Raising the Dead: García Lorca, Trauma and the Cultural Mediation of Mourning
Melissa Dinverno is Assis- The dead embody, and therefore become so much of, what the tant Professor of Spanish at living are unable to realize. Indiana University (Bloo- -Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead mington) and has written on theory and politics of critical Paul Valéry wrote (Felman 1990): “Our memory repeats to us editing, the work of García what we haven’t understood” (76). That’s almost it. Say instead: “Our Lorca, and gender identity memory repeats to us what we haven’t yet come to terms with, what and feminism in 20th-cen- still haunts us.” tury Spain. Her critical -Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community” edition of García Lorca’s Suites is forthcoming (Cáte- dra, 2006). Currently she is Cadavers Past and Present writing a book on editorial theory and is preparing an- In a November 2002 op-ed article in El País, the his- other on the contemporary torian Gabriel Jackson affirmed that “En España tampoco cultural construction of existe ya el tabú sobre los horrores de la época de Franco.” García Lorca. Only three days earlier, however, Congress had agreed on a resolution which, despite morally recognizing and pledging support to victims of the Civil War and dictatorship for the first time since Francisco Franco’s death, aimed precisely to contain efforts to recuperate that past. Acknowledging “la necesidad de recuperar la memoria colectiva,” Congress em- phasized both that this recovery occur “dentro del espíritu de concordia de la Constitución,” and that its own recognition of these victims should not “reavivar viejas heridas o remover el rescoldo de la confrontación civil” (“El Congreso”). The barely-disguised anxiety regarding the wounds that the re- cuperation of a traumatic past might reopen finds a curious echo in the conservative government’s 1997 recognition of the life of Federico García Lorca, a figure emblematic of Civil
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 9, 2005 30 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
War and Francoist victimhood. In prepara- August 1936,1 and for “todos los mártires tion for Lorca’s 1998 centenary celebration, del fascismo en España” that lie in oblivion José María Aznar’s administration pledged (Prado 14). For as Emilio Silva, president 600 million pesetas for the year’s activities, of the Asociación para la Recuperación de affirming “a los cuatro vientos” that “61 la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), recognizes, años después del fusilamiento que acabó and BBC journalist Katya Adler notes, “Lor- con la vida de Federico García Lorca, es el ca’s fame gives a face and a name to Spain’s momento de olvidar viejas fobias y rencores” dead thrown in ditches.” The polemic over (Enríquez Gómez 76). As Juan Enríquez whether Lorca’s body should be uncovered Gómez notes, the Partido Popular’s very is thus haunted by larger, unresolved issues public financing of institutions dedicated regarding the Civil War, the regime, and to Lorca and to a national celebration of the post-dictatorship, for indeed, only in Lorca’s life could be read as: 2000, twenty-five years after Franco’s death, was the public silence surrounding the mass el primer paso de una serie de ac- graves finally broken. The current debates ciones encaminadas a lavar la cara de over Lorca’s bodily remains invariably los sectores conservadores del país en el Caso Lorca, iniciado con su fusila- revolve around the relationship between miento, en el año 1936. (76) individual and collective memory, the ownership of the dead and their meaning Indeed, Aznar himself recognized it as, in part, within memorial processes, and the “proper” “un gesto para la concordia” (76). Despite his ways of mourning and of memorializing the emblematic victimhood, then, Lorca becomes past.2 Perhaps most importantly, interven- a politicized body that mediates the active tions have shown an acute awareness of forgetting of a violent, turbulent, and trau- the tragic proportions of what these tombs matic past, a body through which a politics hold: remains of the disappeared. For many, of consensus might be reinforced and affective these bodies are improperly buried; marked by engagements with the past evacuated. This violence and oblivion, they cannot be effectively collective memorialization of Lorca’s life is mourned where they currently lie. Yet re- thus promoted by the state as long as it grafts covery means disinterring the death of the a harmonic national (and political) identity victims, the guilt of their killers, the shame over the collective wounds of the past. of the survivors for having remained silent; More recently, Lorca’s body is once it means unearthing painful personal and again mediating the treatment of these col- collective memories, and recognizing that lective wounds. Since 2003, the potential the nation has not come to terms fully with exhumation of Lorca’s physical remains that past. As such, Lorca’s potential exhuma- from a mass grave in Víznar, Granada, tion, in turn, has brought to light both a has, in turn, unearthed contentious issues tension between a need to recover the trau- regarding history, memory, and the encryp- matic historical past and an anxious desire to tion of the past. On both an international leave it buried, as well as an awareness that and domestic level, his body is being pressed Spain is in a state of unresolved mourning. into service as a tombstone, a literal and Collective imaginings of these bodies as symbolic grave marker for those individu- encrypted alive, awaiting resurrection and als that were apparently killed with him in proper burial by survivors and subsequent Melissa Dinverno 31 generations, reinforce the notion that it is body into national and cultural history precisely the silencing of the traumatic past during the Transition is heavily mediated that has resulted in an unfinished mourn- by this deathly presence, a process that has ing process. In this way, Lorca’s dead body also profoundly affected current configura- currently mediates the nation’s relationship tions of Lorca. Significantly, and as is well to its grievous history and gives shape to a known, representations of his work, literary perception increasingly reflected in national criticism, biography, and even celebrations headlines and cultural spaces that, like thou- of life at that time were marked by his sands of Civil War victims buried in mass status as disappeared, by his violent death. graves, the collective memory of the recent Indeed, the interest in Lorca’s biography past “esperaba enterrada—pero no muerta” has often overtaken understandings of his (Serrano). literary work. Paul Julian Smith has rightly Recent critical discussions regarding emphasized the fetishization of Lorca’s death the fragility of the political situation in and notes that Lorca’s life and death have for the wake of Franco’s death, the Transition’s years been widely regarded by many as the politics of consensus, and the consequent key to understanding his literary work and encryption of a distressing past include vice versa (105), defining this “biological precisely the period in which Federico determinism” as one of the main tenets of García Lorca’s previously censored body the “cult of García Lorca” (136). Even so, we was being reinscribed into collective his- have yet to explain either this repeated col- tory and memory.3 That is, despite a slow lective return to a lorquian body marked by and inconsistent recuperation of García death or the recurring assumption that body Lorca under the regime, it was not until and work are intimately related, two notions the waning years of the dictatorship and the that I will argue are connected and underpin complicated start of democracy that a more most literary and cultural criticism of Lorca’s complete recovery of his figure and corpus work, as well as his enormous weight as a was undertaken within Spain. Teresa Vilarós cultural icon since the dictatorship.4 has insightfully written that: This essay returns primarily to the period of 1970-1986 in an attempt to un- El instrumento de escritura que la derstand the cultural processes involved in historia usa en estos primeros mo- the recent construction of Federico García mentos es sobre todo el de un pun- Lorca, particularly as it revolved around zón dedicado a horadar y destrozar, his assassination and cadaver, around a col- una aguja que imprime sobre el texto lective desire to imagine his death and/or a de la transición la presencia rotunda de la muerte. […] [E]l desgarro lorquian body marked by death. While ac- físico y político que la presencia de knowledging that appropriations of Lorca’s la muerte supone en estos primeros death began almost immediately after his años de la transición es simplemente assassination and, therefore, well before the sobrecogedor. (118) 1970s, I examine this recent period of po- litical, social and cultural upheaval as a mo- In the same vein, I would like to recuperate ment when the dynamics of constructing a this “presencia rotunda de la muerte” and lorquian body were particularly complicated suggest that the incorporation of Lorca’s and might have yielded different results. For 32 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
