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.

The Meaning Behind the Mask in Lorca

Although the mask is a central motif throughout Lorca’s poetry, plays and drawings, its meaning is in no way clear. Why was Lorca so interested in masks? What do masks mean in Lorca’s work? Are they always symbolic? How does the mask relate to what Lorca was trying to do with his art overall?

Lorca, Mask

First, the mask is a key symbol that appears in Lorca’s drawings as an objectie representation of his notion of dual identity, or the mask that stands for one’s “social self” that conceals the “solitude behind” (Oppenheimer 50). For example, Lorca’s drawings often explore the image of the clown wearing a comic mask that falls away to reveal a different underneath. For Lorca, the clown mask was about the comic face that people are forced to wear “to face the world,” with Buster Keaton as the quintessential “tragic clown” (Oppenheimer 50). Lorca’s representations of the mask underscore the influence that the work of surrealist and cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and, of course, Salvador Dalí, had upon his drawings. His masked faces are often cubist in nature, revealing multiple and shifting perspectives, and exhibit his characteristic “involuntary style” that moved away from conventional representation without becoming complete abstraction (Oppenheimer 71).

Lorca, Falling Mask

Lorca, Face with Arrows

Lorca, Portrait of the Poet in New York

One of Lorca’s most famous mask drawings is his Self-Portrait of the poet in New York in which Lorca shows himself as a mask at the center of a New York landscape, surrounded by skyscrapers, strange black animals, and decaying plants. Just like his collection of poetry written during his stay in New York City that he believed should have been titled “New York in the poet,” Lorca is grappling with the issue of self-identity in a modern world, drawing a parallel between his own feelings of being “uprooted” from his homeland and the struggle of the African American community in New York. Whether the mask is a façade determined by the individual or forced upon him by society, Lorca understood the mask primarily as a symbol of a repressed interior identity.

Lorca, Music and Mask

Lorca, Clown Mask

Lorca, Mask with Animal

However, the mask also brings with it a number of other cultural associations that surely Lorca and his readers would have recognized and understood. While the most immediate association with the mask for theatre students is commedia dell’arte, I am going to focus on exploring the mask in regards to Spanish Carnival traditions and the rise of modern portrait painting in the early 20th century.

Carnival Masks

Carnival is a ritual festival that celebrates both the coming and spring and the beginning of Lent, gaining this latter Catholic definition in the 15th century when Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon conquered Spain from the Moors and introduced Christianity. Its festivities traditionally fall on the Tuesday before Lent, but it is also traditionally celebrated in Spain over the preceding weekend beginning on Friday with a traditional processional of floats and masqueraders. While it became a popular form of lowbrow entertainment during the 18th century, today it remains rooted in rural tradition. Since the Golden Age of Spanish literature, carnival has been closely associated with the genres of farce and satire, serving as a ritualized form of social critique and ridicule. Over the centuries Carnival has frequently been banned or regulated by the authorities that feared social unrest fostered by Carnival’s topsy-turvy spirit that challenges those in power. The masks worn during Carnival were considered especially dangerous because of their anonymous quality that allowed for crime, protest, and generally bad behavior. In 1937, Franco placed a ban on masquerade and festivals throughout Spain, demonstrating the political implications of Carnival as a symbol of the power possessed by the people themselves and the spirit of subversion, disorder and defiance embodied by the mask (Regalado).

Morena, or cow, mask for Carnival

Masks and the Modern Portrait

The mask is also a tool of modernist portrait painting that developed during the early 20th century and dominated the European art world of Lorca’s lifetime. In painting, modernist art sought to challenge traditional European representational or “realistic” art by instead expressing an essentially “existentialist vision” of the instability and hyper-fragmentation of the human identity as these artists of the historical avant-garde saw it (Serraller 7). Many of these modernist painters like Pablo Picasso were drawn to “primitive” tribal masks because of the unconventional, non-western facial representations that they offered (Klein 31).

Matisse, Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1912-13

Picasso, Mask of a Woman, 1908

Lorca, Portrait of Dalí.

