) [They educated us only for our souls] – the minutiae of Jesuit practice instilled in Alberti an incipient class consciousness and sense of comradeship: These major and minor differences were a source of pain to us, and as we grew more sensitive and our ability to reason became more highly developed, feelings of resentment began to ferment within us, an attitude to my mind not unlike what workers today feel toward their employers – that is, class hatred. (LG, 42)

The dunes, scoured as they were by teachers armed with telescopes, meant freedom to the day boys who went there, as ‘El ángel de arena’ [‘The Angel of Sand’] relates, ‘temerosos de lazos y palabras duras’ [fearful of traps and harsh words], to play their truant games. Branded a sinner, the poet sees his whole childhood in terms of stolen pleasures: Dos niños de la noche, terribles, expulsados del cielo, cuya infancia era un robo de barcos y un crimen de soles y de lunas. (429) [Two boys of darkness, fearful, expelled from heaven, whose infancy was a theft of boats and a stealing of suns and moons.]

But if Marxist theory would later convince him of the evil of capitalism – whose ethos might even extend one day to the planets50 – he knew instinctively as a child that the seashore offered a more vital form of salvation than his school: Vi que el mar verdadero era un muchacho que saltaba desnudo, invitándome a un plato de estrellas y a un reposo de algas. (429) 50

With a foresight that anticipates ‘Starwars’, Alberti writes of U.S. economic imperialism in the poem ‘New York’: ‘Tu diplomacia del horror quisiera/ la intervención armada hasta en los astros’ (641) [Your horror diplomacy would see/ armed intervention even in the stars].

UNDER THE JESUITS

63

[I saw that the true sea was a boy who dived naked, offering me a plateful of stars and a quiet interlude of seaweed.]

This charitable and liberated ‘mar verdadero’ [true sea] stands in implicit contrast to a false sea as viewed and valued by the Jesuits who prefer the regimented hierarchy of school to the untrammelled freedom of nature. Opposition between school and sea is caught again in the fourth part of ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ [‘School (S.J.)’] when Alberti argues with poetic logic that the sea could have entered the school any time it wished: Podías haber saltado, haber entrado en clase una mañana, una noche, en la hora del olvido de los números. (616) [You could have scaled the walls, you could have entered class one morning, or night,/ at a time when numbers were distracted.]

From his perspective of the mid-1930s at the time of writing, he imagines the sea turning revolutionary like himself, taking possession of the school much as proletariats appropriated prestigious buildings on the outbreak of the Civil War:51 Ahora, cuando ya no hay remedio, o si existe es tan sólo el de la bala que conspira en la mano, se me ocurre invitarte, proponerte esta ingenua conquista o toma de poder de las pizarras, de los serios pupitres donde yacían de pronto, empañados, coléricos, los ojos de las gafas que nos odiaban siempre. (OC, 616) [Now,/ when there’s no longer any alternative, or if there is it’s just a bullet’s scheming in one’s hand, it occurs to me to invite you, and propose this ingenuous conquest or taking of power from blackboards, from sombre desks where suddenly there would lie/ steamed up and angry,/ the eyes of glasses that always hated us.]

Whimsical as it may be, this is another example of insurrection on the part of the undervalued and the excluded, for the sea, like the rest of nature, is of no 51

The appropriation of buildings is treated in the second part of ‘Madrid-otoño’ (OC, 672), which is discussed in Chapter Six.

64

ROBERT HAVARD

consequence to the Jesuits whose blinkered mentality is devoid of aesthetic sensibility. In the above lines the sea makes an effective analogy for the proletarian masses not only on account of its size, strength and amorphous unanimity, but also for its characteristic tranquillity which suggests a submissive force that can suddenly erupt into aggression. The sea, in short, is too strong to be resisted or shut out like the day boys and the foolish virgins. Although, much like the working class, it may be unaware of its power: Te lo digo a ti, mar, que venías a las puertas del colegio, sin pensar, puede ser, entrar en clase nunca. (616) [I am telling you all this,/ sea,/ since you came to the school’s doors, without ever thinking,/ perhaps,/ of entering into the class.]

The contrast between a seascape’s beauty and the lugubrious Jesuit mind struck Ortega y Gasset whose school was also in Andalusia, near Málaga. Reviewing Pérez de Ayala’s autobiographical A.M.G.D.: La vida en los colegios de jesuitas [A.M.G.D.: Life in Jesuit Schools], Ortega is reminded of his own youth as an ‘emperador’ [emperor], or high-ranking boarder, in ‘el imperio de la luz’ [the empire of light]: Hay un lugar que el Mediterráneo halaga, donde la tierra pierde su valor elemental, donde el agua marina desciende al menester de esclava y convierte su líquida amplitud en un espejo reverberante, que refleja lo único que allí es real: la Luz … yo he sido durante seis años emperador dentro de una gota de luz, en un imperio más azul y esplendoroso que la tierra de los mandarines.52 [There is a place caressed by the Mediterranean, where the earth loses its elemental quality, where the sea water descends slave-like and converts its liquid breadth into a shimmering mirror which reflects the one thing that is real there: Light … I have had six years as an emperor inside a drop of light, in an empire that is more splendorous and blue than the land of mandarins.]

Ortega notes that Ayala’s schooldays were spent in the very different climate of Asturias, ‘en un paisaje del Norte, que conviene muy bien a la melancolía y al dolor de la vida que describe’ [in a Northern landscape, in tune with the dolorous, melancholy life he describes], but he concludes that, essentially, the two boys endured the same terrible repression: 52

José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, I, 532.

UNDER THE JESUITS

65

Mas yo pongo la mano a modo de visera para resguardarme las pupilas de esa refulgencia excesiva en que flotó mi infancia, y entonces descubro la misma niñez triste y sedienta que formó el corazón tembloroso de Bertuco, el pequeño héroe de Ayala.53 [But I raise my hand to shade my eyes like a visor from that excessive glare in which my infancy floated, and I find the same sad and thirsting childhood that formed the trembling heart of Ayala’s young hero, Bertuco.]

For Ortega, the Jesuits simply encouraged their pupils to ‘burlarse de todos los clásicos del pensamiento humano’ [mock all the great classical thinkers], including Descartes, Galileo, Kant and Darwin. Lacking interest in art themselves, they suffocated their alumni under ‘un montón de reglas o ejercicios estúpidos y supersticiosos’54 [a pile of rules and silly, superstitious exercises]. Ortega agrees with Ayala’s indictment in all its essentials, adding only that he failed to mention the Jesuits’ worst defect: ‘la ignorancia … la incapacidad intelectual de los RR.PP.’55 [ignorance … the intellectual inadequacy of the Reverend Fathers]. Returning to the beach, we can say that, for Alberti, it was classless in both senses, with its natural beauty and freedom replacing the endless, sterile arithmetic of San Luis Gonzaga. This contrast lies at the heart of ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ [‘School (S.J.)’], as we have seen, while it also appears in the two central stanzas of ‘El ángel de los números’ [‘The Angel of Numbers’]: Tizas frías y esponjas rayaban y borraban la luz de los espacios. Ni sol, luna, ni estrellas, ni el repentino verde del rayo y el relámpago, ni el aire. Sólo nieblas. [Cold chalks and sponges/ lined and erased light from the open spaces. No sun, moon, or stars,/ nor the sudden green flash and the lightning,/ nor air. Only mists.]

The boys’ confusion, imaged in a blackboard covered with smudges and crossings out, contrasts with the limpid vitality of the excluded natural world. Especially effective is the notion of a sudden illumination conveyed in the so-called green flash, ‘el repentino verde/ del rayo’, a rare phenomenon seen 53 54 55

Ibid., 533. Ibid., 534. Ibid., 535.

66

ROBERT HAVARD

on westerly-facing coasts at sunset.56 The argument implicit in the polarising of illumination and calculation recalls the view put by Antonio Machado, one of the two modern poets Alberti most admires.57 Machado, who had benefited from an enlightened education at the same Instituto just referred to, held the Krausist and Bergsonian views of its founder, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, which, in a nutshell, placed the intuitive faculty above the analytical as a mode of apprehension.58 Essentially, analysis dissects and therefore deals only with static, lifeless concepts, while intuition grasps life in its flow, as Bergson argued, seeing the vital whole in a flash. In these terms, Alberti’s crowded blackboard captures far more than the boys’ hapless confusion. It suggests, too, the finical mentality of Jesuit teachers in their feverish attempts to block out daylight. This is the dual context that informs the rebel escapism of ‘Los ángeles colegiales’ [‘The Schoolboy Angels’], las estrellas errantes son niños que ignoran la aritmética [wandering stars are boys who are hopeless at maths]

as it does the poet’s sombre recollection of his boyhood – ‘infancia mía de ceniza’ (432) [my childhood of ashes] – in ‘Muerte y juicio’ [‘Death and Judgement’], where he speaks alternately of an abused world of nature and of a confused child: Las flores … desangradas en un aburrimiento de cartillas y pizarrines. 4 y 4 son 18. Y la X, una K, una H, una J … Niño. Perdido entre actuaciones, triángulos, fórmulas y precipitados azules. (433)

56

‘A flash of greenish-blue light seen, when the sun’s disc appears or disappears in a sunrise or sunset on a clear horizon’, Oxford Dictionary. The Spanish version is much fuller: ‘Rayo verde: Fenómeno que se observa algunas veces al ponerse el Sol en el mar cuando el cielo está completamente limpio de nubes. No dura más que una pequeña fracción de segundo. Hasta el presente no existe una explicación satisfactoria de este fenómeno, habiendo quien opina que se trata de una impresión puramente subjetiva. La teoría más admitida atribuye este fenómeno a la dispersión atmosférica.’ Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana, XLIX (Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1958). 57 See AP 5, 99. His other favourite modern poet is, surprisingly, Jiménez. 58 See, for instance, Machado’s poem beginning ‘Hay dos modos de conciencia’ [There are two forms of knowing’] in A. Machado, I, Poesías completas, edición crítica de Oreste Macrì (Espasa-Calpe/Fundación Antonio Machado, Madrid, 1989), 577; or Robert Havard, Antonio Machado: Campos de Castilla (Duckworth/Bristol Classical Press, London, 1997), 75, with a discussion of this poem and of ideas relating to Krause, Giner and Bergson in the Introduction.

UNDER THE JESUITS

67

[Flowers … / bled dry in a tedium of primers and slate pencils. 4 and 4 are 18. And the X, a K, an H, a J … / Boy. Lost among performances, triangles, formulas and cast-down blues.]

Perversely, while Alberti identifies mathematics as the bane of his childhood, his poems show a high incidence of numbers, especially in Sobre los ángeles and Sermones y moradas.59 The explanation for this is rooted in the Jesuit mind which expresses itself via an emphatic predilection for numbers that goes far beyond mathematics and permeates its entire mode of articulation, this being the operative term as Roland Barthes has shown: Whoever reads the Exercises sees at first glance that the material is subjected to an incessant, painstaking, and almost obsessive separation; or more exactly, the Exercises is this separation itself, to which nothing is pre-existent: everything is immediately divided, subdivided, classified, numbered off in annotations, weeks, points, exercises mysteries, etc. A simple operation which myth attributes to the Creator of the world, separating day, night, man, woman, elements, and species, forms the continuing basis of Ignatian discourse: articulation.60

In short, Loyola’s linguistic mode, with its persistent subdividing into articles and the numbering off this entails, greatly increases the tendency to use numbers which is already marked in biblical narrative and in the codifying of religious dogma, viz. ten commandments, seven deadly sins, four last things, four horsemen of the apocalypse, five wise and five foolish virgins, to mention but a few. What Barthes terms ‘an exasperated form of binarism’ in the tree-like bifurcations or ‘continuous arborescence of Ignatian discourse’ results in a proliferation of numbers in the Spiritual Exercises and, we may assume, in Jesuit teaching praxis.61 59

The importance of numbers is quite apparent in titles: ‘El ángel de los números’ [‘The Angel of Numbers’], ‘Los dos ángeles’ [‘The Two Angels’], ‘5’, ‘Tres recuerdos del cielo’ [‘Three Recollections of Heaven’], ‘Dos niños’ [‘Two Boys’], and especially ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [‘Sermon on the Four Truths’]. In addition the use of numbers in Sobre los ángeles will be found in poems on the following pages: 391, 393, 397, 400, 401, 402, 408, 409, 418, 428, 431, 432, 434, 435, 437. 60 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 52. 61 Ibid., 56–7. As for Loyola’s predilection for numbers, it may be noted that his Exercises are mapped out over Four Weeks, each day having an appropriate number of exercises based on contemplations, meditations, prayers, preambles, notes and additional material. The First Exercise in the First Week, for instance, is described as ‘A Meditation with the Three Powers on the First, Second and Third Sins’, while the Note to the Second Contemplation on the First Day of the Third Week begins: ‘In this Second Contemplation, after the preparatory prayer with the three preambles mentioned above, the same method of procedure for the points and colloquy will be followed as in the First Contemplation (of the Last Supper). Two repetitions will be made on the First and Second Contemplations at the times of mass and vespers, and before supper the prayer of the senses should be made

68

ROBERT HAVARD

Seen in this light, Alberti’s aversion to mathematics is synecdochic shorthand for his abhorrence of the Jesuit mentality as a whole while his flight to the beach is equally a return to innocence and an escape from corrosive indoctrination: The dunes! In my third year I decided to find out what it would be like to enjoy myself by playing hooky from my classes. The dunes, with their golden, shifting sands, became my fiery place of refuge during Math period and those dull afternoon Rosary sessions … after burying our clothes and books we would run stark naked down to the shore – totally free of theorems and equations. (LG, 52).

The point, as Barthes noted, is that the obsessive numbering off results in a dramatic accretion of topics, for, besides providing an inventory of biblical material and associated dogma, the Spiritual Exercises also categorize the various modes by which the trainee Jesuit is to understand them. The purpose of this accretion, as we have already seen, is brainwashing: ‘the need to occupy the totality of the mental territory’.62 Both trainee Jesuit and schoolboy have a crammed timetable for a very good reason: to shut out the world and its sinfulness. Similarly, the crowded blackboard is emblematic of the Jesuits’ saturation tactics and their urge to occupy the boys’ mental space. That the young Rafael appears not to have freely accepted the offer to attend school on Sundays is hardly surprising, while it is very likely that his performance in Maths is less a reflection of his native ability than of his will to resist the colonization of his mind. By the same token, the high frequency of numbers in Alberti’s poetry is not an indication of the success of Jesuit methods, or of the poet having succumbed to saturation tactics. On the contrary, for the greater part of Sobre los ángeles, where emphasis falls on the poet’s catastrophic state of mind and its causes, the use of numbers is better seen as a key feature in creating what is effectively a neurotic linguistic register. This, in turn, implies that the root of Alberti’s problem lies in his schooling and the schisms it provoked. Later, in the last third of Sobre los ángeles and through Sermones y moradas when the cathartic process reaps therapeutic dividends, the continuing high incidence of numbers functions more as an ironic and subversive linguistic device which expresses the poet’s abomination of the system on which he was raised. There is a degree of overlapping here, no doubt, but the notion that numbers are specially meaningful to Alberti seems indisputable and can be seen again in one of the first poems he wrote, ‘Viaje’ [‘Journey’], of 1920–21, a last classroom poem to consider:

on the same two contemplations, always beginning with the preparatory prayer and the three preludes …’ See Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings, 294, 323. 62 Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 69.

UNDER THE JESUITS

69

Han castigado a la luna porque nunca se sabe la lección de Aritmética. Mírala cómo llora ¡tan blanca! – colegiala – en el rincón viejo. Se le está destiñendo la carota pintarrajeada. ¿Vamos a consolarla? ¡A la una, a las dos y… a… las tres! Cuidado no te caigas, niño. (16) [They’ve punished the moon because she never learns her arithmetic lesson. See how she cries so white-faced!, – schoolgirl – in the old corner. It’s starting to streak her mask smudge her colours. Shall we console her? On one, on two and… on… three! Watch out, don’t fall, boy.]

In this delightful poem the tearful recipient of school discipline is ‘luna’ [moon] who, much like the virgins in the earlier poem, functions metaphorically as a ‘colegiala’ [schoolgirl], though with a strong suggestion that such a natural object should not be confined in a classroom. Once again a failure to grasp mathematics is ostensibly the reason for her punishment, luna being made to stand in a corner of the classroom. This ‘rincón viejo’ [old corner] is no doubt the dreaded ‘rincón de los castigos’ [punishment corner] Alberti refers to in his autobiography – ‘so many tears shed while I stood punished in

70

ROBERT HAVARD

the corner of the room’ (LG, 25) – which places the poem in his primary years when he was ‘learning to read and write in the school run by Carmelite Sisters’ (LG, 21). The motifs of colour and masks are in keeping with an earlier coeducational phase, but the idea of colour being streaked by tears conveys too a sense of innocence lost in the hard grind of the three R’s. The use of number in the poem’s last lines is based on a well-known children’s game, ‘el escondite inglés’ [English hide-and-seek], in which the sequence ¡A la una,/ a las dos/ y … / a … / las tres! [On one,/ on two … / and … / on … / three!]

is chanted by one child – let’s say a girl – who stands facing a wall while other children prepare to creep up behind her, edging towards the wall which is their goal. They may only start to encroach when the one at the wall has finished chanting numbers and arrives at the following rhyme that completes the chant: … el escondite inglés, sin mover los pies! [… English hide-and-seek,/ without moving your feet!]

After shouting this the girl at the wall turns round sharply in an attempt to catch her chums moving their feet, sending back anyone so caught to the starting line to begin their journey towards the wall again, hence the title, ‘Viaje’ [‘Journey’].63 Typically the child at the wall counts slowly, with dramatic pauses – indicated by suspension points in the poem – for at this stage she can turn and catch anyone who has moved too soon. The rhyming couplet is then reeled off at machine-gun speed, giving them less time to encroach, whereupon the child spins round and often catches someone in mid step. Hence the final warning – ‘Cuidado no te caigas,/ niño’ [Watch out, don’t fall,/ boy] – for a child caught with one foot aloft has to balance like a one-legged statue until either he falls or the other turns back to the wall to count again. The poem’s charm centres on the parallel between the child in the classroom, who is made to stare at a wall as a form of punishment, and the child playing in the street or yard outside who also faces a wall intermittently but as part of a game she effectively controls. When the young poet asks his

63

For the explanation of the Spanish game and its completing rhyme I am indebted to Esther Santamaría Iglesias, tutora at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. There are umpteen variations on this type of wall game, with its chanting and quick turn that stops the encroachers in their tracks. One played in parts of Britain is based on the loud spelling out in individual letters of L-O-N-D-O-N, followed by a raucous cry of London!, underlining once again the theme of a journey.

UNDER THE JESUITS

71

classmates with reference to the sad ‘colegiala’ [schoolgirl], ‘¿Vamos a consolarla?’ [Shall we console her?], the game of el escondite inglés occurs to him quite naturally as a way of cheering her up, for in it her powerless classroom status is magically transformed into a pleasurable and even authoritative role which compares with that of her teacher. Not only does she call out numbers in the manner of a teacher to the assembled youngsters but she is also empowered to send back transgressors to their starting blocks. In this imitative way the torment of the classroom is transcended, while there is already perhaps an implicit sense of rebellion in a game that involves usurping the teacher’s role. Self-empowerment and the recovery of one’s identity is the key: the classroom punishment of facing a wall compares with the identity denial in the bridegroom’s shut-out reply, ‘I know you not,’ but the girl who plays the wall game in the yard turns her face back towards her peers as and when she chooses. It is in her face that they discover their fate and, in Lacanian terms, their identity or lack of it if they are subsequently made to turn away. The handful of poems Alberti wrote with a classroom setting are all expressive in different ways of a child’s torment and in them we find a clear evolution in the poet’s analysis of its causes. Maths is identified as the instrument of torment in all three stages. It is little more than something baffling in the earliest poem, ‘Viaje’ [‘Journey’], of 1920–21, but it has grown into an anti-life force in the Marxist analysis of ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ [‘School (S.J.)’], of 1934–35, where number embodies the Jesuit system of repressive indoctrination with overtones of class and privilege. There is no sense here of mathematics having a positive function, as it may for instance in the Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas, who speaks of understanding God’s infinity in terms of ‘emerging/ from the adolescence of nature/ into the adult geometry/ of the mind’.64 Number functions only as a means of quantifying and subdividing, which is to say, discriminating, classifying. Of the three poems, the middle one, ‘El ángel de los números’ of Sobre los ángeles (1928–29), is perhaps the most satisfying, for it retains much of the enchanting naiveté of ‘Viaje’ while its imagery alludes to the problematic issues of religion and class spelt out in ‘Colegio (S.J.)’. Its crowded blackboard is a graphic summation of Loyolan practice as Alberti experienced it, notably in contrast to the enlightenment of ‘the green flash’, while its subtext of a biblical parable evokes the sense of exclusion and discrimination that Alberti knew as a child. It thereby points an accusing finger at Church complicity in creating a society of privilege and class. In this poem we sense the young boy’s actual confusion as well as the adult poet’s urge to solve an equation involving Matthew, Maths and Marx which simply did not add up. Some readers, however, may find it hard to accept that such a fundamentally intelligible poem – written in 64

See the poem ‘Emerging’ in R.S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945–1990 (Dent, London, 1993), 163.

72

ROBERT HAVARD

heptasyllables, with strong assonantal patterning in a-o – has anything to do with Surrealism. This is the question we now address.

Sobre los ángeles: structure, paranoia and Surrealism Diehards who take the view that form, structure and intelligibility are the antithesis of surrealist practice should note two points we have so far barely mentioned. First, with reference to Alberti, it is clear that the adherence to form and structure, epitomized in numerical patterning, amounts to a subversive mimicry of the Jesuit methods he was subjected to in his formative years. Our reading of ‘El ángel de los números’ was more to locate the source than to illustrate the practice of that tendency in the poet’s use of language. Later we shall consider at length the issue of subversiveness as a psychological imperative in Alberti’s poetry, but for the moment let us simply acknowledge that subversiveness is in step with the revolutionary spirit of Surrealism. The second point, more general and fundamental, is the one Dalí made with reference to Lacan. Having read in 1933 Lacan’s ‘admirable thesis’, De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (Le François, Paris, 1932), Dalí says he had come to similar conclusions himself before that date, and he explains with great clarity: Lacan threw a scientific light on a phenomenon that is obscure to most of our contemporaries – the expression: paranoia – and gave it its true significance. Psychiatry, before Lacan, committed a vulgar error on this account by claiming that the systematization of paranoiac delirium developed ‘after the fact’ and that this phenomenon was to be considered as a case of ‘reasoning madness’. Lacan showed the contrary to be true: the delirium itself is a systematization. It is born systematic, an active element determined to orient reality around its line of force. It is the contrary of a dream or an automatism which remains passive in relation to the movingness of life. Paranoiac delirium asserts itself and conquers. Surrealist actions bring dream and automatism into the concrete; but paranoiac delirium is the very essence of Surrealism and needs only its own force.65

The idea that paranoia is itself a structuring force, ‘born systematic’, is precisely the line Dalí took in his paranoia-critical method, developed around 1929. The convergence with Lacan is not coincidental: Lacan had been impressed by Dalí’s article, ‘L’Âne pourri’ [‘The Rotting Donkey’], which prompted him to contact the Catalan painter in 1930 when he was writing up his thesis.66 Very likely, as Malcolm Bowie says, ‘Dalí and Lacan influenced 65 66

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 140–1. See Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 256.

UNDER THE JESUITS

73

each other at this time and on this matter.’67 The crucial point, however, is that, for Lacan, the structuring facility or ‘force’ of the unconscious is an inevitable consequence of its constituent nature, for, as he puts it in his most famous dictum: ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’.68 Elsewhere he writes: What the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language. Thus from the outset I have alerted informed minds to the extent to which the notion that the unconscious is merely the seat of the instincts will have to be rethought.69

In short, the notion that the unconscious consists of and generates totally random impulses is mistaken. The unconscious is something we know and access through language, says Lacan, something that has its own rules and system. Paranoia, in particular, is characterized by this structuring orientation. One point to be drawn from these observations, I suggest, is that evidence of linguistic structure or systematization in a text, far from precluding paranoiac input, will tend rather to confirm it and, more generally, the presence of the unconscious at work. This, with an important caveat, is precisely what we find in Sobre los ángeles. The caveat has to be mentioned at once: it is the need to distinguish linguistic patterning or systematization from what goes by the name of poetic form, that is, syllabication, rhyme and so forth. The difference can be illustrated by comparing two poems. First, ‘Paraíso perdido’ [‘Paradise Lost’], the volume’s opening poem, is typical of the kind in which external poetic form dominates. So orderly and controlled are its sixteen heptasyllabic tercets that one suspects Alberti’s intention was to ease his reader into the text with an unchallenging proem that mapped out his themes in conventional, accessible terms. Not that it lacks interest: the search for a disjunctive self lost in the dark, formless wasteland of the present is a paradigm of the poet’s concerns and, moreover, is eminently susceptible to Lacanian treatment in terms of it suggesting a fruitless search for the self in the other. Nonetheless, the ubication seems altogether too purposeful, retrospective or ‘after the fact’, arousing the suspicion that this poem was written last. Its tidiness and essential passivity of form provide a packaging that adds little to the poem’s statement. By contrast, in ‘Los ángeles bélicos (Norte, Sur)’ [‘The Bellicose Angels (North, South)’], we have a poem that is – to borrow Dalí’s phrase – ‘born systematic’: 67

Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Fontana, London, 1991), 39. David Macey writes: ‘Salvador Daí’s theory of “paranoiac knowledge” (sic) is certainly of great relevance to the young Lacan,’ in his introduction to Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Penguin, London, 1977), xv. 68 Jacques Lacan, op. cit., 20. 69 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. from the French by Alan Sheridan (Routledge, London, 1977), 147.

74

ROBERT HAVARD

Viento contra viento. Yo, torre sin mando, en medio. Remolinos de ciudades bajan los defiladeros. Ciudades del viento sur, que me vieron. Por las neveras, rodando, pueblos. Pueblos que yo desconozco, ciudades del viento norte, que no me vieron. Gentío de mar y tierra, nombres, preguntas, recuerdos, frente a frente. Balumbas de frío encono, cuerpo a cuerpo. Yo, torre sin mando, en medio, lívida torre colgada de almas muertas que me vieron, que no me vieron. Viento contra viento. (397–8) [Wind against wind./ Me, a powerless tower, between. Whirlwinds of cities/ go down gorges./ Cities of the south wind,/ that saw me. Towns,/ in the snow and ice, spinning./ Towns I know not,/ towns of the north wind,/ that saw me not. Crowds from the sea and land,/ names, questions, memories,/ face to face./ Heaps of cold spite,/ body against body. Me, a powerless tower, between,/ a livid tower hung/ from dead souls that saw me,/ that saw me not. Wind against wind.]

This is an altogether different type of systematization. Form imposes itself here irresistibly and from within as an indispensable part of the poem’s statement, conveying all the pent-up tension the poet seeks to release. In the guise of parallelisms, repetitions and oppositions – each so evident as to need no comment – linguistic form articulates the poet’s agonized, powerless, but highly structured self. It is a self caught and buffeted by opposing forces, paralysed in hypertension. The images – geographic, demographic, meteorological70 – convey frustration on a large scale, but this is secondary to the

70

The wind imagery is attributable to his stay at the home of José María de Cossío in the Cantabrian village of Tudanca where he witnessed ‘the battle of the winds, known by the inhabitants of that solitary region as the Abrego and Gallego’ (LG, 261). Alberti confirms

UNDER THE JESUITS

75

structuring of language in which the counterpoints of phrase and the circularity of syntax suggest the enclosed format of a palindrome. In this kind of poem we begin to sense the validity of Lacan’s point about the unconscious being structured like a language, not to mention the futility of protesting that form is antithetical to surrealist practice. Here linguistic structuring bears all the signs of the inner workings of the mind, for, essentially, it voices a psychological tension that derives from an input of contradictory values, a dialectic of opposition that is hardly surprising in one raised on a diet of good–evil, heaven–hell, soul–body contrasts. The same tension is found in ‘Can de llamas’ [‘Dog of Flames’], where spatial imagery and word patterning derive more obviously from a religious substructure: Sur. Campo metálico, seco. Plano, sin alma, mi cuerpo. Centro. Grande, tapándolo todo, la sombra fija del perro. Norte. Espiral sola mi alma, jaula buscando a su sueño. ¡Salta sobre los dos! ¡Hiérelos! ¡Sombra del can, fija, salta! ¡Únelos, sombra del perro! Riegan los aires aullidos dentados de agudos fuegos. ¡Norte! Se agiganta el viento norte … Y huye el alma. ¡Sur! Se agiganta el viento sur … Y huye el cuerpo. ¡Centro! Y huye, centro, candente, intensa, infinita, la sombra inmóvil del perro. Su sombra fija. Campo metálico, seco. Sin nadie. Seco. (415–16)

the importance to Sobre los ángeles of his stay in Tudanca in a letter dated Madrid, February 1929, in Correspondencia a José María de Cossío, ed. R. Gómez de Tudanca and E. Mateos Miera (Pre-textos, Valencia, 1998), 37.

76

ROBERT HAVARD

[South./ Metallic landscape, dry./ Flat, soulless, my body. Centre./ Big, covering it all,/ the dog’s still shadow. North./ My soul a single spiral,/ a cage looking for its dream. Jump on them both! Attack them!/ Still dog shadow, jump! Join them up, dog shadow! They spray the howling winds/ indented with sharp flames. North!/ The north wind puffs up big … / And the soul flees. South!/ The south wind puffs up big … / And the body flees. Centre!/ And it flees, centre,/ red hot, intense, infinite, the immobile shadow of the dog./ Its still shadow. Metallic landscape, dry./ Without anyone./ Dry.]

Few would deny the poem’s kinship with surrealist practice in the sense it gives of language disintegrating: ‘My language became harsh and cutting. The rhythmic cadences crumbled into bits and pieces’ (LG, 260), says Alberti, recalling the early compositions of Sobre los ángeles. We note the single-word sentences – seven examples – and the verbless sentences, including the first seven and the last four. Such fragmentation with its resulting compression evokes a state of mind – together with a patently inseparable mode of writing – we have heard Alberti describe: I began to write blindly at any hour of the night without turning on the light in my room and with a kind of undesirable [= inadvertent] automatism, spurred on by a trembling, feverish and spontaneous urging … (LG, 260)

Yet we hardly need scrutinize ‘Can de llamas’ to know that its ‘bits and pieces’ are strongly structured, mostly on the basis of oppositions: south–north, body–soul, fire–wind, light–shadow. At the centre is the dog, paralysed, unable to fulfil its mythical function of uniting polar opposites. Instead, much like the ossified Church and Jesuit teaching, it serves to accentuate the demarcation of body and soul, encouraging the tendency towards a dichotomized, schizoid self which the poem enunciates in its mathematical, equational phrasing. Linguistic patterning and poetic form are not one and the same thing, we conclude. In the first part of Sobre los ángeles, to be sure, there is evidence of light assonantal patterning and some regularity of verse length. This is less pronounced in the second part, and all but disappears in the third and final part where, as Alberti says, after his visit to Tudanca in May 1928, ‘the short, controlled and concentrated verse line I had been writing gradually became longer and more in keeping with the movement of my imagination in those days’ (LG, 261). But even early on, in the compressed pieces, poetic form is subordinate to linguistic patterning. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, and when we find them occurring together it is clear which has the deeper effect and contributes more to the poem’s statement. It can be tested in ‘El ángel ceniciento’ [‘The Ashen Angel’], where terse elliptical language

UNDER THE JESUITS

77

appears in regular, assonanted lines to form a concentric, palindromic whole. A shorter example is ‘Los ángeles mohosos’ [‘The Mouldy Angels’] where ellipsis is again instrumental in generating pattern: Hubo luz que trajo por hueso una almendra amarga. Voz que por sonido, el fleco de la lluvia cortado por un hacha. Alma que por cuerpo, la funda de aire de una doble espada. Venas que por sangre, yel de mirra y de retama. Cuerpo que por alma, el vacío nada. (401) [There was light that brought/ for bone a bitter almond. Voice that for sound,/ the frayed rain,/ chopped by an axe. Soul that for body,/ the airy sheath/ of a double sword. Veins that for blood,/ bile of myrrh and broom. Body that for soul,/ emptiness, nothing.]

There is assonance in a-a and a preponderance of the six-syllable line, with seven of the twelve lines being hexasyllablic. But the dominant structural feature is the syntactical patterning that arises from the fact that the last four stanzas are grammatically dependent on the first. The format is established in stanza one – ‘Hubo luz que trajo/ por hueso una almendra amarga’ [There was light that brought/ for bone a bitter almond] – which functions with ellipsis in all subsequent stanzas: [Hubo] voz que [trajo] por sonido, el fleco de lluvia … [[There was] voice that [brought] for sound,/ the frayed rain …] [Hubo] alma que [trajo] por cuerpo … [Hubo] venas que [trajeron] por sangre … [Hubo] cuerpo que [trajo] por alma … [[There was] soul that [brought] for body … [There were] veins that [brought] for blood … [There was] body that [brought] for soul …]

The two verbs in the first stanza are implicit in the following stanzas that gain in tautness from this formula of parataxis with deletion. What the repeated

78

ROBERT HAVARD

sentence structure suggests is limitation (of linguistic resource) and fixation (of thematic concern). We sense an obsessive mentality trapped in a pattern of linguistic thought that is programmed or systematized. At this point language and mind – or the unconscious – are one, as Lacan said. In addition, the source of the obsession is plain in the biblical echoes, specifically: ‘And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light’ [‘y hubo luz’] (Genesis 1: 3). Closer inspection reveals that the poem inverts the Judeo-Hebraic creation myth in that each one of the prized attributes – light, voice, soul, veins, body – brings negative associations: bitterness and mutilation (twice each) and ‘el vacío, nada’ [emptiness, nothing]. We take this desperate, nihilistic conclusion to be a sign of the human condition. The point is, as Barthes noted, that the creation of the world is based on a process of separation or division: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night … And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters’. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament … And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmaments of the heaven to divide the day from the night’ … And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good …71

The crucial separation, implicit in the above divisions, soon follows: it is the moral separation of good and evil, a post-lapsarian dichotomy that is prefigured in the second chapter of Genesis in the tree of knowledge. Its human form is the separation of body and soul which leaves the personality fragmented, no less in the case of Alberti, as we have seen, than in Adam and Eve who, on eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, became ashamed of their nakedness and were banished from Eden. Germane is the issue of language itself, for the act of naming or denominating clearly involves separation, that is, the distinguishing and classifying of plants, animals and all things according to species or ‘after their kind’. The view that names and things existed in perfect symbiosis in the God-given language of Eden is here countered by a sense that language, as a process of denomination and articulation, has a deep affinity with the fragmented self, the corps morcelé, and indeed with the classifying mentality that the Jesuits pre-eminently illustrate. We shall return later to the positive use of language as an oracular medium when we consider Alberti and Lorca in their prophetic mode, but for the moment we conclude in the opposite vein with a last look at 71

The Reader’s Bible, Genesis 1: 3–7, 14–18, 7.

79

UNDER THE JESUITS

the poem that has been the centre of our attention, ‘El ángel de los números’. Its tragic theme, we note, is presented via a systematic linguistic form of classification, separation and opposition: Vírgenes con escuadras y compases, velando las celestes pizarras Y el ángel de los números, pensativo, volando del 1 al 2, del 2 …

> > > > > >

Vírgenes sin escuadras, sin compases, llorando las muertas pizarras el ángel de los números, sin vida, amortajado sobre el 1 y el 2 …

[Virgins with set squares and compasses, watching over heavenly blackboards And the angel of numbers, pensive, flying from 1 to 2, from 2 …

> > > > > >

Virgins without set squares, without compasses, crying the dead blackboards the angel of numbers lifeless, shrouded above the 1 and 2 …]

Tizas frías, esponjas rayaban y borraban la luz de los espacios

=

Ni sol, luna, ni estrellas, ni el repentino verde del rayo y el relámpago, ni el aire. Sólo nieblas.

[Cold chalks and sponges lined and erased light from the open spaces

=

No sun, moon, nor stars, nor the sudden green flash and the lightning, nor air. Only mists.]

There is too the negative equation:

The oppositions are unmistakable in the patterning: ‘con/sin’ [with/without], ‘velando/llorando [watching/crying], ‘celestes/muerta’ [heavenly/dead], ‘volando/sin vida’ [flying/lifeless], ‘pensativo/amortajado’ [pensive/ shrouded]. In addition, there are examples of straightforward repetition, also of image equations or implicit similes – the parallel between a full, smudged board and the airless mist – and there are instances of sound association, ‘velando/volando’ [watching/flying], ‘rayaban/rayo’ [lined/flash]. In these various ways the poem’s system imposes itself and achieves its individual or unique form. At the same time, as readers, we are fully aware that an obsessive tendency underlies this form and we sense that the poet is driven by a linguistic imperative that is as much a cathartic need as the product of indoctrination.

3 LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

Last Things First: Scatology and Eschatology Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel qu’importe! Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau! [Dive into the depths of the abyss, be it Heaven or Hell! Into the depths of the Unknown to find oneself again!] Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal1 To me, spirituality is visceral. Salvador Dalí2

Giménez Caballero and scatology Ernesto Giménez Caballero, though not a writer of the first rank, is an influential figure in the Spanish avant-garde on two counts: as founder–editor of La Gaceta Literaria (1927–32) [The Literary Gazette], Spain’s nearest equivalent to La Révolution surréaliste, and as author of one of the most risqué works of the period, Yo, inspector de alcantarillas [I, Inspector of Drains] (1928). A precocious and enterprising figure, who liked to be known by his initials as Gecé or GC, Giménez Caballero had a strict religious upbringing and surprisingly reconverted to a church-based fascism during a visit to Rome with his Italian wife in September 1928, a change of heart that led to the demise of his journal.3 Fortunately, he had already written his most interesting work, Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, an uneven collection of scabrous stories with rather more scatology than eschatology in them, though we note that Spanish, significantly perhaps, has only one word to cover these two terms.4 The collection was published by Biblioteca Nueva, a progressive 1

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, edited by A. Adam (Garnier, Paris, 1961), 160. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 139. 3 Giménez Caballero was twenty-seven when he founded La Gaceta Literaria, a journal with a circulation of 3,000 copies. Though ostensibly apolitical, the journal went into terminal decline during the Second Republic when increasingly larger sections of it were written by its editor who had become a pro-fascist spokesman. In effect, the journal ceased to exist long before its publication stopped, as Miguel Hernando Fernández points out, together with further details, in La Gaceta Literaria (1927–1932), biografía y valoración (Colección Castilla, Universidad de Valladolid, 1974), 21 et passim. 4 In Spanish, for phonetic reasons and orthographical conventions, escatología covers both ‘scatology’ [study of excrement and, by extension, of the obscene in literature; from 2

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

81

publishing house that had been making Freud’s works available in Spanish translation since 1922. Its stories owe much to psychoanalytical theory, as will be deduced from a title that suggests delving into the lower recesses of the mind where unseemly material is deposited. The author also acknowledges a debt to Surrealism epigraphically: J’aimerais n’avoir jamais commencé … Este comienzo de un poema de André Breton fue mi comienzo.5 [‘I would wish never to have started …’ This beginning of an André Breton poem was my beginning.]

The book’s tripartite introduction sets out the title’s three elements in turn. First in focus is the ‘Yo’ [I] or inner self, which the narrator has come to realize is elusive, buried ‘dentro del estuche de mí mismo’ [inside the casing of myself]: ¿Era, acaso, mi yo una estrella en pozo? ¿Un arroyo en sima? ¿Un mineral en subsuelo?6 [Was my I, perhaps, a star in a well? An underground stream? A buried mineral?]

Next comes the Inspector who dons special attire to ‘desaparecer bien, en lo profundo, hacia abajo’ [disappear right down, into the depths]. This treatment of the self as a subject suitable for detached scrutiny smacks of Dalí’s deliberateness; indeed, the Catalan was a close friend who contributed to the second number of La Gaceta Literaria on 14 January 1927. As for the narrator–inspector, he intends to take us down in search of his real self to subterranean levels where only the more daring of contemporary writers and artists tread: En la zona abisal tropecé amigos que buscaban sus naufragios como yo los míos, con andaduras fantasmales de medusas de plomo (Joyce, Eluard, Ernst, Unamuno, Ray, Gracián, Kafka, Joan Miró).7 [In the abyssal zone I came across friends who were seeking out their shipwrecks just as I was, on ghostly journeys of leaden jellyfish (Joyce, Eluard, Ernst, Unamuno, Ray, Gracián, Kafka, Joan Miró).]

the Greek skatos meaning ‘ordure’] and ‘eschatology’ [the doctrine of ‘The Four Last Things’, death, judgement, heaven and hell, from the Greek eskhatos meaning ‘last’]. 5 Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, originally published by Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid, 1928. I cite the new edition, introduced by Edward Baker (Ediciones Turner, Madrid, 1975), 23. 6 Ibid., 24. 7 Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, 27.

82

ROBERT HAVARD

Unamuno and the Golden Age Gracián apart, the figures listed are avant-gardists and four of them committed surrealists. The abyssal zone, with its suggestion of oceanic depths, probably refers to the bowels of Madrid, which, like so many cities in recent times, had experienced phenomenal and chaotic growth. The ensuing description of sewers replete with base matter is as impressive in its detail as it is redolent with allegorical content: El reino de los epiplasmas: la alucinante comarca de las atarjeas: donde vertían las ciudades (animal, vegetal, mineral, hombre) sus últimas substancias disueltas en fango. Me arrodillé en la linde del reino, como ante una Creación del Mundo, al revés. Ante mí fluía la vida orgánica en su postrer metamorfosis visible, en el postrer educto de su individualidad. La vida en el final de su vida: en su epiplasma. [The kingdom of epiplasms: the fantastic land of sewage channels: where cities (animal, vegetable, mineral, man) tipped their last dregs of matter dissolved in slime. I knelt down at the kingdom’s edge, as before a Creation of the World, in reverse. Before me flowed organic life in its final visible metamorphosis, in the last redoubt of its individuality. Life in the last throes of life: in its epiplasm.]

A heavy dose of irony is at large in this inversion of the creation myth and in the speaker’s mock wonder at beholding a viscous mass of degenerate matter. Admirably precise is the term epiplasm, ‘what remains over’, which stands in implicit contrast to protoplasm, the source of life, as the end does to the beginning. The emphatic ‘La vida en el final de su vida’ [Life in the last throes of life] recalls ‘The Four Last Things’, a doctrine beloved of the Jesuits, which Alberti mocks in the numerology of ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [‘Sermon on the Four Truths’]. The sequence ‘(animal, vegetal, mineral, hombre)’ [(animal, vegetable, mineral, man)] suggests the irrefutable material condition of the last, man, a theme expounded in the third part of the introduction, ‘Alcantarillas’ [Drains], where the author makes a startling inventory of all that passes before his eyes in this kingdom of detritus: Alegrías papel bodas alambres materia materia materia materia rosa flecos amor cartón pena materia materia materia metal sangre mondas óxidos materia materia materia materia lágrimas vino nostalgia madera

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

83

barro risa corcho tela cristal materia materia materia materia pus esperanza agua dolor luz materia materia materia materia materia materia materia materia8 [Joys matter

paper matter

rose

fringes

matter

metal matter

weddings matter

love

matter

blood matter

tears wine mud laughter

wires

matter

cardboard

sorrow

matter

peelings matter

rust

matter

nostalgia wood cork cloth glass

matter

matter

matter

pus

hope

water

matter matter

matter matter

matter matter

matter

grief

light

matter matter]

In what is virtually a concrete poem even the lower-font ‘materia’ [matter] seems indicative of entropic decline. Insistent repetition of the word has the effect of suggesting that all items listed are forms of matter. This applies logically to objects one would expect to find in sewers or rubbish channels – paper, cardboard, peelings, rust, mud, cork, cloth, pus – but less so to substances that have a special association with human life – weddings, rose, blood, tears – even if the likes of tears are strictly a chemical substance. Finally, matter rubs shoulders illogically with denominatives that are abstract or emotional concepts: joys, love, sorrow, nostalgia, hope, grief. One effect of the listing is to confuse the degree of materiality in given items. Some seem less material by virtue of their affinity with the human realm: wine in comparison with cork, for instance, cloth and glass as compared to wood and metal. Others are difficult to classify at all owing to the narrative nebula or symbolic imprint they bear: laughter, fringes, light, water. As we scrutinize the torrent of glutinous waste that passes before us we have an overwhelming impression that human life as well as matter is being swept away and we sense an inescapable bond between the human and object realms. We are reminded again of Dalí who not only treated excrement as a theme in his paintings but was excessively preoccupied with his own stools: I considered it a normal thing to pay close attention to my stools and talk about them. My shit is an integral part of myself, and its consistency, odor, and shape are connected to my moods, my work, my way of living. I had had explosive, foul-smelling bowel movements when I was a student

8

Ibid., 29–30.

84

ROBERT HAVARD

painting the town; today I have admirable stools, well modulated and shaped since I have become an ascetic.9

For Dalí a stool is an exterior representation of its maker, a barometer or even mirror of his health and life-style, and as such it merits close scrutiny. As something an individual makes, furthermore, a stool is indicative of man’s creative impact on the world, of the way he changes what he ingests. Faeces thus have a special importance for Dalí, as in The Lugubrious Game (plate 2) where the paternal figure in the bottom right-hand corner has defecated in his trousers in an echo of the artist’s father.10 This painting stunned Breton when Dalí took it to Paris in 1929, much to the latter’s delight: Breton was very quickly shocked by the presence of scatological elements. He wanted no turds and no Madonna. But there is a contradiction to the very fundamental of pure automatism in setting up immediate taboos, for these excrements came to me directly, biologically.11

Buñuel mocks the same taboo as late as 1974 when, in Le Fantôme de la liberté, he has socialites sit around a table on toilets, engaging in polite conversation and tending genteelly to the call of nature before they retreat to scoff food surreptitiously in private cubicles. In addition to this obvious capacity to épater le bourgeois, excrement has a conceptual significance in Dalí that underpins one of his trademark images: namely, the soft texture he attributes to a range of solid objects, most famously the limp watches in The Persistence of Memory. Softness, in one sense, connects with putrefaction, as Dalí affirms: ‘In the acceptance of scatology, of defecation and death, there is a spiritual energy that I exploit with great consistency.’12 But the Camembert texture also suggests reality’s edibleness vis-à-vis the devouring mind of one who finds infinite connections and creative possibilities in its raw material, as the artist again explains: Dalí’s genius lies in having eliminated the appearances of the right angle, the logic, the aestheticism that lock reality into cages and returning to it the organic, malleable, limp forms on which a true network of correspondences can be established. My limp watches, for example, are the symbol of this illustration.13

Similarly, the rocks of Cape Creus, like the pebbles on Cadaqués beach or the stains on his classroom ceiling, are in a state of ‘permanent metamorphosis’, 9 10 11 12 13

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 114. Dalí’s father had done the same. See Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 46. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 127. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 149.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

85

each capable of changing at a moment’s notice when the artist visualizes ‘an eagle, a camel, a rooster, a lion, a woman’.14 In short, for Dalí, the consistency of excrement suggests the clay-like nature of reality before the creative power of his mind. On reflection, concrete is hardly the word to describe Giménez Caballero’s poem where the external shape imitates the consistency of excrement or amorphous waste. Lack of vertical alignment is as important to the poem’s visual statement as the absence of punctuation and syntax is to its linguistic statement. Unfortunately, not all the stories that follow are as impressive, for some are too explicitly Freudian as well as crudely scatological. Typical is ‘Esa vaca y yo’ [‘That Cow and I’] which deals with a man who was deprived of motherly love as a child and, having retired from his office to the outskirts of a town, now feels a compulsion to drink milk straight from the udders of a certain cow: ¡Tomar la leche de esa vaca! ¿No me ha mandado el médico mucha leche? ¡Qué tetas suavemente carmín, tambloteantes, densas, cuajadas, duras, fecundas! … He conseguido que me enseñen a ordeñarla. Y me quedo solo, al atardecido, entre el estiércol y la paja, y la hierba, borracho de ese olor nauseabundo y fuerte, que me transfigura, que me transe. Y la contemplo previamente, sus ojos anchos, inconscientes, estúpidos, pero tan entrañables para mí. Y luego le exprimo las ubres … Y, éste es mi pecado, llego a hacerlo directamente con mi boca.15 [To have milk from that cow! Didn’t the doctor tell me to drink lots of milk? What smooth crimson tits, quivering, thick, clotted, hard and full! … I’ve been shown how to milk her, and, when I’m alone, at dusk, amid the dung, straw and grass, high on that overpoweringly nauseous smell, I am captivated, transfigured. First I look into her wide eyes that are dull and insensitive, but so loving to me. Then I squeeze her udders … And, this is my sin, I do it with my mouth right on her.]

We hardly need know that his mother took him away from an Asturian village at four, became a wet nurse to a rich family and moved to Seville where she died giving birth to another child. Predictable too – given the Hindu references – is the quasi-mystical ecstasy that the reborn male experiences on feeling, in an echo of the Eucharist, ‘el líquido nutriente, salvador, tibio correr por mi garganta’16 [the nourishing, warm and redemptive liquid running down my throat]. More offensive is ‘El redentor mal parido’ [‘The Ill-born Redeemer’] in which a muleteer, Petaco [Paunchy], is reduced to the level of his animals, sexually on one occasion: 14 15 16

Ibid., 128. Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, 59–60. Ibid., 60.

86

ROBERT HAVARD

El Petaco entró en la cuadra borracho, bebido, pero muy bebido; más de lo general. Y se la acercó. No llevaba ningún palo en la mano. Ella se le quedó inmóvil, trémula, espantada, aguzando las orejas con dificultad. Él, el Petaco, lo que nunca había intentado, la acarició las ancas y, con las dos manos que le temblaban, mientras la decía con ronquera apagada ¡tú, la virgen!, ¡bueno! …¡Lucera! …¡Rica! … la levantó la cola.17 [Petaco entered the stable rotten drunk, more so than usual. He went up to her, without a stick. She stood quiet, trembling, frightened, barely able to prick up her ears. Petaco stroked her rump, something he hadn’t done before, and with both hands shaking as he hoarsely whispered – Okay, Starlight! You virgin! My beauty! – he lifted her tail.]

The feeling of repugnance is intensified by minute descriptions of the stable, ‘bien estercolada, obscura, fétida, picante’ [dungy, dark, stinking, pungent], and its atmosphere, ‘tibio, espeso, cargado de gases densos, de moscas, de pulgones y de correderas’ [warm, heavy, loaded with thick gases, flies, fleas and crawlers], where the piling up of adjectives owes something to Azorín. Use of the free, indirect style personalizes Lucera [Starlight], a beast of burden who wishes only to please her master: ‘¿Por qué entonces aquellos palizones del Petaco? …¿Estaba enamorada de él?’ [Why so many beatings from Petaco? … Was she in love with him?]. Correspondingly, Petaco’s subhuman nature – ‘¡Es un asno, es un tío mulo!’ [He’s an ass, a mule brain!] – brings down him to the mule’s level, or even reverses their standing. Lucera dominates the story and provides the parabolic thrust, this being abetted by a parallel with Christ’s donkey and the presumed asexuality of mules which allows her inner liquid to be described as ‘blanco, nítido, inmaculado’ [white, clear, immaculate] in an echo of the Virgin. Doubly abused as female and beast, Lucera grows sick and is put in a corner where she passes blood for a week. When her paunch swells grotesquely she is stripped of belts, put outside and left to die. Unos chicos se acercaron, y se la sentaron sobre la barriga. ‘¡Aún está caliente!’, dijo uno. Ella se estremeció como para sacudirse un pulgazo y los chicos se alejaron intimidados. Luego pasaron unos gitanos, que sin mirarla detenidamente la dieron por muerta. Luego un perro se acercó a olerla.18 [Some boys came and sat on her belly. ‘She’s still warm!’ said one. She shook as if to cast out a flea and the boys made off frightened. Some gypsies passed by and, without looking closely, took her for dead. Then a dog went up to smell her.]

17 18

Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

87

The mule’s condition recalls an image that made a powerful impression on both Buñuel and Dalí in their youth and led to the scene in Un Chien andalou where two putrefied donkeys with gouged eyes are draped over grand-pianos. This childhood image, which Dalí proclaimed in his article L’Âne pourri (1930), is a virtual icon of the Spanish view of death, and as such it is worth citing Buñuel’s recollection in full: It was in Calanda that I had my first encounters with death, which along with profound religious faith and the awakening of sexuality constituted the dominating force of my adolescence. I remember walking one day in the olive grove with my father when a sickeningly sweet odor came to us on the breeze. A dead donkey lay about a hundred yards away, swollen and mangled, serving as a banquet for a dozen vultures, not to mention several dogs. The sight of it both attracted and repelled me. Sated, the birds staggered about the cadaver, unable to take to the air. (The peasants never removed dead animals, convinced that their remains were good for the soil.) I stood there hypnotized, sensing that beyond this rotten carcass lay some obscure metaphysical significance. My father finally took hold of my arm and dragged me away.19

The sheer fascination with the horror of death seems to be based on the way that materialism and the notion of its transcendence mutually infuse one other with significance, which is to say, in short, the way scatology and eschatology make sparks. This also appears to be what Dalí has in mind in ‘L’Âne pourri’: Et nous ne savons pas si derrière les trois grands simulacres, la merde, le sang et la putréfaction, ne se cache pas justement la desirée ‘terre de trésors’.20 [And we do not know if behind the three great simulacra, shit, blood and putrefaction, there does not lie hidden precisely the desired ‘land of treasures’.]

In Giménez Caballero’s story, however, once the boys have left the apparently dying Lucera, she miraculously manages to bring herself to her feet and embarks upon an arduous journey. Crossing inhospitable land, she arrives at a remote chapel where the altar displays a bespattered figure on the cross: ‘El Cristo tenía la cara sucia, llena de picaduras de moscas y con restos de palomina bien visibles’ [Christ’s face was dirty and full of fly-bites, with pigeon droppings clearly visible]. The Saviour’s reduction to the common denominator of excrement results from the fact that the chapel’s turret is a

19 20

My Last Breath, 11. See Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 1, 6-vii-1930, op. cit., 11.

