The crucified mind rafael alberti and the surrealist ethos in spain

Inpractice my priorities are complementary, for it should be mutually enlight-ening to compare Alberti’s work with that of such radical avant-gardists asSalvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Feder

SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 186

THE CRUCIFIED MIND RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN

TAMESIS

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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

PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA

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.

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Great Britain byAntony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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’s Un Chien andalou 165

Alterity in Aleixandre: mysticism or evasion? 177

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

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)

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

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)

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

My approach is driven by a double conviction: that there is no moreluminous star than Alberti in the galaxy of Spanish poets who began toshine in the 1920s, and that his work provides a unique touchstone forappreciating the ethos of Surrealism in Spain The reasons for this latterclaim are outlined in Chapter One, ‘The Crucified Mind’, which serves as

an introduction by relating Alberti to Surrealism’s different phases Myown view, polemical as it may be, is that assessments of Surrealism inSpain 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

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 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 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

Universitario de Filosofía y Letras de Cádiz, XII (1984), 19.

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

and History)], Alberti is undeniably a poet of rapid shifts of focus andstrong experimental tendencies Yet he is no gadfly; rather a poet whoimbibes 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 inSpain This, in a word, is religion, which is to say, the distinctively biblicalregister 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 scarcelyless rigorous Christian Brothers, founded by La Salle, another order whichhad 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 queremosser sinceros con nosotros mismos, esa cosa la encontramos en la masa de lasangre … Son cosas que, sobre todo en España, están en la médula

¿verdad? …Toda nuestra educación ha sido profunda ¿verdad?, y no soncosas que se eliminen fácilmente … Nuestra formación no pudo serpeor … Referente a Buñuel, supongo que ha estado en un colegio tanreligioso 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 aprendióallí no se desaparece, ¿comprendes?, aunque digamos que sí Y surgeconstantemente.3

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

The thrust of my argument is that religion, the most traditional facet ofSpanish life, is paradoxically the underlying reason why the avant-gardemovement 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.

3 Ibid., 293–4.

French model It is precisely because religion is in the Spanish blood, like avirus, that it is so deeply implicated in the two most characteristic and thera-peutic practices of Surrealism, catharsis and transcendence This book tracesthe impact of religion on Alberti, principally, as a typical example of hisgeneration, by looking at his personal and artistic formation Broadlyspeaking, religion is found to be repressive and neurosis-inducing, asdiscussed in Chapters Two and Three where Giménez Caballero and MarujaMallo 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 anew 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 ofAlberti Here Alberti is the dominant subject and the fulcrum by whichthematic, 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 Ibelieve to be distinctive about the surrealist output in Spain Since writingthat earlier book I have had the benefit of discussing these issues with anumber of postgraduates who invariably sparked insights Though it isimpossible to itemize their contribution fully, I would like to acknowledgethe sparks of Jennie Wood, Craig Duggan, Lowri Williams, Thierry Passeraand 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 withAlberti; also to Dr Bob Morris Jones, for guiding me through some of theintricacies of syntax; to Dr Rob Stone, for advice on film; to EstherSantamaría Iglesias, for help with problematic translations and sundry otherissues; to her father, Alfredo Santamaría, for his personal account ofschooling under La Salle Christian Brothers in the 1930s; and to Dr JohnTrethewey, who read my text with care and made many useful suggestions.Parts of certain chapters are based on material that first appeared in theform 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

Trust, which, through the offices of the British Academy, made available agenerous grant to cover both the costs of copyright and the provision oftransparencies for the illustrations used in this book.

institu-The Crucified Mind

The crucified body, the crucified mind The norm is not normality butschizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified mind

Norman O Brown1

Yo creo que es que el surrealismo español tiene unas característicasdiferentes … si usted lee la poesía francesa surrealista, usted verá que,con la española hay una gran diferencia Yo creo que es más seria laespañola, y más profunda, y menos charlatana

[The point is that Spanish Surrealism has different characteristics … ifyou read French surrealist poetry, you will see that it differs greatlyfrom 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 inthese 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 theevolution of Surrealism itself as the movement’s thinking was directed inParis 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, wasactively 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

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.

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

15-xii-1929, and was published separately in its definitive form in 1930.

Alberti is not only a major player in the Freudian and Marxist phases thatdemarcate 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 thenotion 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 dentalism to create a manic form of materio-mysticism That Alberti wasattuned to this thinking shows his instinctive grasp of French theory, while italso reflects his personal circumstance not only in terms of his religiousupbringing but also as regards his artistic bent which brought contact with thelikes of Maruja Mallo and artists of the Vallecas school, as well as Dalí It isthis dimension of his work that distinguishes him from writers for whomSurrealism was at bottom little more than a fashionable literary style It isalso the part of his work that has been most overlooked

transcen-It has to be said here, parenthetically, that assessment by critics of alism in Spain, despite occasional successes, remains defective Foremostamong their failings is a reluctance to address conceptual issues, an omissionnot offset by generalizations and endless cross-references that are the typicalfare in biographical, generational and thematic studies Two examples, fromamong the better critics, will suffice to illustrate the problem Firstly, PaulIlie posits the idea of a ‘surrealist mode’ as ‘a broad aesthetic category’ inSpanish literature, which even antedates Surrealism in France, a Chris-tians-before-Christ argument that is unhelpful in a critical context anddiluting in its effect.4Brian Morris, in a purist reaction, states that we cannoteven speak of Spanish Surrealism as such, for this pairing is a ‘contradiction

Surre-in terms’ and as ‘Surre-incongruous’ as ‘Welsh gongorismo’.5 Though we mayneed 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 blessingyou were not admitted to the inner sanctum, not authenticated as a surrealist.But can we accept this restriction from Breton, a renowned control freak?Nosuch 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 ofthe 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 hardly

4 Paul Ilie, The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature (University of Michigan, Ann

Arbor, 1968), 7.

