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  • Los espejos del yo: Existencialismo y metaficción en la narrativa de Unamuno by Luis Álvarez-Castro
  • Brian J. Cope
Álvarez-Castro, Luis. Los espejos del yo: Existencialismo y metaficción en la narrativa de Unamuno. Salamanca: U of Salamanca P, 2015. Pp. 265. ISBN 978-1-58871-163-2.

Los espejos del yo: Existencialismo y metaficción en la narrativa de Unamuno examines an interrelated cross section of Unamuno's literary production through the lens of reader-response theory and is the author's second monograph on Unamuno. In effect, the study explores the place of the reader in the hermeneutical labyrinths constructed by Unamuno in six key works: Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, Niebla, Abel Sánchez, Cómo se hace una novela, Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez, and San Manuel Bueno, mártir.

In the introduction, Álvarez-Castro establishes the study's general focus on the relationship between author, text, and reader. The critical framework that he builds seamlessly integrates the relatively scant but valuable criticism that has examined the role of the reader in Unamuno's novels from a reader-response perspective. One noteworthy strength of the study, in fact, is the way that it develops in careful dialogue with the scholarly criticism in general. Another is the way that it brings to light a profitable connection between two incongruent lines of inquiry in the scholarship on Unamuno: metafiction and existentialism. Álvarez-Castro acknowledges that, individually, these lines have received ample attention, and he makes a persuasive case for seeing in reader-response theory a generative space for examining their interconnectedness.

In chapter 1, Álvarez-Castro recounts Unamuno's interest in Herostratus, the fourth century BCE arsonist who destroyed the Temple of Artemis hoping to acquire everlasting fame. Herein lies the root of Álvarez-Castro's critical inquiry: to understand the ways in which Unamuno's profound desire to achieve immortality through his writing left an indelible mark on his literary production in terms of structure, style, and theme. The bulk of this chapter offers an enlightening critique of Unamuno's professed motivation for writing. In the process, it highlights a salient contradiction in Unamuno's aesthetic outlook. On the one hand, Unamuno asserts his own autonomy as reader, but on the other, he pioneers a metafictional approach that, beginning with Niebla, essentially predetermines the reader's inferential interpretation of his novels' storylines. One strength of this chapter is the way that Álvarez-Castro uses theorists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to provide perspective on Unamuno's obsession with achieving [End Page 681] immortality through literature. Another is the exposition of the original and evocative concept of "chantaje existencial."

Chapter 2 examines Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho as the theoretical cocoon from which gestate Unamuno's heterodox ideas on literature and the role of the reader as co-creator of the text's meaning. The subjective commentary on the existential themes that Unamuno crafts as he reads Cervantes's masterpiece attests to his view of literature as a phenomenological experience that flouts the commonplace assumption of the text as a vessel containing the author's meaning. Unamuno's style of metafiction that arises in Niebla and evolves thereafter in subsequent works shares Cervantes's knack to place the burden of understanding on the reader but also exhibits originality in how it prefigures the reader's reception of the story.

In chapter 3, Álvarez-Castro examines the ambiguity surrounding Augusto Pérez's demise in Niebla and alleges that the reader is made to play a game of existential extortion ("chantaje existencial") by virtue of the metafictional structure of the text. By participating in the extortion, the reader receives a payoff of sorts—existential validation—and, in the process, becomes the vehicle through which Unamuno's desire to perpetuate his own existence is fulfilled. Although at times very insightful, Álvarez-Castro's argument is premised on an unsupported assumption of the reader's cognitive dissonance and is unduly reductive in scope.

In chapter 4, Álvarez-Castro argues that through metafiction Unamuno successfully situates the reader not as the recipient but rather as the originator of the text's truth. His reading of...

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