[In the following essay, Speck argues that Como se hace una novella is a series of metanarratives constructed like a maze of mirrors in a carnival, suggesting that the novel tells the story of Unamuno's search for this narrative “way out” of the labyrinth of reflection.]

Como se hace una novela (1927), one of Miguel de Unamuno's last novels, contains his most extreme experiments with narrative form. In it, he set out to push to their farthest limit the explorations of the autonomous character, the self-reflecting narrative, and the fiction-within-a-fiction which he began in Niebla and other works.¹ Yet this highly avant-garde novel is also one of Unamuno's most political works: he wrote it to protest the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, who had driven him to imprisonment and then to self-imposed exile in France.² The unexpected mixture of experimentation and topicality which went into Cómo se hace una novela has led most readers and critics to pass it over for Unamuno's more accessible works.³ Yet this novel, representing the mature Unamuno's statement on the meaning of fiction for history, repays closer scrutiny. In this paper, I hope to shed some light on the work by focusing on the question posed by its title.

Miguel de Unamuno, always the Greek professor, loved to reduce words to their roots and reassemble them, to play with grammatical constructions in order to reveal their hidden ambiguities. In Cómo se hace una novela, these games begin with the title itself. It can be translated in several ways: “How a Novel is Made” (the reflexive as passive, e.g., “La sangría se hace de vino y frutas”); “How a Novel Makes Itself” (the reflexive proper, e.g., “Miguel se miró en el espejo”); “How to Make a Novel for Oneself” (analogous to “Miguel se hace la cena”); or “How to Become/Make Oneself Into a Novel” (as in “Miguel se hizo médico”). The Spanish reflexive allows all of these interpretations, although some are more likely in this sentence than others. Unamuno rephrases his title in order to bring out each of these meanings at some point in the text. Other reflexive verbs play a counterpoint to the title: confesarse, comerse, aburrirse, salvarse, conocerse, and—the key word in all of Unamuno's work—morirse. The effect achieved by the constant recurrence of these verbs is reinforced by Unamuno's use—and creation—of compounds beginning with re- and auto-, such as representar, recobrar, retraducir, repetir, revivir, resurrección, rematanza, remortificación, and autobiografía.

But reflexivity is more than a stylistic device in Cómo se hace una novela. The novel itself is constructed like the maze of mirrors in a carnival. The Unamuno of 1927 writes about the Unamuno of 1925, who is writing an autobiographical novel about a Spaniard exiled in Paris, who is reading a novel which is in its turn an autobiography …⁴ Each of these protagonists mirrors all the others—ineffectual intellectuals caught in a labyrinth of reflections and desperately seeking a way out. The novel tells the story of Unamuno's search for this “way out,” and his progress is marked by the successive meanings which he gives to his title.

I. HOW A NOVEL IS MADE

Cómo se hace una novela was built up by successive accretions around a core story written in 1925, whose protagonist, Jugo de la Raza, bears the surnames of Unamuno's grandmothers (p. 134). Unamuno could not publish the story in Spain because of its political content, and so he allowed it to be translated into French as Comment on fait un roman. Under this title it appeared in the Mercure de France on May 15, 1926, preceded by a “Portrait d'Unamuno” by Jean Cassou (included in the novel itself, pp. 91-102). When Unamuno moved to Fuenterrabía on the Spanish-French border and decided to expand the story into a novel, he made no attempt to find his Spanish original:

Y ahora, cuando al fin me resuelvo a publicarlo en mi propia lengua, en la única en que sé desnudar mi pensamiento, no quiero recobrar el texto original. Ni sé con qué ojos volvería a ver aquellas agoreras cuartillas que llené en el cuartito de la soledad de mis soledades de París. Prefiero retraducir de la traducción francesa de Cassou y es lo que me propongo hacer ahora. Pero ¿es hacedero que un autor retraduzca una traducción que de alguno de sus escritos se haya hecho a otra lengua? Es una experiencia más que de resurrección, de muerte, o acaso de remortificación. O mejor de rematanza.

(pp. 87-88)

The typically-Unamunan play with recobrar-retraducción-resurrección-remortificación-rematanza underlines the paradox: even though Spanish is the only language in which he can express himself, the writer refuses to “recover” his original text, preferring instead the round-about method of “resurrecting” it through re-translation. He does this even though he suspects that the experiment may prove a “rematanza.” Translation and re-translation have become in some way a confrontation with death.

