SOURCE: Maiorino, Giancarlo. “Picaresque Econopoetics: At the Watershed of Living Standards.” In The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, edited by Giancarlo Maiorino, pp. 1-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

[In this essay, Maiorino applies the insights of New Historicist scholarship to the picaresque, focusing on Lazarillo de Tormes.]

I

At the divide between the waning of feudalism and the birth of capitalism, orations on human dignity, praises of folly, seafaring discoveries, and mercantile adventurism set off outbursts of human ingenuity. Merchants in Florence and elsewhere, Jules Michelet wrote at an early stage of Renaissance criticism, upheld a religion that found “in gold its real presence and in letters of exchange its eucharist.”¹ It was the “other” Renaissance of commercial pursuits that made ambitious individuals proud, powerful, and appreciative of the advantages wealth could bestow on lineage and society.

At the beginning of early modern Europe, the sociology of wealth quantified its influence through an array of paintings, ledgers, account books, and art objects as well as literary, historical, and ecclesiastic texts. While “signifiers” such as “labor,” “price,” and “profit” are not just mercantile, concepts of value, utility, and effectiveness have been artistic and economic for the longest time. Seme, in fact, means “word” and “coin.” Even people could be “of base coinage”; like gold, they could be adulterated.² As a matter of fact, the very word-concept “classical,” which has set a major standard in Western culture, stems from the appropriate usage of language among educated citizens who belonged to the first-class taxpayers, whereas proletarius did not pay taxes (Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae xix, 8, 15). Canon-making and cultural standards were thus geared to economic and social criteria (Curtius 249-50).³ In a significant way, therefore, mimesis was “econo-mimesis.”⁴ In the wake of studies on the Protean complexity of the Renaissance, scholarship has highlighted the impact of economics on the cultural syncretism of the age through such topics as “Venetian and Dutch Elites,” “Art and Accounting,” “The Embarrassment of Riches,” “The Poetics of Accumulation,” and “Cultural Aesthetics.”⁵

Antiquity favored affluence over indigence, and so did Humanism in Florence and elsewhere. Below the veneer of aristocratic wealth and mercantile prosperity, however, the majority of the population lived in abject poverty. Paganism and Christianity took the poor to be a familiar presence on street corners and in market-places. Because its social depth and range were significant, poverty was recognized, but no remedies were proposed. Throughout the early Middle Ages, society was entrenched along the divide between maiores et potentiores and minores et infirmiores. After the tenth century, a tripartite structure ordered society into oratores, bellatores, and imbelle vulgus. Physical work and mechanical arts were held in low esteem vis-à-vis intellectual and moral strength. The humanists did not openly test that assumption. In Spain, the picaresque mindset did not either, but it did expose a society whose class divisions left no doubts about who was privileged and who was exploited. If the new novelistic mode did not call for open revolt, it nevertheless singled out an unfair state of things. To foster awareness was a first step toward provoking indignation, which in turn could lead to change. But it would take centuries for that process to shake the status quo (MacMullen 86-87, 118, 127). Economic power and class discriminations were thus crucial to marginality, picaresque or otherwise. Popolo grasso and ricos hombres, in fact, knew how to guard their wealth, and they did it with a vengeance (Huppert 17). At best, indigence was to be alleviated, but not eliminated.

Introductory remarks of this sort make it clear that Homo ludens, Homo loquens, and Homo oeconomicus shared a common vocabulary long before the Renaissance, and research could not but follow suit. Sociologists have explored the psychological and aesthetic range of the philosophy of money, and historians have found in consumerism a point of entry into processes of cultural change.⁶ Along Mediterranean shores, the ‘golden century’ drew strength from the “cycle of gold” that financed it. Any golden age, in fact, must rest on gilded foundations if it is to have a lasting impact on society.⁷ Since it became a marker of individual and collective “fashioning,” wealth—or lack thereof—affected what could be called econopoetics, which this essay takes to describe deficient negotiations between economic signs and noneconomic verbal signifiers in Lazarillo de Tormes (1550-54?).

While focusing on the autobiographical life of a single individual from birth to adulthood, the picaresque text exposes bankrupt aspects of sixteenth-century culture in Spain, where the Christian Reconquest set up a mindset whose outlook on economics was substantially different from Italian or Dutch mercantilism. Once the Old Christians emerged victorious, the socioeconomic context of the Iberian peninsula retained Arabic and Jewish ascendancy on matters of agriculture, trade, and business. To them, one ought to add Italian merchants and bankers. And many Spanish businessmen who excelled at their trade used wealth to acquire estates and become noblemen in the manner of landed aristocrats. By so doing, they dried out the ranks and power of their own middle class. While the wealth coming from the New World kept dreams of grandeur alive, the ruling classes kept on despising any sort of manual or commercial labor. Their unproductive supremacy was bound to tumble. And it did. At the opposite pole of purity of blood and contempt of money and labor, there emerged the picaresque. To put it in terms of New Historicism, this study explores artworks embedded into a network of material practices which called on will, guts, and wits to face the relentless assaults of poverty.

