The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
Alexander Haig
I’m not Jack Nicholson. I’m not Brando. But I do mumble.
Benicio Del Toro
Material objects are indispensable to picaresque narratives, which deploy variations on the theme of acquisition and its antonyms. The pícaros, after all, are have-nots who want to attain and obtain, and their stories record their generally unsuccessful quests. Lázaro de Tormes starts a process that culminates, in many ways, in the account of Pablos the buscón. Objects become psychological, even subconscious, tools of personal histories and social skirmishes. A key feature of Francisco de Quevedo’s La vida del buscón, first published in 1626, is its baroque language, which attests to the inscription of the author in his narrative, and specifically to his conceptual and rhetorical skills. At the same time, Quevedo gives the Segovian narrator / protagonist Pablos a psyche and a set of circumstances that distinguish him from his creator. The Buscón combines artistry and anxiety, aesthetic flourishes and an emotional self-portrait by the pícaro as outsider. Perhaps unwittingly, Quevedo cedes space to a character that he would hardly have respected or valued in any way. The “materiality” of words in the Buscón – the concrete objects that appear in the text and the verbal signs themselves – makes them symbols of social reality and analogues of the world outside. This essay puts forth the argument that the perspectives implicit in the dialectics of author and narrator are based on particular semiotic presuppositions. Quevedo puts words on display, while Pablos hides behind words, and the resulting discourse reflects dazzlingly, if at times inadvertently, the conflictive age in which the novel was composed.
It has become a commonplace of criticism of the Buscón to debate the primary feature of Quevedo’s text: its conspicuous exhibition of verbal wit – its conceptismo – or its intensification of the conventions of picaresque narrative. Which is the dominant element? Which is at the service of the other?1 The polemics parallel the case of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604), which has been deemed both a set of sermons bolstered by picaresque episodes to maintain reader interest and a picaresque tale with appended sermons to pay homage to the Tridentine emphasis on didacticism.2 There is in the Buscón technically only one voice, the first-person voice of Pablos, but it would by no means be a stretch to recognize a voice-over, the mark of a literary ventriloquist at work. Pablos is definitely a presence in the novel. He is the acknowledged storyteller, and the story is his. Moreover, the construct of the “implied author,” as outlined by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction and refined in subsequent decades,3 applies most heartily to the elitist and bigoted Quevedo’s intervention in the Buscón, as architect of a brand of determinism that mirrors the sensibility of the hierarchical society in which he thrived and suffered. One set of words, then, can do double, triple, or quadruple duty. Pablos self-consciously narrates his story, and Quevedo refashions or recontextualizes it according to his own plan, a plan laden with derision, irony, and, gloriously, an openness that likely would not have been intended or desired by the consummate satirist. It may be worthwhile to recall that the aspiration for upward mobility would not have been an admirable social trait in early modern Spain.4
Pablos is an antisocial figure on a number of levels. He is not only a New Christian, but the offspring of despicable parents and the member of a clan of outcasts. He is, arguably, the lowest of the low, but he does have an education of sorts, elementary and middle schooling and a time at the University of Alcalá de Henares, thanks to his colleague and master Don Diego Coronel. The question of whether his academic background can justify the height of ingenuity that he reveals is a significant factor in assessing the place of Pablos in the narrative. Much depends on the reader’s inclination to enter the world and mindset of the narrator or to envision a puppeteer behind the mask of an autobiographical chronicler. The vying for space helps to define the structure of the Buscón and to establish the links between the shape of the story and the shape of things far beyond the pages of the book. The degree of sympathy that a reader might have for Pablos is conditioned by one’s attitude towards the social rebel or underdog, itself conditioned by the mores of a given period and locus. A majority of readers in the new millennium probably would be more inclined to favour the antihero than the rigid and prescriptive (and proscriptive) protocols of Habsburg Spain.
It is possible that Quevedo wrote the Buscón well before its publication date and that the manuscript circulated as early as 1603 or 1604.5 In any event, he would have been familiar with Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache, each of which hurls its narrator into a mine field of irony. Discourse can be incriminating, even when the narrator seems to wish to defend himself. Lázaro de Tormes initiates a paradigm of breaking a protective silence. He is, in every sense, a town crier, publicizing wines and his private business as the gossipmongers hang onto every word. In setting out his defence, his explanation of “the case,” Lázaro aims at fabricating a rhetoric that will glorify and historicize his rise from life’s nadir, and yet his untenable position shows through. He wants readers to see him as indifferent to the code of honour – and some readers and critics most certainly do – but he is not fully convincing.6 He ultimately is trapped by his confessions, plotted and unpremeditated. His masters are specialists at verbal deception; they use language to abuse their charge and to profit from trickery, and their lessons in “how to do things with words” instruct Lázaro on the nature of signs and on the multiple faces of reality.7 The narrative ends on a wonderfully ambiguous allusion to prosperity, which follows an account of a thorny marital situation and what has to have been a traumatic public scandal. As a precocious spin doctor, Lázaro allows the incipient picaresque genre to rely on and to relish its polysemous base and its rich and mutable subtexts.8
