Poetry, Physics, and Painting in Twentieth-Century Spain by Candelas Gala (review)

This is, simply and succinctly put, a first-rate book. It is well-researched, well-written, and obviously sprang into existence as a labor of love. And not just as a love of literature, but also of art and most particularly of physics: complementarity holds sway throughout. Poetry, Physics . . . is more than a little Newtonian, setting up a potent field that generates and radiates, as well as attracting, light and heat, on a macro, as well as a micro scale. In turn, the book’s “sub/atomic” mechanics are viable, though unlike the still-theoretical electron, Gala’s book does not spring from nothing to something (or vice versa). The devil’s in the details, and I don’t mean just the one that Maxwell imagined. From the first pages, it is clear that the author knows her physics and physicists, as well as her poetry and poets. Her prose, densely packed with diverse, but always germane and insightful, information, is reliably readable and at times – many times – is nothing short of limpid. Rather than complicating her scientific discourse, making it all-the-more complex, less accessible, and thus more intimidating (and less interesting) to non-scientists, she’s able to clarify concepts and constructs. Though this does not take place in a vacuum, and comes about without the almost cartoonish oversimplification that so often can characterize explications of science for humanists. But by the same token, Gala hasn’t overcharged the plasma that is her prose with the literary jargon that can be so offputting to scientists, not to mention to the general public. In this and so many other regards, Gala’s text enlightens without one discipline casting shadows across the other or, in turn, without its being overshadowed. Poetry, Physics . . . is not light reading, even when the subject is light – as in waves, particles, photons, etc. –. Style and content are illuminating, reciprocally and reflexively. It’s not a question of a smattering – nor of a smashing! – of science for the sake of literature and art, or vice versa. These discourses stand together in a mutually substantial and generally harmonious accord that is not atomistic at all.

For a more or less “casual” reader, Gala’s tome might initially seem a bit intimidating, this for physicists who know little of literary culture or vice versa, for devotees of belles lettres who’ve managed to ignore/remain ignorant of the “hard sciences.” If such a reader perseveres, s/he’ll quite possibly become more conversant in, even a convert to, this sort of creative interface of the sciences and the humanities . . . or at least more sensitive to the profound connections envisioned by the poets and artists weighed in the balance here. Gala’s pointed style and delivery, rather than being obfuscatin are, instead, enticing. She writes with an authority arising from a profound understanding, which is communicated on every page. This book’s not just a history of science from a lay point of view: her expertise and insight range from field theory to thermodynamics, from electromagnetism to quantum mechanics, from radiation to relativity, then applying these scientific ideas to an understanding of poetry and art as they developed in early twentieth-century Spain, though without neglecting what was developing on the other side of the Atlantic, in the Americas. She employs that understanding to good effect, to get out how contemporary physics would help shape the work especially, but not exclusively, of the Generation of ’27. So doing, Gala’s study becomes one not of influence per se, but rather of interplay, of incorporation, and most definitely of interpretation. The “Introduction” (“Opening Remarks”) lays the foundation, scientifically and aesthetically, for later chapters, which focus on Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Juan Larrea, Gerardo Diego, Rafael Alberti, Concha Méndez, and Federico García Lorca. The author’s “Closing Remarks” offer a deft wrap-up – though without undue repetition – of her discussion of these figures and their works. This relationship also...