if we accept the notion that the Transition through traumatic events of the Civil War, witnessed a hegemonic effort to eliminate of the Franco regime, and of the Transition’s collective spaces that mediated affective politics of reconciliation.7 engagements with the problematic past, how can we understand the intense inter- Fatal Fascinations: est in the death (and life marked by death) Narrating Lorca’s Death of Lorca? In what ways did that politics of consensus affect Lorca’s cultural construc- In his 1966 essay for ABC, “La obra tion then and his cultural importance now, de Federico, bien nacional,” Edgar Neville, particularly with relation to issues of encryp- critic, director and former friend of García tion, mourning, and memory? Alternately, Lorca, sought to inscribe the poet into Span- considering the importance of cultural sites ish literary history. Significantly, Lorca takes for collective memorial engagement, how shape in Neville’s article within a discourse did the recuperation and reinscription of on memorializing that seeks to recognize Lorca into collective discourses mediate and unite a divided nation. For Neville, cultural, psychosocial and political processes rewriting both Lorca’s work and “su figura in the early years of Spanish democracy? particular, tan mal conocida, tan intencio- The following discussion constitutes an nadamente mal aclarada” into the national exhumation of García Lorca as a technol- consciousness forms part of the project of ogy of memory —a mediatory space for the reinscribing the silenced vencidos into na- production of cultural memory, a site by tional history and Civil War monuments. which people articulate a relationship to the What is perhaps most interesting about the 5 past. I argue that a significant part of the article is that it harbors the seeds of a fascina- complex construction that is Lorca today is tion that expands in the following decade, wrapped up in a kind of exhumation and as Neville’s explicitly stated goal of inscrib- memorializing of him that was done very ing Lorca’s work as “un bien nacional” is publicly in the seventies and early eighties. overtaken by a narrative that returns time Analyzing the way in which his previously and again to Lorca’s death. For in addition censored body was being inscribed in the to lamenting Lorca’s assassination as both public sphere through 1986 (the 50th anni- a personal and national loss that has yet to versary of his assassination and of the start of be recognized, Neville literally retraces the the Civil War), I propose that the repeated poet’s fatal path to Víznar (“he ido buscando return to his death and the fusion of his su huella—tal vez el trocito donde yace—en corpus/cuerpo can be understood as related Bíznar [sic]”). This investigative itinerary processes within a dynamics of mourning.6 includes the description of Neville’s largely In this sense, I read Lorca and his work as unsuccessful interviews of villagers who memorial texts marked by encryption and refuse to implicate themselves and give him loss. I ultimately suggest that the fetishiza- information, his attempts to shift any guilt tion of death that has haunted lorquian from the regime to unlocatable others, and representations is connected to his iconic his call for Lorca’s reburial with official rec- role as cultural mediator of unresolved ognition. The article unwittingly suggests, collective and individual mourning—that then, that writing Lorca into the national is, the process of witnessing and working patrimony may only happen by returning to Melissa Dinverno 33 the originary site of the crime, identifying the recovery of this silenced historical event the guilty, and advocating an exhumation as part of the nation’s own itinerary along and proper burial in a symbolic ceremony the path of healing. That is, they assume that would unite the nation (“La obra”). that any reformulation of national narratives Neville’s reshaping of Spanish cultural of identity (and Lorca’s place within those identity thus imagines the dead lorquian narratives) starts with a return to the dead body both as an unresolved event in the body and the resolution of the enigmas it individual and national consciousness and, presents. Akin to detectivesques that para- buried as it is by techniques of silencing doxically advance narratively by beginning (distortion, censorship), as one that must with a cadaver and recreating the past that be unearthed in order to heal both personal produced it, Lorca’s absent dead body be- loss and the enduring national divisions comes the origin of individual and collective of the Civil War. While Neville wrote this narratives on the past, present and future. piece, historian Ian Gibson was in Spain In a perceptive 1986 review of Ian working on La represión nacionalista de Gibson’s later two volume biography on Granada en 1936 y la muerte de Federico García Lorca, Luis Fernández-Cifuentes García Lorca (later retitled El asesinato de observed the pressing importance that Fed- García Lorca), a project that began as a study erico García Lorca’s death had held for the of Lorca’s life but, following a path not un- social imaginary in the intervening years, like Neville’s article, nonetheless ended as referring to Gibson’s 1971 text and asserting a ground-breaking investigative history of that “es probable (y también perturbador) the poet’s death. His study relied heavily on que el libro más popular, más divulgado e personal interviews, archival and historical incluso más importante sobre García Lorca research, and his own retracing of Lorca’s sea el que describe las circunstancias de su final steps.8 Notably, the cover of the recent muerte” (86). Although the reasons behind republication of this book emphasizes the and the events leading to Lorca’s death had detectivesque nature of the text, bearing as been at issue since 1936, particularly after it does Graham Greene’s observation that 1971, public discussion of his assassination El asesinato de García Lorca stands as “una intensified, perhaps in no small part due to fascinante investigación sobre el asesinato Gibson’s investigative study.9 Indeed, from de Lorca. Tan apasionante como una novela the early-1970s through the mid-1980s, policiaca” (El asesinato [1996]). Such a de- there is a constant and growing effort in tective story was envisioned by Gibson as the national press and other cultural texts a fact-finding mission based on historical (biographies, films, etc.) to imagine the days testimony that could indeed uncover a truth and minutes before Lorca’s assassination, and guilty parties, an investigative project the moment of the killing itself, and its that was, as he commented regarding his aftermath. How are we to understand these project on Paracuellos, “necesario para la multiple attempts to imagine and narrate salud de la nación” since it did not seem to Lorca’s death, and what, if any, connection him “positivo para la nueva democracia que might they have to the investigative project sigue habiendo tantas incógnitas” (qtd. in that preceded them? To what degree do Fernández-Cifuentes 88). Though the poli- they conceive of the lorquian cadaver as tics of these writers differ, both envisioned a space that mediates other narratives? I 34 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
propose that just as the detectivesque relies them, the veracity of the testimony itself, on witnesses to produce a testimony regard- the sense of personal and/or communal guilt ing the past, we might first approach this surrounding Lorca’s assassination, and the repeated return to Lorca’s end as, in part, way that his death has marked the witness a widespread preoccupation with witness- emotionally and otherwise. These narratives ing. That is, the diverse interventions in a directly relate the ability to talk about what public discussion of Lorca’s death during the happened in the past to the witness’s own 1970s and 1980s suggest the articulation of well being in the present. Likewise, Gibson’s a layered public practice of witnessing, an belief that these historical projects were nec- effort to narrate in different ways and thus essary for the health of the nation resonates testify to what had been a long-silenced with these testimonial texts. Indeed, several event under the regime.10 interviews with Luis Rosales, a friend of One major memorial site in which this Lorca in whose home the poet was detained, fatal return signals a testimonial endeavor emphasize his repeated attempt to form a is in a range of projects that, like Gibson’s round-table of witnesses and Neville’s, attempt to uncover the truth regarding Lorca’s end and recuperate the en donde se hable de ‘aquello’ desde historical past from different angles. More el principio hasta el fin. Luis quiere specifically, the aim to remember and nar- el careo y saber la verdad desde todos los lados, y decir la suya y escuchar rate the poet’s death through investigative la de los demás. […] Luis dice que discourses permeates the Spanish press over él lo que quiere es que se sienten the next ten years, particularly in interviews todos, que hablen todos los que en of primary witnesses that can testify to esto tienen voz. (Medina 21) Lorca’s last days and hours, in the narration of itineraries that return to and recreate the Giving voice to the past in public, repeatedly path that the poet may have followed from going over the details, piecing together the Madrid to Víznar, in interviews of those that events of the assassination with others, and have been judged by the public as having recuperating that historical past through had a hand in Lorca’s death, and in chron- the testimony of witnesses and the search icles of what had been discovered to date for factual evidence is envisioned as a proj- about the events surrounding the death.11 ect that will give some kind of individual In different ways, and particularly in the and collective relief. Furthermore, as