BSS, LXXIX (2002)

Orfeo and the Cratyline Conspiracy in Unamunos Niebla

MARSHA S. COLLINS
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

A naturally significative expression is one that represents the same thing to everyone, like groans of the sick or dogs barking, asserts Peter of Spain in his influential work on dialectic, Tractatus (1230s?), the equivalent of a bestseller in Renaissance Europe.1 Apparently, both Cervantes and Unamuno took exception to the philosophers ironically phrased affirmation of Aristotelian nominalism, for in El casamiento engaoso y El coloquio de los perros (1613) and Niebla (1914) readers find that the highly articulate groans of the sick and barking of dogs frame a sophisticated dialogue on language and the nature of humankind. In the case of Niebla, however, persistent critical focus on the metafictional chapter 31 of the novel, in which the protagonist confronts an overbearing, fictionalized version of the author, has somewhat obscured the fact that the book does not end until the mortally ill Augusto Prez dies, the dog Orfeo delivers a funeral oration for his master in the form of an interior monologue, and then the dog expires, too. Shortly before Orfeos climactic speech, a ghostly Augusto returns to remind his creator that even if in Calderonian terms life is a
1 Peter of Spain, Language in Dispute: The Summulae Logicales, trans. Francis P. Dinneen, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 39 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), 2. Peter of Spain, Tractatus, called afterwards Summule Logicales, ed. L. M. de Rijk (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972): Vox significativa naturaliter est illa que apud omnes idem representat, ut gemitus infirmorum, latratus canum (2). For more information on Peter of Spain (Pope John XXI), see Rijk, ixc; Dinneen, xviixxxix; and Jos Luis Abelln, Metodologa e introduccin histrica, in Historia crtica del pensamiento espaol, 5 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979), I, 23336. Abelln (23435), notes the large number of editions and wide dissemination of the Tractatus in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and points out the revival of critical interest in Peter of Spain and his works in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rijk (lviilxi), argues that Peter of Spain composed the Tractatus in Len, and considers the possibility, which he ultimately deems unlikely although not impossible, that the philosopher taught logic and composed the work in question at the University of Salamanca. E. J. Ashworth, Traditional Logic, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1988), 14372, cites Peter of Spain with regard to the persistence of the Aristotelian doctrine that spoken language is conventional (15556).

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dream, no se suea dos veces el mismo sueo.2 Keeping in mind the heros wise counsel, in the pages that follow I seek not to resuscitate Nieblas hero or his canine counterpart, but rather to revive critical interest in the crucial roles Orfeo plays in the novel as Augustos complement and as the figure who voices the final, poignant and eloquent monologue cum epilogue in which the works major themes of language and human mortality converge. Orfeo clearly belongs in the gallery of doubles who inhabit Unamunos fiction, but not among the symbolic, fragmented individuals locked in selfdestructive rivalry who rule Abel Snchez (1917), Dos madres (1920) and El otro (1926). Complementary alter egos predominate in Niebla, as illustrated by Unamuno (the man and character) and Vctor Goti, the numerous couples who constitute a mise-en-abyme marriage cycle within the work, offering a variety of marital paradigms for consideration by Augusto and readers, and even by the germination of the text as a whole, which provides a creatively rewritten, intertextual double of Galds El amigo Manso (1882) and the authors own Amor y pedagoga (1902).3 Orfeo has secured a place in a series of analogous pairings of creator with created, in which God is to Unamuno (the man), as Unamuno (the man and fictionalized author) is to Augusto, as Augusto is to Orfeo. The protagonist himself suggests the dogs position in this hierarchy of analogous relationships when he tells his pet: Yo he sido ms que tu amo, tu padre, tu dios! (657). But the talking dog also displays kinship with Blasillo, the heros double in San Manuel Bueno, mrtir (1930), the simple-minded shadow figure who echoes only the words that express the protagonists hidden, innermost suffering, and yet whose fundamental innocence prevents public recognition of Don Manuels private agony of doubt, parrotted unselfconsciously in Blasillos refranes. Similarly, the innocent Orfeo, Augustos confidant and witness to his internal existential struggle, synthesizes and articulates the process of his masters growth and acquisition of a painful inner life at the end of Niebla.4
2 Niebla, in Obras completas, ed. Manuel Garca Blanco, 9 vols (Madrid: Escelicer, 1966), II, Novelas, 541682 (p. 678). All references to Niebla are to this edition. 3 Gayana Jurkevich offers a Jungian approach to Unamunos doubles in The Elusive Self: Archetypal Approaches to the Novels of Miguel de Unamuno (Columbia: Missouri U. P., 1991), 10933. Frances Wyers also analyses Unamunos doubles in Miguel de Unamuno: The Contrary Self (London: Tamesis, 1976), 8291. On El amigo Manso and Niebla, consult H. L. Boudreau, Rewriting Unamuno Rewriting Galds, Bucknell Review, XXXIX (1996), 2341; on Amor y pedagoga and Niebla, consult Geoffrey Ribbans, La evolucin de la novelstica unamuniana: Amor y pedagoga y Niebla, in his Niebla y soledad: aspectos de Unamuno y Machado (Madrid: Gredos, 1971), 83107. 4 Gayana Jurkevich discusses Orfeos ancestry in two earlier Unamuno poems, El idiota y su perro (1900) and Elega en la muerte de un perro (190506), in Unamunos Gestational Fallacy: Niebla and Escribir a lo que salga , ALEC, XV (1990), 6581 (pp. 68 71). By far the most perceptive analysis of Orfeos role in Niebla is that of Alexander A.

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Unlike Blasillo, however, who emerges all of a piece in the fictional world, Orfeo undergoes an ontological growth process that mirrors the existential journey of Augusto and robs him of his initial state of complete innocence. Geoffrey Ribbans describes three phases in Augustos ontological development: (1) the initial awakening, which corresponds to the protagonists sighting of Eugenia and his decision to pursue her; (2) the growth period, marked by Augustos study and experience of love and the Other, which leads to his decision to engage actively in life through marriage; and (3) the final, painful reawakening, in which the hero fights ontological negation in the face of Eugenias betrayal and Unamunos death sentence.5 Orfeos sentimental education parallels this outlined trajectory. Consider, for example, the respective births of the protagonist and his dog. When the protagonist walks out onto the stage of life in chapter 1, he is little more than a disembodied soul floating aimlessly above the sentient world in the realm of Platonic ideas, in which umbrellas are valued as beautiful aesthetic objects rather than as useful instruments. So adrift is Augusto in the mist of non-being that he even believes a meandering dog would suffice to give him the sense of purpose and will that he lacks. The author gifts him with Eugenia instead of a pooch, of course, and the good birth promised by her name comes about, for her eyes anchor his floating soul to a mans body and the lower realm of human existence. Augusto materializes in the wake of the magnetic pull of the womans eyes: Pas por la calle no un perro, sino una garrida moza, y tras de sus ojos se fu, como imantado y sin darse de ello cuenta, Augusto (557). Chronologically, the protagonist is an adult, but philosophically, he does not yet possess a mature, superior awareness of being. When Orfeo is born at the end of chapter 5, the dog appears abruptly out of the mist, directly after Augustos reverie in which he reminisces about life with his mother, recalls the pain of losing her, and longs to recover that intimate human bond. As before, Unamuno fulfills his wish, but in a skewed, permuted way. The hero wanted a stray dog; he received a young woman. Here Augusto wishes to relive the role of cherished son, loved and protected by his mother. Instead, he must assume the role of parent to his own adopted child Orfeo, an orphan like his master. And while Augustos disembodied spirit descends from the higher realm of pure Ideas into a tangible, mature body, Orfeos innocent, infant body ascends from the lower realm of pure physiological being into a world of human
Parker, On the Interpretation of Niebla, in Unamuno: Creator and Creation, ed. Jos Rubia Barcia and M. A. Zeitlin (Berkeley: California U. P., 1967), 11638. I find Parkers analysis of Orfeo on the whole excellent and thought-provoking, but the extremely moralistic cast of his discussion of the contrast between Orfeos innocent love and Augustos awakening to erotic passion is perhaps a bit more Calderonian than Unamunian and downplays the parodic aspects of the novel. 5 Estructura y significado de Niebla, in his Niebla y soledad, 10842.

