Fog: Nivola Or Novel

Miguel de Unamuno is one of the most important authors in Spanish literature. He was born in Bilbao in 1864 and died in Salamanca in 1936. To this day, his name resonates as one of the greats in Hispanic literature and one of the representatives of the Generation of 98.

In 1914, he published a rather peculiar novel, a novel that he prefers to classify as “nivola”, thus preventing critics from comparing it with other works. That novel is none other than Niebla , a work that we will explore in this article.

In this work he collects many of the ideas present in his previous texts, but he does so through the life of a character, Augusto Pérez, a wealthy man with a law degree. The story itself doesn’t have too many twists, but the writer tried to give it another dimension.

A new reading that he himself would include in the range of “nivola” and not of a novel as it would have been conventionally described. In this article, we will reveal some of the keys to Niebla in the hope that, as you read it, you will be carried away by its genius.

Niebla’s argument

Something that will attract the reader’s attention early on is that the prologue is signed by Víctor Goti, one of the characters in the work. Likewise, the author makes a post-prologue in which he argues that we are not going to read a novel, but a “nivola”.

To confuse all this even more if possible, the epilogue consists of a narration of the events of the play, but from the point of view of Orfeo, Augusto Pérez’s dog, the protagonist.

The action starts when Augusto sees a woman with whom he ends up falling madly in love. He will try, with his limited resources, to conquer her, but he will only get rejections, since the woman has a partner. However, over time, he will agree to have some dates, but in order to take advantage of the protagonist. Finally, on her wedding day, she writes to him explaining that it was all a hoax.

From this moment on, we are witnessing an authentic revolution from a narrative point of view. Augusto is so unhappy that he plans to commit suicide. However, Augustus is nothing more than the character of a play and, as such, he lacks free will. It is Unamuno, the author, who can make the final decision.

At this moment, what in the cinema we would know as the fourth wall is broken and Augusto decides to start a talk with the author; that is, speak directly to Unamuno.

The character ends up rebelling before the author, exposing his intentions. In this way, the author doubts: is he himself a character from another fiction? To what extent do you have free will? The idea is that, as Unamuno begins to doubt his own freedom and his reality, the reader questions his own existence at the same time. What if we only existed in a dream? What if we are part of someone’s dream?

The magnitude of the novel is not only found in the plot, but in its capacity for dialogue with the reality of the reader and, in this case, also of the author. Hence, Unamuno decides that the work should be included in another generic classification, in a category riddled with paratexts and which he prefers to call “nivola”, making it impossible for critics to classify or compare it.

Realities and fictions in Niebla’s novel

Unamuno’s work bears a certain relationship with Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream . In some way, the fiction is more real than the authors themselves. For Unamuno, the characters have a life of their own, the reader makes them live and what matters is how literature is revived.

All of this is closely related to the problem of immortality: if we are what we dream of and we call everyone’s dream in common reality, we cannot know what is real.

Unamuno had read Descartes, but also Calderón de la Barca and, precisely there, lies the inspiration for his “nivola”. We see a reflection of Descartes’ rationalism, since we have, in principle, no reason to believe that what surrounds us is more than a dream.

Unamuno, despite being a believer, can not rationally deduce the existence of God as Descartes does, therefore, he has no reason to believe that what surrounds him is a dream or deception. How do we know when the senses are deceiving us?

Unamuno brings together all this complexity in Niebla by drawing different regions: that of fiction, in which we find the characters; framing fiction, we would find the reality of fiction, which is the place where the fictional author is; finally, outside, in the limits, we would find another reality, that of the reader himself.

With Niebla , the author describes different planes that are intertwined. The author himself ends up acting as a character when he meets Agusto. In other words, we are faced with a reality of reality that would be that of the world that surrounds us and, in turn, a reality of fiction where Unamuno is. Finally, a fiction of fiction that is where the characters are.

More philosophical aspects of Niebla

Another of Niebla’s fundamental issues is, as we have well anticipated, that of free will. It arises from two perspectives: the first is found in the fictional entity, from which the character asks if he is free.

We see an Augustus who wants to commit suicide, but he finds that Unamuno does not allow it, he cannot do it because he is simply a character. And, at this point, the same doubt is reflected in the reader.

The characters are born from a language, from an inheritance; For this reason, we are not free to think what we think and we re-consider these two possibilities : God does not exist and reality is nothing more than the dream that we all dream or that God exists and we would be God’s dream.

Augusto fights for his life, his fictional life, but his after all. In desperation, the character of Augusto announces to the readers that they are also going to die and that the work is, ultimately, a metaphor for human existence itself.

What is the nivola ? It is a novel in which the characters are not previously defined, but are made as they move, the creator does not have a plan of what will happen, as it happens in life itself.

The objective of the nivola is none other than to confuse critics who tend to compare everything with the above, in this way, it provides an unprecedented new genre with which to compare.

For Unamuno, there is something cheating in the realistic novel, they make us believe that it is real and that is the genre of men who do not see that their reality is a dream. The nivola, however, would be a way of understanding any novel; a novel that only exists when it is thought, activated and read. It is an uncomfortable novel, in which the prologue is also a novel; in which reality and metafiction intermingle in the text.