Joan Miró, Portrait of Madame K., 1924

Modernist painters seized upon the mask as a “strategy” for mediating between the artist and their subject because of its transformative properties (Klein 27). Rather than using the mask strictly as a means of concealing or revealing an interior individual identity with an exterior social one, modernist portrait artists saw the mask as a tool for performance and used it to seek the liminal space as defined by the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner between two clearly defined states of being where new identities are formed (Klein 28). The portrait’s subject was not simply the face beneath the mask in the painting but the mask-like identity presented by the portrait itself with no suggestion of a different face hidden beneath. The portrait was no longer a static representation of the individual, but a “bricolage” of face with mask as the portrait shifted between the subjectivity of the artist and that of the model to show multiple perspectives, periods of time, or identities (Klein 33). Just as traces of the Surrealist, Cubist and Expressionist art movements can be found throughout Lorca’s work, this same understanding of the relationship between the mask and identity exists in Lorca’s own artwork with his own highly non-representational drawing style. In his self-portrait in New York, for example, are we looking at the poet or his mask, or has he become his mask? While the mask is certainly a symbol of dual identity in Lorca’s work, it also challenges this concept of identity within the context of modernist portrait painting in which the mask creates a new identity that is not necessarily an oppressive social force upon the individual.

Egon Shiele, Self-Portrait, 1912

Kathe Kollwitz, Lament or Self-Portrait, 1938

Dalí, Self-Portrait, 1921-22

Dalí, Cubist Self-Portrait, 1923

Dalí, Self-Portrait, 1941

Frida Khalo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940

A portrait of Lorca by Dalí

Works Cited:

Klein, John. “The Mask as Image and Strategy.” The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso. Alarco, Paloma and Malcolm Warner. Yale University Press. 2007. Print.

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

Regalado, Mariana. “Entroida in Spain.” Carnaval! Ed. Barbara Mauldin. University of Washington Press. 2004. Print.

Serraller, Francisco Calvo. “The Spirit Behind the Mask.” The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso. Alarco, Paloma and Malcolm Warner. Yale University Press. 2007. Print.

Verde

Like any image that appears in Lorca's writing, the color verde is not a fixed symbol but rather a constellation of meanings, many of them anithetical, that help us to understand the complex images and ideas that are presented in his poetry and plays. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the various meanings of the color green in Lorca's writing or the only way to interpret this color symbol, but rather a way to begin thinking about the ways in which green holds symbolic, historical, psychological, archetypal and biographical significance in our play as we build a list of meanings and develop our own symbolic vocabulary.

Green as unrequited or illicit love

In his essay “The Symbolic Ambivalence of ‘Green’ in García Lorca and Dylan Thomas,” Robert G. Havard discusses Lorca's poem “Romance sonámbulo," paying particular interest to Lorca’s “verbal conflict,” in which multiple and antithetical meanings and images are contained within a single word that becomes a symbolic unit, such as green (811). Along with the more traditional associations of green with ripening, youth, fertility, and energy, consequently reminding us of age and mortality, Havard explains that in Lorca’s poem green also functions according to more traditional Spanish colloquial negative associations with the color. Havard cites Lorca's use of the term viejo verde to describe the "lascivious Pedrossa" in Lorca's play Mariana Pineda as a key example (814). Green is not simply “unripeness, immaturity and bitterness,” as it signifies when associated with fruit, but “in the context of love or sexuality…it will inevitably be negative in character, as in the cases of unrequited, perverse of illicit love” (814-815). Green is thus associated with both the “enticement and disillusionment” that occurs in the poem, and often goes hand in hand with amarga, bitterness, “which is generally presented in a negative nocturnal atmosphere” (818). Havard goes on to explain that this symbol must be understood within the context of the poem’s psychological realm that is created in part by the repetition of green rather than its immediate plot. For example, green is not only a physical attribute, but it is also representative of freedom in the poem, whether this is a physical or emotional release or freedom of expression. Havard relates these ambivalent meanings of the symbol green to the tragic plot of “Romance sonámbulo” by demonstrating how they contribute to the sense of deception, destruction and hopelessness felt by the man who satisfies his “violent and incurable passion” for the green girl who is the “impure object” of his desire (817).

Lorca, Costume for Leonarda

Along with the awareness that this essay builds of how and why Lorca uses the color green as a symbol, it also calls attention to the ways in which this symbol becomes problematic and allows us to challenge its meanings in a gender-conscious way. We might ask questions such as: why is the color green associated with women and femininity (both in Lorca's work and more broadly in our culture) and how does this create harmful images of women in accordance with traditional gender roles? How do the ambivalent meanings of the color symbol green relate to the virgin/whore dichotomy? Must green always have these negative connotations and can they ever become positive? How does green relate to the objectification of the young girl in the poem and her threatening, tragic role? Or how can the reader’s sympathy shift to align with the plight of the ‘elusive girl’ rather than the fate of man who plays her victim? By illuminating what green signifies in Lorca's poetry, this essay allows the reader to cast a critical eye on the problematic, often anti-feminist meanings of the color green and thus encourages the reader to consider how these meanings can be exposed and ultimately changed.

