SPA3: Miguel de Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir
Lecture Notes by Dr Rosemary Clark
Unamuno’s second last novel, San Manuel Bueno, mártir, was published in 1931. In that year, the Spanish King abdicated and fled the country after a sweeping republican victory in General Elections had made it glaringly obvious that the Spanish people were utterly disillusioned with monarchy and with the military dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, who had effectively governed for the last seven years, since 1923. By 1937 another dictator with an even more iron hand than Primo de Rivera – Francisco Franco Bahamonde – would take and hold power for almost forty years. In between lie the six startling, revolutionary years of the Second Republic leading to civil war in 1936. The willingness of many Spaniards to submit to Franco may well have been a panic-stricken response to the chaos and violence of those intervening years – chaos and violence that were spiralling even as Unamuno wrote this brief and startling novel.
Conditions in Spain had been worsening for a long time – arguably three centuries – but its slow decline had speeded up over the 19th century, marked by civil wars and abortive coups, by demands for a constitution to control an incompetent monarchy and politicians, by the French invasion, wars in Morocco and – most cataclysmic of all – the loss of an overseas empire that had once provided jobs abroad and provided a market for industry at home. The Mexican Revolution in 1810 had started a process that culminated in the loss of Spain’s last vestiges of empire in 1898. Unamuno was a member of what came to be known as the Generation of 1898: writers of all kinds who charted and questioned and sought to understand and explain their country’s disastrous fall from greatness. By the 19th century, in France, Britain and Germany industry not agriculture was where money was to be made. In Spain there was ship-building in Galicia, mines and steel mills in the Basque Country and textile mills in Barcelona, while railways were facilitating the drift of population from the country to the town. Spain’s industrial revolution had happened late and was patchy, but urban slums soon matched the rural poverty of landless labourers in the poor south – and centre... and north.
At the same time, the nineteenth century had seen new ideas sweeping away old certainties. The scientific work of Darwin, Lamark and others had revealed in the human race an animal heritage: were we Sons of God or the latest in a line of monkeys? Physiologists and neurologists were opening up the human body and head, scanning its secrets and finding no soul but only organs and grey matter. The new science of psychology was trying a different approach, studying the behaviour of hysterics, phobics, obsessives and in Vienna Freud was already working as a clinical psychoanalyst. New kinds of knowledge were challenging the old and making the world a more frightening place for some.
It was tempting to look back beyond recent disaster to what seemed to the nostalgic a more glorious past: on the one hand, to Spain’s rich medieval pluralistic culture, the glorious Christian Reconquest of the peninsula and the centuries of Empire; on the other hand, to the imagined peace of a rural existence – working on the land, in small communities, with traditional values. The first-person narrative of one of the inhabitants, Ángela Carballino, voices how many Spaniards still feel today about their pueblo or their patria chica, to which they return from the anonymity of the city to the family house and their roots. Ángela Carballino’s father had come to the village a generation before, married a local girl and never left. Angela went away to the town for her schooling but likewise came back. Her brother Lázaro has spent years in America, making his fortune, and he comes back. Even the priest is from the village (Q1):
Decíase que había entrado en el seminario para hacerse cura, con el fin de atender a los hijos de una su hermana recién viuda, de servirles de padre; que en el seminario se había distinguido por su agudeza mental y su talento y que había rechazado ofertas de brillante carrera eclesiástica porque él no quería ser sino de su Valverde de Lucerna, de su aldea perdida como un broche entre el lago y la montaña que se mira en él. (SMBM 16)
This idyllic image is in fact far from the reality of much of Spain’s barren, rocky, uncultivable landscape, yet it would seem at first to offer a 1930s reader is a comforting reaffirmation of traditional values of family responsibility, self-sacrificial service to others, and the stability of a society rooted in Spain’s old village communities and regions – so unlike the frightening reality of rural poverty, the drift of desperate peasants towards urban slums and communities already fragmenting into political factions and resorting to violence. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had reinforced the grim message of the French Revolution just over a century before: violence could rid a people of incompetent rulers and turn society upside down. WW1 had shown death on a scale never seen before – or captured so brutally, thanks to the new technologies of photography. The English poet Yeates’s words on the front of your handout capture the sense that the world was spinning out of control:
The falcon cannot bear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
W.B. Yeates: ‘The Second Coming’
San Manuel Bueno, mártir begins with what might at first seem like comforting old certainties: a traditional rural Spain of a village community under the benevolent patriarchal leadership of a saintly Catholic priest. Set amidst the natural splendour of Spain’s dramatic terrain of mountains and lakes, there is the village charmingly called Valverde – green valley – de Lucerna – suggesting light (luz), or the morning/evening star (lucero). Here, children are baptised and prepared for their first communion, the mass – that commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice of his own life to save the world from the consequences of its sin – is celebrated regularly, and the Church – in the saintly person of Manuel Bueno – cares for its flock in sickness and health from the cradle to the grave, even for Blasillo el bobo. But what about beyond the grave, as is the Christian hope? Well, there’s the question.
