Visor de obras.

El amigo Manso (1882) enjoys the reputation of being a transitional novel, one standing midway between thesis novels like Doña Perfecta (1876) and Gloria (1877-78) and Galdós' masterpieces of the 1880's: Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-87) and Miau (1888).⁷⁵ Contemporaries saw the novel as a playful, well made piece, yet they for the most part either overlooked it or shied away. Only Clarín perceived many of the complexities of the novel, as John Kronik has shown in his commentary on Clarín's review.⁷⁶ On another occasion Clarín stated that he preferred El amigo Manso even to Miau, citing its use of dramatic dialogue as an example of Galdós' «grandísimo talento de escritor realista»⁷⁷ as well as the light, joking tone which led him to qualify the novel as an «intermezzo que Vd. despreciaba y que salió una perla».⁷⁸ On the other hand, in 1883 Pereda, to whom Galdós was to give the manuscript two years later, refers only incidentally to «cierto caballero de apellido Manso, que se me entró por las puertas este verano pasado chorreando gracias y donaires». And upon having the manuscript bound he merely remarks that «más merecía la alhaja».⁷⁹

When the novel appeared in mid-June, 1882, it received only a few random comments, perhaps because, as one reviewer testily observed, «la aparición de un libro del eminente novelista provoca algunas frases bonitas en los periódicos, a la vez que se dedican artículos kilométricos al perro Paco, a un señor López que nadie conoce, por su soporífico discurso acerca de las habas verdes». Yet he also sidesteps El amigo Manso, appealing to «los escasos límites de mi inteligencia», and passes to another book, «que, aunque no de la importancia del anterior, merece estudiarse con especial atención y detenimiento».⁸⁰ Apparently the novel was, despite obvious merits, something tricky and in-between, for which even Galdós had scant regard. «El amigo Manso es un poema burlón», wrote Ortega Munilla, in his early commentary on the novel.⁸¹

Munilla's appraisal, marking the novel's irony and wit, finds echoes in modern criticism. Pointing to the declared fictional existence of the protagonist, Ricardo Gullón writes that «para eliminar amargura y dramatismo Máximo Manso es de papel y siendo así no hará falta tomarle muy en serio. ¿Qué tragedia puede alcanzar a quien no pasa de ser un capricho del creador?».⁸² Yet he perceives the complexity of a novel whose parts interact and combine in changing relationships so that retrospective readings keep modifying story and meaning. El amigo Manso, «a imitación de la vida, ofrece incesantes sorpresas», and Manso himself, traced minutely as a historical type, nonetheless appears as «un desconcertante individuo» (p. 66). Gullón ably sums up Manso's perplexing, contradictory personal traits by recalling Irene's   —46→   equivocal utterance, sí pero no, ironic mainspring of the novel (p. 91). Similarly Gustavo Correa, attending to «la doble vertiente simultánea de realidad y ficción», explicates Manso's dual nature, «su independencia a la vez que dependencia», which «refleja exactamente la relación entre criatura y creador (novelista)».⁸³ Correa has seized upon the ambiguity inherent in Manso's declared existence as a fictional character, one who «participa, al mismo tiempo, de la calidad de lo que existe y de lo que no existe, de lo que es real, o de lo que se presenta como mera apariencia» (p. 105).

These contradictions prompt several questions: what kind of mixture of fiction and reality does El amigo Manso represent? What is the relationship between the fictional worlds created by both author and character, and between these and so-called reality? Finally, how do these overlapping real and fictional worlds relate to our own outside the book, removed in time and space, often an alien milieu, yet just as often an image, even a confirmation, of what was narratively portrayed? For El amigo Manso, consciously artful, consciously literary, declaredly fictional, does present clear and effective relations to life. Despite his sparse comment, Clarín shows how that «intermezzo» pressed upon his mind, commingling effortlessly with his perception of everyday experience: «Hoy en el meeting librecambista», he writes Galdós in 1883, «tuve ocasión de recordar y citar el discurso del Amigo Manso».⁸⁴ Appearances to the contrary, something serious lies at the heart of the novel. Even a critic of such great learning as Montesinos approaches it gingerly, speaking as if in warning of its «inmensurable complejidad», its «mitificación... terriblemente elusiva», thus sounding a major theme developed in subsequent critical work.⁸⁵

Clearly Galdós himself had struggled with his subject. Berkowitz writes that «given Galdós' high speed of composition, this work progressed slowly. The theme of the contrast and conflict between ideas and reality fascinated him, but its elaboration proved extremely difficult, in part because he was still disturbed by his experience with La Desheredada».⁸⁶ The many drafts, cross-outs, substitutions and marginal notations of the manuscript depict a veritable palimpsest, a labyrinthine network of scenes, episodes, snatches of dialogue and character sketches that painstakingly have become resolved into the smooth surfaces of the final version.

