Drawing a Dream: Joaquín Peinado’s Artwork and the Semiotic in José María Hinojosa’s La flor de Californía

Abstract

The juxtaposition of dream narratives from Spanish surrealist writer José María Hinojosa’s La flor de Californía (1928) and artist Joaquín Peinado’s four drawings found interspersed throughout the collection demonstrates a symbiotic relationship between the artist and writer’s creative purposes, in true surrealist fashion creating an “image-text.” Thus, the present article argues that Peinado’s drawings represent a key element for understanding La flor de Californía and should be considered an integral part of the dream texts. Julia Kristeva’s ideas on signification and the interplay of the symbolic and the semiotic orders present in poetic creation prove useful in understanding this interplay of image and word. Hinojosa’s texts, along with Peinado’s drawings, attempt to re-create this process of signification, in which the text, although tied down by the symbolic order—that is, systems and realism—, constantly pushes to evade logic and allow the semiotic to emerge through genotexts. Hinojosa and Peinado’s combined creation of drawings and writings are examples of one such attempt to obliterate the social constraints of the symbolic order and allow the reader/viewer to witness indirectly the semiotic processes of the pre-Oedipal phase.

Keywords:

• José María Hinojosa
• Joaquín Peinado
• Spanish surrealism
• semiotic
• Julia Kristeva

Notes

1 “Viaje a Oriente” will not be included in this study because, unlike the other five texts, it does not appear to bear a direct relation to Peinado’s images.

2 Coger also is used colloquially in the Americas to signify fornication. What’s more, the stem of the verb fornicate is easily discovered in the title of Californía; these double and hidden meanings are most likely intentional.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie R. Gates

Stephanie Gates is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wheaton College in Illinois. Her research explores 20th century Hispanic literature and film, centering on themes related to power and inequality, gender, and psychoanalysis. She has also published in the journals Hispanófila, Romance Notes, and the Latin American Literary Review.