Remembering, interpreting, and quoting traditional popular culture: Cultural memory in Manuel de Falla's 'El amor brujo' and Federico Garcia Lorca's 'Poema del cante jondo' (Spain)

The notion of “depth” is frequently invoked in discussions of flamenco; indeed, one of flamenco's most important modalities—cante jondo—is an explicit claim to profundity. This dissertation explores how Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo and Federico García Lorca's Poema del cante jondo approach that depth. Rather than reproducing documents or languages of flamenco to appropriate their supposed reified content or essential knowledge, Falla's and Lorca's works, I argue, reconstruct the practices of producing meaning of traditional flamenco. They re-create (that is, create again) the interplay between artists and audience at the traditional flamenco performance by offering bold metaphors, symbols, and narratives that promote the listener or reader's hermeneutic production of meaning for the texts. This practice of quoting not meanings, but rather traditional popular processes of producing meaning, is what is here meant by cultural memory. Theories of memory from Vico to Ricoeur help to conceptualize Falla and Lorca's alternative, which opens a transforming horizon in the panorama of Spain's essentialist casticismo and Europe's orientalist modernity by proposing a model of avant-garde based on the hermeneutic appropriation of traditional popular cultures. The hermeneutic understanding of cultural memory considers the idealistic and determinist faithful reproductions of traditional popular documents, along with notions such as authenticity, precision, integrity, and purity, to be cultural manipulations. In contrast, Falla and Lorca address flamenco as a means to promote poetic interpretation, which re-creates the beginning acts of communication that, in a mythical or at least methodological sense, are the foundations of human communities, recognizing the other beyond the strategies of domination.