[In the following essay, Davis argues that the stories of how Guzmán swindles a silversmith, a merchant, and his uncle offer clues to the Guzmán's greatest deception of all—deceiving readers into believing his final conversion is authentic.]

Since its publication in 1599, Guzmán de Alfarache has been the subject of controversy, and its critics remain divided today. They debate Alemán's message, agreeing only that the novel is structured on a complex and problematic narrative. The fictive author Guzmán is made to relate his past and comment on it for the readers' edification, but the intricate shifts in his account between diegesis and mimesis often obscure both his reasoning and its relationship to episodes in the plot.¹ Moreno Báez and other scholars have attempted to clarify this contrapuntal narration by arguing that both “consejos” and “consejas” work along separate temporal planes to convey a univocal argument.² According to them, as narrator of an exemplary Counter-Reformation fiction, the penitent author Guzmán condemns his past wrongs while giving a verisimilar account of them. However, some critics have shown that the narrator does not structure his memoirs with the clarity that the work's didactic intentions lead readers to expect. McGrady (95) and Parker (36) point to negative examples of the past that are constructed to entertain when they should be presented with criticism, and Arias' analysis reveals that Guzmán's lofty moralizing weaves ambiguous arguments and condemns the engaño of others with greater frequency that it does his own.³ Focusing on different aspects of the novel, another group of critics presents convincing evidence that while the fictive author condemns most types of engaño as immoral and detrimental to society, he nevertheless confounds our attempts to judge his own past deceptions. His narration in the present is rhetorical and often contradictory in a manner that makes him appear to be either impenitent or the author of a dualistic message.⁴ The studies of these scholars have sharpened considerably our critical awareness of the novel's complexity by demonstrating the novel's self-contradictions and ambiguities, and by revealing in Guzmán's present authorial discourse the same misleading patterns that punctuate his past communications.

In his recent book, Ife suggests a motive for the novel's contradictory narrative strategy: Guzmán's ambiguities and paradoxes deliberately intend to deceive readers in order to give them an experiential basis for analysis and criticism of the narration. Arguing that “the cautionary aspect of the story will only succeed if the reader is given the chance to experience what it is he is being cautioned against” (128), Ife proposes that the novel subjects readers to an oppositional process of “engagement” or deception in narrative examples and “detachment” or clarification through commentary.⁵ Guzmán's instruction or desengaño through deception, the essence of the novel's “agudeza compuesta,”⁶ merits such close study, and the configuration proposed by Ife has solid merit as a structural model for Guzmán's narrative agudeza. In this paper I will argue, however, that principal segments of the novel containing narrative and commentary invert the procedure outlined by Ife. In recounting his three most complex swindles, the fictive author Guzmán does not use narrative to deceive and moral digression to clarify. With great ingenuity, he deconstructs engaño by providing narrative examples of its operation—detailed accounts that should awaken critical “detachment” in careful readers. But he simultaneously attempts to “engage” them in an analogous process of deception within the authorial commentary that frames his narrative. Exemplifying agudeza, the fictive author Guzmán “deceives with the truth,” but with an inventiveness that Ife has not explored.

In this study I hope to contribute to recent analyses of the Guzmán's ambivalent discourse by examining the duplication of contradictory reasoning within the narrative of Guzmán's three famous swindles—those of the silversmith, the merchant, and his uncle—and in the discourse through which he narrates them. Studies that highlight aspects of Guzmán's narrative technique have praised the ingenuity and verbal deception of individual episodes;⁷ the present study will argue that the swindles are more than isolated highlights in the trickster's career. Occurring midpoint in both parts of the novel (I, 2, 9-10; II, 2, 5-6; and II, 2, 7-8, respectively), they share a common procedure: the future author uses misleading narration to establish profitable relationships with his audience. A necessarily brief account of each swindle will show that they form a self-reflective progression that “anticipates” Guzmán's deceptive communication in the novel. In other words, Guzmán's “present” strategy of narration as author is projected onto the temporal plane of the narrative, in which a series of discrete and thus more easily apprehended examples of his medium serve as analogues for the relato of the novel itself. Guzmán, the “pícaro hablador” who (as Sobejano astutely observes) defines his relationship to society with language, uses narrative in each swindle to induce his audience of victims to reward him.⁸ He proceeds from a deceptive narrative based on falsehood and ambiguity in the swindle of the platero to an account wrought from truth, polysemia, and only a minor equivocation in the deception of his relatives, thus modeling the narrative technique that assures him greatest creative flexibility and freedom from detection as an author: “engañar con la verdad.” During the narrative of these swindles, we find that Guzmán explains each event to other characters with misleading commentary that prevents them from drawing accurate conclusions from the events themselves. His aggressive judgement of prior actions in the narrative past provides a textual doubling of the authorial commentary with which Guzmán surrounds these episodes. As Reed (70) states, “the reader-in-the-text accuses, and Guzmán overwhelms and diverts him with elaborate circumlocutions. Moreover, the reader's responses are prescribed, before he is provided with sufficient information to assess events independently.”⁹ Through such cameo narratives of his experiments in verbal deception, Guzmán teaches real readers to examine closely the relationship between what he chooses to retell and how.

