In his essay critical essay of 1933, “Theory and Play of The Duende,”1 the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) attempted to define the aesthetics of a paradoxical ecstasy, the uniquely human response to certain moments in the performance or experience of art that he called the duende.
Duende, Lorca says, is a matter of “style that is truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.” The paradox of the Romantic experience of duende is that confirms what is most alive, and the melancholy proximity of death, the ache of transcendence and the pull of the soil. In the case of music, Lorca writes:
Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels, and no philosopher has explained.’
The uncanny surge of duende requires a certain risk, something that that technique alone cannot account for. There are no artists of lasting importance who have not—in our analysis—transcended mere technique. It is the difference between the possession of motor skills and authentic style. It is the distinction between technical ability and what we might call creative genius. Yes, genius requires a certain amount of personal risk in the introduction of style—it may involve “creative illness” in Jungian terms, or psychosomatic breakthrough. Sylvia Plath had it, but no machine can have it. For Lorca, duende is “a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought.” Duende exists in transpersonal and peak experiences.
Even when expressed through abstractions in art, music, literature, it is experienced in the body of the performer and the audience. It cannot be achieved in music through autotune, nor in the literary or fine arts through algorithms. I can’t find the quote, but some time ago—and I may be paraphrasing slightly—I remember Will Self saying that the Internet had not produced a single work of art of lasting significance. Finally, the same is true for artificial intelligence: it lacks both the psychosomatic struggle that transcends technique, and the ability to evoke simultaneously the superhuman and the all-too-human in the artist and the audience.
The great artists of Southern Spain, Gypsy or flamenco, singers, dancers, musicians, know that emotion is impossible without the arrival of the duende. They might deceive people into thinking they can communicate the sense of duende without possessing it, as authors, painters, and literary fashion-makers deceive us every day, without possessing duende: but we only have to attend a little, and not be full of indifference, to discover the fraud, and chase off that clumsy artifice.
Lorca distinguishes duende from two other manifestations which are inferior: the angelic creation, and creation involving the Muse. Even as described in 1933, these are analogous to art generated by artificial intelligence.
The angel guides and grants, like St. Raphael: defends and spares, like St. Michael: proclaims and forewarns, like St. Gabriel.
The angel dazzles, but flies over a man’s head, high above, shedding its grace, and the man realizes his work, or his charm, or his dance effortlessly…
The Muse dictates, and occasionally prompts. She can do relatively little since she’s distant and so tired (I’ve seen her twice) that you’d think her heart half marble. Muse poets hear voices and don’t know where they’re from, but they’re from the Muse who inspires them and sometimes makes her meal of them…
Lorca is not saying that these cannot produce the appearance, the semblance of art, but that their artifice is finally indifferent. Lacking the possibility of duende, it is a matter of generation by technique and the distant imitation of, not the embodiment of style, which—as Joan Didion reminds us—is character. Whatever one thinks about bullfighting today, some of Lorca’s most salient examples are in flamenco and bullfighting. Hemingway preempted this slightly in The Sun Also Rises (1926)2 in describing the difference between Pedro Romero and lesser matadors. As Hemingway’s alter-ego, Jake Barnes, explains to Brett Ashley:
Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of his line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technique that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bull-fighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding the purity of his line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he was preparing him for the killing (p. 171).
As appalled as I am by bullfighting today, even as I recognize its primal psychic and aesthetic origins, Hemingway’s and Lorca’s complimentary appraisals hold as metaphor. One cannot fake duende. I am with Lorca on its necessity in the appraisal of art. One finds it “through the maximum of exposure.” One must risk the horns with authenticity. Art generated at and by the console generates the same fake emotional feeling, while the artist is really safe. His gestures and tweaks of the algorithm are nothing more than the angelic distance that “guides and grants,” or the distance of the Muse, who “dictates, and occasionally prompts.” Sometimes these roles are reversed, with the software as angel or Muse, but the lack of danger is final failure. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) in cinema has a similar problem: no matter how technical its imitation of life and shadow, CGI cannot escape the problem that its objects always emit light but cannot reflect light. And we sense the difference intuitively (which is not to say that the difference has not been accepted, when certainly CGI spectacle dominates much of cinema, in box office terms). Yet, it is Simone Biles who possesses duende, and not Spiderman. This, we know.
As ever, thank you for reading. I hope this gives you some ideas.
Warm regards from the cold deserts of NM.
—James Reich
James Reich’s latest book The Holly King: 28 Poems is available exclusively in a signed and numbered limited edition from Stalking Horse Press.
Federico García Lorca. The Theory and Play of The Duende. A.S. Kline (trans.). https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.php
Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 2006.