Reading Lorca through the Microscope

Abstract

Federico Garca Lorca's years in the Residencia de estudiantes immersed the poet in the interdisciplinary dialogue which characterized Spanish artistic, literary and scientific circles in the 1920s. Specifically, the prevalence of scientists, physicians and students of science and medicine in the Residencia exposed the poet to a new world of images and discourse. The influence of the Sciences, personified in Santiago Ram?n y Cajal, can be traced in drawings and verbal texts composed by Lorca at this time. A comparative reading of Cajal and Lorca's theoretical texts reveals striking parallels and supports a reading of Lorca's work through the lens of Science. What do a leukocyte, a Golden Age poet, a twentieth century poet-dramatist-artist musician, a scientist-photographer-professor, a walking anatomy model?all artists?have in common? The reader familiar with Federico Garc?a Lorca's work will recognize the anatomy model from the film script Viaje a la luna, and the Golden Age poet from Lorca's lecture La imagen po?tica de Don Luis de G?ngora. Lorca populates his creative universe with these and other characters and through them explores the creative process and the quest for beauty. Of course, Lorca himself is the poet-dramatist-musician-artist. The scientist photographer-professor is Santiago Ram?n y Cajal, the eminent Spanish neurologist and recipient of the 1906 Nobel Prize for Medicine. The leukocyte, a microscopic to all the persons mentioned, also provides a literary common structure linking Garcia Lorca and Ram?n y Cajal. A founder of'the Junta para la Ampliaci?n de Estudios e Investigaciones Cient?ficas from which was created the Residencia de Estudiantes, Ram?n y Cajal was instrumental?albeit indirectly?in providing Lorca with the opportunities intrinsic to a Residencia education. Mario Hern?ndez has acknowledged that reproductions of Ram?n y Cajal's nerve cell drawings, pub lished in the Spanish press as he rose to international acclaim and won the Nobel prize in 1906, are probable models for several of Lorca's drawings {Dibujos 112). The question of Cajal and Lorca's personal acquaintance is intriguing. The critical issue, however, is the mutual infiltration of the discourses of their respective disciplines and the resultant cross-fertilization between the Sciences and the Arts. Lorca and Cajal, by virtue of their genius and their body of work, serve as exemplars of such cross-fertilization, its process and product. Specifically, Cajal's research, thought, prolific writing and his role in the scientific community and Spanish society provide a context in which to read Lorca. This article (and the book-length study to which it relates) will establish channels of influence between the world of science, here represented by Ram?n y Cajal, and Garcia Lorca and propose a new reading of the poet in all the aspects of his creative production. Connections and resonance with the scientific world personified in Cajal abound, not only in Lorca's drawings, but also in his thought and aesthetics. The scientific as motif in Lorca's work has not been studied exhaustively. Such a study must include the work of other scientists and artists whose work influenced Lorca. Santiago Ram?n y Cajal, the eminent Spanish neurologist, was a genius whose work has withstood the passage of time?no small task for a scientist! From the period of his most productive research?1888 through 1923?to the present, neurologists and histologists have