Galdós - Amazon Web Services

Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
El amigo Manso won little esteem from its contemporaries: a novel without plot or action, they
called it; Clarín, to the best of our knowledge, failed to review it; and Unamuno pretended not to have
understood it. Early critics paid little attention to the fact that Chapter I and Chapter L constitute a
frame that establishes Máximo Manso in his own words as a lie, a fictive invention. These critics read
the novel as an autobiographical account or as a disquisition on « krausismo » and late nineteenth-
century educational theories 121 . Even Casalduero, in his predilection to classify, still labels El amigo
Manso as a naturalistic novel in which Galdós exposes society to objective, scientific observation 122 .
Vast as Galdós' readership has been, Galdós has yet to find his readers. The more recent commentators
have tended to recognize the importance of the play on autonomy in this direct antecedent of Niebla
, but in limited contexts or as a subservient component of the novel. Peter G. Earle, though concerned
with other matters, has expressed well Máximo's duality as a creation: « El amigo Manso es la
novela en que Galdós mejor sitúa a su protagonista en la circunstancia del novelista mismo. Es un
espíritu autónomo que lleva su 'apariencia humana' en calidad de prestada » 123 . Robert H. Russell
has pointed to Manso's awareness of himself as a writer of fiction and says cautiously: «It is not
entirely imprudent to suggest that El amigo Manso is as much concerned with literature as it is
with education» 124 . However, he prefers to hover above Galdós' game as a knowing non-participant,
assumes that the unnamed character in the novel to whom Manso refers as his creator is Galdós, and,
collating his reading of the novel with the author's career, limits his thesis to Galdós' discovery that
the humanity of his fictional creations is deepened if his own ideological posture does not obtrude
onto their reality. Gustavo Correa has understood and insisted more than any other critic that Galdós
121 Emilio G. Gamero y de Laiglesia, Galdós y su obra , II. Las novelas (Madrid: Imprenta Ruiz,
1934), discerned that Máximo Manso is both « un ser efectivo y real » and « hechura de la fantasía del
novelista » (p. 86) but, not knowing what to make of that, made nothing of it. Walter T. Pattison, given
to positivistic sleuthing, rejects out of hand the denomination of Manso as an autonomous character
(« El amigo Manso and el amigo Galdós », Anales Galdosianos , 2 [1967], 151, n. 72).
122 Joaquín Casalduero, Vida y obra de Galdós (1843-1920) , 3rd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1970), p.
223; reprinted from Homenaje de poetas a Pierre Darmangeat (Paris: Les Éditions Polyglottes , 1966),
pp. 83-90.
123 « La interdependencia de los personajes galdosianos », Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos , No.
250-252 (1970-71), 129.
124 « El amigo Manso : Galdós with a Mirror», MLN , 78 (1963), 167.
89