Introduction

Summary

Alma extraña de mi hueco de venas,

te he de buscar pequeña y sin raíces.

¡Amor de siempre, amor, amor de nunca!

– ‘Tu infancia en Menton’, Poeta en Nueva York

The 70th anniversary of the death of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) has now passed. In Spain, pressure is mounting on the authorities to have the site where García Lorca and three other victims of a Francoist death squad were interred, excavated, and the bodies exhumed. The current climate in Spain favours the ‘recovery of historical memory’. In the pursuit of the truth around García Lorca's assassination, sometime soon the poet's bones may be dug up. This study of García Lorca's theatre comes at a time when public attention is on raising the physical remains of the man from the dead. But rather than focus on the power the mortal residue of the man has in the imagination of admirers the world over, my modest contribution to a wealth of knowledge about this writer seeks to understand what makes his work immortal. In actual fact, this study concerns the tension between mortal and immortal life; specifically, the opposition of carnal desire to a love that is transcendent – the age-old dichotomy between the flesh and the spirit.

Since the ‘explosion of interest’ in García Lorca attendant on the centenary in 1998 of his birth, a number of important studies have pointed to new horizons of research into the poet's theatre. The ever-keen mind of Paul Julian Smith produced a collection of articles in his The Theatre of Garcia Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis (1998), which encouraged us to look at García Lorca's theatre from the perspectives of the works in performance and juxtaposed the texts to other discourses, then contemporary to the poet, such as medicine and psychoanalysis. In the final chapter of this book, I also stress the importance of looking at stage productions of García Lorca's plays perhaps as a way of seeing the proof in the pudding.