The Crucified Mind Rafael Alberti and the Surrealist Ethos in Spain

  

Colección Támesis

SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 186

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE

SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN

  

ROBERT HAVARD

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE

SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN

TAMESIS

  

© Robert Havard 2001

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First published 2001 by Tamesis, London

  

ISBN 1 85566 075 X

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Havard, Robert. The crucified mind: Rafael Alberti and the surrealist ethos in Spain / Robert Havard. p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías; 186) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

  ISBN 1–85566–075–X (hardbound)

1. Alberti, Rafael, 1902 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Religion in literature. 3. Surrealism – Spain. I. Title. II. Series.

  PQ6601.L2 Z692 2001 2001023349 861¢.62 – dc21

  

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

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  CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

  1. T HE C RUCIFIED M

  IND Surrealism’s three phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Religion and paranoia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Materialism and the transition to political commitment . . . . . . . . 12 Politics and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 The Loyolan imagination: ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place] . . . . . 22 Religion and materiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Alberti’s views on Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

  2. U NDER THE J ESUITS The sins of the fathers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Straw floors and severed hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 In the classroom: Matthew, Maths and Marx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Sobre los ángeles : structure, paranoia and Surrealism . . . . . . . . . 72

  3. L AST T HINGS F

  

IRST : S CATOLOGY AND E SCHATOLOGY

Giménez Caballero and scatology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Maruja Mallo and eschatology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Alberti’s elegy to matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

  4. F ROM P AIN TO P ROPHECY Lorca’s mantic poet in New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Working the oracle: mantic trance or psychic dictation? . . . . . . . 128 Alberti’s oracular imperative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

  5. T RANSUBSTANTIATION AND M ETAMORPHOSIS The paradigm of the Eucharist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 From mass to masturbation: Dalinian metamorphosis . . . . . . . . . 155 The dissolve in Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Alterity in Aleixandre: mysticism or evasion?. . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

  6. C OME THE REVOLUTION Alberti’s sermonic syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Land Without Bread : Buñuel’s surrealist documentary on Spain . . . 200 Communist adventism: De un momento a otro . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 The proletarian poet: ‘Capital de la gloria’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

  

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

Select Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

  

ILLUSTRATIONS

Between pages 116 and 117

  1. Detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (top of right-hand panel)

  2. Salvador Dalí, The Lugubrious Game (1929)

  3. Salvador Dalí, Apparatus and Hand (1927)

  4. Salvador Dalí, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1936–7)

  5. Salvador Dalí, Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)

  6. Maruja Mallo, Espantapájaros [Scarecrows] (1929)

  7. Maruja Mallo, Tierra y excremento [Earth and Excrement] (1932)

  8. Maruja Mallo, La Huella [The Footprint] (1929)

  9. Hand full of Ants trapped in Door; still from Luis Buñuel, Un Chien

  andalou [An Andalusian Dog] (1929)

  10. Bare Feet of Children under Desk; still from Luis Buñuel, Tierra sin

  pan [Land without Bread] (1933)

  ABBREVIATIONS Alberti, Rafael: OCRA Obra completa, vol. I, Poesía 1920–1938 (Aguilar, Madrid, 1988).

  

LG The Lost Grove (University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles,

1959). AP 1 La arboleda perdida. Libros I y II de memorias (Alianza, Madrid, 1988). AP 3 La arboleda perdida. Libros III y IV (Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1927). AP 5 La arboleda perdida, Quinto libro (1988–1996) (Anaya & Mario Muchnik, Barcelona, 1996).

  Aleixandre, Vicente: OCVA Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 1968). Breton, André:

MS Manifestoes of Surrealism (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972).

Buñuel, Luis: MLB My Last Breath (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984).

  UCA Un Chien andalou (Faber & Faber, London, 1994).

  Dalí, Salvador: UCSD The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí (Quartet Books, London, 1977).

  DG Diary of a Genius (Hutchinson, London, 1990). SLSD The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Vision, London, 1968).

  García Lorca, Federico: OCGL Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 11th edition, 1966). Giménez Caballero, Ernesto: YIA Yo, inspector de alcantarillas (Ediciones Turner, Madrid, 1975). Mallo, Maruja:

MM Maruja Mallo: 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color (1928–1942)

(Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942).

