SOURCE: Olson, Paul R. “Lacquer Boxes: Como se hace una novella and the Return of the Nivola.” In The Great Chiasmus: Word and Flesh in the Novels of Unamuno, pp. 156-74. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2003.

[In the following essay, Olson explores the Hegelian conceit of the ontological equivalence of Pure Being and Pure Nothingness in Unamuno's novels as represented by a set of nesting boxes each containing another laquered box and argues that over a period of forty years, Unamuno's use of the nesting-box motif provided a structural and topological guiding principle that informed his work.]

In 1914 Unamuno was summarily dismissed from his position as Rector of the University of Salamanca for reasons that Emilio Salcedo (188-90) supposes to be a combination of the indignation of conservatives over the heterodoxy of the recently published Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, his continuing socialist affiliations, and the opposition of powerful landowners to Unamuno's journalistic campaign for agrarian reform. The outbreak of the European war had the further effect of dividing the nation into germanófilos and aliadófilos, whose positions corresponded roughly to those of the conservative and liberal sectors of political opinion.¹ Unamuno's opposition to the pro-German policies of Alfonso XIII led him into a strongly anti-monarchical position that was later aggravated by the King's military adventures in Morocco, where Spanish forces suffered a disastrous defeat in 1921.

That event imperiled the throne so gravely that Alfonso welcomed the protection of a military directorate headed by General Miguel Primo de Rivera, which in September of 1923 abolished the Constitution of 1876 and began to rule by decree. One of the directorate's first peremptory orders in January of the following year was the dismissal of Don Miguel from his Chairs of Greek and Spanish Philology at Salamanca and his exile to Fuerteventura in the Canaries. By the end of the summer, however, he had escaped to France, where he remained in exile until the fall of the directorate in 1930.²

At first lionized by the Parisian literary elite, Unamuno was before long left in a relative solitude that to him seemed abysmal, despite the fact that it was often lightened by the friendship of several other Spanish exiles, and of the half-Spanish French intellectual Jean Cassou, who was eventually to translate Cómo se hace una novela for publication in the Mercure de France. Unamuno met regularly with these and other friends in the Café de la Rotonde, often referred to as the Café de Trotski, but these recent friendships could not replace the intricate structure of personal relationships that had been a part of his life for over sixty years, and in this relative isolation he fell into a depression in which all writing became for a time nearly impossible. Near the beginning of Cómo se hace una novela he describes his state of mind during the first months of his exile, once the novelty of his presence among Parisian intellectuals had begun to pale: “Me paso horas enteras, solo, tendido sobre el lecho solitario de mi pequeño hotel—family house—, contemplando el techo de mi cuarto … Y no me atrevo a emprender trabajo alguno por no saber si podré acabarlo en paz” (8: 729-30). Nevertheless, early in 1925, or shortly before,³ he decided to write a novel in which, he says, “quería poner la más íntima experiencia de mi destierro, crearme, eternizarme bajo los rasgos de desterrado y de proscrito” (8: 734).⁴

Paradoxically, however, the novel in which he hopes to create and make himself eternal is also feared as something alien to whatever authentic self he may have: “El Unamuno de mi leyenda, de mi novela, el que hemos hecho juntos mi yo amigo y mi yo enemigo y los demás, mis amigos y mis enemigos, este Unamuno me da vida y muerte, me crea y me destruye, me sostiene y me ahoga. Es mi agonía” (8: 734). And he identifies this fear of external representations of the self with the anxiety produced by seeing himself in a mirror:

Y he aquí por qué no puedo mirarme un rato al espejo, porque al punto se me van los ojos tras de mis ojos, tras su retrato, y desde que miro a mi mirada me siento vaciarme de mí mismo, perder mi historia, mi leyenda, mi novela, volver a la inconciencia, al pasado, a la nada.

(8: 734)⁵

He then goes on to say that when he actually began writing, he decided that “la mejor manera de hacer esa novela es contar cómo hay que hacerla. Es la novela de la novela, la creación de la creación. O Dios de Dios, Deus de Deo” (8: 734). The novel begins as a purely hypothetical one, at first narrated principally in the conditional tense:

Habría que inventar, primero, un personaje central que sería, naturalmente, yo mismo. Y a este personaje se empezaría por darle un nombre. Le llamaría U. Jugo de la Raza; U. es la inicial de mi apellido; Jugo el primero de mi abuelo materno … : Larraza es el nombre … de mi abuela paterna. Lo escribo la Raza para hacer un juego de palabras.

