SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 186
THE CRUCIFIED MIND
RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE
SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN
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First published 2001 by Tamesis, London
ISBN 1 85566 075 X
Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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
861¢.62 – dc21 2001023349
This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by
List of Illustrations. . . . vii
Abbreviations . . . . viii
Foreword . . . . ix
1. THECRUCIFIEDMIND 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. UNDER THEJESUITS 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. LASTTHINGSFIRST: SCATOLOGY ANDESCHATOLOGY Giménez Caballero and scatology. . . . 80
Maruja Mallo and eschatology . . . . 92
Alberti’s elegy to matter . . . . 105
4. FROMPAIN TOPROPHECY Lorca’s mantic poet in New York . . . . 112
Working the oracle: mantic trance or psychic dictation? . . . . 128
Alberti’s oracular imperative. . . . 141
5. TRANSUBSTANTIATION ANDMETAMORPHOSIS The paradigm of the Eucharist . . . . 152
From mass to masturbation: Dalinian metamorphosis . . . . 155
The dissolve in Buñuel’sUn Chien andalou. . . . 165
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
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)
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)
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’sFirst Manifestowhich, 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
self-assessment, ‘Yo me defino como un poeta de mi tiempo’1[I see myself
as a poet of my time], applies especially to his so-called ‘crisis’ volumes. From the personal anguish ofSobre 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 ofEl poeta en la calle (1931–1935)[The Poet in the Street] which culminates in a moving poetic diary of the Spanish Civil War, De un
1 See José Luis Tejada, ‘Una entrevista con Rafael Alberti’,Gades. Revista del Colegio
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 had been banned in France.2 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 constantemente.3
[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 of religion is what most distinguishes surrealist practice in Spain from the
2 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, Madrid, 1985), 531.
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 inPoeta 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.
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 Crucified Mind
The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified mind.
Norman O. Brown1 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.]
Rafael Alberti2
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 Surréalisme au service de la révolution(1930–33).3Alberti, 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-SovietOctubre(June 1933–April 1934) which was banned definitively after the Asturian miners’ uprising in October 1934. But
1 Norman O. Brown,Love’s Body(Random House, New York, 1966), 186.
2 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 cassette.
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 thesurrealthat 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’, underpinsSermones 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 diluting in its effect.4Brian Morris, in a purist reaction, states that we cannot
even speak of Spanish Surrealism as such, for this pairing is a ‘contradiction in terms’ and as ‘incongruous’ as ‘Welsh gongorismo’.5 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 evenSpanishRomanticism 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 1920, to be recharged by the more positive surrealist current, it is hardly4 Paul Ilie,The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1968), 7.
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 content, is the defining characteristic of surrealist poetry.6 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 exercised by reason, without regard to any aesthetic or moral concern.7
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, are not covered by the definition.8 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 isnot 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 dictaconcatena-tion 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 another, Marx was there from the start. Yet the triadic scheme serves to
6 Derek Harris,Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights: The Language of Surrealism in
Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda and Aleixandre(La Sirena, Anstruther, 1998), 13.
7 André Breton,Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972), 26.
indicate when the figures held sway, and it is apt with regard to the intercala-tion of Hegel whose integraintercala-tional 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 surrealistrapprochementof 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 bigotry’.9He 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 rubble and suffocation! (LG, 29)10
9 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 abbreviated asLGandAP.
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’sPortrait 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 our oppressive sense of sin.’11 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 reason’
.
12Alberti 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 provokedSobre 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 where I had loved and suffered’ (LG, 259)
.
13His experience was typical, hesays, 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 afflicted by night-time fears and he’d had a very Catholic upbringing].14
alcanzar al fin ni un momentáneo puñado de sol! ¡Cuánta familia hundida! ¡Horrible herencia de escombros y naufragios!’,AP 1, 33.
11 Luis Buñuel,My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984), 48, 14. See alsoMi 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 inPortrait 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, Madrid, 1963), 533.
12 My Last Breath, 30.
13 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 amé y sufrí en mi bahía gatidana’,AP 1, 291.
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 reproduzca jamás.15
[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 ofSobre los ángeles
as it is in Lorca’sPoeta 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 anobsession
:
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 cosa: es una obsesión en él.16
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 concerning religion and the Spanish conscience]. Ibid., 301.
15 SeeDiario de las Sesiones de las Cortes Constituyentes de la República Española
(1931), 1671.