This impression of a perplexed author endeavoring to meet the esthetic and moral demands of his subject reflects the relationship between author and character depicted in the novel itself. It also relates to a much debated question of the times: the didactic versus mimetic aspects of fiction.⁸⁷ Concerned with the instructional potential of narrative, Galdós knew that didactic effects depended upon technique, upon the ways ideas were presented narratively. He knew he must strive to create in fiction an intense illusion of reality so that the reader would confuse the two, applying to life outside the book the values imaged within. Writing as early as 1870 he had spoken eloquently of fiction's power to absorb the reader, drenching his senses in reality, «así es que cuando vemos un acontecimiento extraordinariamente anómalo y singular, decimos que parece cosa de novela... En cambio, cuando leemos las admirables obras de arte que produjo Cervantes y hoy hace Carlos Dickens, decimos: ¡Qué verdadero es esto! Parece cosa de la vida. Tal o cual personaje,   —47→   parece que le hemos conocido».⁸⁸ Recognized as artifice fiction nonetheless may be construed as reality, the way life is, an «imagen de la vida». But the very word «imagen» denotes the duality of fiction: it is real and unreal at the same time. The job of the novelist is to keep the balance between art and life, for as Galdós advises, «debe existir perfecto fiel de la balanza entre la exactitud y la belleza de la reproducción».⁸⁹

Galdós' ideas and his practice of mimetic realism pose some difficult questions regarding El amigo Manso: how, on the one hand, does he reconcile the concern with literature as «enseñanza, ejemplo» with the problem of character autonomy, with the conviction that a novel should reflect a reality unhampered by didactic appeals? How does he shape ideas so as to affirm, not undercut, the illusion of reality, of character autonomy, creating in fiction the confusions and ambiguities of life in ways that control and clarify social and moral values?⁹⁰ For as if Galdós had learned a lesson from his philosopher friend Máximo, the novel El amigo Manso represents, as G. A. Davies has shown, an experiment in didactic method.⁹¹ In another study, «El amigo Manso: Galdós with a Mirror», Robert H. Russell has described the novel as «a kind of allegory of Galdós' own artistic pilgrimage».⁹² The sentimental education Máximo receives at the hands of Manuel his pupil, and Irene, the governess of his nieces and nephew, parallels the literary experience Galdós underwent as a novelist. Thus El amigo Manso is visualized as a mirror in which the author sees himself reflected, sees his own errors in a work like Doña Perfecta where, like Manso, he relied upon ideas to depict truth.

This parallel between the lesson Manso learns in a fictional world about living life and what Galdós learned in the real world about writing fiction may be accounted for within the novel itself as well as deduced from comparisons made with earlier works. In Chapter I we observe the encounter between Manso and the author. A close look at that encounter will reveal how, by commingling fiction and reality, Galdós succeeded in creating an illusion of character autonomy that nonetheless instructs the reader. For while the author, by Manso's own admission, is the creator of a fictional character, Manso is clearly independent and in control of the situation. It is the author who seeks Manso out, plaintively cajoling his «fictional» friend to exchange his story for a ragbag of assorted ideas, literary phrases and a pot of glue. The relationship closely resembles one of teacher and student -and how odd to discover the author cast in the role of student! He depends upon Manso for his novel, and clearly seems less worldly, more brash, while Manso reveals, in his gentle tone of amused condescension, an experienced, mundane personality. He pities his misguided friend for the perplexing chores of a novelist and describes him benevolently as «aquel buen presidiario, aquel inocente empedernido» (1165),⁹³ as if the author were a hot-headed youngster, much like Peñita, also Manso's student, boyish, charming, but insubstantial. The author's novel is the job of a hack- a patchwork of clichés, borrowed ideas, sentimentality and empty rhetoric, «un trabajillo de poco aliento» (1165). Similarly, Peñita's speech is an off-the-cuff improvisation full of hackneyed ideas and «tantas contradicciones como párrafos» (1234). Manso's work is «sólido», «de lo que yo sabía y sabía bien» (1231), the result of clear thinking and honest work. By contrast, the author merely borrows,   —48→   cuts, snips and sticks, «con más de una redoma de mucílago para pegotes», and Peña skates by on «conocimientos pegados con saliva y adquiridos la noche anterior» (1231).

The encounter specifies that (1) Manso's story about a painful educational experience occurred before the author composed his own novel, since it derives from Manso's «agradable y fácil asunto». Thus the author is aware of the lesson Manso learned before he begins to copy that lesson as a novel. As a student, he has (2) learned something from that lesson, something he will apply to the retelling of Manso's story and to subsequent novels. We also see that (3) there are two stories and two authors: Manso's experience as told by him to the author and that author's rendition of that story with Manso supposedly conjured up from the inkwell as the ostensible narrator. Fiction and reality are blended in this device of a «novel-within-a-novel» as Manso's story appears within the frame of Galdós' rendition, written in 1882.⁹⁴ This mechanism of interior duplication -the oral tale framed within its written form- functions to the advantage of the fictional creature Manso rather than to the author. Manso gains the advantage because, unlike Victor Goti's nivola inserted within Unamuno's Niebla as a duplication or reflection, Manso's story appears as the primary source with the author's written account as the reflection. Thus Manso's position vis-à-vis the author concedes him more personal autonomy, more author-ity than Víctor Goti gains from Unamuno. And since the author, who we may presume is Galdós, created as a fictional character, and Peñita, another fictional character, appear to be reflections of one another, Galdós himself slips into an even more duplicitous kind of unreality, one denoting a moral as well as physical state, depicted in Chapter I by the optical illusion of mirrors held up to reflect one another's reflection.