Although the author of Guzmán de Alfarache is not anonymous, he is a controversial and puzzling figure, whose public persona had an air of mystery. Mateo Alemán was likely a New Christian attempting to pass as an Old Christian.9 In the narrative, he constantly attempts to distance himself from his protagonist, but his palpable exasperation with life’s daily struggles and his incorporation of social critique tend to cloud the distinction between the fictional speaker and his real-life progenitor. Guzmán and Alemán fail, to an extent, at extricating themselves from an objectionable other, a father and a rogue, respectively. The wish to deny one’s bloodlines operates in a dualistic and ironic manner. Alemán foregrounds an overcompensating narrator / protagonist while inserting himself into the scheme, protesting a bit too much, and suggesting throughout the narrative process that people cannot escape the hand that fate has dealt them. When a pseudonymous author publishes a false continuation of the novel in 1602, Alemán exerts considerable effort in his own second part to allegorize the theft, to expose the imposter (the author and an alter ego who makes his way into the legitimate sequel), and to stress the superiority of his brainchild, text and pícaro. He does not seem to comprehend that his defence of Guzmán goes against the condemnation of his character’s actions and thoughts in Part 1. The very act of taking Guzmán’s side runs counter to the air of morality that lies at the core of the narrative, however convolutedly. Guzmán is to be despised, and then judged as somehow better than his surrogate. Guzmán de Alfarache connects the literary form known as the miscellany with the novel-in-the-making, as it anticipates Don Quijote. Alemán lacks the control and the dispassionate authority of his contemporary Miguel de Cervantes, who sustains balance within his narrative while denouncing an intrusive continuation. The notable shift in focus in the second part of Alemán’s novel blurs the boundaries between the historical writer and the implied author, but Guzmán’s vita is complex and fascinating. The imprecise design of the narrative does not detract from the trials and tribulations of the title character, who, despite his baseness, despondency, and alterity, manages to serve the cause of exemplarity. The reader’s response to Guzmán de Alfarache is, finally, a function of accepting or rejecting the professed conversion of the narrator, who alleges to have repented his sins and to have been delivered from evil. Engagingly, the only manifestation of that conversion is encoded in the discourse itself, since the recounted events themselves are pre-conversional.
Quevedo has a model for the picaresque and a strong perception of the social order. The protagonist of the La vida del buscón is doomed from the start, persistently endeavouring to be a gentleman at any cost, and Pablos, in fact, pays dearly for his ruses. He is a pawn of fortune and of the man who casts him in plots – and in a plot – that fail him. His brashness and the risks that he takes become greater as his story progresses, as does his punishment. One of the most unsettling aspects of the Buscón is a baroque excess within linguistic and referential frames. Violence, cruelty, and the infliction of pain seem omnipresent and inevitable, and language adapts itself to the milieu. Quevedo is unsparing in his recourse to the extremes, and Pablos, deprived of free will, can only rush headlong into a chain of calamities, disappointments, thwarted plans, and humiliations. He offers a moral and closing words of self-deprecation to his story. Nonetheless, the reader may discover a surprising and paradoxical twist to Quevedo’s rendering of the pícaro, whose figurative imprisonment within the first-person discourse carries a symbolism of its own. The anonymity of Lazarillo de Tormes allows the reader to configure the author as an abstraction, as invisible strings, so to speak. Mateo Alemán in Guzmán de Alfarache becomes increasingly involved in the narrative that he is, at once, inventing and forsaking. He tries to detach himself from his protagonist, while his interests and his stake in the well-being of Guzmán make separation difficult. Within the expanse of his manuscript, Alemán seems less committed to a unified vision or to psychological consistency than to the projection of a society fraught with stumbling blocks and ill will. His grievances are mixed with those of Guzmán, pariah and soulmate. The reader may be able to disentangle Alemán from Guzmán, and vice versa, and, on occasion, may find that their paths and their voices cross, enigmatically but also as part of a strange internal logic of mutual dependency.
What could be classified as a love-hate relationship in Alemán’s novel loses the love in Quevedo’s Buscón. Pablos is an untouchable, with negligible redeeming qualities. His goal of success is stated and restated only to underscore the fruitlessness of his labours. He is the antithesis of a responsible citizen, for he refuses to conform to the rules of decorum, rules that would have him adhere to a standard of subservience. Further, he is the antithesis of the proud and arrogant nobleman Quevedo, who obviously would not condone an egalitarian spirit or a social climber from the lower depths. The more one knows about Quevedo, the greater the chasm between creator and creation. Lázaro de Tormes provides a theory of relativity as rationalization for his conduct and for his dubious triumphs, which he hopes to qualify for Vuestra Merced. This rather modest proposal is daring for mid-sixteenth-century Spain. Lázaro does not bear the slings and arrows of mockery alone, for Lazarillo de Tormes brilliantly fuses, and confuses, the subjects and objects of satire. The mistreated and cuckolded protagonist cannot remove himself from harm’s way or eradicate his complicity in the marital woes, but he is persuasive enough to implicate those around him. Goodness in the world of Lazarillo de Tormes is like the food in the early chapters: neither prevalent nor painless to obtain. Lázaro’s point that he has come a long way and that he and his wife are no worse than their neighbours is well taken. They are not innocent, but they are not more guilty than their fellow men and women. Perspective in Lazarillo is crucial to the innovative format, because the marginal voice expands the frame of the narrative and thus the scope of the social analogue. With an irony of its own, the picaresque challenges the culture of exclusion by opening doors as the narratives depict the closing of doors. The genre captures the restrictive atmosphere and the sites of power through unique and special agents, who previously had been elided from narrative discourse.