(8: 734)

The multiple connections of these names to himself and his forebears make the autobiographical character of the fiction overt and emphatic, but equally emphatic is the purely hypothetical character of the narrative itself. At a later point he will even say of a certain passage that it was one he would include in the novel, “en el caso de que la hubiera escrito” (8: 738-39). Nevertheless, after its hypothetical beginning the narrative begins to use the present tense to evoke the immediate experience of Jugo de la Raza, described as wandering among the old book stands along the banks of the Seine, and beginning to read a novel in which he is completely absorbed until he encounters the words, “Cuando el lector llegue al fin de esta dolorosa historia se morirá conmigo” (8: 734). Reading this makes him tremble and nearly faint, and he returns home determined not to buy the book, and never to read it again. But he is convinced that one day he will not be able to resist the temptation, and will simply have to continue reading, even if he were to die upon finishing it. Earlier in the text, Unamuno had said that he first thought of writing this novel of his exile after having read Balzac's Peau de chagrin, about a magic skin of shagreen that made its possessor able to satisfy all his desires but grew smaller with each such satisfaction, in proportion to the time remaining in his life. The symbolic quantification implied in such a concept corresponds to a tendency in Unamuno himself to fear the minor discontinuities of life as symbolizing and potentially effecting the definitive discontinuity of death.⁶

This hypothetical fiction is then interrupted by Unamuno's saying that in the meantime he, another novelistic character, scarcely wrote anything or did anything, for fear of being devoured by his own actions. In this way the basic dialectic of the text is established: the alternation between Unamuno's personal experience in exile and the fictional history of Jugo de la Raza, and within the latter, an alternation between reading and the renunciation of reading. Zubizarreta calls this a “juego de motivo y contramotivo” that, he says, “produce aquel vaivén de angustia que recorre todas las páginas del libro en todas sus estructuras” (Unamuno en su “nivola” 167). The other structures he identifies are the political, in which the alternation is between activism and the renunciation of it; the existential, in which it is between the project of “making” the personaje and giving up the project; and the ontological, “la amenaza de inminente muerte—‘morirás'—y la voluntad de sobrevivir—‘no quiero morir'” (167-70). Cerezo Galán suggests that “el centro unificador de estas diversas tensiones consiste en el enfrentamiento de la libertad con su leyenda/destino, de la persona con su personaje” (674). Julio Macedo had conceived of this enfrentamiento as being between “hombre” and “personaje” (8: 964), but it is clear that a basic parallel can be seen among all of these pairs.

On the immediate level of narrative discourse, the reading does, in any case, continue. Jugo de la Raza buys the book, finds in it another prediction of his death upon reaching the end; again renounces the reading and burns it; then searches frantically all over Paris for another copy but fails to find one. He travels to Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, and at some point in the journey finds another copy, which he takes to Paris to continue reading. The original nucleus of the work, first published in Jean Cassou's translation in the Mercure de France of May 15, 1926, ends with Unamuno's speculating on various possible endings he might give the story if instead of making it he were simply to tell it, but finally he refuses to give it any ending at all, since, he says, “Esta novela y por lo demás todas las que se hacen y no que se contenta uno con contarlas, en rigor no acaban. Lo acabado, lo perfecto es la muerte, y la vida no puede morirse” (8: 753). Among the many examples of tension between closure and openness previously seen in Unamuno's novels this statement seems to be the strongest expression of the desire for openness, but perhaps even stronger than that desire is the rejection of closure.

In the year following the publication of this portion of the work, Unamuno moved to Hendaye, which he regarded as part of his Basque homeland in spite of its being politically French. He then began to retranslate Cassou's translation (his original manuscript having been lost), as well as the “Portrait d'Unamuno” with which it had been introduced in the Mercure. To this he added a prologue, a commentary on Cassou's portrait of him, a number of bracketed interpolations commenting on his own view of the work as he returned to it almost two years after he first wrote it, as well as on the state of Spain in the spring of 1927. To this he added a continuación written in June and July of that year. The result is a work nearly chaotic in structure, of which he says, at the end of his commentary on Cassou's introduction:

Con esto de los comentarios enchorchetados y con los tres relatos enchufados unos en otros que constituyen el escrito, va a parecerle éste a algún lector algo así como esas cajitas de laca japonesas que encierran otra cajita y ésta otra y luego otra más, cada una cincelada y ordenada como mejor el artista pudo, y al último una final cajita … vacía. Pero así es el mundo, y la vida … Dentro de la carne está el hueso y dentro del hueso el tuétano; pero la novela humana no tiene tuétano, carece de argumento. Todo son las cajitas, los ensueños.

(8: 727)

The three successively embedded narratives are the personal account of his life in exile, the hypothetical fiction of Jugo de la Raza, and the story told in the book read by Jugo. The first of these is, of course, the outermost box, and the innermost the book read by Jugo, essentially empty because all we know of it is its protagonist's warning to Jugo that he will die when he finishes reading it. The parallels between them make it clear that the inner boxes are mises en abyme of the novel as a whole.

This was the structure of the central nucleus published in the Mercure, but the prólogo, comentario, interpolations, and the continuación in the subsequent editions constitute additional external boxes that surround the three central narratives. Indeed, the subsequent editorial history of the text may be envisioned in analogous terms, for since the first publication of the retranslated and expanded version by Editorial Alba in Buenos Aires in 1927, three successive posthumous editions of Unamuno's Obras completas presented the work in slightly different forms, and the historical and political circumstances that determined the variations in the text have their own “novels.” Each successive edition becomes a new container of the original work, yet another outer box in the puzzle.⁷ The criteria that guided the omissions and other changes in these editions seem to have been quite arbitrary, a fact accurately foreseen by Unamuno himself, when he explained why he refused to write anything for publication in Spain: “En España no quería ni quiero escribir en periódico alguno ni en revista; me rehuso a la humillación de la censura militar. … Sé que después de haberme dejado pasar algunos juicios de veras duros … me tacharían una palabra inocente, una nonada, para hacerme sentir su poder” (8: 737).