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beings who think and attempt to communicate with one another through words. Unamuno juxtaposes Augustos pedantically rational, philosophical ramblings in the human medium of language with Orfeos inarticulate, irrational cries and whimpers as he seeks to satisfy the strictly corporeal need for nourishment. A glimpse of Eugenia begins the heros transformation into sentient human, and Augusto, in turn, immediately starts to anthropomorphize the canine child, projecting his own quest for being onto the dog, noting that Orfeo pareca buscar camino en tierra (573). Even the way in which he mollifies the pups hunger takes on an anthropomorphic cast, as Augusto first feeds Orfeo milk from a sponge and then from a baby bottle. Like his master, Orfeo experiences a learning phase of apprenticeship to life. Shortly after he brings the dog home, the protagonist reminds his adopted son that he is an existential blank slate: T eres joven todava y no tienes experiencia de la vida. Y adems eres perro (578). Orfeos canine nature seems the least important fact to Augusto with regard to ontological awareness. As the hero informs his confidant, love has provided the catalyst for his own development of consciousness of being: Amo, ergo sum! Este amor, Orfeo, es como lluvia bienhechora en que se deshace y concreta la niebla de la existencia. Gracias al amor siento el alma de bulto, la toco ... Y el alma misma, qu es sino amor, sino dolor encarnado? (578). Yet Orfeo does learn about life vicariously from listening to Augustos monodilogos and witnessing his ups and downs, master and dog-alter ego communicating on a mysterious, supralinguistic level: Mirndole a los ojos [de Augusto] mientras hablaba adivinaba su sentir (579). In Platonic fashion, the expression of genuine emotion travels straight from the soul through the eyes and into the nascent soul of the pampered pooch. Orfeo absorbs so much from these exchanges that by the time Augusto shares the news that the dog cannot live with him after he marries Eugenia, the quasi-human pet displays distinct signs of suffering: Pero por qu me miras as, Orfeo? Si parece que lloras sin lgrimas! ... Es que me quieres decir algo? Te veo sufrir por no tener palabra. [...] Y el perro, que pareca, en efecto, llorar, le lama la barba (657). If crying confirms the existence of the soul, as Augusto asserts earlier in Niebla, then Orfeos silent anguish marks his passage from pure physiological animal into the liminal zone of human existence, in which the spiritual and the physiological mix. This particular threshold proves rather porous over the course of the novel, a point Unamuno makes clear through constant comparisons between human and dog. When the befuddled protagonist asks the wise Liduvina how a man knows when he is really in love, she replies that he is no longer a man, but rather una cosa, un animalito (589). Both Augusto and Mauricio display canine characteristics in their dogged pursuit of the piano teacher. An irritated Eugenia complains to Mauricio: No quiero ver

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los ojos suplicantes del seorito don Augusto como los de un perro hambriento (585). Vctor repeats virtually the same words in telling the story of the death of his beloved dog-surrogate child, another of Orfeos doubles: [Al] ver aquellos ojos hmedos que parecan suplicarnos vida, nos entr una pena y un horror tal que no quisimos ms perros ni cosa viva (602). The verbal echo serves not only to identify Augusto with Orfeo, but also to link the search for ontological affirmation through reciprocated love by the Other with the quest for immortality. Ironically, the same Eugenia who insists on evicting Orfeo, whom she regards as a lowly animal, becomes the instrument who proves his moral superiority. When she boasts of her willingness to support Mauricio, and thus ensure he is hers, Ermelinda responds, S, tuyo ... Pero como puede serlo un perro. Y eso se llama comprar un hombre (608). While Augusto and Orfeo incarnate a bond of genuine love, bolstered by the canines loyalty and selfless devotion, Eugenia purchases the affection of Mauricio, who more closely resembles a self-serving, readily bribed cur. Augusto defends his pet by quoting the popular adage that [el perro] sera el mejor amigo del hombre si tuviese dinero, but Eugenia corrects him: Porque no lo tiene es su amigo (654). Speaking from the limited perspective of her own selfish motivation, she can only explain the dogs devotion by projecting her own self-interest onto him. Although she misses the mark with Orfeo, in Mauricios case, her cynical comment is right on the money. She tells Augusto that the best way to divest themselves of this annoying, begging mongrel is to throw some crumbs to him in the shape of a job far away. Eugenia assures her short-lived fianc that el pobre Mauricio no muerde, ladra, but in reality, this human jackal steals Augustos money, love, and life, leaving him with Orfeo, whose love and fidelity remain untainted by greed and material interest (654). This act of betrayal precipitates the third and final stage of ontological development, in which master and pet address the mystery of mortality. Thomas Mermall has called the chiasmus Unamunos master trope, which here assumes a criss-cross structural pattern in the plot itself, predicated on recognition of Orfeo as the protagonists double.6 Augusto dies nude in bed, symbolically stripped of the elaborate rhetorical raiment he uses to fend off death in his dialogue-debate with the fictionalized author. In fact, his last line of defense against mortality consists of a tragicomic attempt to sustain pure physiological existence by gorging himself with food in a literalized rendition of metaphorical hambre vital. Augusto loses his
6 See The Chiasmus: Unamunos Master Trope, PMLA, CV (1990), 24555: The chiasmus is therefore both a micro- and a macrostructure; its local use may be extended to encompass the rhetorical design of entire works. [...] The trope subverts or destabilizes a coherent notion of personality and a fixed idea of reality, engenders a dialectic that requires a yielding of the external and inherent opposites of consciousness in a continuous process of self-realization and inverts cause-and-effect relations (248).

