Ethos testimonial y contra-canon (El caso de Gabriel Celaya)

Abstract

The work of Gabriel Celaya (San Sebastian, 1911-1991) consolidates a poetic trend, known as “social poetry”, against four decades of dictatorship of General Franco after Spanish civil war, allowing us to reconstruct a space of distinctive positions from his autopoetics in prose and metapoems. For Celaya, poem must be dialogical and perlocutionary: it does things and speaks. To speak means to talk with others, to exchange ideas and values, to share. To do things with words means to take active action, to be part of social space, to interfere against power restrictions, to replicate impositions of regime, even from such a small place that means nothing in real terms. This possibilism is better than remaining in silence or in a paralyzed muteness. Poetry and essay both help to rationalize functions of art, figurations of poet and nature of poetic act, all vectors that converge in modulation of a testimonial ethos for lyrical genre, a discursive type basically hybrid and rarely applied to poetry. Our study will explore textual and contextual indexes that support Celaya’s authorial project and that enact a contract to approach texts in a specific way, thereby formulating a contra-canon of resistance to power, during period that some critics maliciously called the waste land of Spanish post-civil war.