Eden's exiles and their deviant domains: The aesthetics of negative space in the poetry of Pedro Salinas and Luis Cernuda

My dissertation, entitled Pedro Salinas, Luis Cernuda, and the Locus inimicus: the Aesthetics of Negative Space in the Poete Maudit Tradition, entails a theoretical re-envisioning of the poete maudit tradition, framed through the lens of Gender Studies. My dissertation claims that the traditional interpretation of the poete maudit belies an inextricable link to deviant sexualities that run counter to the dominant discourse on sexuality that came to define the gender constructs that informed Franco's brand of fascist rhetoric. As such, I analyze the poetry of Pedro Salinas and Luis Cernuda and the recurring motif of solitary poet-figures wandering spaces that I call loci inimici, which are violent, inhospitable and vast expanses, such as deserts and tundra. Historically, the poete maudit has been superficially seen as a mere social outcast, a petty bourgeois aesthete who is misunderstood by society and only understood by other true poets. This misunderstanding underscores the fact each poem contains two separate readings: the poets' version and the pedestrian. In other words, both meanings paradoxically inhabit the same text. This dual reading metaphor generates the conditions for poets to challenge prevailing notions of sexuality through the creation of alternative spaces in which the machinery of power wields less force. Although for many poets the negative spaces inhabited by their poet-figures represent a disconnection from the original source of poetic inspiration, the poetic process for Salinas and Cernuda is a misplaced sexuality or disconnection from the original, erotic experience: an extra-marital affair for Salinas and homosexuality for Cernuda. For these poets, a "pedestrian" reading of the locus inimicus fails to take into account the second, more powerful reading that smuggles the erotic nature of the original experience that comes to characterize the poete maudit tradition. In essence, the poete maudit phenomenon of 19th century France reflected an emerging dramatic shift in sexual mores and pre-figured the rise of queer literature. More importantly for Spain, the Spanish incarnations of the poete maudit tradition provide a powerful case study to analyze the fabric that constitutes a divergent construction of masculinity that will come to be suppressed by the official discourse of the dictatorship. Thus, they set the stage for a radical reconfiguration of gender constructs in post-dictatorial Spain that is in transition towards democracy.