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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
Máximo's apparent autonomous nature also has led the critics into social and ontological
considerations -for good reasons, to be sure. Máximo's dual existence as the product of his creator
and as an independent entity willy-nilly invites examination of the grey area between fact and fiction,
reality and illusion. The autonomous character metaphorically raises the question of the split that
exists between man as a social being with social dependency on others and man as endowed with the
power to form and determine himself. Manso articulates that issue in his pithy utterance: « es ley
que el mundo sea nuestro molde y no nuestra hechura ». On another level, man's relation to God is
suggested (the novel's second paragraph establishes the parallel), or more broadly, man's subjection
to fate -the uncontrollability of human actions. A further form of subjection that man is seen to suffer
is the power of his psyche. If Máximo Manso is not the puppet of his creator, he is, then, under the
control of his « mansedumbre »: he may be a free character, but he is not free of his character. The
self and the other are in pernicious contest. From the author's position, the autonomous character -
Máximo in this case- can be seen as a projection of the author's subconscious. Yet another reading of
the novel turns it, like Niebla , into an attack on reason. Máximo, as an intellectual, a philosopher, a
teacher, has the power to autonomize himself through thought. So defined, he functions as both subject
and object, as an eye on society and as matter for examination. His failure, his apparent ingestion into
the bourgeois mode, represents from this standpoint the collapse of the cerebral way.
The presence of these important questions in El amigo Manso over and above its documentation of
a social transformation and its ironic representation of a theory of education is testimony to the novel's
richness. Beyond that, whether or not Máximo is, in fact, a truly autonomous character is in itself a
maintain» (p. 115). Ricardo Gullón, « El amigo Manso, novela galdosiana », in Técnicas de Galdós
(Madrid: Taurus, 1970), pp. 57-102, reprinted from Mundo Nuevo, No. 4 (1966), 32-39, and No.
5 (1966), 59-65, examines various aspects of the Galdós text but is more interested in enlacing it
with Niebla and in defining its self-exposure as a metaphor of the life process than in extracting its
metanovelistic components. He does remark on the first chapter's « operaciones de magia » (p. 77); he
also registers Máximo as an archetype of fiction, « personaje de papel, ente inventado que no recata
sino proclama su condición artificial » (p. 61). Gullón was among the first to give Manso his real due,
but he did not choose to analyze the novel as a commentary on the creative act. Since the completion
of my essay, Arnold M. Penuel has published a brief note, «Some Aesthetic Implications of Galdós'
El amigo Manso », Anales Galdosianos , 9 (1974), 145-48, which bears on Manso's autonomy and
Galdós' concern for fiction.
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