Now the balance between art and life tips toward artifice. Not only does Galdós deliberately equate and confuse fiction and reality. The confusion itself seeks paradoxically to clarify, to assert the palpitating reality of a declaredly fictional non-being over and against the supposedly real -the author, other characters, society at large- in the interest of a specific moral teaching. Education is indeed the subject of the novel, as stated on the opening page. But it is not contained within the interpolated story, nor even in the encounter between author and character. It cuts across boundaries between real and fictional worlds to pose for the reader profound epistemological questions.

For author, character and reader play equivalent and reversible roles: el amigo Manso is at once author, character and reader of his story; el amigo Galdós is author, character and reader, influenced by the narrated experience of his philosopher friend.⁹⁵ El amigo Manso and el amigo Galdós reflect and refract one another in the interest of el amigo lector, to whom the story is told, to whom all artful persuasion is addressed, and upon whose retrospective reading the story depends. In this sense the reader becomes an author, reconstructing the narrative, relating the parts which interact and mutually affect one another, confecting that «metalinguistic perspective» wherein irony lies.⁹⁶

But because the act of reading entails the process of being taught how to read, el lector amigo also reacts like a character. He is instructed, as was Galdós, as was Manso himself. He shares the same standpoint toward the story as Galdós, privy to the confidence of an autobiographical account, receiving   —49→   impressions firsthand, even as Manso himself receives them. Receiving the story leads to identifying with it to some extent, to re-thinking, re-feeling, re-imagining the character's plight, testing his reactions against our own, against our knowledge: of how real people behave. The novel is written and structured so that reading duplicates Manso's experience: we also come to distrust pure reason, relying instead upon an «ojo certero», on «todo el golpe de vista adquirido en la topografía comparada del corazón humano» (1218). Our reactions and participation establish a confusion between real and fictional that rebounds in clarity, in an unequivocal sense of Manso's reality and moral worth at the expense of a society which finds him absurd.

What are the techniques which accomplish the control of confusion and clarity in El amigo Manso? Since the novel is about education, approaching it from the point of view of rhetoric provides some useful insights about what the novel means and how that meaning is technically achieved. The rhetorical approach entails an irony quite appropriate to this ironic little book. According to standard definition, the word rhetoric commonly refers to language characterized by an artificial or ostentatious expression which a writer or speaker uses in an effort to influence or persuade. Hence rhetoric and rhetorical have acquired a depreciatory use so that we speak «of the nature of mere rhetoric (as opposed to sober statement or argument».⁹⁷ Here is the basic opposition of the novel, exemplified by Sainz del Bardal's «naufragios retóricos y chubascos retóricos» (1233) versus Manso's brief speech, «severo, correcto, frío y exacto» (1231). But rhetoric may also be construed as technique, as «the art of using language so as to persuade and influence others», as «skillful or artistic use of speech».⁹⁸ This definition ironically exposes «rhetoric» in the novel, deflating the pompous «bolas de jabón» of Bardal (1232), of don Manuel María Pez, «la imagen más grave de todas las imágenes imaginables» (1228), of the rest of that «grupo sonambulesco» whose speech is hardly skillful or artistic. Wayne C. Booth sees rhetoric as those «resources available to the writer of epic, novel or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader».⁹⁹ Given this definition, El amigo Manso is a perfect piece of rhetoric. It purposefully induces the reader to confuse fiction and reality so that he will emerge instructed, clear about the values imaged within the novelistic world and how they relate to life outside it.

A discussion of the rhetorical control of confusion and clarity may begin with another look at the structure of the novel, which appears as a circle-within-a-circle. The inner circle is Manso's interpolated story, beginning with Chapter II: «Yo soy Máximo Manso» and ending with Manso's demise, although the dividing line cannot be precisely marked. Once the protagonist utters the words which terminate his earthly existence: «Me morí como un pájaro» (1289), that strange, slippery inversion of physical and imaginative reality occurs. For to announce one's own death implies life of some sort, an alter ego unattached to the now defunct human being. Thus the story of Manso's life in nineteenth-century Madrid does not end so much as it shades hazily back into the outer circle, Manso's declared «non-existence» in limbo. The terms «existence» and «non-existence» are, of course, arbitrary and partial; each depicts only one aspect of something intrinsically paradoxical. However,   —50→   from a structural point of view, they identify the two parts which make up the novel: the story of Máximo Manso's sentimental venture, framed at the beginning and end by an imaginative, fictional limbo where Manso declares he is no more than a «quimera, sueño de sueño y sombra de sombra» (1165), a fantasy of the author.¹⁰⁰ The dual circular shape of the novel marks three main units: 1) the opening and concluding chapters which, 2) frame the interpolated story and 3) the relationship between the two. Taking each unit in turn I will examine some of the ways Galdós involves, controls and affects the reader, ultimately teaching him the same lesson he learned from Manso, which Manso had ironically endured at the hands of his pupils.