[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,
yo, con un carbón ardiendo. Vete. (390)17
[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 que tú quieras.18
[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, because it’s crucial, isn’t it? Crucial to Buñuel as a man and because he’s
17 All references to Alberti’s poetry, unless otherwise indicated, are toObra completa,
vol. I, Poesía 1920–1938, edición de Luis García Montero (Aguilar, Madrid, 1988), with the page of reference in parenthesis.
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 hisSecond 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 psychological problem, however interesting that problem may be.19
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-form them into artistic creations’.20
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 spectator simultaneously’.21 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 – to accentuate their concreteness.22 In this way Freudian theory is put to the
service of art in a controlled manner and Dalí’s simulated paranoia integrates the subjective and the objective, as Anna Balakian explains:
19 André Breton,Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972), 139.
20 Ibid., 160.
21 André Breton, ‘The Dalí Case’, in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (MacDonald, London, 1965), 133.
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 the high incidence of subjectivity in what we call ‘the world of reality’.23
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 inThe Weaning of Furniture: Nutrition(1934); the large rock that is also Dalí’s own head inThe 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 inThe 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
surreality, if one may so speak.24
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 thesurreal. 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 seeming dream recitals and sessions of automatism a thing of the past’.25
As for Alberti, there is considerable evidence – in the latter part ofSobre los ángelesand throughoutSermones y moradas– to suggest that he concurs with Dalí in two important respects. First, as we will see in poems such as ‘Los ángeles muertos’ [‘The Dead Angels’], ‘Hallazgos en la nieve’ [‘Dis-coveries in Snow’] and ‘Elegías’ [‘Elegies’], he has an irrepressible object-orientation. This may owe more, in fact, to the materialist values of the Vallecas school than to Dalí, but it incorporates the same unmistakable
23 Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (Allen & Unwin, London, 1972), 192.
24 Manifestoes of Surrealism, 14.
25 Salvador Dalí, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, as told to André
Parinaud, trans. from the French by Harold J. Salemson (Quartet Books, London, 1977; originally published in English by W.H. Allen, London, 1976, and in French, with the title
emphasis on objects as receptacles of subjectivity. Second, he engages in what amounts to a cultivation of his own paranoia, most typically through a simulated identification with Christ and his suffering. Norman O. Brown elucidates the lines that served as an epigraph to this chapter – ‘The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified mind’ – by quoting Freud:
If we throw a crystal to the ground, it breaks, but it does not break haphazard; in accordance with the lines of cleavage it falls into fragments, where limits were already determined by the structure of the crystal, although they were invisible. Psychotics are fissured and splintered struc-tures such as these. We cannot deny them a measure of that awe with which madmen were regarded by the people of ancient times.26
And Brown concludes in his inimitable way: ‘Split the stick and there is Jesus.’27 In Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles a remarkable series of
Christomorphic poems begins with ‘Los ángeles mudos’ (418) [‘The Dumb Angels’], where the poet revisits his native El Puerto de Santa María after many years in Madrid and appears to astonished locals like the Risen Christ. It culminates inSermones y moradaswhere the poet consistently subsumes his voice in that of a prophet–messiah who, in mock sermons, offers the pros-pect of salvation through suffering. Here the supreme Christian notion of redemption in the Passion provides an exact analogy for the artist’s trium-phant passage through the crucible of psychic pain to salvation in his created work. Needless to say, a subversive irony is at large in the conflation of Christ’s suffering with that of a paranoiac surrealist, not least because the psycho-genesis of the latter’s work is religious repression, but also because the message of his sermons is rooted in an atheism that avows the possibility of transcendence via an alchemical reaction between the self and objects. Nonetheless, as in Dalí, it is precisely through his suffering that Alberti’s poet–prophet perceives the Hegelian truth that matter is a vast store of subjectivity. Both the paranoiac identification with Christ and the quasi-mystical insight into the innate potential of objects for transcendence – transubstantiation, one might say – are readily apparent in ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ [Sermon on the Four Truths]:
He aquí al hombre.
Loco de tacto, arrastra cal de las paredes entre las uñas …
No le toquéis, ardiendo como está, asediado por millones de manos que ansían pulsarlo todo.
Escuchadle. Ésta es su voz:
26 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures, trans. W.J.H. Sprott (Hogarth Press, London, 1937), 80.
