Voices of Authority and Linguistic Autonomy in Niebla

Abstract

Miguel de Unamuno's works have often been studied as expressions of his philosophy or life experience. More recent literary theory has eschewed approaches that foreground the author, preferring to focus primarily on the text or the reader. Utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel, this paper analyzes Niebla, one of Unamuno's most frequently studied works, to illustrate that new literary theories can enrich our reading of the text. Bakhtin argues that the novel is characterized by many voices or styles which the novelist welcomes and exploits. The novel should not be viewed as having a single style but as a dynamic interaction between a variety of incorporated languages. The authorial voice is only one among many and it is constantly challenged, muted, and reshaped as it enters into contact with other voices that are present in the text. Authoritative is only one type of discourse that can be incorporated into the novel, especially a Bildungsroman. In the process of maturation, the character passes through a series of ideological phases, each of which is characterized by the interaction of the character's language and the language of a given authority. Unamuno's Niebla is essentially a Bildungsroman, in which Augusto Perez progresses through a series of stages in an existentialist quest for self. These stages are accompanied by linguistic changes, as Augusto gradually sheds the voices of authority and acquires his own autonomous voice. The culmination of this process occurs in the famous scene where Augusto confronts Unamuno. The meeting of author and character is more than an expression of Unamuno's thirst for eternal life through literature; it is a dramatization of the nature of heteroglossia and a confirmation of the linguistic autonomy of the fictional character. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol11/iss2/5 VOICES OF AUTHORITY AND LINGUISTIC AUTONOMY IN NIEBLA MARY LEE BRETZ Rutgers University Miguel de Unamuno's novels, plays and poetry have often been studied as expressions of his philosophy, psychology, and life experience. This was not surprising in the early and even middle part of this century, given the emphasis on a biographical, philosophical, or psychological approach to literature. Starting with New Criticism, however, and continuing on to the present, literary theory has eschewed approaches that foreground the author, preferring to focus primarily on the text or the reader. While it is true that the text is always in some a revelation of the author's self, it is also inevitably a creation of an other. The otherness of the text is of a richness hitherto unimagined, as evidenced by the multitude of literary theories that have surfaced in recent years in an attempt to explain and explore its many facets. Limiting myself to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel, I propose to analyze one of Unamuno's most frequently studied works, his novel Niebla, to illustrate how the application of new theories can enrich our reading of the text. In his essay Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin argues that the novel is characterized by speech diversity, by heteroglossia, which the novelist welcomes and exploits and which enters into a dialogic relationship with his or her own voice.' Consequently, the novel should not be viewed as having a single style, as expressing a single voice, but as a dynamic interaction between a variety of incorporated languages. The authorial voice is only one among many and it is constantly challenged, muted, reshaped, or in Bakhtin's terms, as it enters into contact with the other languages that are present in the text: Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its incorporation), is another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way (Bakhtin, p. 324). Among the many types of discourse that can be