UC Irvine

This dissertation explores the potential of fiction to create existential history as a contemplation of the past that seeks not to explain it but to bring it to life again. There are two guiding questions: first, what does history feel like?; and, second, how does fiction illuminate that experience by means inaccessible to history? My analysis folds over two sets of Peninsular Spanish texts separated by about a century: the short fiction of Spain’s prolific early 20th-century thinker Miguel de Unamuno, and the contemporary novels of Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, with interventions from John Dos Passos (Chapter 2) and Javier Marías (Chapter 3).

The first chapter, “Personality as Historical Truth in Unamuno,” sets the stage by examining the implications of a statement lifted from one of Unamuno’s short stories: “No hay más verdadera historia que la novela . . .” Using this idea as a springboard, I propose a reading of Unamuno’s most popular story, San Manuel Bueno, mártir, that is at odds with the most prominent scholarship but, I argue, in harmony with Unamuno’s own intimations, significantly in the jointly-published “Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez.”

In the second chapter, I argue that novels function well as existential history because they drop readers into a space of potentiality, where ethical choices must be made without knowledge of eventual consequences. The idea of potentiality comes to the forefront in the two primary texts considered: Martínez de Pisón’s Enterrar a los muertos and El día de mañana, set, respectively, during the Spanish Civil War and Transition periods.

The third chapter looks at fiction’s potential to recreate the physical realities of embodied experience, specifically family connections of inheritance and legacy. I consider the difference between memory (internal interaction with the past, from within a body) and history (interaction with the past that always has an external communicative function) in relation to family legacy, family homes, and the metaphor of the mirror as it relates to interactions between family members. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on embodiment and the sensory dimensions of Being inform my analysis throughout the chapter.