An observation made by Booth about modern quest novels like Unamuno's Niebla applies also to Chapter I of El amigo Manso: «Many stories require confusion in the reader, and the most effective way to achieve it is to use an observer who is himself confused... The narrator's bewilderment is used not simply to mystify about minor facts in the story but to break down the reader's conviction about truth itself, so that he may be ready to receive the truth when it is offered to him. If the reader is to desire the truth he must first be convinced that he does not already possess it».¹⁰¹ The novel begins with Manso's statement denying his existence, with subsequent paragraphs that mock the novel itself. Unlike Niebla, which begins with a prologue and postprologue, units structurally separate from Augusto's story, these paragraphs form the first chapter, thus bearing an explicit sequential relation to the interpolated story. Accustomed to numerically ordered chapters, we find nothing unusual until we note how the title of I: «Yo no existo» contradicts Chapter II: «Yo soy Máximo Manso». How can something be part of a whole, yet contradict, be separate from, that whole at the same time? Logic refutes the proposition. The very table of contents posits confusion between Manso as a living person, between a I and a II which while sequentially related appear to contradict each other.¹⁰²

The novel is also capriciously structured: these are «phantom» chapters with the first sentence, often a run-on, forming the title.¹⁰³ Again el sí pero no: chapters which are... and are not, another device depicting that instability and flux so appropriate to the question of the real and unreal. For on one hand phantom chapters with their run-on sentences disclose a mind in play, a very particular, changing mind, pulsating irregularly, humanly, thus determining that flow of words -here is «la realidad palpitante» of the novel. On the other hand, shifting chapter surfaces reflect something opposite in value: the social background of the novel, a «democracia rampante» (1209) made up of phony class identities, «títulos romanos»- a confused society, unreal in its pretensions, cut loose from principle, from reality drifting in a void. These are uncertain, contradictory times, a «plena edad de paradojas» (1209), as Manso so correctly observes. The juxtaposition of Chapters I and II and this deceptive chapter structure set up a confusion between fiction and reality by defamiliarizing traditional narrative components.¹⁰⁴ These components stand exposed as artifice, prompting the reader to approach the novel warily, in a state of alert. Our expectations have been upset and our conventional notions altered about what a novel is and how it is made. In short, our instruction in a new mode of perception has begun.

In Chapter I itself confusion increases. Manso insists that «Yo no existo», words which paradoxically betray some sort of existence, for saying he doesn't exist proves that he does, or else how would he say it?¹⁰⁵ Almost every word in the first four paragraphs is paired in contradiction with another so that whole sentences trap reason in the confusing duality of concept and character. «Juro y perjuro que no existo» (1165), says Manso patiently, anticipating a protest from the reader, but as Denah Lida notes, although the sense is that of «'I swear and swear again', when used without jurar, perjurar means to swear falsely. Thus there is a suspicion of irony in the oath».¹⁰⁶ The suspicion of irony, the suggestion that, appearances to the contrary, the oath implies perjury, that is, existence, multiplies the ambiguity which had occurred as soon as the sentence was uttered.

The legalistic terms couching Manso's announcements to the reader add more confusion: «He de salir a la defensa de mis fueros de mito, probando con testigos, traídos de donde me convenga, que no soy, ni he sido, ni seré nunca nadie» (1165). How can a non-existent being imagine himself in need of defense, as defense implies someone, an existent being -who fears injury from another? But who can confront someone who is not there? And how can witnesses testify to nothingness? The contradictions pile up in clamorous confusion:

Manso's explanation to justify his fictional status and account for the contradictions, for how, «no teniendo voz hablo, y no teniendo manos trazo estas líneas» (1165), only further compounds confusion. «Soy», he declares «-diciéndolo en lenguaje oscuro para que lo entiendan mejor- una condensación artística, diabólica, hechura del pensamiento humano» (1165), a figment of the author's imagination and hence unreal, although empowered by that imagination to speak and act «con apariencia humana» (1165). The creation of this sly creature is like the riddle of the chicken and the egg. From this explanation one assumes that Manso sprang fully clothed from the author's brain: «Es que alguien me evoca, por no sé qué sutiles artes me pone como un forro corporal y hace de mí un remedo o máscara de persona viviente, con todas las trazas y movimientos de ella» (1165). Manso appears as a fictional offspring, dependent upon the author's real existence, upon his imaginative disposition. But appearances are deceiving. Just as Manso characterizes himself as «una condensación artística», a mental caprice of the author, we also see that Manso has some rather patronizing opinions about that author. Manso confides that he is one of «aquéllos que yo llamo holgazanes, faltando a todo deber filial, y que el bondadoso vulgo denomina artistas, poetas o cosa así» (1165). Implied here are two points of view: Manso's as opposed to the   —52→   author's, a discrepancy expressive of character autonomy. And not only does Manso belittle the author's ability as a novelist. His vague, ironic dismissal of the man's professional identity -«ximia Dei, holgazán, artista, poeta o cosa así»- hints at something unreal about him, as if he, too, were not what he seemed or professed to be, as if he, like Manso, were a fictional creature dreamed up by someone, in effect, an ape of God.

