Lorca After Life by Noël Valis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lorca After Life by Noël Valis Elizabeth Scarlett Valis, Noël. Lorca After Life. Yale University Press, 2022. 439 pp. ISBN 978-0300257861. Upon hearing that his friend Federico had been assassinated by Nationalists in Granada, Salvador Dalí stated that he exclaimed, "Olé!" A reaction that at first appears incongruous in the Surrealist manner encloses a truth—that the poet had capped his literary career with the perfect conclusion. Valis shows in this book that this conclusion essentially was not one. The relevance of his tragic death to the interpretation of his work and to his popularity is one of multiple themes in Valis's book on Federico García Lorca's afterlife in poetry and culture, centering on his figure as a victim of political and homophobic violence, as the subject of an enduring mystery concerning the fate of his remains, as a poet of the people, a celebrity, and a gay poet/icon. Part of the premise is that the mark of Lorca on successive poets is more subtle and complex than a standard concept of influence can explain. It also brilliantly explores how his poetry emerged from a fertile context concerning gender and sexuality differences from less canonical sources. Along the way, the book delivers dramatic insights into adjacent or related writers from José Zorrilla and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer to Walt Whitman to Antonio Machado to Rafael Alberti to Francisco Ayala and on to living poets like Jaime Manrique. The line of inquiry is enhanced throughout by grace, eloquence, and ironic reflection as well as a judicious selection of images. "Why Dead Poets Matter," deals with Lorca's status as one of a small group of poets often considered to be "national poets" or proclaimed as "el Poeta" at some point in history. It analyzes how Zorrilla and Bécquer have been memorialized, as authors who vied for this status in the previous century. In tandem, it relates the attempts at constructing a tangible pantheon in Madrid to gather the tombs of representative authors and other figures. Valis asserts that because of his "symbolic importance as the voice of the marginalized and oppressed" and other cultural roles, "Lorca can be considered as probably the last national poet of Spain, a civic presence echoing a much longer, contentious history of national issues of identity and consensus that continue to be worked out on the public stage" (68). [End Page 139] "Lorca's Grave" contemplates the legendary controversy over the author's murder and the location of his earthly remains. The points where his poetry becomes oracular in retrospect over his premature and violent death and disappearance are provocatively collated with his mythification and the ongoing unresolved theories of the exact circumstances of his execution and whereabouts of his resting place. The third chapter continues in this vein, examining claims on his martyr status from the Left (starting with Antonio Machado's elegy "El crimen fue en Granada") and—with far less basis—from the Right (Luis Hurtado). Light is cast on the apparent contradiction of a person whose background matched the stereotype of the señorito (spoiled, idle rich young man) coming to represent the (common) people, with comparison and contrast to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, another figure perceived to embody tensions of social class and popularity. Roy Campbell's conflictive manipulations of Lorca are brought to bear, as well as the Falangist painter Alfonso Ponce de León's haunting self-portrait as an accident victim. All of this leads Valis to conclude that "There was never a clear understanding of what pueblo meant and attempts to limit it to specific social categories run up against an idealizing counter tendency to romanticize the pueblo because pueblo is not a neutral term, so closely associated is it to the idea of nation." (152) The three chapters constituting Part Two of Lorca After Life are united by highlighting the role of sexuality in the poet's afterlife. That a man who was not completely open in living his orientation should wind up representing gayness is repeatedly alluded to, as Lorca's life, work, and projection into global culture are analyzed. First, the consequences of...