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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
itself as a fiction about fiction, and the text assumes the power to create and to destroy through the
word, one in the process of the other.
Manso, for that matter, is a word, a sign. He/It signals an apparent deficiency. In terms of the
characterization in the inner novel, Manso is no man of action because he is a philosopher, a cerebral
person. At that level, one can read his declaration of non-existence as the accurate self-assessment
of an individual so meek that his existence has no significance. From the other perspective, that of
fictionality, Manso's distance from vital existence is consistent with his proclaimed non-existence
because he is a creature born of thought who, by the standards of tangibility, remains a thought.
Part of Galdós' game is to imbue the imagined flesh-and-blood figure he has penned with the very
nature of fictionality. As a result, Manso is a rare character in that his personality as a man does not
transcend his fictionality but rather is determined by it. Clearly, the individual living out the patterns
of a predetermined existence (his autonomy is predetermined) and who harmonizes, as Manso does
and as Manuel does not, with the particular cosmic scheme responsible for his nature is by definition
meek. Accordingly, if we sit in condemnation of the abulic philosopher who lionizes the symbols of
bourgeois values, as Nimetz suggests that Galdós does (pp. 60-61), we miss the mark. Galdós knew
full well that when the Book of Psalms proclaims that «the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall
delight themselves in the abundance of peace» (37: 11), it establishes an equivalency between the
meek and the righteous in opposition to the wicked. The biblical promise, furthermore, is that the Lord
will beautify the meek with salvation (Psalms 149: 4). On both the interior and the framing level of the
novel, Manso has been so beautified. In the novel-within-the-novel, Manso's retreat is the deliverance
of the righteous from the wicked. After having been sucked for a period into the sullied terrain of
the petty bourgeoisie, he meets a fate that corresponds to the moral and intellectual distinction of his
character and is permanently distanced from that besmirched world. Through the framing structure,
Manso's lord and master has accorded his meek-willed invention the beauty and salvation inherent
in the artistic creation.
Gerald Gillespie has defined Manso as a disabused intellectual who in his «real» existence lives in
anguished alienation 152 . «To be sure». But the spatial parameters of this alienation encompass two
directions: not only the usual conception of existing «outside» but also the idea of «above». Modern
literature's alienated characters exist in an ironic zone where their apartness tends to demean their
worth in the eyes of those who share their fictional world but causes in the reader a recognition of their
152 «Reality and Fiction in the Novels of Galdós», Anales Galdosianos , 1 (1966), 19.
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