The (in)visible confession of Unamuno, between María Zambrano and Rosa Chacel

Abstract

Both María Zambrano and Rosa Chacel developed specific studies on confession. A certain coincidence between their postulates indicates that both authors considered that literary genre as an expression of a new type of knowledge, detached from rationalist excesses, no longer legitimized by ocularcentric erudition, but by the knowledge of one’s own self and specifically of the “invisible” aspects of his identity (from the soul to eros). In this way it’s significant that both writers referred to the case of Unamuno as symptomatic of the limits that the confession had in the Spanish canon. The similarity of their observations on the difficulty of the genre in the Basque author, then allows us to investigate the common objective of Zambrano and Chacel in relation to resolving the supposedly failed emergence of the confession within the Hispanic literary tradition.