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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 root problem for critics. If he is autonomous, who made him that way? Who gave him his name? How can he be autonomous and such a perfect little bourgeois? Doesn't the structure of illusion within an illusion simply amount to fabrication? The problem is worth discussing. But whether or not Máximo is autonomous -namely, free by appearances- is secondary to the illusion that he is. Though proportionately in greater view, the human disposition of Máximo Manso is always subservient to his fictional substance. The readers who fail to perceive that fact have ignored or forgotten the first chapter and many details of the narration. They have accepted all too readily Manso's invitation, « Vedme con apariencia humana » (1, 2), and disregarded with equal alacrity his admonition that he speaks without possession of a voice and writes though he has no hands. The narrative trick that makes Máximo appear transcendentally conscious of his fictionality and therefore not to be Galdós' creation makes the novel appear to be Máximo's creation. El amigo Manso is therefore a metanovel -a novel that investigates the nature of the novel, art about art. The autonomous -or supposedly autonomous- character in El amigo Manso raises not so much the question of Galdós' bold novelistic technique in this particular work (a major concern of the critics who have paused to comment on the device), but the whole broad problem of fiction, its birth, the relationship of its constitutive elements, its power, and its immortality 127 . Galdós' novel strikes beyond its evident link with Don Quijote to display the artistic self-consciousness that is so very much a twentieth-century phenomenon. Lest El amigo Manso be taken as a momentary aberration, a measure of Galdós' whimsicality in 1882, it is well to recall that throughout his career he made manifest directly within his novels his preoccupation with the creative process. In the last chapter of Fortunata y Jacinta , in the funeral scene, one sentence stands out for its bizarre timbre in the context of a mimetic narrative: « En el largo trayecto de la Cava al cementerio, que era uno de los del Sur, Segismundo contó al buen Ponce todo lo que sabía de la historia de Fortunata, que no era poco, sin omitir lo último, que era, sin duda lo mejor; a lo que dijo el eximio sentenciador de obras literarias que había allí elementos para un drama o novela, aunque, a su parecer, el tejido artístico no resultaría vistoso sino introduciendo ciertas urdimbres de todo punto necesarias para que la vulgaridad de la vida pudiese convertirse en materia 127 One is tempted to agree with José F. Montesinos' apparent hyperbole: « Nunca como en esta novela irónica ha comprendido el escritor tan claramente el sentido de su actividad creadora » ( Galdós , II [Madrid: Castalia, 1969], p. 29), but precisely because in the context of our discussion, the statement -ironically- is not hyperbolic at all. 92
Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 estética » (V, 544) 128 . This delicious morsel of artistic self-revelation is Galdós' commentary on his way as a novelist and on his belief that there is stuff for a novel in every one of us. The sentences that follow the one quoted are a midway compromise between Galdós' positions in his Observaciones sobre la novela contemporánea en España of 1870 and his 1897 entry speech to the Academy. On a larger scale, in one of his earliest works, La sombra , the creative process is literalized when Paris, an « ente de imaginación », comes to life out of a painting. At the same time, as Harriet S. Turner has indicated, Galdós produces the illusion of Anselmo's fictional autonomy by allowing Anselmo to assert his independence in a series of confrontations between character and narrator-as- character 129 . «The daydreams of Isidora in La desheredada , in which, influenced by her readings of romance, she constructs herself into a fictious heroine, are a form of inner recreation. As well as a commentary on a specific type of narrative, they are a commentary on fiction in general, a complicated but not uncommon case ( Madame Bovary and La Regenta are well-known examples) where fiction fosters fiction. Another instance of reflexivity is Tormento , which, from a certain perspective, is the creation of José Ido del Sagrario as outlined at the end of El doctor Centeno » 130 . In Lo prohibido , José María Bueno de Guzmán undertakes a literary venture in the writing of his memoirs. The God-visions of Luisito in Miau constitute an interior duplication of the creative process, so much so that Luisito replaces Galdós as the all-knowing power that determines Villaamil's suicide. Manolo Infante's last letter in La incógnita posits that reality is incomplete without its fictionalization, where the soul of truth lies, and so Realidad is born. The letter also questions generic distinctions in literature and the authorship of the literary creation. The name that her mother bestows on Tristana is, as the narrator explains it, an act of literary recreation that imposes, from the mother's viewpoint, the harmony and nobility of art on « nuestras realidades groseras y vulgares » (V, 1546). Her protector, for his part, is converted into a theatrical figure by acquaintances who call him Don Lope de Sosa, while he, himself, has engaged in a similar fictional self-recreation: « Andando el tiempo, supe que la partida de bautismo rezaba don Juan López Garrido, resultando que aquel sonoro don Lope era 128 References to Galdós' novels other than El amigo Manso are taken from the Obras completas , V, 4th ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1965). 129 «Rhetoric in La sombra : The Author and His Story», Anales Galdosianos , 6 (1971), 10-12. Turner confuses the categories of author and narrator, but her point is well taken. 130 Cornea develops this idea in Ch. VI, « La realidad como ficción », in Realidad, ficción y símbolo... , pp. 80-99. 93
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