One possible source for the image of the cajitas de laca japonesas (more commonly called cajas chinas) is the preface to Kierkegaard's Either/Or, which Unamuno had come to know in the original Danish after the turn of the century. The pseudonymous editor of that work, said to be copied from various papers found enclosed in the hidden drawer of an antique desk, explains that he has determined them to be the work of two distinct authors, and he continues:

The last of A's papers is a story entitled, Diary of a Seducer. Here we meet with new difficulties, since A does not acknowledge himself as author, but only as editor. This is an old trick of the novelist, and I should not object to it, if it did not make my own position so complicated as one author seems to be enclosed in another, like the parts of a Chinese puzzle box.

(9)

The ostensible author of these lines shortly thereafter refers to himself as being “twice removed from the original author,” but in terms of the fiction itself, the actual author—Kierkegaard—is, of course, at three removes from the discourse of the Seducer, although in reality the relation is an immediate one. Yet whatever the immediate source of the image may have been, there can be no doubt that Unamuno's ultimate model for a work in which the narrative is mediated by a series of authors, editors, and translators enclosed one within another, was the Quixote. Inevitably, then, one senses in Cómo se hace una novela the presence of Cide Hamete Benegeli, of whom Unamuno said in the last chapter of his Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho that he “no es puro recurso literario, sino que encubre una profunda verdad, cual es la de que esa historia se la dictó a Cervantes otro que llevaba dentro de sí … : un espíritu que en las profundidades de su alma habitaba” (3: 252).

But neither in the possible immediate source of the image nor in the classic model of its realization will the significance of the enclosed boxes be exhausted, for in it can be recognized some of the most fundamental aspects of thought present in Unamuno's work from the first years of his intellectual maturity. Cerezo Galán says its ontological significance is that “todo es un mundo vacío, sin fondo. El argumento es que no hay argumento. ¿Cómo expresarlo mejor que en la metáfora de las cajas chinas, embutidas unas en otras, y que nada guardan, o que guardan la nada, porque no hay nada que guardar?” (671). Perhaps it was the explicit reference to the emptiness of the innermost box that most immediately prompted Cassou to observe in the prologue to his translation that “Con Unamuno topamos con el fondo del nihilismo español” (8: 717), to which Unamuno replied in his comentario that:

Nihilismo nos suena, o mejor, nos sabe a ruso … Pero nihil es palabra latina. El nuestro, el español estaría mejor llamado nadismo, de nuestro abismático vocablo: nada. Nada, que significando primero cosa nada o nacida, algo, esto es: todo, ha venido a significar, como el francés rien, de rem = cosa—y como personne—la no cosa, la nonada, la nada. De la plenitud del ser se ha pasado a su vaciamiento.

(8: 726)

Even in this purely philological exercise can be seen the pervasive presence of two of Unamuno's most basic concerns: that of the O todo o nada dichotomy, and that of the Hegelian idea—perhaps better called conceit—of the ontological equivalence of Pure Being and Pure Nothingness, which I discussed in my Introduction and in later chapters. Previously I had pointed out Unamuno's claim in En torno al casticismo that the great merit of Hegel was to understand “que el mundo de la ciencia son formas enchufadas unas en otras, formas de formas y formas de estas formas en proceso inacabable” (1: 790). The image of the lacquer boxes, which becomes an iconic symbol of such a worldview, seeks, then, to transcend the opposition of interiority and exteriority by suggesting that everything is at once interior and exterior, and therefore purely relative. But that relativity itself depends upon their inherent opposition, and the tension between them is left unresolved. In Niebla the worldview symbolized by the nested boxes was at one moment satirized—and thereby implicitly rejected—in the description of Antolín S. Paparrigópulos as “Convencido … de que en última instancia todo es forma, forma más o menos interior, el universo mismo un caleidoscopio de formas enchufadas las unas en las otras” (2: 638). But as in the case of Unamuno's efforts to transcend the dualism of idea and matter, his efforts at overcoming the dualism of interiority and exteriority led him alternately to affirm and deny the reality of interiority. Near the end of the original central nucleus of Cómo se hace una novela, Unamuno rejects the interiority of Kantian noumenalism with the declaration that “el nóumeno inventado por Kant es de lo más fenomenal que puede darse y la sustancia lo que hay de más formal” (8: 753). This assertion could be seen as echoing other antinoumenalist moments in Unamuno, going back some thirty years or more, as, for example, in the passage from the Recuerdos de niñez y mocedad cited in my Chapter 1, where he attributes the child's profound depth of intuition precisely to the fact that he is content to rest his eyes on the surface of whatever is presented to him.

