Unamuno on ruralización

I taught Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mártir in my intro to Hispanic literatures class.  In a way, it's a curious repetition, as I read the novel many years ago in a class structured around the same anthology, Aproximaciones.


While similar fault lines in Unamuno's thinking occurred to me this time, I was certainly struck by the discussion Nature and the rural space in different tonalities.  Unamuno's position is, of course, infamously contradictory.  On the one hand, he praises the timeless existence and illusion (delusion) of the Castilian countryside.  It's nicely placed outside of Spain's official decaying History (into la introhistoria).  Yet, at certain points, he rails against neocasticismo:


La civilización, y con ella la cultura y la humanidad de sentimientos nacieron principal y supremamente en las ciudades.  Y en éstas nacieron hasta la comprensión y sentimiento estético del campo mismo, llevados a los campesinos por hombres de ciudad o en la ciudadanía formados (135).


En torno a casticismo perhaps elaborates Unamuno's intent more fully, attempting to break out of any isolationist tendencies lurking in Spain.  The exchange of ideas inevitably knows no borders.  So culture should not be conceived through them (his analogue is science).


A similar point is proclaimed by Lázaro (before he fulfills his namesake): "Civilización es lo contrario de ruralización" (ibid).  Unamuno's words gloss Lázaro's into a kind of over-writing, oversignification of the countryside signifier.  The landscape remains static.  Its meaning comes from elsewhere.  What I do like about this is the honesty.  Ángela, the narrator, paints Nature the same way: "¡Cómo siente, cómo anima don Manuel a la Naturaleza!" (148-49).  There is no mention of the reverse: Nature animating humans.  There is no insistence on Nature's animation or activity.  To relate this to a previous post of Reichmann, this invisible center of Natura naturans is understood as nowhere, absent.  The presence that does matter is that of things (not words) as Ángela mentions in the first chapter.


I would not claim that the Generation of 98 escape the inevitable loop between city and countryside, but there is a latent awareness of it.