SOURCE: Resina, Joan Ramon. “For Their Own Good: The Spanish Identity and Its Grand Inquisitor, Miguel de Unamuno.” In La Generacion del 98: Frente al Nuevo Fin de Siglo, edited by Jesus Torrecilla, pp. 235-67. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi B.V., 2000.

[In the following essay, Resina contextualizes Unamuno's evolving political philosophy as a member of La Generacion del 98, paying close attention to the ways in which Unamuno's Basque heritage influenced his theories of linguistic and national identity.]

Sean cuales fueren las deficiencias que para la vida de la cultura moderna tenga el pueblo castellano, es preciso confesar que a su generosidad, a su sentido impositivo, a su empeño por imponer a otros sus creencias, debió su predominancia. […] ‘Gran generosidad implica el ir a salvar almas, aunque sea a tizonazos’.

(1905, 1293)

En bien espiritual de Cataluña, en bien de su mayor cultura, hay que mantener la oficialidad irrestringida e incompartida de la lengua española, de la única lengua nacional de España.

(1908^b, 377)

El inquisidor es más caritativo que el anacoreta.

(1908^b, 375)

Centennials, it seems, are a function of history: a turning back, an awareness of elapsed time, a recollection of elements that time has dispersed and pious evocation brings back to life for as long as the rite lasts. History, though, is a double-edged word. It stands both for action in the past and for the retrospective consciousness of that action in the minds of those who have suffered its consequences, who are the consequences of action as well as the agents of memory. Yet consciousness is not just the residue of past events or impressions; it is itself constitutive of history. It is by knowingly producing the conditions of human action that history arises, by acting in knowledge of the effects of one's action. This means that historical discourse is never purely retrospective, that it never records or traces the past for its own sake, but produces itself in order to establish the conditions in which the present is experienced. Organized to honor or remember the past, centennials can also serve to expand the range of its agency, building a bridge to the future by anchoring it in present rhetoric. Or they can stabilize an order inaugurated by the historical agent being commemorated or remembered. In such cases a centennial can legitimate a conservative option that has stalled ideologically, even as the time gap is acknowledged and differences of context are stressed. It seems to me that the large-scale centenary of the Generation of ‘98, activated, financed, and to some extent organized by the Spanish government, partakes of this goal.

During 1997 and 1998 Spain has been the stage for an ideological return of the past, not just by way of centennial celebrations, but above all through vindications of the political culture of the previous turn of the century. These vindications began during the 1996 electoral campaign, when the Popular Party's leader, José María Aznar, in the course of an interview declared that Castile is the Avant-Garde of Spain. This strange notion, burdened with aesthetic-political overtones, can only be understood as an ideological inheritance from the Generation of ‘98 via Falange Española and the National Movement. When the ‘98ers tried to imagine the Spanish nation, they conceived it metonymically in the image of Castile. For them Castile was indeed the essence of Spain, but did that also make it its vanguard? The ‘98ers were confronted with the problem of historical decadence; hence, in their view, Castile's backwardness, its status as a hinterland privileged its image and lent a vanishing aura to values that had proven refractory to modernity. Aznar however seemed to call on those values as if, by virtue of their confrontation with modernity, they were themselves modern, nay ultramodern, by analogy with the artistic Avant-Garde's challenge to modernity. After the elections that returned the conservatives to power, Aznar, seeking a historical referent for his government—and debarred from identifying with the Francoist regime from whose shreds his party had grown out—extolled the period of corrupt democracy known as the Restoration. This long period of conservative rule is in some ways certainly reminiscent of the current Restoration. At the start of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and again in 1975, situations of force (a coup-d'état and a long dictatorship, respectively) were legitimized by a constitutional monarchy and a formal democracy tightly controlled by the political class and buoyed by economic growth. The political culture of that restoration—as of the current one—was based on bipartisan hegemony moderately influenced (some might say disturbed) by the nagging interference of a Catalan political front. Admittedly, these parallelisms are crude, but the unequivocal will to reconnect with the past at a time when the political and economic centers of gravity are being centrifugated must have some significance. Specially when the references are so broad and unfocused that they encompass elements as varied as a parliamentary system convicted of rigging the elections, Catalan reformism, and the Castilian mystique of the ‘98ers. In view of such ambiguity and its inherent contradictions, we may wonder what is gained by staking one's ideological capital on the production of such a disheveled view of the past.

Commenting on Marx's concept of Eskamotage, Derrida notes that this form of legerdemain consists in making disappear by producing “apparitions” or visions (204). Although more subdued than the postmodern hype of the eighties, the recent vindications of turn-of-the-century politics are continuous with the debauchery of the spectacular in the socialist era. Both regimes knew how to produce visions that took the place of events, precisely because the events themselves—among which the dismantling of a national economy and the long road towards the liberalization of the labor market are not the least prominent—had to pass unfocused and preferably unnoticed. The socialists produced images of change to mask how much their conception of the state actually preserved from the inherited relations of power. The conservatives, on whose clock the single European currency will be implemented along with other transferences of state power, disguise the political and economic shifts by creating a mirage of stability and deploying an identity politics: decree on the national anthem, a unified Humanities curriculum centered around a mandated version of “national history,” an intensified language marketing policy designed to challenge the hegemony of English as the medium for international communication, and, last but not least, a renewed opposition to the reestablishment of the Catalan language as the ordinary vehicle of communication in its native areas. This opposition refers not only to the conservative party's negative vote on an extremely cautious law seeking legal parity for the use of Catalan in Catalonia, or to its role in fostering Valencia's linguistic secession from the Catalan-speaking lands, but also to a spate of allegations, disinformation, and alarming declarations given vent by the Spanish media. Fears about the potential reestablishment of Catalonia's pre-1939 linguistic situation are hard to understand in a Spain that is no longer politically circumscribed and culturally sealed. Since Spain is now not merely adjacent to but interrelated with different linguistic communities in a converging European political and economic space, even the semblance of a reason is lacking for the insufferance of a transitional linguistic group situated between Spain's Castilian core and the multilingual reality beyond the state's vanishing borders.

The entire issue is based on Eskamotage, on making the actual object of politics disappear behind apparitions. These apparitions or specters, about which Derrida gives a gripping account in Specters of Marx, are shadows in search of a body, of a social body. Being inherently socia, the specter is involved in competition and war from its first appearance (Derrida 241). Although the specter is always a plurality, as the title of Derrida's book avers, let me say outright that the shadow I am concerned with here and now is the Spanish identity forged by the Generation of ‘98. This shadow haunts the entire century, not as a continuous vision but, in revenant fashion, at concatenated intervals, as a spooky rumble of chains coinciding with various crises. The staccato character of this revelation agrees with the phantasm's mode of self-production. I mean first of all the phantasm of ideology, but also the past as revenant. Is there a privileged form of return for the collective past? I suppose the answer depends on a number of factors, not least on time and place, as well as on the version of the past that turns around and walks back up from Hades. But for us, witnesses of Spanish society at this other turn of the century, there is an unequivocal answer: the dead becomes a spectacle for the living in the profane rituals of institutions. In rituals such as the centennial we face a deliberate practice of identity politics as anachronism. By anachronism I do not mean the obvious fact that a politics of identity is inherently dependent on a time which is not this time, that it depends on memory, personal and collective. I mean, rather, the importation into the present of a past that was itself out-of-joint, displaced, disembodied so to speak, an apparition from somewhere or somewhen else. Uchronism is the extreme form of anachronism, and timelessness in its variegated forms (eternal values, intrahistory, suspension, geographic determination, universality) has been called upon to found the Spanish identity. There is something cosmic in this ever-expanding timelessness which feeds on time. Is not this mode of self-production equivalent to the phenomenon known to physicists as a black hole? Yet a key difference between both phenomena is that, while the black hole is the negation of appearance, ideological timelessness depends on the ineluctable return of something like an appearance, the epiphany of a spectral past that continues to feed on the present. If this reappearance resembles cosmic phenomena, it is those long extinguished stars, which from millions of years away continue to shine on unwitting terrestrial beings, their cold light blinding them to other stars just flaring up into existence.