In his lifelong study of the picaresque, Francisco Rico has found in the technique of “point of view” the “unifying principle” of plot, meaning, and narratology (91-92).⁸ Likewise, my approach to econopoetics makes poetics primary to interpretation, while economics represents a distinctive “point of entry” into a reading of the text that pays equal attention to aesthetic and social relationships. Especially in the antiheroic mode of lifestyles at the margins of affluence, the picaresque borrowed from the traditions of chivalry and Humanism as much as it relied on parody to stir a better awareness of the societal makeup. Compromises and reversals of that sort reached depths that Italian texts never dared to probe, even though the Spanish art of thieving was paralleled on Italian shores by writings on the related “art of lying.”

In spite of gold and goods coming from overseas, too many royal policies proved to be disastrous to commerce and agriculture. In their rubble, the ranks of beggars, pícaros, and vagrants grew almost out of control. Alongside the aristocracy, humanist elites, and a small middle class, there also thrived a “sub” or “under” culture of pícaros, thieves, and adventurers that would crowd Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares and the Golden Age stage of Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina. Even conservative estimates counted pícaros by the thousands everywhere. And among all Spanish cities, Mateo Alemán called Seville the Babilonia de pícaros.

In the empirical form of a novelistic journey from Salamanca, the city of law and learning, to Toledo, the city of business and trade, Lazarillo de Tormes presents the growth of a social outcast whose ambition is to build a better future for himself. Since picaresque “success” thrives more on standards of mediocrity than excellence, the text deals with a blindman's boy who succeeds in becoming town crier. His growth would not produce another tale of rags-to-riches in either the epic or the chivalric mode, but it would tell a story of human survival more typical of life-as-is.⁹ The new genre thus presented urban paupers, alienated middle-class conversos, and individual stories whose self-preservation was spurred and defended by hook and by crook.¹⁰ Although roguery was part of the European scene at large, the socioeconomic depth and artistic output of picaresque life in Spain was unique. Around the middle of the sixteenth century, the life of the underprivileged made inroads into the art and literature of Spain, where a “crítica vulgar” under the aegis of “lo insignificante” offset the traditions of epic and chivalry (Castro, Cervantes 121). As Sancho Panza later put it,

“There are only two families in the world, my old grandmother used to say, the Have and the Have-Nots. She was always for the haves, and to this very day, my lord Don Quixote, the doctor would rather feel the pulse of a Have than a Know.”

(Don Quixote II: Chapter 20)¹¹

By setting forth ideas about poverty that already had concerned Erasmus, writings such as Juan Luis Vives's De subventione pauperum called for a sharing of basic goods with the poor. Contacts between economics and the picaresque quickly revealed gaps between the affluence of the aristocracy and the destitution of the working classes—not to mention the underemployed. Since the bourgeoisie had been disintegrating at the periphery of the other two groups,¹² the novel voiced long-standing contrasts that were socioeconomic at heart.¹³ In their midst, Lázaro de Tormes spent much of his youth growing out of lacería.

With ease, Lazarillo de Tormes would validate the Bakhtinian emphasis on the “prosaic intelligence” and the “prosaic wisdom” of a vulgar discourse that stood as a counterpoint to more privileged genres (Morson and Emerson 308). Picaresque and Cervantine characters believed that “stealing was a free trade,” much as they relished “gipsy language” and “thieves's slang.”¹⁴ And one need only add that, before the emergence of the picaresque, La Celestina gave tragicomic form to the concept of life as mere doing. In addition to literary precedents, picaresque literature included poesía cancioneril, teatro primitivo, refranes glosados, diálogos, as well as continuations and imitations of La Celestina; all in all, a literatura desesperanzada that fostered a rather pessimistic vision of human life (Villanueva 91, 136-37). At the periphery of ingrained privileges, poverty had spread as a social disease throughout Europe, and tales of utter destitution were popular everywhere around the middle of the sixteenth century. However bright the veneer of imperial grandeur, almost half of the population was poor in Spain (Herrero 876-79). While playing a role in the emergence of the picaresque, data of that sort quantified a dejected humanity whose presence was conspicuous throughout Europe. The poor had to remain poor, even though some attention was invested in turning a sympathetic eye toward them. After all, it was economically advantageous that they survive and be strong enough to work.

