Towards a Foucauldian Exegesis of Act v of Garca Lorca's "El pblico"

Author(s): Carlos Jerez-Farrn

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jul., 2000), pp. 728-743
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3735499
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 TOWARDS A FOUCAULDIAN EXEGESIS OF ACT V OF

GARCIA LORCA'S EL PUBLICO

Of all of Federico Garcia Lorca's works, El publico is the one that has suffe
greatest adversities. The fact that the play is the first text by Lorca, and als
in modern theatre, that deals with homosexuality directly, without the peri
tactics so frequently used in his more conventional theatre, is the principl
for the difficulties it has faced since its composition. The play, which was
during Lorca's stay in New York in 1929, has come down to us in an in
state, the only existing copy being the manuscript that Rafael Martin
edited in I974.1 Although it is known that Lorca read the play to a circle o
friends in 1930, it was never performed until I979, ironically fulfilling th
prophecy that the play was 'for the theatre years from now'.2 Besid
manuscript's many vicissitudes, El publico is one of the most complex and
of Lorca's 'lost' works. Its difficulties are mainly due to the play's s
fragmentation, to the apparent illogicality of the scene sequences, and to th
arbitrary manner in which the characters make their appearance. Differen
of reality intermix to become confused with historical or dreamlike sequen
play's verbal density is often a serious impediment to the reader's underst
the action, and whereas in Lorca's more popular theatre words are used as
of communication and comprehension, in El publico they are used to
meaning.
There is no doubt that Elpuiblico's semiotic obfuscation and peculiar structure are
direct consequences of Lorca's interest in the avant-garde experimentations of the
time, both in the visual arts and in the theatre. The theory that Poeta en Jueva York
was, among other things, a pretext for Lorca to prove to his friends, especially Dali
and Bufiuel, how far he could go with modernist aesthetics, could equally apply to
this play. It can also be argued that the fragmentation and impenetrability of the
play serve to articulate a number of important aspects about the dominant ideology
under which the play was written. It is my conviction that Elpzublico should be read
not only as an example of the modernist literary discourse Lorca was developing so
adeptly but also as a dramatization of the author's personal frustration within a
social system that reacted to homosexual subjectivity with a bizarre mixture of
censure, ignorance, and denial. The incoherence of the play, its incompleteness,
and its lack of the aesthetic harmony so typical of his better-known plays, should be
read as signs of the dialectical tensions the homosexual subject experiences in a

Since a discussion of the various versions of the play falls beyond the scope of this study, I refer the reader
to Martinez Nadal's introduction to this edition of 'El plblico'y 'Comedia sin titulo' (Madrid: Seix Barral, I978),
pp. 13-29 (hereafter Elpztblico), and, especially, to the more recent study by Julio Huelamo Kosma, where the
topic receives wider attention (El teatro imposible de Garcia Lorca. Estudio sobre 'El publico' (Granada: Universidad
de Granada, I996)).
2 This comment is recalled by Mildred Adams in her description of the alarm the play caused among the
poet's friends when they heard it for the first time in Madrid: 'At the end, Bebi [Morla Lynch] was weeping,
not from emotion, but from dismay. "Federico, you are not going to have that played. Apart from the scandal,
it is unplayable." Lorca did not try to defend his piece. Down in the street he told Rafael [Martinez Nadal]:
"This is for the theatre years from now. Until then, lets say no more about it"' (Mildred Adams, Garcia Lorca:
Playwright and Poet (New York: Braziller, 1977), p. i96). The same consternation and incomprehension was also
be shown by the Cuban friends who comprised Lorca's audience for the first reading of the play (Ian Gibson,
Federico Garcia Lorca, 2 vols (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1985), II, p. I 14).

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 CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN 729

system that is bent on preventing the existence and authentic articulation of

homosexuality. It is from this perspective that the play's failed attempt at
constructing harmony should be interpreted. The text, after all, is inspired, among
other things, by the ostracism Lorca himself experienced as a homosexual, the
prejudice and injustice society levelled at him, and the unresolved inner conflicts
that these created in the author. Traditional criticism has tended to attenuate the
play's homoerotic content, and thereby its political content. Yet the play becomes
much more intelligible once the problems that beset Lorca and the ideology of his
times are recognized. As Paul Julian Smith has demonstrated in his recent analysis
of Lluis Pasqual's I986 production of El pziblico in Madrid, one of the successes of
the play's staging was the way in which 'the play's conceptual complexities' were
made to disappear, thanks to the adroitness of the production and to the way it
communicated 'Garcia Lorca's ideas on both homosexuality and theatre [...]
without either apology or apologetics'.3
Among the five acts that comprise the work in its present form, it is perhaps the
fifth that best exemplifies the complex dialectic created as alternative sexual
ideologies attempt to become visible and legitimate. This act contains a key episode
in which the themes and preoccupations introduced earlier converge in a revealing
and dramatic manner. I am referring in particular to the commotion caused by the
Director's experiment, in which Julieta is discovered to be in reality a boy disguised
as a woman. The Stage Director had previously tried to demonstrate that Romeo
and Juliet need not be a man and a woman for their death scene to be heart-
rending, and that equally passionate love can exist between men. It is undoubtedly
the play's most transgressive incident, the one that metaphorically brings the house
down. With the exception of the brief and cryptic interventions of Helena, the
Centuri6n, and the historical-literary Julieta de Verona, this is the first time in the
play that homosexual intimacy is seen and openly commented on by a supposedly
heterosexual audience within the play. The scene is thus unprecedentedly defiant.
Of special interest in this context is the intervention of the five Estudiantes who
enter discussing the cleverness of the Director's trick and the upheaval it has caused.
Their conversation alternates with the appearance of three Damas who comment
on the shocking experience of having discovered that the stage Julieta was a fifteen-
year-old boy. The symbolic function of this second group of commentators is
especially significant, since they represent the social sectors least sensitive to and
most condemnatory of the homosexual love portrayed on stage, what Eve Sedgwick
would call 'the psychosis that makes graphic the mechanism of homophobia.'4 It
was the consolidation of the bourgeoisie at the beginning of the last century that
made possible these new methods of reasoning about sexuality. As Michel Foucault
observed in chapter of his History of Sexuality, significantly entitled 'We, "Other
Victorians"':

It was in the 'bourgeois' or 'aristocratic' family that the sexuality of children and adolesce
was first problematized, and feminine sexuality medicalized; it was the first to be alerted

3 The Theatre of Garcia Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univer
Press, I998), p. 25.
4 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Colum
University Press, 1995), p. 91.