88

ROBERT HAVARD

pigeon-loft. Out of this, as the mule stares long and hard at the altar, a young pigeon swoops to alight on Christ’s shoulder as though bringing a nuncio. Suddenly the mule recovers health, her scabs and mange disappearing. She resumes her peregrination and is soon followed by a pair of oxen, a rag-and-bone ass and a soldier’s horse. This parallel with the Messiah climaxes when she too meets a violent end, struck down by a military lorry. In the carnage her immaculate juice is expressed, whereupon she expires with one last cry of anguish: Un largo relincho se oyó en toda la redonda. Un relincho agudo, desgarrado, lacerante, irredimible, una queja de pérdida espantosa, de dolor sin medida, de malogramiento absoluto.21 [A long whinny was heard all around. A piercing whinny, lacerated and irredeemably forlorn, a lament of terrible despair, of immeasurable grief, of utter despondency.]

Thus mule succeeds cow in the Redeemer’s role and a clear pattern emerges in Giménez Caballero’s technique, namely that of mixing scatological images with religious or eschatological ones. This, of course, is highly characteristic of the Spanish mentality that delights in extended blasphemies; indeed, some stories may strike us as little more than narrative expansions of profanities. A clear example is ‘Infancia de Don Juan (Cuadernos de un jesuita)’ [‘Don Juan’s Infancy (A Jesuit’s Notebook)’], which deals with the gross act of a boy masturbating in front of an altar of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a sin he commits to get himself expelled from his Jesuit school. The tale is recounted by a school-friend who, in old age, has become the incarnation of the cruel masters the two had hated as boys. After evoking details of Jesuit severity – drawn no doubt from GC’s own experiences – the narrator is at pains to stress the deeper significance of the boy’s act: Hablaron de vicio secreto, del demonio en su cuerpo, de qué sé yo cuantas cosas … Nadie había comprendido aquel acto enorme de protesta, de rebeldía, de soledad enérgica, de perturbación, que no de masturbación, frente a la divinidad, que simbolizaba para él la opresión de todo el colegio sobre su vida. Nadie, nadie comprendió aquella afirmación de poder a poder, de radicalismo místico. Sacrilegio que era, en rigor, un sacrificio …22 [They spoke about a secret vice, about the devil in his body, about goodness knows what … No one had understood that huge act of protest, of rebellion, of strenuous isolation and perturbation, though not of masturbation, facing the godhead, which for him symbolized the entire school’s 21 22

Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, 40. Ibid., 75.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

89

oppression of his life. No one at all understood that affirmation of power against power, of mystic radicalism. His sacrilege was, strictly speaking, a sacrifice …]

Not only is the act seen as a grand Esproncedean gesture of defiance, but the boy’s self-sacrifice is compared with the Saviour’s submission – to Roman authority – which, amazingly, makes masturbator and crucified Christ one. A last story on the lines of a profane joke is ‘Monjas’ [‘Nuns’] which links the taboo themes of menstruation and female masturbation with the Passion. It is in two parts, the first of which, ‘La monja negra’ [‘The Black Nun’], tells of a girl in a primitive tribe who at the onset of menstruation is shut away for three years in a dark pit sealed in mud and reeds. The purpose of this barbaric custom, we are told, is to bring about her purification, while it also hides her shame and saves her contaminating others, that is, males. Forbidden to leave her prison on pain of death, the crazed girl finally rebels and breaks out of her dark ordeal into a blinding orgasm of light that instantly consumes her. The second part, ‘La monja blanca’ [‘The White Nun’], neatly inverts the first. Here a girl is enclosed in a monochrome white monastery where the cubic sterility is every bit as oppressive as the witchdoctor’s pit. Unlike Lorca, who deftly evokes the fantasy produced by sexual repression in ‘La monja gitana’ [‘The Gypsy Nun’], Giménez Caballero leaves little to the imagination. The nun’s road to perdition begins when her confessor gives her an ebony crucifix with a bloodied figure of Christ. Her hitherto unblemished world darkens when she focuses on his side and sees ‘una llaga profunda como una hendidura de cueva’23 [a deep wound like a cave’s fissure]. Fixated on this cleft, she finds it connects with her own strangely disturbed feelings: Y una noche, durmiendo, sintió un olor de humedad como a subterráneo. Y sintió una mano convulsa que le engarfiaba la suya. Y sintió que su dedo se introducía en una hendidura trémula, ardiente, mojada y roja. Y tras su dedo se introdujo ella misma, toda ella misma. Y una obscuridad absoluta la envolvió. Y las carnes se la fueron desgarrando según se hundía, avanzando en la caverna. Y de pronto, un frío color cuchillo. Y luego una vasta delicia. Y luego, sed. Y luego sintió su corazón deshacerse en escombros. Escombros de yeso. Y estos escombros empinarse en colina. El Gólgota de cal. Y sobre su vértice vibrar un largo cuerpo, duro y blando; estremecerse, desfallecido y delirante, a lo largo de vertical madero, un vago miembro negro, buscando en sombra la llaga, aquella hendidura, ahora helada y febril, donde ella sentía hundirse su dedo, su mano y su boca sin brillo, con aliento obscuro y ciego. [And one night, while sleeping, she sensed a damp underground smell. And she felt a convulsive hand grapple hers. And she felt its finger enter a trembling crack that was hot, moist and red. And after her finger she herself 23

Ibid., 152.

90

ROBERT HAVARD

went in, all of her. And an absolute darkness enveloped her. And her flesh was tearing her apart the further it sank in, advancing into the cavern. Suddenly, a knife-coloured cold. Then an enormous pleasure. And then, thirst. Then she felt her heart crumble into pieces. Gypsum rubble. And this rubble rise up in a hill. A lime Golgotha. And trembling on its crest, a long, firm and tender body; an indistinct, black member, shaking, dying and delirious, the length of the upright timber, seeking the wound darkly, that cleft, now frozen and feverish, where she felt her finger going in, her hand and her sombre mouth, with a dark blind breath.]

This is a remarkable passage, given that the author is male. Bordering on pornography, it is saved by its style – the biblical anaphora, for instance, is well adapted to erotic tension – and perhaps too by an element of confusion in girl and reader alike. We wonder what is being penetrated and by what instrument. Closer inspection confirms it is the crucifix that produces a knife-coloured cold in the nun. This brings to mind the crucifix–knife in Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961), though Christ’s conversion into a dildo has more in common with the climax of L’Âge d’or when the debauché who emerges from the Duke of Blangis’ chateau after ‘120 days of Sodom’ is unmistakably Christ himself. We are reminded of the surrealists’ reverence of the Marquis de Sade, not to mention the fact that the latter attended the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris between the ages of ten and fourteen, a school staffed by Jesuits.24 The depiction of Christ’s body as phallic and his wound as vulvi-form is the culmination of a tendency to mix scatological and religious motifs that seems little short of compulsive in Giménez Caballero. No doubt he would have agreed with Buñuel that ‘sex without religion is like an egg without salt’, a predilection the latter attributed to his Jesuit education.25 However, the most impressive story in Yo, inspector de alcantarillas makes a different and more metaphysical point about the body. Entitled ‘Patio sucio’ [‘Filthy Yard’], it owes more to Kafka than ‘the divine Marquis’ and is particularly 24

See Lawrence W. Lynch, The Marquis de Sade (Twayne, Boston, 1984), 3; also Ronald Hayman, De Sade, A Critical Biography (Constable, London, 1978), 9–11. Roland Barthes wonders to what extent the Marquis’s chateaux at La Coste and Silling and the Bastille prison itself were variations on his Jesuit School, in Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 127. Buñuel was delighted to hold in his hands the original scroll of The 120 Days of Sodom which the Marquis had written in the Bastille in 1785. The recently discovered scroll had been acquired by his friend, the Viscount of Noailles; see Agustín Sánchez Vidal, El mundo de Buñuel, 225. 25 Buñuel’s comments are worth quoting in full: ‘I believe in a chaste eroticism. You can attribute that to my Jesuit education. Sexual pleasure for me is directly linked with the idea of sin and only exists in a religious context. The sexual act cannot be reduced to a chapter on hygienics; it is an exciting, dark, diabolical experience. Sex is a black tarantula and sex without religion is like an egg without salt.’ See Carlos Fuentes, ‘The Discreet Charm of Luis Buñuel’, in Joan Mellen (editor), The World of Luis Buñuel: Essays in Criticism (Oxford University Press, New York, 1978), 69–70.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

91

effective in terms of integrating theme and visual motif. It tells of a sickly boy who lives cooped up in a ground-floor flat, his bedroom window at eye-level with the base of an interior well into which the neighbours throw their rubbish. The yard’s accumulated filth and stench is so great that the boy vomits uncontrollably at different times of the day, especially when new deposits of rubbish are tipped down the walls from a tavern that backs onto the yard. Soon there is a synchronized link-up between matter in the patio-well and the boy’s retching throat: Mi estómago, mi lengua, mi vientre no eran mi vientre, no eran mi lengua y mi estómago, sino el patio aquel lleno de cascajos fermentados, de mondas, de duelas húmedas, de barrillo seboso, de espesor de aceite … Todo el patio de la taberna, sucio, pestífero, salobre, brumoso, sin sol, aguachado, deslavazado, saburroso, repulsivo, lo tenía yo dentro, era mi interior gástrico … Mi estómago era una erupción.26 [My stomach, my tongue, my gut were not my gut, my tongue and my stomach, but that yard full of fermenting rubbish, peelings, wet staves, grimy sludge, wedged in oil. The whole yard of the tavern, filthy, pestiferous, brackish, misty, sunless, liquidy, colourless, muciferous and repulsive, was inside me, my gastric entrails … My stomach was an eruption.]

This startling mix of the human and object worlds takes us beyond the level of profanities and derring-do taboo games. Admittedly, when the story ends with the boy’s recovery, there is a faintly parabolic air of a biblical or psychoanalytical cleansing. Admittedly too, the story maintains a materialist thrust that is consistent with the collection’s equation of the human level with the animal and even with base matter. But whereas this equation typically stems from an erotic and essentially moralistic source, the point of ‘Patio sucio’ – besides the glimpse it allows of low urban society – is the straightforward link it makes between the personal and the material: the boy has only to think of the patio and he vomits: La imagen íntegra del patio (con todo su estímulo asqueroso) aparecía un segundo en mi imaginación …¡Puaf! Como un resorte, en el acto, mi estómago se distendía, se empinaba, se descargaba, deshaciéndose, arrojando el patio. Y así, casi sin parar … Imagen de patio, expulsión de patio.27 [The whole image of the patio (with all its disgusting stimuli) would appear for a second in my imagination and … Yuck! Like a push-button reaction, straightaway my stomach would become distended, rise up, discharge, unload and vomit into the yard. And so it went on, endlessly … Patio image, patio spew.]

26 27

Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, 115. Ibid., 115–16.

92

ROBERT HAVARD

This comes close to the powerful epiplasmic theme of the introduction. It also anticipates much in Alberti’s work of the period, which is not surprising given that the two writers moved in the same circles and imbibed the same influences. Cinema was important to both and, bearing in mind that Giménez Caballero founded the Cineclub Español (in October 1928), it is likely that the subterranean tenor of Yo, inspector de alcantarillas owes something to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), which was reviewed by Luis Buñuel in La Gaceta Literaria (1 May 1927) and shown in Madrid in January 1928.28 Subterranean images were not unknown either in La Révolution surréaliste, which was compulsory reading for the editor and contributors to La Gaceta Literaria. The cover illustration to Breton’s journal for 15 March 1928 shows two men peering into a manhole, with the caption ‘La prochaine chambre’,29 which presumably refers to death or the infernal regions. This, in turn, brings to mind Alberti’s later play, El hombre deshabitado [‘The Disinhabited Man’], as well as the lines that end Les Fleurs du mal and which Breton regarded as the starting point of the modern tradition: Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel qu’importe! Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!30 [Dive into the depths of the abyss, be it Heaven or Hell! Into the depths of the Unknown to find oneself again!]

As for Giménez Caballero, it has to be said that, for all his innovation, he remains an ephemeral writer, partly, one feels, because of the unremitting pessimism of his work that almost invariably presents humanity as degraded. In the last analysis, he lacks a metaphysical edge, notably with regard to the constitution of objects. This is a point we find better developed in Alberti’s lover of the late 1920s, Maruja Mallo, an artist who illustrated the cover of Yo, inspector de alcantarillas.

Maruja Mallo and eschatology Maruja Mallo was born in Lugo in 1909 and came to Madrid at an early age where she studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. An older student at the Escuela, Salvador Dalí, introduced her to his circle of friends at the 28 Underground imagery … began with Metropolis’, writes Philip Strick in ‘The Metropolis Wars: The City as Character in Science Fiction Films’, Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies, edited by Danny Peary (Dolphin, New York, 1984), 47. 29 La Révolution surréaliste, no. 11, 15-iii-1928, op. cit., 1. 30 On the importance to Breton of these lines which conclude Les Fleurs du mal, see A. Balakian, Literary Origins of Surrealism: A New Mysticism in French Poetry (University of London Press, London, 1967), 7.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

93

Residencia de Estudiantes, including Lorca and Alberti. After leaving the Escuela in 1926, she embarked on a passionate, if Bohemian relationship with Alberti, the poet having been smitten with her free spirit as well as her beauty: Aquella muchacha pintora era extraordinaria, bella en su estatura, aguda y con cara de pájaro, tajante y llena de irónico humor … Yo la admiraba mucho y la quería … Parecía aun más juvenil de lo que era. Audaz entonces para el color y con los dedos llenos de líneas que ya las escapaba con dinamismo y valentía.31 [That slip of a girl painter was extraordinary, stunning in appearance, quick-witted, with a bird-like face and trenchant irony … I admired her greatly and I fell for her … She looked even younger than she was. Daring for those days in her make-up and lined fingers that sparkled with energy and spirit.]

Their haunts were the parks of Madrid, like the Retiro that is fleetingly evoked in Sobre los ángeles: ‘Tú. Yo. (Luna.) Al estanque’ (252) [You. Me. (Moon.) By the lake]. Another favourite location was the city’s cinemas: Se amaba igual la oscuridad de las salas cinematográficas que la de los bancos bajo la sombra nocturna de los árboles.32 [The darkness of the cinema salons was as welcome as that of park benches under the nightly shadow of trees.]

But though Alberti could say ‘El cine nos influía mucho’ [The movies influenced us a lot], their strongest mutual interest was in the plastic arts. They were especially close to Benjamín Palencia and Alberto Sánchez whose group in south Madrid became known as the ‘escuela de Vallecas’ [Vallecas school]: A aquel barrio, a aquellos llanos que lo limitaban, íbamos Maruja Mallo y yo casi todos los días en el metro, el trayecto más largo que corría entonces.33 [To that district and the plains beyond it, Maruja and I went almost every day on the metro, which was as far as the line went in those days.]

What appealed to Alberti in the Vallecas style of art was its material quality, especially Alberto Sánchez’s sculpture that projected the very substance from which it was made. Ironically, the sculptor was destined to end his days far 31 32 33

AP 3, 27. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28–9.

94

ROBERT HAVARD

from Castilian soil, in Moscow, where Alberti would meet him again years later. Sánchez explains how the Vallecas spirit evolved and how earnest they were in pursuit of simple material form: Procuré hacer una escultura más sencilla. Y ya no tuve inconveniente alguno en ir a buscar estas formas al campo; formas que encontraba muchísimas veces dibujadas por el hombre cuando labraba la tierra. En realidad, yo no hacía más que levantar estas formas de la tierra […]. Llegamos a la conclusión de que para nosotros no existía el color, sino las calidades de la materia […]. Nos proponíamos extirpar los colores artificiales, agrios, de los pintores, de los carteles. Queríamos llegar a la sobriedad y a la sencillez que nos transmitían las tierras de Castilla […]. Tomamos la cosa con verdadero fanatismo. Nos dimos a coleccionar piedras, palos, arenas y todo objeto que tuviera calidades plásticas. Hasta el extremo de que una vez encontramos en un barbecho de Vallecas un zapato viejo de mujer, y sobre el hallazgo comparamos los dos mundos: el del campo abierto y el del interior de Madrid. Esto nos hizo lanzar el grito de ‘¡Vivan los campos libres de España!’34 [I tried to make a simpler type of sculpture. And I took to looking for shapes in the country; shapes that I often found man had made working the land. In fact, all I had to do was pick them up from the ground…We came to the conclusion that for us colour didn’t matter, only material qualities…We set out to get rid of sharp, artificial colours, used by painters and in posters. We wanted the sobriety and simplicity that we found in the Castilian earth…We were really fanatical about it. We began to collect stones, sticks, sand, any object that had plastic quality. One day we even found a woman’s shoe in an empty Vallecas field, a discovery that prompted us to compare two different worlds: the open country and Madrid. This gave rise to us shouting: ‘Long live the free fields of Spain!’]

The telluric ethos of the Vallecas school made a strong impression on Maruja Mallo and on Rafael Alberti. Among other things it must have stirred an awareness of the potential for political statement in art, though neither was yet as far down the proletarian road as Alberto Sánchez. Hitherto Maruja had painted colourful scenes of Verbenas [popular festivals] and Estampas [Illustrations] which were multiple compositions in the playful spirit of the Twenties, inspired by the kinetic energy of the street and the cinema. In 1927, when she returned to Madrid after holding her first exhibition in Gijón, her work so impressed Ortega y Gasset that he arranged an exhibition at his Revista de Occidente building, from 26 May 1928. Maruja wrote: Cuando estuve ante la presencia de Ortega exclamó: ‘¡Si es una adolescente!’ Y al visitar mi casa y conocer mi obra pronunció: ‘Revista de 34

This personal testimony is found in Raúl Chavarri, Mito y realidad de la Escuela de Vallecas (Ibérico Europea, Madrid, 1975), 27–56, see 37, 40, 43.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

95

Occidente nunca realizó una exposición, pero ante este caso precursor, la Revista dará a conocer esta obra original y polifacética.’35 [When I was introduced to Ortega he exclaimed: ‘But she’s only a girl!’ And when he came to visit me and saw my work he said: ‘The Revista de Occidente has never held an exhibition, but, in the case of this precursor, the Review will be happy to publicize her original and multifaceted work.’]

Despite having impressed Ortega, a highly respected art critic, Maruja turned from the apparent gaiety in her initial paintings to the haunting theme of left-over objects lying on the ground. These she now depicted in dark-toned paintings, virtually devoid of colour, which continued the earthy emphasis of the Vallecas school but with a strong necrological aura, as certain titles indicate: La Huella [The Footprint] (plate 8), Cardos y esqueletos [Thistles and Skeletons], Lagarto y cenizas [Lizards and Ashes], Fósiles [Fossils] and Antro de fósiles [Den of Fossils]. Other paintings point to human and sociological issues, Basuras [Rubbish], Grajo y excremento [Rook and Excrement], Tierra y excremento [Earth and Excrement] (plate 7), as well as the disturbing Espantapájaros [Scarecrows] (plate 6) which André Breton bought in 1932 at Maruja’s provocatively named Paris exhibition, Cloacas y campanarios [Sewers and Belfries].36 This panoply of epiplasm represented a radical step forward from the rural Vallecas topics, even if Alberto Sánchez’s discovery of a woman’s shoe in a ploughed field had foreseen its direction. Alberti followed the same path, to the extent of including ‘una suela extraviada en la nieve’ [a shoe-sole lost in snow] among the junk objects he listed in ‘Los ángeles muertos’ (291) [‘The Dead Angels’], while Maruja gave prominence to a shoe sole in her painting Basuras [Rubbish]. That poet and painter were as one on this is also attributable to the fact that Alberti used to visit Maruja when she stayed at Cercedilla, some thirty miles north of Madrid in the Guadarrama foothills. His journey by train took him through wastelands and rubbish dumps in the sprawling capital’s outlying districts. This was the moment when, in his pit of despair, he invented the angels of Sobre los ángeles: Pero mis ángeles no eran los del cielo. Se me iban a manifestar en la superficie o en los más hondos subsuelos de la tierra. Coincidiendo con el arrastrarme los ojos por los barrizales, los terrenos levantados, los paisajes de otoño de sumergidas hojas en los charcos.37

35

See Anon., Maruja Mallo. La gran ignorada en Galicia (Diputación Provincial de Lugo, 1995), 6. 36 The best publication of her work remains Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color (1928–1942), estudio preliminar por Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942). Breton’s purchase is indicated on p. 115. 37 AP 3, 29.

96

ROBERT HAVARD

[But my angels were not from heaven. They appeared to me on the ground or in the deepest subsoils of the earth. Just at that time when I was dragging my eyes over quagmires, raised land, autumn landscapes with leaf-filled puddles.]

He recalls how he walked upon this wasteland with Maruja: De la mano de Maruja recorrí tantas veces aquellas galerías subterráneas, aquellas realidades antes no vistas, que ella, de manera genial, comenzó a revelar en sus lienzos. ‘Los ángeles muertos’, ese poema de mi libro, podría ser una transcripción de algún cuadro suyo.38 [Maruja frequently led me by the hand through those subterranean galleries, those hitherto unseen places that she began to depict so brilliantly in her canvases. That poem of mine called ‘The Dead Angels’ could well be a transcription of one of her paintings.]

Here the poet freely acknowledges his debt to Maruja and indicates that it was she rather than he who broke new ground with this subject matter. In effect she opened his eyes to the Dadaist or anti-art possibilities that are implicit in his reference to subterranean galleries. This recognition was long overdue on Alberti’s part, as he told Geoffrey Connell in 1979: Connell: Alberti: Connell: Alberti: Connell: Alberti:

Connell: Alberti: Connell: Alberti:

38

¿Y sería después o poco después de escribir Sobre los ángeles que usted conoce a Maruja Mallo? No, mucho antes. Es que me sorprendió algo que usted no la menciona en La arboleda perdida … La debo de mencionar, pero no la mencioné. Tengo que añadir quince o veinte páginas sobre ella en la próxima edición. … Y que no incluyó en las colecciones ese poema a Maruja Mallo … (i.e. ‘La primera ascensión de Maruja Mallo al subsuelo’.) Son asuntos amorosos con otras mujeres …¡para que no sean celosas! Eso no se puede decir. Pero ahora lo voy a poner porque es injusto. Es una persona que jugó un papel muy fundamental en mi obra y en mi vida, en esos años … Fue como una especie de …¿cómo diría yo? … Es una persona de gran talento … ¿… de consuelo, después de Sobre los ángeles? No, no de consuelo. Parte del drama de Sobre los ángeles es ella. Es ella que tiene el accidente ese …39

Ibid., 29. Interview with Alberti conducted by Geoffrey Connell in 1979, see Chapter One, footnote 2. It appears that Maruja left the poet for another, see Alberti’s letter dated Madrid, February 1929, in Correspondencia a José María de Cossío, 38.

39

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

[Connell: Alberti: Connell: Alberti: Connell: Alberti:

Connell: Alberti: Connell: Alberti:

97

And would it have been after or shortly after writing ‘Concerning the Angels’ that you met Maruja Mallo? Oh, a lot earlier. It’s just that I was rather surprised you made no mention of her in The Lost Grove. I should have mentioned her, but I didn’t mention her. There’ll be fifteen or twenty pages on her in the next edition. And that you didn’t include that poem of hers in your collection … [i.e. ‘The First Ascension of Maruja Mallo to the Subsoil’]. These are matters of the heart, concerning other women. To avoid jealousy, some things can’t be spoken of. But now I can put things right. She’s someone who played a very important role in my work and in my life, at that time. Was she a kind of … how can I put it …? She’s a very talented person. … consolation, after ‘Concerning the Angels’? No, not consolation. Part of the drama in ‘Concerning the Angels’ is her. She’s the one who had that accident.]

Even if they do not run to the promised fifteen pages, Alberti’s generous comments on Maruja Mallo in volume V of La arboleda perdida set the matter right. Maruja, let us be clear, was no wallflower in the avant-garde circles of late 1920s Madrid, nor was it only her life-style that attracted attention. This free-spirited young woman, whose front-door at Cercedilla was mounted with sheep skulls, was described by no less a critic than Jean Cassou as ‘profundamente auténtica y su obra … se impone al espíritu de la manera más perturbadora y más vigorosa’ [profoundly original and her work … reaches into you with disturbing effect], while Benjamín Arnés considered her canvases to be ‘los más considerables de la actual pintura española’ [the most important in contemporary Spanish painting].40 Her quality had not escaped Lorca who saw her Revista de Occidente exhibition and, besides finding imagination and sensuality in the Verbenas, detected a more sombre aspect in the Estampas: ‘estas estampas de maniquí que están pintadas con ausencia de color, son noticias necrológicas’41 [these mannequin illustrations, painted without colour, are obituary announcements]. That the painter herself was aware of the deeper implications of her subject matter, both as regards her earlier and her later style, is plain from her Montevideo lecture of 1937.42 She 40

A photograph of Maruja at her extraordinary front-door may be seen in Maruja Mallo. La gran ignorada en Galicia, 7. The article by Jean Cassou (originally published in La Revue Hebdomadaire, Paris, 28 May 1932) and that by Jarnés (La Vanguardia, Barcelona, April 1931), together with others may be found in Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro, 50–1. 41 See Gómez de la Serna’s introduction to Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro, 8. 42 The Popular in Spanish Art (as illustrated in my work 1928–1936)’. This lecture, delivered to the ‘Amigos del Arte’ [Friends of Art] Society in Montevideo, is given in the

98

ROBERT HAVARD

comments with insight and conviction on the ten paintings and thirty drawings that composed her 1928 exhibition. The verbenas, she points out firstly, as the most traditional event in the Spanish calendar, not only synthesize aspects of popular culture but also externalize a number of important social forces, as her paintings suggest: On these commemorative occasions the common people come together. They take mythology and the saints as an excuse for communal jollification. They are not moved by the slightest respect for religion, but on the contrary parody the heavenly order and the infernal hierarchy, disguising themselves with the attributes of divine and devilish figures. They make reproductions of glorious paradises and infernal caverns. It is by no means uncommon in Verbenas to see an angel riding a pig or steering one of the miniature cars of the fair … The angels of the Verbenas wear crowns, wings and paper robes, drink beer and lemonade and blow ‘Mother-in-Law-Killers’ in the faces of the friars who saunter through the crowds or sway in the swing-boats … The irreverence and the grace, the parody and the creation of a society that rose up and confronted the ruling class, transforming it and mirroring it in a world of phantoms and dolls. A Verbena.43

The verbena’s gaiety, then, masks a more serious purpose, its parody, irreverence and potential rebelliousness, as ever, targeting the Church and the ruling class. The Estampas [Illustrations] that follow also celebrate the communal spirit of the people, be it in new sporting activities like tennis, football and swimming, or in the sheer movement of city streets revolutionized by transport systems. But standing dolefully against this are the anachronistic figures who live indoors like mannequins, ‘ladies and gentlemen in moments of crisis, faded, protected by the aroma of mothballs and apothecaries’ prescriptions, who appear in opera boxes and in salons, or languish forgotten in provincial conservatories’. Clearly, these obituaries, as Lorca took them to be, are for persons in the privileged classes. Maruja is at her best, however, in describing the sombre paintings that brought her greatest triumph in May 1932 when she exhibited at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. This was the gallery run by Pierre Loeb who frequently exhibited Joan Miró but who had made the costly error of declining Dalí, prompting the latter to call the gallery a ‘grocery shop’.44 The sixteen pictures that made up Cloacas y campanarios [Sewers and Belfries] – ‘works

original Spanish and in English translation in Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro, 39–43 and 44–8. I quote from the English, making minor adjustments where necessary in an attempt to improve its readability. 43 Ibid., 44–5. 44 The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 76.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

99

inspired by the slums and suburbs of Madrid’, as Maruja says – are brought vividly to life in her commentary: At this time I was impressed by the sight of nature eliminating waste, by the scorched and puddled earth. Drains stirred up by breezes, belfries buffeted by winds. The world of things in formation that I frequently came up against on the outskirts, is the fundamental basis of my work at that time. Over the cracked earth an aureole of débris rises. In these desolate panoramas the presence of man appears in footprints, clothing, skeletons and corpses. This human presence, real but phantasmal, rising in the midst of this vortex of refuse, is added to scattered stones, ash-strewn wastes, silt-covered surfaces, in which the coarsest plants grow and the fiercest animals roam. With these earthy settings, these ravaged fields, are associated the ruined temples, broken images, torn vestments, ruined machines and weapons.45

Maruja is dealing with the same inversion we found in Giménez Caballero and, a little earlier, in Alberti. The nightmarish landscape is a stark reversal of paradise, in which sense the collective theme of Cloacas y campanarios [Sewers and Belfries] compares with that in Pierre Reverdy’s first major collection, Les Épaves du ciel (1924) [The Wrecks of Heaven], which polarizes the heavenly ideal and material debris. Maruja’s passage and the paintings it evokes also compares with the terrible vision experienced by Joyce’s hero in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when he goes to bed petrified after hearing the preacher’s sermons and feels ‘the leprous company of his sins’ close in on him: He strove to forget them in an act of prayer, huddling his limbs closer together and binding down his eyelids: but the senses of his soul would not be bound and, though his eyes were shut fast, he saw the places where he had sinned and, though his ears were tightly covered, he heard. He desired with all his will not to hear or see. He desired until his frame shook under the strain of his desire and until the senses of his soul closed. They closed for an instant and then opened. He saw. A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettlebunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggled upwards from all the ordure through the bristling greygreen weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.46

The objects – coarse plants, junk, ordure – and the subdued colouring are identical with Maruja’s, as too is the cruelty of the animals that Stephen 45 46

Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro, 45. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 140–1.

100

ROBERT HAVARD

Dedalus now sees approaching him: ‘The malice of evil glittered in their hard eyes … a rictus of cruel malignity … They moved in slow circles … their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite’. At this point the young boy cries out in terror: He flung the blankets from him madly to free his face and neck. That was hell. God had allowed him to see the hell reserved for his sins: stinking, bestial, malignant, a hell of lecherous goatish fiends. For him! For him! He sprang from the bed, the reeking odour pouring down his throat, clogging and revolting his entrails … At the washstand a convulsion seized him from within; and, clasping his cold forehead wildly, he vomited profusely in agony.

Yet Maruja’s paintings and her commentary do more than depict a hell on earth. Crucial to their aura of apocalypse and spiritual dilapidation is her detection of a ‘human presence, real but phantasmal’ in the objects themselves. This is again in line with surrealist thinking, notably that of Breton, for whom it was an act of faith that ‘Rien de ce que nous entoure ne nous est objet, tout nous est sujet’47 [Nothing that surrounds us is object to us, everything is subject to us]. Breton had found a phantasmal quality in the empty spaces of Giorgio de Chirico’s early paintings, and the same idea would preoccupy Dalí. J.-E. Cirlot reminds us of the influence exercised on Dalí by Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, L’heure des empreintes [The Hour of Footprints], a photograph of which appeared in the sixth number of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution.48 In his article ‘Objets surréalistes’ [‘Surrealist Objects’] Dalí explains that ‘Ces objets … sont basés sur les fantasmes’ [These objects … are based on phantoms], while the same number contains Breton’s article ‘L’Objet fantôme’ [‘The Phantom Object’].49 This haunting human presence, axiomatic in a footprint or discarded clothes, applies to virtually all items found in a rubbish dump. Much as Giménez Caballero’s sewer provided a retrospective narrative of human life, the rubbish dump is a collection of base yet enigmatic objects that are at once concrete and charged with human association. The dump, furthermore, has the stamp of randomness so dear to the surrealists, for its gratuitous juxtaposition of objects gives a pure sense of dépaysement, of disorientation-cum-alienation. From here it is a short step to Maruja’s stark landscape that is presided over by scarecrows: 47 A. Breton, ‘Le Surréalisme et la peinture’, in La Révolution surréaliste, nos. 9–10, 1-x-1927, op. cit., 42. 48 See J.-E. Cirlot, El mundo del objeto a la luz del surrealismo (Anthropos, Barcelona, 1986), 86, and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (republished by Jean-Michel Place, Paris, 1976), 57. 49 See Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution no. 3, 17, 20.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

101

In wastelands sown with fossils and excrement, I found footprints in the mud, stamped on the uprooted plants. On those lands encircled by limestone mountains and coal pits, stand the scarecrows: anatomies of nails and sticks that display chamber pots and brooms for heads. Their pitiful limbs of funereal aspect hold up cast-off civilian clothing, empty clerical gowns, rags billowing out and torn by the winds.50

The scarecrows, themselves a random collage of thrown-away objects, stand like sentinels or crucified Christs against a landscape that is even more lamentable than the vision of a devastated Spain – ‘mística y guerrera’ [mystic and warlike] – that Antonio Machado found in Soria.51 In effect, these paintings are, as Jean Cassou put it, ‘pesadillas que revelan esa España brutal e injuriosa’52 [nightmares that reveal that brutal and insulting Spain]. In their forlorn, sombre quality, in their accusatory social stance and implicit anticlericalism, the paintings follow the tradition of Goya who also turned from rococo gaiety to a dark, nightmarish vision. In Maruja’s most evocative painting, Espantapájaros [‘Scarecrows’] (plate 6), a wind sweeps down from distant mountains to lift the torn clothes of scarecrows and create a chilling sense of the ‘cuerpo vacío’ [empty body] that Alberti described in ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ (250) [‘The Disinhabited Body’]. John Crispin’s inspired comparison of Maruja’s scarecrows with Grünewald’s disturbing crucifixions – which Dalí, not surprisingly, found too ‘materialistic’ – has been confirmed by Alberti who spoke of that ‘tremendista pintor Grünewald, que alguna influencia tuvo en ciertas visiones de mis poemas de Sobre los ángeles’ [awesome painter Grünewald who had some influence on certain images in my poems in ‘Concerning the Angels’].53 Following this cue, we note that Alberti’s poem of the same title, ‘Espantapájaros’ [‘Scarecrow’], captures the sense of utter desolation that Christ experienced on the cross. In this striking poem, another virtual transcription of a painting by Maruja Mallo, the speaking voice, curiously, seems to be at one and the same time that of the poet, the scarecrow and Christ. It begins:

50

Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro, 41. See the poem ‘Campos de Soria’ from Campos de Castilla, in Antonio Machado I: Poesías completas edited by Oreste Macrì (Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1989), 515. 52 Part of Cassou’s article in La Revue Hebdomaire, Paris, 28-v-1932, is given in Spanish in Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro, 50. 53 See John Crispin, ‘La Generación de 1927 y las artes plásticas’, in H. Romero (ed.), Nuevas perspectivas sobre la generación del 27 (ensayos literarios) (Ediciones Universal, Miami, 1983), 37, and Rafael Alberti, La arboleda perdida, V, 102. Dalí, by contrast, wanted ‘to paint a Christ that is the absolute opposite of Grünewald’s materialistic, savagely anti-mystical one’; The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 217. Buñuel had intended a Grünewald crucifixion in Belle de jour, but was obliged to cut it by the censors; My Last Breath, 242. 51

102

ROBERT HAVARD

Ya en mi alma pesaban de tal modo los muertos futuros que no podía andar ni un solo paso sin que las piedras revelaran sus entrañas. ¿Qué gritan y defienden esos trajes retorcidos por las exhalaciones? Sangran ojos de mulos cruzados de escalofríos. Se hace imposible el cielo entre tantas tumbas anegadas de setas corrompidas. [In my soul future deaths already weigh so heavily that I cannot take a single step without stones revealing their insides to me. What do those clothes twisted by exhalations shout against and defend? They bleed mules’ eyes shot through with shivers. Heaven becomes impossible amid so many graves submerged in rotting mushrooms.]

This first stanza establishes a deathly ambience around the speaking subject, a tormented figure who, we soon discover, is destined to bear the suffering of the world: ¿Adónde ir con las ansias de los que han de morirse? [Where shall I go bearing the anxieties of those who must die?] …¿Qué nuevas desventuras esperan a las hojas para este otoño? Mi alma no puede ya con tanto cargamento sin destino … [… What new disasters await the leaves this autumn? My soul can no longer bear such a purposeless burden …] …¿Qué espero rodeado de muertos al filo de una madrugada indecisa? (303) [… What am I waiting for surrounded by dead people on the edge of an uncertain dawn?]

This bears comparison with Ortega’s metaphysical point that it was only when Adam appeared in Eden that ‘comenzó esto que llamamos vida’ [there began this thing we call life], in the sense that only the human dimension gives meaning to life, morally, spiritually, emotionally and through suffering.54 Alberti’s imagery is far bleaker, however, as is Maruja’s when she itemizes the array of objects to be found in this fetid netherland, often with a rhetorical panache that is reminiscent of Alberti’s prose poems: Near to the stricken places are the ruins, the fossil dens. On the damp stones the skeletons falling to pieces lose their symmetry amongst rotting

54

See José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Adán en el Paraíso’ (1910), Obras completas, I, 480.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

103

barrels and guitars. The stained maps fall apart. Under a perspective of arches the in-rushing sea invades cellars. At the mouth of swamps decapitated corpses decompose on the smoking earth, where brambles wither and bristles die, but where excrements flower and garbage is glorified.

The power of this description owes much to its relentless inventory of material objects, but it also gains from the heavily deictic presentation by a speaker who has assumed the role of witness. The insistent prepositional phrases have a locative force – ‘Near to … On the … Under a … At the …’ – and in this they duplicate Alberti’s technique of ubication found at the end of Sobre los ángeles, for instance in the extraordinary ‘Los ángeles muertos’ [‘The Dead Angels’], a poem Alberti described as a transcription of a Maruja Mallo painting. Here the poet offers a strictly paranoiac and materio-mystical thesis, instructing us to search for our past selves in the junk of rubbish dumps: Buscadlos, buscadlos: en el insomnio de las cañerías olvidadas, en los cauces interrumpidos por el silencio de las basuras. No lejos de los charcos incapaces de guardar una nube … Porque yo los he visto: En esos escombros momentáneos que aparecen en las neblinas. Porque yo los he tocado: en el destierro de un ladrillo difunto, venido a nada desde una torre o un carro. Nunca más allá de las chimeneas que se derrumban … En todo esto … En esas ausencias hundidas que sufren los muebles desvencijados, no a mucha distancia de los nombres y signos que se enfrían en las paredes. Buscadlos, buscadlos: debajo de la gota de cera que sepulta la palabra de un libro … Cerca del casco perdido de una botella, de una suela extraviada en la nieve, de una navaja de afeitar abandonada al borde de un precipicio. (442) [Look hard, look hard for them:/ in the insomnia of forgotten drains, in channels blocked by the silence of rubbish. Not far from puddles incapable of holding a cloud … Because I have seen them:/ in that momentary debris that appears in mists. Because I have touched them:/ in the banishment of a deceased brick, reduced to nothing from a tower or cart. Never far from those chimneys that collapse …/ In all this … In those sunken absences suffered by rickety furniture, not far from the names and signs that grow cold on walls.

104

ROBERT HAVARD

Look hard, look hard for them: under the drop of wax that entombs the words of a book … Near the lost shell of a bottle,/ a stray shoe sole in the snow, a razor abandoned on the edge of a precipice.]

The sheer weight of material and epiplasmic objects is overwhelming. But so too is the effect of the prepositional phrases in which they are enbedded – not far from, under the, never far from, near the and the six times repeated in the – for this creates an incantatory and mock-religious sense of prophecy, a mode of language we shall explore shortly. For the moment let us simply note that Maruja’s adoption of this mode in her prose of 1937 reciprocates linguistically what the poet had earlier borrowed visually. It also shows that Maruja was conscious of the eschatological force of these images. In the blighted zone that her paintings depict, the natural, chemical processes are inverted, for, paradoxically, epiplasm flourishes while protoplasm decays: ‘on the smoking earth where brambles wither and bristles die, but where excrements flower and garbage is glorified’. The history of life is here materially preserved in coprolites and man himself is as enmeshed in matter as his worn-out shoes are caked in ordure: From the petrified dung spring the thistles that hold aloft the remnants of mitres, top hats and tatters. Faecal and twisted leaves penetrate broken shoes, and stop at the edge of gaping footprints in the mire. Drains bedraggle the aimless bristles and brambles.

The inclusion amid detritus of ecclesiastical vestments, mitres, is now entirely expected, as is the allusion to top hats, with its class associations. The same pairing is soon repeated: ‘ghostly frock coats sprinkled with cigarette stubs’ and ‘cassocks … surrounded by the skulls of asses’. We again think of clerics in the Buñuel–Dalí films: for instance, the two Christian Brothers in Un Chien andalou – one of whom is played by Dalí himself – who drag the grand pianos laden with putrified donkeys; and the archpriests in L’Âge d’or – ‘o más bien sus restos’ [or rather their remains] – who appear on a rocky coast in full but decayed regalia: El esqueleto de uno de ellos, con su vestimenta muy vieja y en desorden, se mantiene aún sentado sobre una roca … Por aquí y allá, jirones de ropa ya casi irreconocibles’.55 [The skeleton of one of them, with its very old and disorderly clothing, remains seated on a rock … Shreds of now scarcely recognisable clothing scattered about.]

55

42.

See Luis Buñuel, Un perro andaluz, La edad de oro (Ediciones Era, Mexico, 1971),

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

105

Maruja Mallo concludes her commentary on her own paintings with a pointed development of the religious theme: Like the sewers are the belfries, approached by gloomy stairways, with chains and gaffs. The mournful and abandoned belfries, miry haunts of anachronistic spectres and resting places of rags, where the floors are littered with trampled palms and crowns. On the walls the same bloodstained hands that built the cross have left their prints. In the corroded and solitary interiors, among wasted stones covered with cobwebs and worm-eaten wood, infested by rats, herald of things for which there is no future, the elements of the mystic rites decay. The floors and walls of temples tumble into the pools of cellars, rise towards roofs visited by lightning and flames. These were the necrological panoramas that I found in the city centre and in the rubbish dumps on the outskirts of the capital (1929–1931). The buildings of the ruined temples, the destruction of the established sewers. The most frequent and tangible reality that I came up against: the dying agony of superstition, the hecatombs of rubbish that drifts towards the drains, seeking the subsoil while the death-rattle of the religious rites sounds in the gloomy belfries.

Maruja’s apocalyptic vision is as much focused on the end of religion as it is on the entropic process of matter decaying. Indeed, the two concepts are linked in what is effectively a modern, atheistic treatment of the Ecclesiastes–Manrique view of existence as inexorably death-bound. Ironically, the obituary Maruja writes is for religion itself, while she also implies an heroic dimension in the person who accepts the material limitations of existence.

Alberti’s elegy to matter The same radical truth is put by Alberti several times in the course of ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [‘Sermon on the Four Truths’], but especially at its end: Bien poco importa a la acidez de los mostos descompuestos que mi alegría se consuma a lo largo de las maderas en las fermentaciones más tristes que tan sólo causan la muerte al hormigón anónimo que trafica con su grano de orujo. (456) [It is of little consequence to the acidity of decomposed musts that my joy is consumed lengthwise on timbers in the saddest fermentations that merely bring about the death of the anonymous ant that traffics with his grain of bagasse.]

Alberti’s intimate knowledge of the sherry industry in El Puerto de Santa María here provides a complex metaphor of human existence. Essentially life

106

ROBERT HAVARD

is seen as a chemical process in which organic substances change. This includes the pressing of grapes after harvest to produce the musts or expressed juices, from which only those with the required level of acidity are selected. It also includes fermentation, which occurs when the air makes contact with the yeasts that grow on the skin of grapes. Finally, it includes the ageing that takes place in timber casks traditionally made of American oak. These stages in sherry production are interwoven with (but in fact remain indifferent to) the poet’s emotional life: ‘Bien poco importa a la acidez de los mostos descompuestos … que mi alegría se consuma’ [It is of little consequence to the acidity of decomposed musts … that my joy is consumed]. Here the notion of being consumed, or of dying, derives from the ‘velo de flor’ [flower veil], a phenomenon that occurs in the making of ‘fino’ as opposed to ‘oloroso’ sherry. This veil – or ‘la flor del vino’ (431) [the flower of the wine], as it is called in ‘El ángel de las bodegas’ [‘The Angel of the Wine Cellars’] – consists of micro-organisms that grow to cover the surface of the wine and give the fino its characteristic bouquet and dryness. Only when this biological process has run its cycle and the flower has disappeared or died will secondary fermentation have taken place and the fino come into being. In the earlier poem this almost magical transformation gives rise to a parallel with Christ and the resurrection: Te vi flotar a ti, flor de agonía, flotar sobre tu mismo espíritu. (431) [I saw you float, flower of agony, on your own spirit].

In ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ the parallel is less obvious, as is the parallel between Christ on the cross and the way wine matures in casks, ‘a lo largo de las maderas’ [along timbers]. In this poem the Christ figure is subsumed in the speaking voice and the tone is one of resignation before the simple fact that our life will run its biological course. The poem’s final image of an ant carrying a fragment of bagasse or grape residue is appropriate in two ways: it suggests presumption in anyone who thinks his life is of greater consequence in the scheme of things than an ant’s, while it also provides a supreme example of epiplasm in the ‘orujo’ or bagasse, a waste product prized for its high alcohol content and distilled essence. The image tends to confirm Dalí’s notion that base matter may hold the key to the kingdom: And we do not know if behind the three great simulacra, excrement, blood and putrefaction, there does not lie hidden precisely the desired ‘land of treasures’. As connoisseurs of simulacra, we have long learned how to recognize the image of desire behind the simulacra of terror, and even the awakening of ‘golden ages’ behind the ignominious scatological simulacra.56 56

See Haim Finkelstein, Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writing, 1927–1942 (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996), 57. I have based my translation on Finkelstein’s.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

107

Alberti and Maruja Mallo take Dalí’s point further by suggesting that it is in the acceptance of matter, the acceptance of our total immersion in and circumscription by matter, that we find our salvation. This comes through forcefully in ‘La primera ascensión de Maruja Mallo al subsuelo’ [‘The First Ascension of Maruja Mallo to the Subsoil’], Alberti’s supreme tribute to the woman who inspired him in the most creative period of his life. The poem, which surely some day will find its rightful place in Sermones y moradas, begins with a decidedly earth-bound trajectory as the poet hails his saviour with the kind of adoration that Dalí later reserved for Gala: Tú, tú que bajas a las cloacas donde las flores más flores son ya unos tristes salivazos sin sueños y mueres por las alcantarillas que desenbocan a las verbenas desiertas para rusucitar al filo de una piedra mordida por un hongo estancado, dime por qué las lluvias pudren las hojas y las maderas. Aclárame esta duda que tengo sobre los paisajes. Despiértame. [You, you who delve into sewers where the most flowerly flowers are but sad goblets of disillusioned spittle and who expire in drains that flow into empty festivals only to be reborn on the edge of a stone bitten by a stagnant mushroom, tell me why the rain rots leaves and wood. Settle this doubt I have about landscapes. Awaken me.]

The motif of descent – as in Yo, inspector de alcantarillas [I, Inspector of Drains] and the dominant motif of the sótano [cellar] in ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [‘Sermon on the Four Truths’] – conveys the idea of introspection, that is, of the creative artist’s ability to delve into herself and connect with the unconscious. Naturally, downwardness suggests Maruja’s worldly as opposed to heavenly focus as well as her pronounced object-orientation. Both points are developed by the poet who has learnt these truths from the woman who some called ‘la musa de los surrealistas’57 [the surrealists’ muse]: Emplearé todo el resto de mi vida en contemplar el suelo seriamente ahora que ya nos importan cada vez menos las hadas … Mira siempre hacia abajo. Nada se te ha perdido en el cielo.

57

See Maruja Mallo. La gran ignorada en Galicia, 86.

108

ROBERT HAVARD

[I’ll spend the rest of my life contemplating the ground seriously now that we are ever less interested in fairies … Always look downwards. You have lost nothing in heaven.]

At this point Maruja assumes the role of oracle and messiah, following the preordained pattern of sacrifice and transcendence. The first stanza’s descent-cum-resurrection – ‘tú que bajas … para resucitar al filo de una piedra’ [you who delve … to be reborn on the hard edge of a stone] – is duplicated in a host of moribund and putrefactive imagery, including: ‘hongo estancado’ [stagnant mushroom], ‘los más bellos excrementos del mundo’ [the most beautiful excrement in the world], ‘un sofá muerto’ [a dead sofa] and the necromantic: una teja aturdida se deshace contra tus pies para predecir otra muerte. [a stunned tile breaks against your feet to foretell another death.]

From these depths, her resurrection is assured: Desde los pantanos ¿quién no te ve ascender sobre un fijo oleaje de escorias, contra un viso de tablones pelados y boñigas de toros, hacia un sueño fecal de golondrina? [From the marshes who cannot see you ascend on a steady wave of slag, against a sheen of smooth planks and bull’s dung, towards a swallow’s faecal dream?]

The insistent scatological stress takes us, as ever, in the opposite direction to heaven. (The reference to ‘escoria’ [slag] reminds us of the paradox in the name of Phillip II’s great monastery, El Escorial [the Slagheap].) Yet, as the poem’s title tells us, the process depicted is one of transcendence – ‘ascensión al subsuelo’ [ascension to the subsoil] – a trajectory that leads into rather than out of this world. Reversing the hierarchical Great Chain of Being, the Alberti–Mallo view of reality prioritizes simple or base matter. This may be in part because matter contains within it the eschatological truth of its own perishability, as in the case of the rubbish dump; but it is also because material reality, from faeces to scarecrows, retains a latent human quality, an enigmatic subjectivity that persists without depriving objects of their concreteness. Matter, in short, is where the objective and the subjective meet, at which point the prospect of transcendence arises. This can be tested for a last time in Alberti’s poem ‘Elegías’ [‘Elegies’], a series of seven numbered sentences, which reads:

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

109

1. La pena de los jarros sin agua caídos en el destierro de los objetos difuntos. 2. La noticia del crimen de la noche, abandonada entre cardos, muelles rotos y latones viejos. 3. La botella que no se rompió al caer y vive con el gollete clavado en los oasis de las basuras. 4. La venda rota de una herida, arrastrada por las hormigas de las tres de la tarde. 5. Esos chorros de agua de carbón que desvelan el sueño boquiabierto de los túneles. 6. El moscón que se clava de cabeza en la espina de un cardo. 7. La caja vacía de cerillas junto al excremento de los caballos. (471) [1. The suffering of waterless pitchers fallen in the banishment of deceased objects. 2. The evening crime report, abandoned amongst thistles, broken platforms and old brass. 3. The bottle that didn’t break on falling and lives with its neck stuck in the oasis of the rubbish dump. 4. The broken bandage from a wound, dragged by 3 p.m. ants. 5. Those jets of coal water that uncover the open-mouthed dream of tunnels. 6. The botfly that gets its head stuck on a thistle’s thorn. 7. The empty box of matches alongside horse dung.] The poem contains virtually all the features we have been discussing. Its seven snapshots are of earth-located objects which, like Alberto Sánchez’s sculpture or Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, give off a strong sense of the anti-art. This is underlined by the un-poetic (and mock-Jesuitical) numbering, though it is counteracted by the conspicuously poetic title, ‘Elegías’ [‘Elegies’]. The objects are all ‘objetos difuntos’ [deceased objects], the necropolis being a rubbish dump. From this focal image flows the key attribution of human qualities to matter: the pitchers suffer, a bottle lives, tunnels dream. What was once a standard poetic device, personification, has taken on literal force, the point being that these objects have had a life of their own in relation to human life: crime report, broken bandage from a wound, box of matches. The quality of sentience, together with the obvious potential of objects to affect or be affected by human life, sets up an indivisible bond between the two realms. Human presence is ‘real but phantasmal’, as Maruja said, its haunting quality suggesting that the same death-bound process applies to human life. Each of the seven images is thus a simulacrum of the human condition, not only in the sense of our mortal trajectory but in terms of our existential angst that is caught in the dépaysement of randomly juxtaposed objects. The poet is apparently disinterested in structuring his poem as

110

ROBERT HAVARD

a poem: we note the monotonous format in which each item consists of a single sentence of a dozen words or so, all but one beginning with a definite article. This linguistic passivity helps evoke a tone of resignation, the poet’s detachment being further underlined by his complete absence (even as a speaking voice, for the numbering reduces the poem to the status of an anonymous inventory). However, the artistic disinterest is deceptive. Closer inspection discovers an element of structuring in the series of simulacra that begins by insinuating human–object integration and concludes with two images that are resoundingly objective. The first reminds us of the death-bound ant at the end of ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’: 6. El moscón que se clava de cabeza en la espina de un cardo. [6. The botfly that gets its head stuck on a thistle’s thorn.] Like the insect images so frequent in Buñuel – but unlike their fetishistic treatment in Dalí – this renders the aura of death in a starkly unsentimental vein. The butterfly in Un Chien andalou comes to mind, with the close-up of a skull painted on its back, and we recall that Buñuel’s favourite author was the nineteenth-century scholar, Jean Henri Fabre, ‘the man who wrote about ants’.58 Nonetheless, objective as Alberti’s image is, we cannot help suspect that the combination of head and thorn and especially the visual pattern of an upright stem traversed by the horizontal spread of agonized wings is suggestive of the crucifixion. The final image provides a conclusion that is an appropriate mix of the scatological and eschatological: 7. La caja vacía de cerillas junto al excremento de los caballos. [7. The empty box of matches alongside horse dung.] Here the phantasmal human quality is reinforced by the absence of the objective referent, matches. That these have gone up in smoke is a fact of life, whether from lighting tobacco or candles is immaterial. What remains is epiplasm, the dung that constitutes the atheist surrealist’s response to the threat of ‘The Four Last Things’. We are back to the excremental vision, so richly treated by Spaniards supersaturated with religion. On one level, nothing seems so puerile as the fixation with excrement. Nor is this juvenility confined to Giménez Caballero. Precisely the same rebellious schoolboy mentality underlies such observations as Alberti made of the Tiber:

58

Fabre’s Souvenirs d’un entomologiste was the first book Buñuel would take to a desert island. See The World of Luis Buñuel, 138, 101.

LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY

111

las gaviotas viajeras las he visto en Roma, rodeando la cúpula de San Pedro y descender a las aguas del Tíber para pescar los sucios detritus que arrojan las cloacas del Vaticano.59 [I have seen migrant seagulls in Rome, flying round Saint Peter’s dome and descending to the waters of the Tiber, there to fish in its filthy detritus discharged from the Vatican’s sewers.]