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exaggeratedly rational linguistic gifts in the deathbed scene, stuttering and stammering his way to the end of life. The hero must come to terms with the animal part of his nature, although the ensuing argument over the cause of his demise does nothing to resolve the ambiguity surrounding his death established in the dueling prologues of Vctor Goti and Unamuno. Yet while death robs the protagonist of human discourse and reminds him of his biological limits, his masters death endows Orfeo with the power of speech, which elevates him above mere animal existence and enables him to express complex thoughts linguistically. Predictably perhaps, exposure to mortality forms an integral part of the dogs education from infancy. Augusto holds up the ashes of his fathers last cigar for the pups perusal as an illustrative memento mori: Mira Orfeo, mira la ceniza que dej mi padre en aquel cenicero ... Esta es la revelacin de la eternidad, Orfeo, de la terrible eternidad (578). Like his master, Orfeo later receives a death sentence from his god, albeit in a more roundabout manner. After Eugenia abandons him, Augusto finds some comfort in Orfeos unwavering devotion: [...] Ya no nos separarn al uno del otro! Viviremos juntos en la vida y en la muerte (660).7 The statement proves prophetic, but not before Orfeo experiences what Vctor Goti and Unamuno call a second birth, nacer por el dolor a la conciencia de la muerte incesante, de que estamos siempre muriendo (662). For the loyal canine, this awakening to a higher level of ontological awareness begins just before he gains the power of rational thought and expression, when Orfeo rubs his nose in the smell of death, not the death of just anyone, but when he sniffs the decaying flesh of his adoptive father. The shock brings about a questioning of faith similar to Unamunos famous 1911 crisis, which inspired Del sentimiento trgico de la vida (1912). Just before Orfeo launches into Nieblas climactic internal monologue, the narrator permits readers to enter the dogs mind: Y al sentirle ahora muerto sinti que se desmoronaban en su espritu los fundamentos todos de su fe en la vida y en el mundo, y una inmensa desolacin llen su pecho (679). Anguish before the death of his beloved master provides Unamunos perro sabio with the impetus and the voice to articulate the most elusive existential quandary of humankind in a funeral oration defined by dialectics and saturated with antinomian paradoxes, hallmarks of the authors style. And who better to speak of the mystery of mortality than the quintessential poet-prophet-musician Orpheus? Unamuno resurrects in Niebla the Orpheus myths three principal constituents of love, death and
7 It is interesting to note that Blasillo, San Manuel Buenos double, dies along with his master, too. For more on the multiple layers of signification of Augustos death by supposed overeating and the chiastic pattern of master (language loss) and dog (language acquisition) consult Roberta Johnson, Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain, 1900 1934 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1993), 94102.

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art, reenacting the original narrative patterns of ascent and descent; birth, death and rebirth; and loss and recovery. In some versions of the ancient tale, Orpheus loses Eurydice on the ascent from Hades and the poets subsequent death and return to Hades reunite them. Unamunos Orfeo also bounds out of a foggy netherworld, loses his loved one to death, and then regains Augusto after surcease of his own life. The Orpheus myth dramatizes as well the power of art in general, and language in particular, for the poets singing ensorcells shades, gods, people, and even rocks and trees. Certain variations of the story relate that after the Maenads dismember Orpheus, his head magically transcends death and continues singing for all eternity, contrasting human mortality with arts immortality. Unamuno likewise immortalizes the mortal Augusto and Orfeo, and himself, in his nivola, although the dog seems to make an independent, self-possessed bid for eternal life through the funeral oration, in which he dematerializes, metamorphosing into a disembodied voice, the latter-day equivalent of a divinely inspired Orphic talking head. As Charles Segal has stated, however, the Orpheus myth actually dwells on the ambiguities of art, specifically languages limitless power over the tangible world and its limited ability to escape the subjective consciousness that wields it: Above all, it is the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in language itself that generate the ambiguities and conflicts in the various versions of the myth: the capacity of poetic language to encompass the unsayable and its futility in the face of ineffable joy, beauty, or suffering; its ability to clarify or to distort; its power of self-transcendence and also of self-deception.8 Given Unamunos lifelong fascination with language, the stylistic and thematic logocentrism of Niebla, and given that the novel climaxes with a dog delivering a moving, sophisticated oration, the author leaves little doubt regarding his understanding and deployment of the nuanced complexities of the Orpheus myth or regarding the care he has exercised in baptizing the dog Orfeo. In fact, discussion of the symbolic nature of such names in Niebla has become commonplace in Unamuno criticism, but the relationship between this feature of the text and the novels engagement with language remains largely unexplored. The author introduces the theme in the central narratives opening sentence: Al aparecer Augusto a la puerta de su casa extendi el brazo derecho, con la mano palma abajo y abierta, y dirigiendo los ojos al cielo quedse un momento parado en esta
8 Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1989), 35. For more on the love, death, art triangle, and the evolution of the Orpheus myth over time, read Segal, 135, 15598, and Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1971), 119, 21872.

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actitud estatuaria y augusta (557). The narrator suggests that an inherent relationship exists between the protagonists name, Augusto, and his nature, his august demeanor. But the ironic, parodic context in which the observation appears subverts this conclusion. After all, the heros pose resembles that of a bumbling, bourgeois Adam tentatively accepting a somewhat soggy spark of life from Michelangelos conspicuously absent God. Moreover, the unexceptional surname Prez that he bears mockingly undercuts the lofty Augusto. At this juncture, the protagonist merits the adjectives estatuario and augusto only in so far as he suffers from existential paralysis born of lack of will, and thus remains immobile, a lifelike, but lifeless statue. Thus, a sentence that superficially proposes an essential connection between res and verba, on analysis seems to support a different assertion altogether, i.e. that an arbitrary tie binds names to the things they represent. By the end of the novel, however, the author reverses this position as well. Few readers would want to question that through his fight against death and his contentious interview with his maker Unamuno, the protagonist acquires a certain tragic, majestic grandeur.9 Even Augustos god, who issues the death sentence, finds himself compelled to shed a tear of compassion for his dying creation. In short, the hero earns the rubric Augusto in the course of awakening to the inevitability of death and waging Everymans, Prezs, war against mortality. At the same time, Unamuno restores an almost magical power to the protagonists name as Augusto actualizes the existential potential contained by the label he has worn since his birth in the text. The same enigmatic forces at work in Unamunos fictional world also inspire Augusto to name his dog Orfeo, que as le bautiz, no se sabe ni saba l tampoco por qu (573). This moniker seems incongruous in the extreme, since the puppy can do little more than whimper at first, but the magnificent rhetorical skills he displays in the concluding elegy dispel any lingering doubts the reader might have about the appropriateness of the title. The casual use of the verb bautiz in retrospect takes on an added, sacral meaning, for his speech sets him apart as an animal cursed and blessed with visionary powers. Yet the parodic inevitably remains a part of this scene in that Augusto appears as a sort of mock Adam naming the animals (Genesis 2: 1920) and in that Unamuno playfully reminds the reading public that the
9 Nicholas G. Round characterizes the tragic sense of Niebla: The tragic sense is and remains a religious outlook. But it is not a surrogate metaphysic, designed to restore plausibility to comforting theological and ontological formulae. Rather it is a humanism, concerned with the discovery of values in human livesa discovery whose manner becomes fully clear only when it is manifested, as in Niebla, in a world of lived or imagined human reality (The Tragic Sense of Niebla, in Hispanic Studies in Honour of Geoffrey Ribbans, ed. Ann L. Mackenzie and Dorothy S. Severin [BHS Special Homage Volume] [Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1992], 17183 [p. 180]).