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 730 Act v of 'El publico'

the potential pathology of sex, the urgent need to keep it under close watch and to devise a
rational technology of correction.5

These strategies of power put into operation an apparatus that generated a

repressive discourse and contributed to the creation of stereotypes such as 'the
hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse
adult' (p. 105). As the judicial fate of the actors in Lorca's text illustrates, one
purpose of these taxonomies was to establish with maximum force and clarity the
parameters of what was admissible, in order to distinguish and punish the
inadmissible, the sexual dissidence that could destabilize the social and sexual power
exerted by the dominant ideology. Mary McIntosh refers to this categorization of
the homosexual: 'The creation of a specialized, despised and punished role of
homosexual keeps the bulk of society pure in rather the same way that the similar
treatment of some kinds of criminals helps keep the rest of society law-abiding.'6 It
is not only the desire to repress sexual perversions that puts such repressive
mechanisms into operation but also the desire to maintain the resulting position of
power, thus making sexuality an instrument of control of that same power. Again,
the words of Foucault are enlightening when he refers to this duplicity:
The primary concern was not repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but rather
the body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that 'ruled'. This was the
purpose for which the deployment of sexuality was first established [.. .] as a means of social
control and political subjugation. (History, I, I23).

Act v of El puzblico offers various examples of the system of power/knowledge that

finally judges the actors' sexual transgression. One such example is Dama 2's
complaint about the intimacies she involuntarily witnessed when the actors' sexual
identity has been revealed: 'jQue necesidad teniamos de lamer los esqueletos?' (El
publico, p. 35). Her protest is better understood if analysed from the point of view of
the ideology it represents. Foucault expresses this viewpoint when he writes of the
negative association between power and sex, and the juridical-discursive character
that power deploys when dealing with sex:
To deal with sex, power employs nothing more than a law of prohibition. Its objective: that
sex renounce itself. Its instrument: the threat of a punishment that is nothing other than the
suppression of sex. Renounce yourself or suffer the penalty of being suppressed; do not
appear if you do not want to disappear. Your existence will be maintained only at the cost of
your nullification.

The mechanisms that characterize censorship, the philosopher continues, are

constituted in such a way that
one must not talk about what is forbidden until it is annulled in reality; what is nonexistent
has no right to show itself, even in the order of speech where its nonexistence is declared; and
that which one must keep silent about is silent from reality as the thing that is tabooed above
all else. (History, i, p. 84)

It is the transgression of this silence and the breaking of prohibitions that infuriate
the audience, in part because the efficacy of their homophobic discourse depends
primarily on the invisibility of this human reality they want to treat as nonexistent.

5 The Histo[y of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley, 3 vols (New York: Vintage Press, 1990), I, p. 120 (hereafter
Histo[y).
6 'The Homosexual Role', in The Making of the Moder Homosexual, ed. by Kenneth Plummer (Totowa, NJ:
Barnes & Noble, 198I), pp. 30-49 (p. 32).

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 CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN 73I

This silence also allows simplistic stereotypes and distorted manipulations of

homosexuality to continue in force. Contrary to what has been assumed, homo-
phobic discourse is due not to ignorance but to a well-organized political force, to 'a
political anxiety about the subversive, revolutionary, social arrangements that gays
may be trying out [and] about a threat to the way people are expected to relate to
one another'.7
The profound anxieties that this kind of transgression provokes are as varied as
the motives behind the repressive mechanisms exemplified in Lorca's text. Figuring
among them is the horror of discovering that the dramatized romantic attraction
acquires corporality and proclaims its existence and naturalness. This is implicit in
Dama 2's protest that 'sus voces estaban vivas y sus apariencias tambien' (Elpublico,
p. 127), from which we are given to understand that the sentiments of the two actors
were real, as was the relationship their roles symbolized. This significant comment
paves the way for the students' analysis of the performance. The members of the
audience manifest their defensiveness by lynching the sexual dissidents as soon as
they discover that two men demonstrate a mutual attraction in defiance of the
common rules and, what is more serious, they truly love one another. This the
public cannot tolerate. The various examples in the text, although they seem to
contradict one another, confirm the intrinsically incoherent nature of homophobia,
in David Halperin's terms, 'the logical contradictions internal to homophobic
discourses' (Saint Foucault, p. 34). The explanations given for the revolution that has
broken out in protest against the Director's play are indicative of this. According to
Estudiante 4, the most dogmatic of the group, 'el tumulto comenz6 cuando vieron
que Romeo y Julieta se amaban de verdad' (El publico, p. 127), that is, when they
discovered that Julieta was a boy disguised as a woman, and that, being a man, he
truly loved Romeo: 'El puiblico tiene sagacidad para descubrirlo todo y por eso
protest6' (p. 129). The euphemistic 'everything' refers to the homosexual relation-
ship and to its non-procreative nature, as corroborated later when the student says:
'El Director de escena abri6 los cotillones y la gente pudo ver como el veneno de las
venas falsas habia causado la muerte verdadera de muchos nifios' (pp. 127-29).
Here 'veins' metonymically designate blood and, by extension, semen, according to
ancient medical theories.8 These 'veins' are 'false' because the social context from
which Estudiante 4 speaks equates 'authentic' sexual activity with procreation. To
deny this is equivalent to causing 'la muerte verdadera de muchos nifios', which
would explain why the vital fluids that miss their supposed objective are seen as

7 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 77- 12 (p. 8i), quoted in
David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault. Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1995), p. 121 (hereafter Saint Foucault).
8 Galen was among those who maintained that 'as warmth and pleasure build up and diffuse, the increasingly
violent movement of the whole man causes the finest part of the blood to be concocted into semen, a kind of
foam that finally bursts forth powerfully and uncontrollably' (Thomas Laqueur, 'Orgasm, Generation and the
Politics of Reproductive Biology', in The Making of the Modem Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century,
ed. by Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Lacqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 7). The
semen = blood equation established by the biological sciences and popular culture in the nineteenth centuriy
and the beginning of the twentieth has been thoroughly analysed by Bram Dijkstra in Evil Sisters: The Threat of
Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. (New York: Knopf, i996). See especially the chapter entitled 'For the
Blood is the Life'.

