DI PASTENA Intertextual Resonances JOURNEYS 2017

Viaggi per scene in movimento
1
Viaggi per scene in movimento
General Editor
Carla Dente
Steering committee
Carla Dente,
University of Pisa
Michael Wyatt,
Independent scholar
Dominique Goy-Blanquet,
Emeritus Professor of Elizabethan Literature
Université de Picardie
Giovanni Iamartino,
University of Milan
Francesca Fedi,
University of Pisa
Enrico Di Pastena,
University of Pisa
List of publications
1) Journeys through Changing Landscapes. Literature, Language, Culture and their
Transnational Dislocations (2017)
2) Shakespeare and Money (in press)
Journeys
through Changing Landscapes
Literature, Language, Culture
and their Transnational Dislocations
edited by
Carla Dente and Francesca Fedi
Journeys through changing landscapes : literature, language, culture and their
transnational dislocations / edited by Carla Dente and Francesca Fedi. - Pisa : Pisa
university press, 2017. - (Viaggi per scene in movimento ; 1)
809 (WD)
I. Dente, Carla II. Fedi, Francesca 1. Letteratura – Analisi - Saggi
CIP a cura del Sistema bibliotecario dell’Università di Pisa
The editors of this volume wish to acknowledge the generous support of the
University of Pisa to the Research Project (PRA 2015) that made possible
both this book and its related research opportunities. They are grateful also
for the active contribution of the Dept. of Philology Literature Linguistics and
to the guest scholars who took part in our collaborative work.
A special thanks is due to Sylvia Greenup for her work on the revision of our
texts in English, to Chiara Ferrara for her editing at Pisa University Press,
and to Claudia Napolitano, again at Pisa University Press for her support and
editorial coordination.
© Copyright 2017 by Pisa University Press srl

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GENERAL EDITOR PREFACE
The transnational dimension of literature and research in the huma-

nities has increasingly come into focus over recent years, selecting
texts and authors and producing new scholarship that promotes
dialogue across disciplines, times and boundaries. This series of re-
search books intends to offer a channel for valuable work in this
field: it will publish new writings in English, in Italian and in other
European languages in areas such as transnational literature, history,
language translation and linguistics, theatre and performance, po-
litical and cultural studies, history and dissemination of books and
ideas. The investigations will suggest a rich web of itineraries and
exchanges which have triggered a range of creative interventions in
the cultural field, stimulating also the reflections of researchers in
order to account for the complexity of cultural and literary phe-
nomena. The emphasis, then, will be explicitly on movements and
transformation of stories, texts and ideas across time and space with
the aim at throwing new light on some problematic issues within a
variety of cultural paradigms, while inviting an integrated approach
to the understanding of their meanings and mechanisms.
Carla Dente
V
LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
1) Journeys through Changing Landscapes. Literature, Language, Cul-

ture and their Transnational Dislocations (2017)
2) Shakespeare and Money (in press)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements IX
Introduction. Cultural Mobility and Exchange: a Brief Overview XI
Carla Dente
SECTION I
Dante’s Journeys to England through Criticism and Book Dissemination
Dantesque Conversations: Walter Savage Landor’s Portraits of Dante 3
Roberta Ferrari
Cockney Dislocations: the Romantic Essayfication
of Dante and Francesca 29
Paolo Bugliani
Wider Circles: Popularizing Dante
from Temple Classics to Penguin Classics 49
Nick Havely
‘The first duty of a poet’: what Dante Meant
to Samuel Taylor Coleridge 73
Silvia Riccardi
SECTION II
Myths, Texts, Sources, and their Itineraries
Giovanna Crossing: French and English Versions of Joan of Arc 87
Dominique Goy-Blanquet
‘Incerto tempore . . . incertisque locis.’
L’apologo del cieco e dello storpio tra Oriente e Occidente
dai trattati filosofici e religiosi al teatro di William Butler Yeats 105
Edoardo Giovanni Carlotti
A ‘triste cometa’. Dislocations of the ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ Myth
in Vittorio Alfieri’s Maria Stuarda 125
Francesca Fedi
Friedrich Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans, a Tragedy in Movement 147
Francesco Rossi
Lorca and the Others. Intertextual Resonances
in José Ramón Fernández’s La tierra 169
Enrico Di Pastena
VII
The Malefic Pucelle. Early Rewritings
of the Myth of Joan of Arc in England 203
Anita Simonini
SECTION III
Trespassing, Identity, Stereotypes: Language Mobility
Sconfinamenti di lingue a nordest 215
Vincenzo Orioles
Gaulish and Latin, Cornish and English. Analogies and Differences
in the Conflicts between four European Languages 225
Filippo Motta
Between Ethnogenesis and Politico-cultural Identity.
The Evolution of the Ethnonym *Priteni, Old Welsh Prydyn/Prydein,
Old Irish Cruthin, Latin Britanni (English British) 239
Andrea Nuti
Out of the ‘Infinibility’. Scaping the Prison-house of Language
in the Translation of Finnegans Wake 257
Enrico Terrinoni
Translingualism and Transnation
in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Italian literary Exile 271
Angelo Monaco
SECTION IV
Trespassing, Identity, Stereotypes: Literary Mobility
Identity Paradigms in the Perception of the Viking Diaspora 279
Marco Battaglia
‘Beware of Rome’. The Italian Villainous Priest in Tudor Drama 317
Nicoletta Caputo
Amber is a Girl’s Best Friend.
Understanding the Jewellery Episode in Mansfield Park 337
Sylvia Greenup
Representation of Cultural Mobility in Damascus by David Greig 355
Carla Dente
SECTION V
Case Studies
Fictions of Fact: Antonio Pérez in Traiano Boccalini’s
Ragguagli di Parnaso and William Vaughan’s New-found Politicke 371
Michael Wyatt
VIII
Please, Continue (Hamlet): Shakespeare on the Move 389
Sara Soncini
Beyond the Walls of the Page:
Shakespeare in Italian Prison Theatre 411
Beatrice Montorfano
Contributors 419
Index of names and categories 427
IX
LORCA AND THE OTHERS.
INTERTEXTUAL RESONANCES
IN JOSÉ RAMÓN FERNÁNDEZ’S LA TIERRA
Enrico Di Pastena
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know

is what we do not want to know
Eric Hoffer
José Ramón Fernández’s La tierra, first published in 1998, was signif-

icantly staged at the Centro Dramático Nacional in Madrid in 2009
and favourably reviewed by Spanish audiences, especially in Ma-
drid. The play tells of a little-known crime that took place in a rural
area of provincial Spain in the 1980s: a poor feeble-minded wretch
was murdered by a band of angry people, who thought he was re-
sponsible for the accident that had dashed one of their member’s
dreams of glory. After being killed, the man is buried and forgotten
by everyone, except for the story’s protagonist, Miguel, who, deeply
affected by his personal failure, ends up managing things so that the
victim’s body is found and he prepares to atone for his crime.
It is first opportune to comment briefly on the formal peculiarities
of this text, which I have examined elsewhere (Di Pastena 2015: 142-
43) and which will therefore not be the subject of any further analysis
here.1 Amongst the freedoms Fernández takes, some forms of licence
with punctuation are especially noteworthy (questions and exclama-
tions are almost never marked typographically), a feature that makes
one think of a mitigated re-proposal of the forms of the experimental
novel,2 or also, to remain perhaps more appropriately within the field
1
In her recent doctoral thesis, Rosa Serrano has also noted that in a
number of the prose lines spoken by the play’s characters a series of hendec-
asyllables emerges, thus demonstrating how the work slides towards a form
of communication that borders on poetry and is mindful of the implications
of sounds and the creation of an inner rhythm, a recurring characteristics in
Fernández’s work (Serrano Baixauli 2015: 216-17).
2
One need only remember the deviations from the norm in matters of
punctuation in Cortázar’s Rayuela, a text much appreciated by Fernández, as
well as certain characteristics of the style of Martín Santos, Delibes or Cela,
Enrico Di Pastena
of theatre, of the style of Michel Vinaver, who is held in high esteem