Yet the use of excrement as a motif cannot be so easily dismissed. In a poem or on a canvas it makes an artistic statement, one that rejects repressive conventions. It can also make a political statement, excrement being the sign of the great leveller. When excrement is treated so seriously that it becomes a fixation, or is even hallowed, as it appears to be on occasion in Dalí, Maruja Mallo and Alberti, we suspect an element of paranoia. But the root of the paranoia clearly lies in the Church which has pronounced the body sinful, a point testified by its filthy by-products. In practice, it was those who railed against sin and the filthiness of the human body who were mad.60 Christianity aspires to the non-bodily, to the spiritual and the clean, to the death of the body in Christ who cleanses our sins. The championing of excrement is the championing of the body and of its finality in complete countertype to the championing of Christ. The point is made by Nietzsche: In our time it is not enough to drop Christianity and go on as before, for everything that remains is Christian; it is necessary ‘to overcome everything Christian by something super-Christian, and not only to rid oneself of it – for Christian doctrine is the counter-doctrine of the Dionysian’.61

It is the way that Alberti and Lorca strive for the super-Christian that we shall examine in the next chapter.

59

AP 5, 34. For instance, Martin Luther: ‘We are nothing but a worm in ordure and filth, with no good or hope left in us, a loathsome abomination and object of scorn because of the loathsome stench and scorn for the sake of the cross.’ Quoted by Norman O. Brown in Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1959), 226. 61 H.J. Blackham paraphrases and quotes F.W. Nietzsche in Six Existentialist Thinkers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1961), 35. 60

4 FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

From Pain to Prophecy The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius which is everywhere call’d the Spirit of Prophecy. William Blake1 My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; My heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace … Jeremiah 4: 192

Lorca’s mantic poet in New York In a clear echo of the Passion Lorca refers in Poeta en Nueva York to his ‘voz de mi abierto costado’ (498)3 [voice of my open side], an allusion indicative of the speaking role he adopts in this volume as a poet–seer whose visionary gift – like that of Jeremiah, ‘the weeping prophet’4 – is grounded in suffering. From the opening line, ‘Asesinado por el cielo’ (473) [Murdered by heaven], the dominant theme in this Lorca’s most avant-garde collection is suffering. Moreover, it is a suffering derived from, conditioned by and even acted out in a conspicuously religious context, as a number of titles indicate: ‘Iglesia abandonada’ [‘Abandoned Church’], ‘Navidad en el Hudson’ [‘Christmas on the Hudson’], ‘Nacimiento de Cristo’ [‘Birth of Christ’], ‘Grito hacia Roma’ [‘Shout towards Rome’] and ‘Crucifixión’ [‘Crucifixion’].5 No less striking is the modulated voice and pitch that the poet consistently adopts to project his suffering, for this is based on a tradition that 1

This is the inscription on Plate 8, representing ‘Principle 5’, in All Religions are One (1788), see William Blake’s Writings, vol. I, ed. G.E. Bentley, Jr. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978), 15. 2 The Reader’s Bible. 3 Numbers in parenthesis indicate the page of reference in Federico García Lorca, Obras completas, 11th edition (Aguilar, Madrid, 1966). 4 See Mark E. Biddle, Polyphony and Symphony in Prophetic Literature: Rereading Jeremiah 7–20 (Mercer University Press, Macon, 1996), 15. 5 This poem is also known by the title ‘La luna pudo detenerse al fin’ [‘The Moon finally managed to stop’].

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

113

reaches back as far as poetry itself to a time when, as Blake indicates above, the roles of poet and prophet were virtually indistinguishable. ‘Así hablaba yo’ (499) [Thus spoke I], says Lorca in oracular vein as he emerges at the end of one poem from an agonized trance-like state; ‘Yo estaba en la terraza …’ (486) [There was I on the terrace …], he proclaims in another, ubicating himself as witness to the horror of New York; ‘¡oh salvaje Norteamérica!’ (486) [oh barbarous North America!], he admonishes the erring twentieth-century nation much as Isaiah chastized the house of Judah, ‘yo denuncio a toda la gente’ (516) [I denounce all the people]; ‘ya las cobras silbarán … ya la Bolsa será una pirámide de musgo’ (487) [now shall the cobras hiss … now shall the Stock Exchange be a pyramid of moss], he foretells the godhead’s retribution; ‘aleluya, aleluya’ (492), he interjects ironically; ‘No busquéis … Buscad … Aguardad’ (481–2) [Don’t look … Look … Wait], he directs the lost citizens of New York in the familiar imperative. These and other rhetorical figures are the recognizable formulae of prophetic discourse. Recognizable too, as we shall see, is the rhythm and cadence of the poet–seer’s utterances, steeped as they are in an oral, extempore and essentially performative tradition. Why did Lorca adopt a mantic voice? How does it compare with the sermonic mode Alberti favours? What bearing does this type of utterance have on the surrealist ethos? These are questions to keep in mind as we assess the modern poet’s recourse to the mantic (a term preferred to prophetic, by the way, on the grounds that the latter is now too limited to predictions about the future, while also germane is that mantic comes from the same Greek root as mania which has connections with ‘madness’.) Lorca himself was at a loss to say why he went to New York in June 1929: No sé para qué he partido; me lo pregunto cien veces al día. Me miro en el espejo del estrecho camarote y no me reconozco. Parezco otro Federico.6 [I don’t know why I’ve left; I ask myself a hundred times a day. I look in the mirror in my cramped cabin and I don’t recognize myself. I seem a different Federico.]

But it was no madcap decision. His recent personal relationships had brought him anguish. His new celebrity status was an encumbrance in homophobic Spain. Even the widespread popularity of his latest volume, Romancero gitano [Gypsy Ballads], seemed only to confirm the low opinion of it shared by two admired friends, Buñuel and Dalí.7 There was a need to change direction, 6

See Carlos Morla Lynch, En España con Federico García Lorca (páginas de un diario íntimo, 1928–1936) (Aguilar, Madrid, 1958), 43. 7 Buñuel and Dalí’s unfavourable comments in letters they wrote on the Romancero gitano are quoted by Augustín Sánchez Vidal, El enigma sin fin (Planeta, Barcelona, 1988), 176–8.

114

ROBERT HAVARD

discard his Andalusian mask, develop what he called ‘mi nueva manera espiritualista’ (1654) [my new ‘spiritualist’ style] and write a more authentic ‘poesía de abrirse las venas’ (1664) [opening of the veins type of poetry]. Where better to find anonymity and reconstruct himself than in the new skyscraper metropolis? Not that he expected to like it: ‘New York me parece horrible, pero por eso mismo me voy allí’(1673) [New York seems horrible to me, but that’s precisely why I’m going there], he wrote to his friend Carlos Morla Lynch in early June 1929. He was not disappointed. The city, like a twentieth-century Bosch tableau packed with variant images on human torment, provided ample proof and illustration of the way society crushes the individual. One clear pattern is established in the mutilations of the first poem, as Lorca – via the conjunction ‘Con’ [With] – places himself alongside the sensitive and the defenceless: Con el árbol de muñones que no canta y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo. Con los animalitos de cabeza rota … y mariposa ahogada en el tintero. (471) [With the stumps of a song-less tree/ and the boy with an egg-white face./ With the little broken-headed animals/ and butterfly drowned in an inkwell.]

Another pattern derives from the pervasive pollution; for instance, the city’s river – ‘donde el Hudson se emborracha con aceite’ (517) [where the Hudson gets drunk on oil] – or the insalubrious arrival of dawn: La aurora de Nueva York tiene cuatro columnas de cieno y un hurracán de negras palomas que chapotean las aguas podridas. (497) [Dawn in New York has/ four columns of mire and a hurricane of black pigeons/ that splash in putrid waters.]

Spiritually contaminated are ‘la otra mitad,/ la mitad irredimible’ (516) [the other half,/ the unredeemable half], which includes ‘obreros parados’ (486) [the unemployed], ‘los borrachos’ (504) [drunkards], poor white industrial workers and servile blacks whose menial status is apparent in their accessories, ‘plumeros … ralladores … cacerolas’ (479) [feather dusters, graters, casseroles]. Supreme amongst the victims, however, are the young: A veces las monedas en enjambres furiosos taladran y devoran abandonados niños. (497) [At times furious swarming coins/ drill and devour abandoned children.]

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

115

Such despoliation runs counter to the Christian promise – ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5: 4) – but it matches the poet’s keen sense of having lost the purity of childhood. In the spirit of Alberti’s ‘Paraíso perdido’ [‘Paradise Lost’], Lorca devotes several poems to this critical and indeed Freudian concept. In some – ‘1910’ and ‘Poema doble del lago Edem’ [‘Double Poem of Lake Eden’] – he recalls his own youth. In others he empathizes with the children he finds about him, notably ‘El niño Stanton’ [‘The Boy Stanton’]. Kindred spirits in vulnerability are the animals that the city maims – ‘la patita de ese gato/ quebrada por el automóvil (517) [the cat’s paw/ smashed by a car] – and those it simply devours: ‘Todos los días se matan en Nueva York/ cuatro millones de patos,/ cinco millones de cerdos …’ (515) [Every day in New York they murder/ four million ducks,/ five million pigs]. This systematic abuse is done with the Church’s blessing, or at least connivance, to judge by the reference to the Jesuit founder, ‘San Ignacio de Loyola/ asesinó un pequeño conejo …’ (517) [Saint Ignatius of Loyola/ murdered a tiny rabbit], while the established church in ‘Iglesia abandonada’ [‘Abandoned Church’] is patently unable to console a deranged man who lost his son in the Great War. Perhaps it was the novelty and garishness of New York that made its cruelty stand out so sharply, for in Spain by contrast the social evils tended to lie buried under tradition or were hidden by a veil of censorship. It was, at any rate, the manifest and brutal quality of the display that had attracted the poet to New York: … yo no he venido a ver el cielo. Yo he venido para ver la turbia sangre. (515) [I haven’t come to see heaven./ I’ve come to see the muddied blood.]

He had come, in short, to witness the plight of humanity in extremis, to see the future revealed in a godless metropolis of tortured souls: No duerme nadie por el cielo. Nadie, nadie. No duerme nadie … No duerme nadie por el mundo. Nadie, nadie. No duerme nadie … Pero si alguien cierra los ojos, ¡azotadlo, hijos míos, azotadlo! (494) [No one sleeps in heaven. No one, no one./ No one sleeps. No one sleeps in the world. No one, no one./ No one sleeps. But if someone closes his eyes,/ whip him, my children, whip him!]

In what sometimes appears to be an excessively repetitive lamentation Lorca depicts the citizens of New York as automatons wasted by the city’s inhuman rhythms. They move in somnambular shells – ‘huecos … puros huecos’ [hollow … totally hollow] – bonded only by suffering:

116

ROBERT HAVARD

Agonía, agonía, sueño, fermento y sueño. Éste es el mundo, amigo, agonía, agonía. Los muertos se descomponen bajo el reloj de las ciudades … y la vida no es noble, ni buena, ni sagrada. (525) [Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream. This is the world, my friend, agony, agony. The dead decompose under the cities’ clocks … and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.]

This terrible cry of suffering, like the tragic wail of flamenco’s cante jondo [deep song], is heard in a dog’s plaintive howling in a cemetery, which is enough to move the dead to tears: El aullido es una larga lengua morada que deja hormigas de espanto y licor de lirios. Ya viene hacia la roca. ¡No alargues tus raíces! Se acerca. Gime. No solloces en sueños, amigo. ¡Amigo! Levántate para que oigas aullar El perro asirio. (510) [The howling/ is a long purple tongue that unleashes terrifying ants and the liquor of irises. Here it comes towards the rock. Don’t spread your roots! It draws nearer. It moans. Friend, don’t sob in your dreams. Friend!/ Get up so you can hear/ the Assyrian dog howl.]

It is heard too in the bellowing of cows (499), and in their bleeding and shrieking: Su hocico sangraba en el cielo … Un alarido blanco puso en pie la mañana. (503) [Its snout was bleeding in heaven … A white scream brought the morning to its feet.]

The poet is subject to the same excruciatingly physical type of pain: Mi dolor sangraba por las tardes … Mi agonía buscaba su traje, polvorienta, mordida por los perros … tú buscaste en la hierba mi agonía, mi agonía con flores de terror … (502) [My suffering bled in the afternoons… / My agony went looking for its suit,/ dusty, dog-bitten/ … you looked for my agony in the grass, the terrible flowers of my agony …]

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

117

Ultimately this pure and tangible quality of suffering is the catalyst that elevates the poet to the status of one who is able to serve as a guide to humanity. It empowers him to lead us – his people, listeners, readers – to a deeper understanding of life’s anguish, taking us beyond the obvious to hidden truths: Todos comprenden el dolor que se relaciona con la muerte, pero el verdadero dolor no está presente en el espíritu … El verdadero dolor que mantiene despiertas las cosas es una pequeña quemadura infinita en los ojos inocentes de otros sistemas … Pero el verdadero dolor estaba en otras plazas donde los peces cristalizados agonizaban dentro de los troncos … (495) [Everybody understands the suffering associated with death, but true suffering isn’t in the spirit …/ True suffering that keeps things awake/ is a small and infinite burn mark on the innocent eyes of other systems … true suffering was in other areas where crystallized fish were dying inside tree-trunks …]

Much like Alberti in ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [‘Sermon on the Four Truths’], the poet serves as a sounding board, as Yaweh said of the prophet: ‘I have made you an assayer and tester among my people’ (Jeremiah 6: 27). He is a shaman-like interpreter endowed with quasi-supernatural powers who knows suffering through personal experience and who, consequently, like Jeremiah, cannot restrain his voice: ha de gritar … ha de gritar … (522) [you have to shout … / you have to shout …]

he repeats seven times, and: Y yo, Stanton, yo solo … iré penetrando a voces las verdes estatuas de la Malaria. (503) [And I, Stanton, I all alone … will shout my way through the green statues of Malaria.]

He is, finally, in one of Lorca’s most memorable phrases: … un pulso herido que sonda las cosas del otro lado. (499) [a wounded pulse that sounds out things on the other side.]

118

ROBERT HAVARD

Once we grasp this interpretative power of suffering our approach to the volume can be straightforward and inclusive. There is no need to reject Derek Harris’s view that ‘the fundamental subject of the book is the poet not the city’,8 but we may wonder if the division is meaningful. Certainly New York serves as an extended metaphor of the poet’s tormented self, but it also shows the social evils and degenerate values that provoke his anguish. What is crucial, as the precise title Poeta en Nueva York intimates, is the balance and sense of interaction between the two terms, self and city. Some poems focus more on the self, others on the city, but the interaction is constant, even in those poems set in rural Vermont where we keenly feel the city’s absence. What I wish to show is that Lorca’s composite poetic persona consists in the various guises of a voice that offers lamentations, warnings and truths about a multiple reality called the city, and that the interactive process of Poeta en Nueva York derives essentially from the mantic quality of his voice. N.K. Chadwick has set out the main points in the (often pagan) practice of prophecy: The fundamental elements of the prophetic function seem to have been everywhere the same. Everywhere the gift of poetry is inseparable from divine inspiration. Everywhere this inspiration carries with it knowledge – whether of the past, in the form of history or genealogy; of the hidden present, in the form commonly of scientific information; and of the future, in the form of prophetic utterance in the narrower sense. Always this knowledge is uttered in poetry which is accompanied by music, whether of song or instrument. Music is everywhere the medium of communication with spirits. Invariably we find that the poet and seer attributes his inspiration to contact with supernatural powers, and his mood during prophetic utterance is exalted and remote from that of his normal existence.9

Chadwick proceeds to discuss the idea of a ‘dissociated condition’ during prophetic utterance, that is, a trance-like state of mind or ‘prophetic frenzy’, induced and ‘artificially regulated’ more or less at will, which is perhaps not unlike psychic dictation: It is commonly insisted on by experts that the shaman recites in a condition of dissociation more or less complete what he has previously soaked in during daily life. The mind, moving on traditional lines, reproduces unconsciously what it has previously assimilated.10

In this exalted state ‘the seer links his fellow-men with the spirit world’, his function being to serve as ‘messenger between the spirit and the material world’: 8 9 10

Derek Harris, García Lorca. Poeta en Nueva York (Grant & Cutler, London, 1978), 69. N. Kershaw Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy (Cambridge University Press, 1942), 14. Ibid., 16, 22, 51, 63.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

119

He alone can convoy the spirit of the dead to the living, and he alone can convoy the living in safety to their last abode among the dead. He alone can bring knowledge from the gods and from the spirits of the underworld. He alone can interpret the spiritual messages which he receives to his fellow men and present them in a form which will carry enlightenment and conviction.11

The seer’s journeying – between the living and the dead, between matter and spirit – is a constant feature in the literature of revelation and discovery.12 Lorca’s own journey to New York conforms to the pattern: besides having strong overtones of a personal quest, it is an attempt to reveal to his fellow men what life is like on the other side, not simply on the other side of the Atlantic, but in hell. Hell, in fact, is such an obvious inference to take from the horrific urban landscape depicted in Poeta en Nueva York that, ironically, the poet feels obliged to remind us of the city’s concrete reality: No es el infierno, es la calle. No es la muerte, es la tienda de frutas (516) [This is not hell, it’s the street./ This is not death, it’s the fruit stall.]

The main point of the seer’s journeys, as Chadwick explains, is to provide ‘an initiation into the next life … They are a kind of spiritual dress rehearsal, a trial trip to Heaven or Hell.’13 Such speculative expeditions are common in African, Polynesian, Japanese, Islamic, Norse and Celtic traditions, to name but a few, while the role of chanting seer or guide is played variously by tohunga, shaman, kahin, druid, vates and what the Welsh called awenyddion, mad or wild men such as Merlin who had special powers.14 Lorca evokes this atavistic force in ‘Danza de la muerte’ [‘Dance of Death’] where the procession of blacks bearing the venerated tribal mask of Death to the capitalist shrine on Wall Street is in effect a journey within a journey: El mascarón. ¡Mirad el mascarón! ¡Cómo viene del África a Nueva York! … El mascarón. ¡Mirad el mascarón! Arena, caimán y miedo sobre Nueva York … (484–5) 11

Ibid., 27, 57. Compare, for instance, the recent popular texts: Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974), Geoff Boltwood, The Messenger: The Journey of a Spiritual Teacher (Piatkus, London, 1994) and especially the concept of ‘the wounded healer’ in Melanie Reinhart, Chiron and the Healing Journey (Penguin, London, 1989). 13 Poetry and Prophecy, 94. 14 See Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Prophecy in Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini’, in James L. Kugel (ed.), Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1990), 155. 12

120

ROBERT HAVARD

[The mask. Look at the mask!/ How it comes from Africa to New York!/ The mask. Look at the mask!/ Sand, crocodile and fear above New York.]

When the procession arrives at the Stock Exchange we have what appears to be the ultimate confrontation between two worlds: ‘El ímpetu primitivo baila con el ímpetu mecánico’ (485) [primitive impetus dances with mechanical impetus]. Yet, as the poet–witness is quick to point out, ‘No es extraño este sitio para la danza, yo lo digo’ (486) [This isn’t a strange place for the dance, I insist], for in truth death could find no more suitable setting than Manhattan’s sterile ‘desfiladeros de cal’ (485) [canyons of lime] and Wall Street’s ‘columnas de sangre y de números’ (486) [columns of blood and numbers]. Lorca perhaps wishes to suggest the imminent demise of the capitalist system, a view many held after the Stock Market collapse in October 1929, just weeks before this poem was written. In this sense the arrival of the African parade at the world’s financial hub suggests the return of nature’s vital forces to the aseptic concrete, as the poet predicts: Que ya las cobras silbarán por los últimos pisos, que ya las ortigas estremecerán patios y terrazas, que ya la Bolsa será una pirámide de musgo, que ya vendrán lianas después de los fusiles y muy pronto, muy pronto, muy pronto. ¡Ay Wall Street! (487) [Now cobras shall hiss on the topmost floors; nettles shall shake courtyards and terraces; the Stock Exchange shall be a pyramid of moss; jungle vines shall supplant rifles and very soon, very soon, very soon. Oh, Wall Street!]

Lorca distinguishes between the far-sighted processors who convey the mask of Death to Wall Street and death itself which is already there in spirit, for instance in the person of ‘el director del banco observando el manómetro/ que mide el cruel silencio de la moneda’ (485) [the bank director scrutinising the Stock Exchange/ that measures the cruel silence of money]. Just as T.S. Eliot observed in 1922 of the crowds flowing over London Bridge, ‘I had not thought death had undone so many,’15 Lorca sees that the true dead are not only magnates and financiers but the myriad anonymous office workers: ‘los otros, los borrachos de plata, los hombres fríos,/ … los que beben en el banco de lágrimas de niña muerta’ (486) [the others, those who are drunk on silver,

15

T.S. Eliot, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, in The Waste Land, see The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (Faber & Faber, London, 1969), 62.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

121

the cold men,/ … those who drink a dead girl’s tears at the bank.] Money’s pernicious effect reaches everywhere and everyone: Las muchachas americanas llevaban niños y monedas en el vientre … … los camareros y los cocineros y los que limpian con la lengualas heridas de los millonarios… (579, 481) [American girls carried children and coins in their wombs … … waiters and cooks and those who clean millionaires’ wounds with their tongues.]

The poet’s message is clear: the modern world, epitomized in the city of New York, has made a god of money and has lost its way and is doomed. This compares with the unsparing denunciation of Jerusalem by Old Testament prophets who called the city a ‘brazen harlot’ (Ezekiel, 16: 30) for its unfaithfulness to Yaweh, and voiced God’s despair – You have burdened me with your sins, you have wearied me with your iniquities … (Isaiah 43: 24)

– as well as his righteous retribution: ‘I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins’; ‘I will make this city a Horror’ (Jeremiah 9: 11; 19: 8). The worship of money, as in biblical times, is an act of idolatry by which the people forsake the path laid down for them. Their collective iniquity is caught in the vulgarity of ‘Paisaje de la multitud que vomita’ [‘Landscape of the Vomiting Multitude’] and ‘Paisaje de la multitud que orina’ [‘Landscape of the Pissing Multitude’], the first of which shows a horrified Lorca pressed in on all sides by mindless Coney Island day-trippers: yo, poeta sin brazos, perdido entre la multitud que vomita (488) [I, an armless poet, lost/ among the vomiting multitude].

In this poem the freak side-show figure of ‘la mujer gorda’ [the fat woman] embodies all that is grotesque in the tumultuous pleasure-seeking city. Much like Fellini’s obsession with fat women in Roma and other films, it again brings to mind the personification of Israel as a harlot (Jeremiah 3: 6; Ezekiel 16: 26) and the woman-city of Revelations: Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of the earth’s abominations … the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, merchants of the earth have grown rich with the wealth of her wantonness … Come out of her, my people,/ lest you take part in her sins … for her sins are heaped high as heaven. (Revelations 17–18)

122

ROBERT HAVARD

A wrathful Yaweh had exiled his chosen people to Babylon as a punishment for breaking their covenant to worship the one true God. There they remained for seventy years in trial and repentance until they had sufficiently atoned for their sins and it was time to do judgement upon that city’s graven images. Its destruction – ‘the broad walls of Babylon shall be utterly broken’ – is seen in terms of civilization being reclaimed by nature, especially animals: ‘wild beasts shall dwell with hyenas in Babylon’ (Jeremiah 50: 39), ‘and I will make it (Babylon) a possession of the hedgehog’ (Isaiah 14: 23). The same happens elsewhere: Their strong cities will be like the deserted places … And the birds of prey will summer upon them, and all the beasts of the earth will winter upon them. (Isaiah 17–18) From generation to generation it shall lie waste … But the hawk and the porcupine shall possess it, the owl and the raven shall dwell in it … Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches, and wild beasts shall meet with hyenas … There shall the owl nest and lay and hatch and gather her young … yea, there shall the kites be gathered, each one with her mate. (Isaiah 34: 10–15)

Though primarily destructive, this reinstatement of nature also signals a restoration of former, simpler values: ‘The redeemed shall walk there’ (Isaiah 35: 9). This is the point Lorca consistently makes by reference to exotic plants and zoo animals in New York where, as we have seen: ‘las cobras silbarán por los últimos pisos,/ … las ortigas estremecerán patios y terrazas … / ya vendrán lianas después de los fusiles’ (487) [cobras shall hiss on the topmost floors,/ nettles shall shake courtyards and terraces/ … jungle vines shall supplant rifles]. In ‘Oda al rey de Harlem’ [‘Ode to the King of Harlem’] the displaced blacks, like the Jews in Babylon, must patiently await their emancipation: ¡Negros! ¡Negros! ¡Negros! ¡Negros! Jamás sierpe, ni cebra, ni mula palidicieron al morir. … Aguardad bajo la sombra vegetal de vuestro rey a que cicutas y cardos y ortigas turben postreras azoteas. (481–2) [Blacks! Blacks! Blacks! Blacks! No serpent, zebra or mule/ ever turned pale in the face of death. … Wait under your king’s vegetable shadow/ until hemlocks and thistles and stinging nettles/ disrupt the last rooftops.]

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

123

In the meantime the poet instructs them to keep faith with nature which will vanquish the negative forces of the city and reclaim what was once its own: Buscad el gran sol del centro hechos una piña zumbadora. El sol que se desliza por los bosques … el sol que destruye números y no ha cruzado nunca un sueño, el tatuado sol que baja por el río y muge seguido de caimanes. (481) [Look for the great central sun/ as you turn into a buzzing pineapple. The sun that slides through the forests … the sun that destroys numbers and has never crossed a dream, the tattooed sun that goes down by the river and bellows with crocodiles in pursuit.]

These natural forces associated with the blacks will, he assures them, overthrow the established and less charitable system which, ironically, is based on the Old Testament: Entonces, negros, entonces, entonces, podréis … poner parejas de microscopios en las cuevas de las ardillas y danzar al fin, sin duda, mientras las flores erizadas asesinan a nuestro Moisés casi en los juncos del cielo. (482) [Then, blacks, then, only then,/ will you be able … to place pairs of microscopes in squirrel lairs and dance fearlessly, at last, while bristling flowers murder our Moses virtually in the bullrushes of heaven.]

On that joyful day the Church will conspicuously not be invited to the festivities, nor will its leader, who is linked with the forces of power and oppression: ¡Que no baile el Papa! ¡No, que no baile el Papa! Ni el Rey, ni el millonario de dientes azules … (486–7) [But don’t let the Pope dance!/ No, don’t let the Pope dance! Nor the King,/ nor the millionaire with blue teeth]

Salvation – for the blacks as for mankind in general – is thus bound up with the idea of the life force of nature returning to overwhelm the death values of a concrete and capitalist city that is only Christian in an outward and degenerate sense. The poet advocates ‘los programas de la selva’ (517) [the jungle’s programmes], which is to say, as he concludes ‘Panorama ciego

124

ROBERT HAVARD

de Nueva York’ [‘Blind Panorama of New York’], a restoration of chthonic values: No hay dolor en la voz. Aquí sólo existe la Tierra. La Tierra con sus puertas de siempre que llevan al rubor de los frutos. (496) [There is no pain in the voice. Only the Earth exists here. The Earth and its timeless doors/ which lead to the fruits’ reddening.]

The same point is made forcefully to the boy Stanton: he should forget civilized white values and hold instead to the simple truths he instinctively knows as a child: Tu ignorancia es un monte de leones Stanton … Stanton, vete al bosque con tus arpas judías, vete para aprender celestiales palabras que duermen en los troncos, en nubes, en tortugas, en los perros dormidos, en el plomo, en el viento, en lirios que no duermen, en aguas que no copian, para que aprendas, hijo, lo que tu pueblo olvida. (502–3) [Your ignorance is a mountain of lions, Stanton … Stanton, go to the woods with your jew’s-harp, go learn celestial words that sleep in tree-trunks, in clouds, in turtles, in sleeping dogs, lead and wind, in sleepless lilies and unrepeating waters, so that you may learn, my son, what your people forget.]

Most triumphantly, in the last verse of ‘Oda a Walt Whitman’ [‘Ode to Walt Whitman’], when Lorca stands near the American poet’s grave by the Hudson, he envisages that the messenger who bears the glad tidings of nature’s advent will not only be a child – compare ‘and a little child shall lead them’ (Isaiah 11: 6) – but also, appropriately, black: Quiero que el aire fuerte de la noche más honda quite flores y letras del arco donde duermes y un niño negro anuncie a los blancos del oro la llegada del reino de la espiga. (526) [I want the strong breeze from the deepest night to strip flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep and a black child to proclaim to gold-craving whites the coming of the kingdom of the ear of corn.]

On this prophetic note the sequence of poems written in New York reaches an uplifting conclusion. The poet–seer has led us through the gamut of

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

125

collective or tribal experience, detailing the torment of a hellish present – the fruit of our false values – before allowing a glimpse of the promised land. Reflecting on Lorca’s essentially spiritual journey to New York, we can make a number of observations on what he says and the way he says it. As to content, firstly, this bears close comparison with Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel which, as Alexander Rofé notes, are books with a tripartite structure comprising (a) Judgement, (b) Oracles against the Nations and (c) Consolation and Restoration.16 Examples of judgement and restoration are especially plentiful in Poeta en Nueva York, as we have seen, while there is also a strong sense of ‘the Nations’ or of ‘el pueblo’ [the people], in which context the blacks are the chosen ones with whom Lorca identifies most closely and the whites those who have lost their values, ‘lo que tu pueblo olvida’ (503) [what your people forget]. The poet–seer functions as intercessor between the people and a distant, unseen godhead. He conveys a series of messages or truths to them, while at the same time he embodies their suffering and implicitly represents this to the godhead, indifferent though the latter is. When conveying messages to the people the poet speaks with an authority and omniscience that we assume stems from his supernatural inspiration. His messages fall into two types: either they warn against the people’s wrongdoing and of God’s consequent wrath, which type is directed at the incorrigible whites; or they instruct as to how best to reach the promised land, which type is addressed to the blacks (or children) and typically involves the rejection of white values (including the Church) and a request to keep faith with older natural values. As regards the poet–seer’s second function of representing the people’s suffering, here Lorca is especially close to Jeremiah in whom, says Timothy Polk, ‘the personalism of the prophetic preaching reaches its definitive form’.17 Like Jeremiah – ‘My eyes are spent with weeping’ (Lamentations 2: 11) – Lorca identifies at an emotional level with the people in their plight and is consequently unable to keep silent. For example, in ‘Grito hacia Roma’ [‘Shout towards Rome’] he shouts down a curse or mantic spell on the Pope, appropriately from the height of the Chrysler Building, an act of rebellion prompted by the pontiff’s signing of a concordat with Mussolini in 1929. In this kind of irreverence Lorca’s anger and perplexity again recalls Jeremiah’s frustration: Jeremiah contra mundum et

16 Alexander Rofé, Introduction to Prophetic Literature, trans. from the Hebrew by Judith H. Seeligmann (Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, 1997), 41 et seq. Rofé points out that Jeremiah is rather more complicated than the other two major prophets on account of the personal dimension and biographical detail included. 17 Timothy Polk, The Prophetic Persona: Jeremiah and the Language of the Self (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplementary Series 42, University of Sheffield, 1984), 7.

126

ROBERT HAVARD

Deum.18 In another poem Lorca suggests that his own suffering and unsatisfied aspirations may serve as a consolation and relief for others: Este fuego casto de mi deseo, esta confusión por anhelo de equilibrio, este inocente dolor de pólvora en mis ojos aliviará la angustia de otro corazón devorado por las nebulosas. (514) [This chaste and burning desire of mine, this confusion that comes from longing for equilibrium, this innocent gunpowder suffering in my eyes will lighten the anguish of another heart/ devoured by nebulae.]

The prophet’s intercessory role between people and godhead is ‘dialogical’, says Polk, there being much in his analysis of Jeremiah that bears on Lorca: At one moment Jeremiah may speak in a voice that is purely his own, while at the next speak as or with the voice of the people … and in the next in a voice indistinguishable from Yaweh’s … Representing each party to the other, Jeremiah is subject to an extraordinary tension. He not only entertains the grief and anger proper to each toward the other but comes personally to embody the divine–human event such that his life becomes a vehicle for the event’s interpretation. Jeremiah’s life becomes his message.19

In similar vein, we sense that Lorca’s prophetic self in Poeta en Nueva York is as much delineated by his identification with the suffering people as it is by his indignation towards them. As a composite representation of these and other emotions he is a paradigm or blueprint that contains the entire meaning of the text. His mantic role is again evident when he leaves New York and retreats to Lake Eden for several weeks in August–September 1929. This withdrawal into solitude – ‘cuando me quedo solo’ (501) [when I am alone] – follows a well-known vatic pattern that Anthony Storr describes: The enlightenment which finally came to Buddha whilst he was meditating beneath a tree on the banks of the Nairanja river is said to have been the culmination of long reflection upon the human condition. Jesus, according to both St Matthew and St Luke, spent forty days in the wilderness undergoing temptation by the devil before returning to proclaim his message of repentance and salvation. Mahomet, during the month of Ramadan, each year withdrew himself from the world to the cave of Hera. St Catherine of

18

See John Paterson’s commentary on Jeremiah in The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. v (Abingdon Press, New York, 1952), 538. 19 Ibid., 125.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

127

Siena spent three years in seclusion in her little room in the Via Benincasa before entering upon an active life of teaching and preaching.20

The tranquillity Lorca experienced during his retreat to Vermont was of immense benefit to him. Not only did he write some of his finest poems during this interlude on the shores of Lake Eden, it is clear that his creativity was directly attributable to the spiritual regeneration he achieved there. The concentrated self-focusing that solitude allowed was enhanced by his sense of communion with nature, an experience dear to Walt Whitman who also discovered himself in nature or with animals: I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long.21

This neo-Romantic mood is especially evident in ‘Poema doble del Lago Eden’ [‘Double Poem of Lake Eden’] where the poet rediscovers his voice, a voice that comes to him in beautiful modulated tones as he absorbs the lakeside scene: Era mi voz antigua … La adivino lamiendo mis pies bajo los frágiles helechos mojados. ¡Ay voz antigua de mi amor, ay voz de mi verdad, ay voz de mi abierto costado …! Estás aquí bebiendo mi sangre … voz mía libertada … (498–9) [It was my former voice … I divine it licking my feet/ beneath the fragile wet ferns. Oh, former voice of my love,/ oh, voice of my truth, voice of my open side …! You are here drinking my blood … / liberated voice of mine …]

This voice struggles within him against other contaminated voices, ‘las voces de los borrachos’ [voices of drunkards] and ‘esta voz de hojalata y talco’ [this voice of tinplate and talcum]. It is a pure voice that emerges from the poet’s deepest self at a time when he felt most vulnerable, knowing that his respite in Vermont would soon end and that he would have to return to the city,

20

Anthony Storr, Solitude (Flamingo, London, 1988), 34. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (W.W. Norton, New York and London, 1973), 60.

21

128

ROBERT HAVARD

Así hablaba yo. Así hablaba yo cuando Saturno detuvo los trenes y la bruma y el Sueño y la Muerte me estaban buscando. (499) [Thus spoke I./ Thus spoke I when Saturn stopped the trains and mist and Dream and Death were seeking me.]

His period of quiet introspection served to recharge this oracular voice. What it consists of as a performative organ is something we shall now try to determine.

Working the oracle: mantic trance or psychic dictation? While our attention up to now has been primarily focused on content, it will not have escaped notice that rhetorical devices abound in the production of Lorca’s mantic voice. This is hardly surprising for musicality and metaphorical exuberance are necessarily prominent in all prophetic utterance, given the exalted mood of the speaker and what Chadwick describes as: the practical necessity of couching prophecy in the most impressive and far-reaching vehicle of expression, partly through a desire to reach the spirits, who are assumed to be far away, and partly to ‘publish’ orally in the most impressive form.22

A pronounced rhythmic quality, so characteristic of oral poetry, is indispensable to the seer as a tool of access and comprehension, while the modulation of his voice is an essential requisite for the revelation of truths or hidden knowledge. Rhythm is achieved in a number of ways. Kugel distinguishes a tendency in biblical prophets to use repetition, parallelism and binary or two-part sentences such as the following: Happy the man who fears the Lord, Who greatly delights in his commandments. (Psalm 112)

Here the second line B is separated from the first line A by a slight pause usually marked by a comma, while B is separated from the next line by a longer pause or stop. Kugel suggests that: this pattern of stops [,.] is responsible for much of the feeling of regularity found in biblical poetry … B is clearly separable from A, yet serves to continue A. The feeling of connection between the two parts is often achieved (as in the preceding example) by having B parallel A in some 22

N.K. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy, 45.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

129

fashion, through similar syntax, repetition or restatement and the like, or by ellipsis of some element found in A and implied in B.23

These features are already apparent in the first poem in Poeta en Nueva York, ‘Vuelta de paseo’ [‘Back from a Walk’], which is short enough to quote in full: 1 4

8

12

Asesinado por el cielo, entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe y las formas que buscan el cristal, dejaré crecer mis cabellos. Con el árbol de muñones que no canta y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo. Con los animalitos de cabeza rota y el agua harapienta de los pies secos. Con todo lo que tiene cansancio sordomudo y la mariposa ahogada en el tintero. Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día. Asesinado por el cielo. (471)

[Murdered by heaven./ Between shapes that move toward serpent and shapes that seek out glass,/ I’ll let my hair grow. With the stumps of a song-less tree/ and the boy with an egg-white face. With the little broken-headed animals/ and ragged dry-footed water. With everything tired and deaf-mute/ and the butterfly drowned in an inkwell. Bumping into my daily different face./ Murdered by heaven.]

We note the straightforward repetition of line 1 in line 12, though, as Swettler remarks of Islamic practice: ‘the repeated phrase or period continually takes on new semantic and emotional connotations’.24 In the above poem the meaning of the first line is expanded by the time we reach the last line, for the murder of the poet is linked with and coloured by the mutilation of (other) defenceless creatures which have been enumerated in the meantime. It is a short step from here to parallelisms and to binary sentences. Parallelisms occur in lines 2 and 3 above, and again in lines 5, 7 and 9, where each line beginning with ‘Con’ [With] presents a new example of mutilation or sickness. Ellipsis is also evident, for grammatical correctness would require each line to begin with a verb such as ‘Estoy con …’ [I am with]. The intervening lines 6, 8 and 10 parallel each other, syntactically as well as metaphorically, 23

James L. Kugel (ed.), Poetry and Prophecy, 3–5. Michael Swettler, ‘A Mantic Manifesto: The Sura of The Poets and the Qur’anic Foundations of Prophetic Authority’, in James L. Kugel (ed.), Poetry and Prophecy, 91–2. 24

130

ROBERT HAVARD

while each stands in binary relation to the line it follows. The connectives ‘y’ [and] dispense with the need for a comma, though a short pause occurs at the preceding line endings. Each connective introduces another image variant on the abused type the poet identifies with, as in the first pairing where the loss of limbs is echoed in the lack of facial features: Con el árbol de muñones que no canta y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo. [With the stumps of a song-less tree/ and the boy with an egg-white face.]

Finally, lines 4 and 11, though distant from one another, have considerable semantic compatibility in that both refer to a changing facial identity. In all, one would have to say that the poem is a tightly bound unit, with semantic and syntactical patterning bringing a significant admixture to the isomorphic repetition and nearly regular assonance in e-o. Kugel notes that longer sentences ‘are particularly characteristic’ of prophetic utterance in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which no doubt is due in part to the fervour of the poet–seer’s inspiration running away with him.25 Longer sentences are cumbersome to illustrate, but we can say that they typically occur when the poet is emotionally aroused, as in the angry and repetitive conclusion to ‘Grito hacia Roma’ [‘Shout towards Rome’] or again in the second half of ‘Danza de la muerte’ [‘Dance of Death’] which whips up a feverish mood: Son los otros los que bailan con el mascarón y su vihuela; son los otros, los borrachos de plata, los hombres fríos, los que crecen en el cruce de los muslos y llamas duras, los que buscan la lombriz en el paisaje de las escaleras, los que beben en el banco de lágrimas de niña muerta o los que comen por las esquinas diminutas pirámides del alba. (486) [It’s the others who dance with the mask and its vihuela; it’s the others, drunk on silver, the cold men, those who grow in the fold of thighs and hard flames, those who seek the earthworm in the landscape of fire-escapes, those who drink dead girl’s tears in the bank or those who eat pyramids of dawn on tiny street corners.]

This enumeration is structured largely by anaphora – in the lines beginning ‘Son los…’ and ‘los que…’ [It’s the/ those who] – and by semantic and syntactical parallels in the development of each phrase; additionally, the strong rhythm is enhanced by occasional alliteration: ‘crecen en el cruce’, 25

Ibid., 4.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

131

‘beben en el banco’, ‘comen por las esquinas’. A poem’s rhythm is established at the outset, as we can observe in ‘New York (oficina y denuncia)’ [‘New York (Office and Denunciation)’]: Debajo de las multiplicaciones hay una gota de sangre de pato; debajo de las divisiones hay una gota de sangre de marinero; debajo de las sumas, un río de sangre tierna. Un río que viene cantando por los dormitorios de los arrabales, y es plata, cemento o brisa en el alba mentida de New York. (515) [Under the multiplications/ there’s a drop of duck’s blood; under the divisions,/ there’s a drop of sailor’s blood; under the additions, a river of young blood. A river that comes singing/ through the suburbs’ dormitories, and it is silver, cement or breeze/ in New York’s fake dawn.]

Repetition of the line-opening words ‘Debajo de’ [Under] and ‘hay’ [there’s] is supported by the mathematical parallelism, multiplications–divisions–additions, which in turn introduces three variant images on blood. The last of these, ‘un río de sangre tierna’ [a river of young blood], leads via virtual anadiplosis to the final image, ‘Un río que viene’ [A river that comes]. This industrialized river is an abomination of the biblical rivers such as the Jordan or the ‘river of the water of life’ that flows ‘bright as crystal’ through the new Jerusalem in the conclusion to Revelations (22: 1). Its sterile slab re-appears in ‘Navidad en el Hudson’ [‘Christmas on the Hudson’] which begins: 1 4

8

12

16

¡Esa esponja gris! Ese marinero recién degollado. Ese río grande. Esa brisa de límites oscuros. Ese filo, amor, ese filo. Estaban los cuatro marineros luchando con el mundo, con el mundo de aristas que ven todos los ojos, con el mundo que no se puede recorrer sin caballos. Estaban uno, cien, mil marineros, luchando con el mundo de las agudas velocidades, sin enterarse de que el mundo estaba solo por el cielo. El mundo solo por el cielo solo. Son las colinas de martillos y el triunfo de la hierba espesa. Son los vivísimos hormigueros y las monedas en el fango. El mundo solo por el cielo solo. Y el aire a la salida de todas las aldeas. (491)

132

ROBERT HAVARD

[That grey sponge!/ That slit-throated sailor./ That huge river. That breeze with dark boundaries. That knife edge, love, that knife edge. There were four sailors wrestling with the world, with the world of groins all eyes can see, with the world you can’t cross without horses. There was one, a hundred, a thousand sailors wrestling with the world of sharp-edged velocities, unaware that the world was alone in the sky./ The world alone in the sky alone. It’s the hills of hammers and the triumph of thick grass. It’s the teeming anthills and coins in mud. The world alone in the sky alone and the breeze at every village’s exit.

Here anaphora brings an obsessive note in the insistent and deictic ‘Ese/Esa’ [That] (lines 1–5). The first syllable in this demonstrative, Es-, transforms alliteratively into ‘Es-taban’ (at line 6), a verb that is itself repeated three times. There follow four instances of ‘con el mundo’ [with the world] which run into three assertions beginning with ‘el mundo’ [the world] and lead to verbatim repetition of the resounding phrase ‘El mundo solo por el cielo solo’ [the world alone in the sky alone]. Finally, lines 14 and 15 unfold in parallelistic fashion. What the poet achieves by this structuring is a focus on key words and concepts (river, sailors, wrestling, world, sky, aloneness), plus a highly rhythmic utterance that carries a sense of emotive urgency, obsession and despair. The expansive ‘Oda a Walt Whitman’ [‘Ode to Walt Whitman’] also begins with a river image: 1 4

8

12

16

Por el East River y el Bronx los muchachos cantaban enseñando sus cinturas, con la rueda, el aceite, el cuero y el martillo. Noventa mil mineros sacaban la plata de las roca y los niños dibujaban escaleras y perspectivas. Pero ninguno se dormía, ninguno quería ser el río, ninguno amaba las hojas grandes, ninguno la lengua azul de la playa. Por el East River y el Queensborough los muchachos luchaban con la industria, y los judíos vendían al fauno del río la rosa de la circuncisión y el cielo desembocaba por los puentes y los tejados manadas de bisontes empujadas por el viento. Pero ninguno se detenía, ninguno quería ser nube,

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

133

ninguno buscaba los helechos ni la rueda amarilla del tamboril. (522–3) [Along the East River and the Bronx bare-waisted youths were singing with the wheel, oil, leather and hammer. Ninety thousand miners extracted silver from rocks and children drew stairways and perspectives. But no one was sleeping,/ no one wanted to be the river, no one loved huge leaves,/ no one the beach’s blue tongue. Along the East River and Queensborough youths were battling with industry, and Jews sold to the river’s faun/ the rose of circumcision and on bridges and rooftops the sky discharged herds of wind-driven bison. But no one paused for thought,/ no one wanted to be a cloud, no onelooked for ferns/ nor the tambourine’s yellow wheel.]

These four stanzas are effectively two alternating pairs, the first and third stanzas and the second and fourth being closely related by repetition and parallelism. The first and third set the scene with a pictorial description of lusty young men engaged in industry, that is, in the extraction of profitable commodities from nature. Emphasis is on physical labour in the first stanza, but by the end of the third it has shifted to the exploitation of this labour. The term ‘judíos’ [Jews] is generic for businessmen, an admittedly offensive notion but one that needs to be seen in the biblical context of an erring people, just as whites generally and the Catholic Church in particular are said to err. The exploitative tendency of industry is captured in the image of circumcision which, aside from the licentious colouring of faun, suggests that even the workers’ youth is a saleable commodity. This further betrayal of primary values recalls Jeremiah’s warning that ‘all the house of Israel is uncircumcised in heart’ (9: 26). In the second and fourth stanzas the parallelisms between lines 6 and 16, 7 and 17, 8 and 18 are sharper. Again the idea is that humans are brutalized by the city’s industry and are incapable (in ascending order) of sleeping, dreaming, desiring change and loving nature. The latter is rendered by evocative parallels: 8 ninguno amaba las hojas grandes 18 ninguno buscaba los helechos [no one loved huge leaves// no one looked for ferns]

Both are developed in binary fashion by seconding lines: 9 ninguno la lengua azul de la playa 19 ni la rueda amarilla del tamboril [no one the beach’s blue tongue// nor the tambourine’s yellow wheel].

134

ROBERT HAVARD

The poet is nothing if not consistent in his theme: urban civilization alienates man from his roots and deprives him of his imaginative faculty by cutting his umbilical link with nature. By contrast, Walt Whitman is a beacon showing an alternative way: 1 4

8

12

16

Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman, he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas, ni tus hombros de pana gastados por la luna, ni tus muslos de Apolo virginal, ni tu voz como una columna de ceniza; anciano hermoso como la niebla que gemías igual que un pájaro con el sexo atravesado por una aguja, enemigo del sátiro, enemigo de la vid y amante de los cuerpos bajo la burda tela. Ni un solo momento, hermoso viril que en montes de carbón, anuncios y ferrocarriles, soñabas ser un río y dormir como un río con aquel camarada que pondría en tu pecho un pequeño dolor de ignorante leopardo. Ni un solo momento, Adán de sangre, macho, hombre solo en el mar, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman … (523–4)

[Not for a single moment, handsome, aged, Walt Whitman, have I lost sight of your beard full of butterflies, nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon, nor your virginal Apollo thighs,/ nor your voice like a column of ash; handsome ancient of mist/ who moaned like a bird, with its sex pierced by a needle,/ enemy of the satyr, enemy of the vine and lover of bodies under rough cloth. Not for a single moment, virile beauty who amidst mountains of coal, billboards and railway lines, dreamt of being a river and of sleeping like a river with that comrade who would place in your heart a simple leopard’s small pain. Not for a single moment, full-blooded manly Adam, man alone on the sea, handsome, aged, Walt Whitman …]

Fittingly, Whitman too was a visionary poet, as the admiring D.H. Lawrence noted: ‘Whitman enters on the last phase of spiritual triumph. He really arrives at that stage of infinity which the seers sought.’26 In similar vein Malcolm Cowley comments: ‘ “Song of Myself” should be judged, I think, as 26

See Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 844.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

135

one of the great inspired (and sometimes insane) prophetic works that have appeared at intervals in the Western world, … like Thus Spake Zarathustra.’27 Whitman himself wrote, thinking of poets: There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait a while, dropping off by degrees, and prophets en masse shall take their place.28

In his poetry Whitman speaks of his nation on a grand scale, ‘I hear America singing’; he embodies its aspirations, ‘I advance from the people in their own spirit’; he preaches a gospel of oneness and equality, ‘For you … Democracy … I am trilling these songs’; and, besides rejoicing in nature, he champions ‘the body electric’ and sexuality, ‘From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus.’29 In these ways he exemplifies for Lorca all that is open, true and virtuous. That he also celebrates the love of man for man – For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy? And who but I should be the poet of comrades?30

– elevates his stature in Lorca’s eyes and endows him with historical importance, while his decent manly values (described in lines 9–10) make him a model to be venerated. Lorca’s verse is seldom as prolix as Whitman’s ecstatic ‘chants’,31 but his first sentence above extends to eleven lines and contains seventy-four words, a case perhaps of being infected by Whitman’s voluble enthusiasm. Control and rhetorical argumentation comes through repetition: ‘Ni un solo momento’ [Not a single moment] occurs three times; through negative enumeration, ‘ni tus hombros … muslos … voz’ [nor your shoulders … thighs … voice]; and through transpositions, ‘viejo hermoso … anciano hermoso … hermoso viril … viejo hermoso’ [handsome, aged … handsome ancient … virile beauty … handsome, aged]. Lorca’s view of New York is, however, the opposite to that of Whitman who marvels at the thriving metropolis: ‘Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?’32 Whitman delights in the display of physical labour: Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil, Each has his main sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire. 27 28 29 30 31 32

Malcolm Cowley, ‘Hindu Mysticism and Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” ’, ibid., 919. See the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, ibid., 729. Ibid., 12, 19, 93, 91. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 163.

136

ROBERT HAVARD

From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements, The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms, Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure, They do not hasten, each man hits his place. The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses … tall he stands poised on one leg on the string piece …33

But Lorca, with the same keen eye for the male torso, finds only oppression in the rampant capitalism of industrial society. The decades that have elapsed since ‘Song of Myself’ (1855) and Whitman’s death in 1892 have brought prolific growth and huge problems. Effectively, Whitman’s dream for his new nation and great city has been betrayed by the false gods of productivity and profit. ‘Duerme’ [Sleep], Lorca tells the poet, ‘duerme, no queda nada’ [sleep, nothing remains], for ‘América se anega de máquinas y llanto’ [America is drowning in machines and grief]. Yet Lorca admires Whitman precisely for his ability to dream, for retaining his dream in the face of encroaching pollution, ‘montes de carbón, anuncios y ferrocarriles’ [mountains of coal, billboards and railway lines]. Crucially, if almost imperceptibly, Whitman’s steadfastness in holding to his dream is transformed in the poem’s second half into a resoluteness in the face of moral pollution. Which is to say, Whitman remains impervious to the sordid temptations of the flesh – implicitly a grave threat to homosexuals in the city – and instead keeps faith with his ideal of comrades: Y tú, bello Walt Whitman, duerme a orillas del Hudson con la barba hacia el polo y las manos abiertas. Arcilla blanda o nieve, tu lengua está llamando camaradas que velen tu gacela sin cuerpo. (526) [And you, lovely Walt Whitman, stay asleep on the banks of the Hudson with your beard towards the pole and your hands open. Soft clay or snow, your tongue is summoning comrades to keep watch over your bodiless gazelle.]

Here, on the second occasion that Lorca uses Whitman’s word ‘camaradas’ [comrades], with its military and egalitarian associations, the position of the word in an enjambement gives it added force. What Lorca must have admired most in Whitman, the self-proclaimed ‘bard of personality’, was his unabashed sense of his own value and virtue, as for instance in ‘One’s-Self I Sing’ and especially ‘Song of Myself’ which begins: ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself.’34 For someone like Lorca,

33 34

From ‘Song of Myself’, ibid., 39. Ibid., 22, 28.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

137

whose socio-cultural background told him in no uncertain terms that his homosexuality was vile and sinful, this must have been a revelation. That Whitman could present himself so positively, address his nation so authoritatively and write in a visionary language that set himself above the common run, would have been nothing less than astonishing. It was one thing for the likes of Lautréamont to chant on the desperate state of man, but quite another for a homosexual to instruct his people as to what was pure and good, putting nothing above one man’s love for another, his comrade. Lorca takes up the banner and continues the prophetic practice of discriminating between right and wrong, and between different groups of people. He denounces the licentious type: Pero sí contra vosotros, maricas de las ciudades, de carne tumefacta y pensamiento inmundo, madres de lodo, arpías, enemigos sin sueño del Amor que reparte coronas de alegría. Contra vosotros siempre, que dais a los muchachos gotas de sucia muerte con amargo veneno. (525–6) [But yes, against you, city queers, with tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts, mothers of slime, harpies, sleepless enemies of Love that bestows crowns of joy. Against you always, for you give boys drops of foul death with bitter poison.]

