[In the following essay, Round argues that Paz en la Guerra is both one of the last works of nineteenth-century Spanish realism as well as postrealism—using a metanarrative to unite documentary, historical fact with novelesque, imaginative vision.]

Of Paz en la guerra two things are fairly generally granted: that it is unlike Unamuno's later novels, and that it stands at an extreme outer limit of Spanish nineteenth-century realist fiction.¹ Both these commonplaces are rooted in very widely-shared experiences of reading the book. The compulsion which Unamuno feels to convey the inwardness of events is still, at this stage in his work, contained within the forms of a story of outward events. We are not yet being presented with the kind of alternative to more traditional varieties of the novel which Unamuno was later to canvass in theory and to cultivate in practice. Yet as we look back on Paz en la guerra from the perspective of its ending, we are aware that the mould of a realistic narrative of historical events has been decisively broken.

That experience makes it rather too easy to say either that Unamuno has attempted but failed to produce a novel in the historical-realist convention, or that the youthful novelist has not yet found the manner of his maturity.² Both assessments tend to dismiss out of hand the kind of fiction which Paz en la guerra is, in favour of some more familiar kind which it might have been but is not. Yet the novel's achievements and its limitations must both be related in the first instance to what it actually tries to do. It is here that our first difficulty arises. We know a good deal about what nineteenth-century Spanish realism is like: we have La Regenta and most of Galdós to tell us. We know what the Unamuno novel is like because we have Niebla and Abel Sánchez and San Manuel Bueno and the rest. But we know much less about the kind of novel Paz en la guerra is meant to be because there are few, if any, other novels like it.

There is no mystery about why this should be so. Paz en la guerra had hardly appeared on the bookstalls when its author's personality was shaken to the roots by what has come to be called his ‘religious crisis’ of late March 1897.³ By its very timing that crisis cannot be an issue in interpreting this novel. But it does have to be taken into account in understanding all of Unamuno's subsequent work, including the distinctively narrowed and intensified focus of his later fictions. For the 1897 experience was above all else a reassessment of priorities: it would never again be important to Unamuno to put into a novel what he had found it important to put into this one. On the other hand, that input was itself decisively shaped by the young Unamuno's experiences, concerns, and habits of thought. No other writer, as it happened, was close enough to these to take up the practice of fiction just where Paz en la guerra had left it. This novel, then, remains a nonesuch; it represents a road which was, in the event, not taken. That much is easily registered. It is much harder to say where that road was leading.

Unamuno himself seems to have been far from clear about this during the long process of the work's composition.⁴ Some of his early definitions of the piece which he had in hand no doubt reflect preliminary states of the text. Thus in July 1890 he called it a ‘cuento largo o novela corta', and a ‘cuadro de costumbres’ (CI [Cartas inéditas de Miguel de Unamuno], p. 119). Two years later he was concerned lest it should turn out a ‘monstruo novelesco-histórico-político-religioso-filosófico’ (CI, p. 167; 5th April 1892); by 1895 it was ‘mi novela o lo que sea’ (CI, p. 203; undated). Yet side by side with these adjustments and anxieties there grew in him a stubborn, intuitive defensiveness of the kind of book it was turning out to be. From an early stage he had hoped to make it ‘una obra de verdad, de literatura’ (CI, p. 124; 26th July 1890), and he undertook with increasing self-awareness the management of its dual character as realistic truth and literary creation. As he did so, its ‘idealistic', non-Naturalist' aspects came to matter more to him than its documentary value. ‘Cada vez reduzco más los elementos históricos', he wrote in 1892 ‘y los fusiono más en los novelescos’ (CI, p. 174; 17th May). But the ‘novelesque’ component here cannot be taken to imply any purely aesthetic concern. On the contrary, when the novel finally appeared in January 1897, Unamuno went out of his way to defend the formal oddity of what he had produced. His aim, he declared, had been to avoid neat climaxes and clear-cut contrasts, and to achieve a certain sameness and uniformity in the telling: ‘Todo normal, todo modesto, todo fluyente, todo desvanecido’ (CI, p. 249; 20th January 1897).

The dominant note in all this, as so often in Unamuno, is the pursuit of synthesis: fusionar is evidently a key term.⁵ No less typical is the fact that several syntheses at once seem to be in play. What is it, precisely, that Unamuno seeks to ‘fuse’ with the documentary stuff of a historical account of later Carlism? At one moment it seems to be a body of highly explicit and self-conscious intellectual and ideological concerns: religion, politics, philosophy. At another words like normal, modesto, fluyente seem to point in a different direction. They recall very strongly—and there is a host of other evidence that this is not coincidental—the notion of intrahistoria which Unamuno had so recently been developing in the essays of En torno al casticismo.⁶ Yet intrahistory—the anonymous but universal collective experience of peoples which for Unamuno constituted the inwardness of history—was of its nature inchoate, inexplicit, unselfconscious. Clearly the ‘novelistic’ element which is to be fused with historical documentation must itself encompass both ideology and intrahistory. That aspiration is not too hard to formulate; we are still little nearer to seeing how it is to be achieved.

The difficulty persists when we come to focus that enquiry on the text of Paz en la guerra itself. ‘Todo normal, todo modesto, todo fluyente, todo desvanecido’ is not the description of a surface-texture which lends itself at all readily to analysis. Patterns of historical involvement are deliberately blurred by the evocation of other models of experience. The story flows restlessly, indeterminately on, losing its way in a haze of vivid but largely unrelated detail. ‘The interest in details of feeling,’ we might well want to conclude ‘dominates over the interest in events, which is a peculiar thing to say of a book that professes to be history.’ It seems an impossible way to set about writing a historical novel—or it might well seem so, but for the fact that the remark just quoted was not originally made about Paz en la guerra at all. It was a comment on Tolstoy's War and Peace—by general consent a historical novel which does work.⁷