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732 Act v of 'El publico'

'veneno'. It is a term that Lorca uses with identical connotations of sterility in other
allusions to homosexuality.9
Estudiante 2, while in accord with Estudiante 4's interpretation, nevertheless feels
the need to clarify his comment by stating in an ironic way that the 'tumulto
comenzo cuando observaron que no se amaban, que no podian amarse nunca' (El
publico, p. 129). The audience became indignant because they saw two men in what
they considered to be a false enactment of love. Their attitude exemplifies what
Halperin has categorized as 'the homophobic logic that ineluctably constructs
"love" in exclusively heterosexual terms'.10 The real emotional ties that bound these
two actors together is something clarified by Student 2 when he adds that the
audience protested because they saw that the actors truly loved one another in the
most intimate and everlasting part of their being: 'Se amaban los esqueletos y
estaban amarillos de llama' (Elpuiblico, p. 129). Their passion went to the very bones,
as opposed to the superficiality conveyed by the costumes: 'Pero no se amaban los
trajes' (p. I29). The signs denoting presumed conventional love receive the
audience's approval, even when they are sheer theatricality, simulacra, precisely
what the 'teatro al aire libre' represents and what its detractors have criticized and
tried to avoid. The sentiments that these two star-crossed actors in love with each
other portray in this 'teatro bajo la arena' are intolerable for the conservative
audience; the love is something they do not wish to imagine because it represents a
desecration of a supposedly exclusive heterosexual privilege.
Estudiante 4 refers elliptically to this desecration when he states that what the
audience has indeed seen several times was 'la cola de Julieta cubierta de pequefios
sapitos de asco' (p. 129). The symbolic value of the toad in this context is extremely
significant, invoking an amphibian used in traditional Christian symbolism to
denounce the demonic craftiness of lust.1' In the erotic-religious paintings of
Hieronymus Bosch, for example, the toad appears as an emblem of the lasciviousness
associated with the feminine genitals upon which it sits. It is thus depicted in The
Seven Deadly Sins and The Haywain, and again in The Garden of Earthly Delights, although
in this last painting it is associated with the woman's breasts. Besides being
recognized as a symbol of diabolical desire, the toad is an animal to which poisonous
properties are attributed. It is also associated with faecal impurities. Lorca, who
must have been familiar with these paintings, since they form part of the Prado
collection, re-elaborates this plurivalent symbol to denote its multiple significance
and to express at the same time the feelings of aversion that homosexuality stirs in

9 This brings to mind, for example, the veiled allusion the American woman makes to Keaton's sexual
ambiguity in Lorca's El paseo de Buster Keaton when she asks him sarcastically, 'jTiene usted un anillo con la
piedra envenenada?' (Obras completas, 3 vols, ed. by Arturo de Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1987), I, 279 (hereafter
Obras)). The meaning conveyed here appears more explicitly in the condemnation Lorca makes of the 'city
faggots' in his 'Ode to Walt Whitman': 'Contra vosotros siempre, que dais a los muchachos I gotas de sucia
muerte con amargo veneno' (Obras, I, 531).
'O 'Historicizing the Sexual Body: Sexual Preference and Erotic Identities in the Pseudo-Lucianic Erotes', in
Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to Aids, ed. by Donna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
I992), pp. 236-6 (p. 241).
1 As Jonathan Dollimore observes in relation to this dialectic: 'Woman was once (and may still be) feared in
a way in which the homosexual now is - feared, that is, not so much, or only, because of a radical otherness,
as because of an inferior resemblance presupposing a certain proximity' (Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde,
Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 199 1), p. 253).

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 CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN 733

this audience.12 In popular belief, and in medicine, when it has not been synonymous
with unbridled promiscuity, homosexual love has been viewed as a merely genital
sexuality, identified with moral turpitude and practised by 'men who prostitute their
bodies to lust and forget what they are born to be, contending with women in
passivity', according to Lactantius, a medieval moralist concerned with such sexual
matters.'3 For those who insist on seeing a debased sexual content, homosexuality
becomes a depravation that nullifies the spiritual potential of which it is capable,
even when the 'sensuous element' ofhomogenic love 'though present, is exquisitely
subordinated to the spiritual', as Edward Carpenter explained in his account of the
'love sentiment' in homosexuality.14
The mental block displayed by the audience is unconditional in its inability to
understand that the sexual impulses inherent in robust love, as Whitman defined
love between men, can include affection and friendship. The necessity of elevating
love over desire and the futility of the attempt encapsulate clearly the existential
dilemma that Lorca portrays. The dilemma exists in its heterosexual form, but in
the case of a dissident love it is intensified by the difficulties involved in attempting
to represent such love in a positive way. It is impossible to escape what Thomas
Yingling describes as 'the moral implications of a homosexual personality when
they could by the definition of the time point to that personality as immoral'.15 It is
a dilemma that Lorca's text does not try to resolve but presents in the way the
author sees it, as a system in which the sexual dissident will be punished and
alienated, whether for sexual reasons or not. Halperin synthesizes the arbitrariness
of the homophobic reasoning herewith implied:
Homophobic discourses contain no fixed propositional content. They are composed of a
potentially infinite number of different functionally interchangeable assertions, such that
whenever any one assertion is falsified or disqualified, another one - even one with a
content exactly contrary to the original one - can be neatly and effectively substituted by it.'
(Saint Foucault, p. 33)

Foucault noted the challenge homosexual relationships pose to the very foundation
of the patriarchal system when he observed:
Imagining a sexual act that does not conform to the law or to nature, that's not what upsets
people. But that individuals might begin to love each other, that's the problem. That goes
against the grain of social institutions: they are already criss-crossed by emotional intensities
that both hold them in place and fill them with turmoil.16

12 The toad as a symbol of lust appears frequently in Lorca's work, as in expositions 31 and 32 of Viaje a la
luna, as well as in 'Iglesia abandonada' and 'Nacimiento de Cristo' in Poeta en Nueva York. The same is true of the
frog, which appears with the same symbolic value on two further occasions in Elpsiblico: in the self-deprecation
that the Director expresses: ('Es en un pantano podrido donde debemos estar, bajo el legamo donde se
consumen las ranas muertas' (p. 8I)), and later on, in a diametrically opposed sense, when Estudiante I,
overjoyed with his newly acquired freedom, exclaims: 'iAlegria! iAlegria de los muchachos, y de las muchachas,
y de las ranas!' (p. I43).
13 Quoted by John Boswell in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), p. 349.
14 Edward Carpenter was Lorca's contemporary and an early advocate of homosexuality in England. See
Christopher Craft's erudite study, Another Kind of Love. Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, I850-I920
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), where this citation appears (p. 32).
15 Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 66.
16 Quoted in Saint Foucault, p. 98. Equally suggestive are Foucault's thoughts on the promiscuity with which
homosexuality has been defamed, with the objective of making difficult 'everything that can possibly be
upsetting about affection, tenderness, friendship, faithfulness, comradeship, companionship for which a fairly
controlled society cannot make room without fearing that alliances might be formed, that unexpected lines of
force might appear'(p. 98).