in case of interviews and itineraries, these texts Tico Medina’s 1972 interview with Luis attempt to bear witness to the traumatic Rosales, these testimonial texts often move event of the death on a primary level. Here beyond a focus on the primary witness to I include accounts narrated by individuals highlight the presence and importance of who knew Lorca and by those who did not the secondary witness, the individual who know him but nonetheless feel haunted by elicits, listens to, and makes sense of the his death, “agobiado por la memoria de lo testimony.13 Particularly in interviews, this que no he vivido” (Monleón “La muerte” representation of the two-sided nature of 25).12 Each text thus becomes a testimony testifying to the past often emphasizes both to those traumatic and encrypted events, the empathetic unsettlement of the second- emphasizing the difficulty of speaking of ary witness (LaCapra 47), and the secondary Melissa Dinverno 35 witness’s “contamination” (Felman 107) by of the assassination and even in the mind of the traumatic events that are finally being Lorca, signaling a different process of wit- narrated. That is, the listener takes shape in nessing. José María Alfaro, a former friend, these texts as empathetic secondary witness ends a remembrance of the poet by imag- and as primary witness to his or her own ex- ining him at the moment prior to death: perience of that testimony.14 Moreover, the “De lo que sí estoy convencido es que al secondary witness’s crucial role in the public enfrentarse con el trance final debió percibir, processing of this traumatic testimony could por si y por los demás, todo el desesperado not be more dramatically exemplified than horror de la muerte inútil” (3). Alfaro thus in Ian Gibson’s 1979 interview with Luis envisions himself one with Lorca emotion- Rosales. Following Rosales’s frustration ally and sensorially, stating confidently what regarding the lack of a state-sponsored Lorca was feeling when he knew death was truth commission on Lorca’s death (“Los upon him. In a similar move, in his 1984 últimos” 1979, 41), Gibson uses the space film “El balcón abierto” Jaime Camino uses of the interview to ajudicate Rosales’s guilt, a handheld subjective camera to represent taking on the role of lawyer, judge and jury, Lorca’s death. Paul Julian Smith has insight- and closing with his verdict: fully read the deployment of this technique as part of a liberal political project to ensure Yo creo, en definitiva, que este hom- the intended audience’s identification with bre de mirada serena y arrolladora Lorca and victims of oppression (113). I humanidad dice la verdad y sólo la would suggest as well that precisely because verdad—ahí están los testigos, algu- this technique puts the viewer squarely in nos de los cuales he nombrado—, the same position as does Alfaro’s imagined y que hizo todo lo que pudo por death trance, that is, in the mind and body proteger y salvar a Federico. Que se le deje en paz con su pena. (“Los of Lorca, such an identification also speaks últimos” 1979, 43) to a desire to create a reactualization, a wit- nessing of that death scene from within; it In the absence of a governmental and/or embodies an attempt to know what Lorca’s community forum in which a collective experience of those events actually was. The narrative might emerge, the secondary wit- viewer becomes the one who experiences ness thus transforms both interview and the assassination; the viewer becomes an article into a surrogate courtroom where this impossible primary witness from inside the painful past can be narrated by the primary event, an imagined transformation to which witness, reimagined by the readers, judged I will return later.15 by society, and converted into a catalyst Indeed, although all of these testimo- for relief. nial texts on one level establish a relationship Beyond investigative projects that re- with the reader/viewer that assigns the latter turn time and again to Lorca’s death, public a role as a secondary witness—someone sites are also populated by repeated efforts who must receive and process the narra- to visualize and sensorially imagine the tive offered by the text—, they frequently moments preceding the killing, the death work to create a vicarious primary witness itself, and a body marked by death. Multiple in the reader. For as Shoshana Felman has representations put the reader at the scene written: 36 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
the specific task of the literary testi- the light for the readers to see, those that mony is, in other words, to open up “siguen creyendo que la muerte de Federico
in that belated witness, which the es un tema oscuro” (29). Monleón carefully reader now historically becomes, the interweaves the versions of Lorca’s death imaginative capability of perceiv- ing history—what is happening to with his own personal itinerary “por los others—in one’s own body, with the últimos lugares en que vivió Federico” (25). power of sight (of insight) usually af- Unequivocally including the reader as a forded only by one’s own immediate walking companion throughout the article physical involvement. (108) (e.g. “Abandonamos el camino principal” [25]), Monleón tells us stories of Lorca’s Retaking Felman’s focus on sight and the death as he describes in present tense the imagined experience, what is significant Granadine scenery now, the spaces where in many of the representations of Lorca’s 1936 haunts 1975 Spain. Both through his death is an explicit incitement of the con- verbal narrative and the captioned photo- temporary reader/spectator to see and thus graphs that accompany the article, we are witness this lorquian body and its end. More incited to see, hear and feel those places, to specifically, such a call to witnessing sur- experience them as witnesses like Monleón faces as a push to visualize the events from himself (and perhaps as a primary witness the “outside,” not as Lorca, but as another in 1936) and make the connection between witness to the events. In a 1986 article on past and present. Indeed, according to the Lorca’s “obsession” with death, Anita Arroyo writer, that assassination is visible every- both emphasizes the immediate visibility of where in the present and in public life, even the killing (“Duele ver tronchar, tan absurda if its historical truth has yet to be recognized y cruelmente, […] la fecunda vida de un or fully narrated, and it is up to the reader ser único […]” [3; emphasis added]) and and writer, a complicated web of witnesses, pictures a comforting, idealized image of to testify to its ghostly presence. his final moments: Unlike Arroyo and Monleón’s con- struction of a more intimate cooperative lo mataron, pero—imaginamos— witnessing involving both writer and reader, que una sonrisa seráfica iluminó su others seem to actively set out to prompt in ultimo hálito de vida temporal y que, sonriendo, sigue sembrando estrellas the reader/spectator a primary witnessing en el cielo. (3) without an intermediary. In José Antonio Rial’s 1979 play “La muerte de García In this way, the writer and her readers Lorca,” the production of an audience that (“imaginamos”) are onlookers at the mo- would bear witness to the visually imagined ment of death. A more complex narrative death is crucial.16 Like Arroyo and Mon- that likewise explicitly involves the reader as león, Rial stages the assassination using primary witness to the death, José Monleón’s techniques aimed at involving the audience 1975 article, “La muerte de García Lorca” in the scene, but actively attempts to create stages an “exhumation” that is at once of a public, communal witnessing. The play- a body and a series of events and places. wright set up the space in a circular man- He unearths them and holds them up to ner, “donde el público se siente en torno y Melissa Dinverno 37 participa en la crisis, pasión y muerte de Fe- killing. In this sense, Juan Antonio Bardem’s derico” (Pérez Coterillo, “Cuando el teatro”) movie Muerte de un poeta (1986) from the or, as Pérez Coterillo wrote in a review of same period takes a tack not altogether dif- the opening, so that the public sat: ferent from Rial and Caballero, filming a meticulous recreation of apparently histori- en torno a la estancia, en sillas de cal events leading to Lorca’s death, crafting anea, atrapado en la misma historia, what essentially stands as a visual reactual- metido de bruces en ella, tanto, que ization of his end that converts spectators pueden tocar con las manos si no into primary witnesses of those events. dieran crédito a lo que ven sus ojos. Ultimately, then, and despite their (“Rajatabla” 43) wide-ranging techniques and mediums, all of these narratives can be read as testimonial Precisely the proximity and embodiment of texts. They embody a repeated attempt to the imagined events surrounding the death imagine traumatic events, yet one which push the audience to bear witness to that takes place within an effort to process that past, to see and process it, to experience and past. Akin to Felman’s understanding of participate in the horror of the assassina- testimony in The Plague, these narratives tion. The physicality of the staging forces that circle Lorca’s cadaver and return to his any “Doubting Thomas” into the events execution imply that in a strange conflation of past and pres- ent, allowing touch to confirm the poet’s sacrifice if the witness refuses to see and [t]he task of the testimony is to believe. Similarly, the covers of the 1985 impart that knowledge: a firsthand, carnal knowledge of victimization, of and 1986 Los Domingos de ABC special what it