SOURCE: Tull, J. F., Jr. “Alienation, Psychological and Metaphysical, in Three ‘Nivolas’ of Unamuno.” The Humanities Association Bulletin 21, no. 1 (winter 1970): 27-33.

The concept of alienation, both as a psychological term and as a literary theme, seems to be in the process of becoming an empty abstraction, a stereotyped artifice to label conveniently what is, in truth, a habitual way of viewing human society and the universe shared by many individuals in the contemporary world. Actually, the sense of alienation is not new. As a psychological phenomenon in Western culture, it has its roots in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the last century, and on a deeper level, metaphysical alienation began with the dawn of human consciousness, as symbolized in the myth of the Garden of Eden, when man first felt himself to be apart from Nature and commenced to manipulate it as a foreign object, outside and independent of himself, with the consequent estrangement from the universe of which he is an integral part.

Spanish authors of the last two centuries, like many of their counterparts in other Western countries, have been dealing with the themes of both psychological and metaphysical alienation while, generally, not attempting to label them as such. An example in nineteenth-century Spanish realism is that of Torquemada, the usurer, protagonist of a series of novelettes by Galdos, who views other human beings as objects to be manipulated for financial gain and who, in Torquemada en la hoguera, (“Torquemada at the Stake”), reveals during the agony and death of his young son his inability to relate himself not only to society, but to the ultimate nature of reality.

But it was in the social, political and spiritual crisis of Spain at the turn of the century that writers came to the fore who spoke, in the clearest terms, of the intimately related concepts of psychological and metaphysical estrangement. Among the members of the so-called “Generation of '98,” poets like Antonio Machado and authors like Pío Baroja revealed what was, in fact, their own alienation from the social and spiritual climate in which they lived. Machado, for example, experienced profound metaphysical anxiety because of his inability to feel a meaningful relationship with his God. Baroja, who was much less concerned with metaphysical considerations, writes of such figures as Andrés Hurtado, in El árbol de la ciencia, (“The Tree of Science”) and Manuel, in La busca, (“The Quest”), who are deeply alienated from the conventional view of Spanish society in their epoch.

It was, however, for Unamuno, a figure who transcends the notion of generations and who speaks, at one and the same time, as both modern and universal man, to synthesize and spell out in his poetry, essays and, especially, in his “nivolas”¹ the dilemma of the individual “of flesh and bones,” as he was fond of saying, alienated both psychologically and metaphysically in the twentieth century. In this study, I should like to single out, as examples of this synthesis, three characters in the three “nivolas,” Niebla, (“Film” [that dims the sight]), Nada menos que todo un hombre, (Every Inch a Man), and San Manuel Bueno, mártir, (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr). Rather than define at the outset my concept of the aspects of alienation under consideration, I should like, as did Unamuno, to let them unfold in terms of the internal struggles of the characters as they developed in the works.

The first case in point is that of Augusto Pérez, protagonist of Niebla, who suffers both pathological and spiritual alienation. Upon his death, the doctor in attendance remarks under his breath: “Who knows whether Augusto existed or not, especially he himself … ? The individual is one who knows least of his existence … He exists only for others.”²

The truth is that Augusto did not even appear to exist even for others. As he says in a monologue to his dog, Orfeo: “Many times it has occurred to me to think, Orfeo, that there is no me, and I went through the streets with the impression that other people couldn't see me …”³ Augusto did exist for some: for his friend, Victor Goti ; for his fiancée, Eugenia, “the woman of the future,” as her uncle called her ; for Rosario, the young laundress who befriended him ; for the servants of his household. Yet it was his good friend, Victor, who advised him to “devour himself,” and his fiancée, Eugenia, believed that he existed only as means to secure the money to flee with her lover, Mauricio. Rosario thought that he “must be mad,” and the servants could make no sense of his actions.

If we overlook for a moment the ubiquitous presence of Unamuno as creator of the novel, and if we accept Augusto as a fictional being as real as Unamuno himself—(Augusto, in a dramatic scene toward the end of the work asks his creator: “Was it not you who, not once but many times, said that Don Quijote and Sancho are not only as real, but even more real than Cervantes?”)⁴—if we accept these two conditions, we can examine Augusto as a prototype not only of the young Spaniard alienated from his society, but also as a typical instance of the psychological alienation of many modern men.

