Unamuno, Epistolarity, and the Rhetoric of Transatlantic Hispanism

El primer beneficio, la primera claridad de una carta es para el que la escribe, y él es el primer enterado de lo que quiere decir por ser él el primero a quién se lo dice. Surge de entre los renglones su propio reflejo, el doble inequívoco de un momento de su vida interior.

(Pedro Salinas, "Defensa de la carta misiva y la correspondencia epistolar" 35)

Twelve years after the loss of Spain's last American colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Miguel de Unamuno wrote in a letter to Chilean poet Ernesto Guzmán that "ahora lo que es cierto es que nuestro yo, el propio nuestro, lo descubrimos al contacto de otros yos" (Epistolario americano 350). This general statement could summarize Unamuno's approach to the intricacies of individual subjectivity and the dilemmas of national identity in post-colonial Spain. The vexing relationship between self and other permeates Unamuno's interest in the mysteries of personality as much as his concern with the national self, especially at a time when Spain was experiencing "una de las más graves crisis de su existencia política y vida espiritual" and needed to open up to Europe and its former colonies to rediscover itself (Epistolario americano 351). However, the opening quote can also be read as a succinct comment on the form that frames the Spanish writer's words, namely a letter. Indeed, a fundamental function of epistolary writing is to express a reciprocal relationship between self and other—between the letter writer and the addressee—while at the same time overcoming absence, separation, and loss and providing a privileged medium for self-knowledge and self-discovery.

Unamuno expressed on various occasions his preference for the private letter as an adequate instrument to convey his ideas. He claimed that his thoughts would often occur to him while writing letters: "es a las cartas a las que debo muchos de mis más fecundos pensamientos" (7: 987).¹ But besides giving shape to his opinions and beliefs, epistolary writing offers a model for analyzing his persistent search for authentic individual and collective identities in the face of national decline.² For Unamuno, the personal letter becomes an instrument to transcend the party politics of the nation and open up a space where a cohesive collectivity can develop. He skillfully ignored the divisive potential of the letter as document—as Jacques Derrida put it, "the letter is immediately dispersed or multiplied, a divisive echo of itself" (79)—and underlined its unifying qualities instead. As the Spanish philosopher claimed in a series of articles entitled "Cartas a los Amigos"—published during the early 1930s in the Madrid newspaper Ahora—the sense of community that stems from epistolary exchange awakens "la conciencia civil de nuestro pueblo" and opposes "la política de cine y radio" (7: 1070)—that is, the sort of alienating political propaganda aimed at winning massive popular support. It is the intimate and spontaneous tone of the letter that lays the foundation for a renewed principle of social organization unmediated by inauthentic formulas.

I will argue here that the illusion of direct communication associated with epistolary writing helped Unamuno present national identity and its projection as a common Hispanic culture beyond the peninsula's borders as something natural or given (as opposed to constructed or artificial). Epistolarity—that is, the capacity of "the letter's formal properties to create meaning" (Janet Altman 4)—allowed the Spanish author to hide the discursive construction of national and transatlantic "imagined communities," to use Benedict Anderson's often-quoted term. The apparent disavowal of rhetoric that characterizes the personal letter becomes thus a device for creating a sense of community above man-made rules and laws as well as centuries of Spanish colonial control in America. As I shall discuss, Unamuno's conception of transatlantic Hispanism negotiates the political contradictions between Spain and its former colonies in order to palliate national degeneration and maintain the hegemony of the metropolitan culture across the Atlantic.³ However, I suggest that the function and formal properties of the letter...