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

1972), 160, 8.

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

Recently a more text-based approach to the issue of Surrealism in Spainhas come from Derek Harris who argues that language, as distinct fromcontent, is the defining characteristic of surrealist poetry.6 He includes achapter on French surrealists for ubication and begins in the proper place byreminding 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, theactual way thought works The dictation of thought, free from all controlexercised by reason, without regard to any aesthetic or moral concern.7

Many of the values enshrined here would continue to have relevance, but, asHarris recognizes, it is inadequate as a definition since it ‘equates Surrealismwith just one specific technique: the production of text automatically’, itbeing well known that ‘Surrealism has metaphysical aims’ which, implicitly,are not covered by the definition.8 After this good start Harris sheds nofurther light on Surrealism’s metaphysics but focuses instead on linguisticstrategies, principal among which, he argues, is the way phonemic patterns ofalliteration 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 textgenerates itself; and (iii) textual self-generation – via phonemic concatena-tion – is the proper measure of psychic dictation and the yardstick by whichsurrealist poetry should be judged A syllogism, in fact, but hardly acomment on metaphysics Ultimately, Harris is as neglectful of conceptualissues as Morris, and his assessment of four Spanish poets on the imitativebasis of their closeness to an early French model takes no account of theevolution of surrealist thought, but is, to all intents and purposes, stuck in thegroove of psychic dictation

It is imperative to begin, I suggest, by appreciating that Surrealism movedthrough three key phases: the psychoanalytical, the metaphysical and thepolitical Putting it another way, it passed successively under the spell ofFreud, Hegel and Marx These phases are not isolated categories, nor are theychronologically discrete; for one thing, Freud was never discarded, and, foranother, 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.

8 Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights, 14, 15.

indicate when the figures held sway, and it is apt with regard to the tion of Hegel whose integrational metaphysic guided Surrealism in its transi-tion from the subjective materialism of ‘the surrealist object’ to the politicalmaterialism of Marx The crucial point is to accept that Surrealism evolvedideologically, that there is a conceptual difference between the 1924 and

intercala-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 alinguistic focus, should consider the impact not only of the first, predomi-nantly Freudian wave of influence but also of subsequent waves It is all themore remarkable that critics have failed to do this when we bear in mind thatSpaniards like Dalí and Buñuel played a significant part in generating thoselater waves, and especially when we recognize that, in Alberti, Spain has apoet who illustrates all three phases

Religion and paranoia

The structure of this book is based on the concept of Surrealism’s threephases, 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 exaggeratedbigotry’.9He states unequivocally:

I am compelled once more to put in writing the repugnance I feel for thisSpanish Catholic spirit, this reactionary and savage Catholicism that dark-ened the blueness of the sky from the days of our childhood, covering uswith layers and layers of gray ashes which only served to muffle any realcreative 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 manyentire families drowned or buried alive? What a hideous inheritance ofrubble 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 as LG and AP.

10 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 pulmones hemos visto luchando fiera y desesperadamente por subir de esas simas, sin

His own torment was acute in his adolescent years 1912–17 when he attendedthe Jesuit school in El Puerto de Santa María, the prestigious Colegio de SanLuis 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 LuisBuñuel, who, reflecting on his own childhood, speaks of ‘a repressive andemasculating Catholicism’ and remarks: ‘In the end we were worn out withour oppressive sense of sin.’11 Buñuel, in fact, discharged himself from theColegio del Salvador in Zaragoza, where he too had been a day pupil forseven punishing years, following a final ‘humiliating’ incident in which one

of the Jesuits, the study hall proctor, gave him ‘a swift kick for no apparentreason’.12

Alberti reacted at an early age against the regime to which he wassubjected, but so deeply inculcated in him were images of hell and damnationthat, years later, they resurfaced with a vengeance and provided the psychicenergy 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 ofhell, 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 poetsDámaso Alonso, who attended the main Jesuit school at Chamartín inMadrid, and the state-school educated García Lorca: ‘Federico tenía terroresnocturnos y era una persona de una formación muy católica’ [Federico wasafflicted 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 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,

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.

14 See Aub, Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel, 300 Of Dámaso Alberti says: ‘tiene una

Indeed, it was widely held that an over-zealous type of religious educationhad damaged legions of Spain’s youth, a view put forward by none other thanManuel 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 thatwould secure him the premiership, Azaña lamented the interference of reli-gious orders in the nation’s education system and he singled out ‘la agitaciónmás 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 donelasting damage to generations of Spaniards:

Quien no tenga la experiencia de estas cosas, no puede hablar, y yo, que hecomprobado en tantos y tantos compañeros de mi juventud que seencontraban en la robustez de su vida ante la tragedia de que se lesderrumbaban 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 sereproduzca jamás.15

[Those of you who have no experience of this should remain silent; but, asfor myself, having witnessed so many of my boyhood friends reach theprime of life only to find tragically that the basic principles of theirintellectual and moral formation came crashing down around them, I feelbound 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 enqué colegio estuvo, pero esas cosas las conocemos y las tenemos a flor depiel … Y Buñuel ha tenido la valentía de sacársela y mostrarla Pero lamuestra porque la tiene verdaderamente en todas las venas; no hay otracosa: 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 See Diario de las Sesiones de las Cortes Constituyentes de la República Española

(1931), 1671.

16 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 293.

[The thing is he was educated, as I was, by Jesuits I don’t know whatschool 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 hedoes this really because it’s in his veins and he can’t help it: it’s anobsession with him.]

