Great Chiasmus: Word and Flesh in the Novels of Unamuno

Introduction: Chiasmus, Word, and Flesh

1 Introduction Chiasmus, Word, and Flesh The venerable OED defines chiasmus as “a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other.” Its Greek etymon, ciasmovı, refers to the action and effect of ciavzein, “to mark with or like a c” (Liddell and Scott). Its meaning is therefore in the first instance quite literally literal, that is, having reference to the Greek letter c, which can iconically represent concepts of crossing over, reversal, or exchange. Its structure may be schematized as ab…n : n…ba, the “n” allowing for any number of terms in the figure, but in the great majority of instances the structure is a simple ab:ba, or at most, abc:cba. In more extended forms, the effect of the figure, with its formal symmetry, harmonious balance , and repetition within difference, is that of giving the verbal sequence a strong structure, implicitly converting its unidimensional, temporal linearity into the spatial complexity of an “object”—one might even say “body”—existing in space.1 In the structure of an entire narrative it creates this effect by defining limits and marking out areas of text, each section of which calls upon the reader to keep the others in mind, and suggests a logic and inevitability to the plot. This in turn creates the effect—however illusory—of an underlying coherence in the entire narrative and in life itself. Although he does not himself use the word chiasmus, Miguel de Unamuno was very much aware of his own tendency to think in terms of reversals, antitheses, and binary oppositions . For example, in an epistolary essay of 1906 he wrote: Más de una vez me has dicho que suelo ver las cosas del espíritu algo a la manera de como si las del mundo material las viésemos en un cinematógrafo cuya cinta corriera al 2 Introduction revés, yendo de lo último a lo primero, o como si a un fonógrafo se le hiciera girar en sentido inverso al normal. Tal vez sea así, y padezca de una enfermedad del sentido del tiempo y el de la consecuencia lógica; pero es lo cierto que, con harta frecuencia, me parece que son las premisas lo que los hombres ponen por conclusiones, y éstas por aquéllas. (3: 876–77)2 A similar self-analysis appears some twenty years later in Cómo se hace una novela, this time with an example of the figure itself: “…nada dura más que lo que se hace en el momento y para el momento. ¿He de repetir mi expresión favorita la eternización de la momentaneidad? Mi gusto innato —¡y tan español!— de las antítesis y del conceptismo me arrastraría a hablar de la momentaneización de la eternidad” (8: 730). Notable here is the fact that the chiastic reversal effects no semantic change and therefore no contradiction whatever in the two phrases, the meaning of which is given by the exclamatory gloss that immediately follows them: “¡Clavar la rueda del tiempo!” Both phrases present a transcendent view of time from the perspective of eternity, a mystical—or poetic—totum simil in which every “before” and every “after” are simultaneously present. Here this meaning is enhanced by the symmetry of the structure itself, and it can often be seen that this is an important effect of the chiasmus: that of overcoming the pure temporal linearity of language by making it refer back to previous moments in its onward flow. The significance of chiasmus in the thought of Unamuno has been recognized in various studies appearing in the final decades of the past century. In one of these (“Estructuras quiásticas”) I treated it in the first instance as a form of wordplay , and went on to comment particularly on its aesthetic effects, as well as on the psychoanalytical implications of some of its uses. Important work has also appeared in two studies by Thomas Mermall on the rhetoric of Unamuno (“Mystical Rhetoric” [1976] and “Master Trope” [1990]), which analyzed his chiasmi both as microstructures and as macrostructures, “extended to encompass the rhetorical design of entire works” (“Master Trope” 248). In the earlier of these, Mermall studied the mystical rhetoric permeating La agonía de cristianismo, touching only indirectly on the chiasmus itself, which “for want 3 Introduction of a better...