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734 Act v of 'El publico'

Homosexuality represents no problem as long as it is reduced to mere sexual

contact, but if it is conducive to an emotional attachment, and if the sexual
relationship implied is accompanied by an equally implicit desire to redefine the
hierarchical system that excludes it, then the impact is altogether different. This is
precisely the cause of the riot in Lorca's play. For this reason, it is considered
necessary to minimize the emotional dimension of homosexual love by diverting
attention to other realities, such as the sexual. This way, the fury society discharges
on demonstrations of this kind appears fully justified.
That said, it is to be expected that Lorca was hesitant about staging Elpuiblico. He
made clear in an interview that it was a play he did not intend to stage, partly
because, as he stated:
Creo que no hay compafia que se anime a llevarla a escena ni publico que la tolere sin
indignarse ... porque es el espejo del piublico. Es decir, haciendo desfilar en escena los
dramas propios que cada uno de los espectadores esta pensando, mientras esta mirando,
muchas veces sin fijarse, la representaci6n. Y como el drama de cada uno a veces es muy
punzante y generalmente nada honroso, pues los espectadores en seguida se levantarian
indignados e impedirian que continuara la representaci6n. ... Si, mi pieza no es una obra
para representarse; es [. .] 'Un poema para silbarlo'. (Obras, III, p. 557)

Any attempt to mock the moral and sexual hypocrisy of an insensitive public was
bound to meet the fate of El putblico, Lorca believed. The more perturbing
implication in his statement is the audience's fear of identification with certain
forms of sexual desire that are hidden in the human psyche, contradictory notions
that often go undetected because the individual is not aware of them.17 As C. A.
Tripp has explained persuasively:
Part of what needs to be accounted for is the fact that murder, graft and a host of other
violent crimes, though strongly taboo, fail to stir the intensely personalized emotions that can
still be aroused by the homosexual. [ . .] Thus, for most people, one of the most disturbing
images in homosexuality is that of two men kissing, for it is easily imagined and sharply at
odds with what is expected.18

An equally perturbing consequence of the unveiled emotional reality, to judge by

the effect it has on the public, is that it highlights aspects of life that spectators prefer
not to acknowledge, such as the lack of love and the false sexual morality that they
themselves share, the emptiness of the social structures to which they conform, and
the insincerity that the structures create in some individuals who, without realizing
it, sacrifice their personal authenticity to the social milieu. In this respect, Lorca's
theatrical experiment assumes, according to Hamlet, the theatre's proper function:
'to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn
her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure'.19 The
most obvious criticism of the vacuity of social rules and the lack of emotions that

17 As Sedgwick has pointed out with respect to the modern understanding of homosexuality: 'It holds the
minoritizing view that there is a distinct population of persons who "really are" gay; at the same time, it holds
the universalizing views that sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable identifies; that
apparently heterosexual persons and object choices are strongly marked by same-sex influences and desires,
and vice versa for apparently homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual identity and modern
masculinist culture may require for their maintenance the scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male
desire that is widespread and in the first place internal' (Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), p. 85).
18 The Homosexual Matrix (New York: Meridian, 1987), p. 241.
19 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. by Peter Alexander (Glasgow: Collins, 1970), p. 1048.

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 CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN 735

characterizes them is represented by the profesor de ret6rica and his wife Elena/
Selene, symbolical as the latter is of 'the loveless union between man and woman',
to use Marie Laffranque's definition.20 I refer specifically to the dialogue between
Estudiantes 2 and 4, spoken when they are informed of the devastating effects of the
revolution:

ESTUDIANTE 4. La primera bomba de la revoluci6n barri6 la cabeza del profesor de ret6rica.

ESTUDIANTE 2. Con gran alegria para su mujer, que ahora trabajara tanto que tendra que
ponerse dos grifos en las tetas. (p. I25)

The curious modernist metaphor of the faucets with which Lorca refers to the
breasts of Selene is not a grotesque caprice on the part of the author, but a veiled
allusion to the lack of eroticism in her conjugal relationship, a frustration for which
she surreptitiously compensates with her nocturnal escapades.21 As Estudiante 3
says: 'Dicen que por la noche subia un caballo con ella a la terraza' (p. I25).22 Now
that her husband is out of the way, she will be able to satisfy her needs freely and
joyously. Erotic love is thus portrayed as a mechanical act that satisfies itself as soon
as it is freed from the institutional impediments that restrict it; in other words, when
marriage is dissolved. Ironically, those same restrictions have kept the sexual act
intrinsically impure, despite the supposed monogamy and procreative ends to which
it was directed. What is revealing about the incident, because of the ironic value the
author attributes to it, is that Selene, who exposes to public shame the secret she has
discovered in the enamoured male actors, is the same person whose marriage is
exposed as a grotesque sham. The perversions in which she participates during her
nocturnal adventures 'en las terrazas' are the source of true pleasure, greater than
the approved means of sexual satisfaction that her marriage is supposed to provide.23
It is easy to see Selene as a periphrastic example of the inauthenticity that social
conventions foster and homosexual paradigms reveal.24 This is one of the many

20 'Poeta y piblico', in Cuadernos El Publico, 20 (1987), 29-35 (p. 32).

21 For Michel Carrouges, 'la transposition de l'trotisme en fonctionnement d'un appareil purement
mecanique ne traduit nullement une negation de tout l'erotisme; elle l'affirme, au contraire, en tant qu'il est
un pur processus mecanique. Sa signification reside, en revanche, en ce qu'elle le reduit a ce processus et le
separe de tout ielment de participation biologique et spirituel' (Les machines celibataires (Paris: Chene, i976),
p. 37). This is one of the characteristics shared by modernist artists: to make use of the scientific discoveries of
ordinary and disparate objects to allude playfully to human sexuality. The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp, the
bicycles and trains that appear in the sketches by AlfredJarry that Carrouges comments upon, as well as Dali's
paintings of velocipedes, are all examples of this trend.
22 The significance of the horse in Lorca's work has been treated by Rafael Martinez Nadal in 'El publico':
Amory muerte en la obra de Federico Garcia Lorca (Mexico City: Joaquin, 1970), where he sees the horse as the
'personificaci6n de los instintos mas ocultos que arrastran al hombre, energia sexual y locura' (p. 234). The
image of the roof can be interpreted as a signifier of an amorous location, as when the Stage Director says to
Man i: 'Me gustaria verte dormir en los tejados' (Elpzublico, p. 47). The roof appears with this same meaning
in '1910 (Intermedio)' in Poeta en Nueva York: 'en los tejados de amor, con gemidos y frescas manos' (Obras, I,
448).
23 According to Freudian theory, 'the feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual
impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has
been tamed. The irresistibility of perverse instincts, and perhaps the attraction in general of forbidden things,
finds an economic explanation here' (quoted in Dollimore, p. 81 ).
24 This is Gerald H. Storzer's interpretation: 'The social self is a form of non-being [...]. Even love and
sexuality can be "socialized". Love can be feigned and added as an accoutrement to the mask [.. .]. Sexuality
is relegated to the confines of limited social roles or becomes a conquest for social ends' ('The Homosexual
Paradigm in Balzac, Gide, and Genet', in Homosexualities and French Literature, ed. by George Stambolian and
Elaine Marks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1979), pp. I86-209 (pp. I91-92). For Yingling, 'non-
homosexual identities also exhibit a dynamic of masking and loss through "deep" and "surface" structures,
but the instance of homosexuality makes this apparent in different cultural registers and sites' (Hart Crane,
p. 29).