If we were Freudian in approach, we might say that this estrangement began with the early death of Augusto's father and the resultant relationship of emotional dependence on his mother which deprived him of a sense of self and inhibited his relations with others. But here Unamuno, as in most of his works, does not concern himself with describing the details and traumas of the childhood of his characters. Rather, he presents them as adults already moulded in their ways, beings immersed in their particular view of things. In point of fact, the greatest cause of the adult Augusto's existential problems, as is seen throughout Niebla, is his concept of the relationship of love. It is very possible that a mature, reciprocated love—not Augusto's concept of love as a mixture of romantic fantasy and physical attraction—might have redeemed him from his alienation, as it did in the case of Alejandro Gómez, in Nada menos⁵ [Nada menos que todo un hombre]. For as he himself exclaims to Rosario: “To dream together! Not to be together, each one dreaming his own dream, no, but dreaming together a single dream!”⁶ Again, in a painful scene with the terrified Rosario, he says: “Let me see myself in your eyes, as in a mirror … Only in that way will I come to know myself, seeing myself in the eyes of a woman.”⁷ Reciprocated love with a candorous woman, it can be demonstrated, often confers a new conception of self to one who has never had a sense of identity and who believes, like Augusto, that other people “cannot see him.”

The irony is that the alienated man does not fall in love in a fashion that might redeem him. Augusto's “love” for Eugenia begins when “not a dog, but a graceful young woman passed along the strees, and like one drawn by a magnet without realizing it, Augusto followed, in pursuit of her eyes.”⁸ Augusto, “adrift” on the street, fell in love with a woman who proved to be totally incompatible and, in the end, appallingly cruel.

There are other characteristics of the alienated man that appear in Augusto's psychology. As Víctor says, he is a “loner,” a “little Hamlet.” He has few friends, most of them male, and seems able to relate completely only with non-human creatures, in this instance, the stray dog, Orfeo, that he takes off the streets. After a scene in which he learns that Eugenia's lover, Mauricio, knows all about his confession to Rosario and after a succinct letter from Eugenia, informing him that she is leaving with Mauricio, aided by Augusto's generous financial help, the latter's mental state worsens, and the process of further retreat into psychological alienation begins to unfold. The aberrations of Augusto's conduct cause extreme uneasiness in his servants and even in Rosario, who for a moment fears for her life. Totally defeated in his attempts to pierce through the film which has progressively blinded his eyes, Augusto commits suicide.

I say “suicide” because I share the belief of Víctor Goti, in his prologue to the novel, that he did so and not that he died as a whim of his creator. As Augusto's faithful servant, Liduvina, observes after his death: “Well, I think my master got it into his head to die and obviously if one insists on dying, he ends up by doing so.”⁹ Augusto's suicide is psychic, as in many cases in the “nivolas” of Unamuno. He died as a result of his steadily increasing alienation, and if Unamuno was a God who dictated his death, he did so as an impersonal God who destroyed a man according to the necessities of the latter's own “inner logic,” to use Augusto's own words.

“One exists only for others” was the comment of the doctor. I find this observation fallacious. It is true that there is among men a constant interaction which gives them a superficial conception of their social being, but the belief of Augusto on seeing himself in the mirror: “I end up by doubting my own existence …”¹⁰ is, on a deeper, metaphysical level, the reaction of an individual who has never experienced the profound, integrated core of his inner self that is the essential inheritance of all men, alienated or fully incorporated in their world.

Julia Yáñez, in Nada menos, combines the same aspects of psychological and metaphysical alienation found in Niebla, in a slightly different form. For her father, Don Victorino, “a person of very dubious moral background” she and her beauty were the key to his hopes of economic redemption. As he explained to her, until that moment he had succeeded in “avoiding the [economic] coup de grâce … through you! Invoking your name! Your beauty has been my shield.”¹¹

Then came her suitors: first, Enrique, “an incipient Don Juan,” who sought a way to end his relationship with Julia “once he succeeded in making it known in all of Renada that its sacred regional beauty had admitted him to her window.”¹² Next it was Pedro “more stout-hearted” than Enrique, who exclaimed that Julia was mad when she suggested the idea of a mutual suicide pact, an act that would put an end to the maneuverings of her father toward her. Julia even affirmed to Don Victorino that she was being courted by Don Alberto Menéndez de Cabuérniga, “an extremely wealthy landowner, depraved, capricious when it came to women … married and separated from his wife” and who had married off several young girls with a splendid dowry. Julia believed that her father was capable of selling her favors to Don Alberto, that, for him, it would not seem a bad idea.