  

FOREWORD

  My first priority in this book is to shed new light on the poetry Rafael Alberti wrote in his avant-garde period, 1927–38. My second is to unravel the complexities that beset the issue of Surrealism in Spain and offer a pragmatic approach to its distinctive ethos (it being accepted here that a varietal differ- ence between Surrealism in Spain and in France – its HQ – is inevitable for the simple reason that the two countries have two very different cultures). In practice my priorities are complementary, for it should be mutually enlight- ening to compare Alberti’s work with that of such radical avant-gardists as Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, Maruja Mallo, Gimémez Caballero and Vicente Aleixandre across the genres of painting, film, prose and poetry.

  My approach is driven by a double conviction: that there is no more luminous star than Alberti in the galaxy of Spanish poets who began to shine in the 1920s, and that his work provides a unique touchstone for appreciating the ethos of Surrealism in Spain. The reasons for this latter claim are outlined in Chapter One, ‘The Crucified Mind’, which serves as an introduction by relating Alberti to Surrealism’s different phases. My own view, polemical as it may be, is that assessments of Surrealism in Spain have tended to be too narrow and too exclusively based on ideas found in Breton’s First Manifesto which, though important, do not consti- tute the whole picture. The fact is that Surrealism evolved, and so too, in surprisingly close step, does Alberti’s poetry. His disarming

  1

  self-assessment, ‘Yo me defino como un poeta de mi tiempo’ [I see myself as a poet of my time], applies especially to his so-called ‘crisis’ volumes. From the personal anguish of Sobre los ángeles (1927–1928) [Concerning the Angels], to the increasingly metaphysical themes of Sermones y

  

moradas (1928–1929) [Sermons and Dwelling Places], to the political

  turmoil of El poeta en la calle (1931–1935) [The Poet in the Street] which ₁ culminates in a moving poetic diary of the Spanish Civil War, De un

  See José Luis Tejada, ‘Una entrevista con Rafael Alberti’, Gades. Revista del Colegio x FOREWORD

momento a otro (poesía e historia) (1934–1938) [Any Minute Now (Poetry

  and History)], Alberti is undeniably a poet of rapid shifts of focus and strong experimental tendencies. Yet he is no gadfly; rather a poet who imbibes the spirit of his age and who has a gift for assimilating its changes.

  There is another reason why Alberti serves as a standard for Surrealism in Spain. This, in a word, is religion, which is to say, the distinctively biblical register of his language and his mental constructs already evident in the titles

  

Sobre los ángeles and Sermones y moradas. The point is that Alberti was

  educated by Jesuits, as was Buñuel, while Dalí was taught by the scarcely less rigorous Christian Brothers, founded by La Salle, another order which

  2

  had been banned in France. Consequently, and typically, Alberti sees reli- gion as a fact of Spanish life, a conditioning ineradicable even in those who, like himself, had long since turned atheist:

  Esas cosas las conocemos y las tenemos a flor de piel, y cuando queremos ser sinceros con nosotros mismos, esa cosa la encontramos en la masa de la sangre … Son cosas que, sobre todo en España, están en la médula ¿verdad? …Toda nuestra educación ha sido profunda ¿verdad?, y no son cosas que se eliminen fácilmente … Nuestra formación no pudo ser peor … Referente a Buñuel, supongo que ha estado en un colegio tan religioso como el mío, de jesuítas. ¿Y qué? Eso es lo que deja más huella. Luego lo rechazamos y lo protestamos, pero, en el fondo, lo que aprendió allí no se desaparece, ¿comprendes?, aunque digamos que sí. Y surge

  3 constantemente.

