Bodies in Motion : Spanish Vanguard Poetry, Mass Culture, and Gender Dynamics [1 ed.] 9780838757987, 9780838757444

Citation preview

Bodies in Motion

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Bodies in Motion Spanish Vanguard Poetry, Mass Culture, and Gender Dynamics

Catherine G. Bellver

Lewisburg Bucknell University Press

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䉷 2010 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-0-8387-5744-4/10 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bellver, C. G. (Catherine Gullo) Bodies in motion : Spanish vanguard poetry, mass culture, and gender dynamics / Catherine G. Bellver. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8387-5744-4 (alk. paper) 1. Experimental poetry, Spanish—History and criticism. 2. Human body in literature. 3. Dance in literature. 4. Sports in literature. 5. Machinery in literature. 6. Social change in literature. 7. Sex role in literature. 8. Popular culture and literature—Spain—History—20th century. 9. Literature and society —Spain—History—20th century. I. Title. PQ6097.E94B46 2010 861⬘.60911—dc22 2009031788

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Contents Acknowledgments

7

1. Introduction

11

2. The ‘‘Felices Veinte’’ and the Dynamics of an Era

28

3. Dance, Gender, and Poetry

61

4. Poetry, Sports, and the Body in Play

111

5. Motors, Machines, and Other Mechanical Marvels

160

6. Conclusion

206

Notes

212

References

236

Index

251

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Acknowledgments I WISH TO EXPRESS MY GRATITUDE TO MIGUEL JIME´NEZ OF THE RE-

sidencia de Estudiantes and to Jose´ Antonio Mesa Tore´ of the Centro Cultural Generacio´n del 27 for their assistance in locating the heirs of the poets cited in my study. The Centro Cultural Generacio´n del 27 must also be recognized for granting me permission to cite from the facsimile editions of the magazine Grecia and He´lices by Guillermo de Torre. For their authorizations to quote the poetry included in this book, I acknowledge the following: the literary agency of Carmen Barcells for Rafael Alberti, Anthropos Editorial for Ernestina de Champourcin, Biblioteca Nueva for Carmen Conde, Elisa de la Nuez for Josefina de la Torre, Elena Diego Marı´n for Gerardo Diego, Margarita Ramı´rez for Jorge Guille´n, Victoria Rosado of the Centro de Ediciones de la Diputacio´n de Ma´laga for Jose´ Marı´a Hinojosa, Paloma Altolaguirre for Concha Me´ndez, Editorial Pre-Textos for Lucı´a Sa´nchez Saornil, and the literary agency Mercedes Casanovas for Pedro Salinas. The publication information for the books and editions from which my citations are taken can be found in the references section.

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Bodies in Motion

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1 Introduction DURING THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY,

Europe experienced a devastating war meant to end all wars and a Marxist revolution that shook its underlying socioeconomic foundations. These years brought not only war, social upheaval, and economic crises, but also many social and cultural changes. Scientists and theorists were altering the way the outside, material world and the inner one of the human psyche were viewed and interrelated. The industrialization initiated in the nineteenth century produced a variety of machines and devices meant to enhance the everyday life of common citizens and promoted a consciousness of social inequality among workers and women. At the same time, technology reduced the time and effort people needed to invest in work and, consequently, increased opportunities for leisure. Technology also nurtured the growth of consumerism and a fascination with action and speed. For many, life was becoming centered on moving increasingly faster within the here and now. As physical movement and carefree pleasure gained prominence, poetic practices and forms also changed. Spain did not participate directly in World War I, but it felt the impact of a series of costly and politically destabilizing military campaigns in Africa during the early twentieth century. Its neutrality during World War I triggered an influx of foreign capital, which in turn prompted economic growth, increased industrialization, and expanded the middle class in urban centers. These developments along with the emergence of the workers’ movement elsewhere accelerated the formation of workers’ parties and precipitated social unrest in Spain. Albeit at a slower pace than in the rest of Europe, in Spain social change in the form of technological progress, an increase in leisure time, and the expansion of liberalism along with its concomitant features of commercialization and consumerism led to cultural change. The Spanish historian Juan Pablo Fusi has written that from 1900 to 1939 Spain experienced ‘‘un ‘despertar’ sorprendente, asombroso [. . .] despertar al hilo del cual la cultura espan˜ola asumio´ con decisio´n los de11

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safı´os que le plantearon las exigencias de europeizacio´n y modernidad’’ (1999, 12) [a surprising and amazing awakening . . . an awakening in which Spanish culture decidedly assumed the challenges presented by the demands of Europeanization and modernity]. An important part of this awakening was the birth of the popular, mass culture that would become an identifying feature of the twentieth century. In the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, a shift took place in the definition or conceptualization of what culture meant. Culture in the late nineteenth century was generally accepted as meaning a high spiritual state that could be reached, according to Matthew Arnold, through reading the best of what has been thought or said. Culture was considered a phenomenon of superior or noble import and a national treasure to be conserved and venerated. Once sanctified, a literary work became a part of the canon that was to be passed on to future generations and down the social ladder. The intellectual and social elites assumed a paternalistic attitude toward the masses, whom they meant to humanize through the culture that validated the superiority of those same elites. The culture of the masses, thought of then as popular culture, was associated with folklore; it was seen as arising anonymously from the ‘‘folk,’’ their customs and values. It preserved identifying ethnic characteristics and, as such, manifested itself in oral rather than written form and in crafts more than art. In Spain, this belief in a popular essence with spontaneous and original manifestations was espoused by the educators of the Institucio´n Libre de Ensen˜anza and its students among the Generation of 98, such as Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal, Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez, and Antonio Machado, the son of an eminent folklorist. Miguel de Unamuno eloquently articulated this prevailing conviction in his essays published in 1895 as En torno al casticismo (About Casticismo). In this work he defined the notions of ‘‘intrahistoria’’ and ‘‘tradicio´n eterna’’ as that silent and continuous undercurrent that sustains the present, an eternal, hidden tradition that forms the essence of the human soul of Spain. Romanticism had endorsed the nationalistic spirit that engendered various independence movements across Europe in the nineteenth century and had nurtured in Spain a pronounced tendency toward costumbrismo [regionalism] in literature and a drive toward autonomy in the Basque provinces and Catalonia. Unamuno’s particular allegiance to the provincial masses reflects the pseudo-Marxist posture or sentimental socialism he adopted in his early career. He and his brethren of the Generation of 98 turned to the ‘‘low’’ culture of the pueblo in order to find symbols not only of national distinctiveness but also of native goodness that compensated for the government’s many political

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failures, which culminated in the threadbare illusions of empire displayed in the Spanish-American War. Since the twentieth century would become an era of constant change and growing commercialism, a new type of popular culture would be born that comprised a long series of transferences, starting with a progressively greater influence of Anglo-Saxon and especially North American–generated forms of culture. This international shift in the geographical source of culture was accompanied by the internal one from rural to urban centers. These transfers of cultural power reflect the economic changes taking place in modern industrialized societies and an accompanying growth in metropolitan population.1 The Industrial Revolution created, along with the proletariat or urban lower classes, a business middle class and a new phase of capitalism that opened the way for a market-driven economy and the spawning of mass culture. Popular culture would no longer be of the people, but for the people. Popular culture came to be understood as spectacles produced by entrepreneurs interested in profit, not ethnic identity, or as activities produced as commercial enterprises and bought by individual consumers. Rather than generators of culture, the masses became passive receivers, and instead of participants, they became the compliant consumers of products from distant fabricators of culture. Though many performers of mass culture would be celebrated and nearly deified, the authors of mass culture, like those of traditional, rural culture, would often be anonymous members of collaborative teams. Unlike traditional culture, however, modern popular culture is geared primarily toward money—toward both expenditure and revenue. The twenties were the turning point in the switch from a culture of rural folk to what would become today’s mass culture of films, pop music, sports, and the audiovisual and electronic media. This shift occurring in the twenties reflects the practices and ideology of modernism; the past is abandoned for the present, and any sense of temporal continuum is forfeited in favor of constant change and therefore fragmented time. As the middle classes swelled, a greater number of people had disposable income with which to pay for culture; and as expanding communications systems made transnational contact possible, popular culture was no longer a private affair or an event witnessed by small, communal, and relatively homogeneous audiences. It came to involve public, widespread, and global events experienced by massive, diverse audiences. The study of culture among academics of today means an interdisciplinary approach that challenges the exclusiveness of institutionalized literary studies and a collapsing of the distinction between high and low culture with the implied purpose of demythifying the first and le-

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gitimizing the second. The stress shifts from a nineteenth-century emphasis on ethnic essence to one of cultural differences and otherness, along with an analysis of power structures. Culture no longer means the general body of the arts or the intellectual side of civilization because, as Stephanie Sieburth has written, today ‘‘it is impossible to differentiate in a clear-cut way between highbrow genres and lowbrow ones’’ (1999, 14).2 However the impression of antagonism and of the need for vindication that current cultural studies regularly leaves can be misleading in the case of Spanish literature, which has often combined or juxtaposed high and low culture. Furthermore, Spain today still differentiates between regional tradition or workingclass culture and metropolitan or global culture emphasizing new technologies; it does so in the interest of nurturing the diversity of its seventeen autonomous regions after the stifling homogeneity imposed by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.3 For this reason the term used most frequently in Spain today for pop culture is ‘‘cultura de masas,’’ not ‘‘cultura popular.’’4 The romance, the quintessential poetic form of Spanish folklore, has since the fifteenth century been adapted by poets of high culture. A case in point is Luis de Go´ngora, who, although called the Angel of Darkness because of the difficult and obscure style of many of his poems, was always appreciated for the poems he composed in the simple mode of folk ballads. This tendency to adopt and adapt the romance and other popular forms continued throughout the centuries up to the vanguard era and beyond.5 The music of Manuel de Falla and the poetry of Federico Garcı´a Lorca were conscious efforts to vindicate the ‘‘popular’’ elements of Spanish culture. Falla’s El amor brujo (1915) was an amalgamation of Gypsy folklore and modern music. Lorca, for his part, incorporated the Andalusian tradition into his poetry, sympathized with the Gypsies in their marginalization, and enlightened the cultural elites with his recitals and arrangements of popular compositions. These efforts can be interpreted as the modernist artists’ alliance with the underclasses in the face of bourgeois domination, as a public appropriation of the art of the anonymous masses by individuals of the elite who gave it their own signature, or, less cynically, as a guileless attempt to tap fertile and kindred sources of artistic creation. Whatever the explanation for the interest of canonical poets in cultura popular during the twenties, it is clear that ‘‘high’’ culture did not neglect ‘‘low’’ culture in Spain. In fact, one of the stylistic isms of the period was neopopularismo, the tendency to seek in folklore those elements comparable to the goals of modernist poetry.6 Between 1918 and 1931, the starting date for ultraı´smo, the first of the ‘isms,’ and the practical end of the avant-garde in Spain, many artistic movements con-

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verged or overlapped. The result was, in the words of Derek Harris, ‘‘a confusion, rather than a fusion, of different elements, a hybrid creation, a squared circle’’ (1995, 4).7 During that period, an entirely different kind of culture was emerging that would later develop into the overpowering conglomeration of today’s mass media. The years between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War were a significant moment of transition in the concept of culture that in turn mirrored a more generalized social shift from industrialization to consumer acquisitiveness, from a life absorbed in drudgery to one permitting leisure, and from the genteel ideals of refinement to the ethos of materialistic contentment. With his keen awareness of the transformations underway around him, Ortega y Gasset, in the 1926 essays later to appear under the title La rebelio´n de las masas, defined the new ‘‘mass man’’ as a spoiled child, overindulged, ungrateful, and forever clamoring for rapid self-gratification. Of course, these changes were not open to everyone. The vast majority of Spaniards either rejected this new culture because of their deep-rooted conservatism or lacked the money to enjoy it. The new culture of fast movement, youthful exuberance, and carefree idleness was a luxury accessible primarily to those of the intellectual and financial elites who appreciated things novel, scandalous, or risky and who took note of the new visual culture of advertising in magazines, newspapers, and billboards. This new culture was enthusiastically embraced at the time by some poets as a promise of a totally new reality unbound by the past or by bourgeois artistic mediocrity. Yet the antisocial disposition of these poets can also be seen as a manifestation of the apolitical stance of an affluent and self-assured bourgeoisie.8 Lucı´a Sa´nchez Saornil, who herself published in ultraı´sta magazines and later became a political activist, wrote that the drive for change among her contemporaries was a purely bourgeois gesture and not a struggle for real social change: ‘‘Algunos [. . .] hemos tenido que llegar hasta aquı´, a codearnos con el dolor [. . .] para comprender que todo lo dema´s es literatura, snobismo, miedo al anonimato. Por eso sonreı´mos ante ciertas cosas que parecen audacia. Lo nuevo y lo viejo, lo burgue´s y lo antiburgue´s, son te´rminos propios, netamente burgueses’’ (1996, 18). [Some of us have had to get to the point of rubbing elbows with pain in order to understand that everything else is literature, snobbery, fear of anonymity. For that reason we laugh at certain things that seem to be boldness. The new and the old, the bourgeois and the antibourgeois, are purely and typically bourgeois terms.] Not only the personal background of the poets of this generation but also their political milieu nurtured their comfortable aesthetic position. Many of the poets of the Generation of 27 were members of

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well-to-do families who did not hold full-time jobs. The lack of interest in culture on the part of the dictator Primo de Rivera and his benign neglect of intellectuals suited the Spanish avant-garde’s expressed desire to escape banal reality and allowed them the space to maneuver as they pleased—to detach themselves from established, canonical literature as well as from the masses, both urban and rural, and to find inspiration in new areas and refuge in linguistic hermeticism.9 Thus, my basic argument is that during the period 1918–31 poetry in Spain was produced by a cultural elite for a cultural elite, for the ‘‘immense minority’’ as Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez called it, but this cultural elite capitalized on the new forms of culture (which had not yet evolved into the prototype of the bourgeoisie), not so much because of their sympathies with the masses but because of their thirst for novelty and their desire to renew and revitalize poetry. What Andreas Huyssen termed the ‘‘Great Divide,’’ ‘‘the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture,’’ continued to exist among Spanish poets even if they occasionally engaged with rural cultura popular as part of the neopopularista trend. Huyssen has argued that the historical avant-garde waged the first and most sustained attack in the twentieth century on the aesthetic notion of the self-sufficiency of high culture; and Walter Benjamin believed that it was a possible democratization of culture.10 While this is true from the point of view of its artistic perspective and antisocial pose, the historical avant-garde did not carry with it a serious deconstructive or political agenda.11 In Spain, poets did not conceive of poetry as a means of social solidarity and political pertinence until they had shed their vanguard excesses and faced the looming reality of a nation falling into civil war. Cultural studies today tend to center on ‘‘low’’ or ‘‘popular’’ culture in society and literature or to highlight the blurring of boundaries between high art and mass culture, but in the twenties high art was still held in high regard. The twenties were a dynamic era of social and mental commotion and of transition and transformation between late nineteenthcentury outlooks not yet absorbed in technology and the late twentieth-century world of consumerism and commercialized culture. Therefore, I use the emerging mass culture of the twenties as a lens with which to focus on poetic works of a ‘‘high’’ or ‘‘intellectual’’ nature. This approach will be aimed at finding the answers to questions such as: To what extent are the entirely new features of modern society incorporated as themes, images, or motifs in specific poems? What attitude toward them do the poetic speakers display? From what perspective do the poets employ them? How do these aspects of culture shape the structure and language of poems and the poetics of poets? And finally, do male and female poets handle them differently?

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Some critics have chosen to call the Spanish literature of the first third of the twentieth century the Silver Age, because its richness is second only to that of the Golden Age.12 Whether or not it is given an official title, the period 1900 to 1936 was indeed a sterling period for Spanish literature by virtue of the lasting stature of so many of its representatives, its depth of thought, the variety of its forms, the extent of its experimentation, and the quality of its linguistic artistry. The poetry of this period consolidated its prestige and splendor under the name ‘‘Generation of 27,’’ but I minimize the use of this term, since it encompasses a broad spectrum of poets who do not always display a fascination with the emerging forms of popular culture. Furthermore, its date refers to the homage paid to Go´ngora rather than to the earlier engagements with experimental artistic forms.13 More than a continuous, coordinated poetic movement, the poetry produced in Spain between 1918 and 1931 was a succession of different attempts to renovate the poetic scene. Comradery and professional association were certainly evident among the poets, but their efforts to innovate manifested themselves in a rapid succession of isms (e.g., creacionismo, ultraı´smo, neogongorismo, neopopularismo, surrealismo) meant to advance the front line of new kinds of poetic expression. Therefore, I refer most frequently to the poetry studied here as ‘‘vanguard’’ or ‘‘avantgarde.’’ In 1925 Guillermo de Torre already used the term ‘‘vanguardia’’ to refer to the experimental poetry of Spain and the rest of Europe in his monograph Literaturas europeas de vanguardia. For Anthony Leo Geist, the publication of this book marked a brief, intense, and fundamental period in the history of Spanish poetry of the twentieth century.14 Even if written from the partisan viewpoint of his own allegiance to ultraı´smo, the book offers valuable data and early insight into the essence of vanguardism as a drive toward novelty and change, a desire for speed and instantaneity, and a fascination with metaphors, adjectives, and technical freedom. Ultraı´smo itself was short-lived and did not encompass all poetry with avant-garde aspirations, but it was the first of the isms, the one that most consistently coincided with the avant-garde (as considered here), and the only one in Spain that can be considered a movement by virtue of its manifestos, proclamations, and magazines. Its goal was to be ‘‘ultra,’’ to go beyond the existing aesthetic by assimilating anything new. However, in the perennial fashion of Spanish poetry, the renovation of the ultraı´stas did not signify total oblivion of the past. In his declaration of intentions for the new poetry Gerardo Diego stated, ‘‘El ser ultraı´sta parece suponer un rompimiento de relaciones con el pasado histo´rico. Pero [. . .] [se] puede ser ultraı´sta y saber historia’’ (1920, 6). [To be ultraist seems

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to mean a break with the past. But one can be an ultraist and know history.] The avant-garde posture of artistic revolution of the ultraı´stas and others was contemporary to the less dogmatic and less scandalous disposition of the modernism evolving from symbolism and embodied in Spain by Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez. Besides being aesthetically less shocking than the avant-garde, ‘‘modernism’’ is a historically broader term reaching back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, or at least to the 1890s, and subsuming or coexisting with the avant-garde and the isms appearing between 1910 and 1930.15 Modernism replaced a realist and mimetic vision with a more abstract and subjective one and substituted for linearity the fragmentation of time and the multiplication of space. In a more general sense, modernism can be characterized as a concentration on the present and on presence. It incorporates a desire for innovation and experimentation, an overriding preoccupation with language, form, and technique, an aggressive antagonism to convention, reality, and the bourgeois masses, and above all a firm belief in the autonomy and self-sufficiency of art. Avant-gardism carries these aspirations to the extreme with a more radical rejection of the past and a decided passion for newness.16 This fixation can generate a deep sense of alienation and anxiety bordering on nihilism, or it can induce displays of flippancy and playfulness. The comic and the tragic, freedom and victimization, pleasure and suffering create dualities or contradictions.17 Vanguardism, which for my purposes is synonymous with the avant-garde, was but one sector in what were conflicting or complementary concepts of art. Thus, the era known in English as the ‘‘Roaring Twenties’’ and in Spanish as ‘‘los felices veinte’’ [the happy twenties] is only one part of the story of the period; it is the wild and idle side. Modernism, Raymond Williams asserts, ‘‘had proposed a new kind of art for a new kind of social and perceptual world. The avant-garde, aggressive from the beginning, saw itself as the breakthrough to the future: its members were not the bearers of a progress already repetitiously defined, but the militants of a creativity which would revive and liberate humanity’’ (1996, 51). Williams stresses that the avantgarde was formed in urban centers and at once reflects and promotes the kinds of practices that would become relevant to a social order developing toward metropolitanism and internationalism (1983, 84). For this reason the impact of the city on Spanish vanguardism needs to be noted while keeping in mind the lingering agricultural nature of Spain’s economy and the strong drive to nationalism promoted by the government. Nevertheless, a select cadre of Spanish vanguardist poets reveled in the possibilities of modernity without reflection or appre-

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hension and savored city life for its vibrant alternative to the staid and stagnant culture surrounding them. They welcomed the technological marvels that promised a progressive future, they applauded the physical activities involving ludic indulgence, and they embraced the emerging forms of mass culture as a means of challenging official bourgeois culture. The nature of this new culture influenced some of their poetic practices: their focus on the visual aspects of reality, their concentration on present time, their preference for speed and change, and their resorting to fragmentation of all kinds. Unintentionally, by embracing the changed nature of culture, the avant-garde poets contributed to the creation of a mainstream art, the very thing they repudiated. Peter Bu¨rger has suggested that in its efforts to liberate itself from bourgeois society, the avant-garde began a process that would render it inconsequential. One of his major theses is that the historical avant-garde movements criticized not only the schools that preceded them but also the institution of art itself and the course it took in bourgeois society. To free itself from that society and develop ‘‘purely,’’ it pursued autonomy by detaching itself from the praxis of life. This freedom, however, meant marginality and a loss of effectiveness in its social milieu. The intention of the avant-garde was to reinvent art by engaging with modern practices of life. However, art cannot remain pure and autonomous if it connects with the mundane aspects of life. As the twentieth century progressed, the art that continued to attach itself to popular culture would intensify its banality and its identification with ‘‘low’’ culture; and the art that maintained its autonomy from bourgeois and capitalistic society would exclude itself from making a social impact. The avant-garde tried to adopt both postures. It also rebelled against the present by reveling in it; it exercised its hostility toward contemporary reality with its spent traditions and dissatisfying rationality by flaunting modes recently available in that present reality that pointed to realms beyond the rational and to an uncharted future.18 All this made the avant-garde years a pivotal moment in the later development of mass culture as well as the general concept of modernity. Modernity, in its broadest sense, goes beyond the limits of literature and identifies a spirit overwhelmingly impelled toward change and newness. The promise is material progress and physical well-being, but the outcome compromises this initial optimism, for, as Octavio Paz argues, novelty will become a convention, an obligatory doctrine, a tradition—the paradoxical opposite of the vanguardist’s goal. In Los hijos del limo (The Children of the Mire), his reflection on modernity, he writes that despite its apparent contradictions, modernity is a tradition in that rupture and change are constants: ‘‘La modernidad es una

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tradicio´n pole´mica y que desaloja a la tradicio´n imperante, cualquiera que e´sta sea; pero la desaloja so´lo para, un instante despue´s, ceder el sitio a otra tradicio´n que, a su vez, es otra manifestacio´n momenta´nea de la actualidad. La modernidad nunca es ella misma: siempre es otra’’ (1987, 18). [Modernity is a polemic tradition that dislodges the prevailing tradition, whatever it may be, but it dislodges it only to yield its place, an instant later, to another tradition that, in turn, is another temporary manifestation of the present. Modernity is never itself; it is always something else.] He goes on to declare that modernity is characterized by an ever-accelerated process of change aimed not at creating a future but another present. The past and the future ‘‘are present in the now,’’ and change happens so rapidly that a sensation of immobility rather than movement is produced (221). The present, movement, and speed are all intrinsic to modernity. Movement in particular epitomizes the spirit of the new aesthetic and the new age, for movement implies action, mobility, change, vitality, and diversion. Movement was glorified and converted into the compelling myth that the avant-garde poets exploited. The avant-garde was a moment of indeterminate enthusiasm, carefreeness, and vitality; an outburst of delight over the new possibilities of the self, especially the material self, and over the discovery of new kinds of pleasures; and a celebration of dynamism, speed, and change. With their jubilance, the vanguard poets reflected and helped construct the ‘‘felices veinte.’’ This spirit calls into play changing notions of time and space and the movement through both. Modern means of communication expanded time and gave people access to simultaneity. New modes of transportation brought distances closer and allowed humans to reach the sky. Einstein, Freud, and Bergson provided the philosophical and intellectual support for a shift in sociological and ontological orientations. Einstein’s theory of relativity postulated that all frames of reference are equally privileged, because the speed of light is the same for all observers. Freud discovered a psyche layered between the conscious and unconscious mind and explored the enduring persistence of past experience on present behavior. Bergson argued that time was not discretely and spatially divided but rather a phenomenon of flow and duration. Artists of all kinds, as Stephen Kern skillfully demonstrates, embodied these theories in their attempts to capture simultaneity and duration. Arnold Hauser sees simultaneity as a defining feature of the modern age: ‘‘Everything topical, contemporary, bound together in the present moment is of special significance and value to the man of today, and, filled with the ideas, the mere fact of simultaneity acquires new meaning in his eyes’’ (1999, 230–31). Paz concludes that temporal

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dispersion and a series of disconnected fixed moments negate movement (1987, 171), but nonetheless, the power of movement as a cultural and social driving force had been unleashed. The consolidation of time into a perpetual present or, to use Kern’s term, a ‘‘thickened present,’’ not only characterizes modernity, but also underpins the poetry examined in the present book. Absorbing and projecting the philosophical and cultural changes of the era, poets attempted to reorder time and create a sensation of simultaneity through syntactical and conceptual fragmentation, through typographic manipulation as well as the juxtaposition of interjections, exclamations, and onomatopoeia. Spanish vanguard poets showed little regard for politics until the end of the twenties, but they were certainly attuned to the dawning of mass culture that was already influencing society. Not confining themselves simply to reflecting their cultural milieu, these poets registered it in their poetry, sought new aesthetic and existential significance in it, and tapped it for discursive renewal. Like the other adherents of the avant-garde aesthetic, they conceived of art as belonging to a realm independent of empirical reality and as creating a new and presumably superior reality. However, their rejection of representational art and mimetic expression did not mean they were unaware of the material changes occurring around them. Quite the contrary, they drew inspiration, images, and ideas from those ingredients of the real world that they perceived as endorsing their desire for innovation, liberation, and youthful verve. For all their antisocial posturing and their professed antibourgeois aesthetics, Spanish avant-garde poets engaged themselves with the mass culture evolving around them. By acknowledging and celebrating in their poetry those elements of modernity they chose to single out, they legitimized those elements and created a new type of poetry. For Jose´-Carlos Mainer this approach to art constituted a creation ex nihilo (1983, 186). Although his notion of artistic creation in a vacuum is implausible, it does stress the aesthetic radicalism of the vanguardists. Renovation for its own sake, the intermingling of different ventures or art forms, variety and complexity, rupture and synthesis made for an entirely new kind of poetry. Key to the direction vanguard poetry took was its close and optimistic relationship with the new forms in society that connoted movement and ludic pleasure: cars, airplanes, trains, movies, radio, jazz music, dance, and sports. I single out dance, sports, and machines for consideration not only because they assumed radically new meanings as part of the new forms of popular culture emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also because they clearly embody movement. With their implications of activity, physicality, and presentness, they

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exemplify and symbolize the dominating creed of change and freedom that sustains modernity.19 Film, the only totally new artistic genre and cultural form emerging in the period, will not be discussed, since I hope to maintain a cohesiveness based on only those forms of the new culture that involve physical movement in the realm of real time. That is not to say that cinematography is not related to movement. Films, after all, are colloquially called ‘‘moving’’ pictures. However, their movement is a representation more than a reality, even keeping in mind that this statement can be compromised by the argument that film repeatedly actualizes movement, creating the illusion of a perpetual present. As the Spanish sociologist Amando de Miguel affirms, movies give the illusion that everything is occurring for the first time, on screen: ‘‘El cine es esencialmente ‘accio´n’, como se dice cuando se rueda. Al espectador le produce una sensacio´n de que esta´ viviendo ese presente’’ (2001, 138). [Movies are essentially ‘‘action,’’ as they say when they begin to film. They produce in the spectator a sensation of living that present.] The impact of film on all the arts of the time prompts Hauser to call the twentieth century (which for him begins after World War I) ‘‘the Film Age.’’ He goes so far as to credit film with originating the new concept of time founded on simultaneity and the present (1999, 214–31). Films also showed the avant-garde a new way of focusing the eyes. ‘‘La velocidad esencial al feno´meno cinematogra´fico, la capacidad para captar ima´genes desde nuevas perspectivas, tomas desde vehı´culos en movimiento y la virtud de organizar la realidad a gusto del artista— montaje—son fuentes de inspiracio´n permanente en la vanguardia’’ (Pino 2004, 164). [The speed essential to the cinematographic phenomenon, the capacity to capture images from new perspectives, takes from moving vehicles and the advantage of organizing reality to the artist’s liking—montage—are the sources of permanent inspiration for the vanguard.] New ways of looking at reality and an emphasis therefore on visual elements combined with a fascination for fast movement and the present moment to create a new artistic medium and to influence old ones. The Spanish avant-garde thrived on films. In his ‘‘Carta abierta’’ (Open Letter) in Cal y canto (Quicklime and Stone) Rafael Alberti confessed he was born with cinema, and he wrote his book Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos (I Was a Fool and What I’ve Seen Has Made Me Two Fools) on the actors of the silent screen: Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. Prominent Spanish writers wrote essays on film, even before the twenties, and a number of novelists, as well as poets, took inspiration from the movies.20 Intellectual magazines, such as La Gaceta Literaria, started sections devoted to

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movies and founded cinema clubs. The young Spanish intellectuals of the twenties began writing screenplays, directing, and producing. One of the most important films of the era, Un chien andalou, of course was directed and produced by the Spaniards Salvador Dalı´ and Luis Bun˜uel. The only poet to go beyond being an enthusiastic spectator to become a moviemaker was a woman—Concha Me´ndez. Her film Historia de un taxi was widely announced in the press in 1927, but like many others of the period has not survived.21 Before exploring dance, sports, and machines, the three activities involving bodily movement considered in this book, I review the historical, social, and cultural context in which Spanish vanguard poetry was embedded in a chapter entitled ‘‘The ‘Felices Veinte’ and the Dynamics of an Era.’’ The political history of Spain during the twenties, or more broadly from 1918 to 1931 (the end of World War I to the beginning of the Second Republic), is characterized fundamentally by the relative stability imposed by the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera after decades of instability and disorder, of political assassinations, of labor unrest, and of the emergence of new social classes. Thanks to a mutual indifference between the government and the vanguardists, the avant-garde poets pursued their goal of creating an artistic realm divorced from mundane reality. They aimed their social rebellion against the bourgeoisie rather than the government. As the years passed, more and more poets committed themselves to political causes, but during the ‘‘happy’’ twenties they focused their attention on the captivating new things that offered new pleasures. Special mention needs to be made of the advancements in education and particularly of the role of the Residencia de Estudiantes, where some of the poets studied or came in contact, one way or another, with liberal thought and current cultural developments. Three sociocultural phenomena—the city, the youth cult, and the cult of the body—are important indicators of change. First, urbanization was altering the social dynamic of the country. Madrid, in particular, became the emblem of Spain’s attempt to modernize and a European entertainment center. Spain’s neutrality in World War I made Madrid a destination for frivolous escape from the horrors of reality and an environment of ludic pleasure, which continued to flourish after the war. Second, a previously unknown type of youth cult was born that not only embodied action and novelty, but also epitomized the carefreeness, optimism, and pursuit of fun that vanguardists sought. Closely related to this phenomenon was the cult of the body. The body is in its prime during youth, and it is then most capable of movement, speed, and agility. In the twenties a variety of new machines enabled the body to move faster than it had ever done be-

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fore, and improvements in hygiene promoted its care. The subject of the body leads to questions of gender. In the early years of the twentieth century, the female body was exploited in a variety of risque´ spectacles, and in the twenties it was becoming a commodified object within the emerging consumer culture. At the same time, however, a new, modern woman was born, a woman who had freed her body of the physical constraints of former fashions, who participated in activities requiring bodily movement, and who ventured beyond the domestic setting. Modernism, however, was in many ways a masculine, if not a masculinist, movement. The discussions on gender that arose among male writers in Spain indicate that established gender concepts were being threatened by new cultural developments. This tension necessitates a comparison between female poets’ and male poets’ attitudes toward gender, specifically as these are revealed in the gaze, in the ways of looking at the other as well as at the self, and ultimately at poetry. The spirit of the twenties was portrayed differently in the avant-garde poetry of men and that of women, but in both, dance, sports, and machines were synonymous with the liberation the era promised and the exhilaration of speed and motion that made the twenties ‘‘felices.’’ Of the three activities studied here that set the body in motion, dance is analyzed first in the chapter ‘‘Dance, Gender, and Poetry.’’ Dance was a noteworthy cultural determinant in the early decades of the twentieth century. Not only was this the Film Age, it also was the Jazz Age. With its syncopated rhythms and varying degrees of improvisation, jazz exemplifies the freedom, the energy, and the sense of rupture to which many of the vanguardists aspired. Music, however, will not be considered directly in this study, since it represents real, corporal movement even less than film. Nevertheless, music forms the implied background in my discussion of dance of the period, because jazz music accompanied many of the new dances. Certain sectors of Spanish society, as in the rest of Europe, were enthralled by the sensual and frenetic dances coming from the United States and especially those associated with black America; and a number of avant-garde Spanish poems were inspired by these provocative dances. Beyond representing a poetic chronicle of the times, the textualization of dance points to cross-genre, gender, and theoretical considerations. The contrast between the way male poets and female poets perceived dance and especially the dancer underscores the difference between the male view of the other and the female view of the self, between the spectator and the spectacle, and between the gaze and the actor. Poets, as will be shown, reflected on the meaning of

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dance and attempted to capture rhythms and kinetic qualities with words. Using cultural developments and gender dynamics as the pillars supporting poetic realization, this chapter explores dance as a poetic motif that functions on three different levels: metaphoric, thematic, and discursive. As metaphor it is a vehicle for the expression of something else, while as a theme it is the subject of a poem. To encompass all references to dance, for my purposes the thematic use of dance incorporates the setting of a poem, the protagonist or speaker in that scene, or the activity of dancing. The discursive function refers to the possible transmutation of poetry into dance and to the assumptions about art that this contact engenders. A section of this chapter is devoted to traditional dances, because, for all their drive to embrace jazz dances, Spanish vanguard poets did not totally disregard folk dances. The poetry of male poets and female poets is discussed under separate headings because, as mentioned earlier, male vanguard poets continued to look at the female body from the traditional perspective of the desirous spectator who stares at the seductive and compliant other. By contrast, female poets create dancers who speak for themselves and who achieve a sense of physical as well as spiritual freedom through their bodies in motion. Besides being a telling cultural and psychological feature, dance during the vanguard period in Spain was an aesthetic stimulant that challenged poets to reflect on the meaning of both poetry and dance and even to attempt to emulate the quality of motion in dance through the written word. The next chapter, ‘‘Poetry, Sports, and the Body in Play,’’ presents sports within the context of social change, gender dynamics, and the cults of youth and of the body. Sports evolved at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century into a more democratic activity, enjoyed by more and more people. The revival of the Olympic Games was instrumental in increasing the emphasis on sports in Spain and in promoting their inclusion in the educational curriculum. Given the growth of sports as an integral part of mass culture and their link to the rapid motion and playful pleasures defining the spirit of the Roaring Twenties, it is not surprising that vanguard poets should turn to sports for inspiration. Sports provided a new poetic language and a new thematic field for the vanguard poet’s impulse for novelty, originality, and youthfulness. Although the sports theme in poetry has a very long history, the intensification of democratization and the emergence of pleasure as a serious existential goal account for poets’ stress on the ludic and escapist dimensions of sports. The modern athlete, especially the soccer player, is immortalized in vanguard poetry as the embodiment of masculine beauty, physical

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strength, and dominion. Male poets’ attitude toward the female athlete is entirely different. Rather than an admirable example of physical prowess and energy, the female athlete, like the female dancer, continues to be viewed through the lens of patriarchal sensibilities as an object of mesmerizing visual delight that stimulates amorous or erotic sentiments. The female body continues to be for men a symbol and a source of the objectification of beliefs. However, as Spanish women generally were experiencing a release from bodily restrictions, a few were making a name for themselves as athletes. Female Spanish poets saw in sports a possibility for personal transcendence or a vehicle for liberating self-affirmation. Skiing and swimming were the sports that women poets poeticized, for this was an era in which the rich enjoyed the mountains in the winter and the beaches in the summer. The Roaring Twenties were typified by frolicking and physical enjoyment, and the commitment to novelty and an evasion of rule-bound reality on the part of vanguard poets found a matching disposition in sports. Poetry and sports coincided in a mutual celebration of the ludic spirit; just as poets considered sports to be poetry, so their poetry became a kind of sport. The correspondence between poetry and sports must of course be seen in the broadest, most general terms of reflections on the meaning of poetry and art rather than of true imitation. My last chapter, ‘‘Motors, Machines, and Other Mechanical Marvels,’’ looks at the impact of technology on Spanish vanguard poetry. For Stephen Kern, the sweeping changes in technology taking place in the decades before World War I are what created new modes of understanding and experiencing the world. This unprecedented growth in technology continued after 1918 and became the inspiration for many Spanish poets, who glorified numerous machines and recent inventions in their poems. Since Spanish women poets dedicated fewer poems than their male counterparts to machines and material objects, less attention is paid to gender difference in this chapter than in the previous ones. In studying poets’ responses to machines, not only must one refer to the myriad of technological advancements flooding society and filling people with a grand sense of wonderment, but one must also underscore the poetics of the machine initiated by the futurists. The overwhelming social changes brought about by machines along with vanguardists’ ludic impulses drove them to celebrate the new technologies with obsessive, albeit short-lived, insistence. The machine infused them with hope for a new age, a new thinking, and a new poetry. Their euphoric outlook led them to envision a mechanized paradise that would transform human essence. Of all the machines that enraptured poets, the airplane and the automobile stand out, but they also wrote poems about an array of other mechanical

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marvels: the streetcar, the train, the telephone, telegraphy, electricity, and typewriters. Although the relationship to technology was different for women than for men, a few female poets who identified with the vanguard posture applauded the machine and saw themselves mastering it. However, the dream the machine promised to women was not one of a transformation of humanity but that of personal liberation and revitalization—in other words, of the attainment of personhood. Dance, sports, and machines—all ingredients of a new mass culture emerging in the Western world at the beginning of the twentieth century—found their way into Spanish vanguard poetry. They were textualized, celebrated, and to a certain extent emulated. Dances, sports, and machines became the thematic core, the vehicles for new kinds of metaphors, and the symbols of modern values. These three elements of popular culture inspired a significant number of poems written between 1918 and 1931, and the poems, in turn, chronicled a new principle of life founded on change, youthfulness, and movement.

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2 The ‘‘Felices Veinte’’ and the Dynamics of an Era HUMANS LIVE IN HISTORY, NOT ONLY IN THE DIACHRONIC SENSE OF

temporal progression that Jorge Manrique compared to rivers invariably emptying into the sea of death, but also in the synchronic sense that Jose´ Ortega y Gasset encapsulated in his phrase ‘‘Yo y mis circunstancias’’ [I and my circumstances]. Therefore, as a human endeavor, a poetic movement also issues from the past and interacts with the present. Because poets are lodged within time and are influenced by the complexion of their historical circumstances, they are affected by the social, political, and cultural situation around them. Consequently, a brief review of the social context of the twenties sets the stage for an understanding of the poetry produced during those ‘‘roaring’’ and ‘‘felices’’ years.

Historical Context Leading historians have examined the concrete details of the political and social events in Spain during the first third of the twentieth century. For example, Fernando Garcı´a de Corta´zar and Jose´ Manuel Gonza´lez Vesga entitle their chapter devoted to the first half of the twentieth century ‘‘La burguesı´a satisfecha’’ (The Satisfied Bourgeoisie), because during this period, except for certain sectors of society, Spaniards generally displayed bourgeois ‘‘conformismo y abulia’’ [conformism and lack of will]. Manuel Tun˜o´n de Lara, the coordinator of Editorial Labor’s grand project on history, offers in the eleventh volume a wealth of facts, statistics, and details on the period 1923 to 1939.1 What is relevant to the present study is not the specific historical occurrences of the period, but the general social climate that those occurrences created and that framed, nurtured, and stimulated writers. The evocation here of the historical context of the twenties is not meant to reduce poets to mere pawns of their environment, but to re28

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mind us that, as creators of images, realities, and visions, poets ratify and reflect as well as reject and supplant the world around them. In Spain, the first two decades of the twentieth century were an era of political, economic, and social change. The political scene was crisisridden, with instability and disorder being its defining characteristics. For all the rhetoric about ‘‘el desastre nacional’’ [national disaster] at the onset of the century, the loss of Spain’s last vestiges of its empire in 1898 did not provoke a great political or economic upheaval, but a certain perception of crisis heightened an awareness of the changes taking place. Jose´ Alvarez Junco singles out three aspects of change that followed the ‘‘disaster.’’ First, the parliamentary system of Antonio Ca´novas de Castillo suffered a loss of prestige and various corrupt political mechanisms of the time were condemned, while the so-called regenerationist proposals increased their endorsements. Second, the ruling elites—not only the political and military elites, but also the clergy, the aristocrats, and the landlords—suffered a loss of support. And third, in the ideological sphere Spaniards modified their patriotic rhetoric to reflect the new attack on national identity resulting from their failure in the war with the United States (Alvarez Junco 1999, 74–75). Soon Spain found itself involved again in a war—this time over its Moroccan possessions—and a general strike against a recruitment drive to escalate the Moroccan War ended in a popular insurrection known as the ‘‘Tragic Week of 1909.’’ Antonio Maura, the resolute conservative who had replaced Ca´novas as prime minister, responded to the revolt with such harshness that an international protest obliged the king to request his resignation. The next political leader, Jose´ Canalejas, unified the Liberal Party, but labor problems arose again. When he resorted to repressive measures after another of Spain’s many strikes, he was assassinated. He was followed by Eduardo Dato, who increased political tension not only with liberals but also among his fellow conservatives. He was forced out of his position after the enormous labor upheaval of 1917 and was also assassinated, in 1921. Politics in Spain was a dramatic failure. Power was fragmented and decentralized. Frequent changes in government created extreme instability, Spain’s system of caciquismo (rule by local power bosses), hampered cohesive central administration, and social unrest caused insurmountable problems. As the government floundered, the new industrial elites, especially those in Catalonia, were growing rich, the middle class was expanding, and the new proletarian class created by industrial development began to organize into labor unions and, more importantly, to agitate. About the time that vanguard poetry was emerging, labor unrest overwhelmed the country: ‘‘[H]abı´a huelgas por doquier y la onda revoluc-

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ionaria europea repercutı´a de modo impresionante en el campo andaluz, mientras que en Barcelona se endurecı´a el duelo sindicalisimo-patronal, convertido en caza del hombre’’ (Tun˜o´n de Lara 1982, 283). [There were strikes everywhere, and the European wave of revolution reverberated in an impressive way throughout the Andalusian countryside, while in Barcelona the dueling between industrialists and unions intensified, until it became human carnage.] The general strike in Barcelona of 1917, the most significant one of the period, set the tone for the last years of the constitutional monarchy of Alfonso XIII. Tun˜o´n de Lara calls the period of 1917–23 a ‘‘[t]iempo de violencia, de descomposicio´n del sistema polı´tico, de escisiones ideolo´gicas y de rupturas sociales’’ (1981a, 503) [a time of violence, of breakdown in the political system, of ideological fracturing, and of social rupture]. By the internationally historic year of 1917, the political consciousness of different sectors of Spanish society had been set.2 The discontent of workers and the middle class in general grew as inflation rose, the military was dissatisfied with the government’s organizational policies toward it, and the various elites consolidated their power. In the economic sphere, the identifying feature of the era was a surge in industrialization, which ushered in a degree of modernization that created wealth and improved the standard of living but that also created new problems of worker abuse and political complications. In the nineteenth century Spain had experienced economic expansion manifested in a growth in population and an increase in personal income. By World War I it had become a country capable of using industrial technologies even though it still could not be called an ‘‘industrialized’’ country (Ringrose 1996, 56). The concentration of population began to shift from rural areas to urban centers, agriculture lost workers to the factories, industrial monopolies were forming, and a corps of nouveaux riches was emerging. The upper middle class became wealthier and more powerful thanks to foreign capital that flowed into Spain during the First World War. Spain’s neutrality in the war was advantageous to business as it increased trade relationships and created for foreigners a haven from the war. The poet Concha Me´ndez, for instance, in her memoirs of those years, describes as follows the beach of San Sebastia´n, where she spent her summers as a young girl: Era una maravilla. Durante la Primera Guerra Mundial se lleno´ de extranjeros, se veı´a atravesar la frontera a familias completas, que transportaban sus muebles. Llegaban y se instalaban por donde fuera: los hoteles estaban llenos y se les veı´a hasta en la calle. Las personas adineradas llegaron a comprar propiedad. Como la moneda francesa se devaluo´, nosotros y los

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dema´s espan˜oles con recursos atravesa´bamos la frontera para comprar perfumes, sombreros y todo tipo de accesorios. (Ulacia Altolaguirre 1990, 36–37) [It was amazing. During World War I it was full of foreigners, you would see whole families with their furniture crossing the border. Once they arrived, they settled in anywhere: the hotels were full and you could even see people in the streets. The people with money bought property. Because the French franc was devalued, we and other Spaniards of means crossed the border to buy perfume, hats, and all kinds of extras.]

The war, however, had a negative effect on the tensions within the country as social disturbances in the form of strikes and political crimes intensified. The irreconcilable ideological divisions between the Left and the Right were exacerbated when some Spaniards, the aliado´filos, favored the Allies or accepted intervention, and others, the germano´filos, sided with Germany and wanted no intervention. In addition, the communities of the periphery strengthened their opposition to the central state. The sense of local identity nurtured by the regionalism of the nineteenth century evolved into initiatives of nationalism for the Basques and the Catalans, who now began to seek autonomy, an aspiration bolstered by their newly acquired industrial strength.3 In 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera staged a bloodless coup with the blessing of the king, because, with as many as three changes in administration a year, the government was in chaos. In addition, the war in Africa was a failure, and the general public, for the most part, was either passive or demoralized (Garcı´a de Corta´zar and Gonza´lez Vesga 1994, 557). Decades of internecine wars, interminable changes in administration, and assassinations came to an end.4 An era of peace commenced that coincided with the optimism emerging in the West after World War I, the ‘‘war to end all wars,’’ and with the new confidence in diplomacy, international good will, and the power of reason manifested in the creation of the League of Nations. Peace was accompanied by a stunning economic boom that made the twenties ‘‘roaring’’ in the United States and ‘‘felices’’ in Spain. Garcı´a de Corta´zar and Gonza´lez Vesga call the seven years of dictatorship a period of ‘‘biblical abundance’’ (1994, 559). Public works projects included the building of highways, the installation of electricity in many rural areas, and improvements in access to water. Industrial production exhibited strong growth, and factories absorbed more of the workforce. These developments changed the cities. Cities not only experienced an increase in population, but also changed from centers for the bourgeois to places where increased numbers of workers crowded into dis-

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mal and inadequate housing. The advent of urbanization in Spain called attention to new societal needs and prompted some improvement in housing conditions, public health, and education.5 Not all of the government’s actions were beneficial or benevolent. The government’s intervention in the public’s life bolstered its power over the citizenry, and its repressive sociopolitical measures created social unrest, which, although contained, would precipitate the formation of the Second Republic.6 The dictator embraced economic development because it served his drive to forge a national identity and to monopolize industrial production. Modernization and economic development were also part of the political program of the capitalist leadership, who saw in the process a way to increase profitability, control the means of production, and build national pride.7 The dictator ruled Spain in collusion with the financial elites until the economic boom ended with the world depression in 1929 and until renewed political tensions forced the king to ask him to resign. The king relinquished power in 1931 when the Second Republic was declared. The ‘‘felices veinte’’ were over. Despite his hold on government, business, education, and the church, Primo de Rivera showed little interest in culture. Neither did King Alfonso XIII display any intellectual inclinations. According to Carlos Fisas, ‘‘[N]o es que despreciase a los hombres de pensamiento, simplemente los ignoraba. Ası´ como a la Reina le gustaba leer, el Rey raras veces cogı´a un libro que no fuese de temas militares’’ (1995, 217). [It isn’t that he scorned intellectuals, he simply knew nothing about them. While the queen liked to read, the king rarely picked up a book unless it had a military theme.] Exhibiting no noblesse oblige, the Spanish aristocracy did not show a sense of responsibility in regard to serving as patrons of the arts. Quoting a 1932 book, Amado de Miguel writes, ‘‘ La Corte jama´s protegı´a a un poeta, un literato o un filo´sofo. [. . .] Los protegidos de la Corte se espigaban entre los mediocres y el previo pla´cet del valido eclesia´stico o la recomendacio´n jesuita’’ (1995, 53). [The Court never protected a poet, a writer, or a philosopher. . . . The protected among the Court sprouted from among the mediocre and from the previous placet of the ecclesiastic favorite or from the recommendation of the Jesuits.] Writers and artists, for their part, were disillusioned with the political values of the past that had spawned World War I and were dissatisfied by their present society predicated on bourgeois values. A mutual indifference between the government and avant-garde poets permitted the latter artistic autonomy, and since these poets did not raise questions of ethos, they were of little threat to the projects of the dictator. This is not to say that the artistic position of vanguard writers had

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no political ramifications. First of all, they saw their artistic estrangement from society as a gesture of subversion. This rebellion against the bourgeoisie among the Spanish avant-garde accounts for their mythologizing of folk culture and their enthusiasm for the emerging forms of mass culture. This attitude would bring unforeseen results, for as Jo Labanyi remarks: ‘‘The early twentieth-century avant-garde intellectuals who rebelled against the bourgeoisie by co-opting (cannibalizing) elements of popular and mass culture . . . can in practice be seen as consolidating the process of ‘nationalization’ of culture through the incorporation into bourgeois modes of consumption of non-bourgeois cultural forms’’ (2002, 5). Second of all, at the core of their eschewal of quotidian reality and their strong antibourgeois stance there lie the seeds of the subsequent political activism of many of them. Their staunch rejection of the bourgeoisie helps explain the passage of many of the vanguardist writers to the polar opposites of the political spectrum—to communism or fascism. A quote from the novel Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas summarizes this point well: ‘‘Ce´sar Arconada [. . .] declaraba que ‘un joven puede ser comunista, fascista, cualquier cosa, menos tener viejas ideas liberales.’ Ello explica en parte que tantos escritores del momento, en Espan˜a y en toda Europa, cambiaran en pocos an˜os el esteticismo deportivo y lu´dico de los felices veinte por el combate polı´tico puro y duro de los feroces treinta’’ (2004, 84). [Ce´sar Arconada . . . stated that ‘‘a young man could be a communist, a fascist, anything except having old liberal ideas.’’ That explains, in part, why so many writers of the day, in Spain and in the rest of Europe, a few years later, changed the sportive and ludic aesthetic of the Roaring Twenties for the pure and harsh political militancy of the thirties.] Many vanguardists ended up surrendering themselves to politics with the same passion they had devoted to art. Their drive toward artistic autonomy and novelty would, however, lead paradoxically to ideological servitude (Mainer 2005, 297). Jose´ Carlos Mainer sees the political reorientation of the vanguardists as part of a greater shift in the concept of culture that would take place in the thirties. The vanguardists knew the world was changing, but they did not know where those changes were leading. Mainer contends that it was easier for them to see the captivating new things in the world—movies, illuminated billboards, jazz, cars, radios, airplanes, and sports—than to understand that all this would mean a more collective, tumultuous, and well-informed life that had a great sense of individual impotence (291). The concept of culture would change from one based on the accumulation of knowledge, the refinement of sensibility, and the acquisition of social distinction to one that saw art as serving a higher goal and a communal purpose—concepts common

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to both fascism and communism. The vanguard poets of the period 1918 to 1931 could not have known where the technological advancements and the ludic possibilities of their art would take them. Their motivation for turning away from the humdrum and civic aspects of life was to play with the artistic potentials of this new world. While avant-garde poets refrained from addressing sociopolitical matters head-on, there were older intellectuals, university professors, and members of El Ateneo (the open-minded athenaeum of Madrid) who did discuss politics and confront the authoritarianism of the dictator. The most obvious example of uncompromising and obstinate opposition was Miguel de Unamuno, who, even after receiving a pardon from Primo de Rivera, continued to live in exile until the fall of the dictator in 1930. Besides him, during the first decades of the century a whole cadre of formidable intellectuals produced a significant body of essays that have come to represent the peak of intellectual liberalism in Spain and formed, for the first time, a true intellectual class (Garcı´a de Corta´zar and Gonza´lez Vesga 1994, 547).8 The intellectual rigor and sociopolitical insight of the essayists of the twenties were absent in the avant-garde fiction writers, whose books Gustavo Pe´rez Firmat calls ‘‘idle fiction’’: ‘‘[V]anguard novels are nothing if not vacation pieces, idle fictions of the professor’s day off’’ (1982, 140). Poets of the twenties, as already noted, dwelled in a world of their own creation centered on the inner mechanisms of language and poetry. Although there were worker and anarchist disturbances around them, Luis Bun˜uel confessed that he and his friends from the Residencia de Estudiantes disregarded politics until the end of the twenties: ‘‘[H]e de decir que nuestra conciencia polı´tica estaba todavı´a entumecida y apenas empezaba a despertarse. Con excepcio´n de tres o cuatro de nosotros, los dema´s no sentimos el imperativo de manifestar nuestra conciencia polı´tica hasta 1927–1928’’ (1982, 58). [I have to say that our political conscience was still numb and had barely begun to awake. With the exception of three or four of us, we did not feel the necessity to show our political conscience until 1927–28.] Although the writing was socially uncommitted, Spanish avant-garde writers were responsible for a surprising awakening to a new culture.

The Impact of Education An important determinant of the rich cultural environment that Spain enjoyed in the first third of the twentieth century was the advances in education begun in the last part of the nineteenth century by social activists of liberal political leanings. Spain’s cultural awaken-

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ing was a quantitative and qualitative change made possible by the progressive and social evolution that the country experienced from 1876 (Fusi 1999). Although theoretically desirable, literacy and the critical thinking it nurtures posed a threat to the dictator’s political designs for order and stability. Therefore, he took an active interest in controlling education for his own purposes, closing schools and suspending teachers who did not teach Catholic ideology and his doctrine of national unity. He instituted the use of state-approved texts that taught a single-minded conservative curriculum aimed at forging a national identity based on the past and religious dogma. The fusion of religious fervor and patriotism was meant to counter the advocates of secularization and modernization (Boyd 1997, chap. 6). Nevertheless, Spain had made notable strides in education between 1875 and 1923, and during the twenties reforms and experiments in education continued to have a positive impact on the lives of Spaniards. The literacy rates in Spain improved appreciably between 1900 and 1930. In 1900 64% of Spaniards were illiterate and, in 1930, 44%. The literacy figures for men were better than those for women. In 1900, 55.8% of the men and 71.5% of the women were illiterate, but by 1930 the rate was 38.7% for men and 58.2% for women.9 Not only were more children learning to read and write, but also the government took steps to elevate the quality of education. It created a Ministry of Public Education in 1900, raised the salary of many teachers in 1907 and 1912, established the School of Education in 1909, and started the first circulating library for teachers and students in 1912 (Altamira 1949, 601–2). With these enhancements in education came an increase in university enrollments. In 1930 there were 41,000 university students compared to 15,700 in 1885 (Fusi 1999, 15). In 1868 the doors of the university had been opened, at least technically, to women, but the story of women and the university, as Marı´a Angeles Dura´n has written, is one of a thousand years of absence that only began to improve in the twenties.10 As a result of the impact of the women’s movement in the Anglo-Saxon world, of new laws enacted in Spain to benefit women, and of a growing cultural awareness among women, the number of women in Spain attending the university increased from 439 in the academic year 1919–20 to 1,744 in the year 1929–30 (Campo Alange 1963, 228). It is, however, essential to remember that these changes affected only select layers of society and were opposed by the majority of the populace. Catherine Davies reminds us that ‘‘[t]he Spanish process of modernization was fitful and regionally unequal. . . . Liberalism was still considered by many an alien, anti-Spanish ideology belonging to the heretical nations of the Protestant North from whence emanated intermittent currents of per-

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nicious thought including women’s suffrage’’ (1998, 99–100). Education did not tend to open new horizons for women, as it was aimed at confirming the existing belief that learning for them was only desirable to the extent that it helped them in their ‘‘natural’’ capacity, as wife and mother, to serve men better (Capel Martı´nez 1986, 315). Nevertheless, thanks to a few enlightened educators, important steps were taken to improve education for women as well as men. Particularly important in the advancement of progressive methods of education was the founding of the Residencia de Estudiantes (1910), the Residencia de Sen˜oritas (1915), and the Instituto Escuela (1918). Another significant center was La Junta para la Ampliacio´n de Estudios e Investigaciones Cientı´ficas, established in 1907 to send young people, both male and female, abroad to study and thus broaden and modernize the intellectual horizons of Spaniards. All these developments helped form an intellectual elite that played a major cultural role in the twenties and later in the Second Republic. These educational measures of the twenties were indebted to the Institucio´n Libre de Ensen˜anza, founded in Madrid in 1876 by Francisco Giner de los Rı´os.11 Its secular, revisionist methods of education directly challenged the official, church-sponsored system of education in Spain. Its pedagogical program sought ‘‘el parto de un hombre nuevo’’ (Abella´n 1988, 153) [the birth of a new man]. The student, rather than memorized facts, was placed at the center of the learning process so that he could discover his own sensibility and the world around him. Through the preparation of select individuals for leadership roles, it was hoped that reform would affect all of Spanish society. Among the many illustrious writers and thinkers it educated were Azorı´n, Manuel Azan˜a, Antonio Machado, and Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez. One of its significant legacies was the Residencia de Estudiantes, which in the twenties was the center or catalyst for a great deal of poetry of the day. Begun in 1910 and modeled on the college system of England, the Residencia sought to make rich young men into cultured, honorable Spanish gentlemen prepared to form an elite corps of future leaders. Its purpose has been summed up in the following way: ‘‘Conjuncio´n de ‘virtudes’ individuales y sociales, se trata en la Residencia no so´lo de formar individuos, ciudadanos, hombres en sociedad, patriotas, sino lo que es ma´s, una ‘clase directora,’ ‘minorı´a directora’ preparadas para la reflexio´n y para la accio´n’’ (Pe´rezVillanueva Tovar 1990, 194). [A combination of individual and social ‘‘virtues,’’ the Residence aims to form not only individuals, citizens, men of society, and patriots, but also more importantly a ‘‘ruling class,’’ a ‘‘ruling minority’’ prepared for reflection and action.]12 In the twenties, the Residencia had become the most prestigious place for

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the progressive bourgeoisie to educate their sons. The Residencia was not only a dormitory where the young men lived while taking university classes, but also a superb cultural center that exposed the residents to the latest developments in the sciences, humanities, and plastic arts. It provided classes and organized outstanding lectures by luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, John Maynard Keynes, Henri Bergson, G. K. Chesterton, and H. G. Wells. There also were concerts, recitals, dances, films, and other performances. The students of the Residencia formed a nucleus of cultured, well-informed young men who, through the intellectual stimulation and friendships nurtured by the Residencia, initiated the leading literary and artistic projects of the period. As Javier Pe´rez Andu´jar puts it, they constituted the nucleus of the best culture of the period and gave to Spain what is known as its Silver Age (2003, 85). At the Residencia writers, artists, and filmmakers formed the personal and professional alliances that begat many of the vanguard works of Spain. Many of the figures associated with the Spanish avant-garde lived there, including Salvador Dalı´, Luis Bun˜uel, Frederico Garcı´a Lorca, Da´maso Alonso, Pedro Garfias, Eugenio Montes, and Jose´ Moreno Villa. Rafael Alberti, who lived nearby, was a regular visitor. The residents and their friends were what was known as ‘‘sen˜oritos,’’ young men from families of means who tended toward snobbishness.13 This band of privileged fellows amused themselves in merrymaking that ranged from meaningless carousel to bizarre acts that fostered their vanguard spirit and cemented their personal bonds. Together they drank all night, visited brothels, or went to hear American blacks play jazz. They organized country excursions such as the often-recounted one to Toledo where they founded the ‘‘Order of Toledo,’’ a parody of secret fraternal societies, which consisted mainly of throwing sheets over themselves and roaming the streets at night. They also invented a new ‘‘genre’’ called ‘‘anaglifos,’’ an absurd type of poem consisting of four lines with three different unrelated nouns, with the first repeated in the second line, the second noun always being ‘‘la gallina’’ [chicken] and the third one, in the final line, equally illogical. In his memoirs Rafael Alberti writes that the success of the ‘‘anaglifo’’ depended on ‘‘unas condiciones fone´ticas impresionantes por lo inesperadas’’ (1959, 218) [certain phonetic features that flaunted their surprise element]. Moreno Villa, who lived at the Residencia from 1917 to 1937, makes this comment on the ‘‘anaglifo’’: ‘‘Tales juegos respondı´an al espı´ritu revolucionario de entonces, se daban la mano con la escritura automa´tica y otras manifestaciones ma´s serias’’ (1976, 114). [These games reflected the revolutionary spirit of the times, automatic writing paired up with other more serious manifestations.]

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Most of the poets writing in the twenties who did not live at the Residencia were also well educated. Some, namely Gerardo Diego, Jorge Guille´n, and Pedro Salinas, were professors at the secondary or university levels. A few, like Luis Cernuda, struggled financially, but had received a university degree. The story of the female poets of the era was different. Carmen Conde, because of the economic reverses of her family, after graduating from high school went to work in the office of a shipbuilding firm. The other major women poets of her generation were intellectually motivated to pursue higher education, but their desires were thwarted for different reasons: in Chacel for reasons of health, in Me´ndez by family opposition, and in Champourcin because of her refusal to follow practices demeaning to women.14 Because women did not live at the Residencia, they were deprived of the same professional and personal bonding the men enjoyed.15 They did, however, form friendships and professional liaisons with many of the male poets of the time; and Champourcin, Conde, and Me´ndez married poets. Most of the female poets shared with their male peers a family background of wealth or liberal-mindedness. Chacel’s parents, who were well read and welcomed technological advances, encouraged their daughter’s art studies and advanced her intellectual development (Chacel 1981, 160). Champourcin’s father, a cultured and supportive parent, let her use his library and his bookstore account. He also paid for the printing of her first book of poetry (Villar 1975, 11–12). Me´ndez’s family, in contrast, epitomized the nouveaux riches of the era. Her father was a contractor who amassed a great deal of money during the construction boom of 1910–20. She was schooled from childhood in the skills that were to make her a society matron and proper mother, and she lived with the luxuries of a fur coat and clothes designed by Coco Chanel (Ulacia Altolaguirre 1990, 27, 31). The Spanish vanguard poets, the male as well as the female ones, were not typical Spaniards of their day. They were, as Fusi has stated, a minority of intellectuals and writers of exceptional talent (1999, 191). They represented one economic and ideological sector of society, the sector of the enlightened, humanistic, and elitist Spaniards (Tun˜o´n de Lara 1982, 336). Their economic situation allowed them to dedicate themselves to their art. They were well informed of the latest cultural developments, they were open to literary experimentation, and they embraced the ludic spirit of the twenties. As members of the privileged class, they had the time and money to participate in the new forms of entertainment emerging at the time, to participate in sports, and to buy cars. They delighted in poetry, in their own youthfulness, and in the dynamic changes in society that made the twenties ‘‘roaring’’ and ‘‘felices.’’

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The City as the Center of Fun The Spanish vanguard poets were a small group of young people who welcomed the sense of adventure, freedom, and playful absurdity the avant-garde aesthetic fostered. The avant-garde rejected the bourgeoisie in principle but shared its confidence in individual enterprise because it justified artistic originality. The vanguardists as well as the bourgeoisie were fascinated with the new technology and new forms of leisure that industrial capitalism was producing. In Spain, economic prosperity, even if it arrived at a slower rate than in the rest of Europe, and political stability, imposed from above by the dictator, for the nouveaux riches meant greater wealth, and for the poets they created a fertile ground for the pursuit of creative novelty and youthful playfulness. The gratuitous play that the poets represented symbolically in their texts was enacted in literal terms in the capital cities. The growing urban centers spawned by the forces of modernity infused modernists with ambivalent sentiments. They rejected the modern city as emblematic of capitalistic materialism, spiritual mediocrity, and social injustice, for, while technological advances enhanced wellbeing, they also produced social problems, in areas such as employment, housing, and health, and provoked alienation, loneliness, and anxiety. Therefore, the city has been widely demonized by modern writers. Spanish poets of the twenties were no exception. Loneliness and melancholy, according to C. B. Morris, typified Cernuda’s own experience in the city (Morris 1972, 76–89). The poetic persona in the first poem in Un rı´o, un amor declares that he was ‘‘vacı´o’’ [empty] as he walked aimlessly through the city among strange people and that he was ‘‘muerto y andaba entre muertos’’ (Cernuda 1991, 76) [dead and walking among the dead]. Garcı´a Lorca’s antipathy toward the cold indifference of the city is legendary because of his Poeta en Nueva York. Yet, in isolated works poets celebrated the city for its dynamism, modernness, and licentious pleasures. Raymond Williams explains that in metropolitan centers, small, divergent vanguard groups could find a space in which to express themselves and an audience that would hear them. Furthermore, the city in the early twentieth century was changing into the place where new social, economic, and cultural relations were beginning to be formed and exceptional liberties of expression were allowed (1996, 37–47). Williams argues that modernism quickly lost its antibourgeois stance and became comfortably integrated into the new international capitalism (35). From my perspective, the twenties represent the pivotal years in this shift. Although it would soon become the hub of materialism and consumerism, the city, with its vitality, social openness, and constant changes, offered poets

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welcome alternatives to the dull traditions of the past and the restricted rhythms of the provinces. The only two metropolitan centers in Spain in the 1920s were Madrid and Barcelona, comparable in their growing modernness but rivals in politics and ideology. Barcelona was the economic center of the country with a new urban elite of entrepreneurs and financiers and a concomitant series of problems of worker unrest and separatist demands. Catalonia had its own literary and architectural modernisme and a dissident cultural elite intent on nurturing an autonomous Catalan culture. Madrid, in contrast, was the governmental center that attempted to manage national differences and hostilities, and the literary center, the magnet that drew writers from the provinces and beyond, thus embodying nationhood: ‘‘Madrid acaba siendo una sı´ntesis de todas las Espan˜as, al menos de los ambientes urbanos. Es la piedra de toque para comprender la otra realidad complementaria de la Espan˜a rural y profunda’’ (Miguel 1995, 179). [Madrid becomes a synthesis of all the Spains, at least of the urban milieus. It is the touchstone for understanding the other, complementary reality of rural and deep Spain.] Madrid was also a refuge for foreigners. Spain’s neutrality in World War I allowed it to become the place for financial speculation and the destination for escape from the grim reality of war. Madrid had become an entertainment hub for Europeans and the emblem of Spain’s attempt to modernize. The population of Spain had grown from 18.6 million in 1900 to 23.6 million in 1930 (Campo Alange 1963, 171). With the general demographic shift from the country to the city, the population of Madrid increased from 540,000 in 1910 to 750,000 in 1920 and 952,000 in 1930 (Laı´n Entralgo 1994, 588). Urban renewal had begun in the capital, in 1910, with the Gran Vı´a project, an ambitious venture entailing the destruction of blocks and blocks of buildings to make room for a wide boulevard that would eventually stretch from the Calle Alcala´ to the Plaza de Espan˜a. Madrid found endless ways to beautify and modernize itself. The Castellana was lined with baronial palaces. The first movie houses were built as grand and elaborate structures. The opening of luxury hotels such as the Ritz in 1910 and the Palace in 1912, and later the Hotel Victoria, changed the scene of patrician parties from private homes to public places. Banks, including the Banco Hispano-Americano and the Banco Central de Espan˜a, were erected, as was the Palacio de Comunicaciones, the enormous and elaborate postoffice building that dominates the Cibeles Plaza. The building spree continued into the twenties. Movie houses such as the Callao, with its art deco decorations, and the Monumental were built, as were the Palacio de la Prensa (Newspaper Building) (1924), and the Palacio de la

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Mu´sica (1928). Spain had its first skyscraper in 1925 with the Telefo´nica (Telephone Building). With its new widened streets, a metro system, skyscrapers, banks, movie theaters, jazz clubs, hotels, and department stores, Madrid had acquired a cosmopolitan look. Toma´s Borra´s captures some of the enthusiasm that Spaniards felt over the growth in Madrid during the reign of Alfonso XIII: [E]l breve Madrid evoluciona hacia mayesta´tica urbe. Esta´ ma´s poblado, es ma´s ra´pido relativamente a las abulias del fin de siglo. Tiene un equipo sobresaliente de intelectos, las mujeres empiezan a trabajar fuera [. . .] es ma´s rico en glo´bulos sanguı´neos, sangre ambiciosa de aumentar. Las casas comienzan a ser casazas (los ‘‘titanic’’ de Cuatro Caminos), se edifica la Ciudad Universitaria, crece tambie´n la Gran Vı´a, el Metropolitano subterra´neo cuenta con dos lı´neas, el automo´vil preocupa ya con sus problemas de tra´nsito, el avio´n aparece despue´s de 1918 y se habla de ampliar los aero´dromos de Cuatro Vientos y Getafe [. . .] (qtd. in Lacarta 2002, 292–93). [Little Madrid evolves into a monumental urban center. It is more populated, it is faster paced relative to the lethargy of the turn of the century. It has an excellent corps of intellectuals, women begin to work outside the house . . . it is richer in red blood cells, in the ambitious blood of growth. Houses begin to be mansions (the ‘‘Titanics’’ of the Cuatro Caminos area), the university campus was built, the Gran Vı´a also grew, the subway comprises two lines, the automobile is already a concern with its traffic problems, the airplane appears in 1918, and there is talk of enlarging the aerodrome of Cuatro Vientos and Getafe.]

