Inside the Circle: On Rereading Blood Wedding

Inside the Circle: On Rereading Blood Wedding NORMA LOUISE HUTMAN . -" BLOOD WEDDING IS A PLAY THAT GOES NOWHERE, intentionally. Insofar as we have tried to make it move from beginning through middle to end, we have misrepresented the play, falsified it in critical studies as on stages and found ourselves - as usually happens when one puts something together from the wrong blueprints - with a few pieces left over, as for example Death and the Moon. Each time a courageous college or foolish repertory company announces a new production of "Blood Wedding" I find myself wincing. Will I have nerve enough to attend? Or to stay away? Each time a text lists the title, I wonder: shall I skip it? blame the translator? cop out? The last time I refused to cop out, we - the class and I - had the predictable left-over pieces. And yet, Lorca, one tells oneself, is a master of dramatic structure, of poetic containment. Might not then the critic have taken the wrong turn of the road, insisting - as is the wont of critics - upon a reading which falsifies the play? Once more to the text, then, where a favorite line (in Lorca fate is an always present favorite) takes on new significance. For the focus of the play, which alone explains all elements and all characters in coherent relationship to one another, lies in a line which gives a radically distinct structure to the play. Let us start there: in the middle. "When things reach their centers, no one can draw them out." So Leonardo tells the Bride. He should know. He has arrived at the central scene of the drama, the moment in which irreversible forces finally draw together and explode. 329 330 NORMA LOUISE RUTMAN She too should know. Having played with desire and with convention, she has assembled all the elements of her conflict on her wedding day, brought them together for a ritual encounter. That the ritual was to have been marriage and thus fertility and becomes instead burial and hence sterility gives to the tragedy its ironic character. Leonardo's summation of life and fate does not suggest an ongoing action but rather a structure already closed and completed in which the pieces need only to be fitted, revealing their identity and taking their place within the existing frame. His words evoke a series of concentric circles at whose center the principle of irrevocability resides. Action does not unfold but rather enfolds. The movement toward tragedy in Blood Wedding is, ultimately, a dual movement toward the core of each individual's being where he performs an absolute function and enacts an archetypal role and toward a critical encounter among the various archetypal figures who populate the drama. At this core a climax, pre-existing the play's first scene but not entirely revealed, explodes and wrecks its consequences. Characters too strip away their disguises until at this moment they stand revealed in their essential identities. The climactic declaration immediately precedes the play's climactic action at the conclusion of the second act, the flight of the lovers, out of which all action prior and subsequent evolves. Scrapping all the usual considerations of beginning, middle and end with no more than a nod to Aristotle, let's see where that leaves us. The single volitional act of the drama occurs somewhat beyond the mid-point of the drama. It is preceded by long journeys recounted, discovered or commented upon by various characters: mother and son have crossed a vast barren tract on foot to take traditional betrothal gifts to the Bride and to formalize the engagement; the girl and her father have traveled to this remote spot from more fertile lands; Leonardo has come by night on horseback to visit the Bride, his former sweetheart. But we hear only echoes of their travels, as the characters hear no more than the echoes of Leonardo's horse. Yet the stage, static and nailed to convention as women are fastened to their homes, is haunted by journeys which will both culminate and resolve themselves in the unconventional journey-elopement of the lovers. Their flight sets in motion other journeys: the pursuit along sea...