Yet immediately following that praise of the child's naïve phenomenalism came an emphatic reaction in the noumenalist direction, and in a similar way, after the critique in Cómo se hace una novela of Kant's idea of the noumenon there appears in the continuación a renewed preoccupation with interiority in the form of a meditation on St. Paul's concept of the eso anthropos, the inner man. Unamuno there expressed, more fully than in any other work, his profound sense of tension between acceptance and rejection of interiority, and there is reason, in fact, to believe that it remained unresolved throughout the rest of his life, for ten years later, just two years before his death, he again used the image of the nested boxes—the last one of which is empty—in an essay that I shall comment upon in my concluding chapter.

These examples of Unamuno's use over a period of nearly forty years of the nesting-box image suggest that it became for him a basic structural and topological principle that informed a number of quite diverse aspects of his thought. We see it as the expression of some fundamental concepts of metaphysics, as a principle of organization among multiple levels of discourse, as a structure of relations among a series of mediating narrators, and as an image of temporal process within an individual life experience. What is common to all of them is that they are fundamentally concerned with human consciousness and discourse. Even in the metaphysical use of the symbol (“formas enchufadas, unas en otras”) in En torno al casticismo, the world to which the image is applied is the “mundo de la ciencia,” the world as known by scientific observation. With this in mind it can now be seen that a number of other passages that express concepts of multiple inner personalities also imply the nesting-box principle, although not always in as explicit a sense. In Amor y pedagogía, Don Fulgencio had at one point told Apolodoro: “Todo cuanto nos entra por los sentidos en nosotros queda, en el insondable mar de lo subconsciente; allí vive el mundo todo, allí todo el pasado, allí están también nuestros padres y los padres de nuestros padres y los padres de éstos en inacabable serie …” (2: 385). A few years later, in the narrative essay “Intelectualidad y espiritualidad” (1904), he used the free indirect style to ask, “¿Había él escrito aquello? ¿Era él el mismo que quien lo escribiera? ¿No habría en él más de un sujeto? ¿No llevaría en los limbos de su sesera las almas de sus antepasados todos?” (1: 1139).

Such moments represent the extreme range of what can be accepted as actual examples of the lacquer-box principle, but clearly they evoke the concept, even if it be as personalities rather than as physical forms. They are, in any case, of particular value in the interpretation of Cómo se hace una novela, for they suggest a way of understanding the relation between the explicit discursive structure and the theme of internalized personalities. For while in the central nucleus the lacquer-box principle is explicitly associated solely with a concept of narrative structure, the continuación contains a meditation on the themes of fatherhood and sonship suggesting an identification of the discursive logos and the paternal logos. These themes are introduced through the narrative that is the second caja enchufada, as Unamuno finally gives in this epilogue an ending to the hypothetical history of Jugo de la Raza:

Mi Jugo se dejaría al cabo del libro, renunciaría al libro fatídico, a concluir de leerlo. En sus correrías por los mundos de Dios para escapar de la fatídica lectura iría a dar a su tierra natal, a la de su niñez, y en ella se encontraría con su niñez misma, con su niñez eterna, con aquella edad en que aun no sabía leer, en que todavía no era hombre de libro. Y en esa niñez encontraría su hombre interior, el eso anthropos. … Y este hombre de dentro se encuentra en su patria, con su niñez, con su sentimiento—y más que sentimiento, con su esencia de filialidad—al sentirse hijo y descubrir al padre. O sea sentir en sí al padre.

(8: 758)

Unamuno then goes on to recall his own niñez eterna in a moment that constituted for him the experience of discovering the father, and thereby discovering his own filialidad. It was also a moment that identified the father with the mystery of language, for he discovered him conversing in French with a visitor to the family's house in Bilbao. Unamuno then goes on to ask if it is not, in fact, the father who discovers the son, and he recalls Wordsworth's line, “The child is father of the man,” asking if it is not “¿ … el sentimiento—¡qué pobre palabra!—de paternidad, de perpetuidad hacia el porvenir, el que nos revela el sentimiento de filialidad, de perpetuidad hacia del pasado?” (8: 759). The basis of this conceit is once more the tendency toward the formulation of his thought in chiastic structures. Wordsworth's famous line might in itself be regarded as one half of a chiastic pair of statements, one an unexpressed commonplace (“The man is father of the child”), the other a poetic paradox (“The child is father of the man”) that depends for its effectiveness precisely upon its symmetrical relationship to the implicitly evoked commonplace. The three key nouns in each syntagma make the chiastic structure clear: man=father=child / child=father=man.