At this point, the indiano,¹³ Alejandro Gómez, arrived on the scene. He is described by Unamuno as “very willful and very stubborn and very self-centered.” He courted Julia and won her hand in marriage, not only because he had paid her father's debts, but because he exerted the dominance of a strong-willed individual over her. Nevertheless, like her father, he made no display of affection toward her, regarded her as a possession and caused her to ask herself repeatedly “Does he love me, or is it only that he wants to show off my beauty?”¹⁴

Unquestionably, the exclamation “your beauty will cause your ruin!,” a thought which obsessed Julia at the beginning of the story, seems to be the key to the understanding of her state of constant emotional and spiritual crisis throughout the work. Like Pedro, Alejandro views Julia as “neurasthenic,” and Unamuno confirms the idea of acute psychological stress when he comments, shortly before her death, “All these tortures of her spirit destroyed Julia's life, and she became gravely ill, mentally ill.”¹⁵ This mental illness caused her death, a psychic suicide comparable to that of Augusto in Niebla. The enigma of Julia's pathological state and consequent death is not clarified by Unamuno and must rest upon interpretation.

At first glance it would seem that Julia's beauty “caused her ruin” and death because of the cruelty and avarice of her father, a sense of betrayal by her suitors, Alejandro's hermetic nature, in other words, because of her relationship with the men she regarded as most important in her life.

There is, however, another interpretation which explains more profoundly Julia's spiritual crisis, her psychic suicide. “This interpretation has to do not only with her beauty, but with her concept of beauty, with her concept of her own being. As has been pointed out, Julia constantly asked herself whether Alejandro loves her or her beauty. And, in similar fashion, when Enrique abandons her, she exclaims, “And he said he loved me! No, he didn't love me, he loved my beauty.”¹⁶ After Pedro leaves her, she thinks to herself: “He didn't love me either, he didn't either. They fall in love with my beauty, not with me.”¹⁷

This thorough identification with an internal “ego” separated from her body seems to indicate that Julia suffered from a dualistic alienation between her psyche and her external appearance. She despised her body, an aspect of the human being which the philosopher, Alan Watts, has described as a temple of “astonishing wisdom and ingenuity.”¹⁸ In fact, we might conclude that there is not one Julia, complete and integrated, but a woman split in two by an illusory dualism between inward personality and outward physical appearance. Julia is both psychologically and metaphysically alienated because she has not understood and accepted the fusion of corporeal elements and psychic aspects which constitute the totality of every individual and, consequently, she dies.

Spanish criticism of the “Christian atheist,” Don Manuel, in San Manuel Bueno, mártir has seen in him “the most complete personification of the tormented incredulity of [the work's] author,” Unamuno.¹⁹ It has also recognized that Don Manuel's consolation was “to console myself by consoling others, even though the consolation I give them may not be mine.”²⁰ This body of criticism recognizes, moreover, the existential base of Don Manuel's metaphysical anxiety and alienation and his search “to do! to do!,” to flee from “idle thoughts, alone,” and that, for him, “the truth … is perhaps something terrible, something intolerable, something mortal ; simple folk could not live with it.”²¹ The most recent criticism that suggests that Unamuno, with this statement, had repented rather belatedly “for having agitated others with his own religious doubts and anxieties” has been that of Marín, in his introduction to San Manuel [San Manuel Bueno, mártir] in Literatura española, selección.²²

I accept the critics' affirmation that Don Manuel is, in reality, a personification of varied aspects of Unamuno's temperament and that Unamuno experienced feelings of remorse “for having agitated others,” but I should like to expound, at this point, the hypothesis that both creator and fictional character sensed in this late fruit of Unamuno's literary output intuitive glimpses of the possibility of a resolution of the “tortured incredulity” of both. I make reference, specifically, to the curious juxtaposition of three incidents in the very heart of the story, quoted by Lázaro, brother of the narrator and confidante of Don Manuel.

The first episode that Lázaro relates is a scene at the edge of the omnipresent lake when Don Manuel comments: “This is my greatest temptation.” He continues by describing his perpetual combat against a suicidal impulse. The second incident, immediately following, is the scene of the shepherdess, in which Don Manuel says: “Look, it seems as if time had come to an end, as if this shepherdess had been there always, and just as she is, and singing as she is, and as if she were going to continue being there always, as she was before my consciousness began, as she will be when it ends. That shepherdess forms a part, with the rocks, the clouds, the trees, the water, of nature and not history”.²³ The juxtaposition of episodes ends with Lázaro's commentary on the day of the snow storm when Don Manuel said: “Have you ever seen, Lázaro, a mystery greater than that of the snow falling in the lake and dying in it …”²⁴

To me, these three incidents represent three phases in the process of spiritual maturation, intuitive at first, which occur to many individuals, in different cultures and different times, tormented like Don Manuel by incredulity before the meaning of their own existence. In the first episode, I do not believe, with Marín, that the lake represents “the death and oblivion in which men are interred,” but rather Don Manuel's intuitive aspiration toward a sublimation—a “suicide,” if you will—of his conscious ego, imprisoned until now by his alienation, his doubts and anxieties, into a wider vision of human existence, manifested, as will be seen, in the scene of the shepherdess. The rest which Don Manuel aspires to achieve in his last hours (once again, as Niebla and Nada menos, a psychically motivated death) is not the rest of oblivion with physical death, but rather the spiritual rest after the individual's conscious ego sees itself not as an isolated object, alienated from a foreign and impersonal universe, but as an integral part of a process which both incorporates and transcends its individual existence.