means to be ‘from here’(from numbers dedicated to Lorca confront the quarantine), wherever one is from; a reader point blank with José Caballero’s firsthand knowledge of a historical evocative color representations of the poet’s passage through death, and of the wounded, dying and dead body. While the way life will forever be inhabited earlier number shows a close-up painting by that passage and by that death of Lorca’s face splashed with blood but still […]. (111) alive and apparently unaffected, the 1986 number goes farther towards narrating the Enacting varied practices of witnessing, originary moment of trauma by depict- they suggest an attempt to understand those ing six lorquian bodies that suggest a slow events and thereby work through them, motion representation of the successive whether on a primary or secondary level, moments of the killing. From Lorca facing whether as an individual or a community. In the guns of a firing squad, to his falling and this sense, Lorca’s dead body is imagined as blood-stained body, to the last image of a space through which people can return to, him bloody and face-down on the ground, process, and judge what has happened. His the viewer is made to visually pass through body functions as a site that mediates this the assassination and process of death as if discourse of and on witnessing, what is in es- he/she were a primary eye-witness to the sence an effort to establish an individual and event, standing at the time and place of the collective relationship with a grievous past. 38 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
Witnessing the Encrypted Body: these events would function as an obstacle A Dynamics of Mourning to individually or collectively narrating the traumatic past and working through the implications of that loss; they block the The cadaverous presence is the presence mourning process. In this sense, then, the of the unknown before us. disappearance and death of Lorca can be -Maurice Blanchot approached as an event akin to what Felman and Laub have called “the event-without-a How are we, then, to understand more witness,” that is: broadly this desire to witness this dead body, to see, narrate, and claim Lorca’s fate? We an event which historically consists might begin by noting that this cadaver is in the scheme of the literal erasure marked first by the fact that Lorca, like so of its witnesses but which, moreover, many others, was disappeared, and as such, philosophically consists in an acci- his death embodies a violent end and injus- denting of perception, in a splitting tice, but no less importantly, a large measure of eyewitnessing as such; an event, of irresolution. Any consideration of the ex- thus not empirically, but cognitively ecution is plagued by a series of unanswered and perceptually without a witness questions—why was he killed, where was both because it precludes seeing and he taken, how was he killed, what did he because it precludes the possibility of a community of seeing: an event which experience, where was he buried—questions radically annihilates the recourse (the which all point to a fundamental lack of appeal) to visual corroboration (to understanding regarding the very events of the commensurability between two his murder. For on the one hand, those wit- different seeings) and thus dissolves nesses who might have actually testified to the possibility of any community of the death and to the events leading to it have witnessing. (211) either been killed (i.e. the victims them- selves), or have given conflicting answers The radical erasure of Lorca’s body through to some of these questions, rendering them disappearance and mass or unmarked burial, factually unreliable (i.e. those people some- the annihilation of witnesses to the event, how knowledgeable of events surrounding and the “methodical deafness” (Felman the executions). On the other hand, in the 178-83) of the immediate community that immediate aftermath, the nationalists, and certainly did know something of the kill- later the regime, kept the events from people ing as even later press suggests,18 create this by using repressive techniques that reflected event-without-a witness, this “traumatic two extremes: burying the historical referent impact of a historically ungraspable primal either through censorship or by propagating scene which erases both its witnesses and rumors—in other words, by oversaturating its witnessing” (224). Without a physical collective spaces with divergent narratives.17 body, without testimonial narratives that Both techniques ultimately worked to keep reconstruct the events in a way that satisfy- people in the dark on the fatal events. If the ingly provides resolution of the enigmas mourning process is at heart always about surrounding the death, there is no cadaver understanding, about coming to terms with to “see” nor through which a process of loss, then this lack of knowledge regarding mourning might be elaborated; there is no Melissa Dinverno 39 corroboration that might serve as a basis for ment of the lost object, a burying alive of collective witnessing, for the creation of a the memory within an intrapsychic tomb community of witnesses. (130, 140). Thus the “[p]eople who are not This dead body is further marked by authorized to mourn in the name of their the fact that, during most of the dictator- lost object” (163), those who have nowhere ship, it could not be publicly mourned as to work through that loss openly, covertly a collective loss, nor, of course, mentioned bury that memory “without legal burying as a political crime. Indeed, in the months place” within themselves, separated from preceding Franco’s death, José Monleón the ego and unavailable to processes of as- considers the significance of a forthcoming similation (140). This “secret,” or entombed biography on Lorca entitled, García Lorca, trauma, stands as a form of what Abraham asesinado: toda la verdad, writing: and Torok call, rather fittingly for our case, “preservative repression” (140). Given the Las palabras ‘García Lorca, asesi- sustained subjection of diverse narratives nado’ se escriben por primera vez that needed to be told about Lorca’s death, en la prensa española desde que a collective encryption of this loss can be fuera, efectivamente, asesinado, hace said to evolve during the regime.19 Akin treinta y nueve años. El tema se ha conservado a medias palabras, en to Abraham and Torok’s articulations of alusiones veladas y misteriosas, como entombment and blocked mourning, the las familias conservan algunos de fact that there is “no legal burying place” sus secretos; como la familia de ‘La for Lorca’s body, either literally or meta- mordaza,’ de Alfonso Sastre. (“García phorically during the dictatorship, creates Lorca, asesinado” 21) a collective inability to assimilate that loss and, as such, it is encrypted in the collective Monleón’s terms are evocative of the collec- unconscious and lies “awaiting resurrection” tive encryption of the assassination, one that (140). The suppression of these narratives, has arguably resonated beyond public spaces the impossibility of giving voice to and of collective memory and into the private acknowledging this loss, is experienced as a arena. Exploring this gesture toward collec- traumatic erasure of memory on the collec- tive encryption, we might turn to psycho- tive level, much as was the post-regime Pacto analytic notions of encrypted memory and de silencio, as both Moreiras and Vilarós mourning as articulated by Nicolas Abra- have argued. Furthermore, this traumatic ham and Maria Torok. Rewriting Freud’s experience of erasure might also have been notion of incorporation as, instead, an repeated on the individual level, especially obstacle to mourning, they argue that incor- if we take into account Jo Labanyi’s gloss poration embodies a radical denial of loss, of William Rowe and Vivian Shelling’s that is, “the refusal to acknowledge the full observation regarding the loss of private import of the loss, a loss that, if recognized memory in post-dictatorship Argentina. as such, would effectively transform us” In other words, a cause of the traumatic (127). According to Abraham and Torok, it erasure of private memory may very well be is the impossibility of speaking of a loss for the absence of a collective space in which to some reason, the inability to acknowledge articulate memories (“History” 67). Indeed, its profundity, that leads to an entomb- as implied above in Monleón’s analogy 40 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
