Chapter 2 - Lorca, the Modern

Summary

IN THE FIRST decades of the twentieth century, despite having a largely rural economy, Spain's towns and cities, like towns and cities in other parts of Europe, bustled with cars and tramways. The country had its own airline, its own telecommunications companies, as well as a thriving film industry. And yet we would be forgiven for presuming that Lorca did not move about in this modern Spain at all – or at least not very much – if we based our view purely on the reading of his work alone. For sure, he presents a contemporary appearance in photographs that show him wearing the fashionable suits, blazers, ties, and sweaters of the day; or sitting in the rear of a four-door convertible; or posing behind a fairground cut-out of a biplane or motorcycle sidecar with then friend and future film director, Luis Buñuel. But despite images like these that exist of him, the epithet ‘modern’ somehow sits uneasily with the man and, indeed, with much of his work. So much so that it comes across as quite a novelty when, in Paula Ortiz's 2015 La novia [The Bride], a film version of Bodas de sangre [Blood Wedding], the eponymous Bride and her lover Leonardo flee the wedding reception not on a horse, as Lorca had it in his play, but rather on that most modern of contraptions: a motorbike.

In his letter to Guillén on the subject of his Gitano tag, Lorca claimed that he was just as able to write about ‘hydraulic landscapes’ (‘paisajes hidráulicos’) as he was about ‘sewing needles’ (‘agujas de coser’) (EC, p. 414), the former serving as shorthand for modernity in contrast to the traditional associations of manual needlework and of the Gitano culture with which he and his work had become connected. Yet, despite this claim, nothing really approaching a ‘hydraulic landscape’ appears in his work until 1929 when, during a period of residence in New York, he finally set about engaging with what we would most usually think of as the modern world.

Until then, Lorca could only make a claim to modernity on the grounds that he was au fait with the literary and artistic trends of the day and, thus, a ‘modern’ writer.