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protagonist does not know why he names his pet Orfeo because up until this point in the novel, the author-God pulls the strings of the human facsimile Augusto, who has no will of his own and no knowledge of his own fictionality. Nevertheless, the concept of naming something or someone remains for Unamuno, in typically Unamunian fashion, an extremely complex one with important implications: La verdadera materia del arte literario, de la poesa, es el lenguaje que contiene en s el tesoro todo de nuestras intuiciones. Expresar es nombrar. Se perciben los elementos materiales de una cosa, pero no se la conoce hasta que no se la nombra uno en s.10 Literary or artistic language would seem to reserve for itself a certain sacred, expressive power of naming, inextricably tied to the cognitive primacy of intuitive knowledge and very much akin to Augustos, and Adams, divinely inspired baptismal rites. Literature would also claim through language the divine magic of world-making. Nieblas emphasis on names and the act of naming is not the only aspect of the text that invites reader engagement with the more universal theme of language. The pages of the novel provide a fictional forum in which characters discuss and debate the nature of names and language, offering models for the extratextual public to contemplate. Augusto initiates the dialogue on language early in the novel, articulating the name game as a form of play and interplay with serious ramifications, following in the tradition of serio ludere: Y por qu te llamas Domingo? Porque as me llaman. Bien, muy biense dijo Augusto; nos llamamos como nos llaman. En los tiempos homricos tenan las personas y las cosas dos nombres, el que le daban los hombres y el que le daban los dioses. Cmo me llamar Dios? Y por qu no he de llamarme yo de otro modo que como los dems me llaman? Por qu no he de dar a Eugenia otro nombre distinto del que le dan los dems, del que le da Margarita, la portera? Cmo la llamar? (561) Nelson Orringer has reminded critics that Unamuno, professor of Greek Language and Literature and devotee of Hellenism, emphasizes the influence of the Socratic dialogue on Western philosophy and on his own writing, which accounts for the fact that dialogue and dialectics occupy pride of place among the principal characteristics of the nivola.11 The
10 Prlogo a la versin castellana (primera edicin) de la Esttica de Benedetto Croce, in Obras completas, ed. Manuel Garca Blanco, VIII, Autobiografa y recuerdos personales, 9871000 (p. 995). Subsequent references to the Esttica (EST ) are to this edition. 11 See Nelson R. Orringer, Unamuno and Plato: A Study of Marginalia and Influence, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispnicos, XI (Winter 1987), 33153. Unamuno observes: Nuestra filosofa occidental entr en madurez, lleg a conciencia de s, en Atenas, con

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quotation above echoes the words of Socrates near the beginning of Platos Cratylus, the Dialogue that focuses on the appropriateness of names, which as in Niebla, leads to a wider discussion on the nature of language:
SOCRATES

We already see one thing we did not know before, that names do possess a certain natural correctness, and that not every man knows how to give a name well to anything whatsoever. Is not that true? Certainly. Then our next task is to try to find out, if you care to know about it, what kind of correctness that is which belongs to names. [...] How shall I investigate? [...]
[...] You ought to learn from Homer and the other

HERMOGENES SOCRATES

HERMOGENES SOCRATES HERMOGENES SOCRATES

poets. Why, Socrates, what does Homer say about names, and where? In many passages: but chiefly and most admirably in those in which he distinguishes between the names by which gods and men call the same things. Do you not think he gives in those passages great and wonderful information about the correctness of names? For clearly the gods call things by the names that are naturally right. Do you not think so?12

The Cratylus plays off against each other two diametrically opposed views on the link between res and verba, the natural language perspective
Scrates, y lleg a esta conciencia mediante el dilogo, la conversacin social. Y es hondamente significativo que la doctrina de las ideas innatas, del valor objetivo y normativo de las ideas, de lo que luego, en la Escolstica, se llam realismo, se formulase en dilogos (Del sentimiento trgico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos, in Obras completas, ed. Manuel Garca Blanco, VII, Meditaciones y ensayos espirituales, 107302 [p. 291]). Subsequent references to Del sentimiento trgico de la vida (DSTV) are to this edition. Mario J. Valds examines Unamunos theory of language in the context of the early twentieth-century study of language and linguistics in Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature (Toronto: Toronto U. P., 1987), 1121, noting similarities between the authors concept of language and that of his contemporary Edward Sapir, citing their shared interest in Vives, Vico, Goethe and Humboldt, and Unamunos admiration for Croce (16). 12 Cratylus. Parmenides. Greater Hippias. Lesser Hippias, trans. Harold N. Fowler, Loeb Library CLXVII (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1939 [rpt. 1996]), 1191 [pp. 3235]). All subsequent references to Cratylus (CRA) are to this edition. I wish to express my appreciation to Nicholas Round and Nelson Orringer for their very helpful advice regarding this section of my article.

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proposed by Cratylus, which endows language with the magical power to capture and evoke the essence of ideas and things, and the nominalist perspective proposed by Hermogenes, which regards language as a medium of communication that relies on adherence to custom and convention for efficacy, and thus posits an arbitrary tie between words and things sustained only by force of collective habit. While for much of the Dialogue Socrates appears to advance a theory of natural language, in actuality he dismantles that viewpoint in a display of etymological wisdom that dazzles readers with its absurd, ingenious ironies even as it impresses the rather ingenuous Cratylus. To prove that the names of gods, virtues and vices, evince the essence of their being, Socrates alters, adds and eliminates letters, assigns letters subjective qualities, and in general, chops, slices, splices and dices the words as he sees fit, indulging in humorous equivocation in order to arrive at foregone conclusions regarding their origins. At the end of the Cratylus, he demonstrates the spuriousness of this argument by presenting a counter-etymology for the word knowledge to indicate the ambiguity of the name, which could signify either making the soul stand still at things, linking knowledge to stillness, or carrying the soul around with things, linking knowledge to motion, depending entirely on what one wants to prove and how one wants to prove it (CRA, 17879). He summarizes: And so names which we believe have the very worst meanings appear to be very like those which have the best (CRA, 18081). By the end of the Dialogue even Cratylus must concede that convention and custom must contribute something towards the indication of our meaning when we speak (CRA, 17273). Ultimately, however, the debate remains unresolved and neither the nominalist nor the naturally significant, Cratyline view of language garners the title of winner. Although convention has an important role in languages communicative function, Socrates notes that personally he would prefer the theory that names are, so far as is possible, like the things named, but the evidence, such as it is, does not support that theory (CRA, 17475). He believes that the gods are superior name-givers, as are certain humans, such as artists, but observes that humans cannot know how the gods assigned or originally concocted names, and concedes that even artists sometimes make bad choices in creating names. Historically, both Cervantes Coloquio and Unamunos Niebla emerge in an atmosphere of intense intellectual ferment about the nature of language and in epochs that witness the birth of international quests for a universal tongue. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the rediscovery of the Cratylus and other classical works, in part gave rise to nostalgia for an Adamitic, natural language identified with the biblical episode of Adam naming the animals, and hence to a prelapsarian and pre-Babelic state when only one language existed and res and verba were inseparable. This