Between 1910 and 1920 Madrid had been transformed from a modest provincial city into an impressive and elegant modern city that would continue to increase its material well-being. Behind Madrid’s facade of progress and prosperity, there were of course many of meager means who struggled to survive and who could not afford the leisure activities in vogue. They trudged to long hours at work, ate the traditional Spanish fare, and limited their entertainment to the verbenas (festivals for local saints). Antonio Espina maintained that the excitement of Madrid’s nightlife spilled over into the daylight hours, spreading a visible happy mood on everyone, rich and poor: ‘‘Esta intensidad de vida nocturna proporcionaba a las calles, especta´culos y cafe´s un tono de alegrı´a visual extraordinario. Madrid, a fines del XIX, durante el reinado de Alfonso XIII y el perı´odo de la Repu´blica, era a todas horas una ciudad excitante. Pobre y rica de extran˜a manera’’ (1995, 157). [This intensity of nightlife infused the streets, the shows, and the cafe´s with an extraordinary visual gaiety. Madrid, at the end of the nineteenth century, during the reign of Al-

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phonse XIII and the period of the Republic, was at every hour an exciting city. Strangely rich and poor.] All the madrilen˜os may have sensed the gaiety in the air, but only a few could take advantage of this exciting city life. Nevertheless, for those with means a great deal of high living was available in Madrid during the first quarter of the twentieth century. In fact, the English phrase ‘‘high life’’ was often used at the time (Miguel 1995, 53).16 Madrid was a European center of frivolity, of wild nightlife, promiscuity, and vices of all kinds, including cocaine use, excessive alcohol consumption, and gambling. Cafe´s, cabarets, taverns, music halls, and bordellos (with male as well as female prostitutes) thrived. Dozens of hotels and restaurants opened. Lorenzo Dı´az quotes a saying that gained currency at the time: he who hasn’t lived in Madrid, hasn’t lived (1999, 144). Money and wanton revelry convinced madrilen˜os their city had been transformed into a modern metropolis that rivaled Paris.17 It is estimated that in 1912 there were five thousand cafe´s cantantes (cafe´s featuring singers), the favorite ‘‘sport’’ of bachelors of high society (Miguel 1995, 224). Peasants from every corner of Spain fantasized about having adventures in Madrid (Lacarta 2002, 56). The image of Madrid as the city of sin was exploited in the subculture of racy romantic novels and celebrated through poetic distillation in the verses of the vanguardist poets. The chic crowd had endless places in which to seek pleasure. Besides the shows at one of the cabarets that had just opened at the time, there were dances at the newly opened luxury hotels, where they could drink at the first modern-style bars. Night revelers could also stop at one of the innumerable cafe´s in the city, go to see flamenco dancing, or mingle with the populace at a verbena. There were concerts, zarzuelas, and legitimate theater, but what typifies the first two decades of the century were the dozens of music halls, where risque´ and lewd spectacles were performed. These promoters of carnal display and outright pornography created a genre known at the time as the ‘‘sicalı´ptico’’ or the ‘‘psicalipsis.’’ Javier Rioyo summarizes the phenomenon with a sarcastic flair: ‘‘Madrid se ‘civiliza’ a la parisiense, se libera del complejo del Moulin Rouge y crea sus catedrales del vicio. Madrid, ya era caliente, se prepara para el fuego, el siglo XX esta´ que arde. ¡Viva lo ı´nfimo, lo sicalı´ptico y lo sifilı´tico! So´lo los pueblos salvajes no conocen la sı´filis. A Madrid le llega el destape con ma´s ı´mpetu que los gonococos’’ (1991, 311). [Madrid is being ‘‘civilized’’ a` la Paris, it liberates itself from its Moulin Rouge complex and creates its own cathedrals of vice. Madrid, now hot, readies itself for the fire, the twentieth century is ablaze. Long live the sordid, the pornographic, and the syphilitic! Only primitive places do not know about syphilis. Nudity

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arrives in Madrid with more strength than gonococci.] Even the highest officials indulged themselves. While the dictator Primo de Rivera did not hide his licentious escapades, the king, at least, was discreet in his visits to prostitutes and his private viewing of the pornographic films he had made for himself.18 The years 1910 to 1920 were also the heyday of the cuple´. Growing out of the French cabaret tradition, the cuple´ became the epitome of the Spanish popular song in the first quarter of the century. Incorporating at first double entendres that aroused the exclusively male audience, these song turned many of its female singers, of less than perfect morality, into national and international stars. The cupletista joined the gamut of prostitutes—paramours, cocottes, call girls, bit actresses, chorus girls, and tango dancers—that the men indulged and the culture tolerated. Serious intellectuals were not above surrendering themselves to carousing and to a fondness for cupletistas.19 In the twenties, the cuple´, in a more sanitized version, enjoyed a golden age of general popularity and became a national genre of popular music. The years of World War I and those immediately following were a period in which nightlife in Madrid reached a fever pitch of mindless merrymaking and sensual gratification. In the twenties, some of the previous libertinism was mitigated or at least dignified by the participation of a broader public. The members of ‘‘proper’’ society joined the Ateneo, the Casino, and the Cı´rculo de Bellas Artes for intellectual stimulation and cultural awareness. But they also frequented the music halls and the American-style bars filled with cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking flappers, and forbidden pleasures. For example, the first such bar, called Maxim, had a doorman who sold a gram of cocaine in vials from Merck (Dı´az 1999, 124–25). After all, this was the era of the great Gatsby and the Cole Porter song with the line that originally said ‘‘Some get a kick from cocaine.’’ Besides drugs and drinks, there was widespread prostitution. Despite all of his restrictive political measures and religious conservatism, Primo de Rivera tolerated prostitution and unorthodox sexual practices (Dı´az 1999, 159). The Roaring Twenties was a fun-filled time. The variety show and the big spectacles begun before the war reached their peak of popularity. Additional kinds of entertainment and a female audience became part of the ‘‘high life’’ scene. Exotic black and tango dancers debuted in Madrid, as did American jazz and animated dances like the Charleston. The cafe´ had turned into a cultural center with singing and shows of different types (Dı´az 1999, 132, 127). Corpus Barga, a journalist who wrote many articles on his beloved native Madrid, considered the city’s cafe´ tradition a badge of pride and proof of one area in which Madrid surpassed Rome: ‘‘La ciudad de los Papas y de las colinas no

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es la ciudad de los cafe´s; no tiene ma´s que un cafe´’’ (1987, 40). [The city of popes and hills is not a city of cafe´s; it only has one cafe´.] In the twenties, cafe´s and bars with orchestras became popular with the middle class. There were all sorts of musical performances; besides the cuple´s, there were operas, zarzuelas, folk music, the first musicals, and even orchestras with female musicians. Greater numbers of people were enjoying the ‘‘good life,’’ and, for the chic crowd, the nights ‘‘roared’’ with champagne and cocaine; frenetic, seductive dances; and dark rooms electrified by jazz music and sexy shows. The ‘‘felices veinte’’ was an era characterized by wanton abandonment —of promiscuity, opulence, and a devil-may-care attitude. It was a hiatus between the euphoria over the end of World War I and the anxieties caused by the Crash or, in the case of Spain, by the civil war in 1936.20 This cultural climate of ludic display was reflected in the playing with form at the base of the various vanguardist movements. Poets of Spain indulged in harmless vanguardist gestures, in nonsense games, and a variety of poetic capers. As C. B. Morris wrote, Spanish poetry of the period was a game within a broader ‘‘pursuit of mirth.’’ There was ‘‘an uninhibited cult of gaiety that made the flappers crack one another’s shins’’ (1969, 82).

The Youth Cult An integral component of the roaring and happy mood permeating the twenties was a new youth cult and its concomitant admiration for fast movement, of both the body and the machine. Youth embodies not only action and novelty but also carefreeness, optimism, and the pursuit of fun—all qualities embraced by the vanguardists. Writers and artists of the twenties turned against their predecessors as well as their less daring contemporaries, looking instead toward the uncharted future with impulsive enthusiasm and an unfounded confidence in their own uniqueness and power. As Vicente Huidobro, the founder of creacionismo, advised, the vanguardists should create poetry as God creates a tree. The desire to start from zero and promote novelty as an absolute value had already been articulated some ten years earlier by F. T. Marinetti in his futurist proclamations. He proposed a violent assault on culture as it was known. He called for the destruction of museums and libraries, and the eradication of morality, sentimentality, and the idealization of love and woman. Instead, he celebrated industrialized factories, the machines they produced, and the cities in which they were made. For him, the marvels of materialism exuded a grand efferves-

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cence manifested in dynamic action, optimism, and pleasure for all. As a synonym for rebellion, adventure, and energetic movement, youthfulness was part of his provocative program for the future. His manifesto was published in Spain days after its appearance in Paris, and then in 1910, in the ‘‘Proclama futurista a los espan˜oles’’ (The Futurist Proclamation to the Spaniards), written expressly for Ramo´n Go´mez de la Serna’s magazine Prometeo (Prometheus), Marinetti exhorted Spaniards to rise up with a youthful voice: ‘‘¡Voz juvenil [. . .] Voz que debe unir sin pedir cuentas a todas las juventudes como esa hoguera que encienden los a´rabes dispersos para preparar las contiendas! ¡Interseccio´n, chispa, exhalacio´n’’ (Ilie 1969, 73). [Youthful voice . . . A voice that ought to unite, unapologetically, all youth, like the beacon fires that widely dispersed Arab tribes light as a call to battle! Convergence, spark, emanation!] The vanguard disposition shares this concept of youth as a fundamental grounding in change, swift movement, and playful adventure. Marinetti initiated the exaltation of not only what would characterize the twenties, but what would become the religion of the twentieth century, as Octavio Paz insists: ‘‘Nuestra e´poca ha exaltado a la juventud y sus valores con tal frenesı´ que ha hecho de ese culto, ya no una religio´n, una supersticio´n’’ (1987, 22–23). [Our era has exalted youth and its values with such frenzy that it is has made of this cult not a religion, but a superstition.] The Spanish vanguard writers themselves acknowledged their veneration of youth. In his prologue to Literaturas europeas de vanguardia (European Literatures of the Avant-garde), the first summary in Spanish of the European vanguard movements as a historical phenomenon, Guillermo de Torre announced that, contrary to the perception of their elders, he and his fellow young poets saw a new era dawning in 1918: ‘‘Nos parecio´ que alboreaba una sazo´n esple´ndida . . . Hubo un nuevo despuntar de todo, un matinal [. . .] Asistimos [. . .] al descorrerse de grandes telones inaugurables’’ (1965/1971, 18). [We thought that a splendid era was dawning. . . . There was a new birth of everything, a new morning. . . . We were witnessing . . . the opening of grand inaugural curtains.] Torre cautioned that being biologically young is unimportant; the important thing is being worthy of youth and this, for him, means possessing a pure, vibrant emotion and a creative zeal for fresh new actions and reactions (80). The youthful phase of any movement, he asserted, is a period of questioning, rupture, and self-affirmation. He said that the new European generation had broken the umbilical cord with the past and only aspired to be true to itself (83). Guillermo de Torre told his fellow vanguard poets to dwell in one perpetual present, in the moment, in the now: ‘‘[E]sforce´monos simple y humildemente por ser nunistas (nun, momento)’’ (84) [Let’s

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force ourselves, simply and humbly, to be ‘‘nowists’’ (now, the present moment)]. In the same year that Torre published his apology of the vanguard, 1925, Ortega y Gasset published his seminal exegesis of the new art: La deshumanizacio´n del arte (The Dehumanization of Art). Ortega noted that this new art had a marked tendency to consider the creative enterprise as a game, with no pretensions of seriousness, importance, or transcendence. He observed that, while during his generation the ways of the old were respected and aspired to by the young, in the new generation the young tried to prolong their youth. Europe, he affirmed, was entering ‘‘an age of puerility’’ (1964, 62–63). Ortega elaborated on this new power of youthfulness in a 1927 article published in El Sol and later appended to editions of La rebelio´n de las masas (The Rebellion of the Masses). He declares: ‘‘Lo que sı´ me parece evidente es que nuestro tiempo se caracteriza por el extremo dominio de los jo´venes’’ (1958, 194). [What seems evident to me is that our times are characterized by an extreme dominance of youth.] He expresses his surprise over how such old European countries, after a hard and devastating war, view life so quickly with ‘‘a look of triumphant youth’’ (195). Unlike the exaltation of youth in the past, youth today, he perceptively notes, is an acquired absolute and indisputable power that makes mature men and women nervously feel they do not even have the right to exist. In a gesture of servitude, older people begin to imitate young people in multiple ways and become absurd in their attempt to imitate youthful dress (298). No longer, he says, is it a matter of recapturing the youth that is slipping away; it is a question of a life model of youthfulness that forces its adoption on us (198). As Ortega suggests, it was after World War I that the reversal of the order between maturity and youth took place, and it was then that the avantgarde poets adopted the spirit and the gestures of the emerging youth cult in their works.

The Cult of the Body A logical consequence of youth worship was the cult of the body. Again, with his striking ability to discern emerging social trends, Ortega connects the triumph of youth with an obsession with the body. Youth, he affirms, is synonymous with the body, because ‘‘el cuerpo tiene su flor [. . .] en la estricta juventud y viceversa, decae infaliblemente cuando e´sta se transpone. [. . .] El cuerpo es por sı´ puerilidad’’ (1958, 199). [the body has its peak . . . in its youth and, vice versa, it unfailingly declines when youth passes. The body in itself is puerility.]

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This youthfulness expressed itself in a passion for sports and anything else that energized and moved the body with never-before-experienced speed. Soccer, in particular, became emblematic of the beauty of the male body engaged in swift, skillful movement. A whole array of machines—cars, trolleys, planes, helicopters, and trains—enhanced people’s ability to move quickly from place to place. At the same time, on a practical, everyday level, scientific advancements and an increase in income created the opportunity for caring for the body. Before the twentieth century, Spaniards, like other Europeans, were unaware of the origins of disease and were forced to live with filth, flies, and domestic parasites. Amando de Miguel calls the acceptance of soap and other cleansing products for the body one of the most dramatic changes in the everyday life of Spaniards (2001, 77).21 In the early twentieth century the body was being kept healthier, and it was celebrated as it became the metaphor for youth, vitality, and the good life. Special note needs to be taken of the conceptualization of the female body within this context of change. In the early years of the twentieth century, the female body was exploited publicly from a highly sexist and sexual perspective. The female body was paraded on stage in the suggestive, ‘‘sicalı´ptico’’ spectacles of the music halls for the benefit of the masculine gaze. After World War I, there emerged other less lewd, yet still provocative, forms of entertainment involving the female body in motion. At the same time the bodies of women in general were more exposed when fashion introduced shorter skirts and as more women began to enter the male preserve of sports. Nevertheless, the singers and dancers of the music halls, with their extravagant costumes or degrees of undress, their sinuous movements and provocative gestures, and their risque´ or vulgar songs, perpetuated the objectified woman. She was considered both captivating and perverse. She was the femme fatale, an irresistible sensual woman who delighted yet was hated or repelled. Figures like La Bella Otero and To´rtola Valencia were Salome-like, ‘‘la expresio´n modernista de una mujer incitadora y sensual, incluso violenta, que [. . .] era algo vivo y superior pero tambie´n lleno de energı´a propia’’ (Pardo de Neyra 2004, 15) [the modernist image of a provocative and sensual, even violent woman, who . . . was alive and superior but also full of natural energy]. Because they attained fame, fortune, and a certain social status, women like these reinforced the traditional patriarchal notion that women used their body in motion for ill-gotten gains, and they also heralded the advent of the appropriation of the female body for commercial purposes. Both the utilization and the idea of the female body were changing. Peter Brooks perceives a shift in the conceptualization of the female

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body at the turn of the century from the romantic version of the dancer as something ineffable to a body in performance worthy of contemplation for its own bodily capacities (1993, 260). Literature of the time was ‘‘characterized by a breaking of reticence, a greater openness, about the body’’ (260). The open expression of the skillful and sexualized body did not cancel the significance of the female body as object. In his lengthy study on the cuple´ in Spain, Serge Salau¨n points out that during the years of the cuple´ there arose a new phenomenon: the systematized or commercialized dimension of the female body, the rise of the ‘‘cuerpo-negocio o del cuerpo-mercado’’ (1990, 125) [body as business and body as marketplace]. The utilization of the female body as a moneymaking, visual spectacle became the norm in the twenties, expanding to wider audiences. Also community groups of singers or dancers were substituted by passive clients (135, 138). This commodification of the female body confirms a fundamental argument of the present study: that the twenties were a decisive turning point in the nature of popular culture. Despite all these changes, the female body did not cease to be an ambiguous image. It was seen more than before as a body in motion, full of its own energy, yet it continued to be objectified. The physically active female body had a certain allure and elicited men’s attention; yet the ‘‘new, modern woman’’ was openly ridiculed. Female corporeality was a central theme of much of vanguard art, but woman herself was diminished. Her body was presented as totally carnal and often was used purely for shock value (R. Johnson 2002, 41). Vanguard poets as well as the practitioners of the plastic arts reduced the female body to an artistic medium exploitable for its sexually exciting potential. The avant-garde purported to rebel against the traditions of the past and the mediocrity of bourgeois conventions, but when it came to gender, it perpetuated the sexist implications of patriarchal thinking. In her study of gender politics and the avant-garde, Susan Rubin Suleiman affirms that the avant-garde male imagination focuses on the female body, but does not see the body of a real woman, only an image of its constructs (1990, 24). In many ways the avant-garde is about women, but without women (R. Johnson 2002, 41).22

Questions of Gender Modernism is a masculine and even masculinist movement, in Spain as well as elsewhere. Feminist literary critics have argued that the Victorian aesthetic with its emphasis on sentimentality, melodrama, and religiosity was compatible with women’s writing, while the modernist

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aesthetic with its goals of authorial detachment, verbal sophistication, emotional restraints, and complexity favored masculine modes of writing (Jagoe 1993). Maryellen Bieder characterizes modernism as a ‘‘singularly male movement’’ and calls vanguard authors ‘‘an exclusive and self-defining male elite’’ (1992, 314). The futurists were forthright in their scorn for women and sentiment and in their enthusiasm for a masculine art that was unsentimental, virile, and aggressive. In his first manifesto, Marinetti spoke in pugilistic terms of punches, stabs, and jabs and exalted war as the great cleansing agent. In his appeal to Spanish writers, he urges Spanish men to recapture their past will and pride as conquistadores and leave women and friars to trail behind (Ilie 1969, 74–77). For the futurists, manliness, youth, and material progress were as interrelated as physical strength, movement, and speed. Ortega recognized that the tenor of the time was masculine. In a twopart article published in the summer of 1927 and entitled ‘‘¿Masculino o femenino?’’ (Masculine or Feminine?) he characterizes masculine eras as those lacking in an interest in women and stressing instead the vital preoccupations of men, which he identifies as science, technology, war, politics, and sports. He classifies his era as one in which masculine values and male beauty—the strong, skillful, athletic male— predominate and women imitate men in mannerisms and modes of dress (1958, 202–7). He notes that women of his day adopted men’s themes of conversation, spoke of sports and cars, and, when cocktails were passed around, drank like sailors (208). Gender has continued to be a lens with which theorists focus their interpretation of the twenties. Some find that the new culture—of mass and commercial appeal, of dances involving frenetic movement, and of music associated with blacks—was associated with woman and the primitive. For example, in his study of flappers and poets writing in English, David Chinitz says that the Jazz Age was gendered as female. By associating jazz with the frenetic woman, intellectuals turned jazz into a symbol of the feminine and, as such, a metaphor for the impure Other (Chinitz 1997, 321). These gendered presentations of jazz embodied many of the anxieties connected with the advent of modernity. Andreas Huyssen studies modernism as a movement of gendered opposition between an elite group of men with valued aesthetic practices and the forces of mass culture produced by modernization and symbolization of the feminine Other. This opposition arose in the late nineteenth century when male fear of the nascent woman’s movement and bourgeois fear of the industrialized masses were conflated into a single generalized fear of mass culture pejoratively described as feminine and associated with nature out of control, the unconscious, sexuality, and the loss of identity (1986, 47–52). The historical avant-

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garde, Huyssen notes, attempted to work in the interstices of high art and mass culture, but it was ‘‘by and large, as patriarchal, misogynist, and masculinist as the major trends of modernism’’ (60). Male modernists unconsciously projected onto the ‘‘frightful’’ Other their uneasiness over the never-before-seen speed of cultural change and the never-before-known cultural modes. Disturbing feelings of an imminent threat to masculinity and the possibility of the triumph of the female ‘‘filled men with such dread that they had to produce especially ferocious fantasies about female defeat even though women did not elaborate fantasies about their own victory with any special confidence’’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1987, 4). Particularly in a country as conservative as Spain, women did not elaborate fantasies about their own victory, but they nevertheless were, to a limited degree, changing in appearance, conduct, and attitude. Ortega saw all this as an imitation of men, but today’s feminist reasoning would argue that, by changing their look, women were transforming themselves physically and reshaping the model of the feminine. Women wore simpler, more comfortable, and looser clothing that afforded them more time and greater bodily movement, clothing that de-emphasized their curves, making them look slimmer and younger. Independent-minded women with sufficient financial resources ordered designer dresses, bought white kid shoes, and had their hair permed, dyed blond, or bobbed, and showed no embarrassment at holding a cigarette or a cocktail in their hand.23 In addition, they dared to ride in automobiles, play sports, enter nightclubs, stroll the streets without a chaperone, and, in short, participate in the pleasurable life taking place outside the confines of the home. The overall impression projected by this new, modern woman was that of a bold, sporty, and happy being—attributes that characterized the ‘‘felices veinte’’ and would become the goals of twentieth-century life. The exigencies of World War I changed the image of women in the countries participating in the conflict, and, unlike what happened after World War II, the following years expanded the liberating ramifications of the war. Since Spain did not take part in the conflict, the changes in women’s appearance and activities were attributed to foreign influences, especially Anglo-Saxon ones, that were felt not only to corrupt femininity but also to wound national pride. Other culprits were also found. Not very different from the social critics of today who censure the media, celebrities, and the cultural elites for a loss in morality and civility, those of the twenties blamed the startling changes in women on the force of movies, novels, the theater, sports, stories about the aristocracy, and fashion magazines (Miguel 1995, 206). Many mocked the

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new modern woman or condemned her as ‘‘la Eva moderna’’ [the modern Eve], as an immoral deviation from acceptable behavior. Pilar Nieva de Paz quotes one journalist who spoofed the new feminine attire as a dash toward nudity and then sarcastically bewailed that women’s light and loose clothing had not provoked sufficient loosening of morals (1993, 39). She concludes that the basic reason for all the commentaries in the press on female fashion was that it supposed a radical adulteration of what was considered the essential feminine identity traditionally imposed on Spanish girls from childhood (39). Women were supposed to attend to domestic affairs and to leave the home only to make formal visits at friends’ houses, to take decorous strolls, or to stop for a cup of tea. The young woman of the day was accused of being terribly practical and unsentimental, and of being ‘‘frı´a, ambiciosa y egoı´sta, desinteresada de los ‘verdaderos’ valores femeninos’’ [cold, scheming, and selfish, uninterested in the ‘‘true’’ feminine values] and of being intent on living in freedom (39). Despite the ridicule, the outrage, and the condemnation, the new model of woman spread among the middle and upper urban classes. As Susan Kirkpatrick asserts, although the concept of femininity as essentially maternal was still rooted in the minds of men and conservative, Catholic circles, it was notoriously absent from the formulations of the women linked to the vanguard (2003, 26). The broadening of the concept of woman went beyond the world of the artist to create a group of intellectual women who played a prominent role in the social, political, and cultural advancement of the period. As Shirley Mangini clarifies in her book Las modernas de Madrid (The Modern Women of Madrid), these were not ‘‘modernist’’ but ‘‘modern’’ women (2001, 77). These were women who believed in and promoted the emancipation of women but who did not necessarily participate in the vanguardist literary movement. They were ‘‘modern’’ by virtue of their open-minded, progressive essays and their actions in the areas of politics, education, the law, and the press. They included Marı´a de Maeztu, Marı´a Martı´nez Sierra, Margarita Nelken, Federica Montseny, Victoria Kent, Clara Campoamor, Matilde Huici, Irene Falco´n, and Carmen Hildegarte. Women’s increased involvement in the public and cultural spheres intensified the discussion of gender difference that had begun in the second half of the nineteenth century. Concepcio´n Arenal and Emilia Pardo Baza´n along with some of the men involved in the Institucio´n de Libre Ensen˜anza supported greater educational opportunities for women, but most Spanish women showed little interest in challenging established notions on gender. The pseudoscientific arguments of phrenology affirmed that women were structurally and organically

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weak, deficient, and limited.24 Doctors, philosophers, and scholars continued throughout the early twentieth century to deprecate the intellectual and artistic potential of women and thereby to justify their exclusion from all spheres but the domestic one. An embryonic discussion of feminism was begun in 1899 by Adolfo Gonza´lez Posada in his Feminismo. Although a formal women’s movement like the one spearheaded by the suffragettes in England and the United States never existed in Spain, after 1918 the debate over feminism, women’s role, and gender expanded. The discussions considered feminist in Spain were moderate proposals suggesting the enhancement or the modification of women’s traditional roles as wife and mother. The perennial impact of the church, the political apathy of the general female population, and the widespread indifference of the male leaders of the leftist political parties to women workers’ issues made feminism in Spain in the twenties a mildly reformist and unsubstantial phenomenon. Most commentators on the ‘‘woman question’’ were men, and most of those concentrated on limiting, confining, and censuring women. There were some women who defied this negative climate and discussed the issues of equality, political rights, and social justice for women. They addressed women’s concerns not from a feminist perspective, but in more practical and immediate terms, as analysts of current circumstances and advocates for change. Margarita Nelken championed the cause of the female worker, calling for equal pay for equal work, better working conditions, maternity assistance, and child-care facilities. She used the biological differences between the sexes as the basis for her arguments for reform, but she argued against women’s suffrage because she believed Spanish women were still docile instruments of the patriarchal agents of society. Nevertheless, she hoped that the fight would continue so that women’s suffrage would be possible in Spain in the future (1975, 176–77). Concurrent with the publication of Nelken’s La condicio´n social de la mujer en Espan˜a (The Social Condition of Women in Spain) in 1919, Gregorio Martı´nez Sierra delivered a lecture published the following year under the title Feminismo, feminidad, espan˜olismo (Feminism, Femininity, Spanishism), in which he defined feminism as women helping other women in need and as the opportunity for all women to reach their full potential.25 He and a limited number of other male writers were willing to be associated with a ‘‘feminismo sensato’’ [sensible feminism], as they called it, a program of conservative change that improved women’s social conditions but neither altered their traditional social roles nor disrupted existing relations between the sexes.26 The growing threat to patriarchal standards of gender demarcations posed by the incipient signs of feminism and by women’s increased

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participation in public life provoked a debate among some of the prominent Spanish intellectuals of the twenties that was spurred by the recent dissemination of Freud’s theories. On the whole, these discussions were little more than a perpetuation—or, at best, a slight modification—of earlier hypotheses on the biological and mental inferiority of women. On several occasions Ortega outlined the differences between the sexes that he saw as verifying the superiority of men. Subscribing to binary thinking, he saw woman as body, immanence, subjectivity, emotion, and sexuality in diametric opposition to the masculine qualities of intellect, transcendence, objectivity, and rationality. As defined by him, women are confusing beings lacking in spirituality and passion, whose only happiness derives from their submission to the masculine ego.27 He used his journal Revista de Occidente to broadcast views on essentialism and to circulate the justification for feminine subordination. In its initial year, 1923, the Revista de Occidente published articles by Georg Simmel, who identified the feminine as undifferentiated nature trapped in gender and the masculine as both individualized and universal, the force of action and intellect. In 1929 Ortega included an article by Waldo Frank criticizing feminism in the United States, an essay by Manuel G. Morente outlining the distinctions between feminine culture and feminists, and a study by Carl Jung urging the preservation of the separation of the sexes and warning of the harmful consequences of its elimination. In her survey of the image of women in Revista de Occidente, Magdalena Mora finds that the reflections on the sexes were quantitatively the greatest between 1923 and 1929 and that those studies written by men adhering to a traditional system of value stamped a negative ‘‘sexual mark’’ on the active role of women (1987, 195).28 She observes that some fifty times the literary, artistic, or professional activities of women were mentioned or critiqued; however, invariably the attitude toward their works or acts was ‘‘disciminatoriamente esce´ptica o ridiculizadora, subrayando ma´s lo extravagante y pintoresco que lo serio e innovador’’ (203) [discriminatorily skeptical and ridiculing, underlining the extravagant and picturesque rather than the serious and the innovative]. Paradoxically, the journal granted legitimacy and serious publicity to many new women authors and artists, among them Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Rosa Chacel, Marı´a Zambrano, and Maruja Mallo. Entire books were written during the 1920s on the question of gender difference. One of the most conservative responses to the supposed threat posed by feminism was La mujer segu´n los diferentes aspectos de su espiritualidad (Woman According to the Different Aspects of Her Spirituality) by Edmundo Gonza´lez Blanco. Proud of his misogyny, he accused feminists of being handmaidens to anarchists and destroy-

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ers of the family with their negation of the gendered division of labor (1930, 12). His stated aim was to show women’s mental inferiority and spiritual deficiency as well as their ‘‘sensual or erotic passivity’’ (21). He believed that the physiological changes taking place in the uterus during menstruation and pregnancy caused ‘‘very serious disturbances’’ that short-circuited thinking and predisposed woman to nothing more than the preservation of the species through her body (344). From there, he reasoned that woman’s predisposition to sentiment and abnegation in contrast to man’s command of thought and his individualism made her essentially a receptive being capable of assimilating general knowledge but incapable of possessing creative faculties (530).29 During the twenties the fixed notion of sexual difference and female inferiority acquired a new twist among less-recalcitrant male theorists who espoused the idea of complementarity. Ostensibly eliminating moral judgments as to the superiority of masculine traits, this theory still defined gender difference on the basis of biology and justified the patriarchal gender model regarding the subordination of women and masculine privilege. Gregorio Maran˜o´n, a physician who was the major exponent of complementarity, contended that, while the psychological and intellectual differences between the sexes did not confirm the inferiority of women, those differences presupposed certain ‘‘natural’’ female traits that needed to be accentuated for the sake of sexual normalcy. Undoubtedly in response to the increased entry of women into the workforce and to their participation in sports, Maran˜o´n devoted the first of his essays to work and sports. He maintained that besides not having time for anything other than gestating and raising children, women lacked body strength and the muscular system necessary for physical work (1926, 28). In his mind, sports, as a substitute for work in the modern times of leisure, could only be for men. The woman athlete, he explained, is attracted by a passing sense of sexual ambiguity prominent in modern society and manifested externally in the fashion for short hair. However, once she marries, her true femininity asserts itself, and she assumes her proper role as spectator of sports (56–57). The women with aptitude for a profession or who have made a mark on history are anomalies who, he wrote, lack proper sexual differentiation and exhibit, instead, the masculine traits that remain latent in normal women (137–38). Dr. Maran˜o´n’s thoughts on sexual differentiation caused shock in 1926 because of his open and clinical discussion of sex, a taboo topic in a society ‘‘a un tiempo pervertida y timorata’’ (Campo Alange 1963, 198) [at the same time perverted and prudish]. Women occasionally joined the lively public debate on sex, gender,

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and feminism taking place at the time. For example, at the same charity event at which Gregorio Martı´nez Sierra delivered his celebrated lecture on feminism, the Quintero brothers, popular writers of Andalusian comedies, made remarks on limiting woman to her invariable domestic role. That sparked a sharp retort in the press by Pardo Baza´n (Campo Alange 1963, 203–4). Marı´a Luisa Navarro de Luzuriaga responded to the declarations made by Ortega y Gasset twice in La Gaceta Literaria. She answered his remarks on the negative impact of women’s ‘‘mental porosity’’ on Spanish culture, she contradicted his contention that biology disqualifies women from public affairs, and she insisted that femininity and feminism were not incompatible. These confrontations with male pronouncements not only attest to women’s involvement in the feminist debate, but also show that women were inevitably cast in a reactive role. The most significant response to Ortega’s ideas on the nature of women was the essay Rosa Chacel published in 1931 in Revista de Occidente. Questioning both Simmel and Jung, she rejected their essentialist differentiations of the sexes. She argued that Eros and Logos cannot be assigned a gender and that these two principles manifest themselves in both sexes. Frank in her appraisal of the theories that disallowed feminine intelligence, she ascribed to them ‘‘a thousand puerile fears lacking in any logical base’’ (1931, 152). With this essay, Chacel began her lifelong preoccupation with theorizing the role of women in society as regards Eros and culture, tackling the issue of the erotic, debunking the notion of the inferiority of the female intellect, and exploring the problem of gender identity. As many have observed, her stance on gender was equivocal and somewhat confusing.30 Nonetheless, this early essay of hers is significant because with it she entered fully into the male-dominated debate on gender and confronted patriarchal theories with great intellectual depth from the perspective of a female modernist. She went beyond the discussion of gender difference to consider the role of the body in selfhood. While male philosophers, physicians, and social theorists saw the body in limited, determinist terms and woman’s body as little more than a breeding ground for the human species, Chacel saw the body as a vital, liberating site. For her ‘‘[t]he perceiving body is the source of knowledge that facilitates the freedom to have an effect on the world’’ (R. Johnson 2003, 219). No other Spanish female writer of her generation participated in the gender polemics from such a sustained philosophical perspective. Other women considered gender obliquely in the characterization of their fictional creations, as Chacel also did, or they dealt more pragmatically with woman’s historically grounded situation, in Spain, from

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a political, social, or cultural point of view. Women poets of the twenties did not engage in the gender debate in their writings. This does not mean they were unaware either of the debate within intellectual circles or of the misogynist prejudices against women. Ernestina de Champourcin, for example, was very sensitive to the implications of being a female poet. In the brief biographical note she provided for Gerardo Diego’s famous 1934 anthology of contemporary poetry, she expressed her hatred for ‘‘the horrible epithet of poetess.’’ A few years earlier in 1929, in a newspaper article, she heralded a new generation of female poets who were no longer ‘‘poetesses.’’ She identified this new breed of female poets with freedom from sentimentality and freedom from an obsession with love. This freedom was expressed through a new female voice that was loud, dynamic, and jubilant. Women poets, she wrote, enjoy the same spirit of adventure, novelty, and youth that male vanguardists do (1929, 332). This article reveals a surprising consciousness of the radical change in the poetic, aesthetic, and the existential posture that vanguard poetry represented, and it suggests that the liberal-minded women of the period considered themselves equal to their male counterparts. While men were clinging to concepts and customs of the past, women were forging a new identity for themselves that clashed dramatically with the traditional image of women. They initiated a myriad of women-centered ventures such as books, magazines, events, and organizations focusing on women. Women’s magazines addressed timely women’s issues—education, family, hygiene, paid work. Although usually with a conservative or religious slant, these publications created a new awareness of women’s social circumstances. There also were those that could be called feminist magazines, such as La voz de la mujer, founded in 1917 by Celsia Regis, and the more moderate Mundo Femenino, started in 1921 by Marı´a Espinosa. Increasing numbers of women were writing, as journalists, in magazines and newspapers.31 Many different women’s organizations were formed in the twenties. Again, most of them were conservative and religious in ideological leanings and activities, which consisted primarily of charity work aimed at delivering lessons on morality and family life to poor women. At the same time, other more progressive women’s organizations were founded. The most prominent one, the Asociacio´n Nacional de Mujeres Espan˜olas, begun in 1918, promoted equal civil and political rights for women and, by forming a confederation with other leading women’s organizations, attempted to consolidate women’s efforts on a national level. In 1920 Marı´a de Maeztu formed the Juventud Universitaria Femenina, later called the Association of University Women. Of particular importance for the present study was the Ly-

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ceum Club Femenino, because the women poets Ernestina de Champourcin and Concha Me´ndez were members along with many of the other prominent women writers, activists, and professionals. Intended as a meeting place where women could exchange ideas and promote their social and cultural concerns, the organization sponsored lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and homages as well as advocated for the improvement of women’s legal and social status.32 They met with ridicule and outright condemnation not only from men but also from conservative women who repudiated any challenge to the status quo.33 Despite these negative reactions, intellectual and educated women were broadening their cultural horizons and seeking out like-minded persons. A constricting framework of misogyny on the part of most men and a general apathy on the part of the vast majority of women prevented Spanish feminism from achieving the force of the movements in the Anglo-Saxon world. Marı´a Aure`lia Capmany goes so far as to say feminism in Spain never experienced failure ‘‘because it never did anything’’ (1970, 29). Equally pessimistic was Campo Alange’s appraisal of Spanish feminism: ‘‘[T]uvo siempre un cara´cter vergonzante. La resignacio´n fue el rasgo dominante de nuestras mujeres’’ (1963, 9). [It always had a shameful nature. Resignation was the dominant trait of our women.] Marı´a Angeles Dura´n observes that, of all the declarations on women’s rights written from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, none qualifies as a true manifesto and not one was an independent text, nor did any have a strong or immediate impact on society.34 Feminist efforts in Spain were admittedly isolated and very limited, but they nevertheless presented an opposing front to the predominant rhetoric about female deficiencies. What I wish to underline is that for a brief period between 1918 and 1936 an embryonic version of feminism was evident in Spain. There was a thirst among some women for intellectual growth and personal freedom, and some women writers addressed women’s issues. A new, modern woman—physically active, involved in activities outside the home, better educated, and independent-minded—had undeniably emerged and forcibly had to be acknowledged. As Mary Nash attests, even though the paradigm of the ‘‘new modern woman’’ was not widely accepted and did not overturn the traditional image of women, ‘‘this new cultural representation became incorporated into social values and cultural imagery about gender norms. This redefinition of woman in terms of modernity was an effective symbolic device for adapting women to new social, political, economic, and demographic contexts’’ (1998, 31). Efforts in favor of women’s emancipation aided the integration of foreign models of womanhood, and this modernized image

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of woman, in turn, emboldened a small number of Spanish women to occupy public places and to pursue freedom. The gender question exposed a factor of irony in the avant-garde. New modes of liberation were formed, but, to quote Robert Spires, in spite of its label ‘‘new art,’’ ‘‘the Spanish vanguard movement perpetuated old practices at least as far as gender roles are concerned’’ (2000, 220). Technological advances that spelled modernity were cheered by men, but their underlying psychological disposition remained rooted in patriarchal beliefs. Literary techniques and thematics were revolutionized but not deep-rooted, inherited attitudes concerning gender. Even when vanguardist novelists and poets seemed to embrace a new gender discourse, a closer examination reveals ambivalent sentiments. Although they spotlighted the new modern woman, she was welcomed only to the extent that she was a compliant object of male desire, an amusing novelty, a distracting visual image, or a seductive sexual diversion. She existed only on the level of masculine fantasy and textual reality where she could be controlled. For the avant-garde and more generally for modernism, the new woman, a radically different phenomenon, became a metaphor for modernity itself, or a synecdoche, as Susan Kirkpatrick would have it: the new woman was linked to the new technologies that produced goods for a mass market and to the new challenges to traditional political structures (2003, 221). Thus, the equation between the new woman and the new era created for men a new ambivalence that would be reflected in their vanguard literature in contradictory and troubled reactions to woman. The story of female modernists, however, is different. Women authors were less critical of modernity than men because it promised social benefits to women. The image of the modern woman provided all women with refreshing models of existential liberation expressed in physical activities, ludic experiences, and expanded professional possibilities. Beyond this, the avant-garde aesthetic enhanced for the female writer the paradigm of adventure, independence, and movement. Although limited to ancillary or peripheral status, women did participate in vanguardist events, journals, and activities (Bellver 2001, 38). Kirkpatrick, for example, makes a strong case for considering the artist Maruja Mallo a bona fide member of Spanish vanguard painting (2003, chap. 5). In her superb study of gender and nation in the Spanish modernist novel, Roberta Johnson proves that, while Spanish authors of the early twentieth century were not modernist in the traditional understanding of the term as involving technical and verbal innovations, women engaged in what she calls social modernism. Women writers imagined a future sociopolitical order based on free-

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dom for women, and they revamped the presentation of themes rather than of form (2003, vii–viii). Social consciousness and reform were more aptly addressed through narrative discourse or feminist argumentation in essays than through poetry. The Spanish women poets who can be considered modernists were few in number, and the vanguard nature of their poetry was mild. The importance of their poetry lies not in the level of their stylistic experimentation but in the symbolic gesture of their subscription to vanguardism. With their daring break from the sentimentality of most of their female predecessors and their professional or personal liaisons with the leading male poets of the day, they shattered gender demarcations and stereotypes. They embraced the principles of youth, freedom, and ludic play that the vanguardists proclaimed, adapting their techniques and more importantly their message. Emphasizing images, they constructed poems on the basis of terse metaphors or lists of objects, and they exploited the visual and sonorous potential of words to generate poems of exceptional pictorial vividness. They took advantage of the vanguard drive for creativity to forge a female presence in poetry and female personae that exuded freedom, mobility, and selfaffirmation. In contrast to their male counterparts, who saw woman from the perspective of the masculine gaze as a desirable, visual spectacle, through poetry women poets enacted a process of self-presentation. A joyful sense of carefree adventure, of self-affirmation, and, above all, of freedom was the hallmark of the poetry they wrote in the twenties and early thirties. In sum, for all their overt appreciation of spontaneity, impetuosity, and irrationality, the vanguardists did not, underneath it all, rejoice at the liberation of the feminine. Male vanguardists—thinkers and artists as well as essayists, novelists, and poets—desperately clung to the values of the past and the masculine privileges they imparted. They vehemently advocated radical changes in what they viewed as a spent aesthetic, perceiving a liberating future in the mechanics of art and the new machines of the world. This freedom was generic and unspecific, without a consideration for the reality of existing gender dynamics. For the male poet, the liberated woman was a delectable and titillating fantasy and, when not an exciting vision, she was a symbol of the feared yet mysterious other. The idea of woman and freedom in the poetry of Spanish women of the twenties was a dim yet perceptible reflection of the social changes taking place at the time. The government was moving toward republicanism, while urbanization, material progress, and technology were changing everyday life. The power of capitalism and consumerism was poised to change what was considered ‘‘popular’’ culture. For women, the period brought a small but

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significant hope for emancipation, autonomy, and self-fulfillment. In the poetry of both female and male vanguardists, dance, sports, and machines were emblematic of the liberation the era promised and the dynamism it exuded. Together, the exhilarating speed and physical motion encompassed in these activities helped make the twenties ‘‘felices.’’

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tacles flourished in Spain as leisure time became available to more people. Metropolitan centers were filled with cafe´s and cabaret-like venues, concerts, operas, and zarzuelas as well as a variety of theatrical, musical, dance, and circuslike productions, predominantly of a vaudevillian or risque´ nature. In his book on leisure in Spain in the twentieth century, Lorenzo Dı´az lists the most successful genres of entertainment in the early century as ‘‘el ge´nero ´ınfimo, el music-hall, las varie´te´s, el cuple´, la cancio´n espan˜ola, el baile de entronque popular o fora´neo’’ (1999, 70) [the base genre, the music hall, the variety show, the romantic ballad, the Spanish song, dance of a popular or foreign nature].1 The music-hall genre, which had arrived in Spain in 1894 at about the same time as the cancan, enjoyed extraordinary success. Extolling it, Corpus Barga wrote: ‘‘Es el lugar comu´n de todas las artes inverosı´miles. Todo lo irrealizable puede realizarse en e´l. Es la poesı´a hecha especta´culo’’ (1987, 95). [It is the place common to all the improbable arts. All the unrealizable can be realized in it. It is poetry made into spectacle.] Modeling itself on Paris, Madrid created shrines to frivolity and vice in which a whole league of seductive female headliners became stars based on their ‘‘encantos fı´sicos’’ [physical charms] more than on their singing or dancing talents (Dı´az 1999, 87).2 The first famous Spanish cupletista was Consuelo Bello (1884– 1915), the racy beauty known by the stage name of La Fornarina, who in 1900 made her debut by being carried out nude on a silver platter and who, in Paris in 1907, introduced the famous song ‘‘Clavelitos.’’3 Other show names of female performers of the time include La Chelito, La Bella Otero, Imperio Argentina, La Goya, and especially Raquel Meller.4 The best known for combining singing and dancing were Pastora Imperio, La Argentina, and La Argentinita. Erotic spectacles were for men—for dandies, idle rich gentlemen, Bohemians, intellectuals, and lecherous old men—but the libertine pleasures of these nightclubs slowly became known to increasing numbers of people. 61

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Even the ordinary masses knew of these dances and sang the cuple´s. In his memoirs, Alonso Zamora Vicente wrote: ‘‘La gente de bluso´n y los soldados comı´an gallinejas en los puestos de fritangas y bebı´an de recuelo [. . .] y marchosos canturreaban ‘La pulga’ o ‘Que´ mala entran˜a tiene a mı´’ o los tangos primerizos’’ (1991, 30). [The working class and soldiers ate giblets in the fried-food stands and drank weak, restrained coffee . . . and gaily hummed ‘‘The Flea’’ or ‘‘Boy, How She Hates Me’’ and the early tangos.] The cuple´, the dramatized song born in 1893 with the vulgar ‘‘La pulga’’ (The Flea), had become by the twenties a conservative and sentimental musical piece legitimized by its generalized social acceptance and exploited commercially as a product of national culture.5 Along with song, dances were becoming popular on all levels of society. Dance, my interest here, proves to be a telling indicator of the cultural climate, the gender dynamics, and the aesthetic goals of the period. Dance, like any art form, is interconnected with its cultural period, for it is both a practice and a cultural product. As Helen Thomas argues, ‘‘dance is simultaneously a feature of the social-cultural context of its emergence, creation, and performance, and a reflexive practice realized through the medium of the body’’ (1995, 1). In the 1920s, dances like the fox-trot and the Charleston did not merely reflect the times; they also symbolized them. Dance became representative of the high living of the Roaring Twenties and integral to the spirit of jazz—spontaneity, physical activity, and revolutionary change.6 At the same time it was an erotic spectacle for the lustful masculine gaze, dance was also becoming for the first time a form of public recreation in Spain. In the nineteenth century, dances were held in private residences. Not until Capellanes opened in Madrid in the early twentieth century did couples dance in public. From 1900 to 1920 dancing became one of the greatest pastimes among all classes. The upper social classes danced at the Ritz, the Residencia de Estudiantes, and the Cı´rculo de Bellas Artes, while the common people danced at verbenas and open-air restaurants on the outskirts of the city. The accompanying music varied from orchestral to phonographic, and the dances ranged from regional ones to the classical waltz to the most modern rhythms. A whole array of foreign dances captivated the Spaniards in the first third of the century. According to Serge Salau¨n, the cakewalk was introduced in 1903 and the machicha in 1905. The tango arrived before World War I but enjoyed its greatest popularity at the end of the twenties. Before World War I, the fox-trot, the one-step, and the twostep had become popular. Other American dances known to Spaniards

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were the camel trot, the shimmy, the Boston Yankee, and the black bottom.7 In the mid-twenties the Charleston, the emblematic dance of the jazz era, appeared in Spain. Also, apparently holding a special fascination for the people of Madrid was the ‘‘Yale,’’ a dance fusing the fox-trot, the tango, the Boston, and blues (Dı´az 1999, 146). Although talked about, these dances were considered scandalous and indecent. Guillermo Dı´az-Plaja has written about his seeing the first couple who dared to dance the Charleston thrown off the dance floor (1977, 278). Around 1921 the milonga became popular thanks to Raquel Meller, and rumbas and boleros also enjoyed great popularity in the twenties.8 During the twenties, dances inspired by African rhythms reached a peak of popularity. The first black dancers arrived in Spain after the 1900 Paris Exhibition. The Cuban dancer known as the Perla Negra first performed in Madrid around 1914 and, according to the press, transformed the rumba into ‘‘un ge´nero ´ınfimo de mera exhibicio´n gustosa de ver’’ (Rivero Gil, quoted in Dı´az 1999, 130) [a base genre of mere exhibitionism, pleasurable to see]. There were other famous black dancers: ‘‘El Chocolate,’’ ‘‘Salome´,’’ and most notably Josephine Baker, the daughter of a black American mother and a Spanish e´migre´. Everything American became popular: suppers, movies and movie stars, mixed drinks, and dances. The arrival of the Second Republic in 1931 brought at first an even greater atmosphere of freedom and an intensification of the existing ludic spirit, but life lost some of its aristocratic luster as the Second Republic began to incorporate the proletariat into popular culture. The onset of the civil war had a sobering impact, but Madrid never lost its love of spectacle, and many theaters remained open during the war, unless bombings forced them to close temporarily (Abella 1975, 356). Celia Ga´mez became the mythical figure that La Fornarina had been previously.9 With the increase in new dance forms featuring women, European intellectuals paid more and more attention to the dancer. Besides theorizing about ballet dancers, Mallarme´ reflected on Loı¨e Fuller, the innovative American dancer who created a sensation in Paris with her performances in which she manipulated billowing yards of silk attached to her arms through colored lights to create the illusion she had disappeared into her free-flowing garb.10 Vale´ry analyzed the meaning of dance and also extolled the artistry of La Argentina in rapturous terms: ‘‘Mme. Argentina captivates you and whirls you away into the sphere of lucid, passionate life created by her art . . . she demonstrates to you what a folk art, born of an ardent and sensitive race, can become when the intelligence takes hold of it, penetrates it, and transforms it into a sovereign means of expression and invention’’

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(qtd. in Copeland and Cohen 1983, 55). La Argentina (Antonia Merce´) began dancing in Paris in 1910 and became famous dancing in Falla’s Amor brujo and El sombrero de tres picos. Ernesto Halffter, Carlos Dura´n, and Carlos Espla´ wrote scores especially for her. Her fame on the Parisian stage was such that any great success was called ‘‘triunfar como Argentina’’ (Carpentier 1979, 44) [to triumph like Argentina]. Alejo Carpentier uses the adjectives ‘‘marvelous,’’ ‘‘incomparable,’’ and ‘‘inimitable’’ to describe her (1979, 38, 46, 47). The dancer La Argentinita (Encarnacio´n Lo´pez) was linked professionally or personally to many of the figures of the Generation of 27 including Federico Garcı´a Lorca, Ernesto Halffter, Adolfo Salazar, and Ignacio Sa´nchez Mejı´as.11 Ernesto Gime´nez Caballero set her apart from the other dancers for appealing to a wider, more middle-class audience and for being more ‘‘decent’’ (1995, 260). The most famous dancer of the time was probably Pastora Imperio (Pastora Rojas Monje). She debuted El amor brujo, which Falla had written for her, and many prominent writers of the period praised her electrifying personality.12 Rafael Cansinos-Assens reported that a group of young writers, especially Ramo´n Pe´rez de Ayala, turned her into a national symbol, a kind of living Dama de Elche (an ancient Iberian icon), and had constructed a whole metaphysics based on her dances (1982, 2:153). Solo dance recitals introduced by La Argentina had became very popular in the twenties, turning many of the dancers into national and even international celebrities.13 Indicative of the importance of the dancer in Spanish society is the fact that the first Cruz de Isabel la Cato´lica given by the Republic went to La Argentina.14 The female dancer had been associated with the risque´ varieties of dance, but by the twenties she had been legitimized as a performer because she had become the medium through which the avant-garde composer expressed his creativity. She served as muse, artistic servant, and receptacle for his genius; and she came to symbolize modernity, freedom, and masculine desire. Despite this male appropriation of the female body, women in the first quarter of the twentieth century were freeing themselves from literal body constraints. Although later than in the rest of Europe, Spanish women had shed their corsets, shortened their skirts, and bobbed their hair. They began to enter the university and the workforce in greater numbers, to think about feminist issues, and to participate in sports. They were exposing, moving, and developing their bodies more than ever before. The Jazz Age radically changed the way women moved and dressed. Elizabeth Wilson affirms that ‘‘[t]he new dance movement was associated, in the minds of commentators of the period, with a revolutionary feminine attire, and, however inaccurately, with a new morality of licentiousness. In the ‘jazz-age’ of the

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1920s dance meant a whole new syncopated style of movement and the radical modification of constricting clothes. Its jerky rhythms expressed a machine consciousness.’’ The adoption of these dances did not, however, eliminate the repression and suspicion of the body (2003, 168). Many of the vanguard visual artists focused on the female body, but they used it for shock value or as a mere image. As Susan Rubin Suleiman points out, the male vanguard imagination ‘‘does not need to see the woman in order to imagine her, placing her at the center but only as an image, while any actual woman is now out of the picture altogether’’ (1990, 24).15 The dancing woman was not a real woman; she was a symbol, of poetry and of literary creation. Because it is inextricably linked to the body, dance is entangled with sexuality and gender, and the poetry centered on dance and dancers reflects the conceptualization of desire and gender roles. The binary opposition that informs Western patriarchal thinking assigns mind, culture, and reason to the masculine, and body, nature, and irrationality to the feminine. Consequently, the physicality and impermanence the body represents are rejected. The body ‘‘comes to be classified as the dangerous ‘other’ to culture; as a thing that speaks of nature, it has to be surrounded by (private) rituals and controlled through manners and covered appropriately’’ (Thomas 1995, 7). For this reason the dancer has traditionally been portrayed as female, and dance has been connected with the feminine principle. This bias has conditioned both the study and the poetic renditions of dancing.16 Even though both men and women dance, the binary opposition reestablishes itself to form the habitual gender distinctions between the strong and steady male figure and the delicate or dangerous female one. The archetypical saint/sinner dichotomy of literature is played out in dance: ‘‘[B]allet aesthetics shaped females as ethereal, other worldly creatures or as voluptuous adulteresses from exotic climes. . . . Men were figured as the stronger sex and as unalterably earthly figures. Choreographies thus lent plastic and thematic support to a nineteenth-century gender ideology’’ (Tomko 1999, xi). Long-held assumptions about woman’s body were challenged, first, by the notoriety at the beginning of the century of women in theatrical spectacles who used their scantily clad bodies for financial gain and, then, in the twenties, by the popularity of new social dances practiced by the youth of the respectable middle class. Both the female body and the young were struggling to become visible and free. The masculine reaction to the more physical woman was, as it had persistently been, one of desire and dread, of fascination and intimidation. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that by the modernist era, when changes in sex roles were becoming real, men reacted by configuring

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the modern as masculine and by devising a variety of strategies to diffuse the anxiety they often felt and developed the revolutionary poetics of the avant-garde as a result of this ‘‘sexual battle’’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1987, 149). Less of a ‘‘battle’’ took place in Spain, because women were less threatening than in the Anglo-Saxon world. Still, the modern female in Spain was met with derision and misogynistic deprecation, even from some of the politically progressive men; and a variety of political, social, and religious constraints restricted women’s emancipation and restrained female artistic expression. Nevertheless, in spite of facing erasure, ridicule, and ambivalent tolerance, a small number of women poets of the twenties and early thirties interjected into the poetic discourse of the day a female presence that both assimilated modernism and undermined masculine dominion.17

Dance as Theme Given its popularity as both a theatrical spectacle and a new type of social activity in the twenties, dance represented libertine pleasure as well as liberating novelty. Vanguard poets were drawn to the dances of the Jazz Age because of their provocative, sensual nature, their quick-paced and sometimes frenzied movement, and their inspiring sense of originality. Not unexpectedly they looked to dance for thematic support for many of their poems. The complexity of the way they integrated dance as a theme justifies subdividing the usage of dance into three categories—setting, action, and role—and studying it first as a component in the description of a scene, then as an activity observed by the poet, and finally as it appears in the embodying performer. When dance is a part of the social scene described in a poem, it chronicles one of the fashionable diversions of the time. The 1920s saw the popularity of new, fast-moving dances from the Americas surge among those Spaniards who fancied themselves in tune with the Jazz Age. Writers welcomed ‘‘jazzy’’ and mundane motifs as legitimate literary components. In the novel there is the example of Alberto Insu´a’s El negro que tenı´a el alma blanca (1922) (The Black Man Who Had a White Soul), about a black dancer named Peter Wald, who triumphed in Madrid with his fox-trot, shimmy, and tango. There is also the example of Valentı´n Andre´s Alvarez’s curious little novel of 1925 called Sentimental Dancing that tells of a young Spaniard in Paris who whiles away his time with amorous adventures and dancing. The beginning pages of the book are an explicit account of the changes that took place with regard to dance in Madrid around 1912 as a result of

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the exotic dances arriving from abroad. The narrator explains that dances like the pasodoble, the polka, the mazurka, the waltz, and the chotis were slowly replaced by the Argentine tango, the one-step, the fox-trot, and the shimmy; and he remarks that new dance places opened with early sessions, from seven to nine, frequented by modest dressmakers and their boyfriends and later ten-o’clock sessions patronized by a looser crowd (1948, 306–8). In Julepe de menta (1929) (Mint Julep), a compendium of poetry, timely reflections, and pieces resembling greguerı´as (Go´mez de la Serna’s combination of ingenious metaphor and humor), Gime´nez Caballero salutes the tango and the Charleston, which he deems contrasting, yet complementary, forms representative of South and North America, of Latin and Nordic cultures, respectively. He celebrates the urban, nonhuman, flashy spirit of the New World that sustains the spirit of the twenties (1929, 86). Not unexpectedly, allusions in poetry to Jazz Age dances are greatest among the ultraı´stas. Their preference for the concatenation of tenuously related images as well as their fascination for ludic and carnivalesque elements were the impetus for incorporating snippets of dance scenes in their poems. Dancing is a mere prop in a mise-ensce`ne of a night of revelry. Dancers are mixed in with flower-adorned tables, orchestra sounds, and bottles of champagne in Eugenio Montes’s ‘‘Cabaret.’’ Vicente Risco sees the cityscape late at night in his poem entitled ‘‘Bambalinas’’ as a theatrical backdrop on which the tango and the fox-trot are still reflected in the mirrors as reminders of the evening’s revelry. Juan Larrea labels the frenzied pace of the Charleston ‘‘insanity’’ in the poem ‘‘Locura del Charleston’’ (The Charleston Craze). In ‘‘Trapecio’’ (Trapeze) Guillermo de Torre juxtaposes the colors and perfumes of the cabaret and the sounds of the ‘‘acrobatic’’ musicians of a jazz band with the ‘‘savage’’ dance rhythms of the Maoris. Even poets not of the ultraı´sta group, like Pedro Salinas, got caught up in the ludic dance theme. In ‘‘Font-Romeu, Noche de baile’’ (Font-Romeu, a Night of Dance) as the poetic speaker hails a taxi, the nocturnal cityscape metamorphoses into figures dancing to the tune of ‘‘fox-trots ca´ndidos’’ [guileless fox-trots]. In ‘‘Bal Tabarin’’ by Rogelio Buendı´a, Parisian nightlife exudes sensuality in its mixture of flesh, dance, and sound: ‘‘Carne, canca´n, ruido’’ (Fuentes 2000, 87) [Flesh, cancan, noise]. A yellow tone, suggested by artificial lights, lemon squash, and champagne, colors the whole scene, engulfing the revelers in an inebriating glow. The bawdy dance-hall scene also inspires Rafael Lasso de la Vega to focus on the tango in both the opening and closing of his poem ‘‘Cabaret’’: Souper-tango locura antorchas centelleos Alba de la noche. Desnudos Danza de las estrellas

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Champagne Whisky and soda Guirnaldas tulipas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mu´sicas acroba´ticas de los negros jocosos Para cocotas resplandecientes de joyas y de encajes Que tangotean entre los brazos de gentiles amadores. (Fuentes 2000, 182) [The dinner-tango insanity torches sparkles the dawn of night. Nudes Dance of the stars Champagne Whiskey and soda tulip Garlands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acrobatic music of jocular black men for cocottes glittering with jewels and lace who tango between the arms of their charming lovers.]

His disjointed list of nouns (‘‘chaotic enumeration’’ in Leo Spitzer’s words) has a common thread identified in the middle of the poem as ‘‘a factory-like ship of pleasure.’’ The dance hall becomes the glorified site of earthly pleasures, sensuous delights, and physical abandonment. Kursaal, one of these palaces of pleasure, was famous for varie´te´s, a type of variety show mixing dramatized singing, dance, monologues or dialogues, stand-up comedians, ventriloquists, and stripteaselike numbers.18 In the poem ‘‘En el Infierno de una Noche’’ (In the Inferno of One Night), Isaac del Vando Villar arranges the principal words in the form of a crucifix with the word ‘‘Kursaal’’ in a bordered rectangle on top of the cross and the following caption in a box at the foot: ‘‘Nadie sabe lo que puede alcanzarle en esa noche, nadie . . .’’ [No one knows what can happen to him in that night, no one . . .] This concluding commentary reinforces the suggestions of death in the references to waiters dressed in mourning, boot blacks, and a black man. Yet, these first impressions of seriousness are dispelled by the greguerı´a-like statements positioned diagonally across the juncture of the horizontal and vertical beams of the cross. One of these lines is ‘‘un hombre negro ha disparado en el aire un cohete de champan˜a’’ (Fuentes 2000, 316) [a black man has shot a champagne rocket into the air]. And the upright and transverse beams of the cross can be read as a joke. The descending column of syllables completes the phrase ‘‘las golondrinas saben todos los secretos’’ [the swallows know all the secrets], creating an expectation for secret love and lyric poetry, but, after the full pause required to change the direction of reading, one reads ‘‘de nuestra cartera’’ [in our wallet]. In this way the poem captures both the ludic and irreverent spirit of vanguardism and the suggestiveness of the risque´ spectacles that triumphed in Madrid at the beginning of the twentieth century.19 Gerardo Diego, the ultraı´sta of most enduring stature, spelled out

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in essays the movement’s aesthetic and practiced it in the dance poems of Imagen (Image) and Manual de Espuma (A Foam Manual).20 For him, dancing is the epitome of worldly pleasure. The poem ‘‘Paraı´so’’ (Paradise) begins with the one-word line ‘‘Danzar’’ (Dancing) standing as if it were the subtitle in apposition to ‘‘paradise.’’ What follows is a piano-bar scene described through a string of images implying upward movement and culminating in the enthusiastic cheerfulness of the explicative ‘‘hurra’’ [hurrah]. He evokes a more elegant scene in ‘‘Hotel,’’ a poem in which a stream of dances makes the notion of time disappear, the tango appears in all its sensuousness as an opened fruit, images suggest twirling motions, and the mention of ocean liners and cocktail parties creates an atmosphere of high-class leisure. Marı´a Lafitte, Condesa de Campo Alange, a descendent of the dukes of Medinaceli, recalls this new fashion of te´s dansant [tea dances] and comidas a la americana [American-style dinners] usually at the Palace Hotel or the Ritz, at which after each course couples danced the one-step or the fox-trot (Campo Alange 1963, 187–88). For one cultural historian the 1920s were the beginning of a new belle e´poque, an era ‘‘del mirador, de las mun˜ecas desflecadas en el sofa´, de la pianola, y de los bailes en el Ritz, donde nadie se atreve con el tango porque ha sido prohibido por el arzobispo de Parı´s’’ (Bravo Morata 1985a, 151) [of the enclosed balconies, of the fringed dolls on the sofa, of the player piano, and of dances at the Ritz, where no one dared to do the tango because it was forbidden by the archbishop of Paris]. While the tango was a daring and censured dance, the waltz had become the staid entertainment of the middle class.21 Using a whimsical and slightly satirical tone, Gerardo Diego dedicates one short poem in Imagen to the waltz using as his title the fan, the object that reifies its gracefulness, sense of coy coquetry, and datedness: El vals llora en mi ojal Silencio En mi hombro se ha posado el suen˜o y es del mismo temblor que sus cabellos (1989, 157) [The waltz cries in my buttonhole Silence A dream has rested on my shoulder and it comes from the same trembling as its tresses]

The metonymic displacement of the female crying on her partner’s shoulder to the waltz crying in his buttonhole involves a humorous association that echoes Ramo´n Go´mez de la Serna’s greguerı´a ‘‘Los

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botones flojos son llanto de botones’’ [Loose buttons are button tears]. By referring to the woman only indirectly through the metonyms ‘‘suen˜o’’ and ‘‘cabellos,’’ Diego follows the dehumanizing tendencies of the vanguard movement. He shows that although not a new dance, the waltz could be treated with innovative techniques. Other vanguard poets also spotlighted the waltz. Hinojosa finds in it powerful evocative qualities: ‘‘un vals me trajo la luz de otros tiempos; / aventuras de prı´ncipes barı´tonos / con cinturas delgadas’’ (1974, 153) [a waltz brought me the light of other days; / adventures of baritone princes / with thin waists]. Buendı´a directs undisguised praise to the ‘‘immortally elegant’’ yet ‘‘modest’’ waltz hiding itself among the fox-trots and one-steps (1919, 4). Much has been made of Vicente Aleixandre’s treatment of the waltz. ‘‘El vals’’ is recognized for its satirizing of the hypocrisy, falseness, and ridiculousness of the bourgeois and for its erotic underpinnings. The specific interpretation of this poem varies according to the critic’s perspective. Jorge Urrutia, contradicting Da´maso Alonso, argues that the composition possesses a semantic logic, a coherent story line, and visual cohesiveness. In contrast to Urrutia, Derek Harris, focusing on the inner structure of the poem’s imagery, concludes that its language is startling and ambiguous, illogical and incoherent. Opinions on the sexual message in the poem do not coincide, either. Harris maintains that the work reveals the liberation of aggressive and unbridled sexuality, but He´ctor Martı´nez Ferrer maintains that in the end convention, banality, and decorum triumph over sexual realization. Writing in the 1990s under the influence of poststructuralism, E. C. Graf delves into the self-referential, metapoetic, and Lacanian aspects of the poem and discovers evidence of a paradoxical class struggle. Since my focus is the textual adaptation of the cultural phenomenon of dance, I am interested less in the poem’s relationship to itself or other poems than in its cultural references. Most critics reason that Aleixandre’s ridicule of the waltz is based on the absurdity of the sentiments and social values it projects in a new, more liberated age (Alonso 1977, 211). The young poets of the times may have considered the waltz passe´, but it still was a favorite poetic motif of theirs. In fact, Mario Herna´ndez has devoted an article to ten waltz poems from the period.22 The waltz was not so much a silly remnant of the past as a well-established and accepted form that competed with the emerging dance forms and was an object of mockery for the vanguard poets who championed these provocative new dances. In addition, the waltz was less outmoded than might be thought. For example, according to the testimony of Concha Me´ndez, she and her friends often partied at Aleixandre’s home, where Lorca would play waltzes on the piano and,

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in his characteristically humorous way, pretended to dance like a ‘‘cupletista’’ (Ulacia Altolaguirre 1990, 88). Even though they did so in jest, the new poets danced the waltz. In his novel La calle de Valverde (Valverde Street), a personal recreation of a dingy but typical neighborhood of the era, Max Aub has one of his characters go to a nightclub where the patrons pay women to dance the fox-trot, the tango, and also the waltz (1982, 143).23 These complications in interpreting the place of the waltz call attention to the complexity of defining popular culture. If ‘‘popular’’ means widely performed by many different people, the waltz was still popular in the twenties. The underlying competition between the waltz and the new dances not only reveals the filial antagonism with precursors that Harold Bloom deems the impetus for the creation of new art, but also points to the future notion of popular culture as those forms that emanate from North America and appeal to the young. Many of the dances identified with the Jazz Age were associated with black America. David Chinitz writes that ‘‘the strong rhythms and African-American origins of jazz, as well as its affiliation with the mildly ‘uncivilized’ activities for which the jazz cabaret provided a venue, were enough to ensure its reputation as ‘jungle music’ ’’ (1997, 321). A poem by Hinojosa, with its reference to nomadic African people and to coconut, discloses the impact of African dancers on the poet’s imagination: Baila una negra con sexo de lı´quido metal. Tanta´n, tanta´n. Mis amigos los tuaregs me ensen˜aron sus ojos injectados de e´bano y sus dientes de coco mezclados con un canto resbaladizo y la´nguido. (1974, 160) [A black woman dances with sexual parts of liquid metal tam-tam, tam-tam. My friends the Tuaregs showed me her eyes injected with ebony and her coconut teeth mixed with a song, slippery and languid.]

