Carey, Douglas M., and Phillip G. Williams. “Religious Confession as Perspective and Mediation in Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mártir.” MLN 91, no. 2 (March 1976): 292-310.

[In the following essay, Carey and Williams perceive confession to be a significant element of Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr.]

1. ABSENCE, REPLACEMENT, AND CONFESSION IN THE NOVEL

Unamuno in San Manuel Bueno, mártir has created a fictional intra-historia, the “inner history” of his characters' lives.¹ The narrator of the novel, Angela Carballino, in her role as confessor, lays bare her own alma, her “soul,” as well as that of her brother Lázaro, but primarily that of Don Manuel, the village priest. The first-person point of view² lends itself especially well to the nudity of characterization that Unamuno values so highly. He as author does not strive so much for the realistic presentation of the external event as for the revelation of its internal significance. The process of gradual unfolding of the human self comprises the main dramatic action of the novel.

This “unwrapping” of the characters proceeds by stages. At first we are presented with the external realities ; internal states are only enigmatically hinted at. The novel opens at this point:

Ahora que el obispo de la diócesis de Renada, a la que pertenece esta mi querida aldea de Valverde de Lucerna, anda, a lo que se dice, promoviendo el proceso para la beatificación de nuestro Don Manuel, o mejor San Manuel Bueno, que fue en ésta párroco, quiero dejar aquí consignado, a modo de confesión y sólo Dios sabe, que no yo, con qué destino, todo lo que sé y recuerdo de aquel varón matriarcal que llenó toda la más entrañada vida de mi alma, que fue mi verdadero padre espiritual, el padre de mi espíritu, del mío, el de Ángela Carballino.³

Don Manuel, seen from the point of view of the village, is Saint Emmanuel, a model of good works. Angela, while she does not contradict this public image, holds a more complex view of Manuel as martyr. Thus her confession reveals different levels of meaning at work. The narration can be divided into three main parts: 1) the public image of the saint, 2) the inner life of Don Manuel as martyr, and 3) the cosmological drama brought down to earth. The chronological development of the novel which follows sequentially this tri-partite division progresses from a social commentary on the priest's life to Angela's revelation of his soul, finally culminating in a perspective which neither Angela nor Don Manuel alone controls.

The early part of Angela's narration gives the village's perspective its due. The communal interpretation of Don Manuel predominates in the primary portion of her relation (pp. 26-34). Rumor and fame increase his renown and shape his historical existence. The confession, on the other hand, uncovers the psychic life of a man who doubts but acts like a believer.

Society, based on the family unit, tends to interpret all reality in terms of itself. From the village perspective, Don Manuel appears above all as a father. In the second paragraph of the story, we learn that the priest, the intimately-known spiritual father, has replaced in Angela's mind her scarcely-known real father. This pattern of absence and replacement recurs throughout the novel. In its most significant manifestation on the level of plot, it may be abstracted in the following succession of clauses: X dies or is absent, Y replaces X for the sake of Z, Z is suspicious of Y, and Y confesses to Z. X equals a supporting member of the family, Y a “divine” mediator,⁴ and Z the dependent of X. This verbal relationship might be stated more generally in terms of three basic predicates: Absence, Replacement, and Confession. This formula represents the total action of the narrative as well as its component parts, or what we might speak of structurally as the novel's “program” and its sequences.⁵ Having derived the narrative program or formula of the story, let us see how this abstract pattern occurs repetitively in concrete form in the text itself.

In the novel's system of relationships, confession assumes a primary structural significance. It represents a turning point in the narration, a nexus at which one novelistic frame of reference replaces another. This shift of focus appears at three major moments in the novel. In each case, there occurs a change from outer to inner reality. 1) After the death of a clown's wife, the story begins to move from the comic to the tragic, from external to internal analysis.⁶ 2) When Manuel begins to weaken and die, he and Angela are no longer simply playing a symbolic role but are actually living out the Passion drama. Consequently, she loses control over her story, no longer able to maintain that abstract distance between outer and inner, between the Biblical narrative and her own vital experiences. 3) In the Epilogue, although “Unamuno”⁷ admits that he is author of the work, he confesses that his characters have more reality than he does. The relation of creator to creation, story to reality, proves problematic to “Unamuno” as well as to Angela. These significant reversals all tend to undermine historical existence and affirm the fictional role.

Let us consider how these three confessional junctures depend upon the basic predicates of Absence and Replacement in the novel. Angela's father, we are told, died when she was very young. The books he left behind have filled her with devouring dreams. Her initial search for a lost model begins with literary characters such as Don Quixote. Angela's mother, however, replaces the memory of her dead spouse with the words and deeds of the living priest, Don Manuel.

Angela's brother, Lázaro, is also absent from the town but sends his sister money to attend convent school outside the village. Besides the jumble of books she finds there which she cannot wholeheartedly accept, another alternative appears. An overly zealous girl friend proposes that the two of them enter a convent together and swear an everlasting “sisterhood” in blood. Angela rejects this romantic dream also as a replacement for a dead father and an absent brother.

