San Manuel Bueno, martyr
San Manuel Bueno, martyr is a novel written by Miguel de Unamuno. It was published for the first time in 1931, in number 461 of the magazine La novela de hoy corresponding to March 13 of that year.
In 1933, the Espasa Calpe publishing house published San Manuel Bueno, mártir, y tres historias más. Manuel Bueno, mártir with two of the other stories: «Why have I gathered in one volume, making them suffer the same fate, three novels of so different, apparently, inspiration?». After clarifying that "of course, they were conceived, gestated and given birth successively and with hardly any intervals, almost in a rush", he himself answered by saying that the protagonists of these novels "what bothered them was the terrifying problem of personality, if one is what it is and will continue to be what it is".
Structure of the work
The weather
To frame the story, we know that the adverb "now" is extremely important since it refers to the time that passed, to the time that elapsed in the life of Ángela Carballino and therefore to the very time of the novel. Now Ángela is an adult: «at my more than fifty years». With the passage of time there is a significant change in maturity; she also changed her relationship with Don Manuel, the maternal role that he fulfilled, came to be reversed when he confesses her secret to Ángela; therefore it takes place at the time in which she is written (early 20th century) as well as the treatment she had towards him.
The place
The play takes place in a small town called Valverde de Lucerna, a fictitious town, which was inspired by a visit to San Martín de Castañeda, next to Lake Sanabria, in Zamora.
Plot
The narrator is a woman, Ángela Carballino. Her mother is a pious Christian with a strong and unwavering faith. She lives in a small town in the province of Zamora, Valverde de Lucerna, located on the edge of a beautiful lake, next to a mountain massif. The setting is suggested by the wonderful lake of Sanabria in San Martín de Castañeda, Sanabria, at the foot of the ruins of a Bernardos convent, and where the legend of a city lives, Valverde de Lucerna, which lies at the bottom of the waters from the lake.
So real is the scenario described by Unamuno that he devotes two poems to it:
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However, Unamuno does not abide by literary servility to the landscape that serves as his model, both physically and humanly. This does not mean that the author does not know how to aesthetically explain the elements of the landscape.
Angela has been educated in the city. But at the end of the school years, the magnetism that Don Manuel radiates (all told by Ángela's mother), inexorably attracts her to Valverde de Lucerna.
Lázaro, the incredulous brother, who returns from America, rich and with a wide secular cultural background, comes to town very determined to move his family to the city. The enriched secular gentleman seems to despise everything that smacks of religion. But he immediately realizes that Don Manuel is not like the other priests. He is a saint. With him he makes an exception. When his mother dies, he clearly recognizes that Don Manuel is a wonderful man. He finally ends up succumbing in this duel between the two leading figures of the town, and fully enters the orbit of Don Manuel. Since that day, Lázaro never misses mass, he helps the priest, etc. What has Lazarus turned to? Orthodox Catholicism? To the suggestive and electrifying personality of Don Manuel?
Don Manuel sees his life gradually eclipse. Meanwhile, Lázaro is the parish priest's best assistant in pastoral life. The pastor of souls dies in the midst of his parishioners in the parish church, where he says goodbye to the whole town and asks that he be buried with the three planks of wood that he himself cut to help a poor child some time ago. Lázaro and his sister collect the spiritual inheritance bequeathed by Don Manuel. Lázaro also sees his health crack and dies as his teacher.
Ángela Carballino, the last survivor of Don Manuel's spiritual family, is the one who transmits her personal memories and the secret of the life of this exceptional parish priest.
This is the external skeleton of the novel. From the point of view of action, the novel is very simple. There are no exciting episodes. There are no sensational adventures that attract our interest. There is an authentic dramatic tension, but it is relegated to a mostly internal drama. The external anemia of the work is compensated by the spiritual richness of the characters and their different attitudes.
Characters
The census of characters in this novel by Miguel de Unamuno is extremely small. Those who almost exclusively monopolize the scene are the trio made up of the parish priest Don Manuel and his faithful disciples, Lázaro and Ángela. The proper names of characters are extremely scarce, as are their physical descriptions.
