Great Chiasmus: Word and Flesh in the Novels of Unamuno

Chapter Six. Retrospect: The Great Chiasmus and Beyond

222 Chapter Six Retrospect The Great Chiasmus and Beyond A retrospective survey of these studies of structures and themes in Unamuno’s novels inevitably leads to a review of the major lines of commentary I have attempted to follow in the course of the foregoing analyses. My introductory chapter was itself a retrospective view of previous readings—my own and those of various other critics—in the works of Don Miguel, and it led me to suggest—at some risk of committing a sin of naïve formalism —that the chronological trajectory of the novels can be said to form a great chiasmus, in which the sense of intrahistoria that had pervaded Paz en la guerra returns in San Manuel Bueno; the “nivolesque” qualities manifested in Amor y pedagogía and Niebla reappear in many aspects of Cómo se hace una novela; and the novels of passion present a balanced contrast between two aspects of what Unamuno sought to achieve when he said that in them “intenté escarbar en ciertos sótanos y escondrijos del corazón” (2: 1043), first of the masculine heart, and then of the feminine heart. The stages of this chronological sequence therefore have the chiastic form ABC:CBA. Between the two phases of C appeared the tale of a historically active man—Tulio Montalbán—who feels his virile heroism is simply a mask, which he tears off to reveal the underlying reality of an infantilized—very nearly feminized— Julio Macedo. The two aspects of this character therefore correspond to the two aspects of the depths of the human heart that the novels of passion explore. I believe it is not necessary to prove the existence of further parallels and repetitions in the finer details of this sequence in order to conclude that an effect of chiastic mirroring can be perceived within it. The return of the same in such a structure is, of course, always a return with 223 Retrospect difference, which makes it inevitable that interpretations will differ as to whether the same does, in fact, return. Thus, Cerezo Galán regards the nadismo of Manuel Bueno as pervading the whole of the final stage of Unamuno’s work, whereas I have tended to interpret Unamuno’s frequent allusions to Hegel’s idea of the equivalence of pure being and pure nothingness as suggesting that the nada that obsessed the unbelieving priest is actually the ontological equivalent of the indeterminate but substantial dentro of which intrahistoria is the best known manifestation. Although Don Manuel, as if having assimilated the ontology of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, feels its very purity as pure nothingness, the narrator and author of his novel are able to evoke a sense of interiority as plenitude , in which Don Manuel and his nadismo are both subsumed . For this reason I have suggested that the novel represents not so much a triumph of nadismo as a return of the interiority that is intrahistoria, thus bringing to a chiastic closure the whole series of novels up to that point. It might well be argued that what I call chiasmus is simply a phenomenon of dichotomy, repetition, or symmetry, but since they all occur along the syntagmatic—that is, temporal—axis of Unamuno’s total novelistic discourse, I have considered it appropriate to use for this phenomenon the name given by the Greek rhetoricians to the syntactic figure in which it appears. I have therefore begun my study of the chiasmus from the perspective of linguistic formalism, but have moved beyond the level of syntactic microstructures to larger narrative structures, such as those of Paz en la guerra and Niebla. For the study of these forms, the concept of symmetry could be said to apply as well as that of chiasmus, but the latter term has the advantage of being applicable equally well, on a more purely conceptual level, to numerous instances of contradiction, paradox, reversal , and what Mermall called the “interpenetration of opposites ” (“Mystical Rhetoric” 262). Jurkevich has seen that chiasmus is also the appropriate name for interpersonal relations involving a reciprocal exchange of roles (Elusive 41, 131– 33), and in the studies presented here the chiastic structure can be seen as underlying such psychological phenomena as the “fantasy of the reversal of generations” and Augusto Pérez’s contrahistoria. Augusto’s author never explicitly espoused that 224 Chapter Six term or concept, but the numerous expressions by...