[In the following essay, Johnson examines some of the many competing interpretations of Guzmán de Alfarache, himself concentrating on the discrepancies between Guzmán's adventures and Alemán's sermonizing.]

The preeminence of Don Quijote in the history of the modern novel, while demonstrating a facet of the general debt of Western literature to the Hispanic tradition, has been largely responsible for the widespread ignorance or misunderstanding of the other great prose narration that stands together with the Quijote at the headwaters of “our” novel. That work is the picaresque Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) by Cervantes's contemporary, Mateo Alemán. In its time Guzmán de Alfarache was the most popular and influential work of Spanish literature in existence, including Don Quijote. It was translated into the major languages almost immediately and was at least as popular as the Quijote outside of Spain. Mateo Alemán was called the “Divine Spaniard” by the same Europeans who considered Cervantes an amiable clown. In our time Guzmán de Alfarache is important, if no longer popular or influential. It is an excitingly modern work whose relevance has been reestablished by a convergence of three important recent contributions to knowledge. There are first the social-historical-literary studies of Américo Castro, which have enabled us to perceive the human context that made the Guzmán, as well as the Quijote, possible. These works are the products of a uniquely Spanish social environment Castro has called the “Age of Conflict.” The critic who ignores this fundamental reality does so at his peril. Second, there is the tradition of post-Jamesian literary criticism in English with its emphasis on the function and meaning of narrative point of view. Of obvious importance in any narrative work, the phenomenon of point of view, and especially the subtle and intricate system of relationships established between protagonist and narrator becomes positively crucial in those works—the picaresque tradition in general—in which the narrator is also the protagonist of his own narration.¹ The third relatively recent contribution to knowledge which bears on the relevance of our novel is that of Freudian psychology. This is of paramount importance given the fact that Guzmán de Alfarache is a retrospective account of a life by the one who has lived it, and which seeks in a very real way to explain the present by reference to the past. Indeed, the narrator seems frequently to adopt the attitude of a patient in psychoanalysis, and as it happens, his life is a tangle of unresolved neurotic conflicts. The conceptual bases of Freudian psychology allow us to uncover these conflicts—perhaps the most important manifestation of Guzmán's humanity—by freeing them from the seventeenth-century theological vocabulary in which they are frequently embedded.

The foregoing remarks have been an attempt to suggest the importance and contemporary relevance of Guzmán de Alfarache in a general sense. Those that follow seek to provide an introduction to the particular problems posed by the work and its relation to its author.

Mateo Alemán experienced human life as total and perpetual conflict within each man and among all men. In his San Antonio de Padua (1604), a book that attempts to describe the real world, we read: “Es el hombre animal ferocísimo y dañoso, el más indómito de todos, pues los irracionales cada uno se conserva con los de su especie, y sólo él, siendo enemigo aun de sí mismo, lo es también de su prójimo, persiguiendo, cautelando, infamando, haciéndose robos y quitando las vidas los unos a los otros, no teniendo seguridad ni guardándose fe los amigos, los conocidos, los deudos, hermanos, ni el hijo al padre.”² In Guzmán de Alfarache, a book that purports to recreate the real world in fiction, we read: “Muy antigua cosa es amar todos la prosperidad, seguir la riqueza, buscar la hartura, procurar las ventajas, morir por abundancias. Porque donde faltan, el padre al hijo, el hijo al padre, hermano para hermano, yo a mí mismo quebranto la lealtad y me aborrezco.”³

The incessant and inevitable strife Alemán finds so characteristic of human affairs is also the norm for the entire cosmos. In San Antonio de Padua: “Todo contiene dentro de sí una continua pelea y las unas cosas la hacen a las otras, de tal manera que aquello en que se contradicen la hace multiplicar y ser muy diferentes. Pelean los elementos, pelean las fieras, pelean las plantas, árboles, flores y las otras” (II, 4, f. 92). In Guzmán de Alfarache, an aside in a discourse on the force of habit observes: “Tienen perpetua guerra el fuego con el aire, la tierra con el agua y todos entre sí los elementos” (II, iii, 7, 860).

