The new theory of the duende is that Lorca was tongue in cheek when he said that everywhere in Spain people talked about flamenco "having" duende. The word itself existed before, but Lorca himself invented this new flamenco meaning / usage of the term.
Evidence for this is that there is no usage attested before Lorca's own lecture. I just bought a book, a new translation of the lecture, by Maurer, with notes by José Javier León, who came up with this new research.
It is very strange, to be sure. Lorca invented something, that was not true when he spoke, but became true later on through his own influence. We've all had this backward. The other explanation would be that this usage was new in Lorca's time, that he picked up on it and popularized it. We can't prove that nobody said "eso tiene duende" before Lorca gave his lecture. We do know, though, that nobody wrote down this phrase before Lorca.
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This got me thinking, that because something is strange does not mean we shouldn't believe it. In other words, the truth does not care about the structure of our thinking. The "truth is stranger than fiction" trope exists for a reason. A novelist has to invent something plausible, or verisimilar, something that corresponds with our ideas about how things are. But the truth itself has no obligation to be verisimilar.
It reminds me of the idea that "facts have a liberal bias." Well, no they don't. Any ideology will generate cognitive dissonance. It is just easier to see when it is not your ideology.
I was watching a documentary on scientology. Of course, the theology of this is absurd. But all theology is absurd from the perspective of anyone who doesn't subscribe to that particular theology. Credo quia absurdum est, I think is the relevant dictum.
3 comments:
It occurs to me that Hemingway doesn't use the word in Death in the Afternoon (1932).
That would be super early, to have Hemingway use the word at the same time as Lorca. Probably it wan't used in English at all until the 40s?
Yes, I mean it as more evidence for León's theory. When I first started looking at duende (spurred by AL), I remember looking it up in the glossary of Death in the Afternoon, thinking it must also be bullfighting jargon, which Hemingway would have wanted to appear an "aficionado" about. But its application there may also have been Lorca's invention?
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