The crucified mind rafael alberti and the surrealist ethos in spain

Colección Támesis
SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 186

THE CRUCIFIED MIND
RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE
SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN



ROBERT HAVARD

THE CRUCIFIED MIND
RAFAEL ALBERTI AND THE
SURREALIST ETHOS IN SPAIN

TAMESIS


© Robert Havard 2001
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2001 by Tamesis, London

ISBN 1 85566 075 X

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA
website:
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Havard, Robert.
The crucified mind: Rafael Alberti and the surrealist ethos in Spain / Robert Havard.
p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías; 186)
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 1–85566–075–X (hardbound)
1. Alberti, Rafael, 1902 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Religion in
literature. 3. Surrealism – Spain. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ6601.L2 Z692 2001
861¢.62 – dc21
2001023349

This publication is printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire


CONTENTS
List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
1. THE CRUCIFIED MIND
Surrealism’s three phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Religion and paranoia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Materialism and the transition to political commitment . . . . . . . . 12

Politics and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
The Loyolan imagination: ‘viendo el lugar’ [seeing the place] . . . . . 22
Religion and materiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Alberti’s views on Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2. UNDER THE JESUITS
The sins of the fathers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Straw floors and severed hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In the classroom: Matthew, Maths and Marx . . . . . . . . . . .
Sobre los ángeles: structure, paranoia and Surrealism . . . . . .

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

39
42
50
72

3. LAST THINGS FIRST: SCATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY
Giménez Caballero and scatology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Maruja Mallo and eschatology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Alberti’s elegy to matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
4. FROM PAIN TO PROPHECY
Lorca’s mantic poet in New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Working the oracle: mantic trance or psychic dictation? . . . . . . . 128
Alberti’s oracular imperative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
5. TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND METAMORPHOSIS
The paradigm of the Eucharist . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From mass to masturbation: Dalinian metamorphosis .
The dissolve in Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou. . . . . .
Alterity in Aleixandre: mysticism or evasion?. . . . .

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.

.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

152
155
165
177

6. COME THE REVOLUTION
Alberti’s sermonic syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Land Without Bread: Buñuel’s surrealist documentary on Spain .
Communist adventism: De un momento a otro . . . . . . . . . .
The proletarian poet: ‘Capital de la gloria’ . . . . . . . . . . . .

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

191
200
212
222

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Select Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242


ILLUSTRATIONS
Between pages 116 and 117

1. Detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

(top of right-hand panel)
2. Salvador Dalí, The Lugubrious Game (1929)
3. Salvador Dalí, Apparatus and Hand (1927)
4. Salvador Dalí, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1936–7)
5. Salvador Dalí, Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire
(1940)
6. Maruja Mallo, Espantapájaros [Scarecrows] (1929)
7. Maruja Mallo, Tierra y excremento [Earth and Excrement] (1932)
8. Maruja Mallo, La Huella [The Footprint] (1929)
9. Hand full of Ants trapped in Door; still from Luis Buñuel, Un Chien
andalou [An Andalusian Dog] (1929)
10. Bare Feet of Children under Desk; still from Luis Buñuel, Tierra sin
pan [Land without Bread] (1933)


ABBREVIATIONS
Alberti, Rafael:
OCRA Obra completa, vol. I, Poesía 1920–1938 (Aguilar, Madrid, 1988).
LG
The Lost Grove (University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles,
1959).
AP 1 La arboleda perdida. Libros I y II de memorias (Alianza, Madrid,
1988).
AP 3 La arboleda perdida. Libros III y IV (Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1927).
AP 5 La arboleda perdida, Quinto libro (1988–1996) (Anaya & Mario
Muchnik, Barcelona, 1996).
Aleixandre, Vicente:
OCVA Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 1968).
Breton, André:
MS

Manifestoes of Surrealism (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972).
Buñuel, Luis:
MLB My Last Breath (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984).
UCA Un Chien andalou (Faber & Faber, London, 1994).
Dalí, Salvador:
UCSD The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí (Quartet Books,
London, 1977).
DG
Diary of a Genius (Hutchinson, London, 1990).
SLSD The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Vision, London, 1968).
García Lorca, Federico:
OCGL Obras completas (Aguilar, Madrid, 11th edition, 1966).
Giménez Caballero, Ernesto:
YIA
Yo, inspector de alcantarillas (Ediciones Turner, Madrid, 1975).
Mallo, Maruja:
MM
Maruja Mallo: 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color (1928–1942)
(Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942).


FOREWORD
My first priority in this book is to shed new light on the poetry Rafael
Alberti wrote in his avant-garde period, 1927–38. My second is to unravel the
complexities that beset the issue of Surrealism in Spain and offer a pragmatic
approach to its distinctive ethos (it being accepted here that a varietal difference between Surrealism in Spain and in France – its HQ – is inevitable for
the simple reason that the two countries have two very different cultures). In
practice my priorities are complementary, for it should be mutually enlightening to compare Alberti’s work with that of such radical avant-gardists as
Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, Maruja Mallo, Gimémez
Caballero and Vicente Aleixandre across the genres of painting, film, prose

and poetry.
My approach is driven by a double conviction: that there is no more
luminous star than Alberti in the galaxy of Spanish poets who began to
shine in the 1920s, and that his work provides a unique touchstone for
appreciating the ethos of Surrealism in Spain. The reasons for this latter
claim are outlined in Chapter One, ‘The Crucified Mind’, which serves as
an introduction by relating Alberti to Surrealism’s different phases. My
own view, polemical as it may be, is that assessments of Surrealism in
Spain have tended to be too narrow and too exclusively based on ideas
found in Breton’s First Manifesto which, though important, do not constitute the whole picture. The fact is that Surrealism evolved, and so too, in
surprisingly close step, does Alberti’s poetry. His disarming
self-assessment, ‘Yo me defino como un poeta de mi tiempo’1 [I see myself
as a poet of my time], applies especially to his so-called ‘crisis’ volumes.
From the personal anguish of Sobre los ángeles (1927–1928) [Concerning
the Angels], to the increasingly metaphysical themes of Sermones y
moradas (1928–1929) [Sermons and Dwelling Places], to the political
turmoil of El poeta en la calle (1931–1935) [The Poet in the Street] which
culminates in a moving poetic diary of the Spanish Civil War, De un