This symbolism becomes clearer in a passage towards the end of the book. There Unamuno explains that, because he lost his father at the age of six, most of his paternal images came from “imágenes artisticas o artificiales”—portraits, photographs. The only direct memory which the novelist retains is one of sneaking into the parlor and discovering his own father—“a mi padre, a mi propio padre,” he exclaims—speaking in French to a visitor (pp. 180-81). The child suddenly finds himself separated from his own father by the barrier of an alien tongue—“el misterio del lenguaje.” This separation prefigures the father's imminent death. More than half a century later, the child grown-up recalls this scene—which could be called “the primal scene of translation”—in his exile in France and resolves to “resurrect” the story of that exile from a translation in the language which his father spoke in that long-ago parlor. This time, however, Unamuno must save himself from death.

The months of 1925 which the novelist spent in Paris were a “dark night of the soul.” He refused to bring his family with him; lived in uncomfortable boarding houses; spent his days talking with his fellow exiles and reading newspapers from Spain, his insomniac nights fearing that his bad heart would kill him in a foreign land. Because he was too honest not to recognize that much of his misery was self-inflicted—Primo de Rivera had only confined the writer to the Spanish island of Fuerteventura—Unamuno added to the pangs of homesickness a constant questioning of his own motives. Was he not in danger of betraying his “yo íntimo” in order to play a role in the same political circus with the “yo histórico” of clownish dictators and kings? In becoming an actor on the political stage, had he not also become a “hypocrite” (‘actor’ in Greek)? In becoming a “traductor,” had he not also become a “traidor” (pp. 154-155)? The writer is exiled above all from his own self, the strong yo which leaps from every page of Unamuno's Spanish writings lost behind an impersonal French on. He must “make” the novel in order to “confess” (Spanish “confesarse”) this original betrayal.⁵

II. HOW A NOVEL MAKES ITSELF

If the passive construction reduces the human subject to an impersonal “on,” the reflexive proper eliminates it altogether. We find ourselves in a world where novels write themselves, a father disappears to be replaced by his photographs, and mirrors devour the objects they reflect: “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 inconsciencia, al pasado, al la nada” (p. 133). Mirrors serve as a leitmotif throughout the novel. In the parlor where Unamuno discovers his father's mortality, a curved mirror reflects everything “pequeñito y deformado” (p. 180). In Paris, Jugo de la Raza struggles against the impulse to “arrojarme al Sena, al espejo” (pp. 135-36). Unamuno spends his exile in Fuenterrabía watching images of himself, his childhood, and the history of Spain in a river which flows out of the Spanish Basque country (pp. 150-51). Mirrors symbolize the dilemma of the exile. Jugo and Unamuno, like Dante and Mazzini—two other banished writers who are alluded to repeatedly—leave their native land out of love for it. Yet, lost in a foreign city, they find themselves cut off from the changing situation in their homeland without becoming a part of their host country. They tend to overestimate the importance of intrigues in the small exile community and to fall into a Narcissuslike obsession with their own cases. Unamuno chooses reflexive verbs—mirarse, pasearse, entretenerse, lucirse, defenderse, aburrirse—to express the futility of this closed-circle existence.

Jugo de la Raza seeks escape in light fiction:

U. Jugo de la Raza se aburre de una manera soberana—y, ¡qué aburrimiento el de un soberano!—porque no vive ya más que en sí mismo, en el pobre yo de bajo la historia, en el hombre triste que no se ha hecho novela. Y por eso le gustan las novelas. Le gustan y las busca para vivir en otro, para ser otro, para eternizarse en otro. Es por lo menos lo que él cree, pero en realidad busca las novelas a fin de descubrirse, a fin de vivir en sí, de ser él mismo. O más bien a fin de escapar de su yo desconocido e inconocible hasta para sí mismo.

