Abstract

Tragedy arranges events in a narrative which secures the victory of a superior necessity or fate, a victory reaffirmed in the protagonist's death. Lorca's tragedies Bodas de sangre and Yerma, however, manage both to repeat the deadly story and at the same time to disturb it, disrupting the inexorable logic at its core. Since the tragic presupposes the usurpation of human agency by a transcendent force, these dramas open up a space for creative action in the very tragic setting in which such a possibility seems to be most radically denied. ;Is fate accountable for the characters' lack of control over their acts? The protagonists experience their life as predetermined by fate because of the compulsion to repeat a narrative of the past or the future, which they project into the present time of the play. The result is a loss of the capacity to interact and to act creatively. This loss of agency, and the subsequent absence of an agent who can be held responsible for their actions, leads the characters to construct a quasi-divine otherness, fate, to which they attribute the control over their lives. ;Tragic events are not unleashed by impersonal fate, but rather dictated by the characters themselves in their narrative. Since as narrators they restrict the alternatives available to them, the only way they see to exercise some agency is to reenact, time and again, the fixed role-patterns they have fashioned for themselves. In so doing they bring about the fate they have constructed and insert a tragic drama into the plays's present. ;Lorca's characters reenact the tragic events within a framework which suggests the positive vision denied to them. Rather than celebrating necessary death, these tragedies portray the protagonists' illusion of destiny, and poetically lament their inability to envision life. Here, for the spectator, the death of the characters ceases to be inexorable. ;By reconfiguring the tragic as lack of human interaction, Lorca's tragedy redescribes creative action as primarily creating ethical relationships in a space for concern and care which secures, in turn, the voluntary and free dimension of every other act