Luis listens to Lohengrin: Luis Cernuda’s desire across queer time

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I consider three of Luis Cernuda’s poems dealing in art and spectatorship as models for how he might have imagined queer erotic desire. Analyses of two of Cernuda’s ekphrastic poems show how the poet made both aesthetic and erotic experience perceptible and palpable within intertwined bodily and temporal relations. I read these ekphrastic exercises in light of Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza’s “poetic memory” as a concept that anchors poetic forms to a spectral and recurrent temporality exacted in the bodies of poet and reader. Then, I turn to one of Cernuda’s later poems, “Luis de Baviera escucha Lohengrin”, in order to demonstrate how poetics and performance converge in the poet’s work. “Luis de Baviera” exemplifies the experience of materially felt desires across time and links Cernuda (and, us, his readers) to a history of (male homo)erotic attachments. In the article’s conclusion, I suggest centering Luis’s modes of feeling as a method to make reverberations of affect and relation cohere as a shared knowledge outside of and against historical time.

KEYWORDS:

• Ekphrasis
• exile
• queer temporality
• poetry
• poetic memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pérez-Bustamente Mourier explores the journal’s “adhesión a Luis Cernuda” between 1960 and 1962 when the literary magazine was directed by Jacobo Muñoz in Valencia (2005, 6).

2 Schlipphacke’s article helps us to draw out parallels between the trilogy of Sissi films and Cernuda’s “Luis de Baviera”. She writes: “[A]ll three films end with long, elaborate scenes of spectacle, tableaux vivants of royal display that engage in a temporal stretching that interrupts the flow of narrative, suspending the story in a manner that privileges an atemporal allegorical pleasure over historical continuity” (2010, 233). This intersection between poem, film and tableaux vivants reveals the constitutive role of performance in each and channels contemporary homosexual or homoerotic identities vis-à-vis a supposedly historical aesthetic feeling.

3 Silver has argued that Cernuda’s love poetry’s narcissistic quality is connected to the figure of the child: “to reconcile the altered subtheme of love with that of childhood, we need only remember that nearly all Cernuda’s love poetry converges in the Narcissus myth as recycled by Freud and Gide” (1997, 108).

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Ian Russell

Ian Russell received his doctorate in Hispanic studies from Brown University in 2020 and worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown and Jacksonville State Universities. He currently serves as Lector at Yale University and his research interests include queer temporality, transatlantic studies, poetry and performance. Email: [email protected]