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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
that image spatially; instead, it infuses the construct with meaning and delimits that meaning. It is
a sign superimposed on another sign, which latter can no longer be perceived independently of its
informing structure. In other words, the novel cannot be reduced to what the frame contains: a social
portrait of late nineteenth-century Spain or the dialectic between thought and action. The story of
Máximo Manso is bound by a structure that forces a wedge between the bourgeois reality of the inner
novel and the reader's own bourgeois reality all the while as it passes sentence on bourgeois reality.
The two-tiered structuring compels in the reader a critical awareness of what the novel is about and
what the novel is.
Roman Jakobson in a celebrated essay isolated the six factors that constitute a speech event:
addresser, addressee, message, context, code, and contact 133 . Reading a novel can be considered
a speech event. The function that language, or here the novel, takes on at any moment, explains
Jakobson, depends on which of these elements is emphasized. In the bulk of El amigo Manso -
in the interior novel- focus is on the message in its context, and so the novel's function is largely
referential. The frame or outer novel shifts the attention of the addressee (reader) to the novel's code,
and its function thus becomes self-referential, that is, metalingual or reflexive 134 . The frame, being a
statement on fictionality, imposes that theme on the inner structure and colors the thematic statement
of the inner structure with its exposure of fictionality.
« Yo no existo » are the novel's opening words (I, 1). « Yo soy Máximo Manso » is the title
of the second chapter. There are two ways to interpret this transition. It can be said that Máximo
emerges from nothingness (Ch. I) to assume carnality and identity (Ch. II). The novelistic process,
here laid bare, demands, first, imaginative invention and, secondly, shaping of the invented object.
An idea is fashioned into a character. Máximo, portrayed as conscious of himself as a text, actually
reads himself the way the reader reads him. In telling his own story, he creates himself -again as the
reader creates him by reading him. This way of looking at the initial chapters and the book confirms
fiction as its subject.
133 «Linguistics and Poetics», in Style in Language , ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1960), pp. 350-77.
134 Some critics attempt to distinguish between «reflexivity» as a work's reference to itself
generically and «self-reflexivity» as a work's reference to itself specifically. Since these two facets
of artistic self-consciousness are barely distinguishable and one implies the other, I do not propose
to mark such frontiers here.
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