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belief in an original, natural lingua humana that provided access to divine truths ran counter to the predominant, conventionalist notion of language that considered words malleable, deceptive vehicles of human corruption, the progeny of Babels destructive legacy. As Alban K. Forcione has shown, El coloquio de los perros dramatizes a complex, paradoxical, and pluralistic engagement with the theme of language that echoes the aforementioned extremes, as well as nuanced positions in between, but ultimately the Colloquy begins and ends with a celebration of language and rationality as divine gifts which distinguish man from the beast and lift him out of the dark silence of animality.13 The yearning for a natural language in turn inspired the search for a new, artificial and universal language in the seventeenth century, a cause inspired to a certain extent by fascination with Chinese ideographic writing and championed by theologians such as Herman Hugo and John Amos Comenius. Interest in a constructed, universal language returned with a vengeance towards the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, close to Nieblas date of composition. Between 1880 and 1900 roughly forty artificial languages debuted on the intellectual stage of the European cultural lite, among them Zamenhofs esperanto, based on the Romance Languages and featuring total grammatical regularity. From the beginning, esperanto embodied an ideological agenda. Zamenhof intended his fabricated universal language to provide a unifying foundation for the ethnic groups of his native Poland, groups distinguished by languages and locked in strife. But as esperanto expanded internationally, the language acquired a broader ideological affiliation with leftist politics, accrued from association with socialism, global pacifism and international workers movements. Add this renewed concern with a universal linguistic construct related to the seventeenthcentury quest for a natural language, to the pioneering, early twentiethcentury studies in language and linguistics by Croce, Sapir and Saussure, and a clearer picture emerges of the debate on language that forms the background for the creation of Unamunos novel.14
13 Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of El casamiento engaoso y El coloquio de los perros (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1984), 221. Chapter 6, Language: Divine or Diabolical Gift?, 187236, offers an excellent analysis of Cervantes sophisticated engagement with this important issue in Renaissance thought and letters. Ashworth comments on the interest in naturally signifying spoken language that arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: It was due in part to the rediscovery of Platos Cratylus and other classical sources, in part to the strong Renaissance interest in magic and the cabala, with the concomitant hope that a knowledge of natural language would enable one to exercise some control over the objects signified, and in part to renewed biblical studies (Traditional Logic, 156). 14 On the Renaissance notion of natural language and the seventeenth-century quest for a universal language, consult Paul Cornelius, Languages in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages (Geneva: Droz, 1965), 538; Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Mythe et langage au seizime sicle (Bordeaux: Ducros, 1970), 1792; and James Knowlson,

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Given this context, the fact that Augusto and Orfeo lie at the heart of a vast, Cratyline conspiracy perpetrated on readers of Niebla by the mastermind Unamuno seems less surprising. In Cervantine fashion, the authors restaging and revitalization of the Cratylus in his novel forces the audience little by little to question and rethink their most basic assumptions about language. For example, despite initial uncertainty and vacillation, the res/ verba link Unamuno establishes in the case of Augusto and Orfeo lends credence to Socrates statement that the name-maker is of all the artisans among men the rarest in his ability to select a rubric that encapsulates the essential nature of the thing or being (CRA, 2425). Nevertheless, in the same novel thoughts of un perro conjure una garrida moza and memories of Mama summon a pooch from the mist. Such comical, deflected associations between words and tangible reality underscore the imperfection of language as a conduit of communication as well as highlight the inadequacy of aspiring wordsmiths who have little to no knowledge of the sentient world. To emphasize the point, the author skewers the pedantic Antoln S. Paparrigpulos, a caricature of the intellectual who lives among the pages of the printed word, completely removed from corporeal, lived experience. No matter how presumptuously erudite his research may be, his studies (basically nonexistent, since they remain unpublished) are totally ineffectual in terms of practicable solutions to existential dilemmas. When Augusto consults Paparrigpulos regarding his amorous problems, the researcher dehumanizes the situation, turning life into an abstract geometrical proof, launching into a fit of logorrhea symptomatic more of insanity than insight in that res and verba, the reality signified and the signifying word(s), occupy totally discrete universes. Like the advocate of natural language Cratylus, Augusto resists acceptance of the fact that to communicate effectively as a social animal in a social context, people must conform to a degree to conventions dictates. From the heros perspective, language should follow what he regards as the laws of logic, which he would like to think rule his own subjective consciousness. For example, Augusto believes that Eugenias surname ought to bear a feminine inflection: Domingo? No me acostumbro a eso de que se llame Domingo ... No; he de hacerle cambiar el apellido y que se llame Dominga (559). Of course, Eugenias opinion does not figure in his ruminations, and indeed, at this point he knows nothing about her and cannot even describe her beyond a vague memory of her eyes. Such
Universal Language Schemes in England and France 16001800 (Toronto: Toronto U. P., 1975), 743. For information on esperanto and the search for a universal language at the turn of the twentieth century, see Pierre Burney, Les Langues Internationales (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [2nd ed.] 1966), 1723, 8796 and Peter G. Forster, The Esperanto Movement (The Hague: Mouton, 1982), 4173, 188211.

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insignificant details, however, do not keep Augusto from pursuing his abstract laws to what he perceives as a logical conclusion, that naming their male offspring will pose a problem since Dominga just does not suit as a boys surname. A rather literal-minded Augusto finds equally incomprehensible the use of the diminutive as a sign of affection: Por qu el diminutivo es seal de cario? ... Es acaso que el amor achica la cosa amada? (566). Yet the hero has very little in the way of familiarity with social customs to draw on as a basis for communication. He is most comfortable with philosophical abstraction and rational patterns, and Unamuno goes to great lengths throughout Niebla to show that language defies such rigid, conceptual grids, functioning almost as a living entity that possesses human idiosyncrasies and reflects the illogical logic of social change. As the author asserts in his prologue to the Spanish edition of Croces Aesthetics, la verdadera obra de arte es el lenguaje hablado y vivo. Una poesa bella, es decir, una poesa, es la que habla como un hombre; slo los pedantes hablan como un libro ... (EST, 995). This opinion also helps explain Unamunos predilection for dialogue and the spoken word in his fiction. Augusto meets an extreme version of the bookish part of himself in Eugenias eccentric uncle, who speaks in an eminently logical, but completely artificial language contrived away from the milieu of daily life and without the benefit of a collective cultural historyesperanto. When Fermn greets the aspiring suitor, who has just rescued Ermelindas canary from a nasty fall, he addresses Augusto in a sentence in esperanto that means, Y usted no cree conmigo que la paz universal llegar pronto merced al esperanto? (574). The narrator informs readers that Augusto pens en la huda, pero el amor a Eugenia le contuvo (574). The gentleman persists in speaking the so-called universal language such that even the hero, someone more favourably disposed to grand ideas than material substance, must confess: No le entiendo a usted una palabra, caballero (574).15 Dissent from societys linguistic norms leads to confusion and miscommunication in conversation and in the business of daily living. Fermns wife Ermelinda occupies the other extreme of the linguistic spectrum, that of the pragmatic nationalist, and she shows little patience for her husbands enthusiastic embrace of a fabricated language that no one speaks: Conque no nos entendemos en las nuestras, y vas a traer otras? (576). Ermelinda regards this language without a country as an interfering, intrusive medium that will make the already difficult process of communication even more so. Yet whereas in the Cratylus Socrates affirms that each country has its own name-givers and that each language represents similar concepts with different words, with no language
15 Although Romance Languages form the basis for esperanto, apparently this artificial language never enjoyed much popularity in Spain.