The passages just quoted illustrate a remarkable and puzzling fact about Mateo Alemán, namely the persistence of an identical cosmovision in two diametrically opposed literary settings. Superficially, no two works could differ more than the biography of a saint and the autobiography of a condemned criminal. The two should be mutually exclusive, but our quotations suggest that Alemán found at least one way to reconcile their irreconcilable differences, by ignoring the dichotomy of good man vs. bad man and instead making his subject simply conflict and contradiction, interior and exterior, present at all points in the vertical hierarchy of being, at all points in time, and throughout the horizontal continuum of space. The fact that he was by no means the first human nor the first Spaniard to conceive of life and the cosmos in these pessimistic terms in no way invalidates the authenticity of his vision. Rather, his intellectual situation as heir to what might be called an ideology of conflict—Fernando de Rojas and his literary antecedents going back to Heraclitus, for example—and his existential situation as a converso in the conflictive age of Spanish social history enhance the value of his observations as the products of lived experience and not as extracts from the received tradition, even though they may take that form. An obvious example is Guzmán's comment that “La vida del hombre milicia es en la tierra” (I, i, 7, 184), a literal translation of Job 7:1, annotated as such by Francisco Rico, who also remarks its presence in SAP, II, 31. It does not cease for all that to be experienced as true.⁴ The fact that Alemán sees conflict on every hand, within the context of San Antonio as well as Guzmán, should not lead us to conclude the resolution of the conflict. Indeed, that he should write a pseudo-autobiography of a condemned criminal and the real biography of an important saint at the same time, itself suggests conflict, between the two protagonists and within the writer. Vida de pícaro and vida de santo, R. W. B. Lewis to the contrary notwithstanding, are simply not the same. The fact that their author is the same suggests either insincerity—a hypothesis I reject—or an inner conflict whose exterior manifestation is the attempt to ignore the radical differences between the two protagonists.

As every reader knows, however, it is not necessary to go outside the text of Guzmán de Alfarche to find conflict. Besides the expressions by Guzmán of his consciousness of living in a strife-torn cosmos, there is a contradiction between, for example, the picaresque adventures of the roguish protagonist (Guzmanillo) and the somber sermons of the worldly-wise reformed ex-sinner who is the narrator (Guzmán). Both Guzmanillo and Guzmán are furthermore racked by their own inner contradictions. Little Guzmanillo knows perfectly well he is doing wrong, yet he goes ahead and does it. Enrique Moreno Báez has referred this conflict to the Counter-Reformation period and its characteristic artistic style, the baroque chiaroscuro: “Todo lo cual contribuye a crear ese foco de luz un poco vacilante que, cortando por un momento las negras sombras que proyectan sus villanías, forma en su alma un claroscuro de esas tan frecuentes en la primera época de Ribera. Y es que la concepción de un pícaro cristiano, que tiembla al pensar en la enormidad de su culpa en el mismo momento en que la comete y llora al ver la bondad de su víctima, no podría darse más que en una época en que el contraste predominara tanto en la vida como en el arte.”⁵ Old Guzmán insists on his hard won experience and on the authenticity of his conversion, yet at the same time he recounts his cheats and swindles with undisguised glee and not a little professional pride. Not only is it not necessary to go outside the novel to find conflict, but also it is not necessary to go beyond any one aspect of it to find basic and apparently irreconcilable contradictions.