The first swindle occurs in I, 2, 9-10, when Guzmanillo squanders the last of a stolen fortune in a company of soldiers at Almagro under the assumed identity of “don Juan de Guzmán, hijo de un caballero principal de la casa de Toral” (I, 2, 9: 347). Reduced to serving as a pícaro once again, he attaches himself to the unit's captain as his personal factotum. To ingratiate himself, Guzmanillo plots the false sale of his master's remaining jewel, an agnusdei, in order to turn for him a quick profit. We find that to set up this confidence game, Guzmanillo employs two contradictory narratives linked by the common subtext of the family jewel: he uses the previously invented fiction of his own gentility and lost fortune in order to trick the silversmith into trusting him and buying a jewel that is not Guzmanillo's to sell. The pícaro also circulates the account of his lost fortune and real status as servant to regain the jewel from its new owner.

Guzmanillo initiates the swindle by approaching the silversmith and offering to sell the agnusdei at reduced price, thereby baiting his victim's greed. The boy justifies his motive for approaching the silversmith by invoking the personal history that he had invented upon joining the company of soldiers: he claims to be a young hidalgo, whose gambling has reduced his fortune to one valuable piece of jewelry, which he must now sell. He insists that the actual exchange of the agnusdei for money be concealed from public view to assure his own protection from theft afterward. Not relying on the logic of his narrative alone to ensure control of the exchange, Guzmanillo insists that the silversmith verify his words by consulting others. He assumes, correctly, that if the explanatory narrative is corroborated, the silversmith will have no doubt that the motives and conditions of the sale are legitimate, and will thus fall directly into his deception. When the man questions members of the company, Guzmanillo's story is indeed corroborated by soldiers who know him as “don Juan de Guzmán” and have witnessed the loss of his fortune to gambling. Unaware that Guzmanillo's nobility was in itself a narrative fabricated and publicized by the youth in order to explain the source of money stolen previously from a grocer, the silversmith decides to trust these references to Guzmanillo's character and to accept the strange terms with which he dictates the ensuing sale of the jewel.

Once he has accepted Guzmanillo's first narrative as adequate explanation for the sale of the agnusdei, the silversmith mistakenly interprets all of the pícaro's actions in terms of its logic. He responds as one of the vulgo, forfeiting his use of reason as he overlooks crucial inconsistencies in what Guzmanillo says and does while the exchange takes place. To achieve the secrecy essential to his two-fold plan, Guzmanillo conveys the agnusdei to the location of the sale in a pouch whose strings are knotted through his buttonhole. During the transaction the youth, whose hands should be reasonably adroit, feigns an inability to unknot the strings and borrows the silversmith's knife to cut the pouch off below the knot. The silversmith demands an explanation of such strange behavior. A weakness in the novice author's plan is revealed: Guzmanillo did not foresee that he might be requested by the victim of the first narrative to explain the material detail so necessary to the second that will allow him to retrieve the jewel. Guzmanillo quickly defines the severed knot in terms that correspond to the narrative which the platero knows, by responding that he no longer needs the pouch, because the coins received in payment “habían de ir cosidos en una faja” (I, 2, 10: 359). He does not, however, explain how he intends to safely transport the coins until the sewing is accomplished, in apparent contradiction of his previous demands for secrecy. Although this logical discrepancy should alert him to examine the composition of Guzmanillo's narrative carefully, once the silversmith has the agnusdei he reasons no further, departing in satisfaction. The silversmith little suspects that the knot is highly significant as one of two indices of theft in another narrative. Like a member of the vulgo, he interprets Guzmán's words reductively to match the univocal intents of his own communication in the transaction. Would-be discretos among the readers, however, notice the effects of the silversmith's critical shortcomings when they read the contradictory variant of the first account that follows.