by the group Teatro del Astillero, to which Fernández belonged.3
Certain conspicuous similarities in content point to a link be-
tween La tierra and rural drama, a genre particularly popular in
the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, which counts
amongst its most important productions García Lorca’s Andalu-
sian tragedies as well as such unique plays as Valle-Inclán’s Divi-
nas palabras. It should be pointed out that ‒ with the exception
of the above-mentioned works by Lorca and Valle ‒ the drama ru-
ral has been somewhat neglected by the various generations of the
post-Franco period.4 The angst of young playwrights over the last
few decades has turned in different directions and a rural setting
has only occasionally been chosen as a metaphorical foothold for
universal reflections; on the other hand, in particular between the
1970s and 1980s, there was an intriguing rise in the production of
films, and other forms of media entertainment, such as TV adap-
such as the alteration of linear time, the mixing of direct and indirect speech
‒ which might be echoed here in the lack of a clear typographical distinction
between lines and stage indications ‒, and so forth. Without actually wishing
to argue for a genetic relationship with these aspects of Delibes’s work, I should
like to point out that Manuel Alvar has described Los santos inocentes (a novel
we shall be returning to), as a ‘cuento infantil que camina resollando, sin apoy-
os ortográficos: coma, punto y coma, pero ni un solo punto, ni unas comillas
para los textos reproducidos’, reflecting its ingenuous protagonist (Alvar 1987:
65). Also with regard to Los santos inocentes, Sanz Villanueva has described it
as a lyrico-narrative text, on account of features such as the repetitions, the
absence of full stops and the typographical presentation of the dialogue, which
looks like poetry (Sanz Villanueva 1992: 89-90).
3
In the case of Vinaver, the omission of certain punctuation marks is
aimed at obliging the reader to increase the attention paid to the addresser
and to what is being expressed (see Ruiz Álvarez 2003). Various examples of
Vinaver’s idiosyncratic punctuation may be found in his Théâtre complet (that
should be supplemented with later works published individually). The group
Astillero has translated various texts by the French playwright in its ‘Colección
dramaturgia contemporánea’.
4
José Ramón Fernández points this out in a brief article (‘El teatro, la
tierra y la verdad’, which I was given by the author himself) where he offers an
overview of the century-long presence of the rural dimension in Spanish theatre,
whose themes he hopes the new theatre will once more embrace. Interestingly,
this article is chronologically close to the period in which La tierra was composed.
- 170 -
Lorca and the Others. Intertextual Resonances in José Ramón Fernández’s La tierra
tations of novels, that were connected to the rural world.5 Indeed,

the sequences in Fernández’s text may be seen as reminiscent of cin-
ematographic montage ‒ see the review by David Ladra (2010) ‒,
and visual reminiscences certainly carry great weight in the writings
of contemporary Spanish playwrights.
The most evident points of contact between La tierra and the
subgenre of rural drama occur in the setting (a decisive element, as
we shall see), in certain female figures (the dominating mother, the
rebel daughter) and in a range of thematic suggestions, such as hid-
den passion, family, social and economic pressure, a certain degree
of violence, moral bankruptcy, the use of metaphors from the nat-
ural world, and the symbolic presence of rituals such as dance; these
connections, however, are less perceivable in terms of language. The
deployment of language that generally tends towards an artificial and
localised representation of traits of orality ‒ one of the characterising
features of canonical drama rural (De Paco 1971-72: 143-44) ‒ is greatly
attenuated in La tierra. The surface of the play’s neutral language is
only superficially rippled by some particular lexical choice, which does
not, however, point to any clearly identifiable geographical area, and
more generally marks the recovery and the savouring of specifically
connoted terms that are less familiar to a city audience, though not
entirely unfamiliar to novel readers (Di Pastena 2015: 144, note 7).
Despite the more immediately visible similarities, and as useful as
this general contextualisation of the work may be, La tierra cannot
fully be explained as merely a modern re-visitation of a strongly char-
acterised and melodramatic subgenre such as the drama rural. The
harshness (which is, as we have seen, stylised) of rural life in La tierra
is fed by a sort of supernatural curse, symbolized by the fact that since
Pozo was killed and all trace and memory of him have been lost, there
has been no more rain. The apparently realistic dimension of the play
is transcended, moreover, through a dream sequence and most im-
portantly by the fact that the living and the dead are both present
5
Amongst the former may be quoted El espíritu de la colmena (1973);
Tasio (1984); Los santos inocentes (1984); La mitad del cielo (1986). Amongst the
latter Cañas y barro (1978); La barraca (1979); Los gozos y las sombras (1981);
Los pazos de Ulloa (1985); as well as the very recent La malquerida, a Mexican
production loosely based on Benavente’s play.
- 171 -
Enrico Di Pastena
onstage at certain points of the action.6 Elsewhere I have highlighted

how the work’s deep meaning lies in its reflection on the needs and
tribulations of historical memory in Spain. Though this particular fo-
cus does not exclude other more general areas, the play’s more strictly
political implications allow the dramatized material to resonate with
historical events such as the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War and
the subsequent revenges, the (dirty) war of the state against terrorism,
the experience of the desaparecidos in Latin-American dictatorships
or the guilty inertia with regard to the Shoah (see Di Pastena 2015).
It is not by accident that water returns to fertilise the ground only
when the earth is allowed to bring back to light the body of an inno-
cent person. This signals the beginning of a process of justice, which
can be seen as the first step towards a highly desirable reconciliation
during the years when the debate in Spain over the exhumation of
the remains of the ‒ often civilian ‒ victims of the Civil War and its
immediate aftermath was about to be rekindled. I shall not here be
returning to these themes, but, in the light of the fact that one of the
most characteristic features of Fernández’s style is the high frequency
of echoes of literary and theatrical models, both national and interna-
tional, I shall try rather to pinpoint the most important of these ech-
oes in La tierra in order to show how significantly these dislocations
interweave and overlap, sometimes impalpably, throughout the text,
ultimately crystallizing, however, into a work that is much more than
a mere assemblage of different suggestions and voices. The thought
that underlies my work is that, despite what some have recently ar-
gued in Spanish theatrical circles, the literary and the dramatic di-
mension must not only be viewed as non-conflictual but may in fact
turn out to be in a relationship of fruitful collaboration.7
6
On the other hand it should be pointed out that, in a canonical text of
the drama rural such as La malquerida, Raimunda momentarily attributes the
cause of the evil that is befalling her family to the influence of her dead hus-
band (III, ix: 207): ‘Que los muertos no se van de con nosotros, . . . que andan
día y noche alrededor de los que han querío y de los que han odiao en vida.
Y sin nosotros verlo, hablan con nosotros. ¡Que de ahí proviene que muchas
veces pensamos lo que no hubiéamos creído de no haber pensao nunca!’. This
presence, however, does not actually take on a tangible on-scene shape.
7
One should, naturally, not forget that the full potential of a drama text
is realised in its life on stage. There has been some isolated criticism of the lack
- 172 -
This dialogue starts on the very threshold of La tierra. In various

editions (Fernández 1998: 52; 2000c: 69-71 and 2002: 5-6), the text
is preceded by a poem by Antonio Gamoneda ‒ ‘Malos recuerdos’,
originally in Blues castellano, now in the collection Edad (Gamone-
da 1989: 162-63) ‒ and by a quotation from La escritura o la vida, by
Jorge Semprún. The former was expunged from the 2009 edition
for purely extra-textual reasons; it was restored, however, in the bi-
lingual Italian edition I prepared (Fernández 2016b: 58-60; quotes
from this edition). The lines by the Oviedan poet Gamoneda speak
of the irredeemability of the past and of the crimes that have been
committed, be they gratuitous cruelty or self-interested thievery
(though the poetic I, at least, seems to be conscious of this), but
they also trigger a connection between the bitch’s condition of an
innocent victim and that of the unfortunate Pozo, and they contain
the syntagm that then becomes the title of Fernández’s work (l. 31):8
MALOS RECUERDOS
La vergüenza es un sentimiento revolucionario
KARL MARX
Llevo colgados de mi corazón
los ojos de una perra y, más abajo,
una carta de madre campesina.
Cuando yo tenía doce años,

algunos días, al anochecer, 5
llevábamos al sótano a una perra
sucia y pequeña.
of verisimilitude in the excessively literary voice of some of the characters in La

tierra (Ladra 2010): ‘Y con algún tachón como se debe: alguna imagen tópica,
alguna ingenuidad como pudiera ser el don de lenguas de María o algún exceso
de carga literaria en algunos pasajes que, mira tú por dónde, son los que más
despuntan por su valor dramático en la función (la vuelta a casa en metro al
salir del trabajo, el viernes por la tarde en Madrid). Y todo bien tensado por un
halo poético que lo mantiene en pie desde el principio al fin’.
8
Moreover, as we shall see further on, Pozo is explicitly compared to
a dog at various moments in the play (scenes 7 and 21). Fernández himself
(Fernández 1996a: 19) has stated that Gamoneda’s poems perhaps prompted
his earliest inspiration for La tierra.
- 173 -
Enrico Di Pastena
Con un cable le dábamos y luego

con las astillas y los hierros. (Era
así. Era así.
Ella gemía, 10
se arrastraba pidiendo, se orinaba,
y nosotros la colgábamos para pegar mejor).
Aquella perra iba con nosotros

a las praderas y los cuestos. Era
veloz y nos amaba. 15
Cuando yo tenía quince años,

un día, no sé cómo, llegó a mí
un sobre con la carta del soldado.
La escribía su madre. No recuerdo:

‘¿Cuándo vienes? Tu hermana no me habla. 20
No te puedo mandar ningún dinero...’.
Y, en el sobre, doblados, cinco sellos

y papel de fumar para su hijo.
‘Tu madre que te quiere’.
No recuerdo
el nombre de la madre del soldado. 25
Aquella carta no llegó a su destino:

yo robé al soldado su papel de fumar
y rompí las palabras que decían
el nombre de su madre.
Mi vergüenza es tan grande como mi cuerpo, 30

pero aunque tuviese el tamaño de la tierra
no podría volver y despegar
el cable de aquel vientre ni enviar
la carta del soldado.
In the other quotation that precedes the text of La tierra, Sem-

prún re-evokes the embarrassed evasiveness of the people of Wei-
mar, the small town a few kilometres from the Buchenwald con-
- 174 -
centration camp, as they are reminded of the horrors that were

committed there:
[U]n teniente americano se dirigía aquel día a unas cuantas decenas de

mujeres, de adolescentes de ambos sexos, de ancianos alemanes de la
ciudad de Weimar. Las mujeres llevaban vestidos de primavera de vivos
colores. El oficial hablaba con voz neutra, implacable. Explicaba el
funcionamiento del horno crematorio, daba las cifras de la mortalidad
en Buchenwald. Recordaba a los civiles de Weimar que habían vivido,
indiferentes o cómplices, durante más de siete años, bajo los humos
del crematorio.
‒ Vuestra hermosa ciudad ‒ les decía ‒, tan limpia, tan pe-
ripuesta, rebosante de recuerdos culturales, corazón de la Alemania
clásica e ilustrada, habrá vivido en medio del humo de los crematorios
nazis, ¡con toda la buena conciencia del mundo!
Las mujeres ‒ un buen número de ellas ‒ no podían contener
las lágrimas, imploraban perdón con gestos teatrales. Algunas llevaban
la actuación hasta hacer amagos de encontrarse mal. Los adolescentes
se encerraban en un silencio desesperado. Los ancianos miraban hacia
otro lado, negándose ostensiblemente a oír lo que fuera.9
This second epigraph serves to amplify one of the themes of La

tierra ‒ the convenience of not seeing, man’s reluctance to accept
his responsibilities that sometimes turns into complicity with bar-
barity. This central idea is upgraded from the circumscribed di-
mension of the crime story into something that may account for
different and much greater events, specifically but not exclusively
related to the history of the twentieth century, thus universalising
the idea of the stolidity of evil (one has but to think of the reasons
for Pozo’s murder) so that it may include the great question of
absolute evil, Das radikal Böse, which, starting from Kant’s reflec-
tions, Semprún himself tackles in La escritura o la vida and indeed
in much of his works.
9
Semprún 1995: 94-95; 79-80 in the excellent Italian translation La scrit-
tura o la vita, published in 1996, from the French original. Though Semprún
was born in Spain, he wrote most of his work in French and never translated
himself into Spanish.
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Enrico Di Pastena
In La tierra García Lorca may be seen as a privileged interloc-

utor. One feels his echo in atmosphere and situation rather than
through specific parallels; in any case these traces of Lorca inter-
mingle with influences deriving from other sources or from the
same subgenre. Amongst the former is the potential opening up of
spaces that ensues from the rural setting as well as its corresponding
closures (in particular in La casa de Bernarda Alba), which serves to
negotiate subject matter that is both socially topical and, in its pri-
vate declension, connected to the impossibility of restraining one’s
passions (Fernández frequently presents the idea that when man is
in contact with nature he is more exposed to impulses and less safe-
guarded against violence).10 Other themes that may be traced back
to Lorca are the importance of the telluric dimension in human life;
an interest in bullfighting; the family as a source of tensions and
repression; the importance and at the same time the damagedness of
some of the female characters (the character of the matriarch Pilar
has something of the fallen mother in Bodas de sangre and of Ber-
narda Alba’s partly self-imposed inflexibility)11 and, at the opposite
extreme, impatient and rebellious female characters, and finally, the
importance of silence (here used as a strategy), and the sense of
awaiting a fateful and decisive event.
Lorca himself, despite the strong Andalusian roots of his vision,
made an effort towards universalization and his theatre on the one
hand tried to cater to a vaster audience, and on the other, with
its unique poetic voice, denounced the extreme poverty and the
10
In ‘El sonido de los álamos’ (Fernández 1995: 39) the playwright re-
minds us that the earth is a space ‘que supera a los personajes, que puede
cambiar sus vidas, un demiurgo que coloca al hombre en su posición. . . . La
literatura dramática que ha querido crecer ha optado muchas veces a lo largo
de los siglos por abrirse a los espacios rurales, donde se encuentra lo que no se
puede imitar, donde los hombres vuelven a estar a cargo de los dioses’.
11
Bodas de sangre was adapted by José Ramón Fernández and staged at
the Teatro Guerra in Lorca (Murcia) in October 2003, directed by Antonio
Saura. The author’s interest in García Lorca had already emerged in one of
Fernández’s earliest works, Mariana (1991, published in 1996b), a text that
dialogues with Mariana Pineda; the play’s atemporality and its symbolical
intensity have meant that it has enjoyed a certain international success. Con-
cerning more in general the debts that his generation has towards García
Lorca and Valle-Inclán, see Fernández’s own words in Gabriele 2009: 238.
- 176 -
inhuman primitiveness of rural life. In turn, Fernández blurs the

setting. While some words may be traced back to a specific regional
area, such as that of Salamanca-León, with the olive signalling in
particular Andalusia, there seems to be an undisputable analogous
tendency to transcend localism ‒ through an invented toponym
such as Santa María ‒ and to reflect on a particular condition, that
of the code of silence and of unspoken truths, that may indeed go
well beyond national borders.
Bullfighting is one of the thematic cruxes of La tierra. It imbues
its scenes, and clearly marks its language. Some of the most famous
bullfighters are evoked through the adulterated countermelody the
protagonists of this work seem to embody: the greatness that may
be achieved even in tragedy, of figures such as El Yiyo and Sandín,
or that which is only fleetingly evoked through memory (and by
a dead man to boot!) of Alvarito Domecq, El Gallo and Juan Bel-
monte (scene 17), is reduced to a mirage of a success to be achieved
at all costs. No contrast could be more clear-cut than that between
the epic quality of the Sánchez Mejías immortalised by Lorca in
his poem and the myriad of petty expedients to which Fernández’s
characters have recourse.
María’s need to escape reminds us of the impatience of Adela,
the protagonist of La casa de Bernarda Alba, a work which is evoked
also through the fact that she maintains a secret amorous relation-
ship, which in the eyes of society is an illicit one (furthermore, the
male characters, the evanescent Pepe and the guardia civil who gets
dangerously close to María, and through her to her far-from-irre-
proachable relatives, are entirely inadequate). Nevertheless, María
will be able to escape from the narrow confines of her country exist-
ence, while Adela can only dream of a life with her beloved far away
from the suffocating enclosures of the community in which she
lives. María’s character, we shall see, also bears traces of Chekhov,
and the fracturing of the bond between man and nature certainly
evokes the influence of Greek tragedy.
At other times reference to Lorca turns out to be more tenuous.
This is the case of some points of lexical contact. The beginning of
scene 22 reads: ‘La mañana es hermosa como una manzana recién
abierta’, and recalls the sonnet ‘Adán’, where both ‘mañana’ and
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Enrico Di Pastena
‘manzana’ appear;12 it also happens with a passage in which Lorca

describes one of his memories, the use of a more modern plough,13
which is borrowed by Fernández, reworked and inserted into the
spare plot of his play. In an interview from 1934 Lorca recounts an
experience which he describes as his first encounter with a manifes-
tation of art (more specifically, with an artefact):
Fue por el año 1906. Mi tierra, tierra de agricultores, había sido siem-
pre arada por los viejos arados de madera, que apenas arañaban la
superficie. Y en aquel año, algunos labradores adquirieron los nuevos
arados Bravant ‒ el nombre me ha quedado para siempre en el re-
cuerdo ‒, que habían sido premiados por su eficacia en la Exposición
de París del año 1900. Yo, niño curioso, seguía por todo el campo
al vigoroso arado de mi casa. Me gustaba ver cómo la enorme púa
de acero abría un tajo en la tierra, tajo del que brotaban raíces en
lugar de sangre. Una vez el arado se detuvo. Había tropezado en algo
consistente. Un segundo más tarde, la hoja brillante de acero sacaba
de la tierra un mosaico romano. Tenía una inscripción que ahora no
recuerdo, aunque no sé por qué acude a mi memoria el nombre de los
pastores, de Dafnis y Cloe.14
This anecdote goes back to the childhood of the author of Fuente