The relevance of War and Peace to Unamuno's novel has more than once been explored; its bearing on the present argument is more limited. The central affinity between the two novels is obvious enough; much more to the point is the palpable difference between their aims which that kinship throws into relief. The influence of War and Peace is especially evident in Unamuno's account of Ignacio at the wars. The young recruit's historical expectations are constantly subverted, in a very Tolstoyan manner, by the more problematic nature of his intrahistorical experiences. But the similar material in War and Peace has a much more clear-cut and central function. The core of Tolstoy's narrative is the discomfiture of the conscious historical actor Napoleon—rational calculating, efficient—at the hands of the Russian commander, the bumbling, natural, instinctual Kutuzov, assisted by that other natural force, the Russian winter. In sum, it is the triumph of intrahistory over history. To that outcome Tolstoy gives his most emphatic approval. He seeks at every turn to impress upon his readers the supremacy of all that is intrahistorical, and the futility of the merely historical. Each localized deflation of the public, historical image of persons and events is a clear sign of the novel's overall tendency. But in Unamuno, the parallel episodes serve no such tendency. For he is not seeking to show that intrahistory ought, in all cases, to prevail over history; rather he insists that the two belong together. Paz en la guerra aspires to be a demonstration of how they belong together; its instances of the Tolstoyan subversion of history by intrahistory reflect only one of the patterns which this aim involves

The overall picture is correspondingly more complex and at first sight, it has to be admitted, more baffling. Certainly this is the effect of the presence in the text of a host of other contrastive pairs, each of them linked in some kind of synthesis. One does not have to read very far into the novel to identify this dialectical cast of Unamuno's imagination or to find it something of a mixed blessing.⁸ It is, no doubt, clear enough why we are being invited to interest ourselves in the contrast between Carlist and Liberal families, whose traditions in their synthesis form the recent history of Bilbao. Nor is it hard to place or to justify the antithesis between town and country—the synthesis here being ‘Vizcaya’ or ‘Basque society’ or something of that sort. But it is less easy to grasp the relation of Unamuno's habit of mind to his subject-matter when he glosses the troubles of the 1860s and 1870s as a clash between ‘la voluntad nacional’ and ‘la razón revolucionaria’.⁹ Does this imply a more general opposition between ‘will’ and ‘reason’? Do we perhaps have Schopenhauer to thank for it? Does it, in any case, really connect with the experiences described? In their turn the contrasting political traditions are bewilderingly divided and subdivided. The Liberal Aranas are represented by the go-ahead Don Juan and his introverted brother Miguel. Their corporate identity is both ‘liberal de abolengo’ and, antithetically, ‘católica a la antigua’ (p. 102). The Carlist Iturriondos and their circle offer a still more complex pattern. There is an immediate antithesis between the family's instinctual ‘living’ of their tradition and the more conscious historical commitment of their friends, lay and clerical. Among the laymen, the ‘moderate’ Eustaquio is ranged against the more ‘extremist’ Gambelu, both being linked in an implied synthesis with their ideological opponents of similar temper. Within the family the intrahistorical Carlist by tradition, Pedro Antonio underwrites his son's emergence as a Carlist by conviction and by historical action, but also furnishes a living example of just the opposite process. As for Ignacio, he passes through a whole clutch of antithetical states and relationships. His espousal of extremism is paired with the adolescent unbelief of his Liberal friend Juanito. His fervent piety is contrasted, yet also linked, with his early sexuality. In this latter domain his idealistic feelings focussed on Rafaela Arana are brought into the closest association with the coarse carnal impulse that drives him to the brothel. Within Carlism itself he discovers yet more antitheses: the Basque militant tradition which he espouses is set against the new-fangled ideological Carlism of the distictively Castilian Celestino. He also encounters two varieties of anti-Carlist: the committed Liberal, Juanito Arana (whom he prefers), and Pachico Zabalbilde, who at this stage seems wholly and disconcertingly sceptical. This last example leads on to further complexities, since any two of the three young men can be ranged in an antithetical yet linked pairing. Thus, though Juanito and Pachico differ, both belong to the ‘progressive’ camp; Ignacio and Juanito, adversaries by tradition, are both located within the dual tradition that is the life of Bilbao; Ignacio and Pachico, though as yet they barely understand each other, need to do so, and will come to do so very much more before the novel ends. We might note, too, that the first of these syntheses is a matter of history, and the second of intrahistory, while the third seems closer than either to the essential dynamic of the novel as a whole.

That movement, however, remains elusive. In theory all these dialectical patterns might operate as the key to our understanding. The underlying syntheses which they reveal might, as the novel advanced, draw progressively more of its antithetical elements into harmony. That process might well be identified with the movement of a central character—Ignacio, perhaps—towards maturity and a deeper self-knowledge. But Paz en la guerra is not that kind of novel—certainly not in Part I. By the end of that section Ignacio understands himself scarcely any better than we can understand the bewilderingly dialectical way in which his story has been told. One episode, though, does seem to point in this direction: the visit to country relatives and the rustic wedding-feast.¹⁰ These closer contacts with the rural element of the Basque tradition do partially clarify matters for Ignacio. The Basque language has some part in this, as does the encounter with nature. But it also matters that this is an immersion, albeit temporary, in a form of life which can still respond in an integrated way to its own necessities—a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist pattern of production and consumption. Returning, Ignacio feels more drawn to the serene Rafaela Arana, more comprehending of Pachico's scorn for all party labels. These seem signs of a growing maturity, both personal and socio-political. But he still has much to learn. Some of it he never does learn: the story of Ignacio at the wars is the story, largely, of his gathering confusion till, dying, he drifts out of history again once for all.

Much of the dialectical matter in Paz en la guerra seems related, then, to style and mental habit, rather than to any structuring pattern. Indeed, it is hard to say, even after the initial fifth of the book, just how any such pattern is going to be supplied. It is not even clear that Ignacio will in fact be the central figure, though for the moment he does occupy the centre of a congruous if rather rambling set of relationships. Yet the initial emphasis seems to lie with his father, Pedro Antonio, and the central portion of Part I makes Pachico rather more prominent than anything which he actually does would warrant; in other parts of the book we shall find the Aranas to the fore. Ought we, then, to think in terms of a collective protagonist: the city of Bilbao?¹¹