Having slipped the money pouch to an accomplice who disappears with it, Guzmanillo initiates the second stage of the swindle by reinterpreting his empty hands and the knot for onlookers as the silversmith's theft of his master's jewel. In verification, Guzmanillo substitutes for the fictive first narrative regarding his nobility a more accurate second version: witnesses learn that having squandered considerable wealth, he had become the captain's servant and that he had been entrusted with a jewel which was now missing. The soldiers to whom he turns for help in retrieving the jewel accept this version as true for the same reasons that convinced the platero before: they are able to verify the story independently through the verbal testimony of others, including the captain.

To ensure that the second narrative will hide the correct, literal account that the silversmith is certain to offer in contradiction, Guzmán verbally preempts the former's objections about the incident, establishing an aggressive editorial presence very similar to the one that characterizes his work as literary narrator:

Y porque quien da más voces tiene más justicia y vence las más veces con ellas, yo daba tantas, que no le dejaba hablar y, si hablaba, que no le oyesen, haciéndole el juego maña. Imploraba con grandes esclamaciones. …

No le dejé hacer baza; quise ganar por la mano, acreditando mi mentira, porque no encajase su verdad.

(I, 2, 10: 359)

Backed with manipulated and ambivalent physical signifiers, Guzmán provides a narration of the exchange in which his victim's accurate version cannot “fit” or “encajar.”

Guzmán's use of narrative first to manipulate reality and then to interpret it for his audience is mirrored in the manner in which, as autobiographer, the fictive author keeps the versions of others from “fitting” into his own narration. While recounting narrative information that urges readers to analyze his behavior, Guzmán nevertheless attempts to deceive them in the same way that he has his prior audience. He couches the story of the agnusdei episode with misleading editorial interjections. The platero is branded a liar and a hypocrite (“platero confeso”), a userer (“gran logrero”) and covetous of the property of others (“codicioso de la pieza”) (I: 357), and Guzmán implies that, given the opportunity (I: 358), he might have stolen the agnusdei. In projecting his own culpability onto the silversmith, Guzmán hopes to portray his swindle as an act of poetic justice. The discursive comments that color the narrative of this past example are intended to alter our perception of the crime confessed. Discerning readers are led to observe that engaño is offered as an explanation of desengaño, in a dizzying reversal of the narrator's claims to proceed “de la difinición a lo difinido” (I, 1, 1: 99).

The second swindle takes place in Part II, when, as a young man, Guzmán leaves service of the French ambassador. The narrator tells us that he agreed to mastermind the swindle of a Milanese merchant at the request of Sayavedra, his own companion, and the merchant's accountant, Aguilera. Because the merchant is wary of theft, Aguilera's tantalizing proximity to the money permits only imagined opportunities to appropriate it. We learn that the merchant handles the cash transactions himself, while the accountant's only contact with the wealth before him is through his entries in the shop ledgers (II, 2, 5: 213-14). In this episode, readers find that Guzmán quickly exploits the ability of language to define physical reality. He realizes that Aguilera's control of the ledger books may provide an access to their victim's wealth, for words alone guarantee ownership of the coffers' contents. In this confidence game, Guzmán designs a theft that is far less detectable than that of the previous swindle, for it involves manipulation of signs only and not their physical referents. Guzmán focuses his creative energies on the records rather than the cash, minting a verbal currency by secretly falsifying the ledgers and constructing a narrative to explain the merchant's possession of his money. Guzmán's plan is to have this linguistic fortune, entrusted to the merchant, revert to him as literal cash.

To establish his persona and his exchange of words for money, Guzmán makes two visits to the shop. During the first, he lists the credentials by which his request is to be interpreted and deemed plausible: he is a foreign noble who has come to Milan to purchase wedding gifts for his bride. He asks to deposit the money with the merchant for temporary safekeeping. The merchant's quick assent indicates his own thoughts of theft, and Guzmán with equal guile only verbally entrusts his money to him (II, 2, 5: 216-17). Guzmán is expected to return later with the cash which has just been metaphorically “transacted.”

Before returning the following week, Guzmán “verifies” the deposit of money to make his case stronger, secretly entering written notations in a ledger brought by the accountant. He also places labels of his ownership in several coffers brought by Aguilera. After he has “legalized” the coins that he never deposited, Guzmán then enters a written reference to withdrawal of the same coins. In so doing, he makes it appear that the merchant falsified his own records in order to keep money not belonging to him. To ensure results, Guzmán mentions in the ledger entry ten coins of a denomination that the merchant does not possess—“diez doblones de a diez” (II, 2, 6: 220). He has Aguilera secretly add ten such coins to the coffer, assured that when he describes for witnesses the “diez de a diez,” his victim will swear publicly (and in fact truthfully) that he has none. Guzmán knows that authorities will grant his request for a formal investigation, because as a merchant the man has a dubious reputation. According to the pícaro's plan, officials will discover the coins that the merchant denied having, and ensuing testimony will confirm the merchant to be at fault in the linguistically controlled “exchange.”

