SOURCE: Valdes, Mario J. “Metaphysics and the Novel in Unamuno's Last Decade.” Hispanofila 44 (1972): 33-44.

[In the following essay, Valdes argues that Unamuno's late works of literature, from Paz en la Guerra to San Manuel Bueno, mártir and La novella de don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez, demonstrate a well-developed metaphysics and that Unamuno's literary works metaphorically express a dialectical method and a fundamental dualism.]

One of the fundamental problems that confronts the literary critic is how to determine the place and function of philosophy in literature. Because the novel is a more elastic genre the influence of philosophy in it has been more pronounced than in other forms of literature, but philosophy in literature is certainly not limited to the novel nor is this observation an implied value judgement of the genre.

The rôle of philosophy in the novel can be approached through three distinct modes of study: the philosophy of the author, the philosophical message aimed at the reader, and the novel itself as a metaphysical problem. I believe the third approach to be the most fruitful for literary criticism to follow. Although it can be said that philosophical enquiry sheds light on most significant works of prose fiction, as Sherman Eoff¹ has demonstrated so well, there is a select kind of novel whose meaning is not wholly available except through a comparative analysis of philosophical problems and this novel can be considered to be based on a distinct aesthetic premise. It responds to a conceptual world which is symbolically manifested within the confines of the narrative reality. Unamuno sought to create this literature of intellectual commitment, but fully achieved his goal only in the last decade of his life.

Throughout his works Unamuno was developing a metaphysics which identified reality in neo-Hegelian terms of continuous change, an ethics of existential concern for the tragedy of man's existence and in his later years an aesthetics patterned on a personalistic transmission of the author into the reader's quest for self knowledge. All of this has been said before² but what I would add here is that this philosophy had a dialectical method and a fundamental dualism and most significantly that the dialectical method as well as the implicit dualism have been metaphorically expressed in his literature.

Unamuno wrote the following commentary on Hegel's dialectic which can serve us as a summation of his philosophical position: “Los contrarios de la dialéctica existen juntos y la única posibildad de unirlos es dentro del mismo proceso de la existencia.”³

Unamuno's complete works are strongly unified by his relentless search for a literary expression that could satisfy his need to reach out to the reader and engage him directly. It would, however, only confuse the problem to call this almost personal need a dominant theme. The Unamunian vision is a complex development of a philosopher-poet and to fit his writing into a category would be an oversimplification and distortion of it. A brief review of Unamuno's shifting aesthetic solutions to the problem of expressing a growing philosophical system will give us the necessary back-ground for the discussion of the metaphysical novel in the last decade.

From the beginning Unamuno was responding intellectually and intuitively to man's primeval dread of chaos. The maintenance of order in the face of chaos is in its manifold manifestations the Theogonic myth of creation. Unamuno's diversity of genre and aesthetic basis is thus unified as multiple re-enactments of this myth. Unamuno's first mythical position elaborated reality as a process and its principal literary expression came as extended similes discovering reality in the eternal cycle of nature; the sea, forests, trees, mountains are used with effectiveness.⁴ This initial simile will later become the metaphor of “lluvia en el lago” as the soul responds to the question “¿Qué es tu vida?”⁵

The continuance of the universe as an eternal process is the fundamental premise upon which Unamuno's work rests; it is never superseded although it does acquire corollaries, and it is emphatically presented in his last writings which we shall scrutinize in this study. In 1885 when Unamuno began to write Paz en la guerra he was ill-equipped to write a novelistic rendition of the Theogonic myth on this primary universal level. This first novel develops out of a purported reality of historical depiction; his aesthetic principle in this novel is the mimetic representation of external reality. The predictable result is that the mythical aspects of the novel—nature similes of the cycle of regeneration—appear to be gratuitous grafts onto the traditional plot development of the historical novel.

