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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
on the side of disorder, existence conflicts with ethics. If the victory in this world, in this novel, is not
Máximo Manso's, it belongs to his creator, but certainly not to Manolo or to José María, appearances
notwithstanding. By temperament and talent Máximo was unable to enter the reigning bourgeoisie's
power structure: that is to his credit.
We must of course concede that this morally and intellectually superior individual is constitutionally
defective in terms of the demands placed on him by his historical circumstance. As a man of his time,
measured by his practical achievements, among which the acquisition of a new wet nurse is probably
his most momentous, Manso does not loom large. When we fathom the narration's ironic distance,
however, Manso's insignificance can be taken at face value no more than the assertion that this book
is « un trabajillo de poco aliento » (1, 3), for he is never fully disengaged from his literariness.
If Manso's trajectory describes the self-creation of a fictional character, then his fictionality is the
realization of a goal. To transcend that fictionality into life would devalue it. Newton, in her study
(p. 125), already sensed El amigo Manso's overriding implication: that literature carries with it an
immanence of meaning that lived experience cannot hold 154 . Correa accurately conveys the idea
contained in the text:
eternal and the profound and that Máximo is the enabling agent of Peña's triumph, she need not have
been so hesitant in designating Manso's failure as relative. And, out of sympathy as I must confess
to being with Pattison's approach to the novel, I heartily agree with his conclusions about Máximo:
«He has indeed been manso with all the meekness, docility, and lack oi virile spirit which this word
connotes. But if, as he states, there is something above and beyond the facts and events of everyday
life, he can console himself in the knowledge that in this superior realm he still holds the advantage.
Now he is manso in another sense: the bellwether who leads the stupid sheep. The man of action
carries off the superficial and transitory victories; the man of thought moves in the world of truth and
is the guide of society towards a better organization in which egoism and individualism will no longer
corrupt the ideal» (p. 148).
154 In comparing El amigo Manso to an Anatole France novel (« Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard ,
a Possible Source for El amigo Manso », Symposium , 17 [1963], 123-29), Monroe Z. Hafter has
noticed that in a juxtaposition of fiction and reality, the imaginary may prove to be the more real
of the two. Máximos contradictory nature as a self-conscious fiction of flesh and blood leads Hafter
to conclude that the ultimate battle on the level of action and practical resolution is won by the
figment of the imagination. Had Hafter and Russell gone far enough into Galdós' game playing to
detail the supremacy of fiction, they would have been able to resolve the contradiction of Máximo's
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