To initiate the final phase of the swindle, Guzmán returns to the shop and makes an ambiguous request before witnesses that San Miguel (217) argues is the most important communication in the episode. It represents the juncture of two divergent narratives that Guzmán has designed for his separate audiences. The merchant and other characters, and the readers are confronted with both the story of Guzmán's intended deposit as told to the merchant, and the story of his intended withdrawal as told to the various witnesses. Guzmán's ambiguous words fit both versions as he permits each audience to interpret them in different ways.

He offers the first story to the merchant when he repeats his previous statement: “Aqueste criado vendrá por la mañana con un talego y un papel mío. Mande V. Md. que se le dé todo buen despacho.” (II, 2, 6: 220) The merchant interprets it correctly, in the context of Guzmán's previous communication with him, as a reference to Guzmán's intended deposit of money. That is, Guzmán will send a bag (“talego”) full of money together with a slip of paper (“papel”), requesting deposit. Using a reflexive passive verb (“se … dé”), he requests that the servant “be given” quick service: “Mande V. Md. que se le dé todo buen despacho.” Agreeing to these terms, the merchant still anticipates the return of Guzmán's servant with the money.

To begin the second, contradictory variant, Guzmán demands in apparent afterthought the “money,” which he has never deposited with the merchant: “Después que de aquí salí, se me ha ofrecido a el pensamiento que importa llevar luego ese dinero para cierto efeto. Mándelo dar Vuestra Merced.” (II, 2, 6: 220, emphasis added; Rico's edition, II, 2, 6: 659, includes the indirect object pronoun “me,” thus clarifying: “Mándemelo dar.”) Speaking the truth and denying receipt of any money from Guzmán, the Milanese merchant finds himself having to engage in another narrative in which the terms of their previous verbal exchange have suddenly changed meaning. He is caught off guard as Guzmán clarifies the ambiguity of his own request for a cash withdrawal: the “papel” and “talego” were intended to refer, respectively, to the written request and the empty sack for transporting his money (II: 221). More important, however, is Guzmán's sudden revision of his first communication. He repeats the request together with the merchant's verbal agreement for the benefit of witnesses with a crucial yet almost imperceptible linguistic modification, arguing: “Pues acaba en este momento de confesarme delante de todos estos caballeros, cuando le dije que vendría manaña mi criado por ellos, que se los daría, y agora que vuelvo yo, me los niega en un momento?” (II, 2, 6: 221, emphasis added). Guzmán now tells bystanders that the merchant promised to turn over the literal coins to his servant: the direct object “buen despacho” (“quick service”) of his first version, previously paired with “le” (either an indirect object for the servant or, as Lapesa explains, a repetition of the direct object itself), is replaced by “los,” a reference to “los doblones.”¹⁰

Guzmán incisively establishes the authority of this second version, quite ironically, by pointing out elements of his opponent's account that do not fit the new truth that he himself has established, in a series of allegations that begins with: “¿Qué mayor verdad mía o qué mayor indicio de su malicia puede haber que decir poco ha que no le había dado blanca y hallarlo aquí escrito, aunque testado? Si lo recibió, ¿por qué lo niega? Y si no lo recibió, ¿cómo está escrito aquí?” (II, 2, 6: 224). Guzmán culminates this attack with a flourish of convincing logic: “¿Cómoson vuestros … si acabáis de confesar que no teníades doblones de a diez? Que Dios ha permitido que se os olvidase de haberlos recibido, para que yo no perdiese mi hacienda” (II: 225).

The merchant confirms the truth of Guzmán's initial visit, unwittingly giving credence to the story of a verbal contract, and he truthfully denies receipt of the money described by Guzmán or knowledge of any written evidence to the contrary. However, inconsistencies in the merchant's response to Guzmán's story lead to an official investigation and discovery of the coins that were supposed to have been withdrawn, the labels “don Juan de Osorio,” and the particular denominations of the “diez de a diez” that substantiate Guzmán's story. Guzmán's victim has told the factual truth, but not the truth established by the budding narrator. As a result, it is the merchant who is charged with being a swindler. According to plan, the money legally reverts to Guzmán, the putative owner whose word, quite ironically, has been proven true by the “señas … verdaderas y ciertas”—written oaths—designed by him to substantiate his own story (II, 2, 6: 223).