(“García Lorca, asesinado” 21) and as ob- traumatic moment of death as an attempt to served by Elizabeth Kolbert more recently, witness a radically-censored historical mo- the silence in the public arena regarding the ment and thus begin to elaborate a process painful and complex history of the Civil of mourning that might end with Lorca’s War and Francoism has to a great degree reincorporation into collective history and been matched by a silence in private spaces memory. This effort to testify to those events on those same topics and has surfaced in would therefore stand as a way of reversing gaps in storytelling, secrets within a family, the erasure effected by the event-without- topics that cannot be broached (69). a-witness, creating a lorquian cadaver, ac- Given the denial of collective mourn- counts of the assassination, contemporary ing rituals that might have enabled dealing witnesses to those events, and, ultimately, with both that death and its silencing, this a community of witnesses. lorquian body was kept encrypted in the Nonetheless, given the radically over- social imaginary, locked in a state akin to determined nature of García Lorca’s body Abraham and Torok’s notion of inexpress- during these years, the resonance of this ible mourning.20 When the regime’s politics testimonial project must be read as moving on Lorca slowly began to change in the beyond a rewriting of collective history. For 1960s, this corpse could be named and during this period, and naming only a few identified, but only in very limited terms, associations, Lorca is imagined as a symbol as we see in the case of Neville’s careful and/or metaphor for the self (e.g. López neutralization of the regime’s guilt in 1966 Castellón 5), for the tragedy of the Civil War (itself another form of encryption, intended and Francoism (e.g. Monleón “La muerte,” or not).21 Finally, once Lorca could be “le- Armiño “El libro”), for national trauma (e.g. gally mourned” in the aftermath of Franco’s Gibson), for individual and communal pain death, the growing pressure to understand (e.g. Arroyo), for the brutality of dictatorial that past during the first half of the decade regimes (e.g. Vargas Llosa), for thousands merely increased. Indeed, as Monleón sug- of individual victims (e.g. Monleón “La gested in 1975, this “silencio politico” (21) muerte,” “Especialistas”), for rebellion was ready to explode and might be broken against Francoism (e.g. “Nueva etapa”), for by a text that both investigated Lorca’s death a rich artistic and cultural past (e.g. “Nueva and engaged in what had been for forty etapa”), for the tragedies of twentieth cen- years “the danger of naming” (Richard 19). tury history (e.g. “Especialistas”), and for We thus return to the repeated representa- pre-Transition leftist intellectual projects tion of Lorca’s death in these early years of that revolved around a common enemy and democracy. Investigative projects, sensorial a nostalgic and utopic recuperation of the imaginings, provocative reactualizations: past (e.g. “Nueva etapa”). Clearly, this dead these divergent cultural manifestations all body is intensely cathected, and as such, coincide in an effort to remake, to see, and the insistent return to this traumatic origin to understand the event of annihilation, suggests a deeper and more complex sig- even if they are approaching it by enacting nificance than the reinscription of an erased different practices of witnessing. On one historical event (however complicated that level, then, we can read this late-dictator- process might be). That is, what has been ship and early-democratic return to the lost and cannot be effectively mourned Melissa Dinverno 41 moves beyond Lorca as an individual, as tor of collective and individual relationships a symbol of other victims, or as an erased to the past and to the present.23 Indeed, historical event. ultimately what is mourned is not simply Examining more closely the dynamic Lorca as a radically lost object (both physi- embodied in the repeated imaginings of cally killed and discursively suppressed), but Lorca’s moribund body, we might turn to the multiple drives he mediates in Spanish the work of Maurice Blanchot and Sharon society at the time.24 Once that body is ex- Patricia Holland on death. For both Blan- humed from the collective crypt, narrated, chot and Holland conceptualize the dead as and witnessed, the similarly encrypted the locus of unresolved issues of the living, cathexes it mediates on both collective and a space in which the unknown or the un- individual levels (trauma, injustice, loss, realized is located and takes shape.22 These pain, resistance, silence, etc.) may be worked mortal and epistemological saturations of through. This cadaver as a layered nexus of the body in Blanchot and Holland may, in meaning suggests, then, that the mourning a sense, deepen the impact of Peter Brooks’s of this death enacts the working through of suggestive formulation of the body as always a range of other deaths that, likewise, have “other” and his assertion that the writing of yet to be claimed and understood. the body into language is, therefore, an at- The repeated return to and historical tempt to master, to possess, to know it. The recovery of Lorca’s death is thus character- bringing of the dead body into symboliza- ized by a will to memory marked by trauma tion, then, reveals the act of representation and mourning.25 Thinking through issues even more compellingly as an emphatic of representation and the breaking of trau- attempt to make this radically unknown matic silence, Nelly Richard writes: “other” intelligible. Assuming that working through loss is grounded on understand- To speak of sensitive surfaces of ing certain unknown or unintelligible past memory reinscription means to events (LaCapra 143), these inscriptions address a scene of production of of the lorquian corpse in narrative can be languages […]. Images and words, read as essential to working through trauma forms and concepts, help to transfer and elaborating a mourning process. For the resignification of the experience to planes of legibility where the lived if as Dori Laub writes, “The testimony is materiality will become part of an inherently a process of facing loss—of going understanding of the events capable through the pain of the act of witnessing, of unveiling the knots of violence and of the ending of the act of witnessing” that existed previously as a figure (91), then the bringing of this dead body without a face or expression. (27) into symbolization and thereby testifying to its passage through death constitutes the In this sense, Lorca’s body becomes a sig- first steps of this grieving process. Therefore, nifying space, a site onto which traumatic the multiple inscriptions of this cadaver into experience can be transferred, held at a collective spaces write the body into cultural distance, and made intelligible. His body cognition, where it might not only be incor- thus functions as a cultural site that medi- porated into collective identity and memory, ates an individual and collective breaking of but also function as a cultural icon, a media- traumatic silence and the working through 42 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
of a range of losses, all of this in a way that [w]riting trauma would be one of perhaps could not be undertaken otherwise. those telling after-effects in what I The mechanism underpinning this cultural termed traumatic and post-traumatic site, then, is akin to Jean Laplanche’s notion writing (or signifying practice in of the secondary scene, in which this cadaver general). It involves processes of acting out, working over, and to functions at once as a traumatic symptom or some extent working through in symbol of a primary scene of trauma, and as analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to the a scene through which that originary trauma past—processes of coming to terms might be represented and understood. In with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit this way, my reading of the lorquian body events, and their symptomatic effects as a secondary scene of trauma is similar to that achieve articulation in different Cristina Moreiras’s insightful interpretation combinations and hybridized forms. of Juan Goytisolo’s Cuadernos de Sarajevo, (186) of which she writes: In any event, both the act of writing this Tomando como base otros tiempos, body and the resultant iconic representa- otros sucesos históricos, otros afec- tion that this signifying practice generates tos, apelan directamente a un acon- work to reconstitute entombed or erased tecimiento de su propia historia […], individual and collective voices. For if giv- a la vez enlazada intrinsecamente a la ing testimony is a process through which 26 historia colectiva […]. (181) the traumatized survivor may recuperate an inner-witnessing self and thus reclaim the Put in the most basic terms, Lorca stands ability to see and say (Laub 85), Lorca as in as a more manageable way of coming to memorial text (both in the process of being terms with other personal and collective written and as a cultural icon) facilitates a losses. Dealing with the encrypted trauma working through that might lead to a recon- of the Civil War, Francoism and a lack of a stitution of a political and ethical agency in “legal burying place” for a range of events the early years of democracy.27 and experiences, the repeated return to this lorquian corpse marks a memorial engage- Corporal Textualities ment that seeks to grasp both this death and the issues it mediates. Furthermore, in and the Politics of Reconciliation addition to the iconic function of varied representations of Lorca’s body, as we have [W]e are forever striving to make the seen, the testimonial narrative of the 70s and body into a text. early 80s and its embodiment of a layered -Peter Brooks practice of witnessing suggests that his very inscription into language may be read as In 1975, José Luis Vila-San-Juan won what Dominck LaCapra has metaphori- the Premio Espejo de España for his book cally termed “writing trauma,” for if trauma García Lorca, asesinado: toda la verdad, a text “indicates a shattering break or cesura in that seems to fit squarely in the bounds of experience which has belated effects,” then testimonial narratives that we have already Melissa Dinverno 43 analyzed. The publication of and national collective history and memory, the struggles recognition garnered by this purport- over assigning meaning to the past, present, edly investigative project, however, led to and future. a polemic in the Spanish press over just This 1975 effort to rebury a newly how this death was (finally) being inscribed depoliticized