To the either/or of his question as to whether it is the child—the son—who discovers the father or the father who discovers the son, Unamuno will proceed to give an answer in the mode of a both/and, thereby preserving the two halves of the chiasmus. Turning to analogous literary and religious questions, he recalls the dying words of Christ as recorded in St. Luke, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” and asserts that the spirit He yielded into the hands of the Father was simply the work he had come to perform. This leads to further reflections on fatherhood and sonship, which he ends by concluding: “Cada uno es hijo de sus obras, quedó dicho, y lo repitió Cervantes, hijo del Quijote, pero ¿no es uno también padre de sus obras? Y Cervantes, padre del Quijote. De donde uno, sin conceptismo, es padre e hijo de sí mismo, y su obra el espíritu santo” (8: 760). In this way, he has established, on the one hand, the metaphorical identity of Divine Creator, procreative father, and the creative author and, on the other, the identity of created world, created son, and work of art. But it is insufficient to see the relation between the two series in terms of a simple duality. The allusion to the Christian Trinity makes clear the triadic structure of the concept Unamuno here has in mind, as does also his use of the terminology of generational relationships. As an obvious reality of human experience, one is both father and son only within a three-generation line of descent, but we are not dealing here with matters of literal genealogy. It is, rather, a question of subjective representation: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all identified in the Trinity with the unified subject: the self that creates the self that creates the self.

In using the idea of the Trinity in this representation of the subject, Unamuno suggests the possibility of reversing the order expressed in the Nicene Creed with respect to the begetting of the Son (ex patre natum ante omnia saecula) and procession of the Holy Spirit (qui ex patre filioque procedit). The filioque is known, of course, to be a Western addition to the original Nicenean formula, and it has here been understood by Unamuno in almost literally genealogical terms, so that the Father is, in effect, a primal grandfather, and the Son stands between Him and the Holy Spirit, a “Grandson” who is begotten of them both. But if a man is both father and son to himself, and if we may say both that the spirit that is his work proceeds from him, and that he proceeds from his work, it is clear that the names “father,” “son,” and “grandson” are purely relative in meaning. They have become subject to what Ernest Jones has called “the phantasy of the reversal of generations,”⁸ in which the son imagines himself as his father's father and hence becomes, in effect, his own grandfather—in this way, too, becoming both son and father to himself. Such considerations can perhaps contribute to an understanding of the relation between the lacquer-box structure of Cómo se hace una novela and Unamuno's meditations in the continuación on the theme of paternity, particularly when we recall that the idea of a series of ancestral personalities contained within the individual consciousness is an old one in his thought.⁹ It is possible, however, to take an additional step toward understanding this and many other works of Unamuno by considering some aspects of the structure of generations in Unamuno's own family background that have already been seen as pertinent to the interpretation of La tía Tula.

It was not often that Unamuno spoke of the consanguinity of his parents, but he was certainly aware of it, particularly, perhaps, because after the death of his father it was his father's sister, Benita de Unamuno, who supported her daughter and grandchildren, living with the family until her death in 1880. In an essay written in the last year of his life Unamuno recalls her as “mi abuela materna y tía paterna” (8: 1245), and it is not difficult to believe that the duality of kinship of which he was aware in relation to her may also have been evident to him at some level of consciousness with respect to other members of the family. For within that system his mother was also his cousin, and his father was also his great-uncle, and thus a member of the grandparents' generation. As a result, his own position within the structure was also ambiguous, for as cousin to his mother he was in one sense a member of the second generation, while as son he was, of course, of the third generation. When he concludes that “uno, sin conceptismo, es padre e hijo de sí mismo, y su obra el espíritu santo,” the statement may well have had for him a significance far more real than any verbal conceit.¹⁰ The ambiguity of his position in that most immediate structure of being-in-the-world that is the family may well be related to Unamuno's frequent preoccupation with the problem of authentic being, of really existing, which for him was an inward, substantial being, in an almost material, corporeal sense. Within the asymmetry of this family structure, a son's natural Oedipal desire to replace the father might well be accompanied by a sense that the structure itself had already effected the substitution by making the father withdraw into the grandparents' generation and identifying the son, through cousinship with the mother, with the generation of the parents. The incest prohibition would certainly have remained fully operative, but the ambiguity would also have remained, and since the “name of the father” is symbolic of the principle of law prohibiting erotic attachment to the mother, that ambiguity would almost certainly have entered—and there is much evidence that for Unamuno it did enter—into the prohibition itself.¹¹ The reconstruction of a system of symbolic representations in the long-vanished consciousness of Unamuno is not the purpose of this study, but this hypothesized system may be the basis for the surprising degree of correspondence in this work between theme and form, between the lacquer-box principle in narrative structure and the meditation on fatherhood and sonship that appears in the continuación. It may also be possible to relate the topological hierarchy of narrative planes to the linear hierarchy of descent, since the symbolic internalization of that hierarchy implies its conversion—through a doubling back of generation upon generation—into an analogue of the narrative structure. The ontological condition that this implies is intrinsic to any narrative informed by the hierarchical principle of the lacquer boxes. This “old trick of the novelist,” as Kierkegaard called it, has served well the purposes of verisimilitude in fiction; contrasting various levels of narrative, it gives a sense of ontological relativism that mediates readers' acceptance of one particular level of fiction as constituting “reality.” The reader reading about Don Quixote as reader of romances, is persuaded to accept the historicity of the relatively more realistic and more immediate fiction, but at the same time, this ontological relativism may also have the opposite effect of persuading readers to question the ontological status of objective historical reality, including that of their own being.¹²