Our experience and perception of narrative engaño is intensified by the fictive author Guzmán's framing of the account of this swindle with deceptive narration in the present, through a series of diegetic disclaimers of his own blameworthiness in which he transfers culpability to the merchant and confuses the readers' perceptions of their respective roles in the narrated transaction.¹¹ He first relates Aguilera's supposedly objective opinion that the victim was already deemed a thief by the public (II, 2, 5: 214-15). Guzmán then adds his own allegations to reinforce claims of the merchant's prior misdeeds: “Agora sospecho que no fueron sus pensamientos otros que los míos: el de quedarse con ellos y yo de robárselos” (II: 216); “Conformidad teníamos ambos en engañar; mas eran diferentes de las mías las trazas que él debía de tener pensadas” (II: 220). However, readers note that the narrator Guzmán devotes no moral discourse to the condemnation of his own role.¹² In terms of his argument, public ruin of the man instead constitutes a civic service to the “república” that the man's habitual frauds, as Aguilera has explained, “trae … revuelta” (II: 215).

If we compare the narration with which Guzmán encloses the description of the past event to the words attributed to both men within the narrative of the swindle itself, there is an obvious disjunction. In the description of the trato, we see that the merchant consistently told the truth and was desirous that it be demonstrated. The merchant thinks that he has lost his sanity as a result of Guzmán's lies (II, 2, 6: 226-27) and is left “muriéndose del enojo, loco de imaginar cómo pudo ser aquello y aun le pasó por la imaginación, no ser otra cosa que obra del demonio” (II: 228). Unable to figure out how the deception was worked, the man is finally forced to rationalize the entire incident as the work of the devil. Looking beyond the mature narrator's diegetic attacks on his victim's morality, we find that during the incident Guzmán created an ironic, if not heretical, religious metaphor for his own diabolical manipulations of the circumstances, referring to them as the work of “God” (II, 2, 6: 225, 226). Despite his present comments about the merchant's faults, Guzmán's authorship of the burla pesada is made undisputably clear by the narrative. Once again, we find a detailed example of mimetic desengaño accompanied by engaño in the fictive author's moralizing discourse, as he targets his victim for criticism.

Immediately following the episode in Milan, the emerging author's ingenio culminates in a third narrational swindle (II, 2, 7), as Guzmán travels to Genoa to avenge himself for a night of mistreatment experienced during an earlier visit when he called on a suspicious paternal uncle as an immigrant dressed in rags. On that occasion, the Genoese userer had ordered Guzmanillo to be tossed in a blanket by four pranksters dressed as devils, an experience that caused the boy to besoil himself in fright before fleeing (I, 3, 7: 372). This third swindle is Guzmán's most sophisticated, for with the exception of one minor equivocation, he tells the truth, eliminating discrepancies between his communication and reality that may lead to detection and capture. Although it might alert the Genoese relatives to his motives for a second visit, Guzmán boldly reveals his identity. He truthfully describes his father's life to allay their fears that he may be an imposter. The trickster even admits to having passed through Genoa some years before, using “como” to imply a poor memory and an equivocation of nearly four years in the date: “Le dije que habría como tres años, poco menos, que había por allí pasado, sin poder ni quererme detener más de a hacer noche, a causa de la mucha diligencia con que a Roma caminaba” (II, 2, 7: 247). Their gaze fixed upon the young man's obvious wealth, spoils from the Milanese caper, Guzmán's uncle and the rest of the clan do not pause to consider the possibility of deliberate obfuscation in his otherwise accurate account. As Guzmán has previously learned with the silversmith and the merchant, self-interest will lead most audiences to misinterpret truth and falsehood indiscriminately. His prior victims have comprehended the polysemia of his language according to the univocal register most compatible with the reality they desire, overlooking the possibility that he has assigned alternate meanings to the same words in the context of their trato. Identifying the same interpretive weaknesses in his Genoese relatives, Guzmán points the way through which they will become authors of their own financial ruin by speaking the truth in contexts that are ambiguous and by allowing them to interpret his communications as they will. His deceptions this time revolve around the way in which he presents the contents of two trunks and a gold chain.

