Abel Sanchez and Other Stories

INTRODUCTION

Spain is a nation of opposites that enlarge and expand beyond ordinary contradictions; these polarities are in evidence in Spain’s geography, linguistic diversity, cultural makeup, history, politics, and, of course, its art. This is the country of Luis Buñuel, Pablo Casals, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, and Federico Garcia Lorca—all artists of this century whose work reflects the intimate and public tensions of a society forever engaged in a shifting dialectic of polarities. Of all the great artists and thinkers of Spain’s twentieth century no one looms so large and so central to an understanding of present-day Spain as Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936). To understand Unamuno’s work is to understand Spain, and to understand Spain is to understand Unamuno.

This book, a kind of essential Unamuno reader, contains three narratives by Unamuno: The Madness of Doctor Montarco, a short story written and published in 1904; Abel Sánchez, a novel written and published in 1917; and San Manuel Bueno, Martyr, written in 1930 and published in book form in 1933. These three dates mark equidistant points in Unamuno’s writing career. In 1904 he was forty years old and at the beginning of his career as an author, still very much the iconoclastic rebel demanding the regeneration of Spain after the debacle of the Spanish-American war of 1898. By 1917 Unamuno was at his intellectual summit. He had recently published his major philosophical essay, The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), and his modernist masterpiece, the novel Niebla/Mist (1914). He, together with José Ortega y Gasset, was the intellectual power of Spain. While Ortega y Gasset sought to make Spain an intellectual partner in Europe, Unamuno passionately threw himself into the task of challenging the way Spaniards considered themselves as a nation. Unamuno set about provoking Spaniards of all walks of life to think for themselves and to reject dogmatic thinking. The year 1930 was the time of the last great effort by the old warrior; he had recently returned in triumph from exile in France amidst great expectations for political freedom with the beginning of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936).

San Manuel was first published in 1931, and in book form in 1933, at a time of turmoil and the cataclysmic political extremism that in only three years would result in the tragic sea of blood of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Unamuno died on December 31, 1936, defiant, independent, and rebellious to the end. He lived seventy-two years, half in the nineteenth century and half in the twentieth, and he wrote the way he lived—with intensity and passion, the unrivaled defender of the rights of the individual and the community of individuals against the arbitrary rule of the state. In many ways his political views were half a century ahead of his time; he rejected all political systems that suppress individual rights, whether these are invoked in the name of god, nation, or political party. To Unamuno all dogmatism is the same: the effective denial of the individual’s right to form a community of individuals.

Perhaps the most valuable introduction I can give the general reader is to contextualize the three narratives, both historically and intellectually. The Madness of Doctor Montarco was published in a popular monthly magazine, La España moderna, and has been reprinted in Spanish only in the complete works of Unamuno. Its inclusion in this volume was the decision of the late Anthony Kerrigan, translator and editor, who first put together this book in 1956. A number of specific historical and biographical factors are interwoven by Unamuno in this story. The most obvious is the allusion to the public reception of Unamuno’s radically modernist parody of sociology in Amor y pedagogía (Love and Pedagogy; 1902) as a work that was purported to be inappropriate for a university professor. We can also discern a number of Unamuno’s most seminal ideas about life and society. He often caused consternation when he wrote that the instinct that most impels humans to act is not self-preservation as the social Darwinists would have but rather the instinct of wanting more, the appetite to be god—that is, to continue to be the person one is but, also, to encompass and assimilate what one wants from the other. In this story the protagonist remarks that reason and the effective use of reason are not ends in themselves but tools and weapons to be used in the struggle for life as the individual’s personal domain. The narrator makes the observation, often made by Unamuno in his essays, that reason is a conservative force dedicated to the preservation of the established order that protects life as it is known at the time and will tolerate challenges only to the extent that they do not threaten this order. The often repeated assertion was that reason must be used in the service of passion or, as Goya would have it, when reason dreams it produces monsters. Unamuno’s strong characters, like Pachico of Peace in War or Gertrudis of La tía Tula (Aunt Tula), are wide awake and know what they want to accomplish, and they use their rational powers of analysis to achieve it. The moral philosophy of Unamuno rested on the mutual respect of individuals, each with his or her desire to be, and whose differences would be adjudicated by the use of reason.

Doctor Montarco’s reading habits are also Unamuno’s, who read Don Quixote as a philosophical text and who was very well informed on British and German science. Quite clearly, the unconventional doctor also shared with Unamuno his complete rejection of the generic categories of essay, prose fiction, drama, and poetry; Unamuno’s concern as a reader of others and as a writer was with the author’s situation within the text. The organization of a text is to Unamuno a construction of fundamental polarities which are more or less hidden, more or less revealed by the specific linguistic elements used. Style to Unamuno is not only self-expression but a translucent presentation of the inherent conflict in the author’s point of view. Consequently, the more the written words tend to obscure the author’s inner conflict, the less it is a matter of style and the more it becomes gesturing.