  [We understand these things; they’re ingrained in us, and if we’re honest with ourselves we’d say it’s in our blood … It’s in the marrow, at least in Spain … The effect of our schooling runs deep. It’s not easily expunged … Our formation could not have been worse … As for Buñuel, I imagine he went to as religious a school as I did, run by Jesuits. And? Well, it leaves a deep mark. We reject it and fight against it, but in the end what we learnt stays with us – you know what I mean? – even if we say it doesn’t. It keeps coming back …]

  The thrust of my argument is that religion, the most traditional facet of Spanish life, is paradoxically the underlying reason why the avant-garde movement flourished in Spain and, furthermore, that the pervasive influence ₂ of religion is what most distinguishes surrealist practice in Spain from the

  For Dalí this distinction was decisive: ‘la gran diferencia entre Buñuel y yo es que él

estudió con los jesuítas y yo con los hermanos de las Escuelas Cristianas’ [the main

difference between Buñuel and me is that he studied under Jesuits and I with the Brothers

of the Christian Schools]. See Max Aub, Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel (Aguilar,

₃ Madrid, 1985), 531.

  FOREWORD xi

  French model. It is precisely because religion is in the Spanish blood, like a virus, that it is so deeply implicated in the two most characteristic and thera- peutic practices of Surrealism, catharsis and transcendence. This book traces the impact of religion on Alberti, principally, as a typical example of his generation, by looking at his personal and artistic formation. Broadly speaking, religion is found to be repressive and neurosis-inducing, as discussed in Chapters Two and Three where Giménez Caballero and Maruja Mallo are considered together with Alberti. In time, however, a more posi- tive, metaphysical tendency emerges which is also strongly rooted in reli- gion. This is discussed in Chapters Four and Five, first in the context of Lorca’s prophetic voice in Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York], then with a view to the Eucharistic concept of metamorphosis found in Dalí, Buñuel and Aleixandre. Finally, Chapter Six takes on board the coming of a new Saviour in Marx and the commitment made in the 1930s by many surre- alists – including Buñuel and Alberti – to Revolution.

  This book grew out of another, From Romanticism to Surrealism: Seven

  

Spanish Poets (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1988), which arrived at

  Surrealism’s door in its final pages and engaged in a brief discussion of Alberti. Here Alberti is the dominant subject and the fulcrum by which thematic, conceptual and stylistic connections are made with other surreal- ists of his extraordinary generation. I have not attempted to be exhaustive in my selection of material, but rather focused, concentrating on what I believe to be distinctive about the surrealist output in Spain. Since writing that earlier book I have had the benefit of discussing these issues with a number of postgraduates who invariably sparked insights. Though it is impossible to itemize their contribution fully, I would like to acknowledge the sparks of Jennie Wood, Craig Duggan, Lowri Williams, Thierry Passera and Rowanne Cowley. My thanks are due also to Dr Geoffrey Connell – a fine albertista, if one whose views often differ radically from my own – who was kind enough to send me the tape of an interview he had done with Alberti; also to Dr Bob Morris Jones, for guiding me through some of the intricacies of syntax; to Dr Rob Stone, for advice on film; to Esther Santamaría Iglesias, for help with problematic translations and sundry other issues; to her father, Alfredo Santamaría, for his personal account of schooling under La Salle Christian Brothers in the 1930s; and to Dr John Trethewey, who read my text with care and made many useful suggestions.

  Parts of certain chapters are based on material that first appeared in the form of articles, and I would like to thank the editors of the following jour- nals for their permission to draw on them when necessary: Bulletin of

  

Hispanic Studies , both at Glasgow and Liverpool, The Modern Language

Review , Romance Studies and Anales de la literatura española

contemporánea . Finally I would like to express my gratitude for the finan-

  cial supports I have received, both to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which was ready to fund my research visits to Spain, and to the Aurelius xii FOREWORD

  Trust, which, through the offices of the British Academy, made available a generous grant to cover both the costs of copyright and the provision of transparencies for the illustrations used in this book. Robert Havard University of Wales, Aberystwyth August 2000

  Publisher’s Note

  The author and the publishers are grateful to all individuals and institu- tions for permission to use the materials for which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; we apologise for any omission in this regard, and will be pleased to add any necessary acknowl- edgements in subsequent editions.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

1 The Crucified Mind

  The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified mind.

  1 Norman O. Brown Yo creo que es que el surrealismo español tiene unas características diferentes … si usted lee la poesía francesa surrealista, usted verá que, con la española hay una gran diferencia. Yo creo que es más seria la española, y más profunda, y menos charlatana.

  [The point is that Spanish Surrealism has different characteristics … if you read French surrealist poetry, you will see that it differs greatly from the Spanish. I believe the Spanish is more serious, more profound, and less charlatan.]