As opposed to loveless debauchers – listed in eight variants on the pejorative term ‘marica’ [queer] – he sets ‘los puros,/ los clásicos, los señalados’ (526) [the pure men, the classical, the distinguished ones], epitomized by Whitman. Addressing this different group of people, the gay–lesbian community, Lorca again speaks prophetically to those who have gone astray. His purpose is to guide them back to their proper (gay, not heterosexual) path by contacting the spirits of the dead and revealing past values on which to build salvation. In this he fulfils a perennial role of the prophet which, as Chadwick says, is that of being ‘a repository of ancient traditions’.35 Lorca makes contact with Whitman – perhaps in the spiritualist sense – through the musicality of his verse which, if not exactly imitative of the American poet, partakes of the same mantic characteristics. Various types of repetition feature in the production of this voice, but the seer’s aura of clear-sightedness can come from other features too, such as his choice of verb tenses. Polk observes that when biblical prophets speak as with ‘the word of God’ there is a shift from the use of the subjunctive mood ‘towards

35

N. Kershaw Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy, 75.

138

ROBERT HAVARD

the indicative and the imperative’,36 in keeping with an assertive, authoritative address. In Whitman the use of the present indicative is pronounced and it lends a sense that an omniscient witness is disclosing irrefutable truths. The same happens in Lorca, for instance in ‘La aurora’ [‘Dawn’] which starts: La aurora de Nueva York tiene cuatro columnas de cieno y un huracán de negras palomas que chapotean en las aguas podridas. La aurora de Nueva York gime por las inmensas escaleras buscando entre las aristas nardos de angustia dibujada. La aurora llega y nadie la recibe en su boca porque allí no hay mañana ni esperanza posible. A veces las monedas en enjambres furiosos taladran y devoran abandonados niños. Los primeros que salen comprenden con sus huesos que no habrá paraíso ni amores deshojados … (497) [Dawn in New York has/ four columns of mire and a hurricane of black pigeons/ that splash in putrid waters. Dawn in New York groans/ down the immense fire-escapes seeking amidst the groins/ spikenards of sketched anguish. Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth because here morning and hope are impossible. Sometimes furious swarms of coins drill and devour abandoned children. The first to appear know in their bones there’ll be no paradise or unleafed love.]

Here the present indicative invests the speaker with authority and endows the poem with the air of indisputable truth. It does not occur to us that the poet may be merely voicing an opinion: he is dealing in truths, we accept unquestioningly, which have been revealed to him (by a power, muse, godhead) in his state of inspiration. It does not matter that one of his statements is pictorial reportage – pigeons in polluted water – while another is metaphorical fancy, the notion that no one in New York receives dawn in his mouth (like the communion host). The speaker announces both the seen and the speculative as actualities, incontrovertible truths, and all is subsumed in poetry’s metaphorical, divining spirit. This leads us to another key feature: the tendency to speak in riddles. There is, firstly, the type of poem that is structured as a riddle, for instance

36

Timothy Polk, The Prophetic Persona, 174. Swettler similarly notes that ‘the prevalent tense of Qur’anic discourse is the present’, see L. Kugel (ed.), op. cit., 102.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

139

‘Muerte’ [‘Death’], which depicts creatures striving to change into something else – starting with ‘caballo’ [horse] and coming back full circle to horse – an idea that perhaps reflects Lorca’s sense of entrapment in himself. But there is also a more general use of images and metaphors that have the quality of riddles, as for instance in ‘Norma y paraíso de los negros’ [‘Practice and Paradise of the Blacks’] which begins: Odian la sombra del pájaro sobre el pleamar de la blanca mejilla y el conflicto de luz y viento con el salón de la nieve fría. Odian la flecha sin cuerpo, el pañuelo exacto de la despedida, la aguja que mantiene presión y rosa en el gramíneo rubor de la sonrisa. (477) [They hate the bird’s shadow/ on the white cheek’s high tide and the conflict of light and wind/ in the hall of cold snow. They hate the bodiless arrow,/ the precise handkerchief of farewell, the needle that holds pressure and redness/ in a smile’s gramineous flush.]

Here the likes and dislikes of black people are rendered in puzzling images. Patterns are not hard to find – the blacks’ dislike of social conventions stands out, and, in later stanzas, their love of nature’s openness – but the reader is nonetheless severely challenged to decipher meaning. At the same time the mystifying quality of the imagery is offset by use of the present tense indicative in all sixteen verbs in the poem. This produces a startling mix of perplexing images and simple, apparently factual statements, resulting in a poem that is both clear and mysterious, perspicacious and enigmatic. This is not, in the end, surprising, for while the poet as seer writes in an exalted state of clairvoyance he deals in hidden truths that we, the ungifted, simply cannot see. It is only natural that we, as listeners, should experience a degree of perplexity even at the point of luminous revelation. In similar vein Polk observes that biblical prophecies, as metaphorical texts, ‘exhibit a high degree of functional or deliberate ambiguity’. He explains: By ambiguity is not meant hopeless obscurity or the absence of sense but rather a superfluity of sense, multiplicity of meaning, polysemousness. By functional it is meant that the polysemous condition fits into a larger pattern; the multiple meanings are related, and there is a point to their relatedness.37

37

Ibid., 164–5.

140

ROBERT HAVARD

This is what happens in Lorca, as we saw in ‘Oda a Walt Whitman’ where layers of meaning proliferate. To be sure, we can isolate a number of the poem’s thematic units: oppression by industry; loss of contact with nature; moral corruption by the city; Whitman’s steadfastness; differentiation between types of sexuality; betrayal of Whitman’s dream for America; its possible restoration via blacks, children, comrades, and so on. Yet such an inventory serves little purpose, for the point of the poem is its multiplicity of related meanings, or what Polk calls its functional polysemousness. This is the thrust of Poeta en Nueva York where city and self are integrated by the intercessory role of the poet–prophet: qua prophet he sees ‘the larger pattern’ and how the parts fit into it; qua poet he articulates the parts without destroying their unity. In the end the strength of mantic utterance lies precisely in its wholeness of vision, its knack of integrating the parts. Repetition and parallelism of clauses – ‘parallelismus membrorum’, as Robert Lowth noted long ago38 – are the dynamics that create a network of semantic correspondences. The rhythm (in poems that rely heavily on repetition and restatement) essentially approximates to chanted speech. It is a rhythm that both derives from and produces a trance-like state, for the seer is a medium who receives inspiration in a state of dissociation, while as poet he communicates his inspired message in rhythmic utterances that induce a similar condition in his listeners. His efficacy as poet–seer will no doubt be judged on both counts. As noted earlier, utterances made in a dissociated state bear comparison with the surrealist practice of psychic dictation, for in both cases the speaker is exalted or ‘out of himself’. In traditional prophecy, it is true, inspiration flows from an external source, while for the surrealist that source is internal, namely his own unconscious. The latter, however, is equally revered by the surrealist as an oracle of truth and the prime objective for the surrealist as for the prophet of old is to let that source speak freely. It is here, in the context of facilitating utterance and achieving undirected expression that the modern poet gains most from imitating mantic speech. Leaving aside the thorny issue of authenticity, which plagues surrealist theory, we might simply adopt Chadwick’s view that in prophecy ‘the question of dissociation is one of degree’.39 What we find on examining prophetic discourse, or indeed Lorca’s mode of utterance in Poeta en Nueva York, is that the repetitive rhythms and parallelistic phrasing set up a structure, but not a rigid structure; rather it is one that can change and evolve at any moment. In effect a structure based on repetition with variation creates a strong sense of polyphonic argumentation but it does not imprison or over-direct thought. On the contrary, structure in mantic speech is designed primarily with a view to enhancing extempore 38 Robert Lowth, Sacred Poetry (Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews) (Boston, 1829), which is quoted at length in James L. Kugel, Poetry and Prophecy, 22–4. 39 N. Kershaw Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy, 68.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

141

performance, which is to say, it provides the rhythm and corresponding units of space that the poet fills out with his (by degrees) spontaneously conceived images. Lorca may not have known exactly why he went to New York but his journey had the effect of inducing a mantic vision. The poetic voice he discovered there was radically different from the Andalusian persona he had wished to escape, but even closer to poetry’s roots.

Alberti’s oracular imperative Alberti’s poetic utterance changes even more sharply than Lorca’s from one of terse compression in the first two parts of Sobre los ángeles to expansiveness in the third and last section. The poet dates this change from May 1928 when he went to stay at the home of his friend, José María de Cossío, in the Cantabrian village of Tudanca, a sojourn from Madrid that compares with Lorca’s escape from New York to rural Vermont in August 1929. In Tudanca Alberti witnessed ‘the battle of the winds, known by the inhabitants of that solitary region as the Abrego and Gallego’, a battle depicted in two poems we considered earlier, ‘Los ángeles bélicos’ [‘The Warlike Angels’] and ‘Can de llamas’ [‘Dog of Flames’]. He adds: It was there in Tudanca that the short, controlled and concentrated verse line I had been writing gradually became longer and more in keeping with the movement of my imagination in those days. (LG, 261)

It was not just a longer line but a new voice that Alberti, like Lorca, discovered on passing through the crucible of suffering. This change from a victim’s brittle speech to that of a truth-bearing prophet is startling, for, among other things, it presupposes two different views of language. We met them earlier in our consideration of biblical language: first, the ideal or Edenic language which, as a God-given gift, provides a perfect symbiosis between object and noun; second, the obverse view of language in which lexicon and syntax are negatives since denomination equals classification and articulation equals fragmentation in accord with Lacan’s corps morcelé and the break up of the individual personality. As Alberti develops an oracular voice he is increasingly aware of these opposing types of language. In ‘Los ángeles sonámbulos’ [‘The Somnambular Angels’] he is pessimistic about his medium and his voice: Ya sabéis que mi boca es un pozo de nombres, de números y letras difuntos. Que los ecos se hastían sin mis palabras y lo que jamás dije desprecia y odia al viento. Nada tenéis que oír. ¡Dejadme! (423)

142

ROBERT HAVARD

[You know that my mouth is a pit of nouns, numbers and letters that are dead. That echoes tire without my words and what I never uttered despises and hates the wind. There is nothing for you to hear./ Leave me alone!]

With his Jesuit education perhaps still in mind, Alberti’s thoughts on language are entirely negative: his words are stillborn, repressed, spiteful. But in the next poem, ‘Tres recuerdos del cielo’ [‘Three Recollections of Heaven’], which opens the third part of Sobre los ángeles, the theme turns to a positive quest and we are taken back to a time before creation when all things – including language – were unformed: 1 4

8

No habían cumplido años ni la rosa ni el arcángel. Todo anterior al balido y al llanto. Cuando la luz ignoraba todavía si el mar nacería niño o niña. Cuando el viento soñaba melenas que peinar y claveles el fuego que encender y mejillas y el agua unos labios parados donde beber. Todo, anterior al cuerpo, al nombre, al tiempo. (427)

[Neither rose nor archangel had seen their birthday. Way back before bleating and crying. When the light didn’t yet know if the sea would be born a boy or a girl. When the wind dreamt of mops of hair to comb and carnations of fire and cheeks to light/ and water still lips to drink. All, way back before the body, noun (or name) and tense (or time).]

The biblical ‘luz’ [light] in line 3 alerts us to the notion that the poet is dealing with language in the context of creation or in terms of the first naming of things. Linguistic references abound: primitive, child-like sounds in the bleating and crying of line 2; gender concepts in the boy or girl alternative of line 4; noun and verb tense of line 8. At the same time, in lines 5–7, semantic ambiguity derives from the unclear syntax or anacoluthia – a Latinate liberty probably learnt from Góngora – which leaves the verb subject uncertain and the sense fluid. Names, in this unmade world, are strictly unnecessary: Era anterior al arpa, a la lluvia y a las palabras. (427) [It was before the harp, rain and words.]

The poet, in his ‘época del alma’ [epoch of the soul] or unborn state, has yet to be given a spatially differentiated identity:

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

143

Antes, antes que tú me preguntaras el número y el sitio de mi cuerpo … (428) [Before, way before you asked me/ my body’s number and location]

The introduction of ‘tú’ [you] brings an added complication. It might refer to a specific female – Maruja Mallo? – or it might incorporate the notion of a muse and be a metaphor for poetic language. In mock-courtly vein, which anticipates Pedro Salinas’s La voz a ti debida [The Voice I Owe You] (1933), the ‘tú’ is credited with the power of creation, and her coming into his life coincides with his positive discovery of language: Cuando tú, al mirarme en la nada, inventaste la primera palabra. Entonces, nuestro encuentro. (428) [When you, seeing me in the void,/ invented the first word. Then, our meeting.]

Alberti’s own debt, however, is unmistakably to Gustavo Aldolfo Bécquer (1836–70), the Romantic poet to whom this poem is dedicated. In his Rimas [Rhymes] Bécquer had interwoven religion, love and poetry in such a way as to suggest that a mystical quality permeates all three. He had also addressed the issue of language: essentially, his high regard for poetry – ‘Yo sé un himno gigante y extraño/ que anuncia en la noche del alma una aurora’40 [I know a gigantic and strange hymn/ that announces a dawn in the night’s soul] – is offset by a sense of the intrinsic limitations of ‘el rebelde, mezquino idioma’ [rebellious, mean language]. The point, as Henri Bergson was soon to argue, is that language belongs to the common realm and as such it cannot capture the uniqueness of feelings; moreover, its sequential syntax works against the overlapping simultaneity that is the hallmark of our inner life.41 To express this random, intuitive quality – which for Bécquer is the very spirit of poetry – a new language is required. He dreams of: ideas sin palabras, palabras sin sentido, cadencias que no tienen ni ritmo ni compás. [ideas without words,/ words without meaning, cadences that have/ neither rhythm nor measure.]

40

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Obras completas, 8th edition (Aguilar, Madrid, 1954), 439. Bergson held that ‘la pensée demeure incommensurable avec le langage’; see Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, in Oeuvres (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1959), p. 109; also 85–97 et passim. 41

144

ROBERT HAVARD

That Alberti had Bécquer in mind in ‘Tres recuerdos del cielo’ is clear not only from the fact that each of the poem’s three sections is headed epigraphically by a line from the Rimas, but more especially because the third section glosses his famous rima LIII, ‘Volverán las oscuras golondrinas’ [‘The dark swallows will return’], and concludes: Era la era en que la golondrina viajaba sin nuestras iniciales en el pico. En que las campanillas y las enredaderas morían sin balcones que escalar y estrellas. La era en que al hombro de un ave no había flor que apoyara la cabeza. Entonces, detrás de tu abanico, nuestra luna primera. (429) [It was the time when the swallow migrated/ without our initials on its beak./ When tiny bells and climbing plants died without balconies or stars to climb. The time when no flower rested its head on a bird’s shoulder. Then, behind your fan, our first moon.]

Taking his cue from Bécquer’s poem, which shows that even love is subject to the decaying process of time, Alberti escapes into an ideal state that predates the moment when love takes on form. He pays tribute to Bécquer again in ‘Invitación al arpa’ [‘Invitation to the Harp’] where the evocation of a dusty nineteenth-century drawing room reworks rima VII, ‘Del salón en el ángulo oscuro’ [‘In the Room’s Dark Corner’], though the original idea of music being latent in a still harp is converted, as we shall see shortly, to the surrealist concept of objects having sentience. For the moment let us note that the ambiguity inherent in Bécquer’s view of language applies twofold in Alberti. Essentially, the Romantic poet’s distinction between the meanness of language and the divine nature of poetry restates the biblical contrast between the word as a classifying agent and the word as revelation: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1: 1). In Alberti this contradiction is exacerbated by an education that demonstrated the power of words while inculcating a deep mistrust of them, as we see in ‘Engaño’ [‘Deception’] – Alguien detrás, a tu espalda, tapándote los ojos con palabras … Con palabras, vidrios falsos. (411–12) [Somebody behind, at your shoulder, covering your eyes with words … / With words, false glass.]

– and in the poem with an equally telling title, ‘El ángel mentiroso’ [‘The Lying Angel’]: ‘Y fui derrotada/ yo, sin violencia,/ con miel y palabras’ (400)

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

145

[And I was destroyed,/ me, without violence,/ with honey and words]. The deceitfulness of words in the mouths of Jesuits had destroyed Alberti and reduced his own expression, for most of Sobre los ángeles, to bits and pieces of sentences. As he comes through this crucible, however, and discovers a new set of values on which to reconstruct his personality, a remarkable change occurs that takes linguistic form in a more assertive expression. A major feature in this assertiveness is the increased length of line; another is the proliferation of the familiar imperative plural. In the early part of Sobre los ángeles the incidence of imperatives is small and most that appear are in the singular ‘tú’ [you]. The examples ‘Dímelo’ (389) [Tell me it], ‘Vete’ (390) [Go away] and ‘¡… quémame y huye!’ (408) [burn me and flee!] typify the terse, disjointed mode that prevails. The first instance of a familiar plural imperative in anything like sermonic guise occurs in ‘El ángel del misterio’ [‘The Angel of Mystery’]: ‘Reveládmelo … Decídmelo … Explicádmelo’ (417–18) [Reveal it to me … Tell it to me … Explain it to me]. Here it is the speaker who desperately seeks meaning from an outside source and the references to ‘nombres’ [nouns] and ‘voces’ [voices] suggest that language, however enigmatically, holds the key. Very likely the speaker is Alberti as a confused child, while the knowledgeable sources to whom he addresses his supplications are his teachers. Something similar occurs in ‘Los ángeles sonámbulos’ [‘The Somnambular Angels’], which opens with the instruction: Pensad en aquella hora: cuando se rebelaron contra un rey en tinieblas los ojos invisibles de las alcobas. (422) [Think of that moment:/ when invisible bedroom eyes rebelled against a king in darkness.]

The boys were often admonished with the instruction to focus on a signal event in Christian teaching, such as judgement day, the Passion or Lucifer’s rebellion. In the above, however, the bedroom setting suggests a sexual sin: it appears that the solitary offence committed in darkness has become an act of rebellion against God and, typically, the peccadillo of masturbation has assumed cosmic significance. Again in ‘Muerte y juicio’ [‘Death and Judgement’], when our attention is drawn to an unfortunate boy, there is a sense that the imperatives could have been uttered by a teacher: Mirad. Conteneos la sangre, los ojos. A sus pies, él mismo, sin vida. …Atended a unos ojos que preguntan por los afluentes del cielo, a una memoria extraviada entre nombres y fechas. Niño. (432, 434)

146

ROBERT HAVARD

[Look. Contain your blood, your eyes. At his feet, the selfsame one, lifeless. … Observe his eyes that ask for heaven’s tributaries, his memory lost among names and dates./ Boy.]

Alberti presents himself as a troubled schoolboy, but the call to look hard and pay attention seems modelled on the way a teacher might draw attention to a miscreant in front of a class. The resounding conclusion – Para ir al infierno no hace falta cambiar de sitio ni postura. (434) [To go to hell you needn’t move a muscle or budge an inch.]

– depicts Alberti’s childhood nightmare and at once confirms the fate his teachers had always said awaited him. The point is developed in ‘Castigos’ [‘Punishments’], a key poem in which the plural imperative is now plentiful. With six instances of ‘Oídme’ [Listen to me], including ‘Oídme aún’ [Listen to me further] and ‘oídme por último’ [listen to me a last time], the command serves as a virtual refrain, though its meaning changes as the poem progresses. Initially, there is a sense of being located at the time of judgement or punishment, but, rather than a teacher’s threatening voice, it seems the speaker warrants our attention because he has suffered greatly. The Bosch-like torments are steeped in prophetic imagery drawn from Isaiah and Revelations: Es cuando golfos y bahías de sangre, coagulados de astros difuntos y vengativos, inundan los sueños… Cuando saben a azufre los vientos y las bocas nocturnas a hueso, vidrio y alambre. Oídme. (438) [It happens when gulfs and bays of blood, coagulated with dead and vengeful stars,/ inundate dreams … When winds taste of sulphur and nocturnal mouths of bone, glass and wire. Listen to me.]

A child’s admission of ignorance – ‘Yo no sabía…/ Oídme aún’ [I didn’t know … / Listen to me further] – turns into the more positive assertions, ‘Hay noches en que las horas se hacen de piedra … / Se ve que los cuerpos no están en donde estaban’ [There are nights in which hours turn to stone … / One sees that bodies are not where they once were]. An authoritative utterance evolves and the poet’s commands become precise, ‘Pensad en las esferas derruidas’ [Think about ruined spheres], ending on an explanatory note: ‘Porque siempre hay un último posterior a la caída de los páramos’ [Because there’s always some last thing after the demise of deserts]. Effectively, he has moved from

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

147

suffering to assertion and his commands – ‘Oídme, oídme por último’ [Listen to me, listen to me a last time] – are made with the conviction that he is worth listening to because he has something important to say, a truth to communicate. The sense of revealed knowledge is stronger in the next poem, ‘El ángel falso’ [‘The False Angel’], dedicated to Maruja Mallo, and the line length grows in step with the speaker’s conviction: Oíd la lentitud de una piedra que se dobla hacia la muerte. No os soltéis de las manos. (439) [Listen to the slowness of a stone as it turns towards death. Don’t let go of your hands.]

He announces at the outset that he has been taken by evil spirits – the false angel – to the other side, or kingdom of death: ‘entre los nudos de las raíces/ y las viviendas óseas de los gusanos’ [amid the knots of roots/ and the bony dwelling places of worms]. The purpose of this journey, in line with Jesuit practice, is for him to experience that fetid zone with his senses, ‘que yo escuchara los crujidos descompuestos del mundo’ [that I might hear the world’s decomposition cracking]. But the overriding sense is that the journey has prepared the poet to serve as a shamanistic guide for the rest of us, at least those who have suffered as he has: Los que unidos por una misma corriente de agua me veis, los que atados por una traición y la caída de una estrella me escucháis, acogeos a las voces abandonadas de las ruinas. Oíd la lentitud de una piedra que se dobla hacia la muerte. (439) [Those joined by the same current of water who look upon me, those bound together by betrayal and a star’s fall who listen to me, avail yourselves of the abandoned voices of ruins. Listen to the slowness of a stone as it turns towards death.]

Endowed with knowledge and gifted with insight by dint of his journeying, he speaks in exalted mode: indeed, the binary structure of the above four lines – two pairs – imitates the seconding technique of biblical prophecy. The truths he has to impart are expounded in the last poems of Sobre los ángeles and through Sermones y moradas. Truth, in the above, centres on death as a supreme reality illustrated in all things around us, living and inanimate. Elsewhere, for instance in ‘Los ángeles muertos’ [‘The Dead Angels’], the truth asserted with repeated imperatives – ‘Buscad, buscadlos’ [Look hard, look hard for them] – is that we shall find our real selves only in relation to objects, that is, in the material circumstance of our lives. This idea of the interconnectedness of the human and the inanimate, as previously noted,

148

ROBERT HAVARD

compares with the surrealist concept of things having sentience and it returns us, by way of conclusion, to the Bécquerian poem, ‘Invitación al harpa’ [‘Invitation to the Harp’]. In this poem Bécquer’s dusty harp is a symbol of latent creativity: ‘¡Cuánta nota dormía en sus cuerdas/ … esperando la mano de nieve/ que sabe arrancarlas!’42 [So many notes asleep on its strings/ … awaiting the snowy hand/ that knows how to rouse them!]. This embryonic immanence is activated by Alberti whose attribution of sentience to objects is the primary image-making device in ‘Invitación al harpa’: Lejos, lejos. Adonde las estancias olvidan guantes de polvo y las consolas sueñan párpados y nombres ya idos. Un sombrero se hastía y unos lazos sin bucles se cansan. Si las violetas se aburren, es porque están nostálgicas de moaré y abanicos. (436) [Far, far away./ Where rooms forget dusty gloves and consoles dream of eyelids and names long gone. A hat grows weary/ and, with no ringlets, ribbons tire. If violets become bored,/ it’s because they long for moiré and fans.]

Numerous similar attributions or transferences occur: ‘muelles … sin esperanza’ [jetties without hope], ‘la pasión de un libro’ [a book’s passion], ‘el movible sueño de las bujías’ [the movable dream of light bulbs], ‘un manequí de luto agoniza’ [a mourning mannequin lies in death’s throes], ‘las maderas guardan ecos’ [wood retains echoes] and ‘las polillas desvelan el silencio de las corbatas’ [moths unveil the silence of ties]. All these examples – like Maruja Mallo’s paintings – indicate a human presence in objects, while they also imply a reciprocal dependence by humans on inanimate things. This last point comes through strongly at the end of Sobre los angeles where we find the inverse composition: ‘hombres de cinc, alquitrán y plomo … / hombres de brea y fango’ (441) [men of zinc, tar and lead … / men of pitch and mud]. The sheer quantity of these two types of images gives rise to a sense that the demarcation between the living and the inanimate is imperfectly defined. At last, in ‘Los ángeles muertos’ [‘The Dead Angels’], the mantic truth of object–subject intersubjectivity is voiced in exalted terms: Porque yo los he visto: en esos escombros momentáneos que aparecen en las neblinas. Porque yo los he tocado:

42

Obras completas, 448.

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

149

en el destierro de un ladrillo difunto … en esas ausencias hundidas que sufren los muebles desvencijados … (442) [For I have seen them:/ in those fleeting ruins that appear in mists. For I have touched them:/ in the banishment of a deceased brick … in those sunken absences that are suffered by rickety furniture …]

The length of line increases substantially again in the next poem, ‘Los ángeles feos’ [‘The Ugly Angels’], which has a liberal sprinkling of vosotros imperatives: Ved. La luna cae mordida por el ácido nítrico en las charcas donde el amoníaco aprieta la codicia de los alacranes … Mirad esto: ha sido un falso testimonio decir que una soga al cuello no es agradable y que el excremento de la golondrina exalta el mes de mayo. (443) [Look./ The moon gnawed by nitric acid falls into puddles where ammonia squeezes the covetousness of scorpions … Look at this: it’s been a false testimony to say that a rope round one’s neck is unpleasant and that a swallow’s excrement exalts the month of May.]

The poet instructs us to focus on objects around us, but these now have a consistent association: mortality. The fascination with death may owe something to the poet’s illness in the early 1920s, when he was amused by the clinical diagnosis of his physical condition – ‘Hilar adenopathy that was filtering into the upper lobe of the right lung’ – though this pneumonia prompted a radical change of mood: ‘suddenly the fear of becoming seriously ill and dying once and for all became as overwhelming as my carelessness and indifference had been before’ (LG, 143–4). In any event, the poet now has an urgent truth to communicate about the human condition in relation to other perishable objects: Pero yo os digo: una rosa es más rosa habitada por las orugas … [But I tell you: a rose is more of a rose when inhabited by caterpillars …]

This truth, in turn, is related to the concept of suffering as a spiritually enhancing experience, an empowering experience that instils visionary qualities and ultimately entitles the poet to adopt an exalted mode:

150

ROBERT HAVARD

Mirad esto también, antes que demos sepultura al viaje: cuando una sombra se entrecoge las uñas en las bisagras de las puertas o el pie helado de un ángel sufre el insomnio fijo de una piedra, mi alma sin saberlo se perfecciona. (444) [Consider this too, before we lay the journey to rest: when a shadow catches its nails in the hinges of doors or an angel’s frozen foot suffers a stone’s fixed insomnia, my soul unwittingly grows more perfect.]

We sense the poet’s brotherhood with all things that suffer, both living and inanimate. The theme will be fully developed in his next volume which begins with a highly charged sermonic address – to an implicitly large congregation – in which all those who have no experience of suffering and, correspondingly, no experience of the sentience of objects, are excluded: Aquellos que al bucear a oscuras por una estancia no hayan derribado un objeto, tropezado contra una sombra o un mueble; o al atornillar una bujía, sentido en lo más íntimo de las uñas el arañazo eléctrico e instantáneo de otra alma, que se suelden con dos balas de piedra o plomo los oídos. (451) [Those who on plunging darkly into a room haven’t knocked over an object, bumped into a shadow or piece of furniture; or on screwing in a light bulb haven’t felt in the quick of their nails the electric and instantaneous scratch of another soul, let them solder up their ears with two balls of stone or lead.]

As the prophetic compulsion to speak grows ever more intense, utterance takes on exaggerated tones of exaltation and the language expands into tracts of barely grammatical but still highly rhythmic sentences. The truths are now spoken by an officially designated prophet: ‘Atended. Ésta es su voz … Escuchadle. Ésta es su voz’ (452–3) [Pay attention. This is his voice … Listen to him. This is his voice]. What he has to say is so startling – ‘Voy a revelaros un asombro’ (453) [I am going to reveal a wonder to you] – that only a madman could conceive it. It includes the idea of endless metamorphosis: Ayudadme a cavar una ola, hasta que mis manos se conviertan en raíces y de mi cuerpo broten hojas y alas. (452) [Help me dig a wave, until my hands change into roots and from my body there sprout leaves and wings.]

In Alberti this transcendental concept that is so fundamental to Surrealism was first nourished by his sherry-making background, with its inebriated

FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY

151

fantasies and mental fermentations. But, as for many Spanish creative figures, the main suggestive source for the unbounded possibilities of transformation is the religious notion that centred on transubstantiation, a magical concept we shall examine in the next chapter.

5 TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

Transubstantiation and Metamorphosis Lore is given to cristen men, In-to flesch passeþ þe bred; As holy chirche doþ us kenne, Þe wyn, to blod, þat is so red. Anon.1 Each picture is a Mass in which I distribute the Eucharist of a knowledge. Salvador Dalí2

The paradigm of the Eucharist Lorca’s favourite game as a child was to celebrate mass, critics have confirmed via friends of the poet.3 Carmen Ramos, the daughter of Lorca’s wet nurse, tells how Federico used to place a statue of the Virgin on a low wall in the backyard of his house at Fuente Vaqueros and have his family, servants and friends sit before this improvised altar while he, dressed in assorted garments, said mass with enormous conviction. The seven- or eight-year-old Lorca stipulated that everyone should cry during his sermon, an order that Carmen’s mother – tear ducts as obliging as lactic glands – always fulfilled. Luis Buñuel enjoyed the same game: ‘I used to play at celebrating mass in the attic of our house, with my sisters as attendants. I even owned an alb, and a collection of religious artefacts made from lead.’4 As sons of relatively wealthy landowners, Lorca and Buñuel were brought up in a church-going tradition. One of Buñuel’s uncles was a priest who gave him Latin lessons every summer when the young Luis ‘served as his acolyte’, he tells us: ‘I also sang and played the violin in the Virgin of Carmen choir … We were often invited to the Carmelite convent.’5 Attachment to the 1

See Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 107. 2 The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 246. 3 See Claude Couffon, Granada y García Lorca (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1967), 23–4, and Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca, A Life (Faber and Faber, London, 1989), 15–16. 4 Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath, 12. 5 Ibid., 12.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

153

Church was fostered in both families by the mother, as it was in the Alberti household and especially in Dalí’s, over whose parental bed there hung a painting of Velázquez’s Christ Crucified. It is not surprising that the Eucharist, like the closely related Passion, formed part of everyday consciousness, for the eschatological content of the Last Supper was acted out daily under the sign of the meal. Yet the fascination of the Eucharist as a play activity is remarkable and one suspects that the principal reason for it, over and above the attractions of role-play and dressing up, is the extraordinary, magical feature at its heart: transubstantiation. It is difficult to overstate the aura that the Church must have held for the impressionable mind of a child like Lorca who delighted in the religious festivities of Fuente Vaqueros, especially the processions and firework displays in early September in honour of the village patron, the Christ of Victory.6 In rural Aragon this aura would have been even stronger, if anything, for Buñuel who, until he was fourteen accepted as literal truth the local legend of the Calanda miracle: The story goes that in 1640, Miguel Juan Pellicer, an inhabitant of Calanda, had his leg crushed under the wheel of a cart, and it had to be amputated. Now Pellicer was a very religious man who went to church every day to dip a finger into the oil that burned before the statue of the Virgin. Afterwards, he used to rub the oil on the stump of his leg. One night, it seems that the Virgin and her angels descended from heaven, and when Pellicer awoke the next morning, he found himself with a brand new leg.7

Pure magic! In addition, Calanda had a special Easter attraction: The drums of Calanda beat almost without pause from noon on Good Friday until noon on Saturday, in recognition of the shadows that covered the earth at the moment Christ died, as well as the earthquakes, the falling rocks, and the rending of the temple veil. It’s a powerful and strangely moving communal ceremony which I heard for the first time in my cradle.8

Alberti would have had similar hypnotic experiences – in his mother’s arms at the same tender age – hearing the piercing saeta [religious flamenco song] ring out before Holy Week processions along Calle Larga in El Puerto de Santa María. There can be little doubt, however, that the most potent admixture of myth, magic and rhythmic incantation that the Church offered its credulous young is to be found in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Quite simply, the priest who administers the Eucharist turns the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. At the precise moment when the two 6 7 8

Gibson, op. cit., 17. My Last Breath, 13–14. Ibid., 19.

154

ROBERT HAVARD

material substances are consecrated they are metamorphosed into the son of God who is in heaven. This, in orthodox terms, is nothing less than ‘a change of what is there, totally into something else. A conversion of one physical reality into another which already exists.’9 Nor is that all: the ensuing communion consists of eating and drinking the substances that have now been converted into the godhead, a micro-feast derived from Christ’s instruction at the Last Supper to remember him in this way [Luke 22: 19]. Now the Last Supper, as is well known, is based on the Passover feast that celebrated the legendary deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt. As such, it is sacrificial and conforms to a custom that typically involves animal sacrifice, though Abraham’s preparedness to make an offering of his son Isaac to Yahweh [Genesis 22] suggests an earlier variation. In the Last Supper it is Jesus himself who replaces the paschal lamb, as William Trapnell comments: All the important mutations of the ancient Hebraic cult remained in the Eucharist. No longer does the lifeblood of livestock seal an alliance with God, the source of all life, but rather does that of Christ, the incarnate son of God soon to be sacrificed on the cross … Jesus’s own body replaces manna as the bread of divine sustenance.10

We may wonder what impression this act of cannibalism makes on young minds. Presumably, it is accepted within the spirit of magic which, in the context of Christ’s life, is prefigured by such events as his feeding of the 5,000 [John 6: 4–14]. Sophisticated minds have split hairs over impanation, consubstantiation and full-blooded transubstantiation, but, suffice to say, it was the perceived irrationality of the Eucharist that Protestants found hard to swallow: hence the contraction, ‘hocus pocus’ < hoc est corpus meum, which expressed English scorn for the alleged superstition of the mass.11 A tendency to ridicule is apparent too in Buñuel, for instance in his early story, La Sancta Misa Vaticanae (1927), which deals with a competition among priests in Saint Peter’s Square as to who could say mass the most quickly, the winner delivering it in two minutes flat.12 Dalí, for his part, commenting on the inveterate madness of Catalans, tells of ‘the fishermen of Cadaqués who hung live lobsters from the gleaming baroque cherubim of their church’s altar, so that the death throes of the crustaceans might help them better to follow the passion of the Mass’.13 Lorca, in a startling subversion, responds 9

G.E.M. Anscombe, On Transubstantiation (Catholic Truth Society, London, no date),

2. 10

William Trapnell, Voltaire and the Eucharist (Voltaire Foundation, Taylor Institution, Oxford, 1989), 16, 17. See also Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology (Epworth Press, London, 1971), 18–28. 11 See Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966). 12 Luis Buñuel, Obra literaria, ed. Augustín Sánchez Vidal (Heraldo de Aragón, Zaragoza, 1982), 257.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

155

to the city’s voracious appetite in Poeta en Nueva York by offering his own body as food: Yo denuncio la conjetura de estas desiertas oficinas que no radian las agonías, que borran los programas de la selva, y me ofrezco a ser comido por las vacas estrujadas …14 [I denounce the compliance/ of these deserted offices that fail to broadcast suffering,/ that efface the jungle’s programme, and I offer myself to be eaten/ by the squashed cows …]

Motifs associated with the Eucharist are exceptionally plentiful and, in Dalí’s case, they run the gamut from his erotico-religious Profanation of the Host (1929) to the piously ethereal Last Supper (1955). These two extremes are conflated in Buñuel’s film Viridiana (1959) when, in the scene of the beggars’ feast, the camera suddenly freezes and thirteen debauchees are caught in poses that exactly match Da Vinci’s Last Supper, with Christ’s central role being taken by a blind man. This ‘still’ is a remarkable example of metamorphosis that transports us magically from one reality to another. It was Dalí, however, more than anyone, who founded his art on this principle.

From mass to masturbation: Dalinian metamorphosis During the Enlightenment Voltaire ridiculed the illogicality of the Eucharist with an attention to detail his Jesuit tutors would have envied. Besides mischievously exploring such material questions as the status of crumbs and spilt wine on the communion cloth (if these were in fact remnants of the Saviour’s bodily parts), Voltaire also wondered at the communicant’s defecation subsequent to ingestion: ‘Je le fais et je le mange.’15 It is no coincidence, then, that this great icon of the Age of Reason figures in one of Dalí’s most successful double images or trompe l’oeil paintings, Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) (plate 5). Here the revered sage – formally instated as such in the bust – appears to jump out of a setting that consists of a group of women under a ruined arch, their faces rendering his eyes and the arch his domed head. Our initial impression is of two independent and mutually exclusive images, Voltaire and slave market. We view 13

The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 136. ‘New York (Oficina y denuncia)’, Obras completas, 11th edition (Aguilar, Madrid, 1966), 517. 15 William Trapnell, Voltaire and the Eucharist, 8, 182. 14

156

ROBERT HAVARD

the configuration either as Voltaire’s head or as figures in an archway, but not both simultaneously. We pass from one image to the other and back again in a way that mimics Eucharistic transubstantiation as described above: ‘a change of what is there, totally into something else. A conversion of one physical reality into another which already exists.’16 Yet this seemingly arbitrary alterity is one of contrast rather than disconnection, we realize, for Voltaire, the rationalist, is implicitly opposed in the painting by the paranoiac irrationality of Dalí, or rather, his double, Gala, who stares right back at the bust which she alone matches in size. Dalí’s antipathy to Voltaire is, then, crucial to the painting. Years later it emerged in a surrealist ‘happening’ in Paris when a rhinoceros was made to charge full-pelt at the same milk-filled bust of the sage while the artist declaimed: The illustrious Monsieur de Voltaire possessed a peculiar kind of thought that was the most refined, clearest, most rational, most sterile, and misguided not only in France but in the entire world.

Naturally, Dalí identified with the rhino: ‘I will … prove that the opposite of Voltaire is the rhinoceros … Voltaire is all depressions and the rhino, the most irrational and cosmic of all animals, is all relief. I too am all relief.’17 The Slave Market, we conclude, is thus dialectical in its treatment of the rational vis-à-vis paranoiac views of reality. Childhood play associated with the Eucharist gave way in adolescence to another game based on a magical transformation: masturbation. Alberti refers twice to the ‘miracle’ of the erect penis, first witnessed in an older boy in the dunes of El Puerto.18 Dalí’s account of his self-discovery on the beach at Rosas and his cultivation of the solitary pleasure similarly centres on his ‘astonishment at seeing my penis grow big’, as we have already noted: I was seized with the view of this physical transformation of my sexual organ, as it went from a soft appendage to being a long hard one, the tip of which turned into a red and then purple glans until its little lips spread and projected their semen. The whole of this operation fascinated me as an extraordinary process of possession. I was vaingloriously proud of being able to live and know this phenomenon and also full of consternation at what I was doing, realizing how reprehensible it might be considered.19 16

See footnote 9. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 269–70. 18 ‘We all looked on silently as this student, with a sad expression on his face and his eyes looking off into the distance, began to move his fist up and down in the darkened regions of his crotch, his fingers still covered with wet, warm sand. Gently pulsating, the “lion’s nail” licked his thighs. Oh, how long would it be before that miracle also emerged from us?’ Subsequently the boys used to cut classes and go to the beach, ‘trying at times to reproduce the miracle we had seen performed by the fifth-year student’. The Lost Grove, 53. 19 The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 68. 17

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

157

Initially a quantitative change – like the fish and loaves that fed the 5,000 – the erect penis also produces the apparently material transformation of urine into semen, the whole stupefying event provoking both wonder and shame. Now shame, in Freud’s view, goes back to infancy prohibitions against the touching of genitalia and is, according to the same thinker, promoted by the Church, an instrument that suppresses instinctual and sexual impulses.20 Generating expectations of punishment – viz. the castration theme in so many Dalí paintings21 – shame arouses anxiety which in turn finds expression in obsessive actions. These ‘neurotic ceremonials’, which compare with the modern ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’, consist of small daily rites that ‘have always to be carried out in the same, or in a methodically varied, manner’, says Freud, if anxiety is to be obviated. It is the ‘special conscientiousness’ in executing the ritual that stamps the ceremonial as a ‘sacred act’, and it was this same conscientiousness, rather than emphasis upon any underlying meaning, that prompted Freud to conclude that there was ‘an essential similarity’ between the neurotic and religious patterns of behaviour.22 As if to illustrate Freud, Dalí ceremonialized his practice of masturbation – which he described as ‘the core of my eroticism and the axis of my paranoia-critical method’ – by superimposing images of Figueras and Gerona church steeples onto his fantasies and weaving the whole into his daily regime: ‘each work session was generally followed by a masturbation session … I quickly came to associate the pleasures of masturbating and drawing.’23 The common ground is fantasy, no doubt, but narcissism and transcendence are other important links, as we see in Dalí’s remarks on his seminal work of 1929: The Great Masturbator belongs to me and I alone know how to celebrate the Mass of his paranoiac passion … My whole life is an alchemy that transmutes everything into gold.24

Alchemy, metamorphosis, transubstantiation, call it what we will, it is clear that an astonishing if not magical change is common to the mass, sexuality and indeed art. It is hardly surprising that religion and sexuality mix together and produce the most sacrilegious works. An example is The Font (1930) in which the Eucharist chalice and host are placed near the

20

See Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion (Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1985), 82, 39. Agents of castration are paternal figures like William Tell and the female ‘praying mantis’ in the Angelus cycle. 22 The Origins of Religion, 37, 31, 32, 39. Freud writes in ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907): ‘I am certainly not the first to have been struck by the resemblance between what are called obsessive actions in sufferers from nervous affections and the observances by means of which believers give expression to their piety.’ Ibid., 31. 23 The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 92, 96, 69. 24 Ibid., 150. 21

158

ROBERT HAVARD

horror-inspiring images of grasshopper and devouring female – seen in the face of the jug – while in the left foreground a masculine figure administers fellatio to another who covers his eyes in shame as he faces the Eucharist table. Another example of the same period is The Profanation of the Host (1929–30), in which Dalí is symbolically depicted ejaculating into the sacred chalice. The Profanation, in fact, completes a trilogy of 1929 paintings on onanism, namely: The Lugubrious Game (plate 2), where the chalice is shown adjacent to an anus about to be penetrated by a finger, and The Great Masturbator, with its distinctive Dalí head sculpted out of Cape Creus rock. This rock-head makes four appearances in The Profanation together with the same phobic grasshopper on the artist’s mouth, a displacement in Freudian terms of his fear of his father as occasioned by the guilt of masturbation.25 In The Profanation the mouth of one of the four Great Masturbators spews a blood-like saliva into the chalice – symbolic of sperm, says Santos Torroella26 – an act that recalls Giménez Caballero’s tale of a boy who ejaculated into the holy cup to get himself expelled from his Jesuit school.27 We note that the Marquis de Sade – educated at the same Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand as Voltaire – received his first prison sentence for masturbating into a chalice in front of a prostitute,28 while the topic was well known to French surrealists: Georges Bataille, another with a strong religious upbringing, recounts the story of a priest desecrating the holy chalice with his sperm in Seville cathedral in L’Histoire d’un oeil.29 Such interfacing of the sexual and the religious, though clearly subversive towards the Church for its institutionalized repression, is, on another level, tacit recognition of the many parallels between the religious and the sexual, not the least of which is the ecstatic mutations involved in each. Dalí traces his own capacity to visualize the change of one object into another back to his childhood when he would stare at the stains on his classroom walls and imagine them take on ‘an increasingly precise, detailed and realistic personality’. When he tired of one image it would ‘instantaneously

25

See The Origins of Religion, 188. Santos Torroella, ‘Giménez Caballero y Dalí, influencias recíprocas y un tema compartido’, Anthropos. Revista de documentación científica de la cultura, Barcelona, no. 84 (1988), 55. The connection is clear in Erotic Drawing (1931), where the acts of masturbation and spitting into the chalice are depicted in close proximity; see Salvador Dalí (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1980), black-and-white illustration no. 41. 27 Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, 75. 28 See Maurice Lever, Marquis de Sade, A Biography, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (HarperCollins, London, 1993), 119, 121. 29 Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda, Le Mort, Histoire de l’oeil (Union Générale d’Editions, Paris), 160–1. The sequence occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Simone’s Confession and Sir Edmund’s Mass’ in Georges Bataille, Story of an Eye, With Essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Marion Boyars, London, 1979), 59–62. 26

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

159

become metamorphosed into “something else” ’, a process that could ‘go on to infinity’. Dalí observes: The astounding thing about this phenomenon (which was to become the keystone of my future aesthetic) was that having once seen one of these images I could always thereafter see it again at the mere dictate of my will …30

In similar vein he speaks of the pebbles, shells and especially the startling rock formations on the north Catalan coast that he explored as a boy and sometimes marvelled at from a boat with his father: Every rock, every promontory of Cape Creus is in permanent metamorphosis. Each is a suggestion that prompts spontaneous visualization of an eagle, a camel, a rooster, a lion, a woman – but if you approach it from the sea, the nearer you get, the more the symbolism develops and changes. It is a continual simulacrum. The bird becomes a wild animal and then a barnyard fowl … and yet, when we land, the granite beneath our feet is hard, compact, clear, implacable – after having double-dealt us so constantly.31

This ‘metamorphosis of the real’, based as it was on simple childhood daydreams, developed to such an extent that Dalí later claimed: ‘I myself can interpret six, eight, or ten images at the same time from a single vision.’32 But one is also inclined to speculate that Dalí’s persistent recourse to religious terminology when speaking of his art is attributable at least in part to the link between metamorphosis and the Eucharist. In this vein he refers to his moments of inspiration as a ‘state of intense prophecy’; he claims his paintings are endowed with ‘the character of prodigious revelation’; he compares his creativity with Santa Teresa’s and boldly affirms, ‘I lived my Passion to the full like Christ’.33 There is, in short, paradigmatic precision in Dalí’s admittedly exaggerated statement: ‘each picture is a Mass in which I distribute the Eucharist of a knowledge’.34 A recurrent theme emanating from the Eucharist is food and ingestion. Jesus, as Geoffrey Wainwright notes, frequently pictured paradise in terms of feasting (Matthew 8: 11; Luke 13: 29),35 and in this sense communion food, as the antepast of heaven, has links with sexual gratification. The connection is seen in the juxtaposition of fellatio and the Eucharist table in The Font (1930), while the parallel between eating and fellatio is equally plain in the

30 31 32 33 34 35

The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. H.M. Chevalier (Vision, London, 1968), 45–6. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 129. Ibid., 132, 143. Ibid., 217, 245, 251. Ibid., 246. Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology, 26.

160

ROBERT HAVARD

ink drawing, William Tell, Gradiva and the Average Bureaucrat (1932), in which Tell sports a phallic loaf on his head as he turns Gradiva’s leafy face towards his member. In The Birth of Liquid Desires (1932) the male figure again displays a long bread on his head as he ravishes a female while nearby another woman pours water into a bowl. Any lingering doubts about the erotic connotations of bread are dispelled by Catalan Bread (1930) where the crude erection motif, as Finkenstein says, is ‘augmented by the addition of a very suggestive tip’.36 Among Dalí’s many commentaries on bread, the essay ‘Reverie’ stands out for its detailed linking of this motif with masturbation: I pull out then automatically my smallish penis, leaving on the couch the small crust I had been emptying out. I stroke with one hand the hairs on my testicles, and, with the other, I roll up part of the bread removed from the crust … I carry out all these operations preferring to use only one hand (the left hand) with the other releasing my penis that has grown considerably heavier … I hurriedly forced out the ball [of bread] that had been in my left nostril, inserting it carefully, as deeply as possible, under my foreskin that is held by my fingers …37

This metamorphic capacity of moistened bread is also apparent in the following sequence from The Unspeakable Confessions where its consistency is assessed in relation to the amount of saliva present in the paste. Incorrigible as ever, Dalí explores these erotic qualities as a prelude to discussing his ideas on art: I had eaten my fill and was looking absent-mindedly, though fixedly, at a piece of bread. It was the heel of a long loaf, lying on its belly, and I could not cease looking at it. Finally I took it and kissed the very tip of it, then with my tongue I sucked it a little to soften it, after which I stuck the softened part on the table, where it remained standing.38

Bread, with its hard crust and soft interior, combines the opposites of erect and malleable consistencies. In this it perfectly states Dalí’s artistic dialectic, for while his ambition is to present reality in precise or hard terms, he conceives of reality as something essentially soft, transformable by the imagination, melting like his Camembert watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931). No doubt, the rippling mica-schist rocks of Cape Creus and the extraordinary designs of the Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudí – ‘the sublime

36

Haim Finkelstein, Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writing, 1927–1942 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 148. 37 See The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, edited by Haim Finkelstein (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 152, 155. ‘Reverie’ first appeared in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (December 1931). 38 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 306.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

161

Gaudí’39 – played their part in forming Dalí’s ‘culinary’ aesthetic, but his notion of ‘edibility’ centres conceptually on the parallel between the ingestion and defecation of food on the one hand and the artist’s absorption of external reality and subsequent processing of it via his imagination on the other. More could be said about Dalí’s ‘eatables’, as Liaño calls them.40 His beans, crumbs, eggs, chops, fish and crustaceans compose a culinary aesthetic that is echoed in the erotico-ingestion found, for instance, in Cannibalism of Objects (1932) and Autumn Cannibalism (1937) which shows two amorphous figures armed with cutlery devouring each other. Bread is the most recurrent motif, however, and its appearances date from Basket of Bread (1926), of which Dalí wrote: I spent four months painting a basket of bread which, by the power of its density, the fascination of its immobility, creates the mystical, paroxysmic feeling of a situation beyond our ordinary notion of the real. We are at the borderline of dematerialization of matter by the sole power of the mind.41

Just as bread, the elemental icon of the Eucharist, is ideally suited to convey a sense of the super-real, so too is the closely related motif of the table and cloth, which has a similar Eucharistic aura. Among a host of paintings that make the table a virtual fetish in Dalí, the following stand out: The Endless Enigma (1938), with its six mutating configurations; Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938), with three mutations; The Invention of Monsters (1937), The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image (1938), Invisible Afghan Hound with the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of García Lorca in the Form of a Fruit Dish with Three Figs (1938), Imperial Violets (1938), Mountain Lake (1938), with its metamorphic fish on a table, and the two paintings done in human panels, Couple with their Heads Full of Clouds (1936). It is no coincidence that all these paintings deal with multiple, transformational images, for the table, by association with the Eucharist, creates a context for change and an air of magical expectation. Essentially, the table serves to formalize the presentation of objects, as do the flat surfaces of pedestals in other paintings or – with somewhat less formality – chests of drawers, cabinets and grand pianos. Frequently the plane of the table and cloth is integrated with an expanse of level beach to provide the dimensional effect of an infinitely distant horizon. Always the cloth conveys a sense of ritual, as in the dramatically raised version in The Old Age of William Tell (1931). On occasion the table effect is more muted, as in Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) (plate 5); but even in 39 40 41

Ibid., 304. Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, Dalí (London, 1987), 10. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 240.

162

ROBERT HAVARD

this darker variation the surface on which Gala rests her elbow supports the plinth that bears Voltaire’s bust and it thus serves to project the sage’s head from the middle-distance archway into the foreground. Aside from these compositional attributes, the significance of the table motif, I suggest, lies in the sense we have that the objects it displays have been selected and placed on it for an important or ritual event that is about to happen. The objects are almost by definition ‘eatables’ and they will soon be transformed, we expect, the transcendental aspect of their mutation being implicit in the Eucharistic cloth. Dalí’s finest canvas on mutability is probably Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) (plate 4). This, as its title suggests, is mythological rather than Christian in motif, though it is worth observing that the lake in the foreground is a plane and locus of potential mutations not unlike the Eucharist table. Metamorphosis is strictly not a double-image painting but a system of morphological parallels, the principal parallel being between the stooped Narcissus figure to the left and the ossified hand holding an egg or bulb to the right. What the painting offers its viewer is the actual experience of perceiving change, when Narcissus, by visual association with the configuration to the right, turns into a hand holding an egg. At least he can do so if we contemplate the painting in the way Dalí advises: If one looks for some time, from a slight distance and with a certain ‘distant fixedness’, at the hypnotically immobile figure of Narcissus, it gradually disappears until at last it is completely invisible. The metamorphosis of the myth takes place at that precise moment, for the image of Narcissus is suddenly transformed into the image of a hand which rises out of his own reflection.42

This lateral parallel is duplicated in the shape of the snow god who retreats over the distant hills to the right, while it is verbally echoed in the link between Narcissus and the flower of the same name that sprouts from the egg–bulb. Dalí explained this conceit by quoting a conversation he overheard between two fishermen in Port Lligat. When one inquired what was wrong with a local lad who spent all his time looking into a mirror, the other replied, ‘he has a bulb in his head’. Dalí added: ‘A bulb in the head’, in Catalan, corresponds exactly with the psycho-analytic notion of ‘complex’. If a man has a bulb in his head, it might break into flower at any moment, Narcissus!43

42 43

See The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 324. Ibid., 325.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

163

In contrast to these parallels, a lateral opposition appears between the so-called heterosexual group to the right of Narcissus, who are engaged in a spring fertility dance, and the classical, statuesque figure on the truncated chessboard plane which suggests homosexuality. The painting has vertical parallels too, principally between the head of Narcissus and his suggested image in the water below, a silhouette in fact of reflected rocks. Downwardness is duplicated by the blue of water reflecting the sky and by the complementary melting of snow and crumbling of rocks. This last point was stressed in Dalí’s poem entitled ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ which he initially exhibited with the painting: his dazzling head bent over the dizzy space of reflections starts melting with desire in the vertical cataracts of the thaw annihilating himself loudly among the excremental cries of minerals …44

Indeed, there is a repellent texture to the chocolate brown earth – reminiscent of Maruja Mallo – which, as David Lomas says, compels us ‘to think of paint as a material equivalent of excrement’.45 The structure of Metamorphosis is as complex and intellectually premeditated as Velázquez’s Las meninas [The Maids in Waiting]. Its symmetry, or what Dalí in his poem calls ‘divine hypnosis of the mind’s geometry’, bears directly on Narcissus’s thoughts and relates organically to Dalí’s own personality and artistic principles. Few artists are as self-absorbed as Dalí whose obsessions provide the source material for his entire work. At a personal level, it is equally plain that the Narcissus complex connects with both homosexuality and masturbation. We have already alluded to the statuesque male who seductively displays his rear, and it might be added that Narcissus has turned his back on the heterosexuals behind him. Masturbation is even more prominent, as is to be expected in a painting depicting solipsistic withdrawal. What we have, fundamentally, is another example of a grossly enlarged hand – previously seen in Apparatus and Hand (1927) (plate 3) and The Lugubrious Game (1929) (plate 2) – while the oval egg–bulb it touches is plainly testicular. Ejaculation, with abject overtones, is pointed up by various phrases in the poem:

44

The original French ‘Métamorphose de Narcisse’ was published by Éditions Surréalistes, Paris, 1937. The English translation by Francis Scarfe (Julian Levy Gallery, New York, 1937) was written for this New York exhibition. See The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 329. 45 David Lomas, ‘The Metamorphosis of Narcissus: Dalí’s Self-Analysis’, in Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley (eds.), Salvador Dalí, A Mythology (Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1998), 86.