Vaqueros. This mosaic redeemed from the earth, and combined
with the place where the machines embodying progress have in-
tervened, is turned by Fernández into a clear premonitory sign of
findings of much greater import. Thus he masterfully intertwines
this little story with the principle narrative, connecting it not only
to a writer central to the modern Spanish tradition but also to a fig-
ure whose biographical circumstances are an immediate concretion
of the central themes of the play, that is violence ‒ reasonless and
12
The work, which centres on a Miltonic Adam faced with the choice of
remaining sterile, so as to save his descendants from death, is part of Primeras
canciones. See García Lorca 1996a: 186.
13
It is not unusual for machinery that evokes progress to appear in liter-
ary re-elaborations of rural contexts; to give but one example, a new techno-
logical invention, a tractor, such as that in La tierra, also briefly appears in Los
santos inocentes (Delibes 2005: 117), both in the novel and in the film.
14
See Luna 1997: 526.
- 178 -
excessive ‒ as a way in which individuals relate to each other and

the hiding of bodies as a renewal of that violence.
There are other references in the play that may be traced back
to the sphere of the earth. Among Spanish writers, one inevitably
thinks of Valle-Inclán and his intuition, which here also func-
tions as a statement of intentions, that it is place which deter-
mines characters and circumstances, and to a certain extent con-
ditions the gaze. This happens in the Comedias bárbaras,15 where
the setting acquires resonances that transform it into much more
than mere background. The formal modernity with which Valle
understood and regenerated the drama rural (Pedraza 2011: 122-
31), in particular through the truly unique dissonances that he
introduced into Divinas palabras, is signalled in this play by the
early signs of an esperpentización (much more evident in the ur-
ban Luces de Bohemia), that is a distortion in the direction of
the grotesque-expressionistic, a slight echo of which may be felt,
perhaps, in Pozo’s intellectual impairment and in the way he is
bestialised by the other characters. The brutality of certain rural
environments, once again in a Galician key, is also a feature of the
narrative of Camilo José Cela, to which I shall be returning.
In actual fact, more than a few similarities with characters from
Delibes’ Los santos inocentes are detectable in Pozo.16 Delibes him-
self, and his deep roots in the rural and linguistic world of the Cas-
15
I have already commented on Valle-Inclán’s words: ‘es el escenario el
que crea la situación’ ‒ see ‘Don Ramón habla de teatro a sus contertulios’,
Luz, 23 November 1933, an article which was later collected in Dougherty 1983:
262-65, at p. 263 ‒ in Di Pastena 2015, where I remark also on the evident
influence of the Galician author on Fernández’s particular use of stage direc-
tions. For further considerations on the use of space, see Fernández’s argument
in ‘Cosas que he aprendido con Las manos’ (Fernández 2000a: 37), and what
he states in a recent article (Fernández 2014: 475-76) where he gives key tools
for interpreting his dramaturgy: ‘Mi punto de partida es siempre un lugar . . .
desde una perspectiva de espacio más tiempo’.
16
In the novel, however, it is a mentally handicapped man who takes
justice into his own hands as a reaction against the harshness of a rough and
ruthless life dragged along in archaic social and economic conditions; another
difference is that in the novel it is the predatory behaviour of the dominant
groups that interrupts the communication between man and earth. On the
latter issue, see Torres Nebrera 1992: 57.
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Enrico Di Pastena
tilian meseta, are clearly evoked in Las manos,17 a text co-authored

by Fernández with Yolanda Pallín and Javier García Yagüe, which
has striking similarities and indeed was written in close chrono-
logical continuity with La tierra. In La tierra, Los santos inocentes
is mediated by the visual impact of Mario Camus’s film, which
had made significant changes to Delibes’ text and which made a
great impact because of the superb acting of the main characters.18
The novel, and especially the film, therefore, both contribute to
the construction of Pozo, whom I think may also be interpreted
as a cross between two of Delibes’ characters. Like Azarías, Pozo
is almost a child entrapped in the body of a man, were it not for
the occasional flaring up of erotic desire and for his corpulence
and potential physical strength. This robustness is also indebted
to Camus’ film version (where Azarías is beautifully played by the
rather well-built Francisco Rabal). Pozo, moreover, follows Miguel
servant-like, and is treated by him like a companion animal. Such
uncritical passiveness recalls Delibes’ character Paco el Bajo, the
humble farmer who, in the Extremadura of the 1960s, spends his
time in the constant service of his landowner and accompanies him
on his game-shooting expeditions. One of the most memorable
scenes in both novel and film is a partridge shoot, in which Paco
behaves just like a retriever, displaying his well-developed senses,
especially his sense of smell, which, combined with his unshakea-
ble loyalty towards his master, complete his portrayal as someone
whose life is led in subhuman conditions. In turn, Pozo, an out-
cast among people who themselves live in provincial marginality,
possesses a gift that is only apparently supernatural, and which
In particular, in scene LX, the reference is to the novel Las ratas.

17
On the changes made in the film and on the reasons that prompted
18
them, see Delibes 1990: 104-05 and Camus’s succinct explanations in Camus
1993; 1997. Amongst the many studies on the relationship between the novel
and the film I shall point out only the following, which occasionally disagree
on the evaluation and meaning of the changes made by Camus: shorter ex-
aminations are put forward by García Domínguez 1993; 2005: 463-67; Mon-
tes-Huidobro 1994; Hernández García 1996-97; García García-Herreros 2009;
Melendo Cruz 2011; among the more detailed analyses I should mention those
by Santoro 1996: 129-88; Huici 1999: 49-146 and Rolando Villanueva 2001: 55-
92. See also, on both the novel and its adaptation, Buckley 2012: 237-52.
- 180 -
in fact signals his deep correspondence with the primeval forces

of life: he can locate, sniff out as it were, water, the very element
which the heavens hold back when he is so cowardly murdered.
Just like Azarías, who through the fog of his disability establishes
an emotional and symbiotic relationship with a bird, that is with
a creature of the natural world, Pozo has a privileged relationship
with a natural element that is crucial to rural life. In painting Pozo,
Fernández also borrows some brushstrokes from the ‘Canto di-
ciassettesimo’, a poem written in the Romagnol dialect by Tonino
Guerra; he is thinking in particular of some verses referring to
the brother of the protagonist of the 1981 collection of which the
poem is part, Il miele, which starts with an old man who returns
definitively to the country while it dwells light heartedly on the
death throes of the rural world.19 Also, in the course of a conversa-
tion we had in the autumn of 2015, Fernández pointed out to me
how Pozo’s Cyclops-like sadness evokes the melancholy of Charles
Laughton’s interpretation of Quasimodo (here with the aggravat-
ing factor of physical deformity) in William Dieterle’s 1939 The
Hunchback of Notre Dame: the idea itself of unrequited love for
the beautiful woman ‒ a traditional motif briefly hinted at in La
tierra ‒ may well have its remotest origins in the film adaptation
of Hugo’s novel.
It is not difficult to think of other foreign writers linked to
the rural epos whose narratives contain particularly fragile charac-
19
In the Italian original: ‘Mio fratello cammina con le mani dietro la
schiena, / quando mangia sta coi gomiti larghi sulla tavola, / le scarpe le allaccia
poggiando i piedi / sui pioli, se si lava la faccia / fa dei lamenti, soffia, bubbola
dal freddo; / i baffi dritti e il cappello in testa anche a letto, / nel voltarsi è tutto
d’un pezzo / come se fosse impalato. / Gli sono restate le mosse di quelli di una
volta: / accende i fiammiferi sotto le scarpe / e tiene il manico del cucchiaio
chiuso nel pugno’ (Guerra 1981: 75); compare with La tierra, scene 3: ‘Uno de
esos hombres de los que no se sabe nada, a los que no se recuerda, que cuando
se les llama no vuelven la cabeza, sino todo el cuerpo, como si llevasen un peso
grande sobre los hombros’ (here as in all other quotations the italic type is
mine). Guerra asserted that Il miele is not so much a poem about the end of
life as an expression of gratefulness for the life we have been given, because ‘an-
che sulla punta della lama di un coltello, il miele rimane sempre miele’ (‘even
spread on the tip of a knife, honey always remains honey’).
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Enrico Di Pastena
ters. One of these is Of Mice and Men,20 in which, however, John