  2 Rafael Alberti Surrealism’s three phases

  No major creative writer in Spain covers as much ground as Alberti in these critical years from 1927 to the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Equally important is that the sweep of his work matches in all essentials the evolution of Surrealism itself as the movement’s thinking was directed in Paris by André Breton and his circle, notably in the manifestoes of 1924 and 1929 and in the journals La Révolution surréaliste (1924–29) and Le

  3 Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33). Alberti, for his part, was

  actively involved in the nearest Spanish equivalents of these journals, first with regular front-page contributions to Giménez Caballero’s La Gaceta

  

Literaria (1927–32), especially in its stridently Freudian early days, then as

  founder–editor of the pro-Soviet Octubre (June 1933–April 1934) which was ₁ banned definitively after the Asturian miners’ uprising in October 1934. But ₂ Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Random House, New York, 1966), 186.

  From an interview of Alberti conducted informally in the canteen of the Riverside

Studios, Hammersmith, London, 30 November 1979, by Geoffrey Connell, the well-

known Hispanist and Alberti scholar, who generously supplied me with the full tape

₃ cassette.

  Breton’s Second Manifesto appeared as an article in La Révolution surréaliste,

  2 ROBERT HAVARD

  Alberti is not only a major player in the Freudian and Marxist phases that demarcate Surrealism’s heyday; he is also acutely sensitive to the metaphys- ical implications of the surreal that emerged in the late 1920s when, briefly, the Hegelian ideal of transcendence via the union of opposites led to the notion of subject–object integration and ‘the surrealist object’. This theme, central to Dalí’s ‘paranoia-critical method’, underpins Sermones y moradas where, as we shall see, materialist rigour combines with a fervent transcen- dentalism to create a manic form of materio-mysticism. That Alberti was attuned to this thinking shows his instinctive grasp of French theory, while it also reflects his personal circumstance not only in terms of his religious upbringing but also as regards his artistic bent which brought contact with the likes of Maruja Mallo and artists of the Vallecas school, as well as Dalí. It is this dimension of his work that distinguishes him from writers for whom Surrealism was at bottom little more than a fashionable literary style. It is also the part of his work that has been most overlooked.

  It has to be said here, parenthetically, that assessment by critics of Surre- alism in Spain, despite occasional successes, remains defective. Foremost among their failings is a reluctance to address conceptual issues, an omission not offset by generalizations and endless cross-references that are the typical fare in biographical, generational and thematic studies. Two examples, from among the better critics, will suffice to illustrate the problem. Firstly, Paul Ilie posits the idea of a ‘surrealist mode’ as ‘a broad aesthetic category’ in Spanish literature, which even antedates Surrealism in France, a Chris- tians-before-Christ argument that is unhelpful in a critical context and

  4

  diluting in its effect. Brian Morris, in a purist reaction, states that we cannot even speak of Spanish Surrealism as such, for this pairing is a ‘contradiction

  5

  in terms’ and as ‘incongruous’ as ‘Welsh gongorismo’. Though we may need some convincing about that, Morris’s point is clear enough: France has a patent on le Surréalisme – which centred on Paris and was stamped by André Breton – and if ‘Pope’ André did not give you his apostolic blessing you were not admitted to the inner sanctum, not authenticated as a surrealist. But can we accept this restriction from Breton, a renowned control freak ? No such restriction applies to Romanticism, for we say German, French, English and even Spanish Romanticism with impunity. A moment’s reflection leads us to recall that Surrealism came from Dada, the nihilistic movement born of the First World War, or its futility, and Dada had sprung up in several places at once: Berlin, Zurich, New York. When Dada’s battery ran down, around ₄ 1920, to be recharged by the more positive surrealist current, it is hardly

  Paul Ilie, The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature (University of Michigan, Ann ₅ Arbor, 1968), 7.

  C.B. Morris, Surrealism in Spain, 1920–1936 (Cambridge University Press, London,

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

  3

  surprising that its new energy took it from its Paris depôt out across frontiers again.

