the commedia dell'arte ship that dare not speak its name and García Lorca and Dalí

[cimorene]

cimorene: Speaking of my crack ship¹,
perhael: I love that you even have a Commedia dell'arte crack ship.

Apparently Pierrot was taken up as something of a mascot or symbol in the early 1900s by queers or gay men because of his unlucky in love angle, but I couldn't really find much with about queerness and him and Harlequin via a websearch, and somehow there's not really any visual art of them in a particularly slashy context that I can find (apart from the ubiquitous love triangle with Pierrot weeping as Harlequin makes off with a girl, which is admittedly open to such interpretation), even though they've been extremely popular subjects of visual art and iconography for said at-least-200-years (and longer, but the older stuff isn't as easy to find)...

...but what I did find, the only significant written result really, was this scholarly work about Spanish artist and poet Federico García Lorca and his identification with Pierrot, which also revealed to me the apparently well-known-to-scholars fact that García Lorca spent years pining after his close friend, Dalí, after at least one kinky threesome where Dalí watched him with a woman. Apparently García Lorca failed to 'persuade' Dalí to 'change the nature of their relationship', so some sort of active friendzoning was going on, and the writer seems to argue in this book that Harlequin in García Lorca's work can be taken as symbolic of Dalí.

Is this another thing like Tchaikovsky and Hans Christian Andersen where everybody but me already knew about it? Admittedly, you could argue (and plenty of men with bisexual experiences like the above do) that Dalí wasn't queer, and he's the better known of the two. It's less odd that nobody told me about García Lorca because I was only taught about him tangentially in high school Spanish anyway. Still, this discovery distracted me very effectively from my efforts to unearth more written material on queering Harlequin and Pierrot - fortunately, because I still think there's too much of them paired together in the popular imagination for a queer angle to actually be as scarce as the search suggests and it's quite frustrating.

1. To be fair, the reason I say 'crack ship' is more that the idea of shipping clowns makes me laugh incredulously, not that shipping the (for the past two centuries at least) two most prominent characters (Harlequin and Pierrot) together is odd.

Comments

[hebethen]

I had no idea! So there you go, not only was it not just you, but also you have now committed acts of Education^TM :P

[yvannairie]

So, fun fact -- this year my friend got into Five Nights At Freddy's because it has jester robots they completely fell in love with and the first thing they drew were Harlequin/Pierrot versions of the characters.

We are now semi-seriously planning a commedia dell'arte inspired AU for the thing, which will in fact end up being Harlequin/Pierrot (or technically Harlequin/Pierrot/Colombina -- Colombina has two hands \:) ) and while we were talking about it I went "wait."

"I know this from somewhere."

"I know I've thought about this before."

[cimorene]

😂😂😂😂

Pierrot in a happy threesome wouldn't have a reason to cry! All those images of him pining and sadly composing music to the moon while the happy couple do something in the foreground (or background) would become moot. I mean, you can still have an angsty plot before it works out though of course. (And also of course, the slightly later interpretations of Pierrot have already converted his pining to existential angst, so he can just be worried about nuclear apocalypse or solipsism or the fact that you can never go home again or colony collapse disorder.)

[yvannairie]

Pierrot as the beloved Eeyore of a lovey-dovey couple is actually a fantastic set-up for polyfic and now I'm immediately going to go figure out which of my OT3's fit it the best.

[cimorene]

This probably overwrites the earlier trope where Harlequin steals Columbine from Pierrot.

Pierrot must be sort of gently moping/philosophizing around, awkwardly and monochromatically, like a cartoon goth who just happens to be half white, and then just get gently lured/seduced by trickster Harlequin and pretty coquette Columbine.