Sailor Symbolism

In her book Lorca: The Drawings and Their Relation to the Poet’s Life and Work, Helen Oppenheimer analyzes the figure of the sailor in Lorca’s drawings and writing within the context of his work dealing with the nature of identity that emerged during the years of his close friendship with Dalí. While her reading of this symbolic character is useful to understanding the role of the sailor in our play, it is by no means the only interpretation and our play in many ways contradicts or challenges the ideas presented in this book.

The sailor is primarily a symbol of sexual freedom both as it relates to love and passion as well as creative freedom that Lorca saw as intertwined with sexual expression. Often the word “amor” appears in the picture with the sailor and he might be given wings to illustrate his association with flight and freedom. However, the sailor does not represent an attainable love, but one that is anticipatory. He occupies an abstract rather than a realistic life, and rather than a participant in life he is isolated from it. Although the sailor is exiled like the gypsy, his exile is by choice.

As an object of love in Lorca’s work, the sailor represents an unattainable ideal of love within the realm of dreams rather than reality. He is the object of a frustrated love, love “as it should be, but never as it is” (55). The sailor hails from a “dream-world of constant expectation,” and the flowers that often grow from his otherwise empty eyes or mouth symbolize a dream-like longing for a past or future happiness.

Lorca in Cadaqués visiting Salvador Dalí, 1927

Here, Lorca felt the most happy and closest to his own unattainable love for Dalí.

Despite his lofty associations with dreams and unattainable desires, the sailor is also an emblem of sexuality and passion, often appearing as an amorous lover. The drunken sailor or the sailor appearing from within a tomb is thus a symbol of a fatal passion that leads to death and demise.

Lorca, Sueño del marino, 1927

Lorca with Pablo Neruda and other friends dressed up as sailors in Buenos Aires, 1934

Buster Keaton out to sea in The Navigator

Some questions to consider…

How does this interpretation of the sailor relate to or differ from the Sailor in Barbarous Nights? What is the importance of the Sailor’s isolation from society in our play? How does the Sailor’s relationship with dreams and dreaming relate to the surrealist qualities of our play? Does the Maiden ever attain the unattainable love embodied by her Sailor? How does this symbolism surrounding the Sailor relate to issues of gender and identity in the play and in Lorca’s work in general?

Works Cited:

Oppenheimer, Helen. Lorca: The Drawings and Their Relation to the Poet’s Life and Work. New York, NY: Franklin Watts. 1987. Print.

Lorca's Drawings

It is no wonder that Lorca was a visual artist as well considering the vivid images that saturate his writing. While he began by doodling caricatures of his professors and friends at school in Granada, Lorca continued to draw throughout his life, both exploring new ideas and illustrating his own plays and poems. Most of his drawings come several distinct periods in his life, including the times surrounding his friendship with Dalí, while Lorca was studying and writing in New York, and later while in Buenos Aires, where he spent a great deal of time drawing rather than writing and even worked on illustrations for Pablo Neruda (Stainton 342). In 1926, Lorca even exhibited his art work at the Dalman Galleries in Barcelona with the help of Dalí and his friend the critic Sebastía Gasch, and his drawings were published in the newspapers and in his own magazine, gallo, throughout his career (Cuitiño 51, Stainton).

The following is a selection of drawings and paintings made by Lorca. While they are not necessarily illustrations, they demonstrate the way in which Lorca was thinking about particular themes, symbols and recurring motifs in both language and line, and help us to better understand the images and feelings that are expressed in his writing.

Danza macabra

Falling Mask

Face with arrows

Face with arrows

La Guitarra, carpet

Signature, Poet in New York

Sueno del marino, 1927

The eye

Venetian harlequin

Spanish Dancer

Solo la muerte

Soledad Montoya

Severed Hands

Self Portrait of the Poet in New York

San Sebastian, 1927

Lorca's Sailors:

Music and mask

Mask

Mask, figure and tomb

Mask with black animal

Mask with animal

Amor

Leyenda de Jerez

Lemons

La mujer del abanico

Costume for Leonarda

Clown Mask

Bosque sexual, 1933