SOURCE: Del Rio, Angel. Introduction to Three Exemplary Novels, by Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Angel Flores, pp. 11-33. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1956.

[In the following essay, Del Rio provides an overview of contemporary American responses to Unamuno and demonstrates that Three Exemplary Novels “are highly representative of Unamuno's conception of the tragic character,” noting that “the central idea in all [Unamuno's] fiction is the struggle to create faith from doubt and ethics from inner life.”]

I cannot help wondering, rereading these three strange stories thirty-five years after their first publication, what will be the modern American reader's reaction to them. Their singularity was as great in 1920 as it is today, but it could more easily go unnoticed because their author was then widely recognized as the most important of contemporary Spanish writers, while today his name is less generally familiar. The Three Exemplary Novels seem, in their bareness, equally removed from actual experience as the raw material of literary creation and from current literary devices and fashions. But their relevance to the modern temper of anxiety and self-searching is perhaps greater than ever before. No matter how alien they may seem superficially to the prevailing taste, be it inclined toward violent naturalism or toward complex psychological probing, they still obviously deal with elemental forces of human personality, and they still convey, with their extreme, deceitful simplicity, the same sense of power that emanates from all of Miguel de Unamuno's works. For Unamuno, though a great writer and a great thinker, was above all a tremendously powerful and original personality. No Spanish voice was heard during the fifty years of his active intellectual life which could compare with his in the strength of his passion nor in the profound seriousness with which he challenged every complacency, whether of literature, politics, or philosophy. He was primarily a nonconformist, a spiritual rebel in the tradition of the great heretics: a searcher for a truth that was not rational, but of that living sort which man has to find within himself.

Unamuno was known in European learned and literary circles, especially French and Italian ones, as early as 1913; the first English translation of his work, The Tragic Sense of Life, appeared in 1921. But his real prominence in America began in 1924, when one of the periodic eruptions of Spanish politics brought his name into the limelight. His defiance of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, followed by his exile, made of him a sort of liberal hero. The Paris newspaper Le Quotidien arranged for his escape from the small Canary Island where he had been confined, and sent a boat to rescue him. Articles appeared about him in such publications as The New York Times and The Literary Digest. Translations followed: the third story in the present volume appeared in Best Continental Short Stories of 1924-25; Knopf published in succession Essays and Soliloquies, the Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, and the novel Mist. Critics like Mark Van Doren, Eliseo Vivas, and Edwin Muir recognized Unamuno as a somewhat outlandish expounder of modern anxieties. His vogue increased in 1930 when, almost at the founding of the Spanish Republic, he returned triumphantly from exile.

Of greater literary significance were the appraisal of John Dos Passos in Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) and Waldo Frank in Virgin Spain (1926). Both Dos Passos and Frank had a lasting interest in Spanish culture and could not but be attracted to the man who was considered the greatest living figure of Spanish literature and so in the first rank of those whom Frank called “the awakeners.” In the fields of religious and philosophical scholarship also Unamuno was admired. John A. Mackay, the present head of Princeton Theological Seminary, has acknowledged his debt to the Spanish thinker and has called him “Europe's most outstanding man of letters in the early decades of the present century.” Warner Fite, author of Moral Philosophy and The Living Mind, a dissenter from the school of American pragmatism, wrote to a colleague: “I like him for his ‘unbridled romanticism,’ but above all because I can see in each page that Don Miguel knows very clearly what he is saying. His is a romanticism not of one who ignores the philosophy of schools, but of one whose soul has struggled at some moment with all its problems.”

Of recent years, American interest in Unamuno has centered not so much on his political ideas and influence as on his search for a transcendent motivation in personal life and on his remarkable “Spanishness.” William Jay Smith, reviewing a study of Unamuno recently in The New York Times, said of him: “No figure in modern literature has been more personal than Miguel de Unamuno, and yet there is no personality more difficult to define and assess. He himself disliked easy classifications: he was a philosopher and poet, a novelist and teacher, an essayist and political prophet, but above all, he was the incarnation of his country, one whose consciousness was ‘a Spanish consciousness, made in Spain.’”

This characteristic of “Spanishness” in Unamuno, if over-emphasized, tends to obscure the larger and truer view of him as a writer who thought primarily of man as both personal and universal. He believed that by probing deeply the character of man belonging to a time and a place, one can discover what is universal and common to all men, what constitutes the brotherhood of the race. Nevertheless an analysis of Unamuno as the prototype of the Spaniard may furnish a key to his characteristic themes and literary devices, thereby deepening and enriching an understanding of Three Exemplary Novels.

Unamuno lived, as few men and writers have lived, in conflict and contradiction, and it is precisely this living in inner strife which constitutes the core of his thought, of his literary work, of his significance.