The second philosophical phase began even as Unamuno was completing Paz en la guerra and it is the now very familiar open cry against the personal loss of order amidst the ensuing chaos. Unamuno's response to the Theogonic myth had thus entered into an existential concern for the individual predicament. It was at this time that Unamuno's brilliance of mind and originality began to unravel the myth with a creative outpouring that would not cease until his death in 1936. For after a rather futile attempt at reconciling the mythical quest for the survival of a personal sense of order with a didactic aesthetic in Amor y pedagogía (1902), Unamuno abandoned the more traditional aesthetic formulations and by 1907 with the publication of Poesías concentrated on a radical manipulation of reader-author distance. The years 1912 to 1914 mark the first of several intense periods of enormous creativity. In less than two years Unamuno completed his foremost existential statement, Del sentimiento trágico …, the poetic counterpart to the essay Rosario de sonetos líricos, the book of short stories El espejo de la muerte which anticipated many of the literary innovations of the next twenty years, and the novel Niebla, culminating some twenty-five years of literary attempts to cope with the Theogonic myth. In this novel Unamuno re-enacts the myth as Augusto Pérez, the protagonist, struggles to assert and mold his personal sense of order out of the chaos which had been hidden under a heavy mist of abstract contingency. But the extraordinary issue here is that this struggle for survival by Augusto Pérez was not presented as a traditional representation of external reality where the narrative voice would have given us privileged insight into the character's quest. The character presents himself through interior monologue while the narrative voice ridicules him and flaunts his superiority over him. The novelistic reality of Niebla depends on the active collaboration of the self-conscious reader.

From 1915 to 1924 Unamuno participated actively in the political life of Spain. He gradually became a public critic on the events of the day. In an age of controversy, in the press and in the lecture hall, Unamuno excelled because he was intelligent, informal, belligerent and not above entertaining with his caustic commentary. During the First World War he vehemently sought to have neutral Spain take up the Allied cause. As a political pamphleteer he wrote hundreds of articles, for the most part uncollected today, dedicated to this end. After the war Unamuno took up the bitterly contested question of the Spanish constitution with consuming energy and in his now public rôle of prosecutor using personal invective. Unamuno's public stance of political propagandist led him directly to an open clash with the monarchy. After the government takeover by Primo de Rivera in 1923, Unamuno's opposition and criticism grew in proportion to the government's attempts to silence him. The climax was not long in coming; on February 21, 1924 Unamuno was exiled to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands from where he escaped to Paris six months later. During these years when the public man dominated so much of Unamuno's day, the private man was not entirely denied. Unamuno continued to pursue his logos, which had eluded him thus far.

Unamuno's writings now began an explicit cultivation of symbolism. From the biblical polarity of Abel Sánchez (1917), he moved on to the personal polarity of the double in Tulio Montalbán y Julio Macedo (1920)⁶ and La tía Tula (1921), the overladen novel of Virgin motherhood.⁷Teresa (1924), which ends this period, represents the symbolic escape from the polarities of the myth in a return to the womb of mother nature.⁸

The philosophical system which had already expanded from an initial metaphysical position of dualistic process into an existentialist ethics, now began to take the last turn as Unamuno put together the basis of his aesthetics. The idea of the survival of the author's personality through the creative power of his words began to appear frequently after 1907. If examined closely it can be seen as a refined re-elaboration of the Theogonic myth wherein the author, by writing, creates and passes on to others his unique vision or sense of order in the Universe. This concept of aesthetic survival had still to acquire a critical assessment of the mode and substance of the transmission before it could take its place in the Unamunian philosophy. The needed self-examination came suddenly with Unamuno's political exile. A dualistic pattern imposed itself once again; the words of an author are understood by Unamuno to be the expression of an implicit and sometimes explicit polarity between the mask of the public image and the confession of the intimate man. Consequently, his exile, with the ensuing public image, forced Unamuno into a radical examination of his projected self.

