Lorca's Poet in New York

The Fall into Consciousness

Betty Jean Craige

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185996
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Written in 1929–1930, when Federico García Lorca was visiting Columbia University, Poet in New York stands as one of the great Waste Land poems of the 20th century. It expresses, as Betty Jean Craige writes in this volume, "a sudden radical estrangement of the poet from his universe"—an an estrangement graphically delineated in the dissonant, violent imagery which the poet derives from the technological world of New York.

Craige here describes—through close analysis of the structure, style, and themes of individual works in Poet in New York —the chaos into which this world plunges the poet, and the process whereby he is able, gradually, to recover his identity with the regenerative forces of nature. Her study demonstrates that, though seemingly unique in form and motifs, Poet in New York is integral with Lorca's overall poetic achievement.

Chapter One

Introduction

In the early decades of the twentieth century Western Europe and the United States experienced an explosion of creativity in the art world: Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon appeared in 1907; Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, in 1913; Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, in 1922; Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, in 1925 and 1926; and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, in 1929. The twenties saw the rage of surrealism, with the issue of Breton’s First Manifesto in 1924 and the publication of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste. And in 1929 and 1930, while visiting Columbia University in New York City, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca wrote Poet in New York.

Poet in New York, when finally published as one volume in 1940, was hailed as a product of Lorca’s surrealist period, for it had been written after the poet’s close relationship with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, who were both immersed in the movement.¹ Lorca himself had participated actively in the propagation of the ideas of surrealism in 1928 by founding and editing Gallo, an avant-garde magazine which acknowledged the influence of “Picasso, Gris, Ozenfant, Chirico, Joan Miró, Lipchitz, Brancusi, Arp, Le Corbusier, Reverdy, Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Aragon, Robert Desnos, Jean Cocteau, Stravinsky, Maritain, Raynal, Zervos, André Breton, etc., etc.”² In fact, Lorca had experimented with the new styles dominating the Spanish literary magazines in his prose-poems “Nadadora sumergida” (“Submerged swimmer”) and “Suicidio en Alejandría” (“Suicide in Alexandria”), probably written in the summer of 1928 when he was in Cataluña with Dali’s family;³ but, as he says in a letter to his friend Sebastián Gasch, “It is not surrealism, careful!, the clearest consciousness illuminates them.”⁴

The New York poetry was indeed a startling departure from the poetry of Lorca’s Libro de poemas and Romancero gitano, and because of its surface resemblance to some of Breton’s and Eluard’s surrealist poetry, Poet in New York was generally categorized as surrealist. Consequently it received only minor critical attention as a serious work of symbolic expression which was influenced by surrealism, certainly, but was finally illuminated by “the clearest consciousness.” Yet when the poems are analyzed structurally (as well as imagistically and thematically), they reveal not a new technique of poetic creation adopted by the poet, but rather a sudden, radical estrangement of the poet from his universe. Lorca has gone from the state of participation in nature and in his community manifested in the rhythmical, frequently dramatic poetry of imagery drawn from the natural world of southern Spain (in Romancero gitano) to a state of extreme alienation now expressed in the dissonant subjective poetry of violent imagery drawn from the technological world of New York. Thus Poet in New York is the symbolization of Lorca’s experience of depression and isolation in a foreign reality he apprehends as a hostile chaos. It is therefore the account of his psychic journey from alienation and disorientation toward reintegration into the natural world.

Poet in New York, however, transcends the poet’s private vision of modern civilization: it becomes modern man’s recognition of the spiritual “waste land” in which he discovers himself alone, empty, without roots, and without a god. Locked in the cell of his subjectivity, he no longer belongs to the world and no longer moves in time to the rhythms of the cosmos. For now he is “conscious,” and his vision separates him from the world and his gods; now he is “fallen.”

Modern man’s retreat from the world into the recesses of self has transformed the world into the contents of his consciousness and made it real only insofar as it relates to his subjectivity. The harmony he once knew when he belonged to his community has been replaced by the anguish of separation he experiences when the community disintegrates and he finds himself alone in a world of relative values. Such radical reorientation in the universe has as its metaphor the Fall from the Garden of Eden, after which man wanders lost through the world aware of absence and isolation. Between the self and God, between the self and nature, between the mind and the body has opened an abyss not to be bridged by conscious man. The myth of the Fall expresses both the state of man’s alienation from God and nature, resulting from consciousness, and the state of modern civilization’s alienation from any spiritually unifying reality which might have held society together as a community.