Green and Granada

In his essay “A Poet Crazy About Color,” Louis Parrot explores Lorca’s love of color and the way in which it was manifest in his poetry, tracing the evolution of color and its various symbols and associations throughout his work, including Gypsy Ballads, Poet in New York, and some of his later work. Parrot begins his essay by describing how Lorca was not only continuing a Spanish literary and artistic tradition that emphasized color, but also how he was interested in illustrating his poetry in sketches and paintings and came to see the two arts as inseparable, thanks in part to the influence of Dalí. Parrot asserts that Lorca’s gift was for “giving back colors their purest brilliance” so that they were “often truer than those we see,” and explains that how Lorca was continually influenced by the images and landscapes of his childhood and the “colors of the South” of Spain (58, 59). For Parrot, the symbolic significance of green has to do with Lorca's relationship to Granada, Fuente Vaqueros and the vega, the fertile plain that surrounded Lorca's village, helping him vividly evoke his homeland for the reader. For example, Parrot tells the reader that in Gypsy Ballads, the city is often painted with vermilions and “apple green” (58). He also suggests that the wind is typically “green-hued” in Lorca's poetry and that many of his landscapes are a “famous green” as well (59). Parrot even references a passage by Jean Camp about Lorca’s use of green when describing Granada, asking “is not green still today the sacred color of Islam, and did not Lorca wish by this device to underline the impact of [Islam?]” (59). Beyond nature and the landscape, Parrot sees the Moorish roots of Granada at the heart of Lorca's frequent use of green to recreate this world on the page.

The vega.

Green and Nationalism

One of the most terrifying groups organized in September of 1936 by the Civil Government in Granada after the outbreak of Civil War was the Defense Armada de Granada, known as the mangas verdes, or green sleeves because they wore green armbands. These were not trained soldiers from the local barracks but rather those men in town who had been labeled unfit for the military who were instead recruited as spies. These men not only spied on their neighbors and reported any "suspicious activity" or those who seemed potentially threatening to the new Nationalist Movement, but they were also responsible for many innocent deaths fueled by personal vendettas and desires for revenge (Gibson 71).

Works Cited

Gibson, Ian. The Death of Lorca. Chicago, IL: J. Philip O’Hara, Inc. 1973. Print.

Havard, Robert G. “The Symbolic Ambivalence of ‘Green’ in García Lorca and Dylan Thomas.” JSTOR. 1972. 6/10/2010. Web.

Parrot, Louis. “A Poet Crazy About Color.” Lorca: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Manuel Duran. NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1965. Print.

The Symbolic World of Lorca and "Barbarous Nights"

In the introduction to The Symbolic World of Federico Garcìa Lorca, Rupert C. Allen asserts that the psyche is “simultaneously the source and goal of Lorca’s poetry” (3). Throughout this book, Allen not only interprets the symbolism found in Lorca’s poetry, but also argues the importance of the poet’s unconscious to understanding his use of symbolism and the way in which this ultimately allows readers and critics to take a biographical approach to the Lorca’s work. This essay is an important tool for understanding the theoretical aspects of Lorca’s writing, whether this is Freudian or biographical analysis, and also for establishing a vocabulary of symbolism and imagery that is necessary for understanding the meaning of individual words and images in the world of Lorca’s poetry and plays.

Allen speaks primarily in the introduction of the “vital energy of symbol” that is not only significant to the individual, in this case the author, but also bears archetypal importance and represents the creative drive of the unconscious, in which Lorca strongly believed (4). In Freudian terms, the unconscious is suppressed by the individual ego, so that conscious life is in fact a fragmentation of the unconscious. Allen establishes a three-fold relationship between the unconscious and the conscious within Lorca’s symbolism: the mythic level, the esthetic level and the psychological level. According to Allen, the mythic level is distinguished by collectiveness, the symbols that emerge from conscious lived experience and the “biosphere,” found in world and culture of the Gypsy (6). The esthetic level on the other hand has to do with the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious and the inspiration that arises from this interaction. Allen suggests that this interaction is normally one of frustration and repression of the unconscious. As his example of a release of the unconscious to mix with the conscious he cites the “shock poetry” written by Lorca while in New York while he remained in a “dissociated state” (6). The psychological level is then to Allen about reestablishing the lost connection between the psyche and the natural world, a vital connection broken in childhood (7). It becomes clear that Freudian theory and psychoanalysis are crucial to understanding these different aspects of Lorca’s symbolic world and to understanding how the author’s own unconscious and its creative powers might be influencing the symbolism in his work.

