Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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Hirsch, Edward. (2002) The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration. New York/San Diego/London: Harcourt Inc. $24.00

Reviewed by

Maria Way  

University of Westminster

This book deals with duality. Within all of us there is a dark and a light side.  Here, Hirsch discusses the “duende” (the devil) which Federico Garcia Lorca conceptualized in the 1930s.  In 1933, when Lorca first discussed the concept, he was at a particularly interesting stage of his career, amongst other pieces which appeared at this time was a gramophone record on which he played the piano while Lola Membrives (L’Argentinita) sang.  Four other records were issued during the year and achieved much acclaim both with critics and the general public, most particularly in Spain and South America. As a result of their success, he was able to rent a flat for the first time – art doesn’t always pay.  During his short life (he was assassinated during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 at only 38 years of age), Lorca produced an amazingly diffuse body of work.  He was quoted as saying that he inherited his passion from his father and his intelligence from his mother[1]. Like many creative people, Lorca had a number of strings to his bow (poetry, drama, music, puppetry, he was a skilled lecturer even outside Spanish-speaking countries) and amongst his friends and acquaintances he numbered Buňuel, Pablo Neruda and Dalí (who he met at University in Madrid when studying philosophy and literature)[2]. If, as Hirsch, Lorca’s “duende” was indeed the source of his inspiration, it was not only an active devil, but also attracted other similarly gifted artists.

            How does anyone comprehend the birthplace of artistic inspiration? An artist of my acquaintance said that she felt that she would never rise to artistic eminence in the “Britart” scene as she was unable to “bullshit successfully”.  When I asked what she meant, she answered that she could not explain where here inspiration came from – it was just there.  Lorca’s “duende” was perhaps a notion I should have put before her.  As Hirsch says (p.2) Lorca wrote at the bottom of one of his drawings that “Only mystery enables us to live”.  Anyone who wants to try to comprehend inspiration should “open the doors wide into the night and welcome into the house the spirit of inhabitable awe”. This spirit is the “duende”.

            There is a darkness in Lorca, yet he managed to traverse the divide between “popular” and “high” culture, the religious or sacred and the secular.  The notion of the demon (which is the translation of “duende” used here) relates to the Greek notion of the daimon or the Latin daemon, from which we take this word. This use of “demon” in itself would lead us believe that there is also sacred element here.  William Blake, Eric Gill and others wrote of the sacredness of work and, for an artist, that work may be in the form of literature of various sorts, architecture, sculpture, painting or, as in the case of Buňuel, film. We are in awe of great works of art and, as Hirsch tells us, “Awe bears traces of the holy.”(p.xiii) We are moved into a space that is transcendental – think perhaps of the churches of S. Ignazio or the Gesù in Rome, built by the Jesuits to induce awe into a post-reformation populace and still awe-inspiring today.  These buildings have what I would call “the wow factor” – take anyone into one of them and their immediate reaction is to stand transfixed and say “wow!” After four hundred years, they still work.They are, perhaps, the result of the angel rather than the demon.  As Hirsch says:

“The demon and the angel are two external figures for a power that dwells deep within us.  They are the imagination’s liberating agents, who unleash their primal forces into works of art.” (p.xiii)

Artistic work does not happen without some effort and Lorca evidently worked hard or he would not have produced so many different pieces of work.  He came from a background of Spanish Catholicism, a Catholicism whose works of art have a much harder edge than those of, say, Italy.  The danse macabre of the middle ages, seems to have left a greater legacy in Spanish art, which shows a culture of death that is missing elsewhere. In life we are in death, so to speak, and Hirsch shows convincingly how Lorca delved within himself to display this culture, which he found in religious writing and art in the architecture of religious buildings; in the bullfight and in dance.  . He had a sort of duality even in his relationship to death – a sort of desire to fight his fear by acting out his own death (p.19). What Hirsch describes as “his morbid terror (of death) and surreal humor” was shared by Dalí, along with, according to Hirsch:

“…a nervous awareness of the homoerotic and sadomasochistic aspects underlying St. Sebastian’s martyrdom, which was somehow mixed up in their own erotically repressed relationship to each other.” (p.21)

Lorca identified with the persecuted; “the Gypsy, the black, the Jew, the Moor” which he believed had formed the culture of his native land. It is perhaps no accident that he, and we, so often see the “duende” in works from such persecuted groups (think of Flamenco, the Blues, Freud, Rock ‘n’ roll, heavy metal or various black subcultural groups, particularly in the case of modern music, so often described as “the work of the devil”). Hirsch talks of Lorca’s “tragic destiny” (killed by a firing squad), and while there was evidently a dark side to his nature, I find it difficult to believe that Lorca might have been aware that such an ending to his life would occur.  With hindsight it is easy to put a gloss on writings which may not actually be relevant to them.  Had Lorca not been shot, but continued to old age like Dalí, whose sexuality was certainly not repressed, would Hirsch have written of him in the same way?

The book attempts to work out whether Lorca’s concept of the Duende holds water. It is well written and uses examples of both high and low culture to explore the notion. The works of Billie Holliday to Herman Melville, Walt Whitman to Martha Graham, Bennie Goodman to Rainer Maria Rilke, Mark Rothko to Silvia Plath, Wallace Stevens to Jimmy Hendrix,  amongst others, are considered in this exploration.  Hirsch’s erudition is impressive and his passing from examples considered high culture to those considered low culture is particularly refreshing in an academic book. Too often, academe restricts itself to one or the other, but here the two meet admirably.  His bibliography is called “Reading List: The Pleasure of the Text” (pp.279-302) and is not, as he says, a full bibliography, but:

“a record of what has most urgently called out to me in writing this book.  It is a catalog of studied pleasures, of recommended readings, visual guides, and crucial soundings”.

What this book does, as I said at the beginning of this review,  is to point to dualities, in Lorca’s work and elsewhere. Devil and Angel; light and dark; life and death; joy and pain, all of these are elemental forces in both our lives and those who create great works of art. At times the Devil is uppermost and at others the Angel – as human beings we have to learn to live with them. We must also learn to take from them the good they can bring, their cultural space, the spirit which inspires, without succumbing to what John Paul II has called “the culture of death” in society.  Artistic endeavour is a living thing and so often has been repressed in one way or another by the culture that surrounds its creators.

Hirsch’s book has left me with an inordinate desire to work through his reading list and to revisit Lorca’s oeuvres with new eyes, to hear his music with attentive ear, to seek with Hirsch, for the Devils and Angels that beset Lorca and others and influence and inspire their work.