Creative Cognition and the Cultural Panorama of Twentieth-Century Spain by Candelas Gala (review)

In her new book of dizzying dimensions, Candelas Gala studies a series of artists and writers from twentieth-century Spain who use their creative works as a space to explore their understanding of and struggles with the creative process. Though her analysis is rooted in cognitive science, Gala and the artists she engages view creativity as a manifestation of the dynamic interaction between mind and body. Her book and its method stem from this conviction, linking disparate artists and previously unconnected works of art based on their attempts to integrate and reconcile mind with body, and opening both artist and art object to previously unimagined lines of questioning and interpretation.

Gala’s Creative Cognition and the Cultural Panorama of Twentieth-Century Spain is emphatically interdisciplinary, engaging not only other fields within the humanities, but also the latest theories across the full spectrum of human knowledge, and synthesizing them with insight procured by the traditional methods of literary analysis, reading poems through the lens of neurobiology or astrophysics to a strikingly original effect. She shows a deep understanding of the latest developments in fields such as cognitive science and physiology, yet Gala does not fetishize the new, but rather juxtaposes her heterodox, scientifically inflected readings of the texts in question with an acknowledgement of their place in the established critical and philosophical discourse, evoking such canonical thinkers as Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Gala maintains this breadth of reference throughout the book, and her extensive bibliography serves as confirmation that the project was tremendously well researched. In the introduction, many of Gala’s paragraphs are so laden with references that the citations hinder the clarity of the text and detract from the reader’s ability to follow the thread of her argument. However, Gala does a better job of integrating her research with her own textual interpretations in the body chapters.

Gala begins the first chapter by analyzing José María Hinojosa’s La flor de Californía as an exploration of the tension between opposites and the impossibility of achieving integration. She then moves on in her second chapter to study José Moreno Villa’s Jacinta la pelirroja as a representation of a dialectical process that vacillates between opposite poles, never reaching resolution. Her third chapter engages Maruja Mallo’s series of paintings, Naturalezas vivas; Gala argues that, unlike the previous two thinkers, Mallo achieves a synthesis of opposites by blending geometry with spontaneity, reality with art, and form with content, ultimately demonstrating the interconnectivity of the universe. Gala then depicts Jorge Guillén’s Cántico as an exploration of the state of beatitude, or the integration of body and mind, leading to epiphany. Her fifth chapter engages the collaboration between poet Clara Janés and engraver Eduardo Chillida in La indetenible quietud, in conversation with the philosopher María Zambrano, focusing on their shared interest in the relationship between forms and their belief that creativity arises from a moment of abundance and plenitude as a convergence of energy. Finally, Gala examines Agustín Fernández Mallo and his “post-poetry proposal” through a reading of five of his novels, revealing his belief that art, as a simulacrum, reflects the true nature of reality, which is transient and ultimately disintegrates into the void.

Gala’s readings are original and striking, but her prose sometimes seems haphazard and her thought disorganized. One has the feeling, at times, that they are riding the spark of Gala’s inspiration as it leaps from one flash of insight to the next. The text is more evocative than expository, performative and exhilarating rather than declarative, and ultimately falls short of presenting a cogent argument. For example, in her analysis of Jorge Guillén, Gala notes that the poet understands nature according to a system of interdependent relationships. She connects this to the theories of physicist Ernst Mach, which then leads her to Einstein’s theory of relativity, followed quickly by...