After five years at school she returns to Valverde de Lucerna, anxious to renew her acquaintance with the village priest and to place herself under his tutelage. Before launching into these new developments, however, she recalls a rumor concerning Manuel's motives for entering the seminary. The village supposes that he became a priest in order to look after the sons of a sister recently widowed and to provide for them in place of their father. Unlike Lázaro, who leaves the town in order to go to the New World, Manuel gives up a brilliant church career in order to remain a part of his people. In the re-enforcement of the plot pattern, the maternal uncle substitutes for the deceased father. The relationship of the saint to his fatherless nephews implies both social and religious dimensions as well. In his mundane capacity, he provides material support. In his sacred role, he symbolically fulfills the function of a divine mediator, uniting heaven and earth. His name in Hebrew means “God with us.”

As Claude Lévi-Strauss has noted, the word for “uncle” derives in several Romance languages from the Greek term for God: “The Greek θέιοs corresponds in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese to zio and tio; … in certain regions the uncle is called barba. The ‘beard,’ the ‘divine’ uncle—what a wealth of suggestions for the anthropologist!”⁸ Unamuno as Greek scholar capitalizes upon the tenacious survival in contemporary vocabulary of these archaic relationships which have lost their original significance.

In his novels, the uncle and the feminine counterpart often appear as the social equivalent of the maternal divine. Lévi-Strauss, following Radcliffe-Brown, has observed that the maternal uncle in a patriarchal society is actually considered a “male mother.”⁹ The succeeding episode of San Manuel Bueno, mártir enforces this kinship pattern. Angela recounts the return of the disgraced daughter of Tía Rabona to the village and the priest's reaction. Although the word tía serves as a term of endearment which often means simply “old woman” in Spanish, the context demands the more specific sense of “aunt.” Like Tía Tula in Unamuno's novel of that name (the story of a maternal aunt who replaces the real mother of the children), Rabona similarly represents that type of “divine” relative, the counterpart to Don Manuel's masculine role.¹⁰

The plot sequence repeats itself. When Tía Rabona's unfortunate daughter comes back from the city to the town, the priest intervenes and persuades an old sweetheart to marry her and support her illegitimate child. The spiritual father obtains an adopted father to fill the place of the unknown one.

Besides playing the role of substitute father (maternal uncle) to his own sister's children, Manuel performs a similar function for Blasillo, the village idiot. He shows the greatest love and concern of all for the fool, who takes the priest as a model of behavior and imitates all his words and gestures. On another occasion, Manuel replaces an absent husband. When a band of traveling acrobats comes to the town, the pregnant wife of the clown becomes gravely ill during the performance and has to leave. The priest helps her die in a stable while her husband is away entertaining the children. Manuel becomes a Joseph figure in this nativity scene, taking the place of the creator (clown). Manuel substitutes for the spouse, just as Joseph replaces the absent God.

This sequence takes on its greatest significance, however, on the level of the main dramatic action of the novel. As Angela's search for a lost model finally comes to center on Manuel after her return to Valverde de Lucerna, her quest for an ideal of conduct ends. She soon begins to suspect, however, that the saint is harboring some secret. In due time, she not only confesses herself to him but eventually elicits from him a confession of his own doubts as well.

This seemingly simple incident represents in reality the first major transformation of the plot. There occurs a change of subject for the predicate of confession. Confession figures as one of the significant predicates of the novel throughout, but its meaning is dramatically transformed at this point in the narrative. All the people in the village, we are previously told, willingly confess to Manuel.¹¹ The person who was to be the agent of confession, however, now becomes the patient.¹² In other words, Manuel abandons his role as confessor and Angela replaces him. The two roles are inverted, and the plot pattern is repeated in a modified form, emphasizing a new point of view. Agents become recipients and the major events of the narrative are relived.

In the reiteration of the transformed plot pattern, Angela's brother returns to the village. After an initial reaction of disgust, he grows to admire Manuel and accepts him as a model of behavior, although he too suspects him of concealing some truth. He also succeeds in obtaining from the priest a confession of his most intimate thoughts. Manuel reveals to Lázaro that although he assures others of immortality, he himself doubts the resurrection of the dead. He admits, furthermore, that he feigns belief in Christianity in order to assure the villagers of a happy life and death. Through his honesty, the priest wins over Lázaro to his cause. His new “convert” agrees to help console and confirm the townspeople in a faith which he cannot accept personally.

When Manuel dies, Lázaro takes over his religious function as comforter of the villagers. As a convert to “Manuelism,” furthermore, he makes notes in preparation for writing a vida of the saint's life. When Lázaro also dies at last, his sister, Angela, takes his place for the sake of the villagers. She too lives in the people. She also composes a literary work, a confession of the priest's life. The pattern becomes gyre-like, for, in the final development, “Unamuno,” introduced in the text as the “real author,” replaces Angela as narrator. In the Epilogue, his literary confession subsumes hers on the broadest level of the novel itself.