Unamuno—Don Manuel intuits this interpretation of existence in the moments of the shepherdess and the snow storm. The shepherdess—the man freed from his metaphysical alienation—is outside of history, or of the conventional, linear concept we hold of history and life in general. The shepherdess lives in an eternal present, “as if time had come to an end,” in intimate contact with her environment. This is precisely the sensation of existence that Don Manuel has intuited, but has not experienced. It might be added that his constant “via negativa,” his “neti neti,” the negation which he embraces in his interpretation of life, has led many individuals, paradoxically, to an affirmation of life not as an occasion to “console others”, but as an experience which we shall now examine in the incident of the snow storm.

In the storm, the last phase of spiritual development, the snow-flake, the individual, senses that he is fused as an integral part of the cosmos. His alienation and incredulity end, not with respect to the convention of a life after death, but rather with respect to the intimate and sometimes ecstatic relationship that exists between the individual and his universe.

We may thus conclude that Unamuno intuited in these three key incidents the possibility of a concept, a feeling of existence, that is immensely wider for the individual alienated from the rest of nature by his incredulity. Yet Unamuno, like Don Manuel, never achieved the full sensation of this vision of the world simply because he could never completely “let go,” in the words of the French psychiatrist, Hubert Benoit;²⁵ he could not go beyond his concept of human personality as an ego imprisoned and alienated. He did not recognize totally the abandonment of this ego in a “suicide” which, again paradoxically, results in a sense of the eternal present and an awareness of man's fusion with the “lake” which is the cosmos.

Unamuno, in these three “nivolas,” wrote of modern man's psychological alienation and universal man's metaphysical alienation because he had experienced both to the depths of his being. In fact, as may be seen from this study, it is very difficult to draw the line between the two aspects of alienation, the best solution possibly being to recognise that they are conventional distinctions made by an intellect that is habituated to categorizing and defining. In any event, to return to the first sentence of this study, while alienation as a term is in danger of abuse, as a literary theme in the hands of an author with the creative powers of an Unamuno, it can strike us with particular force that this is the way that many men “of flesh and bones” live and have lived. The solution to both aspects of their alienation seems to be in the ever increasing awareness, not only in the humanities, but in the social and physical sciences as well, that man is, and has the potential to come to feel, infinitely greater than he does with his present concept of self.²⁶

Notes

1. When pedantic critics argued that Unamuno was not writing true novels, characteristically he coined the meaningless neologism, “nivola,” to describe his fiction.

2. Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla (Madrid, 1957), p. 159.

3. Ibid., p. 50.

4. Ibid., p. 150.

5. Alejandro, (who will not be studied here), viewed his wife as a “thing,” a posession, until he was suddenly and dramatically able to love her, thus being redeemed from his extreme alienation.

6. Niebla, p. 69.

7. Ibid., p. 126.

8. Ibid., p. 22.

9. Ibid., p. 153.

10. Ibid., p. 114.

11. Unamuno, “Nada menos que todo un hombre,” in Da Cal and Ucelay, Literatura del siglo XX (New York, 1968), p. 17.

12. Ibid., p. 12.

13. An indiano is a Spaniard who has gone to the New World, made his fortune and returned to Spain.

14. Nada menos, p. 20.

15. Ibid., p. 44.

16. Ibid., p. 13.

17. Ibid., p. 14.

18. Alan Watts, The Book (New York, 1966), p. 140. (Watts is also speaking here of a girl who scorns her physical beauty.)

19. Marín's Introduction to “San Manuel Bueno, mártir,” in Literatura española, selección, II (New York, 1968), p. 145.

20. San Manuel, p. 159.

21. Ibid., p. 159.

22. Introduction to San Manuel, p. 145.

23. San Manuel, p. 161.

24. Ibid., p. 161.

25. “Let Go!” is the title of a study on Zen Buddhism by Benoit.

26. As an example, figures of such diverse backgrounds and preparation as the scientist-theologian, Theilhard de Chardin, the psychiatrist, Benoit, the philosopher, Watts, the physicist, Whyte, and author Aldous Huxley have expressed, with differing approaches and vocabularies, a concept that unites them all, that contemporary man is on the verge of a widening of consciousness with respect to his purpose and place in the universe.