And thus it is in this short story. On the surface the conflict of the good doctor appears to be trivial: he wants to have a private life as a writer of creative prose as well as a professional life as a doctor devoted to general practice in provincial Spain. The reader should recognize immediately that this situation is a clear parallel to that of Unamuno himself, who by 1904 was professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Salamanca and also author of Amor y pedagogía, one of the most outlandish parodies of intellectual life in Spain. But even a surface probe into the story of Doctor Montarco reveals a much deeper conflict: a virtual existential polemic between the person others think we are and, therefore, the one we try to act out, like a dramatic role, and the person we think we are or would like to be. The problem is that these personae are not fixed but rather are embarked on a conflictive process of development. The public persona is constantly threatening to take over the identity of the private persona and, on the other side, the private persona despises the hypocrisy of the public persona and tends to blame others for forcing the self to play this part.

In this story, it is the narrator who observes the public persona and, through his friendship, gains access to glimpses of the private persona. As the story begins we are informed that this is a new beginning for the doctor, who was forced to leave his hometown and start anew in the present place of practice. The balance between the public and private personae appears to be working; however, the narrator foreshadows the conflictive situation which lies ahead by informing us that Doctor Montarco confessed to him that there are gestures which are natural enough at first but later become artificial after they have been repeatedly praised. But there are also other gestures which we have acquired by imitation and hard work that end up by becoming completely natural to us. The slippage between the two is constant as long as the public and private faces are more or less equal. The war begins when one side is thrown off balance because of external pressure. Two days after publishing a story halfway between fantasy and humor, Montarco is deeply upset. The townspeople, it seems, look askance at a doctor who is all seriousness in his practice of medicine and, nevertheless, is capable of writing farce. Poor Doctor Montarco loses his practice and is sent to an insane asylum under the care of a former fellow medical student, Dr. Atienza, and it is here that the story takes its last and most unusual turn. The real transgression of Doctor Montarco was not breaking some code of propriety for a doctor, but rather attempting to get people to think for themselves, to reconsider and redescribe the world they have accepted so uncritically.

Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez can be called psychoanalytic fiction, for it clearly delves into the psychosis of pathological envy by means of a narrative alternating between a third-person and a first-person narrator. Unamuno was not only interested in the schizoid condition in individuals but also considered these symptoms at the level of communities.

In the novel, Abel Sánchez, is the object of pathological envy on the part of his lifelong friend and companion, Joaquín Monegro, who ironically and symbolically is the protagonist in the story that has his friend’s name as its title. Abel is congenial and well liked by all; Joaquín is willful, aggressive, and extremely competitive, not unlike the young Unamuno. From the outside—that is, the perspective of the third-person narrator—the reader’s sympathy is with Abel. Joaquín is too intense, too overbearing, and the reader, like the characters in the novel, tires of this constant harangue from this problematic character. Yet we also have the selected first-person entries from Joaquín’s diary, which provide insight into a wounded and painfully obsessed victim of a psychosis of severe insecurity.

In Joaquín’s first entry into his diary, he begins to portray himself as the reverse image of his friend, in spite of the fact that they are not opposites but merely different. Yet it is Joaquín who constructs the oppositional character traits of the two: Abel is the congenial one, and Joaquín, the antipathetic one, without either one knowing why this is so. Joaquín has been left alone. Ever since childhood his friends have left him to himself.

Joaquín’s obsessive envy of Abel is nurtured and matures. When Abel informs him that he will marry Helena, the young woman the two friends have courted, Joaquín writes in his diary that he felt as if his soul had frozen, the icy cold pressed upon his emotions as if flames of ice were suffocating me. Joaquín nurtures a hatred for Helena and even more for Abel.

Years later the British psychiatrist R. D. Laing was to write a description of frantic envy that could have been a description of Joaquín Monegro (although it is doubtful whether Laing knew of Abel Sánchez since his book, The Divided Self, was first published in 1958 and the first English translation of Abel Sánchez was published only two years before):

If the patient contrasts his own inner emptiness, worthlessness, coldness, desolation, dryness, with the abundance, worth, warmth, companionship that he may yet believe to be elsewhere (a belief which often grows to fantastically idealized proportions, uncorrected as it is by any direct experience), there is evoked a welter of conflicting emotions, from a desperate longing and yearning for what others have and he lacks, to frantic envy and hatred of all that is theirs and not his, or a desire to destroy all the goodness, freshness, richness in the world. These feelings may, in turn, be offset by counter-attitudes of disdain, contempt, disgust or indifference.