A Spanish identity constructed from the disembodied and dehistoricized memories of a Castilian past was already misdated in its original formulation. Glaringly anachronistic was the claim that a unitary identity preexisted its construction, that it went back to a time when national formations had not arisen as a key concept of social organization and power. But then such historiographic claims were part of the business of dissipating histories and making realities disappear. The very generalization of the name “Spanish” for the Castilian language, a generalization which is itself part and parcel of the ideological legerdemain, is largely a twentieth century development. Evidence that this generalization did not translate linguistic reality is abundantly present in the numerous linguistic laws against the use of Catalan decreed by all Spanish governments since 1715, and in the compelling fact that its ample social use in the thirties had to be suppressed manu militari. Not unplanned or incidental, as Dionisio Ridruejo suggests in his account of the propaganda operation for the conquest of Barcelona (18), the attack on Catalan is explicit in Fascist doctrine and was launched from the war's very beginning. For this reason it affected first of all right-wing Catalans who fled to Franco's territory and those who participated in the Crusade. Neither did Republican Catalans entertain any illusions about the tolerance of their adversaries. The historian Miquel Tarradell spent part of the war reading Catalan books in Barcelona's Ateneu, obsessed with the thought that the Spanish nationalists would burn everything they could lay their hands on (Roig 169). Needless to say, subsequent events justified his fears.

Spanish nationalists were acting on principles laid down by the Generation of ‘98, those principles which a century later still impede recognition of Spain's multinational composition and the implicit plurality of national rights. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal encroachments on the use of Catalan lacked a systematic ideology. This ideological base first appears around the turn of the century and is given its starkest expression by Miguel de Unamuno. From this moment it spreads into Spanish intellectual and political life irrespectively of political affiliation. It becomes a dogma for the nationalistic liberals of Madrid's Centro de Estudios Históricos as well as for the Falangists, linking up with the annihilation policies of the Franco era and the ABC campaigns and COPE broadcastings of the 1990s. In this decade anti-Catalan sentiment has been deliberately stirred and used as a vote-catching net, first by the conservatives in a sustained assault culminating in the 1996 electoral campaign. And more recently, by the so-called leftwing Spanish opposition, tempted by this strategy's success to test it with diminishing degrees of self-restraint.

Unamuno's attitude towards the non-Castilian languages of Spain was a function of his early disillusion with the cultural possibilities of the Basque language, which in his view was unfit to express a modern culture. Perhaps it is not superfluous to recall, in view of his later positions, that in the 1880s he supported some form of autonomy for the Basques, even if this support was already plagued by his characteristic individualism. In a speech delivered in Bilbao on 3 January, 1887, he defends, in typically ambiguous fashion, personal rather than collective self-determination: “El que combatió contra el derecho divino, justo es combata contra lo que llaman soberanía nacional; ni el despotismo de un hombre, ni el despotismo de la masa” (1887, 174). On this very occasion he warned Basques that Catalonia's fate at the hands of the Castilian troops in 1715 entailed not just the destruction of Catalan institutions but of Spanish freedom in general. Political unity was achieved but it was a despotic unity (1887, 172). Admittedly, this is a far cry from the Unamuno who will eventually adopt a shrill Spanish nationalism driven by antimodernism, authoritarianism, and intolerance towards the other Iberian cultures. Let us trace this development. In 1896, when the Cuban War is still raging, Unamuno claims that the unhindered expression of Spain's multilingual reality would enhance communication and provide a sure basis for civilian freedom and political integration. In an article on the use of the Catalan language, published in Barcelona's Diario Moderno, Unamuno asserts:

Todo castellano, y llamo aquí castellano al que piensa en lengua de Castilla, todo castellano de espíritu abierto e inteligencia sesuda y franca debe desear que los catalanes escriban en catalán, porque produciéndose más como ellos son, nos darán más, y obligándonos a esfuerzos para entenderlos, nos arrancarán a las solicitaciones de la pereza mental y del exclusivismo. Sacan más uno de otro los pueblos autónomos en absoluto libre cambio que sometidos a una unidad centralizadora, vejatoria para uno y otro, aun en el caso en que sea uno de ellos aparentemente el unificador y el otro el unificado.

(1896^b, 503)

Let's repeat it: every open minded Castilian must not only suffer but actively desire the expansion of literary Catalan, and not as a marginal and at best indifferent phenomenon but for precisely this reason: that Castilians will gain both intelligence and tolerance from the acknowledgement and knowledge of this other culture. Unamuno demands absolute freedom of exchange, and this can only mean that reciprocal knowledge cannot be based on the unilaterally imposed duty of speaking the victor's language. But this is not all. Unamuno speaks of written Catalan. If he says nothing of oral practices, it is because in 1896 Catalan was still the language of everyday communication in Catalonia. A Civil War and a cultural genocide would be necessary before the opposite could be assumed to be true. Yet, as we will see, Unamuno does challenge the right of Catalans to use their language as official language, that is to say, as a national language and, therefore, as a language of politics. And this happens not far down the road.

The title of an article published in 1908 is in itself a declaration of principles: “Su majestad la lengua española.” If earlier Unamuno advocated complete ethnic autonomy and linguistic freedom, now he declares Castilian the cornerstone of an authoritarian politics which, for the time being, takes its cue from the monarchical principle. An anecdote serves him as a pretext to deploy his new position. Barcelona's mayor has welcomed the King in Catalan, and an irate Unamuno challenges the mayor's claim that only the vernacular can convey the citizens' sentiments and aspirations unaffectedly. As we have seen, this had also been Unamuno's theme in 1896, when he asserted that translation deforms the original thought. Now, however, he denounces it as “one of many Catalan pedantries.”¹ Catalans, he says, can express themselves flawlessly in Spanish, especially when they want to ask for something (1908^b, 374). By 1908 free exchange has gone by the board together with free communication. Catalans betray their excellent knowledge of Spanish in the very act that reveals their dependence.

Unamuno's castilianization has made him a zealot. Besides chastising the mayor's audacity, he deprecates the King's reassurance that all the national languages are pleasing to his ear, and that he prefers on each occasion the language that best conveys the spontaneous feelings of his subjects. A national language, Catalan?, thunders Unamuno. Absolutely not! In Spain there is only one national language, and that is the Spanish or Castilian language (1908^b, 375). If his majesty the King has been ill advised, her majesty the Spanish language knows her privileges:

En esta cuestión de la lengua nacional hay que ser inflexibles. Cobren toda la autonomía municipal y provincial que quieran, puertos francos, libertades y privilegios y fueros de toda clase; pero todo lo oficial, en español, en español las leyes, en español los contratos que obliguen, en español cuanto tenga fuerza legal civil, en español, sobre todo y ante todo, la enseñanza pública en sus grados todos.