The writings of exile unfold into bifurcated books of unrelated parallel mythical quests. On the one hand they present Unamuno's continuing concern with the Theogonic myth of creation and recreation amidst the threatened return to chaos, and on the other there is now an additional myth, an adamic myth of exile and the loss of paradise; the quest is the search for paradise regained or Spain redeemed from the demoniac figures of Alfonso XIII and Primo de Rivera. Even the most casual reader of De Fuerteventura a París (1926), Romancero del destierro (1927) and Cómo se hace una novela (1927), cannot fail to be impressed by the incompatible nature of the two separate themes.⁹ These were dark days for Unamuno, filled with doubt, frustration and not infrequently financial want. But, it was precisely in these writings of inner polarity that Unamuno gained the essential awareness of his work and was able to formulate an aesthetics. For clearly the Adamic quest for redemption put Unamuno into a self-proclaimed position of Messiah and this image as a public posture opposed and negated the quest for the confession that would re-create the intimate man. The polarity of the personality had to be expressed but not at the cost of the reader's imaginative participation, for if this were lost the entire operation would fail.

Thus, by the last months of exile, Unamuno became fully aware of his use of symbols and their capacity to create literature of philosophical consideration. The complex tripartie philosophy emanating from the Theogonic myth had to be realized within a symbolic pattern. The three works that were written within two years—1929 to late 1930—provide the sought after pattern for the symbolic aesthetics: El hermano Juan (1929), La novela de don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez (1930) and San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1930).

In El hermano Juan, Unamuno goes back to the don Juan theme he had touched upon in Dos madres (1920) and links it up with the lovedeath motif of Teresa. But in this play the protagonist symbolizes sterile love of pleasure without creation. The symbol then grows into the representation of the actor, the mask, the public image which in the earlier works of exile had hidden and threatened the intimate man. Now, don Juan is only the public man; he does not have an intimate counterpart. If we can say that Augusto Pérez of Niebla was the self-conscious character, don Juan is the self-conscious symbol who is condemned to a never ending series of return performances as the Sisyphus of the personality.

La novela de don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez continues the elaboration of the public self as opposed to the intimate self. This short novel begins as a conventional epistolary novel with the unnamed letter writer sending frequent reports of his state of mind and spirit of his friend Felipe whose return correspondence is briefly mentioned in a few of the last letters. In the twenty-three letters of the text the epistoler presents himself as a man plagued with anthrophobia. He seeks to escape the tedium and stupidity of man by immersing himself in nature. He finds a large oak whose trunk is partially hollowed and here he finds a sanctuary, for he as Teresa's Rafael seeks to take refuge in mother nature's womb. But like Pachico of Paz en la guerra he must return to the company of men, and in this renewed contact he meets don Sandalio, who becomes his chess partner, but with whom he scarcely speaks. Nevertheless, he begins to imagine the personality of his silent partner. The letter-writer consistently refuses to allow others to inform him about don Sandalio. He reiterates in his letters that he has no interest in having his image of don Sandalio dispelled by the historical fact. The letters end on a literary note as the writer calls for the active creative reader to take the place of the common, passive reader who reads and follows but contributes nothing. The nature symbol and the literary theory of participation are, as we have mentioned before, of long standing in Unamuno's writing. However, the epilogue of this short novel quite abruptly takes it beyond the aesthetics of collaboration and sets it up as a metaphysical novel in the aesthetics of symbolic manifestation. Again a myth of polarity is drawn upon by Unamuno to symbolize the personality.

Unamuno's authorial intrusion begins with the suggestion that the letter writer and his subject don Sandalio are the same person. The writer being the intimate part of the personality with his symbolic wish to escape from polarity by a return to the womb, and don Sandalio is seen as his public image, i. e., the man others think him to be. No sooner has our intruder made this interpretation when he again suggests that perhaps the recipient of the letters, the purported reader, Felipe, is one and the same as the letter writer and don Sandalio. In this case, Felipe is a truly unknown aspect of the personality, and the letter writer would be the autobiographical image of himself with don Sandalio as his public image. This quasi-game is based on the well-known “Prólogo” of Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo. But Unamuno continues and rapidly adds still another dimension by acknowledging that all three characters are aspects of the author's personality. And, of course, this re-created personality of the author now exists in the mind of the reader, his reader, who reads actively, i. e., imaginatively and not passively and, consequently, establishes the ultimate polarity of personality—you and I.