1

See José Luis Tejada, ‘Una entrevista con Rafael Alberti’, Gades. Revista del Colegio
Universitario de Filosofía y Letras de Cádiz, XII (1984), 19.


x

FOREWORD

momento a otro (poesía e historia) (1934–1938) [Any Minute Now (Poetry

and History)], Alberti is undeniably a poet of rapid shifts of focus and
strong experimental tendencies. Yet he is no gadfly; rather a poet who
imbibes the spirit of his age and who has a gift for assimilating its changes.
There is another reason why Alberti serves as a standard for Surrealism in
Spain. This, in a word, is religion, which is to say, the distinctively biblical
register of his language and his mental constructs already evident in the titles
Sobre los ángeles and Sermones y moradas. The point is that Alberti was
educated by Jesuits, as was Buñuel, while Dalí was taught by the scarcely
less rigorous Christian Brothers, founded by La Salle, another order which
had been banned in France.2 Consequently, and typically, Alberti sees religion as a fact of Spanish life, a conditioning ineradicable even in those who,
like himself, had long since turned atheist:
Esas cosas las conocemos y las tenemos a flor de piel, y cuando queremos
ser sinceros con nosotros mismos, esa cosa la encontramos en la masa de la
sangre … Son cosas que, sobre todo en España, están en la médula
¿verdad? …Toda nuestra educación ha sido profunda ¿verdad?, y no son
cosas que se eliminen fácilmente … Nuestra formación no pudo ser
peor … Referente a Buñuel, supongo que ha estado en un colegio tan
religioso como el mío, de jesuítas. ¿Y qué? Eso es lo que deja más huella.
Luego lo rechazamos y lo protestamos, pero, en el fondo, lo que aprendió
allí no se desaparece, ¿comprendes?, aunque digamos que sí. Y surge
constantemente.3
[We understand these things; they’re ingrained in us, and if we’re honest
with ourselves we’d say it’s in our blood … It’s in the marrow, at least in
Spain … The effect of our schooling runs deep. It’s not easily expunged …
Our formation could not have been worse … As for Buñuel, I imagine he
went to as religious a school as I did, run by Jesuits. And? Well, it leaves a
deep mark. We reject it and fight against it, but in the end what we learnt
stays with us – you know what I mean? – even if we say it doesn’t. It keeps
coming back …]

The thrust of my argument is that religion, the most traditional facet of
Spanish life, is paradoxically the underlying reason why the avant-garde
movement flourished in Spain and, furthermore, that the pervasive influence
of religion is what most distinguishes surrealist practice in Spain from the

2

For Dalí this distinction was decisive: ‘la gran diferencia entre Buñuel y yo es que él
estudió con los jesuítas y yo con los hermanos de las Escuelas Cristianas’ [the main
difference between Buñuel and me is that he studied under Jesuits and I with the Brothers
of the Christian Schools]. See Max Aub, Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel (Aguilar,
Madrid, 1985), 531.
3 Ibid., 293–4.


FOREWORD

xi

French model. It is precisely because religion is in the Spanish blood, like a
virus, that it is so deeply implicated in the two most characteristic and therapeutic practices of Surrealism, catharsis and transcendence. This book traces
the impact of religion on Alberti, principally, as a typical example of his
generation, by looking at his personal and artistic formation. Broadly
speaking, religion is found to be repressive and neurosis-inducing, as
discussed in Chapters Two and Three where Giménez Caballero and Maruja
Mallo are considered together with Alberti. In time, however, a more positive, metaphysical tendency emerges which is also strongly rooted in religion. This is discussed in Chapters Four and Five, first in the context of
Lorca’s prophetic voice in Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York], then
with a view to the Eucharistic concept of metamorphosis found in Dalí,
Buñuel and Aleixandre. Finally, Chapter Six takes on board the coming of a
new Saviour in Marx and the commitment made in the 1930s by many surrealists – including Buñuel and Alberti – to Revolution.

This book grew out of another, From Romanticism to Surrealism: Seven
Spanish Poets (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1988), which arrived at
Surrealism’s door in its final pages and engaged in a brief discussion of
Alberti. Here Alberti is the dominant subject and the fulcrum by which
thematic, conceptual and stylistic connections are made with other surrealists of his extraordinary generation. I have not attempted to be exhaustive in
my selection of material, but rather focused, concentrating on what I
believe to be distinctive about the surrealist output in Spain. Since writing
that earlier book I have had the benefit of discussing these issues with a
number of postgraduates who invariably sparked insights. Though it is
impossible to itemize their contribution fully, I would like to acknowledge
the sparks of Jennie Wood, Craig Duggan, Lowri Williams, Thierry Passera
and Rowanne Cowley. My thanks are due also to Dr Geoffrey Connell – a
fine albertista, if one whose views often differ radically from my own –
who was kind enough to send me the tape of an interview he had done with
Alberti; also to Dr Bob Morris Jones, for guiding me through some of the
intricacies of syntax; to Dr Rob Stone, for advice on film; to Esther
Santamaría Iglesias, for help with problematic translations and sundry other
issues; to her father, Alfredo Santamaría, for his personal account of
schooling under La Salle Christian Brothers in the 1930s; and to Dr John
Trethewey, who read my text with care and made many useful suggestions.
Parts of certain chapters are based on material that first appeared in the
form of articles, and I would like to thank the editors of the following journals for their permission to draw on them when necessary: Bulletin of
Hispanic Studies, both at Glasgow and Liverpool, The Modern Language
Review, Romance Studies and Anales de la literatura española
contemporánea. Finally I would like to express my gratitude for the financial supports I have received, both to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth,
which was ready to fund my research visits to Spain, and to the Aurelius


xii

FOREWORD

Trust, which, through the offices of the British Academy, made available a
generous grant to cover both the costs of copyright and the provision of
transparencies for the illustrations used in this book.
Robert Havard
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
August 2000