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esteemed above the others (CRA, 2829), Eugenias aunt remains as committed to and as constrained by her own perspective of language as the idealistic universalist Fermn. When Augusto asks if she does not think that having just one language might have some merit, Ermelinda responds: S, seor ... ; una sola lengua: el castellano, y a lo sumo el bable, para hablar con las criadas que no son racionales (576). She selects the language she already has mastered and through which she has experienced and categorized the world as the best candidate for a universal tongue, comically adding the element of class distinction into the mix when she puts Asturian into second place. Equally stubborn and subjective in their respective approaches to language, Fermn and Ermelinda cling to a biased view of the spoken word. She cannot see the global forest for a few Iberian trees, while he sees only the cosmic forest, but not the Castilian oaks in his front yard. If intrinsic verbal limits and human bias in the use of words undermine languages communicative function, they wreak havoc on languages cognitive function as well. Socrates acknowledgment of the innate duplicity of words resonates throughout Niebla: Speech makes all things known and always makes them circulate and move about, and is twofold, true and false. [...] Well, the true part is smooth and divine and dwells aloft among the gods, but falsehood dwells below among common men, is rough and like the tragic goat; for tales and falsehoods are most at home there, in the tragic life. (CRA, 8687) Unamunos exploration of languages twofold nature in the novel assumes both comic and tragic dimensions. At the humorous end of the scale, verbal ambiguity provides the basis for the myriad puns that punctuate and enliven the text. Augusto tells Margarita that to follow the grammatical rules of gender agreement Eugenia really must change her surname to Dominga: Y si no, dnde est la concordancia?. To which the doorkeeper responds: No la conozco, seor (558). As Ermelinda indicates, even within the confines of the same national language confusion arises. In the case of these two people, ostensibly they share the same language and medium for analysing information, but the parameters that constitute the foundation for cognitive processing differ radically. While Augusto perceives and categorizes the world through a prism of laws, ideas and theories, Margarita understands only what she has experienced directly and inherited as societys collective legacy, which indicates that la Concordancia must be a womans name. Much later in the novel, additional incongruous wordplay underscores the epistemological gulf that separates Augusto and Eugenia. When the music teacher searches for the perfect word to describe the verses the protagonist has composed in her

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honour, Augusto assumes the mantle of name-giver: Vamos s, muy nivolesco. Qu es eso? Nada, un timo que nos traemos entre Vctor y yo. Pues mira, Augusto, yo no quiero timos en mi casa luego que nos casemos, sabes? Ni timos ni perros. (653) Augusto brandishes a neologism that forms part of an ideolect he shares only with Vctor (discounting Unamuno and the reading public), understood only by the two who worked their way through the fanciful, associative etymology of nivola (navilo ..., nebulo ..., nivola) and exercised a certain Adamistic, evocative magic. But Eugenia, like Margarita, lacks all interest in or understanding of cerebral, logocentric, idiosyncratic invention. The immediate world of custom and contingency, of pets, salaries and mortgages, and the language that captures that circumscribed reality, mark the limits of her knowledge and her potential for acquiring knowledge. As these absurd, fractured conversations illustrate, unintentional ambiguity in speech relativizes and destabilizes languages function as a cognitive tool, making analysis and comprehension highly subjective undertakings with a wide margin of error. But destabilization takes a decidedly more tragic turn when speech becomes a tissue of lies employed to deceive, as Augusto discovers from his dealings with Eugenia. He finds even more alarming, however, the fact that humans subconsciously manipulate language to lie to themselves and remake reality in the form of more palatable falsehoods. If languages malleability enables people to dupe themselves, then the truth must reside somewhere outside the scope of human consciousness and the linguistic realm, and beyond the forum of social discourse: El hombre en cuanto habla miente, y en cuanto se habla a s mismo, es decir, en cuanto piensa sabiendo que piensa, se miente. No hay ms verdad que la vida fisiolgica. La palabra, este producto social, se ha hecho para mentir. Le he odo a nuestro filsofo que la verdad es, como la palabra, un producto social, lo que creen todos, y creyndolo se entienden. Lo que es producto social es la mentira. (619) Augustos trenchant denunciation of language, however, does not represent the final word on the subject in Niebla. For from Unamunos perspective, despite the compromised status of the medium as a cognitive tool, linguistic articulation remains an essential part of the thought process as well as the business of living, and speech does exert a certain incantatory, conjuring power over the sentient world. As Socrates tells Cratylus, how can there be knowledge, and how can anyone know anything without linguistic mediation: How can we assert that they [the original name-

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makers] gave names or were lawgivers with knowledge, before any name whatsoever had been given, and before they knew any names, if things cannot be learned except through their names? (CRA, 18283). Reality itself becomes an illusory linguistic construct, the fictional world of words Augusto describes on his deathbed: Cosas de libros ..., cosas de libros ... Y qu no es cosa de libros, Domingo? Es que antes de haber libros en una u otra forma antes de haber relatos, de haber palabra, de haber pensamiento, haba algo? (675). Illusory and uncertain a cosmos built on words may be, but when all is said and done, that is all humans have as the basis for thought, action and living. Vctor advances this philosophical position in defending the nivolas substitution of dialogue for the conventional novels focus on plot and action: Hablan demasiado!, dicen otras veces. Como si el hablar no fuese hacer. En el principio fu la Palabra y por la Palabra se hizo todo (663). Such comments support what Mario J. Valds has termed Unamunos radical nominalism, that language serves as a mediating force that enables human existence, first, by helping the knower organize reality and formulate his identity, and second, by permitting the knower to transcend the self and communicate with other humans.16 The author lends credence to this viewpoint in Del sentimiento trgico de la vida, in which he states: El lenguaje es el que nos da la realidad, y no como un mero vehculo de ella, sino como su verdadera carne, de que todo lo otro, la representacin muda o inarticulada, no es sino esqueleto (DSTV, 291). Unamuno further asserts, along with his alter ego Vctor Goti: Todo lo hecho se hizo por la palabra y la palabra fue en un principio (DSTV , 292). The grave epistemological problem still remains, though, of how to discern truth from falsehood, how to confirm that humans know what they know, if language, the foundation for all knowledge, is by its very nature unreliable. When Socrates reaches this philosophical impasse in the Cratylus, he confesses to his interlocutor that how realities are to be learned or discovered is perhaps too great a question for you or me to determine and admonishes him that no man of sense can put himself and his soul under the control of names, and trust in names and their makers to the point of affirming that he knows anything (CRA, 18889; 19091). Although Unamuno would doubtless agree with Socrates opinions to an extent, in the fictional context of Orfeos funeral oration he moves beyond
16 Shadows in the Cave: A Phenomenological Approach to Literary Criticism Based on Hispanic Texts (Toronto: Toronto U. P., 1982), 79. Valds observes that Unamuno is not a proponent of some aspect of classical nominalism which would deny the material reality of the world. Unamuno insists on a radical nominalism; he holds that the world is knowable only because it has been organized by the knower through his use of the acquired language (9). Paul Ilie, in Language and Cognition in Unamuno, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispnicos, XI (Winter 1987), 289314 (pp. 28995), focuses on what he terms the space of knowledge between the unexpressed (Valds organizing power of language) and the expressed (Valds transcendent power of linguistic communication).

