Eclipses in culture: from Stephen King to Kubrick through Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Bonnie Tyler and Rubens

On August 12, Spain will become the best place in the world to enjoy a historic total solar eclipse, the first of its kind in the Iberian Peninsula for more than 100 years, specifically in 1912. In any case, in culture, this phenomenon has been the protagonist of fiction, literature, painting or music.

Beyond scientific interest, the momentary disappearance of the Sun has served Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Virginia Woolf, Bonnie Tyler and Pink Floyd, among others, as a narrative engine to save lives, commit unpunished crimes or articulate metaphors about the human condition and the passage of time.

In classic literature, Mark Twain turned the phenomenon into a survival trick in ‘A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’, where his protagonist avoids the bonfire by pretending to control the Sun thanks to his prior knowledge of the astronomical event.

This same premise of using astronomy as a resource for salvation was adopted by the Belgian author Hergé in the comic ‘The Adventures of Tintin: The Temple of the Sun’, where the famous reporter saves his companions from being sacrificed by an Inca tribe.

This phenomenon has also served to frame darker stories, such as that of the American writer Stephen King in his novel ‘Dolores Claiborne’, where the protagonist takes advantage of the gloom and confusion of a solar eclipse to get rid of her abusive husband.

Connected to this novel, King also published ‘Gerald’s Game’, in which the protagonist experiences a traumatic vision that occurs exactly during the solar eclipse of 1963.

Literary journalism and essays have not been immune to this event either. In fact, author Virginia Woolf immortalized in her diaries the experience of the 1927 eclipse in Yorkshire, which also inspired her famous 1928 essay, ‘The Sun and the Fishes’.

Meanwhile, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard addressed this topic in the chronicle ‘Total Eclipse’ in 1982, an essay in which she narrates the trip she made with her husband in February 1979 to the Yakima Valley, in the center of Washington state, the only place in the United States where that solar eclipse could be fully appreciated.

In the cinematographic field, one of the most iconic images in the history of cinema belongs to Stanley Kubrick with ‘A Space Odyssey’ (1968), where a cosmic alignment between the Sun, the Moon and the Earth marks a key moment in human evolution.

In the musical field, Bonnie Tyler published ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, while Carly Simon in ‘You’re So Vain’ (1972), evoked the trip on a private plane to contemplate the totality.

Furthermore, the album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ (1973), by the British band Pink Floyd, became a milestone by closing its repertoire with the song ‘Eclipse’, a reflection on the harmony of the universe overshadowed by the Moon.

In the same sense, ‘Blackstar’, the last studio album released by David Bowie before his death, uses the iconography of the total eclipse in his music videos and conceptual art as a symbol of transit, end of cycle and existential mystery.

In the 21st century, modern audiovisual culture continues to find in the solar eclipse a catalyst for mystery, as demonstrated by the television series ‘Heroes’ (2006) or the horror novel ‘The Strain’ (2009), by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, where the shadow served as cover for a vampire invasion. Del Toro also played the protagonist of Eclipse in ‘Hellboy 2: The Golden Army’.

Although not so directly, the ‘Twilight’ saga or the ‘Game of Thrones’ universe have used this astronomical phenomenon to configure the films and series.

THE VISUAL IMPACT OF ECLIPSES ON PAINTING

In art history, painting has also captured the visual impact of eclipses over the centuries. During the Baroque, artists such as Peter Paul Rubens incorporated the phenomenon as a lighting resource in works with sacred themes such as ‘The Elevation of the Cross’ (1610) or ‘The Miracle of Saint Ignatius of Loyola’ (1617), where the celestial gloom reinforces the drama of the scene.

Also in the 20th century, the phenomenon was approached from currents such as surrealism and expressionism and, in fact, Frida Kahlo included the alignment of the Sun and the Moon in her work ‘Self-portrait on the border between Mexico and the United States’ (1932) after witnessing the eclipse that year in Detroit, while the African-American artist Alma Thomas dedicated her abstract canvas ‘The Eclipse’ in 1970 to exploring the event within her series of works on space exploration.

For his part, the German painter and architect Cosmas Damian Asam left in ‘The Vision of Saint Benedict’ (1735) one of the first documented pictorial representations of the solar corona after witnessing a total eclipse in 1706.

Later, in the 19th century, the Italian landscape painter Ippolito Caffi impregnated his urban architecture with the effect of the lunar shadow in his oil painting ‘Sun Eclipse in Venice’ (1842).