Later in the book, Allen goes on to outline some of the predominant symbolism in Lorca’s writing, which can be categorized as it relates to nature, culture and the lifecycle. For example, Allen begins by describing Lorquian birth symbolism by explaining how the ocean represents “the womb of all life” and that the child is “the promise of continual renewal” (7). Another example of lifecycle symbolism is the connection created between blood and the libido, the Sun God, and even Dionysus. Cultural symbols are people, places or objects in Spanish life that gain archetypal significance and symbolism, such as the liminality encompassed in the carabineer border guards. The glorieta is another important cultural symbol, which functions as a layering of meanings. It’s symbolic significance comes from the layering of its literal meaning, “little glory” and “radiant center,” with its social meanings, a public square or meeting place, that allow this word to be connected to the “circle of silence” associated in Lorca’s beloved canto jondo. Often several of these aspects are combined in one symbol, such as Allen’s description of gypsy lunar symbolism. The moon is connected to the tambourine, the Basque drum, horses and hypnosis by its importance in gypsy fertility spells that thus link all of these both natural and cultural symbols and images to the essence of traditional womanhood (17). Many of the nature symbolism is also related to fertility, such as the recurrence of the laurel plant and its connection to Apollo or the “generative powers” associated with wind and water, becoming libidinal symbols (18, 25). Snow, on the other hand, is “symbolically opposite to vitality,” and death, freezing, paralysis, madness, ego-consciousness and the moon all become intertwined in a sort of symbolic system (26). While these explanations of the symbolism in Lorca’s work are by no means the only way to interpret these frequent images and words, but they do begin to illuminate some of the multiple and complex meanings behind Lorca’s use of symbolism and can help us better think about the interaction between symbols, images and overarching themes in the play.

Works Cited:

Allen, Rupert C. The Symbolic World of Federico García Lorca. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. 1972. Print.

Symbolism in Barbarous Nights

Animals and Birds:

Bull: The national symbol of Spain with the bullfight as Spain's national sport. Children are even taught in school to recognize the shape of Spain because it looks like a bull (In Search of Duende 95). Lorca himself greatly admired the bullfight because it is where "the duende is most impressive" because the fighter battles both death and "geometry" (Play and the Theory of Duende 69).

Butterflies:

Crickets:

Crocodile:

Dog:

Fish:

Frogs:

Horse: The horse is often a sexual image in Lorca, associated with gypsy drums and music in a way that relates to gypsy moon imagery as well (Allen).

Nightingale:

Owl:

Panther:

Partridge: Commonly a symbol of the devil, but can also symbolize the church or Christ.

Rooster: This is the animal chosen to symbolize Lorca's avant-garde magazine gallo, released i 1928 in Granada. As a "rooster of resistance," it symbolizes the liberation from the "conservative tradition" in Granada that his magazine embodied (Sawyer-Lauçanno 3).

Snake/Serpent:

Swan:

Colors:

Red: First and foremost red is blood and is related to both life and death, the life-cycle and menstrual cycle, libido and Dionysus (Allen 7).

White: Virginity and purity at the same time as it suggests coldness, sterility and death (Havard 819).

Green: See "Verde."

Yellow/Gold: In Lorca's poetry, yellow often seems to signify childhood and warm colors are used to describe the landscape of Granada where he grew up (Allen). Also, executioners in Spain traditionally wore yellow or red (Brewer 1317).

Blue: In his essay, "Play and the Theory of the Duende," Lorca describes an Andalucian night as blue (15).

Gray/Silver: Associated with Lorca's New York poetry and also his use of "veiled tones" to evoke poverty and differentiate man-made objects from things found in nature.

Orange: Warm colors are typically associated with Andalusian imagery in Lorca's poetry.

Flowers and Trees According to Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers:

Camellias: Red--unpretending excellence; White--perfected loveliness

Cypress: Death and mourning

Iris: Message

Lily: Day--coquetry; White--purity, sweetness; yellow--falsehood, gaiety; of the Valley--return of happiness. Lorca also described himself as having within him a "white lily impossible to water," while the rest of the world saw him as a red rose, suggesting a profound fear or passion and sex (Stainton 65).