lorquian cadaver reminds us into the public sphere. The indignation and that a conservative politics of normaliza- frustration expressed by Ian Gibson and José tion began during the regime, though it Monleón, for example, took principle aim at also foretells and later dovetails with the the depoliticized body that the text created Transition’s traumatic silencing of a pain- and the claim that this book was touted as ful historical past, a pacto de silencio that a “documento definitivo” (Monleón “¿Toda cut across political affiliations. Here, then, la verdad?”), that it disclosed, in effect, we return to our original frame of the “toda la verdad.”28 Indeed, the conservative Transition’s politics of reconciliation and make-up of the award committee (which the issue of how it may have affected the included Fraga Iribarne, Areilza, Serrano cultural construction of García Lorca then Súñer, and Manuel Aznar) might have been and now. Given an overwhelming public enough to prompt suspicions about the fascination with and attempt to testify to book’s characterization of Lorca’s death, not an assassination that would seem to draw to mention Fraga Iribarne’s comment at the attention to precisely those scars that a award ceremony that “había que descubrirle politics of consensus strived to avoid, how de una vez para enterrarle de una vez” (qtd. did post-dictatorship efforts of erasure and in Monleón, “García Lorca, asesinado” 21). the resulting attempt to bury the grievous Ultimately, as Pérez Coterillo suggests when past of the Civil War and regime impact the Gibson’s 1971 history of Lorca’s assassination writing of Lorca’s body? One answer may be is finally published in Spain in 1979, Fraga’s found in what I read as a shift in the way comment and the book to which it referred this body is represented in the public sphere, were read by many as “el ultimo intento—fra- a move which seems to consolidate around casado—de desdibujar las verdaderas razones approximately 1980. That is, concurrent de aquel fusilamiento sin juicio” (33). What with efforts to testify to Lorca’s death and this polemic underscores then, is not only cadaverous presence, we find a call to move the affectively charged nature of the return to away from Lorca’s dead body and towards this assassination, but the crucial importance a collective focus on his construction as of the precise language in which this body is literary genius. On the one hand, a number written into collective spaces. That this text of editorial projects are undertaken in the and its marketing seemed to harbor a desire 1970s that would make such a change pos- to control Lorca’s body through a depoliti- sible, and publications and performances cization and immediate reburial before that provide new and wider access to Lorca’s body could be inspected and interpreted (e.g. work. Furthermore, there is a desire to get Monleón “¿Toda la verdad?”), brings us back beyond stereotypical characterizations of to the importance of the specific construction Lorca and delve into the nuances of his per- of this memorial text. For it is in the moves of sonality and the work he left, much as Jorge representation that we witness the writing of Semprún insists in 1976, writing that: 44 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
Lo simbólico, ya se sabe, si a veces El mito Lorca no es un mito circun- esclarece un momento de la vida, stanciado a una época política ni a o de la muerte, colectiva, también un asesinato. Detrás de esa panoplia puede, al convertirse en estereotipo, accidental está uno de los tres poetas […] cegar las fuentes de una cabal [sic] mayores del siglo. (“Una inter- comprensión histórica. En el caso pretación modélica”) de Lorca, la historia crítica de su muerte está hecha. […] Pero Lorca According to Armiño’s reading, Lorca is no es solo una muerte, también es revolutionary not in his politics, but in his una obra. (15) poetry. Nonetheless, and despite this call to Similarly, in 1980 Mario Vargas Llosa depoliticize Lorca’s figure and move instead harshly criticizes those who say Lorca owes to a collective concentration on his literary his fame to his death, and, while acknowl- work, what can be traced at this moment edging the assassination, he focuses on and in public spaces is a strange conflation of vindicates the writer’s work. I would argue, body and text. In other words, inscriptions however, that a more significant shift toward of Lorca in public sites increasingly reflect his literary work occurs precisely due to the what Peter Brooks would call a simultaneous articulations of Lorca embodied in some somaticization of the text and semioticiza- of the first major editions published dur- tion of the body. Returning to early reviews ing the post-dicatorship, particularly those of these 1980 editions, for example, we find by Lorca scholars Mario Hernández and that Ian Gibson is interested not in the liter- Miguel García Posada. These texts are akin ary text (ostensibly the point of the review to Vargas Llosa’s defense of the poet’s work, of an edition), but in “[e]l Lorca que emerge for as Florencio Martínez Ruíz notes in his de estas páginas.” Envisioning Lorca’s work 1980 review of García Posada’s edition: (editions, plays, critical studies) as impor- tant insofar as it materializes Lorca’s person, se le sitúa en unas coordenadas es- Gibson seems to suggest that the work can trictamente literarias. Del hombre mitificado, exaltado, idealizado y produce the body, inviting us to reconsider hasta calumniado, se nos pasa la se- both the dominant placement of a large cuencia cordial de una criatura llena photograph of Lorca in the center of the de gracia […] que hizo de su vida una article, and the implications of the review’s vocación permanente de comuni- title. For a second reading of “Una nueva y cación estética y vital. (“Lorca, para excelente edición de Lorca,” cannot fail to lectores de todos los días”) note the implication that person and text are semiotically interchangeable, and indeed, These editorial inscriptions of Lorca con- for Gibson, what is begotten by García struct him in literary terms and move atten- Posada (or by Aguilar, which, he notes sig- tion away from the politics of the cadaver nificantly, “acaba de parir” a new edition) and toward the aesthetics of his work.29 is a new “Lorca,” a body that can be read Certainly, it is precisely this textual focus through the text. Likewise, Martínez Ruíz that prompts Mauro Armiño to stress in also praises García Posada’s edition and the 1982 that: image of Lorca it creates, noting that “Los Melissa Dinverno 45 rasgos de su personalidad parecen unificar the Diputación de Granada’s original plans en una sola persona vida y literatura,” and to designate the Huerta de San Vicente as thus wrapping body and text in a double-he- both the house where Lorca once lived and lix of identity. Mauro Armiño’s 1982 review the site to keep his archive, the Casa-Museo of another of García Posada’s Akal editions in Fuente Vaqueros, the Fundación de underscores this intimate corpus/cuerpo con- Federico García Lorca, and the Residencia nection and further ties it to the nation: “la de Estudiantes). Manifestations of this cor- obra del poeta que encarnó, con su vida y pus/cuerpo often involve slippages between su obra, el destino trágico de una España en the two, as in the 1993 article that makes trance de matarse a si misma” (“El libro de la it seem that Lorca, not his texts, is appar- semana”). What we find, then, is that even ently living in a space within the CSIC within this very effort to depoliticize Lorca (Recio). Furthermore, within discussions to some degree and shift his cultural inscrip- of memorial sites such as archives and tion from political symbol to literary genius, editorial projects, the text itself is saturated the result is a conceptual and linguistic with corporal metaphors: it is repeatedly merging of body and work. Instead of sim- represented as fluids, bones, stumps, voice, ply reshaping the way Lorca is written into breath, born, and resurrected.30 Indeed, public discourse by enacting a clean move Luis Fernández-Cifuentes has argued that from his cadaver to his textuality, some Gibson’s historiographic work incessantly kind of political residue haunts the text. In constructs a life-work equivalence, one that effect, these attempts to politically neutral- Paul Julian Smith has more recently com- ize Lorca’s cultural construction coincide mented as simply one of the fundamental with a heightened preoccupation with the elements of contemporary constructions smooth interchangeability of cuerpo/corpus. of Lorca. The body is not displaced by the text, but Although it is made possible by a series commingled with it. of material factors and responds to diverse It may be unsurprising, then, that projects, I propose that this literary turn in the effort to memorialize García Lorca in the public inscription of Lorca’s figure and Spanish culture since the 1980s has taken the resultant creation of a corporal textual- place within a framework where corporality ity has much to say about the formulation is crucial, where text and body meld, sug- of Lorca as a memorial text and his iconic gesting the connection with and the potency use in the labors of mourning. That is, the of this burgeoning shift in the late 70s and increasing entanglement of corporality and early 80s. In addition to repeated verbal textuality coincides with growing social and representations of this yoking and even political pressure in Spain to work within a intermingling of life and work (his “figura politics of reconciliation. For we recall that