At the heart of this little Paradise, there is a serious flaw. The saintly priest is not filled with calm trust in a sovereign God, but in anguish and mental torment. In the Good Friday mass, which not only celebrates Christ’s death but looks forward to his rising again to new life on Easter Day – his triumphal resurrection – the earth itself seems to be moved by the depth of emotion of the priest and congregation. Yet, instead of the message of sins forgiven and new life, the priest’s identification with Christ at the moment of darkest agony on the cross, just before death, makes even his spiritual daughter Ángela want to comfort him as a mother comforts her child. He can move his flock to tears, but his own anguish reeks of despair (Q2):
Su maravilla era la voz, una voz divina, que hacía llorar. Cuando al oficiar en la misa mayor o solemne entonaba el prefacio, estremecíase la iglesia y todos los que le oían sentíanse conmovidos en sus entrañas. Su canto, saliendo del templo, iba a quedarse dormido sobre el lago y al pie de la montaña. Y cuando en el sermón de Viernes Santo clamaba aquello de: ‘¡Dios mío, Dios mío?, ¿por qué me has abandonado?’, pasaba por el pueblo todo un temblor hondo como por sobre las aguas del lago en días de cierzo de hostigo. Y era como si oyesen a Nuestro Señor Jesucristo mismo, como si la voz brotara de aquel crucifijo viejo a cuyos pies tantas generaciones de madres habían depositado sus congojas. Como que una vez, al oírle su madre, la de don Manuel, no pudo contenerse, y desde el suelo del templo, en que se sentaba, gritó: ‘¡Hijo mío!’. Y fue un chaparrón de lágrimas entre todos. Creeríase que el grito maternal habría brotado de aquella Dolorosa – el corazón traspasado por siete espadas – que había en una de las capillas del templo. (SMBM 18)
To identify so closely with Christ would be an impressive sign of sanctity, but the Christian story tells of resurrection, and here Manuel Bueno’s anguish starts (Q3):
En el pueblo todos acudían a misa, aunque sólo fuese por oírle y por verle en el altar, donde parecía transfigurarse, encendiéndosele el rostro. Había un santo ejercicio que introdujo en el culto popular y es que, reuniendo en el templo a todo el pueblo, hombres y mujeres, viejos y niños, unas mil personas, recitábamos al unísono, en una sola voz, el Credo: “Creo en Dios Todopoderoso, Creador del Cielo y de la Tierra...” y lo que sigue. Y no era un coro, sino una sola voz, una voz simple y unida, fundidas todas en una y haciendo como una montaña, cuya cumbre perdida a las veces en nubes, era don Manuel. Y al llegar a lo de “creo en la resurrección de la carne y la vida perdurable” la voz de don Manuel se zambullía, como en un lago, en la del pueblo todo, y era que él se callaba. (SMBM 19)
What results is a curious inversion of the traditional relationship between priest and parishioner (Qs4):
aquel más que respeto miedo, con que me acerqué a él, trocóse en una lástima profunda. Era yo entonces una mocita, una niña casi; pero empezaba a ser mujer, sentía en mis entrañas el jugo de la maternidad, y al encontrarme en el confesionario junto al santo varón, sentí como una callada confesión suya en el susurro sumisa de su voz y recordé cómo cuando, al clamar él en la iglesia las palabras de Jesucristo: “¡Dios mío, Dios mío!, ¿por qué me has abandonado?”, su madre, la de don Manuel, respondió desde el suelo: “¡Hijo mío!”, y oí ese grito que desgarraba la quietud del templo. Y volví a confesarme con él para consolarle. (SMBM 26; my emphasis)
Ángela adds: Empezaba yo a sentir una especie de afecto maternal hacia mi padre espiritual. (SMBM 28) Remember that the Catholic Church has not yet admitted women priests today, yet in the inverted world of San Manuel Bueno, mártir, Ángela takes a priestly function in relation to the despairing priest (Q5):
no sé ya lo que me digo; no sé ya lo que me digo desde que estoy confesándome contigo. Y sí, sí, hay que vivir, hay que vivir [...] Y ahora, Angelina, en nombre del pueblo, ¿me absuelves?