Myrtle: Love

Narcissus: Egotism

Oleander: Beware

Orange Blossom: Your purity equals your loveliness

Pine: Pity

Poplar: Black--courage; White--time

Red Rose: Love; Deep red--bashful shame

White Rose: I am worthy of you; Withered--transient impressions

Sunflower: Haughtiness

Spikenards: Also known as muskroot, this flowering plant from the Himilayas was traditionally made into an essential oil used as a perfume or medicinal oinment. This is the oil with which Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus.

Tulip: Fame; Red--declaration of love; Variegated--Beautiful eyes; Yellow--Hopeless love

Fruits and Food:

Apples: The symbol of temptation and the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden. Also, "hard apples" are used to describe the work of the "popular school" of embroidery in Granada in "History of this Rooster."

Cherry:

Cinnamon:

Grapefruit:

Lemon: Childhood.

Lorca's drawing of lemons.

Melon:

Milk:

Olives: One at a café with friends, Lorca told his company that he was going to Mass that afternoon because he was intoxicated by the ritual and the aroma of the incense. Dalí pointed at the table replied that he was more interested in this olive.

Oranges:

Pomegranite:

Shaddock: A south asian citrus fruit like a pomelo or a grapefruit.

Other References:

Boletos: Spanish for "tickets."

Boreal auroras: an inversion of the name for the colorful northern light phenomenon "aurora borealis," named after the Roman goddess of the dawn Aurora and the Greek word for wind.

Crepuscular: Of or relating to twilight (dawn or dusk).

Crinoline: A type of many-layered women's petticoat.

Dante: Author of the Divine Comedy, including the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, written in the 14th century.

"Great Stone Face": Buster Keaton was known for keeping a straight face while performing slapstick routines and ridiculous stunts. Some scholars believe this was related to traumatic childhood abuse by his father, who taught him to play it straight.

Hermetic song: As in songs sung in solitude.

Magnesium lights:

Megatherium: A pre-historic genus of giant sloths that lived in Central and South America, referring to their enormous, elephant-like size.

Meningitis: This disease affecting the brain and spinal cord caused by either bacterial or viral infection was a major problem around the world at the turn of the 20th century without much treatment. The line about "masks of meningitis" inverts one of the common treatment that calls for patients to wear masks so as to limit their contagion.

A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Miss Eleonora:

Moiré tie: A fabric with a wave pattern woven into it, such as "watered silk," so called for its appearance like water ripples.

Narcissus: The beautiful Greek mythological hero described by Ovid in book three of Metamorphosis who died starring at his own reflection with which he had fallen in love as punishment for his pride and vanity.

Natalia: Natalia Talmadge was Buster Keaton's first wife (1921-32), the sister-in-law of his boss in Hollywood, and a silent film actress with whom he had two sons.

"The Navigator": Buster Keaton's 1924 film in which he and his love interest are stranded on a ship adrift on the Pacific Ocean.

Nebulae:

Polyphemus: The name of the cyclopse in Homer's Odyssey and one of the sea-god Poseidon's sons. His Greek counter part is Chronus, who became a god associated with time during the Renaissance.

Saetas: A song of traditional Andalusian flamenco music, related to Catholicism.

San Lazáro: Mystery, inner self, depth of feeling.

San Lucía: Associated with blindness and sickness; the surface, the superficial.

San Sebastían: The artist and his creation; homoeroticism; Lorca's relationship with Dalí.

Saturn: The Roman god of agriculture and harvest.

Other Symbols:

Arrows/target: San Sebastían was killed by arrows and the arrow became a motif in the work of Lorca and Dalí; both the symbol of King Ferdinand who expelled the Moors from Granada and one of the symbols of the Falange, a radical Right-wing group that took power during the Civil War in Spain.

Blood:

Cathedrals:

Country of the Dead: Lorca may be referring to his own beloved Spain and not the underworld, and in his essay Play and the Theory of Duende he notes how Spaniards welcome death, celebrate it as "a national spectacle" in the bullfight, and that a "dead man is more alive in Spain as a dead man than anyplace else in the world" (64).