(1908^b, 377)

The mayor's speech is for Unamuno a crime of lese majesté against the fatherland as he understands it, and against culture, which he deems inseparable from the state apparatus:

No puede haber más que una lengua para dirijirse [sic] pública y oficialmente al jefe del estado, que es órgano de cultura, y esta lengua es la lengua de cultura, la única lengua de cultura moderna que hay en España, su única lengua nacional, la lengua española.

(1908^b, 378)

The significance of these opinions does not lie in their power to take stock of the situation—for example, the claim that Spanish is the only vehicle for a modern culture is plainly reactionary after the Catalan modernist movement has been saluted abroad as the avant-garde of Spanish modernization. Their effect lies in their substitution of hardened political clichés (which speak directly to the hardened conception of the centralist state) for sober evidence or rigorous thought. Verification is left to a younger generation of activists who will take to heart the teacher's intransigence. In the nineteen thirties, young Castilian intellectuals will make good on Unamuno's claim that the inquisitor is more charitable than the hermit (1908^b, 375).

Unamuno does not approach language as a philologist; he is engaged in a Kulturkampf. By aggressively insisting on cultural hegemony, he pioneers cultural jingoism in Spain, acclimatizing a new form of intolerance that has been gathering strength in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Porque es en nombre de la cultura, no sólo del patriotismo, es en nombre de la cultura como debemos pelear porque no haya en España más lengua oficial, más lengua de cultura nacional, que la lengua española que hablan más de veinte naciones. Y esto, sean cuales fueren las hermosuras, los méritos y las glorias de otros lenguajes españoles, a los que se debe dejar a su vida doméstica.

(1907^b, 522)

Unamuno is the clearest Spanish instance of a new kind of European intellectual, one who reacts to a perceived destruction of the old world by fanatically opposing change. He is in many ways a product of the nineteenth century's uprooting of traditional certainties: a Christian who can't believe but yearns to do so, a fervent nationalist who can't assume nationhood for his community of origin. Despair tinges his fanaticism. When he rails against the non-Castilian languages one senses his dejection, caused by disbelief in the rebirth of Basque. At first Unamuno's longing for community directed him towards his Basque roots. But the Basque language, still in the first stages of reclamation, could not offer the rewards his ambition required. Concluding that Basque was in its death throes, Unamuno recommended euthanasia. The rational and moral attitude, he said, was to wish it a speedy demise. In his view even bilingualism is deleterious. Since language is subject to Darwinian laws, once Basque has been displaced by Spanish in everyday communication it can never be brought around as a live language (1902, 1060-1061). But anxious that he might be proven wrong, he opposes efforts to revive it at the same time that he rationalizes its necessary extinction:

Es absolutamente imposible hablar hoy en vascuence vivo y verdadero de proyectos ningunos de Hacienda. Y mañana, más imposible aún, merced a los enterradores de esa lengua milenaria y ahistórica que son los que se empeñan en galvanizarla con trabajos de gabinete para impedir su muerte inevitable.

(1917, 546)

Having renounced this source of identity, Unamuno looks to the Spanish language for cultural survival, embracing the mediated sense of selfhood with the convert's fanaticism: “Por mi parte declaro que siento cada vez mayor fanatismo por la lengua en que hablo, escribo, pienso y siento” (1911, 598). As a result he transferred his longing for community to an abstract, spectral, but for that reason expandable Hispanic race. Disembodiment confers on the specter an inflationary existence in the course of which it haunts other bodies. Being neither flesh nor blood, the Hispanic body is not circumscribed by “natural” borders. Unamuno is very clear on this issue. In order for him, a Basque, to be able to commune with this sacramental presence, the nation must not be physically confined to Castile; nor can it be the sum of the various nationalities of the Spanish state. He wants a Hispania high above the petty determinations of origin, a mystical union in a spectral body irrigated by spiritual blood (Unamuno's words): the Castilian language. Turned into metaphors for the soul, language and landscape, both of them Castilian, reach for absolute existence in a pleonastic Hispanic Spain. But for there to be identity there must be a return, a parousia or disclosure of sameness in time. Yet time undoes the body and destroys sameness. Hence Unamuno conceives identity as the return of a disembodied political entity: Hispanidad, the ghost of the Spanish empire.

As Derrida remarks, “For there to be a ghost, a return to the body is required, but to a body more abstract than ever before” (202). In order to be, the phantom of empire vampirizes the emerging patriotisms of the new nations, which Unamuno wants to hitch to a struggle for world dominance of and through the Spanish language (1911, 599). An idol, in the etymological sense of an apparition, haunts the new political bodies of America, spiriting away their aboriginal flesh. Since birth is a condition of bodies, the ghost preys upon whatever is native: ethnicity, indigenous languages, ancient identities, orality, not in order to in-corporate them but to occupy their disincarnated hull. Cannibalism, which entails the incorporation of the other's body under the law of affinity and the consumption of real difference as potential identity, is the native sin upon which the empire legitimates itself. Built upon the dogma of the transubstantiation of the flesh, the empire communes in a mystical body whose real presence is the word. Ruling this idol, ventriloquating through it, are the souls of the dead, the intrahistorical community about which Unamuno still waxed lyrical toward the end of his life. One recalls the tolling of the bell in the submerged village in San Manuel Bueno, mártir, a charnel house of history rattling in Manuel's haunted soul (1930, 140). This phantasmal village comes alive in the reflection of the living village on the specular surface of enclosed water. This image superposing presence and absence, illusory like a trompe l'oeil and thus not properly an image, captures the ghost's tangible intangibility. Ghosts can be recognized by their lack of reflection in the mirror. Autonomous likenesses and tapering wraiths of time, they do not re-present, do not summon the co-presence of an object. Unlike the village of the living, whose reflection on the lake's surface makes it an object of representation, the village of the dead is invisible. Present only to the ear when the wind (spiritus) blows, it exists, like Atlantis, in myth and poetry. That it is continuous with the living village is an article of faith, San Manuel's faith.

Such a faith in a phosphorescent life radiating from the bones of history exchanges social and political realities for a dreamy mixture of power and poetry. One of its adepts, Américo Castro, called this faith Unamuno's Hispanic Gospel (640). A felicitous expression. Unamuno's legacy indeed raised Spanish nationalism to the status of a religion, a metaphysics of identity whose internal mechanism his last novel lays bare. Inextricable from the sense of historical crisis, Unamuno' national theology implicitly contains the ideas of heresy, holy cause, and the coming of a redeemer.

Se habla mucho de la religión del patriotismo; pero esa religión está, en España por lo menos, por hacer. El patriotismo español no tiene aún carácter religioso, y no lo tiene, entre otras razones, por una, la más poderosa de todas ellas, y es que le falta base de sinceridad religiosa. […] Es la raíz de las raíces de la triste crisis porque está pasando España, nuestra patria.

(1905, 1296)

True to a type of European intellectual who emerges in the 1880's and includes Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès, Knut Hamsun, and Julius Langbehn, Unamuno mistrusts reason's capacity to further the community he longs for.² But where reason fails, authority steps in. To be sure, Unamuno insists on spiritual authority, “el imperio espiritual sobre las almas,” which Lazaro admires in San Manuel. But such empire is merely the obverse of imposition raised to a spiritual principle. Although Unamuno refrains from discussing the means needed to implement his patriotic religion, his vehemence suggests coercion at every turn.

