NOTES
- Paul R. Olson, Niebla, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts 40 (London: Grant & Cutler, 1984), 90–93.
- A. A. Parker, ‘On the Interpretation of Niebla’, in Unamuno, Creator and Creation, ed. José Rubia Barcia and M. A. Zeitlin (Berkeley: California U.P., 1967), 116–38, at p. 118. Parker's essay is a fine piece of criticism, though it presents Unamuno's treatment of sexual themes in excessively Manichean terms. Sexual unhappiness in Unamuno's novels is arguably less due to any specifically sexual corruption than to the factors which make other kinds of relationship unhappy.
- Prologue (1932) to San Manuel Bueno, mártir y tres historias más in Obras completas, XVI (Barcelona: Vergara, 1964), 575.
- See Julián Marías, Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1965; 1st edn. 1942), 128: ‘Al morir, la persona no se disipa y muestra sus adentros, sino, al contrario, se cierra sobre sí misma, resume su realidad, la recapitula en ese último acto y nos deja una pregunta sin respuesta, lo más vivo que cabe imaginar’.
- Niebla, in Obras completas, II (Barcelona: Vergara, 1959), 837. All references to Niebla are to this edition.
- Ricardo Gullón, Autobiografías de Unamuno (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), 115: ‘Se agolpan las imágenes en esta espléndida metáfora total, y por su densidad transpositiva e imaginativa, tanto como por su lirismo, el fragmento lanza la imaginación al vuelo y levanta ecos y rumores en el lector’. Marías, op. cit., 100, calls this passage and its immediate context ‘el centro mismo de la preocupación de Unamuno’, but for reasons rather different from those advanced here. M. García Blanco, Introducción to Unamuno, Obras completas, II, 34, refers to it, without explanation, as the ‘key’ to the novel. Olson, ‘Sobre las estructuras de Niebla’ in Volumen-homenaje a Miguel de Unamuno, ed. Dolores Gómez Molleda (Salamanca: Casa-Museo Unamuno, 1986), 423–34, at p. 432, links this paragraph with ‘chiastic’ structures in the novel as a whole, and (less plausibly) with the Nietzschean theme of Eternal Return.
- Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, ‘Unamuno's Niebla: Existence and the Game of Fiction’, MLN, LXXIX (1964), 188–205, especially 204–05.
- Juan Villegas, ‘Niebla: una ruta para autentificar la existencia’, in Spanish Thought and Letters in the Twentieth Century, ed. Germán Bleiberg and E. Inman Fox (Nashville: Vanderbilt U.P., 1966), 573–84, at pp. 582–83.
- Geoffrey Ribbans, ‘The Structure of Unamuno's Niebla’, in Spanish Thought and Letters, 395–406, at pp. 403–04; also ‘Estructura y significado de Niebla’, in Niebla y soledad: aspectos de Unamuno y Machado (Madrid: Gredos, 1971), 108–42, at p. 138 (here taking into account the view of Parker, 134).
- Parker, 134–35; see Blanco Aguinaga, El Unamuno contemplativo (Mexico: FCE, 1959).
- Blanco Aguinaga, ‘Niebla: Existence and the Game of Fiction’, 197; also Ribbans, ‘Structure’, at p. 403: ‘Unamuno's swaggering portrayal of himself, in which he deliberately exaggerates his own characteristics, both linguistic and ideological, is an image of great compressed ironic power, of the capricious God, or worse arbitrary fate who apparently determines the life and death of human beings’, (see also ‘Estructura y significado’, at p. 136). Nelson R. Orringer, ‘Niebla y Dios: una desconocida fuente teológica’, in Volumen-homenaje, 435–56, at pp. 442–50, takes a similarly negative view of the ‘Autor-Dios’.
- Arturo Barea, Unamuno (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1952), at p. 42; a more precisely-formulated view is that of Orringer, at p. 442: ‘El ficticio Autor-Dios procede con malicia, y el Unamuno vivo condena la injusticia de ese figurón que él ha creado’.
- Parker, 137 on Niebla, 999. The whole passage is modelled on Plato, Phaedo paras. 109B-111C, with just enough rather pedantic use of detail to suggest a measure of conscious irony. It would thus be injudicious to rely too heavily on this passage to substantiate a Platonist reading of the work as a whole. As a professional Hellenist, Unamuno would have known that Socrates (the speaker in the Phaedo) explicitly warns his disciples against taking this account of the after-life literally. He may also have known that Orphic influences are strong in this part of the Phaedo. But he would certainly have been aware of the long tradition—from the Cynics, through Cervantes, to Machado de Assis— which underlined a sceptical attitude towards philosophy by presenting it in close association with dogs. Orringer, ‘Unamuno and Plato: A Study of Marginalia and Influence’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, XI (1987), 331–53, at p. 340, has the balance exactly right: ‘half-amused, half-sympathetic’.