Guzmán verifies the literal existence of his wealth by gambling and freely spending his money. He then enlists Sayavedra's aid to duplicate two trunks containing his real riches, which are to be hidden aboard the escape ship, with two more trunks full of rocks. He asks to place “two trunks” in his uncle's house for safekeeping, truthfully referring the actual contents of both sets of trunks: “Truje a plática lo mucho que temía salir de casa de noche, porque tenía en el aposento mis baúles, en especial dos dellos con plata, joyas de algún valor y dineros y, por decir verdad, mi pobreza toda” (II, 2, 8: 261). Left to reconcile what would be a logical contradiction between “plata,” “joyas de … valor,” and “dineros” on the one hand, and “mi pobreza toda” on the other, the uncle interprets “pobreza” as a figurative reference, as Guzmán's ironic understatement of a sizable fortune. Sayavedra then delivers the rock-laden trunks with a statement that is humorously denotative: “Señor, aunque lo que tiene mi señor dentro es de consideración, lo que vale más de todo es pedrería” (II, 2, 8: 264). Because he has seen Guzmán's literal wealth, the uncle concludes that the contents of the trunks, so worthy of “consideración,” must be precious jewels, pejoratively designated by the metaphor “stones.” By placing referents of opposite value in contiguity, the trickster this time has transferred the role normally reserved for himself to his victim, along with, presumably, its moral responsibilities. The creator of this episode's figurative reality, as well as of its damaging effects, is not Guzmán, but the unwitting recipient of his communication. Ironically, in terms of their yield at the end of the trato, the literal rocks which the uncle takes to be jewels function as gems in the rough. The Genoese themselves, through their interpretation and resulting actions, supply the elaboration that translates the rocks into figurative equivalents of real gems, for they then ply Guzmán with wedding gifts that are commensurate in value with precious stones, in order to bring him and his fortune into the family.

During this episode, Guzmán also shows his uncle a real gold chain, which he sends to a platero for a written estimate of its value. Guzmán then asks his uncle to accept the chain as collateral for a temporary gambling loan. In another act of substitution, Guzmán leaves with his uncle an identical chain of “oro de jeringas” (II, 2, 8: 270). Prior to this episode, Guzmán himself had been fooled by the artifice of the false gold chain. Marveling at its apparent perfection, he tells us, he had paid over six-hundred escudos to duplicate it in “oro fino” (II, 2, 6: 229-30). Ironically, we find that like the trunks of rocks, the original, false chain proves to be of even greater value than its duplicate, for it causes Guzmán's Genoese relatives to shower him with groom's gifts that far exceed the value of the real chain.

In this confidence game, Guzmán does not lie about what is signified by his words. He cleverly creates associative contexts in which the relationship between what he says and what he means is influenced by the audience's recollection of previous statements and referents. The huge trunks of “pedrería” and lustrous chain of “oro” derive much of their perceived value through synecdochic association with the stolen, literal jewels and coins which Guzmán has used to signify a fictive wealth and social status. Captivated by the sumptuous signifiers of wealth readily visible to them, typical of the vulgo and his other victims, Guzmán's relatives are blinded to the devalued state of his referents. True to plan, Guzmán's relatives perceive no difference between the artful chest of “rocks” and “gold” chain and his verified wealth. They supply the figurative interpretation of “pobreza” and “pedrería” necessary to the story that they wish to hear. Ironically, they become responsible for the unhappy outcome of this fiction when they proceed with plans for the wedding. Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, marrying off a dishonored daughter and reaping the profit of Guzmán's fortune, Guzmán's relatives warmly welcome him to their fold with prenuptial festivities, without questioning his motives in the disadvantageous match (II, 2, 8: 262). Shortly before the wedding date, secretly set by Guzmán to coincide with the ship's departure, they send him valuable groom's gifts, assuming that this initial outlay will revert back to them once he has married into their ranks. However, Guzmán gathers up his profits from this one-sided exchange on the eve of the wedding and escapes aboard his friend's galley. He leaves the Genoese relatives with the results of what is ultimately their own willful creation of a fiction.

Like the other swindles, this one is incorporated into the main narrative in a way that confuses its meaning and has serious implications for the narrator's reliability. In the pages preceding the Genoese swindle, Guzmán regales readers with a confusing digression—a critique of hypocrites whose “honor” is patently illusive. He moves from a general to a specific focus that vacillates between his own wrongs and those of others (II, 2, 7: 235-36), ending with the condemnation of velveteen-clad “ladrones de bien” whose crimes far outweigh those of “pobres pecadores como yo” (II, 2, 7: 237). The preliminary diegetic bracketing of the narrated incident thus sets the stage for Guzmán's readers, who are prepared to evaluate the wrongs of his social superiors as more serious than his own and receive no instruction to read the Genoese episode with a critical concentration on Guzmán's work as a thief.

We are further discouraged from censuring Guzmán's behavior in the swindle through a series of intercalated comments made by the mature narrator about the wrongs of his relatives. Guzmán interjects into the story of this subsequent encounter with them several graphic and exaggerated descriptions of his previous injuries at the hands of the Genoese, soliciting his readers' sympathy in a completely new context that reverses their roles (II, 2, 7: 247).

