SOURCE: Willem, Linda M. “Turning La incógnita into Realidad: Galdós's Metafictional Magic Trick.” Modern Language Notes 105, no. 2 (March 1990): 385-91.

In the following essay, Willem considers the complementary relationship between Benito Perez Galdós's La incógnita and Realidad.

La incógnita holds a unique position within Galdós's literary production: it is the only novel which deliberately is left incomplete and requires a companion text, Realidad, to bring it to resolution. As Stephen Miller has pointed out, other interrelated Galdosian texts such as Tormento and La de Bringas or Nazarín and Halma are self-contained novels, while La incógnita has no life apart from Realidad.¹ The complementary relationship between the two texts is stated explicitly in the penultimate chapter of La incógnita where that text's narrator, Manolo Infante, speaks of his work as only half of a creation—the body to which Realidad provides...