In Niebla Unamuno had realized precisely this effect with striking originality, treating the inwardness and outwardness of the novel in such a way as to realize a Hegelian “immediate conversion of each into its opposite.” But Cómo se hace una novela goes on to reveal that the preoccupation with the problem of inwardness expressed by the lacquer-box structure makes the emptiness of the innermost box the ultimate center of concern, about which the fiction, in a constant search for the Presence of substantial being, endlessly turns. The ontological relativism seen in Niebla has here become an explicit part of the confessional narrative, and Unamuno indicates near the beginning of this work that “los que vivimos principalmente de la lectura y en la lectura, no podemos separar de los personajes poéticos o novelescos a los históricos … Todo es para nosotros libro, lectura; podemos hablar del Libro de la Historia, del Libro de la Naturaleza, del Libro del Universo. Somos bíblicos” (8: 732). The vision of the child, and of all those for whom books, words, and ideas have not yet come to constitute an order of being equal, if not superior, to that of corporeal reality, is regarded with a sympathy clearly revealing Unamuno's nostalgia: for the child, for his vision, and for the flesh and blood reality from which the world of words and ideas had alienated him. Indeed, the world of books, words, and thoughts is not only one that stands at an agonizing remove from physical reality, but one in which the self is devoured. His most painful concern in exile has been to create himself by creating his own history and that of “his” Spain. But paradoxically: “La historia es leyenda … y esta leyenda, esta historia me devora y cuando ella acabe me acabaré con ella” (8: 733). This sentiment echoes that of Tulio Montalbán, who vainly sought escape from his own devouring legend in the persona of Julio Macedo. The concept of the devouring history is far more complex than the preoccupation with mortality and time commonly associated with the agonistic Unamuno. The latter preoccupations are themselves largely a reflex of the ontological alienation that the “distancing” intrinsic to linguistic reference provoked within him, and the ultimate symbol of this distancing is the lacquer-box structure of discourse—the structure of signs enclosed in signs enclosed in other signs, never containing in themselves anything but the emptiness of their own transcending signification. This may be essentially true of all verbal signs, but Unamuno's anguished search for Presence as a fullness of meaning in the paternal logos has served to make him peculiarly aware of the insubstantiality of all names and all narratives. With this the characterization by Marías, Sánchez Barbudo, and Zubizarreta of Cómo se hace una novela as a key work in the whole of Unamuno's writings becomes more fully cogent, but it is perhaps inevitable that like Ribbans, some readers should regard it as one fallen far short of what seemed to be the promise of its title: the very mirror and model of the novel. As Ribbans says: “Como diario angustiado, parte de su literatura de confesión, la obra tiene su valor, pero Así no se hace una novela. ¡No, señor!” (“Unamuno en la perspectiva” 12). Following Zubizarreta (Unamuno en su “nivola”), Ribbans later suggested adding Cómo se hace una novela to the category of nivolas (“Dialéctica” 157), and with this I am very much in agreement, even though Cerezo Galán says it is “tampoco ‘nivola,’ por más que esta creación unamuniana responda a relatos sin argumento previo, sino … un collage de experiencias, recuerdos íntimos y agrias censuras políticas, comentarios a noticias, reflexiones y notas de lectura, especialmente de Mazzini—otro gran soñador en exilio” (671-72). It doubtless is, as Martin Nozick says, “una creación híbrida” (108), but for a number of reasons it can still be maintained that there is a return of the nivola within it. It is clear, for example, that the effect of being written sin plan previo is even more pronounced here than in Niebla, precisely because as a sort of diary, it is written in response to each day's events and each day's readings. The image of the lacquer boxes may also be said to have been anticipated by the various images of pure, empty form in Amor y pedagogía, such as the empty brackets and the paper birds, as has the very evident self-reflexivity, like that in Niebla, with regard to the novel's own process of creation, and as has the proliferation of enclosing prologues and epilogues. The crudezas that characterize the nivolas are also present in this work, not in an erotic sense, but in the essentially crude terms with which Unamuno heaps insults on the military directorate and all intellectuals and one-time liberal politicians whom he sees as selling out to them.