Contradiction in him had many roots. A voracious reader, he absorbed the whole legacy of Western thought, from the Bible and the classics (he was a Professor of Greek) up to the writings of his contemporaries. Besides the ancient languages he read in sixteen modern ones. When few Europeans cared about North American literature, Unamuno was familiar with William James, Emerson, Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and many less significant figures. He learned Danish expressly for the purpose of reading Kierkegaard in the original, and became under his influence a forerunner of existentialist thought. He assimilated the works of Rousseau and Ibsen, Carlyle and Leopardi, Flaubert and Mazzini, Kant and Hegel, as well as those of Protestant theologians from Luther to such moderns as Ritschl, Harnack, Troeltsch and others, not to speak of those tormented spirits and masters of personal and religious anxiety, like Pascal or De Sénancour, with whom, as with Kierkegaard, he felt a particular spiritual kinship. He had an astonishing capacity to absorb the substance of his reading, to turn ideas into personal experience and to use them in his constant search for a personal truth. As he explained in his essay La ideocracia, he hated the tyranny of ideas to which, under the influence of rationalism, Western culture had submitted for centuries. He himself proclaimed a new creed of “ideophobia”: ideas were not to be worshipped nor followed blindly, but were to be spent, by using them as shoes are used; they were to be subordinated to and made a part of life, the basic reality. Not life in a general and abstract sense, but the life of each individual, each concrete man of flesh and bone, who in Unamuno's view, is the subject and supreme object of all philosophy.

What we have said thus far is, substantially, that Unamuno was a typical intellectual of his time: the decades between the eighteen-seventies and the nineteen-thirties. He has to be associated with that group of thinkers who, following the romantic impulse, revolted against reason in the name of life: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, the irrationalists, pragmatists and vitalists—intellectuals all of them, who, reaching a point of saturation, reacted for intellectual reasons against the intellect and intellectuality. What differentiates Unamuno from the rest of the group is that, thoroughly Europeanized as he was, he turned violently against the European tradition. He made of quixotism a new religion and preached a crusade to bring back the knighterrant of La Mancha to ransom the European soul from bondage to the cult of reason and material happiness. Taking pride in the fact that Spain was often considered a half-African country, he proclaimed the need to Africanize Europe.

In Unamuno, as in all public figures, there was undoubtedly a streak of exhibitionism; he enjoyed his role of dissenter. Nothing could better define his personality and thought than the title of one of his books: Contra esto y aquello (Against This and That). On the other hand, there cannot be the slightest doubt that he was profoundly and dramatically sincere. To understand the basis of conflict in him we have to look further than that dualism of Being and Reason which he shared with his European contemporaries. The real source of Unamuno's significance as the incarnation of tragic contradiction is to be found in the structure of Spanish history. Contradiction and conflict have become part of the Spanish being, and Unamuno, well prepared for it by temperament and education, chose to make of it the center of his spiritual life.

Spain shares with other European countries the great tradition of the West: Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Christian, the Germanic invasions. But she has had other historical experiences which set her apart. She experienced in the Middle Ages eight centuries of living contact with two great Semitic cultures, the Arab and the Jewish. She is the only modern European nation which has passed through a complete imperial cycle, having created and lost a vast empire. On the threshold of modern times she was the Defender of the Catholic Faith, the champion of the Counter Reformation. The result was, by the end of the sixteenth century, a deadly isolation from those main currents of European thought which carried the seeds of the great achievements of Western culture during the last three hundred years.

Thus the history of Spain became a permanent drama. On the one hand she could not renounce her European tradition. On the other she could not compromise, in the Age of Reason, the principles of the fighting Catholic Faith which had come to be the very root of her national character as well as the justification of her struggle against the stream of modern history. Since the eighteenth century Spanish intellectual life has been characterized by the efforts of enlightened minorities to keep up with modern ideas and forms of life, while preserving the essential traits of the national spirit. A country divided, at odds with itself, Spain has lived for two centuries in a permanent state of civil war, violent at certain moments, concealed or repressed at others.

Unamuno's generation, the generation of '98, asserted itself by the intensity with which it felt this national discord. It was not composed of historians or political thinkers, but of artists and poets, highly subjective according to the literary climate of the moment. Each one expressed in his own way the dismal feeling of a fatherland in perpetual crisis, endeavoring at the same time to open new vistas for the future. Together they produced the highest literature to come out of Spain since the Golden Age. After the initial impulse, they followed different paths. Unamuno, more than any of the others, continued to identify himself with the tragic problem of Spain. By wrestling with the conflict of a whole nation he came to wrestle, as few other thinkers of our epoch have, with the essential problems of life, of death, and of human existence.