Publisher’s Note
The author and the publishers are grateful to all individuals and institutions for permission to use the materials for which they hold copyright. Every
effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; we apologise for any
omission in this regard, and will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgements in subsequent editions.


1
THE CRUCIFIED MIND

The Crucified Mind
The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but
schizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified mind.
Norman O. Brown1
Yo creo que es que el surrealismo español tiene unas características
diferentes … si usted lee la poesía francesa surrealista, usted verá que,
con la española hay una gran diferencia. Yo creo que es más seria la
española, y más profunda, y menos charlatana.
[The point is that Spanish Surrealism has different characteristics … if
you read French surrealist poetry, you will see that it differs greatly
from the Spanish. I believe the Spanish is more serious, more profound,
and less charlatan.]

Rafael Alberti2

Surrealism’s three phases
No major creative writer in Spain covers as much ground as Alberti in
these critical years from 1927 to the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.
Equally important is that the sweep of his work matches in all essentials the
evolution of Surrealism itself as the movement’s thinking was directed in
Paris by André Breton and his circle, notably in the manifestoes of 1924 and
1929 and in the journals La Révolution surréaliste (1924–29) and Le
Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33).3 Alberti, for his part, was
actively involved in the nearest Spanish equivalents of these journals, first
with regular front-page contributions to Giménez Caballero’s La Gaceta
Literaria (1927–32), especially in its stridently Freudian early days, then as
founder–editor of the pro-Soviet Octubre (June 1933–April 1934) which was
banned definitively after the Asturian miners’ uprising in October 1934. But
1

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Random House, New York, 1966), 186.
From an interview of Alberti conducted informally in the canteen of the Riverside
Studios, Hammersmith, London, 30 November 1979, by Geoffrey Connell, the wellknown Hispanist and Alberti scholar, who generously supplied me with the full tape
cassette.
3 Breton’s Second Manifesto appeared as an article in La Révolution surréaliste,
15-xii-1929, and was published separately in its definitive form in 1930.
2


2

ROBERT HAVARD

Alberti is not only a major player in the Freudian and Marxist phases that
demarcate Surrealism’s heyday; he is also acutely sensitive to the metaphysical implications of the surreal that emerged in the late 1920s when, briefly,
the Hegelian ideal of transcendence via the union of opposites led to the
notion of subject–object integration and ‘the surrealist object’. This theme,
central to Dalí’s ‘paranoia-critical method’, underpins Sermones y moradas
where, as we shall see, materialist rigour combines with a fervent transcendentalism to create a manic form of materio-mysticism. That Alberti was
attuned to this thinking shows his instinctive grasp of French theory, while it
also reflects his personal circumstance not only in terms of his religious
upbringing but also as regards his artistic bent which brought contact with the
likes of Maruja Mallo and artists of the Vallecas school, as well as Dalí. It is
this dimension of his work that distinguishes him from writers for whom
Surrealism was at bottom little more than a fashionable literary style. It is
also the part of his work that has been most overlooked.
It has to be said here, parenthetically, that assessment by critics of Surrealism in Spain, despite occasional successes, remains defective. Foremost
among their failings is a reluctance to address conceptual issues, an omission
not offset by generalizations and endless cross-references that are the typical
fare in biographical, generational and thematic studies. Two examples, from
among the better critics, will suffice to illustrate the problem. Firstly, Paul
Ilie posits the idea of a ‘surrealist mode’ as ‘a broad aesthetic category’ in
Spanish literature, which even antedates Surrealism in France, a Christians-before-Christ argument that is unhelpful in a critical context and
diluting in its effect.4 Brian Morris, in a purist reaction, states that we cannot
even speak of Spanish Surrealism as such, for this pairing is a ‘contradiction
in terms’ and as ‘incongruous’ as ‘Welsh gongorismo’.5 Though we may
need some convincing about that, Morris’s point is clear enough: France has
a patent on le Surréalisme – which centred on Paris and was stamped by
André Breton – and if ‘Pope’ André did not give you his apostolic blessing
you were not admitted to the inner sanctum, not authenticated as a surrealist.
But can we accept this restriction from Breton, a renowned control freak? No
such restriction applies to Romanticism, for we say German, French, English
and even Spanish Romanticism with impunity. A moment’s reflection leads

us to recall that Surrealism came from Dada, the nihilistic movement born of
the First World War, or its futility, and Dada had sprung up in several places
at once: Berlin, Zurich, New York. When Dada’s battery ran down, around
1920, to be recharged by the more positive surrealist current, it is hardly

4

Paul Ilie, The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature (University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, 1968), 7.
5 C.B. Morris, Surrealism in Spain, 1920–1936 (Cambridge University Press, London,
1972), 160, 8.