Guzmán de Alfarache’s conversion extends the ambitions of the pícaro, who now asks the reader to believe his claims and his sincerity. Alemán intensifies the delinquency of the protagonist and the hardships that he must endure.10 Guzmán has been lost, but he declares himself saved, and his narrative becomes a testament to his liberation. The rhetoric of Lazarillo de Tormes is aligned with self-preservation; Lázaro is writing on command and is mounting a defence. He prepares his reader to expect a calculated strategy, that is, to expect some type of overstatement. Guzmán, in contrast, does not confirm the complete parameters of his thesis – his spiritual transformation – until he reaches the conclusion, and books have been written by scholars sceptical of the change of heart.11 The rhetorical formula of Guzmán de Alfarache is far more intricate than the plan of Lazarillo, due not only to the massive text but also to the mental meanderings of the narrator and the insistence on his disenchantment, his disillusionment. He demonstrates over and over again that he can trust no one. He intimates that God has forsaken him, but religion gives him comfort in the end. That is, without a doubt, a good decision, but not an easily verifiable one. The test requires a reliable narrator, and the anguished, downtrodden, and much-maligned Guzmán is not necessarily the ideal candidate. On the other hand, if Lazarillo maps a new direction – and a new aesthetic and social domain – for the outsider, Guzmán amplifies the narrative space exponentially. The extraordinarily pessimistic view of society comes from the man who communicates the events of his life story after he has gone through a climactic conversion. The resulting tension is a reigning trope of the lengthy and detailed narrative. From a theological standpoint, Alemán may be expressing faith in redemption for even the lowest of the low, but the cynicism that underlies the story and the discourse of Guzmán competes with any positive outlook that one may posit. This dualism may shape a reading of the novel, yet the desperation behind Guzmán’s voice – affecting his idiolect and the laying bare of his psyche – would seem to break the balance. In the many pages of the narrative, the agony, abjection, and misery of Guzmán’s existence never cease. The distance that should accompany the dedication to higher thoughts, and that should affect the narrator’s persona (as opposed to that of the protagonist), does not make its way into the discourse. Alemán must contend, as well, with an earthly problem: the spurious sequel and his own literary reputation.
In 1605 and in 1615, Cervantes devises in Don Quijote a special place for the reader and a special place for irony. He has seen both, I would submit, in the picaresque, which was a recent phenomenon, but one of which we know he was cognizant.12 The reader as arbiter is a sine qua non of Lazarillo de Tormes and of Guzmán de Alfarache, which demand an understanding of the markers of irony. The complexity of baroque art builds upon this base by pushing the limits of the act of deciphering. Lázaro de Tormes’s self-fashioning, a fictionalization of the autobiographical mode, gives added meaning to the authority of words. The character represents – represents – himself to a narratee who must, in one way or another, read between the lines. Words become form and substance, and Guzmán de Alfarache’s contribution in this regard could not be more substantial. The presumed judgment of Vuestra Merced inaugurates a narrative practice that isolates and empowers the consumer of literature; in short, it is a figurative contractual agreement to analyse and interpret the words of the narrator and, by extension, to uncover the rhetorical technique of the author. The pícaro as narrator evokes an environment through words, and, in the archetypal texts, that environment is closely allied to material objects. First, words replace events themselves; historiography replaces history, and words become the partners of revisionism. Second, words are stand-ins for things; one set of signs replaces another, or others. Third, the picaresque often concerns itself with lack, and words, as presence, have to convey absence. Ironically, the medium for producing that message is frequently hyperbole. The neglect that Lazarillo de Tormes suffers at the hands of the blind man, the cleric, and the squire, for example, is rendered in a language that exaggerates scarcity that plays against insufficiency. Hunger is the signified, but the signifiers are replete with materiality. The images of the narrative have a circular feel to them, and Lázaro’s possessions – most notably, the clothing that he purchases at the end of chapter 6, reminiscent of the squire’s attire – summon the spectres of the past. His words, as pregonero and as a wronged husband, resonate to publicize his wretched state.
The discourse of Guzmán de Alfarache may be said to constitute a mannerist middle ground between his predecessor and successor.13 Guzmán is about as insignificant as one could be in the social structure of his day. He is a whipping-boy, an exemplar of the negative, a stain on all he touches, the bad that allows light to shine on the good. His attainments are regularly devalued, denied, or overruled. In the allegory of Part 2, even Guzmán’s name is in jeopardy. The book that begins by using his own words to ridicule him mercilessly later embarks, ironically, on a campaign to redeem him, by exorcising a sequel, a phantom namesake, and an insidious author, and by a last-minute conversion. Throughout his life, Guzmán has had many exploits and encounters, but he has little to show from his travails. The exception is his book, with copious testimony, not merely of incidents but of thoughts and feelings, past and present. Guzmán, one could note, lives in a vacuum. He is a cipher, a nonentity, or, worse, a scapegoat. The narrative object that belittles him and questions his conversion – in spite of his nominal position of control – ends by immortalizing him, by preserving his words and freeze-framing his social interaction, as caught in the blind alley in which he exists. The space allotted to the picaresque narrator / protagonist is enormous. Guzmán writes about his blood relations and about those who have raised him, about his education and training, about love and hate, about justice and injustice, about topics inspired by his experiences or that simply occur to him. The “real” and the anecdotal come together, and so, it seems, do the interests of Guzmán de Alfarache and Mateo Alemán. Whereas for Lázaro de Tormes brevity is the soul of wit, for Guzmán verbosity takes over. Rarely before or since has an underdog been given such an opportunity to vent his frustrations or to put forth, emulating Lázaro, his case. The vast panorama of Guzmán de Alfarache encompasses the social spectrum as Spain entered a new century, a century of turmoil and strife on numerous fronts, and of rapidly changing subjectivities.