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the posed linguistic and epistemological impasse to offer readers a glimmer of an ideal language that would transcend such conundrums. Critical studies have explored the impeccable philosophical and literary lineage the interior monologue manifests. Nelson Orringer observes that Orfeos words pay tribute to ancient Greek civilization coming to terms with human mortality, made apparent in numerous references to Platos Phaedo, specifically to the process of purification, which after death enables the fortunate soul to move into the finer, upper region of the earththe Platonic equivalent of heaven. These allusions secure Unamunos status as a wise, gifted name-maker who appropriately dubs the transfigured canine prodigy Orpheus.17 Carlos Blanco Aguinaga stresses the pervasive Cervantine influence in Niebla, particularly of El coloquio de los perros in this passage. Like Cervantes, Unamuno develops the creative potential inherent in the Greek root kyon or dog, the nickname of the bitingly honest Diogenes and source of the label for his school of philosophy, the Cynics. Both authors offer readers talking dog philosophers who alternately bless, condemn, and fashion a critique of language.18 Review of the dogs discourse on speech and other subjects reveals that Orfeo, Cipin and Berganza also share an extremely moral perspective of life, find humans rather perplexing creatures in that regard, and display concern for the facility with which language becomes a vehicle of hypocrisy and equivocation. With the latter intertextual relationship in mind, Alexander Parker, the critic who has analysed Orfeo in greatest depth, emphasizes this moral aspect of Augustos dog, characterizing him as an embodiment of natural innocence whose pure, loyal, redemptive love serves as a counterpoint to the selfish, cynical love represented elsewhere in the text. In addition, Parker rightly notes that Orfeos oration functions as an epilogue completing the frame for the central narrative set up by the two prologues. Orfeo, like Vctor and Unamuno, is one of the characters who figures in the main body of the text as well as the frame, and who thus enjoys greater proximity to the reader. The prologues and epilogue posit and summarize the major themes explored in the main narrative, but in such a way that they counterbalance one another in tone and perspective. While Vctor Goti raises the issue of the connection between philosophy, eroticism, and corruption in his introduction, the speculative, articulate Orfeo revisits the
17 See Orringer, Unamuno and Plato, especially 34041, on the allusions to the Phaedo in Niebla, and Parker, On the Interpretation of Niebla, 13637 on the appropriateness of Platonic reflection at the end of the novel. 18 For more on the Cervantine and Calderonian aspects of Niebla, consult Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Unamunos Niebla: Existence and the Game of Fiction, MLN, LXXIX (1964), 188205 (pp. 199205). Forcione (Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness, 18081, 201), notes the identification of dog and Cynic philosopher in regards to the Coloquio . In a similar vein, see also E. C. Riley, Cervantes and the Cynics, BHS, LIII (1976), 18999.

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issue in an internalized speech with a focus on longing for an ideal brotherhood of humankind governed by pure, unadulterated love of the type shared by master and pet.19 In a sense, through the prism of Orfeos eyes of innocence readers share a vision of a prelapsarian, Edenic state, recalling the Renaissance nostalgia for Adamitic, natural language so prominent in Cervantes time. Yet Orfeo addresses these issues with a voice both wise and pure, fueled by compassion, which Unamuno labels la esencia del amor espiritual humano (DSTV , 190), and born of the pain of the tragic awareness of human mortality, la conciencia de la propia limitacin (DSTV, 192). The first words of his oration reveal this higher level of awareness even as they express suffering and compassion, co[n]padecimiento: Pobre amo mo!, pobre amo mo! Se ha muerto, se me ha muerto! Se muere todo, todo, todo; todo se me muere! (679). The words combine emotional power with rational analysis and suggest a level of identification that eliminates all barriers between the two souls, porque los hombres slo se aman con amor espiritual cuando han sufrido juntos un mismo dolor ... (DSTV, 189). But Orfeo, who thus speaks from a higher vantage point in terms of spiritual love and consciousness, also speaks in a dramatically different form of language. In his groundbreaking article Language and Cognition in Unamuno mentioned above, Paul Ilie examines the authors long-standing concern with the subjects act of cognition and the problem of communicating fully that experience of knowing to another subject. Unamuno maintains that the innermost type of knowledge subsumes an intuitive, supralinguistic element that inhibits or blocks successful transmission of the substance of that knowledge through words. As a result, one cannot accurately convey through speech the thoughts that arise in the inner world of consciousness, that is, break through the barrier between inner and outer worlds, thought and expression. Yet Unamuno proposes the existence in theory of what Ilie terms plenary cognition, a level of full communication that eliminates such a discontinuity even as it combines a nonverbal component tied to will and emotions with verbal expression. The resultant discourse stretches outward from the subjective consciousness, through the barrier between thought and expression, and into the space of the other. Such plenary communication in all likelihood will forever remain within the province of the artist, who wields nominalistic powers denied the average person.20
19 Parker (On the Interpretation of Niebla) concentrates on the oration as part of Nieblas frame on pp. 12021, and on Orfeos innocence and innocent love on pp. 12728, 137. 20 Ilie states that according to Unamuno imagination and feeling are joined by the will both to understand and to communicate (Language and Cognition in Unamuno, 312), and that poets are the ones privileged by the rare nominalist power to make thoughts and things one and the same (ibid., 313).

