unwriting the good fight reader to understand that it is never an unproblematically given array of facts.^7
Neitheris it an ontological or teleological force of the Hegelian kind, a sort of
spirit driving humankind along. In Auden’s poems history is always at least partly
a construction, even a poetic one. Yet it is a construction with real consequences
for those who construct it and those who are constructed by it. As I have argued
in greater detail elsewhere,^8 it resembles a concept formulated in the 1960s and
1970s by the French philosopher Michel Foucault: that of a discursive formation.
By this he means systems constructed by humans as integral parts of their culture,
which, in turn, construct more systems, until, in the final consequence, they appear
inevitable, ‘natural’, and self-determined.^9 ‘Spain 1937’ shows both the construction
of such systems, or ‘truths’ as Foucault somewhat provocatively calls them, and
their eventual effect as almost metaphysical Truths with a capital ‘T’, now seemingly
removed from, if not in control of, human existence.
The initial stanzas of ‘Spain 1937’ engage in a pronouncedly pedestrian construc-
tion of history through pedantic references to its factual and material frameworks
and requisites, such as trade routes, measuring instruments, and defence works.
They also play jokingly with the ambivalence of material reality and anecdote,
science and superstition. Reckoning with shadows might as much refer to sundials
as it could refer to the story of Diogenes asking Alexander the Great to stop
blocking the sun. Assessing insurance by cards sounds surprisingly contemporary,
but appears to refer to fortune-telling.
Yetintothissometimesplayfulandsometimesseriousmaterialistoratleastlargely
factual framework, the poem already inserts ‘Truths’, the Western teleological
conception of history as moving from antiquity via the Middle Ages to the
Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and even colonialism and imperialism.
What hovers over all these developments (and what is granted the only other verb in
the introductory section) in the manner of the many airmen in Auden’s early poems,
with their detached and simultaneously endangered and dangerous overviews, is
a fortress.^10 As a military structure, it remains the poem’s only overt reference
to conflict, until in the fourth stanza a trial and feuds appear, and eventually
the term ‘struggle’, which then takes over the poem together with its contrastive
epithet (contrastive to ‘yesterday’), ‘to-day’. Its equally important, though more
submerged, function is that of doubling the perspective the poem has exhibited so
far. Significantly, the text lacks a lyrical I, and instead presents its overview of the
(^7) Stan Smith goes as far as regarding ‘Homage to Clio’ as a belated response to ‘Spain 1937’ (Stan
Smith,W. H. Auden(Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 171).
(^8) See Rainer Emig,W. H. Auden: Towards a Postmodern Poetics(London: Macmillan, 2000), 92–3
and 111–14. 9
See Michel Foucault,The Archaeology of Knowledge,trans.A.M.SheridanSmith(London:
Tavistock, 1974); andidem,The Order of Things,trans.A.M.SheridanSmith(London:Tavistock,
1974). 10
Carpenter calls the perspective ‘hawk-like, Hardyesque’ inW. H. Auden, 217.