Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo

Spanish writer and philosopher

• Born: September 29, 1864
• Birthplace: Bilbao, Spain
• Died: December 31, 1936
• Place of death: Salamanca, Spain

One of the outstanding Spanish men of letters of the twentieth century, Unamuno wrote everything from poetry and novels to philosophy, drama, and cultural criticism. He served the cause of Spanish republicanism, was a key figure in the expression of the existentialist tension between reason and faith, and influenced two generations of Spanish students at the University of Salamanca.

Early Life

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (mee-GEHL ew-nah-MEW-noh ee HEW-goh) was the first son and third of the six children of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé de Jugo. His father had gone to Mexico as a young man, accumulated some money, and then returned to marry his much younger niece, Salomé. He had also acquired several hundred books on philosophy, history, and the physical and social sciences, which helped form his son’s mind. From an early age, death preoccupied Miguel. His father, two of Miguel’s sisters, and a school friend died by 1873, producing fear in the young boy. Unamuno’s struggle to accept his own mortality became one of the major themes of his religious, philosophical, and literary work.

Unamuno completed a traditional, Roman Catholic secondary education at age sixteen and then was enrolled in the Central University of Madrid, torn between his love for his childhood sweetheart, Concepción “Concha” Lizárraga, and a mystical belief that God wanted him to become a priest. Fascinated with language since listening to his father talk with a Frenchman in French, Unamuno wrote his doctoral dissertation on the origins and prehistory of the Basque race. In Madrid he applied reason to his religious faith and lost it. He struggled for the remainder of his life to overcome his doubt. After receiving his doctorate in 1884, he returned to Bilbao, competed for a university teaching position, taught private classes, and wrote for local periodicals. Impatient to wait until securing a permanent teaching position, he married Concha on January 31, 1891, and, under the influence of his wife and his mother, began religious observance again. In 1891, he also won a competition for the chair in Greek language and literature at the University of Salamanca.

Life’s Work

In the provincial university town of twenty-three thousand, with the faded glory of its medieval university and magnificent, café-lined central plaza, Unamuno found the tranquillity to read voraciously and widely, ponder the human condition, write insatiably, and rear his family. However, he soon lost interest in teaching Greek: given the desperate problems facing Spain, he decided that the nation really did not need more Hellenists. Although he conscientiously met his pedagogical responsibilities, Unamuno devoted the rest of his time to writing novels, poetry, and essays intended to illuminate the solution to Spain’s problems and his own concerns about humankind’s condition. He also associated himself with Spanish socialism, believing it offered people their best hope of liberty through a religion of humanity, but refused to join the party. In fact, his interest in socialism was primarily religious and ethical; Unamuno’s heart was anarchist.

Transcendental questions troubled Unamuno. In 1896, Raimundo Jenaro, the third of his nine children, was born, but shortly after birth the infant contracted meningitis, which produced fatal encephalitis, although the child lingered until 1902. His child’s condition agonized Unamuno. Why was God punishing an innocent child? Was it because of Unamuno’s own sins, perhaps for having abandoned his Catholic faith? He was desperate for consolation, spent days in meditation and prayer, yet remained anguished. God did not answer, and Unamuno was obsessed with suicide and beset with angina, insomnia, and depression. Not only was reason unable to bring him to a knowledge of God, but it told him that God did not exist, that death brought the finality of nothingness. Yet Unamuno’s despair at the inevitability of death forced him to hope and led him to the paradoxical solution of creating God for himself through his own faith. When he began reading the works of S ren Kierkegaard in 1900, he discovered a kindred being, although Unamuno had already developed the fundamentals of his own thought.

Meanwhile, Unamuno poured forth articles for Spanish and Latin American periodicals plus novels, plays, and criticism to supplement his meager academic salary. In 1895, he published a series of essays, later reedited as En torno al casticismo, which urged a return to the bedrock of tradition, to the study of the Spanish people, as the first step in confronting the nation’s decadence. Paz en la guerra (1897; Peace in War , 1983), sometimes called the first existentialist novel, reflected his experiences during the Carlist siege of Bilbao (1874-1876). Two plays, La esfinge (1898) and La venda (1899), and an analysis of Spanish higher education, De la enseñanza superior en España (1899), soon followed, as did Nicodemo el fariseo (1899), which used Saint John’s account of Nicodemus’s meeting with Christ as a dramatic vehicle for stating the basic theme of all his remaining work: man’s desire for God and his existential will to believe.