164

ROBERT HAVARD

the whole high plateau/ pours itself out,/ crashes and crumbles … The body of Narcissus flows out and loses itself in the abyss of his reflection … falls to the topaz precipice with yellow wreckage of love … The seed of your head has just fallen into the water.46

There is too, in the poem’s final crescendo, what David Lomas aptly calls ‘onanistic repetition’:47 There remains of him only/ the hallucinatingly white oval of his head,/ his head again more tender,/ his head, chrysalis of hidden biological designs, his head held up by the tips of the water’s fingers, at the tips of the fingers/ of the insensate hand,/ of the terrible hand, of the excrement-eating hand,/ of the mortal hand/ of his reflection.

Here masturbation is variously insinuated in the fantasy-hallucination, in the focus upon tender head and watery finger tips and in the contrast with the insensate hand. This terrible, excrement-eating hand, as opposed to the divine delusions of the head, brings the inevitable component of shame. In the painting, we note, Narcissus’s head is not only faceless but bowed in a shameful pose so characteristic in Dalí. In this the painting is remarkably consistent with Bruce Clarke’s dualistic theory of metamorphosis in art: A metamorphosis determines at once a monstrous exhibition and a total concealment of the self. The metamorph’s ambivalence between spectacular display and complete effacement plays off the psychology of shame. Shame is to metamorphosis … the affective keynote.48

In the shamefully exhibitionist Dalí, the simultaneous act of display and concealment is compulsive. As metamorph, he is always seeking new forms of disguise to avoid the punishment he believes he deserves. The Eucharist, as the sign of both morality and of mutation, pointed the way. Ubiquitous as it is in Dalí, metamorphosis is also a key feature in other Spanish avant-gardists who work in different genres. Film is a classic example, as Dalí himself was quick to note in an article published in La Gaceta Literaria in December 1927: In the cinema, a tree, a street, a game of rugby, are transubstantiated in a disturbing manner; a sweet yet restrained giddiness leads us to specific 46

The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 327–8. See Ades and Bradley, op. cit., 92. 48 Bruce Clarke, Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (State University of New York, Albany, 1995), 63. 47

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

165

sensory transmutations … A lump of sugar on the screen can become larger than the interminable perspective of gigantic buildings.49

This cinematic transubstantiation is nowhere more apparent than in the first film Luis Buñuel made – with a little help from Dalí – in 1929.

The dissolve in Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou Buñuel describes the coming of cinema to rural Aragon when he was eight years old as a ‘dramatic intrusion into our medieval universe’. He adds that whereas we are all familiar today with ‘film language’ or the elements of montage – flashbacks, fades, dissolves etc – this was not the case in the early days when cinema was ‘a new pictorial grammar’ and people found it so difficult to follow ‘they needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene’.50 The camera itself was endowed with supernatural powers: I’ll never forget, for example, everyone’s terror when we saw our first zoom. There on the screen was a head coming closer and closer, growing larger and larger. We simply couldn’t understand that the camera was moving closer to the head, or that because of trick photography … the head only appeared to grow larger. All we saw was a head coming towards us, swelling hideously out of all proportion. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we believed in the reality we saw.51

To the awe-struck Buñuel the effect of this magic lantern compared with the Calanda miracle and it would be just as long lasting. Though he often saw three films a day in Paris in the late 1920s,52 by which time the medium itself had grown more sophisticated, Buñuel never lost his boyish wonder for the camera’s illusionist power. Having read Freud from 1921,53 he was quick to appreciate the special properties of cinema which, he said, seemed ‘to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious’: It is the superlative medium through which to express the world of thought, feeling, and instinct. The creative handling of film images is such that, among all means of human expression, its way of functioning is most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep. A film is like an involuntary 49

Dalí, ‘Film-arte, film-antiartístico’, La Gaceta Literaria, 15-xii-1927, 4. See Haim Finkelstein (ed.), The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 53–5. 50 My Last Breath, 31, 32. 51 Ibid., 32–3. 52 Ibid., 87. 53 See Joan Mellen (ed.), The World of Luis Buñuel: Essays in Criticism (Oxford University Press, New York, 1978), 46.

166

ROBERT HAVARD

imitation of a dream. Brunius points out how the darkness that slowly settles over a movie theatre is equivalent to the act of closing the eyes. Then, on the screen, as within the human being, the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious begins.

More specifically, he adds: The device of fading allows images to appear and disappear as in a dream; time and space become flexible, shrinking and expanding at will; chronological order and the relative values of time duration no longer correspond to cyclical reality, cyclical action can last a few minutes or several centuries; shifts from slow motion to accelerated motion heighten the impact of each.54

These and other devices are seen aplenty in Un Chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog], the two-reeler he wrote in ‘less than a week’ in Figueras with Dalí and shot in two weeks in Paris in the spring of 1929.55 The film’s succès de scandale – it ran for nine months at Studio 28, Paris – owed much to its celebrated opening sequence that epitomizes the poetry of film yet never fails to shock: ONCE UPON A TIME … A balcony. Night. A man is sharpening a razor by the balcony. The man looks through a window at the sky and sees … a light cloud passing across the face of the full moon. Then the head of a young woman with wide-open eyes. The light cloud now moves across the face of the moon. The razor-blade slices the eye of the young woman, dividing it.56

This simile of a cloud and a razor cutting respectively through the moon and an eye in exactly the same manner – horizontally, from right to left – had a chilling effect in the cinema, as Henry Miller testified: ‘The public shuddered, making their seats creak … Hysterical shouts were heard.’57 Even today it makes us recoil in horror and close our eyes to the cinematic dark. Yet it also bids us re-open them to a different mode of seeing: that of the unconscious, with its startling capacity for analogy. In this image Buñuel announces that he is taking possession of our eyes and, via the revelatory powers of his medium, is about to release our imaginative vision and 54

Ibid., 107. See also, ‘El cine, instrumento de poesía’ (a lecture published in the University of Mexico magazine, December 1958), in Max Aub, Conversaciones con Bunuel, 185. 55 My Last Breath, 104. 56 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien andalou, foreword by Jean Vigo (Faber & Faber, London, 1994), 3. 57 Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye (London, 1945), 57.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

167

make us see as never before. To prove the point, there follows – after a second incongruous inter-title has appeared on screen – a rapid sequence of dissolves: EIGHT YEARS LATER A deserted road. It is raining … A man dressed in a dark-grey suit and riding a bicycle, appears. The man’s head, back and waist are decked in white frills. A rectangular box with black-and-white diagonal stripes hangs from a thong on his chest.

As this strangely attired cyclist moves off down the Parisian street, we see him first from behind and then from the side until this shot dissolves into a third that is a close-up of him from the front. Next we have a view of the street (as seen by the moving cyclist), which dissolves again into a shot of him from behind, superimposed now on a view of the street. This fluid sequence – ‘Fluencia milagrosa en imágenes’58 [Miraculous fluency in images] wrote Buñuel, defining the essence of cinema – deftly conveys a sense of motion through space, with the kinetic properties of the medium insinuating a dream-like rhythm. As we look through the cyclist’s back, his white frills at shoulder and waist serve to frame the street horizontally. His back solidifies for a moment, but a view of the street is seen again through the cyclist, with an additional shot of him riding into the distance. Magic! Two cyclists where once there was only one! There is magic too in the transparency of his back which compares with Dalí’s hollowed out figures in, for instance, The Weaning of Furniture: Nutrition (1934), where a nurse sits squat on Port Lligat beach, a hole cut through her equal in shape to the bedside table she faces. This motif of the hollow – in rocks, pebbles, architecture – is everywhere in Dalí and goes back to The Enigma of Desire and Accommodations of Desire (1929). At its simplest, the effect is consistent with Dalí’s stated goal to achieve ‘a total discrediting of the world of reality’ and to show ‘the spirituality of all substance’.59 In both painting and film, it seems, the creation of a subconscious aura depends as much on dematerializing external reality as it does upon the realistic projection of inner, psychical elements.

58 See the essay ‘Découpage o segmentación cinematográfica’, first published in La Gaceta Literaria, no. 43, 1-x-1928, republished in Luis Buñuel, Obra literaria, 172. 59 See ‘The Rotting Donkey’ [‘L’Âne pourri’, in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, Paris, 1-vii-1930], in The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 223, and The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 217. In ‘The Rotting Donkey’ Dalí wrote: ‘I believe the moment is drawing near when, by a thought process of a paranoiac and active character, it would be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and thereby contribute to a total discrediting of the world of reality.’

168

ROBERT HAVARD

The cyclist’s clothing is important. Critics typically refer to the white covers on his waist, shoulders and head as ‘feminine frills’.60 There is undoubtedly a suggestion of femininity in them that recalls, for instance, Vermeer’s Lacemaker (soon to appear in the film), but the frills at the shoulder are also reminiscent of the angelic choir-boy attire fashionable in the early part of the century which both Buñuel and Dalí wore as sons of bourgeois parents.61 The word in the Spanish filmscript, however, is manteletes, which denotes a type of religious surplice: Vestments with two openings for the arms worn by bishops and prelates on top of a white cassock and reaching a few inches below the knee.62 In this context both the boyish and feminine associations gain meaning, for the film’s most discernible theme is the quest for a sexual identity that has been rendered problematic by moral strictures imposed in childhood, notably by the Church. This perhaps explains why Dalí often saves a part of his canvas for a diminutive boy figure who stands – holding his hoop or his father’s hand – observing a scene that is a composite of signs representing a sexual puzzle: viz. The Spectre of Sex Appeal, The Triangular Hour, Enigmatic Elements and Atavistic Vestiges after the Rain, all of 1934. In the same vein he places a framed photo of himself as a child at the centre of The First Days of Spring (1929), an important canvas painted immediately after the making of Un Chien andalou in which the theme is again sexual ambivalence. As for the manteletes, they reappear with mocking intent in Partial Hallucination: Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano (1931), where the pianist has them on his back, and in Sleep (1938), where they hang from the nape of an immense head that is unmistakably Buñuel’s in profile.63 We recall that Lorca was convinced that the title An Andalusian Dog was a jibe aimed at him by his two erstwhile friends, partly because of the cyclist’s effeminacy and partly because they had panned his recent volume, Romancero gitano [Gypsy 60

See Haim Finkelstein, Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writing, 93. Gwynne Edwards refers to ‘frilly trimmings’ in The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel (Marion Boyars, London, 1982), 44. Even Agustín Sánchez Vidal fails to comment on the proper significance of ‘manteletes’ in his analysis of the sequence in Buñuel, Lorca, Dalí: El enigma sin fin (Planeta, Barcelona, 1988), 278. 61 Photos of Dalí in such an outfit may be seen in Gibson, op. cit., black and white illustrations nos. 1, 2, 7, 8, 16 and 23, while the same of Buñuel in Jesuit uniform at the age of eight is found in Augustín Sánchez Vidal, Luis Buñuel (Cátedra, Madrid, 1991), 35, and again in J. Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel. biografía crítica (Lumen, Barcelona, 1969), illustration 7 and cover. 62 For the filmscript, see Luis Buñuel, Un perro andaluz, La edad de oro (Ediciones Era, Mexico, 1971), 27. For the definition, I translate from Diccionario de la lengua española, 21st edition (Real Academia Española, Madrid, 1992): ‘Mantelete. (De mantel.) m. Vestidura con dos aberturas para sacar los brazos, que llevan los obispos y prelados encima del roquete, y llega un palmo más abajo de las rodillas.’ 63 These two paintings may be seen in Salvador Dalí (Tate Gallery, London, 1980), nos. 96, 155.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

169

Ballads], for being too provincially Andalusian. Like other northerners at the Residencia, Buñuel and Dalí used the term ‘Andalusian dogs’ to chide those they felt were unaware of new cultural trends.64 It appears not to have occurred to Lorca that the first part of this thinking applied equally to Dalí who, at the time, was also caught up in a sexual dilemma he attempted to resolve in his art. There is perhaps a mild erotic suggestion in the movement of the cyclist’s legs that pedal automatically … he is not holding the handlebars: his hands are resting on his knees. But this seems less virile than onanistic, while the bicycle, his clothing, his show-off way of cycling and the striped box all point to infantilism or arrested development. Like a child he falls to the pavement, out of sheer inertia, as Keaton falls in Lorca’s cinematic skit, ‘El paseo de Buster Keaton’ [‘Buster Keaton’s Ride’], which also feeds on the child-like innocence of silent-movie comics. We note the pronounced air of parody in the Buñuel–Dalí film, for instance in the ironic use of inter-titles that were an integral part of the silent film’s pace and rhythm.65 ONCE UPON A TIME and EIGHT YEARS LATER conspicuously mock the language that was intended as an aid to narrative coherence. Another mocked convention is that of melodrama, as we see in the next sequence which shows a woman reading in a room above the street. Alerted to the approach of the cyclist, she says something to herself in studied fashion, looking resentful and outraged, then she rushes down to the street to comfort him with exaggerated kisses that seem alternatively maternal and passionate. Before descending the stairs she leaves her book on a chair, its open page displaying a reproduction of that icon of chastity, Vermeer’s Lacemaker, which doubtless Buñuel and Dalí alike found sexually arousing in its pious modesty. The woman responds to the challenge of the fallen cyclist by removing a striped tie from the box that hangs from his neck. With the scene having cut to her upstairs apartment, she substitutes this for a colourless tie that she discards, and, after placing the new tie amongst other items – frilly cuffs, box, starched collar – on a bed, she lays them out in a way that suggests they were being worn by someone lying on the bed. When she sits staring at the absent figure on the bed like someone at a vigil we are given to understand that the cyclist has in some sense died. This compares with the metaphorical death Lorca often uses to convey the loss of innocence at the onset of puberty, for instance in ‘1910 (intermedio)’, a year when Lorca was twelve.66 The child-cyclist’s ‘death’ is confirmed by the images that follow: the tie, which

64

See J. Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel. biografía crítica, 58n. See William K. Everson, American Silent Film (Oxford University Press, New York, 1978), 128. 66 Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos’, ‘Tu infancia en Menton’ and ‘Poema doble del Lago Eden’ are further poems in Poeta en Nueva York that deal with this metaphorical death of innocence. 65

170

ROBERT HAVARD

at first lies limply on the bed, changes by camera magic into a knotted tie, twice in fact, first in a sudden mutation and then in a gradual dissolve, which suggests two distinct modes of metamorphosis. The tie is a sign of maturity, no doubt, not least in the sense that the ability to make a knot is a bench-mark of progress. But the knotted as opposed to limp tie reduplicates the vigour of the striped vis-à-vis colourless version and the two waxing images have clear sexual resonance. This gains force when the woman senses someone standing behind her in the room and turns to see who it is: Without showing any surprise, she sees that it is the same man, no longer wearing any of the items that are laid out on the bed. He is looking at something on his right palm with great concentration and some distress. The young woman goes over to him and also looks at what he has in his hand. Close-up of the hand full of ants crawling out of a black hole in the palm.67

The hand of ants is primarily analogous with pubic hair, but the motif of a hole in the palm inevitably suggests Christ’s wounds and adds overtones of innocent suffering. The ex-cyclist’s fascination with the activity in his member is also onanistic and it brings to mind the French saying, ‘avoir des fourmis dans les jambes’ [to have ants in one’s pants or legs], thereby combining notions of irritation and arousal. In essence, the sequence suggests the adolescent stage of self-absorption in bodily change that Dalí described so meticulously: Drying in the sun, after bathing, one morning in the Gulf of Rosas, I noticed a light black down, prolonged by a fewer longer hairs outlining my pubis. I delicately grasped one of those hairs and pulled on it, causing the flesh to rise as the hair doubled in length. With a sharp tug I pulled it out and looked at it in the sun, surprised at this new part of me which I had not seen coming into existence.68

This discovery, as Dalí reported earlier, is followed by the momentous transformation of the phallus, which causes wonder and embarrassment. In the film, a rapid series of dissolves conveys the process of change and the attendant puzzlement: Dissolve to the hairs on the armpit of a young woman who is lying on a beach in the sunshine. Dissolve to the undulating spines of a sea-urchin. Dissolve to the head of a girl seen directly from above.

67 68

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien andalou, 4. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 68.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

171

The change from a hand of ants into an armpit confirms the pubic allusion in the former. It compares with the surrogate orifice in Dalí’s painting, William Tell and Gradiva (1930), in which a huge phallus probes the concavity of a woman’s axilla.69 The second change from armpit hair into a sea-urchin stirred by underwater currents has the effect of suggesting a thicker growth of pubes and, with it, genital arousal. The third change continues to focus on hair, now seen from above, while it also links with the film’s opening motif of the eye – the shot is taken as though through the iris of an eye – which reminds us of the eye’s capacity to perceive analogies. These dissolves show that the preoccupation with change applies at various levels: artistic, sexual and in terms of the workings of the subconscious. Sexuality is the main source of images, as we see in the next sequence: A young girl is using a stick to try and pick up a severed hand with painted fingernails which is lying on the ground.

In her masculine clothes, she is an androgynous figure, while the large hand with painted nails is likewise sexually ambiguous. As a severed hand, which recalls dismemberment in the Calanda miracle, it reintroduces the familiar boyhood threat of punishment associated with masturbation. This is no less fetishistic in Buñuel than Dalí, as we see from his later filmscript, ‘Alucinaciones en torno a una mano muerta’ [‘Hallucinations about a Dead Hand’],70 where the hand has a will of its own. The shame that attaches to playing with the hand is evident when two policemen and a crowd of onlookers gather round the androgen in the street. One policeman admonishes her before he picks up the hand and places it dutifully out of sight in the same striped box that belonged to the cyclist. When she receives the box, the androgen’s link with the cyclist is plain: both suffer from a lack of sexual definition, from an infantile or adolescent blockage. Soon she is run over by a car in an echo of the cyclist’s crash, the intensification suggesting increased levels of anguish as sexuality advances. The whole incident – from the androgen’s playing with the hand to her horribly mangled death under the car – is witnessed by the ex-cyclist and the woman in the apartment above. In effect, the androgen exteriorizes their inner drama and lack of sexual definition. Her ‘death’ implies that another sexual staging post has been reached, which accords with the transcendence on her face moments earlier when she appeared to be listening to some distant religious music. It also tallies with the fact that she lets go of the box a split second prior to the collision when, in another camera trick, it appears suddenly on the ground. Transcendence is seen too in the couple watching above who are overwhelmed with the same 69 See also Erotic Drawing (1931) in Salvador Dalí (Tate Gallery), black-and-white illustration no. 37. 70 See Luis Buñuel, Obra literaria, 207–9.

172

ROBERT HAVARD

emotion and nod as though in rhythm to that distant music.71 Presumably, the releasing of the Pandora-like box of shameful secrets – cf. Dalí’s recurring motif of secretive drawers in the female body72 – signals a preparedness to venture into more salubrious territory. When the scene cuts definitively to the upstairs apartment, sexual resolution seems to have been achieved for the ex-cyclist now turns decidedly macho: The man, with the determination of someone who feels sure of his rights, goes over to the young woman and, after staring at her lustfully with rolling eyes, grabs her breasts through her dress.

This parodic exaggeration – he looks like the villain in a melodrama – is effective in suggesting a dehumanized libido and the sequence has the air of a primitive mating ritual as the male stalks the female round the room, their comic to-and-fro movement played out to the rhythm of a ‘tango argentino’73 [Argentine tango], which increases the stereotype effect. When he finally comes to grips with her a series of rapid dissolves conveys both the urgency and fantasy of his passion: Close-up of the man’s hands fondling the breasts which appear through the dress. The breasts disappear to become a pair of thighs which the man kneads.

Here the English is too prim, for the Spanish commentary confirms what our eyes see on screen: the man caresses ‘nalgas desnudas’ [naked buttocks],74 which inevitably lend a homosexual tenor that is immediately accentuated when the man’s wide-open mouth puckers up like an anus. The male, it seems, has yet to find a socially acceptable sexual identity, this being apparent in the emergence of sadistic tendencies: a stream of blood-flecked saliva begins to run out of the corner of his mouth onto the naked breasts. The sado-anality re-activates a sense of confusion that may be more properly associated with Dalí than Buñuel. In particular, the blood motif recalls Dalí’s liaison with Lorca that reached its artistic culmination in Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1927), a canvas that portrays all three – Lorca, Buñuel and Dalí – in mutilated forms and in what amounts to a triangulation of erotic attitudes, with Dalí effectively caught between two opposites. As to the blood motif, one is inclined to agree with Gibson and Santos Torroella who hold that, for Lorca and Dalí, it fundamentally represents an 71

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien andalou, 5. For instance, Venus de Milo with Drawers and City of Drawers, see Salvador Dalí (Tate Gallery), 120, 133, 134. 73 See Luis Buñuel, Un perro andaluz, La edad de oro, 39. 74 Ibid., 40. 72

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

173

aversion to the female.75 In this sense the main purpose of the mating ritual may well have been to debunk heterosexual attitudes, but, in any event, the issue of sexual identity at this point in the film remains unresolved. When the woman escapes her assailant, another comedic chase routine ensues which ends with her retreating to a corner where she defends herself with a tennis racquet held above her head in a press. It is she who now appears to be sexually immature and, as if to show how to expel repressive elements (break out of a press), the male picks up some ropes – lying inexplicably on the floor – and with great exertion drags them across the room, pulling a succession of objects behind: a cork, melon, two Christian Brothers (one played by Dalí himself) and two grand pianos bearing the rotting carcasses of two donkeys.76 Horrified, the woman escapes to an adjoining room, trapping his hand when she slams the door on him: the fingers of the hand move painfully and slowly as the ants begin crawling out of the palm onto the door (see plate 9).77 Here the Christ-like suffering is acute as the ants drop like blood and the door-jamb cuts his wrist where the androgen’s hand was severed. We are back with the theme of arrested sexual development, the point being made plain when the woman scans the room – oddly identical to the previous one – and finds her pursuer on the bed in his former state: He is wearing the frills and the box lies on his chest. Regression is pointed up at once by the arrival of a stranger who, with paternal severity, scolds the cyclist, tears off his fills and throws them one by one through the window with the box. Masturbation had been insinuated in an image that marked the newcomer’s arrival, namely two hands shaking a silver cocktail shaker through two holes in the door, where severance of limb is again evident. This connects with the secrecy–shame complex when the cyclist tries in vain to hide the straps that held his box. For this he is made to stand in a corner like a schoolboy, his arms spread crucifix-style, the pressed racquet head-high on the wall beside him. When the newcomer turns to face the camera for the first time, we see that he is the same person as the other now obscured behind him but still represented ghoulishly by the racquet on the wall. The one difference is that the newcomer looks younger, which is confirmed by the next inter-title, SIXTEEN YEARS BEFORE. The younger version crosses the room – out of focus and in slow motion – to an old school desk that has strangely materialized. From its messy top he gathers up two ink-stained books and takes them to the other version of himself in the corner who is

75

See Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 165, et passim 162–7, and the quoted letter from Lorca in which it is fairly clear that honey refers to masturbation, in Rafael Santos Torroella, La miel es más dulce que la sangre. las épocas lorquiana y freudiana de Salvador Dalí (Planeta, Barcelona, 1984), 74. 76 The Spanish version says ‘dos hermanos de las Escuelas Cristianas’ [two brothers from the Christian Schools], op. cit., 42, which was the teaching order of Dalí’s school. 77 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien andalou, 8.

174

ROBERT HAVARD

made to hold them in his outstretched hands. The latter’s submission to this further torment only frustrates the younger version who shakes his head as if to say nothing can be done for one who is trapped forever in his past. As he moves in resignation towards the door, however, the one in the corner turns on him and, when his books change suddenly into revolvers, he fires repeatedly at the younger man. The latter falls in slow motion to his death, though not in the room, but in a park, where his hands try in vain to clasp a young woman’s naked back that dematerializes in a dissolve precisely when he reaches the ground. Given Buñuel’s remark that he and Dalí agreed only to use images that ‘had no possible explanation’ but ‘moved them profoundly’,78 it would be unwise to attempt too prescriptive an interpretation of this content. Yet, as we have seen, the images fall into distinct patterns – infantilism, sexuality, authority – which are consistent with Buñuel’s abhorrence of the so-called pillars of society that Surrealism targeted: religion, nationhood, family and culture.79 Images that debunk culture include the grand pianos, Vermeer’s Lacemaker and the books that turn into revolvers, while authority is denoted by the policemen, priests, imposing city buildings, the initially aggressive newcomer and the punishment corner. In relation to these repressive elements, the characters struggle with their identity, though in this they are not so much separate individuals as representations of different facets of repression, inhibition, immaturity and confusion. Their oneness is plain in the newcomer and the ex-cyclist being the same person, also in the symbiosis of the androgen, the cyclist’s regressions and the newcomer’s change from a corrective to empathic attitude. This slipping in and out of character, phase or attitude serves to present the theme of sexuality in a fluid and essentially psychological mode, all of which is underpinned by camera tricks and, supremely, by the dissolves that serve to illustrate types of change. We note, in passing, that the film feeds heavily on the American silent-movie tradition in that infantilism was a pronounced feature of the great comedians – Chaplin, Langdon, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy – whose naiveté was never more obvious than in the context of love. Harry Langdon illustrates the point in Long Pants (1927) where he is laughed at by girls for his short trousers and continues to have amorous problems even after graduating to the adult pants of the title. Known as ‘the baby’, Langdon had a screen persona that encompassed different stages at once, from five-year-old to adolescent and full-grown male.80 His torpid innocence is captured by

78

The World of Luis Buñuel, 153. Buñuel speaks of ‘nuestras injustísimas instituciones sociales, como la religión, la patria, la familia, la cultura, en fin, los llamados pilares de la sociedad’ [our most unjust social institutions, like religion, the fatherland, the family, culture, in short, the so-called ‘pillars’ of society], see Luis Buñuel, Viridiana, 4th edition (Ediciones Era, Mexico City, 1976), 6. 80 See Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (Da Capo, New York, 1980), 284, 268. 79

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

175

Alberti in the poem, ‘Harry Langdon hace por primera vez el amor a una niña’ [‘Harry Langdon makes love to a girl for the first time’], which appeared in his 1929 volume based on Hollywood comedians, Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos [I was a Fool and what I have seen has made Two Fools of Me]. It begins in a simplistic, repetitive vein that captures the famously idiotic, slow-motion blink of Langdon’s eyes: Verdaderamente no hay nada tan bonito como un ramo de flores cuando la cabra ha olvidado en él sus negras bolitas. ¿Me habré dado yo cuenta de que no hay nada tan bonito como un ramo de flores, y sobre todo si la cabra ha olvidado en él una o más bolitas? Verdaderamente no hay nada tan hermoso como estar enamorado, y más aún si un gorrión se le posa a otro gorrión en un ojo. ¿Me habré dado yo cuenta de que no hay nada tan hermoso como estar enamorado, y más aún si un gorrión se le posa a uno o más gorriones en un ojo? (491) [Truly/ there’s nothing as nice as a spray of flowers when the goat has deposited his little black droppings on it. Will I ever realize there’s nothing as nice as a spray of flowers, especially if the goat has deposited one or two droppings on it? Truly/ there’s nothing as lovely as being in love, all the more so if a sparrow alights on another sparrow’s eye. Will I ever realize there’s nothing as lovely as being in love, all the more so if a sparrow alights on one or more sparrows’ eyes?]

Langdon exceeds even Lorca’s Keaton in naiveté. The child-man’s hapless immaturity and ponderous thought processes are aptly conveyed in Alberti’s language with its mindless repetitions and vacuous vocabulary, all of which echoes the inane phrasing of inter-titles. In Un Chien andalou it is the dissolve, more than anything, that allows us to experience the obsessive fantasy element of sexuality which constantly substitutes simulacra for taboo objects of desire. At the same time, the metamorphic texture of the film invites us to experience the mutations of desire that fluctuate between tenderness and macho-style sadism. Throughout the film this transformational treatment renders the various phases of sexuality as a continuum, from adolescent confusion through to the tragically rigid polarizations of adulthood. The latter is suggested in the closing image that depicts the man and woman as living statues buried up to their chests in sand, blinded, in rags, being eaten alive by the sun and by swarms of insects.81 This 81

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien andalou, 11.

176

ROBERT HAVARD

solidification recalls Dalí’s statues – The Lugubrious Game (1929) (plate 2), Venus de Milo of the Drawers (1936) – and his ossifications, Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus (1935), Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1936) (plate 4) which also contains a statue. Against the horizonless desert, which has the deep perspective of so many Dalí paintings, the disturbing image of statues in sand is at once evocative of childhood games and of sexual bondage. The paralysis of the image gives a final punctuation to the film’s kinetic syntax, stopping the eye in its constant search for analogy. It may be thought, with some justification, that the notion of sexual indeterminacy and the metamorphic texture of Un Chien andalou owes more to Dalí than Buñuel. We may also be inclined to accept Dalí’s claim that his own contribution to the film stands out more clearly when it is compared with its ponderous sequel, L’Âge d’or [The Golden Age], which Buñuel shot on his own after the two had quarrelled.82 Yet it cannot be denied that a distinctive feature in Buñuel’s films is the sensitivity he shows towards inanimate objects, including, on occasion, a keen eye for their transformational power. This applies even in the most conventional or outwardly realistic films such as Viridiana (1961) which provides a good example in the recurring motif of the skipping rope. Initially the rope is the plaything of the young Rita, whom Don Jaime watches skip rather too intently. Soon it becomes the noose with which Don Jaime hangs himself in shame after having abused his niece, Viridiana, the novice nun. Later, when Viridiana opens up the large house she has inherited to beggars, she is sexually assaulted by a drunken beggar and faints on touching the patently phallic handle of the skipping rope that now serves the beggar as a belt. This transformation, toy–noose–phallus, serves to connect notions of innocence and sexual bondage. The motif is highlighted by allusive echoes: an outcast beggar, known as ‘El Leproso’ [The Leper] is made to walk with a tin can tied to his waist by a string; Jorge, Don Jaime’s illegitimate son, buys a dog from a peasant who had leashed it to the wheels of a cart, but a second cart promptly comes down the road with another dog leashed to its wheels. Some echoes suggest the bondage of work: a beggar-woman hangs out washing on a line; a man repairs a leather strap and another tries to fix a coil inside a clock; Viridiana herself settles down resignedly to sewing at the end. In these ways Buñuel points up the visual motif of the rope, line, thread or leash and allows the central motif of the skipping-rope to reverberate through the film in recognizable transformations, most of which refer to bondage. This kind of visual echo is also effective in Tristana where the repeated motif of legs/feet – shown walking, tripping, bending, kneeling, having stockings unlaced or shoes shone – provides a prophetic context for the amputation the heroine suffers. What seemed so arbitrary in the Galdós novel is prepared for, subliminally, in the 82

Dalí distinguishes peevishly between ‘who it was who was responsible for the genius and who for the elementary aspects’ in these films, in Diary of a Genius, 91.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

177

film by the constant foregrounding of legs, the ultimate intention of which is to explode the old Spanish proverb, ‘Mujer honrada, pierna quebrada y en casa’ [An honourable woman has a broken leg and stays at home]. Buñuel’s interest in the transformational power of objects is seen right through to the last shot in his last film, Cet obscur objet du désir [That Obscure Object of Desire] (1978), which shows a woman sewing in a shop-window. When the male onlooker turns away to the street there is an apocalyptic explosion – presumably an act of terrorism – which closes Buñuel’s career with an appropriately violent, even blinding flash, completing the cycle begun with the sliced eye. This explosion is perhaps the ultimate transformation and vanishing act, at least for an atheist. But let us turn now to consider the point of metamorphic alterity in literature, specifically in a poet who many consider to be Spain’s most authentic surrealist writer.

Alterity in Aleixandre: mysticism or evasion? Whether or not we rate his poetry as highly as did the judges who awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977, there is no omitting Vicente Aleixandre from any discussion of Surrealism in Spain. Misgivings about his poetic authenticity may arise on several counts: the high incidence of borrowings in his work; his denial of Surrealism for decades until his acceptance of it as a defining influence in 197183; the cosmic scale of his eroticism, too predictable a pose perhaps in someone whose health was not robust. Harbouring these and other doubts about his seemingly deliberate unintelligibility, I am relieved to find that Aleixandre has attracted the attention of critics as perceptive as Bousoño, Harris and Bodini,84 for their views provide an impartial basis from which to approach a key feature in his work that is relevant to our discussion. It was Carlos Bousoño who highlighted Aleixandre’s use of the conjunction ‘o’ [or] and ‘o … o’ [either … or], suggesting that of all his stylistic innovations this was the most significant.85 For Bousoño, the frequent use of ‘o’ reflects Aleixandre’s metaphysical bent and is indicative of a visionary sense of unity, his notion of universal metamorphosis.86 In a self-appraisal Aleixandre said: 83

Note the title of Aleixandre’s Poesía surrealista. Antología (Ediciones Bolsillo, Barcelona, 1971). 84 Carlos Bousoño, La poesía de Vicente Aleixandre, 2nd edition (Gredos, Madrid, 1968); Derek Harris, Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights; Vittorio Bodini, Poetas surrealistas españoles, 2nd edition (Diamante, Barcelona, 1982). 85 Bousoño, op. cit., 328–9. 86 Ibid., 331.

178

ROBERT HAVARD

El tema de la mayoría de los libros del poeta era, si la expresión no parece desmedida, la Creación, la naturaleza entera, yo diría mejor su unidad, y el hombre quedaba confundido con ella, elemento de ese cosmos del que sustancialmente no se diferenciaba.87 [The theme in most of the poet’s works was, if it be not too grand, Creation, nature as a whole, or rather, I would say, its unity, and man’s immersion in it, as an element of that cosmos from which he cannot substantially be separated.]

He added: ‘En la poesía el poeta no piensa sino con el estilo’88 [In poetry the poet can only think via his style]. Aleixandre is supreme proof of this, for it is his way of writing and, above all, his expansive syntax that conveys a Heraclitean sense of fluidity and a constant feeling of transformation, typified in his use of the conjunction ‘o’. Bousoño distinguishes three variants of the conjunction, namely: the disjunctive, the copulative and the identifying. Whereas in normal speech the highest incidence is of the disjunctive [e.g. ‘Either Spain or Brazil will win’] and the least frequent is the identifying [e.g. ‘In New Spain or Mexico’], in Aleixandre this is reversed and the latter is more common. Bousoño focuses on the identifying or equalising variety which he finds, in turn, has four different categories: the imaginative, the synecdochic, the adjectival and the ‘o’ that serves as a nexus. There may be too much classifying here – for the copulative and the nexus seem to overlap – but there is also much that is revealing. Persuasive is Bousoño’s view that the imaginative ‘o’ is not an example of alterity, but rather a hidden simile – the ‘o’ [or] functions like ‘como’ [as] – for instance in the example ‘besos o pájaros’ [kisses or birds], which is equivalent to ‘besos como pájaros’ [kisses like birds], says Bousoño, or again, when the poet writes that the moon ‘deja una estela o cabello de plata’ [leaves a trail or silver hair], which means that the moon’s trail is like silver hair. The point can be simply made by comparing two of the poet’s volume titles, Espadas como labios [Swords like Lips] and La destrucción o el amor [Destruction or Love], for both are equations and the ‘como’ and ‘o’ [as and or] could be exchanged without altering the meaning of either. This metaphysical complexion, says Bousoño, implies a substantial equality in all living things,89 a clear illustration of which is found in ‘Unidad en ella’ [‘Unity in Her’] from La destrucción o el amor (1932–33), written after the poet’s first bout of renal tubercolosis. It begins:

87 88 89

Vicente Aleixandre, Mis poemas mejores, 2nd edition (Gredos, Madrid, 1961), 7. Ibid., 10. Bousoño, op. cit., 331.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

4

8

12

16

4

8

12

16

179

Cuerpo feliz que fluye entre mis manos, rostro amado donde contemplo el mundo, donde graciosos pájaros se copian fugitivos, volando a la región donde nada se olvida. Tu forma externa, diamante o rubí duro, brillo de un sol que entre mis manos deslumbra, cráter que me convoca con su música íntima, con esa indescifrable llamada de tus dientes, Muero porque me arrojo, porque quiero morir, porque quiero morir en el fuego, porque este aire de fuera no es mío, sino el caliente aliento que si me acerco quema y dora mis labios desde un fondo. Deja, deja que mire, teñido del amor, Enrojecido el rostro por tu purpúrea vida, deja que mire el hondo clamor de tus entrañas donde muero y renuncio a vivir para siempre…90 [Body of joy that flows between my hands, beloved face where I contemplate the world, where graceful birds depart in hosts, flying to the place where nothing is forgotten. Your external form, diamond or hard ruby, radiance of a sun that dazzles between my hands, crater that summons me with its intimate music, with that indecipherable call of your teeth. I die because I leap, because I want to die, because I want to live in the fire, because this air outside is not mine, but a hot breath that burns if I draw near and gilds my lips from a depth. Let me look, stained with love, my face reddened by your purple life, let me look upon the clamour deep inside you where I die and renounce my living for ever.]

Typifying Aleixandre’s pan-eroticism, the images taken from nature suggest the beauty of human form and lead inexorably to a sense of the combustible, frenetic and orgasmic. Nature and sexuality are equated on grounds that the cycles of growth and decay in one implicitly parallel the rising and subsiding of passion in the other. Increasingly tense and violent images evoke physical love at the high point of passion when a loss of self is experienced in the act of procreation. This central paradox of birth and death underpins the equalization found in the titles Espadas como labios and La destrucción o el amor, in the spirit of Breton’s declared wish that Surrealism might serve to reconcile oppo90

Vicente Aleixandre, Poesías completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 1960), 307.

180

ROBERT HAVARD

sites.91 Fundamentally, the I is drawn to climactic union with the other, but this union is at once an act of creation and a death of the self. Herein lies the logic of the parallel with San Juan de la Cruz (lines 9 and 16 above) and his longing for death – for instance in ‘muero porque no muero’ [I die because I don’t die] – when only immersion in the divine other will slake the mystic’s ardour.92 Herein too lies the rationale of the echo of Garcilaso’s courtly motif of danger in the beloved’s proximity (line 12).93 But the strongest Golden Age parallel is with Góngora, the tercentenary of whose death in 1927 gave Alberti’s group of poets their generational name. The apparent alternation ‘diamante o rubí duro’ [diamond or hard ruby] (line 5) is very reminiscent of Góngora, for instance his description of the handsome Acis in the Polifemo, ‘cíñalo bronce o múrelo diamante’94 [girds him in bronze or walls him in diamond], a copulative or in Bousoño’s terms. Among the dozen or so further examples of this conjunction in Góngora’s same poem we find: o verde o datilado [either green or date-coloured] o púrpura nevada o nieve roja [either snowy purple or red snow] la tormenta prevista … o pronosticada [the foreseen or forecast storm] o al cielo humano, o al cíclope celeste [to human heaven, or celestial Cyclop]95

All are examples of Bousoño’s identifying or equalizing variety of the conjunction, as is this last example: bóveda o de las fraguas de Vulcano,/ o tumba de los huesos de Tifeo96 [either a dome to Vulcan’s forge/ or tomb to Typhoes’ bones]. 91

Breton asserts his belief ‘in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality’ in the First Manifesto, op. cit., 14; while in 1933 he stated that one of the major functions of Surrealism was to work so that ‘the distinction between the subjective and the objective loses its necessity and value’, in ‘Le Message automatique’, quoted and translated by Alan Rose, Surrealism and Communism: The Early Years (Peter Lang, New York, 1991), 293. 92 See the poem ‘Coplas del alma que pena por ver a Dios’ [Songs of the Soul that Aches to see God’] which begins with the paradoxes, ‘Vivo sin vivir en mí/ … que muero porque no muero’ [I live without living in myself … for I die because I don’t die], San Juan de la Cruz, Poesías completas y otras páginas (Ebro, Zaragoza, 1961), 41. 93 Garcilaso plays on the motif of burning proximity in his use of the Petrarchan conceit that his beloved’s eyes are like the sun (a hyperbole famously satirized by Shakespeare) in a sonnet that opens: ‘Si…por sol tengo solo vuestra vista,/ la cual a quien no inflama o no conquista/ con su mirar es de sentido fuera’ [If for sun I have only your eyes,/ which, whosoever is not inflamed or conquered/ by its gaze is out of his senses]; see Garcilaso de la Vega, Poesías castellanas completas (Castalia, Madrid, 1969), 54. 94 Line 294 of ‘Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea’ [‘Fable of Polifemus and Galatea’]; see Poems of Góngora, ed. R.O. Jones (Cambridge University Press, 1966), 80. 95 Ibid., lines 82, 108, 303 and 424. 96 Ibid., lines 27–8.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

181

– a description of Sicily that again combines two opposites in the creative forge and the deathly tomb. To return to Aleixandre’s poem, we find that the process of identification is strengthened by persistent similes, though the comparative link ‘como’ [as] may be suppressed, as in the appositions of stanza two: Tu forma externa, <es como un> diamante o rubí duro, <es como un> brillo de un sol que entre mis manos deslumbra, <es como un> cráter que me convoca con su música íntima … [Your external form, diamond or hard ruby, radiance of a sun that dazzles between my hands, crater that summons me with its intimate music …]

Both the similes and the use of ‘o’ are more in evidence at the poem’s conclusion:

20

24

20

24

Quiero amor o la muerte, quiero morir del todo, quiero ser tú, tu sangre, esa lava rugiente que regando encerrada bellos miembros extremos siente así los hermosos límites de la vida. Este beso en tus labios como una lenta espina, como un mar que voló hecho un espejo, como el brillo de un ala, es todavía unas manos, un repasar de tu crujiente pelo, un crepitar de la luz vengadora, luz o espada mortal que sobre mi cuello amenaza, pero que nunca podrá destruir la unidad de este mundo. [I want love or death, I want to die from it all, I want to be you, your blood, that roaring lava that enclosed washes beautiful ends of limbs and feels life’s wondrous limits. This kiss on your lips like a slow thorn, like a flown sea become a mirror, like the brilliance of a wing, is still hands, a smoothing of your crusty hair, a crackling of the avenging light, light or mortal sword that hangs threatening over my neck, but which will never destroy the unity of this world.]

Besides three examples of ‘como’ [as/like] (lines 21, 22, 23) and the suppressed simile in the apposition, ‘tu sangre, <es como> esa lava rugiente’ [your blood, that roaring lava] (line 18), the above contains two further examples of the conjunction: ‘Quiero amor o la muerte’ [I want love or death] and ‘luz o espada mortal’ [light or mortal sword] (lines 17, 26). At first sight contrastive, the two elements in each line are identified on familiar

182

ROBERT HAVARD

grounds: the desire for love – immersion in the other – is a desire for a loss of self, or death, this equation being figuratively rendered in the second example by a parallel between the motifs of light and shining sword. The combined effect of similes and equations is to suggest a propensity for union in all things, be they inherently similar or different. This is found too in the poem ‘Silencio’ [‘Silence’], which is short enough to quote in full:

4

8

12

4

8

12

Bajo el sollozo un jardín no mojado. Oh pájaros, los cantos, los plumajes. Esta lírica mano azul sin sueño. Del tamaño de un ave, unos labios. No escucho. El paisaje es la risa. Dos cinturas amándose. Los árboles en sombra segregan voz. Silencio. Así repaso niebla o plata dura, beso en la frente lírica, agua sola, agua de nieve, corazón o urna, vaticinio de besos, ¡oh cabida!, donde ya mis oídos no escucharon los pasos en la arena, o luz o sombra.97 [Beneath the sobbing an unmoistened garden. Oh birds, songs, feathers. This lyrical blue hand, sleepless. Bird-sized lips. I don’t listen. The landscape is laughter. Two waists making love. The shaded trees isolate voices. Silence. Thus do I register mist or hard silver, kiss on the lyrical brow, plain water, water from snow, heart or urn, a forecast of kisses, in this receptacle!, where my ears no longer attended steps in the sand, or light or shadow.]

As in the previous poem, the key motif is light, perceived by the onlooker–poet. No doubt this owes a lot to Aleixandre’s childhood in Málaga and to the shimmering sea of Pedregalejo where his family spent their summers. Like Ortega before him, Aleixandre recalled: En esa edad imborrable, Málaga, sus costas, y su cielo y espumas, y su profunda aura indefinible, fueron haciéndose existencia del poeta, masa misma de su vivir, y nadie como él lo sabía cuando años más tarde 97

Obras completas, 227. From Espadas como labios [Swords like Lips], the poem first appeared in Revista de Occidente (no. 104, February 1932) with much less punctuation (only the stops at the end of lines 3 and 5, after ‘labios’ in line 4, and the exclamation points in line 10). See Vicente Aleixandre, Espadas como labios/La destrucción o el amor, ed. J.L. Cano (Castalia, Madrid, 1989), 53.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

183

interiormente descubría, bajo una luz familiar, todo el paisaje inmerso de un paraíso.98 [In that unforgettable period, Málaga, its coasts, sky and surf, its profound, indefinable aura, became part and parcel of the poet’s existence, inseparable from the mass of his being, which he realized years later when he found inside himself, under a familiar light, a wholly submerged landscape of paradise.]

This intensely material beauty had been celebrated by Góngora, another Andalusian, whose Polifemo and Soledades are full of seascapes. Yet, as Ortega implies, the diaphanous quality of sea and sky is not far removed from the spiritual: Hay un lugar que el Mediterráneo halaga, donde la tierra pierde su valor elemental, donde el agua marina … convierte su líquida amplitud en un espejo reverberante, que refleja lo único que allí es real: la Luz.99 [There is a place caressed by the Mediterranean, where the light loses its elemental quality, where the sea water … converts its liquid breadth into a shimmering mirror which reflects the one thing there that is real: Light.]

Much as in Aleixandre’s ‘Silencio’ [‘Silence’], the sunlit radiance of the material world permeates the onlooker and brings intimations of transcendence. In Ortega this process is phenomenological in the sense that the act of perception serves to integrate man and object, that is, subject–observer and object–observed. Ortega’s phenomenology had a major impact in turn on the metaphysic of Jorge Guillén who, perhaps not coincidentally, was happy to spend his last years in Málaga overlooking the Mediterranean.100 Under Góngora’s spell himself, Guillén sought to convey the ecstasy of immersion in reality via a language that was exclamatory and compressed, as we see in the opening verse of his great work, Cántico [Canticle]: ‘– ¡Luz! Me invade/ Todo mi ser. ¡Asombro!’101 [Light! It invades/ My whole being. Wonder!]. The same exclamatory wonder is at large in Aleixandre’s poem (lines 2 and 10), though in the first of these the exclamation mark is suppressed. As for compression, this is so telegrammatic as to be ungrammatical on occasion – note the absence of verbs in the poem’s first four sentences – and it often results in ambiguity: for example, the word ‘beso’ [kiss] (line 8) may at first be mistaken for a noun rather than a verb. The mixing in of ecstasy and 98

See prologue to V. Aleixandre, Poemas paradisiacos (El Arroyo de los Ángeles, Málaga, 1962), quoted by J.L. Cano in V. Aleixandre, Espadas como labios/La destrucción o el amor, 10. 99 José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, I, 532. 100 I have discussed Guillén’s debt to Ortega and phenomenology in Jorge Guillén: Cántico (Grant & Cutler, London, 1985). 101 Jorge Guillén, Aire nuestro (All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, Milan, 1968), 26.

184

ROBERT HAVARD

confusion is precisely what Aleixandre brings to this complex of ideas stretching back to San Juan de la Cruz: that is to say, from the mystic’s ineffable wonder – famously rendered in his stammering alliteration, ‘un no sé qué que quedan balbuciendo’102 [an ‘I know not what’ that they keep babbling] – through the compressed Latinisms of Góngora, to Ortega’s vitalist metaphysic that, by 1928, Guillén had adapted to his own materio-mysticism in Cántico. But whereas in Guillén the sense of transcendence is always lucidly put, in Aleixandre the language creates an aura of irrationalism – something Bécquer had fondly imagined103 – which is itself an appropriate context for transformation and magic. In ‘Silencio’ transformation centres on the baroque or Gongoresque motifs of light and shade, oppositions that are seen to become one by Aleixandre in his garden: ‘Así repaso niebla o plata dura … o luz o sombra’ [Thus do I register mist or hard silver … light or shadow.] Another opposition reconciled in the poem is that between birdsong and the silence of the poem’s title, for the poet’s sensibility is so steeped in the material substance of his garden he does not so much listen to birdsong as feel it a part of him: No escucho./ El paisaje es la risa. [I don’t listen./ The landscape is laughter.] Los árboles en sombra segregan voz. Silencio. [The shaded trees isolate voices. Silence.] … donde ya mis oídos no escucharon/ los pasos en la arena … [where my ears no longer hear/ steps in the sand …]

The garden, it appears, is a wondrous three-dimensional space – ‘¡oh cabida!’ [oh receptacle!] – in which to witness and perceive all that reality offers the senses, but, as it were, from the inside, experiencing its interconnectedness. The metaphysical overtones in ‘Silencio’ are strong, but we should not forget that the fundamental concept of phenomenology is simple enough and it centres on the idea of a direct or uncluttered perception of reality. It is the directness a child has vis-à-vis reality, a point Aleixandre explores in the poem ‘Cada cosa, cada cosa’ [‘Each Thing, Each Thing’]. Here the objects listed create a childlike aura, while the straightforward language evokes innocence:

102

See stanza 7 in the ‘Cántico espiritual’, San Juan de la Cruz, Poesías completas y otras páginas, 33. 103 In his Rimas [Rhymes] Bécquer imagines, for example, ‘palabras sin sentido’ [words without sense], Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 1954), 441.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

185

Hoy estoy más contento porque monto un caballo de veras … [Today I am happier/ because I am riding a real horse …] No es fácil confundir un ojo y una estrella. [It’s not easy to confuse an eye and a star.] Yo tengo un primo hermano, … un reloj hecho de primavera, una carita de enana que guardo como recuerdo de una excursión al África equatorial … … A mí me gusta dormir sobre un dado.104 [I have a first cousin,/ … a watch made of springtime, a dwarf’s little face that I keep as a souvenir of a trip to Equatorial Africa. … As for me, I like to sleep on a dice.]

Everything is seen by the child to be essentially real – ‘¡Oh, no! ¡La falsedad, no!/ Todo de verdad’ [Oh, no! Nothing false! Everything true] – and precisely as it should be, ‘Cada cosa debe estar en su sitio’ [Everything must be in its place], for, as he said above, ‘no es fácil confundir …’ [It is not easy to confuse …] A with B. Despite this material realness, there is an air of magic and a sense that things have a dynamic presence or energy: Porque todo quiere ser más … Tengo muchas cosas. Pero todas quieren ser más. [Because everything wants to be more … I have lots of things./ But all want to be more.]

This proliferous tendency reflects the endless variety of children’s games and the play of the imagination: ‘Mi prima Rosalía,/ … en su niñez fue un cerdito o crujido/ … se empeñaba siempre en enseñarme cómo deben ser los muslos por los labios’ [My cousin Rosalía/ … in her childhood was a piglet or squeaky thing,/ … she always tried to show me how thighs should be with lips]. But the continuous transformations also have a lot to do with the way the world presents itself to a child, that is, in a constant stream of unexpected juxtapositions: Por dondequiera ve cabezas, o planchas calientes,

104

From Espadas como labios, in Poesías completas, 286–7.

186

ROBERT HAVARD

o inicia saludos y pretende tener una ronca voz y hasta una forma respetable, y deponer sus quejas ante lirio o canapés o luces que no interrumpan. [Everywhere you see heads,/ or hot irons, or start to say hello and want to have a hoarse voice and even a decent shape, and put your complaints before lilies or canapés or lights that don’t cut off.]

We might have read this as psychic dictation had we not been alerted by the childlike aura of the poem. In effect, the jumble of objects and thoughts is not the disjointed outpouring of a tormented unconscious but an illustration of a child’s direct and unstructured way of perceiving reality. Again it is the texture of the language – rather than its meaning – that gives the sense of what Aleixandre wishes to communicate. The four examples of ‘o’ [or] play a significant part, for they serve as a nexus or linking facility and suggest that each and every item, though randomly disparate in itself, is all part of the same reality which a child – like the adult poet in ‘Silencio’ – sees as one whole. This is the opposite, in fact, of Loyolan classification, separation or articulation that Aleixandre, as a child, was lucky enough to escape. Bousoño apart, no one has looked more closely at the technical aspects of Aleixandre’s language than Derek Harris. Among the linguistic features he identifies as contributing to the poet’s aura of irrationalism are: phonetic generation of words through alliteration and assonance; ellipsis and syntactic fragmentation; unattributed direct speech or unidentified speaking voices; anaphora, anadiplosis, enumeration and parataxis (as a means of promoting the extension of sentences); hallucinatory personifications, arbitrary juxtapositions, transferred epithets, the exploitation of semantic ambiguity in words having more than one connotation and of indeterminates like the possessive ‘su’ [his, her, your, their] and third-person verb forms.105 These and other devices, Harris persuasively demonstrates, feed into a rich and often baffling linguistic mode by means of which the poet at once probes and correlates a mystic oneness in the concrete world. Many of the features appear in ‘Toro’ [‘Bull’], which begins:

4

105

Esa mentira o casta. Aquí, mastines, pronto; paloma, vuela; salta, toro. Toro de luna o miel que no despega. Aquí, pronto; escapad, escapad; sólo quiero, sólo quiero los bordes de la lucha. Oh tú, toro hermosísimo, piel sorprendida, ciega suavedad como un mar hacia adentro,

Derek Harris, Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights, 203–16.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

8

4

8

187

quietud, caricia, toro, toro de cien poderes, frente a un bosque parado de espanto al borde.106 [That lie or caste (thoroughbred). Here, mastiffs, quick; dove, fly; jump, bull. Bull of moon or honey that doesn’t unstick. Here, quick; escape, escape all of you; I only want, I only want the edges of the fight. Oh you, most beautiful bull, startled skin, blind smoothness like a sea going inwards, quietness, caress, bull, bull of one hundred powers, facing a forest stunned in shock on the edge.]

