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UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA TESIS DOCTORAL Leonard Cohen en la aldea global: construcciones de la identidad y el deseo de su poética MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTORA PRESENTADA POR María Icíar Álvarez Pérez Directora Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Madrid, 2015 ©María Icíar Álvarez Pérez, 2015 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA PROGRAMA DE DOCTORADO EN ESTUDIOS LITERARIOS Mª Icíar Álvarez Pérez LEONARD COHEN EN LA ALDEA GLOBAL: CONSTRUCCIONES DE LA IDENTIDAD Y EL DESEO EN SU POÉTICA MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL TÍTULO DE DOCTOR CON MENCIÓN EUROPEA Directora: Dra. Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Madrid, 2015 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FIOLOGÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA II PROGRAMA DE DOCTORADO EN ESTUDIOS LITERARIOS LEONARD COHEN IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE: CONSTRUCTIONS OF IDENTITY AND DESIRE IN HIS POETICS DOCTORAL DISSERTATION Submitted by: Mª Icíar Álvarez Pérez Supervised by: Dr. Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Madrid, 2015 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................... 9 The Spice-Box of Earth: Poems of a 'Dark-Romantic' Jew....................................19 1.1. The Spice-Box of Earth...................................................................................22 1.2. The Gears of Creation................................................................................. 28 1.3. The Dark Side of Love................................................................................ 40 1.4. The Weight of Tradition..............................................................................54 1.5. The Spice-Box of Earth: A Recapitulation................................................... 68 The Favourite Game: A Fictionalization of Cohen's Artistic Persona.................75 2.1. Setting the Stage.......................................................................................... 78 2.2. Culture, Ethnicity and Religion as Constructions of Identity...............87 2.3. Art, Love and Sexual Desire as Premises for Creation.........................103 2.4. The Favourite Game: A Recapitulation......................................................117 Flowers for Hitler: From Romance to the Concentration Camp.......................123 3.1. The Volume of Flowers for Hitler.............................................................. 126 3.2. The Mask of the Anti-Poet....................................................................... 138 3.3. Evil is All Around......................................................................................148 3.4. The Saints of Modernity........................................................................... 159 3.5. Flowers for Hitler: A Recapitulation.........................................................170 Beautiful Losers: A Canadian Postmodernist Novel in the Realms of Desire. ..................................................................................................................................175 4.1. Cultural Heritage Background................................................................ 178 4.2. Canadian Postmodern.............................................................................. 194 4.3. An Interpretation of Desire...................................................................... 208 4.4. Beautiful Losers: A Recapitulation............................................................ 233 Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs from a Room: A New Direction in Cohen's Career......................................................................................................................239 5.1. The Sound of Cohen's World................................................................... 241 5.2. The Sound of the Sixties........................................................................... 257 5.3. Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs from a Room: A Recapitulation ......270 CONCLUSIONS....................................................................................................275 REFERENCES........................................................................................................ 285 APPENDIX A: Resumen ..................................................................................... 297 APPENDIX B: Summary...................................................................................... 323 7 8 INTRODUCTION 10 Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld So I can sigh eternally. Kurt Cobain, “Pennyroyal Tea”. Dylan blew everybody's mind, except Leonard's. Allen Ginsberg. This research approaches the study of the works of the Canadian author Leonard Cohen in the decade of the 1960's. It attempts to explore and contextualize questions of identity and desire that have marked Cohen's production throughout all his career. The works that have been selected for this purpose include poetry collections -The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) and Flowers for Hitler (1964)-; fiction -The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966)-; and studio albums -Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) and Songs from a Room (1969)-. This dissertation is, then, a journey through the different creative expressions that the Montreal poet explored in the sixties to express artistic, political, social, and individual concerns that have shaped the artist's identities and desires. It captures Cohen's evolution from young and romantic poet, rebellious and provocative writer to finally folk singer in the same tradition that Nietzsche described the figure of the lyricist in The Birth of Tragedy (1872); he is, then, a poet that encounters in folk music the dual Apollonian and Dionysian impulse that captivates audiences. In this regard, Cohen's evolution might be easily framed by Marshall McLuhan's concept of 'The Global Village', a term popularized in the Canadian's philosopher work The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). By means of electronic technology, McLuhan believes that the world has been contracted into a village where information is instantly shared by everyone. It is in this new electronic era where Cohen manages to find his audience and achieve popularity. He leaves aside his 11 career as poet and fiction writer in order to commit himself to the profession of the troubadour; accommodated in the global village, he becomes a spokesman for his generation with captivating and mysterious songs that abandon the form of the printed book of 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' and embrace the orality of 'The Global Village'. Nevertheless, Cohen's themes and obsessions remain the same whether they are expressed through poems, novels, or songs. Different Cohens concur along the 1960's decade: the romantic, the cynical, the anti-poet, the beatnik, the rebellious, the non-conformist that denounces colonial practices and social distress, the provocative that challenges conventions, the traditionalist, etc. In order to approach each one of them, this research takes as reference the work of several Canadian critics and theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, Michael Ondaatje, or Stephen Scobie; it draws on Sylvie Simmons's biography I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (2012); and it gathers and uses the work of relevant thinkers and philosophers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the aforementioned Marshall McLuhan, etc. Furthermore, the thesis leans on the articles of various scholars who have studied the works of Leonard Cohen in depth for the analysis and interpretations of the Montreal artist's texts. The dissertation is divided into five chapters and a final section of conclusions. Chapter one -'The Spice Box-of Earth: Poems of a Dark-Romantic Jew'- studies the volume of poetry The Spice-Box of Earth by deepening into Cohen's artistic and Jewish identity, as well as by exploring the poet's world of desire from a 'dark romantic' perspective. Chapter two -'The Favourite Game: A Fictionalization of Cohen's Artistic Persona'- analyses Cohen's first novel The Favourite Game as a central text to understand the Canadian artist's identity and his life in art by means of the alter ego of Lawrence Breavman, the protagonist of the novel. The next chapter -'Flowers for Hitler: From Romance to the Concentration Camp'- returns back to the lyric genre in order to approach Flowers for Hitler as a text that signals Cohen's shift into the social sphere, probably infuenced by the Beat generation of the fifties and the fall into silence of the poet and mentor Abraham. M. Klein, Cohen focuses his interests in the exploration of the concept of evil in the twentieth century by using the Holocaust and Nazi imagery as literary figures. 12 Chapter four -'Beautiful Losers: A Canadian Postmodernist Novel in the Realms of Desire'- continues to deepen into Cohen's preference for the social and political, but it introduces as well a world of saints and 'beautiful losers' that are at the core of his artistic production; furthermore, Beautiful Losers signals the path to the Canadian Postmodern due to the disruptive character of the work. Finally, chapter five -'Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs from a Room: A New Direction in Cohen's Career'- deals with Cohen's studio albums Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs form a Room, where the Canadian artist sings in his first record to a world of lovers and romance, whereas in the second one he opts for an anti-war message that denounces violence and the exploitation of soldiers in the time of the Vietnam War. It is interesting to notice how Cohen's first volumes of poetry -Let Us Compare