The Literary Value of cante hondo

I will write for 30 minutes on this topic. Here goes.


When we talk about "literary value," we are talking about the kind of thing literary intellectuals place a premium on. So I don't have to define this value in absolute terms, just say that there is an aesthetic preference among some such literary folk to value what we might call the aesthetics of stark simplicity.

This has a history behind it. For example, a taste for the "popular" might be in contrast to the taste for the baroque, or for literary aesthetics which emphasize how poetic language is supposed to be elevated (associated with higher levels of society.) The symbolist aesthetic of Mallarmé is not a populist one.

The taste for the popular as such arises with romanticism. Specifically, in German romanticism and preromanticism Herder begins to translate Spanish ballads in the 18th century. So the aesthetic of the popular has always been bound up with interest in Spain.

The cante jondo is a sub-set of Spanish folklore.  We have a general sense of Spanish folklore as including romances and canciones, ballads and non-ballad songs, along with their music. Within this general set, there is a privilege accorded to Andalusian folklore, and the cante jondo is a subset of this Andalusian folklore It is important to remember that the general taste for the popular and for Spanish folklore includes other parts of Spain as well, even though Andalusia tends to stand in as a metonymy for the whole peninsula.

Machado y Álvarez mounts a solid argument in favor of the literary value of the lyrics of the cante jondo. He is the first Spanish folklorist and already by his epoch (the 1880s) the cante jondo had become a favored genre within folklore. The value of the cante is its extreme succinctness and directness and the absence of extraneous material, or ripio, filler. There are two kinds of work in folklore: the scientific gathering of material, and the anthology made simply for the delight of literary taste. His Cantes flamencos y cantares is in the latter category.

There are echoes of this aesthetic in the praise for the lírica de tipo tradicional found in Margit Frenk and other later scholars. The idea is a kind of pristine simplicity and directness.

Also, poets like Lorca and Hernández employ this aesthetic in some of their works. The popular has a value as such. I have to confess that I too place a premium on this style, so I cannot be objective. But the point is that this is something that quite a few people have learned to value immensely. My perspective is not some idiosyncrasy of mine, but something I have acquired from others. There is no wrong or right here, in the sense that positive aesthetic values don't ever have to be justified unless there are detractors.

Lorca's poetry exemplifies this tradition, but relates not just to the cante jondo, but to the larger universe of popular, anonymous poetry. In fact, I wouldn't give special priority to the lyrics of the cante jondo, since his view is more expansive than this. The cante jondo is tangential to his work. By this I mean that it touches at one point rather than overlapping substantially. He is writing about the cante jondo, not imitating it directly. (That's another way of putting it.) Yet overall, his contribution is to emphasize the literary value of these poems.

I could easily find examples that are excellent poems, from my perspective. They aren't very similar to Lorca poems:

Flamenca, cuando te mueras,  [when I die, Flamenca]
la lápida la retraten [let them decorate your tomb]
con sangresita e mis venas.  [with the blood of my veins]

Ok.  I have more to say, but the half hour is up...