  Recently a more text-based approach to the issue of Surrealism in Spain has come from Derek Harris who argues that language, as distinct from

  6

  content, is the defining characteristic of surrealist poetry. He includes a chapter on French surrealists for ubication and begins in the proper place by reminding us of the seminal importance of Breton’s dictionary-like definition of 1924:

  SURREALISM. n. masc. Pure psychic automatism through which it is intended to express, either orally, or in writing, or in any other way, the actual way thought works. The dictation of thought, free from all control

  7

exercised by reason, without regard to any aesthetic or moral concern.

  Many of the values enshrined here would continue to have relevance, but, as Harris recognizes, it is inadequate as a definition since it ‘equates Surrealism with just one specific technique: the production of text automatically’, it being well known that ‘Surrealism has metaphysical aims’ which, implicitly,

  8

  are not covered by the definition. After this good start Harris sheds no further light on Surrealism’s metaphysics but focuses instead on linguistic strategies, principal among which, he argues, is the way phonemic patterns of alliteration and assonance can generate lexemes and, in effect, the text itself. This argument is circular and contradictory: (i) psychic dictation is not the essence of Surrealism; (ii) the essence of Surrealism is the way the text generates itself; and (iii) textual self-generation – via phonemic concatena- tion – is the proper measure of psychic dictation and the yardstick by which surrealist poetry should be judged. A syllogism, in fact, but hardly a comment on metaphysics. Ultimately, Harris is as neglectful of conceptual issues as Morris, and his assessment of four Spanish poets on the imitative basis of their closeness to an early French model takes no account of the evolution of surrealist thought, but is, to all intents and purposes, stuck in the groove of psychic dictation.

  It is imperative to begin, I suggest, by appreciating that Surrealism moved through three key phases: the psychoanalytical, the metaphysical and the political. Putting it another way, it passed successively under the spell of Freud, Hegel and Marx. These phases are not isolated categories, nor are they chronologically discrete; for one thing, Freud was never discarded, and, for ₆ another, Marx was there from the start. Yet the triadic scheme serves to

  Derek Harris, Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights: The Language of Surrealism in ₇ Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda and Aleixandre (La Sirena, Anstruther, 1998), 13.

  André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane ₈ (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972), 26.

4 ROBERT HAVARD

  indicate when the figures held sway, and it is apt with regard to the intercala- tion of Hegel whose integrational metaphysic guided Surrealism in its transi- tion from the subjective materialism of ‘the surrealist object’ to the political materialism of Marx. The crucial point is to accept that Surrealism evolved ideologically, that there is a conceptual difference between the 1924 and 1929 manifestoes – hence the need for a second manifesto – and that there was a surrealist rapprochement of sorts with the Communist Party. From this it follows that any assessment of Surrealism in Spain, including those with a linguistic focus, should consider the impact not only of the first, predomi- nantly Freudian wave of influence but also of subsequent waves. It is all the more remarkable that critics have failed to do this when we bear in mind that Spaniards like Dalí and Buñuel played a significant part in generating those later waves, and especially when we recognize that, in Alberti, Spain has a poet who illustrates all three phases.

  Religion and paranoia

  The structure of this book is based on the concept of Surrealism’s three phases, but, as indicated, these are interwoven by a further thematic thread, religion, which is thought to be crucial to Surrealism’s distinctive ethos in Spain. In his autobiography, The Lost Grove, Alberti recalls that he was steeped as a boy in ‘an atmosphere of insane Catholicism and exaggerated

  9

  bigotry’. He states unequivocally:

  I am compelled once more to put in writing the repugnance I feel for this Spanish Catholic spirit, this reactionary and savage Catholicism that dark- ened the blueness of the sky from the days of our childhood, covering us with layers and layers of gray ashes which only served to muffle any real creative intelligence we might have had. How many arms and lungs have we seen struggling frantically and hopelessly to escape from these depths, without ever having grasped even a momentary fistful of sun? How many entire families drowned or buried alive? What a hideous inheritance of

  

10

₉ rubble and suffocation! (LG, 29) Rafael Alberti, The Lost Grove, trans. Gabriel Berns (University of California Press,

Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), 57. The Spanish original reads: ‘aquella atmósfera de

catolicismo loco y exageraciones beatas’, La arboleda perdida. Libros I y II de memorias,

first published Buenos Aires, 1959 (Alianza, Madrid, 1998), 59. These texts will be

₁₀ abbreviated as LG and AP.