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This poem hints at the associations made at the time between things African, woman, and eroticism. Chinitz maintains that ‘‘yoked with mass culture, the feminine, the African-American, and the primitive, jazz functions as a central metaphor for the Other’’ (1997, 321). While women’s participation in the new dances predictably enraged church leaders, for many women these dances signified freedom. The opposition of traditional moralists to the new fashions of the twenties made the celebration of dance by Spanish women poets a challenge to the established order and to the traditional definition of femininity as silence, stasis, and decorum. The Spanish women poets who welcomed the Jazz Age were not afraid to challenge societal expectations. Rosa Chacel, who broke tradition by attending the prestigious art school Academia de San Fernando, was very familiar with nightclub life. She reports that in her travels she made the rounds of the cabarets and visited the ‘‘pleasure districts,’’ and she confesses that her poem ‘‘Epı´stola a Max Jose´ Khan’’ (Epistle to Max Jose´ Khan) frames a religious theme within a setting that evokes her night of cabaret visits with him in Egypt (1992, 252). The drawing of Ernestina de Champourcin reproduced in the July 15, 1928, issue of La Gaceta Literaria epitomizes the facial features of the flapper: a small, round face of fine features and a clochelike hairdo. Her poem ‘‘Atardecer’’ (Dusk) captures the atmosphere of haste and speed characterizing the jazz spirit that devours its own stridency and of ‘‘butterfly girls’’ who fly in their Citro¨en to dances at the Ritz (1991, 9). Sa´nchez Saornil, in ‘‘Fiesta,’’ synthesizes the party atmosphere of champagne, tangos, and relaxed inhibitions in the word ‘‘temptation’’ in upper case (1996, 101). Concha Me´ndez wholeheartedly embraced the spirit of the Jazz Age. In her poem ‘‘Jazz-Band,’’ from Inquietudes, she celebrates the syncopated rhythms, the love of liquor, and the sense of eroticism connected with jazz. In ‘‘Dancing’’ from Canciones de mar y tierra (Songs of the Sea and the Earth), she superimposes ingredients of high-society revelry on nature. The landscape is transformed into an elegant casino club scene with a dance orchestra, roulette gambling, and patrons dressed in tails and drunk on champagne. All of the elements hinge on the central image of ‘‘El fox,’’ the dance favored by the leisure classes in Spain.24

The Vanguardists and Traditional Dances While the dances of the Jazz Age enthralled poets, it should be noted in passing that older dance forms were not totally forgotten, a fact that testifies to the indestructibility of tradition as well as to the

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reluctance of Spanish avant-garde poets to abandon themselves totally to modernity.25 Some of the older dance forms they poeticize derive more from the literary canon than from regional folklore, as is the case with the pastoral poetry that inspired Rafael Alberti after his reading of Renaissance songbooks (1973, 120). In a similar manner, in ‘‘Cancio´n de los aceituneros’’ (Song of the Olive Gatherers), Jose´ Marı´a Hinojosa captures the rhythms of the Andalusian dances of olive gatherers with question-and-answer exchanges, repetitions and parallelisms, and simple syntax and brief lines. Gerardo Diego includes in his ultraı´sta book Imagen a reference to the druid dances performed around the bonfires during the feast of Saint John. Known as ‘‘neopopularismo,’’ this tendency of cultured poets to render folklore motifs ran concurrently and intertwined with vanguardism.26 What lured avant-garde poets was not the rural, quaint features of popular poetry, but those features that coincided with their aesthetic: beguiling simplicity, suggestive ambiguity, and a focus on poetry’s primary qualities of sense and sound. In ‘‘Verbena,’’ Me´ndez celebrates the festivities of the fairground scene with its carousels, cacophony, and playful dances.27 Letting the light and carnivalesque tone filter through his vanguard sensitivity, in ‘‘Zortziko’’ from Imagen Diego personifies the mazurka as an old peasant woman. The quintessential Spanish folk-dance form is flamenco, and the poet of the period inextricably linked to this regional dance was Garcı´a Lorca. The relationship between Lorca and flamenco has been amply studied.28 The intention here is merely to ask in what way his interest in Gypsy dance may have coincided with general vanguardist concerns and the curiosity with new dance fads and to consider how these questions lead to an understanding of the emergence of the concept of popular culture. Flamenco dancing was not new, but Lorca would help make it so. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as flamenco went from songs on the streets to voices on the stage, it changed from an isolated, nonprofessional activity to a marketable spectacle with emphasis on dance. In this period known as the golden age of flamenco, cafe´s cantantes featuring Gypsy singers and female dancers flourished in Spain.29 The flamenco performed in these show-bars for and by nonGypsies was changed stylistically from that performed by Gypsies in private for themselves. These public displays earned for flamenco a reputation for lasciviousness and decadence and then, after the war of 1898, as part of the search for Spain’s decline, moral censure became moral outrage (Washabaugh 1996, 14). As the century advanced, indignation was targeted at the level of kitsch and banal commercialism to which the Gypsy art had fallen. Although a non-Gypsy, Lorca

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championed the Gypsy cause. In 1922 he and Manuel de Falla organized a significant two-day cultural event, the Concurso de Cante Jondo (Deep Song Contest), in Granada, to rescue, celebrate, and dignify Andalusian flamenco.30 In attempting to resurrect the ‘‘pure’’ Andalusian Gypsy essence, which for many was a synecdoche for Spanishness, Lorca was adhering to the political ideology of regenerationism, which sought to renovate the damaged Spanish identity through the veneration of its national treasures and its folk traditions. By this explanation, Lorca’s staging of his famous event seems a romanticized, nostalgic response, but he can also be seen as combating the antiflamenco bias of conservative moralists who judged the flamenco dances to be lowly and lewd. He was looking to the past, but he was also defending a modern vision of culture that admits seductive sensuality and the noncanonical. This revisionist approach illustrates the complex relationship between the cultura popular, in the traditional Spanish sense of enduring forms of the common, rural folk that were performed in private or local celebrations, and popular culture, in the current sense of forms originating in urban settings and performed by known artists for profit. Popular/mass culture appropriates the culture of ‘‘the populace’’ or ‘‘folk,’’ showcasing it and converting it into an object of generalized consumption for all people and for profit. To use Unamuno’s terminology, ‘‘intrahistoria’’ becomes ‘‘historia,’’ ageless tradition becomes lodged within the concrete context of a specific time span. Lorca spotlighted an art form that was being transformed on stage by a cadre of renowned dancers into a commercial phenomenon disconnected from Gypsies. By promoting a Spanish prototype, he attempted to bolster national identity and offset the invasion of newly invented foreign dances, but paradoxically he was contributing to the commodification he presumably was contesting.31 Although Gypsy figures and symbols abound in Lorca’s poetry and he had professional associations with famous dancers of the time, he dedicated surprisingly few poems solely to flamenco dancing. This may perhaps be because flamenco is fundamentally a singing, not a dancing, style, for, as Timothy Mitchell alerts us, ‘‘Contrary to popular belief in the English-speaking world, flamenco is not primarily a dance style. It is first and foremost a folk song style . . . worked under the aesthetic auspices of bard-like singers’’ (1994, 1). In Lorca’s poem ‘‘Baile’’ (Dance), from Poema del cante jondo, the Gypsy woman comes from Seville and is named Carmen, like the foreign-generated stereotype. Forlorn and somnambulant as she dances, Carmen dreams of lost love and past lovers. The nostalgic evocations are counterbalanced by the more plastic descriptions in ‘‘Danza’’ in the same collection, and

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in the poem ‘‘Cafe´ cantante’’ he re-creates the flamenco scene of the nineteenth century that popularized the ‘‘tablado’’ [Gypsy stage]. In ‘‘Cro´talo’’ these visual evocations cede to the audio effects. The stress pattern and sound of the word ‘‘cro´talo’’ are onomatopoetic imitations of the castanets. Three successive verses composed of the one ‘‘cro´talo’’ followed by a longer line suggest the pause that follows with reverberations. In addition to a drive for national regeneration through ethnic reinvigoration, Lorca’s reaction to flamenco reflects two other impulses shared by his peers of the Generation of 27: first, the intellectual elitism that compelled them to reject the establishment; and second, their vanguard fondness for irrationality, spontaneity, and the enigmatic. The intellectual elite tried to legitimize folk and marginalized culture, but in their attempt they inevitably assumed a well-intentioned yet paternalistic posture that transformed the underlying uniqueness and anonymity of that culture into its opposite—a universally known and conventional art (in other words, mass culture). Adopted and adapted by the agents of commercialism, flamenco dancing became a victim of its own success.

Metaphorical Use of Dance The metaphorical use of dance is only tangentially relevant to my objective of exploring the reflections in poetry of the dance fashions of the day, because in the metaphor attention is easily shifted away from the referent to the vehicle, source domain or, as some would call it, the ideal plane.32 Yet, the use of dance as a sign enhances the representation of the signified, illustrates the symbolic nature of language, and points to the imperishability of traditional manners among the vanguardists. The dance metaphor with its stress on the kinetic contributes to avant-garde poets’ search for meanings of motion, movement, and change. Their objectives are enhanced by the metaphoric possibilities in dancing for alertness, animation, and joy. These metaphors will also begin to reveal significant gender differences with regard to life and liberty. The dance metaphor can express the delicate fluttering of eyes in Jose´ Marı´a Hinojosa’s poem ‘‘NNE,’’ or the graceful rising dawn Concha Me´ndez configured as a dancer in Canciones de mar y tierra, or one of Jorge Guille´n’s joyous affirmations of the present moment: ¡Oh danza paralela al horizonte! Velocı´sima, brusca,

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Se estremece ondula´ndose La longitudinal Libe´lula Del atolondramiento. (Guille´n 1977, 168) [Oh, dance parallel to the horizon! Extremely fast, brusque. The longitudinal Dragonfly Of bewilderment Trembles as it undulates.]

The rapid fluttering of the dragonfly’s wings epitomizes the electrifying and exhilarating sensations of nature and embodies figuratively the freedom heralded in the poem’s title, ‘‘Tiempo libre’’ (Free Time), and the cosmic frenzy evoked in the image of the dance in the first line of the stanza. For Alberti, in ‘‘Carmelilla’’ from El alba del alhelı´ (The Wallflower Dawn), dancing conveys the gentle rhythm of the sea, but the inversion of the actions of the poetic speaker and Carmelilla from the first half to the second half of the poem creates an intertwining that very subtly suggests the sexual act: De San Fernando a Sevilla, remando, se fue Carmelilla. ¡Y yo bailando! De Sevilla a San Fernando, bailando, volvio´ Carmelilla. ¡Y yo remando! (1988, 281) [From San Fernando to Seville Carmelilla went rowing. And I dancing. From Seville to San Fernando Carmelilla returned dancing. And I rowing.]

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The exploitation of the erotic implications of dancing also engages Ernestina de Champourcin: ‘‘hoy te convido a bailar / sobre la cuerda tirante / de mi espı´ritu en hervor (1991, 109) [today I invite you to dance / on the tightrope / of my burning spirit]. The speaker’s invitation to her ‘‘amigo’’ to dance on her aroused spirit carries sexual connotations, with the image of dancing on a tightrope enhancing the thrill of passion more than evoking any existential uncertainty. Dance is the ‘‘corporeal image of a given process, or of becoming, or of the passage of time,’’ and as such has symbolized the union of space and time, of heaven and earth, and of the human with the divine (Cirlot 1986, 72–73). Dance as a metaphorical vehicle also dovetails into the explanations given by George Lakoff and Mark Turner for the ‘‘life as journey’’ and ‘‘death as departure’’ metaphors, in which events are conceived as actions and agency is imputed to what is causally connected to the event (1989, 37). Embodying movement, participants, and place, the dance metaphor can apply to life—life as animated activity, energetic self-consciousness, and festive site. Death as a dance, particularly in the medieval motif, incorporates the ideas of death as an act of departure, of the personified agent in the role of escort or dance master, and of the final state or destination. The persistence of the dance-of-death metaphor in modern poetry not only confirms its richness across the ages, but also testifies to modern Spanish poets’ undeniable recourse to tradition. How modern poets used the ‘‘life/death as dance’’ metaphor to express their individual, generational, and gendered perspectives is the matter to be considered. Considering his preoccupation with death, it is not surprising that Garcı´a Lorca resorted to the dance-of-death motif. While his medieval antecedents created a concise, graphic allegory of the universality of death’s triumph and its subjugation of all human souls to the dance, Lorca either masks death under the guise of a dancer or compares the dance to the natural and therefore, from his viewpoint, the noble forces of the cosmos. In ‘‘Romance de la luna, luna’’ (The Ballad of the Moon, Moon) he personifies death as a female dancer. She may perhaps be taken as the fire in the forge that seductively hypnotized the small boy, but more likely she is the personification of the moon. Dressed in a white dress with a bustle, she dances before the child and lures him to his death with her movements and her ‘‘lascivious yet pure’’ sensuality. Conceived here as an extension of nature, death coincides with the archetype of woman as seductive, mysterious, and menacing, as the incarnation of physicality, and as an agent of the destruction of the masculine. ‘‘Pequen˜o vals viene´s’’ (Small Viennese Waltz), ‘‘Vals en las ramas’’

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(Waltz of the Branches), and ‘‘Son de negros en Cuba’’ (Song of the Blacks in Cuba) from Poeta en Nueva York are seen by Derek Harris as versions of the dance-of-death motif. Somber images, elegiac references, and other elements of negativity suggest the presence of death beneath the eroticism and romanticism of the insipid waltz, the apparent innocence of the children’s song, and the celebratory vitality of Caribbean sounds (1978, 63–68).33 The throbbing presence of Thanatos manifests itself graphically in dance, whether in the primordial beats of Cuban compositions or in the simple rhythm of popular dance. Death is translated into dance because of the absorbing, uncontrollable sense of being carried off imposed on the participants. The rapture felt in dance is implicitly identified with the irresistible force of death, and the irrational pull underlying both complies with the surrealist aesthetic of validation of the unconscious. Despite its title, ‘‘Danza de la muerte’’ (Dance of Death), also from Poeta en Nueva York, differs from the medieval variety in significant ways. An allegorical poem with the traditional didactic motivation, this twentieth-century rendition carries an ethical and geographically specific message rather than an abstract, metaphysical one. And although the textual addressee is a plural mass of humanity, the addresser speaks in the first person from a perspective of self-involvement and structural centrality. Also unlike the classic dance-of-death motif, the figure of death, the ‘‘mascaro´n’’ in Lorca’s lexicon, does not round up generic representatives of society; it descends from Africa to dance within the materialistic and dehumanized environs of one particular, named city. This personified death is vengeful and intent on inflicting its wrath on the evil oppressors of society and on liberating their victims of marginalization. In his thorough exploration of Lorca’s treatment of the dance of death, Piero Menarini concludes that Lorca’s motif confirms his ambition to be simultaneously a traditional poet and a modern poet capable of unifying a medieval genre with a vanguard expression (159). Lorca’s version also reveals the nature of Spanish surrealist poetry: its embedded social confrontation, its highly subjective qualities, and its reluctance to abandon all traditional imagery. A comparison between the metaphorical use of dance in the poetry of the male members of the Generation of 27 and in that of their female contemporaries shows that while the men equate death and dance, the women find an analogy between life and dance. John C. Wilcox contends that because women were excluded from the ‘‘transcendent processes of culture,’’ the verses of Spanish women poets share the distinctive feature of nontranscendentalism—of the cultivation of a minimalist vision of life, of a down-to-earth celebration of living, of delight in life’s simple pleasures, and of a joy in the here and

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now (1997, 10–11).34 And the Spanish critic Laura Freixas points out that, unlike their male contemporaries, women poets of the period of the Generation of 27 did not attend university, nor did they go with colleagues to cafe´s and tertulias or live in the Residencia de Estudiantes (2000, 113–16). While to a large extent true, her statements need to be qualified, because these women did participate with men in a number of literary endeavors—granted, not the ones that solidified the group as a generation but, nonetheless, those that created personal and even intimate links.35 This kinship between male and female poets in the twenties represented a certain intrusion into the male-dominated cultural arena and created among these women poets a sense of participation in cultural change. These developments, coupled with the different kinds of physical liberation promoted in the Jazz Age, imbued poetry by women with a sense of presence and self-affirmation not evident before in women’s writing.36 This unprecedented joie de vivre surfaces in those poems by women in which dance is a thematic focus or a metaphorical vehicle. Carmen Conde’s early poetry is characterized by a sense of joy and fulfillment, verifiable by the title of her second collection, Ju´bilos (Jubilation). The jubilant and assertive tenor with which she embraces life accounts for her exploitation of the kinetic qualities of dance to express her concept of poetic creation and human existence. The prose poem ‘‘Afirmacio´n’’ (Affirmation), from Sostenido ensuen˜o (Sustained Daydream), is a clear example of poetic inspiration equated with dance: ‘‘Sabedlo todos, cantores y danzoras de la eterna mu´sica. Antes que los iniciados vinieran a mi oı´do, ya sabı´a yo, porque me la habı´a dicho mi sangre, la danza firme que muestra a la poesı´a sus ritmos.’’ [Everyone, singers and dancers of eternal music, be aware. Before the first ones came to my ear, I already knew the strong dance that gives poetry its rhythm, because my blood had already revealed it to me.] Dance and poetry originate in the realm of the immanent, the primordial, and the inherent as a force that precedes their material manifestation. Existence emerges as a kind of cosmic dance at whose center the poetic speaker places herself as a self-possessed, all-knowing, and autonomous being: ‘‘Nada tienen nuevo que ofrecerme, porque todas sus criaturas vinieron conmigo a la vida’’ (1967, 175). [They have nothing new to offer me, because all of His creatures came with me into life itself.] Conde confirms the ‘‘universal belief that, in so far as it is rhythmic art-form, it is a symbol of the act of creation’’ (Cirlot 1986, 73). In dance there is the pulse of life itself. Ernestina de Champourcin elaborates a connection between life and dance, with greater detail than Conde, in a poem called ‘‘Danza en tres tiempos’’ (A Dance in Three Movements). The title immediately

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points to the element of progression that unites the two elements in the analogy. The word ‘‘tiempo’’ denotes in Spanish not only temporal movement but also the rate of motion of this dance of life. The three sections of the poem, beginning with the verb ‘‘Danzo’’ and with a change of color from red to blue to gray, shape life from an abstraction into a kinetic, plastic phenomenon. The poetic speaker, the sole performer of this dance, finds herself at first energized, enraptured, and free, and then heavy, fatigued, and enclosed. The three phases in her dance mark the three stages of life: youth, maturity, and old age. She recognizes that her mortality stands apart from the endlessness of the essence of life: ‘‘Fuera de mı´—ya siempre—danza el compa´s eterno’’ (1991, 130) [Apart from me, the eternal beat dances—always]. Even though life leads to death, she, like Conde, concentrates on life as music of the spheres to which they joyously dance.37 Life as a dance also appears in a lesser-known female poet, Lucı´a Sa´nchez Saornil.38 ‘‘Poema de la vida’’ (Poem of Life) subtly suggests an Ariadne figure who enters a labyrinth tying a thread to its door to assist her return and who evokes the Fates as she strings beads onto the thread of her life. As the necklace of her destiny lengthens, she evolves through the stages of life, first dressed in virginal white, then sensuously in the colors of the rainbow, and finally, draped, she dances in an awkward manner, stepping aside for younger crowds with lighter and more graceful steps (1996, 83–84). Like Champourcin, she recognizes the evolution of human mortality within the passage of time. Aside from the mapping of the schematic structure of dance (with its elements of change, constant movement, and temporal progress) onto the abstract field of life, Sa´nchez Saornil exalts life as ‘‘esta loca danza’’ [this insane dance] and places the poetic ‘‘I’’ squarely at the poem’s (and metaphorically at life’s) center as a bejeweled female who seduces the masculine others around her: pude enloqueceros oh, hermanos de los ojos tristes y la sonrisa iluminada. Mi belleza entonces como si el arco iris hubiera traspasado mi cuerpo. (1996, 83–84) [I was able to drive you crazy oh, brothers with sad eyes and bright smiles. My beauty then as if a rainbow had pierced my body.]

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Life is equated with jouissance projected and enjoyed through the female body and graphically materialized through the exhilaration of dance. Conde, Champourcin, and Sa´nchez Saornil celebrate life as an energizing, creative, and joyous dance. They avail themselves of the dance motif to communicate positive, life-affirming sentiments. In contrast, Spanish male poets resort to literary tradition to resurrect the dance-of-death motif in order to convey grim ones. In a manner more exaggerated than his male peers, Juan Jose´ Domenchina configures dance metaphorically with negative connotations and a tragic ending of sterile death: Y la danza que empieza en llantos y en infantiles inconsciencias, fina, ma´s tarde o ma´s temprano, en tra´gicas y horribles muecas. Luego, en la negra y triste calma del cementerio, come tierra . . . . . . . . . . ¡El hombre danza para merecerse sus dos metros, cortos, de tierra! (1917, 16) [And the dance that begins in weeping and in childish unawareness, dies, sooner or later, in tragic and horrible grimaces. Then, in the black and sad calm of the cemetery, it eats dirt . . . . . . . . . . Man dances to earn his two short meters of dirt!]

For him the dance of life is nothing but a long lamentation leading to a dismal death. The preceding discussion of the metaphorical use of the dance illustrates patent divergences along gender lines in poetic focus and existential orientation

Female Dancers and Male Poets The gender dynamics at play in the metaphor of the dance of death / life is seen even more clearly in the renderings of the dancing female body. Gender studies have explained that because the Enlight-

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enment privileged the rational-thinking subject, the body has come to be classified as the dangerous ‘‘other’’ threatening culture and the masculine.39 This identification of the dancer as female and the association of the woman’s body in motion with instinctual nature, of course, predates the modern age and reaches back to the biblical prototype: Salome´. In 1973 in his analysis of the European painting tradition, John Berger succinctly stated that ‘‘men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’’ (1973, 47). Women are spectacles, men are spectators. The linkage of sight, masculine desire, and knowledge surfaces in ideas spanning from Plato through the early modern period to the times of Freudian and Lacanian psychology.40 Feminists have reflected on the power of the masculine gaze in the fetishization and dominion over women and its perpetuation in modern times of cultural stereotypes and masculine fantasies.41 Anglo-American feminist critics have discovered that, despite their aesthetic of revolution and disavowal of tradition, modernists clung to patriarchal patterns and developed certain strategies of linguistic experimentation in order to quell their anxieties about unprecedented female achievements in society and literature.42 This anxiety was not limited to English-speaking writers. Roberta Johnson has ably shown in her compelling study of Spanish modernist novelists that, while women writers of the period enlisted the realist mode to promote a more progressive nation and concepts of gender equality, male writers held on to the past, tending to objectify woman and focusing on her exclusively as erotic fantasy.43 Even though Spanish women did not challenge social concepts to the extent that women in other countries did, Spanish male poets still disparaged women and kept alive perennial mental constructs concerning gender. The unfettered flapper sparked ambivalent feelings because, on the one hand, the female dancer entices, arouses, and pleases, but, on the other, she is antithetical to the patriarchal conceptualization of woman as passivity, submission, and stasis. Movement by women subverts the active/passive dyad, and performance undermines the public/private dualism.44 On those occasions when male bodies are conceptualized, the opposition between activity and passivity reestablishes itself within the body component of the dyad through the antithetical distinction of male and female bodies. The female body is equated with compliance, receptivity, and weakness, while the male body is depicted as instrumentality, action, and strength (Bellver, 2002a, 34/320). It is for this reason that even when a man and a woman are dancing the erotically charged tango together, masculine control is still present. For example the narrator in Sentimental Dancing automatically exposes the sexism endemic to the tango: ‘‘La mujer tiene que hacer allı´ dejacio´n

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completa de su voluntad y entregarse por entero al hombre que la guı´a indica´ndole cuanto ha de hacer. [. . .] En la pareja ideal la mujer es esclava. Hay en el tango como un retorno a las pristinas formas de la relacio´n sexual’’ (Alvarez 1948, 422–23). [There the woman has to give up her will completely and surrender herself entirely to the man who guides her and indicates to her what she has to do. . . . In the ideal couple the woman is a slave. In the tango there is a return to the original form of sexual relations.] At first the tango was mainly a male dance, but it gradually became a forbidden couples’ dance, which most critics still find to be a totally male-dominated and a highly gendered discursive formation.45 The interpretations of the tango remind us that gender dynamics must be approached as a nuanced, variable, and complex phenomenon. The very images of visual pleasure that tantalize male spectators and inspire male poets contaminate the women with negative connotations. Although ‘‘sicalipsis’’ or the pornographic wave prevalent at the beginning of the century had subsided somewhat by the twenties, dance was still equated with sin, sex, and sinister adventures and the female dancer with corporal freedom, physical gratification, and orgasmic exhilaration. The vanguardist poet thought of sex, not gender; he saw the dancing female body as a moving, material entity experienced through the senses and not a social concept implicating any kind of repression or oppression. Two poems dedicated to famous dancers of the time aptly illustrate the point. In his poem to Emilina Torres, Pedro Raida characterizes her dancing as liberating, intoxicating, and hallucinogenic through comparisons to ‘‘sweet poison,’’ ‘‘ambrosial anarchy,’’ and ‘‘effervescent nectar.’’ Through metaphoric transformation, liquor is a potion that frees the mind and erases contact with reality. Lasso de la Vega pays homage to the legendary dancer To´rtola Valencia in ‘‘La danza.’’ Although written in the constrictive sonnet form, the poem captures the dancer’s sensuality. At first she appears to be a virgin possessed by mystery, but she emerges from the fragrant darkness onto a sensuous scene of brilliant flowers, lush jungles, and the blue immenseness of night. Energized by the venomous asp that calls to mind both the snake that tempted Eve and the writhing caused by its painful bite, the dancer moves in curvaceous lines and provocative rhythms. This pleasing sensuality can deteriorate into base corporality, as occurs in a poem by Domenchina, who reduces woman to her sexual parts—‘‘Los vientres mercenarios apenas danzan para su placer’’ (1932, 175) [The mercenary bellies hardly dance for their own pleasure]—and her dancing to little more than greedy prostitution. The male gaze can demote the female dancer even further to the level of irrational animal. In

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‘‘Rumba’’ Buendı´a focuses first on the dancer’s breasts that ‘‘flap like a hundred bird wings’’ and then moves down to the shawl around her waist and to her hips, which again suggest a snake and, in this particular poem, conjure up the image of zebra haunches. This denial of human value to the female dancer can be carried even further. In ‘‘Music hall’’ by Luis Mosquera, the women dancers are transformed from living entities into objects whose roundness and softness increase their sensuality as well as their dehumanization: Las mujeres danzan entre los brazos de los hombres con movimiento abandonado y bajo los vestidos estrechos y cortos parecen dilatarse sus caderas y sus nalgas se hacen ma´s curvas y ma´s abiertas como las esponjas mojadas. (Fuentes Florido 1989, 223) [Women dance in the arms of men abandoned to the movement and under their tight, short dresses their hips seem to swell and their buttocks become more curved and open like damp sponges.]

The stable pivot in this metamorphosis is the male I/eye, who lowers his vision below the dancers’ waist to their hips and envisions their increase in size and erotic attraction. Significantly, the only male body part mentioned is the decorous arms that form a frame around female mutability. The dancing female body exists for the visual pleasure of the masculine spectator and makes him both the beholder and holder of her sexuality. Much the same occurs when the masculine speaker watches from the sidelines, as in the following poem by Gerardo Diego. While the speaker gazes at a number of dancing women, he fantasizes that they are different exotic and lustful women, ranging from a sequestered odalisque to a member of a criminal street gang in Paris: Es la noche de gala del casino. Inaugura la orquesta su programa (hay fado portugue´s, tango argentino) y entra indecisa la primera dama.

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El baile luego se contagia y crece. Maja, odalisca, apache y holandesa. Y un negro capucho´n conduce y mece a una fra´gil, pintada japonesa. (Diego 1989, 251) [It is the gala night at the casino. The orchestra begins its program (there is a Portuguese fado, an Argentina tango) and the first lady enters hesitantly. The dance then becomes contagious and spreads. A ‘‘maja,’’ an odalisque, a Parisian apache, the Dutch Mata Hari. And a black-hooded figure leads in and swings a fragile, painted Japanese woman.]

The male figure ‘‘leads’’ and ‘‘swings’’ the fragile Japanese woman; he controls, prompts, and sets her in motion in a gesture of implicit strength. Even when the dance is traditional and highly stylized, the male poetic speaker conceptualizes the female object as the servant of his desire. In ‘‘Estampida real del vaquero y la pastora’’ (Royal Flight of the Cowherd and the Shepherdess), Alberti writes of a cowherd who commands that the shepherdess dance because he wants it so: ‘‘¡Pastora, malva garrida, / baila, mi vida, / que quiere tu buen vaquero’’ [Shepherdess, fair lamb, / dance, my love, / for that’s what your dear cowherd wants]. A compliant woman, she obeys: ‘‘¡Bailo, amor, / que al alba te vi / yo, mi amor, y te sonreı´!’’ (1988, 205) [I dance, love, / for at dawn I saw you / I, my love, and I smiled!]. Gerardo Diego begins the sonnet ‘‘Vocacio´n’’ (Vocation) from Versos humanos (Human Verses) with the lines ‘‘Yo te invite´ a bailar. Y tu´ sumisa / te colgaste indolente de mis brazos’’ (1989, 225) [I invited you to dance. And you, submissive, / hung on to my arms languidly] . The poetic speaker perceives a somber, silent, and submissive dancer, and his mind intuits beneath the physical body he holds in his arms what he deems the deeper significance of woman: ‘‘soul,’’ ‘‘instinct,’’ and ‘‘a chaste maternal yearning’’—all attributes ascribed to woman by patriarchal thinking. Y yo pensaba entonces: alma, instinto. y an˜adı´a: mujer. Y te auscultaba tus tre´mulas, secretas voluptades. Pero no era eso, no. Era distinto. Era que tras tus ropas palpitaba un casto anhelo de maternidades. (1989, 225)

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[And I thought then, soul, instinct. and I added: woman. I listened to your secret, tremulous voluptuousness. But that wasn’t it, no. It was different. It was that beyond your clothing there beat the chaste yearning of motherhood.]

In the end, the dancing woman incorporates the dualistic thinking that supports the archetype of the eternal feminine: voluptuousness and purity, body and soul, reality and mystery. Diego’s friend Juan Larrea in ‘‘Locura de la danza’’ (The Insanity of Dance) explicitly links woman to obedience. He uses the word itself in the first and last stanzas, and in the rest of the poem he deprives her of humanness, envisioning her as sensual materiality transformed into dehumanized plasticity. Described through images appealing to each of the five senses, the dancer obediently directs those senses to the male other and at the same time embodies the archetype of the devouring female; she ‘‘eats’’ her sleeping victims. The dancer’s ‘‘skin,’’ a synecdoche for the woman herself, serves as an obvious instrument of sexual arousal: Pero cuando su piel no es ma´s que una nueva forma de obediencia la pelusa que mi alma despide hacia su ombligo sale en tribus de nieve o huesos sacudidos por la danza sale de los pequen˜os tu´neles de mis piernas visibles (1970, 109) [But when her skin is no more than a new form of obedience the fluff of my soul drifts toward her navel it goes off in tribes of snow or bones shaken by the dance it leaves the small tunnels of my visible legs]

Then, before her final compliant submission to male desire, the female dancer is dehumanized beyond the animal bestiality suggested in the man-eating monster; she is dehumanized into physical space and pieces of furniture. Poems like these compromise the progressiveness of modernity in which the avant-garde writers prided themselves, and they expose the perpetuation of misogyny underlying their pretense of change, innovation, and rebelliousness. Despite their radically new aesthetic and their promotion of liberal ideologies, many men of the twenties still viewed women with condescension or scorn. Ironically, some of the men with the most politically and socially advanced notions harbored

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the most antiquated attitudes.46 For some critics, modernism in Spain displaced the Victorian aesthetic that prized qualities construed as feminine with a new aesthetic aligned with the features associated with the masculine: authorial detachment, verbal dexterity, emotional restraint, originality, and complexity. Bluntly put by Maryellen Bieder, modernism was ‘‘a singularly male movement,’’ and Spanish vanguard authors were ‘‘an exclusive and self-defining male elite’’ (1992, 314). Ortega y Gasset in an article published in 1927 in El Sol defined the avant-garde as a singularly male era: ‘‘[N]uestro tiempo no es so´lo tiempo de juventud, sino de juventud masculina. [. . .] La mocedad masculina se afirma a sı´ misma, se entrega a sus gestos y apetitos, a sus ejercicios y preferencias’’ (1958, 205). [Ours is a time not only of youth, but of masculine youth. . . . Masculine youth affirms itself, it gives itself up to its gestures and appetites, to its practices and preferences.] Andreas Huyssen has contended that, at the turn of the century, popular and mass culture were often feared as a contamination by the feminine. Kathy J. Ogren has no doubt that American and European intellectuals of the Jazz Age associated jazz with mass culture, and Chinitz explains that, as jazz became a contested ground in the cultural war between ‘‘superior’’ high culture and ‘‘inferior’’ mass culture, ‘‘it is natural that the ‘inscription of the feminine’ that applies to mass culture generally should apply to jazz specifically’’ (1997, 321). The gendering of jazz reenacts the traditionalists’ perennial rejection of the feminine as well as anything new and different. Beneath Spanish vanguard poets’ apparent fascination with all things modern lies an uneasiness translated into the archetypical figure of dread: woman. Salinas’s ‘‘Font-Romeu, Noche de baile’’ illustrates the gendering of the elements of the emerging mass culture, in this case the taxi, transformed metaphorically into a ‘‘blond cloud’’ ready to dance the fox-trot. The simultaneity created by the layering of images confuses dancers with machines, and women with objects: Y los bailan sı´lfides de aluminio y celuloide, duras, resbaladizas, con anuncios de automo´viles nuevos en la frente. (Salinas 1961, 99) [It is danced by aluminum and celluloid sylphs, hard, slippery, with automobile ads on their brows.]

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An examination of Jacinta la pelirroja (Jacinta, the Redhead), a 1929 collection by Jose´ Moreno Villa, is helpful to the understanding of the gendering of jazz and the masculine perspective on the dancer.47 The book traces the story of the love between the poetic speaker and Jacinta up to its final stage of disenchantment. Jose´ Francisco Cirre recounts that the book was disconcerting in its day because it erased all contrived sentimentalism and romantic reminiscences. He sees in it an existence rooted exclusively in the present and built solely for sensual pleasure (1962, 67). The unsentimental, unabashed declaration of sexual pleasure is graphically displayed through both drawing and imagery. A telling drawing precedes the first poem, ‘‘Bailare´ con Jacinta la pelirroja’’ (I’ll Dance with Jacinta, the Redhead). Two thick ink strokes outline the left and right sides of a woman lying supine with arms stretched out perpendicular to her body. A squiggly open circle indicates her hair and a prominent V marks her genital area. A male stick figure is drawn with a closed circle for the head, with a descending vertical line that becomes a corkscrew, and with diagonal lines intersecting at the chest to suggest arms. The sexual and stereotypical symbolization could not be clearer. The female is portrayed as horizontal, inert, and receptive, while the male is identified as erect, active, and energized. The dance that the poetic speaker begins with Jacinta is based on the broken rhythms of the jazz sounds originating in Harlem: Eso es, bailare´ con ella el ritmo roto y negro del jazz. Europa por Ame´rica. Pero hemos de bailar si se mueve la noria, y cuando los mirlos se suban al chopo de la vecina. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oh, Jacinta, pelirroja, peli-peli-roja pel-pel-peli-pelirrojiza. Que´ bonitos, que´ bonitos, oh, que´ bonitos son, sı´, son, tus dos, dos, dos, bajo las tiras de dulce encaje hueso de Malinas. Oh, Jacinta, bien, bien mayor, bien supremo. Ya tenemos el mirlo arriba, y la noria del borriquillo, gira. (Moreno Villa 1929, 9–10) [That’s it, I’ll dance with her to the broken and black rhythm of jazz. Europe in exchange for America.

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But we have to dance if the waterwheel turns, and when the blackbirds climb the neighbor’s poplar tree. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oh, Jacinta, the redhead, red-redhead red-red-reddi-reddish. How pretty, how pretty, oh how pretty they are, yes, they are, your two, two, two, beneath the straps of sweet, bone Belgium lace. Oh, Jacinta, treasure, great treasure, supreme treasure. We now have the blackbird above, and the waterwheel, with its donkey, turns.]

He represents the Old World and she the New World. He turns his attention to her, invoking her name and focusing on her body. To describe her he singles out two of her seductive attributes: her hair and her breasts. He underscores, through repetition, the impression they made on him, but through metonymic substitution he avoids directly naming them. Her hair is represented by its exotic red color, and her breasts are obliquely identified by their number and their position beneath soft, bone-colored lace. He intensifies his adulation of Jacinta threefold: ‘‘Oh, Jacinta / bien, bien mayor, bien supremo.’’ However, the female dancer is little more than the sum of her erotic body parts. She listens, he speaks. She may be ‘‘supreme’’ in her physical beauty, but she is still the spectacle before the male gaze. Through her, he validates his own sense of presence and positions himself in a state of rapturous present. The modern woman of the Jazz Age embodied by the dancer excited men sexually with her youthful, blithesome, and nonconventional spirit. She symbolized the radical change in culture, morality, and society that modernity promised.48 Although many of the male poets of the period welcomed political as well as aesthetic change, they could not overcome their fear of the liberated woman nor alter their unconscious conceptualization of her as a servant of their desires. The female dancer appearing in male poetry registers the extrinsic reality of the flappers of the ‘‘felices veinte,’’ but she still ultimately conforms to the fantasies of young men. The critic and poet Jose´ Luis Cano recalls Jacinta as the ‘‘diosa de horas adolescentes’’ [goddess of his adolescent years],who, from the pages of Moreno Villa’s book, filled his youthful nights with lush dreams: ‘‘Con Jacinta, con sus piernas largas y fresquı´simas, como olas de un mar abierto debı´a de son˜ar muchas noches de aquel verano malaguen˜o de 1929’’ (1970, 40, 39). [I must have dreamt many a night in the summer of 1929 in Malaga of Jacinta, with her long, very saucy legs, like the waves of an open sea.] Cano describes

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Jacinta as sportive, uninhibited, and very modern, a lover of jazz, speed, Picasso, and Russian cinema—the very emblems of the Roaring Twenties. The man who was to become a staid essayist on the poetry of the Generation of 27, at age sixteen considered the Jacinta created by Moreno Villa a stimulating breath of fresh air, a combination of seductiveness and purity that remained with him into old age.

Dance, Gender, and Female Poets The release of sexual fantasies that flaunt eroticism and aggressivity was fundamental to avant-garde literature by men. However, as Roberta Johnson urges, we should also examine women’s sexual imagination, which found alternatives to the dehumanized, defaced, eroticized woman of the subconscious of male dream (2002, 52). In poetry by men, women see themselves as men have wanted them to see themselves; but art generated by a woman opens the possibility for a representation of herself unseen before by others. A prime way in which women writers subvert traditional masculine discourse is by inscribing their bodies into their texts. When women speak about the body, they not only usurp the male’s place within the mind, but also collapse the dichotomy between the lofty male mind and the base female body. For women, the female body is not an external, discrete object, an alienated other; it is a speaking subject, an expression of their desire, and a generator of meaning. It has been argued that ‘‘[w]hether the body in literature by women is studied as an expression of ‘e´criture fe´minine,’ as a projection of women’s innate sexual nature, or it is considered a cultural construct, the analysis serves as a ratification of the female creator and as a validation of women’s creations, however different they may be from male discourse’’ (Bellver 2002a, 32/318). The Spanish women poets of the twenties and thirties who wrote about their bodies did so from a gynocentric perspective. Unlike the male poets, they celebrate their own bodies as part of an exhilarating process of self-assertion and self-realization, unfettered by the demands of the other. The sentiments projected by these women poets conjure up the image of the innovative dances of an Isadora Duncan, physically uninhibited, whirling around in a loose-fitting garb. From 1890 to 1910, Duncan, along with Ruth St. Denis and Loı¨e Fuller revolutionized artistic dance in the United States. As Tomko explains, before these pioneers, the image of the female dancer comprised the two extremes of the ethereal, otherworldly ballerina and the alien or orientalized other, but after them women became soloists, innovators, and successful entrepreneurs of dance. Both Tomko and Iris M. Zavala link the

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prominence of women on the stage and in the dance world to political changes that included labor activism, immigration flow to urban centers, and women’s legal rights (obviously more of the latter in the United States than in Spain). Tomko contends that all these developments constituted attempts to capture the body, to make the body stable for a moment, to address its needs, to impose discipline on it, or to mitigate its force (1999, xvi). Zavala, for her part, argues that at the turn of the century, capitalism succeeded in fostering women’s liberating imaginary. As evidence of the breadth of the change in women’s public image, she insists on the contrast in the visual arts between Mary Cassatt and Frida Kahlo, in the Americas, and points to the presence, in Spain, of the modernist cuple´ singer Raquel Meller and the dancer Pastora Imperio (1992, 193). In the 1920s women were seen in Spain on the stage performing a wide variety of dances: Spanish dance, academic dances such as ballet, and other dances influenced by modern choreography originating in the United States, but this was also the time of the emergence of the social dancing that permitted contact between the sexes. The upper classes were fascinated by the new dance fads. In her memoirs, Concha Me´ndez recounts that the Charleston was introduced in San Sebastia´n to the well-heeled vacationers and the monarchs by a North American family: ‘‘[E]ste baile no se habı´a visto en Espan˜a y fue una revelacio´n, porque entonces baila´bamos el ‘One-step,’ el ‘Two-step,’ el ‘Vals-Boston’ y los tangos; la gente que lo veı´a tan movido, se arremolinaba a los lados, sorprendida, para aprenderlo’’ (Ulacia Altolaguirre 1990, 56) [This dance had not been seen in Spain and it was a revelation, because at that time we were dancing the one-step, the two-step, the Boston waltz, and tangos; the people who were watching it, with all its movement, milled around, stunned and wanting to learn it], and that subsequently she was the one to introduce the dance in Madrid (57).49 The mingling of the sexes at dances in public spaces—in elegant, indoor venues for the rich and at outdoor, neighborhood places for the lower classes—authorized diversion for women outside the home and turned any woman into a performing body. This social reality begat certain equations that challenged and at the same time confirmed patriarchal norms. In social dancing, women undermined the definition of femininity as enclosure, inactivity, and somber decorum. However, definable as bodies in motion, dance still reinforced the traditional conceptualization of woman as body, materiality, and spectacle. We are brought back to the equation underlying traditional thinking: if woman is body and dance is bodily activity, then the dancer is inherently feminine—irrational nature and the desired, yet subordinate, other. As already discussed, despite the artistic

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subversion they sought, male vanguard poets perpetuated a longstanding discourse that privileges the rational thinking subject and relegates the other to a subservient position. Only when the poetic voice is female does the silent dancer speak. However, when she speaks, she does not simply reverse the binary opposition of masculinist constructs. Her relationship to herself and to the other takes on an entirely different complexion. Wilcox makes this valid declaration about Ernestina de Champourcin: she ‘‘herself dances and describes her own steps, whereas I suggest, male poets don’t dance, they spectate, they observe, ‘the dancer and the dance’ ’’ (1997, 89). He does not single out any dance poem, but speaks instead of the self-actualizing, exuberant persona Champourcin creates in her early poetry. This same sense of self-realization, carefreeness, and psychic energy is evinced in most of her pre–civil war poetry, but dance distinguishes itself by being an opportunity for self–awareness rather than control over the other. In her symbolization of life as a dance in ‘‘Danza en tres tiempos,’’ Champourcin converts dance into a telling metaphor for the joyfulness of feeling oneself alive. Dance for her is an experiential and not an observed reality, as it is for male poets. The subconscious fear of bodily abandonment that they seem to harbor does not exist for the female poetic speaker who, in exhilarating restfulness, allows herself to be carried off by the dance to a state of existential freedom: Danzo inmo´vil, parada al margen de mı´ misma. Quietud vertiginosa . . . Libre de voz y gesto, soy, lejana de todo. ¡Soy yo, en mis orillas! (Champourcin 1991, 129) I dance motionless, stopped at the margins of myself. Dizzying stillness . . . Free of voice and gestures, I am far from everything. I am I, on my shores!]

The psychic and physical distance from the dance and the dancer maintained by the male poetic voice is obliterated by the female poetic speaker, who, by dancing, transcends the borders of the individual self. Josefina de la Torre also configures her poetic protagonist as a dancer, defying the archetype of both the static female and the silent spectacle. In the poem beginning ‘‘Ro´mpete por el aire’’ (Break Out

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into the Air), narrated from the vantage point of the female dancer, the perspective and the message are gynocentric: ¡Ay, co´mo baiları´a con los brazos en alto, sin descansar! Castan˜uelas de los zapatos, cascabeles del delantal. De´jame que baile y cante y grite mi cantar. (De la Torre 1989, 80) [Oh, how I would dance with my arms stretched up tirelessly! My shoes as castanets, bells on my apron. Let my song dance and sing and shout.]

The poem speaks in the first person, and that poetic ‘‘I’’ is female. She celebrates the joy, festiveness, and freedom of dance that in turn fills her with jouissance of a physical as well as emotional dimension. Unlike male speakers, this one does not privilege herself over others, for she sees this pleasure belonging to everyone and everything: ‘‘que hoy es fiesta, / mi fiesta, / tuya, / la de ma´s alla´’’ (79) [for today is a holiday, / my holiday, / yours, / and that of the great beyond]. These observations confirm the conclusions of feminists who have found the male sense of self to be based on separation, autonomy, and difference and the female sense of self to be based on connection, attachment, and sameness.50 Conscious of her body and its sexual nature, De la Torre writes from it with a narcissistic flourish of the self-satisfaction she enjoys on seeing her image reflected in store windows: Mi falda de tres volantes y mi blusa desprendida, que´ bien me adornan andares y brazos del aire libre. ¡Co´mo se ondea mi falda desde el volante primero perseguida curva ele´ctrica

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hasta la rodilla firme! . . . . . . . . ¡Que´ bien me veo pasar remolino de las brisas pequen˜a y grande, confusa huella blanca en el asfalto! (1989, 94–95) [My skirt with three ruffles and my loose blouse, the gait and arms of the fresh air adorn me so well. How my skirt waves from its first ruffles a pursued electric curve to my firm knee . . . . . . Oh I look so good a whirlwind of the breezes a small and large, confused white mark on the asphalt!]

Although the poetic persona is not dancing, she delights in her ruffled skirt and loose blouse that wave and flutter freely in the breeze. De la Torre creates the image of an agile, unencumbered female figure moving through space with graceful self-absorption. By becoming both the subject and the object of contemplation, De la Torre’s poetic speaker collapses the irreconcilable opposition between self and other that forms the foundation of binary thinking and that prompts the ambivalent view of woman in motion as seductive yet sinful, sublime yet base. The Spanish woman poet of the twenties who wrote the most dance poems was Concha Me´ndez. As a champion swimmer, she was more aware than most women of her generation of the power and prowess of her body. Not surprisingly for her, the swimmer, particularly the diver, is a dancer: Salteando olas torsos radiantes, en lı´ricas danzas y acrobacias. Aquella danzarina del ban˜ador verde . . . Aquel gimnasta . . . (1928, 106)

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[Jumping waves radiant torsos in lyrical dances and acrobatics. That dancer in the green bathing suit . . . That gymnast . . .]

Both the swimmer and the flapper move in space with a vigor and a speed that contradicts the image of woman bound by clothes, home, and tradition. Me´ndez’s analogy between the swimmer, on the one hand, and the dancer and gymnast, on the other, reflects the new physical freedom enjoyed by some women of the period and foretells the gratification of bodily pleasures advocated for women as a whole much later in the twentieth century. Once the equation between athlete and dancer is established, a skier, as easily as a swimmer, can be a dancer: El rumor de las alturas, el rumor de las corrientes, lleva en su falda plisada hecha ritmos, hecha pliegues. Vuela la patinadora descendiendo las vertientes, mariposa de los vientos, danzarina de las nieves. (1926, 69–70) [The noise of the heights, the noise of the drafts of air, she carries in her pleated skirt, made into rhythms, made into folds. The skier flies down the slopes, a butterfly of wind, a dancer of snow.]

As in De la Torre, here the fluttering skirt stands as a metonym for pleasurable freedom. While male poets associate female costume with seduction and deceit or distance and decorum, women relate to clothes as a means of self-expression or of communication with the other. Me´ndez’s skier/dancer, like De la Torre’s walker/dancer, evokes the image of a fluid, free Isadora Duncan–like figure. The female vanguard poet, in her capitalization on the ludic elements and the relative

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openness of her cultural environment, conflates dancing and swimming or skiing because they all connote physical liberation. Lest a distorted impression be created, it must be noted that not all of Me´ndez’s dance poems involve the identification of the poetic ‘‘I’’ with the dance; on occasion the poetic ‘‘eye’’ beholds the dancer. The variety of the dancers observed in her first two books testifies to both the scope of the dance genre in the period and to the impact that dance had on writers. An excellent example of the impact on her poetic imagination of an Isadora Duncan type of dancer with her gauzy tunic is ‘‘La danzarina’’: ¡Que dance la danzarina con tu´nica de neblina! Que dance la danza aquella de la ventolina. Y se asomara´n los astros y descendera´n los montes a ver a la danzarina . . . (Me´ndez 1926, 81) [Let the dancer dance with her tunic of mist! Let that dance of the light winds dance. And the stars will come out and go down the mountains to see the dancer . . .]

In ‘‘Paisaje urbano’’ (Urban Landscape), like her ultraı´sta contemporaries, Me´ndez makes the cityscape her underlying theme and uses striking, ambiguous imagery and enumerative syntax. She evokes the music halls of Madrid: ‘‘Se ha tendido en lo alto, sobre las azoteas, / la etı´ope danzarina dulce y desmelenada’’ (1928, 100) [The sweet Ethiopian dancer with her tousled hair / has spread out on high, over the rooftops]. The African dancer, with her tousled hair rendered decorous by the adjective ‘‘dulce,’’ documents the triumph of blacks on the Spanish stage in the twenties. Although many black dancers were known by their names, Me´ndez’s ‘‘etı´ope danzarina’’ can be any one of those who excited Madrid with their rhythms and writhings.

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The poems on dance by Carmen Conde also demonstrate the sense of self-assurance, potential freedom, and plenitude evident in the Spanish women poets studied here. For Conde, dance is related to music. Rather than the centrifugal pull of a moving circle, as it is for Guille´n, or an acrobatic exercise, as it is for Me´ndez, for Conde dance is the accompaniment to ‘‘eternal music.’’ The eternal infuses dance with a transcendent, sublime meaning that then graces her own poetry: ‘‘la danza firme que muestra a la poesı´a sus ritmos’’ (1967, 175) [the strong dance that shows poetry its rhythms]. As observed earlier, this poem, ‘‘Afirmacio´n,’’ defines dance as poetry itself and an opportunity to affirm her sense of self comparable to the way De la Torre does in ‘‘Ro´mpete por el aire.’’ The festiveness of Conde’s dance is neither the risque´ness celebrated by the ultraı´stas nor the abstract perfection of Guille´n, but rather a personal and human sense of self-realization. The women poets exhibit their delight in their sense of self from the perspective of their own inner impulse to live freely and fully and to create poetry, not from the vantage point of a mere chronicler or distancing eye. Women poets write about many of the same themes and use some of the same poetic techniques as their male counterparts, but they differ in their collapsing of the self and the other and in their indistinguishability of dance and dancer. As Wilcox would say, the female poetic speaker does not ‘‘spectate.’’ She prefers to focus the scene from the perspective of the moving figure within the spectacle, and she lets the poem speak from the acting body rather than the contemplating eye.

Poetry and Dance: Enacting a Concept The consideration of poetry and dance can be taken a step further than metaphorical and thematic dimensions as well as gender dynamics. Instead of evoking referents in real dance settings or sketching dancers, poems can address dance as a concept and, beyond that, attempt to simulate dance through the use of words. These poems might be thought of as crossing genre boundaries, but the poems cannot be rightly called metapoetic nor self-reflective, because their referent is not poetry itself. Nevertheless, the reference to another art form testifies to what might be called the ‘‘meta-artistic’’ bent of vanguard writers, their inclination to focus on theorization and art as art. The poems on dance that are meta-artistic reflections promoted a blurring of boundaries between genres that allowed all arts to dwell in a common realm and made it possible for poetry to ‘‘play’’ with the conventional

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limiting boundaries between the arts. The feeling of happy release and ludic pleasure achieved through this transgression can be equated to the play achieved in dance physically and conspicuously. Dance is conceptualized as the epitome of ludic joy.51 The ultraı´stas, in particular, associated dance with pleasure; they were poet funambulists—agile linguistic performers who ‘‘played’’ with and ‘‘carnivalized’’ (in the Bakhtinian sense) poetry in their minds. Gerardo Diego included three carnival poems in Versos humanos and one in Imagen. The latter one hammers out the notion of revelry or carousal through the repetition of the word ‘‘Carnaval’’ twice in the first line and once in the last line of the poem. City streets are seen as a parade of engaging images configured as a dance by virtue of their linear and fluid movement: Era bello en los ma´rmoles ver danzar los desfiles de las calles Era bello y perfecto como un andamio ae´reo de arquitecto La avenida flotante fluye solamene entre las dos fachadas (1989, 117) [It was beautiful to see the parades in the streets dance on the marbles It was beautiful and perfect like an architect’s aerial scaffold The floating avenue only floats between the two facades]

Raida defines dancing as intoxicating, an altered but always delectable state of being: Es un dulce veneno la DANZA estrellante; es la acrasia [sic] ambrosina de un suen˜o constante y eufe´mico sopor de la ancha HERIDA abierta en el alma, ya resignada y ya FLORIDA.

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la DANZA es el ne´ctar, que efervesce sutil y se derrama generoso espumante y viril en la copa SENSIBLE (Fuentes Florido 1989, 267) The sparkly dance is a sweet poison; it is the ambrosial anarchy of a constant dream the euphemistic drowsiness of the wide wound opened on the soul already resigned and flowery. Dance is the nectar that subtly effervesces and spills over generously foamy and virile into the sensitive goblet]

Raida’s concept of dance is that of a sexual and purely corporal pleasure derived from the wantonness available in the music halls, but Guille´n in ‘‘Aire bailado’’ (Danced Air) perceives in dance a different sense of pleasure that not only transcends the terrestrial but transforms itself into a graphic design and a kinetic abstraction. The thoughts of his dancers in love wander along paths of nostalgia while their feet whirl them around on waxed floors under resplendent chandeliers. The placement of the word ‘‘couples’’ at the beginning of each of the poem’s four parts makes the dancers the point of departure for the other lines. The accumulation of words denoting speed or direction (‘‘fugaces’’ [fleeting], ‘‘tra´nsito’’ [movement], ‘‘giro’’ [rotation], ‘‘cima’’ [summit], ‘‘rauda’’ [swift], ‘‘sesgos’’ [slant], ‘‘vuelta’’ [turn], ‘‘aceleramiento’’ [acceleration], ‘‘Horizonte’’ [horizon]) contribute further to the sense of motion around the firm center of love, a word placed at the structural middle of the poem. Furthermore, the first line of the poem has the couples ‘‘breaking out’’ onto the dance floor, while the final section of the poem refers to the cessation of the frenzied movement. This moment of euphoric release following exhilarating exertion suggests the climax and denouement of the sexual act. However, the jouissance at the end of this poem is more existential than physical; it is the joy of the instant of plenitude that permeates Ca´ntico. Although Guille´n describes the scene, what he captures is not the setting or an image, but a vision of the emotional essence of dance: dyna-

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mism, speed, and transcendence. Dance is a fleeting movement, yet an arrested moment; it is intangible rhythm with a linear form: Tanto el compa´s se infunde Que las formas realza: No hay quien mejor dibuje. Ese ritmo es ya lı´nea (Guille´n 1977, 443) [The beat infuses as much as forms highlight: There is no one who sketches better. That rhythm is now a line]

Guille´n manipulates the time and movement through space that is dance, but his imitation of dance exists only on the level of perception. More than simulating the action itself, he evokes, in the reader, the sensations received by the spectator. In Ca´ntico (Canticle), Guille´n gives presence to absence, converts realities into geometric form, and makes the tangible intangible, or in the words of Da´maso Alonso: ‘‘Era un libro nacido de los ma´s inmediatos, de los ma´s instintivos reflejos del ser que vive; sı´, de reflejos comunes a todo viviente, presentes a cada instante en nuestro vivir; pero ‘descubiertos’ por el poeta, potencializados, sublimados o, quiza´ mejor, restituidos a su sentido absoluto y eterno’’ (1969, 209) [It was a book born from the most immediate, the most instinctive reflections of living beings, yes, the reflections common to everyone alive, present in every instant of our existence but discovered by the poet, made powerful, sublimated or, rather, restored to their absolute and eternal meaning]. For Guille´n, in dance, formless time acquires a living shape: ¡Tiempo! Con las parejas goza enardecido, Pleno tiempo de carne Modelada y en vivo, A trave´s de los sones carne, si tan fugaz, Perfecta ya aquı´ mismo (Guille´n 1977, 443) [Time! Along with the couples, inflamed, full time of flesh shaped and alive, flesh, through the sounds, so fleeting, perfect now right here]

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That living shape, however, is more a sensation than a substance. Guille´n emphasizes the element of whirlwind, the fast-moving force of dance, not its sensorial aspects. He speaks more of the sensation of flying than the audible marked beat or the concrete, visible figures: Parejas veladoras En el giro de un suen˜o, . . . . . . . . . Y pasar y pasar girando Figura tras figura en elemento Ya sordo por las salas Que multiplican los espejos (1977, 444) [Flying couples In the swirling of a dream . . . . . . . . . . And keep swirling and swirling figure after figure in an ambiance now deaf through the rooms the mirrors multiply]

The force of dance is centrifugal, with a power to leave an absent presence in its wake: ‘‘Que esta´ aquı´ desvanecie´ndose, desvanecido: / Parejas recordadas por espejos / Donde perfil, color, semblante son ya antiguos’’ (1977, 443) [That is disappearing, has disappeared: / couples remembered by the mirrors / where outline, color, visages are now old]. Through dance, the ‘‘flying’’ couples reach a dream state, in which centrifugal force dissolves their individuality and humanity into ghostlike mirages reflected in the mirrors as they twirl: ‘‘con la desolacio´n nı´tida de un desierto: / Parejas que a trave´s de los cristales / Se deslizan, lejanas y ya espectros’’ (444) [with the sharp desolation of a desert: / couples that through the glass / slip faraway like ghosts]. In this altered state, for a moment the couples, the setting, and time itself are blurred, losing themselves in a mist: ‘‘Crea´ndose una niebla, perdie´ndose en su niebla’’ (445) [Creating a fog, losing themselves in their fog]. In the end, the poem shifts from the moving circle to the static center, from the spiritual to the mortal, and from transcendence to ‘‘mere’’ yet happy presence: Donde los cuerpos laxos, los semblantes felices Tiernamente se aceptan En la carne viva, tan mortal De una mera presencia. (1977, 445)

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[Where the relaxed bodies, the happy faces tenderly accept each other In the living, very mortal flesh of mere presence.]