– Mi alma es sólo un cuerpo que fallece por fundirse y rozarse con los objetos vivos y difuntos. (453)
[Behold the man./ Mad from touching, he drags lime off walls under his nails./ Don’t touch him, burning as he is, besieged by millions of hands that long to feel him all over./ Listen to him. This is his voice:
‘My soul is only a body that is dying to merge with and rub itself against living and dead objects.’]
And:
Para un espíritu perseguido, los peces eran sólo una espina que se combaba al contacto de un grito de socorro o cuando las arenas de las costas, fundidas con el aceite hirviendo, volaban a cautizar las espaldas del hombre …
Atended. Ésta es su voz:
– Mi alma está picada por el cangrejo de pinzas y compases candentes, mordida por las ratas y vigilada día y noche por el cuervo.
Ayudadme a cavar una ola, hasta que mis manos se conviertan en raíces y de mi cuerpo broten hojas y alas. (452)
[For a persecuted spirit, fish are only bones that bent on contact with a cry for help or when coastal sands, merged with boiling oil, flew to cauterize a man’s shoulders …
Listen. This is his voice:/ ‘My soul is stung by a crab’s pincers and burning compasses, bitten by rats and spied on day and night by the crow./
Help me dig a wave, until my hands become roots and my body sprouts leaves and wings.’]
Alberti’s adoption of a messianic role to preach his truths provides a last point of comparison with Dalí, for this has the effect of exteriorizing his poetic voice in a declamatory, oracular performance: ‘En frío, voy a revelaros lo que es un sótano por dentro … / Voy a revelaros un asombro …’ (451) [Coldly, I am going to show you what a cellar is like on the inside … /I am going to reveal to you a wonder …]. Modelled no doubt on harangues he had suffered as a schoolboy, his performance compares with the simulation, cultivation and clinical detachment found in Dalí who also frequently adopts a Christ mode.28In short, Alberti’s poems of this second phase present a poet
who, far from trying to solve or eliminate his obsessions, is intent, like Dalí, on sustaining and exploring them. That he does so in a manner both meta-physical and sensational – in the Lautréamont tradition – is attributable in large part to religion which, ironically, not only provokes his paranoia but also provides the linguistic register in which it is explored.
Materialism and the transition to political commitment
What for Dada had been a simple desire toépater le bourgeoiscrystallized for the surrealists into political commitment and, spurred by events of the 1930s, alignment with Communism. A conceptual point also linked the surre-alists to the doctrine of dialectical materialism, namely: the primacy of matter. This tenet, axiomatic in turn to Hegel, Marx and the communists, was, however, anathema to Dalí for whom the human mind alone was supreme and objective reality merely in its service, as he argued in ‘L’Âne pourri’ (1930) [‘The Rotting Donkey’]:
I believe the moment is at hand when … it will be possible … to system-atize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality … Paranoia makes use of the external world to impose the obses-sive notion … The reality of the external world serves as an illustration and a proof, and is put in the service of the reality of our mind.29
Such egocentricity flew in the face of an ascendant communist ethos and it led to Dalí’s expulsion from the surrealist movement, announced as provi-sional in January 1934. Dalí, it is true, had antagonized the surrealists by ridi-culing Lenin inComposition: Evocation of Lenin(1931) and especiallyThe Enigma of William Tell(1933) which depicted the Russian demagogue with an enormously elongated buttock. But his stance against materialism was in any case unacceptable in the volatile climate that turned a metaphysical nicety into a heated question of political allegiance. In the maelstrom of events that included the collapse of the New York stock exchange (24 October 1929), the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic on the abdi-cation of Alfonso XIII (14 April 1931), Hitler’s rise to Chancellor (January 1933) and the Asturian miners’ revolt (October 1934), Dalí’s incorrigible Narcissism was increasingly offensive to Breton’s coterie.
Alberti, by contrast, had long been associated with the Vallecas group of artists whose left-wing views complemented a materialist orientation in their work. From 1925 he had regularly visited Benjamín Palencia and Alberto Sánchez in Vallecas, then a rural outskirt to the south of Madrid.30 He was
struck by the ‘concreta revelación’ [concrete revelation] of Sánchez’s sculp-ture which he found ‘profundamente poética, no literaria, y cantan en ella las materias naturales con que están hechas’31 [profoundly poetic, not literary,
for it sings out with the natural materials from which it is made]. Alberti’s first vocation, we remember, was to art: ‘Yo llegué a Madrid para ser pintor’32[I came to Madrid to be a painter], on which subject he was fiercely
patriotic, referring caustically to those painters who left Spain as ‘l’école de Paris’ and waxing lyrical about:
aquellos pueblos y tierras vallecanos en los que soñábamos con la creación de un nuevo arte español y universal, puro y primario como las piedras que encontrábamos allí pulidas por los ríos y las extremadas intemperies.33 [those villages and rural places of Vallecas where we dreamed of creating a new and universal Spanish art, pure and elemental as the stones that we found polished by rivers and exposure to the weather.]