Character and author now reflect one another continuously, with Manso gaining ground with every paradoxical utterance. He prepares us for the confrontation by saying: «El que me saca de mis casillas y me lleva a estos malos andares es un amigo...». But these words, ostensibly asserting non-being, double back to differentiate Manso from the author, who does not invent anyone here but takes somebody already living according to a comfortable routine -«mis casillas»- out of that routine in order to use him for novelistic purposes. The term «amigo» also accentuates Manso's «real» status since it denotes a relationship based upon the common consent of two equals. The assumption that Manso is merely the author's brainchild is untenable. Before any fictional imaginings can take place we see the author, an impetuous person, approaching his friend Manso. Their friendship implies past time, past acquaintance, confirming Manso's historical existence.¹⁰⁷ It also reverses the relationship between author and character so that Manso emerges as the wiser, more experienced, more skeptical of the two. Also, because he has a story, a personal experience which the author persuades him to exchange for a few literary trappings, Manso actually becomes the creator of the novelistic life that ensues.¹⁰⁸ The author, confined to a passive role vis-à-vis his character, is hardly more than a scribe, annotating and embellishing the account with his «frases y fórmulas, hechas a molde y bien recortaditas, con más de una redoma de mucílago para pegotes» (1166). Moreover, in Chapter L Manso dies his own death. The author has neither the right nor the power to kill him because he did not create him and, in effect, Manso continues living even after the author as sorcerer has disembodied his spirit. As Gullón observes, «el creador de Manso le devuelve o cree devolverle a su estado primitivo: lo desnace, como Unamuno hará con Augusto, pero no lo mata, pues en ambas obras es clara la vitalidad de la criatura ficticia, y ciertamente aquí están ahora, con nosotros, contigo lector y conmigo, los dos amigos» (p. 82).

Such personal autonomy -Manso makes his own decision to swap the story for the author's dubious literary talent and in Chapter L he rebukes the author for the clumsy disposal of his physical appearance- firmly establishes both a physical and psychic reality, set over and against claims to unreality such as «quimera soy, sueño de sueño y sombra de sombra».¹⁰⁹ A retrospective reading of Chapter I discloses even more contradictions in these former declarations of fictional status. For example, Manso has asserted in the opening paragraph that «no soy, no he sido, ni seré nunca nadie» (1165), implying that non-being was outside time: nothingness perforce has no relation to history, no present, past or future. Yet in the fourth paragraph depicting the encounter the opposite is true: Manso does have a past -his experience, that «agradable y fácil asunto» the author wants to borrow. Also, Manso's friendship with the author denotes past time. Manso of course has a present: the time in which he speaks and writes, and logically enough, a future: the   —53→   role he will play as narrator and protagonist of his own story which the author re-issues as a novel. Thus in a bewildering shift of meaning, Manso's initial assertions of non-being are retrospectively rendered false by his own utterances and actions.

A retrospective reading of Chapter I affects even those contradictory statements which balanced opposite notions against one another. While ambiguity remains, the positive aspect becomes distinctly stressed and meaning shifts. For example, when we first read the paradoxical phrase «recreándome en mi no ser» (1165) we find the positive connotations of «recreándome» balanced by its negative counterpart, «mi no ser». When read again, after we have understood the implications of Manso's encounter with the author, the word «recreándome» casts an ironic light on «mi no ser», since now Manso's ser and creative powers have been established firmly by his confrontation with the author.

The question of what is fictitious and what is real now becomes a dilemma ironically favoring Manso. In Chapter I he began by declaring himself non-existent because he was only a whimsy imagined by the author. Non-existence, unreality were construed with imagination, hence defining imagination as unreal. But this «unreal» imagination belongs to the author, someone inside and outside the book, part of our world, whom we accept as real, but also part of Manso's world. Is Galdós existent or non-existent? And what are we to make of the disconcerting fact that Galdós is the person characterized as imaginative, not Manso, who existed prior to any such imaginings anyway? Galdós becomes implicated in any assertion of unreality, such as «quimera soy, sueño de sueño y sombra de sombra». His mind is the «sueño», the «sombra», the fiction which has engendered the fiction we apprehend as Máximo Manso. In effect, Galdós cannot be real without extending that reality to Manso. Similarly, Manso cannot exist as fiction without implying something fictional about Galdós.

Thus in Chapter I a deliberately contrived confusion first causes, then clarifies, an awareness of Manso's existence while at the same time it confounds reason. Confusion breaks down our rational convictions about objective truth, preparing us to receive other, more relative and problematic truths. Our learning has already begun: we approach the interpolated story in a distinctly more flexible, inquiring state of mind. Yet at the same time Manso has emerged willy-nilly as a living person, a clear target for sympathetic attachment.

Another matter to consider is point of view. Distinguishing for the moment point of view from other components of the novel, we find it exerts singularly powerful effects upon this purposeful control of confusion and clarity. As Scholes and Kellogg have written, «the point of view in a given novel controls the reader's impression of everything else... We do not, in reading, create a story within ourselves. The story takes the shape its author has given it, a shape governed for us primarily by the point of view through which the characters and events are filtered».¹¹⁰ In El amigo Manso Galdós provides an autobiographical eye-witness narrative, exploiting to the full the irony and paradoxes inherent in the form.