This play of absence and presence is for Mary Lewis Shaw what defines dance and makes possible its comparison to poetry. The spectator holds the key to the significance of the dance and is the one who offers the dancer the flower of his own poetic instinct (1983, 3). At the same time Guille´n and the other poets of his generation confirm the views of dance scholars that the primary characteristic of the art of dance is its motion. As a kinetic phenomenon, dance nurtures meanings associated with activity, action, and life itself, and, consequently for those who projected a joie de vivre in their poetry, dance signified positive experiences. Many Spanish poets of the twenties and thirties wrote on dance, but they did not stray into the realm of theoretical declaration, as some French poets did. For Spanish poets, dance is simply one of the many motifs they textualize, convert into poetic images, or exploit for selfexpression. Yet the question can be asked: Can poetry and dance be compared? Can an interartistic translation, to use Mary Ann Caws’s terminology, exist between these two art forms? If the translation of pictures into text creates a reading situation that is ‘‘stressful,’’ by virtue of the anxiety, selectivity, and positive energy involved, then the comparison between poetry and dance must also be considered, in the words of Caws, ‘‘a struggle at once vivifying, vitalizing, and agonistic’’ (1989, 3).52 The paucity of studies on the connection between poetry and dance makes any consideration on the subject very problematic and highly speculative and therefore requires that its discussion be approached not only with caution but also with a disposition for openness and inconclusiveness. A narrow, restrictive definition would immediately close discussion, because dance and poetry are unquestionably different. One is essentially mental and the other physical; one produces an enduring linguistic text and the other a transient spectacle (at least until the widespread use of film). However, an open attitude toward interpretation allows for broad analyses as well as theoretical considerations. Furthermore, as Caws points out, the dialogue between two art forms does not merely reveal the process of transmutation, but also promotes a reflection on the nature and reception of both genres. Despite Gotthold Lessing’s insistence in Laocoo¨n that artists work within the limiting conditions of their own medium, the dream of uniting separate arts has persisted for centuries and was actively pur-

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sued by different vanguard movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century.53 The dance scholars Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen credit Richard Wagner with the best-known proposal for the synthesis of various arts. In his theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art], he concentrated on uniting music, dance, and speech (Copeland and Cohen 1983, 185). Many trace the attention writers have paid to painting to Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad. This treatment of the visual arts by the verbal craftsman, known as ‘‘ekphrasis,’’ has been employed by numerous poets since then and has been examined by many literary critics, including a number of Hispanists.54 Extremely little attention, however, has been paid in Spanish literary studies to the interaction between poetry and dance, except in the cases of the accompanying lyrics for folkloric dances or the allegoric motif of the dance of death. No satisfactory term equivalent to ‘‘ekphrasis’’ is available for this comparison.55 The broadest definition of ekphrasis found in the Oxford English Dictionary—‘‘a plain declaration, description, or interpretation of a thing’’—has two drawbacks. First, the ekphrastic principle is traditionally linked to the description of painting in poetry. Second, the purpose here is to consider examples more restrictive than ‘‘a plain description’’ of dance in poetry. Descriptions of dances, particularly of popular or rural dances, are found throughout Spanish literature. The metaphorical interpretation of dance in poetry would be endless; any empty space might be called a step or leap and any lilting rhythm could be compared to a dance tempo. My intention is to review comparisons that have already been made between dance and poetry and to reflect upon the debatable points of contact between the two as art forms. Additionally, I analyze these points only in those poems that treat dance on a thematic level. This approach entails an examination of what might be called the discursive use of dance, the attempt to capture or at least simulate qualities of dance through linguistic and structural means. The gestures made may at best be illusory impersonations, but they testify to the experimental and subversive tendencies of modernism and to the refusal of the twentieth century to stay within the boundaries of literary convention. At the end of the nineteenth century, artists and intellectuals became increasingly fascinated with exploring diverse art forms and assimilating into their own works select features from other spheres. Besides the call for artistic unity made by Wagner, the symbolists— Lautre´amont, Rimbaud, Mallarme´—conceived of new ways of looking at reality, poetry, and creativity. For the early twentieth century, Picasso springs to mind with the sculptural qualities of his Mademoiselles d’Avignon, as does the whole cubist movement with its obsession for

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rendering the multiple-angled planes of sculpture through the flat surface of painting. There is also the extreme case of the futurists who, in their glorification of technology, attempted to capture the dynamism of machines through the properties of language and paint. Marinetti’s advocacy of aggressive movement, of gymnastic steps and dangerous leaps, and of pleasure and rebellion created a climate propitious for the incorporation into poetry of spheres foreign to it. The coincidences among these artistic achievements illustrate the modern view of the nature of space, which, as Stephen Kern perceptively observes, challenges the traditional view of space as one, universal, inert void with a vision of space as multiple, plural, and active. As a result, ‘‘in poetry there was a formal shift in the conception of the poem from an arrangement of words to a composition of words and blank spaces between them’’ (Kern 1983, 172). In Spain, in a concerted effort to dismantle the lofty lyrical qualities of poetry, the ultraı´stas exploited the graphic and typographical potential of poetry by designing poems with lines mirroring each other as if in a pool of water, with lines arranged in curves, circles, or diagonals, and with lines distributed among the squares of a crossword grid. These playful treatments of poems as drawings confirm the earlier affirmation that the most common interartistic contact of poetry has been with the visual arts. In addition, the brief duration of the ultraı´sta movement attests to the impossibility of sustaining pure innovation or the continual blurring of genre distinctions. Spanish vanguardists, like the futurists before them, were more interested in gestures than results, in a cry for rebellion than in the tedious task of the reconstruction of art. Anthony Leo Geist calls this a ‘‘Zen’’ concept of art because it implies a mastery over matter that permits completion without execution (1980, 66). Any poetic interpretation of dance will thus be a fleeting gesture rather than an earnest reflection on the process. An early study on dance as a motif for literary reflection is found in the 1952 book by Deirdre Priddin, who wrote on what French writers, poets, and philosophers had thought about the meaning and purpose of dance. Poets such as Gautier, Mallarme´, and Vale´ry wrote critical essays on dance, meditating on its nature and relation to the other arts. For Vale´ry dancing is a symbol of all of the arts, because its action comes to the aid of thought (Priddin 1952, 139). Realized in a concrete manner through the body, dance seems more an action than poetry, but Vale´ry perceives them as analogous. Both are actions, both express the inexpressible, and both transcend the purely utilitarian.56 It is Mallarme´ who has become important to contemporary dance critics, because his essays on dance set forth an ‘‘original view of dance as a poetry of the body and prefigure contemporary efforts to study dance

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as a system of signs’’ (Shaw 1983, 3). He defines dance in primarily abstract terms as the expression ‘‘of the Idea,’’ as a sublime form of poetry freed from words. In describing the similarities and differences between dance and poetry, Mallarme´ tries to show the poetic qualities of dance, not the dance qualities of poetry, but his comparisons inevitably produce points of contact and lines of demarcation that highlight the distinctive characteristics of both genres. In the very contrast between dance and poetry underscored by Mallarme´, we find the borders that the avant-garde writers tried to breach in their desire to break with past ideologies, genre limitations, and established artistic styles. Dance dwells in a tangible, corporal sphere, while poetry resides in an immaterial realm, in an intangible metaphorical realm beyond the visual and the auditory. However, corporality and materiality are precisely what fascinated the avant-garde mind. The typical vanguard poem is constructed of ‘‘bodies’’ arranged on a page, of substantives lacking in verbal support, of images without connecting elements, and metaphors freed from conventional connotations. The objectification of poetry, of course, does not turn it into dance, but it does reveal a longing for the concreteness of dance. Shaw writes, ‘‘What is tangible in dance is generally more relevant to its mode of expression than are the tangible aspects of a text’’ (1983, 5). Integrating this statement with Gloria Videla’s observation that ultraı´stas sought ways to go beyond the limitations of their genre (Videla 1971, 112), I could say that, through their experimentation with typography, ultraı´stas were attempting to make what is tangible in poetry more relevant to its mode of expression, to increase the small degree of concreteness that poetry possesses, and to bring it closer to art forms that deal primarily with the visual. Mallarme´ equated dance with poetry because both, he contended, were signifying systems, but he aligns dance with the signifier and poetry with the signified. It was specifically a desire to disengage the poem from its presumed signifying function that compelled vanguard poets to embrace the sign over signification. All of this points not so much to a parallelism between poetry itself and dance as to a resemblance between avant-garde aesthetic aspirations and the defining attributes of dance. Besides emphasizing the signifier, the corporal, and the visible, the exponents of avant-garde art were enamored of movement—the quintessence of dance. The kinetic quality apparent in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and the multiple-exposure effect of Balla’s Leash in Motion vividly illustrate the avant-garde drive to capture the dynamism and spontaneity of motion. Spanish vanguard poets celebrate all things that move, not only dancers but also soccer players, swimmers, flickering cinematographic

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images, airplanes, helicopters, cars, and a variety of mechanical devices. C. B. Morris remarks that ‘‘Espina sensed the quickening of life when he wrote that ‘Things dance to the combined music of the jazzband and the puttering motor . . .’ Ramo´n Go´mez de la Serna’s belief that ‘In the jazz-band is the fun of modern life, its absurdity, its incoherence’ was shared by Moreno Villa, who captivated by jazz in North America, pledged in Jacinta la pelirroja (1929) to dance with Jacinta ‘el ritmo roto y negro / del jazz’ ’’ (1969, 84). Poets find exciting and aweinspiring the amalgamation of movement, motors, and dance. Dance represents the happy moment of fusion between artistic concept and production, between art and performer. The vanguard poet implicitly answers Yeats’s famous rhetorical question: How can we know the dancer from the dance? We cannot; they are one. Yeats along with Mallarme´ envisioned the dancer as a perfect symbol combining idea and visual realization, ‘‘in a moment in which intellectualization is so thoroughly fused in sensuous embodiment that idea ceases to be a separate realm from image, to become rather something immediately apprehensible through its embodiment’’ (Brooks 1993, 259). Therefore, the dancer and dance itself became an ideal symbol for the concept of modernity. The ideas and goals of Spanish vanguardists suggest a possible identification of poetry with dance on the basis of their desire to produce self-generating art not dependent on mimesis, their wish to bridge different art forms, their preference for visual imagery, and their fascination for experiments with typography. Although Spanish poets did not make open references to the relationship between poetry and dance, certain inferences can be drawn in this regard from their poetics and poetry. Gerardo Diego, for one, writes of this openness to other art forms. In an essay on Vicente Huidobro, he explains that creacionismo actually tried to create a new technique and invent new meanings by looking to spheres other than poetry—by looking to nature, science, the plastic arts, and music (1968, 538). Confessing with forthrightness the conscious link between his own poetry and other artistic media, he told Da´maso Alonso that he intended the poems of Manual de espumas to be a poetic transposition of cubism (Alonso 1969, 236). Diego also modeled his poetry on music, as he reveals in a statement such as ‘‘Empleo como me´todo el mismo de la creacio´n musical [. . .] traduciendo al vocabulario lingu¨ı´stico, gramatical, poe´tico, los elementos de composicio´n musical y los ideales del gran suen˜o humano y casi divino de la mu´sica’’ (qtd. in Pe´rez 1989, 51). [I use the same method as a musical creation . . . translating, into poetic, grammatical, linguistic language the elements of a musical composition and the ideals of the grand human and almost divine dream of music.] Dance possesses a

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peculiarity that coincides with his concept of the arts as grounded in concrete reality but, then rising beyond it, the arts become more valuable as they free themselves from their natural constrictions. J. Bernardo Pe´rez perceives in the poem ‘‘Paraı´so’’ and its exhortations to fly, sing, and dance an illustration of Diego’s idea of art as the creation of an illusion of transcendence. Referring to a book by Suzanne K. Langer, Pe´rez points out that dance is an apt metaphor for art in general, because it creates the illusion of conquering gravity and of liberating the dancer from the forces that control the body (1989, 102). Pe´rez discerns in the textual gap written into the poem after the word ‘‘Danzar’’ an insinuation of the ‘‘free imaginary space’’ in which art is realized (102). In this way, Diego dramatizes visually that dance and poetry are comparable in their liberating, transcendent qualities. The ultraı´stas often used empty spaces and verse design as purposeful signifiers. Speaking of Imagen, Gerardo Diego told Rene´ de Costa, ‘‘[N]o es una poesı´a para ser escuchada, sino para ser vista’’ (1993, 17). [It is not a poetry to be heard but to be seen.] In Limbo, written at the same time as Imagen, Diego played with the visual dimensions of poetry in ‘‘Ajedrez’’ (Chess), simulating chess moves. This textual ‘‘movement,’’ as well as any feature suggesting dance, is enacted of course only by the poet’s pen and the mind’s eye of the readers, and not by a live performer. This underscores the fact that literary texts are fundamentally figurative. The dance qualities integrated into the text are still largely metaphorical—that is, syntactical and typographical arrangements comparable, but not identical, to the actions in dance.57 Yet, the deliberate exploitation of the visual properties of poetry imparts, if not a true kinetic quality, at least a graphic impression of movement. The use of the visual dimensions of poetry for discursive imitation—that is, as a rhetorical device to represent the steps of dance through the arrangement of written letters—is noticeable in ‘‘Five O’Clock Tea’’ by Eugenio Montes. Here both the theme and the referent are the elegant afternoon dances held at places like the Ritz and Palace Hotels, where the upper classes drank, ate, and danced like their counterparts in New York. Placing each letter of the word ‘‘danzar’’ on a separate line and one space to the right of the previous one, Montes forms a diagonal descending line in the center of his poems that suggests visually the sliding motion of a dancing couple. This image constitutes a structural axis for the rest of the poem and mimics the centrality of the dancers surrounded by the music, the smoke, and the drinking evoked in those other lines. The poets not linked to ultraı´smo also played with the auditory and visual aspects of poetry in order to cross genre-defining boundaries

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and attempt to duplicate the syncopated rhythms of jazz dances through linguistic structures and stresses. A prime example is ‘‘Bailare´ con Jacinta la pelirroja,’’ the poem by Moreno Villa quoted earlier. After announcing at the beginning of the poem that he will dance to the distinctive ‘‘broken and black rhythms of jazz,’’ he gives declarative explanations in the first two stanzas before turning inward in the next stanza to play with sounds and other acoustic qualities to mimic the accentuated beat of jazz. The hyphenation of ‘‘pelirroja’’ breaks the intonation of the word, simulating the ‘‘ritmo roto’’ of jazz. While the repetition of the syllable ‘‘pel’’ forms a semantic crescendo to celebrate Jacinta’s red hair, it also acts as a single note turned into a chord that imbues the second half of the poem with a musicality that complements the more descriptive first half. The polyphonic quality of the poem is developed further by the accentuated ‘‘que´ bonitos’’ in a triple exclamation that marks the heavy, broken beat of jazz steps. In the following line, three tonic stresses followed by an unstressed word (‘‘son, sı´, son, tus’’) and then quickly by three strongly stressed monosyllables (‘‘dos, dos, dos’’) mimic jazz syncopation. While sound and stress are interrelated, it is the analogous representation of rhythm and beat that qualifies this poems as an ‘‘artistic translation’’ of dance. The women poets of the twenties attuned to the new developments in popular culture also attempted to imitate dance through poetic form. In ‘‘Ro´mpete por el aire,’’ already mentioned, De la Torre captures through exclamations, irregular line length, and very short lines the swaying motions of a dance, but more specific to the jazz genre is Me´ndez’s poem, appropriately named ‘‘Jazz-band.’’ As in Moreno Villa’s poem, the theme fosters experimentation with poetic form to recreate the external referent within the textual realm. The syncopated rhythm of the music is conveyed in Me´ndez’s poem with the enumeration solely of nouns distributed, in all but one case, one to a line and accompanied, again in all but one instance, by a descriptive qualifier. The disjointed syntax and especially the uninterrupted repetition of a series of morphemic pairings suggest the pattern of step-close-step basic to the two-step and the fox-trot: Ritmo cortado. Luces vibrantes. Campanas histe´ricas. Astros fulminantes. Erotismos. Licores rebosantes. Juegos de nin˜os. Acordes delirantes. Jazz-band. Rascacielos.

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Dia´fonos cristales. Exo´ticos murmullos. Quejido de metales. (Me´ndez 1926, 44) Chopped rhythm, Quivering lights. Crazed bells. Exploding stars. Eroticisms. Overflowing liquor. Children’s games. Frenzied chords. Jazz band. Skyscrapers. Filmy glass. Exotic murmurs. A groan of the brass.]

Although they are not in the rhythm of jazz dance, Lorca also captures different dance rhythms in his poems, particularly in ‘‘Pequen˜o vals viene´s,’’ ‘‘Vals en las ramas,’’ and ‘‘Son de negro en Cuba.’’ In regard to these three surrealist poems, J. K. Walsh states: ‘‘The dancerhythm becomes more than a frame for mood or meditation, or cue for recitative. It rearranges the circumstances so that the poet sets his sexual obsessions and impulses and losses to the pace and sometimes the pettiness of the dance’’ (1988, 514). Derek Harris sees in ‘‘Pequen˜o vals viene´s’’ a mimesis of the 3/4 waltz tempo and in ‘‘Vals en las ramas’’ he perceives a change to ‘‘the more mundane frame of reference of children’s songs, combining the techniques of a counting game with those of a nonsense rhyme’’ (1978, 63, 65). Lorca may not have imitated jazz rhythms, but he distinguished himself by frequently crossing genre boundaries. In both his poetry and his plays, he blended song, dance, lyricism, and dramatization. He believed the poet had to be open to the broad range of the world of phenomena, or, as he said in his famous lecture on Go´ngora in 1927, ‘‘Un poeta tiene que ser profesor en los cinco sentidos corporales’’ (Garcı´a Lorca 1966, 67). [A poet has to be a professor of the five senses.] Although he had faith in the poet’s ability to embrace all of human experience, he recognized that no art is real in the sense that nature is; all poetry submits reality to the transformation effected in the poet’s mind in the process of creating another, artistic reality. Thus, Lorca echoes Diego’s thoughts on the transformative power of art, for they both must admit that art is essentially an interplay of selection and arrangement, a precept as old as classical rhetoric. Art for the avant-garde is

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achieved through technique, the manipulation of form, the transmutation of existing substances. Poetry can be considered dance in the sense of selective imitation but not as true mimesis, as equivalent representation. Poetry as dance must be understood as intellectualization or symbolization. Even dance conceptualized as poetry remains a metaphor, a transmutation rooted in affinity, analogy, and superimposition that does not produce identical or interchangeable forms. As Margaret H. Persin affirms in regard to ekphrastic poetry, a discussion of connections between two art forms inevitably leads to a consideration of the questions of discourse, representation, intertextuality, and ideology. Representation and conceptualization rest on metaphors and symbols.58 Words are symbols, and thoughts are a symbolic process; language is but a systematic means of communication that uses conventionalized signs. These signs do not reproduce anything; they only stand in for things. To Rene´ Magritte’s effective painted illustration of this assertion with his ‘‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe,’’ we must add that ‘‘p-i-p-e’’ is not a pipe either. If art itself is only an equivalent representation, then ‘‘interartistic translations’’ are mimetic representations only to the degree to which the resources of one art form can create the illusion of duplicating another one. In other words, they are an illusion of an illusion. In its struggle for transgression and its illusory attainment of originality, art is a metaphor for life itself. Poetry, like human existence, thrives on illusion, simulacrum, and symbolization. Vanguard poets’ use of the sign system of language to capture the tempo, rhythm, and spatial movements of dance testifies to their great faith in the capacity of the word to build a world apart where human creativity and dominion are attainable. Although they created only a suggestion of dance, a simulacrum, their efforts to test the limits of poetry extended and celebrated the power of poetry. All this discussion confirms the fundamental power of poetry to change essences: the sensorial into linguistic form, the concrete into something intangible and symbolic, one art form into another, and ultimately the reader’s perception of the world.

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4 Poetry, Sports, and the Body in Play SPORTS PLAYED A NOTABLE ROLE IN SHAPING MASS CULTURE IN THE

twenties and in defining the early twentieth century as an era of change and movement. Sports encompass characteristics that have come to be identified with modernity: expanded leisure time, a new awareness of the body and health, and a reverence for youthfulness. Many avant-garde poets of Spain were fascinated by sports because they sensed in them something freeing, energizing, and exciting. As a consequence sports became for them a force that inspired and shaped their works. Sports themselves were conditioned by political, social, and cultural factors—by the political stability imposed by the dictator Primo de Rivera and the economic prosperity produced in the wake of World War I. More opportunities for leisure made more participation in sports possible as a weekend or vacation activity and as a means for personal pleasure as well as physical betterment.1 Beyond a reflection of changing social customs, sports are linked to the conceptualization of the body and, therefore, of gender. In the twenties women began to disrupt the perennial association of sport with masculine strength, skills, and sexuality. Because of the interconnection between all these nonliterary factors, some introductory comments on sports and their impact in modern times are in order.

Sport as Cultural Phenomenon Sports are believed to have been born in religious celebrations and, from the beginning, were a sublimation of aggression or a recess from war. Consensus claims that sports were born in ancient Greece when a sacred truce to war was declared every four years to hold Olympian festivals. Running and jumping, rather than the need for self-defense and the search for food, became part of the celebration of military victories and physical ability. In the Middle Ages, sport with overtones of war expressed itself in tournaments, jousts, and other related contests. 111

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The horse, therefore, was the emblem of the privileged, warring class of horsemen, of caballeros in Spain. The continued connection between sport and war is underlined by Antonio Gallego Morell, who explains that in the medieval chivalric ideal, the tourneys originated not from sportive rivalry but as preparation and training for war and for personal defense (1969, 24). As politics began to depend more on monarchical and ministerial negotiations and societies became more refined, the nature of sports changed. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning argue that social standards of conduct, particularly in some upper-class circles, began to change drastically in the sixteenth century: ‘‘The change found its expression in a new term launched by Erasmus of Rotterdam and used in many other countries as a symbol of the new refinement of manners, the term ‘civility,’ which later gave rise to the verb ‘to civilize’ ’’ (1986, 21). According to them, modern sports were born in eighteenth-century England, when ‘‘[c]ycles of violence calmed down and conflicts of interest and belief were resolved in a manner which allowed the two main contenders for governmental power to settle their differences entirely by non-violent means and in accordance with agreed rules that both sides observed’’ (27). The horseman gave way to the gentleman, and sports became less violent.2 Victorian England, with its preoccupation for decorum, manners, and strength of character, nurtured and advanced a sense of sportsmanship. New kinds of sports emerged: soccer, cricket, lawn tennis, and cycling. In Spain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, according to Garcı´a Candau, medieval forms of sports were basically still perpetuated in board games and in war-related practices like horseback riding and fencing (1999, 531). In this period, sports were more a social event or a healthy pastime than tough competition for coveted prizes. A surge in sport activities toward the end of the nineteenth century was connected to a budding interest in hygiene and health. Sports became a concern in universities, where the first sports clubs and societies were formed. In Spain, physical education became an important part of the Institucio´n Libre de Ensen˜anza and, influenced by the English model, Spain created a sports society in 1887 and formed its first national soccer club in 1889 (Garcı´a Candau 1999, 536). If a specific date were to be picked as the launching point for the modern sports, 1896, the date of the reestablishment of the Olympic Games, would be a reasonable choice. Thanks to the passionate efforts of baron Pierre de Coubertin, a new concept of sports was proclaimed. Coubertin envisioned the Olympic movement as a lofty endeavor among gentlemen amateurs, more interested in the struggle than the

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victory, who engaged in demonstrating their skills and developing international fellowship.3 His emphasis on upper-class talent is met today with skepticism or scorn. For example, Garcı´a Candau calls the revival of the Olympic Games a romantic, but anachronistic idea (1999, 532).4 Perhaps always more an illusion than a reality, amateurism as a phenomenon of disinterested competition came closest to existing only during the first two decades of the twentieth century, after which time it was compromised by professionalism and patriotism. Around 1920, sports in Spain acquired, in the words of Juan Pablo Fusi, ‘‘una dimensio´n social radicalmente distinta’’ (1999, 56) [a radically different social dimension]. Many credit King Alfonso XIII with promoting interest in sports. His passion for sports led him to acquire an important collection of racehorses, to practice many different sports, and to sponsor the founding of the Boy Scouts in Spain and the formation of sports organizations, which accounts for the title ‘‘royal’’ in the names of many Spanish teams.5 Although Spain lagged behind England and France, in the twenties sports grew in popularity, in their hold on the national conscience, and, according to Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former president of the IOC, in their impact on society (Laı´n Entralgo 1994, 845–48). Sports were practiced by more and more people, and they were turning into a spectacle for the masses. The variety of sports played increased, sports clubs and associations continued to be formed, competitions of all sorts were held, and stadiums and other venues were built. Soccer, in particular, galvanized the crowds on the local, regional, and international levels, even rivaling bullfighting in popularity.6 This rise in the impact of soccer testifies to the shift during the twenties of ‘‘popular’’ from meaning traditional folk customs to meaning mass-media-driven culture. The 1920s were full of different kinds of championships that created, in the words of Guillermo Dı´az-Plaja, ‘‘un proceso de masificacio´n de su indudable vertiente polı´tica’’ (1975, 187–88) [a process of massification of an undeniable political bent].7 The Spanish rage, or furia espan˜ola, for soccer was born at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, where the Spanish team received the silver medal.8 Much of this euphoria subsided in 1930 when Spain lost to Italy in the World Cup. These two events carried an important meaning for Spain: ‘‘Lo primero fue un triunfo que exacerbo´ el orgullo nacional, y lo segundo, una afrenta, un aute´ntico latrocinio, que sirvio´ para que el orgullo nacional se sintiera herido’’ (Garcı´a Candau 1999, 537). [The first was a triumph that intensified national pride, and the second, an insult, an authentic thievery, that served to wound national pride.] As these words attest, sports were evolving into an agent of national identity and a mechanism for internal unification and control.9 Fusi affirms

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that sports, and particularly soccer, aroused strong emotional loyalties and victories, especially in international arenas; they evoked a form of ‘‘popularismo espan˜olista’’ [Spanish popularism] that interpreted these wins as a triumph for the nation as a whole. Sport was a form of collective entertainment that accommodated well the facile and widespread patriotism promoted by the dictator (Fusi 1999, 58). The twenties also saw the beginning of a phenomenon that would flourish as the century unfolded: the star athlete. Just as Hollywood movies were creating film legends, sports were producing their own mythic figures. In soccer there were Ricardo Zamora, Jacinto Quincoces, and Pepe Samitier; in boxing Paulino Uzcudun won the European championship and heavyweight matches in the United States; and the darling of the international tennis scene was Lilı´ Alvarez, whom the English dubbed ‘‘the Sen˜orita.’’ Elia Marı´a Gonza´lez-Alvarez y Lo´pez-Chiceri ruled Spanish tennis in the 1920s, making it to three consecutive finals at Wimbledon (1926, 1927, 1928), holding the number-two rank in the world during the same years, and winning the French Open doubles competition in 1929. A consummate athlete, she competed throughout her life and won championships in car-racing, skating, and skiing. A sports sensation, a writer, and a feminist, Alvarez was, to be sure, an anomaly in her day, but her example heralded a change for women and sports.10 Her privileged upbringing underscores the fact that the emerging forms of popular culture in the twenties were basically the purview of a reduced circle of people. There were no neighborhood soccer fields, swimming pools, or gymnasiums yet, and only the rich had the money to go skiing, skating, and sailing.11 Concisely summarized, sports have evolved over the millennia from sacred, religious festival to secular social event, and finally to escapist entertainment. What was born from religious sacrifice and national warfare became communal pageantry meant to socialize the elite and sublimate combat, and then grew during the twentieth century into a profane, personal, and pleasurable experience as well as a distinctive, well-remunerated profession. The twenties mark the era of transition between these last two phases. As democratization advanced, some working people engaged in sports, but the elites dominated sports, celebrating them and exploiting them for their own advantage.12 The illusion of sports as a means of promoting nobility of character, spiritual harmony, and good health was combined with the exhilarating sense of adventure and blithe freedom prevalent in the twenties to create a euphoria that both influenced and mirrored the disposition of the poetry of the period. Sport, like poetry, is a human act saturated with symbolism. Al-

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though it has come to mean recreation, in its origins, sport involved competition, aggression, and violence, and it was a symbol of war. War, in turn, is a kind of game, a tactical and physical operation between opposing sides, an agonistic phenomenon. The cultural philosopher Johan Huizinga, who saw man as essentially ‘‘Homo ludens,’’ called war an energetic form of play, ‘‘the most intense, the most energetic form of play’’ (1970, 89). In Sports as Symbol, Mari Womack studies sport as a metaphor for war and masculine sexuality and the athlete as a symbol of the warrior. Ball games, she points out, combine the intensity of the communal effort of warfare with the exuberance of children’s games. The interconnection between war and sport has continued to present times, for, as Elias writes, in the course of the twentieth century ‘‘the competitive bodily exertions of people in highly regulated form that we call ‘sport’ have come to serve as symbolic representations of a non-violent, non-military form of competition between states’’ (2003, 23).13 The reciprocal equation between war and sport is compounded by the element of game playing. Womack points out that, although sport is a subset of play, it differs from play in an important way. ‘‘Whereas some other forms of play may be exuberant and spontaneous activities with virtually inexhaustible creative potential, sport is more rigid both in form and social organization’’ (16). Avant-garde poetry aspired to ‘‘play,’’ and it resembled sport in that, for all its appetite for spontaneity, its dependence on language involved a certain ‘‘rigidity’’ or conventionality needed to effect communication.14 Sports reveal important aspects of the values and ideals of the twenties. After the devastation of World War I, the human instinct for conflict was sublimated by a new cathartic emphasis on sports, which, as Elias states, displays two contradictory functions: ‘‘the pleasurable decontrolling of human feelings, the full-evocation of an enjoyable excitement, on the one hand, and, on the other, the maintenance of a set of checks to keep the pleasantly de-controlled emotions under control’’ (Elias and Dunning 1986, 49). Control of emotions maintained civility to be sure, but the release of feelings typified the ‘‘roaring’’ spirit of the twenties, and the pursuit of pleasure was becoming the existential orientation of the century.15 Not coincidentally, this was the era in which the ideas of Freud were extended from scientific to intellectual, even poetic, circles. Sports were a type of leisure that focused on the self and that produced pleasurable emotions. Sports encompassed the liberation of psychic zones repressed by orderly and rational society, and they were manifested in motion, an important ingredient of the new age that promised change, excitement, and freedom.

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Sports meshed well with the side of modernity that sparked a bodyand-youth cult. While the ancients believed in the precept of mens sana in corpore sano, in the harmonious and spiritually enriching balance between mind and body, in the twenties the attention to the body was geared toward physical well-being and was connected to sexuality. Amando de Miguel argues that sports would not hold the attraction they do today in complex societies if they did not directly satisfy a particular characteristic of our times: the cult of the body. He points out that people today engage in exercise to keep young, now a value in itself (2001, 150).16 The promise of the Enlightenment of a society based on science, reason, and freedom seemed fulfilled through a steady stream of technological advances, and the human body itself was seen as a marvelous machine—young, vigorous, and defiant of nature. The burst of interest in the body in the early twentieth century may have its roots in Enlightenment philosophy, but new intellectual developments of the time also contributed to modifications in cultural thought. Not only was medical science changing treatment of the body, but modern philosophers were also forging the ideological base for these new ideas. The last three centuries eclipsed the Christian age, which saw the body as evil and in need of restraint, punishment, and disparagement. Gallego Morell observed in his study of sports and Spanish literature that the majority of modern philosophers— Nietzsche, Bergson, Scheler, Simmel, Heidegger—emphasized the vital values of a new state of consciousness (1969, 10). Nietzsche is notorious for his glorification of the body. Zarathustra spoke thus to the despisers of the body: ‘‘ ‘I am body and soul’—so speaks the child. . . . But the awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing besides; and soul is only a word for something in the body. . . . Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call ‘spirit,’ is only an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence . . . your body . . . which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’ ’’ (1961, 61–62).17 All these philosophical, social, and political developments at the turn of the century shaped the contextual framework for the vanguard movements in Spain. While the dictator was content with the national pride and simple patriotism engendered by sports, some intellectuals and young writers saw in them the dynamism of modernity (Fusi 1999, 58). Vitality was one of the qualities of sports with which the new aesthetic coincided. Literature was to be rejuvenated—indeed, to be created anew. Art of all kinds was conceived among the most ardent vanguardists as the fount of novelty and a setting for lively play. The liberation of the body executed in athletic exercise coincided with the

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avant-garde desire to free the subconscious from the hold of reason and to free poetic form from the strictures of established literary precepts. Above all, sports exemplified the movement and the speed that the avant-garde venerated and attempted to translate into textual reality. Spanish intellectuals and writers of the twenties took an avid interest in sports even though few were themselves bona fide athletes. For instance, Rafael Alberti, in his book-length interview with his second wife, reports that he was introduced early to different kinds of sports at his boyhood school run by Jesuits (Mateo 1996, 23). The most athletic of the group associated with the Residencia de Estudiantes was the future filmmaker Luis Bun˜uel, who in his youth was a regular runner and an occasional boxer.18 Jose´ Moreno Villa writes that Bun˜uel was an energetic young man who was always on the move. At the Residencia he would rise early to do some pole vaulting, then practice boxing, and later take a ride in the country in his car (1976, 112–13). Sports figured prominently in the pedagogical plan of the Residencia de Estudiantes to ‘‘mantener el ambiente moral, crear fuertes vı´nculos de vida cooperativa y desarrollar a un tiempo la iniciativa personal y la disciplina esponta´neamente aceptada’’ (qtd. in Crispin 1982, 32) [maintain a moral environment, create strong links of cooperation, and develop simultaneous personal initiative and spontaneously accepted discipline].19 A review of its magazine, Residencia, published between 1926 and 1934, provides ample evidence of the importance placed on sports as an essential educational ingredient. At first, sports covered an entire section or was the topic of the lead article. Notices of the different sporting events held at the Residence, along with numerous photographs of its athletes, appear on its pages. The lofty, idealistic view of sports inherited from the nineteenth century lingered up to 1934, when this evaluation of hockey was printed in the April issue: ‘‘un juego esencialmente educativo, por afirmar hasta su ma´s alto grado las cualidades de altruismo, valor, aguante, caballerosidad y disciplina entre los jugadores’’ [an essentially educating tool to affirm to the highest degree qualities of altruism, bravery, resistance, gentlemanliness, and discipline among players]. Noteworthy are the pictures of the hockey teams from the Residencia de Sen˜oritas (the female counterpart of the Residencia founded nearby in 1915). The cultural elites seemed to recognize that university education and physical exercise were appropriate for women. The extent to which the intellectuals of the time embraced sports as a sign of a healthy and youthful modernity can be seen in the attention paid to sports in La Gaceta Literaria (1927–36), a literary journal closely identified with the Generation of 27. It sometimes had a column under the headline ‘‘Deportes’’ that

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described an international soccer match or reported on an Olympic hurdle race or interviewed an athlete. According to Gallego Morell, the close relationship between sport and literature derived from Coubertin’s obsession with the transcendent potential of sport. The Spanish critic designates Coubertin’s ode to sports, written for the 1912 Games, as the birth of sports literature in the twentieth century (1969, 33).20 However, the synergistic union of sports and art goes beyond one man’s utopian dream; rather, it reflects the entire era’s conception of human existence. Sports not only inspired poets and artists, but also became a subject of reflection for prominent Spanish thinkers of the time. Essays, pithy comments, or newspaper columns were written by Miguel de Unamuno, Ernesto Gime´nez Caballero, Eugenio D’Ors, and Jacinto Miquelarena. The humorist Wenceslao Ferna´ndez Flo´rez approached sports from a parodic perspective, and the tennis star Lilı´ Alvarez from the athlete’s point of view.21 The most influential interpreter of the social and artistic meaning of sport was the ultimate intellectual arbitrator of the period, Jose´ Ortega y Gasset. In El espectador (1916–34), El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923), La deshumanizacio´n del arte (1925), and La rebelio´n de las masas (1930), with his customary perspicacity, he recognized that one of the striking developments of the early twentieth century was the approbation of the human body. He wrote that the cult of the body had begun and after its cult, its cultivation (1966, 730).22 This new interest in the body represented a radical change in existential orientation, for, as he explained, the nineteenth century glorified work, while the twentieth pursued play (195). Life is now geared not toward an end, but toward the means; what is valued is the process, the joyful and genial intervening effort. If life is play and play is lofty, art inevitably responds to this new ideological construct. According to Ortega, the new art lost its seriousness and substance to become a nonart or, at the very least, one more game. The new ‘‘dehumanized’’ style he wrote about tried to approximate the triumph of sports and games (384). Thus, art and sport/games signified the triumph of body over spirit, of youth over old age. Devoid of pathos and transcendence, art became a game through which the artist displayed the joy and dynamic optimism of youth.23

Sports in Poetry Sports were wedded to literature and the arts when the revived Olympics included poetry in 1912, but especially at the 1924 games,

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to which famous writers and artists of the world were invited to compete in literary contests. Not surprisingly, many poets of the period between 1918 and 1931 integrated sports into their poems. As Gallego Morell has already stated, the contours of the ‘‘felices veinte’’ were ‘‘illuminated’’ by literature with a sport theme (1969, 12). My aim is precisely to ‘‘illuminate’’ the inner mechanisms of sports in poetry of the era by focusing on the thematic treatment of sports, various implications of the use of sports, and the presumed aesthetic affinity of this poetry with sports. Sport provided new imagery, themes, referents, and symbols for poets’ impulses for novelty, originality, and rejuvenation. Moreover, poetry itself became, for some, a kind of game, a playing with language, an exercise of linguistic agility, a sportive activity viewed as unpretentious yet nobler than quotidian reality. Although in 1911 Enrique Gonza´lez Martı´nez, with his sonnet ‘‘Tue´rcele el cuello al cisne,’’ had struck the death knell of the swan and much of the poetic mode it symbolized, the hackneyed Spanish poets still tapped into the modernista fount for inspiration. These were the lethargic and pitiful Bohemians that Ramo´n del Valle-Incla´n caricatured in the 1922 play Luces de bohemia. The poets of the Generation of 27, and especially those who ventured into vanguardismo, sought to be nonconventional. They rejected the past, but instead of brooding within a Bohemian malaise, as their predecessors had done, they responded in a positive, active way. They strove to create a new poetry with the elements of the new world around them. One of the most appealing of these was sports. Sports provided a new poetic language. When Rosa Marı´a Martı´n Casamitjana discusses the gaiety and ludic sense of Spanish vanguard poetry, she begins by declaring that the happiness and optimism the vanguardists proclaimed in their manifestos demanded new themes with which to embody lyrically ‘‘la exaltacio´n vital, el ju´bilo de la infancia recuperada’’ [the vital exaltation, the jubilance of a recovered childhood] and not surprisingly, therefore, many ultraı´sta poems incorporated sport motifs (1996a, 377). She gives as examples lines from Pedro Garfias (‘‘Campanas gozosas / juegan al foot-ball con pelotas meca´nicas / de torre a torre’’ [Joyful bells / play soccer with mechanical balls / from one tower to another]), from Jose´ de Ciria y Escalante (‘‘Los a´rboles gimnastas / que han salido a la pista / van recogiendo aplausos con el pico’’ [Gymnastic trees / that have gone out to the track / gathering applause with their tips]), and from Juan Larrea (‘‘De las nieves perpetuas / con un astro explosivo en la pechera / en sus skis urbanos / bajan patinando los tranvı´as’’ [From the perennial snow tops, streetcars skate down on their city skis with a dazzling star on

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their breast]) (377). Other examples of this sort can be cited. Gerardo Diego sees crows’ wings as skis. In Concha Me´ndez’s poem ‘‘Club alpino’’ (Alpine Club), the morning skates in; and in Rafael Alberti’s ‘‘Rosa-Frı´a, patinadora de la luna’’ (Rose-Cold, Skater from the Moon), it is the fir trees that skate across the ice. In an urban scene poeticized by Lucı´a Sa´nchez Saornil, ‘‘Hay un box formidable’’ (Sa´nchez Saornil 1996, 102) [There is a grand boxing match], while in Diego beaches play tennis: ‘‘En el hall del hotel / las playas pelotaris / jugaban al tenis’’ (Diego 1989, 107) [In the hotel vestibule, the pelotaplaying beaches play tennis]. Winter sports particularly seem to stimulate poets’ imaginations, but they also visualize landscapes animated as if engaged in other sports as well. Lightning races across the celestial racetrack, clouds seem to be gymnasts on the trampoline of the sky, and trees are often personified as acrobats. Alberti’s lost, underwater paradise of his first book is projected in Cal y canto onto the sky where, instead of mermaids, machines and sports come alive. Not only do comets bicycle around the rings of Saturn, but, as a critic explains, ‘‘[L]os serafines vuelan la Gran Copa del Viento por la pista de la Vı´a La´ctea. Y en el estadio de la Luna, tiran jabalinas y discos los luceros’’ (Salinas de Marichal 1968, 166–67). [The seraphims fly the Grand Cup of the Wind on the track of the Milky Way and in the stadium of the moon stars throw javelins and discuses.] Although sports imagery appears in the above quotes, sports do not constitute the central theme. Sports exist only on a figurative plane as a metaphorical vehicle to enrich the expression of the primary subject. Nonetheless, by providing the semantic field of meaning for the implied comparisons, sports become a sanctioned source of metaphorical mapping. The realms of comparison are not the traditional ones of nature, precious objects, or exalted beings, but a new and therefore unpoetic idiom. In this way, both sports and poetry are changed; sports are lifted above their prosaic level, and poetry opens itself to modes of expression based on the ingredients of contemporary surroundings. Metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson insist, are not a ‘‘rhetorical flourish,’’ but a mechanism that both reflects and shapes reality. Accordingly, in avant-garde poetry the incorporation of sports motifs into metaphors not only reflected the reality of sports as an influential social phenomenon, but also helped the vanguardists validate a basic premise of their new aesthetic, that of absolute freedom and of change. In the January 1, 1922, issue of Ultra, the ultraı´stas proclaimed their goal: ‘‘[Q]ueremos desaniquilosar el arte. [. . .] Hemos sintetizado la poesı´a en su elemento primordial: la meta´fora, a la que concedemos una ma´xima independencia. [. . .] Cada verso de nuestros poemas [. . .] representa una visio´n ine´dita.’’ [We want to unparalyze art. . . . We

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have reduced poetry to its fundamental element: metaphor, to which we concede maximum independence. . . . Each line of our poems . . . represents an unusual vision.] The metaphor was the primary instrument with which they hoped to free themselves from art and create a totally new, ‘‘unpublished,’’ vision. To help them reach these objectives, sports imagery was an attractive, worthy replacement for established conduits of metaphorical transformation. Unlike sports metaphors, the sports theme in poetry has a long history dating from Pindar and includes works of Ovid, Virgil, and Horace as well as the ancient victory chants of anonymous tribes. Although parallels between ancient and contemporary sports poems exist, there are significant differences attributable to the intensification of democratization in the twentieth century and the emergence of pleasure as a serious existential goal.24 Gallego Morell observes that traditionally the concepts of play and seriousness were counterposed, but in our era, play means a new form of seriousness. His 1969 book Literatura de tema deportiva is a useful starting point for the study of the sports theme in the literature of Spain during the twenties.25 It provides a general history of sport literature in Europe, a survey of the theme, its manifestations in various genres, and an anthology of poems in Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque. He notes that sports in Spain appeared in literature from the beginning, in the Poema de Mı´o Cid, and also in works by Cervantes, Quevedo, and Caldero´n de la Barca. The variety of sports incorporated into the thematic matrix of poems of the twenties runs a wide gamut: boxing, cycling, golf, gymnastics, skating, skiing, soccer, swimming, track and field, tennis, yachting. Gallego Morell contends that sports as a theme in Spanish poetry of the twentieth century began with Ramo´n de Basterra (1969, 107). Basterra, however, took his inspiration from rural, not urban, sources: from the Basque countryside, the humble peasants of the region, and the legendary hero Vı´rulo. He also differed from the vanguard poets in that in his poetry he deplored the new democratized world of machines, lauding, instead, the older world of monarchism and imperialism.26 His use of the sports theme is an expression of his patriotism and ethnic identity rather than a celebration of youthful self-absorption, mass culture, and all things modern. This discrepancy between tradition and modernity, folk and mass culture, agrarian realities and urban society accounts for my exclusion of sports such as hunting, bolos (outdoor bowling), and pelota, the ancient Basque ball game. These activities have a long history and are not reflections of the atmosphere of change, movement, and physical freedom that came to characterize the twentieth century.

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Gallego Morell considers cycling to have given birth to the modern concept of ‘‘literatura deportiva.’’ In 1869 the Frenchman Richard Lesclide founded the magazine Le Ve´locipe`de illustre´. Subsequently, cycling clubs formed, bike races were held, and novels used cycling as their theme. Following the French lead, Spain adopted the cycling fashion and even promoted the sport as a healthful activity for women and the clergy (Gallego Morell 1969, 30–31). However, the first bicycle, the velocipede, with its huge front wheel and small rear wheel, was dangerous and therefore limited to a few daring young men and privileged gentlemen, who, as Antonio Espina recalls, rode the velocipede in their top hats and frock coats (1995, 156). In the beginning of the century, the municipal authorities tried to prevent civilian cycling in El Retiro Park in Madrid, but the army, the Civil Guard, and the police all had ‘‘mounted’’ brigades (Garcı´a Candau 1999, 536). Although the craze for cycling dominated the last decade of the nineteenth century, it still inspired poems during the 1920s. Bicycles continued to conjure up the idea of speed and the carnivalesque. In Diego’s ‘‘Fa´bula de equis y zeda’’ (The Fable of X and Z), the bicycle whizzes down the slope before coming to a stop seemingly contradicted by the continued whirl and hum of the wheels: ‘‘ni se detiene libre fija quieta / o´ptica de la fe la bicicleta [. . .] Por el plano elegante en desniveles / la bicicleta inmo´vil gira y canta / Oh cielo es para ti su rueda y rueda / Equis canta la una la otra zeda’’ (1989, 399– 401) [a vision of faith, free fixed still , the bicycle doesn’t stop . . . along the uneven, elegant ground / the stopped bicycle whirls and sings / Oh heaven, its wheel and its wheel is for you / one sings x and the other z]. This bicycle portrays less a focus on sports than a rhetorical stratagem to superimpose, on Go´ngora-inspired themes, vanguard devices like the use of a modern lexicon and images distributed as verbal collages. Diego is poeticizing the moonlit sky, which he metaphorizes into a circus act. Ricardo Gullo´n says the dizzying succession of accumulated and juxtaposed images in this poem sustains itself on the base of ‘‘crackling’’ words impossible to retell or summarize (1976, 10). While Diego’s poem overrides the anecdotal with his joyful manipulation of the word, ‘‘La rosa y el velocı´pedo’’ (The Rose and the Velocipede) by Adriano del Valle accentuates the anecdotal quality by using the double subtitles ‘‘Fa´bula’’ and ‘‘Romance,’’ by depending almost entirely on dialogue, and by concluding with a narrated epilogue.27 The clever conversation between the rose and the bicycle recalls the debates typical of the traditional Spanish ballads or even of medieval disputes, but dispels any serious association with these ancient forms in the second subtitle: ‘‘Romance a lo Walt Disney.’’ The rose, dubbed ‘‘Don˜a Perfecta’’ [Ms. Perfect] by the bicycle, is ridiculed

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for being ephemeral and ‘‘sillier than a hoopskirt.’’ The rose, in turn, defends herself, bragging of her presence in poetry and in the story of humankind from its beginning to Judgment Day, but then she must concede that the metal and the geometry of the bicycle foretell the ‘‘Annunciation’’ of a marvelous new age (Valle 1977, 74). The story ends happily in Disney-like fashion with the rose and the bicycle marrying and reproducing themselves in their offspring, the hydroplane and the automobile. Both Diego’s and Valle’s poems reconcile the old and the new in a felicitous amalgamation, but others are more forthright in their celebration of modern sports. Sports and the athlete fired up the imagination of the poets of the vanguard period. The athlete embodied the attributes of agile movement, physical prowess, fearlessness, and self-assurance that are symbolized in modernity and masculinity. Modern sports developed as modernism was reaching its apex and the Enlightenment project was fulfilling its promise of a scientific and rational society through technological advancements and steady material progress within a capitalistic system. As part of these phenomena, sports both reflect and reinforce the social goals of the era. As Juan-Miguel Ferna´ndez-Balboa asserts, the sport profession ‘‘is still being influenced by the same powers, confined by the same institutions, affected by the same problems and determined by the same ideological principles and values that have molded modern life. In turn, the human movement profession has shaped people’s meaning and practices regarding physical activity’’ (1997, 8). Thus, both sports and avant-garde poetry are intertwined with historical, ideological, and social developments. Despite their scorn for the bourgeoisie, the avant-garde poets admired certain facets of culture produced by the business classes. They overlooked the commercial and nonartistic foundation of sports, seeing in them instead the displacement of banality, a reaffirmation of youth, and physical liberation. After the tragedy of a world war with weapons, sports—a war without weapons—provided a release from battle without losing its selfaffirming features and converted its negative elements of suffering into invigorating struggle and those of tragic conflict into pleasurable competition. What binds sports, war, and games together is both their element of conflict and their separation from normal everyday routine. In the words of Womack: ‘‘Sports is considered a subset of play, which is set apart from ordinary reality so that ‘real-life’ values and relationships can be practiced without threatening the social fabric’’ (2003, 10). This setting aside of ‘‘ordinary reality’’ was a basic goal of the vanguard aesthetics, but in this desertion vanguardism forfeited

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the possibility of exerting influence on the ‘‘social fabric’’ and created a paradox: it glorified change but short-circuited actual social change. Besides escapism, sports offered the vanguard poet youthfulness, and youthfulness suggested aggressivity, stamina, and disregard for personal safety along with self-confidence, obsession with the present, and personal amusement. This veneration of youthfulness went hand in hand with a preoccupation with physical activity and fitness intertwining sports with the cult of youth and the cult of the body. The valuation of the youthful body explains the high regard bestowed on athletes, and it has implications for issues of gender and desire, for, as feminist theorists have recognized, the body is not merely a corporal materiality; it is also a metonym, an object pregnant with meanings derived from ideological constructs and sociohistorical time frames.28 Western thought has traditionally opposed mind to body, privileging the first as masculine and relegating the second to the feminine and lowly nature. However, this hierarchy is challenged, on both points, when women practice sports, and it is realigned when the male body is celebrated. Sport as part of the sphere of the young comes to symbolize sexuality, courage, and spiritual striving—all qualities incorporated in the archetype of masculinity. Sports have been the male preserve, and through them men have forged their identity. Sports sanction two interrelated acts of behavior long considered distinctively masculine: rivalry and violence. Sports provide a stage for aggressive contests resolved by the dominance of one opponent over another or for the bonding of a group of males in competition against another group. Victories by the group function to consolidate the unifying pride of an entire gender, whole communities, and even nations, while the victory of physically superior individuals serves to create mythic heroes who then act as role models for ordinary individuals.29 The awe-inspiring victorious athlete transcends the norms of nature, overcomes fear, and publicly exposes the prowess of the male body. This display, admiration, and rewarding of the male body carries connotations of male sensuality—male physical beauty, physical potency interpretable as sexual potency, and dominance. No poet is more direct in his metaphorical equation between the male athlete and masculine sexuality than Domenchina in his poem titled ‘‘(Deporte)’’: Avanza, estrenuo, el deportista Lleva en sus manos un balo´n que se desinfla El cual balo´n—escroto enorme—suscita una profusa cosecha de miradas oblicuas (1929, 94)

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[The athlete advances, strong, He carries in his hands a ball that deflates This ball—an enormous scrotum—provokes a bountiful harvest of side glances]

Although Womack sees the wrestler as the quintessential metaphor for male beauty and sexuality (2003, 105), the boxer can be considered the modern equivalent of a single man’s defeat of another through brute physicality. Francisco Ayala, in his surrealist short story ‘‘El boxeador y un a´ngel’’ (1929) (The Boxer and an Angel) and his novel Cazador en el alba (1930) (The Hunter at Dawn), casts the pugilist as one who fights to assert himself triumphantly over physical, social, and ontological opposition. In reference to Ayala, Carlos Ramos notes that in modern times the boxer replaces the soldier as the apt figure of violence executed as a spectacle for mass consumption and that boxing serves as a metaphor for modern man, in a struggle within himself and with forces beyond his control (2002, 146). In poetry, the boxer and the soccer goalie are celebrated as exceptional individuals. Although soccer is a team sport, the vanguardist poet singles out the player who stands alone and single-handedly blocks the opponent. These two choices of athletes not only incarnate the ideals of youth, masculinity, and corporeality cultivated by the society framing avant-garde works, but also confirm the avant-garde’s obsession with singularity—with being different, original, and superior. The boxing idol Paulino Uzcudun, winner of matches all over the world during the twenties, is extolled in an ode by Emilio Fornet published in La Gaceta Literaria (September 1, 1928) as a conjunction of ‘‘Sangre, Verbo y Furia’’ [Blood, Word and Fury]. The poet evokes the gods Jehovah and Osiris. In his estimation, this boxer surpasses man in being sculpted not of clay but of rock and in personifying the wild beast as well the solid strength of the earth—flint, stone, and iron: Chispas de pedernal hay en tu iris De hombre esculpido—no de barro—en roca. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mu´sculo, no cairel; hierro no, guante. Y un emisferio [sic] en cada biceps, nuevo Atlante. (2) [There are sparks of flint in your eye of a man sculpted—not of clay—but of rock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Muscle, not fringe, nor iron, but glove and a hemisphere in each biceps, a new Atlas.]

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In the early twentieth century boxing was becoming an avenue for the lower classes to escape the misery of their marginality and to gain fame and fortune. However, the Spanish vanguard poets did not perceive this socioeconomic significance of boxing; they only saw in it the ludic qualities of physical mastery and corporality. Muscles are the embodiment of these qualities and the sign of masculinity in ‘‘Los poemas musculares’’ (Muscular Poems), published by Eugenio Montes in 1919 in Cervantes. The poem pays tribute to the two types of sports hero: the boxer and the soccer player. First, the boxer: Las canas dobladas en el brazo del a´rbitro. Y el collar de cuerdas ahogando el ring. Los boxeadores remando con los brazos la balsa no quiere navegar [White hair folded over on the referee’s arm. And a collar of cord strangling the ring The boxers rowing with their arms the raft doesn’t want to sail]

The strength of the fighters’ arms is compared to that of rowers confined to a raft that will not move and where they must submit to a beating. In the next lines the muscularity of the boxer is transformed through further metaphorical twists into roses. The poet appropriates the traditional symbol of female beauty and turns it into bruises, a sign of masculine appeal, of violence and physical damage: ‘‘florecen / rosas morenas en los pun˜os / se injerten en las mejillas’’ [dark roses bloom on their fists / they graft themselves on cheeks]. The roses that bloom are dark and implicitly injurious. By ‘‘grafting’’ themselves on the checks of the opponent, they exude a beauty synonymous with aggressive punching and penetration. Montes also employs the rose image for soccer, but for the player, not the ball: ‘‘La rosa en la cuna circular / se inicio´ el ballet’’ (Fuentes Florido 1989, 235) [The rose in the circular crib / started a ballet]. Soccer may evoke the grace of ballet, but it ultimately connotes the excitement of competition, athletic agility, and masculine beauty. Soccer inspired a poem by Luis Herna´ndez Gonza´lez in which the elliptical syntax, accumulated allusions to the shouts of the crowd and the different moves of the players, and the repetition of the word ‘‘beauty’’ dramatize the impact this furia nacional made in the 1920s: Vibrantes frases nombres y voces tiros directos, regates, pases

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fuertes rumores de la emocio´n marchas veloces con el balo´n duro tanteo, bella parada acometida bien esquivada hermoso avance en que el poniente vivo arrebol (Cano Ballesta 1981, 87) [Vibrating phrases names and shouts direct tosses, dodges, passes strong sounds of emotion swift running with the ball difficult scoring, a beautiful save an attack well dodged a beautiful advance in which the vivid rouge of the setting sun]

The poet also published a book, En torno al Foot-ball (About Soccer), that defines sports as joy, beauty, and a new chivalry, and exalts soccer by equating it to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the artwork of Michelangelo, Goya, and Rodin (Cano Ballesta 1981, 87). Hyperbolic comparisons such as these illustrate the level of emotion that soccer provoked among male spectators and writers and the level of adulation to which sports were lifted. The two most important poems on soccer of the twenties and, according to Gallego Morell, in all of Spanish literary history are those by Miguel Herna´ndez and Rafael Alberti. The critic confers credit on the two poets for shaping the national memory, for, as he states, the two soccer players are still remembered in Spain not because of any newspaper article or radio broadcast, but because of these two poems. Gallego Morell sees Herna´ndez’s commemoration of the goalie Lolo Sampedro as a celebration of this hometown hero in the terms of the pastoral poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega (1969, 109–10). Although the metric form and the metaphoric mechanics of the poem may suggest a Renaissance composition, the poetic impetus sustaining the poem is decidedly vanguardist in the impact of the lexicon and the substance of the metaphors. ‘‘Elegı´a—al guardameta’’ (Elegy to the Goalie) is dedicated to the Orihuela player who, in lunging for the ball, hit his head against the goalpost and died. His is a story told with soccer terminology and recorded by a photographer who, in snapping this extraordinary leap, caught him in his moment of greatest glory but also caused his fatal shift in direction. The metaphors involving animals in the first part of

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the poem might imply a transference of bestial strength to humans, but the animals serving as figurative vehicles of meaning are lowly creatures: cricket, blowfly, and spider. Even the oblique reference to a caged lion (‘‘garra’’ [claw], ‘‘zarpa’’ [paw], and ‘‘rampante’’ [rampant]) is deflated by the flimsy construction of its half cage. The forced comparison between his flying cap and a third ear combines an absurd note with a morbid one, suggesting a humor not unlike the greguerı´as of Go´mez de la Serna. The poem, however, ends in the true manner of elegies, with a sad confirmation of negation, absence, and emptiness and with the glorifying affirmation of the goalie’s irreplaceability (M. Herna´ndez 1982, 77). Despite the poem’s elegiac features, the vanguardist purposeful disregard for tradition and its provocative defiance of decorum are conspicuous in the combination of the phallic and the scatological: Entre las trabas que tendio´ la meta de una esquina a otra esquina por su sexo el balo´n, a su bragueta asomado, se arruina, su redondez airosamente orina. . . . . . . . . . . . Ante tu puerta se formo´ un tumulto de breves pantalones, donde bailan los priapos su bulto (M. Herna´ndez 1982, 75, 76) [Between the obstacles the goalkeeper extended from one corner to another the ball is ruined by his sexual part appearing at his fly, its roundness gracefully urinates . . . . . . . . . . . . In front of your entryway there formed a crowd of short pants inside which phalluses shook their bulk]

The soccer ball, metaphorically, and the soccer players, literally, carry the sign of masculinity. The connotations of excitement, triumph, and life conveyed by the phallus contrast markedly with the suggestion of feminization supporting the metaphorical rendering of the goalie’s cracked head: ‘‘como un sexo femenino, / abrio´ la ligereza / del golpe una granada de tristeza’’ (76) [like a female part / the quickness of the blow / opened a pomegranate of sadness]. Under a veneer of rhetorical audacity, the phallocentric archetype that conceives the feminine as

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wound, disjunction, and death still thrives. For all the vanguard’s toying with metaphors and playing with a new subject matter, the vanguard poet perpetuates, even reinforces, the gender dichotomy that casts the feminine as negative and exalts the masculine as gloriously life-affirming. The furia nacional that seized the Spanish consciousness in the twenties inspired Rafael Alberti to write his famous ‘‘Oda a Platko’’ [Ode to Platko]. The poem commemorates, like Herna´ndez’s elegy, a goalie, in this case the Hungarian player on the Barcelona team. In a match between Barcelona and Santander played on Sunday, May 20, 1928, Platko was injured in a spectacular defense move. With his head bandaged, he returned later to the game amid the wild applause of the crowd. That evening Alberti attended the team’s celebration party, and the next day the press carried detailed play-by-play accounts of this game. Gallego Morell rekindles the emotion of forty years earlier with his own hyperbolic comparison of Platko to Roland and El Cid (1969, 124). The exaggerations of both the critic and the poet hint at the shift in the concept of the hero from the military leader to the athletic star taking place in the twentieth century, attest to the contribution that Spanish poetry was still making to the creation of cultural myths, and reveal the growing social strength of mass culture as a defining instrument of group pride. Alberti minimizes the narrative line of his poem, overlaying the event with figurative transformations that convert the man into a god. The incessant repetition of ‘‘nobody’’ and ‘‘nor,’’ and of the phrase ‘‘no one will forget,’’ conveys the indelibility of the name of Platko. Unlike Sampedro in Herna´ndez’s poem, the Barcelona goalie is likened to awe-inspiring animals—the tiger and the bear. The mythification of this ‘‘blond bear from Hungary’’ is extended further to an identification with elements of nature and beyond that to heaven itself. The blue and red of his team jersey relinquish their descriptive qualities to become abstract symbols of heroism: Azul heroico y grana, mando´ el aire en las venas. Alas, alas celestes y blancas, rotas alas, combatidas, sin plumas, encalaron la yerba. (Alberti 1988, 366) [A heroic blue and red commanded the air in the veins. Wings, celestial and white, broken wings, battle-worn, without their feathers, whitewashed the grass.]

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The hero falls, but the wind, as if a divine force, opens the possibility of victory for him: ‘‘Y en tu honor, por tu vuelta [. . .] en el arco contrario el viento abrio´ una brecha’’ (366). [And in your honor and for your return . . . the wind opened a breach in the opponent’s defense.] This elevation of a sport figure to the level of myth strikes Ricardo Senabre as an example of the preference for the trivial and of the trivalization of the hero—signs of a tendency to ‘‘fossilize’’ or dehumanize (1977, 37). However, the poetization of an ostensibly trivial subject matter also attests, from a historical standpoint, to a cultural change occurring with regard to what was considered heroic and also to the electrifying impact that sports was having on vanguard poetry. Other than the boxer and the soccer player, the male athlete rarely appears in the sport poems of the male poets of the twenties. Early in his career, Vicente Aleixandre wrote ‘‘Retrato’’ (Portrait), dedicated to a skater named Luis who makes ever-wider and elegant figure eights and daring pirouettes. The interjection of the words ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘death’’ turns skating from idle entertainment into an existential challenge: ‘‘[E]ntreabres los labios / sobre todas las cosas de la / pista / y de la vida’’ (1978, 107) [You part your lips / over everything in the / rink / and in life]. Skating, thus, transcends pure athletic dexterity to mean a triumph over life itself. A similar poetic transposition from the concrete to the abstract and from the literal to the symbolic occurs in Gerardo Diego’s poem ‘‘Regatas’’ (Regattas), included in Versos humanos (Human Verses). Perhaps because sung from the point of view of the adult who recalls himself as the ‘‘diminuto espectador’’ of boat races, the poem concludes with a philosophical note: Deja que juegue y que rı´a la frivolidad naval. Tu vida sera´ algu´n dı´a una regata mortal. (1989, 299) [Let the naval frivolity play and laugh. Your life someday will be a mortal regatta.]

These two poems show that, for all their use of the sports theme for its connotations of fun-filled competition and liberating diversion, the vanguard poets were capable of seeing in it metaphorical possibilities applicable to serious thoughts on life and death. The act of striving and of personal transcendence is inevitably envi-

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sioned as a male pursuit. For Pedro Salinas it is swimming that lifts him beyond the terrestrial realm of time and space: Flotante, sin asidero, nadador fuera del agua, voluntario a la deriva, por las horas, por el aire, por el haz de la man˜ana. Todo fugitivo, todo resbaladizo, se escapa de entre los dedos el mundo, la tierra, la arena. [. . .] (1961, 79) [Floating, without restraint, swimmer out of the water voluntarily aimless, through time, through the air, through the rays of morning. All fleeting, all slippery, the world, the earth, the sand slip through my hands. . . .]

The male poetic speaker in the poem ‘‘OSO’’ (i.e., ‘‘oeste sur oeste’’ [west southwest]) by Jose´ Marı´a Hinojosa also swims, but he moves in a more fanciful realm of surrealist imagination. Sports propel him, in this and other poems of La rosa de los vientos (The Compass Rose), on a cosmic voyage that plays out the quest motif. This solemn theme, however, is overtaken by the nonchalant, playful attitude of the speaker. Alfonso Sa´nchez Rodrı´guez notices that there surfaces in the poem ‘‘un despreocupado y fresco aire juvenil, un aroma genuinamente vanguardista’’ (1989, 12) [a fresh and carefree youthful air, a genuinely vanguardist aroma]. The Tropic of Cancer is an exercise bar on which he performs muscle flexions: Me salte´ el Panama´, a pie juntillas e hice dos flexiones musculares sobre la barra fija del tro´pico de Ca´ncer Hinojosa 1974, (165) [I jumped over Panama with my feet together and did two chin-ups on the stationary bar of the Tropic of Cancer]

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The speaker of this poetry knows no bounds; without limits of time and space, he goes off unfettered in sixteen directions in a dreamworld of imaginary journeys. He assumes the form of a swimmer, escorted by sea horses that wait for no one: Llegue´ a la playa a nado y tuve por escolta legiones de hipocampos Me puse un ban˜ador; por no esperar al pra´ctico hı´ceme un distraı´do veraneante acua´tico. (165) [I swam to the beach escorted by legions of sea horses I put on a bathing suit; without waiting for the coastal pilot I pretended to be a distracted aquatic summer vacationer.]

The liberation suggested in swimming reflects the physical freedom that sports bestow, as well as the independence bequeathed on many of the poets of this generation by their life of privilege and its accompanying freedom to travel. Hinojosa stood out among the other ‘‘sen˜oritos’’ of the Generation of 27 for his great wealth, social position, and fun-loving disposition. Much has been made of the political implications of his economic status.30 However, it is also important to remember, as Julio Neira does, that this was an era in which travel and adventure were spotlighted and acquiring sportive overtones (1994, 234). Whether through the imaginary journey of Phineas Fogg or the real-life achievements of Amundsen and Lindbergh, this was an era in which mankind was beginning to move freely on the planet in all directions. In the exploits of others and in the conspicuousness of sports, all men sensed an affirmation of their own possible physical mobility.

The Female Athlete in Male Poetry Women, especially those of the upper classes, were beginning to participate in sports—in the mountains in the winter, on the fashionable beaches of northern Spain in the summer, and at urban sports

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clubs. Male poets did not fail to notice the spirited and public display of the female body in action in sports. Invariably, however, it was not the skill, dexterity, or artistry of the female body that the male gaze perceived, but its sensuality and erotic suggestions. The pleasure taken by the male spectator, an act Freud termed ‘‘scopophilia,’’ reduces the female person to passive object and subjects her to the desirous and controlling eye of the masculine observer. The representation of woman as spectacle was bolstered in the past century through film (see Mulvey 1989; Lauretis 1984; Doane 1987). Just as the point of view of the camera is from the masculine position, so that of the male poetic speaker is always that of the spectator who looks upon the female body from afar and on the sly. His is a unidirectional, unreciprocated stare that takes on amorous tones or verges on lasciviousness. The body of the female athlete provides a new opportunity for visual delight for the male voyeur. A case in point is the sight of the woman tennis player in ‘‘Lawntennis’’ by Enrique Dı´ez-Canedo, better known as a critic than as a poet. He recalls a figure from a past vacation and openly admits he surreptitiously observed her body more than her skillful moves with the racket. He sees not her athletic skill but the allure of her inflamed face, the tossing back of her hair, her youthful breasts, and the leg revealed under a flying skirt: Veo tu rostro en pu´rpura encendido, y aquel tu gesto breve y decidido para echarte los rizos a la espalda, y el anhelar del pecho adolescente, y la estirada media, fugazmente vista al volar de la cumplida falda . . . (1924, 109) [I see your face of fiery purple and that quick and resolute gesture of yours for tossing your curls onto your back, and the yearning of your adolescent breast and the taut stocking, briefly seen when your full skirt flutters . . .]