In addition to the initial moralizing discourse and Guzmán's use of misleading narrative flashbacks, the narrative of Guzmán's Genoese swindle is further segmented by a brief digression in medias res on vengeance (II, 2, 8: 252) and a tercet of secondary narratives that appear intended to illustrate and reinforce the critical view of vengeance taken by the moralizing narrator. Like other authorial intrusions, however, this series of comments in fact works to confuse readers. As Celina S. de Cortázar points out (93-94), Guzmán's initial digression condemns “venganza” as an act of cowardice that is immoral and dishonorable. But the narrator then chooses to illustrate his point contradictorily by following it with two secondary narratives in which vengeance is shown to be a prudent, warranted response to engaño's injury of honor (II, 2, 8: 252-56). In the first anecdote, a widow is tricked by a suitor, who creates the public impression that they are lovers. Guzmán praises her vengeance, which consists of marrying the suitor, slitting his throat, and retiring to a convent, as an exemplary means of saving her honor (II, 2, 8: 254). Next we read the brief story of a madman who kills a dog that had attacked him (II, 2, 8: 255). And a third interpolated ancedote shifts focus to a man who forgave his brother's murderer, concluding that such behavior is so anomalous to the human condition as to constitute a miracle (II, 2, 8: 256). Having shown vengeance to be the natural and fair response to injuries involving honor, Guzmán guides us back into the narrative of his own vengeance for previous mistreatment, and now the focus is on justice rather than morality. His conclusion is not admonitory, but flippant: “Pudiérales decir entonces lo que un ciego a otro en Toledo, que, apartándose cada cual para su posada, dijo el uno dellos: ¡A Dios y veámonos!” (II, 2, 8: 270). The narrative of this episode clarifies for us a more sophisticated technique of deception than that seen in the other swindles, providing a crucial desengaño for the strategy that Guzmán repeats as he pens his memoirs: deceiving with the truth. But we find no more honesty in the fictive author's critical comments about his crime than before; in fact, the discursive engaño of this last swindle achieves maximum complexity.

The three swindles that I have studied here serve as analogues for the strategy of narration that structures Guzmán's larger relato of his fictive autobiography. Each swindle is an improvement in narrative technique: Guzmán increases his margin of safety by adding elements of truth to his fictions and by eliminating apparent discrepancies between his words and physical reality. In the first trato with the silversmith, Guzmán's explanatory narratives are corroborated somewhat haphazardly by the words of other soldiers who have no more knowledge of his background than does his victim. But Guzmán is dependent on the use of accomplices and physical props that he explains to the public awkwardly. In the second swindle of the Milanese merchant, Guzmán devises a burla that relies not simply on physical evidence and public accounts of his reputation, but upon written “legal” evidence that proves to be indisputable. However, he is still dependent on accomplices and props. The third swindle most clearly approximates Guzmán's authorial technique in writing his life. Here Guzmán's victims are lured with the truth of his past and present circumstances, which although accurate, is placed in an ambiguous context. The recipients of Guzmán's communication are manipulated to create their own engaño as they attempt to make sense of his words. However, once again, Guzmán must rely on the aid of potentially untrustworthy accomplices and props.

In these swindles, Guzmán's success in deceiving his audience and controlling their response is a result of his manipulative language. The stealthy alteration of physical evidence remains the most dangerous part of each deception because it is traceable. Guzman's security and his profit come instead from his ability to direct the public's apprehension of the physical world with a convincing parody of trusted discourses. Thus, he deceives the silversmith by speaking of honor as an impoverished member of the gentry. In the swindle of the Milanese merchant he parodies judicial language to convince officials of his sincerity by creating a series of false oaths, and he misuses religious discourse to destroy his victim's reason. To rob his usurious relatives, Guzmán speaks their own language, establishing his worth and negotiating the profitable marriage that he flees.

The stories of these three swindles seem to limit the trickster's power by exposing this technique within the safe enclosure of narrative. Yet, by circumscribing Guzmán's success in material “reality,” they implicitly trace a much more disturbing possibility: the trickster need only deny his public access to literal, physical referents in order to work deceptions beyond their control. He does exactly that as he transforms his life into literature. As a fictive author, Guzmán tells us what he wants us to know of his life and he reflects on it in discourses that moralize without clarifying his own culpability. Whereas readers are encouraged to profit by applying the criticisms of Guzmán's sermons and discourses to themselves, the fictive author pointedly neglects to give us a clear diegetic analysis of his own wrongs. The most reliable source of desengaño about how the novel's teachings should apply to its fictive author lies in the representation of his narrational procedure in such analogues as the three swindles studied here.

