Galdós - Amazon Web Services

Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
that they are the inventions of Galdós, but in that they have created themselves into something they are
not and function in a society structured on such fictions. In the same way that any novelistic creation
is given life through language, José María's family's birth into a new social role is legitimized in its
fictionality by the members' adoption of new linguistic signs (Lica > Manuela, Belica > Isabel, etc.).
The purchase of titles of nobility is the crowning step in their creation of a fictional identity. Máximo
himself, who is ostensibly -but only ostensibly- independent of his creator, is also only ostensibly
independent of this society where the clock strikes eleven at the hour of five. But just as the failure of
Nazarín's peculiar evangelism is a measure not simply of his ineptitude but of the spiritual sterility of
nineteenth-century bourgeois society, so too is Manso's sense of uselessness and ultimate withdrawal
an indictment of a society in which the gentle, the learned, and the morally pure have no place.
Any judgment of Manso's nature that leaves his circumstance untouched falsifies the relationship
between the two. Still, as we have shown, through the device of fictive autonomy Galdós distances
the reader of El amigo Manso from Máximo and his bourgeois world. In doing so, he draws attention
to the workings of the esthetic object that is at once his creation and his medium. He causes the reader
to fasten not on the social signification alone, but on the novel as signifier. His endeavor, like any
metalingual enterprise, is semiotic and epistemological at the same time: it ventures in the telling of
the tale to unravel that tale's system of signs and to probe the nature of knowledge dressed as fiction. In
this art that exposes itself, the child in us that is normally swept into the game of belief is suppressed.
That level here is literally reserved for the child, as when Pepito María hides his face in terror at the
sight of the devil on stage. We are pitched, rather, into a more sophisticated game for adults. In words
that Ortega was to echo some forty-five years later, Manso exalts the child's ingenuous faith before the
work of art over the analytical process: « ¡Ni qué cosa humana habrá que a tal análisis resista! Pero es
una desdicha conocer el amargo placer de la crítica, y ser llevado por impulsos de la mente a deshojar
la misma flor que admiramos. Vale más ser niño y mirar con loco asombro las imperfecciones de un
rudo juguete » (XIV, 85). In this by no means rough-hewn plaything, Galdós has us not live the novel
but view it as object, constrains us to become aware of ourselves as readers/players, and even edges us
into a critical analysis of our awareness. In composing a novel that takes its own creation as its theme,
Galdós joins a host of twentieth-century writers of metanovels, Proust, Gide, and Beckett among
them. He makes a Pirandello play look much less astonishing than it did at first blush. He connects
with the modern cinema's penchant for reflexiveness: Fellini's 8 ½ and Bergman's Persona come to
mind immediately. lf these names seem to constitute odd company for the likes of Don Benito « el
garbancero », one must keep sight of the fact that there is a difference between Galdós and the others.
The nineteenth century's ever-increasing isolation of the artist from its social currents has pushed the
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