On his almost daily trips to Vallecas, Alberti was soon accompanied by the young artist, Maruja Mallo, ‘la musa de los surrealistas’34 [the surrealists’
muse], who cut a striking figure in Madrid at that time: ‘la primera sinsombrerista, la primera nudista, y una de las primeras mujeres auténticamente libres’35 [the first woman to go hatless, the first nudist and
one of the first truly liberated women]. When Maruja began to depict earthy, scatological objects in nearly colourless paintings – La Huella [The Foot-print] (1929) (plate 8), Basuras [Rubbish] (1930), Grajo y Excrementos
[Rook and Excrement] (1931)36– their impact on Alberti was profound. His
supreme tribute to her is the poem ‘La primera ascensión de Maruja Mallo al subsuelo’ [‘The First Ascension of Maruja Mallo to the Subsoil’], which, as the title indicates, treats Maruja in mock-paranoiac terms as a Redeemer whose transcendence is towards the matter of this world rather than the next:
30 A portrait of Alberti by Alberto Sánchez dates from 1925. 31 AP 3, 37.
32 See Aub,Conversaciones con Buñuel, 283. 33 AP 3, 33–4.
34 See Anon.,Maruja Mallo. La gran ignorada en Galicia(Diputación Provincial de Lugo, 1995), 86.
35 See Manuel Vicent, ‘Maruja Mallo, la diosa de los cuatro brazos’,El País, 12-x-1981, 11–12.
Tú,
tú que bajas a las cloacas donde las flores más flores son ya unos tristes salivazos sin sueños y mueres por las alcantarillas que desembocan a las verbenas desiertas para resucitar al filo de una piedra mordida por un hongo estancado …37
[You,/ you who delve into sewers where the most flowerly flowers are but sad goblets of disillusioned spittle and who expire in drains that flow into empty celebrations only to be reborn on the edge of a stone bitten by a stagnant mushroom …]
Alberti’s object-orientation compares, then, with Dalí’s as regards the prac-tice of simulated madness or paranoia, but his artistic allegiances with the Vallecas school and with Maruja Mallo led him to a materialism that differs radically from the views of the Catalan painter. His more committed position, prompted by artistic priorities, facilitated an almost seamless transition to the materialist ideology of Communism.
Alberti’s political awakening dates from 1928 when student uprisings against Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship began ‘to shatter the tranquility of the streets’ (LG, 271). Suddenly he was aware of another function of literature as the exiled Unamuno became ‘la voz de la protesta contra el jerezano espadón’38[the voice of protest against the Jerez bullfighter]. In this ‘climate
of violence’ Alberti found a new vocabulary – ‘Republic, Fascism, liberty’ – and he was ‘fascinated by it all’:
The shouts and protests, which in some dim way had existed within me, eating away at my own defenses, finally found an escape hatch and raced frantically into the streets with the fervent students. We walked along the barricades that had been set up on the boulevards, stood firm against the mounted Guardia Civil and the gunfire from their Mausers. No one had called me. It was my own blind impulse which guided me. The majority of those young men knew very little about me, but suddenly we were all friends. (LG, 271–2)
Almost without him knowing it, his personal crisis was subsumed in a confused notion of the national crisis. New works impacted on his social consciousness, notably films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Eisenstein’s
The Battleship Potemkin and, of course, Un Chien andalou which Buñuel
37 The poem first appeared in La Gaceta Literaria, 1-vii-1929, 1, where it is placed between two illustrations of Maruja Mallo,La Huella[Footprint] andCloaca[Sewer]. It is also quoted in full by Geoffrey Connell in ‘The End of a Quest: Alberti’sSermones y moradasand Three Uncollected Poems’,Hispanic Review, 33 (1965), 304–5.