Such an assumption would make Paz en la guerra fairly and squarely a historical novel, in which a historical entity (the city) and historical incident (the war) provide the ultimate focus of attention. Yet that is not where our attention seems to be directed. Already in Part I—and this will be typical of the novel as a whole—what happens to Pedro Antonio is of less concern than what he does with that experience. The Seven Years' War exists in his mind, in his memory, in his family tradition; it is used as part of his response to Ignacio's adolescent problems; it becomes more intensely real as a new Carlist uprising comes to seem imminent. Other characters too ‘make history in their heads’ in much the same way: Eustaquio's habitual search for compromise and Gambelu's nostalgia for the church-burning Liberals of yesteryear appear as the products of temperament no less than of ideology. The young men in particular construct the distinctive worlds of their historical experience, each in his own fashion. Here again the thing which we are being brought to understand seems to be not history itself but the ways in which history is understood. Most of the young, Ignacio and Juanito among them, follow the least reflective of courses, accepting as part of their own lives whichever version of public events happens to be most obviously on offer to them. In this they are contrasted with two more conscious alternatives which, in their turn, stand dialectically opposed to one another. Celestino seeks to manipulate history towards a ‘right’ end, previously defined in abstract ideological terms. To this approach Unamuno, who wrote of this novel as containing ‘desahogos contra el intelectualismo y las gentes intelectualizadas', is perceptibly hostile.¹² Celestino is never able to understand why his theoretical arguments fail to grip, nor will he ever admit that he too is pursuing a personal fulfilment. Nothing from this quarter, we are led to assume, will help us to understand what it is to live one's own historical moment. Pachico, on the other hand, is very evidently being set up to provide some such understanding. Yet even Pachico's credentials for that role are, for the time being, ambiguous. They will remain so, crucially, throughout much of the book.

Pachico Zabalbilde has accepted the need to make his own life as an individual, outwith any purely automatic acceptance of tradition. Yet he still seems to need contact with those who inhabit and accept the ‘given’ traditions of Carlist or Liberal Bilbao. He can only handle these antithetical demands by way of an ironic detachment: ‘Un partido es una necedad’(129). This calling-down of a plague on both houses, negative in itself, seems related to a more positive outlook, widely present throughout the novel: the sense that any total picture must imply a reconciliation of opposites, that each of the opposed parties needs its opposition to the other in order to realize itself. Ought we to take this, then, as Unamuno's over-arching dialectical reading of the historical record? At first it seems plausible. Gambelu and the Liberals furnish one example; the boys in their street-battles provide another. But the link between these comradely affrays and the actual warfare of the book's middle chapters is at best problematic. It is made real enough when the besieged Juanito and Enrique exchange boyhood memories with Juan José, now their besieger (229-30). But it is called into question when Ignacio, drawn deeper into war, finds that the street-battles of his childhood were very different (174). The conciliation of opposites is less blandly achieved than we might have been led to expect.¹³

There is, besides, a logical difficulty, which is thrown into further relief by Pedro Antonio's eventual quietist rejection of the ‘cause’ for which his son has died. If all opposites are ultimately held and reconciled in synthesis, if Pedro Antonio's grief for his son, and that alone, can justify the cause they both served, if history on the field and history in the head are in the last resort interchangeable, then purposive historical activity is denied a meaning altogether. Not just any party allegiance, but any assumption of a historical role becomes a necedad. And that, if the book did end with Pedro Antonio disillusioned and Pachico merely sceptical, would be its final interpretation of all history.

As it happens, that is not how Paz en la guerra ends. But it is not clear from Part I that we are going to come through to anything more positive. Nor—contrary to what we might expect—does it become clear from Part II, or from Part III, or from Part IV. Not until the novel is complete can we look back and say that it has a shape and a view of history that actually amount to some kind of statement. This novel carries to an extreme form that familiar Galdosian feature, the extended exposition. Paz en la guerra, one might say, is all exposition; only in its final pages do we discover that this exposition was also its own development. In any traditional fictional scheme that would be absurd and disabling; even within the structures favoured by the mature Galdós it would be very odd.¹⁴ Yet in terms of Unamuno's dialectical patterning it will do very well.

It will do so, at least, on one condition: since the meanings of the book are witheld until the very end, the reader's interest and commitment must be secured by other means. Hence the importance of the writing of Paz en la guerra, which time and again carries a local conviction that can make us suspend our longer-term uncertainties about where it is all leading. And this is primarily an achievement of realism in the traditional sense. Unamuno may present certain historical processes as obscure because that is how they are experienced: the battles of the war zone register as confused and pointless for the baffled Ignacio; the break-up of Carlism is a matter of hints and suspicions because that is the way it seems to the movement's own naive partisans. But though the events themselves may be left in doubt, the nature of the experiences is all the clearer. Again, the manner in which historical factors impinge on private experience is captured in scenes of custom like Ignacio's last Christmas at home (153-5), or in dialogues like that of the children under siege (227-8); the Arana family's commentary on Ignacio's death (260-1)—where the balance between objective relevance and imaginative rightness brings us very close to Lúkacs' notion of ‘typicality’. We come closer still to a realistic art of documentation when, as happens from time to time, the narrative calls for a passage of factual summary like the pages covering the strategic aftermath of Somorrostro (255-8). Yet even here the imaginative momentum is sustained, so that the information given is not merely information but also part of the fiction. It would be fatal, clearly, for a novel of this kind if the protagonists' personal existence were to be swamped by their historical circumstance, as sometimes happens in the Episodios Nacionales of Galdós. Here it does not happen.

To ensure that it does not happen is a principal function of Part I where the growth of so many of the characters is so painstakingly charted. The effect is reinforced in later episodes of personal growth like Igancio's meeting with the old man in Part II (170-1) or Rafaela's reaction to her mother's death (220-1). These are so clearly registered that we cannot doubt their longer-term effect on the awareness with which Ignacio and Rafaela will take on board any subsequent experience. The characters' experiences, then, even at their most ‘factual', belong to lives whose shaping has been made familiar to us. In similar fashion even the collective life of Bilbao is kept from lapsing into an objectified and abstract generality. It is made present, for example, in the scenes of nightly guard-duty: through such scenes we come to know this community for what it is.

This strong and pervasive emphasis on the story's realistic substance, both historical and personal, has an important effect even on those passages where that substance appears to be most remote. The extended meditations by Pedro Antonio and Pachico which appear towards the end of the novel are in no sense discursive philosophical essays, clamped upon an inappropriate fiction.¹⁵ On the contrary, they grow out of these characters as we know them to be—more exactly still, as we have known them coming to be. These flights of extended synthesis are yet more securely integrated into the narrative by the order in which they occur. It is in one sense a tentative and exploratory order: Pedro Antonio by the monument adds something to Pachico by the sea, and Pachico on the mountain adds again to both. But it is also deliberate: Unamuno has willed this sequence of disclosures as a part of the overall ordering of his book.

