|
Article Excerpt
El paseo de Buster Keaton of 1925, with its discontinuity and elements of surrealista, has been said to embody Lorca's rejection of rationality and realist theater (Vilches de Frutos 40). Similarly, Poeta en Nueva York, the fruit of Lorca's stay in the great metropolis during 1929-30, has been tagged as surrealist (MacKinlay 157), with at least one critic noting connections between the "sequences of images" in the poems and the Buñuel-influenced screenplay El viaje a la luna, also a New York project (Morris 134). Another point in common between Buster Keaton and Poeta en Nueva York is that each involves a black man. In the former, he appears briefly on stage and eats his straw hat; in the latter, the "King of Harlem" wears a janitor's uniform and wields a spoon to scoop out crocodiles' eyes or beat on monkeys' rear ends. Both images challenge our interpretive faculties; indeed Poeta en Nueva York as a whole has been tagged not only as one of Lorca's "most enigmatic and challenging" works (Del Río ix) but as "opaque" and "well-nigh uninterpretable" (McKinlay 163, 167).
One potential interpretive tool, however, is music. C.B. Morris has noted that the straw hat in Buster Keaton evokes the minstrel show, a musical genre rife with racial stereotyping. For Morris, this reference to "physical and to spiritual debasement" links the man with the straw hat to the King of Harlem, who in turn embodies Lorca's empathy for African-Americans (Morris 135). Several scholars have commented on this empathy, which is also seen as related to Lorca's "hating the abstract, the formal, the regulated; and as loving the natural, the spontaneous, the sensual" (Predmore 38). Perhaps it is not surprising that music surfaces so frequently in discussions of Poeta en Nueva York since these very qualities --naturalness, spontaneity, sensuality-- are widely associated with music, often considered open-ended, subjective, and lacking in interpretive specificity. Accordingly, much aesthetic discourse grants to music the capacity to stand in as an ineffable Other in relation to more concrete realities, a topic amply treated in aesthetics and music criticism (Flinn 6-7).
Yet although many critics have detected musical structures in Poeta en Nueva York, there is little discussion either of specific musical genres or of their ideological content. This leaves us with a fascinating lacuna. Rather than try to hear musical structures in the poems, this essay explores that musical-ideological lacuna, centering on African-Americans views on black music, black music's status as the "music of the oppressed," and the primitivist discourse frequently employed by both critics of black music and commentators on the New York poems. For as Morris observes, in Poeta en Nueva York "things are not what they appear to be ... people are not what their uniform makes them seem" (Morris 134). As it turns out, the musical elements in Poeta en Nueva York are not "what they seem" either; in fact, exploring their ideological status complicates rather than clarifies the already difficult poems. Yet the questions thus raised enhance our understanding of the environment in which Lorca penned these enigmatic verses. Further, a sense of musical context can prompt us to appreciate anew not only Poeta en Nueva York but the rich ambivalence that confronts us whenever we hear music in Lorca.
The influence of music on Lorca's works and life has been noted so frequently that only a representative sample of poetic-musical commentary is necessary here. Lorca himself identified Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su jardín as an "operita," as he did for Lola la comedianta, his unfinished collaboration with Manuel de Falla (Ucelay 207). (1) Virginia Higginbotham has noted the centrality of popular songs in the dramatic structure of Bodas de sangre, Yerma, and Doña Rosita la soltera (Higginbotham 779). Venturing into musical terminology --with all the risks this entails--, John Crow finds in Doña Rosita, the "musical skeleton of statement, contrast, and re-statement of the given theme"; additionally, Crow notes that "variations are afforded by the language of flowers which play up and down the scales of Rosita's emotions like unseen fingers on the harp" (Crow 91). More concretely, Christopher Maurer explores Bodas de sangre, linking portions of its text and structure to Johann Sebastian Bach's cantata no. 140, "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" (Maurer 94). Mapping musical genres onto Lorca's language also surfaces in discussions of his poetry. The Poema del cantejondo, for example, is said to draw on the siguiriya, the soleá, and the petenera, all musical forms (Gibson 110). (2) Along related lines, critics invariably note Lorca's skill as a pianist, his familiarity with the classical piano repertory, and his devotion to cantejondo and traditional Spanish songs, several of which he arranged in pleasing if conventional harmonizations. Despite his stature as a modernist author, his musical tastes seem fairly traditional, privileging Bach and Mozart, two icons of the Western musical canon in whose works intellect, balance, formal clarity, and a sense of transcendent beauty are widely recognized.
In the criticism of Poeta en Nueva York we find three kinds of references to music: biographical (detailing Lorca's musical activities in New York), aesthetic (analyzing the poetry itself in musical terms), and ideological (interpreting the poetas in light of the social implications of the music to which Lorca felt drawn). (3) Before delving into the third --the most substantive-- we can summarize the other two. Lorca's musical activity in New York was multi-faceted. By playing the piano...
|