38 Rafael Alberti,El poeta en la España de 1931, seguido del Romancero de Fermín
brought to the Cine Club in Madrid on 8 December 1928, declaring that it was nothing but ‘a desperate and impassioned invitation to crime’ (LG, 272). Alberti rose to the new mood in his nonsensical lecture, ‘Palomita y galápago’ [‘Dove and Turtle’], delivered to open-mouthed ladies of the Lyceum Club on 10 November 1929, and again when he shouted at his audi-ence on the first night of his play,El hombre deshabitado[The Disinhabited Man], 26 February 1931: ‘Long Live Extermination! Down with the putre-faction of the Spanish theatre of today!’ (LG, 289).
He had begun his sacrilegious ‘auto sacramental’,El hombre deshabitado, in 1928, the year in which he finishedSobre los ángeles, startedSermones y moradasand conceived his zany tribute to the tragi-comedians of the silent screen,Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos[I was a Fool and what I have seen has made Two Fools of Me]. Much like the feverishly productive Dalí, whose first Paris exhibition was held in November 1929, and the sorely troubled New-York-bound Lorca, Alberti’s frenetic activity was fomented by an ‘inner turmoil’ (LG, 277): ‘I was still confused and not convinced that my horizons had become any brighter. I was still under the yoke of my family’ (LG, 275). Even in his first political poem, ‘Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir’ [‘With my Boots on I must Die’], ‘written in anger’ and published 1 January 1930, he was less motivated by clarity of purpose than by ‘an undefined sense of desperation’ (LG, 277), as the opening image suggests with its jumble of furniture piled high into street barricades. Yet in these same streets Alberti was beginning to identify with the crowds who shouted ‘!Viva la República! ¡Muera Primo de Rivera!’ and in the same month of January he found himself marching on the Royal Palace only for the demonstrators to be dispersed by mounted Civil Guards who drove some to protest in a cinema and others to burn down a kiosk where they gleefully watched the Jesuit slogan – ‘To the Greater Glory of God and the Dictatorship’ (LG, 278)39– go up in flames. In addition, he had recently met
the beautiful and politically committed María Teresa León who soon dispelled the sentimental gloom which had engulfed him since his break up with Maruja Mallo.
Events gathered pace in the new decade when Primo de Rivera fell in January 1930 and another general, Berenguer, briefly propped up the monarchy in the so-called ‘Dictablanda’ or soft dictatorship. When two young army captains, Fermín Galán and García Hernández, raised the cry of the Republic in the Pyrenean outpost of Jaca, Alfonso XIII made his ‘worst mistake’40 in ordering their execution on 14 December 1930. Alberti was
moved to write ballads on the aptly named Galán, who hailed like himself from near Cádiz, and soon afterwards when he had declaimed them in the
same ‘city of freedom’ – ‘on the top of my voice, standing on a table of a café’ (LG, 294, 296)41– news came of Alfonso’s abdication on 14 April. This
was the ‘breach’ (LG, 272) through which ardent Republicans poured and which would lead with fatal momentum to the outbreak of civil war on 18 July 1936. Alberti’s first project in the newly declared Republic was to turn his ballads into the play,Fermín Galán, which was staged on 1 June 1931 by Margarita Xirgu’s company. It provoked as stormy a reaction as his first play had four months earlier, for when the scene came in the second act,
in which I had the wild idea of having the Virgin appear with rifle and bayonet to defend the battered group of rebels and demanding the heads of the King and General Berenguer, the entire theatre protested violently. The atheistic Republicans objected to the very appearance of the Virgin, and the Monarchists were horrified to hear such criminal feelings expressed by the Mother of God whom I had invented. (LG, 299)
The play enjoyed only modest success, but it decided Alberti on his future: ‘I now clearly and sharply saw before my eyes the common cause of the people’ (LG, 300). Moreover, withEl hombre deshabitado, it helped secure for him and fellow playwright María Teresa León a government subsidy to travel abroad and study European political and agit-prop theatre. Within a month the couple left on a near two-year itineracy that took them to Paris, Berlin and Moscow, from where they wrote bi-monthly reports.42When they
moved from Nazi Berlin to the Soviet capital – for Alberti, ‘un viaje del fondo de la noche al centro de la luz’43[a journey from the depth of night to
the centre of light] – they were made guests of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. On their travels they met Aragon, Chagall, Supervielle, Brecht, Ivanov, Svetlov, Pasternak and many other writers, while on their return journey through Berlin they witnessed the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February 1933 as well as appalling examples of anti-Semitism. Alberti’s experience abroad was definitive in his embracing Communism, which, says Enrique Montero with some justification, had a ‘formación europea antes que española’44 [European rather than Spanish
complexion].