Instinctive, elemental, irrepressible, the bull is an explosive life force that defies logical definition, as the language itself insinuates. Features that convey a sense of the irrational are, briefly: identifying alternation (lines 1, 3); unexpected similes and suppressed similes (lines 7, 3, 8); suppressed exclamations (lines 2, 4, 6); alliterative generation of words, mentira, mastines, miel and pronto, paloma, poderes, parado; anadiplosis, toro/toro (lines 2/3, 8), sólo quiero/sólo quiero (lines 4/5); persistent syntactic compression and sentence fragmentation. One aim of this sharded language is to convey a sense of the primitive by approximating what Harris elsewhere calls a ‘prearticulate’ stage of language.107 In this context we might note that ellipsis is a well known feature in the early stage of language acquisition: a child will typically omit so-called ‘function’ words and use only ‘content’ words in saying, for instance, ‘Daddy coming’ instead of ‘Daddy is coming’.108 In Aleixandre, language texture itself becomes a metaphor and, in effect, we are back with the prophetic or mantic poet, a role he fully endorses: El poeta está lleno de sabiduría, pero no puede vanagloriarse de ella, porque quizá no es suya, una fuerza incognoscible, un espíritu habla por su boca. Con los pies clavados en la tierra, una corriente misteriosa se condensa, hace presión bajo sus plantas para correr através de su cuerpo y ascender a su lengua. Entonces es la propia tierra, la tierra profunda la que arde en ese cuerpo investido.109 [The poet is full of wisdom, but he can’t boast about it, because maybe it’s not his own, an unknowable force, a spirit speaks through his mouth.

106

The poem is from Espadas como labios (1930–31), Poesías completas, 240. Ibid., 224. 108 See R. Brown and C. Fraser, ‘The Acquisition of Syntax’, in C. Cofer and B. Musgrave (eds.), Learning Behavior and Learning Problems and Processes (McGraw–Hill, New York, 1963), 158–201. 109 Quoted by Vittorio Bodini, Poetas surrealistas españoles, 83. 107

188

ROBERT HAVARD

With his feet pinned to the earth, a mysterious current condenses and gathers pressure under his soles and rises through his body to his tongue. It is then the earth itself, from its depths, that burns in that empowered body.]

This is pure shamanism: the visionary poet is a medium through which tellurian forces find an outlet in whatever guise they choose. Yet there is another aspect to the issue of incoherence, as Harris notes: ‘It may be that…expression is being inhibited by forces of repression.’110 Oddly enough, the mantic does not preclude its apparent opposite, repression, which has been described as ‘the key to Freud’s thought’.111 Aleixandre’s awareness of repression as a factor that bears upon his mode of writing was apparent in the title he originally intended for Pasión de la tierra [Passion for the Earth], namely: La evasión hacia el fondo112 [Evasion towards the Depth]. Harris speaks of ‘a conscious or unconscious retreat from full articulation’ and finds indications of repression in a number of poems.113 That there may be ‘psychological obstacles to full expression’ is hardly surprising, and in ‘Toro’ it is evident that these are linked to sexual taboos, most notably, I suggest, against masturbation. ‘Toro’ insinuates the context of a bullfight, it is true, but this is never fully drawn. The magnificent animal erupts in the poem like a bull in the arena, causing others [mastiffs, dove] to flee perhaps, and there is a sense of spectator awe (line 9) which complements the speaker’s stammering wish (lines 4/5) to remain safely behind the barriers. The poem focuses on the bull itself and it evokes the animal’s texture as well as its power, ‘piel sorprendida,/ ciega suavidad’ [startled skin, blind smoothness]. When this combines with liquid imagery in the imaginative and visually precise comparison of the bull’s undulating contours with the sea, ‘como un mar hacia dentro’ [like a sea going inwards], the sense of the phallic gathers strength. It first appeared in line 3, ‘Toro de luna o miel que no despega’ [Bull of moon or honey that doesn’t unstick], which has associations with luna de miel [honeymoon] and also connects moon–horn with semen-like honey. The spurting of liquid on the blood-filled animal’s seemingly swollen neck is also implicit, though this violence is subsumed in an ambience of tenderness, especially in the poem’s second half:

110

Harris, op. cit., 209. See A.A. Brill, for whom the theory of repression is ‘the pillar upon which the edifice of psychoanalysis rests’: The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (The Modern Library, New York, 1938), 939. 112 See Vicente Aleixandre, Mis poemas mejores, 31. 113 For instance, in ‘Ser de esperanza y lluvia’ [‘Being of Hope and Rain’], ‘Partida’ [‘Departure’ or ‘Game’] and in the encypherment of ‘Muerte’ [‘Death’] which was originally called ‘X’. Harris, op. cit., 207, 209, 223–4. 111

TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

12

16

12

16

189

Toro o mundo que no, que no muge. Silencio; vastedad de esta hora. Cuerno o cielo ostentoso, toro negro que aguanta caricia, seda, mano. Ternura delicada sobre una piel de mar, mar brillante y caliente, anca pujante y dulce, abandono asombroso del bulto que deshace sus fuerzas casi cósmicas como leche de estrellas. Mano inmensa que cubre celeste toro en tierra.114 [Bull or world that doesn’t that doesn’t bellow. Silence; vastness of this hour. Horn or ostentatious heaven, black bull that stands caress, silk, hand. Delicate tenderness on a skin of sea, sea brilliant and hot, haunches sweet and booming, startling surrender of bulk that bursts its almost cosmic strength like stars’ milk. Immense hand that covers heavenly bull on earth.]

The erection motifs are unmistakable, based as they are both on the shape of the humped animal – with its singular and heavenly ‘cuerno’ [horn] – and on its size: ‘Toro o mundo’ [bull = world], as well as ‘vastedad’, ‘inmensa’ [vastness, immense] and ‘ostentoso’ [ostentatious] < Latin ostentatio: ob(s), before, tendere, to stretch out. Masturbatory connotations derive from the now familiar ‘mano’ [hand] and from the repeated interfacing of liquid imagery and tactile sensitivity: ‘caricia’ [caress], which occurs twice, ‘seda [silk], ‘piel sorprendida’ [startled skin], ‘ternura delicada’ [delicate tenderness]. The images ‘piel de mar’ [skin of sea] and ‘mar … caliente’ [hot sea] pinpoint the proximity of liquid under a tactile cover, while unmitigated anality surfaces in ‘anca pujante y dulce’ [haunches sweet and booming], where the movement of sea-animal-human skin provokes climax. The latter is conveyed in ejaculatory images (anticipated earlier in ‘vuela’ [fly], ‘salta’ [jump], ‘escapad’ [escape]): abandono asombroso del bulto que deshace sus fuerzas casi cósmicas como leche de estrellas [startling surrender of bulk that bursts its almost cosmic strength like stars’ milk.]

The releasing of pent-up substance in ‘abandono’ [surrender, vacating] is reinforced by ‘deshace’ [bursts, cf. ‘deshacerse en lágrimas’: to burst into

114

Poesías completas, 240.

190

ROBERT HAVARD

tears] which is now explicitly related to semen, ‘leche’ [milk] being colloquial for spunk. In the sexual context the poem bears comparison with Dalí–Buñuel motifs on two counts: first, in the beholder’s astonishment, ‘parado de espanto’ [stunned in shock]; and second, in the trepidation of wishing to remain ‘al borde’ [on the edge], which connects with repression and, very possibly, with notions of sexual identity that may be insinuated from the first line, ‘mentira o casta’ [lie or caste (thoroughbred, genuine article)]. We need not explore the sources of this repression, though it is known that Aleixandre suffered a typically rigorous – if not exactly Jesuit – education.115 Essentially, the poem is an example of symbolization or displacement – that is, evasion – but it differs radically in this from standard literary praxis. By virtue of the fact that the primary context of the bullfight remains unclear, the erotic connotations of the secondary context can be read almost without reference to bulls or bullfighting, especially in the last lines. Rather than correlation of context B via a dominant context A, we have something approaching symbiosis and progressive equalization. In the spirit of Dalí’s double images, the poem’s two elements virtually stand alone, and, insofar as language and the reader’s imagination allow, the bull changes into a phallus. Language is the key to this process which, effectively, explores the metamorphic properties of metaphor. Language is also alchemical in Alberti, in whose case, syntax, as we shall see in the next chapter, is the prime agent of transformation.

115

In Madrid, from the age of eleven, he attended the Colegio Teresiano on San Jerónimo where the headmaster, an astronomer, ‘imponía una disciplina que hacía fastidioso el estudio del bachillerato’ [imposed a discipline that made his secondary education irksome]. See José L. Cano (ed.), Vicente Aleixandre: Espadas como labios/La destrucción o el amor, 8.

6 COME THE REVOLUTION

Come the Revolution A great mutuality of aspirations exists between the Communists and us. Breton, Péret, Aragon, Eluard, Unik (1927)1 The artist must take sides. Paul Robeson (1937)2

Alberti’s sermonic syntax Political commitment in Alberti is foreshadowed by his antipathy towards religion which prompts his adoption of a rebellious poetic mode. Sermones y moradas [Sermons and Dwelling Places], I have suggested, is characterized by Alberti’s imitation of a religious register, that of sermonic discourse. This bears superficial resemblance to Aleixandre’s mystic style, but, in keeping with his subversive intentions, Alberti appropriates different linguistic traits. As to subversion, it will be clear that to mock a religious register is to strike at the heart of religion itself, for, as David Crystal says, there is a ‘close relationship…between language and religion’, especially ‘a register as formalized and tradition-based as Catholicism’.3 Religious writing, traditionally understood, is imbued with divine authority: Moses’s tablets were written by ‘the finger of God’ (Exodus 31: 18); the term ‘Holy Writ’ equates with the Scriptures and the phrase ‘for it is written’ denotes an unchallengeable truth. Speech, similarly, was thought to have a divine source and, as Crystal points out, the metaphor ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God’ (John 1: 1) was ‘very effective in displaying the fusion of Christ and his Gospel’.4 This sense

1

Paul Eluard et al., Au Grand jour (Éditions Surréalistes, 1927), 7, cited and translated by Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red: The Politics of Surrealism (Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 63. 2 Paul Robeson, the black American singer, spoke these words at a rally for Spanish refugee children at the Albert Hall, London, 24 June 1937. For Robeson, who visited Spain in January 1938, the war was ‘the greatest cause’ that faced the world in its fight to eliminate human slavery. See Ron Ramdin, Paul Robeson: The Man and his Mission (Peter Owen, London, 1987), 96. 3 David Crystal, Linguistics, Language and Religion (Burns & Oates, London, 1965), 117, 116. 4 Ibid., 132.

192

ROBERT HAVARD

of a theophoric or God-bearing language is no less evident in liturgy, words being indispensable to prayer and to many kinds of ritual – blessings, litanies, invocations, doxologies – all prominent in Catholicism. Liturgical language must command respect, says Crystal, and it does so by distancing itself from standard language, its unfamiliarity serving to alert us to its ‘exceptional purpose’. Even today, liturgical language is marked, he says, by its formal style, complex sentences, archaisms, formulaic utterances and its avoidance of colloquialisms.5 With these points in mind, we look again, briefly, at Alberti’s use of this register, notably his syntax. If Aleixandre’s syntax is characterized by telegrammatic compression, giving on occasion a sense of mystical awe, in Alberti the opposite happens. Here it is not a question of communicating an individual’s intuitive or irrational experience of union; rather, the poet adopts the role of explicator, his task being to show others what they should do and think in conformity with the system he represents. As a sermonizer, he speaks in a register appropriate to his office, advising, admonishing, sometimes entreating: ‘Al que me está leyendo o escuchando, pido una sola sílaba de misericordia’ (453) [Of the person who is reading me or listening to me, I ask for but one syllable of mercy]. He asserts propositions, analyses hypotheses, demonstrates equivalences and points out falsehoods or contradictions. His language is full of rational rhetoric and it relies heavily on the linkages of argumentation: if…then; and, or, not, but, because, therefore, so, when, once and the like. Often he has so much to say or so many refinements to bring to bear on a given issue that his sentences grow alarmingly. An example is his enunciation of the final truth in the prose poem, ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [‘Sermon on the Four Truths’]: Cuando los escabeles son mordidos por las sombras y unos pies poco seguros intentan comprobar si en los rincones donde el polvo se desilusiona sin huellas las telarañas han dado sepultura a la avaricia del mosquito, sobre el silencio húmedo y cóncavo de las bodegas se persiguen los diez ecos que desprende el cadáver de un hombre al chocar contra una superficie demasiado refractaria a la luz. (455) [When footstools are bitten by shadows and some uncertain feet try to ascertain if in corners where dust grows disillusioned without footprints the cobwebs have laid to rest a mosquito’s avarice, over the moist and concave silence of wine-cellars ten echoes chase each other that the corpse of a man issues on bumping into a surface too refractory to light.]

Our first reaction is probably one of consternation, largely induced by the length of the sentence. Yet there is only one comma and the sentence unfolds without doing violence to grammar. Essentially, the speaker says: when A 5

Ibid., 151–4.

COME THE REVOLUTION

193

occurs, then B occurs. Event B, the main clause, is the action of ten echoes chasing each other around a cellar. This is complicated by two subordinates. A prepositional phrase tells us where the action will happen – over the moist and concave silence of wine-cellars – and an adjectival clause (with gerund and adjectival phrases attached) describes the echoes’ origin: a dead man still moves about the cellar, it seems, bumping into its hard walls from time to time, a painful collision that perhaps causes him to yell or curse. If anything, the first part of the sentence, A, is more complex since it presents two co-ordinated adverbial clauses that give the temporal context in which B happens: A1 A2 A21 A22

cuando los escabeles son mordidos por las sombras [when footstools are bitten by shadows] y [and] >cuando< unos pies poco seguros intentan comprobar [>when< some uncertain feet try to ascertain] si [if/whether] en los rincones donde el polvo se desilusiona sin huellas [in corners where dust grows disillusioned without footprints] las telarañas han dado sepultura a la avaricia del mosquito … [cobwebs have laid to rest a mosquito’s avarice …]

We note that the second adverbial clause, A2, has generated its own subordi1 nates: A2 , an adverbial clause of place, is parenthetically inserted before 2 A2 , the interrogative complement of A2 which strictly includes the complementizer ‘si’ [if/whether]. It is this expansion of the paratactic co-ordinators that most troubles the reader. Effectively, the linear progression of the sentence is broken by subordinate clauses that bring an overload of intrusive information and, as we impatiently await the main clause, it becomes difficult to process the content of the sentence. The delay of the main clause – by four verb clauses, plus adjectival, prepositional and adverbial phrases – is not ungrammatical in itself, but it is excessive and it amounts to an abuse of the normal conventions of sentence structure. Quite simply, sentences are expected to flow more freely and not be weighed down by so much information. Yet this particular linguistic technique is clearly intentional and, as such, indicative of Alberti’s aims. Two obvious inferences can be drawn from the complexity of this syntax. First, that the degree of absurdity it lends is in keeping with the content, there being more than a touch of the absurd about footstools bitten by shadows; dust growing disillusioned and a mosquito’s avarice. Second, that the abuse of syntactical convention is imitative of sermonic and especially Jesuit practice, which presumably abuses language conventions in like manner. Alberti, we surmise, wishes to imply something to the effect that religious apologists typically use language in a way designed to bemuse their listeners/readers, thereby disguising mumbo-jumbo as incon-

194

ROBERT HAVARD

trovertible truth.6 There is, however, a further implication, which derives from the insistent object orientation of the vocabulary. This stands out more clearly if we strip the sentence of its argumentative linkages, which leaves something like: footstools are bitten by shadows feet try to ascertain dust grows disillusioned without footprints cobwebs have laid to rest a mosquito’s avarice ten echoes chase each other the corpse of a man goes bumping against a hard surface.

This virtual bombardment of objects has the effect of suggesting the absolute contingency of the material realm. No less importantly, it serves to confuse the material and human realms, mainly through unusual semantic collocation. Objects have sentience – shadows bite, dust has moods – and insects bear such human traits as avarice; while humans, for their part, are materialized in reciprocal fashion by reduction to non-intelligent parts – feet try to ascertain – and by the illogical notion of a body suffering pain after death (N.B. it is the body not the spirit that survives death). If we accept that the thrust of the passage, semantically, is to confuse these different levels of intelligence or sentience – the object, insect and human levels – we have no difficulty in seeing how the syntax contributes to this confusion. Fundamentally, it integrates the various parts into one whole sentence, thereby suggesting the indivisibility of what is presented (i.e. the object and human facets are one). It also implies that there is an indivisible logic or truth to what is communicated, for the sentence itself, we noted, is a rational or grammatical piece: when A occurs, then B occurs. This formula of co-ordination, besides conveying a sense of propitious conditions, strongly suggests a cause and effect correlation. The sentence can be reconstructed in terms of a circumstantial or ‘indirect reason relationship’:7 when [only when or because] A occurs i.e. when objects [in a cellar] feel and [especially] suffer then [only then or consequently] B occurs i.e. a deceased man [is heard to] shriek[s] in pain

It is left to us to fill in the personal detail. We might guess that the ‘pies poco seguros’ [uncertain feet] belong to Alberti who ventured into the

6

Alberti recalled that the first communion service he heard was ‘probably long-winded and full of inanities’, in The Lost Grove, 23. 7 See Randolph Quirk et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman, London and New York, 1985), 1103 et seq.

COME THE REVOLUTION

195

wine-cellar (on one or more occasions), while the deceased is a cherished relative – probably his Uncle Vicente8 – whose presence is felt as keenly as the resounding echo of a shriek. From this the sentence can be reduced to a simple statement of contingency: When[ever] I go [went] into a [that] cellar I hear [heard] a [my uncle’s] voice echoing.

The ultimately infallible – if paradoxical – logic is that human presence can be felt even when it is absent, for it is contained/preserved in objects, this being the truth to which the poet–sermonizer bears witness. In the above passage the plethora of subordinates underlines the point about the primacy of matter and, in effect, syntax functions as a metaphor of reality’s unrelenting materialism. The same could be said about almost any stanza in this poem. Most consist of a single sentence and many, like the above, have six or more finite clauses. The following sentence has seven, in fact, and its co-ordination compares with the one we have just considered, notably in terms of the delaying of the main clause complement and the consequent sense of a triumphant ending: Yo os prevengo, quebrantaniños y mujeres beodos que aceleráis las explosiones de los planetas y los osarios, yo os prevengo que cuando el alma de mi enemigo hecha bala de cañón perfore la Tierra y su cuerpo ignorante renazca en la torpeza del topo o en el hálito acre y amarillo que desprende la saliva seca del mulo, comenzará la perfección de los cielos. (454–5) [I warn you, drunken childbreakers and female drunks who accelerate the explosions of planets and charnel houses, I warn you that when my enemy’s soul turned into a cannonball perforates the Earth and his ignorant body is reborn in a mole’s dimness or the acrid yellow breath that issues from the dry saliva of a mule, heaven’s perfection will commence.]

The oratorical device of a reiterated main clause lends rhythm and emphasis: ‘Yo os prevengo … yo os prevengo que’ [I warn you … I warn you that]. Sandwiched between, comes the identification of the addressees, namely ‘quebrantaniños y mujeres beodos’ [drunken childbreakers and female drunks], who, not to mince words, are the schoolteachers and pious aunts of Alberti’s tormented boyhood, their inebriation being attributable to religion rather than alcohol. The appositive noun phrase that identifies them is expanded by an adjectival clause, ‘que aceleráis las explosiones de los planetas y los osarios’ [who accelerate the explosions of planets and charnel 8

See The Lost Grove, 31–4. Alberti may well be conflating memories of wine cellars with the ‘dark cellar that had become the lair of horrendous spiders’ in his uncle Vicente’s house. Ibid., 32.

196

ROBERT HAVARD

houses], which is somewhat ambiguous since only the absence of a comma after ‘beodos’ [drunks] marks ‘que’ as who and not as a that introducing the speaker’s warning, as we might first think.9 The word ‘quebrantaniños’ [childbreaker] is close to ‘quebrantahuesos’ [literally bonebreaker], a type of vulture or lammergeier, but also a term applied colloquially to sadistic teachers. This connection gathers strength with ‘osarios’ [charnel houses] – the Spanish word referring specifically to a depository for bones [huesos] – and the parallel thereby equates schools with charnel houses both for their destructive effect and their mutual association with the Church. The speaker’s warning is further delayed by the now familiar use of ‘cuando’ [when] which co-ordinates two adverbial subordinates, each with a subjunctive of pending action: A1 A2 A3

cuando el alma de mi enemigo (hecha bala de cañón) perfore la Tierra [when my enemy’s soul (turned into a cannonball) perforates the Earth] y [and] >cuando< su cuerpo ignorante renazca en … ‘materia’ [>when< his ignorant body is reborn in … ‘matter’] >luego< comenzará la perfección de los cielos. [>then< heaven’s perfection will commence.]

The first co-ordinate, A1, predicts the death and especially burial – in the Earth’s perforation – of the speaker’s collective enemy, the Church, still identified via warmongering imagery. The second co-ordinate, A2, generates its own clause, which consists in effect of two exemplifications of ‘matter’. This is presented via another paratactic co-ordination, the first element being a prepositional phrase and the second a finite clause in its own right: ‘en la torpeza del topo o en el hálito acre y amarillo que desprende la saliva seca del mulo’ [in a mole’s dimness or the acrid yellow breath that issues from a mule’s dry saliva], where mole indicates subterranean matter and mule’s saliva is epiplasmic. This expansion is clearly another case of overloading, teasing the reader who is doubtless relieved to reach the main-clause complement – ‘comenzará la perfección de los cielos’ [heaven’s perfection will commence] – itself an ecstatic, adventist notion. Besides the abnormal expansion, we note that Alberti does not allow us to process the sentence sequentially. It would be much easier if the order were: (1) Main clause + (2) Complement + (3) Modifying adverbial clauses I warn you that + heaven’s perfection will commence + when … and when …

9 It is easy to misread the passage, I can vouch. See From Romanticism to Surrealism, 271.

COME THE REVOLUTION

197

But the modifiers (3) are placed before the complement (2) and the processing is exacerbated by expansion of (3). As readers we know that the matrix clause, ‘I warn you that’, is likely to be followed by a noun clause complement (there being few alternatives stored in our ‘mental lexicon’10) and we await the complementation with some impatience. We are further frustrated by illogicalities or semantic obfuscations which can be more readily seen when the sentence is reduced and paraphrased: I warn you, warmongers and destroyers of youth, I warn you that when my enemy’s soul is turned in death to base matter salvation will be at hand.

The complexity is due in part to the fact that those he warns are also the enemy, but the two seem to be presented as different groups. There is also a degree of semantic change in the two instances of ‘os prevengo’ [I warn you]. The first example, by proximity to the pejorative terms ‘quebrantaniños y mujeres beodos’ [drunken childbreakers and female drunks], is more aggressive or threatening than the second instance, ‘os prevengo que … comenzará la perfección de los cielos’ [I warn you that … heaven’s perfection will commence], which is more in the spirit of forewarn or even foretell. As a whole, the sentence seems to be both a threat (apocalyptic) and a promise (adventist), which is to say, a conflation of two sermonic modes. An additional difficulty arises from the paradoxical nature of the deeper argument that runs something like: only when people realize the fallacy of religion (and the concept of an afterlife) will salvation be possible. Here the adventist concept is borrowed from the enemy register, but, ironically, its fulfilment depends upon the destruction of that selfsame otherworldly system and the coming of a materialist one. As a final example of the way syntax works in unison with semantics to cause confusion and advance the materialist ethos, we look at the poem ‘Sermón de la sangre’ [‘Sermon on Blood’] which begins: Me llama, me grita, me advierte, me despeña y me alza, hace de mi cabeza un yunque en medio de las olas, un despiadado yunque contra quien deshacerse zumbando. (461) [It calls me, shouts at me, warns me, casts me down and lifts me up, it makes my head an anvil in the midst of waves, a cruel anvil against whom (sic) to beat oneself into a pulp.

The first thing to note is that the subject of the six verbs in this sentence is unclear, owing to the absence in the original of subject pronouns and the fact that the third-person-singular verb form in Spanish is the same for he, she, 10

For the concept of predicting sentence structures, see, for instance, Jean Aitchison, Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon (Blackwell, Oxford, 1994).

198

ROBERT HAVARD

you (polite) as well as it. In the English translation, by contrast, a subject pronoun is required by grammar and the chosen It clarifies the issue unduly, weakening the suspense embedded in the poem’s cataphoric structure. If we took our lead from the poem’s title, either sermon or blood could be the understood subject, but this is not resolved until the seventh stanza: mientras me humilla, me levanta, me inunda, me desquicia, me seca, me abandona, me hace correr de nuevo, y yo no sé llamarla de otro modo: Mi sangre. [while it humiliates me, lifts me up, floods me, drives me mad, dries me out, abandons me, makes me run (or vulgarly, come) again, and I don’t know what else to call it: My blood.]

It is ‘sangre’ [blood] that is the subject of so many verbs, in stanza six as in stanza one, and the human element – the speaker – is located by the object pronoun ‘me’ [me]. This simple linguistic point is the key to what the poem has to say: namely, that a material element, blood, dominates the subjective element, the personality, even to the extent that it determines how the latter feels, thinks, reacts and desires. The vicissitudes of the speaker’s emotional life are suggested from stanza two where the railway-station perhaps suggests a romantic anecdote in embryo. Here the ambiguity of verb–subject is especially teasing: Hay que tomar el tren, le urge. No lo hay. Salió. Y ahora me dice que ella misma lo hizo volar al alba, desaparecer íntegro ante un amanecer de toros desangrándose a la boca de un túnel. Sé que estoy en la edad de obedecerla … [You have to take the train, it (?) urges him. No you don’t. It’s (She’s?) gone. And now it tells me that she herself (or it = blood?) made it fly off to dawn, disappearing completely in the face of a daybreak of bleeding bulls in a tunnel’s mouth. I know I’m at an age when I should obey it (her) …]

The speaker acknowledges that he is at the mercy of his metabolism, an idea that may owe something to Alberti’s periods of ill health as a young man. The strong connection between blood, the heart and the emotions suggests the body–spirit conundrum and, in this context, a reversal of values. The seemingly intermediate status of blood, between the subjective and the objective, was doubtless the attraction of this motif for Alberti who wrote a second poem, ‘Adiós a la sangre’ [‘Goodbye to Blood’], and planned an entire volume, Vida de mi sangre [Life of My Blood].11 As to the above 11

See his letters from Paris and Berlin, dated 29-ix-1931 and 11-vii-1932 respectively, in Rafael Alberti, Correspondencia a José María de Cossío, 42, 48.

COME THE REVOLUTION

199

poem, however, the central point is the way that syntactical structure accords startling power to its noun–subject, ‘sangre’ [blood], by withholding it until last. Such extreme cataphora is rare, though Pedro Salinas provides a fine example in La voz a ti debida [The Voice I Owe You].12 More typically, the device is found in biblical discourse, for instance in delayed reference to the Saviour: How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace … who publishes salvation … (Isaiah 52: 7)

Or in rhetorical questions: Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? (Isaiah 40: 12]

Like the hanging interrogative, cataphora – exophora, strictly, in the last example – creates suspense and lends emphasis to the understood or supposed noun subject. This is identified as blood above, but, increasingly in Alberti, adventism is associated with the Marxist notion of the primacy of matter and the coming of a new Messiah. This application of syntax is fundamentally humorous, designed to ridicule via mimetic exaggeration. It foreshadows Alberti’s guiñolesque theatre of the 1930s – notably the heavy Church satire in Dos farsas revolucionarias (1934)13 [Two Revolutionay Farces] – and is consistent with one of Surrealism’s basic tenets, derived from Dada, which Luis Buñuel stressed: ‘El surrealismo nació como fuerza de humor, se fundamentó en el humor como fuerza liberadora’14 [Surrealism was born as a humorous weapon, it was based on humour as a liberating force]. But there is another type of Surrealism, as Buñuel also knew, that is subversive without being at all humorous. It finds its supreme expression in his extraordinary film of 1933 on the impoverished Spanish region of Las Hurdes, which we now consider. What this bleak film has in common with Alberti’s poetry, aside from its persistent 12

See the poem ‘Tú no las puedes ver’ [‘You cannot see them’] where the noun–subject, tears, is delayed until the last lines: ‘(Si las llamara lágrimas/ nadie me entendería)’ [If I called them tears/ no one would understand me]. Pedro Salinas, Poesías completas (Barral Editores, Barcelona, 1975), 315. 13 The two farces are Bazar de la providenica [Providence Bazaar] and Farsa de los Reyes Magos [Farce of the Three Kings] in Dos farsas revolucionarias (Ediciones Octubre, Madrid, 1934). A fragment of Farce of the Three Kings was also published in Octubre’s double number (4/5), 13–15. 14 Interview with Raquel Tibol in the Mexican newspaper Novedades (November 1953), cited by Agustín Sánchez Vidal, Luis Buñuel, 67.

200

ROBERT HAVARD

material focus, is a capacity to confound: for if the subversive intent in Alberti’s linguistic opaqueness is easy to miss, we can also be wrong-footed by Buñuel’s sudden switch from the readily identifiable surrealist traits in his first two films to a twenty-seven-minute documentary that is, to all appearances, unrelenting in its realism.15 My intention is to show that this is not an about-turn on Buñuel’s part, but a complementary perspective within the same, though evolving, surrealist ethos.

Land without Bread: Buñuel’s surrealist documentary on Spain The film Land Without Bread [Tierra sin pan/Terre sans pain], which is also known in Spain by the regional place-name, Las Hurdes, was made in that desolate corner of Extremadura in four weeks’ shooting between 23 April and 22 May 1933.16 Alberti and his wife María Teresa León accompanied Buñuel to Las Hurdes on at least one of his expeditions.17 Moved by what they saw, they used a still from the film on the cover of the first edition of their journal, Octubre. Escritores y artistas revolucionarios [October. Revolutionary Writers and Artists], in June 1933. It shows two ragged boys sitting on school benches (see plate 10), the caption alongside giving the first lines of Alberti’s poem from El poeta en la calle (1931–35) [The Poet in the Street]: Los niños de Extremadura van descalzos. ¿Quién les robó los zapatos? Les hiere el calor y el frío. ¿Quién les rompió los vestidos? (538) [The children of Extremadura/ go barefoot. Who stole their shoes from them?/ The heat and cold hurts them. Who tore the clothes they wear?]

15 One untenable conclusion is that the poems of Yo era un tonto and Sermones y moradas are ‘incoherent’ and ‘a sign of the author’s confusion’, Louise Popkin, The Theatre of Rafael Alberti (Tamesis, London, 1976), 16, which says more about the critic than the poet. As for Tierra sin pan, a marked tendency to undervalue this film and dismiss it in surrealist terms is apparent in its frequent omission from critical studies and the little attention given it in others. 16 The shooting is sometimes mistakenly dated – even by Buñuel himself – as 1932. 17 There is some doubt as to the time of the visit or visits that Alberti and María Teresa León made. The latter recollects that they accompanied Buñuel more than once to Las Hurdes, see Max Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 314, while Alberti speaks of only one early visit prior to the shooting. Bearing in mind that he and his wife were out of Spain from June 1931 until early April 1933, it is likely they were there for some of the shooting, especially since Alberti recalls a number of the filmed sequences; see Aub, op. cit., 288.

COME THE REVOLUTION

201

By 1933 Las Hurdes had already attained iconic status as the region that epitomized Spain’s backwardness. As Mercè Ibarz charts in her excellent book,18 a mystique had developed about this rocky, inhospitable area on the Portuguese border that had once been a refuge for bandits and ‘heretics’ fleeing the Inquisition. In the early seventeenth century Lope de Vega idealized it as a Christian Arcadia in his play, Las Batuecas del duque de Alba, but this gloss had gone by the 1830s when Larra used the same place-name, Batuecas, to denote Spain’s isolation in ‘the back of beyond’.19 When Unamuno ventured into Las Hurdes in 1913 it had already been caricatured as the home of sub-human, wolf-like creatures in articles in La Semana Ilustrada (1906), while Blanco Belmonte had documented its primitive customs with text and photographs published in Salamanca in 1911.20 Unamuno, a professor at the venerated University of Salamanca just fifty miles from Las Hurdes, was accompanied by the scientist Maurice Legendre on his excursion. Legendre’s thesis, published as Las Hurdes, étude de géographie humaine (1927), made a profound impression on Buñuel who, more than forty years later in Mexico, still had a copy of the tome in his study.21 Unamuno’s regenerationist essays on the theme of land ownership and agrarian reform appeared in El Imparcial in 1913 and were collected in Andanzas y visiones de España (1922) [Views and Adventures in Spain] which raised the profile of Las Hurdes as a political issue. In April 1922 Dr Gregorio Marañón was commissioned to inquire into the area’s sanitation. There followed a debate in the Cortes and, from 20 to 24 June 1922, a visit from the monarch himself, King Alfonso XIII, whose popularity was at a low ebb after the Moroccan débâcle of the year before, the massacre at Anoual. A series of articles and gruesome pictures in the photo-journal Estampa brought Las Hurdes back into public consciousness in August–September 1929, just when Primo de Rivera’s regime was tottering. Once Alfonso had engineered the succession of General Berenguer in January 1930, he paid a second visit to Las Hurdes in March that year. This came too late to save the king, who would abdicate a year later, and it had less effect as an appeasement exercise than, say, George V’s visit to the strike-threatened South Wales coalfield in

18

Mercè Ibarz, Buñuel documental. ‘Tierra sin pan’ y su tiempo (Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 1999). 19 Lope’s play was written between 1600 and 1614. Larra’s article, ‘Carta a Andrés’ [‘Letter to Andrés’], was humorously ‘escrita desde Las Batuecas’ [written from Batuecas], 11 September 1832. See Obras de Mariano José Larra (Figaro), vol. 1 (Ediciones Atlas, Madrid, 1960), 80. 20 For La Semana Ilustrada see L. de la Vega, Las Hurdes, leyenda y verdad (Servicio Informativo Español, Madrid, 1964), 22. Blanco Belmonte’s Por la España desconocida, La Alberca, Las Hurdes, Las Batuecas y Peña de Francia was republished by the Diputación Provincial de Salamanca, 1991. See Ibarz, op. cit., 113, 193. 21 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 76. Maurice Legendre, Las Hurdes, étude de géographie humaine (École des Hautes Études Hispaniques, Bordeaux and Paris, 1927).

202

ROBERT HAVARD

1912, or indeed that of his son, Edward VIII, to the same blighted area in November 1936 when he famously commented: ‘Something must be done.’22 Alfonso had already said in 1922 that, in his view, all that could be done for the hurdanos, was to transplant them elsewhere and destroy their homes.23 What the King saw in Las Hurdes made him visibly gape: a ragged, disease-ridden people, including many inbred cretins, who lived in hovels barely a metre and a half high, with no windows, no chimneys, no sanitation, no water – except the stony brook in the street outside – virtually no utensils and little food other than potatoes and string beans. Buñuel resolved to make a film that, if nothing else, would keep faith with Surrealism’s most basic tenet, to shock. His political commitment was high. Like Aragon, Sadoul, Unik and others who left Breton definitively for the Communist Party in 1932, he was disillusioned with the ‘snobbery’ and the ‘slick and bourgeois’ mentality of Breton’s rarefied group:24 Empezaba a no estar de acuerdo con aquella especie de aristocracia intelectual con sus extremos artísticos y morales que nos aislaban del mundo y nos limitaban a nuestra propia compañía.25 [I began to feel uneasy with that type of intellectual aloofness, with its artistic and moral extremes that isolated us from the world and confined us to our own company.]

Contrary to Aragon’s recollection, Buñuel denies being a Party member, but he admits: ‘I was a Communist sympathizer and belonged to the Association of Writers and Artists for the Revolution.’26 He enthused friends about the project, including Ramón Acín, an anarchist and sculptor in metal who said he would fund the film if he won the lottery, which he promptly did. This sounds a bit thin, as one critic suggests,27 for the team was a virtual political cell and they could expect to make use of such material in Republican Spain. Besides Buñuel and Acín, it consisted of assistant director Sánchez Ventura, another anarchist from the Zaragoza surrealist group who had organized a general strike in that city after the Jaca execution in 1930; Eli Lotar, the

22

See John Davies, A History of Wales (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, 1993), 585. 23 Alfonso XIII: ‘Es imposible mejorar la vida que arrastran las gentes de las Hurdes Altas. Hay que destruir las viviendas y trasladar a sus moradores a otros puntos’ [It is impossible to improve the life suffered by the people who live in the High Hurdes. You have to destroy their dwellings and transport their inhabitants to other places]. See El Día Gráfico (30-vi-1922) and Ibarz, op. cit., 38. 24 My Last Breath, 139. 25 Quoted by J. Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel. Biografía crítica, 120. 26 My Last Breath, 138. Aragon is adamant that Buñuel was a card-carrying member of the French Communist Party, in Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 361. 27 John Baxter, Buñuel (Fourth Estate, London, 1994), 143.

COME THE REVOLUTION

203

cameraman, a twenty-eight year old Trotskyite of Rumanian extraction whose credits included Abattoir (1930) [Slaughterhouse], a chilling series of photographs of mutilated animals; and Pierre Unik, ‘Pedro el único’ to his friends, a young surrealist poet who worked on the script with Buñuel. Among the original group of five surrealists who joined the Communist Party in 1927, Unik’s independent spirit can be gauged by his condemnation of France in 1931 ‘as the most solid fortress of oppression in the world’ for insisting on reparation payments from an impoverished Germany, while in the same year he refused to toe the Party line and condemn Dalí for his onanistic article ‘Rêverie’ in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution.28 This largely anarchist team – ‘Yo sentía simpatía por los anarquistas’ [I felt sympathetic towards the anarchists] said Buñuel29 – would not be content with rehearsing ‘el problema de España’ in the steps of Goya, Larra, Galdós, Baroja, Machado and others. They intended to bring Spain’s evils to the centre of public consciousness, exposing the national sickness much as neuroses are abreacted in psychoanalysis. In terms of the twin motives – to shock and to abreact – the film is conceived in a fully surrealist spirit. When asked if it had any connection with his previous films, Buñuel responded: Veo mucha relación. Hice Las Hurdes porque tenía una visión surrealista y porque me interesaba el problema del hombre. Yo veía la realidad de manera diferente a como la hubiera visto antes del surrealismo.30 [I see a strong connection. I made ‘Las Hurdes’ because I had a surrealist vision and because the human problem interested me. I saw reality differently as compared with how I’d seen it before Surrealism.]

The fact that the film has only real as opposed to oneiric images, that it scarcely uses fade or dissolve and is, in short, lacking any semblance of camera trickery, does not preclude a surrealist ethos, in Buñuel’s view: Naturalmente, uno no puede ponerse a hacer una película de este tipo con imaginación y poesía. Debía tratar la realidad tal como es y me impresionó tanto, que sólo podía considerar ese paisaje a partir de las premisas morales del surrealismo.31 28

Pierre Unik, ‘La France des cinq parties du monde’, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 3 (December 1931), 28, quoted and translated by Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red, 89. Dalí’s ‘Rêverie’, in no. 4 of the same journal, 31–6, in which he describes his fantasies when masturbating in front of a young girl, was considered reprehensible and bourgeois by the communists. 29 See T. Pérez Turrent and J. de la Colina, Buñuel por Buñuel (Plot, Madrid, 1993), 17. 30 See J.F. Aranda, Luis Buñuel. Biografía crítica, 123–4. 31 See Buñuel’s interview with Wilfried Berghahn, ‘Seine Freunde, seine Feinde’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15-x-1977, quoted by Michael Schwarze, Luis Buñuel (Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1981), 68–9.

204

ROBERT HAVARD

[Of course, you don’t make this kind of film with poetry and the imagination. You had to present reality as it is, and I was so deeply affected by it, I could only relate to that landscape from the starting point of Surrealism’s moral premises.]

Furthermore, for all its factual treatment, the film has many stylistic features that are distinctly surrealist. In the first place, we note the strong sense of a journey that binds the film, ‘viaje’ [journey] and related vocabulary being frequently on the narrator’s lips. From the outset he speaks in the first-person plural – ‘Antes de llegar a Las Hurdes, hemos de pasar por La Alberca’32 [Before reaching Las Hurdes, we have to pass through La Alberca] – which, though evidently a reference to the film team, has the effect of incorporating us, as spectators, in the collective experience as we accompany them and see through the same camera eye. The journey itself is structured and progressively more disturbing in the manner of a Greek tragedy. From the relatively affluent Alberca, with its three-storey houses and discernible streets, we move to the mountain village of Aceitunilla where barefoot children drink alongside pigs from the same brook in which their mothers wash clothes. At least this village has a school, built since the coming of the Republic two years before, which cannot be said of our next port of call, Martilandrán, a squalid outpost in Las Hurdes Altas [High Hurdes] where even women of child-bearing age have goitres. When we reach the aptly named Fragosa [Rough Land], malaria is the disease highlighted. A man sits shaking with fever in the boulder-strewn street, then a group of cretins emerge to cavort mindlessly before the camera. Our journey, though upwards in terms of altitude, is in all other respects a voyage of descent towards the pit of human misery and, as such, it has the reverberations of a journey into hell. This mythical feature, not unlike Lorca’s journey to New York, is intensified by the religious framing of the film’s narrative. The opening sequence shows a barbaric festival at Alberca in which six newly married men parade on horseback and tear the necks off live chickens suspended above them on a line across the street. After each rider has proved his manhood by decapitating a chicken with his bare hands, the narrator states ironically: ‘Esta fiesta sanguinaria esconde, sin duda, varios símbolos o complejos sexuales que ahora mismo no analizaremos’ (ibid., 184) [This bloody festival doubtless hides numerous sexual symbols and complexes that we won’t go into now]. The event takes place in front of a church that has two skulls in a niche on either side of a door, while we also see a cow emerge from a house that bears the inscription above its door: ‘Ave María Purísima Sin Pecado Concebida’ [Hail Mary, Most Pure, Conceived Without Sin]. The atavistic aura develops when we leave Alberca’s now drunken festivities and reach Batuecas Sanctuary where just one monk remains, with eighteen hermit dwellings in ruins 32

The Spanish text is given by Mercè Ibarz, op. cit., 183, from which I quote.

COME THE REVOLUTION

205

nearby. We have a sense of being at the limits of civilization when mention is made of wild boars, wolves and prehistoric caves with paintings of goats, while shots of the overgrown monastery ruins inhabited by frogs, snakes and lizards recall Lorca’s Babylonian imagery in New York. From here we enter ever further into what appears to be a godless zone, Las Hurdes Altas, but the religious framing is completed at the film’s end when we are told of the death of a baby whose corpse needs to be transported from rocky Fragosa back to the earth at Nuñomoral which has a cemetery. This return journey involves the mythic archetype of crossing a river, where the tiny corpse floats in a Moses basket. At the funeral party’s destination a modest stone altar looks splendid in comparison with the interiors we have recently seen and it contrasts pointedly with the improvised wooden cross that marks the baby’s grave outside. The commentary is ambiguous, but there is an unmistakable sense that religion, for the hurdanos, if not on a wider scale, is steeped in superstition, fatalism, cruelty, suffering and, above all, death. This is confirmed in the film’s closing sequence when a woman is seen ringing a death bell as she passes through a lugubrious street at night. The camera cuts to the disfigured face of another woman who says: ‘No hay nada que pueda mantenerte más alerta que el pensar en la muerte. Rezad un avemaría por el decanso del alma de …’ (ibid., 189) [‘Nothing keeps you more alert than thinking about death. Say a Hail Mary for the soul’s rest of …’]

This is as bleak and pessimistic an ending as that in L’Âge d’or with which it perhaps shares a common source in Buñuel’s mind: ‘Leía un texto de Sade en el que asegura que Dios creó la Tierra para el mal’33 [I read a text by de Sade in which he affirms that God created the World for evil]. One critic sees the film’s pervasive cruelty as a cry against nature and indicative of Buñuel’s belief in ‘la no-existencia de un Creador’34 [the non-existence of a Creator]. Such a moral or metaphysical conclusion is fostered in part by the mythic format of the journey and its framing. In contrast to this stylized approach, the film is factual in the newly emerging mode of the documentary. For his facts Buñuel relied heavily on previous studies, especially Legendre’s, the subtitle of whose book, étude de géographie humaine, is incorporated in the prefatory inter-title: ‘Este ensayo cinematográfico de geografía humana …’ (182) [This cinematographic essay on human geography]. Throughout the film the narrator showers us with statistics, which may be paraphrased as follows:

33

See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 139. C.-J. Philippe, ‘Luis Buñuel, auteur de films’, Études Cinématographiques (Paris, 1963), no. 20–1, cited and translated by Mercè Ibarz, op. cit., 169.

34

206

ROBERT HAVARD

Las Hurdes consists of 52 villages with a total population of 8,000 inhabitants. More than 200 species of tree grow in the ruined gardens at Batuecas. The monastery’s 8 kilometre wall protected the 18 hermitages from wild animals. Many children in Aceitunilla are adopted, taken from the hospice in Ciudad Rodrigo in return for a monthly allowance of 15 pesetas on which a whole family subsist. Goats are kept for milk and their meat is only eaten if an animal falls from a crag and dies. The main food produce in Las Hurdes is honey, but the hives are owned by people in La Alberca who keep them in Las Hurdes during the winters that are milder than in Salamanca. In May and June, when potato and beans fail, the hurdanos live on berries that they eat unripe, out of hunger, suffering dysentery as a result. The men fetch earth in sacks to narrow strips of land alongside the river, but this is either washed away or it turns infertile through lack of nitrogen. For fertilizer the hurdanos gather leaves that they first spread on the floor of their dwellings to decompose. The hurdanos are often bitten by vipers, but it is the treatment they apply to the wound that causes sometimes fatal infections.

In addition, there is a scientific account of the malaria that is endemic in the region. The description of its source in the larvae of stagnant summer rivers, complete with text-book illustrations that distinguish between the harmless and the anopheles mosquito, no doubt came close to Buñuel’s heart as one who had studied entomology. The same surgical tone is used in the account of men who migrate each summer in search of harvest work. Here the facts were too embarrassing for the censor: when a group of men is shown returning destitute to Las Hurdes, unable to find work, the original Spanish commentary spoke of the Municipal Area Law, introduced in the Republic, which restricted jobs to local people with dire consequences for the hurdanos. The censor objected and, indeed, the film did not obtain a license for public release until the Civil War. Unfortunately for Buñuel and his team, the Socialists lost power in the elections of November 1933, and, in December, Gregorio Marañón, who had accompanied the King to Las Hurdes in 1922, banned the film on grounds that it denigrated Spain.35 Maranón, aligned to the new Catholic conservative party, CEDA, would not have enjoyed the sequence showing a schoolboy writing on the blackboard ‘Respetad los bienes ajenos’ [Respect the property of others], with its Marx-based irony. For the most part, however, there is a lack of direct political comment in the film, and this, together with the narrator’s objective tone, tends to universalize its message. At the same time, the statistical bombardment does not fail to make its point, in which sense it is reminiscent of Jesuit practice and the saturation tactics that allow the viewer no respite. Jesuitical too is the overriding sense of hell and its torments, or rather, as Buñuel said, their everlasting quality: ‘no es la miseria, sino lo permanente de esa miseria. 35

See Aub, Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel, 76, and Ibarz, op. cit., 131–4.

COME THE REVOLUTION

207

No es el dolor, sino lo perpetuo de ese dolor’36 [It’s not misery, but the permanence of that misery. It’s not suffering, but the perpetuity of that suffering]. Relevant too is Buñuel’s choice of music for the film: fragments of Brahms’s 4th Symphony lend a forlorn emotive quality that is suggestive of man’s heroic but ultimately futile struggle with the elements that impinge on his existence. Such emotion is perhaps, at bottom, a reflection of the kinship between Las Hurdes and Calanda, the medieval place in which Buñuel said he spent his childhood. Like Lorca’s horrific New York, Las Hurdes is an extreme displacement of Buñuel’s own contingency and, as such, it facilitates the catharsis of personal sentiments that range from abhorrence to nostalgia. This perhaps explains why Buñuel thought of buying Batuecas monastery soon afterwards, for 150,000 pesetas, when another film venture brought him a windfall.37 An important factor to consider when assessing the auteurist as opposed to documentary character of the film is what might be termed its ‘staged’ sequences. The best known is the shot of a goat seen to fall from a rocky precipice as the narrator explains that goats are only eaten when such accidents happen. The puff of smoke to the right of the frame is tell-tale evidence that this goat was in fact shot. We next see it tumbling down the precipice – the camera having moved to the spot where the goat fell – and we surmise, if it is not plain enough to the eye, that the animal cascading below us is already dead. There may be such a thing as documentary licence to apply here, for the chances of capturing an accident on camera are evidently remote and this découpage certainly lends drama. The same may be said of the sequence depicting the death of a donkey – recalling Un perro andaluz – that is attacked by bees and scavenged by a dog. However, it is less easy to accept that virtually every shot in the film involving people was ‘directed’, the hurdanos being paid for their services in food or small sums of money. On inspection it is plain that the migrant workers move to instructions, and the same is true of those who collect sacks of earth and leaves for fertilizer, not to mention the boy who writes on the blackboard. Most surprising is the case of the ailing young girl who is discovered slumped in the street in Martilandrán. When her infected mouth is examined, the narrator laments that nothing can be done for her and promptly reports in a sober tone that she died two days later. This is pure invention, Mercè Ibarz has discovered, as indeed is the sequence of the dead baby at the film’s end, who, in the relevant frame, is 36

Buñuel’s comments were made in a lecture he gave to Columbia University students following a showing of the film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1940 or 1941. See Archivo Luis Buñuel, Madrid, and Ibarz, op. cit., 115. 37 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 77–8. The lucrative film was Don Quintín el Amargao [The Bitterness of Don Quintin], on which Buñuel worked as an executive producer in Madrid, 1935. During the shooting of Tierra sin pan the film crew stayed at Batuecas Sanctuary and travelled several hours each day to the locations in Las Hurdes Altas.

208

ROBERT HAVARD

simply asleep.38 If the baby is not dead, it follows that her grieving young mother, whose face seems chiselled in stoical beauty, is merely posing for the camera, as are all the members of the funeral caravan. These details undermine the film’s credibility as objective reportage and qualify what Aranda calls its ‘aire de documental perfecto’39 [its perfect documentary feel]. Closer on occasion to a ‘drama-documentary’, Buñuel’s film recalls the liberties taken by one of the pioneers of the genre, Robert Flaherty, who in Nanook of the North (1922), for example, had Eskimos hunting seals with traditional harpoons rather than guns, and who said: ‘Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.’40 Buñuel’s effects cannot be explained away on grounds that financial pressures, including a basic lack of film, necessitated short cuts. The level of direction in the film indicates an auteurist control and manipulation of material on Buñuel’s part, be this for political or artistic purposes, or indeed both. Looking at it from a different perspective, it might be said that if Buñuel could open such an oneiric film as L’Âge d’or with a scorpion sequence taken from an archive documentary, he was equally entitled to intensify reality in Tierra sin pan with visual anecdotes that are consistent with the material depicted. It is perhaps no more than a matter of approaching reality from opposite ends of the spectrum, with Bretonian convergence in mind, though this is unlikely to convince purists who expect their documentaries to read like obituaries. With them in mind, we address a more fundamental issue that relates to the medium of film itself and, specifically, to Buñuel’s understanding of it. From as early as the second article he sent Giménez Caballero in 1927 as the Paris-based film critic for La Gaceta Literaria, Buñuel is adamant that a camera does more than view, record and reproduce what is in front of it. The lens, he argues, is itself an interpretive medium: El objetivo puede expresar y, en múltipe proporción, aumentar el caudal de sus ‘ideas’… Silencioso como un paraíso, animista y vital como una religión, la mirada taumatúrgica del objetivo humaniza los seres y las cosas. ‘A l’écran il n’y a pas de nature morte. Les objets ont des attitudes’, ha dicho Jean Epstein, el primero en hablarnos de esa calidad psicoanalítica del objetivo.41 [The lens expresses and exponentially increases the volume of its ‘ideas’… Silent as paradise, vital and animistic as religion, the thaumaturgical eye of the lens humanizes beings and things. ‘For the screen there 38

Ibarz, op. cit., 121. J.F. Aranda, Luis Buñuel. Biografía crítica, 125. 40 See A. Calder-Marshall, The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty (Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, New York, 1966), 97; also Jill Nelmes (ed.), An Introduction to Film Studies (Routledge, London, 1996), 175. 41 See ‘Del plano fotogénico’ [‘On the Photogenic Shot’], La Gaceta Literaria, no. 7, 1-iv-1927, in Luis Buñuel, Obra literaria, 156. 39

COME THE REVOLUTION

209

is no still life. Objects have attitudes’, says Jean Epstein, the first to speak of the lens’s psychoanalytical calibre.]

The camera changes reality, thaumaturgically. Dissolve and fade do not have a monopoly on magic after all, for the lens works miracles on its own. This being so, which is to say, the cinematic medium being by nature Eucharistic, it would scarcely seem to matter if adjustments are made to plot, characters and the like. At least not to Buñuel, who explains that montage, specifically découpage, is the key to film: découpage: se aplica a designar esa previa operación fundamental en cinema consistente en la simultánea separación y ordenación de fragmentos visuales … La intuición del film, el embrión fotogénico, palpita ya en esa operación llamada découpage. Segmentación. Creación. Escisión de una cosa para convertirse en otra. Lo que antes no era, ahora es.42 [‘cutting’: is used to designate that initial and basic cinematic operation that consists in the simultaneous separation and ordering of visual fragments … Film’s intuition, its photogenic embryo, finds its life-blood in that operation called ‘cutting’. Segmentation. Creation. The splitting of one thing to make another. What didn’t exist before, now does.]

