Voice and Performance in the Civil War Poetry of Leon Felipe

n a very real sense all of Leon Felipe's poetry since 1936 is poetry about war. It is war poetry because even then, in 1936-1939, when the Spanish Civil War was dividing his country, his verse already transcended the conflict, to some degree, and recorded the perennial war that Man, or many men, had been waging-and losing-against the powerful. This war had not been fought between republicans and fascists, but between human beings and the hatreds that History elicits within them: Y hay que matar al odio. Mafiana, cuando el odio se haya caido de nuestras miradas, de nuestro coraz6n y de nuestras manos, como un arma intitil, como una herramienta inservible, sobre las ruinas, el Ilanto y sangre de Espafia, aparecera no un comunista ni un fascista, sino un espafiol: el hombre que ha buscado al hombre con mais empefio en este mundo, por encima de todas las ideologias y de todos los partidos (El payaso, 31).' What Le6n Felipe inveighs against are those endemic defects of character in the Spaniard which had culminated in the Civil War. These failings have allowed injustice to reign across the map of Spanish history and are allowing the victors to complete a task begun long ago: the subversion, the appropriation of the people's language by the powerful or those who seek to achieve power. In this way the few suppress the voice of the many. Such a forcible suppression of one's legitimate means of expression places victims and victimizers in a situation which the French critic Jean-Frangois Lyotard has recently analyzed and which he names differend: I would like to call differend the case wherein the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes on that account a victim .... A case of diffirend between two parties takes place when the regulation of the conflict which opposes them is done in the of one of the parties while the injustice suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom (5). In his poetry Le6n Felipe wants to reverse the process. He is less intent in pursuing the struggle for his homeland, which he has given up for lost, than in reclaiming that most important patrimony, language, the necessary speech defined by Unamuno as la sangre del espiritu (42). Le6n Felipe's constant reshuffling of his verse, his frequent self-quotation, the addition of commentary to the various editions, are best understood in this light. This context also clarifies two characteristics of his poetry: the changes of register of the poetic voice and the implicit orality of his verse. Le6n Felipe establishes himself in a performing situation every time he writes-he had been an actor in his youth and became translator and director of plays in Mexico.2 He seems to declaim the poem. Often the situation is defined by a prose prolog, or commentary, out of which the verse rises in a new pitch of anger, despair, indignation, invective. Similarly, when he quotes himself, he has established a new prose 'platform,' from which the lines of previous poems will acquire new significance. This significance is also transmitted by the commentary that often follows the verse. (The practice of self-quotation appears from the late fifties on, in particular, while the use of prose prologs begins in the late thirties.) One purpose of this practice is to insist on the unity of the voice proper and the yo poetico because Le6n Felipe never wanted to assume another voice, a written, literary voice: El poeta habla desde el nivel

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