A certain religious praxis has a marked capacity for creating obsessivepsychical disorders that, in turn, require the therapy of catharsis, or whatFreud 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 inpsychoanalysis which aims to bring repressed memories and troublesomecomplexes 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 byvirtue 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 astrict religious education in a conversation with Max Aub in which theprimary objective is to uncover the avant-garde characteristics in their mutualfriend Luis Buñuel Alberti advises Aub that if he wants to know what makesBuñuel tick he should study his religious formation:

son cosas que, sobre todo en España, están en la médula, ¿verdad? … Creoque bien estructurado, bien pensado, tú, esto, lo debes analizarprofundamente, porque vale la pena, ¿verdad? Vale la pena por el hombre

y por la figura española que se considera más de la vanguardia, más detodo … Claro, es de colegio, familia, represiones infantiles Freud y todo loque tú quieras.18

[In Spain these things are in our marrow, right? … I’d say, properlythought 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 to Obra completa,

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

the page of reference in parenthesis.

18 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 294–5.

seen as the most avant-garde Spaniard of all … Of course, it’s all to dowith school, family, childhood repressions Freud and all the rest of it …]

The relationship between religious repression, Freudian psychoanalysis andSurrealism’s first phase is clear enough, but what of the metaphysical andpolitical 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 alism turn its attention, in passing, to something other than the solution of apsychological problem, however interesting that problem may be.19

Surre-This concludes a long sentence which began with Breton championingHegel’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, form them into artistic creations’.20

trans-The most striking example of a purposeful deployment of psychical 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 ofDalí’s approach, Breton argued, lay in the fact that he showed himself to be

mate-‘strong enough to participate in these events [of his unconscious] as actor andspectator simultaneously’.21 In other words, Dalí was able to treat hisneuroses as subject matter while maintaining the critical detachment of ananalyst towards a patient From 1928 on, his canvases typically consist of anarray of objects that project and itemize his fetishes, the painter havingconsidered these critically before structuring them into an artistic whole Theobjects represent his inner life, their symbolic function having been teasedout by self-scrutiny and by Dalí’s deliberate cultivation of his neuroses; butthey 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 theservice of art in a controlled manner and Dalí’s simulated paranoia integratesthe 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.

22 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 published as Journal d’un Génie, Éditions de la Table Ronde, Paris, 1964), 28.

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 orcontrolled by the artist to extend the scale of analogies and to demonstratethe 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 byhis 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 thefruition 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 metaphysicallysounder 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 byinventing ‘surrealist objects’ which ‘very quickly made the old-fashionedseeming dream recitals and sessions of automatism a thing of the past’.25

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

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’ coveries in Snow’] and ‘Elegías’ [‘Elegies’], he has an irrepressibleobject-orientation This may owe more, in fact, to the materialist values ofthe Vallecas school than to Dalí, but it incorporates the same unmistakable

[‘Dis-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

Comment on devient Dalí, by Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1973), 119 Haim F.

Finkelstein argues that Dalí was largely responsible for ‘a change of emphasis’ in Surrealism and ‘a movement away from dream and automatism to an active soliciting of

the mind to discharge the images hidden in the unconscious’; Surrealism and the Crisis of

the Object (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1979), 30.

emphasis on objects as receptacles of subjectivity Second, he engages inwhat amounts to a cultivation of his own paranoia, most typically through asimulated identification with Christ and his suffering Norman O Brownelucidates the lines that served as an epigraph to this chapter – ‘The crucifiedbody, the crucified mind The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, thesplit, broken, crucified mind’ – by quoting Freud:

If we throw a crystal to the ground, it breaks, but it does not breakhaphazard; 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 whichmadmen were regarded by the people of ancient times.26

And Brown concludes in his inimitable way: ‘Split the stick and there isJesus.’27 In Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles a remarkable series ofChristomorphic poems begins with ‘Los ángeles mudos’ (418) [‘The DumbAngels’], where the poet revisits his native El Puerto de Santa María aftermany years in Madrid and appears to astonished locals like the Risen Christ

It culminates in Sermones y moradas where the poet consistently subsumes

his voice in that of a prophet–messiah who, in mock sermons, offers the pect of salvation through suffering Here the supreme Christian notion ofredemption in the Passion provides an exact analogy for the artist’s trium-phant passage through the crucible of psychic pain to salvation in his createdwork Needless to say, a subversive irony is at large in the conflation ofChrist’s suffering with that of a paranoiac surrealist, not least because thepsycho-genesis of the latter’s work is religious repression, but also becausethe message of his sermons is rooted in an atheism that avows the possibility

pros-of transcendence via an alchemical reaction between the self and objects.Nonetheless, as in Dalí, it is precisely through his suffering that Alberti’spoet–prophet perceives the Hegelian truth that matter is a vast store ofsubjectivity Both the paranoiac identification with Christ and thequasi-mystical insight into the innate potential of objects for transcendence –transubstantiation, one might say – are readily apparent in ‘Sermón de lascuatro 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 queansían pulsarlo todo

Escuchadle Ésta es su voz:

26 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures, trans W.J.H Sprott (Hogarth Press,

London, 1937), 80.

27 Norman O Brown, Love’s Body, 186.

– Mi alma es sólo un cuerpo que fallece por fundirse y rozarse con losobjetos vivos y difuntos (453)

[Behold the man./ Mad from touching, he drags lime off walls under hisnails./ Don’t touch him, burning as he is, besieged by millions of hands thatlong 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 againstliving 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 delhombre …

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 cryfor help or when coastal sands, merged with boiling oil, flew to cauterize aman’s shoulders …

Listen This is his voice:/ ‘My soul is stung by a crab’s pincers and burningcompasses, 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 sproutsleaves and wings.’]