  The original Spanish reads: ‘quiero consignar una vez más en mi obra la repugnancia

que siento por ese último espíritu católico español, reaccionario, salvaje, que nos

entenebreció desde niños los azules del cielo, echándonos cien capas de ceniza, bajo cuya

negrura se han asfixiado tantas inteligencias verdaderas. ¡Cuántos brazos y angustiados

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

  5 His own torment was acute in his adolescent years 1912–17 when he attended

  the Jesuit school in El Puerto de Santa María, the prestigious Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga from which he was expelled at the age of sixteen. His subse- quent condemnation of the Jesuits for their terrifying methods of indoctri- nating children ranks among the most vituperative in a long list of such testimonies that includes James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, in Spain, the accounts of Pérez de Ayala, Ortega y Gasset and Luis Buñuel, who, reflecting on his own childhood, speaks of ‘a repressive and emasculating Catholicism’ and remarks: ‘In the end we were worn out with

  11

  our oppressive sense of sin.’ Buñuel, in fact, discharged himself from the Colegio del Salvador in Zaragoza, where he too had been a day pupil for seven punishing years, following a final ‘humiliating’ incident in which one of the Jesuits, the study hall proctor, gave him ‘a swift kick for no apparent

  12 reason’ .

  Alberti reacted at an early age against the regime to which he was subjected, but so deeply inculcated in him were images of hell and damnation that, years later, they resurfaced with a vengeance and provided the psychic energy that generated his two most subversive volumes in religious terms,

  

Sobre los ángeles [Concerning the Angels] and Sermones y moradas

  [Sermons and Dwelling Places]. Recalling the desperate state of mind that provoked Sobre los ángeles, Alberti alludes among other things to ‘waves of infantile fears that created even greater pangs of conscience, doubt, fears of hell, sombre echoes from that Jesuit school on the shores of the Bay of Cádiz

  13

  where I had loved and suffered’ (LG, 259) . His experience was typical, he says, comparable not only to that of Buñuel and Dalí but also of the poets Dámaso Alonso, who attended the main Jesuit school at Chamartín in Madrid, and the state-school educated García Lorca: ‘Federico tenía terrores nocturnos y era una persona de una formación muy católica’ [Federico was

  14 afflicted by night-time fears and he’d had a very Catholic upbringing].

alcanzar al fin ni un momentáneo puñado de sol! ¡Cuánta familia hundida! ¡Horrible

₁₁ herencia de escombros y naufragios!’, AP 1, 33.

  Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984), 48,

  

14. See also Mi último suspiro (Plaza y Janés, Barcelona, 1982). Joyce’s famous account

of the bone-chilling sermon that harangued the boys of Belvedere College, Dublin, is

found in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape, London, 1964), 123–39.

For Pérez de Ayala’s testimony, see his autobiographical work, A.M.G.D.: La vida en los

colegios de jesuítas (1910), a title based on the Jesuit motto ‘Ad majorem gloriam Dei’.

Ortega confesses to having shared Ayala’s ‘niñez triste y sedienta’ in his review ‘Al

margen del libro A.M.G.D.’, Obras completas, I, 6th edition (Revista de Occidente,

₁₂ Madrid, 1963), 533. ₁₃ My Last Breath , 30.

  The orginal reads: ‘los miedos infantiles, invadiéndome en ráfagas que me traían aún

remordimientos, dudas, terrores del infierno, ecos umbríos de aquel colegio jesuíta que

₁₄ amé y sufrí en mi bahía gatidana’, AP 1, 291.

6 ROBERT HAVARD

  Indeed, it was widely held that an over-zealous type of religious education had damaged legions of Spain’s youth, a view put forward by none other than Manuel Azaña, the future premier, in a debate in the Cortes on 13 October 1931 during the heady early days of the Second Republic. In a speech that would secure him the premiership, Azaña lamented the interference of reli- gious orders in the nation’s education system and he singled out ‘la agitación más o menos clandestina de la Compañía de Jesús’ [the more or less subver- sive activity of the Company of Jesus] which he knew at first hand had done lasting damage to generations of Spaniards:

  Quien no tenga la experiencia de estas cosas, no puede hablar, y yo, que he comprobado en tantos y tantos compañeros de mi juventud que se encontraban en la robustez de su vida ante la tragedia de que se les derrumbaban los principios básicos de su cultura intelectual y moral, os he de decir que ése es un drama que yo con mi voto no consentiré que se

  15 reproduzca jamás.