(p. 134)

But the exile cannot find his unknown self by putting on the mask of “otro.” Wandering on the banks of the Seine and contemplating suicide, Jugo happens on a bookstall and buys a novel. We do not learn this novel's title or subject matter. All we know is that it is an autobiography, and that, in the midst of the story, the narrator turns to the reader and states, “‘Cuando el lector llegue al fin de esta dolorosa historia se morirá conmigo'” (p. 135). Jugo finds himself in the same dilemma as the protagonists of Balzac's La Peau de chagrin and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. He has allowed his fate to be bound up with that of a fictional double.⁶

At first, Jugo tries to convince himself that the author is only making fun of him, but he is forced to admit that, if so, he as reader has become an accomplice in his own destruction: “‘¿O soy yo quien se está burlando de mí mismo?’” (p. 159).⁷ Jugo's fears are justified on a practical level by his bad heart; on a literary level, by the tacit pact through which every reader, while reading, surrenders his reality to the one that the author creates. Jugo tries destroying the book, but soon discovers another copy; finally, he resolves to keep the novel by his bed and read a few pages every night, until he can guess the ending without reading the last page. Yet each word plunges him further into his fatal absorption in the alien self:

Sentía que el tiempo le devoraba, que el porvenir de aquella ficción novelesca le tragaba. El porvenir de aquella criatura de ficción con que se había identificado; sentíase hundirse en sí mismo.

Un poco calmado abrió el libro y reanudó su lectura. Se olvidó de sí mismo por completo y entonces sí que pudo decir que se había muerto. Soñaba al otro, o más bien el otro era un sueño que se soñaba en él, una criatura de su soledad infinita.

(p. 141; emphasis added)

Reflexive constructions pile on reflexive constructions to underline the main point: Jugo de la Raza has already died and a mirror image has taken his place.

This passage marks the point where the game of mirrors which constitutes Cómo se hace una novela—novel within novel within novel—reaches its greatest elaboration. Jugo de la Raza commits a symbolic suicide by delivering his own soul over to what Unamuno calls in an essay “la novela novelesca.”⁸ This condemnation includes folletín or escapist fiction, but it also includes avant-garde literature which engages in self-reflective, art-for-art's-sake games.⁹ A people poisoned with such books easily believes a dictator like Primo de Rivera when he offers them a serial-novel version of their own history. If the Spanish people accept the fiction of Spain which men like the dictator offer, then they will die with Jugo de la Raza: “¿Y cómo acabarás tú, lector? Si no eres más que lector, al acabar tu lectura, y si eres hombre, hombre como yo, es decir, comediante y autor de ti mismo, entonces no debes leer por miedo de olvidarte a ti mismo.” (p. 172)

III. HOW TO MAKE ONESELF (INTO) A NOVEL

Jugo will die because he, like the reader of the “novela novelsca,” chooses to allow the novel to make him instead of trying to make it: “[P] adecía la novela, pero no la hacía” (p. 185). “Making” a novel, to Unamuno, means much more than “telling” (“contar”) a story (p. 163). It means that the reader must take risks and join with the author in the act of creation. For, as Unamuno confesses, “Los mejores novelistas no saben lo que han puesto en sus novelas. … Porque su vida íntima, entrañada, novelesca, se continúa en la de sus lectores” (p. 192). To the reader with an “interés folletinesco y frívolo” in Jugo's fate, the author offers only a sketch of several possible endings (p. 163). The best readers will not demand an ending, for they will understand that “lo hecho”—that which is made, finished—brings death. Only “lo que se hace”—that which is being made, makes itself—lives and gives life (p. 196). In this way, Unamuno ranges himself with many other twentieth-century novelists who challenge their audience to read actively, skeptically.¹⁰

But Unamuno's challenge goes beyond the aesthetic realm. Above all, both author and reader must accept the responsibility for remarking themselves and each other: “¿Por qué, o sea, para qué se hace una novela? Para hacerse el novelista. ¿Y para qué se hace el novelista? Para hacer al lector, para hacerse uno con el lector. Y sólo haciéndose uno el novelador yel lector de la novela se salvan ambos de su soledad radical. En cuanto se hacen uno se actualizan y actualizándose se eternizan” (p. 205). Again and again, Unamuno insists that Cómo se hace una novela should not be read as a novel about his life in France. It is that life, just as Mazzini's letters from exile, Rousseau's Confessions, and Dante's Divina Commedia were their lives (p. 166 and passim). Hacerse leads to salvarse and eternizarse (see p. 205, quoted above). It is not enough for the reader to renounce the novels and religious and political myths made for him by others; he must become—make himself into—his own novel, his own myth. Unamuno chose a quotation from Saint Augustine—another writer of confessions—for the epigraph of Cómo se hace una novela: “Mihi quaestio factus sum” (p. 83). Quaestio, the classics professor from Salamanca reminds us, means ‘problem,’ which is related to project and trajectory (pp. 187-88). The reader must follow Saint Augustine and “make himself into a problem for himself” by rejecting the easy answers provided by leaders like Primo de Rivera and by escapist literature. Only then can he make his life into a problem-question-quest-project-trajectory which transcends the limits of his isolated self: “Y así, luchando, civilmente, ahondando en mí mismo como problema, cuestión, para mí, transcenderé de mí mismo, y hacia dentro, concentrándome para irradiarme, y llegaré al Dios actual, al de la historia” (p. 197).

