A New Chapter

I added a new chapter to the plan of my book in Spanish on Lorca. I realized that I was missing a chapter on "queer Lorca," so to speak. That would have been a pretty conspicuous absence.

I don't want to do another book on Lorca that analyzes Bodas de sangre, or Romancero gitano, all over again. There are enough books that take his poetic or theatrical works and devote chapters to them. Rather, what I want to do is a book about critical problems in Lorca criticism. Honestly, I don't think I could come up with a new interpretation of Yerma. Well, I could, but its novelty would not be sufficient to justify it. There are diminishing returns to the interpretation of canonical works. On the other hand, I am very confident that I have a lot to say about Lorca from many angles of vision.

What's the Difference?

In studying the cultural poetics of cultural exceptionalism, I find it interesting to look at how "the eccentric is at the base of design," to slightly alter a phrase from Wallace Stevens. What I mean is that the writer's individual perspective and identity comes into play in a more universalizable, nationalist project. This idea clicked into place for me when I saw an article by my colleague Roberta Johnson who pointed out that María Zambrano had been claimed by feminists in Spain who emphasized the difference rather than the equality of the sexes. I relate this to the eccentricity (and / or emphasis on difference) in Lorca and Lezama Lima.

Ok. The new Lorca is not going to work as planned. I realized there wasn't enough Lorca there, in my plan, and that I didn't really want to analyze actual poetic works by Lorca very extensively, and that a reader would expect that in a book with Lorca in the title. I realized I was too swayed by the momentum of Apocryphal Lorca and by the potential marketability of the Lorca name.

So it's back to the new modernism project, which will be called something like Modernism and the Paradoxes of Spanish Literary History:.

Here's my new chpater outline. I'm trying to get the ideas to flow in the most seamless way possible, rather than write chapter on separate topics. The whole book is one long essay. The trick is to get everything in its proper place, so I'm still shifting material from one place to another, especially between Chapters 1 and 2 and the preface. I have that illusory feeling that the whole book is in my head waiting to be written. Well, not completely illusory. I do know pretty much what I'm going to say, but in working that out in detail new ideas will emerge, things will continue to shift position.

Lorca and Modernity: Paradoxes of Spanish Literary History

Preface
Chapter 1: Modernity and its Discontents
Chapter 2: Spanish Modernism and the Paradoxes of Literary History
Chapter 3: Contemporary Spanish Poetry: Late Modernism and the Cutlural Logic of Anachronism
Chapter 4: Alternate Models: Machado, Jiménez, Cernuda
Chapter 5: Play and Theory of Lorca's Duende: Nation and Performance
Apocryphal Postscript
Appendix: Glossary of the Duende
Bibliography

My book is taking shape. I want it to be a kind of "big picture" book rather than just another book about Lorca. The people I asked for advice on the viability of the project were positive, but two of them said they'd prefer to read a book about several poets rather than one just about Lorca. I'd prefer to write a more seamless essay on Lorca, while dealing with other poets along the way, in order not to repeat what I did in The Poetics of Self-Consciousness and The Twilight of the Avant-Garde. Valente is rearing his head, wanting to be given equal billing with Lorca.

My model of scholarship is agonic. Much as I don't want to be influenced by Harold Bloom, I find that I am always using the language of struggle, conflict, seeing writing basically as an attempt to wrestle with problems.

My 2009 book Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch, dealt with the reception of Federico García Lorca in the US, with a focus on poets active in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, and Frank O’Hara. Given the North-American orientation of this project, I tried to refrain as much as possible from arguing in favor of any one particular view of Lorca himself, positing instead a multi-faceted “author-function.” Still, Apocryphal Lorca did rest upon certain unstated ideas about Lorca and his place in twentieth-century poetry; it was, in fact, a book about Lorca, even though it did not attempt to put forward an affirmative view of his work. As in a drawing exercise in which the student sketches the spaces in between the parts of a piece of furniture (for example) rather than drawing the object itself, I was writing about Lorca by looking at the absence of certain features of his work in his English-language translations.

Lorca and Modernity will bring some of my implicit assumptions to the fore in order to reflect on the question of what it means for Lorca to be (arguably) the single most significant figure of twentieth-century Spanish poetry. Succintly stated, the problem is that Lorca’s poetry is affiliated with Spanish literary and intellectual traditions that view modernity itself with a great deal of ambivalence. The major critical problem posed by his work, in my view, is what to do with these ostensibly “unmodern” aspects of his work. Lorca’s seeming resistance to modernity becomes significant in both the national (Spanish) and international contexts, for Lorca is not only significant within Spanish literary history but for our conceptions of modernism itself.

I made the mistake of reading something by Ortega y Gasset yesterday. I wanted to look again at the essay on Andalusia. The idea about the essential laziness of the Andalusian culture is pretty damn intolerable. Ortega is no hero of mine, and neither is Gasset. (That's a joke.) I'm thinking this whole tradition of Spanish philosophy is pretty hard to take, from Unamuno to Zambrano. I know I should like Zambrano, because she is important to a lot of people in the general vicinity of things that I otherwise admire, but I cannot take her either. Her writing, her ideas.

It's interesting (to me at least) how a lot of things I write about, I'm approaching from the posture of irritation and resistance. I actually don't think good criticism can be entirely appreciative. You've got to hate something about the writer you're dealing with, or something in the existing criticism. Take Valente, about whom I've written practically a whole book, if you add up all my chapters and articles. I think he's very important, and I admire a great part of his work and what he stands for; yet I also find him profoundly irritating.