Steinbeck’s protagonists embody a relationship that is the opposite
of the one explored by Fernández through Miguel and Pozo. The
mentally sane George Milton does not merely tolerate the presence
of the vigorous and defenceless Lennie Small, but actually protects
him to the last extremity, and chooses to kill him rather than aban-
don him to the murderous rage of their co-workers on the farm.
Miguel, as we have seen, turns Pozo into a sort of companion ani-
mal and actually participates in his murder. Pozo thus becomes the
sacrificial beast, the bull in a metaphorical corrida, without rules,
sense or moral value. The influence of American literature (includ-
ing drama) ‒ which may be felt in La tierra also through the faint
echo of Faulkner ‒21 is, in any case, but the tip of an iceberg, as it
were, of the foreign literary influences that fed a whole generation
of Spanish playwrights who lived their formative years during the
democratic period.
Before briefly examining some of the characteristic traits of the
male protagonist, Miguel, let us briefly observe María. A María
had already appeared in Fernández’s short play El silencio de las
estaciones, which would later be joined together, diptych-like, with
Si amanece nos vamos, in Conversaciones en la oscuridad. Although
the two plays were staged for the first time in Madrid at the Teatro
Lagrada in December 2009, El silencio de las estaciones was written
20
Of the various film adaptations, the latest is by Gary Sinise (USA,
1992), who also plays George Milton, next to an excellent John Malkovich as
Lennie Small.
21
See La tierra, scene 20: ‘¿Te ha dicho tu padre cómo sabes cuándo te
has salido del pueblo? / No. / Por las campanas. Cuando no se oyen las cam-
panas estás fuera de las tierras del pueblo’; this is an echo of The Hamlet (Bk I,
ch. 2: 2): ‘Besides Varner’s store and cotton gin and the combined grist mill
and blacksmith shop which they rented to the actual smith, and the school-
house and the church and the perhaps three dozen dwellings within sound
of both bells, the village consisted of a livery barn and lot and a contiguous
shady though grassless yard’. In José Luis López Muñoz’s Spanish transla-
tion, El villorrio (p. 42): ‘Además del almacén de Varner, la desmotadera y el
complejo de molino harinero y forja que alquilaban al herrero, de la escuela
y la iglesia, y de las quizás tres docenas de viviendas dentro del radio sonoro de
las dos campanas, la aldea contaba con una cochera con caballeriza, su corres-
pondiente corral y una extensión contigua’.
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around 1993 (though it was published only in 1995), that is before

most of La tierra. In the former text we find a woman, María, at a
station: she is returning to her hometown after an absence of many
years, with her burden of frustrated ambitions. She meets and talks
to a young woman, Irene, who is about to leave, and we get a strong
sense ‒ compounded by a sudden change in the flow of time ‒ that
this other woman is not her sister but a younger self on the verge
of running away. The return of this María heralds that of the María
of La tierra, whose character will undergo a further change, with
echoes of Chekhov’s The Seagull, in the later Nina (the protagonist
of an eponymous play), who is perhaps finally saved only by her de-
cision never to set foot again in her native village (there is in the text
an explicit quotation of Alfredo’s line in Nuovo Cinema Paradiso ‒
‘Non tornare più’ ‒ spoken to the young Salvatore as he is leaving).
In Fernández’s theatre this need for flight is balanced, if not soothed
out entirely, by the need to return: in the case of María in La tierra,
a mere pretext serves to justify this; in fact, she has returned, several
years after having departed, mostly in order to come to terms with
unresolved issues, and she probably contributes, simply through
her presence, to triggering in her brother the decision that leads to
the dénouement.22
María and her cousin Mercedes perceive the desire, perhaps the
need, to rebuild their friendship, but this seems to be impossible
because the choices they made have taken their lives in very differ-
ent and distant directions and too much time has passed. Mercedes
has stayed and experienced the many difficulties her family has en-
dured (Miguel’s fall, Pilar’s disorders, the hardships caused by the
drought); María has left, in search of a less suffocating horizon and
the illusion of love, but she has ended up feeling like an extraneous
22
In La tierra the immediate circumstantial reason for María’s return to
her hometown after years of absence is her nephew’s first communion. I also
think it is useful to point out that in Los santos inocentes (both in the novel and
in the film) there is a reference to the first communion of Carlos Alberto, the
landowner’s son – and in the novel this passage is more clearly highlighted in
that it prompts in Paco’s daughter Nieves the desire to take communion herself
(not a secondary feature in the economy of Delibes’s Christian humanism) and
in exponents of the oppressors a reaction that in itself reveals their classism.
This may be a further sign of a link between Delibes and La tierra.
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Enrico Di Pastena
body in the metropolis. Through the relationship between these

two figures, Fernández is perhaps subtly evoking the dialectics be-
tween those who were exiled and those who remained, during the
long dark night of Francoism, when each side ‒ both those who
stayed and those who left, and thereby gave up part of themselves ‒
felt they had got the worse deal. The relationship between the two
women also recalls that between Nataša and Irina in Chekhov’s
Three sisters. Starting from the second act, Nataša stops being the in-
secure and awkward woman she has been so far and gradually takes
over the destiny of the household, until she becomes its true mis-
tress; similar are Mercedes, who ultimately overtakes in the family
hierarchy the matriarch Pilar, exhausted by her illness, and María,
who, as we have seen, has sought her fortune elsewhere. In Chek-
hov’s play, Irina, the youngest of the sisters, also appears at first to
be the most vital and hopeful of the three, her greatest desire being
to seek emancipation through work (though she is the daughter of
an army man and part of a family where it had not been necessary
to work). In fact, she does not, in the end, give up the possibility
of leaving, despite the death of her betrothed in a duel. If, for Irina,
Moscow represents at once the site of nostalgia and a new destina-
tion, also identified with ardently desired love (Čechov 2014: 425),
for María, as for the young Miguel and his relatives, Madrid is the
site of infinite possibilities, although these turn out to be much less
gratifying than expected. At the close of Chekhov’s play, the three
sisters on stage appear at least capable of embracing one another
when faced with yet another loss (the death of Baron Tuzenbach),
while the three women in La tierra, though they are united by their
suffering, still seem separated by a certain emotional distance.
The final scene of the play (scene 23) hides a Shakespearean
echo.23 The closing lines, spoken by Pilar, remind us of the answer
Enobarbus, Antony’s lieutenant, gives Cleopatra at the start of An-
23
This is a recurring element in Fernández (who has also adapted Shake-
speare), especially in his early plays; it is possible to detect an echo of King Lear
I, 4: 38; these are the words spoken by Kent: ‘. . . that which ordinary men
are fit for, I am qualified in, and the best of me is diligence’) in Para quemar
la memoria: ‘Emilio: Yo no puedo. Soy un criado, y un hombre vulgar. Estoy
capacitado para todo aquello en que son aptos los hombres ordinarios, y lo
mejor de mí es ser diligente’ (Fernández 2000b: 58).
- 184 -
tony and Cleopatra III, 13, when everything, even Antony’s honour,
seems lost, after he followed the Queen of Egypt’s fleet in its flight:
Cleopatra: What shall we do, Enobarbus?

Enobarbus: Think, and die.
¿Qué vamos a hacer nosotras?