Me sentí como penetrada de un misterioso sacerdocio y dije:
–En nombre de Dios Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo, le absuelvo, padre.
Y salimos de la iglesia, y al salir se me estremecían las entrañas maternales. (SMBM 38; my emphasis)
Manuel Bueno’s death is not explained by any medical complaint, or by age, but as a wearing out of an exhausted body and a mind that has struggled throughout with the temptation of suicide. What we have here, is surely not belief and hope but doubt and despair. Yet given the evident integrity in unfeigned anguish of the work’s protagonist, it would clearly be simplistic to suggest that what Unamuno is writing about is religious hypocrisy, so what is he doing?
Unamuno the philologist engages in subtle games with words and their ambiguities in order systematically to undermine any illusion that language might be clear and certain. Consider the epigraph at the start of the novel (Q6):
Si solo en esta vida esperamos en Cristo, somos los más miserables de los hombres todos. San Pablo: 1 Cor., XV, 19.
For the Christian who believes that Christ rose from the dead the message is one of joyful hope: Of course we shall see him in the next life! But for those who do not believe in the resurrection, the message is: Those who have been deluded into belief are in a fools’ paradise and their awakening will be catastrophic. The quotation can be read either way, so: we are dealing with a text playing on ambiguity, and much of that ambiguity is generated by its narrative structure: it is the account given of the man’s life and death by one intimately involved in the person and the events: Ángela Carballino. There is never, at any stage, any question of independent objectivity – any more than there is in the four gospels written by some of Christ’s early followers.
The priest – who is one of the people from the village and not an outsider – ‘nuestro san Manuel Bueno’ – is kind and does good, but is he a saint? For the Catholic Church to give someone the title ‘saint’, there has to be proof not merely of goodness but of miracles performed, witnessed and attested to. Ángela’s narrative is ambivalent about this (Q7):
En la noche de San Juan, la más breve del año, solían y suelen acudir a nuestro lago todas las pobres mujerucas, y no pocos hombrecillos, que se creen poseídos, endemoniados, y que parece no son sino histéricos y a las veces epilépticos, y don Manuel emprendió la tarea de hace él de lago, de piscina probática y tratar de aliviarles y si era posible curarles. Y era tal la acción de su presencia, de sus miradas y tal sobre todo la dulcísima autoridad de sus palabras y sobre todo de su voz – ¡qué milagro de voz! –, que consiguió curaciones sorprendentes. (SMBM 17)
The first impression was of certainty – comforting certainty – as the Church moved ahead with beatification (Q8):
Ahora que el Obispo de la diócesis de Renada, a la que pertenece esta mi querida aldea de Valverde de Lucena, anda, a lo que se dice, promoviendo el proceso para la beatificación de nuestro don Manuel, o mejor, San Manuel Bueno, que fue en ésta párroco, quiero dejar aquí consignado, a modo de confesión y sólo Dios sabe, que no yo, con qué destino, todo lo que sé y recuerdo de aquel varón matriarcal que llenó toda la más entrañada vida de mi alma, que fue mi verdadero padre espiritual, el padre de mi espíritu, del mío, el de Ángela Carballino. (SMBM 13; my emphasis)
The repitition of ‘padre… padre’, and the shift from the more conventional ‘padre espiritual’ to the unfamiliar and therefore more obtrusive ‘padre de mi espíritu’ can be read as foregrounding Ángela’s childlike submissiveness to her spiritual mentor. And yet, at the same time, the curious paradoxical term ‘varón matriarcal’ poses a problem: note that it is not ‘maternal’ – motherly – but ‘matriarcal’ – embodying the law of the mother. True, in the Old Testament God’s loving care of his people is likened to a hen gathering her chicks together under the safety of her wings, and Angela may also be emphasising that the priest – whose robes are as feminine as they are masculine – is not hard and macho but endowed with a feminine tenderness: after all, much religious art makes Jesus look both white anglo-saxon rather than middle-eastern semitic, and gently feminised. However, I want to suggest another way of reading the term ‘varón matriarcal’. ‘Varón’ is unequivocally male, but at the same time Unamuno’s narrator sets the priest within a power structure that is female: a matriarchy, of which he is part and to which he will be held answerable.