He was a liberal, and for many years was considered a prophet of regeneration, but he carried the two Spains within him and felt at ease with neither. Thus he was the fiercest critic of the Monarchy; thus, though one of the fathers of the Republic, he soon turned against it to accept, though but for a few days, the rebels of 1936. Nothing could have been further from his spirit than the Franco regime, and he tried again, so far as circumstances permitted in those days of totalitarian terror, to shout his protest. So he died on the last night of that tragic year—in complete despair, we can but imagine, at the sight of his country's Cain complex unleashed in all its fury. He wanted a whole Spain, not a divided one, as in his writing he strove for the idea of the whole man.

While for the rest of the world Unamuno has therefore become the embodiment of the Spanish spirit, to many of his countrymen he is the incarnation of rebellion, of all that they consider negative and harmful to Spanish tradition. Not long ago, at the celebration of the seventh centenary of the University of Salamanca, of which he was the most eminent professor and rector in modern times, the bishop of the diocese prohibited a homage that had been prepared for Unamuno. A number of Catholic authors now criticize him for the heretic quality of his thought—heretic, that is, from the point of view of Catholicism. And with reason, for Unamuno's religion, like everything else about him, was deeply personal. Perhaps no better description has been given of the roots of his inner conflict than that of Hernan Benitez in El drama religioso de Unamuno: he was a man of “a Protestant mind and a Catholic heart.”

The Three Exemplary Novels are highly representative of Unamuno's conception of the tragic character and of his original and totally arbitrary idea of what a novel should be. Their conciseness as compared to his other works of fiction gives the reader a sharper view of his power to concentrate in elemental terms the assertiveness of human personality with its inner contradictions and conflicts. For the novel was to Unamuno chiefly a medium of expression for a philosophy which could not be systematized—a method of vitalizing thought. As he himself said, “reason annihilates and imagination completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it is imagination that gives life.”

The central idea in all his fiction is the struggle to create faith from doubt and ethics from inner strife. Life is a constant wrestling with mystery, a drama with two main characters: man and an everelusive God, i.e. elusive in terms of rational certainty. The essence of human personality he finds in a proposition of Spinoza's Ethics: “Everything, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.” But men are mortal, and they cannot reconcile themselves to ignoring what is to become of them. They cannot reconcile their feeling of life, their urge for eternity, with the mystery of death. Faith gives them a solution: God, at least the Christian God, is the warrantor of eternity. But reason and science have destroyed the ground where Faith is born and grows. As a result, modern man is bound to live in doubt—not rational Cartesian doubt, but vital existential doubt. This is the root of what Unamuno calls “the tragic sense of life,” because for him the impossibility of certainty is not a source of skepticism, pessimism or renunciation, but rather of energy for the constant quixotic strife. Life itself is nothing but that strife: man is forced to struggle in uncertainty and at the same time to seek after truth. This means that he is forced to live in “agony,” an agony inherently tragic. “If it is nothingness that awaits us,” he concludes, “let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us fight against it quixotically.”

For sheer power and for bareness of literary devices, Three Exemplary Novels can hardly be compared with anything currently in vogue. In structure and tone they are closer to drama than to any form of narrative literature. Their harshness and their stifling atmosphere of passion are reminiscent of some of the plays of Strindberg (a writer very much influenced by Ibsen, as Unamuno was in his youth) or of O'Neill. The significant difference is that Strindberg and O'Neill are naturalistic authors whose works are studies in hatred and lust, while Unamuno's aims are predominantly philosophical and metaphysical: he does not attempt to foster psychological understanding of human behavior but to give, as he would say, “glimpses of the deep mystery of man's soul and conscience.” It is in this sense that his works are related to existentialist literature.

The three stories here included are typical of Unamuno. Their common elements are these: First, each has a central character or “agonist” endowed with a strong will and bound to subdue or destroy anyone who interferes with or opposes him. Secondly, these “agonists” are deficient in all moral and social conventionalism. Finally, the customary detailed treatment of atmosphere in space and time, without which it is indeed difficult to conceive what we call a novel, is almost entirely absent.

The driving passion in Raquel, the main character of “Two Mothers,” and Carolina, the heroine of “The Marquis of Lumbria,” is the maternal instinct. In the case of Raquel it is almost demoniac in its intensity; in Carolina it is mixed with other motives and is weaker but perhaps more complex. The dominant passion of Alejandro Gomez is not so clearly defined: it is pure will, the absolute affirmation of the I, the self, in complete alienation of the you, the others. Confronted with these three, minor characters are of no importance; they become either victims or mere puppets. Their weakness has sometimes been called a defect in Unamuno's fiction, but it must not be forgotten that it is a direct result of his concept of life. In the world of existence, of human will, either you are or you are not.

Thus conceived, character is stronger than any moral or social convention, for personality justifies itself. It obeys the method of passion, which Unamuno described many years before he wrote these tales:

Arbitrariness, the brusque affirmation of a thing because I wish it to be so, because I need it to be so, the creation of our vital truth—truth being that which makes us live—is the method of passion. Passion affirms, and the proof of its affirmation is founded upon the energy with which it is affirmed. When some poor intellectual, some modern European, opposes ratiocinations and arguments to any of my affirmations, I say to myself: reasons, reasons, and nothing more than reasons!