41 Cádiz is forever associated with resistance to oppression since the proclamation in 1812 of theConstitución de Cádiz, followed in 1820 by Riego’s liberalpronunciamiento
against Ferdinand VII.
42 Several of Alberti’s contributions from abroad to El Sol and Luz are gathered by Robert Marrast in Rafael Alberti, Prosas encontradas (1924–1942) (Editorial Ayuso, Madrid, 1973).
43 AP 3, 20.
44 Enrique Montero, ‘Octubre: revelación de una revista mítica’, introduction toOctubre,
Back in Madrid in April 1933 Alberti and María Teresa León set about producing their new review,Octubre, the first number of which appeared in June that year subtitledEscritores y artistas revolucionarios[Revolutionary Writers and Artists]. There followed a statement of principles: ‘Octubreestá contra la guerra imperialista, por la defensa de la Unión Soviética, contra el fascismo, con el proletariado’ [‘Octubre’ is against imperialist wars, for the defence of the Soviet Union, against fascism, for the proletariat]. Its offices were listed as 45 Marqués de Urguijo, the domicile of Alberti and his wife who sold around 2,000 copies in the streets ‘a gritos’45[shouting it out], all of
which added to the sense of struggle. There was a spate of left-wing journals at this time, including Nueva España [New Spain] (1930–31), Nuestro Cinema[Our Cinema] (1932), which championed proletarian German as well as revolutionary Soviet cinema, and Sin Dios [Without God] (1932–33), subtitled Órgano mensual de la Atea, filial de la Internacional de Librepensadores proletarios revolucionarios [Monthly Organ of Atheism, Affiliated to the International Body of Revolutionary Proletarian Free-thinkers], to which Alberti had contributed from abroad. Unsurprisingly, a militant atheism featured inOctubre.
Politics and religion
As is well known, Church and State have been closely identified in Spain since the fifteenth century when Fernando and Isabel, the so called ‘Catholic Monarchs’, promoted the concept of nationhood by unifying the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and expelling the Moors. Clericalism thrived, most infa-mously in the Inquisition, and though temporary restraint came with the rise of Liberalism its momentum was restored in the latter part of the nineteenth century when the secularization of education in France led to an influx of Jesuits and other teaching orders into the Peninsula. By 1912 the Jesuits controlled ‘without exaggeration, one-third of the capital wealth of Spain’,46
investing the equivalent of £60 million sterling in diverse enterprises. Gerald Brenan comments:
It seemed scarcely in the national interests that one section of the community – and that a militant one – should control so large a share of the industrial life of the country, and then one must remember that a good part of this wealth had to be acquired by cadging for gifts and bequests among the rich and that these favours were not given for nothing.47
In effect, the Church was expected to defend the interests of the rich against the poor, and, at a time when illiteracy was rampant, ‘the colleges of the Jesuits and Augustinians became what the public schools are in England’, telling their pupils, for good measure, that ‘if they associated with Liberals, they went to hell’.48Brenan concludes:
The Church presented in Spain an insoluble problem, and when in the end the majority of the population abandoned it in despair at its political intran-sigence and burned churches and killed priests in revolutionary – I might almost say in true Catholic and filial – anger, there is surely nothing to be surprised at.49
Octubre’s aggressive anticlericalism was much in the tradition of Goya whom Alberti greatly admired and regarded as a profound influence on the Spanish avant-garde: ‘El surrealismo español viene de Goya’50 [Spanish
Surrealism comes from Goya]. Most poignant for Alberti was Goya’s drawing in which a skeletal man hands over his skin to three representatives of the State – a bishop, a government official and a general – with the caption reading: ‘El pueblo entrega lo último que le queda’51[‘The people
hand over all they have left to give’]. Two other prints fromThe Disasters of War series appeared in Octubre, including ‘Que se rompe la cuerda’ [‘The rope is breaking’], which shows a cleric on a tightrope balancing precariously over people below, a reference to the aloofness of the Church in 1808. Alongside, Alberti placed his poem, ‘La iglesia marcha sobre la cuerda floja’ [‘The Church is Walking a Tightrope’], which depicts the pontiff crudely as a fawn of power:
Mis oraciones
darán más fuego a sus cañones. Mi agua bendita
redoblará su dinamita. Nuestra señora será la dulce cargadora de los fusiles
de sus guardias civiles y Dios, el guía de su secreta policía. … Banquero, hermano, sube hasta mí, dame la mano, que si la cuerda
48 Ibid., 50, 51. 49 Ibid., 52.
50 Letter to V. Bodini, quoted by Francisco Aranda inEl surrealismo español(Lumen, Barcelona, 1981), 15.
que si la cuerda
se rompe iremos a la mierda.