Most revealing is the view Buñuel developed as Epstein’s assistant: that the lens has ‘psychoanalytical’ properties and a capacity to humanize things. Here the insistence on objects – vis-à-vis humans – is the key. In part it reflects Buñuel’s well-documented aversion to stars: ‘un gran plano de Greta Garbo no es más interesante que el de un objeto cualquiera’43 [a close-up of Greta Garbo is no more interesting than that of any object]. It is also a factor in his admiration for Buster Keaton’s object-orientated films: ‘En Buster Keaton la expresión es tan modesta como la de una botella … pero la botella y el rostro de Buster Keaton tienen puntos de vista infinitos’44 [Buster Keaton’s expression is as modest as that of a bottle … but a bottle and Buster Keaton’s face have infinite aspects]. Its most radical concept, however, is found in Epstein’s view that ‘objects have attitudes’, which is implicit again in Buñuel’s comment on a Garbo film, ‘el drama termina también por subordinarse a las cosas’45 [the drama too is ultimately subordinate to things]. We saw something of this in the repeated rope motif in Viridiana with its

42

See ‘Découpage o segmentación cinegráfica’, La Gaceta Literaria, no. 43, 1-x-1928, in Luis Buñuel, Obra literaria, 171. 43 ‘Del plano fotogénico’, ibid., 156. Greta Garbo had imperiously dismissed Buñuel from the movie set during his first stay in Hollywood in 1930; see My Last Breath, 129. 44 From ‘Deportista por amor’, Cahiers d’art, no. 10, 1927, in Luis Buñuel, Obra literaria, 166. 45 ‘Del plano fotogénico’, ibid., 156.

210

ROBERT HAVARD

transformations, but Buñuel seems to have in mind a simple depiction of objects for their own sake, as pure unadulterated things: En un momento determinado una de ellas (i.e. cosas) se alza con todo el interés y significado dramático. Entonces el objetivo se dirige exclusivamente a ella, dejando todo lo demás, incluso el elemento humano, como cosa mediata y farragosa.46 [At a given moment one of them (i.e. things) stands out with all its dramatic interest and meaning. Then the lens focuses on it exclusively, as a complex and mediating thing, leaving everything else to one side, including the human element.]

In these terms, the prime virtue of a documentary lies in our simple awareness that environmental contingency – the things it contains – are of paramount importance. This ascendancy of concrete reality is exactly what Buñuel exploits in Tierra sin pan. We remember that, among Buñuel’s team, Ramón Acín was a sculptor in cheap metal, while Eli Lotar, the cameraman, achieved a similar materialist thrust in photographs. In Lotar’s case, it was not merely a question of his unsavoury themes, but, more importantly, of a technique that Mercè Ibarz adroitly defines as one characterized ‘justamente por la destrucción de la perspectiva’47 [precisely by the abolition of perspective]. This is clear in Tierra sin pan, since, as Ibarz further notes, Las Hurdes is ‘un lugar quizá sin perspectivas’48 [a place perhaps without perspectives]. In effect, the enclosed valley topography constantly provides shots in which the land serves as a screen-high wall or backdrop to what is depicted. Two or three panoramic views of Las Hurdes are given as preliminary ubication, and another appears at the end to complete the packaging, but the body of the film is set between steep-sided, sky-excluding hills. This creates a sense of airless entrapment and claustrophobia, while it relates the hurdanos’ predicament definitively to the poor quality of their land. In addition, the camera consistently adopts a downward, earth-bound angle that truncates the perspective and relates objects and humans to the ground. It would be tedious to itemize the angle of every single shot, but, in broad terms, the downward or high angle shot dominates in a ratio of at least 50%, with the neutral or horizontal angle and the upward or low angle shots sharing the remainder. In some sequences the downward is obtrusively insistent: at Alberca, for instance, more than a dozen shots of the barbarous rite in the street are taken from a vantage point of an upper storey, possibly the hotel where the team stayed. This is offset by the odd upward shot of the horsemen, 46 47 48

Ibid. Ibarz, Buñuel documental, 69. Ibid., 112.

COME THE REVOLUTION

211

one set dramatically against the church architecture. In Batuecas we look down on the valley and its ruins, with momentary variation provided by a steep upward shot of the monastery façade. The film’s natural angle is reinforced to great effect when the camera tracks down from a fountain to a frog and then a snake shifting over the ground, while the thick growth of trees also blocks out the view. When we move to Las Hurdes, the downwardness is relentless. At Aceitunilla consecutive high-angle shots take in children in the street, women washing at a brook, a pig drinking from the same water, a child giving water to a baby and a youth stooping to drink. In all these cases, humans and animals are seen against a stony ground where water trickles. The camera then sweeps down perpendicularly into a gully where a woman bathes her infant’s head and another washes clothes. Finally, we see three young girls dipping bread in an unclean brook to savour it as a delicacy, then we move off to the school where our eyes – like Alberti’s – are attracted by the bare feet of children under desks (see plate 10). Our first view of Martilandrán is of its low slate roofs, seen from above in a tilted perspective, which the commentary likens to a legendary shell-covered animal. Here we see men, women and children framed in stone settings, leaning listlessly against the walls of their houses. We look down on the falling goat, the donkey’s carcass, migrating workers and those who fetch earth in sacks. A lyrical dissolve, all the more effective for its rarity, shows river stones change into a dry stone wall that the hurdanos have constructed to protect their narrow strips of land. Then the eroded land is shown in cross-section, its layers full of stone. Downwardness continues with the gathering of leaves, shots of torn shoes or bare feet on stone paths and a man spreading leaves on the floor of his house. We see a near-dry river, inspect larvae in a bowl, watch cretins crouch before us and see a baby’s corpse carried over land and water until it is finally laid to rest, in the ground. The accumulation of these pitiless, screen-filling shots with their insistent downward trajectory – again reminiscent of Maruja Mallo’s paintings – creates an extraordinarily powerful effect. The downward shot suggests objectivity, in the sense of a laboratory-like study, while it contrasts pointedly with the heroic or ennobling low-angle shot that, for instance, Leni Riefenstahl exploited in her propagandist treatment of Hitler in Triumph of the Will based on the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally.49 The lens, we might agree, is ‘psychoanalytical’ in its depiction of objects in Tierra sin pan: notably, the ubiquitous and uncharitable stone seems to capture a quality in the hurdanos’ life as well as suggest the oppressive material factors that bear down on them. In these sequences we sense the interpretative power of the lens that Buñuel argued:

49

See Jill Nelmes (ed.), Introduction to Film Studies, 178–9.

212

ROBERT HAVARD

El objetivo – ‘ese ojo sin tradición, sin moral, sin prejuicios, capaz, sin embargo, de interpretar por sí mismo’ – ve el mundo.50 [The lens – ‘that eye without tradition, morality or prejudice, but which is capable nonetheless of interpreting for itself’ – sees the world.]

As for the link between man and objects, it is clear that what was once a metaphysical issue has now become decidedly political. The lack of perspective in the camera shots produces the lasting impression we form of the hurdanos and their tragically constricted life. Watching them, we continually ask ourselves: why do they live like this, or rather, why do we allow it to happen? Naturally, we are incited to respond, for the film has provoked a crise de conscience ‘of the most general and serious kind’, in accord with Breton’s definition of Surrealism’s mission in the Second Manifesto.51 Yet as we watch the hurdanos, we also empathize with them and even sense that the limitation depicted in their lives, extreme as it is, applies to those of us who live in less arduous circumstances. In this, the film tells the age-old story that Buñuel said he learnt from Surrealism, namely ‘that man is not free’.52 It tells this story through images that are as subversive as they are nightmarish, as rebellious as they are moral. Made, as Buñuel said, with a ‘visión surrealista’ [surrealist vision], the film expresses both the tensions of the Second Republic and the evolving Marxist-materialist ethos of Surrealism. It was Alberti who would see this through to the Civil War.

Communist adventism: De un momento a otro When Buñuel described Surrealism as ‘la única cosa seria de nuestro tiempo’53 [the one serious thing in our time] he cocked a snook at those who saw it as a frivolous art practised by eccentrics and aligned himself with the likes of Alberti for whom social emancipation would be as indispensable as the liberation of the mind. Paris-based since 1925, Buñuel had witnessed Surrealism’s natural progression – if bumpy ride – from a revolutionary mentality based on the unconscious to one that was increasingly collective in its concern. Born of Dada, itself the product of First World War nihilism, Surrealism had been at least partly political from the start, as evidenced by the attack on colonialism and the Riff wars in the First Manifesto. Breton, Aragon, Éluard, Péret and Unik officially joined the communists in 1927, hoping this act of commitment would convince the Party of their good faith 50

From ‘Del plano fotogénico’, La Gaceta Literaria, in Luis Buñuel. Obra literaria, 172. See Manifestoes of Surrealism, 123. 52 See Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 36, June 1954, cited in Joan Mellen (ed.), The World of Luis Buñuel, 252. 53 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 77. 51

COME THE REVOLUTION

213

and spur other surrealists to do likewise. In fact, it prompted a minor exodus from Surrealism’s ranks, led by Artaud, but it failed to change the Party’s view of Breton’s group as degenerate bourgeois lost in their own contradictions. The hostility abated momentarily when, on 3 December 1930, the fascist Ligue des Patriotes attacked a Paris cinema showing L’Âge d’or. Later that month Breton confirmed the surrealists’ commitment to Marxism in the Second Manifesto, dismissing as ‘puerile’ the objections of those who worried over Surrealism ‘getting involved in the social struggle’.54 Another gesture of allegiance was the re-naming of their organ, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, as were the proposals to form a Workers’ University and a trade union of writers and artists. The latter was usurped by the Party’s founding in 1931 of the A.E.A.R. [Association des écrivains et des artistes révolutionnaires] which set up its own organ, Commune, that Aragon edited in more orthodox vein than Breton’s Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. Many surrealists felt unwelcome, especially when they were not allowed to join A.E.A.R. for nearly a year, while Breton was unimpressed by his assignment to a gas workers’ cell and being asked to prepare a report on the conditions of heavy industry in Italy. Aragon’s visit to Russia in 1930 had turned his attention to the utility of art. He was still prepared to defend Dalí as late as 1932, but the last straw came with the surrealists’ expulsion from A.E.A.R. the following year, provoked by Breton’s criticism of propagandist literature, Alquié’s support, and the surrealists’ refusal to disavow either. Aragon’s defection was inevitable, given the Party’s need for discipline in such turbulent times, while Breton’s different priority had always been to hold the surrealists together by preserving the concept of artistic independence even when serving the Revolution. This was the cornerstone of the manifesto he published after visiting Trotsky in Mexico in 1938, Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant, where indépendant reflects his many difficulties with the Party as well as his anti-Stalinism. In Spain these ideological tensions were less marked since the Spanish Communist Party was weak in the early 1930s and there was no surrealist movement as such. Nonetheless, the political situation was every bit as fraught and cultural parallels are apparent, for instance, in the way La Gaceta Literaria was superseded by journals of greater political commitment, notably Alberti and María Teresa León’s Octubre. Its subtitle, Escritores y artistas revolucionarios [Revolutionary Writers and Artists], was in the spirit of the French A.E.A.R., though Octubre preceded its counterpart, Commune, by a month. Alberti, in effect, was the Spanish equivalent of Aragon and the two editors exchanged contributions in translation, including their own 54

Manifestoes of Surrealism, 138. He added: ‘I really fail to see … why we should refrain from supporting the Revolution’; and: ‘Surrealism … deliberately opted for the Marxist doctrine in the realm of social problems.’ Ibid., 140, 159.

214

ROBERT HAVARD

work.55 They had met in the USSR in 1933, travelled to Moscow together in 1934 as representatives to the Soviet Writers’ Conference, and would later visit each other in Madrid and Paris during the Civil War and Resistance periods.56 The close affinity between the two is evident in their statements. Aragon: ‘On my return from Russia, I was no longer the same man … I had to break with these men who always had the word “revolution” on their lips, yet for whom there were things more precious than the Revolution itself.’57 Similarly, Alberti: Dije antes que yo volvía de la Unión Sovética … y que volví otro. El recibimiento que me hicieron casi todos mis amigos poetas y escritores de entonces fue de gran frialdad y sonrisitas irónicas veladas.58 [I said earlier that I returned from the Soviet Union … and I came back a different person. Almost all my previous poet and writer friends gave me a wide berth, with ironic half smiles.]

Flushed with idealism from his travels, Alberti’s disenchantment with Spain on his return gave rise to one of his most vitriolic poems, ‘Al volver y empezar’ [‘On Returning and Starting Up’]. It deplores the lack of agrarian reform in the Second Republic and, in equal measure, the passive complicity of his erstwhile friends: Vine aquí volví, volví aquí en el instante en que unas pobres tierras cambiaban de dueño, eran tomadas violentamente por aquellos que hacía siglos se partían la vida sobre ellas, doblados de cintura, salpicados los trigos con su sangre … Llegué aquí, volví y vi cadáveres sentados,

55

For instance, Alberti’s poem, ‘Un fantasma recorre Europa’ [‘A Spectre Haunts Europe’], appeared in the November 1933 edition of Commune as ‘Un Spectre hante l’Europe’, while Aragon’s similarly adventist poem, ‘Un organillo empieza a tocar en el patio’ [‘A Hurdy-gurdy Starts to Play in the Yard’] appeared in the first number of Octubre, 16–17. 56 See Rafael Alberti, Prosas encontradas, 9th augmented edition by Robert Marrast (Seix Barral, Barcelona, 2000), 121, 141; and Rafael Alberti, La arboleda perdida, III y IV, 21, 97–101. 57 Louis Aragon, Pour un réalisme socialiste, quoted and translated by Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red, 97. 58 AP 3, 58.

COME THE REVOLUTION

215

cobardes en las mesas del café y del dinero, cuerpos podridos en las sillas, amigos preparados de recibir de balde el sueldo de la muerte de los otros. Vine aquí y os escupo. Otro mundo he ganado. (524–5) [I came here,/ I returned, I came back just when a few scraps of land were changing ownership, taken violently by those who for centuries had broken their bones on them, doubled over,/ the wheat spattered with their blood … I arrived here,/ I came back/ and I saw seated corpses, cowards at the coffee and money tables,/ putrid bodies on chairs, friends who were ready to accept others’ death wages for nothing. I came here/ and I spit on you./ I’ve found another world.]

This poem is placed second in El poeta en la calle after the stridently Marxist ‘Un fantasma recorre Europa …’ [‘A Spectre Haunts Europe’] which announces the coming of a new, omnipresent saviour in fields, factories, offices and political demonstrations: ‘Un fantasma recorre Europa … / Nosotros le llamamos camarada’ (524) [A spectre haunts Europe … / We call him comrade]. What the poems share is the ‘furious impatience’ that Pierre Naville, an ex-surrealist, saw as characteristic of Marxist–Leninist zeal and which he found lacking in Breton’s ‘en attendant’, engagement in art while waiting for the revolution.59 Alberti’s urgency, by contrast, mirrors the temperament of Aragon whom he described as ‘comunista apasionado, arbitrario, colérico, casi terrible, separado hacía tiempo de casi todos sus amigos’60 [a passionate communist, volatile, furious, almost terrifying, long since separated from almost all his friends]. Alberti’s own anger would find extreme expression in a pair of sonnets entitled ‘El perro rabioso’ [‘The Rabid Dog’] in De un momento a otro, where the shocking image of a dog with a feverish compulsion to bite conveys the mindless fanaticism of militants who commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of Revolution. Such an unfavourable depiction of political fervour is surprisingly candid and – contrary to what some critics would have us believe – it suggests there is more to Alberti than propaganda. Indeed, though he was close to Aragon and inspired by his ardour, his own political poetry is superior to that of the Frenchman whose weaknesses he perhaps recognized in describing him as ‘tan peligrosamente comprometido’61 [so dangerously committed]. Alberti’s merits need to be weighed against the demands of his circumstance which, 59

See Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red, 68. AP 3, 97. 61 Ibid., 101. Adverse criticism of Aragon is mentioned by Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red, 107. 60

216

ROBERT HAVARD

besides his anti-fascist and Party obligations, also included, as we shall see, the not inconsiderable challenge of being a proletarian poet. His historical circumstance bears heavily on his work, as he says, ‘Yo me defino como un poeta de mi tiempo, de un tiempo terrible’ [I see myself as a poet of my time, a terrible time], adding: Yo quisiera, lo he dicho muchas veces, ser un poeta de la paz, un poeta de lo bello, de la bahía, del agua, de las cosas eternas que siempre dan a la poesía cosas nuevas. Pero es que yo no puedo prescindir de que he llevado una vida angustiosa … y que yo siento profundamente lo que pasa en mi época: las muertes, las guerras, las sombras tan llenos de muertos …62 [I would have liked to have been a poet of peace, as I’ve often said, a poet of beauty, of the bay, the water, the eternal things that constantly rejuvenate poetry. But I cannot disregard the troubled life I’ve had … and I feel the events of my time deeply: the deaths, wars, shadows laden with the dead …]

Alberti need not apologize for being the first major Spanish poet of his generation to treat politics in his poetry. What is surprising is that so few of his contemporaries grasped that nettle. Less surprising is the bad press he has had: given Franco’s long dictatorship and communism’s waning esteem, it could hardly have been otherwise.63 He attributes it squarely to ‘partidismo’ [political prejudice], or, more forthrightly: Yo siempre encuentro algún hijo de puta crítico que me tira a matar, sea como sea, y esas cosas proceden de fondos oscuros … y esas cosas sí que son comprometidas.64 [I always find some son-of-a-bitch critic who wants to shoot me down, for whatever, and these things come from dark depths … and really from political bias.]

He is entitled to resent sniping criticism, having put himself in the front line both as soldier and poet. Yet even his most fervent admirers would have to

62

See José Luis Tejada, ‘Una entrevista con Rafael Alberti’, Gades, XII (1984), 19, 20. Pieter Wesseling comments on negative critical responses to Alberti’s political poetry in Revolution and Tradition: The Poetry of Rafael Alberti (Albatros, Valencia/Chapel Hill, 1981), 47. Outright condemnation is found in critics such as Ricardo Gullón and C.B. Morris, while a dismissive attitude is implicit in the virtual omission of comment on political poems in Solita Salinas de Marichal, Geoffrey Connell and Salvador Jiménez Fajardo. Critics who look closely at these poems include, besides Wesseling, Antonio Jiménez Millán, La poesía de Rafael Alberti (1930–39) (Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1984), and Judith Nantell, Rafael Alberti’s Poetry of the Thirties: The Poet’s Public Voice (University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 1986). 64 Ibid. 63

COME THE REVOLUTION

217

admit his political poems are uneven, at least in El poeta en la calle where a wall-poster directness can obscure a sense of the poet himself. Alberti, I suggest, grew into his vocation as a poeta comprometido and his reputation ultimately stands or falls by De un momento a otro (poesía e historia) [1934–1938], the volume to which we now turn. The four different parts of De un momento a otro seem at first sight to comprise a very disparate volume, yet inspection reveals a remarkable homogeneity and thematic coherence. The first two sections are relatively short and in the first, ‘La familia’ [‘The Family’], Alberti follows the surrealist prescription by attacking the institution of the Family – ‘Families, I hate you!’ Gide had famously said65 – as well as a cluster of related targets such as class, religion and nationhood.66 The first poem, ‘Hace falta estar ciego’ [‘You’d Have to be Blind’], continues the exhortative mode of El poeta en la calle in suggesting that only the myopic can fail to see the justness of the revolution that is at hand, ‘que ilumina por dentro nuestra lengua,/ nuestra diaria palabra’(613) [that gives inner light to our language,/ our daily word]. In the major poem that follows, ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ [‘School (S.J.)’], Alberti traces his political roots back to his boyhood, as we have seen. His depiction of the Jesuit school where he sat uneasily in the same class as landowners’ sons complements poems in El poeta en la calle such as the revolutionary ‘Romance de los campesinos de Zorita’ [‘Ballad of the Zorita Peasants’] and ‘La lucha por la tierra’ [‘Fight for the Earth’] where the Church is seen to work hand in glove with the privileged few against the landless peasants. Here, in embryo, lies his militancy and his ideal of comradeship: ‘tanta ira,/ tanto odio contenidos sin llanto,/ nos llevaban al mar … / a las dunas calientes,/ donde nos orinábamos en fila mirando hacia el colegio’ (614–15) [so much bile,/ so much hatred,/ tearlessly restrained,/ led us to the sea … / to the hot dunes,/ where we stood in a row looking back at the school and pissed]. Nationhood is further demonized in ‘Geografía política’ [‘Political Geography’] where the mapping out of the globe as property is contrasted with the new red of a proletarian revolution that will transcend frontiers. This had crystallized for Alberti when he first entered Russia by train and saw the sign, ‘La Unión Soviética saluda a los trabajadores del mundo’ [The Soviet Union welcomes workers of the world], and nearby, ‘Nosotros borraremos las fronteras’67 [We shall erase all frontiers]. The international perspective comes to the fore in the volume’s third section – ‘13 bandas y 48 estrellas’ [13 Stripes and 48 Stars] – a

65

André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres (Mercure de France, Paris, 1987), 90, quoted and translated by Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red, 13. 66 In the Second Manifesto Breton had written: ‘Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion.’ Manifestoes of Surrealism, 128. 67 Rafael Alberti, Prosas encontradas, 9th edition, op. cit., 111.

218

ROBERT HAVARD

sixteen-poem travelogue that charts Alberti’s visit to the United States, Central America and the Caribbean where he was sent by the Party to raise funds for the Asturian miners. The binding theme is U.S. oil- and dollar-based imperialism, as seen in the plunder of Cuba, ‘Los yankis vienen volando,/ urracas azucareras’ (647) [The Yanks fly in,/ sugar-stealing magpies]; acquisitive tourism in Mexico, ‘el gringo que compra en tu retrato/ tu parada belleza ya en escombros’ (649) [in your portrait the gringo buys/ your still beauty now despoiled]; paramilitary rule in Panama and Costa Rica, ‘Yo fui a Costa Rica. – ¡¡oh, su policía!!’ (651) [I went to Costa Rica./ Oh, those police!!]; and racial oppression in Martinique, ‘negros como asnos de apariencia tranquila’ (656) [blacks docile-looking as asses]. Yet everywhere there is a detectable counter-current of revolution, be it historical, as in Venezuela where the anti-imperialist movement began – ‘Se ve que estas montañas son los hombros de América’ (653) [You can see that these mountains are America’s shoulders] – or actual, as in El Salvador and Nicaragua where the rebel leader, General Sandino, had been executed only the year before: ‘Los yankis firman la paz …/ pero matando a Sandino’ (651) [The yanks sign the peace treaty …/ but killing Sandino]. Rhythmic spontaneity in these poems lightens their political load and they impress far more than Alberti’s Eastern European poems in El poeta en la calle. They benefit too from a Hispanic empathy with the oppressed, implicit in the epigraph taken from Rubén Darío with its notion of linguistic imperialism: ‘¿Tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés?’(637) [Will so many millions of us speak English?]. Essentially, the anti-colonial and anti-racial themes – embracing Mexican Indians as well as Cuban blacks – convey a sense of solidarity with the proletariat who, as Lenin had noted, is their natural ally:68 Negro, da la mano al blanco, dala ya dásela ya. Blanco, da la mano al negro, dala ya, dásela ya … Mano a mano, contra el norteamericano … (647) [Black, give your hand to the white man,/ give it,/ give it to him now. White, give your hand to the black man,/ give it,/ give it to him now …/ Hand in hand,/ against the American …]

68

The surrealists had called for a boycott of the Colonial Exhibition that opened in Paris in May 1931, condemning the concept of ‘La Grande France’ and citing Lenin’s support of ethnic peoples. See Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red, 95.

COME THE REVOLUTION

219

Economic imperialism is highlighted in a second major poem, ‘New York’, which opens this third section of the volume. Its subtitle, ‘Wall-Street en la niebla. Desde el Bremen’ [‘Wall Street in the Mist. From the Bremen’], locates the poem at the point of Alberti’s arrival by ship in the American metropolis in late 1934. It also introduces the concept – reminiscent of Lorca – of the poet as seer, one with the perspicacity to see through New York’s shrouded mists to the capitalist structure below. Viewing the city from the Hudson in the early morning, he is alert – ‘despierto’ [awake] – and his state of heightened perception enables him to discern patterns and unveil truths: the mist is a ‘vaho de petróleo’ [vapour of petrol]; the skyscrapers are ‘inconmovibles cajas’ [unmovable safes]; the financiers who rule lives are ‘hombres macilentos’ [gaunt men], their political bosses ‘gansters’ [gangsters], their acts ‘robos calculados’ [calculated crimes]; the vaunted notion of Liberty is ‘prostituida, mercenaria, inútil’ [prostituted, mercenary, useless] and the harbour’s famous statue ‘baja a vender su sombra por los puertos’ [comes down to sell her shadow in the ports]. The poet is at first anonymous, Alguien se despertaba pensando en que la niebla ponía un especial cuidado en ocultar el crimen. (639) [Someone awoke thinking that the mist was taking special care to hide the crime.]

– but his identity assumes ever greater clarity and conviction in his role as witness to wholesale atrocities: Y era yo que despertaba comprendiendo, sabiendo … era yo quien oía, quien veía, despertándome … Y era yo quien veía, quien oía, ya despierto, asomado a la niebla, viendo como aquel crimen disfrazado … / se agrandaba … Y era yo entre la niebla quien oía, quien veía mucho más y todo esto. (639–40) [And it was I who awoke knowing,/ understanding … it was I who heard, who saw, on waking up … And it was I who saw, who heard, now fully awake, looking into the mist …/ And it was I in the mist who heard, who saw all this and a lot more.]

Repetition gives a sense of urgency, while the waking motif suggests revelation as the poet penetrates the lie of capitalism epitomized in this city. New York’s indisputable grandeur left him agape in a prose description – ‘La tremenda ciudad se alzaba en un amanecer de rascacielos como si fueran iluminadas ventanillas de trenes verticales subiendo entre la

220

ROBERT HAVARD

niebla’69 [The tremendous city rose up in a dawn of skyscrapers that seemed like the lit windows of trains rising vertically in the mist] – but this condenses in the poem to: ‘igual que verticales expresos de la niebla’ [like vertical express trains in the mist]. Its grandeur is now seen as a sham, a cover to exploitation, while the skyscrapers’ upward thrust betokens an imperialist urge to own more: Era yo … viendo como aquel crimen disfrazado de piedras con ventanas se agrandaba, ensanchándose … viéndole intervenir hasta en las nubes. (640) [It was I … seeing how that crime disguised as stones and windows got bigger, swelled up … / seeing it intervene even in the clouds].

At this point Alberti’s visionary perspicacity takes on a second dimension – ‘veía mucho más’ [I saw a lot more] – and becomes continental in extension: New York. Wall Street, Banca de sangre … araña de tentáculos que hilan fríamente la muerte de otros pueblos. (641) [New York. Wall Street, Bank of blood … a spider’s tentacles that coldly spin/ other peoples’ deaths.]

Whereas Lorca saw New York as an oppressor of its own citizens, to Alberti’s political eye the city is a malicious force subjugating a whole continent. He would subsequently become aware of the poverty within the city – ‘barrios más pobres que las abandonadas aldeas de nuestras Hurdes’70 [districts poorer than our abandoned villages in Las Hurdes] – which was all the more offensive since they stood cheek by jowl with unmitigated wealth. But Alberti’s target is economic imperialism that takes the form of ‘la extracción triste de metales … de cañas dulces … de café y de tabaco’ [the sad extraction of metals … of sugar cane … coffee and tobacco] and, says the clairvoyant, may result in star wars: ‘Tu diplomacia del horror quisiera/ la intervención armada hasta en los astros’ (641) [Your diplomacy of horror would advocate/ armed intervention in the stars]. All this is attributable to the petrodollar: ‘y todo envuelto siempre en un tremendo vaho de petroleo’ [everything constantly wrapped up in a huge vapour of petrol]. Yet, as Alberti concludes with irresistible poetic logic, America’s ‘agónicas naciones’ [dying nations] throb with a longing for vengeance that sooner or later will see the hallowed stars and stripes burn ‘en una justa,/ libertadora llama de petróleo’ (641) [in a just/ and liberating flame of petrol.] 69 70

AP 3, 42. Ibid., 42.

COME THE REVOLUTION

221

The poem is impressively organic in its development of the central image of petrol from a pollutant hiding the city’s evil to an imperialist agent of oppression. Both factors are perceived by the mantic poet who predicts a combustible outcome in Revolution. Alberti’s anti-Americanism accords with his rejection of paternalist superstructures in favour of an egalitarian ideal. That his analysis is based on Marxist principles is again clear in the next poem, ‘Guajiras burlescas de los banqueros alegres y desesperados de Wall Street’ [‘Burlesque Songs of Happy and Desperate Wall-Street Bankers’], where six décimas [ten-line stanzas] portray the faceless bankers in terms of the commodities they control: Mi sangre es un yacimiento de emisiones petroleras (642) [My blood is a deposit/ of petrol emissions.] Por rayos de mi cabeza yo muevo un cañaveral. [With the rays in my head/ I move sugar-plantations.]

The last speaker, a magnate who no doubt made his pile in Cuba, is caricatured as a feudal overlord who has the ridiculous diabetic motto emblazoned on his royal arms: ‘Tengo azúcar en la orina’ [I have sugar in my urine]. Again we note the interplay between man and material reality, but there is no metaphysical concept here, only the suggestion of omnivorous consumerism and ecological abuse, with everything driven by profit. The magnate fears communism, for it threatens to end his degenerate ways. Yet, as the poet recognizes, he will adapt and survive that revolution: Materias primas me canta mi cartera de caimán. Los empréstitos se van dragándome la garganta. Si el comunismo me espanta como un insondable abismo, que se lleve el comunismo todo cuanto ahora poseo. Y en un yate de recreo naufrague el imperialismo. (644) [Raw materials sing to me/ in my alligator wallet. Bank loans keep/ dredging in my throat. If communism frightens me/ with its bottomless depth, then let communism take/ all I possess. And on a pleasure yacht/ may imperialism sink.]

222

ROBERT HAVARD

The décima’s epigrammatic style suits the burlesque purpose. Moreover, like the sonnets of the second section, it shows Alberti’s willingness to mix classic poetic form with the free verse of ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ and ‘New York’ poems, as well as with the experimental Afro-American rhythms of a poem like ‘Casi son’ [‘Almost Song’].71 This variety of form is indicative of Alberti’s free poetic spirit. It also suggests his persistent searching for a voice in tune with his egalitarian message. This would be a pressing issue in the fourth and last part of De un momento a otro where revolution becomes Civil War.

The proletarian poet: ‘Capital de la gloria’ Was proletarian literature merely a weapon in the class struggle? Was it possible at all in a capitalist society, or something to be achieved in a distant future, as Breton and Trotsky thought?72 Could an intellectual be revolutionary while living apart from the proletarian class, or must he join the masses, as Gorky argued?73 Should a poet not accept ‘a certain necessary abdication of the personality’, as Claude Spaak put it, and write only of the heroic struggle for socialism?74 These are the sort of questions any communist writer or poet worth his salt would have taken on board in the 1930s. Alberti is no exception, as we see in the first stanza of ‘Madrid-otoño’ [‘Madrid-Autumn’] which opens the fourth and last section of De un momento a otro: Ciudad de los más turbios siniestros provocados, de la angustia nocturna que ordena hundirse al miedo en los sótanos lívidos con ojos desvelados, yo quisiera, furiosa, pero impasiblemente 71

The title ‘Casi son’ refers to the traditional Cuban ‘son’ [song/sound] while it is also a pun in that ‘casi son’ literally translates as almost are, suggesting people who almost are free, perhaps. 72 Breton cites Trotsky’s Revolution and Culture: ‘We shall reach this stage only after a long and painful transition, which lies almost entirely before us.’ Breton agreed: ‘I do not believe in the present possibility of an art or literature which expresses the aspirations of the working class. If I refuse to believe in such a possibility, it is because, in any prerevolutionary period the writer or artist, who of necessity is a product of the bourgeoisie, is by definition incapable of translating these aspirations.’ Second Manifesto of Surrealism, op. cit., 156–7, 155. 73 In his key-note speech at the first Soviet Writers’ Congress, which Alberti attended in Moscow in August–September 1934, Gorky said of the writer: ‘if he wants to fight hand in hand with the masses, then he must march in the ranks of these masses’; Maxim Gorky, ‘Soviet Literature’, in Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, ed. H.G. Scott (International Publishers, New York, 1935), 142. 74 Claude Spaak, ‘Libération de l’esprit’, Documents 34, II nouvelle série trimestrielle (November 1934), 30–3, cited by Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red, 129.

COME THE REVOLUTION

223

arrancarme de cuajo la voz, pero no puedo, para pisarte toda tan silenciosamente, que la sangre tirada mordiera, sin protesta, mi llanto y mi pisada. (671) [City of the darkest and most deliberate atrocities, whose nightly suffering makes fear bury itself wide-eyed in livid cellars,/ I should wish, furiously, yet impassively, to tear out my voice by its roots, but I cannot, that I might tread upon you so silently/ the spilt blood would bite my grief and my footstep without protest.]

In the autumn of 1936, as Madrid suffers under Franco’s aerial bombardment and the onslaught of Moorish mercenaries, Alberti depicts the conflict with a rhetorical flourish that befits its epic dimension. He also shows a sensitivity to his role as poet: whether out of a feeling of inadequacy in the face of such momentous events, or a reluctance to intrude upon the grief of others, he seeks to lose his poetic persona, ‘arrancarme de cuajo la voz’ [tear out my voice by its roots]. As a poet, he knows the dangers of a bombastic Quintana-like panegyric. As a communist, he knows that mass suffering is not to be appropriated by an individual. Rather, he would be a mouthpiece, ‘haciendo de mi voz pulmón de todo un pueblo’ (689) [making my voice the lungs of a whole people], as he asserts in ‘Aniversario’ [‘Anniversary’]. His vain hope is to merge with the city’s blood-spattered streets. Only an impersonal treatment will allow the collective body to listen unoffended, ‘sin protesta’ [without protest]. Only by identification with those who suffer is the poet validated, as Wilfred Owen put it in his ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’: ‘except you share/ With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell’.75 In the second stanza we go with Alberti to the western suburbs and the disfigured front-line of battle: Por tus desnivelados terrenos y arrabales, ciudad, por tus lluviosas y ateridas afueras voy las hojas difuntas pisando entre trincheras, charcos y barrizales. Los árboles acodan, desprovistos, las ramas por bardas y tapiales donde con ojos fijos espían las troneras un cielo temeroso de explosiones y llamas. (671) [In your broken fields and suburbs, city, in your wet and frozen outskirts,

75

Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments. Vol. I: The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Chatto & Windus, London, 1983), 124.

224

ROBERT HAVARD

I tread dead leaves in trenches,/ puddles and quagmires. Stripped trees elbow their branches/ over walls and fences where embrasures stare unblinking at a fearsome sky of explosions and flames.]

His imagery is assured as ever: the autumn weather parallels human mortalities; the stark branches, with anthropomorphic elbows, suggest snipers; the continued personification of the city – integrating objects and living organisms in one whole – keeps the notion of a collective identity and heroic purpose in mind. The thought occurs that precious objects will be lost in the devastation, including the Prado treasures that Alberti had responsibility to protect.76 But humble objects attract most attention, notably in the bomb-sites that provide a powerful juxtaposition of war and normality. Some houses stand eerily empty like a stage set, open on one side and roofless, yet still showing everyday situations: ‘la escena/ del mantel y los lechos todavía ordenados,/ el drama silencioso de los trajes vacíos,/ sin nadie’ (672) [a supper scene and the beds all made,/ a mute drama of empty clothes,/ with no one present]. There is something surreal, as Wesseling noted,77 in this mixture of horror and normality, in the empty suits that recall ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Man’] of Sobre los ángeles. Conceptually, the bomb-site is close to the rubbish-dump in its interplay of man and objects, human absence being just as poignant here since it is brought about by violence. Alberti’s keen eye sees an unexpected juxtaposition, registering empty clothes alongside sandbags that are shuffled in the reflections of ‘biseles fríos/ de la menguada luna de los pobres roperos’ [cold bevelled edges/ on waning mirrors of poor wardrobes]. This exact image, with its hint of chance, shows how little poetic artistry has been lost to propaganda. The poem’s first part reaches its climax via the sustained personification of the city. Ironically, like Christ’s body, it is ravaged on all sides by those who claim to be defenders of the faith: ‘la frente de tu frente se alza tiroteada,/ tus costados de árboles y llanuras, heridos’ [your forehead’s front is lifted, shot through with bullets,/ your sides of trees and plains, wounded]. Yet the city’s indomitable spirit will not be buried under the ‘montes de escombro’ [mountains of debris], for the poet senses that within it there gestates ‘el germen más hermoso de tu vida futura’ [the most beautiful seed of your future life] and, in oracular vein, he affirms: Bajo la dinamita de tus cielos, crujiente, se oye el nacer del nuevo hijo de la victoria. [Crackling under the dynamite of your skies one hears the new child of victory being born.] 76 77

See AP 3, 77–8. Pieter Wesseling, Revolution and Tradition: The Poetry of Rafael Alberti, 66.

COME THE REVOLUTION

225

Given the spirited resistance of Madrid and the timely arrival of the International Brigaders in November 1936, Alberti cannot be denied his moment of optimism. Surprisingly, he continues the poem into a second part, his refusal to end on a triumphal note being a measure of his artistic as opposed to propagandist ambitions. The shorter second part describes the expropriation of one of Madrid’s aristocratic houses by the group Alberti worked for, the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas [Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals]. Their ejection of hoary objects – books, rickety sofas, family portraits – that are piled outside in the street makes nearly as pathetic a composition as the chattels of the poor in bomb-sites. The poet sees a striking feature in the portraits: en donde los varones de la casa, vestidos los más innecesarios jaeces militares, nos contemplan, partidos, sucios, pisoteados, con ese inexpresable gesto fijo y oscuro del que al nacer ya lleva contra su espalda el muro de los ejecutados. (672–3) [in which the masters of the house, dressed up in the most superfluous military trappings,/ look upon us, broken, dirty and trampled, with that indescribably sombre, steady countenance of persons who since birth have felt against their back the wall of the execution yard.]

This strong idea of noble forbears staring out from torn canvases with the eyes of men facing a firing squad – indeed, that they were born with such terror in their eyes – synthesizes history and the present crisis in a compelling image: the aristocracy, it suggests, have always known their days of privilege were numbered, that a bloody Revolution was coming. Alberti’s image may have been inspired by a shot of workers carrying such portraits in the film by Ivens and Storck, Borinage (1933),78 though its far-reaching implications are his own. As an image, it restores a note of violence and, in enabling the poet to identify with the masses, it forms a harder basis for a conclusion than the first part offered: este cuadro, este libro, este furor que ahora me arranca lo que tienes para mí de elegía son pedazos de sangre de tu terrible aurora. Ciudad, quiero ayudarte a dar a luz tu día. (673)

78

The shot appears in Mercè Ibarz, Buñuel documental. Tierra sin pan, 105.

226

ROBERT HAVARD

[this canvas, this book, this anger that now tears from me the elegy I feel for you are drops of blood in your terrible dawn. City, I want to help you give birth to your new day.]

A perfect alexandrine quatrain formally closes what is, by any standards, an exceptional poem. The birth motif is still present in the blood and suffering of these final images. So too is the theme of Alberti’s role as a proletarian poet, at the service of the people, his foetal poem having come out of him only after much agonizing. He can be proud of his achievement. Though poised, it is not an excessively formal poem, for the sporadic half-lines give a sense of spontaneity in keeping with the uncertainty of war. Its detail shows a poet responding to an actual situation as well as an ideological crisis. Avoiding the pitfalls of propaganda and of bourgeois literariness, Alberti comes close to achieving the impossible synthesis of losing his voice in writing his poem. Impersonality is most readily achieved in poems that deal with the collective endeavour of war. A fine example is ‘Los campesinos’ [‘The Peasants’] in which rustic soldiers are described via the objects and implements they know best, that is, in Marxist terms, with regard to the material conditions of their life. They are ‘duros, color de la corteza’ [hard, bark-coloured] and dark, ‘como los pedernales’ [like flinstones]; their cloaks smell of ‘corderos mojados’ [wet lambs] and they have an unsavoury aura of ‘estiércoles y fangales’ [manure and bogs]. Yet these plain men – ‘muchos no saben nada’ [many know nothing] – selflessly lay down their lives: van los hombres del campo como inmensas simientes a sembrarse en los hondos surcos de las trincheras (681) [the country men depart like immense seeds to be sown in the deep furrows of the trenches.]

This marvellously synthetic simile – men/seeds, furrows/trenches – captures the natural and epic quality of their sacrifice. Yet the displacement of men rather than seeds in the earth suggests unnaturalness too, with the implication that these victims of a feudal latifundist system must have been greatly abused to go voluntarily from field to trench. The same image is developed in the poem ‘Vostros no caísteis’ [You Did Not Fall’]: ‘Siembra de cuerpos jóvenes … / semilla de los surcos que la guerra os abriera’ (682) [A sowing of young bodies … / seed of the furrows that war had opened to you]. The topic is undeniably emotional, but as Wilfred Owen put it, ‘These men are worth/ Your tears,’ and Alberti cannot fail to record what the Shropshire poet called ‘The pity of war, the pity war distilled.’79 Perhaps the most selfless sacrifice is that of the motley group honoured in ‘A las Brigadas 79

Wilfred Owen, op. cit., 124, 148.

COME THE REVOLUTION

227

Internacionales’ [‘To the International Brigades’], who, in far-flung corners, as Auden memorably wrote: heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower … They floated over oceans; They walked the passes: they came to present their lives.80

Pablo Neruda witnessed their arrival in Madrid: ‘Camaradas,/ … os he visto … / venir de vuestros rincones, de vuestras patrias perdidas … / a defender la ciudad española en que la libertad acorralada/ pudo caer y morir mordida por las bestias’81 [Comrades,/ … I have seen you … / come from the corners of your lost countries … / to defend the Spanish city in which besieged liberty/ might fall and die, ravaged by beasts]. For Alberti too the point is the volunteers’ internationalism, that they came from diverse places without that narrow sense of nationhood which Breton denounced for its ‘intérêts égoïstes’82 [selfish interests]: Venís desde muy lejos … Mas esta lejanía ¿qué es para vuestra sangre, que canta sin fronteras? [You come from afar … But that distance, what is it to your blood that sings without frontiers?]

This proletarian union, to which Alberti pays homage in cultured alexandrines, is the communist ideal in action, the antithesis of that self-seeking imperialism deplored earlier. The men are ‘anónimos’ [anonymous] in their selflessness, or ‘abnegados y generosos’ [self-sacrificing and generous] as Antonio Machado described them when they finally departed.83 Alberti insinuates the volunteers’ ignorance of the country they have come to defend, but he also recognizes the tribute they have paid Spain: La tierra que os entierra la defendéis, seguros … Quedad, que así lo quieren los árboles, los llanos, las mínimas partículas de la luz …¡Hermanos! Madrid con vuestro nombre se agranda y se ilumina. (677)

80 W.H. Auden, ‘Spain, 1937’, in Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–1944 (Faber & Faber, London, 1950), 191. 81 Pablo Neruda, ‘Llegada a Marid de la Brigada Internacional’ [‘Arrival in Madrid of the International Brigade’], Obras completas, 2nd edition (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1962), 261. 82 See the first and thirteenth resolutions of Contre-attaque which declared its signatories to be violently hostile to such notions of nationhood, in André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme (Pauvert, Paris, 1962), 169, 176. 83 Antonio Machado and various authors, prologue to Homenaje de despedida a las Brigadas Internacionales (Editorial Hispanoamérica, Madrid, 1978), 5.

228

ROBERT HAVARD

[Steadfastly did you defend the earth in which you lie … Stay with us, for the trees want you to, and the plains and the smallest particles of light … Brothers! In your name Madrid grows tall and shines brighter.]

The last line anticipates Machado’s valedictory comment, ‘el haber merecido vuestro auxilio…es uno de los más altos timbres de gloria que puede ostentar’84 [to have merited your help…is one of the highest tributes ever bestowed]. Highly charged as the notion of a soldier finding rest in foreign soil is, it gains conceptual weight in Alberti’s poem from the integrating, material force of the imagery: the ground disputed in battle is the same as that in which the soldier lies buried, which, in turn, is the capitalized ‘LA TIERRA’ (528) [THE EARTH], that the impoverished Spanish peasant fights for. Poems that celebrate the collective endeavour of war thus facilitate the poet’s submersion of his identity while they also fulfil the function of inspiring soldiers who heard them recited at the front. The communist troops naturally receive special attention and, while leaders like Kleber and Hans Beimler are singled out for praise, more typical is the depiction in ‘¡Soy del Quinto Regimiento!’ [‘I Belong to the Fifth Regiment!’] of a peasant’s simple pride in serving in the crack regiment for which La Pasionaria recruited. Among the best is ‘Quinto Cuerpo del Ejército (A Modesto su Jefe)’ [‘The Army’s Fifth Corps (To Modesto its Leader)’] which intermixes the soldiers’ experience prior to the war – ‘entre los cardos, las piedras, los calores’ (687) [amid thistles, stones and heat] – with their current plight, the implication being that they have little to lose by suffering the privations of war: ‘Ellos, analfabetos, descalzos, cargadores/ de vida amarga … / ellos, entre las balas, los himnos y las flores,/ miradlos vencedores’ [Them, illiterate, barefoot, bearers/ of life’s bitterness … / them, amid bullets, hymns and flowers,/ see them triumphant]. Alberti’s focusing on the common purpose was crucial since the Republican effort was split by leftist factions and separatist animosity of the kind he attempts to defuse in ‘Defensa de Madrid, defensa de Cataluña’ [‘Defense of Madrid, Defense of Catalonia’]. This ballad was originally two poems and, for all Alberti’s harmonizing intentions, its two separate parts remind us of that fatal lack of cohesion. After acclaiming the fortitude of Madrid under siege, the poet lavishly praises Catalonia for its beauty and renowned industrial strength; but the sub-text is a challenge to Catalans to put aside age-old prejudices and join the struggle: ‘La libertad catalana,/ ¡sabedlo!, en Madrid se juega’ (676) [Catalan freedom,/ let’s not mince words, is at stake in Madrid!]. Stephen Spender, a delegate at the Writers’ Conference in Barcelona in 1937, recalls one meeting: ‘the poet Rafael Alberti accompanied me. As soon as he arrived he 84

Ibid., 6.

COME THE REVOLUTION

229

launched into a diatribe against the Catalans, criticizing their failure to take sufficient part in the war’.85 More circumspect in his poetry, Alberti went on to stress solidarity between the two regions in ‘Madrid por Cataluña’ [‘Madrid for Catalonia’] in 1938 when Barcelona was under the hammer of Savoia bombers. A last feature that bears on the collective voice in ‘Capital de la gloria’ is Alberti’s use of nature. This staple of poetry provides a lyrical backdrop to the horrors of war as well as many resources for commenting on the war’s progress. Seasonal transition is especially meaningful: the coming of spring typically suggests new life and hope, whereas autumnal images correspond to fatalities and gloom, as we have seen. Effective as these rhythms are, Alberti is often at his best when breaking the convention. In an appropriately truncated sonnet, ‘Abril, 1938’ [‘April, 1938’], when the Republican cause was faring badly, the poet asks incredulously: ‘¿Otra vez tú poniendo flores …?/ ¿Otra vez tú, la Primavera?’ (690–1) [You again, displaying flowers …?/ You again, Spring?]. In ‘El otoño en el Ebro’ [‘Autumn on the Ebro’] the war seems out of step at first with the seasons’ rhythm, then a parallel is developed between the Republican soldier, defenceless under the Nationalist bombs, and the bare trees: ‘Resistencia del árbol, tan dura, tan humana … / el hombre de esta España se siente,/ como los troncos, firme, ya desnudo o vestido’ (696) [The tree’s resistance, so hard, so human … / the man of this Spain feels,/ like the trunks, firm, whether naked or clothed]. The last-ditch Republican offensive of the Ebro had been contained by 2 August 1938 when the soldiers dug into the hillsides around Gandesa and suffered constant bombing from Nationalist aircraft which had uncontested domination of the sky. On 22 September the International Brigades fought for the last time before being withdrawn and, it is with this in mind, that Alberti extols the resilience of the archetypal Spaniard, ‘el hombre del Ebro … el hombre de esta España’ [the Ebro man … the man of this Spain], who now stood alone against the fascist powers. The situation was as bleak as the weary rhythms of his punctuated alexandrines suggest and, though the poet is obliged to end his poem on a note of optimism, it is one imbued with a fatalism that is as certain as the seasons’ turning: El otoño, otra vez. Luego, el invierno. Sea. Caiga el traje del árbol, el sol no nos recuerde. Pero como los troncos, el hombre en la pelea, seco, amarillo, frío, mas por debajo, verde. (696) [Autumn, once again. Then, winter. So be it. Let the tree’s clothes fall, and let the sun not remind us. Yet like their trunks, the man in battle, withered, yellow, cold, but underneath, green.] 85

Stephen Spender, World within World (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1951), 245.

230

ROBERT HAVARD

Rather than the vain hope for a reversal of fortune, ‘verde’ [green] suggests the Spaniard’s inner spirit, indomitable even in defeat. In a certain sense he has triumphed, Alberti seems to suggest, if only over his own submissiveness, and things will never be the same again. Some poems are more about the poet’s own response to the war. In ‘Monte de El Pardo’ [‘El Pardo Mountain’] the sun suddenly appears in winter during a battle, its radiance oblivious to the human tragedy, and Alberti is struck by the incongruity of it all. This is heightened by oppositions – ‘rabioso silencio’ [rabid silence], ‘fiera mansedumbre’ [savage gentleness], ‘sol/nieve’ [sun/snow] – and by the mixture of beauty and devastation which leaves the poet anguished and confused: todo esto me remuerde, me socava, me quita ligereza a los ojos, me los nubla y me pone la conciencia cargada de llanto y dinamita. La soledad retumba y el sol se descompone. (679) [all this destroys me, deflates me, makes my eyes heavy, turns them misty and loads my conscience with grief and dynamite. The loneliness resounds and the sun clouds over.]

It is a moment when time stands still, when the poet, elemental man now rather than a communist, is perplexed at the unresolved horror of a war starkly divorced from its setting. He seems uncertain of his role in the conflict, while his inner self – ‘cargada de llanto y dinamita’ [loaded with grief and dynamite] – experiences the emotional and ethical contradictions that are acute in a civil war, even to the extent of feeling a pang of ‘soledad’ [loneliness] which is antithetical to the socialist ethos. By the end of the volume, as defeat stares the Republicans in the face, his doubt is so severe it encompasses his role as a poet. In ‘Nocturno’ [‘Nocturne’], the last poem we shall consider, all three stanzas are followed by the emphatic line, ‘Balas. Balas.’ [Bullets. Bullets.], against which brute force the poet’s words seem futile: ‘las palabras no sirven: son palabras’ (693) [words are no use: they are just words]. The second stanza itemizes the literature of war – ‘manifiestos, artículos … discursos’ [manifestoes, articles, speeches] and the like – which are similarly feeble in this brutal context, ‘tristeza de tinta que ha de borrar el agua’ [a sadness of ink that water will erase]. With his feelings drowned out by the persistent ‘Balas. Balas.’ [Bullets. Bullets.], Alberti concludes by expressing his agony as a poet at being reduced by events to mute impotence: Ahora sufro lo pobre, lo mezquino, lo triste, lo desgraciado y muerto que tiene una garganta cuando desde el abismo de su idioma quisiera

COME THE REVOLUTION

231

gritar lo que no puede por imposible, y calla. Balas. Balas. Siento esta noche heridas de muerte las palabras. (694) [Now I suffer all the poverty, misery, sadness, disgrace and death that is to be found in a throat when from the abyss of its language it would shout out what it cannot say, and it falls silent. Bullets. Bullets. Tonight I feel the death wounds of words.]

His wish, announced in ‘Madrid-otoño’ [‘Madrid-Autumn’], to lose his voice – ‘arrancarme de cuajo la voz’ [tear out my voice by its roots] – is granted, ironically, in this poem of late 1938 when the Republic’s plight is desperate and a war-weary poet can muster no words of encouragement for his comrades or even praise for their forlorn efforts. Defeat is numbing and, as Madrid enters its third year of siege, the unrelenting sound of ‘Balas. Balas.’ [Bullets. Bullets.] silences proletarian optimism as well as Alberti’s muse, though not before he has written one of his finest poems. The war’s tragic outcome, unrecorded in the volume, becomes the last imminent event subsumed in the title De un momento a otro [Any Minute Now]. We can be thankful, however, as we reflect on ‘Capital de la gloria’ that Alberti did not lose his distinctive voice even when he spoke for the proletariat.

CONCLUSION

Conclusion Though Breton ultimately failed to join Surrealism with Communism, this does not mean the two were incompatible. Nor does the fact that Alberti embraced Communism in the 1930s diminish his standing as a surrealist; rather, it shows he went the full distance. Surrealism is ‘an extremely eclectic movement’, Helena Lewis says,1 which is evidenced in the list of forerunners Breton acknowledged in the First Manifesto and, more particularly, in the movement’s evolution. We have described this under three broad headings, the psychoanalytical, metaphysical and Marxist, and we have seen Alberti engage in all three, mirroring developments in France. In the spirit of his statement, ‘Para ir al infierno no hace falta cambiar de sitio ni postura’ (434) [To go to hell you needn’t move a muscle or budge an inch], we might conclude that Alberti was a surrealist without going to Paris. Those who did go, like Buñuel and Dalí, were exponents of the visual image; but we recognize that while their images crossed linguistic frontiers, they came out of a specifically Spanish circumstance and mind-set. This book has been less about Spanish figures conforming to a French model and more about what they brought of their own. They brought a lot, which is unsurprising, since, as Dalí proclaimed in his lecture at the Sorbonne in 1955, France is the most intelligent country in the world, the most rational country in the world. Whereas I, Salvador Dalí, come from Spain, which is the most irrational and the most mystical country in the world.2

Dalí effectively suggests a natural Spanish predisposition towards Surrealism on two counts: irrationalism and transcendence. We recall Freud’s comment on Dalí: ‘What a fanatic! What a perfect Spanish type!’3 In diametrical opposition stands the rational French type, epitomized by Voltaire, which perhaps explains why the French were, in the end, better at theorizing about Surrealism than creating major works in its name. My simple point has been that the Spanish circumstance that produced Alberti and Lorca, as well as Buñuel and Dalí, is one supersaturated in religion. This largely explains why Spaniards had 1 2 3

Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red, x. Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 127. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 120.