San Manuel Bueno, mártir was Unamuno's last novel. He wrote an early outline late in 1929, a first draft that was published in 1931, and a final version published together with La novela de don Sandalio … in 1933. This novel was the culmination of an aesthetic search for the metaphysical novel, and also a philosophical achievement, for it realized the logos of his philosophical system.

The Theogonic myth of creation as in Unamuno's biblical models gives the novel the primary pattern for dialectic struggle within which the Adamic myth will play its part. The aesthetic premise for this novel is that of the symbolic manifestation of thought; it is not dependent on the representation of external reality, nor on a didactic revelation of truth. This is an aesthetic premise of mythical and symbolic manifestation of a philosophical problem.

Literary expression through a pattern of opposites is a well-known literary tradition reaching back at least to the book of Genesis. Consequently, a systematic analysis of Unamuno's novel that brings forth the various polarities in the language, plot, characterization, special and temporal elements of structure and theme, has proven only that the author partakes of a long lived and perhaps essential literary tradition.¹⁰ As important as this endeavor may be, I believe that it would overlook the profundity of Unamuno's literary achievement. Although some critics will disagree with my premise that there can be a metaphysical as well as a mimetic aesthetics in the novel, I shall take courage from my convictions and proceed in an outline of the inherent metaphysical system in this novel.¹¹

The narrator's presentation of don Manuel as “aquel varón matriarcal” in the first paragraph sets the stage for the development of the metaphysical structure of the novel. Don Manuel's capacity to create and sustain the spiritual life of his villagers reminds one of Robert Grave's description of the kings of ancient Greece who maintained their control by claiming the creative primacy of their matriarchal predecessors through ritual. Don Manuel's office as priest not only gave him the means of exercising control over his parishioners but also demanded his use of ritual to represent the re-creative powers of the promise of immortality.

Not only does the introductory presentation of don Manuel anticipate the use of contraries throughout the novel but also the very relationship of narrator to protagonist carefully structures the novel on a dialectical pattern.

The novel begins with don Manuel as the spiritual father of the narrator, but by the end of the third chapter and before we have the full revelation of his inner turmoil, the narrator begins to feel a kind of maternal affection for her spiritual father. This feeling grows in intensity and becomes the principal motive for writing the memoirs which we must realize jeopardize the possibility of don Manuel's beatification. Angela must write for she is spiritually re-creating don Manuel through the written word of her gospel-like confession. Time in this novel is a juxtaposition of past and present within which the narrator develops the double polarity of time and character. She has been the spiritual daughter in the past, but as the novel progresses she is moving toward the present in which she has the reverse rôle of spiritual mother, i. e., the evangelist re-creating the saint. The ambivalent nature of the narrator's sense of purpose is always with us, for she reminds us that she does not know to what end her writing will be put. But there are the last words of Lazarus to his sister:

—No siento tanto tener que morir—me decía en sus últimos días—, como que conmigo se muere otro pedazo del alma de Don Manuel. Pero lo demás de él vivirá contigo. Hasta que un día hasta los muertos nos moriremos del todo.

(OC [Obras completas], XVI, 622)

Lazarus anticipates the threat of oblivion for the memory of don Manuel when shortly after the master's death he began to compile a record of his words which are later the basis for the narrator's writing. The last page of Angela's confession gives her entire project an extra-rational spirit of inner compulsion which cannot be explained under any circumstances as rational behavior, not even plain common sense. She is a narrator who is not able to determine whether her story is true or false, empirical experience or a dream, reality or illusion. But she is certain she has had an experience of saintliness. Angela Carballino is in the select company of inspired narrators.

