SOURCE: Davis, Nina Cox. “Indigestion and Edification in the Guzmán de Alfarache.” Modern Language Notes: Hispanic Issue 104, no. 2 (March 1989): 304-14.

[In the following essay, Davis discusses motifs of eating and digestion in Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache to explore themes of literary deception.]

The tendency of Guzmán criticism in recent decades has been to focus on the conclusion of Part II, the account of the narrator's alleged repentence and religious conversion while serving life sentence as a galley slave.¹ By reading the nearly one-thousand page fictive autobiography solely in terms of its closing chapters, as an example of—or response to—Counterreformation apologetics, modern readers cast Spain's first so-called picaresque novel as a startling anomaly within the genre which it created.

The outcome of the convict-turned-author's story must of course also be considered in light of his statement of intent in the opening pages of the novel. While Guzmán is not made to preface his relato with a prologue like Lázaro's, the primary patterns of motivation and behavior that give shape to the novel's discourse are expressed clearly in the first three chapters. The narrator Guzmán tells us that he has been inspired to live a life of deception by his desire to create for himself a lasting appearance of honor, much in the fashion of his counterparts Lázaro, Pablos, and Justina.² Readers learn that Guzmanillo the pícaro, already self-supporting, eagerly abandoned his mother and Seville to prove at Court the prowess of his rapidly maturing pico, evoked by the verb “galleaba”: “Ved si un mozo como yo, que ya galleaba, fuera justo con tan honradas partes estimarse en algo.”³ (I, 1, 2: 141-42) The figurative acceptation of the verb gallear, “Por alusión es querer sobresalir entre otros hablando” (Diccionario de autoridades, s.v. gallear), acquires fuller meaning in the chapters to follow, as Guzmanillo takes to the road and develops from the role as author of discrete deceptions to the mastermind of extended verbal confidence games and, ultimately, of the elaborate fiction of his life as an exemplary narrative.⁴

In Books 1 and 2 of Part I, the segment of interest in this study, the chronicle of Guzmán's developing mastery of that society which seeks to restrict him, through the aggressive reinterpretation of its realities with his pico or mouth, is cloaked by synecdoche: the narrative places primary emphasis not on the mouth as the nexus for communication with the outside world, but specifically on its material function in eating. The account of Guzmán's education as a pícaro thus takes on the fascinating and often disturbing configuration of repeated digestive crises, as he appears to “peck” for physical sustenance in a hostile world. Alemán has his narrator employ in the narrative of many episodes the carnivalesque motifs of bodily functions—particularly eating and defecation—which were burlesque subtexts for the Lazarillo and many later picaresque novels. The insistent repetition of metaphors of ingestion, digestion, and evacuation, however, provides a more profound continuity to the narration of the Guzmán. From the beginning of the novel, we find that eating and vomiting, and other digestive functions metonymically associated with ingestion—smelling, seeing, touching—serve also to concretize the more abstract process of reception and interpretation that accompanies communication. Despite their apparently antithetical relationship to the conceptual center of the novel, these successive references to the physical serve to explore relationships of meaning and principles of reception that organize its narrative.

Instead of focusing directly on the distrubing potential that resides in his linguistic mastery, the clever narrator, then, displaces the readers' attention at the start of the narrative onto other operations of the mouth. The analogic relationship between eating and speaking reveals itself only slowly, as the narrative explores through the examples of various pranks the relationship between digestive metaphors and linguistic engaño. Readers thus notice the frequency of references to foodstuff and eating long before they begin to reflect on the relationship between the misleading morsels that “Guzmanillo” and other characters swallow (the verbal medium that has defined them incorrectly) and the resulting effects upon their honor. That items of the material economy serve as metaphors for language itself becomes clearer at the middle of the novel, when in his pranks with sweets for courtiers, Guzmán clearly reveals their underlying linguistic support, and the link between his tantalizing language and honor—both his and his patron's—comes to the forefront.