CONCLUSION

233

an abundance of both irrationality and transcendence. Irrationality, the outward expression of neurosis and paranoia, is the state of mind induced by a repressive system. As Nietzsche says: It was Christianity which first painted the Devil on the world’s wall; it was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to its deeper roots: but belief in the sickness which it propagated continues to exist.4

This sickness, more acute when the propagators were Jesuits, is there for all to see in works like Sobre los ángeles and Poeta en Nueva York, in Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game, Maruja Mallo’s Scarecrows and Buñuel’s An Andalusian Dog. Spain, to be sure, had its own list of forerunners who had explored these nightmarish depths, including Quevedo, Goya and Espronceda, as well as the appropriated Dutch painter, Hieronymus Bosch, ‘El Bosco’. But the cure, as Nietzsche forecast, was another matter. It had to be found elsewhere, outside religion, yet in a system that was in itself a vicarious form of religion complete with its own mystical apparatus of transcendence: Surrealism. What is remarkable in the figures we have considered is not the persistence in their work of a religious thematic content, which can almost be taken for granted, but rather the way that their entire mode of thinking and expression is steeped in religious practice. This is what most distinguishes the ethos of Surrealism in Spain. The three examples of it that we have seen – and no doubt there are more – are the prophetic, the Eucharistic and the pervasive Loyolan method of actualization. It is a strong mixture that produces serious and compelling art.

4

F.W. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880) quoted and translated by R.J. Hollingdale (ed.) in A Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977), 173.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY SOURCES AND REFERENCES Alberti, Rafael, Obra completa, vol. I, Poesía 1920–1938, edición de Luis García Montero (Aguilar, Madrid, 1988). ———, The Lost Grove, trans. Gabriel Berns (University of Caifornia Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959). ———, La arboleda perdida. Libros I y II de memorias, first published Buenos Aires, 1959 (Alianza, Madrid, 1998). ———, La arboleda perdida. Libros III y IV de memorias (Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1927). ———, La arboleda perdida, Quinto libro (1988–1996) (Anaya & Mario Muchnik, Barcelona, 1996). ———, El poeta en la España de 1931, seguido del Romancero de Fermín Galán y los sublevados de Jaca (Publicaciones del Patronato Hispano-Argentino, Buenos Aires, 1942). ———, Correspondencia a José María de Cossío, ed. R. Gómez de Tudanca and E. Mateos Miera (Pre-textos, Valencia, 1998). ———, Prosas encontradas (1924–1942), ed. Robert Marrast (Editorial Ayuso, Madrid, 1973). ———, Prosas encontradas, 9th augmented edition by Robert Marrast (Seix Barral, Barcelona, 2000). ———, (prologue) Romancero general de la guerra española (Patronato Hispano-Argentino de la Cultura, Buenos Aires, 1944). Aleixandre, Vicente, Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 1968). ———, Espadas como labios/La destrucción o el amor, ed. J.L. Cano (Castalia, Madrid, 1989). ———, Mis poemas mejores, 2nd edition (Gredos, Madrid, 1961). ———, Poesía surrealista. Antología (Ediciones Bolsillo, Barcelona, 1971). Anon., Maruja Mallo: La gran ignorada en Galicia (Diputación Provincial de Lugo, 1995). Aub, Max, Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel (Aguilar, Madrid, 1985). Balakian, Annai, Surrealism. The Road to the Absolute (Allen & Unwin, London, 1972). Barthes, Roland, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. R. Miller (Jonathan Cape, London, 1977). Bousoño, Carlos La poesía de Vicente Aleixandre, 2nd edition (Gredos, Madrid, 1968). Breton, André, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

235

———, ‘The Dalí Case’, in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (MacDonald, London, 1965). ———, Position politique du surréalisme (Pauvert, Paris, 1962). Buñuel, Luis, My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984). Also Mi último suspiro (Plaza y Janés, Barcelona, 1982). ———, Obra literaria, ed. Agustín Sánchez Vidal (Heraldo de Aragón, Zaragoza, 1982). ———, Un perro andaluz, La edad de oro (Ediciones Era, Mexico, 1971). ———, Viridiana, 4th edition (Ediciones Era, Mexico City, 1976). ——— and Dalí, Salvador, Un Chien andalou, foreword by Jean Vigo (Faber & Faber, London, 1994). Dalí, Salvador, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, as told to André Parinaud, translated from the French by Harold J. Salemson (Quartet Books, London, 1977; originally published in English by W.H. Allen, London, 1976, and in French, with the title Comment on devient Dalí, by Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1973). ———, Diary of a Genius, trans. by Richard Howard (Hutchinson, London, 1990; first published as Journal d’un Génie, Éditions de la Table Ronde, Paris, 1964). ———, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. H.M. Chevalier (Vision, London, 1968). ———, Salvador Dalí (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1980). ———, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, ed. Haim Finkelstein (Cambridge University Press, 1998). García Lorca, Federico, Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 11th edition, 1966). Giménez Caballero, Ernesto, Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, originally published by Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid, 1928; new edition by Edward Baker (Ediciones Turner, Madrid, 1975). Harris, Derek, Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights: The Language of Surrealism in Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda and Aleixandre (La Sirena, Anstruther, 1998). Havard, Robert, ‘Rafael Alberti’s De un momento a otro: The Matter of Poetry, Politics and War’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Glasgow), 73 (1996), 81–103. ———, ‘Christ, the Paranoiac, the Surrealist, the Communist, Rafael Alberti’, in Changing Times in Hispanic Culture, ed. Derek Harris (Centre for the Study of the Spanish Avant-Garde, Aberdeen, 1996), 133–41. ———, ‘The Sins of the Fathers: Jesuit Echoes in Rafael Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles and Sermones y moradas’, Romance Studies, 31 (1998), 33–44. ———, ‘Rafael Alberti in the Classroom: Matthew, Maths and Marx’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), 76 (1999), 471–84. Ibarz, Mercè, Buñuel documental. ‘Tierra sin pan’ y su tiempo (Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 1999). La Gaceta Literaria, reimpresión onastática (no. XVII de la Biblioteca de 1936, Revistas de la Segunda Republica Española de la edición original de Madrid, por Topos Verlag, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 1980) in three volumes: vol. 1, Jan. 1927–Dec. 1929; II, Jan. 1930–Dec. 1930; III, Jan. 1931–May 1932. La Révolution surréaliste: collection complète 1924–1929 (Jean-Michel Place, Paris, 1976).

236

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution: collection complète 1930–1933 (Jean-Michel Place, Paris, 1976). Lewis, Helena, Dada Turns Red. The Politics of Surrealism (Edinburgh University Press, 1990). Loyola, Saint Ignatius of, Personal Writings, trans. with introductions and notes by Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996). Mallo, Maruja, Maruja Mallo: 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color (1928–1942), estudio preliminar por Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942). Merello (S.J.), Augustín Castro, Alberti, colegial y marinero (historia y poesía) (Las Palmas, Unión Eléctrica de Canarias, 1994). Montero, Enrique, ‘Octubre: revelación de una revista mítica’, introduction to and edited reprinting of the original Octubre, escritores y artistas revolucionarios, Madrid, Gráficos Carrazas, 1933 (Topos Verlag AG, Vaduz, 1977). Tejada, José Luis, ‘Una entrevista con Rafael Alberti’, Gades. Revista del Colegio Universitario de Filosofía y Letras de Cádiz, XII (1984), 5–28.

SECONDARY SOURCES AND REFERENCES Aitchison, Jean, Words in the Mind; An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon (Blackwell, Oxford, 1994). Alfaya, Javier, Alberti: un poeta en la calle (Cuadernos para el diálogo, no. 81, Madrid, 1977). Anon, Diario de las Sesiones de las Cortes Constituyentes de la República Española 1931 (Cortes, Madrid, 1931). Anscombe, G.E.M., On Transubstantiation (Catholic Truth Society, London, no date). Aranda, Francisco J., El surrealismo español (Lumen, Barcelona, 1981). ———, Luis Buñuel: biografía crítica (Lumen, Barcelona, 1969). Auden, W.H., ‘Spain, 1937’, in Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–1944 (Faber & Faber, London, 1950). Balakian, Anna, Literary Origins of Surrealism: A New Mysticism in French Poetry (University of London Press, London, 1967). Bataille, Georges, Madame Edwarda, Le Mort, Histoire de l’oeil (Union Générale d’Editions, Paris, 1973). ———, Story of an Eye. With Essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Marion Boyars, London, 1979). Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du mal, ed. A. Adam (Garnier, Paris, 1961). Baxter, John, Buñuel (Fourth Estate, London, 1994). Bayo, Manuel, Sobre Alberti (CVS Colección Ateneo, Madrid, 1974). Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, Obras completas, 8th edition (Aguilar, Madrid, 1954). Bergson, Henri, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, in Oeuvres (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1959). Bible, The Reader’s Bible, being the complete authorized version of the Holy Bible (Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, London, 1951).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

237

La Biblia Vulgata Latina traducida en Español, y anotada por ... el P. Phelipe Scio de S. Miguel. Segunda edición revista, corregida y aumentada por su mismo traductor (Benito Cano, Madrid, 1797, reimpreso por Samuel Bagster, London). Biddle, Mark E., Polyphony and Symphony in Prophetic Literature. Rereading Jeremiah 7–20 (Mercer University Press, Macon, 1996). Blackham, H.J., Six Existentialist Thinkers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1961). Blake, William, William Blake’s Writings, vol. I, ed. G.E. Bentley, Jr (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978). Bodini, Vittorio, Poetas surrealistas españoles, 2nd edition (Diamante, Barcelona, 1982). Bowie, Malcolm Lacan (Fontana, London, 1991), 39. Bowra, C.M., ‘Rafael Alberti, Sobre los ángeles’, in The Creative Experiment (Macmillan, London, 1949, reprinted 1967). ———, Poetry and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1966). Brenan, Gerald, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge University Press, London, 1967; first published 1943). Brill, A.A. (ed.), The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (The Modern Library, New York, 1938). Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1959). ———, Love’s Body (Random House, New York, 1966). Brown, R. and Fraser, C., ‘The Acquisition of Syntax’, in C. Cofer and B. Musgrave (eds.), Learning behavior and learning problems and processes (McGraw–Hill, New York, 1963). Buhigas, José Ignacio, Carnaval: un siglo de historias de El Puerto (1836–1936) (Ayuntamiento de El Puerto de Santa María/Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1983). Chadwick, N. Kershaw, Poetry and Prophecy (Cambridge University Press, 1942). Chavarri, Raúl, Mito y realidad de la Escuela de Vallecas (Ibérico Europea, Madrid, 1975). Cirlot, J.-E., El mundo del objeto a la luz del surrealismo (Anthropos, Barcelona, 1986). Clarke, Bruce, Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (State University of New York, Albany, 1995). Connell, Geoffrey, ‘The Autobiographical Element in Sobre los ángeles’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 40 (1963), 160–73. ———, ‘Sobre los ángeles: Form and Theme’, Spanish Studies, 4 (1982), 1–14. ———, ‘The End of a Quest: Alberti’s Sermones y moradas and Three Uncollected Poems’, Hispanic Review, 33 (1965), 290–309. Couffon, Claude, Granada y García Lorca (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1967). Crispin, John, ‘La Generación de 1927 y las artes plásticas’, in H. Romero (ed.), Nuevas perspectivas sobre la generación del 27 (ensayos literarios) (Ediciones Universal, Miami, 1983). Cruz, San Juan de la, Poesías completas y otras páginas (Ebro, Zaragoza, 1961). Crystal, David, Linguistics, Language and Religion (Burns & Oates, London, 1965).

238

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diccionario de la lengua española, 21st edition (Real Academia Española, Madrid, 1992). Edwards, Gwynne, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel (Marion Boyars, London, 1982). Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (Faber & Faber, London, 1969). Éluard, Paul, et al., Au Grand jour (Éditions Surréalistes, Paris, 1927). Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana, XLIX (Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1958). Everson, William K., American Silent Film (Oxford University Press, New York, 1978). Finkelstein, Haim N., Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1979). ———, Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writing 1927–1942 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Freud, Sigmund, New Introductory Lectures, trans. W.J.H. Sprott (Hogarth Press, London, 1937). ———, The Origins of Religion (Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1985). ———, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W.D. Robson-Scott (Hogarth Press, London, 1962). Gagen, Derek, ‘ “Invitación al aire”: The Imagery of Ascent in Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles’, Modern Language Review (1988), 867–81. García Lorca, Federico, Mariana Pineda, ed. and trans. Robert Havard (Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1987). García de Carpi, Lucía, La pintura surrealista española (1924–1936) (Istmo, Madrid, 1986). Gibson, Ian, Federico García Lorca, A Life (Faber & Faber, London, 1989). ———, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (Faber & Faber, London, 1997). Gómez de Liaño, Ignacio, Dalí (Academy Editions, London, 1987). Góngora, Luis de, Poems of Góngora, ed. R.O. Jones (Cambridge University Press, 1966). Guillén, Jorge, Aire nuestro (All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, Milan, 1968). Harris, Derek, García Lorca: Poeta en Nueva York (Grant & Cutler, London, 1978). Havard, Robert, From Romanticism to Surrealism. Seven Spanish Poets (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1988). ———, Federico García Lorca: Gypsy Ballads/Romancero gitano (Aris & Phillips, Warminster, 1990). ———, Federico García Lorca: Mariana Pineda (Aris & Phillips, Warminster, 1987). ———, Jorge Guillén: Cántico (Grant & Cutler, London, 1985). ———, Antonio Machado: Campos de Castilla (Duckworth/Bristol Classical Press, London, 1997). Hayman, Ronald, De Sade, A Critical Biography (Constable, London, 1978). Hernando Fernández, Miguel, La Gaceta Literaria (1927–1932), biografía y valoración (Colección Castilla, Universidad de Valladolid, 1974). Ilie, Paul, The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1968).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

239

Jiménez, Juan Ramón, Libros de poesía, recopilación y prólogo de Agustín Caballero (Aguilar, Madrid, 1959). Jiménez-Fajardo, Salvador, Multiple Spaces. The Poetry of Rafael Alberti (Tamesis, London, 1985). Jiménez Millán, Antonio, La poesía de Rafael Alberti (1930–39) (Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1984). Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape, London, 1964). Kerr, Walter, The Silent Clowns (Da Capo, New York, 1980). Kugel, James L. (ed.), Poetry and Prophecy. The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1990). Lacan, Jacques, Écrits (Seuil, Paris, 1966), trans. into English by Alan Sheridan, Écrits. A Selection (Routledge, London, 1977). ———, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Penguin, London, 1977). León, María Teresa, Memoria de la melancolía (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1970). Lever, Maurice, Marquis de Sade. A Biography, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (HarperCollins, London, 1993). Lomas, David, ‘The Metamorphosis of Narcissus: Dalí’s Self-Analysis’, in Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley (eds.), Salvador Dalí, A Mythology (Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1998). Losada Gómez, Maria Jesús, ‘Maruja Mallo’, Bellas Artes (August–September, 1974), 22–4. Lynch, Carlos Morla, En España con Federico García Lorca (Páginas de un diario íntimo, 1928–1936) (Aguilar, Madrid, 1958). Lynch, Lawrence W., The Marquis de Sade (Twayne, Boston, 1984). Machado, Antonio, et al., Homenaje de despedida a las Brigadas Internacionales (Editorial Hispanoamérica, Madrid, 1978). Machado, Antonio, Poesías completas, I, edición crítica de Oreste Macrì (Espasa-Calpe/Fundación Antonio Machado, Madrid, 1989). Marcilly, C., Ronde et fable de la solitude à New York (Ediciones Hispanoamericanas, Paris, 1962). Mellen, Joan (ed.), The World of Luis Buñuel. Essays in Criticism (Oxford University Press, New York, 1978). Miller, Henry, The Cosmological Eye (London, 1945). Monguió, Luis, ‘The Poetry of Rafael Alberti’, Hispania, 43 (1960). Morris, C.B., Surrealism and Spain, 1920–1936 (Cambridge University Press, London, 1972). ———, prologue, Rafael Alberti, Sobre los ángeles/Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos (Cátedra, Madrid, 1989). Nadeau, Maurice, The History of Surrealism, trans. R. Howard (Plaintin, London, 1987). Nantell, Judith, Rafael Alberti’s Poetry of the Thirties: The Poet’s Public Voice (University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 1986). Neruda, Pablo, Obras completas, 2nd edition (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1962). Nietzsche, F.W., A Nietzsche Reader, ed. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977). ———, Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979).

240

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Oppenheimer, Helen, Lorca, the Drawings, their relation to the poet’s life and work (Herbert Press, London, 1986). Orchard, D.B. et al., A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (Thomas Nelson, London, 1953). Ortega y Gasset, José (1910), Obras completas, I (Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 6th edition, 1963). Owen, Wilfred, The Complete Poems and Fragments. Vol. I: The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Chatto & Windus, London, 1983). Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966). Pérez Turrent, T. and Colina, J. de la, Buñuel por Buñuel (Plot, Madrid, 1993). Philp, H.L., Freud and Religious Belief (Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1956). Polk, Timothy, The Prophetic Persona. Jeremiah and the Language of the Self (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplementary Series 42, University of Sheffield, 1984). Popkin, Louise, The Theatre of Rafael Alberti (Tamesis, London, 1976). Proll, E., ‘The Surrealist Element in Rafael Alberti’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 18 (1941), 70–82. Quirk, Randolph, et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman, London and New York, 1985). Ramdin, Ron, Paul Robeson. The Man and His Mission (Peter Owen, London, 1987). Rofé, Alexander, Introduction to Prophetic Literature, translated from the Hebrew by Judith H. Seeligmann (Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, 1997). Rose, Alan, Surrealism and Communism. The Early Years (Peter Lang, New York, 1991). Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Salinas, Pedro, Poesías completas (Barral Editores, Barcelona, 1975). Salinas de Marichal, Solita, El mundo poético de Rafael Alberti (Gredos, Madrid, 1968). Sánchez Vidal, Agustín, El enigma sin fin (Planeta, Barcelona, 1988). ———, El mundo de Luis Buñuel (Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada, Zaragoza, 1993). ———, Luis Buñuel (Cátedra, Madrid, 1991) Santos Torroella, Rafael, La miel es más dulce que la sangre: las épocas lorquiana y freudiana de Salvador Dalí (Planeta, Barcelona, 1984). Sarriá, F.G., ‘Sobre los ángeles de Rafael Alberti y el surreralismo’, Papeles de Son Armadans, 91 (1978–9), 23–40. Schwarze, Michael, Luis Buñuel (Plaza & Janes, Barcelona, 1981). Sheehy, Judge Eugene, ‘My School Friend, James Joyce’, in James Joyce, Interviews and Recollections, ed. E.H. Mikhail (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990). Spaak, Claude, ‘Libération de l’esprit’, Documents 34, II nouvelle série trimestrielle (November 1934). Spender, Stephen, World within World (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1951). Storr, Anthony, Solitude (Flamingo, London, 1988). Strick, Philip, ‘The Metropolis Wars: The City as Character in Science Fiction

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

241

Films’, Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies, ed. Danny Peary (Dolphin, New York, 1984). Thomas, R.S., Collected Poems 1945–1990 (Dent, London, 1993). Trapnell, William, Voltaire and the Eucharist (Voltaire Foundation, Taylor Institution, Oxford, 1989). Unamuno, Miguel de, ‘La educación jesuítica’, Obras completas, IX (Madrid, 1971). Vega, Garcilaso de la, Poesías castellanas completas (Castalia, Madrid, 1969), 54. Velloso, José Miguel, Conversaciones con Rafael Alberti (Sedmay, Madrid, 1977). Vicent, Manuel, ‘Maruja Mallo, la diosa de los cuatro brazos’, El País, 12-x-1981. Wainwright, Geoffrey, Eucharist and Eschatology (Epworth Press, London, 1971). Wesseling, Pieter, Revolution and Tradition: The Poetry of Rafael Alberti (Albatros, Valencia/Chapel Hill, 1981). Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass, ed. S. Bradley and H.W. Blodgett (W.W. Norton, New York and London, 1973).

INDEX abreaction see catharsis Abraham (and Isaac) 154 Acín, Ramón 202, 210 Ades, Dawn 163 Aitchison, Jean 197 Alberti, Rafael 1–79, 105–11, 141–51, 191–200, 212–31, ix, x, xi; in El Puerto de Santa María 5, 9, 39, 40, 45, 50, jail 50, father’s absence from 50; family decline 55, 59; poverty, caciquismo in 59; carnival in 59–60; sherry in 50, 105–6, 150, Holy Week in 153; Bay of Cádiz and dunes 5, 60, 68; and masturbation 41–2, 55, 156 and n, schooling at Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga 5, 24, 40, 41, 50, 51, poor at Maths 51–2, religious education 52, school marks 53n; 54, primary 55; ‘free’ day-boy 55, uniform, rank 56; expulsion from 5, 58; exercises 61; incipient class consciousness 62; arithmetic 65, brainwashing 68, ironic use of numbers 68; in Madrid, with Maruja Mallo 96–7, with María Teresa León 17, illness 149, during Civil War 222 et seq.; Berlin 16; Las Hurdes, 20, 200, 211; Moscow (International Union of Revolutionary Writers) 16, 94, 214, 217; America 218–22, Catalonia 228–9, Paris 16, Rome 110, views on Surrealism (Connell interview) 32–8, 96–7 Poetry volumes De un momento a otro [Any Minute Now] ix–x, 21, 212–31 El poeta en la calle [The Poet in the Street] ix, 21, 200, 215, 217, 218 Sermones y moradas [Sermons and Dwelling Places] ix, x, 2, 5, 9, 15, 24, 34, 67, 68, 107, 147, 191, 200n

Sobre los ángeles [Concerning the Angels] ix, x, 5, 6, 7, 9, 15, 24, 33, 34, 36, 49, 67, 68, 72, 73, 76, 93, on angels 95–6, 101, 103, 141, 147, 148, 224, 233 Yo era un tonto y lo que visto me ha hecho dos tontos [I was a Fool and what I have seen has made Two fools of Me] 15, 19, 175, 200n Poems ‘Abril, 1938’ [‘April, 1938’] 229 ‘Adiós a la sangre’ [‘Goodbye to Blood’] 198 ‘A las Brigadas Internacionales’ [‘To the International Brigades’] 226 ‘Aniversario’ [‘Anniversary’] 223 ‘Can de llamas’ [‘Dog of Flames’] 75–6, 141 ‘Capital de la gloria’ [‘Capital of Glory’] 222, 229, 231 ‘Casi son’ [‘Almost Song’] 222 and n ‘Castigos’ [‘Punishments’] 24, 146 ‘Colegio (S.J.)’ [‘School (S.J.’)] 54–9, 61–5, 71, 217, 222 ‘Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir’ [‘With My Boots on I must Die’] 15 ‘Defensa de Madrid, defensa de Cataluña’ [‘Defence of Madrid, Defence of Catalonia’] 228 ‘Desahucio’ [‘Eviction’] 7, 24 ‘Dos niños’ [‘Two Boys’] 67n ‘El alma en pena’ [‘The Soul in Torment’] 24 ‘El ángel ceniciento’ [‘The Ashen Angel’] 76 ‘El ángel de la arena’ [The Angel of Sand’] 62

INDEX

‘El angel de las bodegas’ [‘The Angel of the Wine Cellars’] 106 ‘El ángel de los números’ [‘The Angel of Numbers’] 51–4, 65, 67n, 71, 72, 79 ‘El ángel desconocido’ [‘The Unknown Angel’] 49 ‘El ángel falso’ [‘The False Angel’] 147 ‘El ángel mentiroso’ [‘The Lying Angel’] 27, 144–5 ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Body’] 7, 24, 27, 101, 224 ‘Elegías’ [‘Elegies’] 9, 108–10 ‘El otoño en el Ebro’ [‘Autumn on the Ebro’] 229 ‘El perro rabioso’ [‘The Rabid Dog’] 215 ‘Engaño’ [‘Deception’] 57, 144 ‘Espantapájaros’ [‘Scarecrow’] 101–2 ‘Geografía política’ [‘Political Geography’] 217 ‘Guajiras burlescas de los banqueros alegres y desesperados de Wall Street’ [‘Burlesque Songs of Happy and Desperate Wall Street Bankers’] 221–2 ‘Hace falta estar ciego’ [‘You’d Have to be Blind’] 217 ‘Hallazgos en la nieve’ [‘Discoveries in the Snow’] 9 ‘Harry Langdon hace por primera vez el amor a una niña’ [‘Harry Langdon makes love to a girl for the first time’] 175 ‘Himno de las bibliotecas proletarias’ [‘Hymn to Proletarian Libraries’] 20 ‘Invitación al harpa’ [‘Invitation to the Harp’] 144, 148 ‘La familia’ [‘The Family’] 217 ‘La iglesia marcha sobre la cuerda floja’ [‘The Church is Walking a Tightrope’] 18–19 ‘La lucha por la tierra’ [‘The Struggle for Land’] 20–1, 217 ‘La primera ascensión de Maruja Mallo al subsuelo’ [‘The First Ascension of Maruja Mallo to the Subsoil’] 13, 30, 96, 107–8

243 ‘Los ángeles bélicos (Norte, Sur)’ [‘The Bellicose Angels (North, South)’] 73–5, 141 ‘Los ángeles colegiales’ [‘The Schoolboy Angels’] 52, 66 ‘Los ángeles feos’ [‘The Ugly Angels’] 149–50 ‘Los ángeles mohosos’ [‘The Mouldy Angels’] 77–8 ‘Los ángeles mudos’ [‘The Dumb Angels’] 10 ‘Los ángeles muertos’ [‘The Dead Angels’] 9, 95, 96, 103–4, 147, 148–9 ‘Los ángeles sonámbulos’ [‘The Somnambular Angels’] 141–2, 145 ‘Los campesinos’ [‘The Peasants’] 226 ‘Los dos ángeles’ [‘The Two Angels’] 67n ‘Los niños de Extremadura’ [‘The Children of Extremadura’] 20 ‘Madrid por Cataluña’ [‘Madrid for Catalonia’] 229 ‘Madrid-otoño’ [‘Madrid-Autumn’] 63n, 222–6, 231 ‘Monte de El Pardo’ [‘El Pardo Mountain’] 230 ‘Muerte y juicio’ [‘Death and Judgement’] 24, 26, 66, 145 ‘New York (Wall Street en la niebla. Desde el Bremen)’ [‘New York (Wall Street in the Mist. From the Bremen)’] 62n, 219–21, 222 ‘Nocturno’ [‘Nocturne’] 230 ‘Romance de los campesinos de Zorita’ [‘Ballad of the Zorita Peasants’] 217 ‘Paraíso perdido’ [‘Paradise Lost’] 26, 73, 115 ‘Quinto Cuerpo del Ejército (A Modesto su Jefe)’ [‘The Army’s Fifth Corps (To Modesto its Leader)’] 228 ‘Sermón de la sangre’ [‘Sermon on Blood’] 45, 197–8 ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [‘Sermon on the Four Truths’] 10–11, 67n, 82, 105, 109, 117, 150, 192–7

244

INDEX

‘¡Soy del Quinto Regimiento!’ [‘I Belong to the Fifth Regiment!’] 228 ‘Tres recuerdos del cielo’ [‘Three Recollections of Heaven’] 67n, 142–4 ‘Un fantasma recorre Europa’ [‘A Spectre Haunts Europe’] 214n, 215 ‘Vida de mi sangre’ [‘Life of my Blood’] 198 ‘Viaje’ [‘Journey’] 68–71 ‘Vosotros no caísteis’ [‘You Did Not Fall’] 226 ‘5’ [‘5’] 25–6 ‘13 bandas y 48 estrellas’ [‘13 Stripes and 48 Stars’] 217–18 Plays Bazar de la providencia [Providence Bazaar] 199n Dos farsas revolucionarias [Two Revolutionary Farces] 199n El hombre deshabitado [The Disinhabited Man] 15, 16, 92 Fermín Galán [Fermín Galán] 16 La farsa de los Reyes Magos [Farce of the Three Kings] 19, 199n Autobiographies and writings El poeta en la España de 1931 [The Poet in 1931 Spain] 18n, 19n ‘Palomita y galápago’ [‘Dove and Turtle’] (lecture) 15 The Lost Grove (English translation) 4, 14, 15, 16, 19, 33, 40, 41, 42, 50, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 70, 74n, 76, 141, 149, 194n, 195n, 224n La arboleda perdida [The Lost Grove] vols I-II, 4n, 97; vols. III–IV, 93, 214; vol. V, 34, 97, 101n Aleixandre, Vicente 177–90, ix, xi, 35, 36, 37; recalls childhood 182–3; and transformation 184; and irrationalism 184; 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 232, 233 Poetry volumes Espadas como labios [Swords like Lips] 179, 182n, 187 La destrucción o el amor [Destruction or Love] 179 Mis poemas mejores [My Best Poems] 178, 188n Pasión de la tierra [Passion for the Earth] 188

Poesías completas [Complete Poetry] 179 Poesía surrealista. Antología [Surrealist Poetry. Anthology] 177 Poems ‘Cada cosa, cada cosa’ [‘Each Thing, Each Thing’] 184–6 ‘Muerte’ [‘Death’] 188n ‘Partida’ [‘Departure’ or ‘Game’] 188n ‘Ser de esperanza y lluvia’ [‘Being of Hope and Rain’] 188n ‘Silencio’ [‘Silence’] 182–4, 186 ‘Toro’ [‘Bull’] 186–90 ‘Unidad en ella’ [‘Unity in Her’] 178–82 Alfonso XIII 12, 15, 16, 201, 202 and n, 206 Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals 225 Alonso, Dámaso 5 and n, 35 Alquié, Ferdinand 213 Aragon, Luis 16, 32, 191, 202 and n, 212, and Alberti 213–15 Aranda, J. Francisco 168n, 202n, 208n Arnés, Benjamín 97 Artaud, Antonin 213 Asturian miners’ revolt 1, 12, 218 Aub, Max x and n, 5n, 7, 13n, 43n, 200n, 201n, 202n, 205n, 207n, 212n Auden, W.H. 227 and n Azaña, Manuel 6, 19 Azorín (Martínez Ruiz, José) 86 Balakian, Anna 8–9 Baroja, Pío 203 Barthes, Roland 27–8, 30, 67, 68, 78, 90n Bataille, Georges 158 Baxter, John 202n Baudelaire, Charles 80, 92 and n Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo 143–4, 148, 184 and n Beimler, Hans 228 Belmonte, Blanco 201 Berenguer, General Dámaso 15, 16, 201 Berghahn, Wilfried 203n Bergson, Henri 66, 143 Bible, the (and ‘biblical register’) 22, 53 and n, Biblia Vulgata Latina 54n; and anaphora 90, 126n; and binary structures 128, 142; and syntax 199; Ecclesiastes 59, 105, Exodus 191, Ezeiel 121, 125, 130, Genesis 78, Isaiah

INDEX

113, 122, 146, Jeremiah 112, 117, 121, 122, 125, 126, 130, 133, John 144, 191, Luke 126, 159, Lamentations 125, Matthew 50, 53–4, 57, 71, 115, 159, Revelations 121, 131, 146 Biddle, Mark E 112n Blake, William 112, 113 Bodini, Vittorio 177, 187n Boltwood, Geoff 119n Bosch, Hieronymus (‘el Bosco’) 48, 114, 146, 233; The Garden of Earthly Delights [plate 1] 48 Bousoño, Carlos 177, 178, 180, 186 Bowie, Malcolm 72–3 Bradley, Fiona 163n Brahms, Johannes 207 Brecht, Bertolt 16 Brenan, Gerald 17, 18 Breton, André 2, 3 and n, 12, 32, 34, 36, 37, 92; buys Maruja’s painting 95, 99, 179, 191, 202, 208, 212, 213, 215, 222, 227 and n, 232 First Manifesto ix, 1, 3, 9, 39, 180n, 212, 232 Second Manifesto 1n, 4, 8, 212, 213, 222 and n Pour un art révolutionnaire 213 ‘Le Message automatique’ 180n La Révolution surréaliste 1 Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 1, 12n, 100, 213 L’Objet fantôme 100 Surrealism and Painting, 8n, 100 Brown, Norman O. 1, 10, 111n Brunius, Jacques 166 Buñuel, Luis 165–77, 200–12, ix, x and n, xi, 4, schooling at Colegio del Salvador, Zaragoza 5, 6–7, 24, 42, and masturbation 43, and discipline 49, 52 and n, 56, and rotting donkey 87, 94, 152, plays at Mass 155, Calanda miracle and drums 153, 171, 165, first cinema in Aragón 165, with Dalí 166, 168, in Jesuit uniform 168n, 190, 199, and entomology 206; 232 Films Belle de jour [Day-time Beauty] 101n Cet obscur objet du désir [That Obscure Object of Desire] 177 L’Age d’or [The Golden Age/La edad de oro] 6, 90, 104, 176, 205, 208, 213

245 Le Fantôme de la liberté [The Phantom of Liberty] 84 Nazarín [Nazarene] 31 Terre sans pain [Land without Bread/Tierra sin pan/Las Hurdes] 20, 200–12 Tristana 176 Un Chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog/Un perro andaluz] 166–75, 6, 14, 43, 87, 104, 110, 207, 233 Viridiana 90, 155, 174n, 176, 209 Writings ‘Alucinaciones en torno a una mano muerta’ [‘Hallucinations about a Dead Hand’] 171 La Sancta Misa Vaticana 154 Mi último suspiro [My Last Breath] 5n, 56, 101n, 152n, 165n, 166 ‘Léxico sucinto del erotismo’ [‘Brief Lexicon of Eroticism’] 43

cante jondo [flamenco deep song] 50, 116 Cano, José L. 190n Cassou, Jean 97, 101 Castaneda, Carlos 119n catharsis xi, 7, 51, 79, 203, 207 Catherine of Siena, St 126 Catholicism 4, 41; and bigotry 50, 133, 191, 192; and CEDA party 206 Catholic Monarchs 17 Cernuda, Luis 36, 37 Chadwick, N.K. 118, 119, 128n, 137, 140 Chagall, Marc 16 Chaplin, Charles 174 Chavarri, Raúl 94n Christ, Jesus and Christomorphism (see also prophet) 10, 11 and n, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 53, 86, 87–8, 90, 101–2, 106, 111, 153; and Eucharist 153–4, 155, 159; wounds 170, 173, 191, 224 Christian Brothers x and n, xi, 29, Dalí as 104, 173 Cine Club Madrid 15, 92 Cirlot, J.-E. 100 Clarke, Bruce 164 Commune (journal) 21, 213, 214n Communism (and Party) 4, 12, 14, 16, 21, 202, 203, 212, 213, 216, 218, 222, 227, 228 Company of Jesus see Jesuits Connell, Dr Geoffrey xi, 1n, 14n, 21n, 35, 37n, 96–7, 216n Cossío, José María de 74–5n, 141, 198n

246

INDEX

Couffon, Claude 152n Cowley, Malcolm 134 Cowley, Rowanne xi, 54 Crispin, John 101 and n Crystal, David 191 and n, 192 Dada 2, 12, 15, 96, 199, 212 Dalí, Gala 107, 162 Dalí, Salvador 155–65, ix, x and n, xi, 2, 4, 6, 11, expulsion from surrealist group 12, 15, 22, elder brother 27, 29, schooling 29, at Port Lligat 31, and masturbation 45, 156–7, and spirituality 80; and excrement 83–4, 85 106, 92, 98, 100, 110, and Cadaqués Mass 154–5, imaginative games 158–9, ‘eatables’ 84, 161, and Port Lligat fishermen 162, dematerialization 167, and Un Chien andalou 173 and n, 174, 190, 232, and paranoia-critical method 2, 8, 10, 12, 34n, 37, 44, 72, 157 Paintings, drawings Accommodations of Desire (1929) 167 Apparatus and Hand (1927) [plate 3] 44, 163 Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938) 161 Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus (1935) 176 Assumption (1952) 31 Atavistic Vestiges after the Rain (1934) 168 Autumn Cannibalism (1937) 161 Basket of Bread (1926) 161 Cannibalism of Objects (1932) 161 Catalan Bread (1930) 160 City of Drawers (1936) 172 Composition: Evocation of Lenin (1931) 12 Couple with their Heads Full of Clouds (1936) 161 Enigmatic Elements (1934) 168 Honey is Sweeter than Blood (1926–7) 43, 172 Imperial Violets (1938) 161 Invisible Afghan Hound with the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of García Lorca in the Form of a Fruit Dish with Three Figs (1938) 161 Last Supper (1955) 155 Partial Hallucination: Six

Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano (1931) 168 Profanation of the Host (1929) 155, 158 Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) [plate 5] 9, 155–6, 161 The Birth of Liquid Desires (1932) 160 The Endless Enigma (1938) 161 The Enigma of Desire (1929) 167 The Enigma of William Tell (1933) 12 The First Days of Spring (1929) 168 The Font (1930) 157, 159 The Great Masturbator (1929) 9, 44, 157, 158 The Great Paranoiac (1936) 9 The Invention of Monsters (1927) 161 The Invisible Man (1929) 9 The Lugubrious Game (1929) [plate 2] 43, 84, 158, 163, 176, 233 The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1936–7) [plate 4] 44, 162–3, 176 The Old Age of William Tell (1931) 161 The Persistence of Memory (1931) 84, 160 The Spectre of Sex Appeal (1934) 168 The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image (1938) 161 The Triangular Hour (1934) 168 The Weaning of Furniture: Nutrition (1934) 9, 167 Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936) 172, 176 William Tell, Gradiva and the Average Bureaucrat (1932) 160, 171 Writings Diary of a Genius 8n, 31–2, 34n, 232 ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ (poem) 163 The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí 160n The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí 9 and n, 11 and n, 28, 29, 44, 84, 101n, 160, 161, 167n, 170n, 232

INDEX

L’Âne pourri [The Rotting Donkey] 12, 72, 87, 167n ‘Reverie’ 160, 203 Darío, Rubén 218 Darwin, Charles 65 Davies, John 202n Da Vinci, Leonardo 155 de Chirico, Giorgio 100 Descartes, René 65 dépaysement 100, 109 Día Gráfico, El (journal) 202n Duchamp, Marcel 109 Duggan, Craig xi Ecclesiastes see Bible Edward VIII (of England) 202 Edwards, Gwynne 168n Eisenstein, Sergei The Battleship Potemkin 14 Eliot, T.S. 120 Eluard, Paul 81, 191, 212 epiplasm 82, 92, 95, 104, 106, 196 Epstein, Jean 208, 209 Ernst, Max 81 eschatology 80n, 81, 82, 87, 104, 110 Espronceda, José de 89, 233 Estampa (journal) 201 Eucharist 11n, 85, 152–5, 157, 158, 159, 162, 164, 209, 233 Everson, William K. 169n excrement 31, 83, 84, 85, 102, 104, 108, 110, 111, 163 Ezeiel see Bible Fabre, Jean Henri 110 Fellini, Federico 121 Finkelstein, Haim F. 9n, 106n, 160, 168n First World War (Great War) 2, 115, 212 Flaherty, Robert 208 Four Last Things see eschatology Franco (Bahamonde), General Francisco 35, 62, 216, 223 Freud, Sigmund 1, 2, 3, 4, 7–8, 10, 22, 35, 37, 73n, 85, 115; neurotic ceremonials 157, 165, 188, 232 Fuentes, Carlos 90n Gaceta Literaria, La 1, 14n, 80 and n, 81, 92, 164, 167n, 208, 212n, 213 Gala see Dalí, Gala Galán, Captain Fermín 15 and Jaca 202

247

Galdós, Benito Pérez 176, 203 Galileo 65 Garbo, Greta 209 García Hernández, Ángel 15 García Lorca, Federico 112–41, ix, xi, schooling 5; 15, views on Surrealism 33, 34, called Federica 46, and Un Chien andalou 46, 168–9; 78, 89, 97, 98, spiritualist style 33, 114, and New York 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, and nature, 120, 123, 124; 136, 141, plays at Mass 152, 172, 175, 204, 205, 207, 219, 220, 232 Poetry volumes Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York] xi, 6, 19, 27, 36, 48, 112–41, 155, 233 Romancero gitano [Gypsy Ballads] 113 Poems ‘Ciudad sin sueño’ [‘Sleepless City’] 115 ‘Crucifixión’ [‘Crucifixion’] 112 ‘Danza de la muerte’ [‘Dance of Death’] 119–20, 130 ‘El niño Stanton’ [‘The Boy Stanton’] 27, 115, 116, 117, 124 ‘Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos’ [‘Fable and Ring of the Three Friends’] 27, 169n ‘Grito hacia Roma’ [‘Shout at Rome’] 19, 112, 117, 125, 130 ‘Iglesia abandonada’ [‘Abandoned Church’] 112, 115 ‘La aurora’ [‘Dawn’] 114, 138 ‘La monja gitana’ [‘The Gypsy Nun’] 89 ‘Luna y panorama de los insectos’ [‘Moon and Panorama of Insects’] 126 ‘Muerte’ [‘Death’] 139 ‘Muerto de amor’ [‘Dead from Love’] 46, 58 ‘Nacimiento de Cristo’ [‘Birth of Christ’] 112 ‘Navidad en el Hudson’ [‘Christmas on the Hudson’] 112, 131–2 ‘New York (oficina y denuncia)’ [‘New York (Office and Denunciation)’] 131, 155 ‘Niña ahogada en el pozo’ [‘Girl Drowned in a Well’] 27

248

INDEX

‘Norma y paraíso de los negros’ [‘Practice and Paradise of the Blacks’] 139 ‘Oda al rey de Harlem’ [‘Ode to the King of Harlem’] 122–3 ‘Oda a Walt Whitman’ [‘Ode to Walt Whitman’] 116, 124–5, 132–7, 140 ‘Paisaje de la multitud que orina’ [‘Landscape of the Pissing Multitude’] 121 ‘Paisaje de la multitud que vomita’ [‘Landscape of the Vomiting Multitude’] 121 ‘Panorama ciego de Nueva York’ [‘Blind Panorama of New York’] 117, 123–4 ‘Paisaje con dos tumbas y un perro asirio’ [‘Landscape with Two Graves and an Assyrian Dog’] 116 ‘Poema doble del Lago Edem’ [‘Double Poem of Lake Eden’] 27, 46, 115, 117, 127–8, 169n ‘Tu infancia en Menton’ [‘Your Childhood in Menton’] 27, 169n ‘Vaca’ [‘Cow’] 116 ‘Vuelta de paseo’ [‘Back from a Walk’] 48, 114, 129–30 ‘1910 (intermedio)’ [‘1910 (Intermediate)’] 27, 45–6, 169 Plays, prose ‘El paseo de Buster Keaton’ [‘Buster Keaton’s Ride’] 169 Mariana Pineda 28 Drawing Manos cortadas [Severed Hands], 46–7 Garcilaso de la Vega 180n Gaudí, Antoni 160, 161 Genesis see Bible George V (of England) 201 Giacometti, Alberto 100 Gibson, Ian 43, 44, 46n, 84n, 168n, 172 Gide, André 217 and n Giménez Caballero, Ernesto 80–92, ix, xi, 1, and La Gaceta Literaria 80n, Yo, inspector de alcantarillas [I, Inspector of Drains] 80–92, 107; and Surrealism 81, 99, 100, 110, 158, 208 Stories ‘Esa vaca y yo’ [‘That Cow and I’] 85 ‘El redentor mal parido’ [‘The Ill-born Redeemer’] 85–8

‘Infancia de Don Juan (Cuadernos de un jesuíta)’ [‘Don Juan’s Infancy (A Jesuit Notebook)’] 88–9 ‘Monjas’ [‘Nuns’] 89–90 ‘Patio sucio’ [‘Filthy Yard’] 90–2 Giner de los Ríos, Francisco 52n, 66 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 13n, 97n Góngora, Luis (and gongorismo) 2, 142, 180–1, 183, 184 Gorky, Maxim 222 and n Goya, Francisco 18, 101, 203, 233 Gracián, Baltasar 81, 82 Great Chain of Being 108 green flash 65, 66n, 71 Grünewald, Matthias 101 and n Guillén, Jorge 183, 184 Gullón, Ricardo 216n hand (motif) 43–8, 58, 171, 173, 189 Hardy, Oliver 174 Harris, Derek 3 and n, 34n, 35, 118, 177, 186, 187, 188 Hayman, Ronald 90 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 12, 22 Heraclitus 178 Hitler, Adolf 12, 211 Ibarz, Mercè 201 and n, 204n, 205n, 207, 208n, 210n Ilie, Paul 2 Imparcial, El 201 International Brigades 225, 226, 227 and n, 229 Isaiah see Bible Ivanov, Piotr 16 Ivens, Joris 225 Jeremiah see Bible Jesuits x and n, 5 and n, 6, 7, motto 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 28; hypocrisy of 29, 30, 39–79, teachers 41–2, 82, 109, 142, 147, 190, 193, 206, 217, 233 Jiménez, Juan Ramón 53n, 60–1 Jiménez Fajardo, Salvador 216n Jiménez Millán, Antonio 169n John, St see Bible Jones, Dr Bob Morris xi Joyce, James 5, 23, 25, 30, 39–40, 41, 42, 81, 99 Juan de la Cruz, San 180n, 184

INDEX

249

Paintings Antro de fósiles [Den of Fossils] 95 Basuras [Rubbish] (1930) 13, 95 Cardos y esqueletos [Thistles and Skeletons] 95 Cloaca [Sewer] 14n Espantapájaros [Scarecrows] [plate 6] 95, 100–1, 233 Estampas [Illustrations] 97 Lacan, Jacques 37, 47, 48, 71, 72–3; Fósiles [Fossils] 95 structure of unconscious 73 and n, 75, Grajo y Excrementos [Rook and 78, 141 Excrement] (1931) 13, 95 Lang, Fritz Metropolis 14, 92 Lagarto y cenizas [Lizard and Ashes] 95 Langdon, Harold 174, 175 La Huella [The Footprint] (1929) [plate Larra, Mariano José de 203 8] 13, 14n, 95 La Salle (see also Christian Brothers) x, xi, Tierra y excremento [Earth and 49 Excrement] [plate 7] Laurel, Stan 174 Verbenas [Festivals] 97, 98 Lautréamont, Comte de 12, 137 Manrique, Jorge Coplas [Verses] 59 and n, Lawrence, D.H. 134 105 Légendre, Maurice 201, 205 mantic 112, 113, 126, 128, 137, 140, 141, Lenin, Vladimir 12, 215, 218 and n 187, 188; see also prophetic León, María Teresa 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 200 Marañón, Gregorio 201, 206 and n, 213 Marcilly, C. 46n Lewis, Helena 191n, 203n, 214n, 218n, Marrast, Robert 16n, 214n 222n, 232 Marx, Karl (and Marxism) xi, 2, 3, 4, 12, Liaño, Ignacio Gómez de 161 20, 21, 22, 50, 62, 71, 199, 206, 212, Loeb, Pierre (Galerie Pierre) 98 213, 215, 221, 226 Lomas, David 163 Mass playing at 28, 41, 152–3, 55, 155, Lope de Vega 201 157; see also Eucharist Lotar, Eli 202, 210 masturbation 41–6, 88, 89, 145, 155, Lowth, Robert 140 156–7, 158, 160, 163; onanastic Loyola, St Ignatius of [San Ignacio de] 22, repetition 164; 169, 171, 189, 203 and n 27, militarism 28, 41, 30, 115, 186, 233; materialism 4, 12, 13, 14, 30, 31, 82, 83, ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place] 87, 91; and Alberto Sánchez 94; 107, 22–3, 28, 32, 37 108, 147, 185, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, Spiritual Exercises 40, 61n, (and 209, 210, 212, 226 numbers) 67 and n, 68 materio-mysticism (and subject-object Luke, St see Bible integration) 2, 8, 9, 30, 83, 110, 148, 184 Luther, Martin 111n Matthew, St see Bible Lynch, Carlos Morla 48n, 113n, 114 Merello (S.J.), Agustín Castro 40, 41, 55 Lynch, Lawrence 90n Messiah see Christ Machado, Antonio 21, 66 and n, 101 and n, Meissonier, Ernest 8n Mellen, Joan 90n 203, 227 and n, 228 metamorphosis xi, 32, 84, 152 et seq., 159, Mahomet 126 161, theory of 164; 170, 175, 190, and Mallo, Maruja 92–105, ix, xi, 2, 13, 14, cinematic dissolve 169–70, 174, 175, 15, 30, 34, early days 92–3, and 176, 178, 184, 185 Vallecas school 93, skulls on front-door Miller, Henry 166 97, Lorca on 97, Cloacas y Millet, Jean Francois The Angelus 29 campanarios [Sewers and Belfries] exhibition 95, 98, and Madrid slums 99, Miró, Joan 81, 98 self-appraisal 99, 101, 102–3, 104, 105, Monguió, Luis 37 Montero, Enrique 16 107, 109, 111; 143, 147, 148, 163, 211 Kafka, Franz 81, 90 Kant, Immanuel 65 Keaton, Buster 169, 174, 175, 209 Kerr, Walter 174n Kleber, General Emilio 228 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich 66 Kugel, James 130

250

INDEX

Morris, C. Brian 2, 35 and n, 216n Moses 191 Mussolini, Benito 19, 125 mystic(ism) 10, 28, 177, 180, 184, 186, 191, 233 Nantell, Judith 216n Naville, Pierre 205 Neruda, Pablo 227 and n Nietzsche F.W. 111, Thus Spake Zarathustra 135, 233 and n Nuestro Cinema [Our Cinema] (journal) 17 Nueva España [New Spain] (journal) 17 numbers (motif) 67–8, 109, 110 object-orientation see materialism Octubre, escritores y artistas revolucionarios [October, revolutionary writers and artists] (journal) 1, 17; and Goya 18; 19, 20, 21, 199n Oppenheimer, Helen 46n Ortega y Gasset, José 5; on his Jesuit education 57–8; 64, 65, 94–5, 102, 182; recalls childhood 183, 184 Owen, Wilfred 223, 226 Palencia, Benjamín 13, 93 paranoia see also Dalí 4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 32; and Lacan 37, 44, 72, 111, 167n, 233 Passera, Thierry xi Passion see also Christ 11n, 30, 89, 112, 145 ‘Pasionaria, La’ (Dolores Ibarruri) 228 Pasternak, Boris 16 Péret, Benjamin 191, 212 Pérez de Ayala, Ramón 5, 64, 108 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 180n phenomenology 183, 184 Phillip II 108 Polk, Timothy 125, 139, 140 Popkin, Louise 200n Pope, the 18, 19, 123, 125 Prado, the 47, 224 Primo de Rivera, Miguel 14, 15, 19, 201 prophet (prophecy, prophetic discourse) xi, 10, 21, 22, 78, 104, 113 et seq., 146, 147, 150, 159, 176, 187, 233 psychic dictation see Surrealism punishment 41, 69, 171, 174 putrefaction 15, 28, 87, 108

Quevedo, Francisco de 233 Quintana, Manuel José 223 Quirk, Randolph 194 Ray, Man 81 Reinhart, Melanie 119n Residencia de Estudiantes [Student Residence, Madrid] 52n, 93, 169 Reverdy, Pierre 99 Révolution surréaliste, La (see also Breton) 80, 92 Riefensthal, Leni 211 Riff wars 212 Ripalda’s Catechism 40 Robeson, Paul 191 Rofé, Alexander 125 Rose, Alan 180n Rubin, Miri 152n Sade, Marquis de 90, Jesuit school 158, 205 sadism 172, 175 Sadoul, Georges 202 Salinas, Pedro 199 Salinas de Marichal, Solita 216n Sánchez, Alberto 13, 93, 94, 95, 109 Sánchez Ventura, Rafael 202 Sánchez Vidal, Agustín 43n, 113n, 168n, 199n Sandino, General César Augusto 218 Santamaría, Alfredo xi, 49 Santamaría Iglesias, Esther xi, 70n Santos Torroella, Rafael 158, 172 scatology 13, 30, 80–1n, 85, 87, 108, 110 Second Spanish Republic 6, 12, 16, 19, 80n, 204, 206, 212, 214 Semana Ilustrada, La (journal) 201 Shakespeare, William 180n Sheehy, Judge Eugene 39–40 Sin Dios [Without God] (journal) 17, 20 socialists 206, 220, 230 Soviet Writers’ Congress 222 Spaak, Claude 222 and n Spanish Civil War ix, 1, 16, 21, 63, 191n, 206, 214, 222–31 Spender, Stephen 228, 229 and n Spiritual Exercises, see Loyola Stock Exchange collapse (1929) 12, 113, 120 Stone, Dr Rob xi Storck, Henri 225 Storr, Anthony 126–7 Supervielle, Jules 16

INDEX

Surrealism ix, x, xi, 1, 2, 21, 22, 39, 72, 76, 81, 113, 177, 233 first definition of 3, psychic dictation 3, 128, 140, automatic writing 2, 9, 33, 34, metaphysics of 3, 8, phases of ix, 2, 3, 4, 8, 22, 34, surrealist object 2, 4, politics of 8, 212, Alberti on 1, 32–8 and Goya 18, 21, Aleixandre on 32, 35, Buñuel on 199, 202, 212, Dalí on 32, Lorca on 33, and Communism 4, 232, and transcendence xi, 9, 13, 22, 31, 171, 232, 233 Surréalisme au service de la révolution, Le 87n, 167n, 203n Svetlov, Mikhail 16 Swettler, Michael 129 syntax 75, 77, 191–200, binary sentences 128–9, parallelisms and repetition 129, 130, 131; 140, 142, 186, 187 table (motif) 161, 162 Tejada, José Luis ix, 216n Tell, William 157n Teresa de Ávila, Santa 159 Thomas, R.S. 71 transubstantiation 10, 32, 153, hocus pocus 154, 155, in cinema 164–5 Trapnell, William 154, 155n

251

Trethewey, Dr John xi Trotsky, Leon 203, 213, 222 and n Unamuno, Miguel de 14, 81, 82, 201 Unik, Pierre 191, 202, 212 Vallecas (art group) 2, 9, 13, 14, 93; ethos of, 94, 95 Velázquez, Diego de Silva 163 Vermeer, Jan 45, The Lacemaker 168, 169, 174 Villalón, Fernando 53n Virgin Mary 16, 18–19, 86 Voltaire, François 155, Jesuit school 158, 162, 232 Wainwright, Geoffrey 159 Wesseling, Pieter 216n, 224 Whitman, Walt 49, 127, 134–40, see also Lorca Williams, Lowri xi Wood, Jennie xi Xirgu, Margarita 16 Yaweh 117, 121, 122, 125, 126, 154