The Fiction of Fate

Abstract

Few spectators would deny that the end of Federico Garcia Lorca’s tragic plays is brought about by the workings of fate, as stipulated by the classical model they re-enact.1 Lorca’s characters express the sense of being controlled by an inexorable force. In Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) (1933) the Mother fears that her son, the Bridegroom, will be killed at the hands of a member of the Felix family, following the same fate as his father and his brother.2 Meanwhile, the Bride decides to marry in the hope of being freed from the irresistible attraction she still feels for another man called Leonardo, himself a Felix, three years after the end of their relationship.3 Both situations point to the characters’ lack of control over their acts. The first demonstrates the problematic relationship between the tragic subject (here the Mother’s son, the Bridegroom) and the Past, which has its origin in an inherited defilement, a form of guilt attached to the characters’ ancestors. Blood in Blood Wedding is the channel for this irreversible transmission of guilt, and a diffuse version of fate that dissimulates its transcendent source.4 Embodied in blood, fate now appears natural. Accordingly, both Leonardo and the Bride are compelled to ‘follow the course of their blood’,5 while the Bridegroom, suddenly forgetting his desire to marry and secure the continuity of his lineage, inherits the fate of his ‘casta de muertos en mitad de la calle’ (breed that dies in the middle of the street),6 and hastens to re-enact his father’s and brother’s death.