THE CRUCIFIED MIND

3

surprising that its new energy took it from its Paris depôt out across frontiers
again.
Recently a more text-based approach to the issue of Surrealism in Spain
has come from Derek Harris who argues that language, as distinct from
content, is the defining characteristic of surrealist poetry.6 He includes a
chapter on French surrealists for ubication and begins in the proper place by
reminding us of the seminal importance of Breton’s dictionary-like definition
of 1924:
SURREALISM. n. masc. Pure psychic automatism through which it is
intended to express, either orally, or in writing, or in any other way, the
actual way thought works. The dictation of thought, free from all control
exercised by reason, without regard to any aesthetic or moral concern.7

Many of the values enshrined here would continue to have relevance, but, as
Harris recognizes, it is inadequate as a definition since it ‘equates Surrealism
with just one specific technique: the production of text automatically’, it
being well known that ‘Surrealism has metaphysical aims’ which, implicitly,
are not covered by the definition.8 After this good start Harris sheds no
further light on Surrealism’s metaphysics but focuses instead on linguistic
strategies, principal among which, he argues, is the way phonemic patterns of
alliteration and assonance can generate lexemes and, in effect, the text itself.
This argument is circular and contradictory: (i) psychic dictation is not the
essence of Surrealism; (ii) the essence of Surrealism is the way the text
generates itself; and (iii) textual self-generation – via phonemic concatenation – is the proper measure of psychic dictation and the yardstick by which
surrealist poetry should be judged. A syllogism, in fact, but hardly a
comment on metaphysics. Ultimately, Harris is as neglectful of conceptual
issues as Morris, and his assessment of four Spanish poets on the imitative
basis of their closeness to an early French model takes no account of the
evolution of surrealist thought, but is, to all intents and purposes, stuck in the
groove of psychic dictation.
It is imperative to begin, I suggest, by appreciating that Surrealism moved
through three key phases: the psychoanalytical, the metaphysical and the
political. Putting it another way, it passed successively under the spell of
Freud, Hegel and Marx. These phases are not isolated categories, nor are they
chronologically discrete; for one thing, Freud was never discarded, and, for
another, Marx was there from the start. Yet the triadic scheme serves to

6

Derek Harris, Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights: The Language of Surrealism in
Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda and Aleixandre (La Sirena, Anstruther, 1998), 13.
7
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane

(University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972), 26.
8 Metal Butterflies and Poisonous Lights, 14, 15.


4

ROBERT HAVARD

indicate when the figures held sway, and it is apt with regard to the intercalation of Hegel whose integrational metaphysic guided Surrealism in its transition from the subjective materialism of ‘the surrealist object’ to the political
materialism of Marx. The crucial point is to accept that Surrealism evolved
ideologically, that there is a conceptual difference between the 1924 and
1929 manifestoes – hence the need for a second manifesto – and that there
was a surrealist rapprochement of sorts with the Communist Party. From this
it follows that any assessment of Surrealism in Spain, including those with a
linguistic focus, should consider the impact not only of the first, predominantly Freudian wave of influence but also of subsequent waves. It is all the
more remarkable that critics have failed to do this when we bear in mind that
Spaniards like Dalí and Buñuel played a significant part in generating those
later waves, and especially when we recognize that, in Alberti, Spain has a
poet who illustrates all three phases.

Religion and paranoia
The structure of this book is based on the concept of Surrealism’s three
phases, but, as indicated, these are interwoven by a further thematic thread,
religion, which is thought to be crucial to Surrealism’s distinctive ethos in
Spain. In his autobiography, The Lost Grove, Alberti recalls that he was
steeped as a boy in ‘an atmosphere of insane Catholicism and exaggerated
bigotry’.9 He states unequivocally:
I am compelled once more to put in writing the repugnance I feel for this
Spanish Catholic spirit, this reactionary and savage Catholicism that darkened the blueness of the sky from the days of our childhood, covering us
with layers and layers of gray ashes which only served to muffle any real

creative intelligence we might have had. How many arms and lungs have
we seen struggling frantically and hopelessly to escape from these depths,
without ever having grasped even a momentary fistful of sun? How many
entire families drowned or buried alive? What a hideous inheritance of
rubble and suffocation! (LG, 29)10

9 Rafael Alberti, The Lost Grove, trans. Gabriel Berns (University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), 57. The Spanish original reads: ‘aquella atmósfera de
catolicismo loco y exageraciones beatas’, La arboleda perdida. Libros I y II de memorias,
first published Buenos Aires, 1959 (Alianza, Madrid, 1998), 59. These texts will be
abbreviated as LG and AP.
10 The original Spanish reads: ‘quiero consignar una vez más en mi obra la repugnancia
que siento por ese último espíritu católico español, reaccionario, salvaje, que nos
entenebreció desde niños los azules del cielo, echándonos cien capas de ceniza, bajo cuya
negrura se han asfixiado tantas inteligencias verdaderas. ¡Cuántos brazos y angustiados
pulmones hemos visto luchando fiera y desesperadamente por subir de esas simas, sin


THE CRUCIFIED MIND

5

His own torment was acute in his adolescent years 1912–17 when he attended
the Jesuit school in El Puerto de Santa María, the prestigious Colegio de San
Luis Gonzaga from which he was expelled at the age of sixteen. His subsequent condemnation of the Jesuits for their terrifying methods of indoctrinating children ranks among the most vituperative in a long list of such
testimonies that includes James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and, in Spain, the accounts of Pérez de Ayala, Ortega y Gasset and Luis
Buñuel, who, reflecting on his own childhood, speaks of ‘a repressive and
emasculating Catholicism’ and remarks: ‘In the end we were worn out with
our oppressive sense of sin.’11 Buñuel, in fact, discharged himself from the

