unwriting the good fight The shocking assertion only makes sense when it is reread through the discussion
thatthe life that makes this claim has undertaken before it reaches this conclusion.
It does not claim that there is an essence behind itself (as in ‘I represent everything
that is Spanish’); neither does it insist on a firm political status (as in ‘I am the
voice of the Spanish Republic’). This Spain is the many, and often conflicting,
positions of its individuals and collectives, including the Spanish nation and even
Franco’s Falange. They are held together in an odd merger of an organic and a
technological image sketched in stanza 12 as heart, eyes, lungs, but also shops and
squares of ‘the city’: in short, by being citizens. This collective civic identity does
not submerge individual desires, anxieties, and weaknesses, but it challenges them
to arrive at ethically correct and responsible actions and decisions—without the
promise of an ultimate elevation to or salvation in a greater transcendental identity,
such as that of an eternal Spanishness. Ultimately, one could even argue, the Spain
of Auden’s poem potentially includes anyone who associates with the necessary
decisions concerning Spain’s citizens, even theinternational fighters and supporters
of either side of the conflict, be they on Spanish territory or not.
This non-essentialist interpretation of ‘Spain’ in Auden’s poem is the only
reading that overcomes an otherwise insurmountable logical flaw between the
poem’s insistence on generalizations, historical and cultural networks, and the
entanglement and mutual generation of private and public. That ‘Spain’ is defined
not only asachoice andadecision, but as ‘yourchoice,yourdecision’ (my italics)
supports the inclusive character of the appeal. It may read like propaganda, but it is
a rhetoric that is self-undermining and therefore critical, since it stands on its own,
without a clear definition of who ‘you’ is, and no easy identification of a common
goal or enemy either.
The strong rhetorical stress on the declaration of ‘Spain’ is coupled with equally
powerful hints that, whatever choices and decisions are made, the outcomes
might be tragic. These hints of the poem are structural, and they play with genre
conventions. The poem’s twenty-three stanzas fall neatly into six ‘Yesterday’ ones
and six that outline the ethical argument sketched above and are connected by
‘As’ and ‘And’. These represent the two initial acts of a traditional five-act play,
exposition (the poem’s general history) and dramatic build-up (its ethical argument
and self-identification), and it is not difficult to figure out that this play is not
going to be a comedy, but a tragedy. The next two stanzas represent the dramatic
climax of the third act, in which for the first time a lyrical ‘I’ appears. The ‘Spain’
declaration marks the highlight and end of this third act.^15 It is followed by three
anti-climactic stanzas focusing on collectives in the shape of the many, them, and
finally us, which form the fourth act. The fifth act consists of five stanzas starting
with ‘To-morrow’ and then ‘To-day’. Finally there is a one-stanza epilogue.
(^15) Samuel Hynes even states: ‘In terms of my metaphor of the ’thirties as a tragic drama, Auden’s
‘‘Spain’’ is about the third act’ (The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s
(London: Faber, 1976), 253).