Calls for inflexible imposition and constraints alternate with sneers and ridicule, with an intensity revealing genuine anxiety. We have already seen his resistance towards the philological evolution of Basque, a language he calls and wishes ahistorical. Galician he disallows on the grounds that it cannot reconquer the urban middle class. Its literary use, though undeniable, is restricted to the low style, a trademark of the uneducated.

Y La Veu de Catalunya, por su parte, cuando trata del movimiento lingüístico en otras regiones españolas, pierde los estribos y da aire a los mayores absurdos. Hace poco traía una carta de Galicia llena de ridículas consideraciones sobre el uso de la lengua gallega. Si lo hubieran leído en la tierra de la Pardo Bazán y de Valle-Inclán, ¡no se habrían reído poco de ello! Porque en Galicia tampoco hay, digan lo que quieran cuatro exaltados, cuestión del gallego. El gallego mismo que cultivan, sobre todo en el género festivo, algunos escritores gallegos no pasa de ser algo artificial. Es como esos trajes regionales que cuando van desapareciendo o cuando han desaparecido, los visten los señoritos en Carnavales. En Galicia no volverá a ser el gallego la lengua corriente de las clases medias e instruídas de las ciudades.

(1917, 548-549)

Leaving aside the class prejudice and the limiting conception of culture exhibited in this judgement, it is impossible not to notice the double standard. While Unamuno disparages a language that is alive in rural Galicia, elsewhere he preaches the need to revitalize Spanish by giving wider currency to expressions garnered from the Castilian peasantry. Why the double standard? Why the impatience with peripheral languages that refuse to give up (and give themselves up to) the ghost? He gives us a clue by insisting on his Basque identity, but asserting time and again that this identity can only be articulated in Spanish. Unamuno is afraid that history might prove him wrong. Therefore he fights with tooth and claw any suggestion that Basque and Galician may gain a foothold in print, and thus in culture as the nineteenth century understood it. He must deny the possibility in order to disown that which he fears the most: in his own religious terms, the sin against the spirit, against the Basque spirit. And since denial requires universal connivance, Catalans are reproved ostensibly for exaggerating the significance of these languages, in truth however for encouraging them through their own exemplary literary renaissance. The stirring of languages that he deems and wishes historically condemned must be neutralized at any cost. To that purpose he denies and ridicules, blasts and cajoles by turns. Appeals to realism and acceptance of the inevitable alternate with emotional rantings and an unwavering tactic of delegitimation. He encourages dialectalisms with the aim of fragmenting and atomizing, denounces derivations and neologisms as so many falsifications, and attacks the formation of standard codes as a vestigial archaism driven by political reaction (1902, 1060; 1905, 1296).

Eskamotage plays a decisive role in Unamuno's view of cultural evolution. First of all Eskamotage of the political function of the state, which he construes as essentially cultural. Eskamotage also of the fact that, at a certain stage of development, languages do not die a natural death but are killed through legal and ideological means. And Eskamotage, finally, of the evidence that oppressed languages can endure long-standing imperial pressures if they preserve or regain a political space. The fall of two empires, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, has been necessary to expose the ideologeme hidden in Unamuno's liquidation of the Basque linguistic question by analogy with another oppressed language:

Que se vaya hoy a los habitantes de la antigua Lituania y se les pregunte si quieren volver a hablar lituánico, dejando el alemán, y se verá lo que contestan. Así sucederá con los vascos de mañana, cuando hayan abandonado por completo el vascuence. Por mi parte me compensa de los torpes insultos que algunos de mis paisanos me hayan dirigido el pensar que sus nietos me darán la razón algún día.

(1902, 1061)

Unamuno finds solace in the thought that some day there will be no Basque speakers left. Veiled and withdrawn is not only the issue of a language's political relevance but also the status of the linguistic factors juggled with. In 1908, in his article on her Majesty the Spanish language, Unamuno had imputed to Catalan the same faults that he presses against Basque and Galician in 1917: artificiality, lack of fit between the vernacular and a high culture which, in a blatant begging of the question, he defines as consubstantial with the state's administrative culture. The Basque language lacks a proper term for “Internal Revenue Service” (“Hacienda”), Galician is the language of the peasantry, and Catalan is strange to the monarchical dignity of Spanish. Yet Eskamotage fails when the objects to be concealed are juggled against each other. The silk handkerchief cannot facilitate the sleight of hand and at the same time prestissimo disappear behind itself. That trick will not work; something else must catch the eye while the object is removed from view. Catalan, which after all does have a print culture, and a modern one to boot, whose public use is extensive, and is the language of an urban middle class, cannot be both conjured away and played against the other languages. So, how does Unamuno get out of this pass? The stock ruse is to magnify the paradox by scapegoating the Catalan language. Regionalized and isolated, it is made to bear the sins of artificiality and subculturalism imputed to the other peripheral languages. Denounced as socially fractured, it will be loathed for naturally producing an unnatural cleavage in the Spanish identity. A bad example, whose exceptionality is conceded in order to keep other potentially renascent languages on their vanishing course.

No, en eso de la lengua regional—o si quieren nacional; por una u otra palabra no hemos de reñir—los catalanes están solos. Ni los valencianos están con ellos, porque en Valencia, en la ciudad, todas las personas cultas se expresan y piensan en castellano. Los versos valencianos de Vicente Wenceslao Querol, tan exquisito poeta en castellano, suenan a falso y a artificio de erudito.

(1917, 549)

The sleight of hand includes the regionalization of Catalan by severing its territories. “Regional,” however, is a conflictive term. Of what linguistic circumscription would Catalan be a regional variant? What map could include it as a dialectical variant of a dominant language? Neither is it a variant of Spanish, nor is it circumscribed by an administrative division in political maps. Rather, a language that once benefited from political sovereignty and today is spoken in various circumscriptions within and beyond the Spanish state. A national language, then, Unamuno concedes—a word here or there changes nothing. Yet, a few years earlier Unamuno had been emphatic: words are everything. Only her Majesty the Spanish language deserves to be called a national language; there was no national salvation, no culture, no education, no law outside this language. Unamuno takes back with one hand what he feigns to give with the other. He, a philologist who certainly knows better, produces a supposedly self-contained Valencian language, only to declare it unfit for social and cultural life. Yet this same language is very much alive in Catalonia; renaming it Valencian does not change either its code or its scope. But recognition that Catalan and Valencian are regional variants of the same national language is implicit in Unamuno's triumphant assertion that not even Valencians (“not even” ratifies a contrary assumption) follow Catalans in their effort to preserve their language. Unamuno's quandary is that, like every juggler, he must show that which he would occlude and name that whose existence he would deny.

Faithful to the tactic of conceding in order to refuse, and inverting the relation between action and reaction, he denounces Catalans as exporters of linguistic revolt. They might have a usable vernacular but others do not. If they respond solidarily to the awakening of other national languages, they are acting in bad faith, since there is nothing to respond to where Spanish reigns supreme. Casting Catalan as the linguistic problem of Catalans, Unamuno dissembles the fact that the problems experienced by Catalans with their language stem from the intransigence of Castilian Spain. In other words, the language problem of Catalans dissembles Unamuno's (and the state's) problem with languages other than their own.

