Abel Sánchez by Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo

First published:Abel Sanchez: Una historia de pasion, 1917 (English translation, 1947)

Type of work: Psychological fable

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: Somewhere in Spain

Principal Characters:

• Abel Sanchez, a famous painter
• Joaquin Monegro, a physician
• Helena, Abel’s wife
• Antonia, Joaquin’s wife
• Abelin, Abel’s son
• Joaquina, Joaquin’s daughter
• Joaquinito, the son of Abelin and Joaquina

The Novel

Hatred resulting from envy is the consuming passion of which Abel Sanchez is the history. Indeed, because the novel is so dominated by Joaquin Monegro’s envy and hatred of his lifelong acquaintance, Abel, it has often been suggested that hatred is the central character in the work. Moreover, although the novel focuses primarily on Joaquin, it is entitled Abel Sanchez because Joaquin’s identity comes solely from his envy of Abel, thus making Abel the work’s focus.

The narrative is told primarily in the third person, but it is interspersed with sections from Joaquin’s memoirs (or Confession), which serve as his own commentary on what Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo calls Joaquin’s psychological disease or affliction. Since their infancy, Joaquin records, it was always Abel who was the congenial one, while he himself was antipathetic; thus, from the beginning, Joaquin envied him. The bare and understated tone of the novel, as well as its simple and straightforward narrative line, suggests that Unamuno is working with the parable form here, in particular the biblical story of Cain (Jo-Cain) and Abel; thus, because the biblical myth demands it, the story moves relentlessly to an inevitably tragic conclusion.

The difference between the two boyhood friends is made clear when Abel becomes an artist of some repute and Joaquin decides to become a physician in order to rival him in fame. The rift between them becomes most pronounced when Abel marries Joaquin’s cousin, Helena, the woman whom Joaquin desires to wed. Joaquin records that on the night he realized that he could not have Helena, he was born into his life’s hell. From this point on, he is nothing beyond his hatred for Abel. First, he decides to crush Abel’s artistic fame with that of his own as a maker of scientific discoveries, a creator of works of scientific art. He also vows to find a woman of his own with whom he might take refuge from his hatred. Thus he marries Antonia not out of love but out of a need to find a motherly figure to succor him. Antonia marries him because she understands the nature of his obsession and hopes to cure him of it.

The crucial distinction between the two men is ironically emphasized by Abel’s artistic ability, which most see as predominantly technical, even scientific in its approach, and Joaquin’s scientific abilities, which Joaquin sees as basically intuitive, even poetic. Yet Joaquin becomes so involved in his daily medical practice that he neglects his aspirations to make great scientific discoveries. His hatred for Abel is increased when a woman for whom he has been caring dies and he discovers that Abel’s painting of her allows her to live forever. The next stimulus to Joaquin’s engulfing hatred is the birth of Abel and Helena’s child, a boy whom the parents name Abelin, after the father. Joaquin vows that he will have an even more beautiful child.

When Abel proposes to paint the biblical story of the death of Abel at the hands of Cain, Joaquin is compelled to read Lord Byron’s poetic version of the story, Cain, which he says penetrates him to the core. Joaquin realizes that his immortal hatred of Abel constitutes his very soul, and that he is doomed to live in this literal hell forever. When his daughter Joaquina is born, Joaquin vows that she will be his avenger against Abel.

In spite of his hatred, however, Joaquin is the chief eulogizer of Abel at a banquet given to honor the artist’s painting of Cain’s murder of his brother. The speech is so brilliant that those who hear it claim that it is greater than the painting, a work of art in itself, and that it is the speech that makes the painting. Unfortunately, because the speech is about Abel, the praise it receives only increases Joaquin’s hatred.

While the son of Abel studies medicine, Joaquin lavishes all of his attention upon his daughter, who, like her mother before her, realizes that her father is more of a patient than a doctor. When Abelin’s medical studies end, he become Joaquin’s assistant; as Joaquin begins to try to use him to get revenge on Abel, his daughter decides to enter a convent as a way to save her father spiritually. Joaquin, however, convinces her to marry Abelin, for he says he will be redeemed if she will make Abelin his son.

