ABSTRACT
Theodore Ziolkowski's foreword to the translation is remarkable for his statement that Unamuno was "incapable of systematic philosophy". Unamuno rejected previous forms of the Spanish novel as pompous and inflated; he also rejected materialism as an explanation of phenomena, and positivism in particular. The forms he chose were unsettling to the professoriat of his day, but they were not capricious. In Mist Unamuno skirmishes with the conception of genre, a mere word to him. Genre in art defines a component of the imagination. Confusion of genres, with the romantic aim of the Gesamtkunstwerk, might seem to identify Unamuno as a late romantic, but one must doubt that. No romantic sponginess pervades his work, despite the fog motif and the recurrence of that centuries-old Spanish theme, La vida es sueno: life is a dream. His concern is for the complexities of existence, conceived as fundamentally tragic but expressed in an exuberance of wit, farce, comedy, and verbal play.