Alberti’s adoption of a messianic role to preach his truths provides a lastpoint 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 hehad 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

28 This is discernible throughout his Confessions, for instance: ‘[I am] the greatest

intuitive genius of lucid life ever brought to earth … I am the perpetually reborn … Dalí is the most sublime personage there is and I am Dalí … A new consciousness of humanity may start with me, Dalí … And my painting therefore has the character of prodigious revelation Most human beings have never gotten outside their own bodies … but I come out dripping with the “other” truths … Actually I have no bodily dimensions My self is Dalí … Each picture is a Mass in which I distribute the Eucharist of a knowledge … I

lived my Passion to the full, like Christ.’ The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí,

135, 245, 246, 251.

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 physical and sensational – in the Lautréamont tradition – is attributable inlarge part to religion which, ironically, not only provokes his paranoia butalso provides the linguistic register in which it is explored

meta-Materialism and the transition to political commitment

What for Dada had been a simple desire to épater le bourgeois crystallized

for the surrealists into political commitment and, spurred by events of the1930s, alignment with Communism A conceptual point also linked the surre-alists to the doctrine of dialectical materialism, namely: the primacy ofmatter This tenet, axiomatic in turn to Hegel, Marx and the communists,was, however, anathema to Dalí for whom the human mind alone wassupreme and objective reality merely in its service, as he argued in ‘L’Ânepourri’ (1930) [‘The Rotting Donkey’]:

I believe the moment is at hand when … it will be possible … to atize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world ofreality … Paranoia makes use of the external world to impose the obses-sive notion … The reality of the external world serves as an illustration and

system-a proof, system-and is put in the service of the resystem-ality of our mind.29

Such egocentricity flew in the face of an ascendant communist ethos and itled 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 in Composition: Evocation of Lenin (1931) and especially The

Enigma of William Tell (1933) which depicted the Russian demagogue with

an enormously elongated buttock But his stance against materialism was inany case unacceptable in the volatile climate that turned a metaphysicalnicety into a heated question of political allegiance In the maelstrom ofevents that included the collapse of the New York stock exchange (24October 1929), the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic on the abdi-cation of Alfonso XIII (14 April 1931), Hitler’s rise to Chancellor (January1933) and the Asturian miners’ revolt (October 1934), Dalí’s incorrigibleNarcissism was increasingly offensive to Breton’s coterie

29 The original reads: ‘Je crois qu’est proche le moment ó, par un processus de caractère paranoiaque et actif de la pensée, il sera possible (simultanément à l’automatisme et autres états passifs) de systématiser la confusion et contribuer au discrédit total du monde de la réalité … La réalité du monde extérieur sert comme illustration et preuve, et est mise au

service de la réalité de notre esprit.’ S Dalí, ‘L’Âne pourri’, Le Surréalisme au service de

la révolution, op cit., no 1, 9–10.

Alberti, by contrast, had long been associated with the Vallecas group ofartists whose left-wing views complemented a materialist orientation in theirwork From 1925 he had regularly visited Benjamín Palencia and AlbertoSánchez in Vallecas, then a rural outskirt to the south of Madrid.30 He wasstruck by the ‘concreta revelación’ [concrete revelation] of Sánchez’s sculp-ture which he found ‘profundamente poética, no literaria, y cantan en ella lasmaterias naturales con que están hechas’31 [profoundly poetic, not literary,for it sings out with the natural materials from which it is made] Alberti’sfirst vocation, we remember, was to art: ‘Yo llegué a Madrid para serpintor’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 queencontrábamos allí pulidas por los ríos y las extremadas intemperies.33

[those villages and rural places of Vallecas where we dreamed of creating anew and universal Spanish art, pure and elemental as the stones that wefound polished by rivers and exposure to the weather.]

On his almost daily trips to Vallecas, Alberti was soon accompanied by theyoung artist, Maruja Mallo, ‘la musa de los surrealistas’34 [the surrealists’muse], who cut a striking figure in Madrid at that time: ‘la primerasinsombrerista, la primera nudista, y una de las primeras mujeresauténticamente libres’35 [the first woman to go hatless, the first nudist andone of the first truly liberated women] When Maruja began to depict earthy,

scatological objects in nearly colourless paintings – La Huella [The print] (1929) (plate 8), Basuras [Rubbish] (1930), Grajo y Excrementos

Foot-[Rook and Excrement] (1931)36– their impact on Alberti was profound Hissupreme tribute to her is the poem ‘La primera ascensión de Maruja Mallo alsubsuelo’ [‘The First Ascension of Maruja Mallo to the Subsoil’], which, asthe title indicates, treats Maruja in mock-paranoiac terms as a Redeemerwhose transcendence is towards the matter of this world rather than the next:

30 A portrait of Alberti by Alberto Sánchez dates from 1925.

36 See Maruja Mallo 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color (1928–1942), estudio

preliminar por Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942).

tú que bajas a las cloacas donde las flores más flores son ya unostristes salivazos sin sueños y mueres por las alcantarillas quedesembocan a las verbenas desiertas para resucitar al filo de unapiedra mordida por un hongo estancado …37

[You,/ you who delve into sewers where the most flowerly flowersare but sad goblets of disillusioned spittle and who expire in drainsthat flow into empty celebrations only to be reborn on the edge of astone bitten by a stagnant mushroom …]

Alberti’s object-orientation compares, then, with Dalí’s as regards the tice of simulated madness or paranoia, but his artistic allegiances with theVallecas school and with Maruja Mallo led him to a materialism that differsradically from the views of the Catalan painter His more committed position,prompted by artistic priorities, facilitated an almost seamless transition to thematerialist ideology of Communism

prac-Alberti’s political awakening dates from 1928 when student uprisingsagainst 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 jerezanoespadón’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 racedfrantically into the streets with the fervent students We walked along thebarricades that had been set up on the boulevards, stood firm against themounted Guardia Civil and the gunfire from their Mausers No one hadcalled me It was my own blind impulse which guided me The majority ofthose young men knew very little about me, but suddenly we were allfriends (LG, 271–2)

Almost without him knowing it, his personal crisis was subsumed in aconfused 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] and Cloaca [Sewer] It

is also quoted in full by Geoffrey Connell in ‘The End of a Quest: Alberti’s Sermones y

moradas and Three Uncollected Poems’, Hispanic Review, 33 (1965), 304–5.