Criticism has, quite naturally, concerned itself with these contradictions, in the main with the discrepancy between the picaresque adventures and the ascetic sermons. The history of this criticism, from the seventeenth century to the present, is too well known to bear repetition here. Suffice it to say that Alemán's contemporaries, Catholics of the Counter-Reformation, saw the relationship as a complementary, rather than a contradictory one, that the eighteenth century came down heavily on the side of the adventures at the expense of the “superfluous” moralizing, that the nineteenth century lamented the disparity between the two, and that the twentieth, especially since Moreno Báez's epoch-making study, has taken up the task of reconciling the two extremes and as a corollary has insisted upon considering the novel in its seventeenth-century frame of reference.⁶ This has been accomplished in various ways. There is for example the “Catholic-apologetic” school of Moreno Báez, who has recently been seconded by A. A. Parker and Maurice Molho, who affirms: “Il faut lire Aleman en catholique.”⁷ Diametrically opposed is the view of Américo Castro, who in the decade before his death insisted increasingly on Mateo Alemán's identity as a converso, a semioutsider whose situation prohibited an orthodox view of the world and man's relations with God.⁸ Castro actually refers to Alemán as the “most anti-Christian” of Cervantes's contemporaries. Another attempt to place our novel within its historical-social-religious milieu is that of J. A. Van Praag, who bases himself on Castro's theory of a conflict between castas but considers Alemán a combative orthodox Jew and not a victim of the alienation characteristic of the conversos.⁹ His Alemán does not rail after the fact at what he considers Christianity's broken promises, but before the fact at its false premises. Gonzalo Sobejano considers the Guzmán a didactic work which has as its purview the totality of man's ethical and axiological dimension, and not merely his relations with his Creator.¹⁰ Edmond Cros sees the work basically as the product of Classical and Counter-Reformation rhetoric with an ethical as well as a purely theological thesis.¹¹ The terrestrial dimension of the novel remarked by Sobejano is insisted upon finally by Angel San Miguel, who devotes most of his attention to a demonstration of the necessary interrelationship of all the elements—narration, sermons, interpolated stories—which make up the work's structure.¹²

It is indeed encouraging to witness this revival of interest in the “other” great novel of Spain's most fecund period of literary history and the only work which in the opinion of Hispanists and Europeanists alike merits the classification of “picaresque novel.” Everyone seems to be agreed, Unamuno to the contrary notwithstanding,¹³ that Guzmán de Alfarache is a great work, but as to why it is great, or the more basic question of what does it mean, we seem to be experiencing the situation summed up by Sansón Carrasco in his review of critical appraisals of Don Quijote, I: “En esto hay diferentes opiniones como hay diferentes gustos.” The tendency to view the moralizing “digressions” as an integral, necessary part of the work is unanimous. The tendency to consider the work within its historical-social-religious context is likewise unanimous. But alas, in spite of so much unanimity, so much effort, so much archive research, so many sophisticated explications de texte, there is nothing approaching general agreement on a number of fundamental points. In Counter-Reformation or simply in the broadest Judeo-Christian context, is this book orthodox or heretical? Is Mateo Alemán identifiable with Guzmán de Alfarache, or is Guzmán an aesthetically distanced creation? Is Alemán a reformer or a complainer, or is he concerned solely with Heaven to the exclusion of earth? Is Guzmán a Stoic, a stoical Christian, or a coward? Has he really reformed or not? Is this book supposed to instruct us, or entertain us, or both? If it is supposed to do both, how can we resolve the basic contradiction between narration of an adventure (the entertainment) and criticism of the same adventure (the instruction)? What vision of human experience does the book offer? What vision of divinity?

These questions are more open today than ever, perhaps not in spite of but because of the revival of interest in the Guzmán. Their existence demonstrates first that the novel is by no means a fossilized relic of the past, and second that in spite of the universal acceptance of the necessity to examine it within its relevant historical context, each critic necessarily comes to grips with it from his own unique vital perspective: his race, milieu, moment, his religion, and his moi. This multiplicity of unanswered questions further suggests that the work, its author and his view of the world are every bit as conflictive as the four quotations from Alemán at the beginning of this essay would lead us to expect.¹⁴