In the vocabulary of social distribution, the picaresque text was probably the first to call attention to the oppressed humanity of infrahombres.¹⁵ The humanity, that is, of mozos, pícaros, and cheap manpower, not to mention thieves, criminals, picardía, and vida buscona; a low-life world where jerigonza, nombres germanescos, and slangs of all sorts gained currency. Picaresque novels, Michel Butor would remind us, exposed “les entrailles, les dessous, les coulisses de la société—the guts, the underside, the margins of society” (96). Hence the dilemma: what kind of language would such a humanity speak? It certainly was neither humanistic nor courtly, let alone chivalric. Instead, it was more likely a vernacular counterlanguage replete with colloquialisms, preliterate jargon, refranes, and the vox populi of proverbial phrases. The type of linguistic brew that was more Erasmian—from Adagia to Colloquia—than Ciceronian. This essay aims at reconciling the New Historicist emphasis on unheroic subjects with the uniquely Spanish notion of intrahistoria. Instead of a microhistory, however, I focus on the prototype of the picaresque. While centering on the economic marginality of poor Spaniards whose lives were shaped by survival, my approach sets out to balance the ever widening gyre of contextuality—which draws from New Historicism, cultural anthropology, and interdisciplinary approaches of sorts—with aesthetic matters of form.¹⁶ From food and lodging to fashion, money, and manners, econopoetics brings together an array of different languages, which are reciprocally paraliterary and paraeconomic. For Barbara Hernnstein Smith, the traditional tendency to exclude economic factors from works of art and literature mystifies their very nature. And the picaresque could certainly prove that exclusions of that sort would have the effect of defining the genre out of existence (33).¹⁷ My treatment of econopoetics in Lazarillo de Tormes centers on the waterseller chapter, whose threshold function will be highlighted through a comparison with Velázquez's painting of the same subject.

II

Lázaro becomes a waterseller in the sixth chapter of Lazarillo de Tormes. At first, he takes up the task of mixing colors for a painter. But he soon quits because that job made his life very hard. In the cathedral of Toledo a priest then gives him the job of water carrier. Lázaro discharges his duties successfully. He pays the priest an agreed amount of money and keeps the rest for himself. After four years, he has saved enough to buy clothes and a sword. At that point, he decides to quit his job and try for better luck. Age-wise, he is a restless youth whose socioeconomic ascent begins with the instruments of the trade: a whip, four jugs, and a donkey. So equipped, he sets out to carry water around town. Yet he never calls himself aguador. During those four years, however, the tempo of life picks up. The vaguely achronological “by now” and “one day” of the boy's earlier tasks echoed medieval practices, which divided the day along religious zones such as “at dawn,” “about noon,” or “toward sunset.” That was the beggar's time at street corners familiar to blindmen and their servants. Neither time nor space could be of their choice, for they had to be “where” and “when” alms were more likely to be given. By contrast, the young water carrier pays the priest thirty maravedís every day, keeps the rest, and works for himself on Saturdays. His daily chore sets a money-yielding pace; time itself is about to become a clock-measured commodity. Lázaro thus learns to discipline talent, initiative, and the dynamics of his environment into a profitable routine. He saves money and gains confidence in himself; however meager his earnings, he can set ambitious goals. Money brings regularity to the narrative, while savings introduce some vestiges of wealth. Yet, the appearance of prosperity would not yield substantial possessions.

The job of waterseller gives Lázaro security. But security could not remain his life project. In the commercial city of Toledo, in fact, the escudero taught him that one's life had to be guided by a set of principles. Once Lázaro understood that he had to pursue a version of honor within reach of his buena fortuna, the economic makeup of the chapter turned around. Jugs and whips faded into the background:

I did so well at the job that after four years of careful saving I had enough to dress myself very decently in second-hand clothes; I bought an old fustian jacket and a worn coat with braided sleeves and a vent. I also got a cloak which had had a fringe once, and an old sword made when they used to make them at Cuéllar.

(76)¹⁸

If he still appreciates the fact that it took him four years of careful saving to buy second-hand clothes, one must surmise that Lázaro's ensuing prosperity has been rather limited. His experience points back to the escudero, whose pathetic demeanor carried the stamp of economic bankruptcy. The text thus brings to the fore disjunctions between “cost of living” and “standard of life.” The former is meant to provide for basic needs. At the periphery of affluence most humanity kept on struggling with cost of living. Amid lowlife society, cost of living sets up compensations based on exploitation rather than fairness. And all sorts of political, psychological, and religious pressures were brought to bear on the acceptance of such a disparity. By contrast, standard of life points to a lifestyle that makes cultural values almost as primary as subsistence itself. In a minor—if not parodic—key, Lázaro reaches, or at least he thinks he has reached, that qualitative threshold at the end of the sixth chapter. Thereafter, he would try to convince himself that his good luck has drawn cost of living and standard of life into a profitable—if not honorable—equation.