After the marriage, Joaquin turns more and more of his practice over to Abelin, who begins to collect Joaquin’s research notes in order to compile them into a book. At this same time, Joaquin begins to write his Confession, a diary which he addresses to his daughter. He also plans a literary fiction in which he says that he will portray the soul of Abel, whom he is convinced is dominated by the same intense envy from which he suffers. He takes solace in the hope that Abel will be remembered only as a creation of Joaquin; ironically, Joaquin is unaware that he is only a creation of his hatred of Abel.

When Joaquinito, the grandson of both Abel and Joaquin, is born, Joaquin tries to make Abel leave, for he believes that the child loves Abel most. When Abel tells Joaquin that the boy fears the contagion of Joaquin’s bad blood, Joaquin grabs him by the throat and Abel suffers a fatal heart attack. For the next year, Joaquin lives in lonely melancholy, until he becomes ill; without Abel to hate, he no longer has an identity of his own. On his deathbed, he tells his family that his life has been like a nightmare, a living hell. His final recognition is that if he had loved Antonia, he might have been saved.

The Characters

The character of Joaquin dominates the book. All others, even Abel,who gives the work its title, exist only to serve as reflections of or counters to him. Nevertheless, Joaquin is less a realistic character than an embodiment of his own envy and hatred. His monomania, which transforms him into a flat, representative character, is what makes the book into the fable that it is. It is less true to say that Joaquin is mad than to say that he is a symbolic embodiment of the madness of hatred. Even on his deathbed, he asks what has made him so envious, but there is no way to account for what has made him that way, any more than there is to account for the envy and hatred of John Milton’s Satan or William Shakespeare’s Iago. It is the mystery of Original Sin that Unamuno wishes to personify in Joaquin. Abel Sanchez is not a psychological study of an understandable or curable psychic disease, but a symbolic fable about man’s basic disease of hatred. Philosophy, not psychology, is necessary to understand the book.

Because the story is patterned after the biblical story of Cain and Abel, the characters are controlled by the role which they play in the narrative. Abel is the object of Joaquin’s hatred and little else. His being an artist is meant to emphasize the gap between his intuitive self and Joaquin’s coldly rational scientific self. No further psychological implications of these professional roles are explored in the novel. The children in the work, similarly, are merely ironic reflections of their respective fathers. Abel’s son becomes drawn to Joaquin and his medical profession, while Joaquin’s daughter becomes the sensitive and intuitive one concerned for her father’s soul. The wives are also only slightly drawn. Helena is little more than a stimulus for Joaquin’s envy, while Antonia merely plays the role of possible salvation for her husband.

Thesis, not character, is the center of interest in this work, for although he probes a psychological state, Unamuno is primarily interested in exploring a philosophical mystery—the mystery of hatred itself. Consequently, the novel is less realistic than it is allegorical; the characters represent unitary states rather than complex psychological personalities.

Critical Context

Abel Sanchez has been called Unamuno’s first mature and fully realized novel. It is certainly his first starkly symbolic novel, for it is bare of any social or otherwise realistic context; the characters are allowed to stand alone on a stage of purely representative relationships. As such, the work falls into the tradition of the parable. Although the character of Joaquin seems to be thoroughly explored, he is the existential state of hatred brought mythically into the world by his namesake, the biblical Cain.

This short novel, like the other fictional works of Unamuno, is governed by the philosophical ideas which infuse it. The author, often called an early existentialist thinker, is here primarily interested in exploring, as he does in his other fictions, the implications of hatred as a basic human state which alienates the self and creates its own identity. Thus, Abel Sanchez is a thesis novel of some philosophical complexity, created in the period of time between the great poetic parables of the isolated man of the Romantic movement and the fictional depictions of the existential hero of the modern period.

Bibliography

Barcia, Jose Rubia, and M.A. Zeitlin, eds. Unamuno: Creator and Creation, 1967.

Marias, Julian. Miguel de Unamuno, 1966.

Mora, Jose Ferrater. Unamuno: A Philosophy of Tragedy, 1962.

Valdes, Mario J. Death in the Literature of Unamuno, 1966.