Lorca After Life

Nöel Valis's Lorca After Life is about Federico García Lorca, of course. But it's really about why certain dead poets matter and why we obsess over them. The Andalusian poet appears frequently in poetry, novels, films, streaming television series, graffiti, music and blogs almost one hundred years after his murder by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. In the introduction to Lorca After Life Nöel Valis writes that “there is something fundamentally unfinished about Lorca” (4) due in part to the fact that he constantly doubted, revised, and tinkered with his published work. But even more significantly, Valis argues, the initial shock and subsequent international response to Lorca's violent demise continues to haunt his work, life, and death, leaving many readers, critics, historians, and biographers to try to fill the holes in what we can piece together about the often mysterious and complex author. Rather than throwing up her hands and dismissing the ongoing fascination with Lorca's persona and his ongoing appeal to widely different reading and viewing publics, however, Valis goes into depth into the possible reasons for his enduring appeal and the degree to which his celebrity allows people to ask questions about memory and the stories about Lorca that proliferate in the collective imagination. Valis asks the key question “What does it mean to be ‘Lorca’ as a persistent memory and posthumous presence, but above all as a celebrity, whose iconic exceptionalism is writ large not only in those stories (about his life) but in some of his own work and in the poet's own fashioning of self?” (6). Lorca After Life in no way aims to even attempt to have the final word in the academic debates about the author in any authoritative way. Instead, it serves as a model for how to conduct a study of a literary figure who just might mean much more outside of the field of Literary Studies than within.Lorca After Life is divided into two sections. The three chapters that make up Part One (‘Why Dead Poets Matter,’ ‘Lorca's Grave’ and ‘The People's Poet and the Right’) explain how Lorca as a literary and media phenomenon enjoys multiple personas: the people's poet, a member of the dead poet's society, and his enduring status as an international gay icon. The communities that Valis deals with in the first half of the book are literary-cultural (the dead), social (the people's poet) and political (a bit surprisingly, from both ends of the right-left divide). The second half of Lorca After Life focuses squarely on sexual politics and Lorca's engagement with a variety of international gay communities in three chapters (‘Fabulous Fag (I), or the Politics of Celebrity Murder,’ ‘Fabulous Fag (II), or the Celebrity of Sex,’ and ‘Fabulous Fag (III), or a Face in the Crowd.’ She points out that some of these identities overlap, but others that are posthumously projected by certain communities onto Lorca after his death (such as national poet or gay icon) are often incompatible. One of the most interesting moments in the book is when Valis asks questions about why the pueblo is considered to be only sociopolitical and never sexual, and why the right (José Antonio Primo de Rivera) sometimes used their exalted rhetoric to claim Lorca as one of their own.It is impossible to fix Lorca After Life with any one disciplinary label. It is part biography, but also a cultural history. It incorporates key working concepts from the study of modern spaces and translational networks, gender studies, literary criticism, celebrity and popular culture studies. It is a compelling read for anyone interested in Spanish avant-garde literature to be sure and it includes a number of masterful close readings of Lorca's poetry. At the same time, it also has a lot to offer to readers interested in gender, sexuality, and celebrity more generally. Lorca's sexuality was politicized by his death. This complicates the sometimes overlooked fact that in his own time, the poet was never publicly “out,” if we can retroactively translate that current term to talk about the social politics of homosexuality one hundred years ago. Valis places Lorca's sexuality and celebrity into historical context in productive ways, comparing his relatively tame persona to those of much more well-known cultural figures such as Álvaro Retana, for example, paying special attention to Retana's sexual persona as part of his public performance as an author and how it differed significantly from Lorca's much more ambiguous sexual persona. This looking back at the sexual politics of one hundred years ago forces us to problematize and place into greater context ideas about gender and sexuality that we are working with today in productive ways that remind us that there is no such thing as a teleological progression of increasingly enlightened ideas about the body and gender as time marches on. Lorca After Life is an intriguing, heartfelt and complex book about the indebtedness of our current ideas about sexual politics that have a long, mediated, and haunted history.