[My prayers/ will add fire to your canons./ My holy water/ will recharge your dynamite./ Our Lady/ will be the sweet loader of the rifles/ of your Civil Guards/ and God the guide/ of your secret police/ … Banker, brother,/ come up here, give me your hand,/ for if the rope/ for if the rope/ breaks, we’ll all be in the shit. (559)52
The elements of buffoonery here – and again in La farsa de los Reyes Magos53 [Farce of the Three Kings] – connect with Yo era un tonto, but
Alberti’s humour is far from innocent now. The Pope, we remember, had signed a concordat with Mussolini in 1929 – an act which prompted Lorca’s vitriolic ‘Grito hacia Roma’ [‘Shout at Rome’] inPoeta en Nueva York –and though Primo de Rivera committed a much lesser offence in allowing Jesuit and Augustinian colleges to grant degrees this still caused an uproar and did much to bring the Jerez dictator down. It also ensured that the issue of reli-gious education would be high on Azaña’s agenda when the Republic was declared.
Alberti, like many Spaniards, saw the Church as pivotal in the class struggle. One of his uncles, he humorously recalls, was ostracized by his family for holding Republican views with, ‘There’ll be no atheists in this house’ (LG, 79),54and he reflects:
What ideas about liberalism and other democratic doctrines were incul-cated by the Jesuits in the minds of the poor students who attended their schools? They were considered infernal … It simply wasn’t elegant or refined to be a Republican. Night-watchmen, coachmen, grocery-store-keepers and even perhaps civil servants at City Hall could afford to be so ‘common’. Naturally, drunks could too. (LG, 79).55
The source of this mentality is attributed squarely to the Jesuits who:
confundían y mezclaban en una sola bola las ambiciones democráticas de una burguesía que empezaba a industrializarse, con las lógicas exigencias de un proletariado que esa misma industria iba creando y el grito natural del campesino que reclamaba la tierra.56
52 Octubre, nos. 3, 14–15. 53 Octubre, nos. 4–5, 13–15.
54 Cf. ‘Nada de ateos en esta casa’,El poeta en la España de 1931, 13.
55 Cf. ‘Toda persona que compartiera esta idea olía a azufre del infierno, a vino de taberna, a alpargata sucia, en fin, a ordinariez y falta de distinción. Era muy poco elegante ser republicano. Algún sereno, agún cochero podían serlo. También, eso sí, los borrachos.’
El poeta en la España de 1931, 32.
[confused and lumped together in one rag-bag ball the democratic aspirations of a middle class in the throes of industrialization with the legitimate demands of a working class that the same industry was creating and the natural cry of peasants reclaiming their land.]
InOctubre, by contrast, everything was put in the clearest terms. A priority was made of education, as in Alberti’s rousing ‘Himno de las bibliotecas proletarias’ [‘Hymn to Proletarian Libraries’] with its theme of ‘estudiar para luchar’ [study to fight], and in ‘Los niños de Extremadura’ [‘The Children of Extremadura’], a region whose poverty he and María Teresa León saw for themselves when they accompanied Buñuel to Las Hurdes as he prepared his shocking social documentaryTierra sin pan[Land without Bread]:57
Los niños de Extremadura van descalzos.
¿Quién les robó los zapatos? … No saben
los nombres de las estrellas. ¿Quién les cerró las escuelas?
[The children of Extremadura/ go barefoot./ Who stole their shoes?
… They don’t know/ the names of the stars./ Who closed their schools?]
Octubrecontinued the spirit ofSin Dios which had run articles like ‘La próxima guerra imperialista y el papel de la Iglesia’ [‘The Next Imperialist War and the Role of the Church’] (February 1933) and had invited urban and peasant workers to send in any information they had on the malevolent influ-ence of clericalism in their areas.58Alberti takes up the peasants’ cause in his
poem ‘La lucha por la tierra’ [‘The Struggle for Land’] which sees religion in Marxist terms as an instrument of oppression in its advocating stoic accep-tance of suffering in this life as a means of attaining salvation in the next. Such deception in the name of one who insists on being called ‘Señor’ [Lord/Sir] – ‘como cualquier propietario o explotador de hombres’ (526) [like any other landowner or exploiter of men] – was now gone for good:
ahora combatimos diariamente no por esa patria lejana, ese salario invisible que es la promesa de tu gloria … (528) [no longer do we fight daily for that distant land,
for that invisible payment which is the promise of your glory …]
Instead the peasants are disposed to fight only for the land they work upon: ‘la reconocen nuestros pies,/ espera y grita bajo ellos: LA TIERRA’ [Our feet recognize it;/ it waits and cries beneath them: THE EARTH].