“[Y] llegaré al Dios actual”: Cómo se hace una novela, then, beneath its avant-garde techniques and political polemics, forms another chapter in the story of Unamuno's search for God the Father. The child Unamuno first experiences God's absence when he hears his own father speaking in a language that the son cannot understand. His exile among strangers who speak an alien tongue revives the pain of that original loss. But if language in the form of translations, cheap novels, and the lies of politicians stands between man and his God, it can also become the means to his salvation if he chooses to use it to create. God made man to be his reflection, his second self (p. 130). The man who creates himself finds the God within himself, just as the orphan recovers the lost father in his own sons. “Cada uno es hijo de sus obras,” declares Unamuno after Cervantes, “pero ¿no es uno también padre de sus obras? … De donde uno, sin conceptismo, es padre e hijo de sí mismo …” (p. 183). When Unamuno becomes his own father, he ends the exile which began when he heard his father speaking French in the parlor long ago. Hacerse means both creer and crearse.¹¹

IV. PASSIVE, ACTIVE, REFLEXIVE

Unamuno uses reflexivity to structure Cómo se hace una novela on all levels—stylistic, symbolic, and thematic. The reader would expect to find many reflexive constructions in Unamuno, if only because good Castilian style requires the use of the reflexive rather than the passive to make general statements. Compare, for example, the English, “Many novels are written for money” with the Spanish “Muchas novelas se escriben para ganar dinero.” But the Castilian reflexive has developed spectrum of meanings which extend beyond the basic one of action returning on the subject. It is used to describe events that involve the speaker emotionally: contrast “Napoleón murió en 1821” with “¡Se murió mi padre!”; “Miguel comenzó a escribir” with “Miguel se puso a escribir.” The use of the reflexive often throws a sentence off its center by placing the object of an action in the grammatical subject slot and its agent in an oblique case: compare “Olvidé el número” with “Se me olvidó el número.” Reflexives can also express the crossing of a frontier from one state to another: “Durmió ocho horas anoche” as against “Se durmió a las ocho” and “Hace sol” as against “Los días se hacen más largos en el verano.”¹² In general, the reflexive brings out a subjective, problematic attitude toward the reality to which it refers.

These properties of the reflexive suit Unamuno's aims. In Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos (1913), he attacked philosophers who hide their fear of death behind abstraction and the pretence of objectivity.¹³ He called for philosophers who dared to acknowledge their personal struggles with doubt. Using the reflexive and similar resources of the Spanish language, Unamuno created a style for himself which is concrete and subjective, yet flexible and capable of expressing the universal. Because it has its roots in colloquial structures, Unamuno's style is particularly suited for taking a popular phrase, playing with all its variants, and laying bare its deepest meaning. The following is a typical example: “Y todos los hombres en nuestro trato mutuo, en nuestro comercio espiritual humano, buscamos no morirnos; yo no morirme en ti, lector que me lees, y tú no morirme en mí que escribo para ti esto” (p. 107). Here, the grammatical—and philosophical—subject passes among yo, tú, and nosotros like the hot potato in a playground game. Reflexive constructions enable the author of Cómo se hace una novela to express his discentered, paradoxical, and impassioned view of life and death.

Unamuno's preference for the reflexive finds an echo in his frequent use of the mirror as a symbol. If all autobiographical works are mirrors, then Cómo se hace una novela resembles three mirrors placed so as to reflect each other. Moreover, Unamuno's allusions to the confessional works of Saint Augustine, Dante, Rousseau, Mazzini, Proust, and Gide have the effect of extending this self-reflecting series into an infinite regression in the intertextual space of literary history. The reader is reminded of Don Quixote's meetings with readers of the first part of Cervantes' work, and of Unamuno's own earlier experiments with the narrative that doubles back on itself. Yet, in Cómo se hace una novela, the mirrors have multiplied.

