A False Assumption

I assumed that lightning could only strike once. So my Lorca book was the result of an idea that only comes to a scholar once in a career, or usually not at all! After writing that book, I assumed that I would return to a series of solid but less interesting projects. I got lucky once, and I should be satisfied with that.

The combination of a canonical author that a lot of people cared about, and an idea to do something nobody had ever done before, brought me more attention than virtually all my previous work put together. I am not being at all immodest, but completely objective when I say that this book brought my career to a different level. I am basing this not on my own subjective feeling about this work, but on everything that has ensued since I came up with the idea: an NEH Fellowship, a book from Chicago, favorable reviews, promotion to full professor, the Higuchi award... Of course, I have my subjective feeling that I have done good work as well, but the past six years have been amazing for me by any measure.

But there was a problem. What is the motivation to do work that is not as interesting, to me, or to others, as Apocryphal Lorca?

When beginning my present project I did write to a group of scholars, friends in the field, about whether they would prefer that I write a book about Lorca or one with Lorca at the center, but including other poets. I know I wrote to Elena Delgado, Luis Martín-Estudillo, and Silvia Bermúdez, and maybe José María Rodríguez. Some thought that a book about more than one author would be better, and I was half way toward completing this book when I discovered that I needed to write a book only about Lorca. I should have been tipped off by the title, What Lorca Knew, but sometimes I can be needlessly dense.

So I had misinterpreted this light bulb going off in my head. It was not that I should write one interesting book and then go back to my dogmatic slumber, but that I should continue the project of which AL is only the first volume. Since making this discovery a few days ago, I have been on fire. Not coincidentally, I have had the highest number of hits on this blog this month since I began it. More than 6,400, when my previous high was 5,200 in March of this year.

The lesson here is "write the book you are meant to write, the book you prepared all your life to do." The one you really feel compelled to pursue. If you are doing that, then all you need is to be competent, to use what you learned in grad school, your scholarly base, and very elemental skills in time management that are not in the least complex or difficult to put into action.

What I wrote in the last three days

Would you read a book that started out like this?

Introduction: Lorca / modelo para armar

Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch (2009) is “not a book about the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca” but, rather, an exploration of Lorca’s problematic reception among poets in the US, including Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, and Frank O’Hara (xi). In this sequel, What Lorca Knew: Lorquian Poetics for the Twenty-First Century, the subject is, once again, the poetic afterlife of one of the great poets of European modernism. In this case, I have written a book that is more directly about Lorca, but my focus remains on his lasting presence in literary culture. Instead of limiting my scope to American poetry, I have chosen a set of critical problems relating to his critical and poetic reception in his native Spain, and to the academic industry devoted to his work around the world.

Unlike many other books on Lorca, What Lorca Knew does not consist of interpretations or explications of individual plays or books of poetry. Precisely because other capable scholars and critics have dealt adequately with his major achievements, I do not think another volume of this type is the most urgent task at the present moment—at least not for a critic of my particular disposition. I have not put forward new interpretations of Romancero gitano or Bodas de sangre, works that have been studied in great detail by countless other scholars. Instead, I have examined various dimensions of his ongoing cultural legacy, with particular attention to the ways in which his poetry is re-imagined in “hermeneutical situations” of multiple kinds.

These situations are, in principle, endlessly varied, but I have chosen three main areas of concentration. My primary interest is in Lorca’s poetics, especially as they take shape in his lectures on Flamenco music, Spanish folklore, and the duende. My aim here is to treat Lorquian poetics as the self-conscious construction of a poet who knew what he was doing, rather than as an anti-intellectual and naïve genius. Having defined “what Lorca knew,” my second aim is to study the ongoing influence of Lorquian poetics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with particular attention to his influence on two rival schools of contemporary Spanish poetry, whose uses of Lorca are diametrically opposed. I also remain interested in the larger cultural uses of Lorquian poetics, both in Spain and in the United States. Thirdly, I am interested in the academic reception of Lorca in relation to this poetic and cultural legacy: my hermeneutic construction of Lorca’s self-conscious poetics requires that I, too, be self-conscious of my own position as an academic specialist in the field.

