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Unamuno's Niebla: From Novel to Dream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Frances W. Weber
Frances W. Weber*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Abstract

Critics have said that Niebla shows both the protagonist's emergence into conscious existence and the author's attempt to create himself through the novel. But the plot repeatedly points up the character's self-deception, which makes the author's effort problematical. Niebla begins with a comic view of Augusto Pérez's falling in love with the image of a woman he has invented; it ends with a philosophical defense of the confusion of fiction and reality. The ambiguity caused by these incompatible approaches is heightened by the similarities between Augusto's ideas and Unamuno's. The ironic exposure of selfdelusion alternates with a serious theory of fantasy. In the last chapters Unamuno, like Augusto, seems to argue for total delusion. This view is most explicitly formulated in the “Historia de Niebla” which appeared as a prologue to the 1935 edition. In it Unamuno fuses legend, novel, nivola, and eternal life into the image of a communal mist in which one can be saved. Throughout his life Unamuno tried to see himself as a substantial entity and not merely an idea in the minds of others. As that goal became more elusive, he chose instead to imagine that the world was a dream in which he could be eternally represented. In order to perpetuate his illusory self, he turned all reality into fiction. Niebla anticipates this maneuver.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 2 , March 1973 , pp. 209 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 Obras completas (Barcelona: Afrodisio Aguado, 1958), x, 922. All references to Unamuno are from this edition. Niebla appears in Vol. II.

2 Ricardo Gullon, “El amigo manso, entre Galdos y Unamuno,” Mundo Nuevo, num. 4 (Oct. 1966); Geoffrey Ribbans, “The Structure of Unamuno's Niebla” in Spanish Thought and Letters in the Twentieth Century, ed. German Bleiberg and E. Inman Fox (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1966); Leon Livingstone, “The Novel Self-Creation,” in Unamuno, Creator and Creation, ed. Jose Rubia Barcia and M. A. Zeitlin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1967); Ruth House

Webber, “Kierkegaard and the Elaboration of Unamuno's Niebla” Hispanic Review, 32 (1964); Ciricaco Moron-Arroyo, “Niebla en la evolution tematica de Unamuno,” MLN, 81 (March 1966); Carlos Blanco-Aguinaga, “Unamuno's Niebla: Existence and the Game of Fiction,” MLN, 79 (March 1964).

3 According to Carlos Blanco-Aguinaga's interpretation, the work is ultimately a game to make the reader aware of the complexities of the creative act and, of course, of Unamuno, who can hopefully re-create himself for future readers “in dialogue with the other,” “Unamuno's Niebla …” (p. 205).

4 Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), p. 308. Girard says that all novelistic conclusions are conversions. “The hero denies the fantasy inspired by his pride” (p. 293).

5 A. A. Parker summarizes the different critical reactions to the novel'ssplit in “On the Interpretation of Niebla” Unamuno (Berkeley,Calif.: Barciaand Zeitlin, 1967),pp. 116–38.

6 A. A. Parker is the only one who has noted that the theme of knowledge is here tied to Augusto's “awakening of sensuality” (Unamuno, p. 126). He tries “to retain his innocence by avoiding the knowledge that frightens him and seeking instead a kind of abstract knowledge that will leave him with Orfeo and the memory of his mother.” Rof Carballo has pointed out that for Unamuno sensuality and “excessive curiosity for knowledge” were always tied together (“El erotismo de Unamuno,” Reuista de Occidente, 19, 1964, 71–96).

7 Ricardo Gullon comments on the passage and asks “?Podria entenderse que por ser su amor como es, reflejo del maternal, no le importa . . . que el cuerpo de Eugenia y Eugenia misma sean de su antiguo novio? ?O es que la represion provoca inhibiciones indominables, le fuerza a extranas idealizaciones'?” (Autobiografias de Unamuno, Madrid: Gredos, 1964, p. 106).

8 That this may be a means of protecting what such a person considers his real self is evident in an essay Unamuno wrote in 1921, “Robleda el actor.” Robleda acts, he explains, in order to hide behind the roles he plays; he does not want to make a spectacle of himself. “Es que me quiero para mi y nada mas que para mi.” He has a horror that others might see him, look at his own gaze and “steal the secret of his solitude” (OC, ix, 290, 292). R. D. Laing has described the dichotomy between the “real self” which is divorced from all activity that is observable by another and the “false self” or “false-self system” (The Divided Self, London: Penguin, 1959). See also Ch. iii, “Pretence and the Elusion of Experience,” in this author's The Self and Others (London: Tavistock, 1961).

9 Unamuno frequently employed the literary convention that makes the eyes of the beloved mirrors in which the lover can gaze enraptured—at his own image. In Dos madres, Raquel tells Juan “iDejame que me bese!” and she kisses his eyes (OC, ix, 444). Augusto's fantasy of Eugenia is built on “the fugitive vision of those eyes.” Narcissus seeks his being in a mirror he himself has made.

10 Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 291.

11 The theme of total dependence is developed also in the intercalated stories in which each person lives through another. (For other readings, see Harriet Stevens and Geoffrey Ribbans.) No one is autonomous. This too is the ultimate meaning of Unamuno's repeated use of the motif of a man whose love or desire is awakened or stimulated by another (e.g., in Abel Sanchez and Dos Madres).

