Unamuno

Teaching Unamuno's San Manuel always draws me into different speculations.  This was the first Spanish novel I read years ago, and in many ways, a text that haunts me.  This admission itself has become somewhat of a disciplinary oddity.  Most Hispanists want to either avoid, dismiss or comfortably forget about Unamuno and his "Generation's" España oscura.  (This tendency is curious in light of what one professor recently told me: a specialist in Latin American literature said it was a tragedy that Unamuno has become so overdetermined in the peninsular tradition.  Geographical issues aside, I wonder what would happen if Latin Americanists attempted to claim him?)    For practical reasons, I do not have this luxury of forgetting.  One of my exam questions departs from the obsessive trope of landscape in the Generation of 1898.  I have looking into their own roots in the Insitución Libre de Enseñanza, krausismo and the political atmosphere of the 19th century.

As a sort of pretext to switch from the short story to the novel, we discussed several descriptions of the novel from Kundera, Vargas Llosa, J. Goytisolo and Borges.  So throughout this reading, I returned again to the peculiar framing at work in San Manuel.  Ángela begins to narrate her memories of San Manuel and slowly disappears into the dialogues and anecdotes of her text.  Her voice fuses into a multiplicity of narrators and audiences.  Put differently, other voices and objects seep into her text, calling attention to their own presences and projects.  Among these latter entities, the final authorial voice is not Ángela's but Unamuno's.  He shifts her "confesión íntima" into a sort of confusion.  She concludes:

Y al escribir ahora, aquí... cuando empiezan a blanquear con mi cabeza is recuerdos, está nevando, nevando sobre el lago, nevando sobre la montaña....  Y no sé lo que es verdad y lo que es mentira, ni lo que vi y lo que soñe. (129)

This passage again calls attention to landscape.  Not so much as a discrete collection of external entities, but rather as a dimly lit interior terrain.  Yet this interiority is not completely sealed away but forced to touch a community of voices, those of her narrative.  The same might be said of Unamuno's rurality.  Despite Unamuno's presentation of a rural ambience untouched by modernization or History (en mayúscula).  It cannot remain pure and outside of History.  Instead, Ángela herself causes them to touch and repel from one another (her education in Renada and, of course, her brother's rhetoric).

The confusion of "la confesión íntima" results in a transference from a letter to a novel, a genre that Unamuno determines is "el más íntimo".  This last point is counterintuitive.  How is a novel more intimate than a poem?  The former is often perceived as a packed space, full of voices and story lines while that latter is often a concentrated mediation of the lyric function.  In light of my comments above, it seems that Unamuno's suggestion is precisely about the relations between the various metaphors and narrative layers.  His "novela de tesis" is not some ironic posturing, but a sincere (albeit feigned on certain levels) between different modes of thinking and being.