Garcia Lorca's Suites and the Editorial Construction of Literature

In his study The Order of Books, the critic Roger Chartier wrote:

Readers and hearers, in point of fact, are never confronted with abstract or ideal texts detached from all materiality; they manipulate or perceive objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading (or their hearing), thus the possible comprehension of the text read (or heard). Against a purely semantic definition of the text [...] one must state that forms produce meaning and that a text, stable in its letter, is invested with a new meaning and status when the mechanisms that make it available to interpretation change.

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Concerned as he is with the relationship between reader and text, Chartier's observation that form produces meaning has largely been held as a given by most cultural and literary critics, especially since structuralist theory, as they set to work creating readings of texts. Nonetheless, Chartier's focus on the particular physicality, the materiality of the literary text and its impact on the reader and interpretation invites us to consider a field within Hispanic literary and cultural studies that has yet to be rigorously theorized or systematically questioned: the editorial construction of literature. That is, critical editing stands as a kind of "mechanism" that makes literary texts available to the reader, a shifting discourse that shapes and produces a text for the reader's consumption. Despite the insights of deconstruction and particularly the "cultural turn" in literary studies that has led more scholars to analyze the modes of production, dissemination and consumption of culture, critics have still to generate a debate that problematizes the production of Hispanic literature by academic editors and, therefore, both the form in which we consume texts and its impact on our critical readings of them.¹ If indeed the materiality of the text at hand is crucial to our reading of it, what do the forms that editors choose "mean," and in turn, how does that meaning impact on what non-editing literary critics say? What are the dominant modes of editorial production within Hispanic Studies? What implications do particular editorial practices hold for the representation of the work, literary-critical interpretation, and textual availability?

These questions sketch the outlines of a theoretical and practical debate on editorial positionality that underpins literary interpretation, the scholarly (re)production of culture, and the relationship between editorial, literary and cultural studies. Although the scope of this discussion is far too broad to address in the confines of this essay, I hope to map some of its fundamental coordinates here by using the vantage point of a text that simply does not fit the editorial paradigms that currently dominate the literary scene in Hispanism. Federico García Lorca's posthumously published collection, Suites, is just such a text. Written between 1920 and 1923, heavily revised in 1926 and in the 1930s, published in pieces in avant-garde journals, and intended for publication as a collection at least seven times, Suites is a fragmented, complex, and materially-rich text that defies conventional editorial practices.² Despite the importance García Lorca and his work have in contemporary Spanish culture, and although critics have increasingly turned their attention to this collection since the mid-1980's, most remain unaware of its existence or resist considering it as a collection per se. Upon closer analysis, it is unclear to what extent the silence surrounding Suites may have taken root not only because of its complex and fluid material situation, but also because of the way that editorial critics have dealt with that material situation in constructing the collection itself. In this sense, then, Suites is a text well-suited to making visible the editorial paradigms that are at work precisely because it disrupts the practices by which the academic sphere often produces literature in Hispanism. In other words, the editing of Suites enables us to read for the limits of our current practices of representation so...