In the first place, Manso's eye-witness account inevitably confuses the objective and subjective. Narration always depicts in some manner the mind engaged in telling: as we absorb what happens or what Manso chooses to represent as happening, consciously or not we absorb his point of view, becoming open and vulnerable to his personality. So from the outset his eyewitness narrative insures the non-existence of impartial truth, since any observation reaches us richly mixed with inward, subjective views. The encounter, however, qualifies this eye-witness point of view with limitless confusions. For in addition to not knowing how much of the experience is actual or made up, we also do not know by whom, since the story was first told to the author by Manso. Thus the story reaches us from several removes: «Quimera soy», says Manso, «sombra de sombra y sueño de sueño», but from our vantage point the story is a copy of a copy of a copy, subject to even more distortion and falsification. We see that the novel, inked words on the page, is 1) Galdós representation of 2) the author's representation of 3) Manso's representation, which derived in turn from what he saw, that is, from the 4) impressions or representations originating in his mind as he responded to the minds -other mental configurations- of the people in the story.¹¹¹ The mirrors reflect infinite kaleidoscopic permutations.

Moreover, autobiographical narrative deceptively suggests only one point of view. As Gullón observes, «el centro de conciencia es la de Máximo Manso y por eso todo, personajes y situaciones, lo vemos desde su punto de vista. No hay otro» (p. 62). Yet Manso the eye-witness cannot see everything, not even all that happens in his own mind. His limitations, soon discovered and exploited, cause ironic disparities between what he knows and what the other characters know. The result is an epistemological spiral that loops around and doubles back, catching up the characters -and the reader- in a mesh of partial truths. Nowhere is this spiral more tellingly displayed than in Manso's confrontation with José María in, appropriately enough, doña Cándida's new apartment. There, as elsewhere, much of the telling is dialogue. How much does Manso's point of view differ from José María's? From Irene's and doña Cándida's? From our own? What do we know that he doesn't know? How reliable a narrator is he? Finally, how does Manso differ from himself? Disparate voices from his yo múltiple contest the field: «el yo autoridad» versus «[e]l yo timidez» (1227), «el puro yo, la grata sombra de uno mismo» (1185) versus «ese otro», a disconcerting «figura de pesadilla» (1212). Manso the eye-witness contemplates a divided, contradictory self. «Polizonte de mí mismo» (1126), «un Leverrier de mi propia desdicha» (1237), he plays different roles, now «como simple testigo», now «como víctima» (1218), and comes to feel so alienated from himself that all identity dissolves into a grotesque, misshapen shadow: «Yo no era yo, o por lo menos, yo no me parecía a mí mismo. Era a ratos, sombra desfigurada del señor Manso, como las que hace el sol o la caída de la tarde estirando los cuerpos cual se estira un cuerpo de goma» (1289).

From this vivid sense of Manso's divided self spring the seeds of attachment, for inside views predispose a reader toward a character. «Aproximar es aprojimar»: we feel closer to highly individualized minds characterized in the rambling disclosures of an inside view.¹¹² And Manso's disclosures have   —55→   particular appeal. In Chapter I we immediately note the confidential, personal tone of his account. The conversational addresses to the reader -«Vedme con apariencia humana» (1165)- and witty remarks such as his parenthetical joke «diciéndolo en lenguaje oscuro para que lo entiendan mejor» (1165), depict an urbane, agile mind, at ease with his audience and eager to confide.

Even more striking is Manso's preoccupation with narrative style. As he rambles on about his fictional status, digressing here and there, we note an abrupt concession to the rational method so essential to his character: «Orden, orden en la narración» (1165), says Manso, pulling his story together into an orderly discourse. The words provide a glimpse into the inner workings of a particular personality whose habits of mind assert themselves spontaneously, free from authorial manipulation. The methodical Manso is quite different from the author, portrayed as rather undisciplined and brash. Manso impresses us as real -not a puppet, not a type, not an abstraction. Yet the chiding aside to himself- «Orden, orden en la narración», which qualifies him as real -occurs as he seeks to explain the opposite, his non-being. Thus we sense what sort of a man he is by the way he says he is nobody! The more unreliable he seems, the more real he becomes. Again the futility of logic and the impression of a lively personality are dramatically united.

For the same didactic impulse controls the baffling intersubjectivity of Manso's eye-witness account. The interplay of minds, crisscrossing between character, author, reader and story, confuses and clarifies: it mocks pure reason but creates character, a person of compelling complexity, of palpitating reality. It undermines the concept of knowledge as truth while instructing in the art of knowing: how to mix mind and heart, a keen eye with abstract ideas, «la razón pura» and «la razón práctica» (1270). Knowledge is paradoxical: it consists in knowing that we cannot know. Our very limitations are what permit perception, not to be is to be, the fictional is real, reality is an illusion. As Manso approaches death, his knowledge is completed in the recognition of its incompleteness. Replying to doña Javiera's frank admission -«Pues el fruto de usted no lo veo, amigo Manso», -Manso says: «Es posible. Lo que se ve, señora doña Javiera, es la parte menos importante de lo que existe. Invisible es todo lo grande, toda ley, toda causa, todo elemento activo» (1289).