Angela Carballino’s narrative voice controls the text and within its small world, creates the characters presented to us: we have no other access to them, and they cannot escape her control; they are subject to her direction. In that world, her relationship with her priest, Manuel Bueno is put forward as so absorbing as to make other friends in the village, or the traditional path to independence from parents through marriage, superfluous: indeed, she refers to the village as a convent (Q9). There is no indication that Ángela does not like men, but in a curious reversal of the traditional role of childlike submission to her spiritual father, since the age of sixteen she has cast the priest in the role of the child she will never conceive naturally. (Q4) places the priest in a relationship of sonship with both Ángela and his natural mother as the latter echoes the Virgin Mary’s acknowledgement of Christ at the tragic moment of his deepest despair as he hung on the cross, with nails through his hands and feet, and a mocking crowd hurling abuse. Note how the ambiguity of su is exploited to make it unclear for a moment who we are talking about – Mary or Manuel’s mother:
‘¡Dios mío, Dios mío!, ¿por qué me has abandonado?’, su madre, la de don Manuel, respondió desde el suelo: “¡Hijo mío!”, y oí ese grito que desgarraba la quietud del templo. Y volví a confesarme con él para consolarle. (SMBM 26)
See now hoe in (Q5), in the reversal of roles that not only puts a woman in the position of priest that is still denied her in the Catholic Church but also puts the ‘nombre del pueblo’ in the place of God, the priest begs Ángela for absolution, as a Catholic might pray to the Virgin:
no sé ya lo que me digo; no sé ya lo que me digo desde que estoy confesándome contigo. Y sí, sí, hay que vivir, hay que vivir [...] Y ahora, Angelina, en nombre del pueblo, ¿me absuelves?
Me sentí como penetrada de un misterioso sacerdocio y dije:
–En nombre de Dios Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo, le absuelvo, padre.
Y salimos de la iglesia, y al salir se me estremecían las entrañas maternales. (SMBM 38; my emphasis)
Once again, ambiguity is rife, for just as ‘confesándome contigo’ can refer either to Ángela confessing (traditional) or the priest doing so (revolutionary), in (Q4), the ambiguous ‘su madre’ of ‘la de don Manuel’ draws attention to the fact that the reader-listener has conflated Christ and don Manuel, to both of whom ‘su madre’ can apply. Ambiguity is created again as Ángela’s mother dies, attended by the priest and her children. Into whose hands is San Manuel committing his spirit: God’s hands as tradition goes, or the dying mother’s, and does the ‘nuestra’ of ‘madre’ include the priest on whom her eyes fix as child?
Mi hermano, acercándose, arrasados sus ojos en lágrimas, a nuestra madre agonizante, le prometió solemnemente rezar por ella.
–Y yo en el cielo por ti, por vosotros – respondió mi madre, y besando el crucifijo, y puestos sus ojos en los de don Manuel, entregó su alma a Dios.
–“En tus manos encomiendo mi espíritu” – rezó el santo varón. (SMBM 32; my emphasis)
So power shifts from the male priest to female maternal figures of power who are repeatedly conflated with the Virgin as Mother of Christ and Queen of Heaven with power to intercede for us in heaven. In 1931, the new Republican government – of men – voted to give women the vote. In 1933, and after two years of chaos, women effectively voted in the right-wing Catholic government that tried – in vain – to turn the clock back and return Spain to its old-pre-revolutionary ways. This conservative tendency in Spain’s Catholic women is evident in the controlling matriarchy behind Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir.
This text can be read from a political perspective, or as marking social changes in early twentieth-century Spanish society, or as a discussion of the institutional Catholic Church in a rapidly changing world. Surely, though, its greatest power lies in its exploration of what Unamuno would frequently refer to as ‘el sentimiento trágico de la vida’. Faced with uncertainty and spiralling violence, a crisis in the authority of the state, the community, the family: all the old traditional institutions, the individual is thrown back on his/her own resources to determine the path to take. Notice how Manuel Bueno deals with Ángela’s desire for certainty in matters of doctrine (Q10):
Una vez que en el confesionario le expuse una de aquellas dudas, me contestó:
–A eso, ya sabes, lo del Catecismo: ‘Eso no me lo preguntéis a mí, que soy ignorante; doctores tiene la Santa Madre Iglesia que os sabrán responder’.