Together with Apocryphal Lorca, What Lorca Knew forms part of an ongoing larger project that I am calling Lorca / modelo para armar [Lorca / model to construct]. There may be additional volumes in this series as well. The title comes from a novel by Julio Cortázar, 62 / modelo para armar, which in turn is derived from Chapter 62 of Rayuela [Hopscotch]. The idea here, quite simply, is that an author like Federico García Lorca is a construction rather than a truth or essence to be discovered. This assertion should hardly be controversial, but it leads to some surprising conclusions. The hermeneutical enterprise does not lead to a better understanding of who Lorca “really was,” but to an open-ended exploration of what he might mean for us.

The hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer provides a way of understanding the ongoing legacy of a hyper-canonical figure like Lorca, who presents interpretative problems of dizzying complexity. Because Lorca has been the object of endless translation, transformation, and commentary, he...

Literary Theory 101

A lot of my Lorca project is just Literary Theory 101. An author is an "author-function" (Foucault) not a biographical subject with a set of fixed "intentions." The speaker of the poem is not the biographical subject.

We construct a literary tradition retrospectively; it isn't handed to us as a given (Borges). The problem of translation is co-substantial with the problem of literature itself (Borges). Hermeneutics is historical and takes into account the linguisticality of language (Gadamer). Language is not an unproblematical mirror for representing reality (every literary theorist ever).

Gay identity is not fixed or essential, but constructed (every theorist since Foucault and Sedgwick).

These are things I have almost always known (or so it seems). Lorca studies is too often innocent of these basic principles. I can make a contribution simply by being competent in my understanding of these ideas, and just a little bit creative in seeing the implications that ensue.

***

Here is a free idea for you: explain the literary theory of Borges using the terms of Gadamerian hermeneutics. You can use "Kafka and His Precursors," "The Homeric Versions," and "Pierre Menard." You can take this idea free of charge and write your own essay. Just credit me with the original idea.

"A Scholar assumes that others might also be scholars"

I was exploring some material on one of my favorite academic blogs today. In an older post, Z / Profacero / Z writes:

This was a scholarly interaction, and it took place at a large state institution. Say anything you want about how this was a fifty year old man, flattered that a seventeen year old blonde who wasn’t even in his class, came to ask about his book. It was still a scholarly interaction on all sides. From it, I learned that a scholar will answer your questions seriously, no matter who you are. To put it a little differently, a scholar assumes that others might also be scholars.

I'm giving a little bit of context for this aphorism, because I wanted to show the experience out of which it arose, a visit by the blogger as college student to a professor's office. The entire series of posts is worth reading, since the theme is "what is a scholar?"

I make this assumption myself: others may also be scholars. They aren't necessarily so, but they may be. Any serious, sincerely asked question deserves a serious scholarly answer, whether the questioner is 17 or 85, an academic or a civilian. I answer questions by random strangers who email me all the time.

Teaching, I assume my students are scholars, or could be. By this I mean that they deserve the benefit of having a scholar as their teacher, someone, himself, involved in learning. At least for those four (or five or six) years of undergraduate education, the student is a researcher, a scholar.

The assumption can backfire when students, or even colleagues, do not see themselves this way. So the question, which I have been grappling with while reading and commenting on this other blog, is, what gets in the way of our being scholars? What blocks that energy, that identity?

A lot of what I blog about here is academia 101. In other words, things you should know by around the end of Freshman year in college, if not before. How to formulate a thesis / a critical problem. How to write a good term paper / article. The question that I need to consider, however, is why college professors become alienated from their scholarly identity?

In defense...

of idiocy. A nice title for a very reasonable article on the usefulness of outside letters in promotion cases.

Journals

I realize I don't know where else to send an article. There are very few in my field where I am interested in publishing right now. Probably I will choose Revista Hispánica Moderna, since I haven't published there since the '90s at least. I have been relying on invitations for so long I hardly know what it's like to submit an article cold. I have one almost ready to send out, so that's my project for tomorrow morning.

I feel I should risk rejection once in a while with an article.

Article Submitted

So I actually submitted an article this morning, having changed it from a chapter to article. I noticed it had some signposting in it, that I didn't feel like eliminating, so it is not completely "classic" in style. It also had some 1st person singular language. That's fine. If it is turned down for that it makes very little difference to my career. If it is accepted, then I will have an article written in that "voice."