38 Rafael Alberti, El poeta en la España de 1931, seguido del Romancero de Fermín

Galán y los sublevados de Jaca (Publicaciones del Patronato Hispano-Argentino, Buenos

Aires, 1942), 16.

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 ygalápago’ [‘Dove and Turtle’], delivered to open-mouthed ladies of theLyceum 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 finished Sobre los ángeles, started Sermones y

moradas and 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 feverishlyproductive 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 streetbarricades Yet in these same streets Alberti was beginning to identify withthe crowds who shouted ‘!Viva la República! ¡Muera Primo de Rivera!’ and

in the same month of January he found himself marching on the Royal Palaceonly for the demonstrators to be dispersed by mounted Civil Guards whodrove some to protest in a cinema and others to burn down a kiosk where theygleefully 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 metthe beautiful and politically committed María Teresa León who soondispelled the sentimental gloom which had engulfed him since his break upwith Maruja Mallo

Events gathered pace in the new decade when Primo de Rivera fell inJanuary 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 ofthe Republic in the Pyrenean outpost of Jaca, Alfonso XIII made his ‘worstmistake’40 in ordering their execution on 14 December 1930 Alberti wasmoved to write ballads on the aptly named Galán, who hailed like himselffrom near Cádiz, and soon afterwards when he had declaimed them in the

39 The proper Jesuit motto is a little shorter: ‘Ad majorem gloriam Dei’, see footnote 11.

40 Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge University Press, London, 1967;

first published 1943), 85.

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 18July 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 playhad 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 andbayonet to defend the battered group of rebels and demanding the heads ofthe King and General Berenguer, the entire theatre protested violently Theatheistic Republicans objected to the very appearance of the Virgin, and theMonarchists were horrified to hear such criminal feelings expressed by theMother 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, with El hombre deshabitado, it helped secure

for him and fellow playwright María Teresa León a government subsidy totravel abroad and study European political and agit-prop theatre Within amonth 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 theymoved from Nazi Berlin to the Soviet capital – for Alberti, ‘un viaje delfondo de la noche al centro de la luz’43[a journey from the depth of night tothe centre of light] – they were made guests of the International Union ofRevolutionary 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 theReichstag on 27 February 1933 as well as appalling examples ofanti-Semitism Alberti’s experience abroad was definitive in his embracingCommunism, which, says Enrique Montero with some justification, had a

‘formación europea antes que española’44 [European rather than Spanishcomplexion]

41 Cádiz is forever associated with resistance to oppression since the proclamation in

1812 of the Constitución de Cádiz, followed in 1820 by Riego’s liberal pronunciamiento

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 to Octubre,

escritores y artistas revolucionarios (Topos Verlag AG, Vaduz, 1977, reimpresión de la

edición de Madrid, Gráficos Carrazas, 1933), xii.

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 subtitled Escritores y artistas revolucionarios [Revolutionary Writers and Artists] There followed a statement of principles: ‘Octubre está

contra la guerra imperialista, por la defensa de la Unión Soviética, contra elfascismo, con el proletariado’ [‘Octubre’ is against imperialist wars, for thedefence of the Soviet Union, against fascism, for the proletariat] Its officeswere listed as 45 Marqués de Urguijo, the domicile of Alberti and his wifewho sold around 2,000 copies in the streets ‘a gritos’45[shouting it out], all ofwhich 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 in Octubre.

Politics and religion

As is well known, Church and State have been closely identified in Spainsince the fifteenth century when Fernando and Isabel, the so called ‘CatholicMonarchs’, promoted the concept of nationhood by unifying the kingdoms ofCastile 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 nineteenthcentury when the secularization of education in France led to an influx ofJesuits and other teaching orders into the Peninsula By 1912 the Jesuitscontrolled ‘without exaggeration, one-third of the capital wealth of Spain’,46

investing the equivalent of £60 million sterling in diverse enterprises GeraldBrenan 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 industriallife of the country, and then one must remember that a good part of thiswealth had to be acquired by cadging for gifts and bequests among the richand that these favours were not given for nothing.47

45 María Teresa León, Memoria de la melancolía (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1970), 79.

46 Gerald Brenan cites J Aguilera and A Marvaud in The Spanish Labyrinth, 47–8.

47 Ibid.

In effect, the Church was expected to defend the interests of the rich againstthe poor, and, at a time when illiteracy was rampant, ‘the colleges of theJesuits 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 endthe majority of the population abandoned it in despair at its political intran-sigence and burned churches and killed priests in revolutionary – I mightalmost say in true Catholic and filial – anger, there is surely nothing to besurprised at.49

Octubre’s aggressive anticlericalism was much in the tradition of Goya

whom Alberti greatly admired and regarded as a profound influence on theSpanish avant-garde: ‘El surrealismo español viene de Goya’50 [SpanishSurrealism comes from Goya] Most poignant for Alberti was Goya’sdrawing in which a skeletal man hands over his skin to three representatives

of the State – a bishop, a government official and a general – with thecaption reading: ‘El pueblo entrega lo último que le queda’51[‘The people

hand over all they have left to give’] Two other prints from The Disasters

of War series appeared in Octubre, including ‘Que se rompe la cuerda’

