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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 116
Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 modern writer to take refuge in an artistic hermeticism. When Galdós creates a self-referential art and leads his readers to experience a specific novel as an examination of the novelistic genre, he does so without jettisoning the bourgeoisie. Like Máximo Manso, he is not estranged from, or even by, the practices and values of the bourgeois society to which he belongs. He too is critical subject and corruptible object of his petty circumstance. El amigo Manso therefore functions both in the sphere of socio-political commentary and in the hermetic realm of esthetic introspection. The radicality of Galdós' procedure in his time lies in the fact that, narrators' interventions notwithstanding, the realistic novel does its best to hide its identity as a novel, while Galdós in El amigo Manso creates an illusionist art that signals the coming break with illusionism. «You think El amigo Manso is life?» he asks us, straight in the tradition of Cervantes. «Don't deceive yourselves! This is a novel!» We must remain awake to the fact that when we read a novel we are engaging in a game. Children play games to fill their time, to learn and grow. So do adults. Reading novels is one of our games. We know the rules beforehand; we learned them long ago. To play El amigo Manso requires a few new rules, because it is a game that plays with the game that it plays. The critic's game is to discover that game and its rules. Cornell University 117
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