Lorca's Suites: Reflections on Cubism and the Sciences

Abstract

Critics have acknowledged the innovative spirit of the avant-garde in Suites, but little has been done on the possible impact of Cubist and scientific tenets on the conception of these poems. This essay proposes a reading of Suites from the perspective of the avant-garde spirit, as it affected the arts and sciences at the time when this collection was being written. Cubist preoccupations about form, space, dimension, colour, simultaneity, multiple planes, and its disregard for the anecdotal in favor of the fragmentary and the discontinuous paralleled and responded to the new scientific discoveries. While remaining faithful to his belief in mystery and the limitations of reason, Lorca visited many of the tenets in Cubism and the sciences; the self-reflexive character of the Suites is informed by Lorca's awareness of those tenets, which he adopts as a way to understand and speak the language of the universe.La critica ha reconocido el caracter vanguardista de las Suites lorquianas, pero poco se ha escrito s...