y obra adquieren de nuevo una palpitante this push to depoliticize Lorca’s body occurs actualidad” [“El legado”]), lorquian archives simultaneous to a collective preoccupation are often envisioned in corporal metaphors with witnessing his assassination and work- (e.g. “Sorpresa en Granada”), and other ing through its profound cultural, political, memorial spaces such as “casa-museos” are social, and personal implications. In other organized according to a conceptual and words, while there is some pressure to move practical unification of life and text (e.g. towards writing this figure from aesthetic 46 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies angles and thereby neutralize or downplay space through which the wounds of the past his political legacy, unfinished mourning might be confronted. work nonetheless continues to haunt this dead body, perhaps in no small part because some would have this cadaver exhumed Raising the Dead: only to be immediately encrypted more Lorca, Memory and Mourning deeply in the collective unconscious. We might read the somaticization of Lorca’s text Ultimately, Spain’s politics of recon- and the semioticization of his body, then, ciliation certainly affected the use of Lorca as an outcome of the encounter between in retribution—focused politics, in elaborat- unresolved mourning and the increasing ing a politics of working through the past consolidation of a politics of consensus, through affective engagements, and in the one that required a guarantee, as Gregorio cultural forms through which the mourning Morán observes, “que nadie pudiera utilizar of his death and its symbolic meaning were el pasado para desentrañar el presente” (87). processed. In this sense, the Pacto de silencio Given the potentially disruptive nature stands as a political, social and economic of depictions of Lorca’s victimized corpse force crucial to the critical construction of within this context, the body is grafted onto García Lorca and future discussions of his the text, the text is seen in terms of corporal cultural weight and meanings. Witnessing metaphors, and the work of mourning now the narrative of trauma, mourning and continues via the additional terrain, or the survival that is unwittingly within memo- even more intensely cathected terrain, of rial narratives on Lorca during this period, textuality. In this way, the imagined cor- we are invited to reexamine his production poral textualities become memorial sites as a cultural icon in different mediums and with equal or even greater potency than across periods. In this light, for example, the imagined body had in isolation. For the scholarly concentration on death as ultimately, this reinvigorated focus on Lorca a theme or foreshadowed fate in Lorca’s as a literary genius results in the creation of work might instead be reevaluated as per- a literary corpus which can stand in for the haps embodying what LaCapra would call body, thus producing a material existence a transferential reading (142), suggesting for a desaparecido and providing the reader that the often-cited lorquian obsession with with a body to mourn. Moreover, given fatality owes its existence in no small part literature’s polysemic quality, this fusion to Lorca’s readers and their needs as they of body/text makes it possible for readers relate to loss. Furthermore, imagining the to continually locate new relationships to body/text as a potentially incommensurate the past, and therefore, new understand- interpretative space might also help explain ings of both Lorca and the present. In this the continued cultural importance that Lorca sense, Lorca’s iconic function as we have claims in post-dictatorship Spain: the text envisioned it here is not lost—he continues can be continually reshaped for divergent to operate as a technology of memory and ends (whether related to mourning or not). in the same way; however, he becomes at Similarly, the labors of mourning wrapped once a more complex secondary scene and up in the memorializing project that Lorca a potentially incommensurate transferential mediates remind us of the potential resilience Melissa Dinverno 47
of the will to memory and the inability of a this assumption that has stirred the debate in- politics of oblivion to entirely obliterate the volving the disinterment of Lorca’s body. 2 difficult past, as here, the lorquian memo- See Soria Olmedo, Prado, and Labari, for example. rial text is made to persist, shape-shifting 3 under different pressures, but surfacing See, for example, Labanyi, Morán, Moreiras-Menor, Navarro, Resina, Subirats, and nonetheless. In this sense, and particularly Vilarós regarding the Transition’s Pacto de silencio in a situation where a politics of reconcili- and its profound implications. In particular, ation continues to evacuate memorial sites Moreiras-Menor and Vilarós assert that this at- of affective engagements and simply pay tempted collective erasure of a grievous history lip service to the persistent presence of resulted in the traumatic encryption of that past the traumatic past, it may ultimately turn and of the attempt to deal with the wounds of out to be unsurprising that this emotion- the Civil War and Francoism. It is within both ally-charged cadaver repeatedly resurfaces this understanding of the post-dictatorship and as a site through which an encrypted past the Franco regime’s own traumatic silencing of might be witnessed. For as Sharon Patricia the historical past that I am reading the cultural construction of Lorca. Holland observes, the dead both embody 4 It has been noted that this life/literature our own unknowns and “acknowledge no bond owes something to the fact that many of borders” (19). Writing on the potential rais- the first to write about Lorca’s life were literary ing of Lorca’s body from the mass grave at critics (e.g. Monleón “La muerte” 25). I agree Víznar, Nuria Labari notes that “pese a que this is part of the larger picture, as is the fact nadie tiene ningún interés en desenterrar al that historians (particularly Gibson) sought poeta éste sigue empeñado en ver de nuevo biographical data in Lorca’s literary work. My la luz.” Showing a resilient and “outrageous reading, however, implies a broader way of un- disrespect for boundaries” (Holland 18), derstanding even those earlier inscriptions, while this ignored lorquian body is again surfac- it both posits and seeks to explain why there is an intensification and fusion of this body/text ing subversively to provide another space binary during the Transition. for confronting the past. But particularly 5 I understand cultural memory similar to in the event that this cadaver embodies an critics such as Oren Stier and Marita Sturken. encrypted and improperly buried past, this Sturken writes, ghostly presence will surely continue to both Cultural memory is produced haunt Spanish culture and mediate new through objects, images, and repre- articulations of cultural memory. sentations. These are technologies of memory, not vessels of memory in which memory passively resides Notes so much as objects through which 1 Francisco Galadí, the grandson of the memories are shared, produced, and banderillero thought to have been killed with given meaning. (9) Lorca, notes that: I thus assume that the relationship between El que mi abuelo comparta fosa con individual and collective memory is one of en- Lorca es sin duda la razón por la que tanglement and that the production of memory hemos podido encontrarlo y por eso is a site of interpretational struggle. celebro la casualidad […]. (Labari) 6 Lorca’s cultural construction depends on a The recuperation of his grandfather has only range of social, economic, political and cultural been possible because Lorca’s remains have issues (e.g. sexuality, exile and diaspora, moder- marked the alleged place of burial; it is precisely nity). I focus here only on death, trauma and 48 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies mourning as one major area of that construction. aspect of a range of cultural texts during this Within that, I begin to set up a dynamic in which period. Some of the most important concepts we can read a wide range of representations of for this analysis are primary witness, secondary Lorca. Though I at times explicitly consider texts witness, belated witness, and the impossible in the politics of their venues, I emphasize this witness of the event-without-a-witness. less due to the constraints of an essay and as I 11 See, for example, “Introducción a la muerte attempt to identify a broad-based framework de Federico García Lorca” (interview with Rosales) that includes politically-opposed texts. (1972), “La muerte de García Lorca. Exhumación 7 On trauma, see Caruth (esp. 91-92, de un crímen” (1975), “Los últimos días de Fed- 135-36) and Erikson (esp. 183-90). I work erico García Lorca: El testimonio de Angelina” with psychoanalytic notions of mourning as (1975), “Los últimos días de García Lorca: Luis a process by which a subject recovers libidinal Rosales aclara su actuación y la de su familia” investments associated with a lost object and (1979), and “Casi toda la verdad” (1979). There gains distance from that prior fixation (see esp. are literary and filmic representations of the same Freud; Abraham and Torok). See also LaCapra type of investigative project, a detectivesque nar- on “working through”: rative that seeks to solve a series of enigmas and the person tries to gain critical discover the truth regarding Lorca’s death, one distance on a problem and to example of which would be Jaime Chávarri’s A distinguish between past, present, un dios desconocido (1977). Regarding “primary and future. […] [E]specially in an witness” see Felman and Laub. This generally ethical sense, working through does refers to a person who experienced first-hand not mean avoidance, harmoniza- the traumatic event, while “secondary witness” tion, simply forgetting the past, or denotes an individual who helps make sense of submerging oneself in the present. the primary witness’s testimony, the person that It means coming to terms with the “begets, the truth, through the speech process trauma […] and critically engaging of the testimony” (16). the tendency to act out the past 12 Despite the fact that these are different […]. (143-44) types of witnesses, for this discussion I include The labor of mourning requires “working those who witnessed something first-hand and through the painful memories and recollections those who experience a kind of postmemory instead of reliving them and acting them out” (Hirsch 8), particularly since the itineraries by (Jehlin 6). second-generation writers both imagine a reliv- 8 See Gibson’s “La muerte” (1975) and ing of the past and often include interviews of El asesinato for more on this text’s troubled primary witnesses. publication history. His effort follows a prior 13 See footnote 11 regarding “secondary detectivesque project, that of Agustín Penón, witness.” whose work was finally published posthumously 14 To help make this testimony intelligible, by Gibson in 1990 as Diario de una búsqueda the listener must witness the victim’s difficult pro- lorquiana (1955-1956). cess and his own present empathetic engagement 9 To get a broad sense of the avalanche of with the victim’s memories (Laub 57-58). texts written on Lorca’s death in the 70s and 80s, 15 See Felman (esp. 224-40) regarding an at- see, for example, Gibson’s most revised bibliog- tempt to testify from inside otherness, an impos- raphy on this topic (El asesinato 381-84). sible witness to the event-without-a-witness. 10 In the following discussion, I use primar- 16 The Spanish premiére took place in ily concepts of witnessing and testimony as Madrid in 1979. See Pérez Coterillo “Cuando articulated by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub el teatro” for more on Rial himself and on the in Testimony in order to reveal the testimonial difficulties he faced in producing this in Spain. Melissa Dinverno 49
17 Rumors continue to circulate that not may denote an inability or refusal to mourn the long after Lorca’s murder, authorities exhumed lost object, or even more generally as the result and moved the body to another site, suggesting of an inexpressible grief. At the same time, this a fear of both the stories this body might wit- term may be more limiting than not. The more ness and the power people might derive from it. technical notion of melancholy suggested by According to yet other rumors, Lorca was not Abraham and Torok holds that the melancholic buried in Víznar at all, but near a neighboring subject comes into being not via the creation of town. See, for example, Kolbert 75. the crypt (created out of an inexpressible mourn- 18 Similar to Felman’s concept of “methodi- ing, for example), but via an identification with cal deafness” is that of “percepticide,” articulated the lost object in order to protect the crypt, for by Diana Taylor in Disappearing Acts (1997). “as long as the crypt holds, there is no melan- For examples of such a methodical deafness or cholia” (136). As Idelbar Avelar rightly notes, percepticide, note Neville’s observation when he according to Abraham and Torok, tries to gain information from people in Víznar: Melancholia thus emerges as a reac- “Nadie sabe nada: los jóvenes, porque no habían tion against a threat to the protective nacido; los viejos, porque aún les dura ese miedo crypt, because the subject begins to a comprometerse […].” In “Exhumación de un identify with the love object as a way crimen,” José Monleón also comments on his of protecting him/her from the pos- experiences in FuenteVaqueros and Granada: sibility of being mourned. (9) un vecino, que nos vio con la cámara According to this definition, then, melancholic fotográfica y sospechó nuestro ofi- identification is only one possible modality of cio, nos dijo que al escritor lo habían the intrapsychic crypt and endocryptic identi- fusilado en Málaga, que la culpa la fication, and therefore may be only one path to tenía la familia y que, dentro de a more complex understanding of the dynamics muy poco, iba a levantarse un gran of mourning, loss, and encryption in Spanish monumento a Federico en la plaza society at this time. (See Abraham and Torok, más cercana. […] Aquí mismo, en esp. 130-136, 140-142.) Granada, es fácil descubrir el gesto 21 At what is still a complicated moment in Span- evasivo si habláis de Federico ante ish history, Neville carefully depoliticizes the crime: gente desconocida. Como si el tema A esta distancia nadie podrá creer pudiera postergarse eternamente; que pretendemos atacar a un régi- como si no fuera nuestro, doloro- men que como tal, no tuvo la culpa samente nuestro, y necesitáramos del drama. […] A Federico lo mató a los franceses o a los ingleses para el desorden de los primeros mo- esclarecerlo. (25) mentos, cuando los malvados de In these articles, encryption takes shape through cada campo aprovecharon el barullo silence, through rewritings of the past in a way para saciar su instinto y vengarse de that avoids the painfully known facts, and sus enemigos o del éxito ajeno. Fue through evasion and delay. Finally, regarding un crimen pueblerino, asi se puede Monleón’s last comment, it is worth noting that decir que personal […]. many of the efforts to “exhume” Lorca indeed 22 See especially Blanchot 257 and Ho-lland 19. were undertaken by foreign scholars. I am study- 23 See Stier’s articulation of “icon” as an ing this in a related project within the context of “embodied memorial representation” (33) which exile, repatriation and national identity. marks a path “through the icon to memory to 19 See prior note regarding encryption. discover our relationships to the past” (47). 20 This can be described as a melancholic Thus, a major characteristic of the icon is that it state in the broad sense that it stands as an ob- facilitates an individual or collective engagement stacle to mourning, that is, insofar as melancholy with the past. 50 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
24 As Torok notes, Avelar, Idelbar. The Untimely Present. Postdictato- it is not at all a matter of ‘introject- rial Latin American Fiction and the Task of ing’ the object, as is all too com- Mourning. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. monly stated, but of introjecting Blanchot, Maurice. “The Two Versions of the the sum total of the drives, and their Imaginary.” The Space of Literature. Trans. vicissitudes as occasioned and medi- Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, ated by the object. (113) 1982. 25 On two forms of the will to memory Brooks, Peter. Body Work. Objects of Desire in (identity and trauma), see Eyal. Modern Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard 26 See especially Moreiras 170. UP, 1993. 27 Regarding working through and both Caballero, José. “Cincuenta años del asesinato political and ethical agency, see LaCapra 144. de Lorca.” Los Domingos de ABC 17 Aug. 28 See Gibson (“La muerte”), Monleón (“Gar- 1986: Cover. cía Lorca,” “¿Toda la verdad?”) and Pérez Coterillo ———. “Lorca, Sonetos de amor.” Los Domingos “Casi toda la verdad.” Part of the irony of Vila- de ABC 24 Mar. 1985: Cover. San-Juan’s 1975 publication and definitive truth Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experiences: Trauma, claim is the fact that Gibson’s 1971 history of Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Lorca’s death was censored in Spain until 1979. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. 29 This is not to criticize the politics of “El Congreso acuerda una condena unánime al fran- these editions. Indeed, concentrating on Lorca’s quismo y un reconocimiento a sus víctimas.” El literary work was regarded by many as a way of Mundo 20 Nov. 2002. 20 Nov. 2002
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” or, Theorizing Culture in Modern Spain.” Collected Papers. Vol 4. London: Hogarth Constructing Identity in Contemporary Press, 1967. Spain. Theoretical Debates and Cultural Gibson, Ian. El asesinato de García Lorca. Bar- Practice. Ed. Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Oxford celona: Plaza y Janés, 1996. UP, 2002. 1-14. ———. “La muerte de García Lorca. Carta abi- ———. “Rescuing the Living Dead from the erta a José Luis Vila-San-Juan por su libro Dustbin of History: Popular Memory and ‘García Lorca, asesinado: toda la verdad.’” Postwar Trauma in Contemporary Spanish Triunfo. 31 May 1975: 38-39. Film and Fiction.” Occasional Papers Series. ———. La represión nacionalista de Granada en 25 Bristol: University of Bristol Depart- 1936 y la muerte de Federico García Lorca. ment of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1971. American Studies, 1998. 1-19. ———. “Los últimos días de García Lorca: Labari, Nuria. “El laberinto lorquiano. La familia Luis Rosales aclara su actuación y la de su de Lorca se manifiesta contraria a la exhu- familia.” Triunfo 24 Feb. 1979: 40-43. mación de los restos del poeta.” El Mundo 11 ———. “Una nueva y excelente edición de Lor- Sept. 2003. 11 Sept. 2003
Navarro, Vicenç. “Los costes de la desmemoria his- Semprún, Jorge. “Símbolo y crítica.” El País 19 tórica.” Editorial. El País 16 June 2001, Edi- Aug. 1976: 15. ción Impresa, Opinión. 16 June 2001