The dynamism and the vitality imparted by words in the earlier narratives continue in La vida del buscón, in which Quevedo and Pablos seem to spar for dominance. Simultaneously, the two could be seen to join forces to surpass the achievements of the picaresque novels (and novelists) that come before them. Baroque intensity drives the story, the discourse, and the overall composition of the Buscón, whose deep structure is predicated on rivalry and competition. Like Lazarillo, and unlike the adroitly meandering Guzmán, the Buscón is a manageable text, with a few digressions but by no means a miscellany. There is a clear pattern to Pablos’s life, from lowly lineage to maturity, along with a clear message, which the narrator himself imparts as a moral when he brings his autobiographical document to a close. Quevedo charts a distinctive course by pairing language and psychology as perhaps the most striking dialectical elements of the narrative. I want to address and to affirm the statement that, in the Buscón, Pablos has a mind of his own. I consider the statement to be both absurd and valid, while some will see it as solely absurd. I agree with Edwin Williamson that Pablos steps out of Quevedo’s “coercive grasp,”14 which helps to explain how words – in current parlance – multitask and obscure meaning in the narrative. Giving the word to Pablos replicates the narrative transfer of the preceding texts, but the effect is different. Quevedo goes beyond baroque artistry to advance the growth of the novel, and he has not typically been given accolades for doing so. This could be because he and his protagonist, while compelling, are prodigiously disagreeable.
Through Pablos, Quevedo immediately attaches conceptismo to picaresque convention. The humble genealogy of the opening chapter is mired in wordplay, but this is excess in reverse, a surfeit of bad blood and a mockery of Christian ideals. Quevedo enjoys not only artistic detachment as he showcases his verbal gifts, but he takes advantage of the first-person narration to spotlight Pablos, willing to share details and unaware of the snares of irony into which he is falling. Pablos unmasks his parents, who try to conceal their true selves through euphemism, apparently without realizing that he is doing the same thing. The rhetorical artifice – and edifice – is set up at the beginning: Pablos is clever and artful, but his words betray him. His assertions and conclusions, such as the gratitude that he pays to (indisputably wayward) parents so mindful of his welfare, are, more often than not, empty, misguided, and untrue. The Renaissance self-refashioning15 of Lazarillo de Tormes acquires a baroque thrust. By pumping up the rhetoric, Pablos may give an unaccustomed materiality to words, but the very language that is being exalted threatens to overshadow its subject. Pablos has no status in society. He is a hollow man, and yet he is perforce the centre of the narrative. An implied author would seem to want to dislodge him by decentring his speaker. A way to do that would be to discredit him, or to have Pablos discredit himself by showing one thing and telling another; the narrator would be misrepresenting the truth and therefore could not be trusted. In addition, the more elaborate and sophisticated the discourse, the greater the odds that the reader would contemplate the work of the artist over the rationale of the character.
Pablos’s various progenitors and parental figures are prominent from the beginning, and the instruction is that those disfavoured by destiny cannot overcome the obstacles on their passage through life. The father is a thief, the mother a prostitute and a witch who has not raised him. Quevedo is not inclined to defend his literary issue. As a man of letters, Pablos can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – can adjust the data, rename, and reappraise – but the separate reality has a temporary quality, an air of make-believe. The words of the Buscón generate a conundrum that forms the crux of the narrative. Words are the source of Pablos’s centrality and, it could be argued, the source of his undoing. They are, in theory, his entrée to decent society, but, in practice, testimony to his ill-founded pretensions. Quevedo, Tantalus-like in his burlesque of paternity, situates Pablos in a propitious site, a site of authority, of authorial strength, and then envelops – or, appropriately, swaddles – his discourse in irony. Quevedo abuses Pablos as society abuses its objectionable denizens, by strategizing to place him in the periphery of his own narrative. This is a magisterial example of ironic distance. It is Quevedo’s admonition against civil disobedience that may seek to overwhelm the disobedient civilian. Quevedo permits Pablos to represent himself in the court of public opinion, with every confidence that the pícaro has a fool for a client. The urge to be a gentleman motivates Pablos, and the prospect of foiling the notion – repeatedly and resoundingly – animates Quevedo. While Lázaro de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache yearn for respectability, Pablos – who first makes the wish as a child – wants, instead, the accoutrements of success, not goodness, precisely, but goods, not self-improvement but improved surroundings. He can never afford to be sensitive, nor can he rechannel the negative energy with which heredity and environment have endowed him. His masters and his neighbours will not waste a moment to ponder his innermost reflections or the depths of his soul. Pablos is innately unworthy of deferential treatment and of integration into mainstream society, no matter how uncompromising or unwavering his commitment may be. His condition is, alas, chronic, unremitting, and irreparable.
In one plotting of La vida del buscón, Quevedo occupies the centre and Pablos the margins. The author has on his side the inquisitorial and hierarchical order, and the pícaro only the indicators of disorder. Eventually, a new order – modern, and with a broad range of inflections – and a modified plotting can identify the inequity of the social system, find some compassion for the persecuted, and “read” Pablos, and the antihero in general, more sympathetically. Modernity likewise brings a new scientific imperative and, irony upon irony, an improbable team of advocates: Sigmund Freud and succeeding psychoanalysts. The picaresque, in Lazarillo de Tormes (and maybe even before, in Francisco Delicado’s La lozana andaluza, of 1528), precociously puts forward a cumulative approach to characterization. The mature protagonist is the product of a process enacted in the text. Control is proven to be a misnomer, an illusion. Lázaro scorns the squire’s fixation on honour, for example, but his purchase of clothing and his reaction to the gossipmongers of Toledo may divulge his own latent preoccupation. Guzmán de Alfarache fights to free himself of his father, and his discourse has much to do with free association. Guzmán de Alfarache brings the conflict with the father to bear on an author who becomes ever more decisively a supplement of the narrator / protagonist and a subconscious subject. The dissolute Pablos may be the most transparent product of discrimination to be found in picaresque fiction.
