New Table of Contents

What Lorca Knew: Late Spanish Modernism and Intellectual History

1. The Grain of the Voice: Nation and Performance in Lorca’s “Juego y teoría del duende”
2. Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, and the Vicissitudes of Spanish Modernism
3. María Zambrano and the Genealogy of Late Modernism
4. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Samuel Beckett and José Ángel Valente•*
5 Antonio Gamoneda and the Persistence of Memory
6. What Claudio Knew
7. The Spanish American Connection: Blanca Varela and Eduardo Milán
8. Poetry and Aphorism (From Antonio Machado to Luis Feria)
9. The Verse Paragraph (From Juan Ramón Jiménez to Olvido García Valdés)

I need some snazzier title chapters.

Lezama

If I add a chapter on Lezama Lima and the chapter on aphorisms, then I will have 10 chapters. I can then skip the chapter on Lorca's Diván del Tamarit, for which I have no ideas anyway. That will give me the following chapters to complete this year:

Lorca
Zambrano
Claudio
Lezama
Aphorism

I probably won't finish the book in 2011, then. Realistically, I could finish Lorca and Zambrano, since I have substantial work done on those already, over the summer. I could finish three more over the next AY.

The 1930s

I've been increasingly interested in the 1930s. Zambrano's first works, the beginnings of Lezama Lima. Lorca's duende lecture and Diván del Tamarit, Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mártir. The 30s represents the end of historical modernism and the beginning of late modernism. The Civil war is 36-39. The years right before are fraught with ideological conflict. The historical avant-garde has its last glorious moments before dying or becoming something else.

The late modernism of the 1975-present period is steeped in the 30s and 40s, that reorientation of modernism that occurs then.

What do you do, then, with social realism of the 1950s and 60s? Speaking of Spain, I guess we could see Sartrean engagement as an influential but short-lived movement. Any good poet from about '55 on was trying to find a way out of the realist nightmare. Even before social poetry reached its high-water mark the good poets were already trying to make an end-run about it. It took a while to develop in the later work of Valente, Crespo, Gamoneda, Atencia, but it was already in early Rodríguez.

Maybe I need chapter on Atencia? It couldn't hurt.

The 30s

The 30s are becoming a point of convergence for this (k)new book I'm writing. Lorca's duende lecture, his Diván del Tamarit, the earliest writing of María Zambrano, date from this decade, when modernism in its historic phase was ending and something else was taking its place. This something else is what I call late modernism, the long aftermath of the modernist movement. I'd say we are still in this aftermath.

What Maisie Knew

Henry James wrote a novel with the title What Maisie Knew, focalized (in part) through the perception of the title character, a child. It's a narrative tour-de-force, because of the limitations of the child's perspective. The adults in her life do all sorts of horrid and sordid things, and the reader (an adult reader, presumably) knows more than the consciousness through which the information is filtered. I haven't actually re-read this novel since 1980 or so, so if I am getting technical details wrong there's no wonder. I didn't even like the novel itself, but I remembered the technique and the title.

So I decided that I would call my next book What Lorca Knew. The subtitle is The Embodiment of Knowledge in Spanish Poetry, using a title from a book by William Carlos Williams. Here the idea is that knowledge is embodied, pragmatic, rather than being merely mental or "cerebral." The embodied, pragmatic dimension is evident in poetry as a performed art.

What did Lorca know? How can we know what he knew and didn't? What does a poet know, if we take as a starting point Plato's idea that the poet doesn't know anything? This was the starting point for María Zambrano in Poesía y filosofía, and I will have a chapter on Zambrano here too.

I also consider the model of the poet-intellectual as embodied by Valente, and its contradictions. I'll have a chapter on Claudio Rodríguez too. See this post on Arcade.

Originally the book was supposed to be about Spanish modernism; it still is, since all the writers studied are modernists or late modernists, but now the emphasis is on a particular strain of modernity identified with the problem of knowledge (or "conocimiento") and thought (or "pensamiento"). I want to show that Lorca and Rodríguez are also poets of conocimiento.