The present study will consider early examples of this process that chronicle the transition of Guzmanillo from consumer of food fictions to nascent author or “chef” of his own clever confections in Part I, Books 1 and 2. Before the narrator is able to fend for himself and to fabricate, albeit ironically, his own “honor” through verbal artistry, he undergoes a process of desengaño after falling victim to the engaño of the world around him. In a thorough and long-overdue study of this material in numerous picaresque and “para-picaresque” works of the Spanish Golden Age, La bourle et son interprétation, Monique Joly argues, as this study hopes to confirm, that burlas are not simply used for entertaining effect in the narration of the Guzmán, but form its basic structuring principle.⁵ She cites (335 and 487-523) the series of food frauds staged at inns in Part I, Books 1 and 2 as particularly good illustrations of the dual process of “‘burlar’” and “‘burlarse’” (10-11) that characterizes communication in the novel, because Alemán overtly but deceptively highlights in these episodes his use of folkloric characters, situations, and lexical registers already associated in the minds of contemporary readers. Guzmán tells us that, upon leaving home, he was humiliated by the verbal wiles of more experienced pícaros, beginning with two innkeepers who offered him inedible food. In the first example, Guzmanillo stops on the road to order a meal from a sly “ventera” who quickly seizes on his naïveté, perceiving him to be “boquirrubio, cariampollado, chapetón … Juan de buen alma” (I, 1, 3: 147). She calls him “bobito” and “hijo” with maternal solicitousness, but grossly overcharges him for a meal of dirty bread and an omelet containing chick embryos. Guzmanillo is driven by hunger to suffer her burla, even though he is suspicious of the crunching “tiernecitos huesos” in the “tortilla” (147-48). Soon after leaving the inn, he vomits up the remains on the road, and his fears are confirmed by the physical evidence before him. This first culinary example reveals a Guzmán totally subject to the deceptive acts of others. His analytical skills conform to the early phase of his career; as we soon discover, the mature narrator Guzmán will educate the readers to a more complex evaluation of his communication with others by tracing his own learning process in experiential increments which are linked by foodstuff and ingestion.

To reinforce this point, Alemán has Guzmán repeat the first incident, elaborating metaphors of ingestion but with a slight difference: previous experience with the ventera leads to the character's more cautious analysis of a second innkeeper's behavior. In a second eating scene at the next day's inn, Guzmanillo is served foul-smelling dishes of mule meat called “veal” by the innkeeper, but trusting his senses this time, he refuses to eat. His suspicions are confirmed the following morning when he discovers the mule's hidden carcass.

Guzmán observes that in this second incident he was led to suspect deception long before he could prove it, merely by paying close attention to the innkeeper's words. Watching “Guzmanillo” and the muleteer closely, apparently to see if they recognized the illegal meat, the innkeeper had mistaken the muleteer's laughter for discovery of the substitution and had rushed to the table in an unsolicited defense of the repast: “—¡Voto a tal, que es de ternera, no tiene de qué reirse, cien testigos daré si es necesario!” (I, 1, 5: 174). The innkeeper's additional comments in a context that seems to require no explanation arouses Guzmanillo's suspicions of fraud: “por sólo habello jurado mentia, porque la verdad no hay necesidad que se jure. …” (5: 178). In effect, the truth soon to manifest itself in the meat is forced into the open by the explanatory discourse that contradicts it. Readers are forewarned by Guzmán at the beginning of his relato that language can serve to obscure or contradict rather than to clarify, and that its defensive use almost surely indicates the speaker's guilt.

Assuming that we have been persuaded to see him as an innocent victim of circumstances after reading the mishaps of Book 1, the narrator Guzmán then tells us in Book 2 that he was forced to “tratar el oficio de la florida picardia” (I, 2, 2: 263). He ceases to be the victim of food and instead uses it to play self-serving pranks on others.

Depicting himself as a scullery boy, Guzmán proceeds in Chapters 5 and 6 of Book 2 to describe the hierarchy of deceptions in a palace kitchen, under the control of the head cook.⁶ Two principal motives of the novel thus develop simultaneously: shifting from inns to palace, the narrative invokes spatial movement to draw the protagonist and reader closer to the work's thematic center—the society of cortesanos or discretos crucial in Guzmán's enterprise of finding the proper audience to appreciate his “honradas partes.” The narrator also begins to dissect methods of deception attributed to his past, introducing and duplicating within the narrative the densely autocritical perspective of his controlling authorial discourse. From this point on Guzmán has his younger self Guzmanillo reflect on types and methods of representation, in a misleading “prefiguration” of the same narrational procedure that directs the entire story.

Briefly, in this next narrative cluster, household servants are encouraged by the cook to pilfer leftovers from the kitchen and to sell them on the street, provided that they share the profits with him. The leftovers, already rotting, are routinely covered with sauces and garnishes to look more appetizing, and hence, easier to sell (I, 2, 5: 298-99). Once again, foodstuff is used to concretize a process of symbolic representation: the overlay of sauces and garnishes allows often indigestible products to be marketed for profit. The mistaking of the figurative for the literal in this section vividly recalls for readers the naive reception that defines the vulgo.