As good a starting-point as any for the analysis of that ordering is the division of the material into five parts. This was determined at an early stage of composition; already in 1892, Unamuno had devised a set of provisional titles: Germinación; La guerra; Bilbao; Smorrostro; ¡Traición!¹⁶ In the final state of the text, the subject-matter of each part except the last is compatible with this scheme. Part V, however, is now concerned not with the alleged betrayal of the Carlist cause, but with a drawing together of themes towards the vision of ‘paz en la guerra misma’. As between the five sections there is no regularity of internal structure. Part I moves from Pedro Antonio to Ignacio and (more cursorily) to the Aranas; at its very centre the attention shifts unexpectedly to Pachico before returning to Ignacio and the Aranas again. Part II is built around a straightforward antithesis: as Ignacio approaches his enlistment his commitment grows; as he learns more of the war at first hand it wanes again. Part III begins and ends with the Arana family—at first with Miguel and his brother to the fore; later, after a brief glimpse of Ignacio, with Rafaela and her uncle. Here, uniquely in the book, the Liberal forms of life are presented as meaningful in their own right. But their meanings remain tantalizingly uncompleted: what, for example, are we meant to make of the collection of pornography found among Miguel's belongings after his death? A detail, perhaps, from the real life of the diarist on whom Miguel was modelled?¹⁷ Or a symbol of the tragic voyeurism of his kind of detachment? We do not know enough to decide. Part IV has a simpler, more purposive structure. Ignacio's final disillusion and death is followed by the exploration of three contexts in which a progressively deeper understanding of his story is attempted: conventional politics, Pedro Antonio's first grief, and Pachico's meditation by the shore. This movement inwards in quest of meanings continues in Part V with two alternative versions of the theme of ‘peace in war’. Pedro Antonio concludes his dialectical relationship with Carlism by withdrawing once for all into intrahistory; Pachico's mountain vision, arguably, has implications that are very different.

The sequence of these five sections offers a number of dialectical patterns. At the most elementary of levels, the division of attention between Carlists and Liberals might be summarized as: both—Carlism—Liberalism—Carlism—both. We might recast this scheme, more adequately altogether, in terms of a first historical synthesis (Part I), then a period of antithetical conflict (Parts II-IV), and finally a new synthesis in Pachico's understanding (Part V). Or we might trace how history and intrahistory alternate in the novel's several parts. In the first section the concern is primarily with intrahistory; only in Part II does Ignacio enter history. In Part III the two elements are co-terminous: the siege of Bilbao is history; the daily life of its people, intrahistory. Part IV reverses the movement of Part II: Ignacio, dying, moves to the intrahistorical level once again. In Part V there is a clear return to intrahistory with Pedro Antonio, but Pachico's reflections are less easy to categorize. They may be taken either as reinforcing that movement of return, or as a newly-challenging coda in their own right. On that choice much depends. In its general outline, however, this scheme is both a dialectical and an elaborately symmetrical one, with intrahistory playing just that role as the ground of all history which En torno al casticismo had assigned to it in theory.¹⁸

The title of the novel suggests a third obvious source of patterning: the distribution of the themes of guerra and paz. In this regard we might describe Part I as presenting peace sustained by war—the memories of the 1830s giving meaning to life in latter-day Bilbao. Part II, evidently, moves the story on from peace to war; civilian Bilbao under siege in Part III combines the two; Part IV reverts to peace again. In Part V the terms of the first part are reversed: Pachico's personal war is now sustained by his inner vision of peace. Alternatively Part I might be seen in Hegelian terms as a thesis—peace, as represented by Pedro Antonio—and the whole central portion of the book as its obvious antithesis—war—with Ignacio as its representative figure. Part V would then be their synthesis: Pachico's understanding of paz en la guerra.

Not all these schemes carry the same implications for the overall meaning of the novel. Some of them are cyclical in character and thus tend to negate any notion of purpose or development. In other schemes the dialectical model does introduce some new element, suggesting that Paz en la guerra may after all be a work which makes sense of history and offers an agenda for meaningful historical action. The choice between these views tends to turn on how one reads Pachico's final meditation. If it is the understanding which he achieves on the mountain-top which seems to matter most, the cyclical, ahistorical view of the book is likeliest to prevail; if it is what happens when he comes down, then the novel (and history) can more readily be seen as having some inherent direction.¹⁹ Critical analysis of the text at this point leaves the question still in the balance: Pachico's vision and his sense of mission belong inextricably together. To obtain some clue as to Unamuno's priorities, we shall need to look at Pachico not in the isolation of these final pages, but in relation to his fellow-protagonists in the book as a whole.

The fact that Paz en la guerra does have three central characters of roughly equal importance is surely one of that novel's major enigmas. It does nothing to reduce the already considerable complexity of the subject-matter; we have to assume that Unamuno would not have put himself to this additional trouble unless it enabled him to express something central to his purposes. Nevertheless, the primary reason for the appearance of three protagonists here does seem to be the rather mundane one that their author thought of them one after the other.²⁰ First came the quiet, traditionally-minded Carlist shopkeeper of the short story Solitaña (1889)—essentially a portrait from Bilbao life—to be developed later as Pedro Antonio Iturriondo. But when Unamuno began to contemplate a novel of some length on the Carlist theme, he needed a central character who could be more directly involved in historical action. At this point Ignacio made his appearance; his death was among the earliest episodes to be drafted. Finally, to build into the novel his own efforts to understand the inwardness of what was going on, Unamuno devised the character of Pachico Zabalbilde. Pachico's is an Unamunian consciousness even at the cost of some anachronism: his philosophical development, closely parallel to that of his creator in the 1880s, would scarcely have been possible in the period to which the story assigns it.²¹

Though created in this apparently ad hoc fashion, these three figures are ranged in some strikingly apposite patterns.²² They have an evident bearing on the relationship between history and intrahistory—perhaps the most obviously central among the book's concerns. Pedro Antonio exists very much as a member of an intrahistorical community and Ignacio no less clearly as part of a consciously historical movement. Pachico initially belongs to neither: his existence is first and foremost that of an individual. But he interacts with the other protagonists in a development which seems decisive in giving Paz en la guerra the shape which it has. Pedro Antonio, over the years, helps to form the character of Ignacio, only to lose him to the historic cause of Carlism. Ignacio, in the course of his brief and confusing foray into history, at least manages to reach a measure of mutual closeness and comprehension with Pachico. Pachico finally comes to understand not only Ignacio but Pedro Antonio too. That understanding enables him to overcome his earlier individualist isolation and to participate in both intrahistorical and historical forms of life. Again we have the familiar outline of a dialectical scheme: thesis, the intrahistory of Pedro Antonio; antithesis, Ignacio's history; synthesis, Pachico's access to both. But this time the scheme is framed as a process: the dynamics of the novel.