Colegio del Salvador in Zaragoza, where he too had been a day pupil for
seven punishing years, following a final ‘humiliating’ incident in which one
of the Jesuits, the study hall proctor, gave him ‘a swift kick for no apparent
reason’.12
Alberti reacted at an early age against the regime to which he was
subjected, but so deeply inculcated in him were images of hell and damnation
that, years later, they resurfaced with a vengeance and provided the psychic
energy that generated his two most subversive volumes in religious terms,
Sobre los ángeles [Concerning the Angels] and Sermones y moradas
[Sermons and Dwelling Places]. Recalling the desperate state of mind that
provoked Sobre los ángeles, Alberti alludes among other things to ‘waves of
infantile fears that created even greater pangs of conscience, doubt, fears of
hell, sombre echoes from that Jesuit school on the shores of the Bay of Cádiz
where I had loved and suffered’ (LG, 259).13 His experience was typical, he
says, comparable not only to that of Buñuel and Dalí but also of the poets
Dámaso Alonso, who attended the main Jesuit school at Chamartín in
Madrid, and the state-school educated García Lorca: ‘Federico tenía terrores
nocturnos y era una persona de una formación muy católica’ [Federico was
afflicted by night-time fears and he’d had a very Catholic upbringing].14
alcanzar al fin ni un momentáneo puñado de sol! ¡Cuánta familia hundida! ¡Horrible
herencia de escombros y naufragios!’, AP 1, 33.
11 Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984), 48,
14. See also Mi último suspiro (Plaza y Janés, Barcelona, 1982). Joyce’s famous account
of the bone-chilling sermon that harangued the boys of Belvedere College, Dublin, is
found in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape, London, 1964), 123–39.
For Pérez de Ayala’s testimony, see his autobiographical work, A.M.G.D.: La vida en los
colegios de jesuítas (1910), a title based on the Jesuit motto ‘Ad majorem gloriam Dei’.
Ortega confesses to having shared Ayala’s ‘niñez triste y sedienta’ in his review ‘Al
margen del libro A.M.G.D.’, Obras completas, I, 6th edition (Revista de Occidente,
Madrid, 1963), 533.

12 My Last Breath, 30.
13 The orginal reads: ‘los miedos infantiles, invadiéndome en ráfagas que me traían aún
remordimientos, dudas, terrores del infierno, ecos umbríos de aquel colegio jesuíta que
amé y sufrí en mi bahía gatidana’, AP 1, 291.
14 See Aub, Conversaciones con Luis Buñuel, 300. Of Dámaso Alberti says: ‘tiene una


6

ROBERT HAVARD

Indeed, it was widely held that an over-zealous type of religious education
had damaged legions of Spain’s youth, a view put forward by none other than
Manuel Azaña, the future premier, in a debate in the Cortes on 13 October
1931 during the heady early days of the Second Republic. In a speech that
would secure him the premiership, Azaña lamented the interference of religious orders in the nation’s education system and he singled out ‘la agitación
más o menos clandestina de la Compañía de Jesús’ [the more or less subversive activity of the Company of Jesus] which he knew at first hand had done
lasting damage to generations of Spaniards:
Quien no tenga la experiencia de estas cosas, no puede hablar, y yo, que he
comprobado en tantos y tantos compañeros de mi juventud que se
encontraban en la robustez de su vida ante la tragedia de que se les
derrumbaban los principios básicos de su cultura intelectual y moral, os he
de decir que ése es un drama que yo con mi voto no consentiré que se
reproduzca jamás.15
[Those of you who have no experience of this should remain silent; but, as
for myself, having witnessed so many of my boyhood friends reach the
prime of life only to find tragically that the basic principles of their
intellectual and moral formation came crashing down around them, I feel
bound to say that I will use my vote to ensure that such a drama will never
be enacted again.]

The psycho-drama that Azaña saw as a feature of Spanish life is as deeply
embedded in the religious iconography and neurotic texture of Sobre los ángeles
as it is in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York] or the Buñuel–Dalí
filmscripts, Un Chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog] and L’Age d’or [The
Golden Age]. Religion for Buñuel, says Alberti, is simply an obsession:
Es que ha tenido una formación como yo, de colegio de jesuítas. No sé en
qué colegio estuvo, pero esas cosas las conocemos y las tenemos a flor de
piel … Y Buñuel ha tenido la valentía de sacársela y mostrarla. Pero la
muestra porque la tiene verdaderamente en todas las venas; no hay otra
cosa: es una obsesión en él.16
formación religiosísima … tiene su fondo también y su infierno tremendo, quizá más que
nadie. Es alumno de los jesuítas de Chamartín de la Rosa y conoce muy bien, porque yo he
hablado mucho con él cuando éramos jóvenes, todos los problemas religiosos y de
conciencia española. Los conoce mejor que nadie’ [He had an extremely religious
education … he feels its depth and its fearful hell perhaps more than anyone. He was a
pupil of the Jesuits at Chamartín de la Rosa and I know, because I spoke to him a lot when
we were young, that he is well aware, perhaps more than anyone, of the problems
concerning religion and the Spanish conscience]. Ibid., 301.
15 See Diario de las Sesiones de las Cortes Constituyentes de la República Española
(1931), 1671.
16 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 293.


THE CRUCIFIED MIND

7

[The thing is he was educated, as I was, by Jesuits. I don’t know what
school he went to, but we understand these things, they’re ingrained in

us … Buñuel has been brave enough to bring it out and display it. But he
does this really because it’s in his veins and he can’t help it: it’s an
obsession with him.]

