Tragic Sense of Life | Page 9

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In the Preface to his _Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un Prólogo_ (1921)
Unamuno says: " ... novelist--that is, poet ... a novel--that is, a poem."
Thus, with characteristic decision, he sides with the lyrical conception
of the novel. There is of course an infinite variety of types of novels.
But they can probably all be reduced to two classes--_i.e._, the
dramatic or objective, and the lyrical or subjective, according to the
mood or inspiration which predominates in them. The present trend of
the world points towards the dramatic or objective type. This type is
more in tune with the detached and scientific character of the age. The
novel is often nowadays considered as a document, a "slice of life," a
piece of information, a literary photograph representing places and
people which purse or time prevents us from seeing with our own eyes.
It is obvious, given what we now know of him, that such a view of the
novel cannot appeal to Unamuno. He is a utilitarian, but not of worldly
utilities. His utilitarianism transcends our daily wants and seeks to
provide for our eternal ones. He is, moreover, a mind whose workings
turn in spiral form towards a central idea and therefore feels an
instinctive antagonism to the dispersive habits of thought and sensation
which such detailed observation of life usually entails. For at bottom
the opposition between the lyrical and the dramatic novel may be
reduced to that between the poet and the dramatist. Both the dramatist
and the poet create in order to link up their soul and the world in one
complete circle of experience, but this circle is travelled in opposite
directions. The poet goes inwards first, then out to nature full of his
inner experience, and back home. The dramatist goes outwards first,

then comes back to himself, his harvest of wisdom gathered in reality.
It is the recognition of his own lyrical inward-looking nature which
makes Unamuno pronounce the identity of the novel and the poem.
Whatever we may think of it as a general theory, there is little doubt
that this opinion is in the main sound in so far as it refers to Unamuno's
own work. His novels are created within. They are--and their author is
the first to declare it so--novels which happen in the kingdom of the
spirit. Outward points of reference in time and space are sparingly
given--in fact, reduced to a bare minimum. In some of them, as for
instance Niebla (1914), the name of the town in which the action takes
place is not given, and such scanty references to the topography and
general features as are supplied would equally apply to any other
provincial town of Spain. Action, in the current sense of the word, is
correspondingly simplified, since the material and local elements on
which it usually exerts itself are schematized, and in their turn made, as
it were, spiritual. Thus a street, a river of colour for some, for others a
series of accurately described shops and dwellings, becomes in
Unamuno (see _Niebla_) a loom where the passions and desires of men
and women cross and recross each other and weave the cloth of daily
life. Even the physical description of characters is reduced to a standard
of utmost simplicity. So that, in fine, Unamuno's novels, by eliminating
all other material, appear, if the boldness of the metaphor be permitted,
as the spiritual skeletons of novels, conflicts between souls.
Nor is this the last stage in his deepening and narrowing of the creative
furrow. For these souls are in their turn concentrated so that the whole
of their vitality burns into one passion. If a somewhat fanciful
comparison from another art may throw any light on this feature of his
work we might say that his characters are to those of Galdós, for
instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony.
Joaquín Monegro, the true hero of his _Abel Sánchez_ (1917), is the
personification of hatred. Raquel in _Dos Madres_[1] and Catalina in
_El Marqués de Lumbría_[1] are two widely different but vigorous,
almost barbarous, "maternities." Alejandro, the hero of his powerful
Nada Menos que Todo un Hombre,[3] is masculine will, pure and
unconquerable, save by death. Further still, in most if not all of his

main characters, we can trace the dominant passion which is their
whole being to a mere variety of the one and only passion which
obsesses Unamuno himself, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after.
Here is, for instance, _Abel Sánchez_, a sombre study of hatred, a
modern paraphrase of the story of Cain. Joaquín Monegro, the Cain of
the novel, has been reading Byron's poem, and writes in his diary: "It
was when I read how Lucifer declared to Cain that he,