Crossroads:

Gardens:

Gloves:

Jasper: A speckled or striped stone with religious meaning that is generally red, yellow, brown or sometimes green. In Revelation 21, jasper is used to describe the "shining" city of New Jerusalem and makes up the first layer of the city's foundation. It is also one of the twelve stones in the High Priest Aaron's breastplate, described in Exodus 28. Its symbolism includes "blood atonement" via the sacrifice of Christ, prosperity, protection from spirits, and the "perfection of saints" (Gaylord).

Mask:

Moon and stars: Eternity and romance (Maurer). The moon is also connected to the tambourine, the Basque drum, horses and hypnosis by its importance in gypsy fertility spells that thus link all of these both natural and cultural symbols and images to the essence of traditional womanhood (Allen 17).

Neuter moon: Latin for "neither," as in neither male or female, stripping the moon of its typical gendered image and symbolism.

Ocean/wave/tide: "Sexual and emotional freedom" associated with Cadaqués where he spent his spring with Dalí in 1925 in contrast to the "repressed desires" represented by "landlocked Granada" where he missed his friend and love; the Mediterranean as a "life-giving force" (Stainton 136-7). Wind too becomes associated with libido (Allen).

Sword/dagger:

Thread/embroidery: In "The History of This Rooster," a prose piece written to launch his avant-garde magazine gallo in 1928 and to "attack...the conservative tradition in Granada," there is a rivalry between "two great schools of embroidery" in town (Sawyer-Lauçanno 3, 29). The first school is the Sacred Convent of Santo Domingo, associated with purity, tradition, and wealth, while the second is the "more popular, more vibrant...republican art" of Paquita Raya (29). It is the latter embroiderer to which Don Alhambro, the magazines fictional founder, goes to have his rooster emblem realized. At the end of the story, the rooster resurrects himself after Don Alhambra has been martyred in order to return and take his place as the title of the magazine, "four bright yellow hens" are embroidered onto silk (33).

Wings:

Works Cited:

Allen, Rupert C. The Symbolic World of Federico García Lorca. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. 1972. Print.

Brewer, Ebeneezer Cobham. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Co. 1905.

Gaylord, Harry A. "Christian Symbolism in the Breastplate of Judgement--Chapter 12." Web. 10-6-10. <http://sunandshield.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/breastplatechapter12.pdf>.

Havard, Robert G. “The Symbolic Ambivalence of ‘Green’ in García Lorca and Dylan Thomas.” JSTOR. 1972. 6/10/2010. Web.

Lorca, Federico Garcìa. In Search of Duende. Ed. Christopher Maurer. New Directions. 2010. Print.

Maurer, Christopher. Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dalì and Federico Garcìa Lorca. Swan Isle Press. 2005. Print.

Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. “Introduction.” Barbarous nights: legends and plays from the Little theater/Federico Garcia Lorca, Trans. Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. 1991. Print.

Stainton, Leslie. Lorca: A Dream of Life. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1999. Print.

Three Saints: Santa Lucía, San Lázaro and San Sebastián

Who are these three saints?

Santa Lucía, or Saint Lucy in English, was a virgin martyr born to nobility in Syracuse, Sicily who became the patron saint of blindness, hemorrhage disease and authors. Her troubles began when Santa Lucía wished to remain a virgin as a sign of her faith although her mother had arranged a marriage for her. She prayed to St. Agatha for a miracle that would convince her mother, and when her mother's hemorrhage disease was cured she decided to give in to her daughter and Lucy became the patron of this illness. However, her suitor did not back down and yet still she refused. Her punishment was to become a prostitute, but God saved her from being dragged away by a team of oxen. Next she was tortured and sentenced to death but the fires for her burning at the stake would not stay lit. Finally she was killed by being stabbed in the neck with a dagger or a sword, winning her crown of virginity and martyrdom (Saint Lucy).

Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta, St. Lucy and St. Agata, 16th c. St. Agatha, to whom St. Lucy prayed for a miracle, is traditionally depicted carrying her breasts on a plate to represent one of the tortures she was subjected to during her martyrdom. It is also speculated that St. Lucy too had her breasts sliced off during her torture.

It is unclear whether her eyes were gouged out during her torture or if she cut them out in response to her unwanted suitor's advances. St. Lucy is traditionally represented in art as carrying her eyes on a golden platter or in a cup or bowl to represent her martyrdom. Before her death, it is said that her eye sight was miraculously restored. The online source for this part of her legend also offers a unique image of St. Lucy painted by Francesco del Cossa in the late-fifteenth century in which her eyes are depicted instead growing like buds from plant stem (St. Lucy). The Golden Legends of the Medieval Sourcebook state that, “In Lucy is said, the way of light” because not only does her name mean "light" but her feast day, December 13th, also fell on the winter solstice before the Gregorian calendar was introduced(Bridge).

