Angel Ganivet's Suicide

Angel Ganivet's suicide at the age of 32 brought to an abrupt close the development of an innovative writer and thinker. Although necessarily limited in number, his publications had a significant impact on his contemporaries and on the development of the essay in Spain. His writings challenge the established generic borders in keeping with turn-of-the-century experimentation with limits and traditional definitions. He combines the essay and the epistolary form in Cartas finlandesas (1898; Letters from Finland) and in the posthumous El porvenir de España (1912; The future of Spain), and takes the hybrid form of travel essay and social commentary in a second posthumous work, Hombres del norte (1905; Men from the north). Ganivet writes from the
For both authors, selfishness completely inhibits personal and social reforms by preventing the indispensable component of love. In the views of Ganivet and Unamuno, love is a pure and noble sentiment manifested in the help of others and the control of egotistical tendencies. The person who adopts this ideal love will prove a formidable collaborator in the utopian missions postulated by the two authors. For Unamuno, "El fuerte, el radicalmente fuerte, no puede ser egoísta: el que tiene fuerza de sobra, la saca para darla" (ETC 46). The ideas of force and power go hand-in-hand with love, and not egoism. By exhibiting this same quality, the Ganivetian "maestro" is essentially the same "radicalmente fuerte" of Unamuno: a selfless individual whose pure love results in his/her pupils' attainment of the mother ideas, as explained previously in terms of Ganivetian indifference. In Unamuno's eyes, love itself makes possible the true success of ideal reform and the collective, individual benefits of the Spanish people: "A través del amor llegamos a las cosas con nuestro ser propio" (24). These "cosas" are the ideas or the superficial history found in the "libros y registros" but that are achieved and understood appropriately by means of "nuestro ser propio," in other words, by means of the "intrahistoria" and the eternal tradition of the people. Unamuno believes love establishes the union
For Unamuno, the "europeización" of Spain is critical for initiating this social and intellectual process since Spanish ideas are stagnated. Together with the attempt of each citizen to discover their "tradiciones eternas," Spaniards should Europeanize themselves. They must join the process of internal discovery with contemporary European ideas in order to stimulate and enhance the immobile intellectual current of the present: "Con el aire de fuera regenero mi sangre, no respirando el que exhalo" (ETC 145). Ganivet views Spain's crisis as caused precisely by the invasion of foreign ideologies. What must be done, therefore, is reduce external influences in favor of the dominance of Spanish ideals. Foreign philosophies can only be implanted in Spain if they conform to the country's contemporary common philosophy. Of all the similarities noted in this study, it is this point that most distinguishes the proposed reforms of the