Don Manuel
The name
The symbolism of the name in the case of Don Manuel hardly needs demonstration. It is steeped in Biblical references. The name carries a blessing or a curse, reveals a person's destiny, or better, consecrates him for a new mission.
Manuel is the Spanish version of Emmanuel, the name of the Messiah announced by the prophet Isaiah; its meaning is "God with us." Don Manuel is the forger of a new religion, new not because of its form, but because of its interiority.
The outer figure
Little is said about the outward appearance of the protagonist. Three physical features: the erect height of his body, the blue color of his eyes, and his powerful voice. And a very important psychic trait: the ability to read inside hearts. The first two features frame the priest within the environment of the village: the mountain and the lake. The third resembles the penetrating power of the Messiah.
The character
It is the small, repeated actions that define the character of a character. The author of the story begins by referring above all the external anecdotes of the life of the parish priest. He has not seen a single flaw in him. They are all virtues. His vocation was started by a family charity movement. His family is unknown.
Don Manuel is a very active person, he always wants to be doing something. He helped his parishioners in the village in all that he could. He was the soul of the town. A close collaborator of the doctor, of the teacher, he was interested in everyone's life, both spiritually and materially.
He's the character who clearly takes all the initiative. He is the spiritual guide of the town, the director of Angela's conscience. When Lazaro shows up, it looks like a fight for dominance in the village is about to break out. The outcome shows us that in this combat there have been neither winners nor losers. The lake and the mountain are paradigmatic features that define even the very physique of the priest.
Lazarus
The name
Unamuno once again has used the symbolism of the name. This is how Lazarus himself recognizes it: «He made me a new man, a true Lazarus, a resurrected man. He gave me faith”, based on the New Testament writings where Christ made the recently deceased Lazarus walk. Lazarus is also a written reference to a "soul healing" miracle.
The character
He appears on the scene with great pretensions. For a moment he seems to have all the characteristics of an antagonist: he appears to her as anti-clerical, progressive, a supporter of rationalism, a lover of urban culture, concerned with social problems. Progressively, these traits fade, and with an obvious schematism, he turns from an enemy into a beloved disciple.
This is a very special conversion. Basically it is a contract. Don Manuel has made Lázaro comply exactly with all religious practices. But Lázaro has snatched something precious from him: Don Manuel has had to give him what he guarded most jealously: the secret of his life. It all seems to come down to a simple exchange. Lázaro recognizes that Don Manuel has made a new man out of him. The "manuelization" has been complete, even in early death.
His personality, at first, appears closely linked to the image of the New World. He is opposed to the Old World, which he identifies with feudalism and reactionism.
After his conversion, he appropriated the symbology that accompanies Don Manuel: the lake, the mountain, etc.
Angela Carballino
The name and the mission
Ángela Carballino is the supposed author of the book. Unamuno has not made any explicit reference to the meaning of her name. Angela, in Greek, means messenger. It has been proposed as a destination "to save the memory of the priest." She is the spiritual heir of Don Manuel.
He has lived in contact with a saint; she knows that she is the last witness to a unique experience, and she wants her message not to disappear with her own death.
Character
He manifests two peculiarities from the beginning: intuition and religiosity. It is most probable that Angela by herself would not have come to know the priest's secret. But what about Angela's religiousness? Her faith was not a calm and placid faith. Before she entered don Manuel's orbit, doubts had begun to open up a hole in her soul. Angela's faith is strongly shaken when she finds out from her brother that the priest's life is a pious lie. Her brother has opened her eyes, and what before had precise and obvious contours begins to be wrapped in a diffuse mist. Her ambiguous attitude is sufficiently outlined.
The novel, then, is based on a triangle of characters —Don Manuel, Lázaro and Ángela— with the particularity that the subordinate character of the triangle is the narrator. At the beginning, the priest acts alone, introduced by Ángela. But the relations between the two are not real, since Ángela still does not know the true spiritual situation of Don Manuel. Then Lázaro enters the scene, initially as an antagonist. After the "contract" established between the two, the peace of coexistence is signed that evolves towards a total delivery of Lázaro into the arms of the priest. The disjunction has become a very close conjunction, which the mother's death signs forever.