The principle respects in which it differs from the other nivolas are seen in its specificity in time, place, and historical moment, and in its tragic view of that moment, which is occasionally attenuated by touches of lyric sentiment but not by any humor, even of the essentially satirical variety found in the nivolas. Common to the nivola's often heavy-handed humor and the occasional crudeness of tone in Cómo se hace una novela is the fact that they verge on the grotesque so strongly as to reveal the depth of anxiety—or of bitterness—lying within them. It is certainly most unlikely that Unamuno ever intended Cómo se hace una novela to be the very mirror and model of a novel in the conventional sense. It does not resolve and negate the question implicit in the Cómo by providing an answer to it, but—like the title itself—the novela preserves the question as an integral part of the work itself, a question that corresponds precisely to the one evoked in the quotation from St. Augustine that serves as an epigraph for the entire work: Mihi quaestio factus sum. The fact that Cerezo Galán's comments always refer to its title as an explicit, direct question (¿Cómo se hace una novela?) is certainly an erratum, since no edition gives it that form, but this is an apt reminder of the fact that the indirect question in the title as published implies the direct question this critic gives. To the direct question implied by the title, as well as to the quaestio of the self, Unamuno ultimately responds, not with an answer presuming to resolve it, but—as he tells us in the continuación—by converting the problema into a metablema, that is, by converting the contemplated proyecto (his translation of the Greek problema) into an active trayecto (his translation of metablema), accepting and exploiting the linear and irreversible temporality of language itself to create the novel, the life, even the national history he would like to achieve. As Cerezo Galán pointed out in reference to Unamuno's remarks on the Kantian concept of the noumenon, “No hay un noumeno inalcanzable, donde se guarda el secreto del verdadero yo. Tampoco hay una historia meramente externa o fenomenal, sino la unidad dialéctica, procesual, de lo uno y lo otro” (678). In realizing this trayecto, Unamuno reveals his sense that the inner truth of the novel's fiction is, in fact, the act that is at once its creative “making” and its own verbal signifying; a pursuit of Presence in the struggle against Absence, against the void in the final, empty, box.

In bringing Cómo se hace una novela to a close, Unamuno clearly sought more than once to create rhetorically a “sense of an ending” that he subsequently felt compelled to negate. The final words of the original nucleus are a question, which may imply an intrinsic openness, but as a rhetorical question, it expects no answer, and its openness becomes itself a form of closure: “Y tú, lector, que has llegado hasta aquí, ¿es que vives?” (8: 754); the continuación ends with what sounds like a more definitive ending: “Y así es, lector, Cómo se hace para siempre una novela” (8: 762), the apparent finality of which is made more emphatic by the way the text is dated: “Terminado el viernes 17 de junio de 1927, en Hendaya, Bajos Pirineos, frontera entre Francia y España.” Immediately following this, however, is a series of brief reflections, dated from 21 June through 7 July, the first one of which questions the preceding claim to closure: “¿Terminado? ¡Qué pronto escribí eso! ¿Es que se puede terminar algo, aunque sólo sea una novela, de Cómo se hace una novela?” (8: 763). And when the entire text comes finally to an end, it is simply with one last off-hand insult to Primo de Rivera: “Es un fuego fatuo, una lucecita que no puede hacer sombra” (8: 769); rhetorically, it simply trails off, with no clear sense of closure. Here, then, just as in Amor y pedagogía and Niebla, there is a profound tension between closure and openness—that is, between ending and continuing—already manifested in Jugo de la Raza's fear of finishing the reading of his novel, as well as in Unamuno's personally reported fear of endings and discontinuities in his own daily life.

It is certainly appropriate to regard Cómo se hace una novela as representing a return of the nivola, but clearly it also constitutes, not only a return, but a continued presentation of the major themes found in all of Unamuno's work, among which one of the most notable is that of the tyranny of ideas. Although filled with direct expressions of Unamuno's thoughts on the political and social situation in Spain and on the human condition generally, it is not fundamentally a work—much less a novel—of ideas. As Cassou's prologue pointed out: “No le gustaría el que en un estudio consagrado a él se hiciera el esfuerzo de analizar sus ideas. … La ideocracia es la más terrible de las dictaduras que ha tratado de derribar. … Unamuno no tiene ideas: es él mismo, las ideas que las de los otros se hacen en él.”¹³ In the comentario Unamuno accepts this characterization of his attitude toward ideas, but with one important rectification: “Dice luego Cassou que yo no tengo ideas, pero lo que yo creo que quiere decir es que las ideas no me tienen a mí” (8: 722). He refuses to allow himself to be possessed by any ideology or system of ideas, but obviously his mind was constantly filled with thoughts related to his passionately felt concerns, political, religious, and metaphysical. In this return of the nivola, Unamuno insists as much as ever that flesh and blood reality is never to be subordinated either to literary verbiage or to political ideologies.

The problem of ideocracia is simply one aspect of the broader problem of the dichotomy between word and flesh which was Unamuno's constant preoccupation. His denunciation of the tyranny of ideas does not prevent his coming close at times to suggesting the possibility of the primacy of thought and of ideas, as when he asks himself whether his political enemies, the King and his generals, really exist outside of his own mind. It is clear, however, that the idea of the primacy of thought, of the idea of “the Idea,” is again, as in Niebla, accompanied by a note of nostalgia for the realm of palpable reality. When Unamuno said that those who live in and by the written word cannot sharply distinguish between fictional and historical characters, it was with more than a touch of longing for the palpable, material, reality of history. As other texts of Unamuno have shown, language—the word—provides a link between the two, but human beings must not allow their corporeal reality to be dominated by language and by thought. Indeed, the frequent presence of lacquer-box structures in Unamuno's thought may, as I have previously suggested, be due to a profound longing to give three-dimensional “body” to the syntagmatic linearity of texts, which is that of language itself.