Space in this novel is almost entirely symbolic with setting reduced to the minimal inference of background for the acts of the master. Let us therefore examine the symbolic polarity of mountain and lake which gives the novel its thematic unity and also provides the basis for the metaphysical interpretation.

The narrator's description of the protagonist progresses through similes of nature as he is compared to both the mountain and the lake. The similes are essentially contradictory but the extent of their opposition is not apparent until they are metaphorically expanded:

Y no era un coro, sino una sola voz, una voz simple y unida, fundidas todas en una y haciendo como una montaña, cuya cumbre perdida a las veces en nubes, era Don Manuel … la voz de Don Manuel se zambullía, como en un lago …

(OC, XVI, 589)

The symbolic polarity of mountain and lake primarily signify the personal struggle of the protagonist to find a reason for living. The mountain as a symbol of faith and specifically of the belief in personal immortality is established with the description of his mission to defend his people's happiness through religion. And the lake symbol is don Manuel's conviction that only nothingness lies beyond death. Consequently, don Manuel's mission is interpreted by himself as keeping his people from looking too deeply into the lake, for the legend of the submerged city will only demonstrate that the past is but an anonymous sedementary accumulation of the remains of men's lives. The threatened irrevocable loss is the termination of personal consciousness.

Don Manuel's position as to the symbols is at once a separation and a unification. For he is the buffer that shields and protects the faith of the villagers from the skepticism of enquiry. However, his own state of mind is the full personification of the polarity in continuous opposition. Thus the dialectic of contraries operates on two planes in the novel—the external reality of life in the village and the internal reality of the protagonist's own consciousness. The contraries on either plane are dialectical polarities since they each acquire their meaning in opposition to the other. The metaphysical symbols are brought together not only in the narrator's description of don Manuel, but also in his own words as recalled by Lazarus:

“¿Has visto, Lázaro, misterio mayor que el de la nieve cayendo en el lago y muriendo en él mientras cubre con su toca a la montaña?”

(OC, XVI, 610)

Change and the illusion of eternity are the essential elements in the metaphor. Reality (snow falling onto water) is an ever-changing process which can nevertheless appear as an illusion of eternity (the hood of snow on the mountain). The mystery is the illusion itself in the observer. Certainly the natural process of falling snow is part of a continuous cycle of change with only a different rate of transformation. Nevertheless the eternal snows of the mountain appear to defy change.

The first level—life in the village—where the symbolic polarity operates develops into the protagonist's ethical code. His method of protecting the faith is to evade all questions about it and to concentrate on conduct and general social well-being. It soon becomes apparent that he is just as staunchly opposed to the theologian who is preaching the sacrifice of this life for the sake of gaining eternal salvation as he is to the social reformers who would ask a generation to sacrifice all for the sake of future generations. In both cases (to don Manuel and to Unamuno both absolute positions are polarizations) they are sacrificing the only value of life itself for an illusion. Only Lazarus is keen enough to see the inconsistency of his ethics to his purported position of belief in immortality. Consequently, the social dimension of the symbols demonstrates the practical ethics of the protagonist which are consistent to his metaphysical position and only inconsistent with his rôle as a member of the orthodox clergy.

The second level—the inner consciousness—presents the symbolic dialectic in all its dramatic effectiveness. By the time we receive the climatic discovery of the protagonist's state of mind, we have been slowly prepared by the narrator's characterization of don Manuel as an overt transfiguration of Christ. The parallel being drawn between the character's activity and his biblical model is however radically transformed as the two are linked as non-believers in struggle against despair: “¡Dios mío, Dios mío, ¿por qué me has abandonado?”

The novel is plotted in a loose chronology clearly determined by the biblical models and sources. The focal point throughout is not narrative action, but rather the words and deeds of the master as remembered and recorded by the disciple. The symbolic polarities on this level of inner conflict are richly expanded through the explicit identification of the protagonist with the archetype of the conflict of contraries from the Bible.