The sequence of absences, replacements, and confessions has not only a human but a divine significance as well. God Himself is absent in the novel. Emmanuel (“God with us”) replaces the missing Deity. Lázaro, Angela, and Manuel becomes links in a chain of spirituality, as intermediaries to heaven. Divine absence is clearly the generating element of the novel proper.¹³ “Unamuno” introduces a whole new frame of reference in the Epilogue, however. The author is also absent from the work, yet in the Epilogue he speaks of himself as creator of the novelistic personages, himself a god figure.

In the final twist of the gyre-like confession, “Unamuno” himself emerges as the absent god, whose controlling point of view shapes the novel. He casts suspicion and doubt on his own role, however. When he insists that the literary character Manuel has more reality than he, as “author” does, the whole process unwinds backwards, in the final transformation of the story:

¿Sé yo si aquel Augusto Pérez, el de mi novela Niebla, no tenía razón al pretender ser más real, más objetivo que yo mismo, que creía haberle inventado? De la realidad de este San Manuel Bueno, mártir, tal como me le ha revelado su discípula e hija espiritual Ángela Carballino, de esta realidad no se me ocurre dudar. Creo en ella más que creía el mismo santo ; creo en ella más que creo en mi propia realidad.

(p. 59)

This last development of the plot sequence parallels Angela's initial confession to Manuel. Unamuno in the novel attempts to break down the distinction between reality and fiction. In the inversion from history to novel, he maintains that history does not hold any ultimate importance whereas the novel possesses eternal significance. In this swift reversal of logic from the real to the virtual image, Angela replaces “Unamuno,” Lázaro replaces his sister, the priest replaces Lázaro, and the Deity replaces Manuel. Hence God alone proves real in proportion as the “reality” of the characters—including both “Unamuno” and Unamuno—is placed in doubt.

2. MEDIATION AND THE SEARCH FOR MODELS: THE COSMOLOGICAL DRAMA BROUGHT DOWN TO EARTH

From this pattern of replacements, two parallel developments emerge. One concerns the movement from reality to fiction, the other, the passage from life to death. Each replacement mediates between two antithetical realms that appear to mankind logically inconsistent. The total implications of this reversal are philosophical and religious. Unamuno's novel creates a perspectivistic philosophy that asserts the existence of God and life after death. God seems absent, incarcerated in the Bible, and Manuel appears locked away in a book, but in the final transformation of absence and replacement in the plot pattern, Unamuno as author would have us as readers focus on the reality of the absent father.

Thus Unamuno's literary creation asserts the existence of an absent God. Eternity is implied as well, although it is logically impossible to understand in life that in death immortality will be given. Within the system of the novel, the fact that creation is possible at all proves that eternity exists. In order to make literature function as an analogue of eternity, however, Unamuno has to place himself in the conclusion of the novel, to include himself within the literary context. Unamuno's writing is characterized above all by the way he introduces his own subjectivity into the text. Thus the device of authorial intrusion serves both religious and philosophical ends. The Epilogic framework places the author within the context of his own fictional world.

All literary creation involves an act of self-confession, Unamuno maintains, an expression of man's longing for immortality. It is through his creative works that one eternalizes himself in others, for, as Unamuno pointed out in his novel Niebla, he who creates creates himself, and he who creates himself dies. In San Manuel Bueno, mártir, confession paradoxically leads to death, in a progressive self-annihilation. The more the priest confesses in the narrative, the weaker he becomes.

There comes a point when he is no longer simply playing a comic role as pretender for the sake of the village.¹⁴ Once he begins to reveal his tragic secret of doubt, his whole existence starts to move toward death. Manuel's role develops from an imitation of to a total identification with Christ. During the Communion of his last Easter Week, his role has already become his reality. The distance between the liturgical drama and his own life has vanished. In his personal Passion, he takes the words of Christ, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as his own. Angela, furthermore, is no longer merely playing the part of a mother to Don Manuel ; she is transformed into the Mater Dolorosa.

The act of confession interiorizes the human drama. The village perspective gives way to the frame of reference of Manuel, Lázaro, and Angela. In turn, the religious viewpoint, that of Jesus and Mary, replaces their individual personal interpretations. Through these transformations of perspective, the novelistic process of interiorization, the drama moves from comedy to tragedy.

The religious seeker turns everyone he meets into his double. In the early part of the narrative, Blasillo, the village idiot (Greek ἴδιοs, “one's own,” that is, “uneducated,” “in one's natural state”) mirrors the priest's own liturgical role of mimesis. Manuel, like the fool, imitates a divine model in the comic drama of the Christian faith. The weeping clown in the story marks the transition between the two realms. As another alter ego of the saint, he symbolizes the tragic contradictions in the priest's comic role, which he enacts for the sake of his people. Lázaro's relation to Manuel, on the other hand, reveals the thoughtful, tragic phase. Unamuno explores the tension between the two roles exemplified in the novel by the laughing idiot (the comic) and the doubting Lázaro (the tragic).

Thus the movement from comedy to tragedy comes with the shift from the relation of Blasillo and Manuel to that of Lázaro and Manuel. These two paired masculine relationships represent the priest's public life versus his secret life. There exist two groups in the village, the people who follow out of blind faith and those who follow out of doubt. Manuel has to be confessor to one group and confess to the other. With the former, comedy is the order of the day. The fool exemplifies man playing society's roles. With the latter, life becomes replete with tragedy and problem. Lázaro represents the protestor, the doubter.