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This notion forges another link with the debate on language during the epoch of Cervantes, in which the doctrine of an inner mental language with natural signification formed part of the critical discourse on the capacity of utterances to represent or make known, that is, serve a cognitive function.21 The tie perhaps appears most clearly in Unamunos prologue to Croces Esttica, in which intuition, language and conceptualization constitute parts of the same cognitive process: Pensamos con intuiciones; el concepto se apoya en la intuicin; la ciencia, en el arte (EST, 995). Unamuno has elected to actualize plenary cognition in the fictional space of Orfeos oration, engendering language that transcends the innate limitations of ordinary interpersonal communication. The canine delivers a formal discourse, an elaborate speech, through the human medium of language, but paradoxically the speech assumes the shape of private, internal thought, in a sort of latter-day version of the ancient doctrine of naturally signifying, inner mental language, as indicated by the words pens as that introduce the monologue (679). Orfeos words thus conjoin inner and outer worlds, subjective ideas and public communication. The dog makes impressive use of his rational faculties to condemn human hypocrisy, falsely labeled cynicism from the canine perspective. He targets three aspects of human conduct for mordant criticism: language, clothing and burial of the dead. Orfeo regards words as instruments for lying: En cuanto [el hombre] le ha puesto un nombre a algo, ya no ve este algo; no hace sino or el nombre que le puso, o verle escrito. La lengua le sirve para mentir, inventar lo que no hay y confundirse (680). Clothing allows people to disguise or hide their genuine physical attributes, and burial rituals permit the illusion of negating the decaying effects of death. In each instance, humans obfuscate physical reality and abrogate biological law, denying their essential animal nature by dwelling in an intangible realm of ideas unsubstantiated by sentient experience, hiding the corporeal evidence of animal instinct and sexuality, and ignoring the inevitability of death. But even as Orfeo flexes his rhetorical and logical muscle to criticize his masters species, he employs language replete with empathetic affect for humans, transmitted through countless exclamations that display compassion: Almacenan sus muertos! Un animal que habla, que se viste y que almacena sus muertos! Pobre hombre! (681). He offers a portrait of what should constitute truthful speech, plenary communication, in his recollection of the monodilogos he sustained with Augusto: Cunto le ense con mis silencios, con mis lametones, mientras l me hablaba, me hablaba, me hablaba! ... Y s, yo le entenda, le entenda,

21 Ashworth, Traditional Logic, 15762. He traces the doctrine to St Augustine and Boethius.

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mientras l me hablaba hablndose, y hablaba, hablaba, hablaba. l, al hablarme as hablndose, hablaba al perro que haba en l. (681) Master and dog complement each other, achieving total communication through a language of spoken words and supralinguistic silences, reason and emotion, ideas and doggy caresses. The onomatopoetic impact of the repeated variations of hablar in the quotation underscores the completeness of the exchange in that the words are recognizable as discrete linguistic units, and yet at the same time, run together when read aloud to sound vaguely like a barking dog, thus reuniting verbal articulation with nonverbal, animal voicing of instinct and intuition. And for all of his moral reservations about language, Orfeo understands that the absence of speech in a social context or within subjective consciousness signifies death along with rupture of the flow of this perfect act of cognition established between two subjects of being, one of whom is a shadow figure of the other: Y ahora aqu, ... sin habla ni por fuera ni por dentro. Ya nada tienes que decir a tu Orfeo. Tampoco tiene ya nada que decirte Orfeo con su silencio (681). Significantly, Orfeos death coincides with the acquisition of a natural language of plenary cognition that conjoins the intellectual and physiological aspects of being.22 He dies not as an animal, but rather as a person who has used the uniquely human expressive vehicle of language, albeit of an exceptional type, to voice his awakening to consciousness of mortality. Orfeos internal discourse restores a magical power to language in that his words convey rational thought and formal rhetoric even as they disclose the emotions of suffering and compassion behind them, which in turn, summons the canines death and reunion with his master or god. Delivering the funeral oration, Orfeo retains the moral superiority of natural innocence, but he attains an even higher level of being by gaining superhuman knowledge and communicative skills, much like those of his mythic ancestor Orpheus. Small wonder, then, that Unamuno bestows special visionary powers on the oracular pooch, who as he undergoes a final apotheosis shares a glimpse of the great beyond with Nieblas readers: All
22 My view differs from that of Paul R. Olson, who sees the verbal and the physiological as separated by an unbridgeable chasm in Niebla (Niebla, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts 40 [London: Grant & Cutler, 1984], 9093). Richard L. Predmore writes of Unamunos imagery joining the spiritual and physical in Flesh and Spirit in the Works of Unamuno, PMLA, LXX (1955), 587605. On Orfeos critique of humankinds unwise devaluation of sentient experience see also Round, The Tragic Sense of Niebla, 176, and Johnson, Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain, 19001934 , 100. On the uncertainty with which Unamuno regards language as an instrument sufficient to capture life experience, and the complicated role of gender in linguistic communication in the novel, consult Alison Sinclair, Definition as the Enemy of Self-Definition: A Commentary on the Role of Language in Unamunos Niebla, in Words of Power: Essays in Honour of Alison Fairlie, ed. Dorothy Gabe Coleman and Gillian Jondorf (Glasgow: Univ. of Glasgow Publications in Foreign Languages and Literatures, 1987), 187225.

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BSS, LXXIX (2002)

MARSHA S. COLLINS

en el mundo puro platnico, en el de las ideas encarnadas, est el perro puro, el perro de veras cnico. Y all est mi amo! (681). With the emphasis on awakening to consciousness of mortality as a defining ontological and epistemological moment, the same funeral oration that echoes Cervantes canines and Renaissance theories of natural language clearly anticipates later existential thought on the role of death in human existence. As Martin Heidegger, one of Unamunos kindred existential spirits would later state: To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes.23 In regard to the written word, Heidegger has also asserted that poetry is the founding of truth, a projection that thrusts up the unfamiliar and extraordinary and at the same time thrusts down the ordinary and what we believe to be such.24 Unamuno grounds the truth of consciousness of human mortality in a funeral oration laden with absurdly comical paradoxesan internalized, public speech presented by a prophetic dog, a kyon who denounces human cynicism with language employed to subvert language, an intellectual, talking dog who scoffs at perros sabios, and a canine whose description of heavens landscape includes both Platonic ether and precious stones as well as the Christian saints San Huberto, Santo Domingo and San Roque accompanied by their loyal dogs. As the author observes in Del sentimiento trgico de la vida, el ms alto herosmo [...] es [...] saber ponerse en ridculo y no acobardarse en l (DSTV , 293 94). And so Unamuno confronts the most tragic truth of human existence in a fictional world defined by humorismo confusionista, his creative speciality. Vctor Goti categorizes laughter in the face of the ultimate tragedy, the stripping away of the illusion of immortality, as a brave, human form of cosmic vengeance born of existential despair: Si ha habido quien se ha burlado de Dios, por qu no hemos de burlarnos de la Razn, de la Ciencia y hasta de la Verdad? Y si nos han arrebatado nuestra ms cara y ms ntima esperanza vital, por qu no hemos de confundirlo todo para matar el tiempo y la eternidad y para vengarnos? (54647) With the tale of Augusto and his precocious pet, Unamuno has done precisely that, entrusting the final words, laughter, and tears about the bittersweet human condition to the wise and witty Orfeo, in whose climactic monologue readers discover lo bufo ... y lo trgico ... fundidos y confundidos en uno, merged in the mist of Niebla (545).25
23 The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 16382 (p. 178). 24 The Origin of the Work of Art, in ibid., 1587 (p. 75). 25 An earlier version of this article was presented at a symposium on Modernism and Modernity held in honour of Geoffrey W. Ribbans at Brown University in September, 1998.