In the pranks involving foodstuff and its containers in Chapters 5 and 6 of Book 2, Guzmanillo masters and surpasses deceptive narratives worked on him by others in Book 1. Instead of simply lying about these objects of consumption, he trafficks in them by deceiving with the truth—a narrative technique which will become increasingly important as he ascends from interactions in a lower social stratum—with the vulgo—to communications with influential courtiers—or, presumably, discretos.

In one class of deceptions found in Chapter 5, Guzmanillo misplaces food in the kitchen in order to facilitate stealing it later in the day. In the event that it is missed, he is able to credit himself by producing what was in truth only misplaced: “Muchas cosas que hurtaba las escondia en la misma pieza donde las hallaba, con intención que si en mi sospechasen, sacarlas públicamente, ganando crédito para adelante. …” (I, 2, 5: 291). Even at this early stage of development, one of Guzmán's most salient traits is the creation of incorrect assessment of his actions with cover stories to confuse a suspicious audience. Despite the constraints of his apprenticeship to the cook, Guzmanillo creates an underground economy in which the values assigned to food fluctuate according to their linguistic articulation. The mature narrator's public exposure of his behavior as a charitable service to readers imitates suspiciously the structural model of this early narrative pattern, in which the negative value of bait for engaño is contradicted by the discourse that serves to explain it. Guzmán's work as pícaro de cocina provides simply the first instance of what proves in the novel to be a highly organized series of mediating narrations presented to both fictive and real audiences.

Guzmanillo's most notable burla as pícaro de cocina highlights this strategy. Guzmán surpasses the wiles of his master, the cook, when he temporarily appropriates a silver goblet in order to turn a tidy profit without actually stealing it. He takes the goblet to a silversmith and, like an obedient servant, contracts to have it cleaned and polished for two reales. Since he has already established his credibility with past discoveries of “lost” items, the cook's wife, who first notices that the goblet is missing, never suspects Guzmán. Afraid of her husband's anger, she confides in Guzmán himself, who cleverly advises her to purchase a similar one and to tell her husband that the old one is being cleaned. Safe from accusation by either of his masters or the silversmith, Guzmán accepts eight reales from the wife for the secret purchase of a new goblet, pockets six en route, and picks up the polished goblet for two. He thus manipulates the woman into deceiving her husband with the truth, while removing himself from the scene of the crime (I, 2, 5: 292-94).

As he runs increasing risk in the narrative, either because he appropriates things of value or because he harms victims capable of retaliation, we see that the character Guzmán learns to incorporate as much truth as possible into his deceit, in order to make his culpability more difficult to verify. By erasing perceptible discrepancies between his words and the reality to which they refer, Guzmán places the burden of correct interpretation on the audience. By the end of Book 2, the developing pícaro masters the transition from playing pranks on the less discerning vulgo for material profit, to performing witty burlas that challenge discretos to detect and reward him for their complexity. As they near the midpoint of the novel, readers thus are forced to reevaluate the pícaro Guzmanillo's communications in light of their intellectual sophistication and complexity.

In describing his work as pícaro de cocina, the narrator distinguishes between “los hurtillos de invención” or burlas of his own artifice, such as that of the goblet, and “los de permisión” such as food sales, obligatory and to gain favor with the cook (I, 2, 5: 294-95). In the course of Book 2, he rejects the latter, which require servitude and no skill, in favor of those “de invención,” inspired by his own genius. Such deceptions allow the young narrator to operate at will, without the permission or the knowledge of his masters, and in breach of the implicit contractual relationship that controls his behavior as an inferior. Guzmán discloses that breaking the rules was in fact more tempting to him; he would rather be the cock that “ya galleaba,” than have the profit itself, fulfilling a goal far more important than that of material gain. His inability to restrain himself from undercutting the cook's system of engaño with noteworthy “hurtillos de invención,” however, finally causes his dismissal.

Guzmanillo's apprenticeship as scullery boy is brought to an abrupt end in a grotesque episode involving eggs, which gives particular plasticity to his oscillation between misrepresentation “de permisión” and independent burlas “de invención.” Increasing success has made him careless and he is seized with the desire to flaunt his identity as a coverup artist. Originally considering the theft of “un par de huevos” from the cook's quarters without payment of the required quid pro quo, he cannot resist stuffing his “juboncillo roto” with more eggs than he can carry or that the torn doublet is able to conceal (I, 2, 6: 312-13). He is caught by the cook, who smashes most of the eggs hidden inside of Guzmán's clothing in punishment (I, 2, 6: 312-13).