Primero pensar. Y después morirnos.
The closing quotation from Shakespeare, however, does not com-

pletely annul the general closeness of the situations experienced
by the two groups of characters belonging to Chekhov’s and to
Fernández’s plays respectively, condemned as they are to live out
a hopeless existence, the only slight change consisting in the fact
that Irina moves away and María will presumably depart again
at some point. In Three Sisters we also find a head of the fami-
ly who has died, a disappointing brother (Andrej recalls Miguel:
‘All his hopes have gone’, as Maša says referring to him in Act
IV), frustrated love on account of the departure of a male figure,
the monotonous agony of provincial life (though with regard to a
small town rather than to the countryside), and the semi-vegeta-
tive condition of its inhabitants. But, above all, what puts the two
works in such a privileged dialogue with each other is the way they
scrutinize a time of crisis and change: the crumbling social milieu
that can only project the attainment of happiness onto future gen-
erations in the one play is parallelled in the other by the difficulty
experienced by the rural world in preserving its identity, as it loses
itself somewhere between its desire to escape and the unbearable
inclemency of reality; the inhabitants of both these microcosms
are incapable of measuring up to the present.
Although the alteration of linear temporality is an almost un-
renounceable feature of postmodernity, the particularly significant
treatment of time in La tierra, with the irregular alternation of two
chronological planes, may perhaps be indebted to another work
that has an explict Chekhovian mould: John Boynton Priestley’s
Time and the Conways, a text long known in Spain as La herida del
tiempo. Both the recent stagings of the play in Madrid are known
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Enrico Di Pastena
to Fernández,24 though there had been others before (a very famous

one by Luis Escobar in 1942), and others would follow. The oscil-
lation in time (in Priestley this occurs only once when there is a
twenty year lapse in the action, whereas in La tierra there is a con-
stant to-and-fro movement in time), the focus on the family circle
and, most of all, the distance between the expectation of a brilliant
future and the existential and financial shipwreck the characters
experience are some of the possible points of contact between La
tierra and this play, which shows how human beings can drown
over the course of time. Another crucial text that investigates the
disintegration brought on by the passage of time is O’Neill’s Long
Day’s Journey into Night; this also should be considered in relation
to La tierra.
We now come to Miguel. Paradoxically, the trauma caused by
Pozo’s death and the shadows it projects onto the life of the pro-
tagonist offer him a possibility of redemption. Miguel is driven to
indirectly accuse himself because he can no longer bear the weight
of silence and he needs to remedy, at least partially, the evil he has
done, evil that appears to mark the land that surrounds him. The
presence of a sort of curse weighing on the land reminds us of
Sophocles’ two famous tragedies: Oedipus Tyrannus, where the city
is plagued by a sickness whose causes are initially unknown, and
even more so, Antigone, with its heated debate over a necessary and
yet forbidden burial. In Oedipus Tyrannus, which like Oedipus at
Colonus dramatizes events that precede those described in Antigone,
though this was composed later,25 Thebes is scourged by the plague:
people, animals and plants (Sophocles 1994b: 329, ll. 25-27) all die
because of the crimes their king has unknowingly committed.26
Thus speaks the Priest at the beginning of the play:
24
By José María Morera in March 1984; in 1993, in Spanish and with
a title closer to the original, by Mario Gas (El tiempo y los Conway; the year
before the play had been performed in Catalan).
25
A late dating of Oedipus Tyrannus, around 411 BC, had already pro-
posed by Perrotta 1935: 257-68.
26
See also González Cruz 1998: 50. Years after writing La tierra, thus
further demonstrating his interest in Sophocles, Fernández had been commis-
sioned to adapt the play by Jorge Lavelli (with whom he also collaborated on
that occasion), which was first staged at the Mérida Theatre Festival in August
- 186 -
Priest: . . . For the city, as you see yourself, is grievously tossed by

storms, and still cannot lift its head from beneath the depths of the
killing angry sea. A blight is on the buds that enclose the fruits, a blight is
on the flocks of grazing cattle and on the women giving birth, killing
their offspring; the fire-bearing god, hateful Pestilence, has swooped
upon the city and harries it (Sophocles 1994b: 329, ll. 23-28).
This is caused by a heavy sin that weighs upon the polis:
Creon: . . . The lord Phoebus orders us plainly to drive out from the
land a pollution, one that has been nourished in this country, and not
to nourish it till it cannot be cured (Sophocles 1994b: 329, ll. 96-98).
Sophocles recuperates the motif of the mysterious malady that tor-

ments the land from Herodotus’ The Persian Wars, where it was also
linked to a crime.27 The sin that weighs so heavily on Thebes can be
expiated through the exile of the guilty man or by means of a death
in revenge for the death of Laius, the former sovereign of Thebes
and the cause of all its evils.
Similar echoes may be found in Antigone,28 when Tiresias reveals
that Thebes is polluted because Polyneices has not been buried, an
event that has put out of joint the link between the human and the
divine.29 Polyneices’ sister, Antigone, intends to have an honourable
burial performed for her brother, and is willing to pursue this aim
2008. Pasolini, an author Fernández admires, had filmed his own version of
Oedipus Tyrannus in 1967.
27
See The Persian Wars (Herodotus 1922: 297, VI, 139): ‘But when the
Pelasgians had slain their own sons and the women, their land brought forth
no fruit, nor did their wives and their flocks and herds bear offspring as before’.
For the reference, see Perrotta 1935: 223, note 1.
28
There are also clear echoes of the story of Antigone and Polyneices in
El que fue mi hermano. Yakolev; see Pérez Rasilla 2004: 39; Checa Puerta 2014:
235 also refers to the protagonist as a ‘moderna Antígona’.
29
‘Tiresias: . . . it is your will that has put this plague upon the city; for
our altars and our braziers, one and all, are filled with carrion brought by birds
and dogs from the unhappy son of Oedipus who fell’ (Sophocles 1994a: 97). He
is echoed by the Chorus, who invokes Bacchus: ‘Chorus: . . . now, since the
whole city is gripped by the assault of plague, come with cleansing movement
over the slope of Parnassus, or the resounding strait!’ (Sophocles 1994a: 109).
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Enrico Di Pastena
despite the contrary orders issued by Creon, king of Thebes, who

wishes Polyneices to be left for the birds and the dogs, as a punish-
ment for having dared to take up arms against the city. Spurred on
by the indissoluble bond of family, Antigone disobeys the king’s or-
ders, her justification being that she is following a higher and eternal
law, and declaring that she is unwilling ‘to overrule . . . the unwritten
and unfailing ordinances of the gods. For these have life, not sim-
ply today and yesterday, but for ever, and no one knows how long
ago they were revealed’ (Sophocles 1994a: 45). This initial impulse
in the heroine’s action will lead her towards a process of dissolution
and frustration that will break out into a clash with institutional-
ised power and culminate in her death; on the other hand Hegel’s
influential reading of the play has contributed to underlining how
Creon becomes the spokesperson for the law of the community and
is moved only by his dedication to the interests of the state.30 I there-
fore agree with Maria Grazia Ciani’s view that we may legitimately
suppose that both the maiden and the king are right, ‘Antigone as the
sister, Creon as the legitimate sovereign’, and that both ‘are wrong,
Antigone because she in fact transgresses the law, Creon because he
offends piety’ (Ciani 2000: 11; translation by Sylvia Greenup). To ex-
plain her behaviour Antigone must resort to an oxymoron ‒ ‘I shall
lie with him . . ., having committed a crime that is holy’ (Sophocles
1994a: 11) ‒ which reveals how she has violated a human law in order
to observe a divine norm; while Tiresias appeals to Creon to desist
from his obstinacy and cease to vent such rage against the body of a
dead man ‒ ‘Give way to the dead man, and do not continue to stab
him as he lies dead! What is the bravery of killing a dead man over
again?’ (Sophocles 1994a: 97). Sophocles sacrifices both protagonists
to the irreconcilability of their positions, a tragic destiny which must
be the outcome of the clash between the two contendents. Many
interpreters, with a more Manichean and less dialectical approach,
tend instead to read Antigone as a play about the pursuit of those
individual rights that have been destroyed by the state.
Antigone therefore rightly intends to bury the victim; Miguel
is equally right in wanting to disinter Pozo’s body so that it may be
buried with dignity. The former acts on the basis of consanguinity
30
Hegel 1967: 520ff. and also 636, 963, 1360.
- 188 -
and observes an unwritten law, the latter because of an old bond of