Paradoxically, it is this avant-garde game that leads Unamuno to the solution to the personal problem that he faced at the novel's outset: How can the “desterrado” save his “yo íntimo” and reach outside the narrow circle of exile to touch the “yo”s of his fellow countrymen? He can do this when he realizes that writing a novel can be a political act: “Y aquí entra lo de la acción y la contemplación, la política y la novela. La acción es contemplativa, la contemplación es activa; la política es novelesca y la novela es política” (pp. 184-85). No man is free as long as he believes that action and thought are incompatible. Jugo de la Raza commits moral suicide when he acts as if his exile condemned him to become a mere reader of other people's lives; Primo de Rivera and his avatars commit the equal and opposite error when they shout, “¡Muera la inteligencia!”¹⁴ Unamuno's spiritual exile ends when he realizes that he can “make” his novel into an aesthetic, political and religious quest: “Y he aquí cómo la religión y la política se hacen una en la novela de la vida actual” (p. 206).¹⁵

In such a quest novel, the triangle of author, text, and reader must take a new shape. In conventional fiction, text and reader serve as passive objects of a process controlled by the author. The relationship among the three can be summed up in this sentence: “I, the author, write this text for you, the reader.” But in the twentieth century, a kind of writing has appeared which cannot be descirbed so simply. In these works, “I, the author, and you, the reader, write for ourselves a text which writes itself, and, in doing so, writes us.”

Roland Barthes, in his essay, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” calls for a reinterpretation of modern literature in terms of the “middle voice” of Greek, Sanskrit, and Indo-European.¹⁶ Barthes draws on an article by the linguist Emile Benveniste entitled, “Actif et moyen dans le verbe.”¹⁷ The linguist explains that the distinction between active and passive voice in the modern European languages is a transformation of the ancient dichotomy between the active and middle voices. He gives several paired translations as examples of a verb used first in the active, then in the middle voice: “The priest sacrifices for another / ‘The supplicant sacrifices for himself’; ‘He bears gifts’ / ‘He carries away gifts he has received’; ‘He untethers the horse’ / ‘He untethers his own horse’; ‘He causes the war’ / ‘He causes a war in which he takes part’; and so on. In the middle voice, “[L]e sujet est centre en même temps qu'acteur du procès; il accomplit quelque chose qui s'accomplit en lui, naître, dormir, gésir, imaginer, croître, etc. Il est bien intérieur au procès dont il est l'agent.”¹⁸ Benveniste goes on to state that many of the functions of the old Indo-European middle voice are carried by the reflexive in the modern Romance languages.¹⁹

Unamuno, the Greek professor from Salamanca, would surely have chosen the middle voice for his title if it had been available to him. For, to the author of Cómo se hace una novela, writing is not the act of making a product but of making oneself. It is a process in which, to borrow Benveniste's words, “the subject is center as well as actor,” in which “he accomplishes something which accomplishes itself in him,” and continues to accomplish itself in its readers long after the author's death. Cómo se hace una novela issues a challenge to authors and readers to create new roles for themselves: the best Spanish fiction of this century, especially the “new novel” of Latin America, takes up this challenge.

Notes

1. Miguel de Unamuno, San Manuel Bueno, mártir; Cómo se hace una novela, ed. Manuel García Blanco, 5th ed. (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1976). Hereafter cited in the text. This paper uses the edition prepared by García Blanco for volume ten of Unamuno's Obras completas (Barcelona: Vergara, 1958). Allen Lacy charges that this edition “amends deliberately and drastically the text of Cómo se hace una novela in such a way as to remove most of the polemical sting of Unamuno's political observations.” Lacy, “Censorship and Cómo se hace una novela,” Hispanic Review, 34 (1966), 320. He quotes several examples and asserts that the changes affect about nine percent of the original text. Although I find these accusations disturbing, I have used the García Blanco edition because it is the one most generally available and because mine is not mainly a political analysis.

   Unamuno was aware of the work of other European writers who were experimenting with auto-referential texts. He mentions Pirandello on page 116, Proust on page 157, and Gide on page 190.

2. Ricardo Gullón explains the background of this incident and shows how Unamuno used it in the novel in his Autobiografías de Unamuno (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), pp. 264-89.

3. The place of Cómo se hace una novela in the development of Unamuno's fiction is explored in Ricardo Diez, El desarrollo estético de la novela de Unamuno (Madrid: Playor, 1976), especially pp. 215-45.