A certain religious praxis has a marked capacity for creating obsessive
psychical disorders that, in turn, require the therapy of catharsis, or what
Freud calls abreaction. Creative figures, we know, tend to exorcize their
demons in their work and Sobre los ángeles is a classic example of
‘Desahucio’ [‘Eviction’], the paradigmatic title of its second poem. Its third,
‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [‘The Disinhabited Body’], describes the process:
Yo te arrojé de mi cuerpo,
yo, con un carbón ardiendo. Vete. (390)17
[I cast you out from my body,/ me, with a burning coal./ – Get out.]

This biblical exorcism, we cannot fail to note, finds a close parallel in
psychoanalysis which aims to bring repressed memories and troublesome
complexes to the surface for purposes of eradication. Ultimately, the most
persistent feature in Sobre los ángeles is its intertwining of biblical and
psychoanalytical motifs, the two being all the more tightly enmeshed by
virtue of the fact that expulsion is effected via the agency of angels.
It is revealing that Alberti should speak at length about the impact of a
strict religious education in a conversation with Max Aub in which the
primary objective is to uncover the avant-garde characteristics in their mutual
friend Luis Buñuel. Alberti advises Aub that if he wants to know what makes
Buñuel tick he should study his religious formation:
son cosas que, sobre todo en España, están en la médula, ¿verdad? … Creo
que bien estructurado, bien pensado, tú, esto, lo debes analizar
profundamente, porque vale la pena, ¿verdad? Vale la pena por el hombre
y por la figura española que se considera más de la vanguardia, más de
todo … Claro, es de colegio, familia, represiones infantiles. Freud y todo lo

que tú quieras.18
[In Spain these things are in our marrow, right? … I’d say, properly
thought out and structured, this is a matter you should analyze in depth,
because it’s crucial, isn’t it? Crucial to Buñuel as a man and because he’s

17

All references to Alberti’s poetry, unless otherwise indicated, are to Obra completa,
vol. I, Poesía 1920–1938, edición de Luis García Montero (Aguilar, Madrid, 1988), with
the page of reference in parenthesis.
18 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 294–5.


8

ROBERT HAVARD

seen as the most avant-garde Spaniard of all … Of course, it’s all to do
with school, family, childhood repressions. Freud and all the rest of it …]

The relationship between religious repression, Freudian psychoanalysis and
Surrealism’s first phase is clear enough, but what of the metaphysical and
political phases? Here we recall the change of direction Breton signposted in
his Second Manifesto:
… considering all this, I doubt that anyone will be surprised to see Surrealism turn its attention, in passing, to something other than the solution of a
psychological problem, however interesting that problem may be.19

This concludes a long sentence which began with Breton championing
Hegel’s theory of the ‘penetrability of subjective life by “substantial” life’,
the clear implication being that source material of a psycho-neurotic type is

no longer enough to guarantee the quality of a work: there is a need for
conceptual substance and for what Breton calls an ‘artistic gift’ by means of
which the artist ‘can, rather than transform his dreams into symptoms, transform them into artistic creations’.20
The most striking example of a purposeful deployment of psychical material for such ends is Dalí’s ‘paranoia-critical method’ which has the additional virtue of being cast in a metaphysical framework. The novelty of
Dalí’s approach, Breton argued, lay in the fact that he showed himself to be
‘strong enough to participate in these events [of his unconscious] as actor and
spectator simultaneously’.21 In other words, Dalí was able to treat his
neuroses as subject matter while maintaining the critical detachment of an
analyst towards a patient. From 1928 on, his canvases typically consist of an
array of objects that project and itemize his fetishes, the painter having
considered these critically before structuring them into an artistic whole. The
objects represent his inner life, their symbolic function having been teased
out by self-scrutiny and by Dalí’s deliberate cultivation of his neuroses; but
they are painted as objects in a naturalistic vein – with no sign of brushwork –
to accentuate their concreteness.22 In this way Freudian theory is put to the
service of art in a controlled manner and Dalí’s simulated paranoia integrates
the subjective and the objective, as Anna Balakian explains:

19

André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane
(University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972), 139.
20 Ibid., 160.
21 André Breton, ‘The Dalí Case’, in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson
Taylor (MacDonald, London, 1965), 133.
22 Dalí chose to paint, in fact, ‘in the ultra-regressive manner of Meissonier’; see
Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, trans. Richard Howard (Hutchinson, London, 1990; first
published as Journal d’un Génie, Éditions de la Table Ronde, Paris, 1964), 28.

THE CRUCIFIED MIND

9

Dalí’s position was that paranoia, which in its acute stage we call abnormal
or pathological, is basically a mental mechanism which can be cultivated or
controlled by the artist to extend the scale of analogies and to demonstrate
the high incidence of subjectivity in what we call ‘the world of reality’.23

The strong sense we have in Dalí of subject–object integration is enhanced by
his fondness for compositions that combine humans with objects: for
example, the furniture-woman who sits splayed on a beach in The Weaning of
Furniture: Nutrition (1934); the large rock that is also Dalí’s own head in The
Great Masturbator (1929). Integration is also the key in his celebrated
double or multiple images where a human form emerges out of a configuration of objects, as in The Invisible Man (1929), The Great Paranoiac (1936),
Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) (plate 5). In
conceptual terms this kind of subject–object integration represents the
fruition of an ideal Breton had begun to formulate in his First Manifesto:
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality,
which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a
surreality, if one may so speak.24

