The only virtue that Don Miguel de Unamuno did not have was humor, he lacked it completely. In a man who wrote one of the most original essays on the life of Don Quijote and Sancho it may be strange, but not: humor was a thing of Cervantes rather than of Don Quijote, and Unamuno always believed more in Don Quijote than in Cervantes, to which life was spent (genius and figure) amending the flat. Was Unamuno right? In this I think not, because neither Don Quijote nor Sancho are conceivable without the gaze, humanity and humor of Cervantes. Don Quijote might not have it, but Cervantes endowed him with that comic comic very similar to Buster Keaton's , which is hilarious as soon as his equine face appears on the screen. This was the case with Don Quixote and his outlandish trace: there was no corner of the world where his only mention or his sad figure did not move to the joy of the people.
Removing this small line, one sees only Unamuno, colossal literary and human virtues . No one in Spain could be compared in his time, and that being the second golden century of Spanish literature is portentous. And in Europe the same, rubbing shoulders with the most influential thinkers, from Bergson to Croce, from Russell to Husserl. A novel like Niebla may not be superior to those of Valle-Inclán or Baroja, but it is not inferior to the best of each of them, and we would say the same about Unamuno's poems in relation to those of Darío, Machado or Juan Ramón Jiménez. His travel books are up to those of Azorín and we read his essays with as much or greater benefit than those of Ortega, which he surpassed in the very conception of philosophy as the Nietzschean alliance of thought and poetry (to Ortega we would say that hindered poetry when he philosophized, or to be more exact, that when he was unable to reach it, he tried to conceal such lack by taking hold of his high-flying cursilery, "poetic dizque", so characteristic of his prose and without diminishing its value ).
Of his newspaper articles, thousands and writings over fifty years, it can only be said that many of them were the lungs of Spain, through which the best of this country could breathe and stay alive in black times of its history , when he didn't sleep soundly in the middle of very long and dangerous apnea. Spanish readers, and many Latin Americans, as Unamuno's articles were searched in both parts of the ocean, knew that his article was found that morning in the newspaper (and not only in a newspaper, but often in several, because of all of them he needed to think and pay the coal bill) he was going to put the best of himself inside his head and do it at full speed: so much to discuss (almost always: with Unamuno it is normal to discuss, which is not It means, by no means, not to agree with him, but to complete it, just as he believed that his observations on Don Quixote or his dissensions with Cervantes completed them both), both to discuss, say, and to get the best of ourselves from the "deep of our soul" (his expression). Yes, there is no one whom Unamuno's reading leaves indifferent . Of course, you have to read it.
From what one has been seeing throughout these years, with Unamuno there is a completely extravagant fact: people who have not read it at all, or have read it in the past or very briefly, have a firm idea of it and armored However, the opposite happens to me. Except for his plays, which I have never read or seen, he prides himself on knowing his poems, novels, essays and articles quite well, of these some lighter and others less, as well as hundreds of letters and interviews, and each Once I reread something about him, I admit: "It's better, much better than I remembered . " Even when one finds in this or that passage something in which time has taken his reason or become old, it always seems to me that the beginning, the nucleus, the origin of this or that idea is of formidable originality and strength. To read Unamuno is to attend the birth of a fact and its development.
In other words, Unamuno is either taken or left, or likes in general or produces rejection , almost always in an emotional way.
There is probably no one of such complexity in the whole history of Spanish literature and at the same time of such naturalness. The complexity expressed it in the form of paradoxes. Already in his time he was accused of it, of being too contradictory and extravagant and never knowing where he was going to leave. He justified himself and said, very Cervantine in that and fighting against his conceptualist temperament , that if a thinker does not lose by letter of more, he will never gain anything. And that's what paradoxes do, force the play. He was exposed to it, of course, to be misunderstood (as when he wrote that "invent them", in which some encrypted Spanish energy or cerrilism), or to be shot (as the day he uttered another of his most remembered phrases, "You will win but you will not convince", in the paraninfo of the University of Salamanca, in front of Millán Astray, in October of the year 36, in a gesture of courage that would have deserved three laureates of San Fernando).