Antonio Collantes de Tera´n in ‘‘Jugadora de tenis’’ (Tennis player), published in Mediodı´a in January 1928 (Barrera Lo´pez 1999, 10), eliminates gender from a perfect tennis serve by transforming the act into a linear, geometric form: ‘‘Trayectoria eficaz en lı´nea recta; / recta sin claudicar, limpia y perfecta. / Tiro de ala y en el ala el tiro’’ [An effi-

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cient trajectory in a straight line / straight without any hesitation, clean and perfect / a wing swoop and the swoop in the wing]. In the middle of the poem, the wing is identified as an arm attached to a palpitating breast, but the living quality of the figure is quickly voided by a metaphorical conversion into a precisely posed sculpture that disdains the sensuous rose. The female tennis player is portrayed in diametrically opposite terms, either as heated, sensual carnality or as abstract perfection—tactile, reposing flower and the cool, kinetic athlete. Subtly the poem still confirms the perennial binary vision sustaining patriarchal thinking. Predicated on systematized dualities, patriarchal thought projects not only opposition but also conflict and stratification. Alluding to this system, He´le`ne Cixous wrote: ‘‘Theory of culture, theory of society, the ensemble of symbolic systems—art, religion, family, languages— everything elaborates the same systems. And the movement by which each opposition is set up to produce meaning is the movement by which the couple is destroyed. A universal battlefield. . . . And we perceive that ‘victory’ always amounts to the same thing: it is hierarchized. The hierarchization subjects the entire conceptual organization to man’’ (1981b, 91). The feature of binary thinking that Cixous and other feminist theorists deplore is its imposition and privileging of one gender over another. The masculine is understood as superior to the feminine; the male is rendered as the active subject and the female as the passive object. Sports is an endeavor of physical activity, of deft movement, and bodily fitness, but the male eye can only perceive the female athlete through the lens of patriarchal ideology, which has conditioned him to see the female body as an object of beauty—immobile, seductive, and desirable—as an ideal rather than a reality. Realism, of course, is not the goal of lyric poetry and especially not of avant-garde poetry. The eye of the poetic speaker recognizes only what his culture has taught him to notice and what his ‘‘I,’’ his personal experience and own subjectivity, drives him to perceive. Poetry, like all art, is a symbolic construction, an interpretation of reality filtered through the artist’s own manner of viewing and shaped by his culture. Iris Zavala reminds us that, as Stephen Greenblatt wrote, language takes the symbolic materials of one cultural field and applies them to another, augmenting or reducing the force of the signs, altering their meaning, or relating them to other symbolic fields (Zavala 1992, 54). When it comes to the female body, she says, ‘‘[E]l mundo de la economı´a simbo´lica de los textos patriarcales esta´ determinado por un rizoma de estereotipos y fantası´as culturales, que a menudo, como un boomerang, nos revela los constructos psicolo´gicos de la psique´ masculina. El cuerpo se transforma ası´ en objeto voyerı´stico o fetichista, que invita a

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intercambios ero´ticos con los espectadores masculinos’’ (56). [The world of the symbolic economy of patriarchal texts is determined by a rhizome of stereotypes and cultural fantasies, which often, like a boomerang, reveals the psychological constructs of the masculine psyche. The body is thus transformed into a voyeuristic or fetishistic object, that invites erotic interchanges with masculine spectators.] Any number of examples illustrates that when the masculine poetic persona casts his sights on the athletic other—be it male or female—he can only see it through the cultural constructs of the male psyche and his own self-centeredness. The poem ‘‘El ski en el hielo’’ (Ice Skating) by Rogelio Buendı´a is emblematic of the centrality assumed by the masculine speaker. The poetic speaker announces himself in the first word of the poem and positions himself in the middle of the human presence, first following the skating other (‘‘Yo me fui tras de tu ruta’’ [I followed your route]), and then followed by her (‘‘Tu´, blanca como un skating / seguı´as imperturbable’’) (1923, n.p.) [You, white like a skating rink / remained unfazed]. Alberti wrote a better-known poem on a female skater—‘‘Rosa-Frı´a, patinadora de la luna.’’ The pronoun ‘‘I’’ does not appear in this poem, but the masculine ego is not absent. The skating Rosa-Frı´a is identified as ‘‘novia mı´a’’ [my betrothed], and her scarf and skirt fluttering in the wind metaphorically wave farewell. Robert Manteiga considers the bride a variant of a consistent association in Alberti’s poetry between the pure young woman and water (1978, 25–26). Salinas de Marichal relates this poem to Alberti’s reading of Huidobro and of Russian literature (1968, 80–81). In addition, tradition resonates in the poem’s sonnet form and the title of the romance ‘‘Rosa-Frida’’ echoes in the name ‘‘Rosa-Frı´a.’’ Whatever the source of his rhetoric, it is apparent that even if initially generated by a real female skater, inspiration for this poem functions through a variety of well-established literary paradigms. She is rendered more unreal through her powers of cosmic transcendence. Her scarf reaches to the sky; she cracks the silent light of the night; and, as the sun dawns, the moon follows behind. Alberti’s poem insinuates the captivating effect the skater has on the male observer who imagines the female skater to be an ascending, almost angel-like chimera. In contrast, Guillermo de Torre in ‘‘Skatingring’’ from He´lices describes the dizzying and hypnotic impact of the sight of skaters, in the ultraı´sta manner, with an explosive accumulation of visually strong images. In keeping with this poetic mode, the scene described is an interior one, with the light provided not by the moon but by ‘‘Arcos voltaicos’’ [Voltaic arcs]. The modernity established by this reference to modern technology is enhanced by the use of other technical terms (‘‘dextro´gira’’ [dextrorotary], ‘‘levo´gira’’ [lev-

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orotary]), of medical terminology (‘‘diplopı´a’’ ), and of foreign words (‘‘ring’’). The entire scene is animated on different sensory levels: the flickering lights are accompanied by a ragtime rhythm congruous with the ‘‘contortions’’ of the skaters. This poem exemplifies the irrepressible hold movement had on the poetic imagination of the era and especially the exciting movement embodied in sports. Skating epitomizes the kind of motion named in the title of the collection. Like a helix, skaters go around in concentric circles; they spin, twirl, whirl, and loop. Their spirits compromise the speaker’s position as spectator (‘‘Mis pupilas espectadoras se escapan imantadas por las figuras torna´tiles’’ [My spectating pupils magnetized by the twirling figures]) and make him so dizzy that he pictures himself on the ice: Y he aquı´ que inconscientemente impulsado por el ve´rtigo me veo ingra´vido patinador en el ‘‘ring’’ Su´bito un mareo vesperal Todo gira armo´nica y desarticuladamente (Torre 2000, 115) Here I am unconsciouly propelled by vertigo I see myself as a weightless skater in the ring Suddenly a vesperal dizziness Everything spins harmoniously and disjointedly]

He recovers quickly from the hypnotic effects of vertigo to become again the describing and interpreting spectator. Although overcome by the exhilarating action of this fashionable sport, the poetic eye still sees gender through the filter of archetypal dichotomies: ‘‘rigidez de los ‘sportsmens’ [sic] sonrisas tamizadas a trave´s del ‘chic’ impecable de las fe´minas ondulantes’’ [rigidness of sportsmen with smiles filtered through the impeccable chicness of the undulating females]. The male figures stand firm and steady, while the female ones appear more whimsical and inconstant. Swimming is the sport that permits the underpinnings of the traditional archetype of woman to manifest itself the best. Rather than focusing on the active swimmer, the male eye chooses to accentuate the beauty of the motionless sunbather. Even Guillermo de Torre, who in He´lices exalts the new ‘‘man’’ ensconced in an urban and industrial environment, sees woman, in ‘‘Playa’’ (Beach), like the canonical poets of the past, as a nymphlike figure emerging from the sea like a wave, foam, or Venus. The function of the female swimmer as the pivotal center of the scene is graphically communicated by the placement of

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the word ‘‘nadadora’’ at nearly the literal middle of the poem. The three spaces left after the word ‘‘swimming’’ typographically accentuate the centrality of the female figure in this seaside spectacle. From the initial lines of the poem, the female presence descends upon both the water and the sand, infusing them with feminine attributes. The female body and nature appear fused: ‘‘Al nadar contra corriente vienen a anidarse en las palmas de las manos las formas hesperidias: Se tactean los senos del agua y sus opalescencias mo´rbidas acarician los sentidos inmersos’’ (2000, 118) [By swimming against the current the Hesperides-like forms come to nest on the palms of the hand: they feel the watery breasts and their delicate opalescences caress the submerged senses]; but in the end the female bathers remain graceful goddesses before whom the sea kneels in deference. This process of deification becomes more obvious in ‘‘Preferida a Venus’’ (Preferred over Venus) by Jorge Guille´n, a poem on a bather with no pretense of allusion to athleticism. The poetic speaker insists that the bather is not a goddess, but, as a living marvel, she is distilled from the material world and lifted to an abstract realm of seductive beauty: Imprevista Surge—lejos de su patria—la seduccio´n marina. ¡Salve, tu´ Que de la tierra vienes para ser en lo azul (1977, 299) [Unexpectedly The marine seductress emerges—faraway from her homeland. Hail to you! You come from land to dwell in the blue]

The female figure is plucked from her specific, identifying domain (‘‘patria’’) and situated on a plane of generic essence (‘‘lo azul’’). This reductive process to which woman is subjected is extended to include objectification and fragmentation in ‘‘La ban˜ista’’ (The Bather) by Mauricio Bacarisse. This poem, as Roberto Pe´rez explains, is comprised of complex metaphors that present themselves before the poet as he contemplates a sunset while smoking a cigarrette. Within this scheme, the female bather is merely one of many visual props in the scene: ‘‘y la ban˜ista que jama´s se nombra / sumerge a luz de gloria los tobillos’’ (Bacarisse 1989, 196) [the bather is never named / she submerges her ankles in the glorious light]. The poetic speaker admits that the woman remains nameless and then fixates on her feet with a concentration suggestive of a foot fetish. Later in the poem the mascu-

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line gaze is replaced by the rays of the sun, a symbol of the active principle related to the masculine sex. Sunlight girds the immobile female with a ‘‘rica ajorca’’ [beautiful ankle bracelet]. The languid quality of the recumbent female figure resembles death; the bather ‘‘dies’’ as the sun sets: ‘‘y la ban˜ista muere sin que pueda / acabar la mentira de una imagen’’ (196) [and the bathers dies without being able / to finish the falsehood of an image]. Fusing with the natural world the female bather, within the male imagination, loses all vital energy, discrete presence, and selfhood. In contrast to most of his male peers, Alberti seemingly celebrates the vigor and fame of a female swimmer. In the poem ‘‘Nadadora’’ (Swimmer) with the sense of urgency and assertiveness that characterizes the poetry of his youth, Alberti starts and ends the poem with a refrain of three imperative verbs: ‘‘huye, mar, / corre, playa, / viento, para!’’ (1988, 363) [Flee, sea, / run, beach, / wind, stop]. The speaker is the swimmer herself, who proclaims with exclamations and pride the extent to which her name has traveled from Paris to London and to Rome. The geographical sweep of her renown adds to the celebratory amplification of her voice, but the hyperbolic extent of her boast (the clerics of the Vatican paint crosses on her swimsuit) and the absurdity of her claims (she is conceded five hundred thousand plenary indulgences by the fish of the Tiber) lend a flippant if not mocking tone to the poem. Likewise the lines ‘‘¡Viva mi nombre en todos los sombreros / del bulevar!’’ [Long live my name on all of the hats / on the boulevard!] imply that her fame is rather superficial, alive temporarily among the frivolous bourgeoisie, and not destined for the annals of history. What began as an apparent tribute ends up being a thinly veiled spoof of the accomplishments of the female athlete. Rather than a serious misogynistic satire, however, the poem more likely projects the sense of the inconsequential and the playfulness that pervades Cal y canto, a collection in tune with ultraı´smo and much of the avant-garde spirit. Alberti’s ambivalence before the female athlete, whom he both celebrates and mocks, epitomizes the attitude of his fellow Spanish vanguardists. Embracing change and modernity, they nonetheless resisted altering the basic patriarchal vision of woman as passive and immobile, as if harboring a hidden fear of female corporal power. As Luce Irigaray theorized, masculine representation continually reproduces only itself, and therefore the male gaze suppresses the female or produces a feminine ‘‘nothing.’’31 The vanguardist poet confronts the challenge presented by the new reality of the female athlete obliquely by lightheartedness or a defensive retreat into long-standing archetypes of the feminine.

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Women, Sports, and Poetry Despite the male poets’ reluctance to modify the time-honored image of woman, the world was changing and so were women. Their bodies having been freed from constrictive clothing, they could move more freely in the space around them. The hourglass-shaped vessel was replaced by the slim, linear figure. The new female style of slender hips, flat chest, and exposed legs, typified by the flapper in the United States, was called the ‘‘garc¸onne’’ style in Europe because of its boyish look. Women were becoming more malelike also by their participation in sports. Magazine articles, illustrations, photographs, and posters promoted the image of the stylish athletic women, creating the impression that she was more common than she actually was (Serrano and Salau¨n 2006, 159–64). Even though the emancipated ‘‘modern woman’’ was a rarity in Spain, most people viewed her with horror as a threat to the ‘‘true’’ feminine values of love, marriage, and motherhood. Pilar Nieva de la Paz explains that the new woman emerging in the twenties, often called ‘‘la Eva moderna,’’ was disparaged widely in the press because her comfortable and simple clothing was thought to be immoral and her image imitated a foreign—namely, AngloSaxon—model. Thus, she was seen as an adulteration of both essential feminine and national identity, a masculinization imposed by fashionable, immoral, foreign modes of conduct. The media, however, continued to accentuate the ‘‘masculine’’ qualities of this woman, depicting her as a tall, thin, stylized silhouette with a cigarette in her mouth and a cocktail in her hand or engaged in sports, riding in cars, or dancing wildly (1993, 38–39).32 Despite the protestations of the monitors of morality, a few privileged women did defy the national patterns of femininity and adopted the foreign standard of the carefree, sporty woman. Campo Alange recognized decades ago that the sports habit begun in the first years of the century contributed to the transformation of women (1963, 192). Sports demanded that women wear less clothing to be able to move easily and quickly. A study more theoretical than Campo Alange’s, Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity stresses that fashion, as a cultural phenomenon, is a medium for the ideas, desires, and beliefs circulating in society and was influenced greatly by the leisure activities emerging in the machine age. Tennis, bicycling, and swimming by necessity made the wearing of pantaloons, trousers, or bloomers acceptable (2003, chap. 8). The general participation in sports by women, at least those of the upper classes, was nurtured by the example of King Alfonso XIII, who during his summer vacations in San Sebastia´n organized sports festi-

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vals to which he invited the distinguished families of the city and those rich enough to vacation there. One of the latter was the poet Concha Me´ndez, who in her memoirs recalls the summers she spent there with her family: ‘‘Au´n siendo nin˜a, empezamos a veranear en San Sebastia´n. Era la playa ma´s lujosa de Espan˜a. Era una maravilla. Durante la Primera Guerra Mundial se lleno´ de extranjeros. [. . .] San Sebastia´n era un centro de juego’’ (Ulacia Altolaguirre 1990, 36–37). [When I was still a child, we began to vacation in San Sebastia´n. It was the luxury beach of Spain. It was marvelous. During the First World War it was full of foreigners. . . . San Sebastia´n was a center for amusement.] This world of good living, parties, concerts, swimming, and yachting was a world apart from the humdrum existence of the majority of women. Economic privilege and boldness of spirit, stemming in part from their intuited difference from other women, moved a few women poets to welcome modernity. They embraced the new dances, technology, and sports. The words that Josefina de la Torre provided for her biography included in Gerardo Diego’s 1934 anthology of poetry succinctly survey the leisure activities of the lucky few: ‘‘Me encanta conducir mi auto, pero mi deporte predilecto es la natacio´n. He sido durante dos an˜os Presidenta del primer Club de Natacio´n de mi tierra. Otras aficiones: el cine y bailar’’ (Diego 1966, 526). [I love to drive my car, but my favorite sport is swimming. For two years I have been the president of the first Swimming Club in my region. Other pastimes: movies and dancing.] Fewer female than male poets took inspiration from sports, probably because men had a long history of sports. Following the dictum ‘‘Write what you know best,’’ the women poets wrote about sports primarily from a personal, experiential point of view. Wilcox has already observed that women poets of the twenties, such as Me´ndez and Champourcin, worked from a personal and a down-to-earth attitude. Confirming feminist studies that define female discourse as individualized, he writes that a woman’s identity is linked to her own sensibility, to ‘‘her desire to express her own emotions and feelings (rather than to distance herself from them)’’ (Wilcox 1997, 96). We must remember that part of the difference of female style and subjectivity is circumstantial. In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong explains that the refreshingly realist style of nineteenth-century women novelists, so different from the academic rhetoric of canonical writing, is attributable to their lack of training in classical texts. Similarly, the Spanish women poets of the twenties were self-taught in literature rather than university-bred.33 They learned a great deal from their association with their male counterparts and from participation in certain cultural events, though they were still confined to the periphery of literary his-

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tory.34 Thus, women poets wrote less and differently about sports than their male counterparts either because of these social circumstances or because of a psychological difference that, according to French feminists, accounts for ‘‘e´criture fe´minine’’ and, according to American feminists, creates a distinctive subjectivity that relies on connections rather than competition.35 All these differences, I would argue, make the limited treatment of sports by women poets all the more noteworthy. With their cultivation of sports in their lives and their poetry, Spanish women poets overcame social obstacles and historical precedent. Though they were not revolutionary in their poetic execution, they trespassed gender demarcations in their appropriation of a theme considered masculine and in their adoption of the modernist discourse, widely deemed an aesthetic prejudicial to women. In this light, their poems sprung from a deeper defiance of tradition than those of the male poets. De la Torre and Me´ndez were women who wrote about sports from experience, unlike the male poets, who for the most part did not play sports and wrote of them as an objectification of beliefs and a source of symbols. Nevertheless, sport is used symbolically occasionally in female poetry. However, in keeping with the tendencies observed as common in female writing, the sports imagery is not used to create a deified other, be it a male hero or a female beauty, but to convey a sense of the desirous self. Such is the case with Champourcin. In much of her poetry, the poetic speaker displays a strong desire for transcendence, for a union with an exalted but still accessible other. This almost mystic drive became increasingly spiritual and religious in her, but in the poetry of her youth her quest is for fulfillment through earthly love and human experience. Signifying movement and triumph, sports is an apt vehicle for the textualization of dynamic, lifeaffirming sentiments. In La voz en el viento (1931) (The Voice in the Wind) her poetic protagonist speaks with a sense of dominion and a declared confidence in self-realization. The initial and title poem of the collection presents an exultant, cosmic bareback rider who proclaims her capacity to soar and the power of the word (her windsteed) to reach ‘‘untrod height’’ and fill ‘‘uninhabited heights’’: Sin la´tigo ni espuela . . . . . . . . Galopare´ adherida al filo de los tiempos . . . . . . . . ¡Erguida sobre el lomo de todo lo inestable,

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derrumbare´ certezas en nombre del azar! (1991, 115) [Without a whip or a spur . . . . . . . . . . I will gallop clasping the edge of the ages . . . . . . . Sitting upright on the back of everything unstable I will destroy certainties in the name of chance!]

This woman rejects male implements of violence and domination, while she also defies the masculine conceptualization of woman as passive and inactive. At the same time she contradicts feminist observations regarding the aversion to verticality among women writers.36 Champourcin, like other Spanish women poets of her day, assimilated imagery associated with the masculine into a generalized expression of freedom that can be read as a desire for liberation from traditional discourse, social restraint, and artistic limitation. De la Torre portrays the female athlete as much more timid and tentative than Champourcin. Her nocturnal bather easily wades into the absolutely motionless sea: Mis pies descalzos, de plata. La orilla muerta del mar en la playa, sobre el sudario de arena mojada. (1989, 65) [My bare, silver feet The dead seashore on the shroud of the wet sand.]

More notable is her rendering of the observed masculine other, who in contrast to the female speaker is a figure of action. He begins with frenetic motion: ‘‘Estaba sobre la playa / en una carrera loca’’ [He was in a frenetic race along the beach], and then lies on the sand as a clean, linear presence: ‘‘Estaba limpio y desnudo [. . .] / y era toda su presencia / una recta indefinida’’ (89–90) [He was clean and nude . . . /

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his whole presence was / an undefined straight line]. She is explicit in her adoration of the male athlete in the poem beginning Te querı´a por tu palabra inu´til, fuerte muchacho atle´tico como un mundo desnudo y trazado de nervios. (90) [I loved you for your useless word, a strong, athletic youth like a nude world and outlined by nerves.]

He is a young boy, rather than a man. He exudes youth, strength, and self-absorption. She wishes he would have won her over by overcoming her resistance—‘‘tu´ hubieras sido vencedor / de mi acero’’ (91) [you could have been the conqueror / of my steel]—but he remains a ‘‘proa valiente’’ [valiant prow], a valiant guide and an unattainable object of desire. Her desire expresses itself in terms of an urge to be possessed, not to possess. Despite this traditional portrayal of woman as the modest maiden who awaits and dreams of love, she stands out among her female contemporaries for having her female ‘‘I’’ assume the role of spectator of the masculine body. In one poem she admires a man’s strong tanned arms with sensorial imagery that enhances the sensuality of her expression: ‘‘tus brazos / morenos, fuertes, seguros / como dos remos, salados!’’ (92) [your arms / tanned, strong, confident / like two oars and salt-covered]. The body De la Torre describes exudes manly qualities, but the female gazer does not extract abstract meanings from it. What she perceives is a physical, living presence. De la Torre’s sensuality does not compare with that of the early twentieth-century women poets of Latin America, but, no matter how guarded her visual rendering of masculine physical beauty, it is exceptional, given the cultural restrictions placed on the female gaze by a culture encumbered by its Arabic past and by the Catholic Church.37 Traditionally Spanish women were neither to speak nor to look. The concept of feminine modesty and purity required that the female gaze be restricted by having eyes hidden, deflected to the side, or cast downward. The direct gaze of the female was associated with cupidity, seduction, or perfidy. Therefore, the female gaze was repre-

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sented in literature by two opposing images: that of demure eyes hidden by a fan or veiled by visillos or the bewitching direct look casting the mal de ojo.38 Within this cultural context, when the female ‘‘I’’ fixes her eyes on the male body and makes it an object of female sensual delight, she alters deep cultural and artistic patterns and challenges notions of gender. Concha Me´ndez is more radical than De la Torre not because of any descriptions of male beauty, but because she shatters the paradigm of the modest, passive female. Her male contemporaries dress their poems in a vanguardist garb that masks traditional thinking that conceives of the male athlete as the active, admirable other and the female as the seductive, compliant other, distant and unapproachable. Me´ndez’s athletes, however, are women who speak in a declarative voice from and about themselves. Sports, for her, involves active participation and constitutes a direct means of self-realization, not an external mechanism for the surrogate completion of the self. Her poems are generated from the perspective not of the gazing ‘‘eye’’ but the performing ‘‘I.’’ Given the importance of sports as a life-affirming experience for Me´ndez, her biography takes on relevance in the creation of a daring poetic persona. Me´ndez defied the conventions regarding proper female behavior. She and her friend the surrealist painter Maruja Mallo made a sport out of their daring challenges to propriety and gender difference. They shared, as Inmaculada de la Fuente puts it, a ‘‘sentido de desparpajo’’ [sense of impudence], an iconoclastic urge to have fun by scandalizing (La Fuente 2002, 448).39 They enjoyed a boundless zest for life that expressed itself in a love for the excitement available in their urban milieu. They walked the city streets, visited the museums, and went to the verbenas, whose crowds and excitement Mallo captured in her paintings. As Susan Kirkpatrick contends, Me´ndez and Mallo appropriated public urban space for themselves and consciously constructed themselves as female counterparts of the flaˆneur (2003, 226–27). They also delighted in scandalizing their elders with what at the time was unbecoming conduct for a ‘‘lady.’’ Me´ndez recounts in her memoirs how they flouted the dress code of the day by parading around Madrid without hats, arousing the ire of her mother and comments from pedestrians (La Fuente 2002, 48). Mallo and Me´ndez rebelled against society by transgressing barriers of gendered behavior that went beyond their scandalous public displays to include an entry into the realm of the arts with a subject matter—sports—considered unfeminine. Sports were a recurring leitmotif in Mallo’s paintings, specifically in the series called Estampas (Printed Pictures). She and Me´ndez participated in sports together and influenced each other’s

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life and work.40 What Kirkpatrick writes about Mallo and sports can be applied to Me´ndez,—that is, that her work reflects the transformation of feminine identity and that she helped develop a connection between modern woman and sports (2003, 232–33). Significant is the frequency with which Me´ndez served in Mallo’s paintings as the prototype for the modern woman—riding a bicycle, carrying a tennis racquet, or wearing a bathing suit on her sturdy, tanned body. Me´ndez was a veritable athlete—a champion swimmer, a skier, and a lover of all sports. Her three months every summer at the beach in San Sebastia´n introduced her to swimming at a very early age. Her whole family swam well; one of her brothers represented Spain at the Paris Olympics, and one of her sisters won national prizes. She saw herself as a champion: ‘‘Yo soy campeona de natacio´n’’ [I am a swimming champion] was her retort to the sea captain’s wife who questioned her crossing to England on a ship, unaccompanied (Resnick 1978, 136). She flaunted her ability to swim. Once in San Sebastia´n, when some fishermen were celebrating on board their boat the festival of the Virgen del Carmen, much to the shock of those who saw her she plunged into the water and swam over to join them in the festivities. She proudly wrote to Garcı´a Lorca that a photographer took her picture and an article in the newspaper called her a brave young lady.41 The press of the day viewed her with amazement and bewilderment. In an interview with her in San Sebastian in 1927, a journalist wrote, ‘‘Conchita Me´ndez es el campeo´n femenino de natacio´n. Tan conocida como simpa´tica. [. . .] Todo interesa a ella como protagonista. Su gran dinamismo—el tı´pico de su generacio´n—no le consiente ser espectadora’’ (Txibirisko 2001, 23). [Conchita Me´ndez is a female swimming champion. As well known as she is nice. . . . She likes to be the center of things. Her dynamism—typical of her generation—does not allow her to be a spectator.] In a more poetic manner, in one of his verbal portraits later collected under the title Espan˜oles de tres mundos (Spaniards from Three Worlds), Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez wrote of Me´ndez: ‘‘[E]ra la nin˜a desarrollada que veı´amos, adolescente, con malla blanca [. . .] la sirenita del mar que sonreı´a secreta a los mocitos en su nicho de cristal, es acuario esmeraldino entre algas, corales y otras conchas; la campeona de natacio´n’’ (1942, 157–58). [She was a developed girl whom we watched, an adolescent with her white swimsuit . . . the mermaid who smiled secretly at the young boys from her glass niche, she is an emerald aquarium among algae, coral, and other conches; the swimming champion.] When her contemporaries wrote of her poetry, they invariably coupled an allusion to athleticism with her name, making ‘‘athlete-poet’’ the distinguishing epithet for her. Dı´ez Canedo called her ‘‘marinera

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y deportiva’’ [seaworthy and sporty], and similarly Rafael CansinosAssens wrote: ‘‘[A]porta al tema marino ese pathos deportivo propio de nuestro tiempo’’ (1930, 4). [She brings to the sea theme that sportive pathos peculiar to our age.] Ce´sar M. Arconada summarized her poetry in terms of her sport activities: ‘‘Concha es como su poesı´a: intre´pida, nadadora, estudiante, cineasta, deportista. Mujer de hoy. Mujer movida, resuelta, decidida, valiente. Sube en aeroplano. Gana concursos de natacio´n. Juega al tenis. [. . .] Ama. Vive. Juega’’ (qtd. in Sa´nchez Rodrı´guez 1994, 172). [Concha is like her poetry: intrepid, swimmer, student, moviemaker, athlete. A woman of today. An active, resolute, determined, bold woman. She goes up in a plane. She wins swimming competitions. She plays tennis. [. . .] She loves, lives, plays.]42 Befuddled by this woman, male critics suffer from what Margaret Persin calls ‘‘attention displacement,’’ the compulsion to disregard her textual body and fixate instead on her physical body.43 Me´ndez epitomized the ‘‘modern woman’’—independent of spirit, defiant of social norms, and passionate about the new cultural trends. Not surprisingly, ‘‘Una mujer moderna’’ (A Modern Woman) is the title of the book of essays published to commemorate the centennial of her birth and the title of some of the individual essays. For Alfonso Sa´nchez Rodrı´guez, the ‘‘modern woman’’ became the ‘‘real woman’’ when she abandoned the avant-garde mode (1994, 133); and for Quance, Me´ndez’s vanguardism was motivated by an ‘‘a´nimo andro´gino’’ [androgynous spirit] that made her reinvent herself in the image of her male companions (1991, 110). More critical is Jose´ Carlos Mainer, who regards Me´ndez’s vanguardism as facile and superficial, and says her poetry is a haphazard compendium of themes of the twenties or outright imitations of her male contemporaries (‘‘Las escritoras’’). Even though Me´ndez’s male colleagues also did not sustain their vanguard spirit beyond the twenties, her excursion into the avant-garde is interpreted as unreal, feigned, or derivative. Part of the reason for this gender-linked contradiction in critical response is the complexity involved in the interpretation of female texts made by phallocentric thought processes, which deny women creative parity with men and disallow any change in the established conception of ‘‘woman.’’ Any woman who does not conform to the set and therefore comfortable image can only be perceived as a deviation, an exception, or an oddity, never a reality or a paradigm for the future. Even Me´ndez’s most supportive critics feel obliged to emphasize that she is an anomaly among women. Luis G. de Valdeavellano affirms that she is ‘‘un tipo de mujer no frecuente todavı´a en el ambiente espan˜ol: independiente, segura de sı´ misma, ambiciosa de nuevos panoramas’’ [a type of woman not frequently found in a Spanish context:

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independent, sure of herself, and striving for new horizons]. In the afterword of her first collection, Inquietudes (1926) (Restlessness), Jose´ Lorenzo states that, because she does not conform to the typical childish woman of the day, she seems ‘‘algo extran˜o y fuera de la o´rbita de nuestro raciocinio’’ [something strange and outside of the sphere of our reasoning]. The product expected by her social class would have been a country-club ‘‘sports woman’’ preoccupied with massages, manicures, and beauty salons, but because she was endowed with a brain and sensibility, she turned to poetry (Me´ndez 1926, 106–07). Although their assessments may not be totally incorrect, by casting her as different from other women they disassociate her from one gender without integrating her into the other. She becomes trapped within an admiration that does not permit her to thrive as a literary figure either of her day or of later annals.44 To free herself from the restrictions imposed by patriarchy, a woman must free herself of the ‘‘feminine,’’ of the behavior associated with her gender; and to be a poet she must also step outside her gender and assume an unexplored identity. Obliged to shatter the prevailing conceptualization of the female, the woman poet becomes the ‘‘new woman,’’ but she still finds herself excluded from the milieu that prides itself on being modern. Although Me´ndez wrote in the vanguard mode, she differed from the male poets of her generation in a significant way. Her ‘‘sportiness’’ was an existential stance, a manner of being. To use Gerardo Diego as a gauge of this difference, we note that, although linked with ultraı´smo, he displayed no real rebelliousness toward society. In the 1920s he settled into a high school teaching job, first in Soria in 1920, then in Gijo´n in 1922, and in Santander in 1931. During this period, Me´ndez, defying all convention, traveled alone and lived briefly, on her own, in London and Buenos Aires. Traveling and sports were the outward expression of a deep-rooted impulse of hers toward adventure and change. For her, life itself was a sport. In an interview given in London and printed in La Gaceta Literaria, she declared: ‘‘Esto de marchar a la ventura, a lo desconocido, con todas las inseguridades, es el mejor de los deportes.’’ [This aspect of dashing out to adventure, to the unknown, with all its insecurities, is the best part of sports.] Voicing the credo of modernity that change is renewal, she continued: ‘‘Las cosas y las gentes se gastan en seguida; y hay que buscar cosas y gentes nuevas. Renovarse y renovarlo todo, ese es el secreto’’ (‘‘Los raids,’’ 1929, 3). [People and things are used up quickly; you have to seek new people and things. Renew yourself and renew everything; that is the secret.] Sports, poetry, and life burst forth from her with spontaneity and selfconfidence: ‘‘Soy amateur, lo mismo del deporte que de la literatura. En los dos campos debute´ con cierto e´xito—no se´ si merecido—. Mi

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caracterı´stica es no haber tenido entrenadores. Todo ha sido en mı´ espontaneidad, y confianza en mı´ misma’’ (qtd. in Iturralde 2001, 34). [I am an amateur, in sports as well as literature. In the two fields I debuted with some success—I don’t know if it was deserved—. My characteristic is not to have had any trainers. Everything in me is spontaneity and self-confidence.] Me´ndez possessed an impassioned urge to live life to its fullest, as the first poem of Inquietudes proclaims: ‘‘tiene mi a´nimo / sed de horizontes. / Tiene mi pluma / sed de cantares [. . .] en mı´ se inician / los avatares’’ (Me´ndez 1926, 5) [my spirit possesses a thirst for horizons. / My pen has / a thirst for songs . . . in me transformations / are begun]. An English critic of the era understood that ‘‘she is not merely crying at the moon; she is preparing to go there in an autogiro. If you deny her that, she will plant a beanstalk which her enthusiasm will urge up to heaven. And if you cut down her beanstalk, she will sprout wings and be gone. You cannot stop Concha Mendez’’ (Richardson 1935, 239). No other Spanish poet—male or female—exemplified the ‘‘Roaring Twenties’’ as Me´ndez did. She personified modernity in its definition of youthfulness, enthusiasm for change, love of movement, and dynamic self-assurance. Sports is studied here with regard to Me´ndez on both a biographical and textual level, not to minimize the poetic substance of her work but to underscore the breadth of the avant-garde force in her. Her poetry, like that of any poet, is a creation, a transference of many empirical elements into language, a fabrication that employs a particular discourse to project a distinctive characterization of human existence. Her lived experience served as an impetus for her discursive energy and colored her configuration of the sports figure. The athletes in her poems are predominately females who speak in the first person, in the present, and with pride. Sometimes a third-person point of view is used, as in her poems that register the excitement of boat races. References to the colors of the flags imply competition and pageantry; and the repetition of action verbs connotes the rapid movement of the racing canoes: Corre ligera, ligera. Al viento marino va ondeando su bandera. Sobre la bandeja azul salta, salta, salta y vuela. (Me´ndez 1938, 77)

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[It runs swiftly, swiftly. It is waving its flag in the sea wind. Over the blue platter it jumps, it jumps, it jumps and flies.]

In another poem, it is sailboats that race with their banners aglow in the morning sun and with their sailors standing out like ‘‘gymnasts among the sails.’’ Metaphorically transformed into automobiles, the boats acquire the speed linked to modern technology and necessary for victory: ‘‘Automo´viles marinos, / rizan su estela de espuma’’ (90) [Nautical automobiles, / they curl their foamy wake ]. The poetic ‘‘I,’’ like these sailboats, generates motion, fast-paced action, and thrilling emotions. Me´ndez’s poetic persona is not the spectator of action but a performer, an actor on the stage of life and, furthermore, a figure in control of the world around her, victorious and animated. She portrays herself as ‘‘captain’’ of a sleigh as well as of a merchant ship; she fancies herself a watchtower sentinel; and she wants to sign her name as king. This bold speaker does not merely intrude upon masculine space; she moves through it, with confidence, both horizontally and vertically.45 Her sailor persona dashes out to sea in anticipation of the freedom it promises: ‘‘¡Vamos a la mar! / ¡Vamos en busca / de su soledad! (Me´ndez 1926, 97) [Let’s go out to sea! / Let’s go out in search / of its solitude!]. In another poem, the sailor figure finds herself on the high bridge in command: Subida al palo trinquete, ban˜ada en viento marino. Mi alma, moreno grumete. (Me´ndez 1930, 49) [Atop the foremast bathed in the sea breeze. My soul, a tanned cabin boy.]

This outspread occupation of outdoor space contests the marginalization from power and the exclusion from public space imposed upon women by patriarchal gender ideologies. Focusing on Me´ndez’s utilization of the body, Margaret Persin discovers examples in which the poet challenges the concept of ‘‘docile bodies’’ that Foucault posited and concludes that Me´ndez does not merely establish ‘‘the possibility of her existence and viability in public rather than domestic domain,’’

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she offers a different positionality (1997b, 193). One of the ways Me´ndez undermines the concept of the ‘‘docile’’ female body is through sports. By appropriating sports, her female speakers divest this badge of masculinity of its sexual exclusivity. This opens room for her female athletes to be strong, well-trained, and admirable: En el Estadio me entreno al disco y la jabalina. Al verme jugar, sonrı´en las aguas de la piscina (Me´ndez 1930, 137) [In the stadium I train in discus and javelin Seeing me play, the water of the swimming pool smiles]

Swimming and skating or skiing are the two types of sports Me´ndez poeticizes. Unlike her male contemporaries, for her sports do not signify either male heroics or female seductiveness, but rather they convey a joyous sense of movement with all its corollaries of speed, expansiveness, urgency, and excitement. The poem ‘‘Club Alpino’’ (Alpine Club) captures these phenomena with a series of disjointed, juxtaposed images that convey successive actions: the arrival of the skiers at the club, their congregation in their Nordic attire before they leave, and their departure to the slopes. Although ‘‘patinadores’’ means ‘‘skaters,’’ the word doubles as ‘‘skiers.’’ As the skiers disappear in the snow, all they leave behind are the tracks of their skis: Los patinadores se alejan del Club Caminos de nieve bajo un cielo gris. Caminos de nieve —estelas de skis. (Me´ndez 1928, 65) [The skiers leave the Club Paths of snow beneath a gray sky. Paths of snow —the wakes of the skis.]

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The urgency with which Me´ndez’s poetic speaker goes up and down the ski slopes is clearly seen in ‘‘Apuesta’’ (Bet). She proposes a bet to see who goes down the slopes first: ¡Vamos, a los ventisqueros! ¡Haremos una carrera, a ver quien llega primero! (Me´ndez 1926, 27) [Let’s go, to the snowdrifts! We will race to see who gets there first!]

In two other poems from the same collection—‘‘Los patinadores’’ and ‘‘La patinadora’’—the skier/skaters rush down the mountainside in a surge of kinetic delight that fuses them with nature, in the first poem with the snow, and in the second with the roar of the wind. The thing that effects this fusion is an article of female clothing. In the first poem, a white scarf falls in the snow and in all its whiteness returns to its rightful element: ‘‘y alla´ quedo´ hecha nieve / que vuelve a su elemento’’ (1926, 37) [and there its rested turned into snow / it returns to its element] and in the second poem, the graceful dancerlike skater carries the wind in the pleats of her skirt: ‘‘el rumor de las corrientes, / lleva en su falda / plisada / hecha ritmos / hecha pliegues’’ (68) [she carries the sound of the currents / in her pleated skirts / turned into rhythms, / turned into folds]. In an additional ski poem, ‘‘Patinadores’’ (Skiers), from Canciones de mar y tierra (Songs of the Sea and the Earth), the poetic speaker again urges speed and flight through skiing: ‘‘¡Seguidme, patinadores, [. . .] por vertientes y llanuras / volando con los skis!’’ (1930, 36) [Skiers, follow me . . . along the slopes and plains / flying with your skis!]. Noteworthy is not only her placement of herself at the head of the pack, but also her sense of personal wholeness: ‘‘que llevo el alma y el traje / encendidos de colores’’ (36) [for my soul and my suit / are ablaze with colors]. This union of the inner and outer self, the spirit and the body, is achieved through sports and clothing. Dress and clothing have a long history as a marker of gender and a means of communication. Differentiation in clothing has served to identify the sex roles of women and both to restrict their bodies in accord with patriarchal moral codes and to display them for the plea-

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sure of the masculine gaze. Sandra M. Gilbert has shown that costume imagery is radically revisionary for the female modernist because she struggles to define a gender-free reality, ‘‘an ontological essence so pure, so free that ‘it’ can ‘inhabit’ any self, any costume’’ (1982, 196). Sports played an important role in women’s freedom to ‘‘inhabit’’ any costume and helped free women’s body from claustrophobic clothing. Me´ndez employs short skirts as a metonym for the freed female body. The physical freedom required by sports is transferred in ‘‘Patinadores’’ to the inner being of the skier. Her soul and her clothing are fused in a shared excitement expressed with the phrase ‘‘encendidos de colores,’’ in which the descriptive and symbolic meaning are likewise consolidated. Swimming, the sport at which Me´ndez excelled, affords the full expression of freedom of body and spirit. This sport, like the others in her poetry, looms as an activity of adventure, movement, and excitement. In her poem ‘‘Natacio´n’’ (Swimming), swimming is depicted like the boat races she poeticizes, as a public spectacle of rapid movement, fierce competition, and bodily strength: Y el mu´sculo en contracciones deportivas. Ritmo; ritmo de brazo y he´lices. Ya, el vencedor, los vencedores —laureles sin laureles—. (Me´ndez 1928, 102) [And the muscle in athletic contractions. Rhythm, rhythm of arm and helices Already, the victor, the vanquished —laurels without laurels.]

The one-syllable line ‘‘Ya’’ abruptly breaks the stanza in two parts, each part containing two lines, which in turn repeat a bipartite structure. This punctuated repetition simulates, as the verses themselves proclaim, the mechanical rhythm of the swimmer. The propeller-like arms in this poem become oars in the poem ‘‘Nadadora’’ (Swimmer): ‘‘Mis brazos: / los remos. / La quilla: / mi cuerpo’’ (1928, 31) [My

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arms: / the oars. / The keel: / my body]. In stark contrast to the traditional image of woman as soft and fragile, as serene Madonna or lithesome maid, Me´ndez’s swimmers are sturdy machines. Even if her swimmer is compared to a dancer, she is an acrobatic dancer, a figure in perpetual motion: Salteando olas torsos radiantes en lı´ricas danzas y acrobacias Aquella danzarina del ban˜ador verde . . . Aquel gimnasta . . . (Me´ndez 1928, 106) [Beaming torsos jumping waves in lyrical dances and acrobatics That dancer in the green bathing suit . . . That gymnast . . .]

Because sports helped liberate women’s bodies and made it possible for them to intrude into a proverbial masculine preserve, the theretofore impervious balance of power between the sexes shifted slightly. Me´ndez capitalized on this shift to create bold, athletic, and self-affirming protagonists who swim and ski or skate with physical dexterity and unabashed independence.

Poetry as Sport Concha Me´ndez ends her poem ‘‘Nadadora,’’ in Surtidor (Fountain) with these lines: ‘‘Si fuera sirena, / mis cantos / serı´an mis versos’’ (1928, 31) [If I were a mermaid, / my songs / would be my verses]; and in the poem ‘‘Tu´ y yo’’ (You and I) in Canciones de mar y tierra, she declares ‘‘Loca por los altamares /—patinadora o sirena—/ enarbolando cantares’’ (1930, 128) [Fanatical about the high sea /—skier or mermaid—/ brandishing ballads]. She sets up a correlation between sport, the sea, and poetry—the three areas that signify liberating adventure for her. Other vanguardist poets also see a correspondence

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between poetry and sport, a correspondence that goes beyond the use of sport as a metaphorical vehicle or a thematic focus to encompass the broader sphere of poetic discourse, linguistic structure, and aesthetic principle. Just as European society in general after World War I welcomed sports as wholesome and embraced playful diversion as sociably defensible, in literature the sickly, Bohemian, and negative demeanor was abandoned in favor of what Juan Cano Ballesta saw as the bourgeois ideals: vigor, health, and happiness (1981, 66). To suggest that poetry and sport coincide in more than this general participation in the zeitgeist of the twenties is a risky proposal that can only be pursued on the condition that there be an acceptance of loose, imprecise comparisons and an awareness that any interconnection will always be one of shared ideals more than of material similarities. The comparison between literature and other art forms calls for the suspension of belief—the belief in the differences among art forms, in the uniqueness of each one, and in the distinction between reality and expectation. Lessing argued forcefully that the visual and verbal arts could not be compared, because the first were spatial and the second, temporal. However, the ancient technique of ekphrasis has long brought these two artistic realms in contact, and in modern times it has exceeded the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work to become what Mary Ann Caws called ‘‘stressful’’ ‘‘interartistic translations.’’ A motivating impulse behind much of avant-garde literature was to amalgamate art forms and thereby defy truths, truisms, and traditions. After quoting a poem by Guillermo de Torre on the cubist Juan Gris, John Crispin concludes that poetry and painting shared the same ideals: ‘‘no-referencialidad (poesı´a pura, pintura pura); concisio´n; yuxtaposicio´n de planos (o de meta´foras) o deformacio´n de las perspectivas a trave´s de un concepto imaginativo’’ (2002, 38) [nonreferentiality (pure poetry, pure painting); conciseness, juxtaposition of planes (or metaphors), or the deformation of perspectives through an imaginative concept]. Of course, any correlation between the verbal and plastic arts is compromised by their inarguable differences. Even though avant-garde poetry, especially in its ultraı´sta manifestations, came the closest to assuming painterly qualities when it played with typography, and both poetry and painting are artistic expressions, their shared qualities have more to do with similar ideals than with genuine technique or style. If this is the case for two art forms, then it is even more obvious in the case of poetry and sport, which belong to two disparate and ostensibly contradictory realms of human activities. The only way they can be compared is in the broadest and most general terms in relation to the underlying motivations or expressed goals. Within these narrow parameters, the comparison still ends up being

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more metaphorical than literal. Nevertheless, the fact that any correlation, however oblique, can be made between the poetry of the twenties and sports exposes the underlying ludic quality of this poetry and the driving desire of avant-garde poets to exceed the limits of literary tradition, genre design, and cultural compartmentalization. Literature is the dynamic interplay between selection and organization—between what Aristotle termed inventio and deposito and the formalists called the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic. Therefore, what distinguishes writers is how they arrange what they choose to use. The vanguardist poets chose sports as a referent and as a structuring model for their creative impulses. In sports they perceived the freedom, the spectacle, and the nontranscendence to which they aspired. Releasing themselves from the hold of the established aesthetics and disregarding the socioeconomic problems of their day, they ‘‘played’’ with poetry instead of seeking ethical meanings or a social impact. Play, Roger Caillois writes, is an occasion of pure waste (1979, 5). However, unlike the proponents of ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ who also wanted to escape the banality of reality, the vanguard poets did not want to produce a superior object of art; they even professed to be seeking an antiart. What set the vanguard spirit apart from former aesthetic practices was its shift in the function of poetry from the production of a poem to the process of poetry writing. What energized them was the thrill of creation, the discovery of new potentials in language, and the affirmation of vitality. For them vitality signified life, life conceived as a triumph of vigor over stagnation, of activity over stasis, and of youthful impetuosity over mature sobriety. All these preferred states imply movement, and movement, for them, was best exemplified in sports. Games, sports, and play allow appreciable freedom within a set of fixed but freely accepted rules. Play proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space, and it promotes the formation of social groups that tend to surround themselves with secrecy or to stress their difference from the common world (Huizinga 1970), but avant-garde poets chose to see the liberating rather than the binding elements of games and the individualizing rather than communal function of sport. Games of all sorts, especially sports, produce a release of tension through an immersion in a realm different from ordinary life. Whether they were the ultraı´stas, who sought an original world of their own creation built with metaphors, or the surrealists, who delved into the world of the psyche and dreams, the poets of the twenties coincided in their rejection of common reality. Their compulsive drive for freedom and experimentation fed their deluded disregard for the fact that writing always occurs within a linguistic system based on certain expectations and conventions. Anthony Leo Geist recognized

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this escapist urge. He wrote that because poetry of the period divested itself of any ethical function and social responsibility, the poet tends to isolate himself from the world and participate ‘‘en un juego cuyas reglas u´nicamente conoce e´l y sus compan˜eros. El artista quiere ser como un acro´bata o un prestidigitador’’ (1980, 49) [in a game whose rules only he and his companions know. The artist wants to be an acrobat or a magician]. Rather than the acrobat, Guillermo de Torre opts for the archer as the apt metaphor for the new poet. In July 1920 in the magazine Grecia he wrote: ‘‘El arte antiguo era un arquero que apuntaba y cobraba la pieza. El Arte Moderno se contentaba con disparar sin importarle el blanco. [. . .] Nosotros no llegamos a disparar: nos contentamos con la intencio´n, con el adema´n.’’ [Ancient art was an archer who aimed at and retrieved his prey. Modern Art contents itself with shooting without any interest in the target. . . . We don’t even shoot: we are content with the intention, with the gesture.] Poetry for them is sport; pure gesture: random, experimental, and without purpose. The vanguardists’ equation between poetry and sport is predicated on their own particular interpretation, an interpretation that concentrates on sports’ qualities of boldness and power and not their organized and rule-bound nature. Pedro Raida in an issue of Grecia writes of the ‘‘modernos atletas del canto’’ [modern athletes of song]. Overlooking the possibility of the female athlete, he lists the qualities of the new youthful, ‘‘athletic’’ poets in terms of the standards for masculinity: boldness (‘‘Audacia fervorosa’’), mental fortitude (‘‘cerebral intrepidez’’), and virility through victory (‘‘virilidad roma´ntica, / constancia por la victoria’’). Actual athletes also found this equation plausible. When asked in an interview published in La Gaceta Literaria on December 15, 1927 what he thought of literature, the soccer player Fe´lix Pe´rez replied, ‘‘La considero como algo superior, algo bello. Mi mayor ideal serı´a saber combinar las letras con la facilidad que, a veces, combino y juego el balo´n de mis partidos [. . .] el deporte y la literatura pueden ser compatibles.’’ [I consider it to be something superior, something beautiful. My greatest ideal would be to throw around letters with the ease that sometimes I throw around and play the ball in my matches . . . sports and literature can be compatible.] In another issue of La Gaceta Literaria (April 1, 1927), an effusive description of sport on the occasion of the Olympics in Antwerp resonates with many of the same idealistic concepts that the avant-garde poets sought—innovation, modernity, youthfulness, vigor, and a sense of material existence: Descubrir, conocer, dominar el u´ltimo hallazgo de la civilizacio´n, la ma´s maravillosa ma´quina: el cuerpo humano. Colmar la laguna de treinta sig-

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los. Sentirse joven y potente, ingenuo como en la aurora del mundo; sacudir el lastre de los prejuicios y el de las inquietudes decadentes; encarnar una fuerza que se inicia y ha de desarrollarse irresistible como fuerza que es de la Naturaleza. Sport. (Reparaz 1927, 6) [To discover, know, control the latest discovery of civilization, the most marvelous machine: the human body. To span the gap of thirty centuries. To feel young and powerful, just like the dawn of the world, to shake off the burden of prejudices and decadent restlessness, to be a force that is just beginning and will develop irresistibly as a force that comes from Nature. Sport.]

For the athlete and the poet, sport became virtually a philosophy of life centered on liberation from worldly and past constraints, an adventure in progress, and movement through space. Sport is only one facet of the broader ludic spirit that dominated a great deal of poetry in the twenties. The sportive or, more broadly, ludic quality can be seen in the existential disposition of poets who viewed both life and art as play. In 1928 Gerardo Diego declared: ‘‘Juguemos a hacer arte como el nin˜o juega a hacer vida’’ (qtd. in Bernal 1994, 123). [Let’s play at making art as a child plays at making life]. In his poem ‘‘Salto del trampolı´n’’ (Trampoline Jump), Diego characterizes his verses as leaps on a trampoline: ‘‘Salto del trampolı´n. / De la rima en la rama / brincar hasta el confı´n / de un nuevo panorama’’ (1989, 63). [Trampoline jump. / From rhyme in the branch / to jump to the end / of a new panorama.] Bernal alludes to a number of Diego’s poems that project this childlike enthusiasm for play or that focus on games of chance. However, there are also stylistic techniques in Diego’s and others’ poetry that reveal a subliminal emulation of sport with language. These mechanisms include structural, semantic, and typographical gaps that seem to mimic the leaps common to sports. The rhythm and speed necessary in sport are translated into poetry by the linguistic means available to the poet: lexicon, syntax, phonics, prosody, and imagery. Poets become, in the words of Gallego Morell, gymnasts of language: ‘‘Se somete el lenguaje a una gimnasia; se piensa en la gimnasia como una literatura. [. . .] La poesı´a adquiere ritmo de ve´rtigo, se rodea el verso de espejos para que multiplique la imagen y se acelera el tempo de su recitado o lectura’’ (1969, 108). [Language is submitted to gymnastics, gymnastics is considered literature. . . . Poetry acquires the rhythm of vertigo, the line surrounds itself with mirrors to multiply the image, and accelerates the time of its recitation or reading.] More than speed as a theme, what is created in the poem is the sensation of speed. This notion of the concordance between

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poet and athlete in their intelligent use of rhythm is affirmed by Don Johnson, in his book on American poetry, with this quote by Dave Smith: ‘‘[W]hat a poet must have in the right order is the head, the heart, and the foot. That’s a physical description of a rhythmic and intellectual activity, of poetry’’ (2004, 24). In the poem ‘‘SkatingRing,’’ Guillermo de Torre both reflects upon and reproduces the vertigo of the speaker: Todo gira armo´nica y desarticuladamente El semicı´rculo solar desprendido mi cabeza volante una cabellera rubia un jersey verde exclamaciones guturales en ingle´s aquellos brazos denudos [sic] unas risas Diplopı´as y espejismos pintorescos Al fin la brisa estelar limpia y normaliza mi vista (2000, 115) [Everything whirls harmoniously and disjointedly The loosened solar semicircle my flying head a blond head of hair a green sweater guttural exclamations in English those nude arms laughs Diplopias and picturesque mirages At last the starry breeze cleans and normalizes my eyesight]

While the long sweeping line apes the gliding of the skaters, the fragmented syntax and the visual spaces between words give the impression of the fast-moving figures that blur his vision, at the same time they actualize the meaning of the word ‘‘diplopı´a.’’ Juan Larrea similarly attempted to reproduce elements of sport through meter, syntax, and other techniques of language. Margherita Bernard studies at length the ludic, sportive, and cinematographic elements in all of Larrea’s poetry, but the single poem ‘‘Longchamps,’’ on the sport of horse racing, can exemplify the mental ‘‘gymnastics’’ that Gallego Morell referred to. In this poem inspired by a hippodrome in Paris, Larrea juxtaposes allusions to music, nature, and the racetrack: ‘‘Trenzado del violı´n que nadie escucha. [. . .] Y de sus ma´stiles / la mar desciende ilesa / Arco iris sobre el hipo´dromo’’ (1970, 315) [A crossover step on the violin that no one hears. . . . And from its masts / the sea descends unharmed / A rainbow over the hippodrome]. This overlay of images coalesces unarticulated references to spatial expanse and the implicit need to cover distances. The poetic speaker confesses that he prefers the rainbow (that is, nature) to the jockey: ‘‘a un viaje te prefiero, / y a ti y al jockey que conduce / la lluvia entre sus brazos con el mayor esmero’’ (315) [I prefer you to a trip / and you and the jockey that rides / the rain between his arms with the

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greatest care]. Robert Gurney, who devotes twelve pages to the analysis of this poem, perceives in the rejection of the jockey a personification of the poet’s inner self and anguish. He insists that the poem textualizes the essence of a psychological and spiritual drama overlaid with irony and skepticism. However, viewing the poem from the perspective of sports, the fusion of the jockey with nature can suggest the extreme speed of the horse and the otherworldliness that speed produces. The image of the tattoo, at the end of the fourth stanza, leads to that of the beach, at the beginning of the fifth, and then to hands and to waves and finally to the violin. This rush of imagery transformation generates a mental movement—a mental progression based on the intellectual leaps in play when making conceptual associations. The poem ends with the horse replacing the violin as the instrument of music and the sea voyage is a horse race. The poetic speaker becomes the jockey and the ‘‘you’’ that plays music in the poem. Much like the horse in a race, the mind of the poet runs so fast that one image metamorphoses into another too quickly for the spectator/ reader to make sure connections between them. The agility the ultraı´stas sought was mental and linguistic rather than physical, but they shared with the athlete a love for quick and unexpected movement that creates a stunning (verbal, in their case) spectacle. Like racing horses, their poetry projects a sense of fleeting, rushing energy. Their clipped lines, broken syntax, and lists of objects and images create a textual nervousness, and their bewildering metaphors entrap readers’ attention. This poetry and sports are united by a certain emotional rhythm or by what decades ago Emilio Alarcos Llorach called ‘‘ritmo psı´quico de contenido’’ [psychic rhythm of content] and Gerardo Diego, years after his ultraı´sta experimentation, called ‘‘elasticidad,’’ the adaptation of poetic rhythm to poetic expression (1967, 31). Thus the consideration of the intangible, mental movement experienced in the avantgarde poem as evocative of the visual, physical speed of a horse is meant to show in the most general terms the extent to which movement overtook the poetic imagination of the period. The movement portrayed in Spanish vanguard poetry can constitute a very tenuous parallel based on the shared ideals of poetry and sports or an overt thematic support. Whatever the manifestation of movement in poetry, the dynamic between poetry and sports confirms the broad ludic tendencies of vanguardist poetry: youthfulness, physical vigor, and carefreeness fueled by the impulse for play.

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5 Motors, Machines, and Other Mechanical Marvels THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LAID THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDA-

tion for reshaping human thought and challenging fixed political systems. Ideas on freedom, equality, and fraternity not only fired the imagination of revolutionaries committed to demolishing tyranny, they also became the underlying principles driving the political, economic, and the sociocultural constructs of subsequent centuries. There arose a belief in the ability of the human race to dominate nature and the material world as well as a belief in the possibility of change. This new vision sustained an irrepressible enthusiasm for progress and an undying faith in science. These idealistic concepts manifested themselves in the nineteenth century in the political arena in struggles for national independence, in the struggle for the liberation of slaves, and in the growth of the workers’ movement. The Industrial Revolution changed the dynamic between the rural and urban sectors, created a new class of laborers, and began the redistribution of wealth from the static aristocratic classes to the emerging mobile entrepreneurial classes. Capitalism extended even to the literary sphere as writers, particularly many novelists, were often obliged to produce their works as money-generating products. One of the consequences of this remodeling of social structures during the nineteenth century was the advent of machines and of devices geared to the improvement of material well-being.

The Dawning of the Machine Age The twentieth century saw the flowering of the Machine Age, an era of many new inventions and mechanical marvels that went beyond the experimental object and manufacturing advancement of the previous century to include accessible commodities for private use by increasing numbers of consumers. The quantity of motors, machines, 160

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and other mechanical marvels appearing early in the new century was unprecedented. There were the telephone, the telegraph, and the electric light, the gramophone, the radio and film, the locomotive, cars, helicopters, dirigibles, and airplanes. These products of engineering and manufacturing wizardry enthroned technology as social redeemer and nurtured the popular culture that Ortega derided as a result of the emergence of the ‘‘mass man’’ and that Aldous Huxley satirized as part of a ‘‘brave new world.’’ At the same time, the products of the new age bedazzled many poets of the avant-garde, who saw in them a decisive break with the past, an exhilarating manifestation of speed and motion, and a grand opportunity for ludic pleasure. In the United States, spectacular technological advancement started the country on the path to superpower status. Spain, however, did not enjoy the political power that the United States was rapidly acquiring, nor did it have the same level of industrialization and social progress or a similar ideological orientation. Nevertheless, new sectors of wealth were being born, a certain modernization was taking place, and machines were making a substantial impact on society. The picturesqueness of Spain with its mule-drawn trolleys, gaslights, and women wrapped in shawls was being overshadowed by a much more modern image. As Amando de Miguel notes, Madrid’s Goyaesque qualities were offset by a Europeanized Madrid in the twenties with its electric lights, trolleys, telephones, motorcycles, cars, buses, airplanes, the metro, the tango, and soccer (1995, 182). The capital had been converted from merely the site of the royal court to a veritable metropolis. Barcelona also changed. Guillermo Dı´az-Plaja recalls with fondness this city, where ‘‘los automo´viles renqueantes y apestosos’’ [hobbling and foul-smelling cars] contrasted with the quiet and smooth vehicles they were replacing, and drivers wore fur coats and protective glasses (1977, 268). The growth of the automobile between World War I and 1930 was phenomenal. From a half million cars in the world in 1914, the number grew by 1925 to thirty-five million in the United States alone. The statistics for Spain vary. Pilar Folguera in Vida cotidiana en Madrid (Daily Life in Madrid) says cars had tripled in Madrid from four thousand in 1921 to fourteen thousand in 1929 (1987, 60), but in her essay for Oral History she states that during the twenties private cars tripled in Madrid from 9600 to 22000 (1985, 51).1 Whatever the exact number, the transportation revolution was a reality. Traffic problems increased, car accidents occurred, and city officials tried in vain to teach citizens about traffic lights. The mayor of Madrid ordered drivers as well as pedestrians to stop when the appropriate traffic light was lit, but the madrilen˜os kept disregarding the signals and the mayor’s in-

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structions (Bravo Morata 1985c, 193). Car factories had been established in Spain; and for those who could not afford the exorbitant price of cars, the subway provided rapid transport. Since its inauguration in 1921, the Madrid metro system grew in 1928 to forty-thousand passengers (Folguera 1987, 68). The most awe-inspiring of the new technologies, the one that defied the natural law of gravity and kindled the most fanciful dreams, was the airplane. Robert Wohl said in the first volume of his history of aviation: ‘‘Long dreamt about, enshrined in fable and myth, the miracle of flight, once achieved, opened vistas of further conquests over Nature that excited people’s imagination and appeared to guarantee the coming of a new age’’ (1994, 1). The airplane at first had little or no direct impact on people. The most mechanical of inventions was transformed symbolically into a spiritual creation and perceived by most as an aesthetic event with artistic and moral implications. Although the airplane would of course become an important instrument of war and a commercialized form of transportation, during the first third of the century it remained a prodigious invention and a portent of a grand future. The rapidity of planes advanced the myth of movement and speed that epitomizes modernity. Pilots could be inventors, adventurers, or sportsmen, but they were above all heroes. People believed that flying was a sacred and transcendent calling that justified its cost in lives (Wohl, 1994, 3; and Wohl 2005, 2). It was not uncommon for the pilot to be considered a poet and flying to be identified with poetry. This exaltation of aviation as a noble endeavor and unique achievement expressed itself in Marinetti’s first manifesto, in the first writers inspired by aviation, and in the Hollywood aviation films of the thirties. The advent of the airplane age not only fueled illusions of superiority, but also stirred national pride and patriotism. The United States would come to dominate aviation, but during the years before World War I the French identified themselves and were identified by others as the country of aviation. With a tradition of balloon flight that went back to 1783 and the Montgolfier brothers’ ascent, France was the leader in aeronautics and had heroes such as Alberto Santos-Dumont, Hubert Latham, and Louis Ble´riot. Germany’s Count Zeppelin had shown in 1907 that his giant airships could stay aloft for eight hours and travel at a speed of 220 miles an hour. Mussolini recognized early the political importance of entering the air age.2 With the Charles Lindbergh historic flight across the Atlantic, not only was one of the most enduring celebrities of the twentieth century created, but the United States also began to eclipse all other nations in aviation. Spain joined the leaders of aviation in 1926 with the celebrated

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flight of the 450 horsepower hydroplane the Plus Ultra, which flew from Spain to Argentina. The plane took off the morning of January 22 with a crew of four headed by Ramo´n Franco, the brother of the future dictator Francisco Franco, from Palos de Moguer (the port of Columbus’s departure) and reached the Canary Islands eight hours later. On the twenty-fifth, it flew to the Cape Verde Islands. After decreasing its weight and leaving one crew member behind, it flew on the thirtieth to the Island of Fernando Noronha in twelve hours and forty-five minutes; from there it continued to Pernambuco, Brazil, and finally reached Buenos Aires, where the crew was received by thousands applauding from the streets, balconies, rooftops, and even trees (Bravo Morata 1985b, 133–53).3 According to Gallego Morell, the flight of the Plus Ultra was one of the greatest events of modern Spain and gave rise to the modern concept of ‘‘Hispanidad.’’ It also generated panegyric poems and prose accounts that compared the flight to that of Daedalus (1969, 115–19). The modern marvel that became the most available to Spaniards in their homes during the twenties was the radio. Radio transmission began in Barcelona in early 1924 and later that year in Madrid. Home entertainment was revolutionized. From their own homes ordinary citizens could hear faraway voices and entire concerts. A radio frenzy overtook the country; every household wanted one of the new contraptions. Parlors were crowded with the tangle of cables necessary for the earphones of the first radios. One writer speculates that the radio reconciled quarreling spouses and caused quarrels between content ones (Bravo Morata 1985b, 91). Technology was no longer just a feature of factories that subjected multitudes of workers to tedium, darkness, and danger, but also the means for producing devices that brought wonder, diversion, and freedom to everyone. Lorenzo Dı´az quotes a newspaper of 1924 that said that radio was ‘‘el nuevo paraı´so artificial que ha descubierto la Humanidad a´vida de placeres’’ [the new, artificial paradise discovered by human beings eager for pleasures] and that the addiction to cocaine, morphine, and opium had given way to an addiction to radio (1999, 157). The myriad marvels of technology changed the way people saw themselves, and life itself, particularly as it related to time and space. As Stephen Kern convincingly illustrates, at the turn of the twentieth century the wireless and the telephone, along with cinema, changed the way people thought about and experienced the present, because they replaced a lineal sequence of events with simultaneity (1983, chap. 3). An obsession for speed was fostered by successive awe-inspiring inventions. Even the bicycle amazed, because it was four times faster than walking, and warnings were issued about getting ‘‘bicycle

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face’’ by moving against the wind at top speeds (1983, 111). In addition, there were battleships, passenger ships, and automobiles. Nothing moved faster than electricity, which raced through conduits, powering motors and accelerating a variety of activities including travel, newspaper reporting, factory work, and even the death of criminals, with the advent of the electric chair (114–15). Technology reduced distances and broadened people’s mental as well as physical horizons, allowing them to travel farther and know about more places. Thanks to the airplane a directional shift came about in people’s thinking that affected deep-rooted values associated with the up-down axis. The airplane redirected attention for the low, which is associated with immorality, vulgarity, poverty, and deceit, to the high, the direction of growth and hope, the source of light, and the heavenly abode of the Deity. The airplane not only carried passengers up, it also uplifted them because it raised human consciousness and unified people and nations (241–44). Technology also changed the spirit of art and had an impact on the formulation of the aesthetics of the period. With their insatiable thirst for novelty and experimentation, the vanguardists went beyond the confines of art to search for magical realms of artistic creativity and fell under the spell of technology. As Renato Poggioli wrote in 1962, ‘‘Lo sperimentalismo di tali artisti e` una specie de faustismo estetico, una ricerca dell’El dorado o dell’elisir de lunga vita, della fontana de gioventu` o della pietra filosofale’’ (1962, 155). [The experimentalism by these authors was a kind of Faustian aesthetic, a quest for El Dorado or the elixir of longevity, of the fountain of youth or the philosopher’s stone.] He criticizes the invasion by technology into areas of the spirit into which it had no justification for entering (158). As an initially spontaneous burst of enthusiasm over an understandably impressive array of technological advancements, the reaction of the avant-garde was definitely simplistic and naive. Nevertheless, its embrace of technology and its faith in the power of the machine to save the world and renew the human spirit would become the driving ideology behind much of Western society and its commitment to materialistic progress. The changes taking place in the arts in the first quarter of the twentieth century were too numerous and too complex to be attributed solely to aesthetic factors. For, as Gene H. Bell-Villada confirms, ‘‘This exponential growth in literary, visual and musical technique, and the resultant intensification and ‘thickening’ of each respective medium, is too all-pervasive in Modernist art to be explained solely as an aesthetic phenomenon. . . . Modernist technique has its origins in the implacable, hitherto unprecedented growth of product technique

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that characterizes the encompassing industrial-capitalist society’’ (1996, 130). Peter Bu¨rger and Andreas Huyssen have demonstrated that members of the avant-garde, especially in the visual arts, crossed what Huyssen calls the ‘‘Great Divide,’’ the boundary between art and life. Huyssen sees in the application of the technological media to art the distinguishing feature that sets the avant-garde apart from the aestheticist modernism (1986, x). This distinction is undeniable but not absolute. The avant-garde, to be sure, foregrounded the products of capitalist society and even accepted the bourgeois ethos of relentless innovations as the prescribed ontological stance. However, the avantgarde’s goal was the thrill of creation, not material comfort, and defiant activity, not passive acceptance of new norms. Huyssen himself recognized that much of the representation of technology in art was a critique of ‘‘the invasion of capitalism’s technological instrumentality into the fabric of everyday life, even into the human body’’ (11). The fact that the images that artists were using to attack capitalist visions were also used in totalitarian contexts to define the function of the individual within the whole illustrates that the machine was an ambivalent symbol of both liberation and enslavement. At the same time it subjugated humanity in new ways, it was coming to signify the triumph of movement over stasis, of the future over the past, and of individual freedom over physical limitations. Poetry criticized the economic substructures of society less than the novel and engaged less than the visual arts with bourgeois society. Although modernism generally continued the spiritual alienation from bourgeois banality projected by the romantics, its avant-garde phase felt a certain attraction to the products of middle-class materialism. However, the fondness for the new repertoire of machine themes and images did not correspond to an urge to mingle with the bourgeois masses. Poetry was still considered an autonomous domain from which to reach a higher realm and fabricate an original universe. Spanish poetry was written for the ‘‘inmensa minorı´a’’ [immense minority] by the poet, who was essentially a lone inventor of a linguistic reality. During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, modernization and industrial development were pursued as a political program by the bourgeoisie and certain sectors of the Left, but even then it was pursued as part of a capitalist strategy to dominate the means of production more than as a step forward needed for the nation to overcome its historical backwardness (Pino 2004, 151). It was not until the beginning of the thirties that writers began to lose their fascination with vanguardism and to consider more human and social concerns. Consequently, the twenties represent both a political hiatus from social confrontations and a break from the seriousness of art.

