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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 El hombre de pensamiento descubre la verdad; pero quien goza de ella y utiliza sus celestiales dones es el hombre de acción, el hombre de mundo, que vive en las particularidades, en las contingencias y en el ajetreo de los hechos comunes. (XXXIX, 245-46) Which of the two plucks more enjoyment from life is clear, but if the formula is valid, it is also clear whose contribution is the greater. Manso plainly affirms the power of the creative spirit: « Desde su oscuro retiro, el sacerdote de la razón, privado de los encantos de la vida y de la juventud, lo gobierna todo con fuerza secreta. La conciencia es creadora, atemperante y reparadora. Si se la compara a un árbol, debe decirse que da flores preciosísimas, cuya fragancia trasciende a todo lo exterior » (XXXIX, 246). These words, like all of El amigo Manso , need to be read simultaneously with their opposing connotations: as a rationalization that turns Máximo into the object of irony and as a serious evaluation of the cerebral being's creative function. The thinker, the philosopher, the artist gives life, invents the existence of others. The reason for his being is the existence of those he has created. The philosopher and the artist create so that others might understand and enjoy. The objects - ideas, fictions, characters- through which these others gain understanding and joy then exist alone for the reader or perceiver, autonomously, while their creator, essential though his role has been, fades from existence. When Manso feels his spirit suffused with Irene's, the sentiment causes him to say that everything appeared beautiful and gratifying to him, like a projection of himself. The wonder of creative inspiration, here the encapsulation of an ideal, confers upon the artist the power to transfigure reality while reality appears transfigured in his eyes. Nothing is what it is and everything transcends what it is. The artistic imagination not only improves on reality, but gives birth to a new circumstance. When Manso from his vantage point in limbo talks of the earthly « desgraciadas figurillas » disdainfully as playthings that entertained man in his childish state, he is, among other things, seeing them -« ¡Pobre gente! » -from the creator's perspective as insignificant objects designed for a moment's distraction. Supremely powerful, he conjures them at will as <strong>Galdós</strong> conjured him. 156 If the artist as creator sits with God and with Nature in his possession of a singular authority, his invention -both the fiction as such and the fictive creature- wins uncommon prominence. The creator may berate his creations in their symbolic state as mortals, but the autonomy device allows neither the reader nor the creator to forget that the mortality of the fictional creation is not nearly so fragile 156 Cf. Infante's final words to Equis in La incógnita (V, 786). 114
Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 as theirs. A character not granted such fictional self-awareness is real in his own world and therefore, from the inner perspective of the work itself, no more immortal than the real characters of the real world. In other words, special as Manso may be for his creative capacity, he is more special yet as a fiction. It is well to recall that, by contrast with Niebla , in El amigo Manso the creator approaches the creation: « Este tal vino a mí hace pocos días » (I, 2). Moreover, Manso's tone before his creator -« este tal »- is condescending at worst and compassionate at best, superior in either case: « le tuve tanta lástima que no pude mostrarme insensible a sus acaloradas instancias » (I, 3). But the fictional creation's superiority is not limited to his condition relative to his inventor; it is absolute. A mythical creature who can say in truthfulness, « no soy, ni he sido, ni seré nunca nadie » (I, 1), may in his earthly function wear the mask of a Don Nadie of woeful mortality and carnality, but he can make such a statement precisely because he is quite the opposite of that. In his autonomous modality he is conscious of his transcendence, so that he can follow up the initial declaration with what amounts to an affirmation of that transcendence: « me pregunto si el no ser nadie equivale a ser todos, y si mi falta de atributos personales equivale a la posesión de los atributos del ser » (I, 2). Pirandello's characters echo this sentiment when they loudly proclaim their superiority over people who breathe and wear clothes. A product of the imagination, barring a coincidence or a miracle, is not palpable, and Manso's greatness is as non-existent, yet every bit as existent, as he is. The likes of Doña Javiera, to whom Manso addresses the words, « Invisible es todo lo grande, toda ley, toda causa, todo elemento activo » (L, 307), are not blessed with the sensitivity that the special status of fiction demands for its recognition. We, on the other hand, are, and we can join him in his happy state. The game of literary reflexivity in which <strong>Galdós</strong> luxuriates in El amigo Manso is a component of the novel which any reading of the book must embrace. That the novel should undertake an appraisal of its own constitution is enough to dispel the charge of gratuitousness that might be burled at this absorption in game playing. The metanovelistic undertaking, however, is judged as sterile by those convinced that its view onto itself excludes the world, that which really counts. In El amigo Manso , though, the game is not gratuitous because the work's investigation of fictionality and the socialideological planes are fully integrated. The reader's acquisition of consciousness of the problematics of fiction permits him to capture all the more readily the corresponding social structure that evolves in the context of this self-examination of fiction. Doña Cándida is an example. « Llena de pomposos embustes » conceived « en su mente soñadora », she lives a lie in her new house: the silverware is not silver, the champagne is cider, the table is missing a leg. But she believes in her own creation. « De su infeliz estado hacia ridícula comedia » (V, 29). A fiction has overtaken the reality from which it sprang. Like Doña Cándida, the members of this bourgeois society are fictional beings not only in the sense 115
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