St. Lucy holding her eyes like flowers.

Saint Lázaro, or Saint Lazarus of Bethany, who is the patron saint of lepers, was a disciple of Jesus who fell ill and died before Jesus was able to reach him. After mourning with Lazarus’ two sisters, which is described by the simple and famous phrase "Jesus wept," Jesus went to the tomb of Lazarus after he had been dead for four days and called him out (John 11:35). Lazarus was thus raised from the dead (Lazor). This story comes from the Gospel of John, although there is also a legend that Lazarus later was cast out of Bethany by the Jews and arrived in Provence to later become the first bishop of Marseilles, where his head is kept, while according to the Eastern Orthodox Church, his remains lie in Constantinople (Clugnet). In the Orthodox religion, the Saturday before Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, is Lazarus Saturday (Lazor). The Order of St. Lazarus is a military and religious order of Christian chivalry dedicated to defending the faith, the sick and the poor. Its symbol is the Maltese Cross, and it is represented by the color green, an interesting coincidence because of the importance of the color green and its symbolic, highly sexual meanings evident in Lorca’s work (Clugnet).

Born in Narbonne, Gaul, and raised in Milan, Italy, Saint Sebastian was born to a wealthy Roman family and became known for his acts of kindness and charity towards fellow Christians. In order to carry out these acts, he joined the Roman army around 283 to escape suspicion. As a soldier, Sebastian made many converts and helped to cure many people including the Roman governor by making the sign of the cross and performing baptisms. By 286, many of his converts and fellow Christians had been martyred, and Sebastian himself was found out by the Emperor Diocletian to be a Christian. He was then given to Mauritanian archers, tied to a tree, and shot to death with arrows.

Holbein, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, c. 1516

A traditional Renaissance depiction of St. Sebastian.

El Greco, St. Sebastian

However, he was found alive by Saint Irene, who nursed him back to health. Soon enough, he was found again by the Emperor and sentenced to be clubbed to death and his body thrown into a sewer. His body was recovered by a young woman and buried at the catacombs of Calixtus instead, where a church was built over his remains. There are several relics of Saint Sebastian scattered in cathedrals throughout France. Traditionally, he is considered a protector against the plague because he supposedly saved the cities of Rome (680), Milan (1575), and Lisbon (1599) from epidemics ("St. Sebastian").

St. Sebastian with an angel

St. Sebastian Basilica, Rome

St. Sebastian today: Robert Mapplethorpe, St. Sebastian

Lorca, Lucy and Lazarus

While Lorca was not a practicing Catholic, he was fascinated by Catholic liturgy and ritual, leading him to seek inspiration from religious themes such as the lives of saints which he would have studied while reading The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Vorgine. In his introduction to Sebastian’s Arrows, Christian Maurer explains how St. Lucy, St. Lazarus and St. Sebastian relate to Lorca’s poetics as well as his relationship to Salvador Dalí. St. Lucy and St. Lazarus appear in Lorca’s 1927 poem as symbols of the different directions each artists philosophy seemed to take: while “St. Lucy, which favors ‘the exterior of things, the clean airy beauty of the skin, the charm of slender surfaces,’ would appear to represent the art of Dalì in the mid-1920s,” St. Lazarus appears to “[symbolize] Lorca’s own poetics” which had to do with mystery, depth and inner life (Maurer 17). For Dalí, however, St. Lazarus was “the quintessence of putrefaction” (Maurer 18). Maurer suggests that Lorca was thinking about these two poles as “dialectical principles” in art as well as in his relationship with Dalí that would soon come to an end (20).

Unpacking the Symbolism of St. Sebastian

For both Lorca and Dalí, St. Sebastian became a symbolic figure with many meanings, particularly in light of the deep but often tense relationship between the two young artists. While Maurer’s insights into the symbolism of St. Sebastian according to Lorca and Dalí give us clues as to how to interpret the appearance of this figure in Lorca’s work, the multiplicity of meanings and intersections with Lorca’s art and life also leaves room for further interpretation by theatre artists like us. Although Lorca would have been familiar with this well-known Spanish icon, he first mentions St. Sebastian in 1926 after seeing a renaissance sculpture of the saint by Alonso Berruguette at the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladoid (18). It was only six years later while giving a public reading of Poet in New York that Lorca paused to say that, “one of man’s most beautiful postures is that of St. Sebastian” (20).