The Christ-like presentation of don Manuel by the narrator must be seen in the light of the narrator's relationship to him as daughter and mother. As his spiritual daughter she is a part of the mountain of faith which maintains the illusion of immortality, but as his virginal spiritual mother she responds to the need to re-create him and thus save him from disappearing in the lake of oblivion.

The archetype is at its fullest development in don Manuel's open self-characterization as a latter-day Moses:

Como Moisés, he conocido al Señor, nuestro supremo ensueño, cara a cara, y ya sabes que dice la Escritura que el que le ve la cara a Dios, que el que le ve al sueño los ojos de la cara con que nos mira, se muere sin remedio y para siempre.

(OC, XVI, 617)

The final touch of biblical archetype used to support the inner conflict is Unamuno's authorial intrusion at the end of the novel:

… se nos dice cómo mi celestial patrono, San Miguel Arcángel—Miguel quiere decir “¿Quién como Dios?”, y arcángel, archimensajero—, disputó con el Diablo—Diablo quiere decir acusador, fiscal—por el cuerpo de Moisés y no toleró que se lo llevase en juicio de maldición, sino que le dijo al Diablo: “El Señor te reprenda”. Y el que quiera entender, que entienda.

(OC, XVI, 627)

With Unamuno's entrance into the text the entire pattern of symbolic polarity is re-cast into a larger conflict. The devil as prosecutor is demanding the damnation of don Manuel for having preached eternal life (the mountain) while believing only in death as annihilation (the lake), but Michael the messenger (the author) opposes the rational prosecutor on the grounds that the will to believe is the only faith possible in the reality of man. Consequently the two central myths are reconciled: the Adamic myth of redemption and the return to paradise is subordinated but active within the principal Theogonic myth of creation and re-creation. Moses-Manuel does not reach the promised land but he is redeemed by Michael the author through his writing. Unamuno as author has taken the system of polarities out of the fictional confines of the novel and by addressing the reader has engaged him directly in the fuller polarity of reality as Unamuno understood it. The novelistic engagement of the reader is transcended, into the philosophical problem of the reader's existence and this is Unamuno's final contribution to the aesthetics of the novel.

Notes

1. See Sherman Eoff, The Modern Spanish Novel: Comparative Essays Examining the Philosophical Impact of Science on Fiction (New York, 1961).

2. Cf. my own Death in the Literature of Unamuno (Urbana, 1964), studied the relationship of Unamuno's philosophy to his literature and sought to emphasize the fact that Unamuno did not discard ideas, he expanded on them. Paul Ilie's excellent study, Unamuno, An Existential View of Self and Society (Madison, 1967), centers on the problem of polarity but from the point of view of psychology: “The result was an ostensibly inconsistent philosophy. However, an internal analysis of these textual divergencies reveals a completely coherent and often unvaried statement on a given question. My approach, therefore in this book will be to consider the entire body of writings as the expression of an intellect at war with itself” (p. viii). And recently another important study on Unamuno has come out with a clear recognition of the changing patterns of Unamuno's dialectic philosophy: Carlos París, Unamuno. Estructura de su mundo intelectual (Barcelona, 1968), pp. 209-68.

3. This commentary appears on the place-marker used by Unamuno in his reading of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik; the book is available for consultation in Salamanca in the Unamuno library, the number is 1260.