In place of stoical forebearance there is only impatience for an improved material circumstance in the here and now, a change to be brought about through struggle: ‘Prepárate en la paz para la guerra’ [‘Prepare for war in peace’] is María Teresa León’s proverbial advice in the second number of
Octubre, while Alberti quotes Marx for his title in ‘Un fantasma recorre Europa’ [‘A Spectre Haunts Europe’], the lead poem inEl poeta en la calle
(523) which appeared inOctubreand in French inCommune. The same immi-nence pervades the aptly titled De un momento a otro [Any Minute Now], Alberti’s major political work which covers his visit to America and the Carib-bean in 1934 as well as the Civil War in which he fought. Naturally, immi-nence reflects the political ferment and anxiety of the time, but it has religious overtones and is prophetic or adventist in seeing the coming communist revo-lution as the way to the promised land. Surprisingly, this is Antonio Machado’s argument in an article dedicated to Alberti in the last number of Octubre, ‘Sobre una lírica comunista que pudiera venir de Rusia’ [‘On the Prospect of Communist Poetry from Russia’]. Machado speaks of Russia’s
misión histórica, esencialmente cristianizadora … Porque Rusia trabaja para emancipar al hombre, a todos los hombres, de cuanto es servidumbre en el trabajo.59
[historical and essentially Christianizing mission … For Russia strives to emancipate man, all men, from what is servitude in work.]
And he concludes: ‘será necesaria una fe comunista’ [a communist faith will be needed]. That the deeply spiritual Machado could embrace Communism in this way suggests another perspective on the link between religion and politics, for here the latter appears to have assumed the duties abrogated by the former. It also suggests that transcendental patterns of thought – normally associated with religion and seemingly endemic in Spaniards – have been transferred to the Utopian politics of the hammer and sickle. This perhaps explains why surrealist writing in Spain – at least the genre of poetry, in Alberti’s view – was rather more serious than in France:
es más seria la española, y más profunda, y menos charlatana; porque muchas partes del surrealismo han quedado en mucho bla-bla-bla, en mucha conversación.60
[the Spanish is more serious, more profound, and less charlatan; for many types of Surrealism have degenerated into babble, so much empty talk.]
Before we consider Alberti’s own view of Surrealism, however, there is a further positive feature to mention which derives directly from a religious formation and which a number of Spaniards seem to have channelled into their creative practices.
The Loyolan imagination: ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place]
My argument so far is that Surrealism has three phases, based on Freud, Hegel and Marx, and that what invigorates each in the Spanish context is the presence – interference, if you will – of religion. A repressive form of reli-gion impacts negatively on the individual, in whom it generates neuroses, and on society at large, where it is deeply implicated in a civil catastrophe that had been brewing for centuries. But religion is not wholly negative, even from a surrealist perspective. For one thing, it promotes a transcendental disposition that distinguishes the ‘visionary’61Dalí and the materio-mystical
Alberti from the French model. For another, it provides a rich biblical register complete with a body of symbols and a prophetic discourse that is well suited to probing the surreal. But where religion and especially the Jesuits may have had most impact is on the creative imagination, in which context, I suggest, they stimulated a practice of what might be called actualization. Anyone who has read Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, the Jesuit manual, will know that the saint’s instructions to his trainees focus on the theme of experi-encing things for oneself. The trainee must know hell as an actual reality, Loyola directs in the Fifth Exercise of the First Week, the ‘Meditation on Hell’:
The composition here is to see with the eyes of the imagination the length, breadth and depth of hell …
To look with the eyes of the imagination at the great fires and at the souls appearing to be in burning bodies …
To hear with one’s ears the wailings, howls, cries, blasphemies against Christ our Lord and all the saints …
To smell with the sense of smell the smoke, the burning sulphur, the cesspit and the rotting matter …
To taste with the sense of taste bitter things, such as tears, sadness and the pangs of conscience …
To feel with the sense of touch, i.e. how those in hell are licked around and burned by the fires.62
61 ‘I am essentially a visionary,’ says Dalí, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador
Dalí, 143.