Not only does the fool reflect the public image of a priest who plays his part in a Divine Comedy. The novel implies, furthermore, that Christ acts likewise in taking on his shoulders the weight of history in order to free man. Like Myshkin of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, the fool symbolizes both Don Quixote and Jesus together. He appears as the comic double of the Christ figure, like the clown, a kind of saint.

Lázaro-Manuel, on the other hand, represents the image of Christ as King of Tragedy. Manuel plays a double role: he is both king of feeling and king of thought. In the initial sequences of the novel, his public life is based on emotion and is closely tied to the faith of the villagers. Up to this point in the text, the true nature of Manuel's secret doubt has not been revealed. But after the death of the clown's wife, the narrative begins to move into the realm of thought. In the exchange of one double for another, the novel's perspective changes from the comic external event to its tragic internal significance. From the priest's point of view, the role of imitation gives way to the act of confession.

Society at large in the novel is by definition searching for a paternal view of life. The father in the village of Valverde de Lucerna is, however, absent. This absence is mirrored in Manuel's theological dilemma—his belief that man is born on the cross and asking, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”¹⁵ A sinner and doubter, he perceives that he has been abandoned by the Father. Manuel as martyr searches for a mother to replace a mother.¹⁶ In the first transformation of the plot, after the death of the clown's wife, he begins to take as a model the Mater Dolorosa, Angela, to confess to her. He shifts his role from confessor to son. He goes from the priest as padre to live out the part of Jesus, the doubting Christ, the forsaken Son of God. When he gives up his paternal status, he has to take Angela as mother and pray to her the Sinner's Prayer.

Manuel's search for an object of admiration leads to a maternal image. In his metamorphosis from father (priest) to son, he gives a different interpretation than before to Imitatio Christi. He cannot go to confess himself until he alters his own role. The abandonment of one concept for another can be traced psychologically to a feeling of forsakenness. In the sequence of replacement, since he cannot approach the father, he must petition the mother. If God leaves him alone, he has to go to Mary. Therefore he bares his heart to Angela.

In the second transformation of the plot, the characters go from playing a role to living a role. In the confessional Angela comprehends for the first time the full implications of her role. Once Manuel starts to reveal his inner throughts, the only thing he can affirm is earthly life. She absolves him and feels that she is maternal. She in fact becomes the maternal.

From the sociological point of view, Don Manuel becomes the maternal uncle of the village, since the father is absent.¹⁷ In a patriarchal society, moreover, the maternal uncle is considered a male mother.¹⁸ “Aquel varón matriarchal,” Angela calls him (first paragraph of the story). In San Manuel Bueno, mártir, Unamuno sets up a diachronic kinship which implies a synchronic one. His whole philosophy consists of bringing down to earth the cosmological drama. By manipulating an earthly kinship system, he also creates a heavenly one not bound by time.¹⁹

There exists a code by which the village lives, whose supreme incarnation is Don Manuel. The outside world, on the other hand, espouses a different set of values. Inside the village, one experiences charity and total honesty. All the townspeople admit their sins to the priest openly. Confession in the village, moreover, results in absolution and purity, that is, a form of giving.

The outside world, on the other hand, represents a different system of exchange.²⁰ Confession there inevitably leads to incrimination and punishment, that is, a form of taking. Those who enter the town from the exterior come with two different kinds of requests, which illustrate the two systems of exchange. Some arrive there for selfish ends, others come seeking a form of help more commensurate with the village code. A judge from a neighboring community, for example, tries to persuade Manuel to force a suspected criminal from a near-by town to confess his crime. The priest refuses to assist the judicial authority, however, because charity alone matters to him. Those from the outside world searching for something which damages the town code are rebuffed.

Those, on the other hand, who come asking help for themselves the village can assist. Such as these have either potentially or actually rejected the exterior world. Tía Rabona's daughter who returns from the city with an illegitimate child is reintegrated into the village. On another occasion, Manuel allows an outsider whose son took his own life to bury him in consecrated ground, despite the Church's prohibition.

Lázaro returns to the town in order to take his family to Madrid. An overemphasis on blood ties causes him to underestimate the values of the spiritual community. Full of anti-clerical anecdotes and “progressive” philosophy brought back from the New World, he at first demeans village life and Don Manuel. The evidence of sense, however, soon forces him to reverse his judgments and model himself on the saint's life style.

Thus the two systems of exchange in the novel prove antithetical. What Lázaro on returning, the judge, and the heartbroken father all share in common is the hope of harmonizing the two modes of reality. Each learns that the values of the outside world cannot be brought into conjunction with the town. Since the code of Valverde de Lucerna is so different, in a positive, Christian sense, the story presents several examples to show that the cosmological drama which Manuel wants to perform on the stage of the village is in effect being acted out there.