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 736 Act v of 'El piublico'

examples that reveal how 'the paradoxical nature of the perverse endangers the
very metaphysics which employ it' (Dollimore, p I26). What is normally defined as
crime (all that does not fit the conventions and moral values imposed by society)
comes under new scrutiny when the accusers themselves take part in transgressions
of this type. Thus the ruling class, whose sexual repression is provoked by the
inhibiting systems that they themselves have constructed, is exposed in the social
dialectic that oscillates between the hysterical fear of confronting sexuality and the
proliferation of brothels, adultery, and other forms of sexual activity where pleasure
and punishment go hand in hand, satisfying both desire and guilt. The psycho-
analytical and sexual-medical sciences of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries revealed findings about the individual so disturbing that even when they
were not considered pornographic, they were removed from circulation.25
The image of social class that El publico projects is better understood when
situated in the appropriate biographical context. The criticisms that Lorca directed
specifically towards the bourgeoisie are numerous and can also be found scattered
throughout his prologues and other dramatic works. When he was as young as
nineteen, adverse reactions to this social stratum already occupied his mind, as we
learn from his almost obsessive diatribes, in which he refers to 'las maldades [. . .] la
hipocresia ruin [...]. el amor muerto por la reuni6n ridicula y grotesca de los
hombres' that made life impossible for 'espiritus de cielo' who love truth and suffer
because of it.26 That he felt this antipathy, along with the conflict that the prevailing
social morality provoked in him, profoundly is shown by the frustration in his
rhetorical questions and the curse he directed against those individuals and
institutions responsible for the moral prohibition that made his life so miserable and
altogether unhappy: 'DPor que no me puedes pertenecer? jPor que tu cuerpo no
puede dormir junto al mio, si lo quisieras asi? dPor que tu me amas con locura y
no nos podemos amar? La sociedad es cruel, absurda y sangrienta. iMaldita sea!
Caiga sobre ella, que no nos deja amarnos libremente, nuestra maldici6n' (Prosa,
p. 172). He was not alone in this respect, since the social hostility he felt was shared
by such intellectuals of his time as his friend and filmmaker Luis Bufiuel and other
writers of his generation, except that in the case of Lorca the problem was intensified
because of the negative way homosexual desire was conceptualized for him. Hence
the raison d'etre of El publico, which crystallizes the silenced hatred that homophobic
ideology had fomented in him, and the passing years had intensified.
Martinez Nadal could not be farther from the truth when he writes of El publico
that it is 'una obra cuya gestacion difiere tan radicalmente de la que caracteriza el
resto de su obra teatral' (Elpuiblico, p. I69). Lorca's recurrent theme is expressed by
Julieta when she says: 'Despues me dejarias en el sepulcro otra vez, como todos
hacen tratando de convencer a los demas que escuchan de que el verdadero amor
es imposible' (p. 9 ). It is not so much a matter of the amorous impossibilities as a
common existential predicament as of the shackles with which society impedes

25 An example of this is Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which was published in Germany after
being banned in England in i897. Gregorio Marafi6n's commentary in 1929 is equally indicative: 'El mas
desvergonzado de los opfsculos libertinos que se venden a hurtadillas, no iguala en informacion pecaminosa a
un volumen de Havelock Ellis; como toda la iconografia pornografica es superada por las vitrinas de un museo
de anatomia' ('El problema de la intersexualidad', in Marai6n, Obras completas, Io vols, ed. by Alfredo Juderias
(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1929; repr. I975), I, 463).
26 Federico Garcia Lorca. Prosa inidita dejuventud, ed. by Christopher Maurer (Madrid: Castalia, I994), p. 85
(hereafter Prosa).

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 CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN 737

love's fruition, whether heterosexual, as in Shakesp

Lorca's less conventional form. It is for this reason that the evocation of
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in Elptublico is so effective and appropriate; this c
illustrates the existential predicament of the two men, thrown into an intrans
and incomprehensible world that annihilates love but condones violence
murder. Proust uses the same point of comparison to illustrate the obstacles inh
in homosexual love in a homophobic society in the introduction to Cities of the
where the narrator says of the Baron de Charlus: 'For men like M. de Charlus,
mutual love, [... .] far more than that of the normal lover, has about it someth
extraordinary, selective, profoundly necessary. The feud of the Capulet
Montagues was as nothing compared with the obstacles of every sort that must h
been surmounted.'27
Up to this point I have discussed how homosexuality inspires the most passionate
reactions, revealing at the same time the way in which homophobic discourses 'have
structured their subjects and objects, how they participate in the legitimization of
oppressive social practice' (Saint Foucault, p. 34). Another aspect of these mechanisms
is revealed in Lorca's text by means of the intellectual component the students
represent. Their intervention is extremely important. The author shows the reaction
of a group of young men who share characteristics such as age, social class, and
intellectual preparation but who, nevertheless, express opposing opinions. Some of
these views are rooted in the natural, and are therefore immune to social conventions
and prejudices. They represent the self that is understood in terms of the pre-social.
At the other end of the scale lie the opposing views that correspond to an ideology
of the most conservative type, subordinated to the social conventions it defends.
Estudiante 4 is the best exponent of the second category, and he is the one who
merits most consideration as the detractor of the ideological concepts held by the
group's other four members. He solemnly affirms that 'la revolucion estall6 cuando
se encontraron a la verdadera Julieta amordazada bajo las butacas y cubierta de
algodones para que no gritase' (p. I29). What is particularly significant is that he
interprets the humiliation to which the 'true' Julieta is subjected as an affront to the
heterosexual values she represents and as an audacity that justifies the condemnation
of the guilty actors. Allowing Julieta to be discovered, gagged and humiliated, does
not, however, represent a desire on the part of the author to take away the honours
traditionally accorded to this paradigm of feminine tenderness and fidelity. The
human sensitivity Lorca expresses in connection with any misfortune in love,
whether Perlimplin or Dofia Rosita, is well known. What the Director carries out in
Elpzpblico is a 'dificilisimo juego potico' (p. I57) through which he tries to silence,
albeit only momentarily, the heterosexual love that the 'true' Julieta represents in
order to give voice to the type of love he tries to defend, an authentic love, but one
that has known only persecution, silence, or grief. This would explain why the latter
type of love appears at the forefront, whereas the former is silenced and cornered,
deprived of voice but not of pain.
The history of the social reality upon which Lorca's experiment is based, and
which in his own way the Director tries to vindicate, is 'one long struggle to reverse
the discursive positioning of homosexuality and heterosexuality [...] to shift