4. The cycles of nature are Unamuno's first extensive figurative expressions. See for example “Pompeya,” 1892, Obras Completas, I (Barcelona, Vergara, 1958), pp. 861-5. Hereafter cited as OC. In a more discursive use see En torno al casticismo, 1895 (OC, III, 184-8). One of the most lyrical is in “Paisaje del alma,” 1918 (OC, I, 852): “Los arroyos que desde el valle contemplaban las cumbres estaban hechos con aguas que del derretimiento de las encumbradas nieves descendían; su alma era del alma excelsa que se arrecia de frío. Y la verdura se alimentaba de aquellas mismas aguas de las nieves. La tierra misma sobre que discurrían los arroyos, la tierra de que con sus raíces chupaban vida los árboles, era el polvo a que las rocas de las cumbres se iban reduciendo.” For commentaries on this usage, see Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, “La naturaleza,” El Unamuno contemplativo (México; Colegio de México, 1959), pp. 164-220; and my Death in the Literature of Unamuno, pp. 37-64.

5. The metaphor is part of the poem “¿Qué es tu vida, alma mía?” written on August 11, 1926 by Unamuno and used again several times, the last being in San Manuel Bueno, mártir. The text of the poem follows:

   ¿Qué es tu vida, alma mía?, ¿cuál tu pago?
   ¡Lluvia en el lago!
   ¿Qué es tu vida, alma mía, tu costumbre?
   ¡Viento en la cumbre!
   ¿Cómo tu vida, mi alma, se renueva?
   ¡Sombra en la cueva!

   ¡Lluvia en el lago!
   ¡Viento en la cumbre!
   ¡Sombra en la cueva!

   Lágrimas es la lluvia desde el cielo,
   y es el viento sollozo sin partida,
   pesar la sombra sin ningún consuelo,
   y lluvia y viento y sombra hacen la vida.

   (Romancero del destierro)

6. Unamuno's preoccupation with the double in literature begins with the short story “El que se enterró,” 1908, and reaches maturity after 1920. Tulio Montalbán y Julio Macedo (1920) which was reworked successfully by Unamuno as a play, Sombras de sueño (1926-30), is a perfect example of Unamuno's elaboration of this theme. The final works with this material are El otro (1926-32) and La novela de don Sandalio … Also of interest is the article Unamuno wrote on The Jolly Corner, Henry James' contribution to this theme. See “Nuestros yos exfuturos, 1923 (OC, X, 529-35).

7. La tía Tula was begun in 1902 and not completed until 1921. It shows signs of having accumulated the Unamunian development of the theme of motherhood. The trajectory for this theme begins to appear in 1902 with Amor y pedagogía where one of the two “solutions” offered to the protagonist is to procreate children; next comes “Los hijos espirituales,” a tragic-farcical short story of 1916 where the child substitutes are dolls for the woman and books for the man. (This motif had been partially anticipated in Niebla (1914) by the story of Víctor Gotí and his wife before the birth of their child). And, in Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo (1920), where two of the three short novels further develop the theme, e. g., “Dos madres” and “El marqués de Lumbría.” La tía Tula is the culmination of motherhood as a dominant narrative theme. However, the most profound development was yet to come in San Manuel Bueno, mártir where both Angela and Manuel participate.

8. Teresa has the lyrical presentation of the theme of “desnacer,” i. e., the return to the womb. The moon and the Virgin Mother as in La tía Tula are invoked but here with a call to the union in the bliss of pre-birth:

   Tú, Señora, que a Dios hiciste niño
                       hazme niño al morirme
   y cúbreme con el manto de armiño
                       de tu luna al oírme
                       con tu sonrisa.

   (Teresa, 150)

9. The passages suppressed from Cómo se hace una novela. Romancero del destierro, and De Fuerteventura a París in the Obras completas are merely the more abusive aspects of the public man in his war for the redemption of Spain.

10. There is ample evidence that Unamuno recognized his affinity to William Blake in the poetic use of contraries. See my study “Archetype and Re-creation: A Comparative Study of William Blake and Miguel de Unamuno,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXIX, No. 1 (October 1970), 58-72.

11. A study which has acknowledged the fact that San Manuel Bueno, mártir is a remarkable synthesis of Unamuno's thought is Ciriaco Morón Arroyo's article “San Manuel Bueno, mártir y el sistema de Unamuno,” Hispanic Review, XXXII (1964), 227-246.