Máximo Manso: Love's Fool

Abstract

Galdós's El amigo Manso has much in common with Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Details in the final chapter — Manso looking down from his afterlife to mock his mourners and despise the world he has left — closely resemble Chaucer's stanzas (adapted from Boccaccio's Teseida) on Troilus after his death. Both protagonists love idealistically women who decline to match their ideal; both suffer for it. Their self-defeating idealism ranges them among the 'fools of love': their stories, like Don Quixote's are tragicomic, but also promote an ironic questioning of values in their world — ironies heightened by the otherwise very different figures of Pandarus and Doña Cándida. Finally, the distinctively Boethian cast of Chaucer's poem is recalled not just by Manso's rather ineffectual pursuit of the consolation of philosophy, but by his story's concern with knowledges of different kinds, and still more by the relevance of that concern to Galdós's wider achievement of an open-ended, non-determinate realism. How he could have known Chaucer's Troilus or any of the texts relevant to it remains mysterious: most of our bibliographical leads run into implausibilities. Yet the issues are worth exploring: readers and critics too have to deal with more than one kind of knowledge.