Poet in New York is a vision of a fragmented world deserted by the gods; it is a vision of a dehumanized civilization whose sickness is born of consciousness and manifested in a material technocracy of empty suits of clothing. New York is a concrete symbol for a world in which “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (as Yeats wrote in 1919): there is no longer a center, a god or unifying myth, to serve as an absolute; and without such a center human life becomes a meaningless, monotonous, material existence of “imperfect anguish.” The poet is assassinated by the sky (in the first line of the volume). The child has the blank white face of an egg. Automobiles are covered with teeth. The New York dawn groans. Money, in furious crowds, devours abandoned children. The moon becomes a horse’s skull. The river gets drunk on oil. And “the metallic sound of suicide . . . revives us every morning.”

In Lorca’s New York there is no real death and no real life: “true pain or sorrow is not present in the spirit. It is not in the air nor in our life nor on these smoke-filled terraces”; there is only the “hueco”—emptiness, vacancy, the void—born of man’s separation from nature and his gods. The tree, universal symbol of the axis of the world, with its roots holding fast to the earth and its branches reaching into the heavens, is now a “tree trunk that cannot sing,” without roots and without branches. There is no connection. The ritual sacrifice by which primitive societies reaffirmed their ties to the earth and the heavens, thereby obtaining spiritual renewal, has long been forgotten; and this modern civilization needs such a symbolic death now to destroy the dehumanizing materialism that is draining it of life.

In his isolation within this world Lorca can at first only name the destructive forces which batter his subjectivity, invade him and deprive him of his identity, disorient him and cut him off from his roots in the earth; he can do no more than cry out in anguish against the incomprehensible universe. However, in the course of his stay in New York, after naming this strange world, the poet begins to understand the workings of the mechanical society that robs men of their humanity; and as he begins to recognize the forces of evil therein he gradually recovers his own identity and oneness with the force of the blood.

Such is his journey, from agonized impotence before a hostile chaos to outrage against the oppressive civilization that suffocates the poet and dams up the blood of human vitality. His quest is for renewed harmony with the natural world in which the blood (and his poetry, metaphorically identified with his blood) may flow in time with the cycles of the cosmos. With respect to the civilization of New York City, such renewed harmony is only possible after an apocalyptic revolution by which the dammed-up blood may be released in a symbolic societal self-sacrifice; with respect to the poet, such renewed harmony can only be achieved after the catharsis of his own symbolic ritual sacrifice which may reunite him with the universe from which he has been estranged. For the ritual sacrifice is the means whereby mankind may participate in the “periodical renewal of the World” (death and resurrection), may imitate the natural rhythms and momentarily know a wholeness once again. By the end of the volume the poet is approaching reconciliation with the natural world.

Federico García Lorca’s expression of the twentieth-century reality he beholds in New York City is profoundly subjective, for the poetry is born of his private anguish of alienation. Yet it is by this profound subjectivism that Poet in New York is finally a universal, “objective” vision of modern civilization, for the poet whose cry issues from the primordial depths of experience is the voice of mankind—in this case modern man separated from nature and abandoned by his gods—giving words to the pain of his time. Thus the vision is somehow familiar to us, as are the visions of Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and of Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” These poets all see “a botched civilization,” an “unreal city,” a world where “the light is buried by chains and noises in the impudent threat of knowledge without roots.” Rootless knowledge—this is the meaning of the fall into consciousness.

Chapter Two

Poet in New York and Lorca’s Earlier Poetry

The song wants to be light.

In the dark the song has
threads of phosphorus and moon.
The light does not know what it wants.
In its limits of opal,
it encounters itself,
and returns.

(p. 361)

The tasting of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and the fall into consciousness put Adam and Eve outside the gates of the Garden to wander lost and alone, made ever restless by the memory of the Garden’s harmony. It is this memory in man’s now inescapable consciousness that impels the human search for a paradise, that brings the knowledge of absence and death, that finally makes possible the rare mystical union with God or with nature—the perishable bliss. As absence and death bring into being the poet, so the awareness of separation from God or nature brings into being Lorca’s poetry, which contains throughout, implicit in its “tragic rhythm,” the mystical yearning for peace. In his early poems Lorca presents the theme in such images as that of the ant who longs to touch the stars. In Poet in New York this yearning is mutilated by the city world; consequently the theme of life reaching beyond itself becomes that of life being cut off or suffocated, to be presented in such images as those of the poet without arms and the tree trunk which can no longer stretch upward toward the sky. But the longing to reach upward does not die when the poet’s arms are severed. The impulse remains.