The dialectical mode, of course, was basic to all Unamuno's thinking. For him, as Pachico's meditations make very clear, it underlay both nature and human existence, both intrahistory and history. It will be worthwhile, then, to consider the three protagonists of this novel in terms of how they respond to this dialectical character, inherent in all things. Pedro Antonio is able to accept it, but only instinctively, unconsciously; Ignacio's only apprehension of it takes the form of a vague unease at the undermining of his historical certainties. Yet it is partly what Ignacio has been in history which enables Pachico, from a vantage-point that is momentarily outside history, to achieve a fuller awareness of dialectical process. He can even identify himself with that process—to the benefit, it is implied, of others—as he leaves his mountainpeak to bring together intrahistorical insight and historical commitment in a life of this-worldly militancy. For Unamuno makes it quite explicit that it will be that kind of life: ‘no contentarse jamás aquí abajo … pedir siempre mayor salario … provocar en los demás el descontento, primer motor de todo progreso y de todo bien’ (301). This, from an Unamuno who wrote regularly for La Lucha de Clases, has claims to be taken at its face value. The affinity with his Marxist Socialism of these years is patent enough: the role that is commended to us in the person of Pachico involves both understanding and changing the world.²³

It was, indeed, very similar to the role for which Unamuno regarded his own experience as having prepared him. The several strands of that experience which contribute to Paz en la guerra can be identified too in terms of the pattern in which all three protagonists are linked. The intrahistorical Bilbao of the novel's early sections recalls his own roots in that city, though it also needs to be remembered that, apart from some details in Part III, this is not a case of direct representation. The Unamuno of the mid 1870s was not a young soldier or ex-student, but a schoolboy of ten, and the life which he describes here largely antedated any parallel experience of his own. Yet in his 1923 prologue he could write as if for him the two were one and the same.²⁴ There is further evidence that this was how he saw them in the minor anachronism which brings Basque national issues a shade too explicitly to the fore at this early date. Ten years later this would fit very well. As for the episodes of historic Carlist militancy, it is not too hard to connect these, despite the ideological divide, with Unamuno's own experience of a different kind of political activism. More than once he had asserted their kinship, stressing the levelling spirit and revolutionary potential of the Carlist movement.²⁵ Most straightforwardly of all, Pachico's culminating vision evokes his author's own pursuit of reflective understanding; that, as we have observed, is Pachico's principal raison d'être in the book. These elements, again, are linked dynamically: each promotes the other. The initially ‘given’ social environment provides the stimulus to activism; that experience calls forth reflection; a more reflective understanding prompts a more informed and radical effort to change the environment. Such, at least, was Unamuno's commitment—and, as represented to us here, Pachico's commitment too.²⁶

One outcome of that commitment, it now becomes possible to argue, was the composition of a novel with the distinctive characteristics of Paz en la guerra. The book is turned decisively away from a realism of causal processes because an account of the world in terms of dialectical processes seemed to Unamuno to be inherently more truthful. In its central process it is at once a statement of its author's dialectical understanding of the Second Carlist War and a record of how that understanding was reached. In other words it is a novel substantially concerned to define the conditions which make its own creation possible. To that extent it is, decisively, not a realist work but a modernist one. Yet it also seeks to be, in a very specific way, a work of Socialist realism.²⁷

That aim, though its most obvious influence is on the novel's formal aspect, also has its effect on the subject-matter. It is in line with Unamuno's Socialist approach to questions of class that he is relatively dismissive of the Liberal-commercial tradition, as represented by the centrally bourgeois Aranas. This was the social grouping closest to his own background and he knew how to value particular aspects of it: Don Epifanio's jaunty, old-guard militancy; the assertive stubbornness of the Liberal community under siege; Pachico's religious modernism. Nor could he mistake the socio-economic dominance of the Aranas and their like. But he found their self-sufficient and self-preserving possession of that dominance of far less interest than the potentially revolutionary ethos of the Carlists.

In this preference, his distaste for established bourgeois inertia may well have been reinforced by a desire to identify growing-points for Socialism in pre-industrial states of society. He was, as is clear from the obituary which he wrote on William Morris, aware of the utopian and medievalist emphasis in Socialist writing which Morris represented.²⁸ But Unamuno himself needed to invent no Dream of John Ball. A few miles out of industrial Bilbao, the largely pre-capitalist communities of Basque rural life still existed. He did not, of course, share the Carlist or early Basque Nationalist belief that a pre-industrial order, exempt from social change, could be recovered or restored on a wider scale. Pachico at the end identifies himself with the ‘torrente incoercible del progreso’ (301) in a Bilbao where the shift to industrialism is about to happen and will not be reversed. The language of that ending is even echoed a few years later by an unashamed advocate of capitalist development, Pablo de Alzola: ‘Los salarios altos son el resultado de la educación progresiva y del espíritu ambicioso de incontentabilidad.’²⁹ The distinctive Socialist note in Unamuno stems from the fact that Pachicos discontent does not serve an individualist ambition but a sense of community. And the life of the villages does make an important contribution to forming such a sense in Paz en la guerra. It is a strongly intrahistorical life, permeated with that ‘resignación trascendente y eterna’ (301) out of which Pachico's conscious struggle is to emerge: ‘El día de la Gloriosa había sido para ellos como los demás días … Eran los silenciosos … los que no gritan en la historia’ (141). It is also a life which interests Unamuno because of its separation from the capitalist economic process: ‘Tampoco se había roto para ellos el primitivo nexo directo entre la producción y el consumo’ (ibid). Indeed, he tends to play down the real ties—land-rents and migrant labour—which linked such villages, even in the 1870s, with the urban capitalism of Bilbao. What was not open to him, however, was to offer a wholly utopian picture of rural existence. He had to confront both social systems—the old as well as the new—as contemporary historical realities; hence the innumerable localized instances in this novel of an achieved realism of documentation and detail.