In 1900, Unamuno became rector of the university, despite opposition from conservatives who disliked the outsider from Bilbao for his socialist rhetoric and his unorthodox religious views. On taking office, he appointed himself to a new chair of the history of the Spanish language, declared that Spain was ready to be discovered, and urged that the students study popular culture. Dressed idiosyncratically in his “uniform,” he appeared a cross between a Protestant minister and an owl; he wore a dark suit, with vest and white shirt buttoned to the top, but no tie, and metal-rimmed eyeglasses, and had an aquiline nose and a closely cropped and pointed graying beard.

Unamuno energetically joined in the campaign of the Generation of 1898 to renew Spain following the loss of its last overseas colonies in 1898. However, while others called for Spain to emulate the science, technology, and democracy of northern Europe and the United States, Unamuno rejected mass society and focused on the potential of the individual. His essays entitled La Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905; The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho , 1927) he considered genuine Spanish philosophy. Subjectively choosing parts of Cervantes’ novel and ignoring relevant scholarship, Unamuno resurrected Quixote in his own image, a person who re-created the world around him through his own will to believe. Although some Spanish republicans looked to Unamuno to lead, or at least to participate in a revolution against the decadent monarchy, he opposed all revolution except in the individual heart. He found José Ortega y Gasset and other Spanish intellectuals too enamored of modern science and declared that Spain should let the northern Europeans invent and then apply their inventions.

Unamuno’s religious thought received its fullest expression in Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos (1913; The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples , 1921). Then, in 1914, the government unexpectedly and without explanation removed him as rector. Liberals and socialists supported him in the ensuing controversy. During World War I, he supported the Allied powers. His novel Abel Sánchez: Una historia de pasión (1917; Abel Sánchez , 1947) portrayed Cain as Abel’s victim and questioned why God accepted the latter’s smug offerings while rejecting those of his brother. In his powerful El Cristo de Velásquez (1920; The Christ of Velázquez , 1951), art and spiritual longing seek in Christ the possibility of redemption from death, while Unamuno eschews all dogma and cult.

For publishing in Valencia an article critical of the monarchy, a court there condemned Unamuno in 1920 to sixteen years’ imprisonment. At the same time he was presented in both Bilbao and Madrid as a candidate for the national parliament but refused to campaign and was not elected. With his sentence under appeal, the faculty at Salamanca elected him vice-rector in 1922. Then, to the dismay of his supporters, he agreed to meet with the king, leading to criticism that he was self-serving and only wanted the rectorship. While awaiting appeal of his sentence, he took care to avoid offending the monarchy but became convinced that Spain was headed for dictatorship. Time bore out his forebodings, and General Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power with the connivance of Alfonso XIII. In early 1924, Primo de Rivera exiled Unamuno to the Canary Islands, stripping him of his salary and positions at Salamanca despite national and international protests. At Fuerteventura, Unamuno planned with some French friends to escape, but Primo de Rivera granted him amnesty, although subjecting him to certain restrictions on his return. Unamuno refused to return and went into voluntary exile in France to wait for the fall of the dictatorship.

Unamuno passed the years of exile, first in Paris and then in Hendaye along the Basque border. They were years of despair and loneliness, since he refused to let members of his family take turns living with him, wanting his exile to be a moral protest. While in Paris, he published L’Agonie du christianisme (1925; The Agony of Christianity , 1928), a difficult but intense and poetical restatement of his anguish caused by loving an unreachable God, from which torment the only respite was death. With Primo de Rivera’s fall, Unamuno reentered Spain on February 9, 1930, and returned to Salamanca. Faculty, students, and workers demanded his reinstatement as rector. His greatest novel, San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1933; Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr , 1956), soon appeared. It tells the story of a priest who loses his faith but assumes the ethical obligation of protecting his parishioners from disbelief by setting an example of saintliness, teaching them to pray, and consoling himself by consoling them.