No sé si es un bien o un mal para los catalanes el que en eso de la lengua regional se encuentren solos, pero es así. Su problema lingüístico es único en España, y querer transferirlo a otras regiones es algo así como si quisieran predicar en Chile los derechos del araucano, en el Perú los del quechua o en Paraguay los del guaraní.

(1917, 549)

Unamuno would turn in his grave if he could know that at the end of the century at least Quechua and Guaraní are slowly but steadily asserting their rights and reconquering social space.

Unamuno's jingoism was due at least in part to Spain's colonial “Disaster.”³ Before the end of the war he had declared himself a free trader, a confused one to be sure, capable of invoking socialism and free trade, humanism and dialectical materialism in the same breath (1896^a, 980-981). As so often with Unamuno, it is best to bypass the confused reasoning and focus on the emotional clamor. It is 1896 and the pathos is still libertarian: “Libertad, libertad ante todo, verdadera libertad. Que cada cual se desarrolle como él es y todos nos entenderemos. La unión fecunda es la unión espontánea, la del libre agrupamiento de los pueblos” (1896^a, 982). Things will change quickly. Still, Unamuno's initial response to the military defeat in Cuba was not a nationalistic reaction but a condemnation of history and a flight out of time. At this moment skepticism towards the national idea anesthetizes the wound inflicted by history. In his article “La vida es sueño,” published in La España Moderna in November 1898, he asserts that the people “lo que tiene no es nación, es patria, tierra difusa y tangible” (1898, 941). As long as people have a material culture of their own the problem of identity does not arise. Why not? Because the tangible fatherland defines a natural community, which in keeping with Ferdinand Tönnies's distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,⁴ guarantees a sense of organic belonging, as opposed to the abstract relations that obtain in a national society, in which the uprooted and anonymous individual first discovers the problem of identity. At this time to sacrifice individuals to the idea of the nation seems to Unamuno a pagan idolatry, more congenial with the Germanic than with the Hispanic mind (1898, 942). He could still assess soberly the political instrumentalization of culture as a ghostly affair, and reckon the obsession with cultural expansion a function of the metaphysical egotism, which the later Unamuno fully shares.

Y por debajo de tales ideas palpita su alma oculta, el deseo de que nuestra nacionalidad cobre relieve y se extiendan nuestra lengua y nuestra literatura, se lean más nuestros libros, los de cada cual de los que así sentimos, y duren más nuestros nombres en los anales y los calendarios. […] hay que inmortalizar nuestro fantasma aquí abajo, tenemos que pasar a la Historia. ¡Hay que alcanzar los favores de la sin par Dulcinea, la Gloria!.

(1898, 945)

In the same article he notes that the Spanish people seem unaffected by the collapse of the Empire, and interprets this indifference as a source of strength. But is this the true meaning of apathy? Does strength really underpin this blasé attitude? Could the masses that had vibrated with chauvinism a few months before be insensitive to the humbling experiences of Cavite and Santiago? Feigning to reject national pride (but concealing, in effect, the wounded national pride), Unamuno proclaims that the ethnic spirit must now go on sleeping and dreaming the slow, dark dream of its healthy, healing routine (1898, 943). Such a reaction is not untypical of traumatic experiences. A state of suspension and insensitivity to suffering is typical of trauma. Due to a surplus of pain, the traumatic event impacts the psyche below the threshold of consciousness. Pain however does not remain indefinitely quiescent but replays itself in a constantly displaced, phantasmagoric likeness of the originating event. Geoffrey Hartman speaks of “a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche” (537). Unamuno, like the Spanish masses he describes, appears unaffected by the traumatic image, but the latter veils, without effacing it, the experience of loss that is already burrowing its way into his rhetoric. As Pierre Vilar once remarked, Spain's imperial past was just too large for the country not to experience nostalgia in a political age in which imperialism was the measure of things (23). And so, the day after defeat, the collective ghost (“nuestro fantasma”) of Spanish nationalism begins to haunt a country bereft of its empire.

Repressed from consciousness, the historical meaning of the empire and its demise returns as a ghost to lead a dissociated existence as a lyrical ideologeme. Taking on a literary identity, that of Don Quixote (a revenant from the feudal past), the meaning of an empire at odds with reality spookily reenters history by religious fiat.⁵ By inverting the hierarchy between the phenomenal and the ontological Unamuno substitutes poetics for history and dresses politics as religion. Eeriest of all is the anticipated return of the repressed in the shadows of the departed. The nightmarish vision of the living dead returning from an extinct empire, the “cadáveres vivientes” (Unamuno's words) who reach the Spanish ports after a miserable voyage over the waters of oblivion calls on fantasy to heal the agony of the eyes (1898, 941). Fantasy sooths by troping the affliction, that is, by causing the traumatic impact to reappear (phantasia means literally “apparition”) as symptom and no longer as event. The real revenants, wounded, maimed, and sick with Malaria, vanish behind a parade of shadows from the historical beyond. It is the time of specters, and Unamuno, like others, seeks in a phantasmagoria of Segismundos and Quixotes consolation for the wound inflicted by history.

A medida que se pierde la fe cristiana en la realidad eterna [one is tempted to translate: to the extent that the empire's collapse becomes manifest], búscase un remedo de inmortalidad en la Historia, en esos Campos Elíseos en que vagan las sombras de los que fueron. Perdida la visión cordial y atormentados por la lógica, buscamos en la fantasía menguado consuelo. Esclavos del tiempo, nos esforzamos por dar realidad de presente al porvenir y al pasado[…].

(1898, 946)

History as a pretext for poetry. The gods, he says recalling the Odyssey in the wake of Cavite and Santiago, devise the destruction of men so that there may be song (1898, 946). History's injury is not avowed as historical, but rendered a metaphysical failure—a loss of faith in eternity—or a mythical fatum—the whim of the inscrutable gods. It takes an ominous turn as the imperial consciousness spuns a pellicle of timelessness over the sores of time. In the depths of military humiliation and with Spain's utter want of political, economic, or scientific sway staring Unamuno in the face, language appears to him as the only means of patriotic affirmation. Thus history returns under a new guise. Just one year after Spain's defeat in Santiago de Cuba, Unamuno, writing for the Buenos Aires newspaper El Sol, links the end of political empire to the founding of a language empire and the achievement of linguistic supremacy over historical and geographic contingencies.

Recluídos de nuevo a nuestra Península, después del gloriosísimo ensueño de nuestra expansión colonial, volvemos a vernos como Segismundo, vuelto a su cueva, según decía Ganivet. Y ahora es cuando nos acordamos de nuestra raza.

Mas esta nuestra raza no puede pretender consanguinidad; no la hay en España misma. Nuestra unidad es, o más bien será, la lengua, el viejo romance castellano convertido en la gran lengua española, sangre que puede más que el agua, verbo que domina el Océano.

(1899, 571)

Race, blood, and the old dream of an overseas domain are given new course by salvaging from the ruins of history that form of hegemony which Pierre Bourdieu has called symbolic domination. In a fatal mixture of the conquistador and the nationalist theologian,⁶ Unamuno demands Lebensraum for the Spanish spirit: “Una tierra no agota la potencialidad de una casta” (1899, 572). Spain's historic destiny, which he had challenged only one year earlier—“A todas horas oímos hablar de la realización de nuestro destino (¿cuál?)”—(1898, 945), will now be fulfilled when every language submits to Castile's accent in homage to the empire that Spain cannot let go.