It was not, even so, a materialistic realism, for Unamuno, whatever tensions this might create with his public profession of ‘Marxism', was far from being a materialist Socialist. The Socialism of Paz en la guerra is of a piece with the definition which he offered in 1893: ‘una gran reforma moral y religiosa, más que económica’.³⁰ Economic considerations and material conditions are certainly not ignored here; nor are non-material factors treated as unrelated to them. But such factors are seen as having value in their own right, in a way which more rigorous notions of material primacy would call into question. Thus Ignacio is clearly a martyr, not of the Carlist cause—in which he hardly believes any more—but of the dialectical truth to which his death bears witness for Pachico. Yet the value of his martyrdom is registered through associations of prayer and sacrifice, centred about his parents' religious faith. Again, Pachico's hard-won synthesis, though it leads to his entry into economic and political struggle, is also made important to us as the outcome of his religious seeking. Though dialectical all through, Paz en la guerra is no work of dialectical materialism.

Yet it cannot, for that matter, fairly be seen as a work of philosophic abstraction in some grandly Hegelian manner. It is too substantial a fiction for that. It exists, rather, in the middle ground—the place where abstract thought and concrete experience meet: in personality, its pursuit of identity, its quest for solidarity. We might speak, perhaps, of the novel's ‘dialectical humanism’. In so doing, we should stress—and rightly—its continuity with Unamuno's later work, despite obvious differences of ideology and method. We should also be acknowledging the nature of that particular range of experience, here interpreted in a distinctively Socialist light, which Unamuno tried to bring within the scope of this novel. In making that attempt, he initiated a reshaping of the form.

For Paz en la guerra, as we noted at the outset, is one of the boundary-marks of nineteenth-century realism in Spain. It was published, coincidentally, within a few months of another such work: Galdós' Misericordia.³¹ The two novels have much in common. They share a disposition to present as real whatever is meaningfully experienced, not merely whatever is the case. This departure from the realist agenda leads in both novels to a slowing of narrative pace and to a structure tending towards a certain formalism—a quality which might be seen as ‘musical’ in the case of Galdós, dialectical in Unamuno. Yet this does not imply any loss of social relevance in either novel. On the contrary, it is in the last resort a sharp and paradoxical social awareness that has brought about this reshaping of two classic realist forms: the novel of bourgeois family life, and the historical novel of nineteenth-century social conflict. In Misericordia economic stress renders the family meaningless as a social unit; in Paz en la guerra the experience of civil war calls into question the conventionally-drawn lines of conflict. This challenge from previously unacknowledged kinds of experience is most clearly registered in the two endings.

At the end of Galdós' novel Benina goes to live in the afueras of Madrid: the city which the nineteenth-century middle class has made cannot contain within itself that virtue which its spiritual health requires. As with her charity, so with Pachico's understanding: the self-knowledge which alone can make sense of the nineteenth-century historical process is not available within that process—and so Pachico goes up into the mountain. The goodness of Benina and the wisdom of Pachico are only to be found ‘without a city wall’. Neither novelist, it is true, is disposed to abandon hope on that account. Pachico goes to the mountain (as Benina, less self-consciously, goes to the afueras) to provide a set of meanings for the whole of the foregoing action. And there is still a belief that these meanings can be conveyed. Juliana, the city's most representative figure, has to seek out Benina and ask her forgiveness. But the young Unamuno, Socialist and activist, is not yet willing to pin his hopes on such individual changes of heart: Pachico will go back into his community, to struggle for peace and truth and progress. Even so, we do not witness the working-out of Benina's new relationship with Juliana—only the emblematic moment of the latter's absolution. Nor do we actually see Pachico performing his agitator's mission or the response which he evokes. These things never got into fiction. Galdós never returned to his madrileño vein; Unamuno never took up the novel of near-contemporary history where Paz en la guerra left off. We seem to have reached the very limits of realistic competence.

Paz en la guerra, as we have noted, moves beyond the genre altogether, in that it has a self-referring aspect, characteristic of post-realist fictions. At the same time, its roots within realism are deep and sustaining. Unamuno sought to ‘fuse’ the historical and the novelesque, to unify documentary fact and imaginative vision, not in order to find an idealist or symbolist escape from his subject-matter, but in order to do it justice. If we seek a fully symbolist response to civil strife, we might find it in a poem of Yeats—part of a sequence whose very title seems to refer us to the related themes of Unamuno's novel: Meditations in Time of Civil War:

A brown lieutenant and his men
Half-dressed in National uniform
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, wind and rain,
A pear-tree, broken by the storm.
I count the feathered balls of soot
The moorhen guides upon the stream
To silence the envy in my thought,
Then turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.(32)

The ending of Paz en la guerra is not of that kind. Pachico, thinking of Ignacio and the other combatants, has run through many emotions but that odd, self-indulgent envy—‘What did you do in the War, Daddy?’—is not one of them. Nor does he slip away to a cold dream of his own making, but takes his path among his fellows, to be with them in history. Unamuno himself, if he took that path, did so on rather different terms from those which he mapped out for Pachico. And, of course, it was not at all the path which the post-realist novel was to take; Paz en la guerra, for all its newness, has no descendants. It is good enough for that to be a pity.³³

Notes

1. Julián Marías, Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1965; 1st edn 1942), pp. 88-9; Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, El Unamuno contemplativo (Mexico: FCE, 1959), p. 77; Armando F. Zubizarreta, Tras las huellas de Unamuno (Madrid: Taurus, 1960), p. 54; José Ferrater Mora, Unamuno. A Philosophy of Tragedy (Berkeley: California UP, 1962), pp. 105-6; Isabel Criado Miguel, Las novelas de Miguel de Unamuno: estudio formal y crítico (Salamanca: Universidad, 1986), pp. 15-16. For a useful summary of criticism to 1975 see Rosendo Díaz Peterson, Unamuno: el personaje en busca de sí mismo (Madrid: Nova Scholar, 1975), pp. 23-9.

