"Ni novela ni nivola":The Purpose of Metafiction in Unamuno's Niebla and Merino's Los invisibles Maria R. Rippon "La realidad es más extraña que la ficción porque no necesita ser verosímil." José María Merino, Los invisibles, 274 "¿Qué es el mundo real sino el sueño que soñamos todos, el sueño común?" Augusto Pérez, Chapter XXXII, Niebla, 145 In what must be one of the most memorable openings in fiction, Benito Pérez Galdós begins El amigo Manso (1882) with these words: "Yo no existo…" and ends the opening paragraph with "no soy, ni he sido, ni seré nunca nadie" (7). Dramatized author Galdós, already an author of 30 novels, approaches this non-entity Manso to help him write another novel. Manso agrees and Galdós creates him by plunging the idea of him into ink, putting it on paper, setting the paper aflame, and placing it all in a flask, from which Manso emerges out of a red flame "convertido en carne mortal" (9). Galdós creates this "mortal flesh" from an idea that he writes into being. Miguel de Unamuno similarly wanted his reader to be able to perceive the life force within his characters (his "agonists"), which came from the characters' desire for life. No amount of attention to the process of writing could enliven his characters; thus, while Unamuno employed the metafictional mode – most famously in Niebla (1914)–, he did so only to serve his idealist and existentialist interrogation of the nature of reality and to explore art as a way to (re-)create and enhance reality. Nearly a century later, José María Merino would write Los invisibles (2000), with its second part entitled "Ni novela ni nivola," which focuses on the generation of the story that we have read in the first part. Like Unamuno, Merino will emphasize the co-dependence of creator and created, author and reader, reader and protagonist in the creation of reality; however, [End Page 95] Merino's reality includes the noumenal as well as the phenomenal, such as the ideas created through or re-created from fiction. Niebla and Los invisibles dramatize their creators within the text, but the creators of these works include the flesh-and-blood authors and readers, as well, who are re-created through their mutual inter-penetration in the lives of the protagonists, or "agonists." Such inter-penetration can assuage the loneliness of existence, metaphorically rendered in Merino through the image of los invisibles. The metafictional mode makes visible a craft usually hidden to the reader; thus, aside from making characters visible who would otherwise be invisible, Merino makes the process of fiction visible, as well. I have confined this essay to the meaning and purpose of metafiction in Niebla and Los invisibles. Given that Merino titles the second part of his novel "Ni novela ni nivola," I have sought to differentiate Merino's use of the self-reflexive mode from Unamuno's, which I ground in their unique approaches to the relationship between art and life. While I cite from several works of non-fiction authored by Unamuno or Merino, it has not been my intent to provide a rationale for their use of metafiction in Niebla and Los invisibles based on their critical essays but rather through textual analysis of the novels themselves. After describing these novels and identifying their metafictional elements, I will examine the way that art "invades" life in each novel and the relationship that this establishes between art and life – what it means to exist, whether in fiction or in reality, and the freedom and necessity inherent in both. The process of creation, rather than the creation (or story) itself, leads to self-knowledge, interpenetration, and, ultimately, an understanding of reality. Proof of the metafictional nature of these two novels lies in any attempt to render their plot summaries. Indubitably, one can provide a list of "events" for each story, but both novels relate so much more than the story of their ostensible protagonists. If I were to confine myself to telling you that one day Augusto Pérez leaves his house and whimsically...