4. A further discussion of the structure of Unamuno's novels, especially that of Cómo se hace una novela, can be found in Leon Livingstone, “Unamuno and the Aesthetic of the Novel,” Hispania, 24 (1941), 442-50; Inés Azar, “La estructura novelesca de Cómo se hace una novela,” Modern Language Notes, 85 (1970), 184-206; Paul R. Olson, “Unamuno's Lacquered Boxes: Cómo se hace una novela and the Ontology of Writing,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, 36 (1970-71), 186-99; and Mario J. Valdés, “Unamuno's Hermeneutics of Reading,” Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century, 4 (1976), 203-13.

5. Martin Nozick sees the loss of authenticity as the central problem in Cómo se hace una novela. Nozick, Miguel de Unamuno (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971), pp. 108-11 and passim.

6. Here Unamuno accomplishes a neat reversal of the scene in Niebla where the protagonist Augusto Pérez pleads with “Unamuno” for his life. Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla (nivola), 13th ed. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1971), pp. 147-54.

7. Mary L. Bretz explores the complex relationship between “burlas” and “veras,” the comic and the tragic, in Unamuno's work in her article, “El humor y la comicidad en Unamuno,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 95-96 (1974), 149-61.

8. Miguel de Unamuno, “Historia y novela” (originally published in 1908), Obras completas, ed. Manuel García Blanco (Barcelona: Vergara, 1958), IV, 928-34. Unamuno states: “Aborrezco las novelas de folletín … las novelas nos llevan a la vaga e inactiva soñación, a la indeterminación de propósitos, a la misantropía, y las historias a la acción viril” (Ibid., pp. 931-34). He goes on to explain that he does not condemn all novels nor praise all histories; the best fiction places its characters in a living historical context, while the best histories go beyond the chronicling of facts to seek the human significance of events.

9. On pp. 164-66 of Cómo se hace una novela, Unamuno inveighs against Góngora and the young poets who had just (1927) celebrated the tercentenary of his death—the so-called “Generation of 1927.” For Unamuno, Góngora represented self-concern and irresponsibility in literature; he is the opposite of Dante, prototype of the poet who remained faithful to both his art and his country.

10. Julio Cortázar makes the same distinction between active and passive reading when he calls for a “lector cómplice” and rejects the “lector hembra.” Cortázar, Rayuela (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968), pp. 453-54.

11. Unamuno quotes the verse from the Lord's prayer, “Hágase tu voluntad, así en la tierra como en el cielo,” three times in the course of the novel (pp. 126, 140, and 204). In Unamuno's view, when one of God's creatures helps to make God's will be done, he participates in the on-going process of God's creation.

    Some of the religious aspects of Unamuno's aesthetics are explored in Julián Marías. Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1943).

12. Andrés Bello, Gramática de la lengua castellana, ed. Niceto Alcalá Zamora y Torres (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, 1952), pp. 245-50; Comisión de Gramática, Real Academia Española, Esbozo de una nueva gramática de la lengua española (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1975), pp. 378-83. Most pedagogical grammars offer a similar analysis of the reflexive.

13. Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1976), Chapter One and passim.

14. In October, 1936, Unamuno, who had been restored to the rectorship of the University of Salamanca, made a speech criticizing Franco. The franquista general Millán Astry interrupted the speech shouting, “¡Muera la inteligencial!” Unamuno died a month later. Gullón, p. 266.

15. In his essay, “Política y literatura,” Unamuno put his conviction that the two are one in a different way: “¿Acción? Las más de las veces lo que se suele llamar así, acción, no es más que palabras. … Y la más honda labor política suele ser precisar expresiones … hacer política, cuando ésta es algo más noble, más espiritual y más hondo que administración y manejo de partidos, es hacer literatura … [y] hacer literatura cuando es algo más noble, más espiritual y más hondo que hacer libros para entretener no más a los lectores y vivir de este entretenimiento, es hacer política.” Obras completas, XI, 682-85. Unamuno makes similar statements in “Políticos y literatos,” Obras completas, XI, 627-35 and in “Yo, individuo, poeta, profeta y mito,” Obras completas, X, 510-12.

16. Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), pp. 134-45.

17. Emile Benveniste, “Actif et moyen dans le verbe,” in his Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), I, 168-75.

18. Benveniste, p. 172.

19. Benveniste, p. 175.