That love for puns (he would have said for the "juices" of the language, taking advantage of his mother's last name, Juice) is baroque and conceptualist, but what Juan Ramón said was that the naturalness in a temperament Baroque is baroque. We see it in his way of writing and thinking, following the thread, without stopping, letting go, like the one who crosses a stream jumping from stone to stone on the stream.
We notice, from time to time, that Unamuno badly supports an argument or an idea, and puts his foot (I would not dare to say the leg) in the water, but that stumbling block does not stop him and he continues to decide the path laid, until he reaches the other side. Because Unamuno spent his life crossing rivers, and getting into puddles. A large puddle was, for example, to remain practically alone in his fight against the dictator Primo de Rivera, who banished him to the island of Fuerteventura, from which he eventually escaped to start an exile in France that ended the advent of the Republic . And puddles were the successive disagreements with the republican authorities, first, and with the Francoists later, during the war.
The grace of Unamuno is not that he thought of a thousand matters , small and large (I say, he had to write a lot because he had many mouths to feed, but not only for this), but that he did it from always unusual, unique places, presenting us reality as we would never have imagined that it could be looked at.
All this caused infinite inconveniences and dislikes, and he spent his life from pendency to penance. Unamuno theorized much about the struggle, the agony, and spoke of it as the engine of the human being , in particular, and of the people in general, and some years before the civil war he asked for one for Spain, convinced that he would shake a Little national drowsiness and purify the environment. Then the real one came, and he was as scared as everyone (starting with his own family and two children each fighting on opposite sides).
I admire more and more the way in which he carried out his monumental work , working not only as a professor of Greek (he could not take the chair of philosophy, which was the one he intended), but as rector, writing, as I said , piecewise in the newspapers, attending his correspondence (about fifty thousand are the letters he wrote, some extensive as an article), attending to his political activism (which went through attendance at rallies, conferences, manifestos, sessions in the town hall or in the constituent courts), and carrying out all its enormous literary work.
And the manifest and supreme paradox: in the midst of that life run over, noisy, epic, tragic in some sections of it, he managed to carry within himself a silent corner, protected from everything, where he managed to isolate himself and write his poetry, eminently lyrical, and to which he gave the greatest importance. When we review his poetic Diary , written in the last ten years of his life , more than one thousand seven hundred compositions dated, we are amazed to see the great strength of that flow. I don't know how to look out of the mouth of a volcano that flows without destroying a beneficial lava.
To that facility and to his capacity for work, even to the naturalness with which his enormous talent was shown, they had them, as it could not be less in Spain, for an inconvenience or a limitation and not an unusual virtue. If Baroja was compared with Valle Inclán, or Machado with Juan Ramón, for example, to show our preference for one or the other, Unamuno is not usually compared to anyone, only with himself and to the detriment of himself, as if All of these Unamuno (the poet, the novelist, the columnist, the essayist, the politician, the teacher) could only keep one to the detriment of another. That explains the general consensus that has been reached, that they take into account the Unamuno thinker about everyone else, as if there was no thought in his poems or novels, and, of course, forgiving him a little life.
It is true that Unamuno, "getting in" with all the human and the divine, and especially with so many humans who go from divine, gave rise to getting into him and his work, taking from the character the only thing that is within reach of the dumbest, which is impertinence. And all instead of admitting once and for all that we have in Unamuno five or six writers of the first order, capable of constituting by itself a whole century of gold. Contrary to what has been believed, Unamuno was not a man who had a higher concept of himself than he had. He too, like Don Quixote, could have said: "I know who I am." "The genius is the one who becomes the voice of a people: the genius is an individualized people," he wrote, and of course he did not think about it, because he did not need it. But I do, and for me Unamuno is the best of that people, whatever people want to understand.
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