Love, Desire and Identity in the Theatre of Federico García Lorca (review)

Reviewed by: Love, Desire and Identity in the Theatre of Federico García Lorca Lisa M. Nolan Paul McDermid. Love, Desire and Identity in the Theatre of Federico García Lorca. Colección Támesis. Woodbridge, Suffolk: UK Tamesis, 2007. Pp 217. $85.00 (Hb). It is not uncommon to find Lorcan scholars who read homosexual desire as bubbling beneath the surface of Federico García Lorca’s entire output –Daniel Eisenberg, Ángel Sahuquillo, and Paul Binding, to name a few. Paul McDermid’s recent book promises another way to read how the playwright’s homosexuality informs his work. Offering a detailed analysis of key plays written throughout the playwright’s life (1898–1936), McDermid presents each chapter with the intention of proving that “García Lorca’s ambition in his theatre works was to promote a spiritual dimension of Love that is always denied to the queer who loves, the one who desires the same sex and finds that the dominant (hetero)culture circumscribes h/er1 desire as merely physical” (202). In other words, McDermid reads the playwright’s corpus as one continuous project that demonstrates that “love” is not impossible but that the body’s physicality restricts it. In the theatre of García Lorca, McDermid concludes, death can be read as transcendence of the bonds of the physical nature of love. McDermid gives a cross-sectional view of García Lorca’s work – including, for example, El Público (called one of the “impossible” plays by the playwright himself) – alongside some of most notable, such as Mariana Pineda, Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, Yerma, and La [End Page 622] casa de Bernarda Alba. Chapter one deals with García Lorca’s little-known, unfinished play Cristo, which obviously invokes the transformation of Christ. McDermid calls Cristo the “unadorned lattice on which the shoots of the poet’s thinking would grow and mature” (32) and contends that, in each of García Lorca’s subsequent plays, a Christ-like martyrdom recurs. Chapter one, then, sets the stage for the rest of the readings in McDermid’s book. Unfortunately, giving such weight to this play reduces García Lorca’s entire output to a generality that sees each play only as a substitution for Cristo rather than as a unique theatrical work that might have different meanings. According to McDermid, in García Lorca’s more sophisticated and later plays, he presents gender – and the panic that it creates when it does not match up perfectly with sex – as a cross to bear, which eventually brings the principal characters closer to a transcendental discovery. The problematics of gender do feature in several of García Lorca’s plays: gender is out of sync in Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba and it is hidden as part of the complex plot of El Público. McDermid argues that the body’s inability to know itself through its gender identity bears witness to a desire that is not, in fact, bodily. Yerma, whose only desire is to have a child, manifests the desire for a “metaphysical self” (146). Adela, the fiery youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba, is interested not in physical union with Pepe el Romano but rather in “the sphere of the metaphysical” (190). And El Público, García Lorca’s only play openly presenting love among men, provides a “metaphysical reflection on the nature of existence” (141). Oddly, however, in foregrounding the playwright’s homosexuality as that which facilitates a more progressive form of “love,” McDermid winds up disavowing the body – which does the facilitating – and leaving characters and plays indistinguishable from one another. In McDermid’s homogeneous readings, the particularities of the body are lost or erased. His analysis of Yerma is exemplary of this danger. He repeatedly states that Yerma does not want a child. But by denying her frustration with a world she sees as always reproducing and by redefining this frustration as a desire to find herself, McDermid seems to perpetuate a Freudian psychoanalytic myth that woman does not have a self in the first place and that this lack is precisely why she seeks to...

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