It is no wonder, then, that the author's protagonists have all the marks of abnormality, both in the pathological sense and in the sense of not conforming to type. But Unamuno's distinctive feature as a novelist is that he refrains from the slightest suggestion either of psychological analysis or of moralizing. He treats the abnormal as if it were absolutely normal. He condemns neither the unscrupulousness of Raquel and Carolina nor the frightful nature of Alejandro's love. He accepts them as they are. So, surprisingly enough, does the reader.

Unamuno's treatment of social background in these stories also puts them in a class of their own. He purposely avoids description. Nevertheless his characters do not move in a social vacuum. Spanish society in some of its less amiable aspects is deftly sketched, and a harsh view is taken of human relations, particularly domestic life. Parents sacrifice everything to interest. Berta's family accepts dishonor; Julia's swindler father does not hesitate to trade on his daughter's beauty. The home seems to be half prison, half insane asylum—a “diminutive hell” like the Count of Bordaviella's hearth. The aristocracy is represented by idle dissipaters, the easy prey of upstarts like Alejandro Gomez, or by weaklings living in a dismal world of the past.

Without impairing the tightness of his design, Unamuno has sharply delineated some typical themes in the Spanish literary tradition. For instance, “honor,” the most powerful motif of Spanish classical drama and supposedly of Spanish social behavior, is treated with complete negativism. “Don Juanism” is caustically presented, whether in the case of Raquel's lover and victim, or in the Count of Bordaviella, that caricature of the professional lover. For Unamuno, playing with love is not a sign of masculinity but of weakness and effeminacy, which he contrasts with the whole woman absorbed by maternal passion or the whole man with his all-possessive love.

Less salient but still present in these stories is the theme of the Cain complex, which obsessed Unamuno and which he developed fully in one of his most tragic novels, Abel Sanchez. It represented for him the primitive impulse of human nature, the bedrock of personality vying for recognition. It is also, of course, the source of fratricidal war, a national disease in Spain. Here it is implicit in the general atmosphere of hatred, and becomes explicit in the story of Carolina and Luisa.

Unamuno repeatedly claimed that all truly original fiction is autobiographic, taking inner experience for its primary source. He “lived” the essential problems of human existence intensively, but he was at the same time a classicist and a scholar who found in the Bible and in Greek literature the first and perhaps the most universal exploration of the mystery of personality. Of the Three Exemplary Novels two deal with the theme of Rachel, Jacob's second and barren wife. Most of the elements freely combined and modernized in the two novelettes can be found in Genesis: “And when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren”; “Give me children, or else I die”; “Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.” What is new in Unamuno's stories, aside from the atmosphere, is the ruthlessness of both Carolina and Raquel. Maternity is not only the center of woman's nature but it is also related to one of the forms of immortality: immortality of the flesh, which Unamuno, in true Catholic fashion, could not conceive as separated from the spirit. The same idea is revealed with even greater intensity in the third story, with relation to Alejandro's fatherhood.

In this as in other respects, “Nothing Less than a Man” is the most powerful of the Three Exemplary Novels. It has become one of Unamuno's best known works, having been translated into several languages and successfully adapted for the stage. It is a typical example of “the tragic sense of life” and of the intensity of which Unamuno was capable. Alejandro Gomez is the quintessence of pure, raw masculinity. His name is significant: Gomez is the Spanish equivalent of Smith, and is reinforced by the quantitative and qualitative connotations of the name Alejandro. He has no lineage or ancestry: “My family?” he says to his wife. “I have no family but you. I am my family. I and you who are mine.” He is not a product of society nor of history; the world is his world, the one that he creates. The real meaning of the novel is to be found not so much in his relation to his surroundings as in his encounter with love and death, the two moving forces of human existence. His love, like that of Raquel or Carolina, destroys its own object. But Alejandro, unlike them, is confronted with his equal, a real woman, Julia, whose possessiveness is as great as his own. The tragic sense of the story lies in the fact that both fail. Julia gains the certainty of Alejandro's love only at the doors of death; Alejandro ends by destroying himself after having destroyed with Julia everything that mattered to him.

Alejandro Gomez is the embodiment of man's will deprived of spiritual strength. His struggle with death becomes in the last instance a struggle with God. He had never dared to look within himself. It is his failure in the face of love and death, the inscrutable designs of God, rather than his contempt for his fellow men, which gives him tragic dimensions. Thus, more than any other of Unamuno's fictional heroes, Alejandro enacts the author's central idea: the drama of individual life is the result of pure will, without horizons beyond the ambit of our conduct; we are condemned to live in agony.