Drawing a Dream: Joaquín Peinado’s Artwork and the Semiotic in José María Hinojosa’s La flor de Californía

Abstract

The juxtaposition of dream narratives from Spanish surrealist writer José María Hinojosa’s La flor de Californía (1928) and artist Joaquín Peinado’s four drawings found interspersed throughout the collection demonstrates a symbiotic relationship between the artist and writer’s creative purposes, in true surrealist fashion creating an “image-text.” Thus, the present article argues that Peinado’s drawings represent a key element for understanding La flor de Californía and should be considered an integral part of the dream texts. Julia Kristeva’s ideas on signification and the interplay of the symbolic and the semiotic orders present in poetic creation prove useful in understanding this interplay of image and word. Hinojosa’s texts, along with Peinado’s drawings, attempt to re-create this process of signification, in which the text, although tied down by the symbolic order—that is, systems and realism—, constantly pushes to evade logic and allow the semiotic to emerge through genotexts. Hinojosa and Peinado’s combined creation of drawings and writings are examples of one such attempt to obliterate the social constraints of the symbolic order and allow the reader/viewer to witness indirectly the semiotic processes of the pre-Oedipal phase.