The Tragic Pursuit of Being. Unamuno and Sartre. By Robert Richmond Ellis. Tuscaloosa and London: U of Alabama P, 1988.114 pages.

In his Prologue, Robert Richmond Ellis states that "the completed Sartrean system" allows us "to undertake a new reading of Unamuno" that will make his work "available to the reader with a clarity which it has heretofore lacked." He asserts that Unamuno's work "reveals the prereflexive, lived moment of the human condition while Sartre' s expresses the passage of that moment to reflexivity" (xi). A comparative study is certainly useful but Del sentimiento tragico de la vida is also a reflexive work, close to the Western tradition of philosophical writing (albeit in the idealist-irrationalist vein).

Ellis' book consists of brief biographies of each writer, accounts of their philosophies, literary theories, and their novels and theatre. Describing the views that each held of writing itself, Ellis reproduces some of Unamuno's contradictory positions without questioning them or acknowledging their inconsistencies. He quotes: "literature is nothing but death" and then goes on to assert that for Unamuno writing "represents life itself" (8, 9). Unamuno veered between these two opposite convictions and never dealt consistently with the opposition.

Ellis claims that the instruments provided by Sartre's system permit us "to 'create' the existentialist philosophy Unamuno chose not to write," thereby making it "accessible to others" (25). But Unamuno is not inaccessible, only contradictory. Ellis is right in seeing Unamuno's primary philosophical concern as ontology though one should add that it is a highly unusual ontology in which human consciousness tends to merge with being itself. But his assertion that "Unamuno' s ontology begins and ends in nothingness" is more problematical (26). He quotes a passage from the Diary (published by Escelicer in Madrid in 1970, not unpublished as he says) in which Unamuno says he has no soul, no spiritual substance (27). Unamuno fought against this feeling of emptiness and one can find many statements about the substantiality of the soul from the early essays through Del sentimiento; "Lo unico de veras real es lo que siente, sufre, compadece, ama y anhela, es la conciencia: lo unico sustancial es la conciencia" (Del sentimiento, Obras completas. Aguado, 1958, XVI, 282). Ellis ignores these statements as well as Unamuno's convoluted arguments that attempt to make substance out of the very experience of insubstantiality (either in the desire for immortality or for fame). Unamuno did not mean that consciousness begins and ends in nothingness but that being (or consciousness) and nothingness are alternately lived or longed for. Ellis correctly observes that the experience of personal nothingness leads to the hunger for being, but not that that hunger is itself substance.

Basing himself partly on a few passages in Unamuno and partly on Meyer, Ellis describes a category which he calls in English "being-forothers" and in Spanish "serse" (Meyer's term), saying it is "suggestive of the psyche" (28). But Unamuno's notion of personality, the persona, the "self-for-others" alternates with a different one, the inner self, which he also calls "bed-rock," "innate being," "intimate self, " "the real and eternal Miguel," "the self that is underneath the self that acts," "the eternal nucleus," etc., all of which are strictly opposed to acts, the opinions of others, the self that exists in the view of others, etc. Ellis argues that the concept of "serse" is Unamuno' s "most important contribution to existential ontology." The word itself, however, is rarely found in Unamuno and it does not seem to fit in with his ideas of consciousness or being which are more reflexive than Ellis assumes. Ellis says that "in Unamuno consciousness arises in the presence of the Other and through him discovers both the subjective and objective dimensions of the serse" (29). But Meyer, using the word in connection with Del sentimiento, identifies it with individuality, ipseity, existence, self, reflexive consciousness; indeed, he uses it synonymously with consciousness, and does not identify it with any notion of "being-for-others." It is simply "experiencia reflexiva de si mismo" (25). I would add that in Del sentimiento consciousness is not only not "being-for-others" but a pure reflexive experience of one's limits; consciousness strikes up against unconsciousness and from that clash arises the awareness of limitation that is itself consciousness.

Another example of the confusions that can arise from Ellis' conceptions of both "serse" and "serlo todo" is his application of them to "historical man" who, he says, attempts to found himself as "serlo todo." Although Unamuno says in the essay quoted that man is the supreme product of humanity (III 478) he is not talking about "serlo todo." The phrase is from Del sentimiento and refers to an ontological and not an historical aspiration. Taking concepts from one essay and applying them to another not only bypasses Unamuno's constant shifts in meaning but imposes upon him an alien system.

Similar problems arise in the discussion of literary theory where we read that Unamuno's novelistic character is a "serse" striving to achieve the ever-elusive and impossible "serlo todo" (52). Augusto Perez would be happy to "be" in any way at all, even to be what Ellis calls a "serge."

Robert Ellis brings up important issues; his book is provocative and will be useful to readers interested in philosophy and literature. I think a more truly comparative approach would have been better. His use of "serse" is a working back from some of Sartre's modes of thinking and formulating. Sartre and Unamuno can and should be set against each other but I am not sure that Sartre's system is necessary to provide access to Unamuno or to articulate his thinking.

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FRANCES WYERS Indiana University

Copyright 1991 by Hispanic Review. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of Hispanic Review.

Wyers, F., Reviews.., Vol. 59, Hispanic Review, 09-01-1991, pp 483.

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