Personality

Lorca's personality – the distinguishing characteristics of the man as they relate to his life story – weighs heavily, it seems, on the criticism of his work. ‘García Lorca’, writes Paul Julian Smith, ‘is perhaps the most extreme case of proprietorial authorship in Spanish literature: it seems impossible to approach his texts without acknowledging his person, and it is almost an article of faith amongst critics that in Lorca literature and life are one.’ For Smith, writing in the late 1980s, the problem with Lorca criticism is that it has sought in his work characteristics of homogeneity and uniformity by which to link it to the person himself. This has given rise, according to Smith, to a number of shared critical preconceptions: that, for instance, Lorca is ‘at once universal and particular’ (p. 107), or that he, like all authors, ‘must be equipped with an oeuvre whose value is consistent, whose conceptual field is coherent, whose style is unified’ (p. 108). Smith reminds us also that critical judgements of Lorca are historically specific: the fact, for example, that ‘the anti-fascism and homosexuality repressed or condemned by early critics are proclaimed and celebrated by later ones’ (p. 107) demonstrates just how treacherous the path connecting authors with their texts can be. Smith's Foucauldian approach to Lorca is one that considers the author to be ‘not a person but a function’ (Smith, p. 106) and that deems it necessary for the author to ‘be deprived of his role as originator’ (p. 107), thus undermining traditional criticism's maintenance of the direct relation between the personality of the author and the ideas of the text. The implications of this approach are that questions like ‘Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?’ give way to other questions such as ‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?