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Vanguardists Celebrate the Machine For a short period Spanish poets engaged in what C. B. Morris has called the ‘‘pursuit of mirth.’’ In his chapter ‘‘The Game of Poetry,’’ he connects the gaiety of the era and the capers and general ebullience of the poets of 1920 to 1930 to their poetry inspired by the wonders of the car, the airplane, the telephone, the radio, and cinema. For him, not only Marinetti but also Tristan Tzara anticipate the restless vitality and the adoration of dynamism and speed that would manifest themselves in Spanish poetry of the twenties, especially in that labeled ultraı´smo.4 However, Morris is highly critical of ultraı´sta poetry, using epithets like ‘‘contrived,’’ ‘‘meaningless,’’ ‘‘incoherent,’’ and ‘‘failed.’’ He condemns the movement’s championing of the machine and mechanical vigor as ‘‘a stillborn enthusiasm and a sterile creed requiring its devotees to celebrate the same things and repeat the same words, which hardened into a rhetoric so predictable that it is difficult to distinguish one ultraı´sta poet from another’’ (1969, 87). Unwittingly, Morris’s comments point to two fundamental properties of the machine—repetitiveness and reproducibility—that colored the technical execution of avant-garde works, changed the nature of art in the rest of the twentieth century, and transformed the underpinnings of modern social thought.5 Avant-garde poetry in Spain, as elsewhere, was obsessive in its engagement with the machine.6 The intensity of its fascination did not last, for euphoria cannot be sustained; emotional elation can only exist in contrast to sentiments of a lower register. As already stressed in this study, vanguardism in Spain corresponds to a brief moment of unbridled enthusiasm for movement, speed, and action; of youthful ebullience; and of innocent confidence in the power of art. The cultural referents Spanish vanguard poets incorporated into their poems capture today’s critics’ attention primarily for their symbolization of a changing society and their testimony to individual poets’ drive to uniqueness. Viewed objectively, this poetry reveals fondness more for shock value than for elaboration, for technique than for substance, and for the clever and the temporary than for the deep and lasting. John Crispin is almost as blunt as Morris in his critique of vanguardism: ‘‘Frente a la poesı´a, la crı´tica se cansa pronto de la obsesio´n por temas maquinı´sticos. Era decepcionante su falta de transcendencia, en provisionalidad y puerilidad de la mayorı´a de sus temas’’ (2002, 53). [Reading this poetry, critics tire quickly of the obsession for machine themes. Its lack of transcendence was disappointing for its provisionality and the puerility of the majority of its themes.] The essence of modernity, change inevitably and paradoxically becomes its own

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opposite: a constant, a convention, and a constriction. Furthermore, by celebrating nontranscendence, the vanguardists deny themselves the transcendence expected of art. Vanguard poetry was filled with an aura of daydreaming. It did not take into account the danger, destruction, and dehumanization that machines are capable of inflicting. The poems fixated on the positive possibilities of technology: dynamism, freedom, speed of travel and communication, and unusual forms of diversion. However, the exigencies of a society about to oust the monarch in favor of a republic soon awoke the artist’s conscious mind from the dream. It must be remembered in passing that intellectuals, artists, and writers may have demonstrated great enthusiasm for the marvels of the machine, but in a country still dependent primarily on agriculture, the farmer still toiled with bent back and without mechanized tools. Factory workers labored in factories that made products to be enjoyed by the new capitalists and the old idle classes. Government policy only made matters worse, as this anonymous statement printed on October 1, 1931, under the title ‘‘Antimaquinismo’’ in La Gaceta Literaria, no. 115 reveals: ‘‘Me cuentan algunos agricultores que este an˜o han desaparecido de los campos espan˜oles los pocos sistemas meca´nicos de cultivo que lentamente se habı´an conquistado frente a la rutina tradicional del campesino ibe´rico. Este antimaquinismo ha sido dictado por el gobierno para solucionar el paro obrero, y dar manos en vez de ma´quinas.’’ [Some farmers tell me that this year the few mechanical farming techniques that had slowly taken over the traditional routine of the Iberian peasant have disappeared from the Spanish fields. This antitechnology move has been dictated by the government to solve worker unemployment, and to use hands instead of machines.] In contrast to the struggles of the industrial and agricultural masses, the privileged few reveled in the benefits of modern inventions that increased their comfort and thrills. Guillermo Dı´az-Plaja reports that only a few families had access to the new marvels; only grand households had central heating, few buildings had elevators, and the first electric bulb emitted feeble light (1977, 266). Even at that, the new machines were at first inadequate. The first cars were jolty and dirty, but an image of freedom was projected by young figures like Bun˜uel, Mallo, or Me´ndez whizzing along the roadways of Madrid. Guillermo Dı´az-Plaja remembers the first plane rides as horrible—noisy, shaky, and scary (1977, 269)—but this did not, however, keep poets from extolling the marvels of the machine. Although many Spanish poets of the twenties displayed vanguardist features or wrote an occasional poem with avant-garde elements, the ultraı´stas were the only ones who as a group espoused literary revolu-

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tion in manifestos. They adhered to the cult of speed, danger, and risk that the futurists advocated, the decomposition of reality that cubists brought about, the iconoclasm that motivated the dadaists, and the playing with optical effects of collages. The ultraı´stas not only wrote about the machine in their poetry, but also adapted to poetry the values that the machine represented: innovation, experimentation, and objectification. Among the vanguardist manifestos circulated between 1910 and 1931 that Jaime Brihuega anthologized, we find an open admission that the elements of modernity, the symbols of the machine, mechanical power, and all the new forces of Western civilization had penetrated numerous sectors of the new aesthetic, furnishing themes, ideas, and images to poetry and the plastic arts (1982, 213). In 1925 Guillermo de Torre wrote that the relationship between the machine and the new poetry was intense: ‘‘[L]as ma´quinas, su proyeccio´n este´tica, no son como varios pretenden, efectos de una sensibilidad, sino causa inequı´voca, palmaria y beneficiosa de esta misma sensibilidad’’ (1965/1971, 85) [Machines, their aesthetic projections, are not, as some allege, the effects of a sensibility, but the beneficial, obvious, and unequivocal cause of that very sensibility]. The connection between modernism and the machine has long been recognized. Hugo Friedrich explained that Baudelaire already saw modernity as a relationship between poetry and technology that could be both positive and negative. Juan Cano Ballesta, in his book on the repercussions of the machine and mechanization on Spanish letters between 1900 and 1933, showed that the enthusiasm for machines and industrial innovation had its roots in authors like Pı´o Baroja. For Cano Ballesta, the singers of the machine replaced the neurotic, amoral bohemians with ‘‘a jubilant attitude’’ and ‘‘los grandes ideales burgueses: vigoroso, sano, alegre y constructivo’’ (1981, 66) [the grand bourgeois ideals: vigorous, healthy, happy, and constructive]. Anthony Leo Geist recognized that the same cult of youth and physical strength that projected itself in a poetic interest in sports also drove poets toward the machinery theme with all its sexual symbolism: ‘‘El culto de la velocidad es otra expresio´n de la virilidad, pues el simbolismo fa´lico de estos vehı´culos es obvio. Es como si el poema fuera un objeto nuevo y potente, igual que los aviones y automo´viles que pueblan la poesı´a ultraı´sta’’ (1980, 50). [The cult of speed is another expression of virility, since the phallic symbolism of these vehicles is obvious. It is as if the poem were a new and potent object like the planes and cars that fill ultraist poetry.] While the impact of technology on literature has been recognized, as Vı´ctor Fuentes argues, canonical critics have overlooked the social and thematic implications of this phenomenon, preferring instead to focus on aesthetics and formal

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elements (2000, 10–13). What has been lacking has been the examination of Spanish vanguard poetry within a broader cultural context. The machine actualized things that formerly only existed in the imagination or dreams—impressive speed, the spanning of long distances, and above all flight. The machine was seen as ratifying the superiority of man, both as species and gender. In their early moments of unrestrained exuberance over the appearance of so many mechanical marvels, the vanguardists perceived in machines more than a source of new themes and images; they envisioned a new age, a new man, and a new thinking. Jose´ Barrera Lo´pez, in his introduction to Torre’s He´lices, advises the book be read in an ideological manner: ‘‘El libro esta´ inmerso en un contexto que es importante resaltar. Incide en las relaciones Industrial-Ciudad, la explotacio´n social y el canto de un nuevo hombre’’ (2000, 22). [The book is immersed in a context that must be highlighted. It touches on the relationship between industry and the city, on social exploitation, and on the hymn to the new man.] The poems in the book, he believes, embrace a reality of sensorial images attuned to the new phase of revolution (23–24), and their ‘‘Dionysian rhythm of life’’ recalls the joyous hymns of Walt Whitman (24). In his rapturous excitement over the advent of the new age, Torre saw poetic vanguardism as one part of a greater, more far-reaching revolution: ‘‘[T]odo vanguardismo aute´ntico supone un congruente extremismo polı´tico [. . .] equivale a extremismo y antiburguesismo: puentes de una revolucio´n moral’’ (qtd. in Barrera Lo´pez 2000, 22). [All authentic vanguardism implies a congruent political extremism . . . it equals extremism and antibourgeoisism: bridges to a moral revolution.] These initial outbursts of excitement over the positive potential of the machine indicate that poets were looking at a more technologically dependent culture and that culture, in turn, was molding their temperament and the texture of their poems. Even though technology along with urbanization would ultimately alienate the artist through pragmatism and materialism, the vanguard poets heralded the new age with celebratory songs of praise. Disregarding the implications of monotony and tedium in the oscillating rhythm of machines, Alberto Ferna´ndez Ballesteros saw only the exhilaration of perpetual motion, which he attempted to capture in a poem through the accumulation of images of circularity and incessant repetition: ‘‘vaive´n de vaive´n, vaivenes’’ and ‘‘Mece, mece, mece, mece / mecida de maniobra’’ (Mediodı´a (February 1928, 9, in Barrera Lo´pez 1999) [swinging back and forth, swingings / It rocks, it rocks, it rocks, it rocks / rocked by maneuverings]. More straightforward in his defense of the machine and echoing the ‘‘new religion’’ Marinetti preached, Torre proclaims in ‘‘Diagrama mental’’ (Mental Diagram)

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that ‘‘motors sound better than hendecasyllables’’ (2000, 85). For him motors connote optimism, spontaneity, and enlightenment. Like so many of the consciously vanguardist poems, this one resonates with metapoetic statements that make it a literary manifesto and, as the title implies, a call to reconstruct poetic thinking. Poetry, Torre says, is to be found not in mythology, in the lives of saints, or in museums, but in railroad stations and boat docks. What he admires is fugacity: ‘‘Me interesa el momento fugitivo ma´s henchido por su sinte´tico expresivismo coeta´neo’’ (86) [What interests me is the fleeting moment, filled with condensed, everyday expressivity.] Beyond thematic inspiration, he seeks in the machine a transformation of the essence of poetry and humanity. In the manner of cubists, he depicts himself in ‘‘Autorretrato’’ (Self-Portrait) as a composite of cables and ions born under of the sign of the helix and the vertex. The union between poem and machine is completed in the title ‘‘Poema manufacturado’’ (Manufactured Poem). This poem extols the ‘‘cerebral, rhythmic, and asexual’’ machine over the ‘‘neurotic, sentimental, and sensual’’ rose that withers and dies. The poetic speaker’s preference points to the victory not only of the present over the past and the man-made object over the natural creation, but of life over death—a triumph he equates with the dominion of the masculine over the feminine: Y la ma´quina el motor polirrı´tmico de lı´neas musculosas se estremece en un espasmo impulsor y diversifica su polen en todas las vaginas de la fa´brica (Torre 2000, 93) [And the machine the polyrhythmic motor of muscular lines shivers in a driving spasm and spreads its pollen in all the vaginas of the factory]

Another ultraı´sta sees in the modern machine the realization of the failed aspirations formerly perpetuated only in mythological fantasy. In 1929 Gime´nez Caballero called the airplane the new Trojan horse and a winged horse, and proclaimed its superiority to all former forms of transportation, including the automobile, which for him still had plenty of the romantic carriage along with the ‘‘esquinces y soslayos

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curvilı´neos’’ [swervings and curvings] of the train (1929, 73). Of all the new forms of transportation, only the plane was a match for the new poetry (75). The airplane implied energy, power over nature, and vertigo. Vertigo, the fourth category of play delineated by Roger Caillois, momentarily destroys the stability of perception, transplanting the player to a different level of consciousness. Not yet a carrier of passengers, the plane was only an instrument for daring risk takers, and, as such, it intensified the atmosphere of spectacle and diversion that made those years ‘‘felices.’’ The ultraı´stas were not the only ones who celebrated the machine. In ‘‘La ma´quina (The Labour-saving machinery)’’ Leo´n Felipe extols the virtues of the machine as a divine gift that eliminates housework as an excuse for the neglect of religion. This poem comes from Versos y oraciones (Poems and Prayers), a book of humble verses of simple faith and deep emotion. Drop a star, however, projects a Promethean pose and a dream for a more just world. Life is called a slot machine, a machine waiting for the coin that will set it into motion, and a jukebox ready to play the music of tomorrow. Seeing the machine as a metaphor of rebirth and renewal, Leo´n Felipe uses it as the material image for his utopian dream of the creation of heaven on earth. In ‘‘Guı´a estival del paraı´so’’ (Summer Guide of Paradise), by Rafael Alberti, the ethical impulse of Leo´n Felipe cedes to a celebratory one. Alberti maps on the sky a disparate array of new mechanical marvels and of festive, carnivalesque scenes with trains, boats, cars, trams, and airplanes, along with bars, hotels, alcohol, player pianos, and gymnasts. As Solita Salinas de Marichal observes, everything in this new paradise is subordinated to the new criterion of record setting and speed achieved by the mechanical inventions that brought dominion over time and space (1968, 167). With the old myths and the established order discarded, in this new paradise man himself is mechanized. The poetic speaker sees himself as the messenger, the ‘‘electric’’ voice of the new life (168). The dynamic, youthful verve with which mythological image clashes with the mechanical world imparts in Cal y canto an irreverent, disconcerting, and humorous quality to many of its poems. However, the apparently flippant joking is often tinged with bitter irony, and Alberti’s poetic, mechanized world can be filled with hostility and destruction.7 Alberti attaches any negative meanings—harshness, hardness, and materiality—regarding the machine to woman. In ‘‘Romeo y Julieta,’’ the female form is dehumanized, rendered as a skeleton made of nickel and with two silver gramophones for lungs. Even the rose, the perennial symbol for love, is now a ‘‘rosa meca´nica’’ [mechanical rose]. Following the lead of the ultraı´stas and the futurists before them, he

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devalues sentiments though irony and objectification, and he demeans the beloved by turning her into an inanimate machine. These clever poetic transpositions deflate the myth of love and feminine beauty with what seems to be an air of whimsy, but at the same time there emerges an attitude of cutting derision and mischievous misogyny. Pedro Salinas is much less ambiguous in his enthusiasm for the machine. Luis Felipe Vivanco states that at least in his first period he was a poet of the technical advancements and of the new ways of life linked to them (1971, 111). Without the elements of absurdity, antithesis, and anguish that Alberti’s poems project, Salinas exudes an unconditional joy toward radiators, heaters, electricity, and cars that bypasses existential considerations for expressions of affection and fantasy. As would be expected, Jorge Guille´n, with his unmitigated optimism in his early poetry for the ‘‘well-made world,’’ celebrates the roar of the machine and the monotonous pistons: ‘‘Fragor. Y se derrumba en un esca´ndalo / De ma´quinas, sin transicio´n mono´tonas. / Se deslizan los e´mbolos. Son suaves’’ (1977, 329). [Roar. And it comes crashing down into a scandalous din / of machines, without a transition, monotonously. / The pistons slide. Softly.]

Machines in Poetry The airplane, as already noted, was the most spectacular of the new mechanical marvels and, unsurprisingly, inspired innumerable hymns between 1918 and 1930. The plane’s wings and capacity for flight made the bird its apt comparison. Jose´ Marı´a Romero strikes an apostrophic pose in ‘‘Cancio´n del aeroplano’’ (Song of the Airplane), commanding the new ‘‘white eagle’’ to soar up to the sky where ‘‘eyes cannot behold you’’ (Fuentes Florido 1989, 283). Isaac del Vando Villar also conceives of the airplane as a bird in his poem to Sonia Delauney. Likewise, Rafael Lasso de la Vega sees planes as birds with wings without feathers that travel through the air swiftly in ‘‘dynamic ecstasy’’ and return to their hangars, which he metaphorically transposes into cages, coops, and cubicles (Fuentes Florido 1989, 187–89). Less commonplace is the equation Elidoro Puche Felices constructs between the airplane and the shark: ‘‘El tiburo´n del aire / que cruzo´ esta man˜ana / por el azul, traı´a de otros cielos / en sus aletas, luminosas algas.’’ (Fuentes Florido 1989, 246) [The shark of the sky / that cut across the blue this morning brought / on its fins luminous algae from other heavens.] This ‘‘shark of steel’’ is no ordinary fish, nor an ordinary bird. It defies the laws of physics his professor taught, writes Antonio M. Cubero in his poem ‘‘El aeroplano’’ (The Airplane). This

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breaking loose from the restrictions that tie humans down is precisely what Cubero admires in one of the very few overtly social statements articulated in Spanish avant-garde poetry: El espacio no esta´ municipalizado. Lejos de los ojos de la policı´a que limita la vida, el alma de las pa´ginas, y neutraliza las diversiones, aniquilosa´ndolas, reducie´ndolas a rumores de sacristı´a. ¡Hombres del aire! . . . . . . . . Ser sonrientes con vuestro destino,—que a cambio de la deliciosa aunque unilateral aventura,—os libra del Hombre de la Acera. Cubero 1919, 6) [Space is not governmentalized. Far from the eyes of the police who limit life, the soul of writing, and neutralize diversions, destroying them, reducing them to sounds of the sacristy. Men of the air! . . . . . . . Smile on your fate—which instead of the delightful albeit unilateral adventure—you free yourself from the Man of the Street.]

Airplanes were both literally and figuratively above it all, aloft on a par with birds and away from governments.8 Planes provided awe-inspiring visual spectacles that stimulated poets’ imaginations. Ce´sar A. Comet sees the shadows of the propellers forming a subtle pattern of lines and arabesques: ‘‘Una red en el suelo / Grandes agujas movibles / bordan sutiles arabescos’’ (Fuentes Florido 1989, 117). [A network on the ground / enormous movable needles / stitch subtle arabesques.] In a similar vein, Guillermo de Torre pictures planes painting spiderwebs across the sky: ‘‘Sobre las / torres aviones trasatla´nticos / se tejen las redes ara´cnidas de los circuitos’’ (2000, 25). [Above the towers, transatlantic planes / weave the arachnidean webs of their course.] More impressive is the effect Torre creates with imagery and typography in ‘‘Reflector.’’ Again the sky displays an ‘‘arachnid weave.’’ The light on the plane’s propeller splices the evening sky like a medieval cutting instrument and sends out an electric charge of light that riddles it. References to bright and

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sharp objects along with words in upper case cut the poem diagonally and vertically discharge linguistic jolts that mimic the invasiveness of the light, while the inclusion of engineering terms lends a cold, scientific overtone to the poem. Pedro Garfias writes an ode to the airplane entitled ‘‘Alocusiones a los hermanos del Ultra’’ (Address to the Brothers of the Ultra). The repeated use of the first-person plural imperative along with the repetition of ‘‘alcemos nuestra frente a las estrellas’’ [let’s raise our foreheads to the stars] creates a hymnal quality and suggests a hope of spiritual transcendence. In fact, the ultimate message is one of renewal; after the eyes are lifted to the sky, the heart beats with a new rhythm. The poet declares the beauty of all that is new and, like Torre, singles out the beacon: La imagen nueva es bella siempre . . . La emocio´n honda es siempre nueva . . . Avivemos la luz del reflector que busca el aeroplano entre la niebla y sobre la colina ma´s lejana (1989, 114) [A new image is always beautiful . . . Deep emotion is always new . . . Let’s make the light of the reflector brighter that searches for the plane amid the mist and over the most distant hill]

The most important tribute to the airplane is found in Torre’s collection He´lices, a compendium of poems dedicated to the exciting new features of the era: cinema, urban merriment, sports, airplanes, and other machines. The airplane held a special significance for this young poet: ‘‘Es difı´cil distinguir a primera vista a los celadores lı´ricos de los hangares, donde zumban los motores de la nueva tendencia poe´tica. [. . .] La labor de Guillermo de Torre y sus correligionarios en la fe exaltada del aeroplano y de la sı´ntesis co´smica expresada en sentencias sin moraleja, denota cierto espı´ritu de colaboracio´n ideal de que esta´bamos muy faltos (Cipriano Rivas, qtd. in Barrera Lo´pez 2000, 35). [It is difficult at first to distinguish the poetic machinists in the hangars, where motors of the new poetic trend roar. . . . The work of Guillermo de Torre and his cohorts of exalted faith in the airplane and in the cosmic syntheses expressed in nonmoralizing affirmations denotes a certain spirit of ideal collaboration that we lacked.] In true ultraı´sta fashion, the book is full of neologisms and scientific terms, eliminations of punctuation, unusual typographical arrangements of

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words, and elliptical syntax, all of which reduce the poems to little more than a series of images or nouns. These are the kinds of composition that moved C. B. Morris to declare, ‘‘The writhing patterns of words with which, suppressing punctuation, he [Torre] tried to create ‘a plastic relief, a visible architecture’—a poetic equivalent of the shapes and structures found in cubist paintings—were a desperate mechanical device which could not conceal the emptiness of a doctrine’’ (1969, 88). The significance of the ultraı´sta poem lies in its gesture, not its substance, and in the theoretic thrust behind its act of creating, not in the lyrical underpinnings of its creations. These poets reveled in the joy of making poetry for poetry’s sake and of living in a world that was opening unimaginable horizons. Consequently, a spirit of ascension and images of verticality permeate He´lices. The entire cosmos is seen in terms of airplanes and electric currents in the poem ‘‘Circuito’’ (Trajectory): ‘‘El ente erra´til que serpeo´ el Zodı´aco / se ha abatido en espiral sobre mi hangar’’ [The erratic being that slithered across the zodiac / has fallen in a spiral onto my hangar]. The ‘‘nomadic’’ spirit of the heavens is reified as ‘‘the helices of space’’ (Torre 2000, 19). The airplane eclipses former views of reality, altering not only the perceived reality but also the poetic mechanics of expression. The vehicles of metaphoric equivalences are taken from the realm of the machine. In his poem inspired by traffic signals, Torre writes that farewells lift off like planes. In ‘‘Paisaje pla´stico’’ (Plastic Landscape) the landscape is aflame with ‘‘squads’’ of airplanes gathering together the crops with its propellers, and the image of the airplane as the crowning finale to the poem is underscored by the use of upper case. Guillermo de Torre was not the only poet of the period who reshaped metaphorical meaning. Rogelio Buendı´a wrote of sleep as a plane traveling downward (1923, n.p.) and Jose´ Moreno Villa portrayed lovers transcending earthly banality as taking a plane upward to the moon (1929, 41). The airplane motif appeared throughout the poetry of Jose´ Marı´a Hinojosa, mainly in metaphorical form as a way to express the thrill of adventure and the joy of travel. For example, in La flor de California (California Flower), the speaker imagines himself as Jules Verne’s Phineas Fogg, in La rosa de los vientos (The Compass Rose) the speaker whirls through the air, and in La sangre en libertad (Freed Blood) he speaks of the beloved’s flight. Julio Neira, who has written extensively on Hinojosa, explains that the metaphorical value of aviation in his poetry was complicated by his love for the pilot Ana Freuller, a woman who at eighty-four, in 1992, was still flying small planes (1994, 241). Jorge Guille´n paid tribute to the airplane, in ‘‘Avio´n de noche’’ (Night Plane), through a metaphorical comparison to the stars, a traditional vehicle for grandeur and transcendence:

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—Fulge muy cerca un lucero novel, aun sonoro, Veloz y triunfando. —Tı´midamente diamantes, Callan las constelaciones. ¿Se colma el tesoro? — . . . Y triunfa pasando: ¡Mundos ya menos distantes! (1977, 268) [—A new, still resounding, star sparkles nearby, Swift and triumphant —Timidly like diamonds the constellations remain hushed. Does the treasure abound? — . . . And triumphs as it passes: Worlds now less distant!]

Alberti avails himself of the aviation metaphor to update the maritime scene and siren motif of his Marinero en tierra (Sailor on Dry Land). In ‘‘Suen˜o de las tres sirenas’’ (The Dream of the Three Sirens) from Cal y canto, his mermaids or sirens flee the sea in favor of the sky, where an automobile and a hydroplane dash by, and in ‘‘Guı´a estival del paraı´so’’ the sky is metamorphosed into an ‘‘aviation field’’ and the heavenly bodies into bicycles, lightbulbs, submarines, and trams. His early attraction to the new transportation and communication modes prepared him to absorb the ultraı´sta motifs that he read about in magazines (Morris 1969, 108–9). However, the airplane represented spiritual ascent and dreams for Alberti even before his incursion into ultraı´sta territory. In a poem from Marinero en tierra, alluding to himself and Gregorio Prieto, he writes: ‘‘Los dos, buenos pilotos del aire, subirı´amos / sobre los aviones del suen˜o, al alto soto / de la gloria, y al mundo, celestes, bajarı´amos / el mirto y el laurel, la palmera y el loto’’ (1988, 84) [Both of us, good pilots of the air, we would rise / above the airplanes of dreams, up to the hedge / of glory and, celestial beings, would bring down to the world / myrtle and laurel, palm frond and the lotus leaf]. Using the airplane as an original motif for the articulation of perennial aspirations, he imagines the two of them as pilots reaching for fame and glory.9 The avant-garde poet professed to seek new machines, new metaphors, and a new way to create art, but what the male avant-garde could not alter was the tendency to perceive the world through the lens of patriarchal concepts of gender and to sexualize movement and stasis. Jose´ de Ciria y Escalante, for example, depicts the highways as desirous and supine virgins eager to receive airplanes, identified with the speaker himself in vertical ascent:

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Las carreteras vı´rgenes cogidas de las manos ofrecen sus vientres desnudos a los aeroplanos En un beso, sin alas me remonte´ a una estrella (Fuentes Florido 1989, 109) [The virgin highways holding hands offer up their nude bellies to airplanes On a kiss, without wings I climb up to a star]

Torre’s ‘‘Madrigal ae´reo’’ (Aerial Madrigal) is a lengthy and complex poem with sexual implications. Cano Ballesta interprets it as a combination of the amorous and machine themes with reflections of Marinetti (1981, 80). The poetic speaker does admittedly follow Marinetti’s lead by using the adjective ‘‘porvenirista’’ [futurist], but he goes beyond the use of a futurist vocabulary to incorporate Marinetti’s advice that sentimentality and love be eradicated in favor of the pursuit of speed, aggression, and virility. Torre personifies the airplane as woman and beloved, a body with a compass for a heart, iconic eyes, and arms made of cables. The machine is incarnated as erotic, female flesh, but at the same time the human body is objectified and reduced to geometric shapes and mechanical form; Torre refers to ‘‘la carnal perpendicular / bisectriz de su divino tria´ngulo’’ (2000, 77) [the carnal, perpendicular / bisectrix of her divine triangle]. In this madrigal, love is depleted of all sentimentality by the focus on science and engineering. The machine rather than the human spirit becomes the agent of transcendence to beauty. While the feminized airplane imparts visual pleasure, the vibrations of the plane lead the poetic speaker to switch his attention from the ‘‘Fe´mina porvenirista’’ [feminine futurist] to himself and envision his culminating orgasmic possession of her: ‘‘en mi espasmo augural / te he poseı´do arrulla´ndote / al ritmo de las he´lices side´reas’’ (78) [in my portentous spasm / I have possessed you, singing you to sleep / to the rhythm of the astral helices]. The airplane in its power to ascend is emblematic of the masculinity that ultraı´smo wanted to project. In his ‘‘Manifiesto vertical,’’ appearing in Grecia, November 1, 1920, Torre equates masculine images with the spirit of ultraı´smo, which he insists is definable as vertical erection. He translates the concept of verticality that the new poetry is to achieve into a visual picture through the typographical arrangement

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of the letters of his title in vertical alignment. He resorts to airplane imagery to convey an act of agitation: ‘‘Vibracio´n conce´ntrica del momento polie´drico, al ritmo de las he´lices cosmogo´nicas’’ (qtd. in Paniagua 1970, 84) [Concentric vibration of the polyhedral moment, to the rhythm of cosmogonic helices]. Less visual and more blatant in the assertion of the virile connotations of ultraı´smo as a rush toward the future, Isaac Vando-Villar ends his ‘‘Manifiesto ultraı´sta’’ (Grecia, June 20, 1919) with this declaration: ‘‘Ante los eunucos novecentistas desnudamos la Belleza apocalı´ptica del Ultra, seguros de que ellos no podra´n romper jama´s el himen del Futuro’’ (Brihuega 1982, 103). [In the presence of the eunuchs of the nineteen hundreds, we undress the apocalyptical Beauty of the Ultra group, confident that they will never be able to break the hymen of the Future.] The airplane solicited the greatest awe and the largest number of poems, but the automobile also inspired poetry. The automobile was often not the thematic focus of poems, but merely one prop on the urban stage, one of the elements in what Leo Spitzer called ‘‘chaotic enumeration.’’ The extensive use of disorderly lists of images that created the impression of irrationality characteristic of vanguardist poetry served as an objective correlative of the hustle and bustle of the streets of the modern cities. In his long poem ‘‘Cosmopolitano’’ (Cosmopolitan), Juan Larrea attempts to capture this climate of the metropolis: ‘‘Frota´ndonos / pasan las horas tocando el claxon / con un poco de humo que nunca fue mujer / sobre almohadones rojos’’ (1970, 58) [Rubbing us, / the hours go by beeping the horn / with a little bit of smoke that never was a woman / on red pillows]. Through metonymic displacement, he converts the abstraction ‘‘time’’ into a perceptible phenomenon. In becoming a car, hours—the synecdoche for time— transform themselves into visual movement, acquire audio qualities, and become tactile, since they ‘‘rub against us.’’ Alberti makes the car an integral part of the picture of his fun-filled, mechanized paradise in ‘‘Guı´a estival del paraı´so,’’ in which he has a car leave the hotel for a seaside party. He repeats the motif of speeding cars, upper-class revelers, and alcohol consumption in ‘‘Invierno postal’’ (Postcard Winter), with its female driver ennobled as ‘‘Amarilis’’ (Amaryllis), and in ‘‘A Miss X,’’ in which a king dies in his car at the seashore. These associations between the car and the rich underscore the fact that cars were still a reality only for the privileged few of urban centers. Ernesto Gime´nez Caballero compares them to dogs that are pets to the powerful and bite the poor (1929, 15). One poet of this generation whose family was rich enough to provide him with a car was Hinojosa, who frequently made his car available to his friends for country excursions (Neira 1994, 228). He adopted the automobile

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as the theme for his poem ‘‘Velocidad’’ (Speed), and he made it the protagonist of his short story ‘‘Los guantes del paisaje’’ (The Landscape’s Gloves). The ultraı´stas offer many tributes to the automobile. The image of the car was so central to their conception of speed, technology, and modernity that they changed the cover of their magazine Grecia in 1920 to include a drawing of an oilcan next to the Greek amphora. Already in 1919 in its April 30 issue, the magazine had published a translation of Marinetti’s hymn to the automobile, in which he extolled the car as a ‘‘God of steel,’’ a fiery dragon, and a beautiful demon. An incessant use of exclamation marks graphically illustrates the heightened emotion the car instilled. In the April 15 issue of 1919, Grecia published ‘‘Un automo´vil pasa’’ (A Car Passes By) by Xavier Bo´veda. The poet concentrates on the changing speed of the car, which at first passes slowly and then dashes off ‘‘frenetically,’’ and he tries to duplicate the noises the car makes through onomatopoeic imitation. In ‘‘La pla´stica del ambiente’’ (The Art around Us), published in the July 30, 1919, issue, he repeats the same technique in his string of ten ‘‘Rs.’’ He suggests speed by placing the poetic speaker in a cafe´ as the observer of the flickering numbers on passing cars. Pedro Raida, in the June 20, 1919, issue, imitates the format of a full-page ad to announce the car of dreams. The dealership for this car is a utopian place called ‘‘Sociedad Co´smico-Personalista’’ [Cosmic and Personalized Company] that has branch offices in the ‘‘great beyond.’’ The car is described as ‘‘para broncı´neo record etereal, montado sobre cuatro esfero´ides tentaculares, con ca´maras en tensio´n sistema originales y aladas cubiertas de procedencia ‘intrepidez’ ’’ [for a bronzed, ethereal record, sitting on four tentacular spheroids, with chambers, under a tension system, original and winged casings of ‘‘intrepid’’ origin]. The car model that Antonio de Obrego´n-Chorot describes in Mediodı´a, another ultraı´sta magazine, is a real one in a showroom. People gather around to gawk as if they were staring at an exotic animal in a zoo. He calls the car ‘‘fauna of a demonic modern era.’’ This ‘‘demonic’’ machine comes from giant distribution plants on the outskirts of the city. The notion of a new beginning is suggested by words such as ‘‘embriologı´a’’ [embryology], ‘‘alumbramiento’’ [childbirth], and ‘‘gene´sica’’ [genetic]. In this age of machine, time is mechanized as ‘‘la hora meca´nica’’ [the mechanical hour] and the workers’ workday is marked by a car horn. While the familiar world turns into a strange mechanized realm, the car is humanized; its color resembles a stylish coat and, with its headlights like wide-open eyes, it stands with the indifference of a skeptic. For the ultraı´sts, the car represented the kind of movement they

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venerated: dynamic pulsation and speed. In ‘‘Al volante’’ (At the Wheel) Torre attempts to convey the sense of dizzy motion and exhilarating emotion that the car provokes: ‘‘En la embriaguez dina´mica / el auto siembra / una estela / de ce´lulas aladas’’ (2000, 45) [In dynamic inebriation / the car sows / a wake / of winged cells]. The car takes flight, it jumps, it shoots forth, and it twitches. From behind the wheel, the entire countryside is animated. Highways rear up, fields gallop, and mountains raise their backs. Personifications, verbs of vigorous motions, and nouns that point to speed, vortexes, and spatial expanse create the impression of constantly changing vistas that are generated by the speeding car and suggested by the word ‘‘kaleidoscope’’ in the first stanza. The emphasis is on the resulting visual flickerings and distortions the car produces: ‘‘todo afluye centrı´peto’’ [everything flows centripetally] and ‘‘se multiplican las diplopı´as’’ [diplopia multiplies] (63). The ultraı´sta poets relished the sensorial and kinetic sensations that cars stimulated, and this delight emanated from their poems. Without the clamorous appeals for radical literary change and the extravagant indulgences in technical experimentations of the ultraı´stas, Salinas and Guille´n, the more moderate professor-poets, also celebrated the advent of the automobile and its message of speed. Pedro Salinas loved cars. Alberti reported, ‘‘In his Fiat A-3.014, Pedro Salinas, every morning, eagerly seeks death, accompanied by insults, threats, angry glares of police and pedestrians’’ (qtd. in Morris 1969, 114). Salinas’s daughter, in her study of Alberti’s poetry, remarks, ‘‘Salinas expresa la curiosidad por estos nuevos elementos que dan nuevos aspectos a la vida, abrie´ndole perspectivas. Las suyas son unas nupcias con la te´cnica que parece van a ser felices’’ (Salinas de Marichal 1968, 169). [Salinas expresses a curiosity for new things that bring new views to life, opening new perspectives. They are a betrothal with technology that promises happiness.] For Salinas, the car stirs up the still grayness of a Madrid street: ‘‘Roncas bocinas vanamente urgentes / apresurar querı´an / su lenta marcha de garzo´n cautivo’’ (Salinas 1961, 58) [Hoarse horns futilely urgent / want to quicken / their pace, slow as that of a captive child]. In ‘‘Font-Romeu, Noche de baile’’ (Night of Dancing), he personifies a Parisian taxi as aluminum sylphs that dance and glide down the streets. These graceful movements in urban environments give way on the open road to the thrill of death-defying speed. The poem ‘‘Aviso’’ (Warning) ends with a sign warning to brake, but the bulk of the poem captures the excitement of a gently winding road that quickly turns dangerous. Exclamation marks, a succession of changes in verb tenses, and insistent alliteration punctuate the poem with emotional intensity:

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¡Que´ miedo frı´o dio´ —dio´, dara´, da, darı´a— vista ası´, rostro a rostro, ni esqueleto ni sı´mbolo: lineal, esencial, muerte pura! [. . .] (Salinas 1961, 72–73) What a cold fear it gave —gave, will give, gives, would give— seen thus face-to-face, neither skeleton nor symbol: linear, essential pure death! . . .

As Seguro azar (Certain Chance), the title of the book in which these poems appear, announces, Salinas embraced ‘‘chance’’ and all that is fleeting, fast, and ephemeral. At this moment in his career, he viewed the world of machines as a positive and fresh way to deal with both reality and poetry. Although Salinas sensed the cataclysmic potential of the nuclear bomb, he would always preserve a substantial dose of his initial feelings of wonder for machines. In a lecture given at Johns Hopkins University in 1937, he argued that ‘‘manufactured reality’’ is a legitimate source of beauty, that it is ‘‘imperialmente hermoso, tan rico y variado en cantidad y en calidad de cosas’’ (Salinas 1976, 24) [imperially beautiful, very rich and varied in quantity and quality of features]. His relationship with the machine was not only lasting, but also intimate. In ‘‘Navacerrada,’’ the car substitutes for the woman as the beloved. The feminization of the machine permits the poet to convey a sense of amorous attachment and joy. However, the masculine speaker abandons the loving union for egocentric possession, first of nature and then of the feminized other. The countryside, he declares, surrenders itself, but he quickly corrects himself, making himself the beneficiary of that submission: ‘‘se rinde, se me rinde’’ [she surrenders, she surrenders to me]. He utters the word ‘‘possession,’’ and his attention immediately changes to his control over the machine and his ability to (op)press it: ‘‘Y de pronto mi mano / que te oprime’’ (1961, 47) [And suddenly my hand / that presses you]. The subtle reference to dominion over the feminine other is underscored in the following line, which has the car running through ‘‘virgin’’ woods. Thus, once again a poet resorts to traditional patriarchal imagery to exalt new inventions and demonstrates his elation through the erotization of the machine. Jorge Guille´n also depicts the car as an instrument of victory, with

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all its implications of conquest, superiority, and jubilation: ‘‘Triunfan madera y metal. . . . Irradiando, regalando / Placer de victoria en viento’’ (1977, 317) [Wood and metal triumph . . . radiating, bestowing the pleasure of victory in motion]. The driver is in control because the car submits to the hands on the steering wheel: ‘‘Siempre sumiso a la guı´a / De unos guantes, de un volante’’ (317) [Always submissive to the guidance / of the glove, of the wheel]. In a sharp contrast to most of the poems commented here, in this poem the driver is a woman. Still, the car surrenders to her not because of her power but because of her beauty. Guille´n does not allow the machine to overshadow nature and love. In the poem ‘‘Viaje’’ (Trip), with the light of dawn shining on the back of the car, he still can hear ‘‘immortal hymns of love’’ over the noise of its wheels. However, like his fellow poets, he is most impressed by the aggressive presence of the automobile and the dynamism with which it overwhelms the cityscape. In ‘‘Todo en la tarde’’ (Everything in the Afternoon), fluffy and calm red clouds hover over the city, but the street stands out as a place of noises where colors clash with sound, and speed shoots across the scene. Although ‘‘without bodies,’’ machines pulsate with life, galloping, running, rushing. The commotion ceases when the horns stop: ‘‘¡Bocinas huyen! Queda / Lejos, grata, la calle’’ (54) [The horns flee! / The street, very pleased, is left in the distance]. In all this discussion, the trolley car needs to be included as an adjunct to the automobile. Just as the hydroplane elicited praise alongside the airplane, the streetcar inspired a number of poems. Although the trolley and the streetcar have all but disappeared today and the precise distinction between them seems irrelevant, in the twenties, together with the car, the taxi, the buses, and the metro, they changed the concept of transportation. People could travel with greater ease and speed even if they could not afford a costly automobile. All these new motor vehicles fired the imagination of Spanish vanguard poets, and the tranvı´a (streetcar) formed the thematic core of a few poems. What impressed poets the most was the grinding and screeching sounds the streetcar emitted and the possibilities for clever imagery it provoked. As he did with the car, Bo´veda employs onomatopoeia to reproduce linguistically the sounds of the brakes, the metal, the wheels, the springs, and the gears. He creates a lively rhythm and playful acoustic effect by repeating the monosyllables ‘‘ro,’’ ‘‘i,’’ ‘‘u´,’’ ‘‘tan’’,’’ ‘‘tin,’’ ‘‘ras,’’ ‘‘taf,’’ and ‘‘chats.’’ The poem ‘‘Tranvı´a’’ rings out with the cacophony of noises characterizing contemporary city streets that constitute a ‘‘new world symphony’’ for modernity (Grecia, April 15, 1919, 7). Lasso de la Vega, in an issue of Grecia later in the same year (October 12), also resorts to the onomatopoeic effects of

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monosyllables to simulate the sounds of the streetcar. He carries the toying with visual imagery further than Bo´veda, who settled for the metaphorical comparison of the streetcar to the Cyclops. Lasso de la Vega arranges his words at the beginning of the composition ‘‘Poema Alfa de Gran Circunvalacio´n’’ (Alpha Poem of a Grand Circular Route) not as a stanza but as a square, with two lines of words arranged horizontally and two others vertically at right angles. The suggestion of a city plaza is made complete with a black outlined oval in the center containing the words ‘‘Falta el monumento a San Fernando’’ [The monument to Saint Ferdinand is missing] and with four nouns denoting different groups of people—children, soldiers, bootblacks, and tramps—placed diagonally in the corners of the square. From this linguistically rendered quadrilateral form converted into a central urban space, there issues forth ‘‘a clamor of old iron’’: the streetcar. Following a reference to the conductor and the sound of the vehicle, a long list of monuments and streets gives the streetcar’s route and creates a sense of movement. The streetcar as a vehicle that moves masses of people helps create the image of the modern city as the embodiment of movement, vitality, and excitement. In his tribute to the conglomeration of visual delights of the city, Larrea in ‘‘Cosmopolitano’’ imagines streetcars as skiers skiing down the tracks and as sandal-clad shepherds dragging their feet along the rails. Personification also serves Francisco Vighi as a mode of expression in his celebration of the trolley car in ‘‘El tranvı´a.’’ He may begin the poem with an allusion to its speed and geometric shape when he writes ‘‘Paralelepipe´dico’’ (Parallelepipedic), but he quickly turns the trolley into a person washing his feet, a spider weaving a web, a tightrope walker, a soldier, and a fisherman (Vighi 1959, 97). In his poem ‘‘Tranvı´a,’’ Gerardo Diego juxtaposes not only the two comparable components of a metaphor, but also different realities— the city and the sea, the natural world and human emotion, the terrestrial and celestial. The unresolved significance of these juxtapositions baffles readers and forces them to try to unravel the illogical associations.10 The poem begins in a straightforward manner with a metaphorical transformation of the trolley car into a silkworm: ‘‘El gusano de cables / va hilando su camino’’ (1989, 690) [The silkworm of wires / threads his way]. Then, in the vanguardist manner, he places side by side disparate and therefore competing realities that, by virtue of their juxtaposition, challenge the reader to posit affinities or to experience the composite emotional impact made by what Carlos Bouson˜o calls the ‘‘vision.’’ The sailor consulting his compass, the fearful and broken stars fleeing the hurricane, and the death of waves on deserted beaches

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together create a vision of cataclysm. The poetic voice consoles the reader, telling him not to be afraid. In the final lines of the poem, the initial ‘‘worm of wires’’ proves to be the trolley car and the vehicle that carried Elijah across lightning-streaked clouds. The aggrandizement of the streetcar into a celestial chariot reflects the reverence avant-garde poets bestowed on the new mechanical marvels, but this inflation of significance can also suggest humor because of the great temporal distance and the radical evaluative discrepancy between the lowly transportation vehicle and the lofty biblical one. This is what occurs in Alberti’s ‘‘Madrigal del tranvı´a’’ (Madrigal to the Streetcar). The tram ticket is metaphorically transformed into a flower cut from the ‘‘balconies’’ of the tram and then pressed between the pages of a book that the speaker holds close to his heart. The medieval song of genteel love announced in the title creates an expectation for praise, but the allusion to romantic sentimentality in the image of crushed violets evinces a tongue-in-cheek attitude. By sanctifying the prosaic at the same time he demythifies the sacred, Alberti creates a mischievous mockery of both. This combination of seriousness and playfulness in Alberti and others is typical of the vanguard posture. The trolley and other motor vehicles elicited a personal commitment to modernity as well as providing a ludic release from reality. Train service began in Spain in the middle of the nineteenth century and had become a familiar poetic motif, appearing for example in the poetry of Antonio Machado as a metaphorical support for his motif of ‘‘life as a journey.’’ Whereas the train gave rise in him to ontological reflections, the vanguard poets found in the train the qualities attuned to their sensibilities for strength and speed. Again, Grecia provides a prime example of this disposition. The issue of November 20, 1919, includes a poem entitled ‘‘Locomotora’’ (Locomotive) that is a hymn to the power of the train engine. The train is compared to a fierce lion and a fiery volcano in eruption. The locomotive is called a ‘‘divine mass’’ three times and is mythified by comparisons to Ulysses, a centaur, and Pegasus. Running a wide range of similes, the poem hammers out a picture of brute and prodigious strength. The train also epitomized speed. Lasso de la Vega in ‘‘Camino de hierro’’ (Railway) sees in the ‘‘Nidos de locomotoras’’ (Nests of Locomotives) in the stations both the ‘‘beauty of strength’’ and ‘‘well-channeled speed.’’ Long blank spaces between words and staggered lines of verse suggest the agitated emotions of the good-byes and hellos, of tears and happiness, and seem to evoke the reciprocating motion of a steam engine.11 They also create a sense of syntactic motion that echoes the concept of speed motivating the whole poem. The wondrous machines animate time and create space:

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El tiempo desfila Vestido de todos los paisajes todas las ciudades del mundo Es la flecha del tren que se dirige fuerte sobre su fin. Detra´s el u´ltimo vago´n engendra de nuevo el espacio (Lasso de la Vega 1999, 457–58) [Time parades by Dressed in all the landscapes all the cities in the world It is the arrow-straight train that heads fiercely towards its destination In back the last car produces space again]

Alberti also celebrates the speed with which landscapes flash before the eyes of passengers in the train: ‘‘beba usted solo, con la vista, el viento / de los precipitados paisajes’’ (1988, 324) [with your eyes, drink alone the wind / of the flashing countryside]. The elliptic citation of the names of the cities through which the Andalusian express passes underscores the speed of the train and the distances it bridges. Diego, a frequent train passenger, wrote several poems on the glimpses of landscapes that whiz by from the vantage point of the passenger. Diego even wrote an essay on the appeal of the train as a literary theme. Although the train was a perennial image of his, it represents speed, of course, in his ultraı´sta period: ‘‘La lı´nea fe´rrea [. . .] dispara flecha’’ (Gallego Morell 1956, 89) [the iron rail . . . discharges arrows] and ‘‘el tren que iba bendiciendo el panorama / no perdio´ kilo´metros ni el compa´s de la ruta’’ (88) [the train that was blessing the landscape / didn’t lose speed or the rhythm of the road]. Travel and mechanical means of communication brought people together in undreamt-of ways. People could not only move from place to place thanks to the airplane, the car, the trolley, or the train, they could also hear the human voice and receive written messages from afar. The first patent for the telephone was awarded in the United States in 1875 to Alexander Graham Bell, but it was not until years later that the telephone reached the general public. In the twenties in Spain, social changes expanded the individual’s possibilities for com-

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munication, and, as the historian Pierre Malerbe notes, the modernization of Spain occurring between 1920 and 1930 resulted from simultaneous innovations on both the collective and individual levels (1981, 24). In 1924 the government of Primo de Rivera conferred a monopoly for phone service on the Compan˜ı´a Telefo´nica. The company’s thirteen-floor building finished in 1930 stood as a testament to national progress and to the prominence of the telephone in daily life.12 Pedro Olmeda Zurita published a melodious tribute to the telephone in Grecia (May 10, 1919). The verbal replication of the ring in the line ‘‘¡Rrin rrin, rrrrrrin!’’ combined with the repetition of the word ‘‘voz’’ [voice] and the phrase ‘‘de extremo a extremo’’ [from one end to another] gives credence to his affirmation: ‘‘El espı´ritu va por un alambre’’ [The spirit travels along a wire]. Sound travels distances, but the magic of this medium exceeds sensory perception, transcending the laws of physics and reaching the divine level: ‘‘Sonido, electricidad, espı´ritu. / Edison. Luz. Dios’’ [Sound, electricity, spirit. / Edison. Light. God]. In the twenties the telegraph still commanded attention for the speed with which it transmitted messages. The ultraı´stas were particularly drawn to the telegraph because its wires were a visible manifestation of the trajectory along which words traveled. In ‘‘Auriculares’’ (Earphones), Torre envisions the telegraph wires as crossing the world on the level of stars: ‘‘A trave´s del mundo / yo persigo / la trayectoria estelar / de los hilos telegra´ficos’’ (2000, 25) [Across the world / I follow / the stellar trajectory / of the telegraph wires]. He also envisions turning words into airplanes: ‘‘El avio´n del Verbo riza el rizo’’ (2000, 25) [The airplane of the Word curls the curl]. Thanks to the telegraph both human words and emotions are elevated above the terrestrial and, by implication, transcend the mundane.13 The scene he describes is animated by vibrations, undulations, and pulsations in a glorious ‘‘apotheosis’’ of sound. Jose´ Rivas Panedes, in an issue of Grecia of 1919, also raises the telegraph wires up to the stars, which then swing from the wires. Isaac del Vando-Villar in La sombrilla japonesa (The Japanese Parasol) imagines sailors on the mast peeling telegrams and mandarin oranges as if they both were the fruit of a tall tree. Larrea also published a poem in Grecia in 1919 dedicated to the telegraph: ‘‘Nocturno: T.S.H.’’ (i.e., ‘‘telegrafı´a sin hilo’’ or ‘‘wireless’’). He emphasizes sound: the twitter of the birds that sit on the wires, a train whistle in the distance, and the voices of personified stars. He replicates the language of the telegraph by writing a line entirely in Morse code. Even Jorge Guille´n cannot resist including the telegraph as part of his account of a happy conversation between friends on a stroll in the country. Why can telegraph cables not be

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called beautiful? he asks (1977, 143). Of course, the answer to this question is precisely what is supposed to be inferred in all of these poems that celebrate machines and technology: They are indeed beautiful. The radio, the telegraph, and the telephone were consequences of the scientific experimentations with electricity, another worthy subject for poetic homages. The wonders of electricity motivated the poet Antonio M. Cubero to recast man in the image of this new miraculous power. Modern man, ‘‘El Hombre-Ele´ctrico’’ [The Electric Man], in his poem of the same name, is a master of sound who in all his dynamism scorns the moon in favor of the airplane. Movement is the inspiration for this new dynamic being, whose nerves palpitate with light. Electricity and light also motivated Torre. In ‘‘Reflector,’’ published in Grecia, June 30, 1919, the setting sun is rendered through images of electricity: ‘‘Las manos engarfiadas del Ocaso / Exprimen el voltaico corazo´n / del sol dormido’’ [The hooked hands of sunset / squeeze the voltaic heart / of the sleeping sun]. Against this darkness, the spotlight on the nose of the plane lights up the sky and the ‘‘acrobatic cathodes send voltage through space.’’ In true ultraı´sta manner, Torre goes beyond the semantic scope of words to exploit the typographic capacity of printing to convey the impact of light on the scene. In the first part of the poem the words ‘‘silencio’’ [silence] and ‘‘penumbra’’ [semidarkness] set in bold and on the diagonal are a graphic translation for sunset. In the second part, the word ‘‘luminarias’’ [lanterns], also in bold, runs vertically to the left of eight lines of poetry. Within different lines of this section, other words referring to light appear in capital letters. The rectilinear arrangement of the allusions to light suggests the straightness, length, and piercing quality of beams of light. He repeats the same basic technique in a poem published in the same magazine on November 20, 1919. Again the poetic message depends not only on the semantic force of the words but also on their arrangement vertically and diagonally on the page. The poem’s title sets the celebratory tone—‘‘Exaltacio´n: Arco voltaico’’ (Exaltation: Voltaic Arc)— and banishes the elegiac atmosphere of evening to the confines of parentheses. Vocabulary pertaining to the realm of physics spills across the page and projects the poet’s excitement over cathodes, anodes, and other things related to electricity. The change in direction of words, even to the extreme of being both upside down and diagonal, not only breaks the convention of linear writing but also obligates physical movement on the part of the reader, who must turn the page around. This disruption and puzzle effect create activity that reproduces the dynamic the words aim to convey. The movement and praise built up through the poem culminate in its concluding line, set in bold: ‘‘CUL-

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´ N TRIUNFAL DEL IMPERATIVO LUMI´NICO’’ [TriMINACIO umphal culmination of the illuminated imperative]. Salinas assimilated the ultraı´sta characteristics of allusions to the modern world of machines and the illogical juxtaposition of the qualities of different objects. A keen awareness of the destructive potential of the machine and modern technology would surface later in his texts preoccupied with the horror of atomic annihilation, such as in the novel La bomba increı´ble (The Incredible Bomb), his poem ‘‘Cero’’ (Zero), and his play Caı´n o una gloria cientı´fica (Cain, or A Glory Of Science). However, his good friend Jorge Guille´n maintained that, despite these serious concerns, the little boy’s fascination with machines as toys always remained alive in Salinas (Debicki 1976, 26). Guille´n reported that Salinas loved city streets with their trolleys, cars, and shopwindows, and he delighted in observing seemingly useless gadgets (Debicki 1976, 29–30). Unlike the ultraı´stas, Salinas did not surrender himself entirely to the machine, nor did his imagery fracture into a kaleidoscope of words, yet he celebrated technical progress, to paraphrase the words of Cano Ballesta (1981, 132), with admiration and surprise, from a humanistic perspective that imposes its authority over the machine. Concha Zardoya maintained that Salinas always pursued the absolute and timeless reality behind the world of the senses, a higher reality behind our quotidian world, a ‘‘trasrealidad’’ [transreality] (1961, 243–46). Spiritual reality may have been his destination, but his point of departure was the world of experience and, in the twenties, often material objects. He wrote poems on the telephone, the typewriter, the radiator, and the lightbulb, delighting in the charm and the surface beauty of the mundane. The lowly radiator was transformed through poetry into a hot, contorted, and disheveled monster, a ‘‘new and delicious creature’’ courted by the ‘‘Mercurios en los termo´metros’’ [Mercuries of thermometers]. Much as in Alberti’s Cal y canto, the incongruent deification of a utilitarian object reflected an appreciation of a product of technology, but it inevitably created a humorous effect and the product was ‘‘magically and mock-heroically transformed’’ (Morris 1969, 113). In ‘‘35 bujı´as’’ (35 Watts) Salinas portrays the grace and allure of the lightbulb. What stands out is not its intrinsic quality but the emotional need of the poetic voice to create a masculine fantasy. While he shows himself to be a modern man with faith in the capacity of technology to facilitate a happy new reality, he does so while perpetuating the archetype of the passive and complicit woman found in fairy tales. He personifies the lightbulb as a princess imprisoned in a castle and guarded by thousands of lances:

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Esta´ presa aquı´ arriba, invisible. Yo la veo en su claro castillo de cristal, y la vigilan —cien mil lanzas—los rayos —cien mil rayos—del sol. [. . .] (Salinas 1961, 62) [She is imprisoned here, above, invisible. I see her in her bright crystal castle, and she is watched —by a hundred thousand lances—the rays —a hundred thousand rays—of the sun. . . .]

The poetic speaker fancies himself the liberator, who, whenever he wants, will free her by pressing the light switch, and she, out of gratitude, will bless him with kisses and love. She will become his ‘‘illuminator,’’ docile muse, and he will live happily ever after with his own secret artificial princess, his ‘‘electric lover.’’ This beloved, like Sleeping Beauty and other fairy-tale females, lies dormant or trapped until the touch of the gallant male brings her to life, and in that life she is at his disposal as the provider of both spiritual and carnal pleasure. This conception of love as a sweet world away from all others where the two lovers dwell and where she embodies love, as both abstraction and experience, is what Salinas will develop in future collections of serious love poems, La voz a ti debida (Voice Because of You) and Razo´n de amor (Reason for Love), in which ‘‘Eso serı´a el amor, para ella. Integrar el amor (abstracto) con el ser concreto; hacerse carne del amor’’ (Feal Deibe 1971, 90–91). [That would be love for her. Integrating abstract love with a concrete being, becoming the flesh of love.] Thus, in a seemingly frivolous poem, the male poet maps upon the lightbulb the sober theme of love as the fusion between two beings and ultimately as the female’s gift to the male. Salinas also feminizes the typewriter. In the twenty-first century, the typewriter is a relic of the past, but in the twenties it was still a remarkable device that could inspire a poet. The poetic quality and subtlety of Salinas’s ‘‘Underwood Girls’’ is highlighted through a contrast to the more descriptive poem ‘‘A Miss ‘Underwood’ ’’ by Adriano del Valle, whose tribute is directed less to the typewriter than to the typist typing the sonnet that this poem is. Valle focuses on her hands, pale like swans with the final and climatic word of the poem, ‘‘mı´o’’ [mine], confirming her servitude to him. In Salinas’s poem, the Underwood girls are the round, metallic keys of the typewriter, and the

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male imagination continues to evoke the image of Sleeping Beauties, specifically identified as ‘‘dormidas’’ [asleep], who passively wait to be awakened by the hands of the Other. ‘‘Despie´rtalas, / con contactos saltarines / de dedos ra´pidos’’ (1961, 114) [Wake them, / with the dancing touch / of fast fingers], commands the poetic speaker. He also commands the hands to treat the keys violently, to kidnap and throw these ‘‘eternal nymphs’’ against the empty world of the blank page, suggesting the impassioned act of some unidentified Zeus-like figure who performs ‘‘the heroic deed.’’ This personification of the machine poeticizes the mundane and raises the contemporary invention to the level of eternal myth, glorifying it as a thing of beauty and wonder, while offering one more example of the male imagination resorting to ingrained patriarchal patterns to exalt the novelties of modernity.

Spanish Women Poets and the Machine The relationship of women to machines has been ambivalent. In her cultural history of women and the machine, Julie Wosk found that women were depicted in American and European art, advertising, and photography over the past two centuries as perplexed by technology and machines, but also as capable of mastering and controlling them. Appliances like the sewing machine, the electric iron, and the vacuum cleaner created objects that supposedly liberated women from the drudgery of household chores, but ‘‘often only entrenched women more deeply into the domestic sphere and added to the tasks they were expected to perform’’ (Wosk 2001, xv). Although Wosk does not make a distinction, there is an important difference between these appliances for domestic, indoor use and the vehicles of transport used outdoors for commerce and recreation. Appliances did not challenge gender identity as did the car and the plane, which, because of their technical complexity and power, were deemed masculine. Therefore, as Wosk does demonstrate, the representation of women with cars and planes was even more complex. The female figure was often used to embody and sell the modern industrial age to men; seduction and sexual excitement were equated with the thrill of these unprecedented mechanical marvels. However, recognizing women as a lucrative market, car companies were compelled to put women in their advertisements. Images of women driving these heavy vehicles were used, but assurances were given that women remained feminine even if they drove. Still, old stereotypes of female fragility persisted, as did the use of the female image as a decorative adjunct. Despite the weight of tradition, the car heightened women’s mobility and gave them temporary

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freedom away from domestic work (Wosk 2001, 125). By bringing radical change, excitement, and liberation from many physical limitations, machines were destined to transform life as it was known and to alter gender identity. The spread of machines affected not only how women were graphically presented but also how they conceived of themselves. Because enthusiasm for change and pleasure is the identifying characteristic of the vanguardist posture, the Spanish women poets who can be called vanguardists also applauded and saw themselves mastering the machine. However, they did not dedicate as many poems to machines as their male counterparts, and when they did, they usually projected a different sensibility. Nevertheless, as in the case of their male poets, the female ones, on the whole, were from the privileged class. Just as Bun˜uel and Salinas were rich enough to have a car, so was Concha Me´ndez. Her contemporaries recall her as an intrepid and adventurous woman, who used to arrive at verbenas in her Citroe¨n (Pe´rez de Ayala 1998, 118). She swam, drove a car, and spoke her mind. Me´ndez was the paradigm of the ‘‘modern woman’’: ‘‘Esta es una muchacha actual, cen˜ida y tensa por el deporte y el aire libre’’ (Dı´az Ferna´ndez, qtd. in Valender 1995, 13). [She is a modern girl, taut and compact from sports and fresh air.] The woman poet most closely connected to ultraı´smo was Lucı´a Sa´nchez Saornil, who published alongside male poets in Cervantes and Grecia. She adopted a masculine voice, publishing under the pseudonym Luciano de San Saor, but she was not as extravagant as the male vanguardists in her commitment to experimentation. She constructed her poems as a string of images infused with novel comparisons, but she did not abandon the use of punctuation, nor did she indulge in the manipulation of typography to imitate shapes and movement. She used avant-garde motifs like the airplane and the telegraph not so much to exalt them as to revitalize perennial themes, usually those of memory, nostalgia, and past love. Her modern motifs are ‘‘sustituyentes metafo´ricos de contenidos anı´micos graves, y no meros toques gratuitos de modernidad’’ (Martı´n Casamitjana 1996b, 15) [metaphoric substitutes for serious emotional contents and not merely gratuitous touches of modernity]. For example, the thematic focus of the poem ‘‘Me deje´ un dı´a [. . .] (Poema de abandono)’’ (One Day I Left . . . a Poem of Abandonment) is not the airplane itself, even though it flies with the swallows and returns to its hangar. The plane is a metaphorical vehicle for the trajectory of a memory and the illusory pursuit of the past: ‘‘Hoy del estrecho hangar / el avio´n loco / se me marcha volando a su recuerdo’’ (Sa´nchez Saornil 1996, 82) [Today a crazed plane / leaves from its hangar / leaving me to take off after its mem-

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ory]. Similarly, from the ‘‘mists’’ where all the music we have ever heard slumbers, ‘‘me llego´ / por el tele´grafo del recuerdo / una incongruente melodı´a’’ (95) [An incongruent melody / reached me / via the telegraphy of memory]. Sa´nchez Saornil joins her male counterparts in celebrating the modern city. Her poem ‘‘Panoramas urbanos (Especta´culo)’’ (Urban Landscapes [Spectacle]) begins: La noche ciudadana orquesta su Jazz Band Los autos desenrollan sus cintas sinfo´nicas por las avenidas ata´ndonos los pies. (102) [A city night orchestrates its jazz band Cars unroll their symphonic ribbons along the avenues tying our feet]

The night is enlivened with the noise of traffic likened to a jazz band. The scene then shifts to the bar scene full of dancing and playful lights, and the commotion is called a magnificent boxing match. At first, as Andrew A. Anderson points out, by exploiting the polyvalence of the word ‘‘cintas’’ she presents the cars as posing obstacles to pedestrians (2001, 200). By the end of the poem, however, the partygoers disregard any dangers in the street, wanting only to ‘‘cabalgar / los caballos de bronce de las glorietas’’ (Sa´nchez Saornil 1996, 102) [ride / the bronze horses in the roundabouts]. This spirit of ebullience associated with the automobile is exploited at greater length by Ernestina de Champourcin, who contributes a note of sexual excitement to the car motif in her five poems of the ‘‘Caminos’’ section of La voz en el viento (Voice in the Wind). The female speaker sometimes is the one in control, with her hair waving freely and with dominion over time: —¡Soy la muchacha te´rmino, el ancla de cristal que detiene las horas. Mis cabellos de nı´quel imantan las estrellas—. (1991, 124)

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[I am the terminus girl, the crystal anchor that holds back time. My nickel hair magnetizes the stars—.]

Words like ‘‘gasoline,’’ ‘‘wheel,’’ and ‘‘horn’’ evoke an adventure experienced through various senses. The sensual connotations of her poems intensify in ‘‘Volante’’ (Wheel) ‘‘when the speaker imagines herself to be the steering wheel of a motorcar desirous of the driver’s touch’’ (Wilcox 1997, 97). The fingers she cries out to hold her will make her ‘‘correr / hasta encontrar mi vida!’’ (Champourcin 1991, 125) [run until I find my life]. Unlike in the poetry of the male poets studied here, her machines are not sexualized objects to subdue and subordinate, but eroticized vehicles of liberation and fulfillment. Part of fulfillment is, to be sure, sexual, for, as Joy Landeira has noted, the word ‘‘correr’’ not only signifies the speeding car, it suggests sexual climax (2005, 111). Less reserved than other female poets in sexual allusions, Champourcin intertwines the erotic implications of hands with the thrill of driving fast to evolve a double sensation of rapture. The female speaker perceives in the gloved hand of the driver and the acrid smell of gasoline a corporal experience of dizzying excitement, of vertigo, and all in all the car gives this woman the opportunity for a new, open expression of female sexuality. The most ardent proponents of vanguardism adhered to an aesthetic of poetry for poetry’s sake. For them, poetry was essentially a world detached from reality, constructed through a composite of images displaying ingenuity and mental dexterity, or depicted on the basis of words as pure signs arranged to form graphic designs. Carmen Conde could not subscribe to this philosophy, because she was aware early in her life of the harshness of reality.14 Unlike the other poets (both male and female) studied here, Conde did not come from a wellto-do family, and she worked in an office from age sixteen to twentyone. She admits that she wrote many of her early verses at her desk overlooking the sea (1945, 9). Her practical experience with office machines erased their mystique. In a prose poem from Ju´bilos (Jubilation) dedicated to the typewriter, the machine is personified as a tired, hardworking female secretary who must obey the demands for swift fingers and write the letters dictated by male bosses. Unlike in Salinas’s poem written from the perspective of the awestruck outsider, her poem is told from the point of view of the machine. In addition, rather than a complicit and beautiful maiden, the typewriter is a rebellious voice against social abuse. At night one typewriter complains about the ab-

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surd work they are all obliged to perform and threatens to break herself into a hundred pieces. Her companions chide her and remind her of her good fortune. Because she is the only one used by a woman, she is cleaned and surrounded by perfume instead of cigar smoke and eraser shavings. A third machine scolds both of her companions, complaining of the tedium of writing only sets of numbers and addresses. She wishes she worked for the woman typist who surreptitiously types poetry, ‘‘beautiful words,’’ words about herself. This fanciful fable not only justifies the moments Conde stole from her job to write poems, but also reflects an early awareness of the potential for abuse in machines. Conde’s attitude toward the machines proves to be ambivalent, for immediately following her piece ‘‘La ma´quina de escribir’’ (The Typewriter), she includes one called ‘‘La locomotora’’ (Locomotive). The locomotive is personified as a happy and friendly being who smiles at passing trains with a sense of superiority, taking pleasure in the control of the hands that set it in motion. It used to speed across meadows for years emitting songs of joy and friendship. Unable to exclude a note on social equality, Conde affirms that the train cars had ‘‘un sentido democra´tico que a los viajeros ricos les molestaba extraordinariamente’’ (1967, 96) [a democratic sense that bothered the rich passengers immensely]. The cars were divided into first- and third-class sections, but these distinctions could not be guessed from the outside by bystanders in the station, and, inside the train, lax conductors allowed any presumptuous passenger to lean out of a window in the first-class section. Conde focuses on the social irony in the train’s configuration more than on its exhilarating speed and motion. In spite of the fact that the poems in this collection have been called ‘‘ultraic’’ (Blackwell 1993, 427), she demonstrates a social consciousness not found in other avant-garde poems. In marked contrast to her male contemporaries, Conde singles out the human and collective meaning in machines rather than their proof of the marvels of science or their power as visual spectacle. ‘‘Aeroplanos,’’ the first of the three poems she includes under the title ‘‘Ma´quina’’ (Machine) in Ju´bilos, shares in the jubilation indicated in the book’s title, but the airplanes want to be like kites, a children’s toy, and a source of laughter. Again, it is not the mechanics, the material strength, or even the erotic implications of the machine, but its association with human emotion that she isolates. Concha Me´ndez, like Carmen Conde, had work experience with machines, but rather than having to submit to tedium out of economic necessity, Me´ndez was involved in the professional advancement of many of the young poets of the vanguard years. She worked alongside her husband, Manuel Altolaguirre, on their printing press, which they

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used to print their magazines He´roe and El caballo verde para poesı´a and to publish the poetry of contemporaries like Garcı´a Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Pablo Neruda, and Miguel Herna´ndez. In his memoirs, Carlos Morla Lynch recalls the image of Me´ndez at the printing press: ‘‘[C]on ademanes de muchacho fornido y una agilidad magnı´fica, mueve palancas, coloca y saca papeles y aprieta tornillos’’ (1957, 241). [With the grip of a muscular boy and a marvelous agility, she moves levers, inserts and takes out paper, and tightens screws.] If Me´ndez in overalls running a printing press conjures up an image of strength and agility, her readiness to drive a car and to go up in an airplane confirms her spiritedness. By her own admission, she saw all the inventions of the century emerge and incorporated them into her early poetry: ‘‘Nacı´ en medio de la modernidad, del canto a los medios de transporte, a la velocidad, al vuelo. Mis primeros poemas esta´n llenos de estas cosas: de clamores a la era moderna, de aviadores, aviones, motores, he´lices, telecomunicaciones’’ (Ulacia Altolaguirre 1990, 30). [I was born in the midst of modernity, of the songs to transportation, to speed, and to flight. My early poems are full of these things: of the noises of the modern era, of aviators, airplanes, motors, propellers, telecommunications.] Like the male vanguard poets, she associates the car with the good life, as one of her earliest poems reveals: Una cantata de bocina Gusano de luz por la calle sombrı´a Los ojos relucientes bajo la noche frı´a. Reptil de la ciudad que raudo se desliza. (Me´ndez 1926, 13) [A cantata of car horns Glowworm along the dark street The shining eyes beneath the cold night City reptile that slithers swiftly.]