27 Remembrance of Things Past, 2 vols, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Frederic A. Blossom (New York:
Random House, 1934), 1, 22.

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 738 Act v of 'El pzblico'

homosexuality from the position of an object of power/knowledge to a position of

legitimate subjective agency- from the status of that which is spoken about while
remaining silent to the status of that which speaks' (Saint Foucault, p. 57). The result
of such an attempt at liberation is expressed by the Director in his dialogue with the
Prestidigitador, the emissary of death, who has come to collect the symbolic victim
whose crime consisted of daring to admit publicly the supremacy of human love
beyond matters of genitality: 'Si yo pase tres dias luchando con las raices y los golpes
de agua fue para destruir el teatro [...]. Y demostrar que si Romeo y Julieta
agonizan y mueren para despertar sonriendo cuando cae el tel6n, mis personajes,
en cambio, queman la cortina y mueren de verdad en presencia de los espectadores'
(El publico, p. I55). But it is precisely the audaciousness of the trick that unnerves
Estudiante 4 and the audience for whom he speaks. This is after all the character
who had refused to admit the liberating possibility of the new emotional alternatives
that Estudiante I had voiced in an earlier play on words;28 the character had
described the public's reaction as correct and effective when he said approvingly,
'Romeo era un hombre de treinta afios y Julieta un muchacho de quince. La
denuncia del publico ha sido eficaz' (p. 139).29 We are given to understand here the
need to deter any intent to bring to light the homophobic mechanism that power
holds in place, what Sedgwick terms 'the mechanism for regulating the behaviour
of the many by the specific oppression of a few' (Between Men, p. 88).
The debate surrounding procreative sexuality clarifies the ethical-political
motives that lie behind the homophobic discourse exemplified by Estudiante 4 and
his fellow ideologues. Although he admits that 'indudablemente se amaban con un
amor incalculable' (El publico, p. I39), he cannot justify this form of love because it
involves a sexual relationship that does not lead to procreation: '[Irritado.] jQue no
es necesario? Entonces que se paren las maquinas y arrojad los granos de trigo sobre
un campo de acero' (p. 131). This is his reply to his companion Estudiante I, when
the latter defends the possibility that two men can love each other with the same
intensity as that of the Shakespearean pair they are representing. The significance
of the machines, and the sterility symbolized by sowing a germinating seed in a
wasteland of steel, is clarified in Herbert Marcuse's Marxist-psychoanalytical study
of how homosexuality is perceived by a practical and productive culture that values
sexuality for its utility:
Against a society which employs sexuality as a means for a useful end, the perversions uphold
sexuality as an end in itself; they thus place themselves outside the dominion of the
performance principle and challenge its very foundations. They establish libidinal relation-
ships which society must ostracize because they threaten to reverse the process of civilization
that turned the organism into an instrument of work.30

28 'Pero un ave no puede ser un gato, ni una piedra puede ser un golpe de mar' (El ptblico, p. 129), by which it
is understood that what is defined in the sexual sense as masculine, 'gato' cannot include sexual imprecisions
like those contained in the epicene 'ave', nor can the clearly feminine 'una piedra' include the feminine and
masculine ambivalences contained by the ambiguous 'un golpe de mar', especially when the aggressive
component of the crushing wave, 'un golpe', is masculine.
29 The comment that in the manuscript appears to be attributed to Student 4, 'La actitud del pfblico ha sido
detestable' (El publico, p. 136), is inconsistent with the attitude this same character manifests during their
conversation. The manuscript upon which Martinez Nadal based his edition shows some hesitation on the
author's part about whether to attribute this comment to Student i, to whom originally and more convincingly
it was attributed, or to Student 4. The inconclusive nature of the text and the troubled history of the only
available manuscript are no doubt responsible for these contradictions and indecisions.
30 Eros and Civilization (Boston MA: Beacon Press, i966), p. 50.

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 CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN 739

Estudiante 4 becomes a spokesperson for a purely biological view that sees the only
objective sexual act as procreative, as a means of perpetuating the species, an
opinion not so different from the views about sexuality expressed from a woman's
perspective in rerma a few years later.31 He sees homosexuality as an obstacle and a
threat to the procreative order that institutionalized society guarantees. Estudiante
2's rebuttal defends a sexuality that surpasses its genetic objective: 'Se sabe lo que
alimenta un grano de trigo y se ignora lo que alimenta un hongo' (El publico,
p. 13 ).32 Wheat, which grows in sunlight, is cultivated for food and germinates, as
opposed to the mushroom, which grows naturally and spontaneously in hidden,
dark, and humid places, has its own nutritious qualities, and, to top it all, is pleasing
to the palate. With this metaphorical meanings in mind, Student 2 challenges the
traditional belief that the only natural sexual practice is the one whose objective is
the reproduction of the human species. At the same time, he recognizes the human
potential that homosexual love has, because it is a human relationship less likely to
be devalued by material, social, or professional interests than its heterosexual
counterpart:33 'Pasaria que vendrian los hongos, y los latidos se harian quizas mas
intensos y apasionantes' (p. I3I). The dark love to which he alludes elliptically
could reveal itself with unsuspected vigour and sincerity. Curiously, it is the same
intensity that the poet and close friend of Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, recalled years
later when he praised the sentiments Lorca infused into his Sonetos del amor oscuro:
'Federico ique coraz6n! Cuanto ha tenido que amar, cuanto que sufrir.'34
It is as if the author had wanted to represent by means of Estudiante 4 the most
rigid kind of intellect, incapable of questioning the power systems whose principal
objective is to subject a majority within a utopian sexual system. The symbolic
significance that this group of students acquires in Elpziblico becomes even clearer if
we consider the convictions the author held about education. The interest Lorca
showed in the theory and process of promoting culture as a means of freeing the
individual from normative ways of thinking and from whatever makes self-
knowledge difficult is well known, as Ian Gibson has noted in his biography. That
Lorca saw culture as a means of discovering one's own emotional identity can be
inferred from an anecdotal incident, an exclamation the poet once made to the
people of Fuente Vaqueros during the inauguration ceremonies of a public library:
'iLibros, libros! He aqui una palabrama gica que equivale a decir "amor", "amor" '
(Gibson, II, 55). Estudiante 4 is not an example of culture in this broad sense. His
companions, Estudiantes I, 2, 3, and 5, however, represent the intellect that resists
the influence of power mechanisms and consequently does not permit sexuality or