  [Those of you who have no experience of this should remain silent; but, as for myself, having witnessed so many of my boyhood friends reach the prime of life only to find tragically that the basic principles of their intellectual and moral formation came crashing down around them, I feel bound to say that I will use my vote to ensure that such a drama will never be enacted again.]

  The psycho-drama that Azaña saw as a feature of Spanish life is as deeply embedded in the religious iconography and neurotic texture of Sobre los ángeles as it is in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York] or the Buñuel–Dalí filmscripts, Un Chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog] and L’Age d’or [The Golden Age]. Religion for Buñuel, says Alberti, is simply an obsession :

  Es que ha tenido una formación como yo, de colegio de jesuítas. No sé en qué colegio estuvo, pero esas cosas las conocemos y las tenemos a flor de piel … Y Buñuel ha tenido la valentía de sacársela y mostrarla. Pero la muestra porque la tiene verdaderamente en todas las venas; no hay otra

  16 cosa: es una obsesión en él.

formación religiosísima … tiene su fondo también y su infierno tremendo, quizá más que

nadie. Es alumno de los jesuítas de Chamartín de la Rosa y conoce muy bien, porque yo he

hablado mucho con él cuando éramos jóvenes, todos los problemas religiosos y de

conciencia española. Los conoce mejor que nadie’ [He had an extremely religious

education … he feels its depth and its fearful hell perhaps more than anyone. He was a

pupil of the Jesuits at Chamartín de la Rosa and I know, because I spoke to him a lot when

we were young, that he is well aware, perhaps more than anyone, of the problems

₁₅ concerning religion and the Spanish conscience]. Ibid., 301.

  See Diario de las Sesiones de las Cortes Constituyentes de la República Española ₁₆ (1931) , 1671.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

  7 [The thing is he was educated, as I was, by Jesuits. I don’t know what school he went to, but we understand these things, they’re ingrained in us … Buñuel has been brave enough to bring it out and display it. But he does this really because it’s in his veins and he can’t help it: it’s an obsession with him.]

  A certain religious praxis has a marked capacity for creating obsessive psychical disorders that, in turn, require the therapy of catharsis, or what Freud calls abreaction. Creative figures, we know, tend to exorcize their demons in their work and Sobre los ángeles is a classic example of ‘Desahucio’ [‘Eviction’], the paradigmatic title of its second poem. Its third, ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Body’], describes the process:

  Yo te arrojé de mi cuerpo,

  17 yo, con un carbón ardiendo. Vete. (390) [I cast you out from my body,/ me, with a burning coal./ – Get out.]

  This biblical exorcism, we cannot fail to note, finds a close parallel in psychoanalysis which aims to bring repressed memories and troublesome complexes to the surface for purposes of eradication. Ultimately, the most persistent feature in Sobre los ángeles is its intertwining of biblical and psychoanalytical motifs, the two being all the more tightly enmeshed by virtue of the fact that expulsion is effected via the agency of angels.

  It is revealing that Alberti should speak at length about the impact of a strict religious education in a conversation with Max Aub in which the primary objective is to uncover the avant-garde characteristics in their mutual friend Luis Buñuel. Alberti advises Aub that if he wants to know what makes Buñuel tick he should study his religious formation:

  son cosas que, sobre todo en España, están en la médula, ¿verdad? … Creo que bien estructurado, bien pensado, tú, esto, lo debes analizar profundamente, porque vale la pena, ¿verdad? Vale la pena por el hombre y por la figura española que se considera más de la vanguardia, más de todo … Claro, es de colegio, familia, represiones infantiles. Freud y todo lo

  18 que tú quieras.