12 Paul Hie, Unamuno: An Existential View of Self and Society (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), sees Victor's advice as evidence that for Unamuno desdob/a-miento was not a tragic condition but a means of recognizing one's inner divisions and gaining “a healthy equilibrium in the face of our conflicts” (p. 45). This “sense of play may create a well-being that, in turn, will ensure a fulfillment ofthe self” (p. 46). But the dynamics of Niebla —and of all of Unamuno's works—show that being a spectacle for oneself gives only a momentary and hazardous balance in the perpetual veerings between contrary and impossible aims.

13 A. A. Parker makes a good point in interpreting Augusto's voracious appetite as “an instinct to abdicate conscious thought,” a desire to turn himself into the “ ‘physiological man,‘ abdicating speech and thought and seeking to return to his mother's womb” (Unamuno, p. 135).

14 Julian Marias, Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1943), p. 179.

15 Yet he also tells us that Unamuno's will to affirm himself was so great that he “fell into the role of an omnipotent creator and in so doing, made the mistake of taking the metaphoric name of the role seriously, when it is really a name that functions only analogically” (“Unamuno's Niebla . . .” p. 197).

16 Blanco-Aguinaga, pp. 199–200.Also Willard King, “Unamuno, Cervantes and Niebla,” Revista de Occidente, 47(1967),219–31.

17 Linguistics and Literary History (1948; rpt. New York: Russell, 1962), p. 50.

18 Francisco Ayala says Unamuno “carecia . . . de esa complaciente virtud que permite al novelador hacerse a un lado para que sus personajes se desenvuelvan segun su propia ley: la virtud cervantina por excelencia. El tenia que invadir exasperadamente el orden de la realidad objectiva, inundarlo con su yo” (Realidad y ensueno, Madrid: Gredos, 1963, p. 99). Agnes Money says Unamuno did not want to separate “el mundo real y el mundo del arte . . . queria corregir lo que consideraba un error: la aceptacion del mundo fenomenico como el mundo real” (“La creation del personaje en las novelas de Unamuno,” La Torre, 11, 1963, 153). Although Money sees this separation as part of a philosophical objection to positivism, I believe it is the consequence of a personal need to elude an intolerable reality.

19 The changes in that title image reflect the shift from novel to dream. Mist is used first for the small details of everyday life (pp. 810, 814, 815). But it is also opposed to knowledge and science as a refuge from reality (p. 818). In this sense, it is synonymous with dream, and dream is always tied to Augusto's unconscious existence when he “formed a part” of his mother (p. 868). Dream often represents the ideal of merging or nonseparation (“ique es el mundo real sino el sueno que sonamos todos, el sueno comun?” p. 865). But both mist and dream have a contrary affective note too. Augusto is trying to get out of the mist; mist is the opposite of self and self-possession. Love will dissipate and congeal the mist (p. 837). Because he does not succeed in love, Augusto sees himself as a somnambulist: “durante anos he vagado como un fan-tasma, como un muneco de niebla, sin creer en mi propia existencia” (p. 971). Yet one of the remedies Victor proposes for Augusto's ontological malady is the intentional confounding of dream and wakefulness, fiction and reality (pp. 968–72). He should try to attain a kind of consciousness. (Clearly this is all quite foggy: words and images transform themselves before our eyes or meet in paradoxical and self-contradictory couplings.) And Unamuno himself, inhis own voice in the 1935 prologue, advances the same kind of fusion and confusion.

20 We might apply Frank Kermode's distinction between myth and fiction. “Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be Active . . . Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent” (The Sense of an Ending, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 39). Unamuno wanted to save himself in myth and even make himself a myth.

21 Unamuno frequently spoke of a pure, inner self, his “idea in God,” his “bed-rock,” “the self that is underneath the self that acts.” See, e.g., “Nicodemo el Farieso” (1899), “iAdentro!”(1900), “Sobre la consecuencia y la sinceridad” (1906).

22 Armando Zubizarreta—Unamuno en su nivola (Madrid: Taurus, 1960)—calls this love (p. 41), as does Unamuno (p. 882), but the possessive does not indicate love so much as simple appropriation and the attempt to control others by incorporating them into oneself. This is whatlove means to most of Unamuno's characters.

23 Carlos Blanco-Aguinaga says Unamuno was never able to give himself completely to the temporal or historical world; the identification of his self with his empirical self was recognized only reluctantly: “Sospecho que hasta el fin fue para el la Historia un sustituto y que nunca hubiese podido aceptar aquello de Ortega de que el hombre solo tiene Historia” (“De Nicodemo a Don Quijote,” Spanish Thought and Letters, Nashville, Tenn.: Bleiberg and Fox, 1966, p. 99).

24 Frangois Meyer, La ontologia de Miguel de Unamuno, Sp. trans. (Madrid: Gredos, 1966), p. 73.

25 One of the many ambiguities of this essay is Unamuno's attitude toward the “Espiritu de Disolucion.” When he refers to Calderon and Shakespeare, he seems to think that the vision of life as a dream is terrible but profound; when he refers to Renan, he is scornfully critical of “el intelec-tualismo esteticista” and of the “sonambulos” who do not feel their own souls.