The BBC reports that a team of Spanish professors at the University of Granada will be allowed next week to excavate the site where poet and playwright Federico García Lorca is believed to have been buried. Working with the Association of the Recuperation of Historic Memory, which only sounds Orwellian, the team is armed with DNA samples from Lorca's surviving relatives to try and identify the remains of the writer, who was executed near his birthplace by Fascist guards in August 1936.
Often when authors die I find myself writing here, "I know how well known and respected he or she was, although I'm not familiar enough with the work to offer a proper eulogy." Lorca would be an exception to that. I was introduced to Lorca's work in high school -- his play "The House of Bernarda Alba," about five sisters stifled by their mother's rule, is standard Spanish-class stuff -- and eventually worked my way through all his work and two biographies (recommend LORCA, A DREAM OF LIFE over the Ian Gibson). Studying the facts of his life allows students to slot him tidily into a timeline of Spanish literature; he was well known as a member of the artistic movement the "Generation of '27" at the time of his death, which bridges the gap between literature before and after Franco assumed power (at which point most of his works were banned for years).
At the time I studied him Lorca had been dead for over 60 years, but I can't think of another author whose death affected me as profoundly. I was sadder about the death of a 38-year-old Spanish man, to whom I had no ties other than a stack of books and a feeling, than at my own great-grandmother's funeral. I felt a ripple of this sentiment earlier this year, as was perhaps inevitable, amid INFINITE JEST with the reminder that its author would not complete another novel, that next year we'll be toting our copies of THE PALE KING and trying to convince ourselves it's almost as good. It's not as good. It will never be as good. Like Lorca, David Foster Wallace had years of work ahead of him, work we will never see and cannot imagine. Does knowing the little we do know about the circumstances of Wallace's death make it any easier to take? Not really.
I'll be following the dig in Granada, and I hope they will find out what happened, but even giving his remains a proper burial won't erase the legacy of the army that took him to the outskirts of town. This was a regime that had so little respect for human life that it allowed thousands of its own men to die in the mountains building a monstrous tomb meant to memorialize the war dead. Spilling blood for the spilled blood. And how many of those men didn't leave a poem or a play behind to be remembered by? And how many of their names have been forgotten, snapped off family trees in a conflict that was really just the rehearsal dinner to the world's 1940s gore wedding? And how many, how many in the mass graves now?
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