Near the end of Cómo se hace una novela, Unamuno insists that this body of the text can be infused with soul only by the creative activity of the reader, just as Víctor Goti had declared in Niebla that a character of fiction has no inwardness other than that imparted to it by the reader. Unamuno further indicates that the danger of the domination of flesh-and-blood reality by words and ideas is particularly great if one's relation to the word is purely passive. It is for that reason that among the multiple meanings of this text's title: “How a novel is made,” “How one makes a novel,” or—the most literal of all—“How a novel makes itself,” the last is of particular significance. The closest he comes to providing an answer to the ¿Cómo? implied in the Cómo of his title is when in the continuación he tells his readers that it is by an active engagement with the text that the reader participates in the “making” of the novel: “todo lector que sea hombre de dentro, humano, es, lector, autor de lo que lee y está leyendo. Esto que ahora lees aquí, lector, te lo estás diciendo tú a ti mismo y es tan tuyo como mío” (8: 761). It becomes clear that for Unamuno the question as to how a novel makes itself is identical with the question as to how a reader participates in its making, and ultimately, with the question as to how the human personality makes itself.

Notes

1. See “La liga antigermanófila española” (9:1480-84).

2. See Salcedo 245-320.

3. On the genesis of this work see Zubizarreta (Unamuno en su “nivola” 21-24).

4. Unamuno's project of creating and eternalizing himself in his role of exile and proscrito is therefore to be carried out—vivíparamente—in the work he has wanted to write and is in the process of writing. This leads him to confront the basic problem of literary representation, which La Rubia Prado analyzes thoroughly, exploring the theme of representation in early German romanticism and the role of the fragment in relation to the problem of representation. On the basis of these analyses, he presents a reading of Cómo se hace una novela “como texto que eleva la cuestión de la representación a un nivel mediado por el fragmento y la alegoría” (Vida 23).

5. With this, Unamuno echoes a passage in the Diario íntimo in which he said: “Yo recuerdo haberme quedado alguna vez mirándome al espejo hasta desdoblarme y ver mi propia imagen como un sujeto extraño, … y me sobrecojí todo como si sintiera el abismo de la nada y me sintiera una sombra pasajera” (8: 797-98). Similar experiences of alienation have been seen in the figures of Apolodoro Carrascal and Augusto Pérez.

6. Among the Poesías of 1907 is one written on New Year's Eve of 1906, in which Unamuno expresses the fear of dying with the end of the old year, and upon finishing the poem. Astonishingly, thirty years later he died on New Year's Eve, of 1936. Aurora de Albornoz's article on the poem refers to it as “un extraño presentimiento misterioso.”

7. For a detailed discussion of the variants in these editions, see my 1977 edition of Cómo se hace una novela and Lacy (“Censorship and Cómo se hace una novela” 317-25). See also the following volumes and pages in the three editions of Obras completas: 1950 (4: 907-85); 1958 (10: 825-923); 1966 (8: 707-69). Quotations from this work will come, as usual, from the third of these, corrected as needed by reference to the edition of 1977.

8. See the chapter so titled in Jones, Papers in Psycho-analysis.

9. See Blanco Aguinaga, “La madre, su regazo y el ‘sueño de dormir’ en la obra de Unamuno,” and Chapter 5 of El Unamuno contemplativo.

10. That one may say this without conceptismo does not mean it is objectively true, but it is a truth of the symbolic system in which the terms appear structured. Lévi-Strauss (Structural Anthropology 50) has said of the kinship system in general that it “does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation.” He immediately adds, however, that “this does not mean that the real situation is automatically contradicted, or that it is simply to be ignored” (50). What is important is the extent to which one is aware of the objective ties of descent or consanguinity, that is, of the extent to which these ties exist within the socially determined realm of the symbolic.

11. As Lacan expresses it, “C'est dan le nom du père qu'il nous faut reconnaître le support de la fonction symbolique qui, depuis l'orée des temps historiques, identifie sa personne à la figure de la loi” (278). Earlier in the same essay, he writes that “c'est bien la confusion des générations qui, dans la Bible comme dans toutes les lois traditionelles, est maudite comme l'abomination du verbe et la désolation du pécheur. … Nous savons en effet quel ravage déjà allant jusqu'à la dissociation de la personnalité du sujet peut exercer une filiation falsifiée, quand la contrainte de l'entourage s'emploie à en soutenir le mensonge” (277). The “confusion des générations” in Unamuno's family background was clearly not so extreme as to produce an actual “dissociation de la personnalité” in him, but it may have had a role in the frequency with which his novels represent problems of self-identity and ontological insecurity.

12. Miller pointed to a similar problem in the novel that uses the ontological relativism of the mise en abyme in an effort to heighten the effect of external reality in the framing narrative: “The imaginary copy tends to affirm the reality of what it copies and at the same time to undermine its substantiality. To watch a play within a play is to be transformed from spectator into actor and to suspect that all the world may be a stage” (35).

13. For this passage I quote the edition of 1977, rather than Escelicer's Obras completas, since that edition makes a change in the last sentence that cannot be justified by reference to Cassou's French original.

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