From childhood, Pablos grapples with the burden of his family’s unsavoury reputation. No memory seems to be devoid of trauma. He is reviled, attacked, called names, and, he thinks, confused with his parents. He admits that he seethed with rage, but hid his feelings, and it is this bottled-up anger that manifests itself in his offensive behaviour. His descriptions disclose the trait of overcompensation, as he does his utmost to win approval, to little avail. He is who he is, and, in a frightfully harrowing moment for the young boy, his mother refuses to deny the accusations that have been made against her. He cannot liberate himself from his familial ties or from his name and the depravity that it connotes. Throughout his life, he will concoct names and identities as a means of obliterating the past, a past that cannot be erased from his mind and that finds ways of catching up with him. Even before he joins a theatre company, Pablos pursues the performance arts, as a prankster who moves up (or down) the ladder to felon. He flaunts these skills as a writer, when he lets words suppress and disguise emotions. His parents mark him as inferior, and his peers do battle with him. A schoolmaster, the licentiate Cabra, nearly starves him, and Pablos’s commentary on the ordeal is a masterpiece in miniature of baroque conceits. Here, as elsewhere, abundance trumps lack, and evasion trumps acknowledgment, which would denote weakness and vulnerability. When Pablos writes of the shortage of food, he reduces himself to skin and bones, to a disappearing body that must be metaphorically resurrected with words. He seems to be preparing the reader for the torment and torture that await him in Alcalá de Henares, where he goes in service to Don Diego Coronel. This may be the quintessential section of the narrative. On the road to the university, Pablos and Don Diego are equals – and equally naive – but, on their arrival, everything changes. Don Diego is received with warmth and enthusiasm, and Pablos is insulted, trampled upon, and disgraced. It is at this point that Pablos realizes that he can succumb to social pressure and accept his station in life, or he can opt for notoriety. Needless to say, he chooses the latter.
Pablos insists that he is content with life on the wrong side of the law. He brags that he has never felt better. Outwardly, he is fearless and adamant in his defiance of the rules by which the virtuous abide. His discourse is, however, patently contradictory in its representation of the highs and lows of his stay in Alcalá. The best of times and the worst of times become intermingled. Pablos seems to forget the devastating welcome that he received – and inscribes into the text – as he boasts of his fame and satisfaction as a full-fledged criminal. He contrasts himself with the studious and upright Don Diego, and his encomiums seem somewhat forced, as well as generous, given that the privileged Don Diego did not balk at the tricks played against Pablos and that he would return as Pablos’s nemesis some years later. Pablos credits Don Diego with enjoining him always to be on the alert, to watch out for himself since he alone would do so, and this becomes his maxim. At the end of Book 1 (chapter 7), Don Diego, under orders from his father, cannot continue to employ Pablos, but he is willing to find him a position as servant. Pablos informs Don Diego that he is now “another” man, who feels that he has a higher calling. He has received word of his father’s death, and he returns to Segovia in order to collect his inheritance and to take his leave for good. As a petty thief, miscreant, and carouser, Pablos is uninterested in possessions. He does not steal food to survive or filch items that he needs or wants. He cannot attain renown, but bad repute will suffice. He has hit upon an outlet for his pent-up aggression, and he has a name, if not a proper one. The exhilaration that comes from this social victory is multilayered, alternately sincere and heartfelt, grandstanding and self-deceptive. There is, nevertheless, an unmistakable facet of the narrative that rises above the flair and ostentation of the pícaro’s hoaxes: Pablos confesses to the reader the shame, the horror, and the indignity that he has felt. He may not see the connections between his background and his actions in the present, but we do.
Never at home in Segovia, Pablos once more finds himself guilty by proxy – or, at least, mortified – when he sees his father “quartered” on the road, and when his uncle Alonso greets him and introduces him to a rogues’ gallery of acquaintances. Pablos grabs his “legacy” and sneaks away in the night. The birthright becomes money alone. Quevedo shrewdly follows the break from the father and the family with Pablos’s meeting of Don Toribio on the journey to Madrid. Pablos now has a father figure and a ready-made family in the band of rascals over whom Don Toribio presides. In this realm, the tangible and the material – and material, literally – carry ample weight. Life for Don Toribio and his henchmen is tromp l’oeil, a game of deception in which the visible is misleading and the real is less than promised. Don Toribio’s wardrobe, for example, seems elegant and complete, but the cloth is in tatters. The magicians of the eye dupe the unsuspecting and try to stay one step ahead of the law. Pablos feels at home in this brotherhood, and he learns to take liberally from others, as the episode of the free lunch at the home of the licentiate Flechilla in Book 3, chapter 2, illustrates. In a month, Pablos acquires a solid education in this school of hard knocks. His adventures become gradually more complicated and more dangerous, and he begins to use aliases. The group is rounded up and jailed by officers of justice. Pablos intuits that money speaks, and he bribes his way out of prison. He helps his cause by befriending a warden and his wife and daughters, objectionable and unattractive New Christians with horrendous credentials. Even though they serve his selfish intentions, they are an ironic replacement family for Pablos, who sets out from his detention in search of new blood, as it were.
