The Trouble with Gender in Lorca's Suites: "Surtidores"

Abstract

Et je nie comparais aux palimpsestes; je goutais la joie du savant, qui, sons les ecritures plus recentes, decouvre, sur un meme papier, un texte tres ancien infiniment plus precieux. Quel etait ce texte occulte? Pour le lire, ne fallait-il pas tout d'abord effacer les textes recents?Andre Gide, L'ImmoralisteEl arte parere ser el empeno en ilescifrar o perseguir la huella dejada par una forma perdida de existencia.Maria Zambrano, Apuntes sobre cl tiempo y la poesiaAlthough the contexts for these two quotations are quite different, Maria Zambrano's words, like Gide's, suggest a way to think about reading (and writing) desire. Gide uses the metaphor of a palimpsest to talk about recovering a self for whom love of the same sex is possible;1 Maria Zambrano's words-descifrar, huella, perdida-suggest that all art arises from a desire on the part of the artist to make out the traces of an unfulfilled existence. What is true, moreover, for the artist is also true for the reader: just as the artist may see his or her life as a palimpsest, so, too, may the reader see the text the artist has created out of his or her desire as a partially obscured writing.A palimpsest teases the reader to find an older text that was removed in order to make way for a new one, which has been written over it. So it poses from the outset something of a paradox: how can one read what has been all but occluded? Does it not really amount to trying to retrace steps that were never taken?And yet, as any reader knows, if the object of the search is desire, then the effort to find the older text is in itself an instantiation of what one is looking for. Gide's narrator, for example, speaks of discovering a younger (truer) self under an older and more recent one, convinced as he is that the weight of inauthentic years had not extinguished a more genuine way of being. His is an effort, therefore, that presupposes the desire that is being recovered. Za m brano suggests somewhat ambiguously, in keeping with her Platonic inspiration, that the object of desire-the forgotten mode of existence-may be located in the past, in one's childhood, or that perhaps it had never come clearly into view at all. (Desire, as Plato reminds us in The Symposium, is born of a lack.') And yet, again, to begin to seek desire out is already to acknowledge its insistence, its presence in the here and now.It strikes me that Lorca was engaged in precisely this kind of inquiry about {his} desire when he wrote his suites.3 Andre Belamich, who first reconstructed Lorca's unfinished project and published the collection as a book (Suites 1983), argued that these early poems take us straight to the heart of Lorca's most intimate pena, having to do with hopes of a fatherhood that might never be (13): in other words, for Belamich, it was the author's worry about his homosexuality that was uppermost in his mind when writing the suites, and this worry was more discernible in these texts than in any other. However, these words and those of many others who have written on the subject, lose sight of the fact that the same poems, in which Lorca's melancholy is clearest, derive their poignancy precisely from the fact that the poet writes as one who comes to see the inevitability of his difference. And that, as he writes, a different desire, almost completely muted by the melancholy it provokes, struggles for recognition. It is this suppressed aspect of the poetic self, susceptible to another desire existing only in palimpsest-half-occluded, halt-visible-, that haunts the poetry of Suites.'To say this is not to reduce the many signs in Lorca's poetry to one or to claim to find something in his poetry that has never before been seen; it is, rather, a way to appreciate how we readers are called upon to (re)create a text that the author himself has left partially unwritten-while recognizing that the ambiguity arising therein, from its being partially unwritten-, is all of a piece with the lyric as Lorca conceived it. …