I'm switching

I'm going to be mostly on substack now.  Look for me there. Bye!   

Woolf and Morrison

 Someone on Facebook was outraged that there would be a Nigerian adaptation of Mrs Dalloway. The poster invoked the names of Baldwin and Morrison, among others, to denounce this. All the comments on the post agreed. Woolf is unsufferable!  

Then I started to wonder, what would Toni Morrison think about Woolf? The answer was a google search away. Her MA thesis was on Woolf and Faulkner. This makes perfect sense, because they are two masters of modernist prose and any serious writer might have something to learn from. 

 But oh, colonialism, white supremacy. What could anyone possibly learn from a British woman of the upper classes?  

Lorca and the canon

 When I started working on Lorca I noticed that people love the canon.  I became 10 times more famous, meaning that maybe 150 people were interested in what I had to say, rather than only 15. I think that people's actual preferences are evident in what they do, not in what they claim they do. So while people talk about having a preference for things excluded from the canon, they don't really mean it. If you are dealing with a non-canonical writer, you have to first convince other people to care in the first place. With Lorca, that was never a problem. Even when meeting with my financial advisor the other week, for example, when I explained my research, he hadn't heard of Lorca, but then looked him up and became interested immediately.  

I can say, people have a preference for the canon. But another way of saying that is that the canon is defined by this preference. Now the canon has a huge projection in middle-brow culture. It's not a snobbish or high-brow thing. In fact, it is only in certain sectors of academia that people even worry about questioning the canon. A true snob will care about a minor writer you've never heard of. 

By middle-brow here, I mean Harold Bloom books on Shakespeare or on the Western canon, movies made from Jane Austen, Shakespeare movies, the appearance of Dante's inferno in a tv series like "Murder in a Small Town." My theory is that truly canonical writers spawn more than scholarly study: they enter popular culture, more specifically the upper segment of pop culture that I am calling middle-brow here. 

Lorca is the subject of novels, plays, operas and art songs, comic books (or "graphic novels," the middle-brow version of comics), illustrated editions, film adaptations, imitations, parodies, homages, and translations, of course. There is a whole secondary body of work inspired by him, in practically any genre you can think of.  So, for example, there will be statues and portraits of him.  

The Clichés of Lorca Studies

 In his own lifetime Lorca's first glimmerings of fame almost immediately gave rise to Lorquismo. He would warn actors he was directing in his own plays not to perform Lorquismo. His work casts a shadow like that of any other canonical writer: think of Kafka and the Kafkaesque. Lorquismo is a kind of a kind of Andalusian kitsch, or we could say, a repertory of clichés associated with the poet. 

Canonical writers have whole critical industries devoted to them: archives, libraries, journals; articles and books. They are also the subject of imitation, parody, homage, adaptation, musical setting, and translation. The reception of the canonical writer, then, will be both academic and popular.  

 Calling something a cliché seems to be negative designation, but it is impossible to have a critical industry or a popular reception without having commonplace ideas that are repeated ad nauseam. A commonplace is not even a bad thing, per se. It is just something that occurs with some statistical frequency.  

Usually, a cliché is a cliché for a reason; it has some genuine basis in the writer's work. 

We should expose clichés, recognize them for what they are, and see how they arose. I will give three examples here. 

1) Lorca as childlike creator.  He is a kind of man-child, innocent and driven by primeval instincts. An inspired poet rather than a fully conscious one.  

2) Andalusian Kitsch.  He represents the idea of romantic Spain, as defined in romanticism itself and in the work of Hemingway.  Flamenco music, bullfighting. The duende. Olive trees and orange blossoms. 

3) Poet of frustrated desire. There is just one theme in work: desire. All of his works are saying the same thing.  

I could go on.  He is the voice of the people, the exemplary victim of fascist violence, poet of tragic vision...

I won't bother to refute the commonplaces, not because I accept them, but because I think identifying them in this way already invites a certain amount of skepticism. Lorca scholars tend to be more nuanced: no serious specialist actually subscribes to any of these clichés.  (Except when they do.) 

In a way, too, the fact that there are many clichés is good thing, because that creates a less unitary vision of his work. If there were just one, it would be even worse. In a way, you can't have Kafka without the Kafkaesque: that is what makes Kafka resonate, even it sounds somewhat cliché to insist on that aspect of his work. Can you have Lorca without Lorquismo? Probably not.