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Article Excerpt
Nacer, agitarse y desaparecer, ese es el drama efímero de la vida humana.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel (9-8-1858), Journal Intime
García Lorca's notoriously complex play, Así que pasen cinco años, has lent itself to a plethora of readings, from the structuralist to the historicist. It has been seen as influenced by Expressionism (Anderson 1992), or has been situated broadly within the avant-garde, with its self-consciously anti-naturalistic characters (possibly drawn from Lorca's visit to New York) and its explorations into the psyche of the protagonist. The assertions of Carlos Morla Lynch, the Chilean Ambassador to Madrid, who heard Lorca read the play at a gathering in his house in October 1931, set the tone for early interpretations: "me infunde la impresión de 'cosa inconclusa,'" he wrote, "de una originalidad y belleza evidente, mas difícil de explicar" (Morla Lynch 1958: 106). In later interpretations, it became more or less accepted that the oneiric atmosphere of the play could be attributed to García Lorca's knowledge of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (Huélamo Kosma 1989). Furthermore, as Paul Julian Smith notes in his influential reading of the play, there has been a "consensus that the temporal, spatial and subjective fragments of [the play] may be traced back to a single, solitary figure, frequently identified with the playwright himselff' (Smith 1998: 72). Smith classifies criticism of the play in terms of anecdote (what he terms "reference without resonance") and allegory ("resonance without reference") (Smith 1998: 72). His reading of parallels between Lorca's work and André Gide's Corydon, read through Freud, emphasizes similarity of structure and situation. Smith's reading is compelling. But Robin Warner's recent exposition of the equivalence between Lorca's play and Nikolai Evreinov's brand of Russian Expressionism (Warner 2003: 156-61) is also interesting. (1) As I offer yet another "anecdotal framework" for the play, I hope to show that it is possible to arrive at a reading which may presenta convincing twinning of reference and resonance. Smith's 1998 study The Theatre of García Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis, illuminated the importance that an (until then, unexplored) investigation of the body of work of Spanish physician Gregorio Marañón might hold for a fuller understanding of Lorca's theatrical output. In 1931, Marañón was engaged on a project to study the life of the Swiss philosopher and diarist, Henri-Frédéric Amiel (his Amiel: Un estudio sobre la timidez was published in Madrid in 1932). Marañón's work on Amiel was influenced by his ongoing interest in the figure of Don Juan. (2) Marañón conceived of Amiel as "un Don Juan casto" (following José de la Luz León's phrase of 1927 [Luz León 1927: 115]), in the sense that, like the legendary seducer of women, Amiel was engaged in an endless pursuit of a string of women, but unlike the mythical anti-hero, he never indulged in a physical relationship with any of them. The phrase "un Don Juan casto" was, interestingly, also used by Lorca, as early as 1926, in the notes which remain of bis proposed work, Diego Corrientes, which promised to be a variation on the Don Juan type. The protagonist, he writes, "ha de responder al sentimiento de un Don Juan ideal, casto. Un Don Juan que no conoció mujeres y las sueña de otra manera que son" (Laffranque 1987: 165). The Don Juan type interested García Lorca as it did many other writers of bis generation. Lorca played the role of the Sculptor to Buñuel's Don Juan in a parody of Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio in 1920 at the Residencia de Estudiantes. (3) He professed a love of the opera Don Giovanni. (4) He included Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla in the repertory of La Barraca. He was also to declare in 1935 that "Don Juan Tenorio es lo más nuevo que a mí se me ocurre, lo que haría si me lo encargaran" (García Lorca 1969: 1774). Lorca's description of the "Don Juan ideal, casto" fits very well with the protagonist of Así que pasen cinco años in the sense that the protagonist of that play is engaged in a futile and cyclical pursuit of a series of women yet without ever getting close to any of them. (5) Elsewhere I have shown how the Amigo 1 of Así que pasen cinco años can be seen asa Don Juan figure (Wright 2000: 66-7). In this article, I shall argue that the play's Young Man can be read asa sort of inverted Don Juan. Through the figure of the reluctant Don Juan, Lorca's Así que pasen cinco años and Marañón's Amiel: un estudio sobre la timidez become linked. Amiel and the Joven of Así que pasen cinco años share with Don Juan a never-ending search for a love ideal, although...
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