friendship and in order to repair a wicked deed. In Antigone, how-
ever, the outcome of the protagonist’s persistence is the severance of
the individual from the community, in line with what, according to
Eduard Fraenkel,31 is a general tendency in Sophocles’ tragedies; in
La tierra, Miguel’s decision to pay for his crime will probably meet
with the incomprehension of the microcosm to which he belongs,
but the possibility of harmonising his actions with the dictates of
moral conscience may lead him to expiation, and therefore to a
future ‒ or at the very least to a symbolical ‒ reintegration into civil
society. What is certain is that his guilt over his action has devoured
him and turned him into a creature inhabited by the shades, ‘an
animated corpse’, who, in this, bears a striking resemblance to the
obstinate Creon.32
This feature of inner torment poisoning every vital impulse per-
haps also lends some vaguely Dostoevskian undertones to Miguel’s
character. However, if Raskolnikov openly confesses and gives him-
self up to the authorities (Crime and Punishment, see part VI, ch.
8), Miguel chooses a more oblique route (perhaps to protect himself
and his family from possible retaliations by the other men who have
taken part in the crime). It is both symptomatic of, and coherent
with, his disposition that the protagonist of La tierra should not
explicitly verbalise his guilt and that he should only indirectly con-
tribute to the discovery of Pozo’s body. Miguel has already experi-
enced in his life the force of the code of silence, a mechanism that
had been adopted in relation to his father’s death, which is never
fully explained in the play. When Pozo asks him about this, Miguel
responds with threats, and prefers not to speak about it. Such be-
haviour is, however, in line with that of the other adult members
31
See Fraenkel 1977: 24: ‘The theme of all seven of Sophocles’ tragedies
is the same: a human being, sometimes even before being born, sometimes on
account of other events, finds himself or herself outside of the human polis’
(translation by Sylvia Greenup).
32
See the words of a Messenger to the Chorus, referring to the king:
he who had ordered a dead man to lie unburied ultimately turns out to be
himself an animated corpse: ‘Messenger: . . . for when a man’s pleasures have
abandoned him, I do not consider him a living being, but an animated corpse’
(Sophocles 1994a: 111).
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Enrico Di Pastena
of his family, and indeed with that of the whole village: it would be
impossible for them to have missed the disappearance of Pozo and
some of them are aware of the cause.
Pozo, with his strong hold on Miguel’s conscience, is not the
only deceased who is unwilling to disappear in La tierra. Old Juan
materialises on scene, appearing to some of the other characters
and even speaking to them. The presence of the dead on the stage,
a frequent feature in Fernández’s theatre ‒ some of his plays are
mentioned by Di Pastena (2015: 148) ‒ and in that of other Spanish
playwrights of the last generations such as José Sanchis Sinisterra
and Laila Ripoll (Checa Puerta 2014), reveals links with an exten-
sive tradition in which Pedro Páramo and the theatre of Tadeusz
Kantor are especially important. For Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece, it
must be said, Fernández has always expressed his particular predi-
lection. But even before we come to their shared use of the manifest
and obstinate presence of the dead, La tierra and Pedro Páramo have
in common a sort of suspension of time, a quasi-oniric dimension
of expectation, a waiting that is metaphorized in the play through
the unusual, prolonged absence of rain that has been the bane of
the village since Pozo’s murder.33
As regards Kantor, the materialising on scene of the dead and
their interaction with the living are amongst the most powerful
characteristics of his theatre. Of the Polish artist and director, Jan
Kott wrote: ‘He is the Charon who ferries the dead back to our side
along the Stream of Memory’ (Kott 2001: 33).34 Kantor’s theatre was
conceived as an attempt, forever frustrated, to return to the past
and implied a disturbing exchange in the position of the living and
the dead, the very ontology of the former questioned through the
words and behaviour of the latter.35 It may therefore be appositely
33
On frozen time see also what Fernández himself writes in ‘El tiempo
de los sueños y de los milagros’ (Fernández 1994: 188 in particular).
34
Translation by Sylvia Greenup. See also Kantor’s thoughts and the ma-
terial available in the section called ‘Teatro della morte’ in the volume from
which it takes its title, edited by Bablet (Kantor 2003b: 195-238).
35
It is worthwhile mentioning in particular the Spanish stagings of Dead
Class (1975), Wielopole-Wielopole (1980) and Let the Artists Die (1985): La clase
muerta was staged first in Barcelona and in Madrid in March 1983, and in the
following years in other Spanish cities; Wielopole-Wielopole in October 1981
- 190 -
pointed out that in La tierra it is not the two dead people, Pozo and
Juan, who appear as ghosts, but almost all the living.
On the presence of the dead in La tierra and in other plays
by Fernández, one may also feel the impact of Hélène Cixous’s
L’histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cam-
bodge, staged by the Théâtre du Soleil under the direction of Ariane
Mnouchkine at the ‘Museo Ferroviario’ of Madrid during the 1986
Festival de otoño. In the play several hundred Asian-featured dolls
observe from above the events of the difficult years in the recent
history of their country, thus evoking a belief of the Indonesian
people on the relationship between the living and the dead. Finally,
I would mention the tangible conditioning the dead exert on the
life of the living in a text such as Pirandello’s The Life I Gave You.
On more than one occasion, the dead who refuse to leave in
Fernández’s texts function for the living as a vehicle of memory,
they are capable of listening carefully and can help them to inter-
pret events. Out of the silence of his absence, Pozo unleashes (also
through the return of María, which opens up old wounds) Miguel’s
inner turmoil, which will ultimately lead to the overcoming of the
impasse;36 Juan tries to explain the violence that has taken place; the
old man seems to be aware of the fact that the local people possess
a violent soul: ‘La culpa de que mataran a ese chico es de la sangre.
La gente aquí tiene la sangre espesa y mala. Pero hay que joderse,
porque nos ha tocado este agujero’ (scene 17); his words, combined
with the echo of Machado in those of his wife Pilar,37 trace a picture
of Cain-like violence that subtly evokes the origins of the theme of
and ¡Que revienten los artistas! in March 1986, also in Madrid; the capital
also hosted the posthumous Hoy es mi cumpleaños in 1991. Fernández has seen
recordings of the Polish playwright’s works.
36
As a matter of fact, Pozo’s repeated silent appearances on stage, even
after his death, were very skillfully used in the 2007 staging by the company
‘Inconstantes Teatro’, directed by Emilio del Valle.
37
Compare the sentence ‘Esta es tierra para el águila’ in scene 5 to the
verse of the poem ‘Por tierras de España’ in the collection Campos de Castilla:
‘[S]on tierras para el águila, un trozo de planeta / por donde cruza errante la
sombra de Caín’ (Machado 1980: 47, ll. 31-32); in the same poem, at ll. 17-18,
we find ‘el hombre malo del campo y de la aldea, / capaz de insanos vicios y
crímenes bestiales’.
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Enrico Di Pastena
the dos Españas, that prolonged opposition of which Machado was

at once a lucid interpreter and a careful observer, right down to the
rural manifestations of this phenomenon.38
Along similar lines one may interpret a reference to a writer
who is quite distant from Machado both from a human and an
ideological point of view. A passage from the final scene of La tierra,
scene 23, condenses and fuses two passages from Camilo José Cela’s
novel Mazurca para dos muertos. Miguel has just been taken away
by the police:
Llueve con mansedumbre sobre los vivos y sobre los muertos

(scene 23).
Llueve como llovió toda la vida, yo no recuerdo otra lluvia, ni otro co-
lor, ni otro silencio, llueve con lentitud, con mansedumbre, con mono-
tonía, llueve sin principio ni fin, se dice que las aguas vuelven siempre
a sus cauces y no es verdad . . . (Cela 1983: 204).
Llueve, sobre la tierra del monte y sobre el agua de los regatos y de las
fuentes, llueve sobre los tojos y los carballos, las hortensias, los buños
del molino y la madreselva del camposanto, llueve sobre los vivos, los
muertos y los que van a morir, llueve sobre los hombres y los animales
mansos y fieros, sobre las mujeres y las plantas silvestres y de jardín,
llueve sobre el monte Sanguiño y la fonte das Bouzas do Gago en la
que bebe el lobo y a veces alguna cabra perdida y que no vuelve jamás,
llueve como toda la vida y aún como toda la muerte, llueve como en
la guerra y en la paz, da gusto ver llover sin que se sienta el fin, a lo
mejor el fin de la lluvia es el fin de la vida, llueve a Dios dar como
antes de que se inventara el sol, llueve con monotonía pero también
con misericordia, llueve sin que el cielo se harte de llover y llover
(Cela 1983: 248).
38
For example, in the romance ‘La tierra de Alvargonzález’ (Machado
1980: 77, ll. 25-26), in the mentioned Campos de Castilla: ‘Mucha sangre
de Caín / tiene la gente labriega’; as pointed out by Gibson 2007: 238 the
text was written in years when many murders took place in the countryside
around Soria.
- 192 -
Already at the beginning of the novel one finds:
Llueve mansamente y sin parar, llueve sin ganas pero con una infinita
paciencia, como toda la vida, llueve sobre la tierra que es del mismo
color que el cielo, entre blando verde y blando gris ceniciento, y la raya
del monte lleva ya mucho tiempo borrada.
‒ ¿Muchas horas?
‒ No; muchos años. La raya del monte se borró cuando la
muerte de Lázaro Codesal, se conoce que Nuestro Señor no quiso que
nadie volviera a verla (Cela 1983: 248).
Cela’s probable source is the closing passage from The Dead, the
final story from Joyce’s Dubliners:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through
the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon
all the living and the dead (Joyce 1994: 59).
The rain over the Galician landscape is substituted for Joyce’s snow,
but there persists the theme, differently declined in Cela and in
Fernández, of the closeness between the living and the dead.39 In
Mazurca para dos muertos rain is not just a recurring element in
the landscape, it turns out to be first and foremost a narrative leit-
motiv in a text that is formally ambitious, its magmatic plot piv-
oting on a long interior monologue interspersed with fragments
of dialogue. The rain, which opens and closes the narration (if we
exclude the appendix, which is a forensic report), symbolises here
39
In Joyce, however, Gabriel Conroy’s symbolic death seems to involve
the character’s regeneration, which is brought about through his painful com-
ing to terms with the truth about his wife Gretta’s past; see Gozzi 2002: 127 and
the earlier Walzl 1966: 29-30. Various scholars have identified tonal and lexical
closeness, this time in relation to the rain, in Joyce’s later poem ‘She weeps over
Rahoon’, in which a woman weeps over her beloved’s tomb; dated Trieste, 1913,
the poem is part of the 1927 collection Pomes Penyeach, which Joyce composed
in memory of his visit to the cemetery of Rahoon, near Galway, where Michael
Bodkin, Nora Barnacle Joyce’s former fiancé, was buried; as is well known,
Michael and Nora served in part as models Michael Furey and Gretta Conroy
in The Dead. The story was written in 1907.
- 193 -
Enrico Di Pastena
the unchangeable continuity of time as well as the persistence of