With the abdication of Alfonso XIII, Spain became a republic on April 14, 1931, and the municipal government of Salamanca named Unamuno an honorary magistrate for his role in the triumph of republicanism. The university cloister also appointed him rector, and some rumored that Unamuno wanted to be president of Spain. On April 27, the republic designated him president of the Council of Public Instruction, and Salamanca elected him as one of its representatives to the constituent assembly. In its deliberations Unamuno rarely participated except to stress unity, hoping to ward off regionalism. Increasingly disturbed by the factionalism and the anti- or irreligious stance of the leftists, he became openly critical of the republic, refused to be a candidate in the 1933 elections, and resigned from the Council of Public Instruction. Adding to his despondency were the deaths of his wife and eldest daughter in 1934. He retired from his university chair that September at age seventy, but the president of Spain decreed Unamuno rector of Salamanca for life and created a special chair in his name for him. The following year the republic named him a citizen of honor, and in 1936 the University of Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate.

After the outbreak of the civil war in July, 1936, the government removed Unamuno as rector because of his criticism of the republic. The Nationalists, however, soon captured Salamanca and rewarded Unamuno’s support by reappointing him rector. However, Unamuno had come to see the war as national insanity. In a ceremony on October 12 attended by faculty, some Nationalist military leaders, and townspeople, he courageously denounced the speech of a general who had exalted anti-intellectualism and death. Confined to his home for his protest, Unamuno died on December 31, 1936.

Significance

Paradoxical and prickly, egocentric and sincere, Unamuno y Jugo inevitably generated controversy. In his fiction and poetry, he sacrificed art to philosophical concerns, especially his religious despair and struggle for faith. However, to Rubén Darío, the great Latin American poet, Unamuno was first and foremost a poet himself. His philosophy was not systematic and careful, and his assertions were sometimes outlandish and exaggerated. Scholars and critics even disagree regarding Unamuno’s religious views, some arguing that he was an atheist and others that his belief was sincere. Certainly he constituted a thorny problem for Spanish Catholicism, which eventually banned several of his works.

Through the paradox, the self-preoccupation, and the rant, however, Unamuno’s energy, determination, despair, and hope are unmistakable. The volume of his work was tremendous, and its breadth and weight placed him in the vanguard of Spanish intellectual life. With Kierkegaard and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, he laid out the existentialist dilemma, preparing the way for Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He loved Spain deeply, despite its flaws, and became a sort of Quixote himself, tilting at transcendental windmills and giants that few had the courage or will to perceive.

Bibliography

Ellis, Robert R. The Tragic Pursuit of Being: Unamuno and Sartre. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988. A short comparison of the existentialism of Unamuno and Sartre.

Evans, Jan E. Unamuno and Kierkegaard: Paths to Selfhood in Fiction. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. Examines how Unamuno was influenced by the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard. Analyzes three of Unamuno’s novels from the perspective of Kierkegaardian philosophy.

Ferrater Mora, José. Unamuno: A Philosophy of Tragedy. Translated by Philip Silver. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. An excellent, brief survey of Unamuno’s philosophy.

Franz, Thomas R. Unamuno’s Paratexts: Twisted Guides to Contorted Narratives. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006. Analyzes Unamuno’s novels and novellas to examine how he integrated paratextual material, such as epigraphs, prefaces, and notes, into his narrative.

Ilie, Paul. Unamuno: An Existential View of Self and Society. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Considers Unamuno’s contributions to existentialism in relation to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre.

Marías, Julían. Miguel de Unamuno. Translated by Frances M. López-Morillas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942. Old but insightful, this work analyzes Unamuno’s contribution to philosophy, with occasional biographical references.

Nozick, Martin. Miguel de Unamuno. New York: Twayne, 1971. Together with a short biography, this work is an analysis of Unamuno’s thought and an evaluation of his literary art. Contains a good bibliography.

Olson, Paul R. The Great Chiasmus: World and Flesh in the Novels of Unamuno. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2003. Examines Unamuno’s fiction to analyze his use of the chiasmus, a reversal in the order of words or parts of speech in parallel phrases.

Rudd, Margaret Thomas. The Lone Heretic: A Biography of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963. The most thorough biography in English but problematic in some of its details and interpretations.