En tan vastos y variados dominios se cumplirá una diferenciación mayor de nuestra raza histórica, y la lengua integrará las diferencias así logradas. Italianos, alemanes, franceses, cuantos concurren a formar las repúblicas hispanoamericanas, serán absorbidos por nuestra sangre espiritual, por nuestro idioma, y dirán mi tierra, así, en robusta entonación castellana, al continente que oyó ¡tierra! como saludo de otro mundo.

(1899, 572)

While other forms of nationalism are also inextricable from the cult of the national language, none—with the possible exception of French nationalism—has been so obsessed with its imperial expansion. The Falangist slogan “por la lengua hacia el Imperio” merely gave programmatic form to a darwinian conception of language that, in the case of Spanish, originated in the clash between a rising and a fading empire. A defeated empire can hope to retrieve some of its losses through symbolic self-assertion, and Unamuno became prophet and crusader of requital through language. On 14 October 1914, in the Buenos Aires paper La Nación, he extols “nuestro español, que tiene en sí, por inermes que seamos los que le hablamos, tantas y tan excelentes cualidades, no ya para resistir, sino hasta para imponerse” (1914^b, 535). Are these military expressions merely metaphorical? Hardly. Language is for Unamuno the continuation of war by other means. “En el fondo los pueblos que pelean unos con otros no pelean, aunque ellos no lo sepan ni lo crean, sino por el predominio de una lengua. Que A conquiste a B o B conquiste a A sólo significa que los de A hablen la lengua B o los de B hablen la lengua A” (1914^a, 528). And once war becomes not of words but for words, once the religious and the political are displaced by the cultural, the road is open to the new experience of the twentieth century: programmed cultural genocide. The idea of language as a weapon and as the target of aggression became a key element in the Fascist armory during the Spanish Civil War.⁷ This idea still feeds the language race in which many Spanish philologists and politicians engage, both on the global and on the Iberian level. In 1898 conclusive defeat and irretrievable loss did not break the spell of the past on that part of Spain wont to identify with a history of mastery. From the eddies of the ships sunk in Santiago bay rose the ghost of cultural supremacy, the ghost of a ghostlike empire. Since that time Spanish becomes for Unamuno “la lengua que compartirá un día con la inglesa el predominio mundial. Y quién sabe … Quién sabe …, digo” (1911, 598-599).

In the absence of the necessary work of mourning, melancholy takes hold of the Spanish soul, giving it up to visions of power haunted by the consciousness of defeat. Back in the cave, Segismundo dreams of new conquests. Only, now he knows that the epic of gold and blood has passed into legend and can return only as poetry. Promising a second release from the cave, poetry transfigures the bid for power of dreamy Segismundos, and our lord Don Quixote guides their historical despair in search of glorious Dulcineas. During the Spanish Civil War, the servants of the new Francoist state were required to swear their allegiance on this Hispanic bible. But what does it mean to swear by Don Quixote? What holy principle was invoked? What inner commitment did the pledge call upon? Unamuno had made it abundantly clear: performative faith, faith in one's own fictions, irrational faith in faith. Or rather, since faith is inherently tautological, as Unamuno incessantly claimed, the Quixotic principle stood for faith in the irrational, for self-affirmation unperturbed by the violence it may exert on the empirical world. Hallucinated trust in the return of a bygone age justified in advance the warrior-poets who would soon rise in arms in the historically insolvent towns of rural Castile. If Falange Española conceived itself, in the words of its founder, as a “poetic movement,” it was not by virtue of an avant-garde rejection of the past, but because its imagination was possessed by the ghosts of yore. The Spanish Fascists wrote sonnets in the manner of Garcilaso and titled their chief literary journal Escorial. A reference, certainly, to the emblem of Spain's imperial architecture, but above all to the burial place of the Spanish kings, who, as Unamuno remarked, are never really buried, never put to rest (1923, 638). As Werner Krauss perceptively observed,

the root of such confusion between poetics and politics was already planted in the possibilities of the Generation of ‘98. The rejection of political rhetoric led to the double affirmation of the lyrical word and pure action, the unmediated act, to a now aesthetic now emotional transfiguration of a dynamic will to action.

(Spanien 50-51)

The path of cultural despair has a traumatic origin in the clash between two different experiences of time. As in the sixteenth century but in reverse, anachronism assigns their respective historical roles to Spain and America. In 1898 ideological modernity and technological superiority are clearly on the American side, while Spain is a mere vestige of the past. A possible way to relieve the traumatic friction between radically different cultural cycles is to flee from time and to take refuge in timelessness. In 1898 Unamuno signs his earliest attacks on progress and modernity. But flight is only the first defense against history. In a second moment, culture, disguised as nature in the quasi biological process of intrahistory, is again called upon to heal the historical wound and to reassert some form of hegemony. Why the cultural path? And why through despair? The answer lies in Catalonia, Unamuno's greatest political obsession. Admired and scorned, and the latter because of the former, Catalonia had emerged from 1898 not into timelessness but into modernity. In the two decades after the colonial disaster, it forged a distinct national culture, which Unamuno, like other Castile-oriented intellectuals, both admired and resented. In 1901 ambivalence turned into apprehension when political Catalanism defeated the liberal-conservative alliance of the Spanish parties at the municipal polls in Barcelona. And it grew into anxiety when in April 1907 a broad Catalan front, Solidaritat Catalana, swept those parties from Catalonia. The reaction was predictable: Spain, Castilian Spain, must not be humiliated a second time. Catalonia must not be a second Cuba.⁸ Yet how could it be? Catalonia was not coveted by any rising empire and, unlike Cuba, it did not oppose to the rest of Spain an insurrectional army but a civilian culture boasting optimism and modernity and demanding political empowerment. But this, alas, the wounded imperial consciousness could not suffer. One thing was to be overpowered by an emerging economic and technological empire, and a very different one to be challenged by a region twice defeated in the previous two and a half centuries and forced to beg for basic rights. A region whose culture rises or falls with its language, kept at bay through ordinances like the one which in 1896 forbid its use in telephone conversations.