[‘The rope is breaking’], which shows a cleric on a tightrope balancingprecariously over people below, a reference to the aloofness of the Church

in 1808 Alongside, Alberti placed his poem, ‘La iglesia marcha sobre lacuerda floja’ [‘The Church is Walking a Tightrope’], which depicts thepontiff crudely as a fawn of power:

que si la cuerda

se rompe iremos a la mierda

[My prayers/ will add fire to your canons./ My holy water/ willrecharge your dynamite./ Our Lady/ will be the sweet loader of therifles/ of your Civil Guards/ and God the guide/ of your secret police/

… Banker, brother,/ come up here, give me your hand,/ for if therope/ 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, hadsigned a concordat with Mussolini in 1929 – an act which prompted Lorca’s

vitriolic ‘Grito hacia Roma’ [‘Shout at Rome’] in Poeta en Nueva York – and

though Primo de Rivera committed a much lesser offence in allowing Jesuitand Augustinian colleges to grant degrees this still caused an uproar and didmuch 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 wasdeclared

Alberti, like many Spaniards, saw the Church as pivotal in the classstruggle One of his uncles, he humorously recalls, was ostracized by hisfamily 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 cated by the Jesuits in the minds of the poor students who attended theirschools? They were considered infernal … It simply wasn’t elegant orrefined to be a Republican Night-watchmen, coachmen, grocery-store-keepers and even perhaps civil servants at City Hall could afford to be so

incul-‘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 deuna burguesía que empezaba a industrializarse, con las lógicas exigencias

de un proletariado que esa misma industria iba creando y el grito naturaldel 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.

56 Ibid., 32 A very similar, if slightly less militant, passage is found in The Lost Grove,

79.

[confused and lumped together in one rag-bag ball the democraticaspirations of a middle class in the throes of industrialization with thelegitimate demands of a working class that the same industry was creatingand the natural cry of peasants reclaiming their land.]

In Octubre, by contrast, everything was put in the clearest terms A priority

was made of education, as in Alberti’s rousing ‘Himno de las bibliotecasproletarias’ [‘Hymn to Proletarian Libraries’] with its theme of ‘estudiar paraluchar’ [study to fight], and in ‘Los niños de Extremadura’ [‘The Children ofExtremadura’], a region whose poverty he and María Teresa León saw forthemselves when they accompanied Buñuel to Las Hurdes as he prepared his

shocking social documentary Tierra 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?]

Octubre continued the spirit of Sin Dios which had run articles like ‘La

próxima guerra imperialista y el papel de la Iglesia’ [‘The Next ImperialistWar and the Role of the Church’] (February 1933) and had invited urban andpeasant 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 hispoem ‘La lucha por la tierra’ [‘The Struggle for Land’] which sees religion inMarxist 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 …]

57 See Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel, 314.

58 See Octubre, op cit., x, xvi, fn.

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 feetrecognize it;/ it waits and cries beneath them: THE EARTH]

In place of stoical forebearance there is only impatience for an improvedmaterial circumstance in the here and now, a change to be brought aboutthrough struggle: ‘Prepárate en la paz para la guerra’ [‘Prepare for war inpeace’] 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 in El poeta en la calle (523) which appeared in Octubre and in French in Commune 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 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 religiousovertones 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

Carib-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 ofCommunist Poetry from Russia’] Machado speaks of Russia’s

misión histórica, esencialmente cristianizadora … Porque Rusia trabajapara emancipar al hombre, a todos los hombres, de cuanto es servidumbre

en el trabajo.59

[historical and essentially Christianizing mission … For Russia strives toemancipate 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 andpolitics, for here the latter appears to have assumed the duties abrogated bythe former It also suggests that transcendental patterns of thought – normallyassociated with religion and seemingly endemic in Spaniards – have beentransferred to the Utopian politics of the hammer and sickle This perhapsexplains why surrealist writing in Spain – at least the genre of poetry, inAlberti’s view – was rather more serious than in France:

es más seria la española, y más profunda, y menos charlatana; porquemuchas partes del surrealismo han quedado en mucho bla-bla-bla, enmucha conversación.60

[the Spanish is more serious, more profound, and less charlatan; for manytypes of Surrealism have degenerated into babble, so much empty talk.]

59 Octubre, nos 4–5, 4; and reimpression (Topos Verlag AG, Vaduz, 1977), 148.

60 Rafael Alberti, taped interview with Geoffrey Connell See footnote 2.

Before we consider Alberti’s own view of Surrealism, however, there is afurther positive feature to mention which derives directly from a religiousformation and which a number of Spaniards seem to have channelled intotheir 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 thepresence – 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 thathad been brewing for centuries But religion is not wholly negative, evenfrom a surrealist perspective For one thing, it promotes a transcendentaldisposition that distinguishes the ‘visionary’61Dalí and the materio-mysticalAlberti from the French model For another, it provides a rich biblical registercomplete 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 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 onHell’:

experi-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 soulsappearing to be in burning bodies …

To hear with one’s ears the wailings, howls, cries, blasphemies againstChrist our Lord and all the saints …

To smell with the sense of smell the smoke, the burning sulphur, the cesspitand the rotting matter …

To taste with the sense of taste bitter things, such as tears, sadness and thepangs of conscience …

To feel with the sense of touch, i.e how those in hell are licked around andburned by the fires.62

61 ‘I am essentially a visionary,’ says Dalí, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador

Dalí, 143.

62 Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings, trans with introductions and notes by

Joseph A Munitiz and Philip Endean (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1996), 298–9.

