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Article Excerpt
In 1933, Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca gave an address entitled "Play and Theory of the Duende" in which he claims duende as a distinctly Spanish brand of artistic inspiration and performative signature, bound up with the seemingly antithetical qualities of joy and suffering that dominate Spanish culture. In this essay, I use Lorca's concept of duende as a tool for analyzing The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, suggesting that such a comparison provides a new way of situating Hemingway's work Within Spanish and modernist milieux.
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THE INFLUENCE OF SPAIN on Hemingway's aesthetic development cannot be overestimated and is indeed well-traveled territory in Hemingway criticism. As his prolific reading history indicates, his interest in Spain was not only tauromachian but also literary. Inventories of his library document that his collection included such Spanish authors as Jose Ortega y Gasset, Pio Baroja and Federico Garcia Lorca (Brasch; Reynolds). Although the Lorca works in Hemingway's library, including Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter and Other Poems (1937) and Romancero Gitano (1935), do not appear until the 1955 inventory of the Key West collection, Michael Reynolds thinks it likely that "[any] book with KW-55 as its only source was probably in the Key West library in 1940 when Hemingway packed for Cuba" (128, 75). An allusion in The Dangerous Summer to Lorca's 1936 execution substantiates this judgment; Hemingway recalls traveling from Pamplona to Granada, "[coming] down out of the hills in the dark past the entry to the ravine where they had shot Federico Garcia Lorca" (164). The allusion indicates his earlier knowledge of Lorca and the impression that Lorca's death made on him.
This evidence does not conclusively prove when Hemingway became familiar with Lorca or whether he knew Lorca's essays on deep song and duende. However, Hemingway demonstrates an implicit understanding of duende in a 1952 letter to Edmund Wilson, in which he comments that the trend of reading Lorca to learn Spanish is misguided, because "if you do not know the dissonances of [Andalusian] music, or if you do not know Arabic, [Lorca's, poetry] is almost meaningless" (SL 794). This comment suggests that Hemingway does know Andalusian music and understands the meaning it contributes to Lorca's poetry--the resonant quality Lorca calls duende.
Apart from any direct influence Lorca ma), have had on Hemingway's work, my purpose is to suggest Lorca's notion of duende as a way of rereading Hemingway against both modernist and Spanish milieux. To this end, I consider the way duende manifests itself in cante jondo, an older variation of flamenco that employs distinctly melancholic themes and tones, and toreo, commonly referred to as the bullfight. I demonstrate how the cantaor, the matador, and Hemingway all use similar techniques and tropes to the same end--to get at what Spanish novelist Miguel Unamuno and others have called "the tragic sense of life," which Hemingway regards as essential to authenticity. More specifically, I consider liminality and border phenomena, primitivism, and the performative as central and symbiotic characteristics of duende in the Spanish arts and in Hemingway's novels set in Spain, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
TOWARD A DEFINITION OF DUENDE
Although its roots and meaning are contested, most dictionaries claim that the word duende derives from the phrase duen de casa or dueno de la casa, "master of the house;' and refers to a folkloric trickster figure similar to a goblin or poltergeist (OED). (1) In his essay "Play and Theory of Duende," Lorca uses the shape-shifting duende as a metaphor both for the inspirational catalyst and the arrestingly tragic quality found in the most profound art. This treatment of duende elaborates on the common Andalusian usage, which Allen Josephs claims "has more the sense of a chthonian daimon of force" (White Wall 95). The artist and audience are, metaphorically, "possessed" by the duende-spirit.
Lorca eventually arrives at a fairly coherent articulation of duende, but he does so through figurative language; he never explicitly defines the term. This evasive stylistic choice plays up the ineffable nature of duende; as Edward Hirsch puts it, duende "cannot be pinned down or rationalized away" (10). We can, however, derive several general criteria or characteristics of duende from Lorca's circumlocutions, keeping in mind their complex and dynamic relationship.
Firstly, duende functions both as a source of artistic inspiration and as an effect of witnessing the work of art produced by such inspiration. These two functions operate contingently, and neither can be summoned at will. Even when ideal circumstances present the opportunity for duende to arise, its appearance is not guaranteed. (We might liken duende to the potential energy of a stone suspended at the peak of an incline.) In order to evoke duende in an artistic gesture, an artist must confront the deepest recesses of his or her being. Unlike an angel or muse, duende emerges from within the artist, "in the remotest mansions of the blood" (Lorca 51). Its emergence is not revelatory, but is rather the result of an intense struggle between consciousness and unconsciousness, darkness and light, intellect and emotion: "the true fight is with the duende ... he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, smashes styles, leans on human pain with no consolation" (Lorca 51). The artist must struggle with an inconceivable depth of emotion in order to (re)produce it artistically and transmit it to his or her audience.
Duende, then, is not exactly an archetype or an aesthetic, but a depth and quality of emotion, a dramatic sense of emotional intensity, manifested in the production and experience of great art. Moreover, duende encompasses a range of human emotions, particularly the most intense passions identified by Molina as "'the universal anguish of death ... the mystery of sex ... the joy of being'" (qtd. in Josephs, White Wall 96). The ecstatic and tragic extremes necessarily implicate one another. The intense pain experienced at the death of a loved one implies an equally intense experience of love that precipitates and outlasts the trauma of separation. On the other hand, Cirlot notes, "'vital optimism and perfect happiness of necessity imply the other extreme, that is, the presence of death'" (qtd. in Josephs, White Wall 96). Duende foregrounds mortality by confronting the artist and audience with the presence of possibility of death, which in turn inspires passion for life. Lorca specifically claims that in order for duende to emerge, death must be possible; we might read this statement literally or figuratively. The dual recognition of life and death, along with the ritualistic aspect typically associated with duende-inspired experience, suggests that the artist occupies an ambiguous, liminal space when conjuring duende.
Thirdly, duende derives from and evokes the primitive past, and therefore carries with it the weight of human history. Lorca traces it, through cante jondo and the toreo, to Mithraic cults and ancient Dionysian rites, translated by the genealogical convergence of the ancient Iberian culture with African, European, and Oriental diasporas in Andalusia. This move, itself, is apropos of Andalusian culture, which Josephs characterizes as absorptive and atavistic (White Wall 3-5). (2) Lorca's invocation of Dionysus points, additionally, to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy is strikingly similar to Lorca's notion of duende, although Nietzsche explicitly calls the Dionysian an archetype. The primitive, atavistic aspect of cantejondo and toreo enhance their emotional resonance, making them the best suited of the Spanish arts for evoking duende at its purest, according to Lorca.
Lastly, duende requires a strong performative element. Art that has duende was not created for its own sake, but as a communicative gesture. Therefore, the audience's reception of duende matters as much as the artist's production of duende. The artist who performs with duende takes on a metonymic function, becoming a vehicle through which the audience achieves a cathartic release. Josephs notes that this catharsis is not merely...
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