barbarity in a rural area ‒ the province of Orense, in Galicia ‒ that
was well known to the novelist (just as the Salnés was for Valle);
one of the regions that during the Civil War was the scene of many
convenient murders, and the subsequent ruthless acts of retaliation.
In the opening it is stated that the incessant rain (an echo perhaps
of other Latin American literary rains?) has hidden the mountain’s
profile on account of a murder, that of young Lázaro Codesal, who
was fighting in Morocco ‒ a situation, therefore, opposite to that of
La tierra, where the water is denied for the same reason for which
here is so abundant. Cela, moreover, explodes linear temporality
and both the narrator and the characters can openly refer to Fabián
Minguela, the killer of other countrymen, as a dead man who has
killed someone else, a dead man, that is, who is still paradoxically
perceived as being alive when he is spoken of (he is referred to as
‘el muerto que mató a Afouto’ or as ‘el muerto que mató a mi di-
funto’ in the text). Yet the most striking feature of the work is the
undergrowth of killings and revenges that vie with one another in
brutality (Minguela is mauled by dogs and his remains are fed to
a pig, who is then served up as a meal to the relatives of one of his
victims), in accordance with that ley del monte, which is often ex-
plicitly referred to in the play; this is an important factor, because
it corroborates, indirectly and through the hypotext, the legitimacy
of a historicising interpretation of La tierra, though it is also true
that in Mazurca para dos muertos Cela seems to relish the sordid
scatological and bestial aspects of human nature rather than to de-
nounce them.
Finally, the mazurka, a Polish couple’s dance, allows us to at least
briefly refer to another reiterated element in José Ramón Fernán-
dez’s body of work: music. Fernández’s uses music to give greater
depth to characters and situations, and sometimes it is linked to the
main themes of individual works, as happens in Mi piedra Rosetta,
which is specifically discussed in relation to this aspect by the play-
wright himself (Fernández 2016a). Though an exploration of the
musical dimension in his work is not possible here, it should be at
least pointed out that the rhythm marked by the sticks during the
ritual dance is one of the semantic nuclei around which Fernández
developed the plot of La tierra (similar sticks were used in the Med-
- 194 -
iterranean sounds of the shows of Lluís Llach’s tour Un pont de mar

blava between October 1993 and September 1995).
In conclusion, by identifying the principle echoes of texts or
situations in La tierra, I have tried to illustrate how this work dia-
logues with other modern and ancient, Spanish and foreign works,
and how it uses these echoes to bolster its metaphorical implica-
tions, whilst also demonstrating its involvement with a cultural and
ideological debate that is still ongoing in Spain. Far from being a
mere assemblage of literary references, the play shows, through its
combination of tradition and originality, how the people of an im-
aginary location, Santa María, have chosen to bury the past, much
like certain regions or indeed countries which themselves have cho-
sen to forget. One man feels instead the need to give decent burial
to one of the victims of that past. The abyss between these two
positions is very much at the centre of La tierra.
- 195 -
Enrico Di Pastena
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Filmography
Armendáriz, Montxo. Tasio, Spain, 1984, 95'.

Camus, Mario. Los santos inocentes, Spain, 1984, 105'.
Dieterle, William. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, USA, 1939, 117'.
Érice, Victor. El espíritu de la colmena, Spain, 1973, 97'.
Garcini, Salvador and Juan Carlos Muñoz. La malquerida, Mexico, 2014, 116
episodes (TV series).
Gutiérrez Aragón, Manuel. La mitad del cielo, Spain, 1986, 120'.
Klimovsky, León. La barraca, Spain, 1979, 540' (TV series).
Moreno Alba, Rafael. Los gozos y las sombras, Spain, 1981, 760' (TV series).
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Edipo re, Italy-Morocco, 1967, 104’.
Romero Marchent, Rafael. Cañas y barro, Spain, 1978, 360' (TV series).
Sinise, Gary. Of Mice and Men, USA, 1992, 115'.
Suárez, Gonzalo. Los pazos de Ulloa, Spain, 1985, 240' (TV series).
Tornatore, Giuseppe. Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Italy, 1988, 155' (first version).
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DI PASTENA Intertextual Resonances JOURNEYS 2017

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Viaggi per scene in movimento

© Copyright 2017 by Pisa University Press srl

progettazione copertina: Centro Stampa di Meucci Roberto

The transnational dimension of literature and research in the huma-

1) Journeys through Changing Landscapes. Literature, Language, Cul-

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know

José Ramón Fernández’s La tierra, first published in 1998, was signif-

of theatre, of the style of Michel Vinaver, who is held in high esteem

tations of novels, that were connected to the rural world.5 Indeed,

onstage at certain points of the action.6 Elsewhere I have highlighted

This dialogue starts on the very threshold of La tierra. In various

Cuando yo tenía doce años,

of verisimilitude in the excessively literary voice of some of the characters in La

Con un cable le dábamos y luego

Aquella perra iba con nosotros

Cuando yo tenía quince años,

La escribía su madre. No recuerdo:

Y, en el sobre, doblados, cinco sellos

Aquella carta no llegó a su destino:

Mi vergüenza es tan grande como mi cuerpo, 30

In the other quotation that precedes the text of La tierra, Sem-

centration camp, as they are reminded of the horrors that were

[U]n teniente americano se dirigía aquel día a unas cuantas decenas de

This second epigraph serves to amplify one of the themes of La

In La tierra García Lorca may be seen as a privileged interloc-

inhuman primitiveness of rural life. In turn, Fernández blurs the

‘manzana’ appear;12 it also happens with a passage in which Lorca

This anecdote goes back to the childhood of the author of Fuente

excessive ‒ as a way in which individuals relate to each other and

tilian meseta, are clearly evoked in Las manos,17 a text co-authored

In particular, in scene LX, the reference is to the novel Las ratas.

in fact signals his deep correspondence with the primeval forces

ters. One of these is Of Mice and Men,20 in which, however, John

around 1993 (though it was published only in 1995), that is before

body in the metropolis. Through the relationship between these

Cleopatra: What shall we do, Enobarbus?

¿Qué vamos a hacer nosotras?

The closing quotation from Shakespeare, however, does not com-

to Fernández,24 though there had been others before (a very famous

Priest: . . . For the city, as you see yourself, is grievously tossed by

This is caused by a heavy sin that weighs upon the polis:

Sophocles recuperates the motif of the mysterious malady that tor-

despite the contrary orders issued by Creon, king of Thebes, who

and observes an unwritten law, the latter because of an old bond of

the dos Españas, that prolonged opposition of which Machado was

Llueve con mansedumbre sobre los vivos y sobre los muertos

Already at the beginning of the novel one finds:

the unchangeable continuity of time as well as the persistence of

iterranean sounds of the shows of Lluís Llach’s tour Un pont de mar

Alvar, Manuel 1987.

Delibes, Miguel 2005.

Fernández José Ramón 2000c.

García García-Herreros, Catalina 2009.

Joyce, James 1994.

Perrotta, Gennaro 1935.

Armendáriz, Montxo. Tasio, Spain, 1984, 95'.

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