This practice is based on ‘the composition, seeing the place’63 – ‘lacomposición, viendo el lugar’ – as Loyola puts it in the preamble to the FirstExercise, which enables the trainee Jesuit to live the experience of hell throughall his senses Not only trainees, it would seem, but Jesuit schoolboys too, forAlberti speaks of being subjected to ‘horrifying sermons’ and to ‘a fiery lecture

on the torments of Hell’ (LG, 32, 84) These were no doubt similar to the one James Joyce recalls in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which frightens

the life out of a host of young boys, including Stephen Dedalus, his imaginaryself Joyce vividly depicts a visiting preacher conjuring up ‘the horror of thisstrait and dark prison’ in a stream of images that focus on the stench of hell, theintensity of its fire and the boundlessness of its torments.64When the preacher

is finished, Stephen Dedalus is left shaking, hardly knowing if he is dead oralive, with voices shrieking ‘Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!’ inside his head.Later that same day the preacher resumes quietly with the words:

This morning we endeavoured, in our reflection upon hell, to make whatour holy founder calls in his book of spiritual exercises, the composition ofplace We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the senses of the mind, inour imagination, the material character of that awful place and of the phys-ical torments which all who are in hell endure This evening we shallconsider for a few moments the nature of the spiritual torments of hell.65

Needless to say, when the preacher gets into his stride again his depiction ofthe spiritual torments that await the young miscreants is every bit as excruci-ating as the physical ones he outlined in his first session

What is unmistakable in Joyce’s account is the extraordinary stress uponthe imagination, the use of which is seen as imperative:

Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain foul and decomposing inthe grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption Imagine such a corpse aprey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving offdense choking fumes and nauseous loathsome decomposition And thenimagine this sickening stench multiplied a millionfold and a millionfoldagain from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together inthe reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus Imagine all thisand you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.66

At the same time it must be remembered that hell is only one, if the mostdisturbing, of a number of subjects to be imagined Equally important is the

life of Christ, especially the Stations of the Cross, which will occupy thetrainee’s attention in the fourth and final cycle of his meditations AgainLoyola tells the trainee that he must use his imagination to feel the crown

of thorns, the nails and the soldier’s spear; he must be able to taste thevinegar and, in short, he must feel as forlorn in his suffering as Christ was.This practice of ‘viendo el lugar’, of actualizing the experience in all itscircumstantial detail, is something Alberti would have been made stronglyaware of in the Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga, as would Buñuel at theColegio del Salvador in Zaragoza No wonder his poems of torment in

Sobre los ángeles are so hellish No wonder he declaims his sermons with

such messianic fervour in Sermones y moradas In this light we appreciate

Alberti’s image-making power in such agonized poems as ‘Desahucio’[‘Eviction’],

Humedad Cadenas Gritos

Ráfagas (390)

[Dampness Chains Screams./ Blasts of wind]

– ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Body’],

¿Quién sacude en mi almohada

reinados de yel y sangre,

cielos de azufre,

mares de vinagre? (392)

[Who scatters on my pillow/ reigns of bile and blood,

skies of brimstone,/ seas of vinegar?]

– ‘El alma en pena’ [‘The Soul in Torment’],

Sísmicos latigazos tumban sueños,

terremotos derriban las estrellas (420)

[Seismic whiplashes flatten dreams,/ earthquakes demolish stars]

– and ‘Castigos’ [‘Punishments’],

Cuando saben a azufre los vientos

y las bocas nocturnas a hueso, vidrio y alambre (438)

[When winds taste of brimstone

and nocturnal mouths of bone, glass and wire]

All of which points to a hell on earth, as experienced by the boy whomAlberti recalls in ‘Muerte y juicio’ [‘Death and Judgement’] which concludeswith the line: ‘Para ir al infierno no hace falta cambiar de sitio ni de postura’

(434) [To go to hell you don’t have to budge an inch or move a muscle] Thetenor of his language compares with that of Joyce’s preacher:

The fire of hell gives forth no light … the fire of hell, while retaining theintensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness It is a never-ending storm

of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid whichthe bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse ofair … All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we aretold, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer … The brimstone too whichburns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerablestench … the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substancewhich is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakablefury … O how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The bloodseethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart inthe breast glowing and burning, the bowels a redhot mass of burning pulp,the tender eyes flaming like molten balls …

Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith:the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours,the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter,leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goadsand spikes, with cruel tongues of flame And through the several torments

of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amidthe leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by theoffended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting andever increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead.67

In this light we begin to make sense of the excruciating texture of a poemlike ‘5’ with its clear allusion to the five senses as a channel of experienceand understanding:

Cinco manos de ceniza,

quemando la bruma, abriendo

cinco vías

para el agua turbia,

para el turbio viento …

… los cinco navegables ríos

que dan almas corrientes, voz al sueño (408)

[Five hands of ash,/ burning the mist, opening/ five routes/ for themurky water,/ for the misty air … / the five navigable rivers/ thatgive voice and common souls to dreams …]

The poem seems to be about a lost self – very likely the ‘tú’ [you] is the poet

as a young boy – and a striking feature is the absence of the first person, or

67 Ibid., 123–5.

the self as ‘I’ Instead there is a sense of the void, suggesting a violated, gated personality, which is itemized at the poem’s end when each of the fivesenses is allocated a stanza:

abne-Y no viste

Era su luz la que cayó primero

Mírala, seca, en el suelo

Y no oíste

Era su voz la que alargada hirieron

Óyela muda, en el eco

Y no oliste

Era su esencia la que hendió el silencio

Huélela fría, en el viento

Y no gustaste

Era su nombre el que rodó deshecho

Gústalo en tu lengua, muerto

Y no tocaste

El desaparecido era su cuerpo

Tócala en la nada, yelo (408–9)

[And you saw not./ It was his light that fell first

Look at it, withered, on the floor

And you heard not./ It was his extenuated voice they wounded.Hear it, dumb, in the echo

And you smelt not./ It was his essence that rent the silence

Smell it, cold, in the wind

And you tasted not./ It was his name that was shattered

Taste it on your tongue, dead

And you touched not./ What had disappeared was his body

Touch it in the void, ice.]