For Lázaro de Tormes, standard of life represents the future. For the escudero, instead, it symbolizes loss. In fact, he enters the narrative long after his standard of life fell by the wayside. The economy he bodies forth is out of currency, and his rhetoric of wishful affluence folds under its own insubstantiality. Lázaro, instead, begins to invest in the future. Weekly earnings and weekend overtime draw a line between dependence and self-sufficiency. Yet, he could buy only second-hand clothes, a worn-out cloak, and an old sword. Earlier in the fourth chapter, he was given an old pair of shoes that lasted only one week. Nevertheless, he got to know what it meant not to walk barefooted and what it would take to wear shoes once again. Consumable items of that sort demanded a steady income. As always, advantage had a price. The symbolism of shoes in folklore and literature (Libro de Buen Amor) points to sexual favors, which would be given at the price of moral taxation by the end of the last tratado. If Lázaro gets old stockings from the archpriest, we can bet that the same provider would offer his wife plenty of shoes!

Increases and depletions of Lázaro's buena fortuna are part and parcel of a novelistic project that set much of the action within reach of water. Actually, he was born by the river Tormes—“mi nacimiento fue dentro del río Tormes.” Having traded amniotic for fluvial waters, so to speak, the journey downstream transforms him neither into a leader of people nor a valiant knight. Along the way, however, he would learn just about everything one could want to know about matters of indigence.

To draw on current levels—if not kinds—of narrative, the picaresque text would fall outside the grand récit of a totalizing and idealized concept of history. Yet, it could be counted among those petites histoires that historians and cultural anthropologists—from Natalie Zemon Davis and Stephen Greenblatt to Carlo Ginzburg, Piero Camporesi, and Michel de Certeau—have linked to anecdotes and the practice of everyday life.¹⁹ Amid artworks one would assign to the province of grand récit, Velázquez's Las Lanzas (or the Peace of Breda) stands out. Conversely, his Waterseller fits the unheroic context of pequeño intrahistórico.

Whereas Lázaro's ambulatory job takes water to people, youths and adults gather around Velázquez's old man. He bestows life-giving liquid in a room where two jugs are set on a table flanked by a bench. Since the composition is foreshortened, a sense of spatial closure draws viewers into a communal space at the edge of the large water jug. While it is just a commodity in the novel, water involves the archetypal transmission of life in the painting, where the waterseller stands out as the embodiment of an almost archetypal task.²⁰ His gaze does not betray senescence, and there is nothing temporary about him; above all, his posture projects the solemn stability of ritual. Whereas it serves commercial exchanges in the novel, water involves a higher form of transaction in the artwork. The old man holds the bottom of the goblet and the youngster secures his grip on its stem; generations thus join hands. Dictionaries of Renaissance symbols tell us that the purity of glass pointed to intellectual and spiritual clarity. The goblet stands as a transparent point of conjunction between young and old. A kind of eucharistic act is performed, if we only think of contemporary proverbs—“People of Toledo, people of God, water belongs to him, and we only sell it”—or Juan Luis Vives's words: “Your drink shall be … that natural liquor prepared by God for all living creatures in common—pure, clean water.” While passages from Matthew and Psalms speak of water as fountain and source of human experience, Francisco de Quevedo and the moralist Damián de Vegas insisted that heaven was waiting for those who would give a glass of water to one who thirsts (Wind 103; Moffitt 10).

Velázquez's pot-bellied jug is of plain clay, and its shape introduces the waterseller's own figure. Correspondences of that kind make the human face itself appear to be “stilled from within” (Steinberg 282). Under somber lighting effects, the artwork reveals a subdued interplay of clay glazed and unglazed, of wrinkles and flesh, of wood and fabrics, and of a miracle-bestowing goblet. Carrier and vessel are bound together into the portrait of an activity that foregrounds the waterseller's story. By ignoring urban settings and commercial equipments, the artist has painted a rather bare and yet sheltering environment in which objects are as crucial to meaning as human presence itself; one is a function of the other, and both of them shoulder the representation of a humanized reality.