She portrays the car as a glowworm and a slithering reptile. In a pleasing stimulation of the senses, the car horn provides a harmonious song, and the headlights illuminate the dark street. Instead of cacoph-

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ony and congestion, her cityscapes offer a parade of audio and visual delights as, for example, in ‘‘Paisaje’’ (Landscape) from Surtidor (Fountain), in which the poetic speaker, with her forehead against the window of the trolley car, delights in the city squares and modern avenues flickering by. Me´ndez alludes to cars, bikes, streetcars, trains, ships, and motors, but the mode of transportation that captures her imagination the most is the airplane, because it surpasses all the others in speed and transcends terrestrial limits. In ‘‘Nocturno variado’’ (Varied Nocturne), a glorification of the plane as something august, she begins in a literal fashion, calling the plane luminous and colossal, but after she turns the sky into a new kind of sea the plane becomes emblematic of mystery and the hieratic: ‘‘Hiera´tico y silencioso, / surca en lento / caminar / el nuevo mar misterioso’’ (1926, 34) [Hieratic and silent, / it cleaves in a slow / pace / the new, mysterious sea]. Similarly, in the poem ‘‘A la luna’’ (To the Moon) from Surtidor, she conceives of the plane as a way to ‘‘jump’’ to the moon. The plane assumes in Me´ndez’s poetry a metonymic value for adventure and the emotional thrill of speed and freedom. This obsession with flying, upward movement, and transcendence coincides with the spirit of youthfulness and optimism projected in much of vanguardist poetry, but because these feelings are articulated through a female voice, Me´ndez’s poem takes on an important gender significance. She not only does not shy away from writing about or riding in an airplane, but also defies the feminine archetype as earthbound and static, and she embraces action, desires liberation, and imagines self-realization. The airplane stands out as the dream machine that will carry her through a process of rebirth and self-fulfillment in the prose poems at the end of Canciones de mar y tierra (Songs of the Sea and the Land). She draws a profile of herself as the winner of a championship of dreams who travels to every corner of the planet on planes and ships: ‘‘[T]engo prisa por ir—cazadora de cometas y aviones—a disparar al alto todas mis flechas. Y a echar mis redes en los mares’’ (Me´ndez 1930, 183) [I am in a rush—hunter of comets and planes—to shoot all my arrows on high. And throw my nets into the sea]. In the selection ‘‘Alba de suen˜o’’ (Dreamy Dawn) she imagines herself a traveler who meets up with three dark angels in bright clothing who whisk her off in the hours of dawn: ‘‘Detuvie´ronse—polı´cromo friso—al borde del camino por donde yo pasaba, viajera, mi alma cogida de mi mano para que, ası´, no pudiera extravia´rseme . . . —Silenciosos aviones de sombras, hacı´an un raid a trave´s de las horas somnolientas—’’ (169). [They stopped—a polychromatic frieze—at the edge of the road where I was walking, a traveler, with my heart held in my hands so it wouldn’t get

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lost . . . —Silent, shadowy planes flew across the drowsy hours.]15 The importance of voyages, passage, and flights in this collection has already been studied (Bellver 1995), but relevant to the present discussion is Me´ndez’s deviation from the norm of feminine immanence fostered by patriarchal thinking and evident in women’s poetry (Ostriker 1986). Against this cultural reality, Me´ndez’s early desire for verticality can be considered a subversion of male as well as of female paradigms. Her assimilation of imagery associated with the masculine confirms the tendency of Spanish female modernists to free themselves from the existential limitations dictated for women by traditional discourse on gender and to challenge the underlying ideological structures of their society, unlike male vanguardists, who aspired only to innovate the formal aspects of poetry. Me´ndez’s poetry is not all dream and fancy; on the contrary, her poetic vision is grounded in real-life experience and occurrences. She celebrates Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight in ‘‘Vuelo’’ (Flight). High above the earth in unknown regions, he is decorated by the light before his descent: ‘‘Ma´s alla´, lo ¿incognoscible? / (La luz condecora al he´roe.) / El vuelo gigante / se asoma a la tierra’’ (Me´ndez 1928, 107) [Way beyond, the unknowable? / (Light rewards the hero.) / The huge plane / approaches land]. She marvels at the acrobatics planes perform as they crisscross each other and cross over the boats and swimmers below as if on an ‘‘aerial toboggan’’ (1930, 173). Flying for the female speaker of Me´ndez’s poetry is a wondrous act not only performed by heroes but one to which she can aspire personally: ¡Ay, quie´n fuera aviadora para cruzar los espacios como el claror de la aurora! (1928, 24) [Oh, I wish I were an aviator flying across space like the flash of dawn!]

In the poem ‘‘Aerona´utica’’ (Aeronaut), in a notable reversal of gender roles and the poetic motifs of traditional romances, the male lover is abandoned by the free and bold female. He pleads twice for a love token to remember her and her body: —¡Dame la bufanda rosa —volvio´ a decirme de nuevo—. Y guardare´ entre sus pliegues la nostalgia del cuerpo . . . !— (1928, 79)

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[—Give me your pink scarf —he said again to me—. And I will keep between its folds the memory of your body . . . !—]

She climbs into the plane and, leaving the earth behind, describes the exhilarating experience of flight. The plane vibrates with ‘‘a sonata of farewells,’’ the wind plays with her hair, and the plane soars. She finally releases her scarf in a symbolic gesture of liberation from bodily constraints, from the love below, and from reality as lights shine on the ‘‘aerial pathway of her dreams’’ (Me´ndez 1928, 81). The magical machine frees her literally and figuratively so that she can pursue her dreams.

The Machine as Poetry and Poetry as Machine Technology energized artists and influenced their works in decisive and multiple ways. With authoritative certainty Huyssen has declared that technology ‘‘not only fueled the artists’ imagination . . . but penetrated the core of the work itself.’’ He gives collage, assemblage, montage, and photomontage as examples of technology’s invasion into the fabric of art, but he finds the ultimate imposition of technology on art in photography and film because they transfer the reproducibility inherent in technology to art (1986, 9–10). The critical role of reproducibility in altering the meaning of art was recognized already in 1930 by Walter Benjamin, who explained that, although the work of art has always been reproducible, what changed with the advent of photography and film was the rapidity with which it could be done. Technical reproduction, he argues, devalues the authenticity, the here and now, of artwork, jeopardizes its physical duration, and withers its aura—its vestiges of ritual and magic. Consequently, uniqueness and permanence give way to transitoriness and repeatability (W. Benjamin 1996, 102–5). Change, repeated and incessant change, reigns supreme in modernity. With this kind of change, the sanctity of a fixed, venerated object of art evaporates, leaving behind the mundane accessibility of its reproduced image. While theorists like Huyssen and Benjamin focus more on the plastic and commercial arts, the significance and status of literature was also affected by the new cultural developments of the early twentieth century. Although poetry and novels have always depended on reproduction in the form of printing, publication, and reediting, they nonetheless shared with the visual arts the venerable attributes of

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authenticity, permanence, and uniqueness. The advent of mass production replaced the values formerly defining both the plastic and written arts with diametrically different ones that changed their cultural worth and deprived them of importance as cultural determinants. Against this backdrop, the irony in the stance of vanguard poets’ attitude becomes clear. They embraced the machine with all its implications of reproducibility and dehumanization, while simultaneously declaring their eagerness for creativity, experimentation, and uniqueness—qualities antithetical to technology. They seem to have wanted to create poetry not only in the creacionista mode as God creates a tree but also as machines reproduce objects. Both God and the machine possess power superior to that of ordinary humans, a power to make things happen and move, run, or fly. It was this power that the vanguard poet worshipped, without regard for the capacity of the machine to generate a cultural environment and a social ideology hostile to the integrity of poetry. Nevertheless, for a brief historical moment vanguard poets saw poetry in the machine and attempted to put the machine into poetry. They capitalized on the visual potentials of the poem to convert it into a visual object, and they employed a number of rhetorical techniques to approximate or in some way imitate the machine. Unlike the plastic arts, which possess an existence as discrete, palpable objects, in the linguistics arts materiality is secondary to conceptual, psychological, or symbolic qualities. Furthermore, the temporal and spatial dimensions of narrative make its parallels with cinema and mechanization more tenable than poetry’s. Therefore, critics have often seen the imprint of the new technology, particularly of film, not on poetry but on vanguard narrative with its experimentation with structure, its fragmented plotlines, abrupt scene changes, and disruption of chronology.16 Nevertheless, a relationship between technology and poetry also exists. Hugo Friedrich notes that feeling trapped in a technologized, imperialistic, and commercialized era, the poetic imagination takes flight into the unreal, into deliberate mysteriousness, and into hermetic isolation, but, despite this escape, poetry is marked by the era it opposes. Reflections of this zeitgeist of technology-driven modernity are seen in poetry in ‘‘[t]he coolness of its craftsmanship, its tendency to experiment, its hardness of heart,’’ and in its attempts at the ‘‘synthetic poem,’’ in which primal poetic images mix with technological entities and scientific jargon (1974, 129). The tension between rejection and assimilation evident in modernism in general is lacking in vanguardist poetry, which proves to be single-minded, overenthusiastic, and impetuous. Its unmitigated enthusiasm for technology produced unnuanced poetic responses and a utopian posture

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unsustainable in the face of changing social conditions, the waning of adolescent verve, and the maturing of poetic motivation. Those who articulated the goals of vanguardism in manifestos and essays often alluded to machines as subjects of emulation and sources for metaphors for their new poetry. Besides the already mentioned statements in He´lices about machines, Torre wrote in his 1920 ‘‘Manifiesto vertical’’ that the essence of the new artistic era was to be found in vibrating motors, and in a 1924 essay he said that the futurists failed because they did not discern the need to go deeper than simply declaring the beauty of machines. He argued for the assimilation of the underlying rhythms of machines: ‘‘No basta hablar de una ma´quina: hay que asimilarse las leyes de su ritmo’’ (qtd. in Brihuega 1982, 110) [It’s not enough to talk about a machine: you have to assimilate the laws of its rhythm]. Similarly, Salvador Dalı´ and his fellow signers of the Antiartistic Catalan Manifesto called for a new art that turns away from the past and looks instead at one aspect of the ‘‘marvelous reality of the present’’—namely, cars and airplanes: ‘‘[S]e rechazan como valores inadecuados a nuestro temperamento las obras de los museos y se aceptan en cambio arquetipos integrales de ineludible belleza, el salo´n del automo´vil y de la aerona´utica’’ (Ilie 1969, 154). [We reject the works in museums as values inadequate to our temperament, and we accept instead the complete archetypes of inescapable beauty: the automobile and airplane showroom.] Despite these statements of intention by poets, the designation of the specific repercussions of the machine on their style is debatable and necessarily predicated on prior knowledge of their admiration for machines rather than on conclusions inferred from self-evident manifestations of influence. The distance between intention and execution, between desire and reality, and between the actual and the symbolic is always perceptible. When a poet like Torre creates a helix through the diagonal arrangement of words, he still ends up with a graphic image of a machine part, not a tangible, functional object. Even when Duchamps displays a bicycle wheel in an art gallery, he nullifies its practicality and creates art rather than replicating machinery. Since poetry is a mental construct rather than a material artifact, its realization requires intellectual involvement. Being a semiotic achievement, poetry requires that purposeful relationships be established at the moment of its conception as well as at each successive reading. Poetry depends on an intimate interchange with the human mind, while the mechanical motor can exist independently of interpretation. The dadaists tried to disrupt the classic semiotic triangle of sign, concept, and meaning, but their attempts at art without meaning failed, because repeated ran-

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domness induces boredom and because observers and readers inevitably impose meaning. A good example of this drive to interpretation is Torre’s poem ‘‘Reflector.’’ The words written diagonally and vertically, although meant to simulate the directions of the beams of light, are only understood in this way because the title, the semantic support, and the underlying theme of the poem direct readers to this interpretation. Additionally, the unconventional typographical alignments of the words visually enhance the poem’s concluding declaration: ‘‘Y los ca´todos acroba´ticos / voltigean en el espacio (Grecia, June 30, 1919, 10) [And the acrobatic cathodes / flutter in the air]. The poet’s commitment to the machine goes beyond the visual to include the audio. Tracing his personal evolution in ‘‘Autorretrato’’ (Self-Portrait), Torre reveals that the sound of motors stimulate his mental processes: ‘‘Un sı´ncope de esdru´julos / acelera mi vida mental / Un silbido de locomotoras / y un perfume trasocea´nico’’ (2000, 87). [A syncope of proparoxytones / speeds up my mental life / A train whistle / and a transoceanic perfume.] More obvious examples of the absorption of the sounds of motors into poetry are poems like ‘‘Un automo´vil pasa’’ and ‘‘La pla´stica del ambiente’’ by Xavier Boveda, already discussed, in which onomatopoeic phraseology, even when pronounced aloud, remains an assimilation to a different medium that cannot be called a replication. A creative act, poetry is not reproduction; it is representation.17 The transfer of the rhythm of a motor to that of poetry is more successful, because rhythm depends only on an ordered, recurrent alternation of weak and strong elements, be they produced by syntactic and vocal iteration or by metallic pulsation. Nevertheless, semantics orients the interpretation of rhythm, as occurs in Torre’s ‘‘Torre Eiffel.’’ The poet cannot be less subtle when he announces, ‘‘Escuchad el ritmo avio´nico / del motor de mi Verbo’’ (Torre 2000, 33) [Listen to the airplane rhythm / of the motor of my Word]. He imitates the bumpy descent of an airplane with a series of modified substantives staggered downward in five successive lines. The lexical signification of words like ‘‘a´rbol’’ [tree] and ‘‘cabellera’’ [tresses] of course bolster the sensation of descent. Typography and other visual effects, the musical weight of syllables and words, and the manipulation of syntax all reveal an attempt to imitate motors, and, even if not producing true replication, they serve as metaphorical transpositions of the properties of machines. The awe inspired in vanguard poets by the motors and other mechanical marvels conditioned their lexicon and imagery and some of the stylistic devices they used to simulate the rhythms, speed, and energy of machines. But technology fostered another noticeable ten-

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dency: an obsessive fondness for objects. The world of experiences was becoming more and more dominated by objects. Capitalistic materialism was making it possible for ever-increasing numbers of people to acquire useful products, appliances, and contrivances. Because of their increased numbers and the extent of the comfort and entertainment these objects provided, they were accorded a respect and mystique that would continue to grow throughout the century. The appearance in everyday life of cars, trolleys, telephones, radios, phonographs, cameras, cinema, typewriters, adding machines, refrigerators, and lightbulbs created an abundance of delights, which, like exploding fireworks, bedazzled the common citizens and captivated poets. Salvador Dalı´, who theorized regularly about poetry and the avantgarde aesthetic, wrote an article in 1928 in which he called the new labor-saving devices ‘‘objects of the purest and most authentic poetry,’’ and he extolled the eurhythmy of the unique objects of the industrial age and the numerical perfection attained through mass production (1998, 57). He displaced the substance of poetry from the natural world to the mechanical: ‘‘If poetry is the amorous interlacing of things that are as distant and different as could be, never has the moonbeam linked up with water in as lyrical a fashion as with the nickeled mechanical physiology and the somnambulistic gyrations of the phonographic record’’ (58). Mystery and artistry are no longer the preserve of the poem; they dwell in the ‘‘antiartistic world of advertisements,’’ in the ‘‘voyages of discovery of unknown objects’’ like the gray rubber of tires, the clear glass of windshields, and the soft tones of enchanting filter-tipped cigarettes (58). Dalı´ asks how anyone can be so blind as not to see the spirituality and nobility of the object that is beautiful in itself, by its unique, necessary, and harmonious structure, bare of any ornamental artifice (59). The ‘‘aura,’’ that sense of uniqueness in time and space that Benjamin designated as the defining quality of the work of art, is transferred from the realm of the poem to the world of the tangible object. As a poet, Dalı´ was influenced by ultraı´smo and Ramo´n Go´mez de la Serna, and in 1927 he formulated a personal aesthetic he called the ‘‘holy objectivity’’ based on his deep appreciation of the manufactured object. The object, for him, although tangible, was holy. As a result, Dalı´ constructed his poems of the late twenties as catalogs of quotidian objects.18 The various poetic manifestations of the avant-garde in Spain can easily be characterized as an accumulation of objects that, in the words of Dı´ez de Revenga, make the individual poems into storage closets or attics (1995, 26). Juan Eduardo Cirlot reflects on the importance of objects in the plastic arts, and what he saw as the ‘‘rebellion of objects’’ occurring along with the rebellion of the masses can be also inferred from much

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of vanguard poetry. With the Industrial Revolution, he argues, there emerged a progressive renunciation of subjectivity—that is to say, spiritual projection was displaced from the subject to the object. He explains that, although the machine essentially serves mankind, it possesses an independent existence, and it is this autonomous power that accounts for its being venerated (1986, 28). Consequently, the object comes to be considered ‘‘como un recepta´culo de fuerzas universales, como un centro del que irradia poderı´o mı´stico’’ (67) [like a receptacle of universal forces, like a center that irradiates mystic power]. The magic that belonged to poetry, artwork, and religious ritual is usurped by objects. With the dawn of modernity, human salvation is anticipated from things, and the accumulation of material objects promises to be the sacred path to pleasure and happiness. The ‘‘dehumanization’’ that Ortega y Gasset defined in 1925 consisted of an inversion of the customary hierarchy that placed the human over the material and an elimination in poetry of the anecdotal and the sentimental. With the erasure of the first, temporal dimensions disappeared and, with the omission of the second, adjectival ingredients vanished. What was left were the substantives, references to images and objects. By the strength of their quantity and the semantic collision caused by their juxtaposition, these objects replaced the narration and expressiveness of the anecdotal and sentimental elements. The obsessive accumulation of images is not the only feature of vanguardist poetry attributable to the impact of machines. Some critics credit the fragmentation in literature to the machine. For example, Jose´ del Pino in his Del tren al aeroplano (From the Train to the Airplane) affirms that, by virtue of its artificial nature and because it is made of diverse pieces, the machine becomes an emblem of modernity and the object par excellence for the young artists of renovation (2004, 149). An unrestrained display of commonplace objects and an enumerative structure became a typical feature of a great deal of avant-garde poetry, not only of that treating the machine as its subject matter. A fragmented syntax achieved through lists of substantives can capture the indoor atmosphere of a swinging nightclub with its jazz bands, noise, and artificial lights: Ritmo cortado. Luces vibrantes. Campanas histe´ricas. Erotismos. Licores rebosantes, (Me´ndez 1926, 44) [Broken rhythm Vibrating lights

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Frenzied bells Eroticism. Overflowing liquors,]

It can also be used to convey disquieting, chaotic, and deep-rooted emotions, as occurs in these surrealist lines by Rafael Alberti: Tizo electrocutado, infancia mı´a de ceniza, a mis pies, tizo yacente. Carbunclo hueco, negro, desprendido de un a´ngel que iba para piedra nocturna, para lı´mite entre la muerte y la nada. Tu´: yo: nin˜o. (1988, 432) [Electrocuted piece of wood, my childhood of ash, smoldering at my feet, Empty carbuncle, black, dislodged from an angel searching for a nocturnal stone, for a border between death and nothingness. You: I: child.]

However, when applied to the uncontrollable thrill of the new age of exhilarating pleasures and marvelous machinery, a different mood is created. The juxtaposition of random images alluding to action combined with ellipsis, capitalization, blank spaces, and staggered lines communicates mental and physical movement as well as exclamation and rapture. Torre illustrates all these features in his poem ‘‘Bric-abrac.’’ After an opening exclamation of joy, ‘‘APOTEOSIS VIBRACIONISTA’’ [the apotheosis of ‘‘vibrationism’’], as if with a burst of energy, he disregards grammar and randomly names emblems of movement and technology’’: AMBICION CREATRIZ AVIONICA LAS IMAGENES TIENEN UN RITMO DE BALLET RUSO PLURICOLOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ALAS MOTORES ADIOSES IRRADICACION DE LOS INSTINTOS VIAJEROS MADRID PARIS NEW-YORK ZURICH MOSCU (Torre 2000, 61) [Creative airplane ambition Images have the rhythm of a polychromatic Russian ballet . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Wings motors farewells Irradiation of the travelers’ instincts Madrid Paris New York Zurich Moscow]

The age of technology born at the beginning of the twentieth century set the human body in motion and glorified movement along with its seductive corollaries of speed, physical energy, and objectivity. Technology facilitated the manufacture of machines that bestowed on ever-greater numbers of people improved communication, entirely new means of transportation, and unprecedented forms of entertainment. The new technology was seen by many Spanish poets as promising spiritual and aesthetic renewal. The machine was heralded as an agent of salvation bringing comfort and joy unto mankind, for the machine bred not only the material freedom furnished by swift modes of transport but also an existential freedom expressed in youthful optimism and ludic pleasure. During the period of 1918 to 1931, certain Spanish vanguard poets displayed their veneration of technology by incorporating a variety of machines into their imagery and the thematic underpinnings of their verse and by attempting to imitate the visual appearance, sounds, and rhythms of the machine. Unaware of the values, applications, and ideologies it would spawn, the avantgarde welcomed technology, seeing it as independence from bourgeois banality and the threadbare social order, an escape from the stagnation of the present, and a path to free, uncharted artistic expression of the future. The twentieth-century love affair with motion and change had begun and so had mass, commodified culture.

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6 Conclusion IN THE WORDS OF GUILLERMO DE TORRE IN ‘‘BRIC-A-BRAC,’’ THE VAN-

guard era was the moment of the ‘‘apoteosis vibracionista,’’ of the glorification of movement that is rapid, all-encompassing, and seemingly perpetual. This type of movement, along with its implications of freedom, dynamic change, and stimulating excitement, is what Spanish vanguard poets celebrated. The emergence of a new kind of culture predicated on capitalistic materialism, change, and physical pleasure provided them impressive examples of human bodies in motion that they incorporated into their poems on dance, sports, and machines. Bodies in motion also set the tempo for their poetry. In an explosive accumulation of disparate images emanating often from bustling and thriving big cities, Torre, as well as others, captured both the fresh, syncopated, fragmented rhythms and the myriad new activities of life in the twenties. Movies and airplanes, motors and jazz bands, the beat of the fox-trot and the speed of modern modes of transportation coalesced in a polyphonic and polymorphic tangle of words. Although Torre and his ultraı´sta brethren were the most extreme examples of surrender to the avant-garde spirit, other Spanish poets of the twenties, even moderate ones like Pedro Salinas, were infected by the youthful ebullience of the decade. Garcı´a Lorca, who distinguished himself by his defense of instincts and of the role of the irrational in the creative process, was less enamored of technology than the other members of his generation. Despite his innovative and at times hermetic imagery, the thematic impetus of his verse was that of the traditionalist who wished to conserve the dignity of the folk, the people forgotten and marginalized by modernity. Paradoxically, his attempt to preserve their essence through his publications, recitals, and public activities contributed to the conversion of folk culture into mass culture. A number of female poets were attuned to vanguardist thematics and techniques. They adopted the same attitudes as male avant-garde poets, reveling in fun pastimes and the sense of youth, carefreeness, 206

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and thrilling adventure these diversions generated. Poets, such as Concha Me´ndez and Ernestina de Champourcin, played with poetic syntax, images of bodies in motion, and the rhythms of modern life that their male counterparts highlighted. They projected the verticality, vigor, and vitality that traditionally defined masculinity as well as the objectivity, novelty, and audacity that characterizes modernism. The assumption by women poets and female poetic speakers of postures deemed masculine signifies a bold challenge to established gender dichotomies, an invasion of a forbidden existential territory, and an unprecedented appropriation of male prerogatives. However, to infer that vanguard poetry written by women is androcentric would be erroneous. Close examination shows that significant gender differences lie beneath the surface coincidences between male and female vanguard poets. Gender differences originating in the disparate points of view of the poetic agent are also reflected in the differing vantage points assumed by the poetic speaker for the depiction of bodies in motion. In poetry by men, the female figure is invariably a provocative spectacle before the controlling eyes of the male spectator. Contrary to this creation of woman as visual representation and compliant object, in poems by female poets, woman is portrayed as a lived experience, a real person, and an active subject. Representation is in many ways entrapment; in it the subject acts upon the object, making it conform to its will, while at the same time allowing it to embody prevailing cultural discourses. When women in motion—dancers, athletes, drivers, or pilots—are portrayed by women poets, the subject and object are contained within the same person. The poetic protagonist and speaker are one; the creator and her creation are the same gender; and being and doing are indistinguishable. Representation thus cedes to performance, to enactment, or to consolidated presence, and the concepts of agency, action, and liberation are attached to woman. Change is the mark of modernity. Change became a value for its own sake; it was continually effected and invariably exalted. This consecration of change in the early twentieth century brought with it a veneration of movement, speed, and freedom in the sense of ludic release. Beneath the euphoria experienced after World War I, a set of social problems and social pessimism was, to be sure, brewing. An epidemic of influenza was to kill at least twenty million people throughout the world; sociopolitical unrest grew as workers, with the help of labor unions, demanded certain rights and improved working conditions; and the woman’s movement began to challenge unrefuted assumptions regarding gender. Some intellectuals, intuiting the possibilities for exploitation, felt disenchanted by industrialization, ur-

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banization, and the bourgeois ethos. However, the optimistic offshoot of the war nurtured the avant-garde mode and the general spirit of the ‘‘felices’’ twenties. Spain was infused with hope in the future and in progress as its population grew, its cities modernized, and a climate of youthful verve overtook its urban centers. The nouveaux riches surrendered themselves to the wanton liberation afforded them by drink, wild dancing, sports, and a variety of other thrills. Through the communication media recently available, the lower classes became aware of the new forms of entertainment and even began to enjoy some of the comforts and gadgets of modernity. Spanish poets of the twenties fell under the same spell; radical innovation and experimentation became the hallmarks of their poetry. The ‘‘happy’’ twenties are, to be sure, only one part of one brief moment in the history of Spain, but they are nonetheless a significant period, because they produced a provocative aesthetic that pushed novelty and originality to an extreme, created a corps of outstanding poets unseen since the Golden Age, and promoted the birth of a culture based on mass production and consumption. In their wild enthusiasm for everything new and anything nonconventional, the vanguardists were unconsciously endorsing values that would later flourish and become the dominant cultural discourse. Social freedom, a youth cult, ludic pleasure, and fast-moving activity were the primary values that the vanguardists embraced in the twenties and that would seep into the collective psyche of the many during the rest of the twentieth century. The present study has attempted to demonstrate that the impact of these phenomena can be gleaned by an exploration of the ways vanguard poets treated bodies in motion. The body became for them an emblem of liberation, youth, pleasure, and vitality; and movement was a sign of change, advancement, and creation. The analysis of the three new features of culture involving bodies in motion—frenetic dances, sports, and machines—has illustrated that no matter how antiestablishment poets may be, in one way or another they engage in a dialogue with their cultural context. A changing social reality and a changing conceptualization of culture gave birth to the fashionable dances, the growth of sports, and the proliferation of machines. These in turn enthralled poets, influenced the point of view of their poetic speakers, and conditioned the inner structure of their poems. At the same time that jazz, sports, and technology were redefining life, they correlated with the ideas, intentions, and tendencies of vanguardist poets, who found in them symbols and material incarnations for their distinctive aesthetic. Of the three means of setting the body in motion explored in this

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book, dance is purely corporeal, the least utilitarian, and the most pleasurable. It is considered an activity driven by instinctual impulses freed of mental interference and impelled by the most elemental impulses. Dance seems to rise from the libido and be executed with passion and therefore is intimately connected with sexuality. The gyrations and spasmodic movements of the many dances emerging in the first quarter of the twentieth century, along with their syncopated jazz rhythms and exotic origins in foreign cultures, enhanced the erotic associations of these dances. Dances like the tango and the Charleston aroused the masculine spectator. For him, as the incarnation of bodily pleasure, of pure instinct, and of sexual compliance, the dancer was invariably female. When female poets portray the dancer, they also see her as an agent of pleasure, but the dancer is an extension of the female speaker rather than the desired other and consequently a personification of the desirous self and an expression of self-realization. Sports also entail multiple movements of different parts of the body, but, while dance was deemed an affront to social decorum and moral propriety, sports were considered a wholesome body activity focused on the improvement of individual health and physical well-being. The increasing prominence of sports in daily life reflects advances in hygiene and the health sciences, and a shift to material concerns promoted by an ever more market-driven culture. While dance over the centuries was associated with female seduction, sensuality, and sexual gratification, sports had perennially been linked to masculinity: competition, virility, and physical strength. As such, sports continued to be a useful means of instilling national pride and identity. But society was changing and so were gender assumptions. Women, particularly those of the upper classes, began to participate and excel in sports, a fact revealed by the more nonconventional female poets of the era. Furthermore, sports projected the image that the avant-garde desired and the values that the new popular culture advanced: youthful vigor, energizing activity, and the refreshing carefreeness that comes with a healthful and comfortable life. If the dancer is archetypically female and the prototype of the athlete is male, the machine is the neuter component of the triad studied here. The machine and the other mechanical marvels that fascinated many vanguard poets ushered in an age of materiality in which technological advances were equated with earthly salvation, and the acquisition of man-made objects was correlated with contentment. The vanguardists intuitively projected in their art the initial thrill of this new reality, which for them happily eclipsed the hackneyed sentimentality and threadbare outlook of past poetry. The allure of inanimate

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objects expressed itself in a dehumanized poetry fixated on machines and other mechanical marvels that promised superhuman movement. The early enthusiasts of the machine did not yet see that it could subjugate as much as it liberates, that transcendence of human limitation could lead to alienation and degradation, that exhilarating motion could become monotonously routine. The ‘‘dehumanization of art’’ that writers heralded as the road leading to individualized and free artistic expression would soon become, through the commercialization of popular mass culture taking hold in the twenties, something entirely different. Art, in the sense of unique proof of individual creativity, would be devalued and ‘‘popular’’ shifted from meaning spontaneous creations of the folk to commodified, ephemeral, and marketable products of entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, during a few years and in select poets, noticeably more male than female ones, the machine and its related technological marvels became a surrogate body, a vehicle to propel people to unknown speeds, unseen heights, and unimaginable thrills. Even more than dance and sports, the machine came to symbolize modernity—change, novelty, and a perpetual present. The belief that culture is a basic determinant of art and therefore that poetry is a product of cultural discourse has been accentuated by postmodern thinkers and theorists to the point of negating the originality of texts and the existence of a creating poet. Barthes declared the author dead and the text a mix of already existing written texts, a space in which a variety of writing blends and clashes, a tissue of quotations drawn from culture. This view obscures individual idiosyncrasies, divergent reactions, and personal preferences. In a period of poetry as rich as the twenties and early thirties, variations in approach, execution, and outcomes are indisputable. Male and female poets do not read cultural signs in the same way; a rural-rooted Lorca sees them differently than his cosmopolitan contemporaries; and the militant vanguardists do not view them as the more temperate ones do. Vanguardists of all stripes assumed a posture before art totally antithetical to Barthes’s. Barthes stripped the author of his godlike features and his writing of its singularity, but vanguardists strove to create, like God, something utterly new and disconnected from the ‘‘already written.’’ This contrast underscores the driving forces behind vanguardism in general and highlights the differences between modernity and postmodernity and between the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. The avant-garde author was mesmerized by the changes and social advances that promised freedom and individual gratification. Beyond a formal technique, vanguardism was an existential stance that produced a new concept of time and space as well as of art. The whole

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concept of culture began to change, and mass media and mass production turned culture into a corporate product to be sold and then bought by the masses. The movement and change the vanguardists envisioned as liberation would lead to a predictable sameness that would undermine artistic uniqueness. They pursued novelty, but the radically new loses its sting quickly and must be replaced continually to stimulate change, which consequently evolves into a repeated and perfunctory gesture. Thanks to the temporal distance and to the evolution of cultural markers, the postmodern mind perceives in vanguardism a bit of naivete, a good dose of contradiction, and yet a valuable, intriguing lesson. Sociocultural discourses may create texts, but with these existing cultural ingredients, texts also shape their own reality. Poetry creates new worlds while never totally forgetting old ones; it rewrites the present while living it; and it sees what others do not yet see and embraces more than itself. Poetry is many things: it is a product of its times but also a realm apart built by poets.

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Notes Chapter 1. Introduction 1. Even though Spain did not industrialize at the same rate as countries such as England, the United States, Germany, or France, it also experienced unprecedented growth in urban population at the beginning of the twentieth century. From 1900 to 1930, the metropolitan area of Madrid almost doubled. Part of this increase is attributable to the growth in the total population of the country. In 1900, 66.34 percent of the working population was involved in agriculture, but by 1930 this number had dropped to 45.51 percent. See Malerbe et al. 1981, 21–22. 2. Stephanie Sieburth develops in greater detail the problems surrounding the high/low division in the introduction to Sieburth 1994. 3. Books on everyday life and popular culture in Spain continue to include chapters on bullfighting, religious ceremonies, and local festivals. Edward F. Stanton dramatically underscores the juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern in Spain with a photo of a shepherd and his flock passing through La Puerta del Sol in Madrid under a gigantic advertisement for Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Although verging on the picturesque, the photo captures the complexity of popular culture in Spain today. Spain stands in conspicuous contrast to the United States, where mass and electronic media, world travel, and the effects of new waves of ethnic and religious immigration have practically obliterated popular culture in the folkloric sense. Telling anecdotal evidence in this regard surfaced during an interview held on National Public Radio on January 17, 2004. A Danish singing and instrumental group said that for them ‘‘folk music’’ meant anonymous, traditional music. The notion of the durability of rural folk had to be explained to the listening American public. 4. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, who have done a great deal to stimulate cultural studies among Hispanists, recognize that the ‘‘persistence in Spain into the modern period of strong rural cultural traditions means that Anglo-Saxon—and even French—theoretical models have to be applied with caution,’’ because in Spain today the term ‘‘cultura popular’’ tends to continue to be reserved for popular traditions produced and consumed by the people, including both rural and urban lower classes. And a sense of regional language, identity, and culture persists in Spain in the democratic era (Graham and Labanyi; 1995, 8–9). This is not to say that Spanish literature has not felt the impact of commercialism. For Roger D. Tinnell the forces of the electronic age have erased cultura popular: ‘‘In the information age, Spanish folk music is fast disappearing since children no longer play in the streets making up games and singing songs, but instead stay inside, watch television and play with video games. . . . Rock music, particularly American, has largely displaced folk music’’ (Tinnell 1999, 294). From the late 1980s market forces have turned even literature from an intellectual creation into a simple commodity to be sold and bought. Juan Pablo Fusi concludes his study of twentieth-century Spanish culture with this succinct statement: ‘‘[E]n 1900 cultura era igual a modernismo y generacio´n del 98, en 1999 a mercado y

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medios de comunicacio´n’’ (Fusi 1999, 194) [In 1900 culture meant modernism and the Generation of 98, in 1999 the market and the communication media]. Germa´n Gullo´n mockingly laments: ‘‘El lector tı´pico escoge los libros como las prendas de vestir, por marca—deme, por favor un Javier Marı´as, un Dan Brown [ . . . ] es un producto ma´s’’ (Gullo´n 2004, 2) [The typical reader chooses books as if they were pieces of clothing, by the brand . . . give me, please a Javier Marias, a Dan Brown . . . it’s just one more product]. 5. While sharing the Krausist thinkers’ paternalistic attitude toward the masses, once the civil war began the Republican intelligentsia was obliged to assume a more fraternal stance. Politicizing the romance, they made it the voice of the people, the populist cause, and the struggle for freedom. After the civil war, the Franco regime censored new ideas and critical thought, but it recognized the usefulness of folk culture as a way to control and indoctrinate the citizenry. Folk culture primarily in the form of flamenco was used to both homogenize the nation, to erase regional difference, and to paint a picturesque image of the country for the purpose of promoting tourism. 6. Gustav Siebenmann (1973) stresses the kindred elements that the new poets found in certain older lyrics. Among the traits of folklore poetry that attracted the modernists are: repetition, dissonance, negation, magic and mystery, and laconic expression. 7. Instead of a ‘‘confusion’’ of trends, John Crispin perceives three clear lines of poetry intermingling in the twenties: the canonical literary tradition, the formal lesson learned from the avant-garde with its ambivalent attitude toward modernity, and an element that can be called primitivism (2002, 19). 8. Vanguard writers were full of contradictions. They were modernists who rebelled against modernity, and they were members of the bourgeoisie who rejected their own class. In his introduction to Pino 2004, Antonio Go´mez L. Quin˜ones explains the iconoclasm of this prose as the reaction of one bourgeoisie that was ‘‘liberal, europeı´sta e insatisfecha’’ [liberal, Europeanist, and dissatisfied] against another one that was ‘‘sedentaria y tradicionalista’’ [sedentary and traditionalist]. He gives as a third contradiction the progressive bent of the modernist aesthetic of the twenties that ended up in the thirties on the right of the political spectrum. I would complete the complications by pointing out that the apolitical preoccupations of some vanguardists yielded to political involvement. 9. This apolitical stance characterizes the Castilian avant-garde. Catalan modernism, in contrast, expressed nationalist aspirations and reflected greater political tensions. Being the center of thriving industrialization and of worker activism, Barcelona represented an authentic opposition to control by the central government. The Madrid vanguardists limited their subversion to the potentials of literary creations. Some of this group later abandoned zealous experimentation for political engagement—for example, Rafael Alberti, who began his political writing with ‘‘Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir’’ (I Have to Die with My Boots On), in January 1930. 10. Benjamin saw the industrial reproduction of art as a positive and liberating phenomenon that would lead to an open and diverse reality. However, he also recognized that the political appropriation of mass art by the Fascists was a negative and repressive one. By crossing ‘‘the Great Divide,’’ the historical avant-garde challenged the sanctity of high culture and attempted to dethrone art in a grand gesture of aesthetic rebellion and independence, but a variety of sociopolitical forces would gradually convert artworks into market commodities and conformist and culturally dependent vehicles of commercialism. 11. Despite the general lack of direct involvement of Spanish vanguardists in polit-

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ical matters, they did not lack for pronouncements on the political intent of their artistic gestures. For example, Guillermo de Torre said in an interview that all authentic vanguardism presupposes congruent political extremism and that vanguardism is the equivalent of extremism and antibourgeoisism (2000, 22). All their proclamations notwithstanding, the vanguard ‘‘revolution’’ was accomplished by disrupting semantic, linguistic, and metaphorical logic, not political, governmental policies. 12. In his prologue to the second edition of La edad de plata (1902–1939), Jose´Carlos Mainer admits that the name ‘‘Silver Age’’ is inadequate, but he uses it because it has gained currency. According to him, it was used first in a general sense in 1973, by the historian Miguel Martı´nez Cuadrado. 13. Following the lead of Luis Cernuda, Andrew P. Debicki argued in 1968 for the use of 1925, rather than 1927, as the pivotal date for the poetry of the 1920s, because, being too late, 1927 overemphasizes the ‘‘pure,’’ formalistic elements of poetry. By 1994, the date of his Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century, Debicki—along with others, to be sure—had come to realize that the importance of generations had been exaggerated. To compensate for this fragmentation, he situated twentieth-century Spanish poetry in the larger context of European modernity. Andrew A. Anderson opts for greater fragmentation by disassociating the Generation of 27 from the historical avant-garde, which for him seems to comprise most of the poets not included in the ‘‘canonized’’ group of 27. The title ‘‘Generation of 27’’ may not disappear, since habits die hard and, after extended use, names lose their literal meanings and become cultural conventions. Yet the passage of time and the effects of globalization today expand critical horizons and blur generational distinctions. 14. The book was reedited in 1965 and again in 1971 by Ediciones Guadarrama as Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia. The title change reflects his shift from a proselytizing stance to a historical perspective. Instead of beginning with ultraı´smo and including a second part devoted to a discussion of vanguard techniques, the later editions, after a lengthy introduction, treat in chronological order the succession of isms from futurism, expressionism, cubism, and dadaism in volume 1, through superrealismo, imaginismo, ultraı´smo, and personalismo in volume 2, to various isms of the post– World War II era in volume 3. 15. Baudelaire was the first to describe the modern aesthetic of ‘‘presentness,’’ of ‘‘timeless immediacy.’’ In his classic study, Matei Calinescu underscores the value of Baudelaire’s poetics as the description of the literary and cultural trends prevailing from the end of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century (1987, 46–48). 16. Calinescu states that by 1920 ‘‘avant-garde,’’ as an artistic concept, came to designate all the new schools ‘‘whose aesthetic programs were defined, by and large, by their rejection of the past and by the cult of the new’’ (1987, 117). He points out, however, that there were two avant-gardes; the first carried the political meaning of critique of social forms (and thus the rise of socialism), while the second one, emerging in France in 1870 and spreading to other Neo-Latin countries, had aesthetic connotations and goals. Parallel to this distinction, he differentiates two distinct and bitterly conflicting modernities: one is a product of scientific and technological progress, a reflection of bourgeois faith in the benefits of science and technology, and concern with time as a commodity, and the other is an aesthetic concept defined by ‘‘its outright rejection of bourgeois modernity’’ (42). Poggioli also sees an opposition in conflicting modern tendencies. For him, modernism (which in Italy referred to a superficial and overblown avant-garde) is a caricature of modernity; it goes to the extreme limits of everything in the modern spirit that is frivolous and fleeting (1962, 240–45).

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17. In the initial chapter of The Spanish Avant-garde, Derek Harris argues that the avant-garde is more fundamental than an assault on technical organizing and conventions like prosody; it ‘‘is a revolution in the relationship of art to the physical world and to human experience . . . set free from the requirement to copy and reflect something outside itself. Art becomes autonomous, sufficient unto itself and essentially meaningless.’’ Moral intent is replaced by play (Harris 1995, 3). Additionally the avant-garde signifies an ‘‘arena of agitation’’ that implies sacrifice and suffering for the artist (Poggioli 1962, 83). 18. Lily Litvak (1998) makes a case for dating the loss of faith in rationality at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, European culture had already lost confidence in the exterior world, rationalism, and material progress. Some adapted affirmative positions and others negative ones, but they presented a single front in their antirationalism. She also sees in the first years of the new century precursors to the youthful, combative, and optimistic spirit of Marinetti’s futurism (Insula). 19. My plan is not to fall into the trap that Susan Sontag detests, of following rigid, preestablished formulae of interpretations and of reducing reading to a search for questionable hidden meanings. For her, the modern drive to find latent meanings and to reduce the work of art to a content that conforms to limited viewpoints is a reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, and stifling act (1966, 7). As she observes, ‘‘programmatic avant-gardism’’ tried to reinstate the magic of the word and to experiment with form at the expense of content as a defense against interpretation (11). Nevertheless, as not only reading but rereading, literary criticism must indulge in analysis and reflection, in the observation of the what and the speculation of the why. 20. The first article published in Spain seems to be one by ‘‘Andrenio’’ (Eduardo Go´mez de Barquero) (G. Dı´az-Plaja 1975, 178). In 1921 Guillermo de Torre was already writing on the connection between film and the new literature. In his Literaturas europeas de vanguardia (1925), he devoted an entire section to cinema. Other early writings on film include those by Ce´sar Arconada, Francisco Ayala, Corpus Barga, Antonio Espina, Ernesto Gime´nez Caballero, and Fernando Vela. Ramo´n Go´mez de la Serna wrote a novel entitled Cinelandia, and film also formed the basis of novels by Carranque de los Rı´os, Arconada, and Benjamı´n Jarne´s. Numerous poets wrote poems on movies. 21. To say she was the only poet who made a film is true only if Salvador Dalı´ is considered a filmmaker who wrote poetry. Although Me´ndez’s screenplay has not survived, a synopsis was published at the time. (See Pe´rez de Ayala 1998 for a discussion of this film.) She also commented on the role of movies in La Gaceta Literaria. In her memoirs, she recounts that in the twenties she used to go to the movies a couple of times a week with her boyfriend, Luis Bun˜uel (Altolaguirre Ulacia 1990, 39–40), and that during the same years she had sold a movie script (55).

Chapter 2. The ‘‘Felices Veinte’’ 1. In addition, Manuel Tun˜o´n de Lara published Medio siglo de cultura espan˜ola, 1885–1936, a book that covers not only political and intellectual history but also literature as it relates to social developments. Of interest for its emphasis on economic and sociological events is Adrian Shubert’s A Social History of Modern Spain; and a valuable history of culture is Historia de Espan˜a de Mene´ndez Pidal: La Edad de Plata de la cultura espan˜ola, volume 2. 2. A watershed year for the Western world, 1917 is the date of the Russian Revolution and of the entry of the United States into World War I and its birth as the most

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powerful state of the twentieth century. This break in the political profile of the world coincides with the onset of the vanguardist movement in Spain. For this reason, the twenties as a name for a literary episode can be considered to begin in 1917 or at the end of the war in 1918. 3. These two regions displayed hostility toward the central state. Enric Ucelay Da Cal explains that the rise of this anti-Spanish nationalism was related to urbanization and industry. Because Barcelona had become the economic center of the country, it had a different nationalism and made the most radical political demands. Consequently, many of the military interventions in politics between 1919 and 1923 were centered in Barcelona. Ucelay Da Cal reminds us that the military coup of 1923 was launched from Barcelona with the general intent of quelling political threats from the Catalan region (1995, 38). 4. According to Garcı´a de Corta´zar and Gonza´lez Vesga (1994), 1923 to 1930 represents a period of social order in which participation in strikes went from 240,000 in 1920–21 to 20,000 in 1926. Politically motivated assaults were reduced from more than 800 in 1923 to a negligible number (557). 5. See Tun˜o´n de Lara 1981b, for charts and statistics on the social changes in Spain during the twenties. Also helpful is Capel Martı´nez 1986. 6. Shlomo Ben-Ami explains that the dictator’s political policies had created a crisis for Spain’s older political elites. He demolished the power bases of the traditional dynastic elites and, in doing so, created channels for the emergence of new political elites. In addition, Republicanism was strengthened by the desertion of groups formerly aligned with the monarchy and by the failure of conservative elites to redefine themselves in response to political changes (Ben-Ami 1990). 7. The economic development fostered during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, as Shlomo Ben-Ami explains, was cited by the Spanish Right as a rationale for its ‘‘productive’’ and nationalist approach to the economy, an approach later adopted by the Franco regime. Primo’s government was ‘‘interventionist and . . . zealously nationalist’’ (Ben-Ami 1983, 420–41). 8. The names most often cited as Spain’s stellar intellectuals are Manuel Azan˜a, Fernando de los Rı´os, Jose´ Ortega y Gasset, and Ramo´n Pe´rez de Ayala. However there were many more, including Luis Araquista´in, Pablo de Azca´rate, Ame´rico Castro, Luis Jime´nez de Azu´a, Gregorio Maran˜o´n, and Luis de Zulueta. 9. I take my figures from Scanlon (1986, 50). Capel in El trabajo y la educacio´n provides much more data as to the rates of literacy with charts comparing not only men to women, but also different cities and provinces. She also gives invaluable information on the number of women attending school and working outside the home. She outlines the numerous changes in the laws concerning women decreed between 1900 and 1930, but stresses that the application of the new laws was more hypothetical than real (Capel Martı´nez 1986, 99). Other sources for facts on women and education in the early twentieth century are Capel Martı´nez 1975, 71–105, Campo Alange 1963, Folguera 1987, Maillard 1990, and Zulueta and Moreno 1993. 10. The doors of the university might have been open to women, but they were not allowed to receive official degrees and at first not even to attend classes. Carmen de Zulueta and Alicia Moreno report that the first woman to receive a doctorate in arts and letters had to study at home during her first year and take her exams outside the classroom (1993, 17). They also tell that Marı´a Goyri, who would later marry Ramo´n Mene´ndez Pidal, had to be escorted into the classroom, where she sat on the dais next to the professor (18). In 1910 Julio Burrell, the minister of public instruction, allowed women to attend the university without prior government authorization, but attendance by women was still low. Those who did attend were ridiculed by their male classmates (Scanlon 1986, 57).

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11. Based on Krausism, a German school of philosophy, the Institucio´n emphasized ethical civic behavior, personal moral integrity, objective scientific thinking, and individualized intellectual development. Associated with the Institucio´n Libre de Ensen˜anza were men such as Manuel Bartolome´ Cossı´o, Gumersindo de Azca´rate, Nicola´s Salmero´n, Joaquı´n Costa, and Rafael Altamira. Although the students of the Institucio´n were male, its founders promoted the education of women. Fernando de Castro, for example, was an extraordinary promoter of education for women. In 1869 he started a series of Sunday lectures for women. In 1869 he also founded a school to train female teachers, and in 1870 he created the Asociacio´n para la Ensen˜anza de la Mujer, intended to prepare women in many fields other than education. 12. Besides Pe´rez-Villanueva Tovar 1990, also helpful for specific details and data on the Residencia are Margarita Sa´enz de la Calzada, La Residencia de Estudiantes, 1910–1936, 1987 and Crispin 1981, a book-length history of the Residencia between 1926 and 1934. 13. Salvador Dalı´ was blunt in calling them snobs. According to Pe´rez Andu´jar, Dalı´ defined the atmosphere in this way: ‘‘En la Residencia reinaba una suerte de segregacio´n en funcio´n del esnobismo intelectual’’ (2003, 86) [In the Residencia there reigned a kind of segregation in terms of intellectual snobbism]. Agustı´n Sa´nchez Vidal reports that Dalı´ felt that the other residents looked at his paintings with an innate snobbism (1988, 68). 14. Chacel studied in Spain’s preeminent art school, the Escuela de San Fernando, but for health reasons stopped attending the unheated school. She became a member of the Ateneo of Madrid, where she made the acquaintance of the literati of the day. Me´ndez was beaten by her mother when she tried to attend classes at the university. As for Champourcin, she did not pursue higher education because she refused to follow the custom that dictated that female students be chaperoned to school by a family member. 15. Women were involved in the Residencia only as the wives of visiting American professors, as the actresses, singers, or dancers that performed there, or as board members and members of the audience of its events. Ernestina de Champourcin told an interviewer that she went regularly to the lectures and seminars at the Residencia and heard the best minds of the day speak (Landeira 2005, 345–46). Thus, although not in the inner male circle, the female poets were informed about contemporary currents. 16. ‘‘La expresio´n high life (alta sociedad) se utilizaba mucho a principios de siglo. Como es natural, muchos la pronunciaban ‘gilı´,’ que en calo´ es un despectivo (tonto, estu´pido)’’ (Miguel 1995, 53) [The expression ‘‘high life’’ (high society) was used a great deal at the beginning of the century. As expected, many pronounced it ‘‘gilı´,’’ which in slang is derogatory—foolish, stupid]. 17. Dı´az reports that while Madrid offered all-night partygoers places to eat delectable suppers and brothels that stayed open all night, and some that even included discount coupons in a certain newspaper, it was also a city of venereal diseases and with a crowded downtown full of pickpockets, agitators, loafers, and vendors of everything under the sun (1999, 137). 18. It is reported that in the early years of the twentieth century Madrid had three hundreds bordellos (Rioyo 1991, 349–52, 325). Although there were some two thousand registered prostitutes, there were many more who operated beyond the law. Furthermore, prostitution was, in Rioyo’s words, ‘‘un serio negocio’’ [a serious business], involving an array of middlemen, hustlers, pimps, panderers, madams, procuresses, and different types of servants and employees (324–25). 19. Rioyo reports that Ramo´n y Cajal, the Nobel Prize-winning doctor, not only

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had many pictures taken of himself with prostitutes, but he is said to have stopped for ‘‘quickies’’ on the way to his laboratory (1991, 356). Luis Bun˜uel was a heavy drinker and an indomitable womanizer whose brutish behavior verged on the surreal. He often took Pepı´n Bello, Jose´ Bergamı´n, or Rafael Alberti along on his nocturnal adventures (Rioyo 1991, 358–59). 20. According to Jose´ Caballero the ludic spirit remained in Spain until the early thirties. He recounts some of the outrageous, although innocuous, antics that Lorca and Neruda engaged in, like holding inauguration ceremonies with grandiloquent speeches and producing, orally, sound effects of a marching band at the site of monuments already inaugurated (1983, 202). 21. In the nineteenth century some doctors started to awaken people to a sense of cleanliness of the body and the home, but the logistics of taking a bath at home, where there was no running water, were almost insurmountable (see F. Dı´az-Plaja 1969, 44.). Furthermore, superstitions and irrational thinking about fresh air and bathing lingered well into the twentieth century. Swimming at the beach and in pools was still ‘‘un asunto estrafalario’’ [an oddity] of vegetarians and Esperantists (Miguel 2001, 78). 22. In her exploration of Spanish vanguard fiction, Roberta Johnson reaches the same conclusion as Suleiman: that the narratives of male authors are replete with eroticized women that personify the subconscious of the male dream. Johnson’s contribution lies in her uncovering the radically different alternative of vanguard women’s sexual imagination (R. Johnson 2002, 52). Johnson’s efforts notwithstanding, the masculine perspective still colors the conceptualization of modernism. 23. It must be emphasized that the majority of Spanish women followed tradition. Newspapers and magazines promoted the new images, attitudes, and ways of life coming from America and Paris with articles and advertisements on body care, clothes, and home decoration, but most women either disapproved of the new fashions or could only fantasize about them. Playing to fantasy was precisely the aim of the fashion industry (Serrano and Salau¨n 2006, 159–64). 24. In her chapter 4, Scanlon (1986) outlines the prominent ‘‘scientific’’ texts written after 1890 that established the authoritative basis for antifeminist thought among intellectuals and the cultured public. She contends that the notions arising from the new fields of medicine, psychology, and biology were more pernicious than church doctrine because they saw feminism not as wicked behavior but as a threat to the conservation of the species. 25. It is widely accepted today that Martı´nez Sierra’s feminist statements were written by or in collaboration with his politically active wife, Marı´a Leja´rraga. In 1987 Patricia W. O’Connor published Gregorio y Marı´a Martı´nez Sierra: Cro´nica de una colaboracio´n (Madrid: Editorial La Avispa), in which she indicated the decisive participation of Marı´a in works signed by Gregorio and presented proof for these revelations. O’Connor later published Mito y realidad de una dramaturga espan˜ola: Marı´a Martı´nez Sierra (Logron˜o: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2003). Marı´a as ghostwriter for Gregorio is also the subject of Antonina Rodrigo, Marı´a Leja´rraga, una mujer en sombra (Madrid: Ediciones VOSA, 1994). 26. Jose´ Francos Rodrı´guez, for example, argued in favor of granting women voting rights not so much on the basis of gender equality as of gender complementarity. In La mujer y la polı´tica espan˜olas, he refuted the idea that the only possible career for women was marriage, condemned the double standard, and ardently defended women’s right to vote. Within the framework of feminism of difference and the prevailing notion of complementarity, he appealed for the erasure of the belief in the superiority of men (1920, 161). 27. Ortega crystallized his ideas on women in works such as ‘‘El hombre y la

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gente,’’ Estudios sobre el amor, and ‘‘Paisaje con una corza al fondo,’’ all collected in Ortega y Gasset 1966. 28. Evelyne Lo´pez Campillo devotes a entire book to this prestigious journal (see Lo´pez Cameillo 1972). She discusses the gender debate begun in its pages in 1923 as well as its reactionary and exclusionary tendencies. 29. Gonza´lez Blanco was not the only antifeminist of the period. Roberto No´voa Santos insists on biological differences to deride ‘‘crafty feminism’’ and exalts the real woman: ‘‘bella, fecunda, tierna y mentalmente feminina—la plena mujer’’ (1929, 70). The gynecologist Vital Aza y Dı´az in his Feminismo y sexo purports to support justice and rights for women, but he says that women should take care not to lose their femininity and ‘‘beautiful aspirations’’ as mothers in the process. Father Graciano Martı´nez enters the debate with his El libro de la mujer espan˜ola. He calls himself a ‘‘feminist’’ but negates any feminist intent by reducing woman to maternal love. 30. Throughout her essays, Chacel paints an ambiguous picture of gender identity. She rejects the image of woman because of its associations with weakness, although she at times celebrates certain female capacities. She rejects identification with the masculine even when she calls for the fusion of woman into man. Besides Mangini 1998, Chacel’s problematic thoughts on gender are also treated by Smith 1992, and R. Johnson 1996. 31. Some noted feminist journalists of the twenties included Marı´a Goyri, Carmen de Burgos, Margarita Nelken, Celsia Regis, and Marı´a Espinosa. For information on the rise of a feminist press in Spain during the period, see Perinat and Marrades 1980 and Roig 1989. 32. The most complete discussion of the Lyceum Club is Fagoaga 1985, 178–79, 182–84, 187–88, 190–92. Also informative are Campo Alange 1963, 208–10; Basauri 1978, 36–38; Nieva de la Paz 1993, 53, 66–68; Rodrigo 1979, 134–36; Zulueta and Moreno 1993, chap 2. 33. Catholic newspapers attacked the club for its secularism and denounced it as antifamily. They went so far as to call for the hospitalization or confinement of these ‘‘insane’’ women. See Bellver 2001, 35; and Bellver 2002b. 34. She observes sadly that the only massive women’s organizations were the Fascist organizations of the Seccio´n Femenina and the Accio´n Cato´lica of the decades of the forties and fifties (Dura´n 1993, 46). Mary Nash (1983) also published an anthology of documents relating to women. Hers is a collection of texts of the period dealing with women’s roles, marriage and the family, divorce, prostitution, and women in the workforce.

Chapter 3: Dance 1. As theatrical tastes changed, these forms evolved between 1900 and 1936, with one-act comedic plays known as ‘‘el ge´nero chico’’ dying out in the twenties and the musical variety show triumphing. Dı´az provides the dates for the rise and fall in popularity of these different genres (1999, 88). 2. For example, in 1906, eleven years before she was discovered to be a spy, Mata Hari was startling audiences in Madrid. Dı´az includes a quote from Rafael CansinosAssens’s La novela de un literato that captures the vulgar level of her entertainment and that of the others of her ilk: ‘‘Y cuentan que la artista [ . . . ] se alzo´ las faldas con sublime impudor y, descubriendo el vientre—ese vientre que tantos habrı´an besado de rodillas—les dijo a los muchachos: ‘Apuntad aquı´,’ cual si quisiera celebrar una co´pula simbo´lica con todos ellos’’ (1999, 85) [And they say the artist . . . raised her

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skirts with sublime shamelessness and, exposing her belly—that belly that so many had kissed on their knees—she said to the guys: ‘‘Aim here,’’ as if she wanted to engage in a symbolic copulation with all of them]. Segre Salau¨n dates the first striptease in modern theater to a performance on February 9, 1893, at the Moulin Rouge. In 1916 the black beauty called ‘‘La Perla Etı´ope’’ still startled the public by dancing a rumba nude. 3. The students in a class of Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal, professor of contemporary history at the Universidad Complutense, during the academic year 1997–1998, prepared a helpful Web page on the cuple´ containing an overview of the nightlife in Madrid, biographies of the cupletistas, and a map of the locations of music halls where they performed. See (www.ucm.es/info/hcontemp/madrid/El%20%Madrid20del% 20cuple.htm). 4. Lest anyone think that ours are the only times with spoiled celebrities, Dı´az recounts that Raquel Meller, a former seamstress who became an international sensation, earned astronomical fees, bought a palace in Versailles where Montesquieu had lived, purchased a piano supposedly once owned by Mozart, and was the first person to use her name to promote products (Dı´az 1999, 129). La Bella Otero was romantically involved or courted by innumerable rich and famous men, including six kings. Her cultural significance has been studied in two biographies: Carmen Posadas, La Bella Otero (Barcelona: Planeta, 2001) and Javier Figuero and Marie-He´le`ne Carbonel, Arruı´name, pero no me abandondes: La Bella Otero y la Belle E´poque (Madrid: Espasa, 2003). The last surviving member of that legendary generation of cupletistas, Imperio Argentina, was memorialized in the ABC on the occasion of her death as ‘‘undoubtedly one of the greatest of all times of the copla and the tonadilla’’ (Spain Boletı´n Cultural, no. 240 [July–August 2003]: 83–85). 5. A year-by-year list of the major cuple´ performances, theater productions, and other spectacles that took place during the period can be found in Bravo Morata 1985a, 1985b, and 1985c. For a monograph on the cuple´, see Salau¨n 1990 and, for his very succinct summary of the history of the cuple´, see Salau¨n 1995. As it won respectability by forfeiting its comic-erotic strand to sentimentality, the cuple´ reached wider audiences and ultimately became a national cultural form suitable for all—in other words, a mass-marketable commodity. 6. Kathy J. Ogren identifies these three qualities as the markers of the Jazz Age. She also affirms that music and dance went hand in hand in jazz, with the music often being created by the interchange between a group of dancers and singers (1989, 20). For this reason observations applicable to jazz music can be inferred from my remarks on dance. 7. The list of dance types originating in the United States in the first part of the century seems endless. Ogren, for example, records the names of ‘‘animal’’ dances: the turkey trot, the grizzly bear, the monkey glide, the chicken scratch, and the kangaroo dig (1989, 36). Performed in honky-tonks, dance halls, and brothels, jazz dances were condemned in the United States, as well as in Spain. 8. See Dı´az 1999, 88; and Salau¨n 1995, 361. 9. The triumph of Franco’s nationalist dictatorship put an end to sexual freedom, the exaltation of modernity, and foreign influences, but the movida, the Madrid scene of the early years of the new democratic period, confirmed Madrid’s perennial fascination with youth, wanton pleasure, and nightlife. Beatriz Martı´nez del Fresno and Nuria Mene´ndez Sa´nchez review dance in Spain in the twentieth century in Amoro´s and Dı´ez Borque 1999, 335–72. 10. In the early twentieth century three American women broke the mold of academic dance: Loı¨e Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis. They devised new

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practices as alternatives to ballet and show dancing and thus paved the way for modern dance figures like Martha Graham. They also helped develop new gender identities for women (see Tomko 1999). 11. Lorca had a long relationship with La Argentinita. She played the lead in his 1920 play El maleficio de la mariposa; he arranged traditional Spanish songs for her to sing; and he dedicated to her his elegy on Ignacio Sa´nchez Mejı´as, who was romantically involved with her. Lorca made presentations with her in Granada and at the Residencia de Estudiantes. Cartas y a´lbum fotogra´fico (Granada: Diputacio´n Provincial, 1993) is a compilation of documents on the relationship between La Argentinita and Lorca. 12. Jacinto Benavente, for example, said, ‘‘[V]e uno a Pastora Imperio y la vida se intensifica’’ (www.tristeyazul.com/artflam/pimper01.htm) [One sees Pastora Imperio and life becomes more intense]. Cansinos-Assens refers to a banquet held in her honor, whose attendees included such disparate admirers as Felipe Trigo and Miguel de Unamuno (Cansinos-Assens 1982; 2:153). 13. For a summary of the variety of major dance genres performed in Spain during the entire twentieth century, see Martı´nez del Fresno and Mene´ndez Sa´nchez 1999. The dance genre classified as ‘‘danza espan˜ola’’ comprised four subcategories: folklore dance, flamenco, bolero, and stylized dance. During the twenties, besides these, ballet was performed in places such as El Teatro Real and the Gran Teatro del Liceo, especially after the boost given by the appearance in Spain of Ballets Russes in 1916. The modern, revolutionary type of dancing introduced by the North Americans Fuller, Duncan, and St. Denis also had its repercussions in Spain starting in the second decade of the century. 14. A picture of Manuel Azan˜a pinning the medal on the beloved dancer is included in Bravo Morata 1985d, 168. Javier Varela reports that, when she visited New York, the Hispanists and Spanish writers went wild over her, crediting her with purifying the authentic roots of flamenco and raising them to a universal level (1999, 108–9). 15. Roberta Johnson recounts some of the jokes centering on women’s bodies, and she refers to two landmarks of vanguard fiction by Spanish male writers—Vı´spera del gozo by Pedro Salinas and El convidado del papel by Benjamı´n Jarne´s—to show that the women who occupy the male imagination are not real (2003, 41–42). 16. David Michael Lewis attributes the inadequacy of philosophical literature on dance to the fact that ‘‘our Western civilization is fundamentally patriarchal. That means, in effect, that it is necessarily organized around male dominance and a corresponding (well-hidden) aversion to the female principle . . . we might notice that most choreographers and dance critics (both of whom represent the hidden power of the ‘intellectual’ side of dance) have been males, while the dancers themselves (representing the intuitive and appreciative side) have been either females or males who are ‘female-oriented’ ’’ (Lewis, in Copeland and Cohen 1983, 86). 17. The dilemmas and difficulties faced by Spanish women poets of the twenties and thirties have been explored in Bellver 2001. 18. The Royal Kursaal was a pelota court in Madrid converted at night into a theater. It was one of the period’s celebrated music halls along with the Tirano´n Palace and the Apolo, the ‘‘cathedral of the genre’’ (Dı´az 1999, 81). Pastora Imperio, La Argentina, La Fornarina, and Mata Hari were among the performers who appeared at the fronton court converted into a stage; there was a semicircle of seats, and behind them chairs and tables in a cafe´ arrangement. The Kursaal was located in the Plaza del Carmen and is occupied today by a movie complex. Cansinos-Assens, writing for El Sol in an article later collected in his La novela de un literato, called the Kursaal an

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‘‘enormous and sumptuous’’ music hall where ‘‘all of Bohemian and elegant Madrid’’ gathered, and he concluded, ‘‘Al fin, tenemos algo digno de una gran ciudad moderna. [. . .] Ahora el vicio elegante tiene su palacio y su templo’’ (1982, 228). [At last we have something worthy of a large, modern city. . . . Now elegant vice has its palace and temple.] 19. This poem was originally published in October 1919 in Grecia. When it was published in Vando-Villar’s La sombrilla japonesa, it was not arranged in the form of a cross, but in traditional poetic format as five couplets. The words at the foot of the cross disappeared, and the statement appearing on the vertical and horizontal beams of the cross appeared as ‘‘Las milonguitas conocen todos / los secretos de nuestras carteras’’ [The milonga dancers know all / the secrets of our wallets]. The lines no longer present a baffling juxtapositioning of signs, and the religious connotation of the poem has been erased. 20. In an essay published in 1919 in the journal Cervantes, Diego outlines his classification of images, which ascend in complexity from ‘‘imagen’’ to ‘‘imagen mu´ltiple,’’ the culminating image of creacionismo, which, he explains, ‘‘[n]o explica nada; es intraducible a la prosa. Es la Poesı´a en el ma´s puro sentido de la palabra. Es tambie´n, y exactamente, la mu´sica, que es substancialmente el arte de las ima´genes mu´ltiples’’ (Diego, in Videla 1971, 111). [Doesn’t explain anything; it is untranslatable to prose. It is Poetry in the purest sense of the word. It is also, and precisely, music, which is essentially the art of multiple images.] 21. Iris Zavala argues that the tango with its specific gestures and poses, its language marked by a wide range of hyperbolic and metaphorical euphemisms for sexual organs, its antiauthoritarian tone, and its association with urban, working-class foreigners, blacks, and marginalized citizens was ‘‘one of the best examples of heterology and transculturation’’ that scandalized and threatened the dominant bourgeois and elite culture. The archbishop of Paris’s prohibition of the dance coincided with a tongue-in-cheek definition made at the time; she quotes it as follows: ‘‘The tango is an old-fashioned dance: the only difference is that formerly it was danced lying down, and now it is danced standing up’’ (1992, 162). 22. In his four-page prologue, Herna´ndez argues that the poets of the twenties exaggerated the romanticism of the waltz as part of their ironic and mocking interpretations of the status quo. In the ten waltz poems that follow, he includes examples by Diego, Garcı´a Lorca, Aleixandre, Miguel Herna´ndez, Pablo Neruda, and Juan GilAlbert. 23. The durability of the waltz as a form of popular culture is demonstrated by the fact that Fred Astaire continued to make movies into the 1950s. To this day, although not a dance form favored by the young, the waltz continues as part of the resurgence of ballroom dancing. 24. Her play El personaje presentido takes place in comparable settings: a night at the opera, an open-air American bar of a tennis club, an ocean liner—all elegant venues in which the upper classes amused themselves. 25. C. B. Morris writes, ‘‘It takes no sharp vision or skilled powers of detection to note the vigorous revival of Spain’s poetic past in Spanish poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. To read Spanish poetry of this period is to rediscover a rich compendium of poetic traditions’’ (1969, 17). Da´maso Alonso sees his contemporaries as reacting against neither their political environment nor literary tradition: ‘‘[D]esde fines del siglo pasado hasta la generacio´n de que hablamos, no hay ninguna discontinuidad, ningu´n rompimiento esencial en la tradicio´n poe´tica’’ (1969, 161) [From the end of the last century to the generation we are speaking of, there is no discontinuity, no essential break in poetic tradition].