On the other hand, I couldn't spend my life studying Ortega (or Gasset). You have to have a core respect for the object of study.

I'm not very good at botanical readings of Lorca.

One of the main scholars I have to deal with in this next project is Philip Silver, now retired from Columbia University. He presents a theory of modernist inadequacy in La casa de Anteo, a theory of romantic inadequacy in Ruin and Restitution.

(Silver was probably the main contributor to the study of Spanish poetry among US academics in the generation right before mine. Unfortunately he wasn't much of a mentor to me. Although he's invited me to contribute to a few collections of essays on Claudio Rodríguez, he never really offered to take that role. The person who did try to actively mentor me was another scholar, whose understanding of poetry was rather antithetical to mine. He brought me to Kansas; we were very good friends for a while, but I think the tensions got the better of us in later years. We never had an official falling out, in fact I had to organize a major symposium for him, and to teach his class when he got cancer, but it was very hard on me. At a fundamental level I just could not respect him as a scholar. It was not just a matter of disagreement, because I might disagree with Silver too in some cases. I felt that he just didn't have "it." I also feel his influence on the field is deleterious. He didn't like Silver--partly, I think, because he knew Silver was at a different level.)

It is interesting that in La casa de Anteo Silver studies Lorca's theater--in a book otherwise about poetry. That creates an opportunity, in a way. The best critics have often side-stepped Lorca's poetry and written about the theater instead.

Spanish literary history has often been narrated as a series of lacks or absences. What is absent or problematic, in such accounts, is modernity itself, high Romanticism, or the Enlightenment. From the point of view of a Hispanist (in other words, non-Spanish specialist in Spanish matters), this becomes doubly problematic: why specialize in an area of the world defined by its deficiencies? Usually the answer is that we Hispanists are motivated by our identification with the liberal Spain repressed by the other Spain. Things are not that simple though. After all, aren't we attracted to the region in the first place because of its exotic backwardness?

Nowhere are these contradictions so strong as in the study of Lorca. The generation of intellectuals right before Lorca despised bullfighting. In a Baroja novel a taste for the national festival usually marks a character as brutish. It is hard to reconcile Lorca with any convenient idea of modernity.

Lorca and Modern Poetry [working title]

Preface

I. Lorca and Modernity. What does it mean for modern poetry, for modernism in Spain particularly, that Lorca is the major figure identified with Spanish modernism? Explore other kinds of paradoxical forms of Spanish modernity in Unamuno, Zambrano.

II. Vicissitudes of the Duende. Explore Lorca's poetics of performativity from the inside out, beginning with a close reading of the duende essay and supplementing it with readings of other of Lorca's lectures.

III. Lorca and Contemporary Spanish poetry. His seeming non-influence on major Spanish poets--but the way in which the same paradox of modernity / non-modernity repeats itself.

IV. Apocryphal Postscript. A revision of my own views, from a slightly different angle. Answer to my critics, etc...

I think it could be a book. I'm conceiving it almost in dissertation style, with three 40-page chapters. Instead of an introduction, I want a very short preface and a first chapter which serves double duty as an introduction and 1st substantive chapter. As with Apocryphal Lorca, it won't be articles first. It will be through-composed rather than stitched together later.

***

When I was in my early 30s, I thought I had pretty much arrived. I was publishing in PMLA and MLN. My second book came out in '94, before I turned 35. Someone said once at one of those tenure meeting years ago, about I forget whom, that you have to be 40 to be a mature scholar. I kind of scoffed at that, because I thought I already knew a lot at age 36. Now, though, I realize I didn't know very much. My second peak, which I'm still enjoying, was in my late 40s. I still feel I don't know enough, but that it was precisely by plunging in and learning on the job that I got where I am--writing beyond myself, as it were. It's writing the books that made me erudite.

I'm in a bit a of a lull. I could be writing my fifth book as fast as possible, but I don't want to rush it at this point. I have to write an MLA talk on Paul Blackburn, a talk on Ullán to give in January in Madrid, and to complete a large departmental paperwork task that I cannot even talk about beyond that. Giving myself a break from writing is actually excruciating, since I am happiest when most productive.

I would really love to undertake some collaborative work. The one problem with scholarly writing is that it's rather isolating. It would be fun to write an article with someone else for a change. But who? And what exactly would be the interchange?

I'm going to do a really major article on Lorca's duende lecture, which is going to be the centerpiece of book 5. In fact, here as I think of it, I really need to do another book about Lorca instead of rewriting book #3.

It would include the following:

Preface, Introduction.

I. Huge, major essay on Lorca's duende article. "Lorca's performative poetics."

II. ???

III. Section on Lorca and contemporary Spanish poetry. Influence on Valente and Gamoneda. The way Lorca is present/absent from Spanish poetry after Lorca.

IV. Postscript to Apocryphal Lorca. A kind of follow-up on Lorca and translation / reception theory. Answer to my critics?

Where the question marks are would inserted some other reading of Lorca's poetry, from an angle yet to be determined, or the piece that would make this a book rather than just a series of unrelated essays. So I have three ideas, which I already know how to pursue more or less, along with a general direction: Lorca in performance / reception. Dynamic readings of him.

Maybe I'm not in a lull after all. This blog post has been very productive.