El duende lorquianode hallazgo poético a lugar común flamenco

Resumen

ABSTRACT Amongst the many existing interpretations of García Lorca’s lecture “Juego y teoría del duende” (Buenos Aires, 1933), the two most frequently encountered are the artistic-literary and the flamencological. Both have often been egotistic and dismissive of other findings, thus hindering a truly interdisciplinary approach to the matter. This lecture stands out amongst other texts by Lorca for its association of artistic creation and flamenco; it describes an unexplored circular journey—from flamenco to flamenco—, and its aesthetic power, flamenco’s appropriation of it, as well as the poet’s posthumous fame, have all contributed to the lecture enjoying success both in its reception and in its reproduction. Furthermore, Lorca’s usual creative process (his insights, whether personal or borrowed; his hyperbole; his poetization) has brought about a great deal of confusion between the real and the figurative, which I have deemed necessary to clarify. My research has been motivated by these shortcomings as much as by the need to review the original documents. Lorca begins his lecture emphatically by claiming that the term duende and the expression tener duende are widespread in the Spanish-speaking world, and offers a number of examples of its use by flamenco artists. However, lexical and semantic research shows that in 1933 the ancient Castilian word did not carry the sense the poet introduced. His duende is a poetic coinage, a neologism that has not been recognized as such historically, and so, without questioning its degree of veracity, Lorca’s radically new meaning of the word duende has been taken as if it were corroborated, popular and widespread. In order to frame the term historically I compare it with three more aesthetic neologisms coined by writers in the first third of the 20th century, i.e. greguería, esperpento and nivola, and, in tune with José Bergamín’s thoughts on disparate, I suggest that a more precise definition of duende in Lorca’s neological sense could be included in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española. My analysis of newspaper resources has helped to uncover a use of duende prior to Lorca’s in the field of flamenco, coined in the 1920s and probably derived from the jargon used by artists from lower Andalusia. The word is abundantly mentioned in articles and reviews written by the Sevillian journalist Galerín. Lorca could have had easy access to it though this columnist, who travelled as a reporter to Granada in 1922, or through artists who performed between Sevilla and Cádiz (Manuel Torre, la Malena, Rafael Ortega, etc.). He either misunderstood or manipulated the term for his own purposes. Reviewing the Lorca manuscript and its typescript has led me to make important reinterpretations and finds: identifying the “real” Floridas; inquiring into the figure of Elvira la Caliente or Murube; coining of the disdainful exclamation “¡Viva París!”; recovering relevant pentimenti; determining the meaning of obscure terms, and so forth. A chapter is devoted to analysing the anecdote that takes place in a tavern in Cádiz with La Niña de los Peines at its centre. I consider this the most important and most reproduced narrative work in flamenco literature, as well as the origins of a narrative subgenre of sorts: that of the stories of enduendamiento, an important corpus which is examined in this chapter. The thesis also considers the crucial importance of the poorly researched and often underestimated creative trio composed of Lorca, Argentinita and Sánchez Mejías, on the one hand for bringing forth a number of artistic novelties and, on the other, for their mutual influence regarding the lecture at hand: echoes of the talk that Sánchez Mejías gave in New York, “El pase de la muerte”, can be heard throughout “Juego y teoría...” as well as through most of Lorca’s bullfighting-related work. The bullfighter-writer and the dancer-singer are, in our view, key to Lorca’s immersion in the world of flamenco juergas and bullfighting. The thesis goes on to examine the duende as a metaphor via the contrast with the meticulous allegories of the muse and the angel, with an added component of animation and personification, aided by a bichrome palette composed essentially of red and black. Finally, the thesis identifies and analyses what I consider the twelve essential vestments (metaphors, disguises...) of the duende according to flamenco literature, i.e. purity, gitanería, antiquity, ruin, the beauty of the ugly, non-musicality, jondura, greatness, truth, mystique, rajo and pellizco. To conclude, I examine the opinion of those who hold dissenting views about or have grown weary of duende and duendismo, I survey how the famous spirit of Lorca has become a cliché and how it is periodically recycled, and I propose that a new critical edition of the lecture be published, based on the renowned editions by Maurer and García-Posada and including the findings of the present thesis.