The pícaro then pursues a series of women, culminating in the courtship of a nun. He goes after the daughter of his landlord and remarks that people grant him more respect when he has lured them into thinking that he is wealthy. Although his plan fails, he acts more boldly in his betrothal to a young lady, Doña Ana, who believes that he is Don Felipe Tristán, a well-to-do aristocrat. He is all but wallowing in the lap of luxury when Don Diego Coronel, Ana’s cousin, appears unexpectedly and corners Pablos, who must relive the past as he listens to a recitation of his family history and burns from within while camouflageing his feelings. The past again haunts him shortly thereafter, when a horse that he has “borrowed” dumps him into the mud in yet another emblematic fall. From this episode, Pablos is left wounded, unguarded, immobile, and penniless, beaten physically and emotionally, and plagued by reminders of a past from which he cannot extract himself. He has nothing to show for his social battles but scars, external and internal. He has come close to conquering an adversarial order; marriage to Doña Ana would have brought him into the Coronel family, but the cycle that awaits him is grimmer and more deterministic, a cycle of inescapability and of failure. Because of his injuries, Pablos cannot flee from Madrid. Because of his transgressions, he cannot remain in the city. The impasse epitomizes the motif of wasted efforts that moves the plot of El buscón. Quevedo apportions Pablos the room to test his talent and to execute his gentlemanly proposition. He continually gives Pablos a false sense of security. There is no harm in this, because failure is certain, preordained by an author who knows that the falls are more stunning when they are unexpected by the protagonist. The destitute Pablos finds another father figure in a beggar named Valcázar, who teaches him the mendicant craft. As he starts the trek towards Toledo, Pablos must remake himself from scratch.
Pablos gains fame and a good income as an actor and writer, performing under the name of Alonsete. He goes so far as to picture himself with his own troupe, but when the manager of his company is jailed, he changes his mind. He writes that he has no real love of theatre, but that he is grateful to have had the diversion and full pockets on his departure from the profession. He next assumes a bizarre role, though one not new to Spanish literature or ecclesiastical history: a suitor of nuns, which he relates to the Antichrist.16 Pablos not only courts his chosen religious lady, but he defrauds her, relieving her of property and abandoning her. He travels from Toledo to Seville, where he joins the criminal underworld, the antisocial elite and the last of his substitute families. In this setting, mayhem and murder are the bread and butter of the would-be gentleman. After having taken sanctuary in the Iglesia Mayor while fleeing agents of the law, Pablos undergoes something akin to a spiritual transformation, vowing to lead a righteous life by settling in the New World with La Grajales, one of the women (“ninfas”) he met in the church.17 He does not detail his adventures in America, but alludes to a second part, which does not materialize and which does not have to, for he supplies the ending. Pablos had hoped that the change of locale would change his luck, but, in his final words, “fueme peor, como v. m. verá en la segunda parte, pues nunca mejora su estado quien muda solamente de lugar, y no de vida y costumbres” [I was worse off, as your Honour will see in the second part, since no one has ever improved his status by just moving and not changing his life or habits] (Quevedo 1998, 308). There is, according to Pablos himself, a character trait that prohibits him from taking an exemplary path, an ingrained resistance to goodness that may be an upshot of his heritage, a response to social stimuli, a personal idiosyncrasy, or a combination of one or more of these elements. The answer is hard to ascertain, but what is straightforward is the coming together of Pablos and Quevedo – ideological enemies working at cross-purposes – in the explicit statement of a theme. In the end, Pablos reads himself much as Quevedo will have read him. This convergence bestows a neatness on the resolution, but is not altogether credible within the dialectical structure of the narrative.
The picaresque begins with things, namely food: grapes, wine, sausages, turnips, pieces of bread, and so forth, in Lazarillo de Tormes.18 A rhetoric of hunger leads to exaggerated descriptions of what is not there. The emphasis on food switches to social gestures related to honour, respectability, and the sanctity of marriage, and language once again is employed to indicate lack. Metaphor, metonymy, and allegory become more discernible as the narrative progresses. Biblical and folkloric diction serve new and ironic contexts, and a new kind of narrator / protagonist utters the words that evoke and, more audaciously, critique the norms and codes of society. At the conclusion of his story, Lázaro has the creature comforts that were denied him as a child, but, ironically, symbolism has become important to him, and the opinion of his neighbours matters to him. Material possessions may not be enough to promote tranquility. Guzmán de Alfarache, in turn, is a reflective man; thoughts weigh heavily on him. His creator Mateo Alemán shares his intellectual sharpness, his loquaciousness, his opinionated nature, and his tendency to veer off on tangents. As with Lázaro, Guzmán’s story has a vertical force, but a negative destiny uniformly blocks success. Guzmán may want prosperity – things – but he is more driven towards recognition for his achievements. The road is filled with obstacles, and the hurdles are never-ending. Finally, he asks the reader to take his conversion on faith, but one can judge him on the basis of discourse analysis, on the way in which he writes about his life after he professes to have changed. Lazarillo de Tormes has a visual and aural style; we can visualize Lazarillo growing into Lázaro, amid the images that punctuate his experiences, and we can hear his voice in what Claudio Guillén refers to as an “epístola hablada” [spoken epistle] (1957, 268).