- Del sentimiento trágico de la vida in Obras completas, XVI, 217. Del sentimiento trágico, though it was many years in the writing, was finally published as a book in 1913, the year before Niebla (see García Blanco, Prólogo to Obras completas, XVI, 13–34). The interpretation of Orfeo's remark proposed here is close to that of Sherman H. Eoff, The Modern Spanish Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1962), 193–94: ‘In other words, the world of abstract ideas and the world of incarnate idea cannot have separate realities. The logical inference is that they must be one; and we shall find that in Unamuno's view the one world is here?.
- Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript quoted by Ribbans, ‘Structure’, at p. 400, and by Ruth House Webber, ‘Kierkegaard and the Elaboration of Unamuno's Niebla’, HR, XXXII (1964), 118–34, at pp. 132–33. See also Alison Sinclair, ‘Concepts of Tragedy in Unamuno and Kierkegaard’, in Re-reading Unamuno, ed. Nicholas G. Round, Glasgow Colloquium Papers 1 (Glasgow: Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Glasgow, 1989), 121–38, especially pp. 125–28.
- Del sentimiento trágico, 267; ‘Conciencia, conscientia, es conocimiento participado, es consentimiento, y con-sentir es com-padecer’. One could multiply examples of Unamuno's awareness, as a thinker who was also a philologist, of the etymological weight of words. See Roger Wright, ‘La estructura semántica de la “razón” en el Sentimiento trágico de la vida’, Cuadernos de la Cátedra de Miguel de Unamuno, XXIV (1976), 69–103, and ‘La estructura semántica de la conciencia en el Sentimiento trágico de la vida’, Bulletin Hispanique, LXXXVII (1985), 485–501 (especially pp. 487–88, 494).
- Del sentimiento trágico, 331. The fictional Unamuno, it is true, shares Augusto's plight for a reason which cannot, in the literal sense, apply to God: he, like Augusto, is doomed to die. But the threat here, as Unamuno saw it, did not lie in mortality as such (as it did in the medieval timor mortis tradition); it lay in the consequent loss of personal being. See A. Gómez-Moriana, ‘Unamuno en su congoja’, Cuadernos de la Cátedra de Miguel de Unamuno, XIX (1969), 22: ‘No está el tema central de su inquietud filosofico-religiosa en un mero deseo de inmortalizarse. Este problema es sólo la superficie […] de un problema de raíces ontológicas mucho más profundas’. There are other threats to being, both direct and indirect, which give rise to related forms of suffering, and there is no contradiction involved in our supposing a personal God to be at least sensible of these. Compare Del sentimiento, 334 ff., where it is argued that God suffers in and through the limitations of his creatures. A loving God—indeed, any God who was not actually malevolent—would be bound to do so, for ‘si Dios no sufre, hace sufrir’ (Del sentimiento, 335).
- Orfeo's ‘natural, faithful, and innocent’ love for his master is finely characterized by Parker, especially pp. 123–24.
- It would be unwise, though, to press this argument too far, and to try to refer every element in Niebla to some would-be theological scheme. For example, Unamuno's intervention in the novel cannot plausibly be seen as any form of transcendent Incarnation; the character of the fictional Unamuno suggests just the reverse of any kenosis or voluntary renunciation of divine attributes. On the contrary, there is—at least initially—a blustering and wilful assertion of creative powers. It is possible that one of Unamuno's motives in exaggerating these features may have been to rule out any possible incarnational reference.
- See Prólogo a la tercera edición, o sea historia de ‘Niebla’ in Obras completas, II, 801: ‘nuestros mejores lectores, nuestros colaboradores y co-autores—mejor co-creadores—los que, al leer una historia […] como ésta se dicen: Pero si esto lo he pensado así yo antes!’
- Unamuno himself was well aware of the problem; see Del sentimiento, 278: ‘aunque bajo formas racionales, el contenido de todo esto no es, en rigor, racional. Toda concepción racional de Dios es en sí misma contradictoria’. But this is scarcely an adequate reply to possible criticisms. Certainly the decision to write ‘bajo formas racionales’ enabled Unamuno to use the opposition between logic and life as an illustration of the tension between doubt and faith. But when he attempts, within this mode of argument, to make particular assertions about his religious outlook, these run the risk of seeming merely logically insufficient, rather than pregnant with lived experience. See further Round, ‘On the logic of Unamuno Criticism: The Problem of “Belief”’, in Volumen-homenaje, 683—708, especially pp. 687, 705).
- Literally, of course, Augusto cannot communicate anything to the Unamuno of history: it was this Unamuno, ultimately, who communicated him, and all that he had to say, to Niebla's readers. Augusto is, as Olson correctly states (Niebla, at p. 93): ‘a creature of language because he exists within and by it’. In another sense, it was quite possible for Unamuno, in the familiar mode of the monodiálogo, to learn from, and be swayed by, the creatures of his own imagination.
- One might argue, indeed, that it is the humanistic element in Unamuno's work, rather than its Catholic background, which makes him, whatever questions may be raised about his beliefs, a specifically Christian writer. Such a demonstration, however, would lie beyond the scope of the present article; see, again, Round, ‘On the Logic of Unamuno Criticism’ for some of the relevant considerations.