2. For example, R. E. Batchelor, Unamuno Novelist: A European Perspective (Oxford: Dolphin, 1972), p. 46: ‘it did not suit his inner needs … he just could not write naturalist novels’; Francisco Ayala, La novela: Galdós y Unamuno (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974), p. 140: ‘la preceptiva del realismo y el inescapable modelo galdosiano … se avienen mal con la personalidad de nuestro autor.’

3. Printing of the first edition (Madrid: Fernando Fe, 1897) was well-advanced by 1st December 1896 (Cartas inéditas de Miguel de Unamuno, ed. Sergio Fernández Larraín (Santiago de Chile: Zig-Zag, 1965), p. 246; cited here as CI), and completed by 31st December, when Unamuno sent a copy to Leopoldo Alas (Epistolario a Clarín, ed. Adolfo Alas (Madrid: Escorial, 1941), pp. 70-2. By 20th January 1897 the first reviews had appeared (CI, p. 248). The religious crisis began in mid-March 1897 (Zubizarreta, p. 115).

4. Begun, apparently, in 1890 (though some portions may be older), the greater part of the text was in existence by the end of 1893, but Unamuno's many revisions were completed only in the late summer of 1896. See Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, Estudios sobre Galdós, Unamuno y Machado (Barcelona: Lumen, 1981; essay first published 1950), pp. 76-87; Ricardo Gullón, Autobiografías de Unamuno (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), pp. 7-25; Manuel García Blanco, ‘Sobre la elaboración de la novela de Unamuno Paz en la guerra’, RHM, 31 (1965), 142-58; Eugenio de Bustos Tovar, ‘Sobre el socialismo de Unamuno', CCMU, 24 (1976), 192; also Díaz Peterson, pp. 11-16.

5. Cf. Unamuno, ‘Sobre el determinismo en la novela', Revista Blanca, 15th November 1898 (OC, IX, 772-3): ‘Quise fundir y no yuxtaponer lo histórico y lo novelístico’ (cited by R. Pérez de la Dehesa, Política y sociedad en el primer Unamuno 1894-1904 (Madrid: Ciencia Nueva, 1966), p. 174.)

6. See Marías, pp. 91-3; Sánchez Barbudo, pp. 77-8; Ayala, pp. 137, 139-40; Díaz Peterson, pp. 62-3; Blanca Molho, ‘A Propos de Paix dans la guerre de Miguel de Unamuno', Trames, 2 (1978), 9; Biruté Ciplijauskaité, ‘Perspectiva irónica y ambigüedad en Paz en la guerra’ in Homenaje a Antonio Sánchez Barbudo: Ensayos de literatura española moderna (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1981), pp. 139 (citing Blanco Aguinaga, pp. 66-7), 153.

7. Frank O'Connor, The Mirror in the Roadway (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), p. 160; the same paradox in Paz en la guerra, Ciplijauskaité, p. 139. On Tolstoy and Unamuno: C. Marcilly, ‘Unamuno et Tolstoi. De La Guerre et La Paix à Paz en la guerra’, BH, 67 (1965), 274-313; H. T. Oostendorp, ‘Los puntos de semejanza entre La guerra y la paz de Tolstoi y Paz en la guerra de Unamuno', BH, 69 (1967), 85-105; also Batchelor, pp. 47-9; David G. Turner, Unamuno's Webs of Fatality (London: Tamesis, 1974), pp. 16-18.

8. See Blanco Aguinaga, p. 60: ‘todos los contrarios se funden’; Batchelor, p. 266; Turner, p. 10. Cf. Unamuno's article ‘Paz en la guerra', Ahora, 25th April 1933 (OC, VIII, 1192): ‘mientras trabajaba en esa visión … aprendía alemán leyendo a Hegel y su fecundo sistema de contradicciones.’ For a different view see John Butt's contribution to the present volume. The novel, of course, illustrates no philosophical system; rather, its imagined reality is constructed according to a dialectical ‘habit of mind’.

9. Paz en la guerra in OC, II, 106. Page-references to the novel given in the text here are to this edition.

10. 138-46; see Ricardo Diez, El desarrollo estético de la novela de Unamuno (Madrid: Nova Scholar, 1976), p. 48; Molho, 11-14; Turner, p. 20 stresses the elements of resignation and passivity in village life.

11. This view enjoys much critical support: Marías, p. 89; Agustín Esclasans, Miguel de Unamuno (Buenos Aires: Juventud Argentina, 1947), p. 15; Joaquín de Zuazagoitia, ‘Unamuno y Bilbao’ in Unamuno a los cien años (Salamanca: Universidad, 1967), p. 117; Martin Nozick, Miguel de Unamuno (New York: Twayne, 1971), p. 143; Victor Ouimette, Reason Aflame: Unamuno and the Heroic Will (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974), p. 156; Diez, pp. 42, 50-1; Ignacio Elizalde, Miguel de Unamuno y su novelística (Irún: CAP de Guipúzcoa, 1983), p. 206.

12. CI, p. 174 (17th May 1892); cf. Ciplijauskaité, p. 140: ‘Aquellos de sus personajes que creen poseer la verdad son enfocados no rara vez desde una perspectiva irónica.’

13. The case seems less clear-cut, certainly, than is implied by Madeleine de Gogorza Fletcher, The Spanish Historical Novel 1870-1970 (London: Tamesis, 1974), pp. 68-70.

14. See, for example, Eugenio G. de Nora, La novela española contemporánea, I, (Madrid: Gredos, 1963), pp. 17-18: ‘la innegable torpeza y premiosidad del autor en el despliegue del argumento’; cf. also Unamuno's own comment to Galdós: ‘cometí la torpeza de meter demasiadas cosas y todas muy apretadas … no tuve el bastante arte para darlas relieve’ (letter of 30th November 1898; José Schraibman, ‘Galdós y Unamuno’ in Pensamiento y letras en la España del siglo XX, ed. Germán Bleiberg and E. Inman Fox (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1966), p. 463).

15. Blanco Aguinaga, p. 76; Ciplijauskaité, p. 153; dissenting views in Nozick, p. 144; Gogorza Fletcher, p. 67.

16. CI, p. 174 (17th May 1892).

17. See CI, p. 249 (20th January 1897): ‘Don Paco Izaguirre, de quien he aprovechado unas memorias manuscritas que hizo durante el bombardeo.’