Unfortunately, I do not have the expertise required to explain or explain away the contradictions and discrepancies whose presence plagues our understanding of this great novel. In fact I should like in the succeeding pages to insist upon them, perhaps to go out of my way to bring them to light, and instead of attempting to answer these existing questions I shall have to content myself with proposing some new ones. It is my belief that many of the traditional problems of Guzmán criticism, especially those related to the question of religious orthodoxy, are only marginally relevant for us in the secularized consumer society of the late twentieth century. To decide, for example, whether the overtly expressed theological doctrine in the novel is consistent with the policies laid down at Trent is really of interest only to specialists in Counter-Reformation theology and to those few literary critics with some particular theological ax to grind. My students at UCLA are frequently ignorant of Catholic doctrine, to the extent of regularly confusing the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth, for example, yet they are keenly interested in Guzmán de Alfarache, which they find “relevant” in a profoundly un-Christian and unseventeenth-century ambience. This fact, together with the renaissance of professional critical interest in the work, demonstrates the existence within it of themes and problems that indeed do touch us directly, in our time and in our humanity. Criticism has experienced difficulty in isolating them because critics have confused the examination of the genesis of a work within its relevant historical context with the analysis of its meaning in the present. The following sequence of events is probably typical. The work expresses a basic human question in seventeenth-century terms. We are touched, not because we are dealing with a specifically seventeenth-century issue but because our humanity responds to the humanity in the work. We undertake a study, but instead of situating ourselves in our own reality and asking twentieth-century questions of the work, we deem it more scientifically rigorous to project ourselves imaginatively into the seventeenth century and ask seventeenth-century questions. In this context the matter of religious orthodoxy is indeed important, as it was for Alemán and his contemporaries. For us, however, religious orthodoxy has ceased to be a burning issue.

It is my hope in this book to place the discussion and the polemics surrounding Guzmán not in a narrowly specific twentieth-century context, but in what I understand to be a generally human one, using the concepts and expressive systems of the twentieth century, which are after all the only ones available to me, just as the themes and rhetoric of the Counter-Reformation were the only ones available to Mateo Alemán. The reader will find reference to such names as Marx, Freud, and Sartre, not because Guzmán de Alfarache is an existentialist antinovel, a communist manifesto, or a psychoanalytic case history but because the thinkers of the present provide conceptual systems and vocabularies that enable us to come to grips with the humanity of the past, which in its humanity is perfectly contemporaneous. In my view, the only “anachronism” into which the humanistic scholar can blunder is that of failing to take advantage of the tools the advance of science has placed at his disposal. It is anachronistic to study the moon through Galileo's telescope in the age when it is possible to go there and dig beneath its surface, but the moon, it should be noted, remains the same.

Notes

1. These relationships have been admirably studied by Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970). See also Antonio Prieto, Ensayo semiológico de sistemas literarios (Barcelona: Planeta, 1972), and the same author's Morfología de la novela (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975), 337-427.

2. Mateo Alemán, San Antonio de Padua (Valencia, 1607), Libro II, Capítulo 12, f. 116 v. All subsequent references are to this edition and will be annotated as follows: II, 12, f. 116 v.

3. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, ed. Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca española (Barcelona: Planeta, 1967), Parte I, Libro iii, Capítulo 1, p. 356. All subsequent references are to this edition, which should become the new standard in Spanish, and will henceforth be annotated as follows: I, iii, 1, 356.

4. See the perceptive comments of Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 187-189.

5. Enrique Moreno Báez, Lección y sentido del Guzmán de Alfarache (Madrid: CSIC, 1948), 117.

6. See the summaries of criticism offered by Edmond Cros, Protée et le gueux. Recherches sur les origines et la nature du recit picaresque dans Guzmán de Alfarache (Paris: Didier, 1967), 55-85; Donald McGrady, Mateo Alemán (New York: Twayne, 1968), 53-56; and now Joseph V. Ricapito, Hacia una definición de la picaresca (Madrid: Castalia, 1978).

7. Alexander A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1967). Parker's devotion to Moreno Báez is obvious throughout his fifteen-page consideration of our novel. For example, “Enrique Moreno Báez has been the first to see this novel as serving the religious ends of the Counter-reformation and mirroring the theological preoccupations of its age. I find the main lines of his thesis fully convincing” (31); “The weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on Moreno's side” (32); “Moreno has pointed out …” (ibid.); “… certain theological propositions, which Moreno Báez was the first to detect” (38); “Moreno Báez is clearly right …” (42); “Anyone … cannot fail to be convinced … by Moreno Báez” (ibid.). Parker also offers an Appendix to his book entitled “The Alleged Unorthodoxy of Guzmán de Alfarache” in which he reiterates a number of points made in his text. For Molho see: Les romans picaresques espagnols, Introduction, bibliographie, chronologie par M. Molho; traductions, notes et lexique par M. Molho et J-F Reille (Paris: La Pléiade, 1968). More recently R. O. Jones has supported the same thesis in A Literary History of Spain. The Golden Age. Prose and Poetry (London: Benn, 1971), 125-132. See also Eugenio Asensio, “La peculiaridad literaria de los conversos,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 4 (Barcelona, 1967).