The visible Manso slips into invisibility in Chapter L, drawing the circle on the novel so that it ends where it began, in Limbo, in «los fríos espacios de la idea». Now Manso's story acquires a fresh ironic dimension as he views from limbo José María, the grotesque poet Sainz del Bardal and the rest of that «grupo sonambulesco» (1291) scurrying to and fro their futile tasks. Again it is a question of Manso's existence and non-existence. Chapters I and L set up ironic correspondences between physical and moral non-being which pivot on certain key words appearing in the interpolated story: «metafísico», «yo no existo», «mi no ser», «limbo», «como si no existiera», etc. For example, Monroe Z. Hafter writes that when José María calls Manso a «metafísico» the word is «ironic partly because of the author's conception of character -he is mythic and not of the physical world; he is elsewhere inept in human affairs -and in part because it wryly tells us about another character's limitations- José María is a fool».¹¹³ Within the interpolated story Manso's   —56→   declared physical non-existence in Chapter I is construed morally by a materialistic, utilitarian society as ineptness in human affairs.¹¹⁴ But when José María, ostensibly the pragmatic man, applies «metafísico» to Manso, the word, uttered within the dual context of physical and moral non-existence, redounds ironically in the exposure of José María's unreality, asserting, by contrast, Manso's reality.

For José María, not Manso, is the real failure, even by his own utilitarian standards: «Tú eres otra calamidad, otra calamidad, entiéndelo bien», he snorts patronizingly to Máximo the night of the charity benefit. «Nunca serás nada..., porque no estás nunca en situación» (1233). Yet José María is clearly the inept, useless «ente de ficción», as his wife Lica tellingly observes: «¡Ay! Máximo», she pleads, «tú que eres tan bueno, ayúdame. No cuento para nada con José María. ¿Ése?, como si no existiera» (1225; my italics). Which of the two Manso brothers is fictional? Only Manso gets things done. Ironically, everyone depends on him and nothing is accomplished without him, whether it be obtaining a wet nurse for his godchild or arranging the marriage between Irene and Manuel. José María, on the other hand, is not only a fool. He is hopelessly useless and unreal, a member of that «grupo sonambulesco» whose unreality depicts, by contrast, Manso's reality, even as Manso, now supposedly returned to his fictional status, contemplates them from limbo.

Gullón shows from still another perspective how the baffling, ambiguous problem of Manso's declared non-existence functions ironically as an instrument of social criticism. Referring to time and setting -«la huera sociedad española de finales del XIX» -Gullón writes: «Esa sociedad gris proporcionó la atmósfera adecuada, atmósfera intencionadamente borrosa, poblada por gentes vacías: imbéciles, granujas, algún idealista fracasado o por fracasar... En tal sociedad, un personaje de papel, una entelequia, podría ser aceptado sin reparo, señalándose así que en el fondo no había diferencia de condición entre quien se sabía mentira y los que se suponían verdad. Y estrictamente no la hay, porque, como Ortega dijo luego, la España de la Restauración fue una fantasmagoría; de la espectralidad de Manso participan cuantos le rodean» (p. 62). The words «Yo no existo» double forward and back, exposing the emptiness and unreality of the «real» world. Manso's fictional status becomes merely a term of comparison, a means of exposure.

Chapters I and L, in their relation to each other and to the interpolated story, create a specific mental context, stored knowledge in the mind of a now instructed reader who, reading retrospectively in response to the novel's structure, matches and combines words in new ways. New verbal figures trace more ambiguities and yet redound in a firm impression of Manso's human reality. One example is Manso's whimsical utterance «recreándome en mi no ser» which, as we have seen, appeared on the first page of Chapter I. There, upon a first reading, the words meant the enjoyment, the pleasurable amusement that Manso took in his queer, confusing status as a non-being. Once we learn how Manso's experience involved his growth from a mistaken kind of idealistic speculation to a sure grasp of reality, we can, in retrospect, construe non-being with moral qualities. That is, «mi no ser» is not the whole of the man's being but only a first stage in the development toward «ser», which culminates in Chapter L. Now the phrase «recreándome en mi no ser»   —57→   seems to turn inside out: attending to its moral implication, we see that «mi no ser» actually means «ser», albeit a deficient one, for to be morally deficient one must, at least, «be». Thus the phrase «recreándome en mi no ser» acquires an existential meaning, roughly expressed as the following: «Within [or from] my [moral condition of] non-being I am recreating myself». Here is nothing less than a capsule definition of the novel's plot: Manso, author of himself, of his story, grows and changes according to experience, to his existence in the society of his times. «Recreándome en mi no ser» was originally ambivalent; now, qualified by a retrospective reading from the vantage point of Chapter L, it reverses to contradict even that formerly paradoxical meaning.

The word «sombra» also illustrates how Manso's reality emerges as a live thing within the controlled structural interplay of point of view. In Chapter I, Manso defined himself as a fictional entity, as a shadow, as doubly unreal, a fiction within a fiction. In Chapter L Manso again uses the word «sombra» to define himself, but now, as an image of his perceived unreality, it implies both a physical and moral state, the one in relation to the other and both to the past and present: «El influjo de estos trastornos llegó a formar en mí una nueva modalidad. Yo no era yo, o por lo menos, yo no me parecía a mí mismo. Era, a ratos, sombra desfigurada del señor Manso, como las que hace el sol o la caída de la tarde estirando los cuerpos cual se estira una cuerda de goma» (1289). Unreality in Chapter I and unreality in Chapter L are two different concepts which contradict and complement one another. The «sombra desfigurada» denotes a moral and physical reality -an existing state- which contradicts the literal meaning of unreality expressed by the words «sombra de sombra» in Chapter I. Yet as Hafter points out, Manso's opinion of himself as a failure, as a man inept in human affairs who cannot now believe in himself, is the morally «unreal» counterpart in the physical world to his declared non-existence in an ideological limbo.