Notes

1. Gérard Genette, Figures, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1966) III: 187-88, discusses these classical modes and their combination in modern literary practice; III: 222 reviews rhetorical tropes and figures used to create ambiguity in Baroque narrative.

2. Enrique Moreno Báez, Lección y sentido del “Guzmán de Alfarache” (Madrid: CSIC, 1948), develops ideas expressed earlier by Miguel Herrero in “Nueva interpretación de la novela picaresca,” Revista de Filología Española 24 (1937): 343-62 and in Angel Valbuena Prat's Prologue to his edition of the Guzmán in La novela picaresca española (Madrid: Aguilar, 1943): 159; Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, “Cervantes y la picaresca. Notas sobre dos tipos de realismo,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 11 (1958): 313-42; A. A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1967); Donald McGrady, Mateo Alemán (New York: Twayne, 1968); 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 (on the distinction between “consejos” and “consejas”); La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969).

3. Joan Arias, Guzmán de Alfarache: The Unrepentant Narrator (London: Tamesis, 1977).

4. Gonzalo Sobejano, “De la intención y valor del Guzmán de Alfarache,” Romanische Forschungen 71 (1959): 267-311; Edmond Cros, Protée et le gueux. Recherches sur les origines et la nature du récit picaresque dans “Guzmán de Alfarache” (Paris: Didier, 1967) 403-419; 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: Juez-penitente,” Aspetti e problemi delle letterature iberiche: Studi offerti a Franco Meregalli, ed. Giuseppe Bellini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981): 61-78; Carlos A. Rodríguez, “Guzmán de Alfarache, narrador: La poética del gracioso,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly (1984): 403-12; El narrador pícaro: Guzmán de Alfarache (Madison: Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1985); Judith A. Whitenack, “The Destruction of Confession in Guzmán de Alfarache,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 18 (1984): 221-39; The Impenitent Confession of Guzmán de Alfarache (Madison: Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1985); J. A. Jones, “Duality and Complexity of the Guzmán de Alfarache,” Knaves and Swindlers: Essays on the Picaresque Novel in Europe, ed. Christine Whitbourn (London: Oxford UP, 1974): 25-47; M. N. Norval, “Original Sin and ‘Conversion’ in the Guzmán de Alfarache,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 51 (1974): 346-64; Hilary Smith, “The pícaro turns Preacher: Guzmán de Alfarache's Missed Vocation,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 14 (1978): 387-97; Anthony Cascardi, “The Rhetoric of Defense in the Guzmán de Alfarache,” Neophilologus 63 (1979): 380-87; Madison J. Woods, “The Teasing Opening of the Guzmán de Alfarache,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 57 (1980): 213-18.

5. B. W. Ife, Reading and Fiction in Golden-Age Spain: A Platonist Critique and Some Picaresque Replies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985).

6. Baltasar Gracián cites Alemán's book as an outstanding example of the use of agudeza to create extended argumentation, “agudeza compuesta” or “agudeza mayor,” in Agudeza y arte de ingenio, Obras completas, 3rd. ed., ed. Arturo del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1971): 364, 372-73, 435, 477-79, 482, 508; El criticón, Obras: 875, 1143.

7. Angel San Miguel, Sentido y estructura del “Guzmán de Alfarache” de Mateo Alemán (Madrid: Gredos, 1971) 211-23; Carroll Johnson, Inside Guzmán de Alfarache (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978) 36-40; Celina S. de Cortázar, “Notas para el estudio de la estructura de Guzmán de Alfarache de Mateo Alemán,” Filología 8 (1962): 79-95.

8. Gonzalo Sobejano, “Un perfil de la picaresca: El pícaro hablador,” Studia hispánica in honorem R. Lapesa, III (Madrid: Gredos, 1975): 467-85.

9. Helen H. Reed, The Reader in the Picaresque Novel (London: Tamesis, 1984).

10. Rafael Lapesa, Historia de la lengua española, 8th ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1980) 405-406.

11. In his analysis of this swindle, San Miguel observes that the readers themselves risk being deceived by the ambiguities of the narrative, in a battle of wits: “El placer que deriva de la acción es un placer intelectual [. …] En el fondo la acción nos presenta una lucha. La victoria será del ingunio” (222-23). Arias, 41-42, shows that Guzmán also transfers blame following the Milanese swindle to a more general adversary designated as “others.”

12. Johnson, 36-40, discusses the notable absence of the autocritical focus that readers expect to find here. Instead, Guzmán presents the effects of his ingenio as a triumph, a pleasure-causing mastery which is designed to impress the readers favorably. Johnson terms this vital component the “titillation aspect” (32).