Poet in New York is a vision of modern civilization that Lorca has not had before, yet it is a vision issuing from the same emotional responses to the world that gave rise to Libro de poemas, Poema del cante jondo, Canciones, and Romancero gitano. The expression of Lorca’s confrontation with New York City differs radically from the expression of his experience before he left Spain as a result of his new radical alienation from the universe and the accompanying loss of identity. But the deepest motivating forces within his personality do not change. Thus the themes which underlie the poems of these early volumes—the themes of the desire for the unattainable, the nostalgia for a lost Eden, and the sterility of self-consciousness—reappear in Poet in New York with not only personal but also social and metaphysical implications. An examination of some of Lorca’s poems written before he went to New York may therefore help to make intelligible the surrealistic (but symbolic) New York poems.

Although Lorca’s early poetry cannot be justifiably pronounced “mystic poetry,” as the term is applied to the poetry of Saint John of the Cross, Libro de poemas and Canciones contain what may be described as a mystical desire for the unattainable, for peace, for the stars. “The song wants to be light” expresses Lorca’s reason for being: the song (the “canto”) reveals man’s desire to be reunited with nature. For in the darkness in which the “canto” is born there are “threads of phosphorus and moon,” sparks that want to be reunited with their center, the sun. The cold moon has no heat of its own and can only reflect the sun; but the sun, the “luz,” is sufficient unto itself—perfect, round, whole, the wholeness which the poet remembers and desires (p. 211).¹ And the “canto” may be related to the “Duende,” the “black sounds” that rise out of knowledge of death, of darkness, as the force of the blood, the force of life.

Lorca’s early poem “Mar” (“Sea,” p. 276), of Libro de poemas, is closely related to “The song wants to be light” and merits examination for its relation to some of the poems of Poet in New York. The first stanza contains its essence:

The sea is

the Lucifer of the blue.

The heaven fallen
for wanting to be the light.²

Lucifer was expelled from heaven for wanting to be God—which was the sin of pride, Adam’s sin. So the poem may be read as a metaphor for the Fall, the separation from God which brings into being the song that “wants to be light.” The blue sea condemned to eternal movement, suggesting the continual flux from which Lorca longs to be freed to rest in the stillness, reflects the perfect sky, as the fallen angel Lucifer remembers his lost home in heaven.³ The sea can never be the sky, nor can it ever be still. But from the sea’s bitterness at being rejected by heaven, from mankind’s pain in separation from God, comes Venus, the goddess of love. Human love is born of Adam and Eve’s desire to be reunited, to regain momentarily the feeling of completion and wholeness which they once knew in the Garden. Hence the beauty in the sadness, the beauty in the dark violence of the sea. Lucifer carried light (the memory of God) to the depths of the sea (the unconscious) to make the sea ever restless (conscious) in its longing for God; thus the sea’s blue reflects the blue of the sky. And Lucifer is man (lines 27-28).

Implicit in Lorca’s mystical impulse is the unrealizable goal; his tremendous passion is never to be satisfied. And implicit in the metaphor of the Fall is a nostalgia for lost innocence. Both these motifs in Libro de poemas reappear in Poet in New York with added social implications.

The theme of longing to see the stars is essentially mystical and tragic. It appears in many of Lorca’s early children’s poems, such as “Los encuentros de un caracol aventurero” (“The encounters of an adventuresome snail,” p. 175), where an ant is condemned to death for having seen the stars. Of this poetic fable Edwin Honig comments, “The design of tragedy is already sketched . . . : hunger for the illimitable; a society whose moral laws are severe unto death; the suffering which comes of frustration; and the inevitable punishment meted out to the innocence of spirit.”⁴ And in Lorca’s early play “El maleficio de la mariposa” (“The witchcraft of the butterfly,” p. 669), a cockroach falls in love with a wounded butte...