Blasillo
Importance of character
Blasillo represents the maximum degree of blind, innocent faith that Don Manuel preaches and wishes for the people. Blas, lives in ignorance and constantly repeats throughout the town the words of the parish priest: "My God, my God! Why have you abandoned me?" whose meaning he does not know. In doing so, he inadvertently highlights the divine phrase that Don Manuel pronounces from his deepest consciousness. Thus, the rational (in a strict sense, the denial of the divinity of Christ) descends to the irrational of the popular faith that Blasillo represents.
Meaning of his death
Blasillo is one of the characters in the novel who are most appreciated by Don Manuel and vice versa. His appreciation for the priest is such that, when he dies, Blasillo dies with him. This death (which was added in future writings of the novel, since it did not occur in the 1930 manuscript) serves to symbolically culminate the identification of the town by its parish priest. In the absence of the "divine" voice, the echo has no function, since the void does not admit resonance. The rest is silence: remember the passage of the creed, impossible to finish without the help of those who, with their faith, transport the one who is silent when the unsayable words arrive. In this way, this death has the same meaning as that of Lázaro, who was a continuator of the exciting endeavor that Don Manuel had, although he no longer had the strength to continue it.
Formal structure and narrative technique
Unamuno did not divide his novel into chapters, but into twenty-five fragments that some critics call sequences. The first twenty-four constitute Angela's story, and the last one is a kind of epilogue from the author.
The author uses a relatively frequent narrative procedure in his story: he tells us that the edited work is, in fact, a manuscript that appeared among the papers of the protagonist of the novel. Master in this technique was Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote.
The narrator follows other procedures already used by classical literature: Ángela Carballino writes because the bishop «has insistently asked her for all kinds of news» about Don Manuel and she has provided him «all kinds of data», but she has always silent «the tragic secret. [...] And I trust that everything that I leave consigned in this memory does not come to knowledge ». It is, then, the structure of a book of memories that begins with an "now" ("Now that the bishop of the diocese of Renada, to which this my beloved village of Valverde de Lucerna belongs, is going, to what is said, promoting the process for the beatification of Don Manuel") and ends in a circular way with the explicit reference to the beatification process promoted by the bishop, and to the "now" or current present of the narrator: "And when writing this now, here, in my old maternal house, at my more than fifty years, when my memories begin to whiten with my head...». And if at the beginning and at the end of the novel, the narrator resorts to the form of the present, in the body of the story the imperfect preterite dominates, the proper time of the narration. The use of the imperfect is essential for the creation of the world of memory by Ángela Carballino: thanks to this time the narrator manages to delve into the invariable continuity of an intrahistorical way of life, while the contours and details of the narrated world are blurred. and only the interiority of the action remains.
Along with the narration, dialogue plays a major role, which in this novel is not limited to transcribing a conversation, but is also a vehicle for ideas and a means of externalizing conflicts and intimate dramas. Sometimes dialogue within dialogue is used, as when Lázaro, speaking with his sister, reproduces a conversation with Don Manuel: «-But is it possible?-I exclaimed in dismay. And so possible, sister, and so possible! And when I told him: "But it is you, you, the priest, who advises me to pretend?", he, stammering: "Pretend? It's not pretending!"».
To tell the story and frame it in deliberately imprecise space-time coordinates, the narrator uses various perspectives. From the first moment she adopts a confessional tone, with a clear testimonial function. Ella ángela she refers not only to what she has seen and heard, but also to what she has felt. Since she is the only source of information, she stands between the facts and the reader. She is not dealing with an omniscient narrator, but with a partial witness, and it is up to the reader to separate the pure "objective" story from its dramatization. In addition to being a witness, the narrator is a participant in the action, which is why we doubt the veracity of the events narrated. Time and space appear undifferentiated and the limits between reality and fiction remain confused. This diversity of perspectives, this sought-after confusion of reality and fiction, of sleep and wakefulness, connects on the one hand with the best tradition of Golden Age literature, and on the other hand announces some of the defining features of the modern novel.