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181

Zambrano, p. 55.

 

182

Underlining this contrast, María Zambrano writes: «Ellos, sí tienen el carácter fantasmagórico del personaje de novela, de quien está viviendo una novela. Sólo Nina vive... la vida.» (p. 26)

 

183

Casalduero has observed: «Pero el sortilegio de Almudena no puede llevarse a cabo, porque él tan sólo promete bienes terrenales» («Significado y forma de Misericordia», p. 218). Almudena is indeed rather a materialist. And it may be that his conjurements never work because he is selfish, i.e., he wants these things so that Benina may belong to him alone. But what really happens to Almudena is that in his case, as well as in doña Paca's, Benina has built a bridge between illusion and reality, making true(in her own special way) one of Almudena's imaginings. (Cf. Casalduero, ibid., p. 215.)

 

184

Vida y obra de Galdós, p. 132.

 

185

Casalduero, «Significado y forma de Misericordia», p. 215.

 

186

The levels of reality which intersect with the materialization of don Romualdo are noted by Gustavo Correa, in El simbolismo religioso en las novelas de Pérez Galdós (Madrid, 1962), pp. 211-215. He emphasizes the dreams of doña Paca and Almudena as forewamings of this apparition, and as testimonies to Benina's powers of creation. Correa does not, however, see in this motif evidence of the fact that Benina, in her spontaneous charity, has also fulfilled the literary demands of the novel by furnishing its dénouement.

 

187

Gullón, p. 189.

 

188

Casalduero, Vida y obra de Galdós, p. 133.

 

189

See my article, «Melancholy and Death in Cervantes», Hispanic Studies in Honor of Nicholson B. Adams (Chapel Hill, 1966), 49-55, and my Spain and the Western Traditions: the Castilian Mind in Literature from El Cid to Calderón, vol. IV, Madison, Wis., 1966), 68-71.

 

190

Galdós gives the reader several indications of this intention. In Chapter VIII he compares the entrance to the sima called La Trascava (geologists would call it a sea-horn) as a «tragadero oculto por espesas hierbas, como las que tuvo que cortar Don Quijote cuando se descolgó dentro de la cueva de Montesinos» (Obras completas, ed. F. C. Sainz de Robles [Madrid, 1960], p. 709a). In the following chapter Galdós again shows that Cervantes' great work is present in his thought: «en la época de esta veraz historia» (ed. cit., p. 712a). There is a clear reminiscence (p. 748b): «En la habitación estaba Florentina, no ensartando perlas ni bordando rasos con menudos hilos de oro...», which recalls Dulcinea's activity as imagined by her chivalric adorer in Don Quijote, I, 31: «ensartando perlas o bordando alguna empresa con oro de cañutillo». See J. Chalmers Herman, Don Quijote and the Novels of Pérez Galdós published by East Central State College, Ada, Oklahoma, 1955.

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