31 On this point, see C. Brian Morris's recent study, in which he writes of Yerma's 'inability to feel beyond the
limits that were imposed on her and which she abides by' ('Yerma, abondonada e incompleta', in El teatro de
Lorca. Tragedia, dramayfarsa, ed. by Cristobal Cuevas Garcia y Enrique Baena (Malaga: Publicaciones del
Congreso de Literatura Espanola Contemporanea, 1996), pp. 15-4I (p. 41)). Paul Julian Smith has re-
examined the subject in the light of Gregorio Maranons's view on female sexuality and maternity: see The
Theatre of Garcia Lorca, pp. 16-43.
32 The metaphor of wheat with the meaning it acquires here appears in Lorca's early work. See for example
'Espigas' in Libro de poemas: 'Brotais para alimento de los hombres. I Pero mirad las blancas margaritas ] y los
lirios que nacen porque sil | [.. .] La flor silvestre nace para el suenio I y vosotras naceis para la vida' (Obras, I,
12I).
33 This idea is discussed by Dennis Altman in his study of homosexual oppression, where he observes that
'homosexual relationships are in themselves an existential assertion, less easily corrupted by convenience and
conformity than straight relationships' (Homosexual Oppression and Liberation (New York: Avon, 197 I), p. 30).
34 See 'Evocaci6n de Federico Garcia Lorca', in Garcia Lorca visto por los poetas, ed. by Emilio Breda (Buenos
Aires: Plus Ultra, I986), pp. 74-76 (p. 76).

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740 Act v of 'El publico'

love to be conditioned by social imperatives. However, this intellectually aware

minority, open to changes that could relieve the unnecessary suffering of the few,
should be seen as a symbol of political-social impotence in the face of other
conservative ideology, endorsed by the most powerful and permanent social
institutions that weighs disproportionately against the representatives of 'true'
culture.35
Despite all their limitations, these characters are the only dissident voices in the
text; they are the only ones who express an open desire to replace the established
norms, and who criticize the institutions that support a hegemonic discourse.
Among these institutions is the Church, as represented by the missal Estudiante 5
refers to when he exclaims happily: 'Y quemaremos el libro donde los sacerdotes
leen la misa' (p. 143). The intransigence of Catholic dogma towards any kind of
non-procreative sexuality is well known; the treatment homosexuality has received
by this institution has been less than benign, as it has traditionally been seen by its
most reactionary members as 'peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum',
The effect such intransigence had on Lorca's work and on his life has been valuably
noted by Javier Herrero.36 It is due to this hostility that the Church appears as the
target of one of the most virulent criticisms ever to issue from Lorca's pen. Next to
the Church comes the University, represented in El publico by the Traspunte, a
character straight from the world of the theatre, who appears calling the students to
hurry to the classrooms: 'Sefiores, clase de geometria descriptiva' (p. I43).
Estudiantes i and 5 disregard the Traspunte's call and by ignoring it they
symbolically reject the schematization of the self that lives immersed in a society
'hecha desde un geometrismo antihumano [que] presiona nuestro ser desde
convencionalismos (sexuales, etc.)', with the result that it stunts 'el desarrollo natural
de nuestras mas evidentes necesidades humanas'.37 Not only must one distance
oneself from the Church and from other institutions equally responsible for the
internalization of normative processes in human beings but authenticity must also
be reclaimed by placing oneself beyond the control of 'los tejados y las familias'
(p. 143), as Estudiante I suggests symbolically. That is to say, it is necessary to stand
outside the bourgeois patriarchal system cradled in the nest of the home that
advocates the suppression of any form of sexual behaviour that could undermine its
power. It is the threat that Guy Hocquenghem perceives when he states that
'homosexual desire is the ungenerating-ungenerated terror of the family, because it

35 The divergence of opinions expressed by the four Damas run from the most favourable reaction, such as
that of Dama I, who is of the opinion that 'era un drama delicioso y la revolucion no tiene derecho a profanar
las tumbas' (p. 127), to the impartial reactions of Damas 3 and 4, to the most intolerant Dama 2, all of which
can be interpreted as indicative of similar disagreement among the most understanding and sensitive
representatives of the bourgeoisie. It is indicative that the views of Dama 2 are heard most often, compared to
the relative silence of the other three Damas.
36 'The violent rejection by contemporary Catholicism of homosexuality as the unspeakable sin, the lived
experience of emotional repulsion that he [Lorca] was bound to feel, as well as the tragic social exclusion that
the curse that had fallen on him, and of which he felt innocent, entailed, all these shattering convulsions had to
leave a profound imprint in his art, and they did' ('The Father against the Son: Lorca's Christian Vision', in
Essays on Hispanic Themes in Honour of Edward C. Riley, ed. by Jennifer Lowe and Philip Swanson (Edinburgh:
Department of Hispanic Studies, 1989), pp. 170- 199 (p. 187).
37 Words used by Carlos Bousofo in a comment on lines of the poem 'Telegrama' by Rafael Alberti: 'Nueva
York. I Un triangulo escaleno I asesina a un cobrador' ('Situaci6n de la obra lorquiana', in Valoracion actual de la
obra de Garcia Lorca, ed. by Alfonso Esteban andJean-Pierre Etienvre (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez y Universidad
Complutense, I988), pp: 6I-64 (pp. 63, 62)).

