ABSTRACT
For Unamuno writing was a form of self-discovery. But because that self or nuclear ‘I’ becomes cognizable only through writing it must be considered first and foremost a linguistic phenomenon. Whether there is an underlying ‘real’ self that is objectified in an author’s work is unknown and perhaps unknowable. We can only know it as a mental construct. The same applies to a linguistic community’s identity across time: this corporate identity is enshrined above all in its literature because that is what survives and where we can recognize it. This accords the activity of reading a crucial place in crystallizing that sense of identity that lies latently or potentially in the writing. Both are creative and inseparable activities, because each exists for the other. This exactly mirrors the notion of personality, which is a form of reading an individual, as well as of reading how an individual is read by others. The self appears as a text, that is to say as an interpretation, and it exists only as interpretation. The inner and outer worlds are inter-dependent. Reading is the outer world of writing in the same way that personality is the outer form of an inner self. Both living and writing are subject to this double dimension, the view from inside and the view from outside, the subjective and objective, the ‘I’ and the ‘You’ in conflict and collaboration. The novel thus becomes for Unamuno the expression of this double-sided view of existence: a living in my world and a living in the world of others. Whatever one may think of Unamunian ontology, with its constant struggle for cognition and recognition, the fact remains that his poetics of fiction is both coherent and consistent with his view of man as a constitutionally divided being trying to make sense of two seemingly different kinds of worlds.
