Galdós - Amazon Web Services

Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
Galdós- does not, in fact, exist prior to the narrative as his capacity to «evoke» Manso might imply.
He exists only thanks to Manso, who creates him within the narrative. So, the character evokes the
author, the creation creates his creator; and one may ask, as twentieth-century writers so often have:
who creates whom, who owes his existence to whom in the fictional relationship? The answers are
as ambiguous as the question is intriguing.
Manso, ever gentle and good, is everybody's friend. For his part, Galdós as narrator is often the friend
of his « criaturas ». But never is the friendship so close as it is between «el amigo» Manso and
Galdós . Why? Because, like the best of friends, they are inseparable. If Manso cannot pinpoint the
«subtle arts» of his creation, it is because the miracle of artistic birth cannot be defined or described
with precision. The creator/creation dichotomy, when carried beyond the obvious and subjected to
analysis, becomes so blurred that no order of sequential precedence between its two factors seems
possible. As a consequence, a character like Manso endowed with the illusion of autonomy assumes
a duality whose two sides the reader might forcibly isolate from each other if he wishes but which
operate conjointly at every moment in the book. It is not, as Gullón would have it (p. 88), that part
of Manso's narrative «I» participates and part contemplates: all of him does both at the same time.
He is poet and empiricist, histor and eye-witness wrapped into one 135 . That is why Manso can first
talk of someone who conjures him (Ch. I: birth as a fiction) and then go on to speak calmly of his
father and mother, to whom he owes his life and all that he is (Ch. II: birth within a fiction). Truly,
an imagined entity should not be depending on a bowlful of chickpeas for his sustenance. It should
be sufficient for a reader to read him. Yet, in that paradox lies the secret of fictional creation, which
must live out this tension of being and not being autonomous. Of course, it is easy to envision the
protests against such a reading: You can't have it both ways! You can't have Máximo creating a
creator who has created him! But that is precisely the beauty of fiction, as Galdós fully realized. Its
delectable ambiguity not only allows us to have it both ways, but forces these paradoxes upon us.
Wordsworth's dictum, «The Child is father of the Man», seems appropriate to the case. Naturally, we
know that there is no such unfathered creature as an autonomous character in the world of fiction.
A character who is a paradox, a game, an irony, a phantom, is, in the end, impossible. Therefore,
the question as to whether or not Máximo Manso or Grau's puppets or Capek's robots or Pirandello's
homeless half dozen or Don Quijote are truly autonomous is beside the point when we acknowledge
its illusoriness. The significance of the issue lies in our capacity to apprehend simultaneously that
135 See Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1966), Ch. VII.
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