Under the influence of Hegel, especially The Phenomenology of Mind,
Breton’s notions of dream and reality crystallized into the metaphysically
sounder concepts of mind and matter, the sum of these leading to transcendence and the surreal. Dalí, who had raised his voice ‘against the excesses of
automatic writing’, saw himself as the person who redirected Surrealism by
inventing ‘surrealist objects’ which ‘very quickly made the old-fashioned
seeming dream recitals and sessions of automatism a thing of the past’.25
As for Alberti, there is considerable evidence – in the latter part of Sobre
los ángeles and throughout Sermones y moradas – to suggest that he concurs

with Dalí in two important respects. First, as we will see in poems such as
‘Los ángeles muertos’ [‘The Dead Angels’], ‘Hallazgos en la nieve’ [‘Discoveries in Snow’] and ‘Elegías’ [‘Elegies’], he has an irrepressible
object-orientation. This may owe more, in fact, to the materialist values of
the Vallecas school than to Dalí, but it incorporates the same unmistakable
23 Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (Allen & Unwin, London,
1972), 192.
24 Manifestoes of Surrealism, 14.
25 Salvador Dalí, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, as told to André
Parinaud, trans. from the French by Harold J. Salemson (Quartet Books, London, 1977;
originally published in English by W.H. Allen, London, 1976, and in French, with the title
Comment on devient Dalí, by Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1973), 119. Haim F.
Finkelstein argues that Dalí was largely responsible for ‘a change of emphasis’ in
Surrealism and ‘a movement away from dream and automatism to an active soliciting of
the mind to discharge the images hidden in the unconscious’; Surrealism and the Crisis of
the Object (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1979), 30.


10

ROBERT HAVARD

emphasis on objects as receptacles of subjectivity. Second, he engages in
what amounts to a cultivation of his own paranoia, most typically through a
simulated identification with Christ and his suffering. Norman O. Brown
elucidates the lines that served as an epigraph to this chapter – ‘The crucified
body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the
split, broken, crucified mind’ – by quoting Freud:
If we throw a crystal to the ground, it breaks, but it does not break
haphazard; in accordance with the lines of cleavage it falls into fragments,
where limits were already determined by the structure of the crystal,

although they were invisible. Psychotics are fissured and splintered structures such as these. We cannot deny them a measure of that awe with which
madmen were regarded by the people of ancient times.26

And Brown concludes in his inimitable way: ‘Split the stick and there is
Jesus.’27 In Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles a remarkable series of
Christomorphic poems begins with ‘Los ángeles mudos’ (418) [‘The Dumb
Angels’], where the poet revisits his native El Puerto de Santa María after
many years in Madrid and appears to astonished locals like the Risen Christ.
It culminates in Sermones y moradas where the poet consistently subsumes
his voice in that of a prophet–messiah who, in mock sermons, offers the prospect of salvation through suffering. Here the supreme Christian notion of
redemption in the Passion provides an exact analogy for the artist’s triumphant passage through the crucible of psychic pain to salvation in his created
work. Needless to say, a subversive irony is at large in the conflation of
Christ’s suffering with that of a paranoiac surrealist, not least because the
psycho-genesis of the latter’s work is religious repression, but also because
the message of his sermons is rooted in an atheism that avows the possibility
of transcendence via an alchemical reaction between the self and objects.
Nonetheless, as in Dalí, it is precisely through his suffering that Alberti’s
poet–prophet perceives the Hegelian truth that matter is a vast store of
subjectivity. Both the paranoiac identification with Christ and the
quasi-mystical insight into the innate potential of objects for transcendence –
transubstantiation, one might say – are readily apparent in ‘Sermón de las
cuatro verdades’ [Sermon on the Four Truths]:
He aquí al hombre.
Loco de tacto, arrastra cal de las paredes entre las uñas …
No le toquéis, ardiendo como está, asediado por millones de manos que
ansían pulsarlo todo.
Escuchadle. Ésta es su voz:

26 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures, trans. W.J.H. Sprott (Hogarth Press,
London, 1937), 80.

27 Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, 186.


THE CRUCIFIED MIND

11

– Mi alma es sólo un cuerpo que fallece por fundirse y rozarse con los
objetos vivos y difuntos. (453)
[Behold the man./ Mad from touching, he drags lime off walls under his
nails./ Don’t touch him, burning as he is, besieged by millions of hands that
long to feel him all over./ Listen to him. This is his voice:
‘My soul is only a body that is dying to merge with and rub itself against
living and dead objects.’]

And:
Para un espíritu perseguido, los peces eran sólo una espina que se combaba
al contacto de un grito de socorro o cuando las arenas de las costas,
fundidas con el aceite hirviendo, volaban a cautizar las espaldas del
hombre …
Atended. Ésta es su voz:
– Mi alma está picada por el cangrejo de pinzas y compases candentes,
mordida por las ratas y vigilada día y noche por el cuervo.
Ayudadme a cavar una ola, hasta que mis manos se conviertan en raíces y
de mi cuerpo broten hojas y alas. (452)
[For a persecuted spirit, fish are only bones that bent on contact with a cry
for help or when coastal sands, merged with boiling oil, flew to cauterize a
man’s shoulders …
Listen. This is his voice:/ ‘My soul is stung by a crab’s pincers and burning
compasses, bitten by rats and spied on day and night by the crow./

Help me dig a wave, until my hands become roots and my body sprouts
leaves and wings.’]

Alberti’s adoption of a messianic role to preach his truths provides a last
point of comparison with Dalí, for this has the effect of exteriorizing his
poetic voice in a declamatory, oracular performance: ‘En frío, voy a
revelaros lo que es un sótano por dentro … / Voy a revelaros un asombro …’
(451) [Coldly, I am going to show you what a cellar is like on the inside … /I
am going to reveal to you a wonder …]. Modelled no doubt on harangues he
had suffered as a schoolboy, his performance compares with the simulation,
cultivation and clinical detachment found in Dalí who also frequently adopts
a Christ mode.28 In short, Alberti’s poems of this second phase present a poet
28

This is discernible throughout his Confessions, for instance: ‘[I am] the greatest
intuitive genius of lucid life ever brought to earth … I am the perpetually reborn … Dalí is
the most sublime personage there is and I am Dalí … A new consciousness of humanity
may start with me, Dalí … And my painting therefore has the character of prodigious
revelation. Most human beings have never gotten outside their own bodies … but I come
out dripping with the “other” truths … Actually I have no bodily dimensions. My self is
Dalí. … Each picture is a Mass in which I distribute the Eucharist of a knowledge … I
lived my Passion to the full, like Christ.’ The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí,
135, 245, 246, 251.