8. See for example Castro's prologue, “Españolidad y europeización en el Quijote,” to his edition of Cervantes, Don Quijote (México: Porrúa, 1960); his own Cervantes y los casticismos españoles (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1966), 18, 32, 38-54, 60-75; and his prologue, “Cómo veo ahora el Quijote,” to his edition of Cervantes, Don Quijote (Madrid: Magisterio Español, 1972), 31-39, 45, 88-90. The studies of Claudio Guillén, “Los pleitos extremeños de Mateo Alemán: I. El juez: ‘Dios de la tierra,’” Archivo Hispalense, 33 (1960), 387-407; “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” Proceedings of the IIIrd Annual Conference, ICLA (The Hague, 1962), 252-266; and “Luis Sánchez, Ginés de Pasamonte y los inventores del género picaresco,” in Homenaje a Antonio Rodríguez Moñino (Madrid: Castalia, 1966) are indebted to Castro's theories and at the same time help validate them by documentation. Castro's theories are also present in the vision offered by Francisco Rico in his prologue to his edition of the Guzmán in La novela picaresca española (Barcelona: Planeta, 1967), lxxvii-clxxxiv, although Rico is unwilling to limit himself to any one factor—e.g., converso author—as the work's determinant.

9. See J. A. Van Praag, “Sobre el sentido del Guzmán de Alfarache” in Estudios Dedicados a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: CSIC, 1954), V, 283-306.

10. Gonzalo Sobejano, “De la intención y valor del Guzmán de Alfarache,” Romanische Forschungen, 71 (1959), 267-311.

11. Edmond Cros, Protée et le gueux … (Paris: Didier, 1967); and more recently his Mateo Alemán. Introducción a su vida y a su obra (Salamanca: Anaya, 1971).

12. Angel San Miguel, Sentido y estructura del Guzmán de Alfarache de Mateo Alemán (Madrid: Gredos, 1971).

13. For Unamuno the Guzmán is “una sarta de sermones enfadosos y pedestres de la más ramplona filosofía y de la exposición más difusa y admoriladora que cabe”. See the essay “¡Ramplonerías!” in Ensayos, IV (Madrid, 1918). It would be instructive to meditate upon this startling opacity.

14. It is tempting to make no distinction between Mateo Alemán and Guzmán de Alfarache, or to attribute the “moral” statements Guzmán makes to Alemán's desire to overcome the stigma of his caste by demonstrating the sincerity of his Christianity, and to attribute the diatribes against society to the resentment created in Alemán by his membership in the cristiano nuevo caste. Of course Alemán wrote Guzmán and of course we can find sentiments in the novel similar to those expressed in San Antonio de Padua or the Sucesos de Fray Garcia Gera or the Ortografía castellana or in the correspondence published by Edmond Cros (Protée …, 436 ss). But the peculiar and fragile narrative structure is shaken to pieces, and with it our hope of understanding the work, if we fail to distinguish strongly and absolutely between Mateo Alemán and Guzmán de Alfarache as speakers. To impose Alemán on Guzmán—occasionally or systematically—makes the work liable to a multitude of conflicting interpretations that all somehow become a function of each critic's ideas and preferences in such matters as the importance of the conversos and the like. I shall focus exclusively on the work as an object, independent of its author, which presents itself for our consideration. This is not because Mateo Alemán does not interest me. On the contrary, he has absorbed a good portion of my energies over the past four years. Nor is it because I am unaware that a work is inevitably the creation of an author, but precisely because I believe that the only way to understand Alemán, his society, and his situation is to begin by acquiring a dispassionate view of his major creation, without imposing him on it capriciously and prematurely, and then, on the basis of the Guzmán, the other works, and the facts of Alemán's life available to us, undertake the study of the man.