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 CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN 741

produces itself without reproducing'.38 As Fernandez Cifuentes has affirmed

the characteristics of Lorca's works is to postulate 'una liberaci6n, un de
sistema familiar'.39 When a social institution such as the family becom
important for the consolidation of bourgeois ideology, liberation becom
urgent.
The decision taken by Estudiante 5 to flee with his new companion, Student I, is
the solution the play offers; fleeing becomes the only option available to such a
person if he is to recover the naturalness wrenched from him by institutionalized
life, the only way he can live out his existence in harmony with the disposition and
biological impulses he has discovered in himself. What is revolutionary in a decision
of this magnitude is the conclusion that to achieve such freedom one must escape
culture, that which imposes meaning on nature 'and renders it into an "Other" to
be appropriated to its own limitless use'.40 Only by means of a return to the natural
world, to the preculture from which Estudiante 5 symbolically emerges, will the self
be able to re-encounter its individuality and feel related to creation. Dollimore sees
a similar paradigm in Gide, for whom social and sexual transgression leads to the
recuperation of the being 'understood in terms of a pre-social individuated essence,
nature and identity, and on that basis invested with a quasi-spiritual autonomy.
Culture has repressed this authentic self and the individual embarks on a quest to
uncover it, a quest that is also an escape from culture' (Dollimore, p. I3).41 This
flight is among the most rebellious and daring acts in Lorca's text, daring because
the possibilities ofreintegration into society after such a decision are minimal. There
would be no way to enter into a pact with the very social norms that exclude one's
love and make one's existence impossible. Only with the destruction of the body as
the centre of desire and emotion could this integration paradoxically be carried out.
This is precisely conveyed by the figurative death of the Desnudo (with all its
reminiscences of Gonzalo - Man I - Romeo - Jesus Christ) and the cry of his
remorseful mother who arrives asking for the inanimate body of her son: 'dDonde
esta mi hijo [. .] Mi hijo Gonzalo?' (p. 161).
The flight is rebellious in that the fugitive couple place themselves beyond the
reach of the institutions they repudiate. Even more provocative is that these
alternatives are accepted joyfully, thus ironically confirming the pleasure that is
produced when the mechanisms of power that question, oversee, and prohibit,
finally provoke their own subversion: 'the pleasure that kindles at having to evade
this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it [. . .] power asserting itself in the
pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting' (History, I, p. 45). It is a subversive
pleasure because the association with nature, as established between Estudiante 5
and the bucolic world from which he comes and to which he returns after his self-
discoveries, creates a dichotomy between the sexual-natural and the social-asexual
that throws into relief the incompatibility between sexual authenticity and social

38 Homosexual Desire (London: Allison & Busby, 1978), p. 93.

39 Garcia Lorca en el teatro. La normay la diferencia (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1986), p. 281.
40 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 37.
41 Paul Julian Smith sees Lorca's defence of homosexuality in a different way: 'A Foucaldian account of Lorca
would be closer to Dollimore's Wilde than to his own Gide.' For Smith, transgression leads to an abandonment
of the essential self and not to its discovery ( The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American
Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I992), p. 136).

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742 Act v of 'El publico'

existence. As Yingling has pointed out, in writing about the disruptive relationship
this type of sexuality represents to the establishment:
This newly sexualized body [becomes] the site of that disruption between Nature and
Culture, between the object and its subject of knowledge or desire [.. .] and in its particular,
disruptive relation to both Culture and Nature, homosexuality [can] foreground this division
in a way that heterosexuality occasionally [cannot] because of its (heterosexuality's) easy
recuperation into the paradigm of the natural. (Hart Crane, p. 148)

Yet Lorca, like Whitman before him, does not try to present romantic sentiments as
the homosexual's only way out in the face of the social hostility he experiences; he
indicates, as did the American poet evoked by Estudiante 5, 'how for all homosexuals
the moment of love always has the potential to be socially subversive' because, as
Joseph Cady's commentary on Calamus explains, 'our perception of its naturalness
and our accompanying joy are exactly the opposite of what the dominant culture
has told us is supposed to happen in our situation and thus inevitably places us in
opposition to its established heterosexual model for identity, relationships and
nature'.42 The veiled criticisms contained in the dialogue among Estudiantes I, 2, 3,
and 5 are among the most provocative that Lorca wrote on the subject. Within its
limits, the dialogue is one of the most radical defences of homosexuality in Elptblico,
and is highly unusual in that instead of launching his attacks against the homosexual
stereotypes that a pre-eminently hostile tradition had bequeathed him, Lorca directs
them against the social institutions responsible for the conditions he denounces. He
sees homosexuality no longer as a censurable individual difference but as a political,
social, and human phenomenon. He has stopped identifying himself (if not entirely,
at least to a significant degree) with the homophobic discourse that he has
consciously or unconsciously reproduced in some of the works in which he deals
with the subject, where the homosexual appears as a person redeemable by a
complex process of erotic sublimation or, in its most negative representation, as an
individual whose degraded desires mark him as degenerate, sado-masochistically
inclined, or even as a defamation of the masculine sex he represents.
It is easy to see that El publico represents a clear testimony of the dialectical
development of Lorquian thought on homosexuality. It articulates important points
about the ideology that underlies this kind of desire. As Louis Althusser suggests in
a well-known passage, 'the peculiarity of art is to "make us see", "make us perceive",
"make us feel" something that alludes to reality [. . .]. What art makes us see [. . .] is
the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself
as art, and to which it alludes'.43 Perhaps one of the most striking revelations of the
play is that it lets us hear the things that ideology conceals at the same time as it
makes more evident the dialectical tensions of the homosexual experience in its
attempt at self-articulation. It is not ironic that El publico, among the 'impossible
works' that Lorca could not see performed during his lifetime, should be one of the
plays that is 'attracting increasing popular and academic attention' all over the
western world, as has been demonstrated by the recent centennial celebration

42 'Not Happy in the Capitol: Homosexuality and the Calamus Poems', American Studies, 19 (I978), pp. 5-22
(p. 20).
43 Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 197 1), p. 204 (italics in original).

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 CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN 743

commented by Paul Julian Smith.44 The play, after all

by an audience whose time, as Lorca put it himself, had

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN

44 'A Long Way From Andalusia: Catalonia's Claim - and Newcastle's - on Lorca's Legacy', TLS,
I998, pp. IO-I (p.io).
45 This article is part of a book-length project, the objective of which is to analyse Lorca's theatre
perspective of the poet's unresolved homosexual concerns discussed here. I express my thanks to t
Endowment for the Humanities for the Research Fellowship awarded for the development of the b
the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame for the grant awarde
translation expenses. I also thank Kristine Ibsen and Jeanne Brownlow for their much appreciate
touches to the present English version, and Chris Perriam for helpful comments on the original draft

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