–‘Pero si el doctor aquí es usted, don Manuel!…
–¿Yo, yo doctor? ¿Doctor yo? ¡Ni por pienso! Yo, doctorcilla, no soy más que un pobre cura de aldea. Y esas preguntas, ¿sabes quién te las insinúa, quién te las dirige? Pues… ¡el Demonio!
Y entonces, envalentonándome, le espeté a boca de jarro:
–¿Y si se las dirigiese a usted, don Manuel?
–¿A quién?, ¿a mí? ¿Y el Demonio? No nos conocemos, hija, no nos conocemos […].
–¿Es que hay Infierno, don Manuel?
–¿Para ti, hija? No.
–¿Y para los otros, le hay?
–¿Y a ti qué te importa, si no has de ir a él? (SMBM 26-7)
When Ángela’s brother, Lázaro, tries to tackle local superstition, the priest says (Q11):
–¡Déjalos! ¡Es tan difícil hacerles comprender dónde acaba la creencia ortodoxa y dónde empieza la superstición! Y más para vosotros. Déjalos, pues, mientras se consuelen. Vale más que lo crean todo, aun cosas contradictories entre sí, a no que no crean nada. (SMBM 40)
So, if even the ‘doctorcilla’ Ángela, and the well-travelled ‘converted’ sceptic Lázaro (two biblical quotations on handout) cannot get their minds around problems such as these and are urged simply to accept and believe, and if Blasillo el bobo can imitate the saintly priest, knowledge itself is clearly demonstrated in this text to be at best uncertain and flawed, stemming as it does from the flawed minds of flawed human beings.
What is interesting is that in this novel, as in others (Niebla), the author-creator-director of all these characters emerges onto the stage and enters into the debate. Unamuno was fascinated with the mechanisms of literature and literary creation. Partly this is a literary game, a donnish little joke, as though to say ‘You liked that, didn’t you? Well it didn’t take me much time. Just dashed it off!’ (Qs12):
¿Cómo vino a parar a mis manos este documento, esta memoria de Ángela Carballino? He aquí, lector, algo que debo guardar en secreto. Te la doy tal y como a mí ha llegado, sin más que corregirpocas, muy pocas particularidades de redacción. ¿Que se parece mucho a toras cosa que he escrito? Esto nada prueba contra su objetividad, su originalidad?
However, there is more to this author’s epilogue, for in some ways the author is like God. author’s create characters who need to act freely if they are to be plausible – as though they were driven by own motives, rather than be manipulated by a clumsily obtrusive writer: like human beings strive for freedom of will and action in a world that is consistently coercive, constantly trying to mould and shape and direct. Unamuno continues:
¿Sé yo si aquel Augusto Pérez, el de mi nivola Niebla, no tenía razón al pretender ser más real, más objetivo que yo mismo, que creía haberle inventado? De la realidad de este San Manuel Bueno, mártir, tal como me lo ha revelado su discípula e hija espiritual Ángela Carballino, de esta realidad no se me ocurre dudar. Creo en ella más que creía el mismo santo; creo en ella más que creo en mi propia realidad.
What stands out is the importance of belief not IN something but the act and function of believing: for the novelist, of creating and sustaining a viable world. That world might seem – become – even BE more real than the creator – to the reader, at any rate. Thus, in literature Unamuno provides us with an exercise for the mind: no certainties, but work
Brought up a Catholic but losing his faith, and in a world where all the old certainties were being undermined, faith was something of an obsession for Unamuno himself. He did not ignore the problem, but faced it:
i. by confronting the monological authority of the Church with questioning voices.
ii. by making the ‘official representative of the Church a hesitant doubter/ searcher, inwardly torn, whose anguish we can share.
iii. by setting the immediate problem of Manuel Bueno in the wider context of a debate about authority, and indeed, of a debate about what – if anything – we can be certain about or KNOW, if we know so little about death.
Gyana Jurkeich has suggested that the suicide of Unamuno’s own father when the boy was six left him searching for that paternal figure of authority in a world where he was surrounded by women. The lake is a symbols of womanhood – the maternal womb. Perhaps Manuel Bueno regresses; perhaps his death breaks the vicious circle in which he was enclosed. This is a problem text, and you are the readers to ponder its problems.
© Dr Rosemary Clark, 2003