The multiple, contradictory meanings of the word «sombra» used in reference to Manso's identity may be summarized as follows:

1) In Chapter I the word, according to Manso, is an unequivocal definition of unreality. But the implications of those first five paragraphs make the reader skeptical. The words «sombra de sombra» are at best equivocal, since the entire question of Manso's fictional status, of his «unreality», is thrown into doubt, if not implicitly denied, by factors such as Manso's confrontation with the author. Also, as an eye-witness narrator in an autobiographical account, Manso himself is subject to unreliability; thus his statement about himself cannot always be taken as face value.

2) The word «sombra» next appears in Chapter VIII. Manso, bemoaning the arrival of José María and his chaotic family to Madrid, casts a nostalgic eye upon his «sombra», his formerly ordered, methodical idealistic existence: «¡Objetivismo mil veces funesto que nos arrancas a las delicias de la reflexión, al goce del puro yo y de sus felices proyecciones; que nos robas la grata sombra de uno mismo, o lo que es igual, nuestros hábitos, la fijeza y regularidad de nuestras horas, el acomodamiento de nuestra casa!» (1185). Now, according to Manso, «sombra» depicts an intimate, personal reality, his «puro yo», that inner, real self deliberately maintained aloof from the distressing   —58→   everyday cares of the outside world. However, when we encounter this definition of «sombra», our view hardly coincides with Manso's nostalgic remembrance. For in the beginning Manso had characterized this «puro yo» and we, in contrast to his view, had perceived it as a personality distorsion, as something so incomplete as to be humanly, morally unreal. We had seen a pedantic, virginal yo, a life of fixed habits, cautiously lived in his mother's shadow, a yo so obsessed with pure reason, with idealistic speculation, that he was unable even to cope with the practical business of running a household. Thus in this context «sombra» expresses both reality and unreality, at the same time that we perceive Manso to be rather deluded. Throughout the rest of the novel this ambivalence causes ironic echoes each time the word is used to refer to Manso, as when doña Javiera reluctantly accedes to his arguments on behalf of Irene's marriage to Manual: «[...] que se casen... Lo que usted no consiga de mí... Tiene usted la sombra de Dios para proteger niñas». Or when, proceeding to the next chapter, Manso says: «No me dejaba ni a sol ni a sombra» (1283).

3) However, the contradictory meanings of the word become reversed when «sombra» appears in the last chapter. As already noted, the word now has for Manso a pathetically negative connotation: «Yo no era yo, o por lo menos, yo no me parecía a mí mismo. Era, a ratos, sombra desfigurada del señor Manso, como las que hace el sol a la caída de la tarde, estirando los cuerpos cual se estira una cuerda de goma» (1289).¹¹⁵ The word now designates for Manso a kind of unreality, a distortion, a joke. Yet this is the image or «sombra» which is most real to us. This demoralized, discouraged «yo», rendered noble to our eye by his practical, selfless efforts on behalf of those who hurt or disregard him, is far more humanly appealing than that «puro yo», a fantasy of philosophical musings and psychological dependencies. Caught, as it were, between disparate points of view and temporal shifts, the word «sombra» discloses the mercurial multiplicity of truth by signifying reality and unreality at the same time.

This kind of baffling ambiguity epitomized in the word «sombra» is ultimately rhetorical. It creates sympathy for Manso because we know he errs in thinking that his is, at the end of the book, an inept, futile personality. We have come to realize just how fine and generous that personality is, and we are saddened to see that even to the end he cannot derive comfort from what we know. Convinced of his failure, he cannot reach out and take up life, as offered him by doña Javiera. She personifies the wholeness of body and mind which contrasts so tellingly with the «fantasmonas» spooking the corridors of the novel -Pez's daughters, doña Cándida, even Irene. For despite her youth, slender figure and self-effacing manner, Irene's ambitions, hypocrisy, and materialistic appetites merely foreshadow the later overblown, overripe Rosalía de Bringas or the clever Marquesa de Tellería, «muy ladina y muy cuca» (1665). Disappointingly, Manso abandons life, turning away from doña Javiera, his excellence misspent and scorned by society at large.

The use of the word «sombra» also illustrates another factor which influences out judgment: Manso is the only character who develops and changes. The others -Irene, José María, even Manuel- remain essentially the same. The process of change and growth is, in imitation of life, ambiguous   —59→   and thus the ambiguity characterizing Manso clarifies two important things: it renders him a fellow human being like ourselves and it teaches us to perceive, and to believe in, that human being. He becomes, in all his confusion and change, our amigo, whereas the others remain distant and unreal, members of that «grupo sonambulesco» -mechanical in their gestures and speech, predictable in their thoughts and desires, esperpentesque in their moral degradation.

Oberlin College