The novel compares two types of models, one a stern relationship of books, learning, education, and money-making (what the father taught). On the social level, the judge represents this perspective. The other is a model of Christian love. The priest stands for this view. The maternal uncle teaches charity and forgiveness. Thus two levels of cultural exchange emerge in the search for models, the mundane—historical, fraternal, and paternal—and the divine—intra-historical, maternal, and sororial.

The novel suggests that the object of religious imitation determines the fate of existence itself. In William Blake's words, one becomes what one beholds. If one sees the model as giving eternity, one will have immortality. If, on the other hand, one views the model as taking away life, one will perish. The true Christ who looks upon God face to face dies inexorably.

In San Manuel Bueno, mártir, man born with a sense of abandonment needs to find a new model and man born in sin needs to confess. The novel treats both these religious themes in terms of a system of exchange. In the former, because of a sense of loss, the novelistic characters replace one image of the divine with another. In the latter, through the act of confession, one exchanges words for the sake of forgiveness (the villagers), for the sake of conversion (Manuel), for the sake of communion (Angela), or for the sake of personal immortality itself (Unamuno).

As we have seen, the system of exchange in San Manuel Bueno, mártir is almost one of kinship. The saint gives away Tía Rabona's daughter in marriage as a sister. He himself replaces the absent father as a maternal figure. Language in the novel functions in a similar way. There occurs a movement in the narrative away from the vocabulary of disjunction (the outer world, individualism, desire, the paternal and fraternal) to the speech of conjunction (the village, community, charity, the maternal and sororial).

In religious terms, there exists a dialectic between the Jesus role, to die (Lázaro, Don Manuel) and the Mary role, to live and give life (Angela). Significantly, the novel breaks down the distinctions between the two opposing parts and confuses them. The figure of Don Manuel represents a kind of Divine Androgyne who combines the functions of producing life and suffering death.²¹

The novel tends to blur opposing categories of existence. In general, on the level of plot, the three major characters mediate between such dichotomies as these:

Horizontally, the story reads one way. Faith implies a movement from life to heaven. Manuel creates a new relation between Lázaro and Angela. Doubt, on the other hand, ties one to death and earth. This stationary mediation, however, is inverted in the vertical reading. Lázaro, the man who dies of life, represents life in death, and vice versa. The heavenly “messenger,” Angela, unites the two realms of divine and human. Manuel, the doubting Christ-ian lives in the tension between faith and doubt.

Just as the Biblical Lazarus' death, three days in the tomb, and resurrection make him a kind of miniature Jesus, so also do all the characters in Unamuno's novel turn out to be “little Manuels.” The doubles of the narrative act as mirrors to reflect various facets of the protagonist's own personality. Manuel is the center of the narrative from which everyone else radiates.²² Each of the other characters illuminates the saint's own sacred role as Divine Mediator. Like Christ, he paradoxically unites Life and Death, Human and Divine, Heaven and Earth, and even, Unamuno would have us believe, Faith and Doubt.

On the broadest level, furthermore, all the characters in the novel represent “little Unamunos.” In the Epilogue, the “real author” cryptically apostrophizes his heavenly patron, Saint Michael Archangel. As “Archmessenger” himself, Unamuno's stance before reality parallels his characters' relation to their fictional universe. In his own sacred role as mediator, he brings down to earth the cosmological drama. Through the use of symbolic language, he unites opposing realms of existence.

Thus Unamuno sees the novel itself, the deliberate confusion of reality and fiction, like myth, the naive confounding of the two levels, as ultimately confessional in nature. What both the literary and mythical symbols reveal is man's need to glimpse an escape from time and space, to see himself as infinite. Through literature, the artist attempts to create an analogue of eternity. He refuses to see the dichotomies of existence as opposites but rather views them as complementary. His confession, then, is hope of resurrection, his struggle to create life from death in order to experience his own personal mode of immortality.

3. NOVELISTIC CONCLUSION AND THE VIRTUAL FAITH OF UNAMUNO: LIFE, LITERATURE, AND AUTHORITY

Unamuno's novelette retraces the trajectory of Western narrative described by such critics as Denis de Rougemont but in the end overcomes that trajectory. Unamuno attempts to create a fictional world that affirms communal existence instead of individual passion ; in place of a death-seeking eros, his novel exalts a life-giving agape.²³ The absence of disjunctive desire in Valverde de Lucerna assures the realization of the Christian ideal. The positive, vital presence of a conjunctive maternal principle in the people comprises Don Manuel's spiritual legacy to his parishioners. The village code of exchange, sharing, communion, and caritas guarantees the continuation of the reproductive role which the priest himself originally initiates.

Manuel's own death, as recounted in the confession, takes place in the context of the life of the town, during the community worship service. Thus even the saint's dying provides a model of life. It is true that Manuel who represents agonic struggle in the narrative moves toward death, but the novel itself attempts to overcome this movement. Angela in her role as narrator wishes to show the necessary reversal from death to life. What appears as physical dissolution is interpreted as immortality from Angela's perspective ; Don Manuel at the moment of his passing becomes a believer. The “Unamuno” of the Epilogue similarly concludes that the fictional personages prove in the end to be more vital than the author himself.