There are, of course, sources held in common by Unamuno and Laing: these are notably Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Kraepelin’s lectures on clinical psychiatry, and Minkowski’s writings on psychiatry. But what interests us here is Unamuno’s creation of a fictional character who could serve as a clinical case study of pathological envy.

There is another aspect of Abel Sánchez that critics have repeatedly pointed out, and that is the oblique but pointed contextualization of the novel within Spain. On his deathbed, Joaquín Monegro sobs: Why have I been so envious, so bad? What did I do to become that way? What mother’s milk did I suck? Was there a philter, a potion of hate mixed with it? A potion in my blood? Why must I have been born into a country of hatreds? Into a land where the precept seems to be: ‘Hate thy neighbor as thyself.’ For I have lived hating myself; and here we all live hating ourselves.

Unamuno was a part of the European modernity that dominated thinking and the arts in the aftermath of the Great War, which demolished most of the social standards inherited from the nineteenth century, i.e., god, national state, the class structure. The emphasis shifted to the individual and an exalted freedom to express oneself that surpassed the most extreme individualistic notions of Byron-like romanticism. The threat of military violence was a great risk that was taken without fully comprehending the extent to which humanity was capable of destroying itself. In Abel Sánchez the personal hatred and evil of Joaquín, born of his self-hate, is equated with a national psychosis of hate of each other in the Spanish nation. Unamuno had no idea how prophetic his novel was to be. A mere twenty-two years later Spain would plunge into one of the bloodiest and most tragic civil wars, which cost this nation more than a million lives, millions of exiles, and devastation to all aspects of national life. Civil war, therefore, can be seen as the social extension of the symbolic polarity of envy and hatred, which plays out the tragedy of Cain and Abel once again. In the end, both sides lose and it remains for the next generation to attempt to find relationships in place of mutual destruction.

The last of the narratives in this book is unquestionably Unamuno’s masterpiece, San Manuel Bueno, Martyr. This short novel was the philosophical summing-up of an intense lifetime. Unamuno completed the novel shortly after returning to Salamanca in 1930, after six years spent in exile for his political views on the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. It was first published in a popular venue in 1931 and then in book form in 1933, three years before Unamuno’s death and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The story is a simple one which has been shared by many other writers: a man of the church loses his faith over the promise of resurrection but nevertheless continues to perform his duties as a priest and to preach the promise of eternal life. Therefore, it is not the relative originality of the story that interests us, but what Unamuno has written into it about life and death, about the community of individuals, and about writing and literature themselves.

The protagonist of the novel is Manuel Bueno, whose life is being narrated by his lifelong disciple, Angela Carballino. With the exception of the last three pages, when Unamuno himself intervenes through an editorial persona, the narration is the confessional, first-person testimony of Angela. The Unamunian angst and intense struggle is not only the intimate battle with suicide, it is also the public denial of the struggle. Manuel’s life is a constant fight to not surrender to the seduction of death, but it is also an all-out effort to ensure that no one knows this truth and no one discovers the source that is the inquiring mind.

Manuel Bueno, the parish priest of the small lakeside village of Valverde de Lucerna in northeastern Spain, has spent his whole life torn between his desire to reveal himself as a nonbeliever and his desire to conceal this state of mind from others. He finally makes his confession to Angela and her brother Lazarus, but in so doing makes them accomplices in the concealment of the truth from the parishioners. We, the readers, share this problem with Manuel since we are the recipients of Manuel’s confession through the confession-like testimony of Angela. The essential point is that as a liar Manuel is irredeemably alone and, therefore, a prime candidate for suicide. He flees solitude and tries to be active all the time, to the point of exhaustion, so as to avoid being alone. Manuel’s confession to Lazarus and Angela is a necessity and Angela’s confession to us is also necessary. Manuel’s confession staves off suicide, and Angela’s written confession, which in the eyes of the church will damn her beloved Manuel Bueno, will save his story from oblivion.

Unamuno’s characterization of Manuel is masterful. It is because of Manuel’s enormous vulnerability to suicide that he has become so adept at concealment. He has mastered the art of leading the community in collective prayer reiterating their faith in eternal life and yet he remains silent himself. All that everyone sees as the perfect parish priest is for the benefit of his parish. He has become a superb actor playing the part of the man he ought to be but is not. If for a moment he would stop pretending to be what he is not and step out of the persona he has come to be in the eyes of the community, he would emerge as Christ—but not as the son of God, but rather as Christ who died on the cross for the love of others. They needed that