Guzmán de Alfarache has a more abstract structure, and it foreshadows stream-of-consciousness and free association. Picaresque narrative is commonly cited as bringing psychological development to the fore.19 Lazarillo does this beautifully and economically; this little book can never be exhausted. Guzmán, in contrast, is exhausting, and that is a fundamental part of its appeal. The psychological vehicle becomes a psychological roller coaster. The reader enters Guzmán’s mind, with a corresponding glance at Mateo Alemán’s mental processes as a bonus. Consistency’s loss can be seen as profundity’s (and perspectivism’s) gain. The dominant possession in the novel is the book itself, united with the emblematic theft and false protagonist within the text of Part 2. Guzmán himself has goals that are abstract – cerebral, social, and judicial – and outwardly viable, signs of acceptability and tolerance. Society sees him as an outcast and a troublemaker, without looking for the causes of his delinquency and the reasons for his displeasure with the status quo. The eye of the storm in the picaresque is the questionable birthright. This is the opposite of the biblical Jacob and Esau, who vie for Isaac’s approval. The pícaro struggles for independence from the father and from the burden of names. Lázaro faces a “case,” whereas Guzmán contends against the world at large and, with Alemán, against ghosts of the past and present. If Don Quijote – with everything else, of course, including a master class in baroque technique and ideology – displays the height of optimism and appreciation of art, Guzmán de Alfarache is the epic of pessimism, the saga of man’s race against time and malevolence.
The amorphousness of Guzmán de Alfarache places the narrative at a stage in which the novel was finding itself, inventing itself. Don Quijote, published shortly afterwards, reaches near perfection by focusing on its status as a work in progress. Cervantes is playful, calm, and in control, infuriated but not defeated (or deferred) by the Avellaneda sequel. Alemán is far more somber, far more incensed, and far more distracted by the Juan Martí continuation,20 and he does some shifting of gears that, with some frequency, upsets the narrative rhythm. The fact that the reader sees two minds at work, in isolation and in tandem, investigates and broadens characterization, discourse, and, last but not least, the very human issue of authorial control. Standing between Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quijote, and between Lazarillo and La vida del buscón, Guzmán de Alfarache seems to have a less formal concept of structure, but Alemán lets the vagaries of life and the muddled curriculum vitae of his narrator / protagonist steer the movement of the text. Lazarillo is an early but superlatively orchestrated novel, impressive in its concision, in which things fall into place. In Guzmán (to reference William Butler Yeats and Chinua Achebe), things fall apart,21 but life – and the life – goes on. Autobiography and the precedent of Lazarillo give the narrative its design, which is complemented in Part 2 by the response to the sequel and by the lead-up to the conversion. The assortment of literary forms – literary materials – fills to overflowing the field of signifiers. Guzmán is disreputable. His voice is mediated from the outset by regulators inside and outside the narrative. He has to concede authority, and this restricts him, yet, paradoxically, frees him from restrictions that those above him must obey. He can be a sounding board for Alemán and for others who can be denounced for their words and even for their silences. Guzmán de Alfarache functions as a symbol of lettered culture, wherein language and rhetoric have the ability to reify – to conceive a space for – the unrepresented and the under-represented. The graft transposes centre and margin, and the transposition presages, among other things, postmodern ideological shifts.
La vida del buscón is a well-wrought novel. Its pieces fit together, and its protagonist sticks to a program of social climbing, overreaching, and descent into criminality. Memories of childhood traumas reverberate in his head, and traces of the past materialize within the narrative trajectory. The war between morality and immorality is an uneven clash, whose results are predetermined. The Buscón is not fueled by suspense but by ironic distance, which noticeably places story and discourse under the aegis, respectively, of an author’s sensibility and a voice-over. Quevedo is not a subtle figure here, hiding behind his words. For him, emplotment becomes entrapment. He shines as a star of conceptist invention and as a self-imposed social watchdog and avenging angel. In short, he exerts himself in order to keep Pablos in his place. Quevedo may have surprised himself, and the reader, by delving deeper into Pablos’s psyche than he may have wished and, through what can only be tagged as a special precognitive intuition, by coordinating his character’s thoughts and actions with psychoanalytical theory. The adult Pablos is exactly what one would expect him to be, having endured a lifetime of abuse. His resistance, his resentment, and his aggressive behaviour are the logical consequences of his contact with a hostile world. His subordination in the narrative – despite his subject position – is an analogue of his subordination in society. Nevertheless, exposure works both ways. Pablos is loathsome, but the disposition is not entirely of his making. This subtext of the Buscón is no less powerful because it is, it would seem, accidental, as irony begets irony. The display of ingenuity becomes a social artefact. A common denominator is identity. The protean Pablos seeks to inflate his worth, and intransigent Quevedo encroaches on his plans. The first adapts new identities in search of a vita nuova, and the second guards against change. The spoken word evaporates into the air as it is enunciated. The written word survives. Pablos’s loss is memorialized in his – in Quevedo’s – book, which readers can interpret and reinterpret over time.
Pablos is not an obvious candidate for sympathy, but his hurt may strike the reader as profoundly as his sins against society. His misdeeds and his attitude are comprehensible, if not easy to condone. There is a persona (albeit non grata) behind the barrage of conceits and behind the braggadocio, that is, a soul behind the mechanisms of deferral and the survival mechanisms. Lázaro de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache rewrite their histories, as a means of excusing their conduct and rationalizing their flaws, which remain ironically on display. Pablos articulates the suppression of his feelings of pain and anger, but the information is presented without a cry for pity and without recasting his negative traits. In the picaresque order, Pablos should be the least verisimilar of the archetypal protagonists, but I would list him as the most “real,” the most lifelike. In appraising Quevedo’s take on materiality, I would prioritize the artistry and the concreteness of verbal constructs. Quevedo expands one’s perception of the universe through language, in much the way that Pedro Salinas describes the poetry of his contemporary (and bitter enemy) Luis de Góngora. In remaking reality, the author of the Buscón turns nature into the microcosm and literary expression into the macrocosm, from what Salinas terms “the simple level of material reality” to a higher aesthetic or poetic reality (1966, 141).22 We have seen, as well, a psychological reality that adds to Quevedo’s appropriation of the models of the picaresque and the baroque. That a hardened criminal assumes centre stage in this production is ironic, but perhaps not as unpleasant as it may seem. Pablos is forthright and elusive, a puppet who often undermines the puppeteer, and, for me, a fictional character who stays with the reader even when the most ingenious of puns may begin to fade.