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26. Gustav Siebenmann credits Guillermo Dı´az-Plaja with being the first to differentiate succinctly between popularismo and neopopularismo. The first trend, identified with the late romantics and the Generation of 98, corresponds to a desire to resurrect old forms, while the second one is associated with modernist poets who discovered traits that seemed modern in certain popular ballads. For the first group, popular poetry was the objective; for the second, it was merely a starting point. Among the features in traditional poetry that attracted the poets of the twenties, Siebenmann lists mystery, dissonance, negation, the laconic, the magical, and repetition. 27. Although an old tradition, the verbena represented freedom for Me´ndez. In her memoirs she fondly remembers her excursions to the verbenas and the poorer neighborhoods of Madrid in the company of the painter Maruja Mallo, who translated their conversations and happy outings into her series of paintings (Ulacia Altolaguirre 1990, 51–52). These fairs symbolized the air of adventure, rebellion, and youthful wonder they both dared to breathe. 28. Prominent Lorca scholars have already studied this aspect of Lorca’s poetry. For works on Lorca and flamenco see: Grande 1992); Allen Josephs and Juan Caballero, eds. Federico Garcı´a Lorca, Poema del Cante Jondo/Romancero gitano (Madrid: Castalia, 1986); Allen Josephs, White Wall of Spain: The Mysteries of Andalusian Culture (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1983); and Juan Lo´pez-Morillas, ‘‘Garcı´a Lorca y el primitivismo lı´rico: Reflexiones sobre el Romancero gitano,’’ Cuadernos Americanos 9 (1950): 238–50. 29. Silverio Franconetti, an Italian promoter, opened the first of these places, the Cafe´ de los Lombardos, in 1842 in Seville. Until the end of the century these ‘‘showbars sprouted like mushrooms, catapulting artists—particuarly Gitano singers and female dancers—to stardom, creating fortunes for the impresarios’’ (Washabaugh 1996, 14). 30. In February 1922, four months before the festival, in a lecture of justification and explanation of the ‘‘cante jondo,’’ Lorca said the music of the people was in danger of being degraded and of disappearing. He declared his intention to try to save this music through an act of love and patriotism (1984, 50). For details on the ‘‘concurso,’’ see: Manuel de Falla, El cante jondo (Canto primitivo andaluz) (Granada: Ucrania, 1922) and Escritos (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Comisarı´a General de la Mu´sica, 1947); Garcı´a Lorca 1984; Antonio Gallego Morell, ‘‘Concurso de cante jondo en la Granada de 1922,’’ ABC, November 6, 1960; Eduardo Molina Fajardo, Manuel de Falla y el cante jondo (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1962); Manuel Rı´os Ruiz, Historias y Teorı´as del Cante Jondo (Madrid: Taller El Bu´caro, 1993); and Edward Stanton, The Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1978). 31. This process of transformation involves complex issues of national identity, cultural hegemony, and political dominance; and it is this area of inquiry that has been targeted by scholars of today’s cultural studies. Stephanie Sieburth (1994) has shown that there was a certain tension between popular and high culture at the end of the nineteenth century and that the schism beween the two was more unbridgeable in the early twentieth century. English publishers have led the way in Spanish cultural studies, bringing out a number of significant books in this area: Gies 1999; Graham and Labanyi 1995; Jo Labanyi 2002; and Barry Jordan and R. Morgan-Tamosunas, ed., Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies (London: Arnold, 2000). 32. Whatever terminology is used, these two semantic levels stem from the Saussurean distinction between the signifier and the signified. Vehicle and tenor are the words used by I. A. Richards for the image or concrete situation described and the ulterior signficance suggested. George Lakoff and Mark Turner define the source do-

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main as the sphere of knowledge of the real that is mapped onto the metaphor or figurative plane, the target domain. Spanish writers on stylistics, like Carlos Bouson˜o, have preferrred the terms ‘‘plano ideal’’ and ‘‘plano real.’’ 33. J. R. Walsh confirms the multiplicity of readings possible for surrealist poems. He sees slumber, rather than death, as the unifying thread of images hidden beneath the surface patterns of ‘‘Vals en las ramas.’’ For him, the images in this poem as well as those in ‘‘Vals viene´s’’ mask sexual and specifically homosexual meanings (1988, 515). 34. Any number of differences in circumstances, including their divergent relationships with canonical literature, their formal training, and their scant cultural opportunities, may account for these gendered contrasts. Writing of nineteenth-century female novelists, Walter Ong already observed in 1982 that a lack of training in academic writing and of learned Latin accounted for their more realistic and quotidian language (1982, 109–13). With less book learning, women poets of the twenties were aware of dance as an aspect of the new social fashions rather than as a part of a literary tradition. 35. Many of the women poets of the period married men who were also writers. Concha Me´ndez married Manuel Altolaguirre, Ernestina de Champourcin wed Juan Jose´ Domenchina, and Carmen Conde became the wife of Antonio Oliver. Although Josefina de la Torre married an actor, her novelist brother Claudio brought her in contact with many of the important writers of the time. Many critics, such as Wilcox, have blamed marital ties for the marginalization of the female poet. Misogyny on the part of the literary world and general society undeniably existed in Spain, but unmarried female writers did not fare any better than married ones. Being married to fellow writers may have meant that the names of women poets were forever linked to those of their husbands, but it also provided opportunities for introduction to other writers, publishing possibilities, and professional support. 36. This is a major premise of Bellver 2001. The enthusiasm of youth, the spirit of the avant-garde, and the feeble but incipient changes in attitudes toward women conditioned the posture of Spanish women poets of the twenties and thirties. They spoke of life, liberty, and desire with youthful verve and confidence. ‘‘The element of possession—of both the self and the other—implied in the joyful expression of presence connotes autonomy and power, qualities indispensable for self-assertion’’ (13). 37. Joy Landeira discusses ‘‘Danza en tres tiempos’’ at length in her monograph on Champourcin (2005, 115–19). She perceives in it not only a sense of ‘‘gynocentric’’ liberation, but also echoes of surrealism, symbolism, and the ideas of Juan Ramo´n. 38. Sa´nchez Saornil became a member of CNT (the anarchist union) and later developed the rationale for what was to become Mujeres Libres, a journal and an organization. She argues for women’s rights, education, emancipation, and human dignity. Of this exceptional woman, Martha A. Ackelsberg writes, ‘‘As for Lucı´a Sa´nchez Saornil (who disappeared somewhat mysteriously after the war), virtually everyone recalled her as a real firebrand. She was a small woman with a powerful presence as an orator, who reminded them—physically and in personality—of Louise Michel, the heroine of the Paris Commune’’ (1991, 94). 39. Helen Thomas’s premise is that being a medium of the body, dance is bound up with the process of gender roles and identification, particularly in relation to girls and young women. As she states, feminists have revealed the centrality of the body as a site of discourse and of social control, and some, like Cixous and Irigary, have argued for rewriting the body, because the feminine has been devalued and repressed through logocentricism (Thomas 1995, 1–30). Lisa Rado has edited a collection of essays (1997) that consider the relation between modernism, gender, and various aspects of

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culture. Washabaugh subtitles his book on the emergence of popular music and dance in the nineteenth century ‘‘Body, Gender, and Sexuality.’’ A significant book on the body and the novel is Brooks 1993. For a consideration of the body in Spanish narrative see Scarlett 1994. 40. In his study of the body in modern narrative, Peter Brooks reviews these connections and states: ‘‘The drive for possession will be closely linked to the drive to know, itself most often imaged as the desire to see’’ (1993, 9). Seeing is knowing, and knowing is power. Therefore, we can conclude that seeing a female dancer confers both sexual pleasure and dominion on the male viewer. 41. Groundbreaking feminist studies on the question of the gaze include Lauretis 1984; Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ Screen 16, no. 3 (1975); and Mulvey 1989, 14–26. 42. Gilbert and Gubar 1987 as well as David Chinitz point to T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Cousin Nancy’’ as an illustration of the avant-garde poet’s use of satire to counteract his uneasiness over the appearance of the ‘‘new woman.’’ Gilbert and Gubar also examine the women in ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ who, by making Prufrock an object of their gaze, turn him into a helpless object. Their knowledge of Michelangelo ‘‘pollutes’’ culture in his eyes, for female usurpation of sight and learning seems unnatural and disturbing (Gilbert and Guber 1987, 31–32). 43. Johnson declares her premise in the initial pages of her study: ‘‘Male Spanish authors of the early twentieth century . . . were more modernist in the traditional understanding of the term, emphasizing technical and verbal innovation in their efforts to represent the contents of an individual consciousness. Women engaged in what I call social modernism, a mode that focuses on interpersonal relations within formal and informal parameters’’ (R. Johnson 2003, vii). She considers the women narrators to be social and political visionaries. Women writers, she admits, narrated imagined women just as male writers did, but ‘‘[i]nstead of being erotic fantasies . . . they are socially and politically committed new women who do not exist in Spain but who are projected for the future. . . . They have a vision, but it is not of the female body; it is of a new body politic, of a different Spanish society in which women act alongside men’’ (225). 44. In the patriarchal polarization of man/woman and mind/body, the female can only exist in a state of grounded corporality or arrested suspension. Feminists have long recognized and analyzed patriarchal binary opposites and the invariable identification of the ‘‘feminine’’ with the negative pole. 45. Iris Zavala interprets the tango as a masculine dance and as an instrument of social challenge wielded by the urban, immigrant underclass of Buenos Aires (1992, 161). Considering the woman’s perspective, Marta Savigliano argues that, although the tanguera is faced with a scene that threatens and muffles her, ‘‘Women have never been just ‘docile bodies’ or ‘passive objects’ on the margins. . . . In the tango, the marginals are the core’’ (qtd. in Washabaugh 1996, 20). Washabaugh (1996, 18–20) quickly reviews various gender interpretations of the tango, including that of Donald Castro, who identifies the male-centeredness in both tango lyrics and personalities, and that of Jeffrey Tobin, who carries the androcentrism of the male dancer further and perceives a transmission of affections between men in the tango. 46. For example, Manuel Azan˜a, a liberal politician and later the president of the Second Republic, wrote of Margarita Nelken, who won a seat in parliament in 1931: ‘‘Esto de que la Nelken opine en cosas de polı´tica me saca de quicio. Es la indiscrecio´n en persona’’ (qtd. in Bordonada 1989, 14). [The fact that Nelken gives her opinion on politics drives me nuts. She is the personification of indiscretion.]

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47. Autobiographical, the book was inspired by a beautiful young American woman with whom Moreno Villa had fallen in love, but whom he could not marry because of her parents’ objections. He recounts the details of this failed relationship in Moreno Villa 1976, 123–41. Portrayed in the poems as attractive, charming, and lively, Jacinta was apparently in real life frivolous and capricious. 48. Seeing a narrower correlation than that between Jacinta and the spirit of the Jazz Age, Salvador J. Fajardo finds in her an expression of the spirit of the Residencia de Estudiantes—lighthearted bantering, creative energies, and iconoclasm producing excitement (1994, 73). 49. Spanish women were not the only ones who danced the Charleston. Salvador Dalı´, for example, is purported to have danced every afternoon with his sister (Rodrigo 1981, 89). 50. Important studies on psychosexual development include Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); Jane Flax, ‘‘The Conflict between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and within Feminism,’’ Feminist Studies 4, no. 2 (1978): 171–89; Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). 51. Barbara Ehrenreich (2006) finds that dancing over the centuries has been a way to address and temporarily escape personal as well as social ills. She defines dance as communal, celebratory, and ecstasy-producing. 52. Caws explains fully her use of the term ‘‘stress’’: ‘‘Stress I mean first, of course, in the sense of a certain anxiety relating to the projects both of comparison and of the expression of that comparison: to relate occasions stress. Secondly, as in metric stress, it is an accent placed on certain details in particular, sometimes in a recurring pattern. Lastly, there is the stress of a ‘stressed’ metal, where the trying moment proves some sort of endurance. Such stress is indeed trying, since, in its translation from one domain to the next, the accent and the positive energy discharged by the problematics of address encounter each other in a struggle at once vivifying, vitalizing, and agonistic’’ (1989, 3). 53. Lessing’s distinctions were subverted by the modernist mind, which aspired to artistic transgressions and the erasure of a variety of different boundaries. Lessing defined poetry as temporal and painting as spatial. His neat distinction can be blurred, for a painting, a large one especially, can contain a sequence of images requiring time to perceive them, and poetry extends over the space of a page—an attribute on which the vanguard poets capitalized. 54. Studies of ekphrasis by Hispanists include Emilie L. Bergman, Art Inscribed: Essays on Ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Peter A. Bly, Vision and the Visual Arts in Galdo´s: A Study of Novels and Newspaper Articles (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1986); Diane Chaffee, ‘‘Visual Art in Literature: The Role of Time and Space in Ekphrastic Creations,’’ Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispa´nicos 8, no. 3 (1984): 311–20; David H. Darst, Imitatio (Pole´mica sobre la imitacio´n en el Siglo de Oro) (Madrid: Editorial Orı´genes, 1985); and Persin 1997a. 55. ‘‘Dance poetry’’ might suggest poetry about dance, but it also connotes poetry to which one could dance. ‘‘Textualized dance’’ points to the written medium of poetry, but it could also mean choreographic notation. Someone might want to use ‘‘terpsichoresis,’’ but I refrain from inventing. 56. Vale´ry used the following reasoning to prove that poetry is action. ‘‘A poem is action, because a poem exists only at the moment of being spoken; then it is in actu. This act, like the dance, has no other purpose than to create a state of mind; it imposes

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its own laws; it, too, creates a time and a measurement of time which are appropriate and essential to it: we cannot distinguish it from its form of time. To recite poetry is to enter into a verbal dance’’ (qtd. in Copeland and Cohen 1983, 63). 57. Cesare Segre (1985) teaches us that a text is any vehicle of unified articulated meaning and therefore can be a painting, theater, dance, or an entire culture. What sets the literary text apart from the others is that it does not limit itself to literal meanings; the linguistic vehicle is capable of communicating nonreferential meanings. Yet, the differences between literary and other types of text, he says, is not of nature but of quality and function. There are many intermediate stages that are not sufficiently appreciated (175–79). It is in these ‘‘intermediate phases’’ that coincidences between poetry and other arts, such as dance, are found. 58. The power of metaphors is limitless. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) make a strong case for understanding metaphor not only as a device of the poetic imagination but also as the fundamental mechanism of our ordinary conceptual system.

Chapter 4. Sports 1. These changes were occurring as a new consciousness of health and hygiene developed. An authentic concern for municipal sanitation, household cleanliness, personal hygiene, and hospital sterilization had not emerged in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. Spain was slow to adopt measures of good hygiene. The sociologist Amando de Miguel rejects Rafael Nu´nez’s belief that traditional prejudices and moral scruples were responsible for Spain’s resistance to cleanliness. He sees the explanation in the high cost of installing running water and in the obstacles of Spain’s dry, mountainous terrain. The present-day formula for soap (alkali and fat) dates only from 1791. Modern soap did not become available in urban centers until the late nineteenth century, and even in the early twentieth it was a luxury (Miguel 1995, 77). The recommended tooth cleaner in 1930 was still charcoal (81). 2. Elias and Dunning (1986) remind us that the level of violence in sports was higher before the eighteenth century and higher in the nineteenth than in the twentieth century. In the ancient Olympic Games the pancration, a kind of wrestling, permitted the killing of one’s opponent. In ancient Greece, in accordance with the code of warriors, boxers were not supposed to move and thus frequently suffered injuries to the eyes, ears, and skull and could be killed. Even in the nineteenth century, greater violence was allowed in boxing than today. Elias and Dunning explain that because we are brought up now with specific standards of self-control with regard to impulses of violence, we possess a heightened sensitivity toward acts of violence and a repugnance to violence committed beyond the permitted level in real life (1986, 133). They are nonetheless quick to point out that transgressions against these standards of violence control do occur in our society: an example would be the spectator hooliganism at soccer matches, which they interpret as an expression of aggressive masculinity. 3. In 1893 Coubertin had already issued a statement on the meaning of amateurism: ‘‘The restoration of the Olympic Games, on foundations and under conditions that are in keeping with the needs of modern life, would bring together representatives of the nations of the world every four years. It may be hoped that these peaceful, courteous confrontations are the best form of internationalism’’ (2000, 299). In April 1896, in an official report of the International Congress, he expressed his hope ‘‘that the revival of the Olympic Games will bring Athleticism to a high state of perfection, and that they will infuse new elements of ambition in the lives of the rising generation: a love for concord and a respect for life!’’ (311). More than a century later the Olym-

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pic Games still fascinate intellectuals and the general public. The return of the Olympic Games to Athens coincided with the publication of six books on the Olympics chosen for review by Jasper Griffen in the New York Review of Books, October 21, 2004, 19–21. 4. These present-day criticisms are in themselves somewhat anachronistic, because at the end of the nineteenth century, in France and many other countries, the upper classes still determined cultural norms. As Robert E. Rinehart points out, Coubertin did not envision ‘‘that his lofty ideals of amateurism and professionalism would be criticized as thin veils for a ‘haves versus have nots,’ privileged upper-class snobbery.’’ Rinehart implies that the intermingling today of amateurism and professionalism is no less censurable: ‘‘[Not] only are ‘professional’ sports the hub of cottage industries; the encroachment of money into ‘amateur’ sports has changed the face of such events as the Olympics, college athletics, and even youth sports. Money drives sport—all sport’’ (1992, xi). 5. Guillermo Dı´az-Plaja attributes the king’s love for sports to his educational upbringing, his personal tendencies, and the English influence received through his marriage to a member of the British royal family. Dı´az-Plaja quotes Winston Churchill’s remarks on the young prince’s interest in sports being an antidote to his delicate physical nature (1975, 186). The Spanish princess Eulalia, married to the Duke of Montpensier, wrote a memoir entitled Au fil de la vie in which she paints a negative picture of the king and his passion for sports. She maintained that sports as practiced by the king and his court were not executed in the English manner, elegantly and for reasons of health, but with an absorbing frenzy that precluded intellectual thought, a touch with reality, or an understanding of the people (Fisas 1995, 218–19). 6. Raymond Carr (qtd. in G. Dı´az-Plaja 1975, 188) writes that the star soccer players were replacing bullfighters in popular mythology, especially in those regions where bullfighting had not reached the point of popular mystique. Garcı´a Candau reports that sports competed with bullfighting for newspaper reporting and provoked many debates among journalists (1999, 537). 7. For a list of the major sports events at the time, see Fusi 1999, 56–57. Also see Federico Bravo Morata 1985a, 1985b, 1985c. 8. In his memoirs of his soccer career, the celebrated goalie Ricardo Zamora writes that the semifinal game between Spain and Belgium was the best match of the Olympics. The next day was filled with award ceremonies, banquets, and merrymaking. He believed that part of the spirit of celebration was attributable to the relief felt over the termination of the world war and to the popularity of King Albert (1931, 43). Zamora thanked the Spanish crowds for welcoming him back home and declared that the Spanish players always strove toward the national representation of the furia espan˜ola, because that was the stimulus for their greatest victories (303). Thus, personal success and patriotic fervor are explicitly linked. 9. Sports boosted the pride and political stature particularly of the Catalan and Basque regions. Dı´az-Plaja asserts that the Barcelona Soccer Club acquired special importance because two of its own were the stars (namely, Ricardo Zamora and Jose´ Samitier). The Basques, with their long tradition of pelota, were particularly proud that no non-Basques were on their team (G. Dı´az-Plaja 1975, 188). 10. Lilı´ Alvarez (1905–98) not only was one of the first women to gain fame as a tennis player; she also also dared to break the dress code. In 1931, she became the first woman to play at Wimbledon in shorts. Even though she did not play for money, Alvarez lived like a millionaire because of her star status. Taking advantage of her fame, she became a journalist for the London Daily Mail in the thirties, writing on a variety of themes, including women’s issues. She continued to play sports. With time,

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she combined her feminism with a preoccupation with spirituality and religion. See her Feminismo y espiritualidad (Madrid: Taurus, 1964). 11. Skating was a favorite sport of the aristocracy. The queen could often be seen in El Retiro Park skating with her children (Bravo Morata 1985a, 77). Since the Spanish royalty vacationed in San Sebastia´n, many of the upper class followed their example and enjoyed swimming and boating at that northern beach area. 12. Even though they included more than the titled, those who practiced sports were still those who ruled society. George H. Sage argues that modernity produced and maintained ideologies of dominance and subordination based on capitalism and its values, which are conducive to political, class, and gender inequalities. He sees in postmodernism a rejection of ‘‘the failed ideologies and practices of modernism’’ and a promise of ‘‘a more democratic and socially just world’’ (1997, 12). 13. Sport as a substitution and symbol for war is evident in our times in the media presentation of the Olympic Games. During the Cold War, the competitions were depicted as a confrontation between democracy and communism. Commentators of the 2004 Olympics remarked that, with the disappearance of the USSR, the United States felt a lesser sense of rivalry, which made the games seem less exciting. The contest between governments, however, continues to manifest itself in the score that is kept of the number of medals major countries win. 14. The avant-garde ventures employed a range of unorthodox procedures that broke the accord of acceptability between text and most readers, but while ambiguity may be tolerated, total arbitrariness is not. For a discussion of reading ultraı´sta poetry as game-playing, as maneuvering within certain limits, see Bellver 1996. 15. Elias explains that excitement provides the release of tension necessary to human existence and that the enjoyable excitement aroused in an athletic contest is socially acceptable for both players and spectators (Elias and Dunning 1986, 48–49). Amando de Miguel gives a similar explanation for Spain’s love of soccer. Soccer serves as an excellent and cheap mechanism for tension relaxation from the ordered life. Soccer, he writes, functions like music or alcohol (2001, 146). 16. He notes that professional athletes along with singers are younger than successful people in other professions. The very fact they achieve success so early generates admiration (Miguel 2001, 150). This affirmation is confirmed by myriad examples projected on TV, and by the petite, agile female gymnasts of sixteen, more girls than women, who enthrall the Olympic crowds. 17. Nietzsche’s celebration of the body is widely viewed as having nurtured the Fascist cult of physical training, but it also foreshadowed the commercialization of sports and physical beauty promoted by democratic capitalism. 18. In his memoirs, Bun˜uel reports that he ran every morning at the Residencia and that he started its track and field club. Although he practiced boxing, he competed in only two matches (1982, 56). For more on Bun˜uel’s experience with boxing, see Sa´nchez Vidal 1988, 57–58. 19. Tennis, hiking, track and field, skiing, and of course soccer were practiced by the residents. According to the first issue of Residencia (January–April 1926), the first sports contests were held there in 1925. In successive years there were events in soccer, cross country, tennis, weight lifting, discus throwing, and running. 20. The interconnection between sports and literature and the promotion of sports literature are verified by the fact that at the 1924 Olympic Games, in Paris, contests in the arts were held concurrently with the sports competitions. Famous figures like Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Gabriel D’Annunzio, and Maurice Ravel were members of the juries for these contests. Prizes in the arts were also given at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam (Gallego Morrel 1969, 33–37).

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21. Unamuno wrote a number of articles on sports over his long career. He often lamented that sports were turning into a spectacle of vain professionals and that his compatriots were more interested in sports than in playing with ideas. Gime´nez Caballero in 1928 published a series of essays entitled He´rcules jugando a los dados (Madrid: La Nave, 1928) that treated sports as games of chance. D’Ors’s comments on sports appear in his Glosario. Miquelarena treated sports in his newspaper columns, his magazine articles, and his book of essays Stadium, Notas de Sport (1934). Ferna´ndez Flo´rez wrote extensively on different sports. In the novels El malvado Carabel and El sistema Pelegrı´n, he wrote on a number of sports themes, and in Aventuras de Floresta´n de Palier he invented a soccer team with a magic ball that makes it invincible. See Ivana Rota for a review of the works on sport by Unamuno, Maran˜o´n, D’Ors, and Gime´nez Caballero. 22. As an idealist or, according to many, as an elitist, Ortega believed that the rise in sports was linked to the birth of the rich, materialistic, and youth-obsessed hombre masa. He also saw the masses, with their newly acquired money, as abandoning their village activities and invading the cities with their archaic tastes. 23. Particularly relevant to the discussion of the imposition on society of the values of youth—the cult of the body and a preoccupation with dress—is Ortega’s article ‘‘Juventud,’’ published in the newspaper El Sol, June 19, 1927, and appended to later editions of La rebelio´n de las masas. 24. This process of democratization was less evident in Spain than in the United States. In American twentieth-century literature, sport poems have become more and more domestic—that is, less heroic and more connected to families and women (D. Johnson 2004, 20–21). In Spain in the twenties, sports began to filter down from the aristocratic class to include selected female participation, but they were not ‘‘domestic’’ in Johnson’s sense of the word. 25. A significant book on sports in avant-garde works is Morelli 1994, with its chapters on Diego, Lorca, Me´ndez, Larrea, Prados, and Hinojosa. 26. For full biographical information on Basterra, see Area´n 1953. 27. In his prologue to Valle’s Obra poe´tica, Da´maso Alonso calls him an indomitable optimist who remains faithful to the spirit of his native Andalusia and who stands out as a poet for his colorfulness and clever play with language. Guillermo Dı´az-Plaja, in his edition of Valle’s Obra po´stuma, says that, although the most characteristic aspect of the poet is his traditional and regional modes, once in a while he delivers almost puerile futurist imagery, a bit late in coming but always full of showy verbal polyphony (1971, 11). 28. Jane Gallop, for example, studies the mind/body split considered by patriarchal thinking to mark gender division and to connect women with materiality and subsequently with motherhood. Reviewing Sade, Barthes, and Freud, she comes to the conclusion that from this basic duality, masculine thinkers develop a whole series of opposites: public and private space, science and poetry, objectivity and subjectivity, theory and intimacy. She wants thinking to pass through the body before it is ‘‘reabsorbed by the powerful narratives of mind over matter’’ (1988, 9). 29. The role of sports in forming and maintaining national identity has been readily recognized: see Ferna´ndez-Balboa 1997, 22; chap. 6 of Elias and Dunning 1986; and chap. 4 of Womack 2003. Amando de Miguel says that in Spain, as in other advanced societies where communal bonds formed by nationalism, religion, and politics have been weakened, sports, especially soccer, provide an important unifying function (2001, 152). 30. Hinojosa formed friendships with many members of the Generation of 27 and participated in a number of their significant activities including the ‘‘Brotherhood of

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Toledo,’’ their tribute to Valle-Incla´n, and their signature homage to Luis de Go´ngora. Rafael Alberti recounts in La arboleda perdida that Hinojosa accompanied him on one of his visits to Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez (1959, 208). Before going to Madrid, Hinojosa had formed friendships with Altolaguirre in Ma´laga and Lorca in Granada (Neira 1994, 228). However, as Julio Neira reports, because of his faithful adherence to surrealism and his habit of dressing in tennis and golf attire, even if he did not play the sports, he was a target of jokes and mocked in the writings of his contemporaries (1994, 232–34). When the Second Republic was declared in 1931, Hinojosa abandoned literature to dedicate himself to politics of the Right against the government. His position as a great landowner made him the enemy of the peasants on his land, who killed him in the early days of the civil war, and a persona non grata for the Republican intelligentsia, who could not forgive him for his right-wing ideology. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death, critics began to reevaluate him and to rescue him from literary oblivion as partisan rancor subsided with the passage of time. The continued vindication of his literary reputation has been aided by the efforts of critics such as Neira and Sa´nchez Rodrı´guez and the commemorative issue of Insula published in 2004 to celebrate the centennial of his birth. 31. According to Irigaray, when the male subject meets the other, ‘‘[t]he really urgent task is to ensure the colonization of this new ‘field,’ to force it, without splintering, into the production of the same discourse. . . . [T]he discovery will be set out hierarchically. . . . The forms of arrangement may vary, but they will all bear the paradox of forcing into the same representation—the representation of the self/same— that which insists upon its heterogeneity, other otherness’’ (1985, 135–37). 32. This was the era of art deco, a highly stylized art characterized by bold outlines, geometric and zigzag forms, and the incorporation of new materials derived from technological advances. This chic and lithesome international style had an enormous impact on the illustrations published in the popular press, which broadcasted a revolutionarily new image of woman—athletically slim, elegant, and high-spirited. The bright colors within sharply defined outlines emphasized the flat surfaces of the drawings and created images that were stylizations or caricatures with no pretension of verisimilitude. These women were but illusions created by the illustrator. The most famous Spanish illustrator in the art deco vein was Rafael Penagos, whose drawings epitomized the ideal female of the day and are still known as las mujeres de Penagos. The centennial issue of Blanco y Negro gives a long list of the notable illustrators of the early twentieth century who not only drew for their covers but also shaped the tastes of the wealthy and the imagination of all its readers. See Blanco y Negro, May 12 1991, 76–86. 33. Their access to formal education was closed or compromised. Me´ndez recounts that her mother beat her until she bled when she found out that her daughter was auditing a literature class at the university (Ulacia 1990, 45). Champourcin was basically self-taught. Her liberal-minded parents encouraged her to read, and by age fifteen she had read translations of the Greek classics. Because she refused to adhere to the custom of having young girls escorted to the university by their mothers, she did not go to college. For more biographical information on Champourcin, see Jose´ Angel Ascunce, prologue to Champourcin 1991; Jorge Cardoso 1900; and Villar 1975. Somewhat like Champourcin, Rosa Chacel began as a child to read the classics she found in her uncle’s library. Despite her learning, she felt her lack of formal education was evident in her thought patterns (Mangini 1987). 34. Spanish women poets of the twenties aligned themselves personally and professionally with the male poets of the Generation of 27, to whom they turned for artistic guidance; they formed friendships with them and published their works, and some of

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them they married. While not included in the groundbreaking events or manifestos of the period, their personal and professional affiliations with their male peers earned them marginal inclusion in the emerging vanguard poetry. This coexistence was short-lived and illusory. Subsequent historical events—namely, exile after the Spanish Civil War, and the mechanics of canon formation—made them disappear from literary history. See Bellver 1997. 35. Jessica Benjamin theorizes that contrary to the masculine phallic economy of appropriation of the object, women’s patterns of desire exhibit ‘‘intersubjectivity,’’ a spatial mode grounded on a continuum that includes the space between the I and you, as well as the space within the I. Other discussions on the psychological need of women to erase ego boundaries have been published by feminists such as Carol Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow, and Jane Flax. The female tendency to bridge interpersonal distances, it is argued, also manifests itself on the level of literary elaboration. See, for example, Gardiner 1981. 36. He´le`ne Cixous decried the portrayal of woman as a passive, compliant Sleeping Beauty, whose place is ‘‘in bed and asleep—‘laid out’ ’’ (1981a, 43). Madonna Kolbenschlag responds to the psychoanalytical interpretation of Sleeping Beauty as a model for the adolescent dream of everlasting youth and perfection and as a metaphoric rendering of the spiritual condition of women, ‘‘cut off from autonomy and transcendence, from self-actualization and ethical capacity in a male-dominated milieu’’ (1979, 5). Ostriker discovers that American female poets evade what she refers to as the Jacob’s ladder yardstick, the association of masculinity with the vertical and from there with achievement, excellence, and superiority (1986, 92–95). For a more detailed study on the implications of the adaptation of verticality in female poets of the twenties, and specifically in Me´ndez, see Bellver 1995. 37. A possible comparison between Spanish and Spanish-American female poets of the period was sensed by Guillermo de Torre, who saw a general analogy between Champourcin and her Latin American counterparts, Delmira Agustini and Juana de Ibarbourou, based not on influence but rather on ‘‘analogı´as de la sensibilidad’’ (‘‘Poesı´a y novela de amor: Dos libros de Ernestina de Champourcin,’’ El Sol, June 13, 1936, 2). The artistic connections between Spanish and Spanish-American women poets has yet to be studied except for the impact of Gabriela Mistral on Carmen Conde in regard to the theme of motherhood (Quance 1998, 194). Evidence for a comparative study can, however, be found (Benegas and Muna´rriz 1997, 34–40). 38. The celebrated novelist Carmen Martı´n Gaite entitled her novel about the stifling impact of gender traditions on young girls Entre visillos. Obliged to hide themselves from the world, women were allowed only a fleeting and filtered glimpse of the outside world from behind the filmy curtains typically used in Spain. She called her book-length feminist essay Desde la ventana. She concludes that, for both women in general and women writers, the window has conditioned a characteristic gaze. Their gaze, she explains, is a looking, without being seen, from an interior fortification (1987, 36). 39. La Fuente calls Maruja Mallo ‘‘la diosa surrealista’’ [the surrealist goddess]. She lived and painted as a surrealist. She had ‘‘cierta habilidad para vivir lo extravagante, lo inusual y lo inesperado con naturalidad’’ (La Fuente 2002, 448) [a certain ability to live all that was extravagant, unusual, and unexpected with total naturalness] and she lived ‘‘ma´s alla´ de la realidad, ma´s lejana, ma´s honda y reco´ndita de lo previsible’’ [beyond reality, farther, deeper, and hidden from the predictable]. She was an acquaintance of Dalı´ and Bun˜uel and took part in their surrealist antics at the Residencia de Estudiantes. 40. Jime´nez Tome´ and Gallego Rodrı´guez (2003, 99) include a quote of Mallo’s

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from an interview conducted with her by Shirley Mangini in 1978 that reveals that their habit of going swimming was part of the inspiration for the themes of her paintings. Mallo was partly responsible for Me´ndez’s rejection of a life of bourgeois idleness. In her memoirs, Me´ndez reports that Mallo taught her that etiquette was really bad manners and that her schooling had taught hypocrisy (Ulacia, 1990, 43). 41. The letter to Lorca, July 20, 1925, is on file at the Fundacio´n Garcı´a Lorca. 42. The habit of conjoining athlete and poet continues to our time among critics in Spain: see Garcı´a de la Concha 1995; Miro´ 1987, 309; and Perea 1990. 43. Persin shared this terminology with me in a letter of May 2005. She created this concept in her unpublished chapter entitled ‘‘The Textual Body of Concha Me´ndez,’’ to be included in a book on Concha Me´ndez she is preparing. 44. The ambivalent reception of her work has been studied as a phenomenon of excision and exclusion (Quance 1991, 1998; Ciplijauskaite´ 1989; and Bellver 1997). 45. Her vertical movement is particularly noteworthy because verticality is an archetypal symbol of positive meanings—achievement, control, and loftiness—and as a such has been linked to the masculine, in contrast to the feminine horizontal. Ostriker discerns not only a persistent male representation of woman as horizontal, ‘‘at rest,’’ and passive, but also a lasting aversion to verticality among women writers. She goes on to censure Simone de Beauvoir for her call for the transcendence of the inferior life of immanence dictated by feminine anatomy, as if verticality continues to be inappropriate for women. Me´ndez’s favoring of verticality in her early poetry is a sign of her thirst for freedom, for physical as well as spiritual freedom. For further discussion of verticality in Me´ndez, see Bellver 1995, 3.

Chapter 5. Machines 1. According to Federico Bravo Morata (1985c, 193) in 1930 there were thirtysix thousand cars in Madrid. 2. Wohl devotes an entire chapter of The Spectacle of Flight to flying and Fascism. He says the connection between the two may not at first seem obvious, but it was real. He emphasizes the role of the writer D’Annunzio and that of Balbo, Mussolini’s aviation minister. 3. Although not as famous as the male aviators, during this same time there also were a few female ones. The first was Marı´a Bernaldo de Quiro´s. The aviator Margot Soriano on her wedding day changed into her pilot suit and flew a plane that took her and her new husband on their honeymoon (see Campo Alange 1963, 187). 4. Although the influence of the futurists on ultraı´smo is emphasized in this book, the role of the dadaists cannot be forgotten. Dı´ez de Revenga, for example, maintains that the ultraı´stas combined the initial influence of the futurists with those of the ‘‘independent-minded’’ dadaists. He insists on differentiating between the ultraı´sta and the creacionista currents in Spain, but for my purposes no such distinction is made and vanguardism signifies an even broader term that encompasses any poem with avantgarde traits. 5. Walter Benjamin, in an important essay of his discussed later in this chapter, studies in depth these far-reaching effects on the arts and society of the machine with its capacity for reproduction. 6. Technology as a literary theme was first recommended in Spain in 1909 when Ramo´n Go´mez de la Serna published Marinetti’s futurist manifesto. Go´mez de la Serna himself was one of the first Europeans to write in the avant-garde mode, and his novels made him the most dedicated Spanish practitioner of vanguard prose. He

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has universally been designated the precursor of Spanish vanguardism on the basis of his greguerı´as, which combine humor, fragmentation, and ingenious observation as a defiance of established literary form. He also subscribed to the ludic spirit of festivity, frivolity, and freedom that epitomized the vanguardist tonality. Other vanguardist novelists include: Benjamı´n Jarne´s, Mario Verdaguer, Antonio Espina, Agustı´n Espinosa, Manuel Ros, Antonio Obrego´n, Rafael Cansinos-Assens, Pedro Salinas, Juan Jose´ Domenchina, Rosa Chacel, Francisco Ayala, and Max Aub. For detailed information on the numerous vanguardist narratives produced in Spain, consult Buckley and Crispin 1973; Pe´rez Firmat 1982; and Spires 1988. R. Johnson 2003 offers an insightful comparison between male and female versions of modernist narrative. 7. While Salinas de Marichal (1968) sees a reflection of a dream in Alberti’s use of the machine, Yara Gonza´lez-Montes (1982) sees the opposite. She contends that Alberti’s vision of the machine relates to his personal feelings of isolation and disenchantment and to his sensitivity to the political situation of Europe after World War I. 8. Occasionally other poets also refer to politics when writing of the airplane. In the poem by Romero already mentioned, the poet urges the plane to rise above the ‘‘trembling’’ bourgeoisie and the ‘‘roaring’’ Bolsheviks. The most politically explicit ultraı´sta poem is ‘‘Los nuevos aviones’’ by Ernesto Lo´pez Parra. He expresses concern for the nationalistic and military potential for the use of airplanes by the United States, Italy, Russia, and Germany. Even though the seeds for development of the airplane as a weapon for war had been planted in World War I, almost no one of his poetic ilk sensed an imminent danger in these awe-inspiring machines. 9. Alberti embraced the avant-garde mode without forfeiting all tradition or losing his own identity. For this reason Morris does not condemn his poetic adventures with the machine as he does those of the self-declared ultraı´stas. For Morris, Alberti ‘‘was no robot recorder of the machine age’’ and ‘‘his passion for machines did not banish his sense of humour’’ (1969, 108, 109). 10. Timothy J. Rogers (1983) explains that Diego’s use of language impinges on reader’s intellectual powers and presents him with visions that require him to reestablish and reorder his own conception of reality. The reader must take apart images by synthesizing various levels of poetic reality in order to find the new reality hinted at. The reader must intuit associations but can never be certain of their connections. 11. For the latter observation, I am indebted to my friend and former colleague Donald Schmiedel. His meticulous proofreading of my manuscript was invaluable. 12. The impact of this building, which, at the time of its completion, was the tallest building in Europe, is confirmed by a novel by Juan Antonio Cabezas, Sen˜orita O-3. The construction of the building is the central focus, and the novelist criticizes bourgeois society and comments on the enslavement of workers by the machine, an analysis that parallels Fritz Lang’s in film (Pino 2004, 152–53). 13. Although speaking of a radio station, Francisco Vighi also underscores the verticality of poles that stand like towers or iron trees (Vighi 1959, 29). The poem ‘‘Ima´genes de la radio’’ is a rapid-fire series of substantives in apposition to the various components of the radio. The absence of any verb in the main clause focuses the poem on objects and the poet’s ability to invent comparisons for the tower. Besides an ‘‘iron cypress,’’ he resorts to comparisons to a dovecot, the bridge of a ship, and anchors. 14. The reverses in her family’s economic situation that forced her to go to work after high school and to pursue a teaching degree instilled in her a certain solidarity with the poor. She and her husband founded the Popular University of Cartagena. She also wrote in local and regional newspapers on behalf of education and the poor. See Rubio Paredes 1990. 15. In her one-act play El a´ngel cartero (The Mail-Carrier Angel) (written in 1929

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and published in 1931), Me´ndez also combines angels and planes. On the religious story of the Three Kings, she superimposes a totally unreligious motif of modern irreverence. The Three Kings bring good tidings to earth by plane, and for their journey they trust in aeronautical instruments more than the stars. 16. In his elegantly written book The Loving Darkness, C. B. Morris explores the mark left on Spanish literature by cinema. He studies not only the climate of support and opposition to film, but also the various ways in which writers translated into literature the ideas, techniques, and images they derived from watching movies. Miguel Angel Hernando in his book on vanguardist prose of the Generation of 27 makes a point of indicating the impact of cinema and machines on narrative and the extent to which critics have paid attention to the importance of the city, industrialization, and popular culture in the narrative of the period. 17. Apropos of this affirmation, it is useful to refer to Octavio Paz’s assertion that language contains the notion of translation and that an artist is a universal translator. Translation is a ‘‘transmutation’’ that consists of the interpretation of nonlinguistic elements by linguistic signs and vice versa. Each one of these ‘‘translations’’ is really another work of art, not a copy as much as a metaphor of the original. He calls analogy the highest function of imagination ‘‘ya que conjuga el ana´lisis y la sı´ntesis, la traduccio´n y la creacio´n and adds that ‘‘[e]s conocimiento y, al mismo tiempo, transmutacio´n de la realidad’’ (2002, 54) [because it joins analysis and synthesis, translation and creation. It is knowledge and, at the same time, the transmutation of reality]. The function of art, be it poetry or painting, is to make connections, to relate the signifier to the signified, to bridge different languages. Avant-garde poets wanted to establish reciprocity between the poem and the machine, but the machine is not a language. It reproduces; it does not re-present or work on the basis of analogies. 18. In the May 2004 monographic issue of Insula celebrating the centennial of Dalı´’s birth, Agustı´n Sa´nchez Vidal traces the evolution of Dalı´’s aesthetic and divides his written production into four phases. It is in his second phase—between 1922, when he went to Madrid, and 1927—that he fell under the influence of ultraı´smo. It was in this period that he reproached Lorca for living in Granada, where there were no streetcars or airplanes. In this same issue of Insula, Willard Bohn considers Dalı´’s obsession for concrete objects a reflection of the impact of surrealism on both his poetry and painting. These differing views on the source of Dalı´’s aesthetic attachment to objects illustrate that objectification went beyond a single aesthetic movement and constituted, instead, a basic characteristic of modernity.

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Sa´nchez Saornil, Lucı´a. 1996. Poesı´a. Introduction by Rosa Marı´a Martı´n Casamitjana. Valencia: Pre-textos. Sa´nchez Vidal, Agustı´n. 1988. Bun˜uel, Lorca, Dalı´: El enigma sin fin. Barcelona: Planeta. Sarmiento, Jose´ Antonio. 1986. Las palabras en libertad: Antologı´a de la poesı´a futurista italiana. Madrid: Hiperio´n. Scanlon. Geraldine M. 1986. La pole´mica feminista en la Espan˜a contempora´nea, 1868– 1974. Madrid: Ediciones Akal. Scarlett, Elizabeth A. 1994. Under Construction: The Body in Spanish Novels. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Segre, Cesare. 1985. Principios de ana´lisis del texto literario. Barcelona: Editorial Crı´tica. Senabre, Ricardo. 1977. La poesı´a de Rafael Alberti. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Serrano, Carlos, and Serge Salau¨n, eds. 2006. Los felices an˜os veinte: Espan˜a, crisis y modernidad. Madrid: Marcial Pons. Shaw, Mary Lewis. 1983. ‘‘Ephemeral Signs: Apprehending the Idea through Poetry and Dance.’’ Dance Research Journal 20, no. 1: 3–9. Shubert, Adrian. 1990. A Social History of Modern Spain. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Siebenmann, Gustav. 1973. Los estilos poe´ticos en Espan˜a desde 1900. Madrid: Gredos. Sieburth, Stephanie. 1994. Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1999. ‘‘What does it mean to study modern Spanish culture?’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture, ed. David T. Gies, 11–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Paul Julian. 1992. Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960–1970. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2000. The Moderns: Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Spires, Robert C. 1988. Transparent Simulacra: Spanish Fiction, 1902–1926. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. ———. 2000. ‘‘New Art, New Woman, Old Constructs: Go´mez de la Serna, Pedro Salinas, and Vanguard Fiction.’’ Modern Language Notes, no. 115: 205–23. Spitzer, Leo. 1945. La enumeracio´n cao´tica en la lı´rica moderna. Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires. Stanton, Edward F. 1999. Handbook of Spanish Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 1990. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Talens, Jenaro. 1975. El espacio y las ma´scaras: Introduccio´n a la lectura de Cernuda. Barcelona: Anagrama. Thomas, Helen. 1995. Dance, Modernity, and Culture: Explorations in the Sociology of Dance. London: Routledge. Tinnell, Roger D. 1999. ‘‘Spanish Music and Cultural Identity.’’ In The Cambridge

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Index airplane, 163, 172, 187; as a spiritual creation, 162, 164, 170–78, 191, 196–98, 200 Alarcos Llorach, Emilio, 159 Alberti, Rafael, 22, 37, 76, 85, 117, 120, 127, 129, 135, 138, 172, 178, 180, 184–85, 204; works of, Cal y canto, 176, 188; El alba del alhelı´, 76; ‘‘Guı´a estival del paraı´so,’’ 171, 178; Marinero en tierra, 176; ‘‘Oda a Platko,’’ 129 Aleixandre, Vicente, 70, 130 Alfonso XIII, 30, 32, 41–42; promoting sports, 113, 139 Alonso, Da´maso, 37, 70, 100, 106 Alvarez, Lilı´, 114, 118 Alvarez Junco, Jose´, 29 anaglifos, 37 Anderson, Andrew A., 192 Andre´s Alvarez, Valentı´n, 66 Angeles Dura´n, Marı´a, 35 Antiartistic Catalan Manifesto, 200 Arconada, Ce´sar M., 146 Argentina, La, 61, 63–64 Argentinita, La, 61, 64 Aristotle, 155 Asociacio´n Nacional de Mujeres Espan˜olas, 56 athlete, female, in male poetry, 132–38 Aub, Max, 71 automobile, 161; as poetic subject, 178– 82, 192–93, 195 avant-garde. See vanguard Ayala, Francisco, 125; work of, Cazador en el alba, 125 Azan˜a, Manuel, 36 Barcelona, 40, 161, 163 Barga, Corpus, 43, 61 Baroja, Pı´o, 168 Barrera Lo´pez, Jose´, 169 Basterra, Ramo´n de, 121

Baza´n, Pedro, 55 Bell-Villada, Gene H., 164 Bello, Consuelo, 61 Benjamin, Walter, 198, 202 Bergson, Henri, 116 Bernard, Margherita, 158 bicycle. See cycling Bieder, Maryellen, 87 Bloom, Harold, 71 boat racing, 148–49 body, cult of the, 23, 46–48, 116, 118, 124 Borra´s, Toma´s, 41 bourgeoisie, 14, 32–33, 37, 39, 165 Bouson˜o, Carlos, 183 Bo´veda, Xavier, 179 boxing, 114, 125–26 Brihuega, Jaime, 168 Brooks, Peter, 47 Buendı´a, Rogelio, 67, 70, 84, 135, 175 Bun˜uel, Luis, 23, 34, 37, 117, 191 Burger, Peter, 19, 165 caberets, 41–42, 67, 72 Caillois, Roger, 155, 171 Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro, 121 Campo Alange, Marı´a, 57, 139 Campoamor, Clara, 51 Canalejas, Jose´, 29 Cano, Jose´ Luis, 89–90 Cano Ballesta, Juan, 154, 168, 177, 188 Ca´novas de Castillo, Antonio, 29 Cansinos-Assens, Rafael, 64, 146 Capellanes, 62 capitalism, 13, 32, 39, 59, 91, 160, 165, 202, 206 Capmany, Marı´a Aure`lia, 57 car. See automobile Carpenter, Alejo, 64 Cassatt, Mary, 91

251

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252

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Catalonia, 40 Caws, Mary Ann, 102, 154 Cercas, Javier, 33 Cernuda, Luis, 38–39, 195 Cervantes, Miguel de, 121 Chacel, Rosa, 38, 53, 55, 72 Champourcin, Ernestina de, 38, 56–57, 72, 77, 79–81, 92, 140–42, 192–93, 207; work of, La voz en el viento, 141– 42, 192–93 Charleston (dance), 62–63, 67, 91 Chinitz, David, 49, 71–72, 87 Cı´rculo de Bellas Artes, 62 Ciria y Escalante, Jose´ Francisco de, 88, 176 Cirlot, Juan Eduardo, 202 city: as the center of fun, 39–44 civil war, 63 Cixous, He´le`ne, 134 clothing in gender dynamics, 50–51, 143–45, 151–52 Cohen, Richard, 103 Collantes de Tera´n, Antonio, 133 Comet, Ce´sar A., 173 commercialism, 12–13 communism, 34 Conde, Carmen, 38, 79, 81, 97, 193–94; works of, Ju´bilos, 79, 193–94; Sostenido ensuen˜o, 79 Consumerism, 11, 59 Copeland, Roger, 103 Coubertin, Pierre de, 112, 118 Crispin, John, 154, 166 Cruz de Isabel la Cato´lica, 64 Cubero, Antonio M., 172–73, 187 cultura de masas, 14. See also mass culture cycling, 122–23 cult of the body, 23, 46–48, 116, 118, 124; of youth, 23, 44–46, 116, 124, 168, 196, 208 culture: distinction between high and low, 12–14, 16, 19; mass, 12–14, 19, 21, 33, 49–50, 59, 74, 87, 111, 113, 209–11; transfer of power from rural to urban, 12 D’Ors, Eugenio, 118 dadaists, 168, 200 Dalı´, Salvador, 21, 37, 200, 202 dance: as theme, 66–72, 209; dance-ofdeath motif, 77–78, 81; dance, gender,

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INDX

and female poets, 90–97; dance, gender, and poetry, 61–65; metaphorical use of, 75–81; traditional, 72–75 dancers, female: as seen by male poets, 81–91 Davies, Catherine, 35 dehumanization, 84–86, 90, 167, 171, 199, 210 Dı´az, Lorenzo, 42, 61 Dı´az-Plaja, Guillermo, 63, 113, 161, 167 Diego, Gerardo, 17, 38, 56, 68–70, 73, 84–86, 98, 106–7, 109, 120, 122–23, 147, 157, 159, 183, 185; works of, Imagen, 69, 73, 98, 107; Manual de espuma, 69; Versos humanos, 85–86, 98, 130 Dı´ez de Revenga, Francisco Javier, 202 Dı´ez-Canedo, Enrique, 133, 145 Disney, Walt, 122–23 Domenchina, Juan Jose´, 81, 83, 124–25 Duchamp, Marcel, 105, 200 Duncan, Isadora, 90, 95–96 Dunning, Eric, 112 Dura´n, Carlos, 64 Dura´n, Marı´a Angeles, 57 education: the impact of, 34–38 ekphrasis, 103, 110, 154 El Ateneo, 34 electricity, 164, 187 Elias, Norbert, 112, 115 Erasmus, 112 Espina, Antonio, 41, 106, 122 Espinosa, Marı´a, 56 Espla´, Carlos, 64 Eva moderna, la (the modern Eve), 51, 139 Falco´n, Irene, 51 Falla, Manuel de, 14, 64, 74; works of, El amor brujo, 64, El sombrero de tres picos, 64 fascism, 34 felices veinte (happy twenties), 18, 23, 28, 38, 44, 50, 119 Felipe, Leo´n, 171 female athlete in male poetry, 132–38 female dancer in male poetry, 81–91 feminism, 51–57, 134, 141 Ferna´ndez-Balboa, Juan-Miguel, 123

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INDEX

Ferna´ndez Ballesteros, Alberto, 169 Ferna´ndez Flo´rez, Wenceslao, 118 film, 22–23, 198–99 First World War. See World War I Fisas, Carlos, 32 flamenco, 73–75 flappers, 139 Folguera, Pilar, 161; work of, Vida cotidiana en Madrid, 161 Fornarina, La, 61, 63 Fornet, Emilio, 125 fox-trot, 62, 67, 69–70 France, as an aviation pioneer, 162 Franco, Francisco, 14 Freixas, Laura, 79 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 82, 115, 133 Friedrich, Hugo, 168, 199 Fuente, Immaculada de la, 144 Fuentes, Vı´ctor, 168 Fuller, Loie, 63, 90 Fusi, Juan Pablo, 11, 38, 113 futurism, 49, 104, 171 Gaceta Literaria, La, 22, 55, 72, 117, 125, 147, 156, 167 Gallego Morell, Antonio, 112, 116, 118– 19, 121–22, 127, 129, 157–58, 163 Ga´mez, Celia, 63 Garcı´a Candau, Julia´n, 112–13 Garcı´a de Corta´zar, Fernando, 28, 31, 34 Garcı´a Lorca, Federico, 14, 37, 39, 64, 70, 73–75, 77–78, 109, 145, 195, 206, 210; works of, Literatura de tema deportiva, 121; Poema del cante jondo, 74; Poeta en Nueva York, 39 Garfias, Pedro, 37, 119, 174 Gautier, Theophile, 104 Gay Nineties, the, 61 Geist, Anthony Leo, 104, 155–56, 168 gender: questions of, 48–60 gender dynamics, in poetry and dance, 97; in poetry and sports, 25–27, 142–45 Generation of 27, 15, 17, 64, 75, 78–79, 90, 119, 132 Generation of 98, 12 Gilbert, Sandra M., 65, 152 Gime´nez Caballero, Ernesto, 64, 67, 118, 170, 178 Giner de los Rı´os, Francisco, 36 Go´mez de la Serna, Ramo´n, 69, 106, 128, 202 Go´ngora, Luis de, 14, 17, 109

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Gonza´lez-Alvarez y Lo´pez-Chiceri, Elia Marı´a, 114 Gonza´lez Blanco, Edmundo, 53–54; work of, La mujer segu´n los diferentes aspectos de su espiritualidad, 53–54 Gonza´lez Martı´nez, Enrique, 119 Gonza´lez Posada, Adolfo, 52 Gonza´lez Vesga, Jose´ Manuel, 28, 31, 34 Graf, E. C., 70 Greenblatt, Stephen, 134 Grecia, 156, 177–79, 182, 184, 186–87, 191 Gris, Juan, 154 Gubar, Susan, 65 Guille´n, Jorge, 38, 75–76, 97, 99–102, 137, 172, 175–76, 180–82, 186, 188 Gullo´n, Ricardo, 122 Gurney, Robert, 159 Gypsies, 73–74 Halffter, Ernesto, 64 Harris, Derek, 70, 109 Hauser, Arnold, 20, 22 Heidegger, Martin, 116 Herna´ndez, Mario, 70 Herna´ndez, Miguel, 127, 129, 195 Herna´ndez Gonza´lez, Luis, 126–27 Hijos del limo, Los, 19–20 Hildegarte, Carmen, 51 Hinojosa, Jose´ Marı´a, 70–73, 75, 131–32, 175, 178; works of, La flor de California, 175; La rosa de los vientos, 175; La sangre en libertad, 175 historical context, 28–34 Hotel Victoria, 40 Homer, 103; work of, the Iliad, 103 horse racing, 158–59 Huici, Matilde, 51 Huidobro, Vicente, 44, 106, 135 Huizinga, Johan, 115 Huxley, Aldous, 161 Huyssen, Andreas, 16, 49, 87, 165, 198 Imperio, Pastora, 64, 91 Industrial Revolution, the, 160, 203 industrialization, 11, 14, 30, 32, 39, 161, 165, 207–8 Institucio´n Libre de Ensen˜anza, 36, 51, 112 Instituto Escuela, 36

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INDEX

Insu´a, Alberto, 66 Irigaray, Luce, 138 Jacinta, 88–90, 106 jazz, 24, 49, 63, 106, 108–9 Jazz Age, the, 62–64, 66–67, 71–72, 79, 87, 89 Jime´nez, Juan Ramo´n, 12, 14, 18, 36, 145; work of, Espan˜oles de tres mundos, 145 Johnson, Don, 158 Johnson, Roberta, 58, 82, 90, 120 Jung, Carl, 53, 55 Junta para la Ampliacio´n de Estudios e Investigaciones Cientı´ficas, La, 36 Juventud Universitaria Femenina, 56 Kahlo, Frida, 91 Kent, Victoria, 51 Kern, Stephen, 20–21, 104, 163 Kirkpatrick, Susan, 51, 58, 144–45 labor unrest, 29–30 Lakoff, George, 77, 120 Langer, Suzanne K., 107 Larrea, Juan, 67, 86, 119, 158, 178, 183, 186 Lasso de la Vega, Rafael, 67, 83, 172, 182–85 Lautre´amont, Comte de, 103 leisure time: increase in, 61 Lessing, Gotthold, 102; work of, Laocoo¨n, 102 liberalism, 34–35 Lindbergh, Charles, 162, 197 literacy, 35 locomotive, 194 London, 147 Lorenzo, Jose´, 147 Lyceum Club Femenino, 56 Machado, Antonio, 12, 36, 184 Machine Age, dawning of the, 160–65 machines: ambivalence toward, 190; as poetry, 198–205; in poetry, 172–90 Madrid, 40–43, 61–63, 66, 68, 91, 96, 161, 163 Maeztu, Marı´a de, 51, 56 Mainer, Jose´-Carlos, 21, 33, 146 Malerbe, Pierre, 186

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Mallarme´, Stephane, 63, 103–6 Mallo, Maruja, 53, 58, 144–45 man as spectator, 82, 97, 102, 207–8 Mangini, Shirley, 51 Mansfield, Katherine, 53 Mantiega, Robert, 135 Maran˜o´n, Gregorio, 54 Marinetti, F. T., 44–45, 49, 104, 162, 166, 177, 179 Martı´n Casamitjana, Rosa Marı´a, 119 Martı´nez Ferrer, He´ctor, 70 Martı´nez Sierra, Gregorio, 52, 55 Martı´nez Sierra, Marı´a, 51 masculinism, 48–50, 92 mass culture, 12–14, 19, 21, 33, 49–50, 59, 74, 87, 111, 113, 209–11 ‘‘mass man,’’ 15, 161 materialism, 165, 169, 202, 206 Maura, Antonio, 29 Mediodı´a, 179 Meller, Raquel, 63, 91 Menarini, Piero, 78 Me´ndez, Concha, 23, 30–31, 38, 57, 70– 71, 73, 75, 91, 94–97, 108–9, 120, 140–41, 144–53, 191, 194–98, 207; works of, Canciones de mar y tierra, 72, 75, 151, 153, 196; Historia de un taxi, 23; Inquietudes, 72, 147–48; Surtidor, 153, 196 Mene´ndez Pidal, Ramo´n , 12 Miguel, Armando de, 22, 32, 47, 116, 161 milonga, 63 Miquelarena, Miguel de, 118 Mitchell, Timothy, 74 modernism, 18–21, 39, 106, 111, 116, 168, 179, 203, 206–9; in art, 165; as a masculinist movement, 48–50, 58, 86– 87, 156; and women, 51, 55–58, 89, 140, 146–48, 191, 207 Montes, Eugenio, 37, 67, 107, 126 Montseny, Federica, 51 Mora, Magdelena, 53; work of, Revista de Occidente, 53 moralists, 74 Moreno Villa, Jose´, 37, 88–90, 106, 108, 117 Morla Lynch, Carlos, 195 Morris, C. B., 44, 106, 166, 175 Mosquera, Luis, 84 Mundo Femenino, 56

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255

INDEX

Nash, Mary, 57 Navarro de Luzuriaga, Marı´a Luisa, 55 Neira, Julio, 132, 175 Nelken, Margarita, 51–52 Neruda, Pablo, 195 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 116 Nieva de Paz, Pilar, 51, 139 nightlife, 41–42 nontranscendence, 167

Priddin, Deirdre, 104 Prieto, Gregorio, 176 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 16, 23, 31–32, 34, 43, 111, 115–16, 165, 186 Puche Felices, Elidoro, 172 ‘‘Pulga, La’’ (The Flea), 62

objectified woman, 47, 82, 171–72 Obrego´n-Chorot, Antonio de, 179 Ogren, Kathy J., 87 Olmeda Zurita, Pedro, 186 Olympic Games, 111–13, 118, 145, 156 one-step, 62, 67, 69–70, 91 Ong, Walter, 140; work of, Orality and Literacy, 140 Order of Toledo, 37 Ortega y Gasset, Jose´, 28, 46, 49–50, 53, 55, 87, 118, 161, 203; works of, El espectador, 118; El tema de nuestro tiempo, 118; La dehumanizacio´n del arte, 118; La rebelio´n de las masas, 118 Otero, La Bella, 47

racing: boat, 148–49; horse, 158–59 radiator, 188 radio, 163, 187 Raida, Pedro, 83, 98–99, 156, 179 Ramos, Carlos, 125 Regis, Celsia, 56 representation, 207 reproducibility, 198–99 Residencia de Estudiantes, 23, 36–38, 62, 117 Residencia de Sen˜oritas, 36, 117 riding. See horse racing Rimbaud, Arthur, 103 Rioyo, Javier, 42 Risco, Vicente, 67 Ritz Hotel, 40, 62, 69, 72, 107 Rivas Panedes, Jose´, 186 Roaring Twenties, the, 25–26, 43, 61–62, 90. See also felices viente romanticism, 12 Romero, Jose´ Marı´a, 172 Rubin Suleiman, Susan, 65

Palace Hotel, 40, 69, 107 Paris, 61, 64, 66–67, 84 Paz, Octavio, 19–21 Pe´rez, Fe´lix, 156 Pe´rez, J. Bernardo, 107 Pe´rez, Roberto, 137 Pe´rez Andu´jar, Javier, 37 Pe´rez de Ayala, Ramo´n, 64 Pe´rez Firmat, Gustavo, 34 Persin, Margaret H., 110, 146, 149 photography. See film Picasso, Pablo, 90, 103–4 pilot as poet, 162 Pino, Jose´ del, 203; work of, Del tren al aeroplano, 203 Plato, 82 Plus Ultra, 163 poetry and dance: enacting a concept, 97–110 poetry: as machine, 198–205; as sport, 153–59 poets, male: view of female dancers, 81–90 Poggioli, Renato, 164

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Quevedo, Francisco de, 121 Quincoces, Jacinto, 114

Salazar, Adolfo, 64 Salau¨n, Serge, 62 Salinas, Pedro, 38, 67, 87–88, 131, 172, 180–81, 188–90, 206; works of, La bomba increı´ble, 188; Caı´n o una gloria cientı´fica, 188; Razo´n de amor, 189; La voz a ti debida, 189 Salinas de Marichal, Solita, 135, 171 Samaranch, Juan Antonio, 113 Samitier, Pepe, 114 Sampedro, Lolo, 127 San Sebastia´n, 139–40, 145 Sa´nchez Mejı´as, Ignacio, 64 Sa´nchez Rodrı´guez, Alfonso, 131, 146 Sa´nchez Saornil, Lucı´a, 15, 72, 80–81, 120, 191–92 Scheler, Max, 116

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INDEX

Second Republic, the, 32, 63 Shaw, Mary Lewis, 102, 105 shimmy, the, 67 Silver Age, the, 17, 37 Simmel, Georg, 53, 55, 116 simultaneity, 163 skating, 135–36, 150–51, 158 skiing, 150–51 soccer, 113–34, 125–28 social consciousness, 59 social progress, 161 social unrest, 32 Spain: as an aviation pioneer, 162–63 Spanish women poets and the machine, 190–98 Spanish-American War, 12, 26 spectator, man as, 82, 97, 102, 207–8; woman as, 142–44 Spires, Robert, 58 Spitzer, Leo, 68, 178 sports, 25–26, 209; as cultural phenomenon, 111–18; in poetry, 118–32; as symbol of war, 115, 123 St. Denis, Ruth, 90 streetcar, 182–84 surrealists, 155 swimming, 131, 136–38, 150–53 tango, 67, 69, 82–83, 91 technology, 39, 58–59, 161, 163–69, 179, 188, 198–99, 205–6 telegraph, 186–87, 191 telephone, 185–88 tennis, 133–34 Torre, Guillermo de, 17, 45–46, 67, 135– 36, 154, 156, 158, 168–70, 173–75, 177, 180, 186–87, 200–201, 206; works of, He´lices, 135–36, 174–75 Torre, Josefina de la, 92–95, 97, 108, 140–44 Torres, Emilina, 83 trolley car. See streetcar Tun˜o´n de Lara, Manuel, 28, 30 Turner, Mark, 77 two-step, 62, 91 typewriter, 189, 194 Tzara, Tristan, 166 ultraı´stas, 15, 17–18, 67–68, 73, 96–98, 104–5, 107, 119–20, 135, 154–55, 159,

................. 17500$

INDX

167–68, 170–71, 174–75, 179–80, 186–88, 206 ultraı´smo, 14, 17, 138, 166, 177–78, 191, 202 Unamuno, Miguel de, 12, 34, 74, 118 United States: as an aviation pioneer, 162; as an industrial power, 161 urbanization, 23, 32, 39–44, 169, 207–8 Urrutia, Jorge, 70 Uzcudun, Paulino, 114, 125 Valdeavellano, Luis G. de, 146 Valencia, To´rtola, 47, 83 Vale´ry, Paul, 63, 104 Valle, Adriano del, 189 Valle-Incla´n, Ramo´n del, 119, 123 Vando Villar, Isaac del, 68, 172, 178, 186; work of, La sombrilla japonesa, 186 vanguard poetry: and the cult of youth, 45–46; and dance, 73, 105–6; female writers of, 55–59, 95–97, 146–50, 207; in the Jazz Age, 66; and machines, 166–90, 200–205, and modernism, 86, 165–66, 206–11; and patriarchal thought, 59, 83, 92, 134, 138, 142, 176; rise of, 14, 16–23, 29–34, 37–39, 42, 48, 58, 119; and the search for meanings of motion, movement, and change, 75, 83 166; and sports, 111, 115, 117, 120, 123, 125–26, 129–30, 154–59 vanguardists celebrate the machine, 166–72 Videla, Gloria, 105 Vighi, Francisco, 183 Virgen del Carmen: festival of the, 145 Vivanco, Luis Felipe, 172 Voz de la Mujer, La, 56 Wagner, Richard, 103 Walsh, J. K., 109 waltz, 67, 69–71, 91 Wilcox, John C., 78, 92, 97, 140 Williams, Raymond, 18, 39 Wilson, Elizabeth, 64, 139; work of, Adorned In Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 139 Wohl, Robert, 162 Womack, Mari, 115, 123, 125; work of, Sports as Symbol, 115

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257

INDEX

woman as spectacle, 82, 97, 133, 137, 207 woman as spectator, 142–44 women, sports, and poetry, 139–53 Woolf, Virginia, 53 World Cup, 113 World War I, 11, 23, 30–32, 40, 43, 139 Wosk, Julie, 190

................. 17500$

Yeats, William Butler, 106 Zambrano, Marı´a, 53 Zamora, Ricardo, 114 Zamora Vicente, Alonso, 62 Zardoya, Concha, 188 Zavala, Iris M., 90–91, 134

INDX

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