Federico García Lorca: Life, Work, and Themes
Federico García Lorca: A Literary Journey
1898-1936: Born in Fuentevaqueros, Granada. Studied law. (L) Music, with his friend Manuel de Falla. 1919-1928: Student residence with Dalí, JRJ, Buñuel. 1929-30: In New York and other American cities. 1932: Directs representations of classical theater throughout Spain with ‘La Barraca’. G: Shot by the rebels in Granada.
Lorca’s work expresses his intense vitality marked by an agonizing sense of death (constant dualities). His life reflected passion, love, and freedom, which opposed the limited time, repressive society, or a tragic fate. Themes include loneliness, frustration, and death on two complementary levels: personal/existential and social/universal. He expresses his own pain and the pain of others. His poetry is rather dramatic: characters face repressed instincts.
Early Works and Influences (1919-1928)
Step 1: Assimilation of currents. Training-Youth Work: the influence of Bécquer, Modernism, and JRJ Machado: Book of Poems (1921) – crisis of childhood innocence, youth anxieties; Singles (1927) – tragic destiny; Poema del cante flamenco – personal pain through Andalusian song; Suites – intimate and sometimes existential. Gypsy Ballads (1928) – a renovator step: marginalization of Roma opposing social and moral standards with a tragic final penalty. Tragic and mythical protagonist. Popular Andalusia + traditional and cutting-edge worship.
Travels and Social Commentary (1928-1936)
Step 2: Travel to the U.S. and Cuba in 1929. Bag of NY: ethical concerns and social and personal crisis (homosexuality) provoke an aesthetic crisis: expression of social and personal issues through Surrealism, free verse. Poet in New York (1940): Poet in New York and TierraYLuna: dehumanized city. Solidarity symbol of civilization and rebellion against social injustices and personal financial crisis. Priority to their own identity (sexual). Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935): chosen by the death of his friend, the bullfighter. Traditional + avant-garde in form and content.
Theatrical Works
Poetic + lyrical dramatic, prose & verse.
Themes in Lorca’s Theater
The myth of the impossible desire. Characters whose passions, wishes, and desires face a relentless reality, leading to loneliness, death, and frustration. Women often symbolize freedom and the power of instinct with a tragic destiny due to convention. Shows a total pedagogical mission: spiritual level + traditional + spectator. Also innovative.
Early Theatrical Explorations
E. INITIAL: Finding a very dramatic voice: The Curse of the Butterfly (1920) – butterfly love for an unattainable cockroach. Cycle of farce: for puppets: popular + poetic, romantic relationships authenticity; for people. Mariana Pineda (1925) – historical drama: heroin dies, killed in 1831, overboard with a liberal banner.
Avant-Garde Theater
E. Vanguard: Personal and artistic crisis in 1929. Influence of psychoanalysis and surrealism. Impossible comedies or mysteries: So That Five Years Pass (1931) – dream and reality unable to save a young life; The Public (1933) – interior world and homosexual love theater; Comedy Without a Title – combating social issues.
Major Tragic Cycle
BIG CYCLE TRAG.Y E. RD: Universal themes and special stories. Swallow: prose and verse, symbols, and mythical rural Andalusian poetry. Blood Wedding (1933) – based on a real event. Yerma (1934) – many symbols: love, sterility, and moral frustration due to social constraints. DR: more realistic + concerned about social issues. Doña Rosita the Spinster (1935) – prose and verse of parody: urban bourgeois theater, frustration of a woman waiting for love that will never arrive. The House of Bernarda Alba (1936) – prose, more dramatic than lyrical, more realism. A frustrated woman enslaved by conventions of society.