18. Thus Marías, pp. 92-3 is able to describe Paz en la guerra in the language of En torno al casticismo: ‘vida callada de la intrahistoria … flujo y reflujo de la marea histórica … las capas más profundas de la existencia …’

19. Versions of the former view in Sánchez Barbudo, pp. 77-8 (intimations of ‘hondo silencio, eterna quietud’); Batchelor, pp. 46-7 (‘Time is divested of meaning’); Diez, p. 58 (‘soledad existencial’); the latter view upheld by Pérez de la Dehesa, p. 173 and (with some reservations in each case) by Blanco Aguinaga, p. 72 and Turner, p. 14.

20. On Solitaña see Gullón, pp. 11-21. By 26th July 1890 Unamuno envisaged Ignacio as ‘el héroe de mi novela’ and had drafted his death-scene (CI, p. 122). As late as 6th March 1893 his plan was to end with Pedro Antonio's meditations, a section of which was published as an essay (‘Crepúsculo’) in El Nervión (CI, p. 186). ‘En Pagazarri', Eco de Bilbao, 22nd October 1893 (OC, I, 509-12) was adapted from the novel's ending as then drafted (CI, p. 216; 13th November 1893), but gives no clue as to how far Unamuno had developed the figure of Pachico. His main features may well belong to a later date (Gullón, p. 9).

21. Pachico is imagined as attending Madrid University in the late 1860s (pp. 126-7), but the then dominant Krausist influence is only cursorily mentioned; the ‘retazos de Hegel y de positivismo’ belong, rather, to Unamuno's own formation in 1880-4; see Sánchez Barbudo, p. 66; Blanco Aguinaga, Juventud del 98 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1978; 1st edn Madrid 1970), p. 62; Epistolario a Clarín, pp. 53-5.

22. Other possible patterns in Zubizarreta, p. 52; Gullón, pp. 32-45; Emilio Salcedo, Vida de Don Miguel (Salamanca: Anaya, 1970), p. 86; Ouimette, pp. 157-62; Díaz Peterson, pp. 59-63.

23. On Unamuno's Socialism see Pérez de la Dehesa, pp. 167-74; Blanco Aguinaga, Juventud del 98, pp. 68-80, 112-13; Bustos Tovar, 187-205. Broadly sympathetic from the early 1890s, he joined the Socialist Party in 1894. Although his specifically Marxist commitment weakened perceptibly in 1895-6, Socialism was important to him throughout the period when Paz en la guerra was being written. For views of the ending as Socialist in tendency see Pérez de la Dehesa, p. 173; Turner, p. 14; contrast Blanco Aguinaga, El Unamuno contemplativo, p. 72; Gullón, pp. 43, 47; Victor Ouimette, ‘Paz en la guerra y los límites de la ideología', RCEH, 11 (1987), 355-76; also John Butt, elsewhere in the present volume.

24. Paz en la guerra, 91: ‘aquí recogí la flor y el fruto de mi experiencia de niñez y de mocedad’; contrast ‘Reminiscencias', El Dos de Mayo, 1887 (OC, VIII, 173): ‘yo nunca he visto un carlista, quiero decir un soldado de S. pretendiente M.’ On Basque nationalism in the 1880s see Antonio Elorza, ‘Sobre ideologías y organización del primer nacionalismo vasco’ in La crisis de fin de siglo: ideología y literatura. Estudios en memoria de R. Pérez de_la Dehesa (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975), pp. 83-5; 95-6; also Bustos Tovar, 191-2.

25. Texts quoted by Pérez de la Dehesa, pp. 118-20; see also Gogorza Fletcher, pp. 73-4; Molho, 9-10; Ciplijauskaité, p. 141.

26. For Unamuno's especially close identification with Pachico see his remarks to Galdós (Schraibman, p. 462): ‘no faltó quien dijese que los personajes eran reales excepto uno que no pasaba de un ente de razón. Y en ese ente de razón me había puesto a mí mismo, había trazado una autobiografía.’

27. Demetrios Basdekis, ‘El populismo del primer Unamuno’ in La crisis de fin de siglo, p. 250 applies this term to Paz en la guerra on the rather different ground of the novel's social determinism, which he sees as deriving from Taine. That influence is clearly present in the Unamuno of the 1890s; here it seems to be a matter of method rather than ideology.

28. ‘Guillermo Morris', La Lucha de Clases, 19th December 1896 (OC, IX, 686-7); cf. ‘El esteticismo annunziano', Diario Catalán, 8th February 1898 (OC, IV, 1087); Pérez de la Dehesa, 160-1, 188.

29. Pablo de Alzola y Minondo, ‘El colectivismo y las reformas sociales', Euskal Erría, 19 (1903), 237, (Elorza, p. 79). Alzola was opposed to the Nationalist rejection of industrial society because it threatened to put a brake on this kind of enterprise; Unamuno's critique (Elorza, pp. 69-70, 95) is both more analytic and more radical.

30. CI, p. 196 (28th May 1893); the next sentence reads: ‘Vuelvo a mi novela y vuelvo a ella con ahinco’; cf. Epistolario a Clarín, p. 53. For Gullón, p. 43 and Blanco Aguinaga, Juventud del 98, pp. 112-13 this attitude marks a drift away from Socialism in the mid 1890s.

31. The first edition (Madrid: Viuda e Hijos de Tello, 1897) has the dateline ‘Marzo-Abril de 1897’ at the end of its text, and is presumably earlier in date than 9th May, when extracts were published in El Liberal (Manuel Hernández Suárez, Bibliografía de Galdós, I (Las Palmas: Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1972), p. 153). By 17th May El Globo had published its review of the novel (Cartas a Galdós, ed. Soledad Ortega (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), p. 337).

32. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Road at My Door', The Tower (London: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 25-6.

33. Two welcome signs of renewed critical attention were the papers dedicated to Paz en la guerra at the 1986 conference of the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas by Paul R. Olson (‘Sobre el arte de Paz en la guerra’) and Jesús Gutiérrez (‘Unamuno y la épica: Relectura de Paz en la guerra’); Ouimette (above, n. 23) fruitfully continues the discussion.