Lorca began by thinking about St. Sebastian as an “emblem of poetry,” planning to give three lectures on “The Myth of Saint Sebastian,” although these were never written (18). While it is unclear why Lorca chose St. Sebastian as a symbol of poetry, he clearly connected archery with the work of the poet who “fires his arrows” only at the best images” (19). Here, St. Sebastian is symbolic of the target of “the artistic creation” of the poet or artist (19). However, St. Sebastian also represents the state of vulnerability that Lorca believed was essential for the creation of poetry, suggesting that despite his passive posture, he is also a figure for the artist. Lorca describes this understanding of St. Sebastian as a symbol for the artist in a letter to Dalí, explaining that “[St. Sebastian] uses his body to lend eternity to whatever is fleeting, giving visible form to an abstract aesthetic idea, just as the wheel gives us the consummate idea of perpetual motion. That is why I love him” (20). For Lorca, St. Sebastian functions at once as a metaphor for both poetry and the poet.

Lorca, San Sebastián, 1927

Just as the dichotomy between the symbolism of St. Lucy and St. Lazarus can be compared to the philosophy of Dalí and Lorca respectively, St. Sebastian is essentially an antithetical figure invoked by these artists to “[mediate]…the debate between modernity and tradition, pathos and ‘asepsia,’ [or freedom from contaminants]” that Lorca and Dalì were constantly in dialogue about (17). Both Dalí and Lorca, for example, had differing perspectives on the vulnerable, passive posture of the saint. Dalí thought that as a protector against plague St. Sebastian could function as a protector against “the ‘germs’ of emotional ‘putrefaction’” (23). In addition, Dalí saw the traditionally “impassive” expression of St. Sebastian as a “flight from emotion” that made him another “spiritual ‘straight man,” like Buster Keaton (23). Lorca, on the other hand saw St. Sebastian’s “serenity in the midst of misfortune” as an admirable quality in the face of what amounted to social criticism and oppression (23).

Both men, however, recognized the homoerotic symbolism of St. Sebastian because of the way he functioned as a metaphor for their relationship and covert homosexuality. Lorca and Dalí would have been aware of how St. Sebastian acquired homoerotic meaning in the 19^th century from Wilde and his contemporaries, who developed his physical penetration to reflect a figurative one in which his serenity and open posture were signs of his enjoyment and willing desire (21). Moreover, there were also parallels drawn between the way in which St. Sebastian suffered for his faith that he had to conceal and the suffering of the covert homosexual. Lorca would have certainly identified strongly with this symbolism of St. Sebastian, both in terms of his ideas about dual identity and his own homosexuality. Dalí clearly connected St. Sebastian to Lorca, writing that, “sometimes I think he [St. Sebastian] is you [Lorca],” and using Lorca as a model for drawings of their favorite saint (21). However Dalí himself identified with St. Sebastian when it came to his relationship with Lorca, whom he believed was in love with him, and Dalí mocks the fact that Lorca’s desire was never consummated when he asks his friend in a letter, “Didn’t you ever think how strange it is that his ass doesn’t have a single wound?” (22). In this context, St. Sebastian’s passive expression is that of “a figure who inspires passion without returning it” and an object of the lover’s gaze (22). Perhaps the most tragic meaning of St. Sebastian for Lorca is not one that makes a general statement about the nature of inner identity and homosexuality but is rather the way in which St. Sebastian might symbolize unrequited love.

Works Cited:

Bridge, James. "St. Lucy." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. Web. 9-14-2010 .

Clugnet, Léon. "St. Lazarus of Bethany." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. Web. 9-14-2010 .

Lazor, Rev. Paul. "Feasts and Saints." Orthodox Church in America. Web. 9-28-10. <http://ocafs.oca.org/FeastSaintsViewer.asp?SID=4&ID=1&FSID=19>.

Maurer, Christopher. Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dalì and Federico Garcìa Lorca. Swan Isle Press. 2005. Print.

“Saint Lucy of Syracuse”. Saints.SQPN.com. 20 April 2010. Web. 9-28-10. <http://saints.sqpn.com/saint-lucy-of-syracuse/>.

"St. Lucy." Library of University of California Images. Web. 9-28-10. <http://vrc.ucr.edu/luci/index.html>.

“St. Sebastian.” Eternal World Television Network. Web. 9-14-10. <http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/SEBASTN.htm>.