Whereas macrohistory acts out narratives which recount pasts of epic grandeur, microhistory is linked to the description of current events and prosaic, if not altogether petty, attitudes of mind. Emphasis is placed on situations that tend to “equalize” people and things. At their static worst, we confront texts that simplify individualism and edge on genre. By yielding an array of details in excess of what is appropriate to the economy of the narrative, texts of that sort create “still life” conditions. Velázquez's painting, however, avoids such a pitfall. Even a cursory comparison with his own bodegones makes it clear that The Waterseller foregrounds a view of human values bent on praising dignity rather than depravation, and intensity rather than insignificance. The pictorial economy of details is as axiomatic as it is crucial to the implied narrative. If one were to argue that description debases human beings to the level of inanimate things, then one could trust that Velázquez “redeemed” the descriptive mode; he did not start with things, but with people. At their most constructive, picaresque artworks take on a kind of “narrative grandeur,” which one could indeed find typical of what has been called the epic of the infrahombre. Readers and viewers are thus moved to reflect on moral and ethical aspects of human existence.

Since it is full of water, the jug responds to external heat by exuding moisture. At spots where drops and runnels make its thick impasto seem almost transparent, the clay partakes of the goblet's brilliance. Condensation thus couches beauty in forms which call to mind the forthcoming passion (baroque or otherwise) for the evanescent—from snow flakes to air bubbles. At the same time, the jug's horizontal crevices echo the wrinkles on the old man's forehead, just as blemishes on the smaller jug repeat the rough texture of his cheeks. Man and jug meet through the handle, which makes the mimesis of reality more direct by foregrounding the utilitarian function of clay ware. At the same time, tears in the old man's cloak heighten fullness and consumption. In the painter's hands, even forms of stillness, Mikhail Bakhtin might agree, could be chronotopic. With ease but without banality, pictorial surfaces unfurl textures which weave a life-giving image.

The large jug rests on a bench that sets it apart from the rest of the composition. Its small neck and heavy size disqualify it as an object apt to expedite distribution. On the table, the smaller pitcher with a wider neck and a clay cup on its top proves to be a more practical dispenser of fluids. One vessel is unique in Velázquez's oeuvre, and it works as a pivot between here and there, quotidianity and archetype. The other is of a stock that appears on kitchen and dinner tables from Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1618) and the Old Woman Frying Eggs (1618) to Christ at Emmaus (1620-21). The coarseness of the clay jug clashes with the elegant goblet he hands to the youngster. Task, thought, and posture are so transparently wholesome that the goblet seems to mirror a humane clarity of heart. That refined piece of craftsmanship is strikingly different from Velázquez's usual glassware. While Three Men at the Table (1618-19) and Bacchus-Borrachos (1628-29) show cheap tumblers, The Waterseller makes a qualitative leap. With pride, common laborers in Pedro de Guzmán's Los bienes del honesto trabajo (1614) could “drink from the work of their hands” (Wind 101-2). A daily task thus turns into an act that exudes wholesome maturity. It would be safe to guess that thoughts about wealth, profit, or career-oriented ambitions have never made a dent in the old aguador's sense of social responsibility. Subtly, the artist has juxtaposed the economics of the trade, which demands efficient utensils, to an archetypal blueprint. The old man does not deal with merchandise, and he seems to have forsaken profit. For sure, he has relinquished the ‘competitive’ evil of goals and ambitions tailored after, and against, other people.

While focusing on expectation and magnanimity, the crystal-clear goblet heightens a still moment replete with past, present, and future. We look at a life-giving transparency. Liquidity itself has been dissolved into a mental contemplation on the meaning of water as the very sustenance of life. Silence enfolds a virtual narrative apt to pour wisdom into the naive emptiness of youth. Such a potential for story telling seems to make a case for ekphrasis in reverse. The picture, in fact, is emblematic in a literary sense, much as language has corporealized itself into the silent people of intrahistoria. Ordinary individuals of that sort are more familiar with facts than performances, much as they speak in songs, maxims, and legends of a kind which the old man would pass on to the youth.

Proverbial forms voice the ethical underpinning of folklore, which reflects the more stable aspects of popular culture (Gramsci 189-90).²¹ It suffices to add that picaresque texts are studded with maxims. The ciego relies on the long-standing symbolism of wine and horns to set up the plot. Economics motivates his journey toward Toledo, and proverbial wisdom justifies it; a hard man in fact can give more than another who does not have anything to give. Selfishness of that kind is unknown to the old waterseller, and it points to that border line where the indigent humanity of intrahistoria edges on more affluent counterparts. On moral and economic grounds, proverbial wisdom tends to spur conformity, which would reinforce Lázaro's gregariousness.