Guzmán's excessive appetite and his refusal to obey the contracts he sets up exile him from a closed system which in the end only restricted his creative impulses. The narrative reinforces for readers the central point that an ever-shifting, self-parodying code is far more effective for the narrator's double-edged communications. Once verbal relationships become predictable, the “audience,” represented in characters such as the cook, enjoys the advantage of anticipating—and at times predicting—the nature of deceptions before them, and, in effect, their ability to define the parameters of the communication that they receive from the likes of the pícaro Guzmán.

After the kitchen segment, Guzmanillo repeats the oscillation between deceptions “de permisión” and “de invención,” continuing to gravitate always to the latter, because in addition to providing for his material needs, they distinguish him from the common pícaro. In Book 3, Chapter 2, he works as a beggar, coming into direct conflict with the large confraternity of beggars in Rome. Guzmánillo only begs part-time, and flagrantly offends the rules, refusing offers of meat when he is satiated (I, 3, 2: 377-78). The other beggars cannot run the risk of allowing his contradictory behavior to confuse the public upon which their livelihood depends, and they insist that he either join their confraternity, and accept proper instruction, or leave town. In compliance with the beggars' code or Ordenanzas mendicativas, the boy must accept and eat food until glutted, and then vomit, thereby emptying his stomach in an ironic and graphic display of “la hambre y miseria de los pobres” (I, 3, 2: 378).

Whereas his vomiting in the “tortilla” episode of Book 1 was emblematic of the process of desengaño or disclosure of truth for Guzmán as well as for his readers, the act of spewing forth semidigested food has, by Book 3, become emblematic of engaño itself. Here the very act of displaying his physical condition before an audience of social superiors constitutes a deception. The message conveyed quite literally through his mouth leads to the audience's misinterpretation of the facts.

Again, as in the episodes of Guzmanillo the scullery boy, resolution of the conflict between the fixed behavioral code of the beggars and his own shifting principles comes when he extricates himself from that former system which defines him too narrowly, allowing himself to invent freely before the governor of nearby Gaeta. In this encounter, ignoring the need for verisimiltude, Guzmán exaggerates self-induced skin eruptions, attracting the amazed attention of the governor, who skeptically observes the pronounced contrast between Guzmán's festering sores and the healthy color of the rest of his body (I, 3, 5: 407). Had he altered his appearance with the imperceptible deceptions practiced by other beggars, “Guzmanillo” 's sores might have convincingly attested to his misery and brought him the material reward of alms. But not content with responses that would reinforce his social inferiority, the character pursues the desire to distinguish himself, even at the risk of his own security, demonstrating once again what has been all along the primary motivation for his behavior within the novel: to create through verbal deception the honor he lacks. In the Gaeta episode, Guzmanillo secures the response of favor that he desires from his public: although he distrusts the boy, the governor admires his wiles and he exempts the pícaro from punishment on the grounds that he is a juvenile (I, 3, 5: 408).

Powerful figures such as the governor represent potentially dangerous victims of Guzmán's tricks. As the narrator begins to discuss his contract with members of the upper class in the final book of Part I, we find that their capabilities appear to categorize them as discretos: they are portrayed as being both discerning and better prepared to retaliate against burlas than are members of the vulgo. The central narrative segments of I, 3 and II, 1 show that representational art both in the past and the present has been directed primarily to the end of being honored and favored by this elite.

Instead of avoiding powerful audiences after the Gaeta incident. Guzmán persists in his dangerous deceptions, tempting a cardinal with his verbal pleas and his apparent skin disease. In this episode Guzmán succeeds in fooling a discreto temporarily only to arouse his interest in how Guzmán's burlas are effected. Guzmanillo is taken to live at the palace, where he soon distinguishes himself as a court jester or “juglar” (II, 3, 9: 445). The central signifiers in the communication that edifies both the fictive public and readers about his art once again are food or other items of consumption. In this sequence, the future narrator lives both literally and metaphorically above both street and kitchen, luxuriating in the company of courtiers. With sustenance no longer an issue, he is able to employ his ingenio for gain superior to the literal or material. He begins his education in the trivium under the direction of the palace “preceptor” (445), and simultaneously hones his representational gifts as a wit, regaling the cardinal with a series of pranks involving his prized candied fruits. By mid-point in the novel, at the end of Part I, readers arrive at the first truly appetizing deceptions—tropelias that elicit the audience's intellectual curiousity, drawing it into a contest of wits for which it is forewarned. These burlas, marking the narrator's intellectual and social coming of age, revolve around conservas that paradoxically function as signs of both engaño and desengaño, as Guzmanillo alters both their containers and contents to deceive his master. The deceptions are consumed voraciously by the cardinal, whose appetite for wit surpasses the pícaro's for sweets. Guzmanillo, inversely, exhibits a newfound self control, opting to savor the sweetness of social success rather than to eat them literally.