12

ROBERT HAVARD

who, far from trying to solve or eliminate his obsessions, is intent, like Dalí,

on sustaining and exploring them. That he does so in a manner both metaphysical and sensational – in the Lautréamont tradition – is attributable in
large part to religion which, ironically, not only provokes his paranoia but
also provides the linguistic register in which it is explored.

Materialism and the transition to political commitment
What for Dada had been a simple desire to épater le bourgeois crystallized
for the surrealists into political commitment and, spurred by events of the
1930s, alignment with Communism. A conceptual point also linked the surrealists to the doctrine of dialectical materialism, namely: the primacy of
matter. This tenet, axiomatic in turn to Hegel, Marx and the communists,
was, however, anathema to Dalí for whom the human mind alone was
supreme and objective reality merely in its service, as he argued in ‘L’Âne
pourri’ (1930) [‘The Rotting Donkey’]:
I believe the moment is at hand when … it will be possible … to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of
reality … Paranoia makes use of the external world to impose the obsessive notion … The reality of the external world serves as an illustration and
a proof, and is put in the service of the reality of our mind.29

Such egocentricity flew in the face of an ascendant communist ethos and it
led to Dalí’s expulsion from the surrealist movement, announced as provisional in January 1934. Dalí, it is true, had antagonized the surrealists by ridiculing Lenin in Composition: Evocation of Lenin (1931) and especially The
Enigma of William Tell (1933) which depicted the Russian demagogue with
an enormously elongated buttock. But his stance against materialism was in
any case unacceptable in the volatile climate that turned a metaphysical
nicety into a heated question of political allegiance. In the maelstrom of
events that included the collapse of the New York stock exchange (24
October 1929), the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic on the abdication of Alfonso XIII (14 April 1931), Hitler’s rise to Chancellor (January
1933) and the Asturian miners’ revolt (October 1934), Dalí’s incorrigible
Narcissism was increasingly offensive to Breton’s coterie.

29

The original reads: ‘Je crois qu’est proche le moment où, par un processus de caractère

paranoiaque et actif de la pensée, il sera possible (simultanément à l’automatisme et autres
états passifs) de systématiser la confusion et contribuer au discrédit total du monde de la
réalité … La réalité du monde extérieur sert comme illustration et preuve, et est mise au
service de la réalité de notre esprit.’ S. Dalí, ‘L’Âne pourri’, Le Surréalisme au service de
la révolution, op. cit., no. 1, 9–10.


THE CRUCIFIED MIND

13

Alberti, by contrast, had long been associated with the Vallecas group of
artists whose left-wing views complemented a materialist orientation in their
work. From 1925 he had regularly visited Benjamín Palencia and Alberto
Sánchez in Vallecas, then a rural outskirt to the south of Madrid.30 He was
struck by the ‘concreta revelación’ [concrete revelation] of Sánchez’s sculpture which he found ‘profundamente poética, no literaria, y cantan en ella las
materias naturales con que están hechas’31 [profoundly poetic, not literary,
for it sings out with the natural materials from which it is made]. Alberti’s
first vocation, we remember, was to art: ‘Yo llegué a Madrid para ser
pintor’32 [I came to Madrid to be a painter], on which subject he was fiercely
patriotic, referring caustically to those painters who left Spain as ‘l’école de
Paris’ and waxing lyrical about:
aquellos pueblos y tierras vallecanos en los que soñábamos con la creación
de un nuevo arte español y universal, puro y primario como las piedras que
encontrábamos allí pulidas por los ríos y las extremadas intemperies.33
[those villages and rural places of Vallecas where we dreamed of creating a
new and universal Spanish art, pure and elemental as the stones that we
found polished by rivers and exposure to the weather.]

On his almost daily trips to Vallecas, Alberti was soon accompanied by the

young artist, Maruja Mallo, ‘la musa de los surrealistas’34 [the surrealists’
muse], who cut a striking figure in Madrid at that time: ‘la primera
sinsombrerista, la primera nudista, y una de las primeras mujeres
auténticamente libres’35 [the first woman to go hatless, the first nudist and
one of the first truly liberated women]. When Maruja began to depict earthy,
scatological objects in nearly colourless paintings – La Huella [The Footprint] (1929) (plate 8), Basuras [Rubbish] (1930), Grajo y Excrementos
[Rook and Excrement] (1931)36 – their impact on Alberti was profound. His
supreme tribute to her is the poem ‘La primera ascensión de Maruja Mallo al
subsuelo’ [‘The First Ascension of Maruja Mallo to the Subsoil’], which, as
the title indicates, treats Maruja in mock-paranoiac terms as a Redeemer
whose transcendence is towards the matter of this world rather than the next:

30

A portrait of Alberti by Alberto Sánchez dates from 1925.
AP 3, 37.
32 See Aub, Conversaciones con Buñuel, 283.
33 AP 3, 33–4.
34 See Anon., Maruja Mallo. La gran ignorada en Galicia (Diputación Provincial de
Lugo, 1995), 86.
35 See Manuel Vicent, ‘Maruja Mallo, la diosa de los cuatro brazos’, El País, 12-x-1981,
11–12.
36 See Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color (1928–1942), estudio
preliminar por Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942).
31