Unamuno’s Farewell to Fiction: The Holy
Apostasy of San Manuel Bueno
by
Glenn
Statile
1)
A Farewell to Fiction
The novel San Manuel Bueno, Martyr
can quite correctly be called Miguel de
Unamuno’s farewell to fiction. Written
in the fall of 1930, after a six year
exile spent primarily in France by way
of the Canary Islands, it was first
published in 1931. Two years later in
1933 it made its appearance in book form
along with three other stories by
Unamuno, who died shortly thereafter in
1936 just after the rise to power of the
Franco regime. By no means a literary
masterpiece, San Manuel Bueno is
still arguably the jewel in the crown of
Unamuno’s efforts to give fictional
flesh to his philosophical views
regarding the human condition. Unamuno
himself has suggested that the novel
should be understood as the third and
final installment of a trilogy of works
which began with The Tragic Sense of
Life (1913) and The Agony of
Christianity (1925).