The Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men: A Study of Type and Secondary Character in Galdós's Social Novels, 1870-1897 (review)

Wisdom 'consists more in conduct than in knowledge,' notes Kant in his Fundamental Principles to the Philosophy of Morals; that is, wisdom is manifest in what we do rather than in what we know. It is on this performative nature of wisdom, perhaps, that realist narrative fiction can, in part, base its claim to pertinence for human life – human doing, in as much as it allows (sometimes irresistibly invites) the reader to accompany its characters in their actions, in strict, sometimes precisely parallel movements of the reader's psyche or soul and the character's fictional development. The reader can thereby gain wisdom through this extraordinary unison of consciousness and conscience with a fictional character. But for this enriching amalgam to occur, the character must fulfil one requisite: he or she (let's use these personal pronouns) must be sufficiently like us to allow our identification with, or, at least, committed observation actions. In this sense, Peter Bly's The Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men does a service to readers of Galdós and of the novel in general, for it reminds us of the importance of characters and their development for realist fiction. In fact, this sustained study of a 'type' throughout Galdós's corpus allows us to see that it is in their lifelike singularity that these characters can work their wisdom. Bly thus fulfils the purpose he poses in his introduction: 'The question that this study hopes to answer is: to what extent are these eccentric old men merely types? Or are they more complex individual secondary characters?'

The introduction tackles directly the difficult concepts which underlie the author's exploration. Bly reviews the varying fortunes of the lifelike character, from Aristotle's 'subordinate ranking' of the character (vis à vis plot, for instance); to the modernist experiments of Proust, Unamuno, and Woolf; to the critical disgust with characters, which, according to Nathalie Sarraute, whom he cites, 'had been reduced to "mere excrescences, quiddities, experiments."' Bly notes the more recent revisiting of characters as a novelistic form, adducing, among others, James Phelan, Martin Price, Seymour Chatman, Thomas Dochery, Aleid Fokkema, Brian Rosenberg, Roger Fowler, Rawdon Wilson and Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan. He then states that his study, 'like those of most recent writers on Galdós's work, aligns itself with the trends in general characterological studies of the last twenty years: characters inevitably involve references to the human condition in the real, contemporary world beyond the printed text; but they are also, and primarily, literary creations that have to be examined in the light of the totality of the narratives in which they appear.' Bly scrupulously delimits the terms 'secondary character,' 'type,' and 'eccentric type.' He then reviews the Spanish nineteenth-century type tradition, as well as Galdós's own statements on and creation of types and eccentrics as he was beginning his novelistic career (1865–70).

The core of the book (chapters 1–10) are studies of some of the most memorable and important secondary characters in Galdós's fictional universe: Dr Anselmo (La sombra); Don Juan Crisóstomo (Rosalía); Cayetano Polentimos and Don Juan Tafetán (Doña Perfecta); José Mundideo, better known as Caifás (Gloria); Relimpio (La desheredada); Florencio Morales y Temprado and Jesús Delgado (El doctor Centeno); José Ido del Sagrario (El doctor Centeno, Tormento, La de Bringas, Lo prohibido and Fortunata y Jacinta); Plácido Esupiñá, José Izquierdo, and Manuel Moreno Isla (Fortunata y Jacinta); Luis Agapito Babel (Ángel Guerra); Pedro de Belmonte and Ujo (Nazarín) (the latter considered by Bly so significant that he 'offers a model of spiritual feeling that is far superior' to that of the eponymous protagonist); and Frasquito Ponte Delgado (Misericordia).

The Dickensian debt is traced by Bly throughout Galdós's corpus, precisely in these secondary characters, and...