  [In Spain these things are in our marrow, right? … I’d say, properly thought out and structured, this is a matter you should analyze in depth, ₁₇ because it’s crucial, isn’t it? Crucial to Buñuel as a man and because he’s All references to Alberti’s poetry, unless otherwise indicated, are to Obra completa,

vol. I, Poesía 1920–1938 , edición de Luis García Montero (Aguilar, Madrid, 1988), with

₁₈ the page of reference in parenthesis.

  8 ROBERT HAVARD seen as the most avant-garde Spaniard of all … Of course, it’s all to do with school, family, childhood repressions. Freud and all the rest of it …]

  The relationship between religious repression, Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism’s first phase is clear enough, but what of the metaphysical and political phases? Here we recall the change of direction Breton signposted in his Second Manifesto:

  … considering all this, I doubt that anyone will be surprised to see Surre- alism turn its attention, in passing, to something other than the solution of a 19 psychological problem, however interesting that problem may be.

  This concludes a long sentence which began with Breton championing Hegel’s theory of the ‘penetrability of subjective life by “substantial” life’, the clear implication being that source material of a psycho-neurotic type is no longer enough to guarantee the quality of a work: there is a need for conceptual substance and for what Breton calls an ‘artistic gift’ by means of which the artist ‘can, rather than transform his dreams into symptoms, trans-

  20 form them into artistic creations’.

  The most striking example of a purposeful deployment of psychical mate- rial for such ends is Dalí’s ‘paranoia-critical method’ which has the addi- tional virtue of being cast in a metaphysical framework. The novelty of Dalí’s approach, Breton argued, lay in the fact that he showed himself to be ‘strong enough to participate in these events [of his unconscious] as actor and

  21

  spectator simultaneously’. In other words, Dalí was able to treat his neuroses as subject matter while maintaining the critical detachment of an analyst towards a patient. From 1928 on, his canvases typically consist of an array of objects that project and itemize his fetishes, the painter having considered these critically before structuring them into an artistic whole. The objects represent his inner life, their symbolic function having been teased out by self-scrutiny and by Dalí’s deliberate cultivation of his neuroses; but they are painted as objects in a naturalistic vein – with no sign of brushwork –

  22

  to accentuate their concreteness. In this way Freudian theory is put to the service of art in a controlled manner and Dalí’s simulated paranoia integrates ₁₉ the subjective and the objective, as Anna Balakian explains:

  André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane ₂₀ (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972), 139. ₂₁ Ibid., 160.

  André Breton, ‘The Dalí Case’, in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson ₂₂ Taylor (MacDonald, London, 1965), 133.

  Dalí chose to paint, in fact, ‘in the ultra-regressive manner of Meissonier’; see

Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, trans. Richard Howard (Hutchinson, London, 1990; first

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

  9 Dalí’s position was that paranoia, which in its acute stage we call abnormal or pathological, is basically a mental mechanism which can be cultivated or controlled by the artist to extend the scale of analogies and to demonstrate

  23

the high incidence of subjectivity in what we call ‘the world of reality’.

  The strong sense we have in Dalí of subject–object integration is enhanced by his fondness for compositions that combine humans with objects: for example, the furniture-woman who sits splayed on a beach in The Weaning of

  

Furniture: Nutrition (1934); the large rock that is also Dalí’s own head in The

Great Masturbator (1929). Integration is also the key in his celebrated

  double or multiple images where a human form emerges out of a configura- tion of objects, as in The Invisible Man (1929), The Great Paranoiac (1936),

  

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) (plate 5). In

  conceptual terms this kind of subject–object integration represents the fruition of an ideal Breton had begun to formulate in his First Manifesto:

  I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a 24 , if one may so speak. surreality

  Under the influence of Hegel, especially The Phenomenology of Mind, Breton’s notions of dream and reality crystallized into the metaphysically sounder concepts of mind and matter, the sum of these leading to transcen- dence and the surreal. Dalí, who had raised his voice ‘against the excesses of automatic writing’, saw himself as the person who redirected Surrealism by inventing ‘surrealist objects’ which ‘very quickly made the old-fashioned

  25 seeming dream recitals and sessions of automatism a thing of the past’.

  As for Alberti, there is considerable evidence – in the latter part of Sobre

  

los ángeles and throughout Sermones y moradas – to suggest that he concurs