In a culmination of the technique used in culinary deceptions throughout Part I, the young narrator succeeds in confounding his audience's perceptions of physical reality by following a strategy that contradicts its expectations. Rather than concealing physical truth within a context of verbal falsehood, Guzmán works active, material deceptions within frameworks of verbal truth. He then dissects his burlas, exposing their technique for his audience with explanations. From this point in the narrative, Guzmán turns his wiles, whenever possible, to the deception of that public whose response is most important to him: he performs for courtiers and the influential—or discretos—who are capable both of giving him a place at court and of honoring his deceptive arts by bestowing on him a fame more attractive than the infamy resulting from his street burlas.

As the narrative proceeds, it becomes clear that Guzmanillo's operations of the pico transpire almost exclusively at the linguistic level, as he baits others with verbal engaño, while developing the refined mastery of fiction that marks his work as present author at the novel's end. Experiencing the context in which the novel's characters so readily “bite,” readers of the Guzmán are similarly lured by the richness of Guzmán's textual repast. Yet multiple examples of the narrator's communications, such as those discussed here also serve as ample warning of the indigestion in store for those who do not examine what they eat.

Notes

1. Most representative of this polemic are Enrique Moreno Baez, Lección y sentido del ‘Guzmán de Alfarache’ (Madrid: CSIC, 1948); Carlos Blanco Aguinaga., “Cervantes y la picaresca. Notas sobre dos tipos de realismo,” Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispánica 11 (1957): 313-42; A. A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 1967): Francisco Rico, ed. La novela picaresca española (Barcelona: Planeta, 1967) cviii-cli; “Estructuras y reflejos de estructuras en el Guzmán de Alfarache,” MLN 82, 2 (1967): 171-84; La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969) on the one hand; and the opposing views of Edmond Cros, Protée et le Gueux, recherches sur les origines et la nature de récit picaresque dans ‘Guzmán de Alfarache’ (Paris: Didier, 1967) 403-429; Mateo Alemán: Introducción a su vida y a su obra (Salamanca: Anaya, 1971) 95-109 and 129-44; “Prédication carcérale et structure de textes,” Litterature 36 (1979): 61-74; Benito Brancaforte, ed., Guzmán de Alfarache (Madrid: Cátedra, 1979) 17-51; Guzmán de Alfarache: ¿Conversión o proceso de degradación? (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1980): “Guzmán de Alfarache: Juezpenitente,” Aspetti e problemi delle letterature iberiche: Studi offerti a Franco Meregalli, ed. Giuseppe Bellini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981): 61-78; Joan Arias, Guzmán de Alfarache: The Unrepentant Narrator (London: Tamesis, 1977); Judith A. Whitenack, The Impenitent Confession of Guzmán de Alfarache (Madison: Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1985).

2. The young pícaro's desenvoltura in this early phase of his career is discussed by Sherman Eoff, “The Picaresque Psychology of Guzmán de Alfarache,” Hispanic Review 21 (1953): 107-119 (see 111-14).

3. References to the Guzmán are taken from Brancaforte's edition.

4. Harry Sieber's book, Language and Society in ‘La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, U.P., 1978) has been an important point of reference for the present study of the Guzmán.

5. Monique Joly, La bourle et son interprétation. Recherches sur le passage de la facétie au roman (Espagne, XVIe-XVIIe siè-cles). Atelier National. Reproduction des thèses. Université Lille. (Toulouse: Ibérie Recherche, Université de Toulouse, 1982). Joly's lexical study provides many excellent clarifications of the importance and role that burlas have in Alemán's novel. I concur with her argument that their function is structural, and that the novel unfolds by means of a dialectic in which the protagonist and other characters both deceive and are deceived. The present article will confirm, however, that I am in disagreement with Joly's thesis that all burlas are viewed in Guzmán's narrative as immoral. Despite their structural affinities to other burlas, Guzmán's theatrical and narrational burlas (or gracias) for courtiers are meant to provide moral edification by highlighting the very process of deception through which they work.

6. Henri Guerreiro, “Guzmán y el cocinero o del estilo de servir a principes. Breve cala y cata en el parasitismo del mundo aristocrático,” Criticón 28 (1984): 137-39, traces the character of the entrepreneurial court cook in serveral literary sources of the period, arguing that the figure functions as an index of corruption in the dominant political hierarchy.