„La luna vino a la fragua...“ - Eine radikalphilologische Lektüre des Romance de la luna, luna von Federico García Lorca

Abstract

The following article could as well be titled “The Romance de la luna, luna – again”; an interpretation of this romance is taken into consideration which tackles the problem that the multiple readings within academic literature bring along a huge spectrum of results and even tend to contradict each other.

The underlying question is that of the appropriateness of dealing with poetically stylised texts by using a scientific-definitory language. This is faced methodically by contrasting the referentialising essentialism of traditional hermeneutics with the constructivist model of the relativity of any meaning according to Markus Hilgert, spokesman of the Heidelberg SFB 933 “Material Text-Cultures”. In order to face this methodological aporia and nevertheless draw scientific statements about the quality of the underlaying text, a close reading in the manner of Jürgen Paul Schwindt´s “Radikalphilologie” is attempted. This is done to examine the “Autotheoria” of this romance, which configures itself within the text, as its “implicit poetology”.

Analysing the often observed interrelation between the dramatic, narrative and poetic stylisation of the poem in this manner can benefit the studies of Lorca's works in multiple ways: on the one hand, by producing dramatic and narrative ambiguities, the implicit poetology of the romance denies the universal validity of the referentialising, content-focussed readings, which are omnipresent even in contemporary research. This way the spectrum of possible interpretations, which is offered by the text, is reduced to single aspects. On the other hand, as the text steadily oscillates between the epistemological mode of cognitive perception and that of intuitive suggestion, as well as the metaphorical presence of both actual and implicated meaning, it becomes apparent that it is inadequate to suppose an evolution from symbolism to surrealism within the Lorquian poetics: at least with respect to the underlying poem, it reveals rather a coexistence of both a `symbolistic´ poetics of inclusion and a `surrealistic´ poetics of transgression.