As a literary image, the jug's full shape harks back to grain bins and maternal wombs at the beginning of the novel, which also highlights shoes, cloaks, bread, sausages, cow's feet, and the priest's glorious bunch of onions. Such an array of things and goods belongs to what the nomenclature of art has called “rhopography.” Its etymon, rhopos, points to trifles and small wares that cultural aesthetics has parceled out to the realm of triviality.²² By contrast, unimportant things are of little interest to artists interested in “megalography,” which depicts objects symbolic of gods, heroes, and memorable deeds. With an eye to economic matters, “megalography” finds a parallel in Xenophon's Oeconomicus, which defines lavish public expenditures. The virtue of megaloprepeia is thus unthinkable in the picaresque, and Norman Bryson insists that rhopography ought to remind us that “all men must eat; there is a levelling of humanity, a humbling of aspiration before an irreducible fact of life, hunger” (61). Hunger makes objects functional; spoons, knives, glasses, and plates imply touch, hands, and mouths. Activities of that sort would be just as familiar to Murillo's destitute youths, who are forever engaged in eating grapes and watermelons (Two Boys Eating Fruit [1670s]).²³ The world of rhopography was bound to proliferate. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy includes a “chapter on things,” and Honoré de Balzac would divide his human comedy into three categories: men, women, and things. Things thus began to take on human qualities; in turn, humans were ever more dependent on materialist goods. Realism, in fact, refers to res, that is to say, to things. Etymologically speaking, realism is “thing-ism” (Levin 33-34, 193).

Cow's feet, innards, and tripe punctuate the prosaics of Lazarillo de Tormes, which rejoices in the depiction of eating scenes known as bodegones and bamboccianti in contemporary painting. Usually, the pícaro was an errand boy—esportillero or ganapán—who hung around kitchens and other places of consumption, ready as he was to carry packages, take on odd jobs, and seize any opportunity—however underhanded—that might yield food or money.²⁴ Their world often was contained at the far edge of stoves and dinner tables, where darkness dimmed historical events and perspectival space. Velázquez's own Old Woman Frying Eggs is a bodegón in which the youth holds a watermelon and a water pitcher. Time is culinary, and the two frying eggs mark the seconds that separate the raw from the cooked. By contrast, stark details in The Waterseller deny the possibility of an “eating scene.” Everybody stands as if expected to stage an event extraneous to the casualness of “dining time.” The transfer of water is linked to acts that are passive for the youth, acquisitive for the adult, and dispensational for the old man. Such archetypal thematics, Miguel de Unamuno would comment, seem to draw from “los abismos sub-históricos, bajo la historia” (49-50). It is a ritual that outlasts human generations without changing people's lot.

At a higher pitch of privation, Velázquez's water jug calls to mind a literary counterpart in the third tratado, where Lázaro shared bread and cow's feet with his master:

He asked me to get the water-jug and when I brought it it was as full as when I had come back from the river. That told me quite clearly that he hadn't eaten very much that day. We drank and went to bed very happily.

(57)²⁵

Toothpicks are in order after food consumption, and water is part of that activity. Food calls for a drink; starvation does not. Quickly, therefore, Lázaro understands that his master has not had a meal. At an earlier occasion and in spite of evidence to the contrary, Lázaro presumed that an escudero's jug would contain wine: “‘Agua es,—me respondió. Bien puedes beber.’—‘You can drink this,’ he said. ‘It's water’” (52, 33). That correction foregrounded utter indigence, while the sword upheld an obsolete world of appearances at variance with life. In fact, Lázaro found in the escudero's purse neither a copper coin “ni señal que la hubiese tenido mucho tiempo—any trace of one having been there for a very long time” (58, 39). The water's undisturbed stillness is of a kind akin to still lifes in the French and Italian sense of nature morte and natura morta. Actually, the ghostlike existence of the escudero, whose nobility is bygone and whose wealth is out of currency, is itself a kind of “lifeless nature.” To that extent, swords, toothpicks, and water jugs could be read as fragments ideologiques.²⁶ The jug foregrounds an implied narrative; rather than denying human presence, it calls forth the escudero's haunting insubstantiality. As a result, the tempo of the story slows down to motionlessness, which echoes the mental inanity of the escudero's worn-out existence (Blanchard 276-77). The narrative thus moves from effects to causes. The jug is full because the empty purse could not buy food. For the escudero, description earmarks the breakdown of potential action, which is instead implicit in Lázaro's own surprise. In one case, water points to inanity and sterility; it is the stillness of the deathlike. For the boy, that very stillness is taken as a negative pause in the unfolding process of life's travails.