The narrative confession, growing out of the saint's life, comprises Angela's own affirmation of spiritual kinship, of earthly communal existence. Over against the history of solitary passion, the individual askesis of the Western narrative tradition, Unamuno tries to establish a fictional world whose primary generating force is maternal, sororial charity. The novelistic code exalts a life-giving faith. The doubters, Lázaro and Manuel, dedicate themselves to assuring the shared happiness of the others.

Consequently, salvation for the priest requires the communal experience. It is indeed solitude which he fears most. At one point, he remarks, “Yo no debo vivir solo ; yo no debo morir solo. Debo vivir para mi pueblo, morir para mi pueblo. ¿Cómo voy a salvar mi alma si no salvo la de mi pueblo?” (p. 34). Through Angela's eyes, we understand that Manuel's passion and death hold significance solely in the context of his society. The disjunctive quest of the romantic hero tends to greater and greater alienation from others, culminating in solitary death, the ultimate distancing. Manuel, on the other hand, dies in a communal setting while praying with the villagers the Apostles' Creed.

Unamuno himself attempts to find a kind of shared salvation through his family and through the perspectives of literature. As an intellectual, however, he is continually undergoing the agonic struggle between faith and doubt. Seen in its most existential perspective, then, the novel comprises a kind of fictional autobiography of the author himself, the chronicle of one man's anguished struggle to believe in spite of the rationalistic certainty of death.

The basic dialectic of San Manuel Bueno, mártir appears in Unamuno's personal religious life as well. The narrative confession reveals the inevitable disparity between external (the saint's reputation) and internal reality (Manuel's private life). A principle of apparent contradiction between works (obras) and the heart (corazón) figures throughout the novel. Angela, the fictional narrator, mediates between the two realms. The Bishop of Renada who instigates Manuel's canonization remains an outsider who knows nothing of the martyr's soul. Doubtless Unamuno liked to think of his own dogmatic detractors as similarly estranged from the truth, for the confession illustrates that only the depth of the novelistic vision can do justice to the fullness of existence, its seemingly irreconcilable oppositions. Just as Angela mediates between Manuel and the Bishop of Renada, the earthly superior (which parallels the disciples' intermediary relation between Christ and the Church), so too would Unamuno have his novel mediate between his own individual perspective and the communal vision.

In his confrontation with Catholic Spain, Unamuno was cast in a position comparable to Manuel's, but significantly, an inverted one. The former, considered heretical by the ecclesiastical authorities of his day, eventually had two of his books placed on the Index, whereas the latter dies an unbeliever but is proclaimed a saint. In the novelistic transformation of life into literature, Unamuno makes Manuel a kind of photographic negative of certain aspects of his own dilemma. In the case of the fictional protagonist, we have public sainthood and private heresy ; in the case of the author (who would have us see him as both inside and outside the novel), acknowledged heterodoxy, and, by implication, the possibility of a secret faith. In any system of mediation, each antinomy always presupposes the other. Both Manuel and Unamuno struggle between faith and doubt, but the public and private roles are reversed. The novelistic world preserves specific relations with the real but transposes them into a different key. Considered as total systems, the author's existence and the narration of his character represent distinct but strictly comparable transformations on a basic pattern.

For Unamuno, life imitates the novel and not the other way round.²⁴ He attempts in his writings to view his own existence as though it too were structured as a book. According to the novelistic theory underlying San Manuel Bueno, mártir, a completed narrative demands a conversion in death. Thus Angela's faith that Manuel at the moment of his passing became a believer is predicated on structural grounds but is justified thematically in terms of her personal beliefs: “… Creo que don Manuel Bueno, que mi San Manuel y que mi hermano Lázaro se murieron creyendo no creer lo que más nos interesa, pero sin creer creerlo, creyéndolo en una desolación activa y resignada” (p. 57). Comprehending very well the laws of the fictional universe, Unamuno wishes to order his own existence in a similar fashion to experience personally the same necessary reversal from death to resurrection. By “novelizing” himself, Unamuno demands a comparable finale for his own life as that of Manuel seen from Angela's view point, an inevitable conversion from doubt to faith, from literature to “reality.” Thus in the broadest perspective, San Manuel Bueno, mártir comprises a fictional autobiography of the life of Unamuno, the history of a soul in spiritual anguish and the dream of a religious reconciliation through literature and the family, in spite of an external authoritative world which contradicts the interior authorial vision.

Notes

1. For discussions of Unamuno's concepts of history and intra-historia, see Peter G. Earle's two articles: 1) “Unamuno and the Theme of History,” Hispanic Review, 32 (1964), 319-39, and 2) “Unamuno: historia and intra-historia,” Pensamiento y letras en la España de siglo XX (Nashville, 1966), pp. 179-86.

2. For a particularly illuminating discussion of literary point of view (regarding the narrative “I,” which is also a “he” and “they” that conceals behind it the poetic personality of the author), see Tzvetan Todorov's article, “Language and Literature,” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 125-33.

3. San Manuel Bueno, mártir y tres historias más (Madrid, 1969), p. 25. All quotations and references to the Spanish text are taken from this edition.

