Lorca After Life by Noel Valis

Author:Noel Valis [Valis, Noel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300265668
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

6. Fabulous Fag (III), or a Face in the Crowd

You could say that Nin Frías was the first to see Lorca as a gay icon. By that I mean Lorca as a prefabricated fantasy, a fetishized image that fulfills someone else’s desires and needs (much as we saw with Retana). Nin’s strategy was to transfer the aura of al-Andalus—its “medieval enchantment”—to the poet, though Lorca was, from nearly all accounts, already a charismatic figure. He also blurred the distinction between man and poet in the cases of both Badanelli and Lorca, emphasizing that they lived “to catch sight of the Andalusian young man and capture him on their canvases.” The poet’s singularity ends up fetishizing homosexuality as well, a gesture also visible in some of Lorca’s own work, notably in the “Ode to Walt Whitman.”

Nin’s outing of Lorca remained an exception for decades to come, confirming his view of homosexuality as both anomaly and eccentricity, as he wrote in Alexis. And yet, the only difference between Nin’s portrait of the poet’s star quality and those of many other commentators was identifying that quality as gay. So we are faced with what might now be called a belated gay icon, but one that also stemmed at least in part from Lorca’s fabled uniqueness and the manner in which that personal aura, exploding like an eroticized radiance, attached to his work. There is no evidence, however, to indicate that the poet intentionally presented himself as gay in public.

Instead, I am arguing, first, that the celebrity status and fame he attained in life (and afterward) need to be resituated within the growing culture (and cult) of celebrity and alongside the heightened visibility of figures like Retana, Hoyos y Vinent, Wilde (and, one might add, Whitman), which I have already commented on. This peculiar status must also be seen in relation to its public—to the crowd, both material and virtual, that creates celebrity. And second, that his charismatic presentation of self in life and, by implication, in his work exhibited traits of the marvelous, the monstrous, and the hybrid, which other writers of his day such as Retana and Cansinos-Asséns saw as both a gay (or ambiguous) and modern phenomenon inextricably linked together. Expressed another way, Lorca built into works such as “Ode to Walt Whitman” and The Public a poetry of performance grounded in iconic exceptionalism, in a poetics of the marvelous that can be read on at least one level as gay, symbolically or otherwise.

This is to say that, like Retana, Lorca, whether intentionally or not, fed the desires of his readers, especially his gay readers, to see in his persona and work a form of personal validation. Nin Frías may have been the first to view the poet’s work as imbued with a “strange and equivocal flavor,” which can be understood as a poetics of oddness, but he certainly wasn’t the last.1 (The phrase recalls Lillian Smith’s controversial Strange Fruit [1944], which used a slang term referring to the lynching of African-Americans but also to lesbianism in her novel.

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