The pronouns are typically ambiguous, but we discern the Jesuit practice ofexperiencing something with all five senses successively What leaves thestrongest impression is the sense of a deliberate, total destruction of person-ality, which I take to be the poet’s own, as a child, destroyed by Jesuit abuse.Indeed, the theme of stealing away a child’s life is a recurring one, from the

‘ángel muerto’ [dead angel] of the opening ‘Paraíso perdido’ [‘ParadiseLost’] to the terrified boy in ‘Muerte y juicio’ [‘Death and Judgement’]:

A un niño, a un solo niño que iba para piedra nocturna …

Mirad Conteneos la sangre, los ojos

A sus pies, él mismo, sin vida (432)

[A boy, a single boy who was going towards night stone …

Look Restrain your blood, your tears./ At their feet, he, the sameone, lifeless.]

It is found too in ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Body’]:

Llevaba una ciudad dentro

La perdió./ Le perdieron (394)

[He carried a city within./ He lost it./ They lost him.]

– and most tellingly, despite the puzzling feminine gender, in ‘El ángelmentiroso’ [‘The Lying Angel’]:

Y fui derrotada

yo, sin violencia,

con miel y palabras (400)

[And I was destroyed/ me, without violence,/ with honey and words.]

It can hardly be coincidental that the theme of a dead child is so prominent

in others who concern us: Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, for instance, has a

clutch of narrative poems on the theme – ‘El niño Stanton’ [‘The BoyStanton’], ‘Niña ahogada en el pozo’ [‘Girl Drowned in a Well’], ‘Fábula yrueda de los tres amigos’ [‘Fable and Ring of the Three Friends’] – as well aspowerful internal projections on dead youth in ‘1910 (intermedio)’ [‘1910(Intermediate)’], ‘Tu infancia en Menton’ [‘Your Childhood in Menton’] and

‘Poema doble del Lago Edem’ [‘Double Poem of Lake Eden’] For Dalí, thenotion of a dead self was starkly represented in his older brother, the originalSalvador, who died some time before the artist was born and for whom thenew Salvador felt merely a substitute in his mournful parents’ eyes Thiscomplex was decisive in Dalí’s youth – ‘I thought I was dead before I knew Iwas alive’68– and it bears strongly on his creative processes, as we shall see.Reconstructing the above with reference to Alberti, we have a curiousexample of a personality that appears to be abnegated but which is extremelyfertile in terms of imagining torment and hallucinating generally Thisseeming paradox, I suggest, is the result of systematic indoctrination, aconclusion I am led to by Roland Barthes’ analysis of Loyola’s method.Barthes points out that the use of the five senses results firstly and most obvi-ously in proliferation, for ‘the imagining of Hell consists in perceiving it fiveconsecutive times in the mode of each of the five senses’.69 Proliferation,Barthes then shows, is an obsessive feature in Loyola’s language as a whole,the antitheses, bifurcations and numberings off producing what he calls the

‘continuous arborescence of Ignatian discourse’.70 What this prolificness

68 The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, 241.

69 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans R Miller (Jonathan Cape, London,

1977), 55.

70 Ibid., 56–7.

reflects, says Barthes, is ‘the need to occupy the totality of the mental tory’, which means, frankly, that Loyola’s language is a brain-washing tooldesigned to fill every waking and sleeping moment of a trainee who is eventold what to contemplate last thing at night.71Barthes observes that ‘Ignatiustakes as much trouble filling the spirit with images as the mystics do inemptying them out’, and, having compared instructor and trainee with ‘psy-choanalyst and analysand’, he relates their dialogue to modern therapeutictheories ‘which define the psychosomatic patient as a subject powerless toproduce fantasies and his cure as a methodical effort to bring him to a

terri-“capacity for fantasy manipulation” ’ He concludes: ‘Ignatius is then apsychotherapist attempting at all costs to inject images into the dull, dry andempty spirit of the exercitant, to introduce into him this culture of fantasy Inshort, the retreatant must be “made neurotic” ’.72 This analysis clarifies theprocess described by Alberti whose own loss of self through mental coloniza-tion and saturation tactics – ‘con miel y palabras’ [with words and honey] –produced a similarly neurotic, depersonalized individual who was ripe for

‘fantasy manipulation’ The Jesuits, it appears, prepared him well for thesystematic and manipulative – i.e paranoiac and virtually self-hypnotic –practice of ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place]

Religion and materiality

Alberti, like Buñuel, was a day-boy not a trainee Jesuit, it is true, but theregime they both suffered was structured along Loyola’s militarist principles.Buñuel refers to ‘this heavy dosage of death and religion’ in his youth andrecalls playing at Mass as a boy,73 a game that no doubt celebrated themystery of transubstantiation Lorca, as Dalí informs, played the same reli-

gious games, especially death games – an example occurs in Mariana

Pineda74– and he cultivated imaginative role-play as an adult:

Lorca … sometimes acted out his own death I can still see his face, deadlyand terrible, as he lay on his bed, trying to go through the stages of his slowdecomposition Putrefaction, in his version, lasted four or five days Then

he described the casket, his coffining, the full scene of its closing, and theprogress of the hearse through the bumpy streets of Granada.75

71 ‘After going to bed and wanting to go to sleep, I should think for the space of a Hail Mary at what time I have to get up, and for what purpose, going over the exercise I have to

make.’ See article 73, or Addition 1, to the First Week, Personal Writings, 299.