Unamuno comes up with two solutions for what many were already calling “the Catalan problem.” The first one is to turn Spain into a larger Catalonia purged of the Catalan element, so that the problem might disappear together with the cultural difference. In a letter to his friend Joan Maragall, Unamuno speaks of his fear (and thus of his despondent hope) that the Catalan Solidarity (the newly united Catalan political front) will not claim leadership in Spain (1907^a, 514). Repeatedly Unamuno urges Catalans to Catalanize Spain, yet posits as a necessary condition the renunciation of the key to their identity: the Catalan language. The second, more practicable solution, is to call for a reactive culture: “A los esfuerzos de Cataluña por crearse una cultura propia no ha sabido responder el resto de España con una cultura española” (1916, 437). Both solutions, inspired by mistrust towards the cross-fertilizing powers of independent cultures, merged seamlessly with the dream of settling the score with the Anglo-American imperial rival. The Castilo-Hispanic response to Catalan and Basque efforts to define their respective national cultures came in the early nineteen thirties with Ernesto Giménez Caballero's call for national salvation through the reassertion of the Spanish essence, with Onésimo Redondo's Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica (Castilian Juntas of Hispanic Action) and with other microgroups agitating for a reactive Spanish nationalism vowed to destroy the peripheral nationalities along with liberalism, the bourgeois economy, and the political weight of the industrial cities. On October 29, 1933 Falange Española gathered the strands of various reactive formations, merging Unamuno's vision of the cultural empire with his unitarian view of Iberian cultures.⁹

Unamuno's relentless offsetting the peripheral nationalisms with an exalted Spanish nationalism reappears (via Ortega y Gasset) in José Antonio's definition of Spain as a unity of universal destiny. Like Unamuno and many a contemporary Spanish intellectual, the Falange's founder filled his doctrine with nationalist content while rejecting the concept of nationalism, which seemed compromised by the claims of the detested Basque and Catalan nationalities. Thus appeared a form of supernationalism whose political expression was the corporatist state. José Antonio Primo de Rivera proclaimed nationalism “a complete stupidity” and declared: “We are not nationalist, because nationalism is only the individualism of peoples. We are Spaniards—one of the few serious things that one can be in the world!” (Krauss 433). And soon the only thing one was allowed to be in the new Spain. For the Falangists, as for Unamuno, the peripheral nationalities were defined by anthropological factors such as archaic customs and residual languages. Hence, while amiable as a natural foundation for the spiritual fatherland, the historical nationalities were contemptible as the expression of an autonomous political will. At play again is Unamuno's distinction between intuition and concept, feeling and mind, an antithesis whose political translation opposes the “sensible fatherland,” defined by one's physical horizon, to “the mental or historic fatherland,” a product of national education, and the higher of the two in the spiritual order (1905, 1288-1289). Applying these criteria, José Antonio criticized the love of the immediate and contingent in the name of a national idea purified of the dross of history: “Those who love their fatherland because it pleases them love it with a will to touch, love it physically, sensually. […] We love the eternal and immovable metaphysic of Spain” (Payne 80). The Falange's dubious neoimperialism, strung between the hope for absolute Castilian hegemony and dreams of Spanish expansionism, found inspiration in Unamuno's own bizarre imperialism, indeterminate between the assertion of the intrinsic generosity of conquest and a diffuse and limitless self-affirmation through the Spanish language.¹⁰ This mixture of boundless ambition and disregard for the concrete and limited forms of social life explains the threadbare articulation of history in Falangist doctrine, its substitution of a sinister compendium of historical clichés for the complexities of past and contemporary existence on the Iberian peninsula. In this context imperialism means a blurring of the confines between concrete political spaces and the ideal projection of dreams of grandeur. Looking from a mountain range on the Castilian expanse below, Unamuno claims that the scene dematerializes before his eyes and turns into the predestined stage for “los más excelsos personajes de la tragedia de la Historia” (1915, 432). In a similar vein, the Falangists fought a transcendent battle above and beyond the misery of circumstantial reality. For them, as Werner Krauss observed, “[t]he stage of Spanish history has no boundaries. It is the Universe” (Krauss “Falange Española” 434).

The Universe as tragico-historical stage implies a cast of characters and a script.¹¹ Alarmed by the spectacle of revenant cultures, Unamuno fell prey to the specters of tradition and to delusions of revealed destiny. His descriptions of the Castilian landscape are haunted by the glories of the past and insinuations of a nationalist mission. High up on the hallowed Castilian range, like Moses on Mount Sinai, he receives the revelation from his national God: “Viendo ceñir los relámpagos a los picachos de Gredos se me reveló el Dios de mi Patria, el Dios de España, como Jehová se les reveló a los israelitas tronando y relampagueando en las cimas del Sinaí” (1909, 285). This is a transcendent deity. The allegedly perennial Spain of the chosen Castilian tradition speaks to Unamuno from the historical beyond with a voice unheard by those who are distracted by present events.¹² Not only the trees, “espejo de nuestra vida y de nuestro pensar,” teach him an ideal lesson (1915, 433), but even dead wood, the very paradigm of matter—in Greek hyle means wood—communicates to him metaphysical messages.

Las dos veces que he visitado Yuste […] sentí adentrárseme el corazón patrio al contemplar aquella caja de madera que guardó una docena de años el cuerpo del que fue emperador antes que le trasladaran a ese horrendo panteón del Escorial. Mejor allí, entre seis tablas de madera de la sierra, de árboles que arraigaron entre rocas españolas. ¡Ah, ser enterrado entre seis tablas de una de estas robustas encinas castellanas, de hoja perenne inmoble al viento de la tormenta, de flor que se esconde entre las hojas y de rojo corazón con que hacen melodiosas chirimías los zagales! Pero a los reyes propiamente no se les entierra; ni muertos se les deja tener contacto íntimo con la madre tierra.

(1923, 638)

Like a seance table, the planks or “tablas” of this empty coffin, which is therefore not a coffin but a resonance box for the spirits, speak to the patriot-medium. And the message with which this box informs him—like spirit informs wood in the hylemorphic doctrine—is the death drive as completion and accomplishment. Death as mystical fusion with the Castilian landscape and the Castilian tradition. A fusion both aided and impeded by the casket, whose planks remind him of the empire: the wood girdles the body—just as the body constrains the soul in Unamuno's neo-Orphism—while metonymycally linking it to the woods and the mountains, where the roaming spirits of kings communicate the empire's universality to the landscape. For mystical purposes, however, metonymy is an imperfect trope. Matter cannot totally seal the spirit. Through their woodenness, the planks assimilate the body (Unamuno's imagined corpse) to the earth. It is only through their form, through their symbolic function as a (vacant) casket, that they interrupt the flow between body and earth. This interruption creates a difference within matter, a meaningful threshold whose historical mark (Yuste) can only be crossed patriotically, with an “innering” or (in geopolitical terms) “self-centralizing” heart. A heart that Unamuno feels “adentrárse[l]e,” seeking the deeper recesses of the body, where matter becomes synonymous with mater, the “madre tierra” of Spanish rocks and Castilian oaks whose perennial leaves are forever still and whose trunks, turned into corpselike but corpseless planks, resonate with spirit. Spirited away, the body is neither here nor there, least of all in the pantheon that will later inspire so much Fascist rhetoric. Kings cannot be properly buried, cannot merge with the ground or rest in a locality. Only as ghosts haunting the landscape can they fulfill the patriotic work to which they were divinely appointed. As Unamuno insisted and his Fascist disciples repeated, Spain was beyond the sensual, material, temporally bound contingencies of particular traditions. Spain was a universal entity, a metaphysical essence unfolding in the realm of spirit. And justly so, since Spain never figured among the titles of the imperial kings of El Escorial, who, on the other hand, possessed titles as incongruous with the idea of the nation-state as “king of Jerusalem” and “lord of Molina.”

