Galdós - Amazon Web Services

Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
composición del caballero, como un precioso afeite aplicado a embellecer la personalidad »; and the
name, it turns out, suits him so well « que el sujeto no se podía llamar de otra manera » (V, 1541).
Nazarín, thanks to its peculiar structure, is a statement on the act of writing. And in Misericordia , the
whole puzzling episode of Don Romualdo can be explained only, but quite easily, as a manifestation
of fiction's miraculous powers of creation.
All these instances reflect the concern on Galdós' part with the problem that Erich Kahler in his
interesting little book, The Disintegration of Form in the Arts (New York: Braziller, 1968), considers
a mark of our times. He says: «more recently the problem of how to render the bewildering complexity
of out reality has become the very subject matter of certain works of art. [This] means the presentation
in a work of art of the artist's struggle with his task -a kind of artistic epistemology» (p. 6). The
French «new» novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, avowed enemy of art that signifies anything external to
art, expresses the same thought: «What constitutes the novelist's strength is precisely that he invents,
that he invents quite freely, without a model. The remarkable thing about modern fiction is that it
asserts this characteristic quite deliberately, to such a degree that invention and imagination become,
at the limit, the very subject of the book» 131 . El amigo Manso is at the least a venerable example
of what Wellek and Warren call the «romantic-ironic» mode of narration 132 . More than that, it is
Galdós' most expansive statement on the problematic nature of fiction.
Chapter I, with Chapter L at its heels, is the structure that shapes the entire novel. In fact, the two
chapters are the unit that comprises the novel in question here: the story of fiction. Between them,
they contain a fictional story. The outer novel serves to distance the interior novel from itself and
from the reader, along lines that turn out to be as Brechtian as they are Cervantine. The interior novel,
if framed, must occupy a space inside and lesser than the framed whole (that is, Chapters I through L
span more pages than Chapters II through XLIX). At the same time, the interior novel is perceived by
the reader as a contained image. But in its function, the frame of a novel is quite unlike a picture frame,
which one might rather compare to the covers of a book. The physical frame of a picture is normally
an adventitious, externally imposed element, which the modern painter regularly prefers to suppress,
leaving the picture to be bound by its natural limits. The novel's frame is an intrinsic member of the
imaginative construct and does not outline decoratively the image it contains nor simply circumscribe
131 For a New Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 32.
132 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature , 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1956), p. 223.
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