4. For the concept of mediation in a specific sense, as applied to the novel, see René Girard's indispensable study, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris, 1961). In his first chapter, “Le Désir ‘triangulaire,’” Girard discusses the mediator in terms of Don Quixote, the first great Western novel: “Don Quichotte a renoncé, en faveur d'Amadis, à la prérogative fondamentale de l'individu: il ne choisit plus les objets de son désir, c'est Amadis qui doit choisir pour lui. Le disciple se précipite vers les objets que lui désigne, ou semble lui désigner, le modèle de toute chevalerie. Nous appelerons ce modèle le médiateur du désir. L'existence chevaleresque est l'imitation d'Amadis au sens où l'existence du chrétien est l'imitation de Jésus-Christ” (pp. 11-12). Edmund Leach in Genesis as Myth and Other Essays (London, 1969), views mediation from an anthropological perspective: “In every myth system we will find a persistent sequence of binary discriminations as between human/superhuman, mortal/immortal, male/female, legitimate/illegitimate, good/bad … followed by a ‘mediation’ of the paired categories thus distinguished. ‘Mediation’ (in this sense) is always achieved by introducing a third category which is ‘abnormal’ or ‘anomalous’ in terms of ordinary ‘rational’ categories. Thus myths are full of fabulous monsters, incarnate gods, virgin mothers. This middle ground is abnormal, non-natural, holy. It is typically the focus of all taboo and ritual observance” (“Genesis as Myth,” p. 11).

5. Regarding this method of approach and its terminology, see Tzvetan Todorov's article, “Structural Analysis of Narrative,” Novel, 3 (Fall, 1969), 70-76.

6. On the level of literature there can be no real “inner” and “outer,” but Angela uses “external” and “internal” perspectives as means of carefully controlling her story. Descriptively, one must distinguish between “inner” and “outer” as the narrators themselves do, with the realization that there can be no such division on the level of language.

7. Not the author of flesh and blood but that “Unamuno” who is but another fictional narrator of the story, in the final novelistic framework of San Manuel Bueno, mártir. Where both the fictional character and the real man are implied, no quotation marks are used.

8. “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology,” Chapter II of Lévi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology (Garden City, N. Y., 1967), p. 30.

9. “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology,” p. 39. For the Radcliffe-Brown—Lévi-Strauss controversy, see the Neville Dyson-Hudson article, “Structure and Infrastructure in Primitive Society: Lévi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown Comments,” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, pp. 218-46. It is not an altogether fair appraisal of Lévi-Strauss. Cf. p. 302 below.

10. Like the other significant names in the text, “Rabona” seems to refer to the cosmological drama (Christ in the New Testament is often called “rabbi, raboni”—“my teacher, my great master”).

11. Unamuno notes in the Epilogue: “… Para un pueblo como el de Valverde de Lucerna no hay más confesión que la conducta. Ni sabe el pueblo qué cosa es fe, ni acaso le importa mucho” (p. 60). For the villagers external conduct seems far more relevant than internal belief.

12. It should be noted that Unamuno most often uses “to confess” in Spanish as a reflexive verb, confesarse.

13. Jean Piaget in his book Structuralism (New York, 1970) discusses generative effects in psychology, linguistics, etc. The generator provides the most basic law of the system of the novel. The actual generators of San Manuel Bueno, mártir are contained in the four principal prayers of Catholic devotion: the Paternoster, the Ave Maria, the Salve, and the Credo. These religious models provide the laws and principles on which Manuel works. They describe the drama, the role he plays. Playing out his script perfectly, Manuel dies on the words of the Creed, “Resurrection of the flesh and life everlasting.” The proto-generator of the novel is, of course, the Biblical passage, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

14. See “Don Quijote en la tragi-comedia europea contemporánea,” the Conclusion of Unamuno's Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (Madrid, 1928), pp. 294-325. The difference between the comic and tragic roles and their merging in the figure of Don Quixote is one of his major literary preoccupations. Unamuno contrasts with his “tragic sense of life” another novelette comparable in some respects to San Manuel Bueno, mártir, entitled “Un pobre hombre rico o el sentimiento cómico de la vida.” The Epilogue to the latter work also mentions Niebla and similarly predicts the immortality of the fictional characters.

15. Compare Unamuno's poem from Romancero de destierro (Buenos Aires, 1927) in which he says that Christ was born on a cross and died in Bethlehem:

    “¡Queda cumplido!” suspiró, y doblando
    la cabeza—follaje nazareno—
    en las manos de Dios puso el espíritu;
    lo dio a luz;
    que así Cristo nació sobre la cruz;
    y al nacer se soñaba a arredrotiempo
    cuando sobre un pesebre
    murió en Belen
    allende todo mal y todo bien.

    This poem was later incorporated in Cómo se hace una novela.

16. Like Augusto Pérez in Niebla. When Augusto's father dies, his mother says, “Hijo mío, hijo mío.” Augusto does not know if she is talking to her husband or to him. As in San Manuel Bueno, mártir, the role of father and son become confused.