What Unamuno did try to bury and confine to a plot of ground were the non-statal languages and cultures. A self-appointed undertaker, he combated efforts to rekindle the social use of Basque: “Más daño le hacen los curanderos que le asisten en su lecho de agonía que los que nos disponemos a cantarle los funerales y a embalsamarlo” (1902, 1061). Moreover, his diagnostic was less confident than he cared to admit. While feigning pious concern for the impracticality of the non-Castilian languages as vehicles for modern culture and for culture tout court, Unamuno shows considerable alarm at the lingering vitality of these prostrate languages and at the thought that one day they may challenge the post-imperial hegemony of Spanish:

Creo entender, siquiera por mi cargo, en cosas de enseñanza un poquito menos mal que en otras cosas, y le digo a usted, mi querido don Telesforo, que si se descentralizase en España la enseñanza, dejando a los Municipios, o siquiera a las regiones, o provincias, el proveer a ella, sufriría gravísima herida la causa de la cultura—de la cultura, no del patriotismo solamente—y la sufriría hasta en las regiones que se creen más capacitadas para la autonomía pedagógica y probablemente más en éstas que en las otras. Pueblo habría en que no se enseñara más que lo de ‘eso no me lo preguntéis a mí que soy ignorante …’ y lo que sigue. Y nuestro órgano de cultura, la lengua, no ya nacional, sino internacional de España, sufriría rudo golpe. Porque nuestra lengua es internacional, como lo son el inglés y el alemán y el francés.

(1907^b, 523)

Unamuno's logic is more instinctive than sound. How could a language boasting the demographic and political rostrum that Spanish commands be threatened by languages that are legally, demographically, and ideologically hemmed in? Why should the state's “organ of culture” be diminished by internal and enormously disadvantaged competition, unless it is not secure in the culture it transmits? And what is one to make of the anxious assertion that Spanish, like English, French, and German, is an international language too? Unamuno argues from the weakness of a post-imperial nationalism in the heyday of European empires. Not the Castilian language but the post-imperial Spanish nation is a feeble, incomplete affair. Conceived in the nostalgic image of its forfeited empire and in the coveted image of the modern empires it cannot emulate, Spain—the idea of Spain launched by the 98'ers—militates against the modern concept of the plurinational and plurilinguistic state advanced by certain peninsular intellectuals and politicians with a prescient logic of future European direction. Gone, after 1898, is Unamuno's free market approach of yore, having turned into a rigid statalism: “Lo que más falta hace es robustecer el poder central, que si de algo peca es de débil; robustecerlo y a la vez flexibilizarlo y enriquecerle con los jugos de la vida toda difusa de la nación” (1907^b, 523).

Unamuno's post-98 political philosophy is best characterized as bad Hegelianism, with the state, or more precisely, the centralist state, driving the wheels of the civilizing process: “El Estado ha venido a ser el supremo órgano de la cultura” (1907^b, 525). Unamuno conceived this process as an extension of the Castilian historical experience; as an expansive domination following the old route of the conquistadors, but in full awareness that the post-imperial struggles of the twentieth century will be for the creation of cultural world-systems engaged in globalization and the definition of post-historical totalities:

Necesitamos hablar castellano, ante todo y sobre todo, para imponer nuestro sentido a los demás pueblos de lengua castellana primero, y a través de ellos, a la vida toda histórica de la Humanidad.

(1905, 1292)

Notes

1. Unamuno actually says “Catalanist pedantries,” but it is clear from the context that Catalan is meant, since speaking preferentially one's mother tongue is not tantamount to embracing a political credo. Unamuno's extension of Catalanism to the mere claim of linguistic rights automatically politicizes the condition of being Catalan.

2. Stern rightly includes Unamuno in this type of intellectual. His characterization of pre-Nazi German intellectuals like Lagarde, Langbehn and Moeller applies verbatim to Unamuno, with the obvious substitution of Spain for Germany: “They exemplified and encouraged what they sought to combat and annihilate, the cultural disintegration and the collapse of order in modern Germany. They were the accusers, but also the unwitting proof of their charges. As a consequence, they were forever wrestling with themselves even as they were fighting others” (Stern 328).

3. Years later, speaking of his religious crisis in March 1897, he says that since that time he became convinced that he was “un instrumento en la mano de Dios y un instrumento para la renovación de España” (an instrument in God's hand and an instrument for Spain's renewal) (letter to Mújica of 2 December 1908; Fernández Larrain 291). I am grateful to Javier Herrero for this reference.

4. Tönnies's theory of modernization as a loss of communal structures of experience and the formation of societal structures appeared in 1887. See Ferdinad Toennies, Community and Society. Trans. Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1957.

5. Unamuno's elevation of Don Quixote to national sainthood is programmatic. He becomes the redeemer in the patriotic religion of which Unamuno, in 1905, considered himself prophet and harbinger (1905, 1296).

6. Unamuno's probable model would be Paul de Lagarde, the father of the German nationalist religion and theorizer of the Germanic expansion beyond Germany's borders. Lagarde had asserted that “Germanism is not a matter of the blood, but of the spirit” (Stern 91).

7. On 16 April 1937, the Diario Vasco warns that Castilian “es un arma contra el enemigo. No emplearla en estos momentos es señal de tibieza patriótica” (Solé i Sabaté 1994, 35).

8. The ghost of Cuba haunts the Spanish imaginary after 1901, and especially after the creation of the Catalan Solidarity in 1905. The Madrid newspaper El Imparcial compares this development with the Cuban independence movement: “Exactamente así se hizo en Cuba la propaganda separatista.” Cited in La Correspondencia Militar, 10 December 1907 (Solé i Sabaté 1990, 98).

9. Unamuno's opinion that Portugal is an artificial nation wrongly excised from Spain reverberates in José Antonio Primo de Rivera's confidence in Spain's eventual reabsorbtion of Portugal (Payne 44). “Me pongo a pensar en la agorera suerte de esta nación [Portugal] tan poco naturalmente formada, y a la vez agólpanseme a las mientes dolorosos pensamientos sobre lo que en nuestra España está hoy ocurriendo. ¡Portugal y Cataluña! ¡Qué mundo de reflexiones no provoca en un español el juntar estos dos nombres!” (Unamuno 1908^a, 211).

10. “Oponen en Inglaterra al pobre sentido de la little England el vasto imperialismo del pueblo que habla inglés, the English speaking Folk; tengamos también los vascos nuestro imperialismo, un imperialismo sin emperador, difusivo y pacífico, no agresivo y guerrero. Rebasemos de la patria chica, chica siempre, para agrandar la grande y empujarla a la máxima, a la única, a la gran Patria humana” (1901, 240).

11. Unamuno explains the transition from his intuitive Basque nationalism to his conceptual Spanish nationalism as a result of his consideration of Spain's history (1905, 1288-1289). He is obviously unaware that the triumph of what he calls conceptual nationalism presupposes the nationalist conception of Spanish history. The opposition between “intuitive patriotism” and “conceptual patriotism,” along with the in-built connotations of nature versus culture, primary versus complex, etc., is not only a mainstay of nationalist doctrine but a consequence of hegemonic nationalism.

12. “¡La sugestión de estos viejos claustros en que se cree uno liberado del peso de los siglos! Al llegar a Torrelavega nos encontramos con un periodista madrileño, que empezó a darnos noticias de los sucesos de Barcelona y de Melilla [the reference is to Barcelona's Tragic Week, one of the salient events in Spain's twentieth century history]. ¡El sempiterno suceso! ¡La devoradora actualidad! Todo anecdótico, todo fragmentario, sin que haya modo de sacar sustancia ni contenido a nada. ¡Cuánto más no me decían del alma de la Patria el sombrío silencio del valle de Pas y la quietud soleada del viejo claustro de la colegiata de Santillana! (1909, 284).

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