Echoes of Walter Starkie’s Voice from The Road To Santiago in Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way.

Abstract

The Irish hispanist Walter Starkie defined himself as a ‘wanderer’ and proof of that are his multiple travels around Rumania, Hungary, Italy and Spain following the gypsies. Considering the nomadism of his character, one can understand why he felt attracted by St. James’ Road or ‘the road that never changes’ to the extent of dedicating his book The Road to Santiago, published in 1957, to the adventures of his fourth pilgrimage. Ian Gibson claims that Starkie’s travel book could have served as inspiration to the surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel when he composed the script for The Milky Way in 1969. Both personalities could have certainly coincided in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid and they both had a solid opinion on religious issues. What is more, both the book and the film show the extent to which Starkie and Buñuel make a journey around time and space following similar discursive strategies in their division concerning past and present. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the possible interdiscursive relationships between Buñuel’s film The Milky Way and Starkie’s travel book The Road to Santiago in a time of political turmoil in Ireland and Spain.