As a servant to the escudero, Lázaro gears his concept of time to hunger. Having met his new master in the morning, he measures time against the expected routine of “shopping” for lunch and dinner. Hours pass by, but neither lunch nor dinner is mentioned. Time thus stretches out hopes and delusions. To justify himself, the escudero reverses the orderly routine of food consumption: “Pues, aunque de mañana, yo había almorzado y, cuando así como algo, hágote saber que hasta la noche me estoy así. Por eso, pásate como pudieres, que después cenaremos—Well, although it was quite early, I'd already eaten. If I eat early, you'd better know that I don't have anything else until nighttime. You'll have to make do as well as you can. We'll have supper later on” (32, 51). Master and servant are playing cat-and-mouse. The “provider” tries to mask his inability to provide for his servant by “displacing” the time of biological needs. When stomachs are not fed, the narrative stealmates into an ominous silence. The very absence of sounds reduces existence itself to a kind of life-threatening wait that puts human potential on hold, as if the future could not come to pass. Hunger reduces time, space, and the world itself to nothing more than the expectation of food. Wits, honor, hopes, memories, and human personality lose all relevance vis-à-vis hoped-for food. At that point, Lázaro and his master are reduced to the animal-like state of predators whose whole being could respond to nothing but the call of hunger.

In the ontological nomenclature of the picaresque, eating time plays a major role, marking as it does the materialist heartbeat of existence. Once lack of nourishment is exposed, the ontology and stylistics of literary art strikes close equivalences between words and things. Whether it be the jug in the literary text or in Velázquez's painting, language thrives on forms of such simplicity that image, writing, and expression seem to defy the very concept of fiction. To that extent, goblet and jug offset the objectual deceptiveness of the stone-bull episode at the end of the first tratado. Whereas the mousetrap signals the presence of goods, unused water denies them. Having reached a state of utter indigence, the text exposes the futility of people whose social standing has to deny starvation, however irrefutable its evidence. By the same token, such “descriptions by default” are quite typical of the picaresque parody of conspicuous consumption. With a passion, literary stylistics mixes taxonomic with rhetorical codes. The first selects items to be foregrounded for description's sake; the second chooses strategies of denotation, connotation, and significance that thicken the symbolism of the narrative. In the picaresque mode, exchanges between the two are at once effective and recurrent. Since men of honor would neither beg nor steal, the outcome is all the more predictable. Just as he wanted sex but could not buy it, so did the escudero end up eating a cow's foot his servant had begged for.

Recent scholarship has focused on the unsavory vicissitudes that hunger has imposed on the poor. Throughout the sixteenth century, a cluster of texts outlined the effects of famine from Italy to Poland. Behind the ambiguous and ominous term “refuse,” in fact, there lurked instincts that preyed on corpses and dung; there were no limits to abomination, so much so that the remains of Buscón's father were linked to the taking of the Holy Sacrament (Camporesi 86-87). Literally and symbolically, the economics of food consumption were an apt, if pitiless, barometer of societal conditions.²⁷ While the escudero's toothpick is no more than a gestural afterthought in the wake of a meal he never consumed, Lázaro finds comfort in the memory of bits of food. Although no semantic field other than food and sex can claim a more euphoric vocabulary (Jeanneret 8-9), picaresque rhopography breaks down discourse through a rhetoric of loss; food and sex are equally deficient in it. However much hunger could not ennoble the praxis of life at its most basic, Marco Antonio de Camos resorted to human anatomy to justify social order (Microcosmia 1595). Faith was lodged in the head and royalty in the heart; veins and nerves stood for nobility; legs and feet carried merchants, artisans, and farmers. The poor, in turn, were reduced to nails, hair, and human debris that fed on edible waste (139-46).²⁸ Because food defines humanity in itself as well as in relation to life at large, picaresque diets are indicators of cultural status. After a reading not of Rabelais or Perrault but of picaresque poverty, one ought to surmise that Louis Marin's “food for thought” would be strictly verbal among most pícaros who never made it to Toledo. In Segovia, there were people who would gladly “breakfast” on nominatives by “swallowing the words” (95, 97). Instances of that sort are introduced in the third chapter of Lazarillo de Tormes, where the penniless escudero feeds Lázaro words instead of meals he craves for more than his servant.

Master and servant, in fact, inhabit a house apt to lodge the dead rather than the living.²⁹ We need only mention that Benedetto Croce called the picaresque “l'epica della fame,” a label that set parodic correlations between megalography and rhopography, the epic and the novel.³⁰ On novelistic matters of romanzi della fame, onions as big as oranges constitute the staple diet of Sicilian fishermen in Giovanni Verga's I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree 1881). The nineteenth-century verista novel, in fact, updated picaresque toils.³¹ They all shared stylistic and thematic traits that weighed on food intake, whether it be actually eaten or just conjured up by the imagination. And trade between what Italo Calvino has called the dialectic of sapore and sapere has been central to a genre as privative or cornucopian as the novel.

