Powers of Utterance: A Discourse Approach to Works of Lorca, Machado, and Valle-Inclan (review)

A fresh wind has blown in from Bristol. Students and scholars will gain many new insights into the works of García Lorca, Antonio Machado and Valle-Inclán thanks to Robin Warner's innovative study. Just as important, they will garner basic principles of discourse-pragmatics approaches to literary texts, a discipline based in linguistics that offers the literary critic new methods to "account for the complexities of the way formal and contextual features interact in the reception and interpretation of literary texts" (183).

The first section of Warner's book is devoted to explaining how discourse studies foreground the communicative situation within which literary texts are embedded, and to analyzing the strategies writers use to dialogue with their readers and audiences. The method assumes that specific lexical and morpho-syntactical features (adjectives, adverbs, parallel syntactical structures, exclamations, etc.) are chosen by authors to produce effects that, when read or heard in a communication event, presuppose shared background information and cultural values by all concerned. Meaning is thus "collaboratively created and negotiated rather than simply produced and received" (184). The formal choices of writers are therefore laden with communicative intent that engages readers and, through them, the socio-political matrix shared by both agents. Warner illustrates her method by means of an acute analysis of Pablo Neruda's well-known poem "Explico algunas cosas." The poet's words are viewed as utterances within a "situation of performance" (23) that implicates the reader in an ethical "here and now"—the Spanish civil war at the time.

The principles thus demonstrated are then applied to theatrical dialogue, a more complex communicative situation in which a life-like conversation (between fictional characters) is embedded in an implicit exchange between author and audience. Warner's examination of Valle-Inclán's ¿Para cuándo son las reclamaciones diplomáticas? draws out the play's dramatic irony, one of the main strategies used in the esperpentos to signal the author's skeptical attitude toward his characters' utterances, an invitation that his audience will presumably recognize and accept. One salient virtue of this analysis is its clarification of the function of Valle's famous stage directions: they become points of complicity in which the reader is asked to share the author's detached perspective and thus view his characters within an ironic frame.

The following two chapters take up specific works written by Antonio Machado and García Lorca, in which the authors establish "a situation of address" and sustain "a communicative relationship with the reader" (60) by means of carefully crafted linguistic features. The happy choice of Machado's "El hospicio" allows us to discern how the poem's adjectives have an "important communicative or intersubjective role" (68), while its metaphors resonate "with broader socio-historical connotations" (78), i.e., Spain's blindness to the bankruptcy of its traditional institutions. The analysis of "A José María Palacio" is a brilliant reading of one of Machado's most successful poems, which, of course, generates the communicative situation by means of the discursive convention of the poetic letter. The function of questions in poetry is examined, and Warner underscores how in this poem they request overall "confirmation of shared beliefs and opinions" originating in the poet's "emotional de-centredness" (97). Machado's proverbs and axioms are in turn framed as essentially heteroglossic poems that stage tensions between dissenting voices—an apt entry into their irony and ambiguity.

The ambivalent engagement with Spanish tradition by Machado and García Lorca comes to the fore in the former's "Los olivos" and the latter's Romancero gitano. But more original is Warner's discussion of contrasting deployments of nineteenth-century melodramatic discourse by Valle-Inclán and García Lorca. Lorca and melodrama? Yes, in Bodas de sangre, melodramatic commonplaces are "refined" to evoke "urgently physical attraction rather than romantic sentiments," whereas in Los cuernos de Friolera, whose eleventh...