UNAMUNO, MIGUEL DE. – Spanish writer, born in Bilbao on 29 September 1864, died in Salamanca on 31 December 1937.
He taught Greek literature at the University of Salamanca. Exiled to the Canaries (1924) for his republican ideas, he succeeded in escaping and took refuge in France, from where he returned to Spain after the fall of the monarchy (1930), subsequently joining the Francoist movement.
His many-sided activity as a journalist and writer drew the world’s attention to Spanish culture in the Alfonsine age. He made masterful use of the ensayo, in which to record the results of his tormented religious, philosophical, literary, and historical journeys and, at the same time, to refine the souls of his fellow countrymen: particularly significant in this regard are Vida de don Quijote y Sancho (1905); Mi religión (1910); Del sentimiento tragico de la vida (1913); La agonía del cristianesimo (1925). U. was
also an effective narrator (Amor y pedagogía, 1902; Niebla, 1914; Abel Sánchez, 1917; La tía Tula, 1921) and a conceptual and rugged lyric poet (Poesías, 1907; Rosario de sonetes líricos, 1911; El Cristo de Velázquez, 1920). He also cultivated, though less successfully, the theatre (the dramas La Esfinge, 1909; Fedra, 1911; Todo un hombre, 1926).
U.’s thought revolves around the contrast between the negations of reason and the demands of life, to which, following in James’s footsteps, he clings with a desperate will to survive, in an agonistic and tragic vision and practice: the activity of a struggle without breath or peace. For the human being who thinks, but above all feels, no alternative remains but this revolt against the cold destinations of reason, this creation and pursuit (like don Quijote, whom U. understood as the supreme embodiment of human idealism) of a goal, watched over and loved not as an object of possession, but as a summons or mirage. Such an attitude obviously excludes the technical elaboration of a philosophical system. U. proceeds by flashes and thrusts, as a rugged and aggressive essayist, poet, and narrator: he does not merely brush against things, but assails them, hurling not arguments of thought but arbitrarietades of typically Hispanic passion, which not infrequently spill over into the excessive or the absurd. Logical reasoning provokes his laughter, with the consequent collapse of common certainties: God created by man’s will and emotional need and therefore reduced to a mythical projection of consciousness; Christianity emptied of every dogmatic structure and absorbed into the general agonistic conception of life (Christ is born, suffers, dies, and rises again incessantly in the believer’s soul and in history); the immortality of the soul postulated not by the authority of reason, but by the need to project one’s own “I” beyond the barriers of space and time; life configured as a succession of “hopes in eternal bloom,” flourishing in solitude, which is, for U., the true and only way of communicating with one’s fellow human beings. “Nothing must exist,” U. affirms, “that cannot become the object of examination,” and in his restless exploration he hurls himself, irritable and implacable, against every obstacle. Hence his fierce opposition to the “priestly caste,” in which he believed he discerned the monopolizer of dogma and the mortifier of the Christian spirit; his hostility toward militarism, falsifier of the genuine concept of the fatherland; his bitterness against the traditionalistic and fetishistic impediments of his people, which hinder their integration into Europe’s spiritual order, delaying the fusion of the entire human family into an anticipated common homeland. A tormented spirit, he felt the religious problem’s perpetual goad, placing it at the summit of human interests. But he made his religion “the tireless struggle against mystery ... struggling with God from dawn to night” and, inevitably, never knew the noonday lights of Truth and Life.