1 For a summary of the arguments on both sides, see the opening of Williamson’s essay, Friedman (1987, 238–9 n36), and Dunn (1993, 72–87).
2 See Friedman (1987, 236–7 n26) and Dunn (1993, 46–72) on approaches to Guzmán de Alfarache. Seminal in this regard is the work of Enrique Moreno Báez. See also, as starting points, the general studies of Alemán and the Guzmán by Donald McGrady and Ángel San Miguel.
3 On the “implied author” and related topics, see Booth, Chatman (1978, 146–95; and 1990, 74–108), Lanser (1981, 49–52, and 130–7), Rimmon-Kenan (1983, 86–9, and 100–5), Genette (1998, 135–54), Currie (1998, 19–29), and Lothe (2000, 11–27), and, for general considerations, Keen and the essays in van Peer and Chatman. In his study of lacunae in the picaresque, Parrack relates silence to the intervention of the implied author.
4 In important studies, Amelang gives nuanced readings of the social structure of Spain and of Europe in general.
5 On the dating of the Buscón, see, for example, Díaz-Migoyo (1980).
6 Frank Casa reads Lázaro as detached from the obsession with honour. For a different slant in the same journal, in a special number dedicated to Lazarillo de Tormes and guest-edited by Robert Fiore, see Friedman (1997).
7 The reference is to J.L. Austin’s book and to speech-act theory (1975).
8 The question of polisemia, especially as it relates to Lazarillo de Tormes, is a major concern of Francisco Rico in La novela picaresca y el punto de vista.
9 See Yovel for commentary on Alemán (2009, esp. 270–5) and for a comprehensive consideration of New Christian identity.
10 Parker (1967) uses the criterion of degree of delinquency to classify narratives as picaresque. Lazarillo de Tormes is, for Parker, a “precursor,” so his dating starts at 1599, with the publication of Guzmán de Alfarache. For a sense of current directions in picaresque studies, see Cruz (2008).
11 See Arias (1977), Brancaforte (1980), Whitenack (1985), and Rodríguez Matos (1985), who share the view that Guzmán is an unreliable narrator whose conversion is suspect. See also Shipley (1982), for an ingenious reading of Lázaro’s rhetorical strategies.
12 Ginés de Pasamonte famously alludes to Lazarillo de Tormes in Part 1, ch. 22, of his own version of Don Quijote.
13 Domínguez Castellano (2003) reads the Guzmán from this perspective.
14 Pablos’s metatheatrical feat – a form of independence from his author – is the thesis of Williamson’s essay (1977, 59).
15 The phrase forms the title, and topic, of a study of early modern English literature by Stephen Greenblatt (1980).
16 In his edition of the Quevedo’s Buscón, Domingo Ynduráin explains that it was said that the Antichrist would be born of a priest and a nun (1998, 289n372).
17 Pablos writes, “Pasábamoslo en la iglesia notablemente, porque, al olor de los retraídos, vinieron ninfas, desnudándose para vestirnos” [We spent our time at church because, remarkably, at the smell of poverty, nymphs came over and undressed themselves in order to clothe us] (1998, 306).
18 Among a number of examples, see the studies of Javier Herrero on the imagery of Lazarillo de Tormes (1978).
19 A complete (and complex) psychoanalytical reading of picaresque narrative – Freudian, in this case – is Johnson’s Inside Guzmán de Alfarache (1975). See also Iffland (1979) on Pablos’s ownership of the discourse in the Buscón, also Freudian in orientation. Johnson (1996) explores Guzmán’s subject position, as does Bandera (2002) with respect to Pablos in the Buscón.
20 In Part 2, Alemán identifies the pseudonymous author as Mateo Luján de Sayavedra. On the responses by Alemán and Cervantes to the spurious sequels, see Friedman (2000).
21 Yeats writes in “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” (1997, 68). Achebe uses the first part of the verse in the title of his now-classic novel of Nigeria.
22 In “Subjects and Objects in the Guzmán” (2005, 108–29) and in Writers on the Market in general, Donald Gilbert-Santamaría offers an engaging view of “literary consumerism.” In “The Destabilized Sign,” William H. Clamurro (1980) relates language (and material considerations) in the Buscón to the concept of cosificación, which he borrows from the work of José Corrales Egea. I cannot reflect on the Buscón without thinking of the analysis of Arnold Weinstein in Fictions of the Self (1981), which I first read many years ago. Weinstein writes that Quevedo’s novel “is a filthy book. It takes the materialist premise of Lazarillo de Tormes to its logical conclusion; spirit and transcendence not only yield to matter, but they are reduced to the lowest animal common denominator: excrement” (1981, 31). Given that this is the work of a devoted poet, Weinstein acknowledges that “even the most repugnant scenes are doing double duty” (1981, 31). The commentary has inspired me, over time and in different ways, to look at the dualistic nature of the text. For examples, see Friedman (1996 and 2006, 33–106).
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