17. The word describing this relation in the Old Testament is goel, which originally meant “uncle,” “next of kin.” Brown, Driver, and Briggs' Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1957) lists the meaning of goel as “kinsman.” The verb root from which the noun derives, means “redeem” (p. 145). The famous passage from Job 19:25 lends a decidedly spiritual connotation to the term, equating the goel with Christ in the King James Version. It still remains for a translator to bring out the familial relationship implied in the word goel as the next of kin who takes responsibility for the orphan or widow. The same word (goel) appears in the book of Ruth to describe the relation of Boaz to the widow Ruth, whom he eventually marries.

18. Cf. above, p. 296.

19. Paul R. Olson in “Unamuno's Lacquered Boxes: Cómo se hace una novela and the Ontology of Writing,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, 36 (1970-71), 186-99, discusses the applicability of psychoanalysis to the question of generational relationships in Unamuno. He discovers in the triadic structure of Unamuno's thought, transformation of the Christian Trinity, a subjective breakdown in the normal order of generation of father and son. Regarding the normative religious and mythological view of generational descent, Olson refers to Guy Rosolato's fundamental study, “Trois générations d'hommes dans le mythe réligieux et la généalogie,” Essais sur la symbolique (Paris, 1969), pp. 59-96, as well as Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic essays on the role of the father. In the case of San Manuel Bueno, mártir, we might conclude that Unamuno's “solution” to the problem of paternity is radically different from that analyzed by Rosolato in the great monotheistic religions, with their notable absence of maternal figures and their patrilinear triads of descent. Unamuno in effect confounds generations (as well as familial and sexual roles) in his depiction of Manuel as mediator.

20. For the concept of exchange, see Marcel Mauss's famous study, originally published in 1925, Essais sur le don: Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaíques in Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris, 1950). Mauss shows that the transaction of goods in archaic society is never arbitrary as it appears but follows clearly observable rules. He maintains that primitive systems of exchange are at the same time moral, economic, juridical, aesthetic, religious, mythological, and social phenomena. The application of his concept of “the gift” to words themselves involves only a short step, since Mauss himself proposed before his death to write a study on prayer as a system of exchange. Naturally the application of his theory of exchange to literature presupposes a higher level of abstraction, but one which is nevertheless entirely valid, given the dialogic, transactive nature of language itself.

21. See Mircea Eliade's book, The Two and the One (London, 1965), particularly Chapter II, “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne or The Mystery of the Whole.” In Patterns in Comparative Religion (London, 1958), Eliade notes that “… bisexuality was a mark of divinity for the primitive ; it represented a formula (approximative, like most mythological formulae) of totality, of the integration of opposites, of the coincidentia oppositorum” (footnote, p. 57).

22. Nature, for example, in the story is compared with the physical description of Manuel: “Era alto, delgado, erguido, llevaba la cabeza como nuestra Peña de Buitre lleva su cresta, y había en sus ojos toda la hondura azul de nuestro lago” (p. 26). The symbolic rather than realistic landscape of the novel, furthermore, concretely emphasizes Manuel's centrality in the lives of all the other characters. The village circles the lake just as the parishioners surround San Manuel. In a similar way in Proust's Combray the family crowds around the aunt like the houses of the village around the church. See Hugo Rodriguez-Alcalá's “El escenario de San Manuel Bueno, mártir, como incantatio poética,” Pensamiento y letras en la España de siglo XX, pp. 407-28. Cf. as well Pelayo Fernández's book, El problema de la personalidad en Unamuno y en San Manuel Bueno (Madrid, 1966), and John Falconieri's article, “San Manuel Bueno, mártir—Spiritual Autobiography: A Study in Imagery,” Symposium, 18 (Summer, 1964), 128-41.

23. See de Rougemont's Love in the Western World (New York, 1956). There is of course a lengthy literature of disagreement on eroslagape.

24. Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending (New York, 1967) notes a similar idea in Ortega y Gasset's “History as System,” an essay in which Ortega discusses man's duty to make himself: “Invento proyectos de hacer y de ser en vista de las circunstancias. Esto es lo único que encuentro y que me es dado: la circunstancia. Se olvida demasiado que el hombre es imposible sin imaginación, sin la capacidad de inventarse una figura de vida, de ‘idear’ el personaje que va a ser. El hombre es novelista de sí mismo, original o plagiario. Entre esas posibilidades tengo que elegir. Por tanto, soy libre. Pero, entiéndase bien, soy por fuerza libre, lo soy quiera o no …. Ser libre quiere decir carecer de identidad constitutiva, no estar adscrito a un ser determinado, poder ser otro del que se era …” (Obras completas, tomo 6, 1941-46, Madrid, 1947, p. 34). Kermode compares the similarity between Ortega and Sartre's views on the relation between life and literature: “This ‘constitutive instability’ (which Ortega speaks of) is the human property lacking in the novels condemned by Sartre and Murdoch. Ortega differs from Sartre on the use of the past ; but when he says that his free man is, willy-nilly, ‘a second-hand God,’ creating his own entity, he is very close to Sartre, who says that to be is to be like the hero in a novel. In one instance the eidetic image is of God, in the other of the Hero” (footnote, p. 141.)