The ritual integrity of Valázquez's aguador stands out even more forcefully if one sets it against the literary narrative. In Toledo's cathedral, a greedy priest gives Lázaro the job of waterseller; with ease, men of the cloth would turn into dubious mercaderes; hombres de negocio and hombres de iglesia often were one and the same.³² Just as easily waters were parted between business and religion. To make things worse, doubts have been shed on representations of “pristine” and good-natured watersellers. Equations between aguadores and moriscos were negative, and so they would remain in Lope de Vega's El anzuelo de Fenisa and Cervantes's gente baja (Don Quixote I: 21). Emphasis was placed on genealogical falsification, name changing, and efforts at furtive assimilation (Shipley, “Lazarillo de Tormes” 250). A Cervantine nobleman, Don Tomás de Avendano, took up “the trade of water-carrier” in Toledo. “With a single load of water he could wander about the city all day long, looking at the silly girls.”³³ Prejudices aside, that menial job was just a few notches above begging.

By and large, watersellers were unsavory characters closer to Velázquez's own Drinkers (also called Borrachos 1626-28),³⁴ which José Ortega y Gasset has read as a Titianesque bacchanal that has been turned “into drunken debauch. Bacchus is a fraud. There is nothing more than what you can see and touch.” To that extent, Velázquez paved the way for the “administrative era in which, in place of Dionysus, we speak of alcoholism” (Ortega y Gasset, Velázquez 97; Braudel, Structure 23-24, 27-29). Because he is not a fraud, the old aguador would keep on living the same way. He is a symbolic image of the enduring, and yet stagnant, “infra-economy” of material life. His time frame is one in which the reliability of ritual takes precedence over the instability of gains and losses.³⁵ In a substantial way, the aguador bodies forth a concept of personality rooted in a culture where individualism is equated with one's given role in society. Man could not yet conceive of himself as an individual except through communal “otherness” (Manrique de Aragon 42). Much as deities were trivialized, Velázquez bestowed dignity on common people; the heroic became common, and the ordinary grew into prominence. Although he lived at the fringe of the urban world he never thought of entering, the waterseller could not be found among the swelling ranks of Sevillian picardía, which rounded its beggars and cutpurses by the slaughterhouse or in nearby San Lucar de Barrameda. At that point in the narrative, old and young watersellers did not, and could not move away from the routine of everyday life; to borrow from Miguel de Unamuno, “el suceso del día, de cada día, es para el hecho de siempre … el hombre de cada día esta naciendo diariamente.” Measured against standards of social climb and conspicuous consumption, it was indeed the average life—vidita—of an ordinary man—hombrecito (Ortega y Gasset, “Sobre el cultivo” 9: 907; Braudel, Mediterranean 2: 740).³⁶

In a way, Lázaro is forced to mystify his origins as much as he has to demystify reminiscences about the escudero's ghostlike nobility and empty claims. Societal myths are measured down to the “realistic” potential of a dispossessed soul out to secure some sort of civilized living for himself. At that threshold, we ought to recall Claudio Guillén's comments on picaresque role-playing, which compels the pícaro to “compromise and live on the razor's edge between vagabondage and delinquency. … He becomes what I would call a ‘half-outsider’” (80). Actually, that boundary condition unravels through stages. In the first two chapters, Lázaro lives at the edge of survival. Even though he has become street-wise, his lack of mental sophistication emerges in the third tratado, where he fails to conceptualize the literal reference to the “dark house” in the episode of the funeral cortege. Since he is determined to dress up his societal “other,” Lázaro changes jobs and breaks away from the simple existence of Velázquez's waterseller. He reaches a point where economic choice and societal constraints lock horns, and the ensuing narrative would teach him the limits of both.³⁷ Once he invests his earnings in buying worn-out apparel, his hard-gained “affluence” turns into another form of poverty. As a result, existence shapes itself as a deficient, if not outright negative counterpart of affluence. Later, Miguel de Unamuno asked a significant question: “What zeal can a worker show as he fashions toys for the sons of the rich merely so as to earn bread for his own children, who have no such toys to play with?” (302). That was a rather middle-class question grown out of a world of production that remained quite foreign to picaresque parasitism. Survival could not, and did not, empower anybody to test the “destination” of goods. For most people, work was aimed at sustenance rather than improvement, much as zeal stemmed from need rather than competence. As a waterseller who provided a service as old as humankind, Lázaro could have lived comfortably at the fringe of bureaucracy and business. Because he rejected work limited to survival, the youth gave up a job and much of his upbringing with it. His father had been working at the mill for fifteen years, and only a transgression halted that routine. In his son's case, circumstances drove him out of agricultural milieus. Two processes converged: one of social integration and the other of moral debasement.

Part and parcel of Lázaro's growth is a new sense of monetary precision and critical judgment. In the first two tratados, time is linked to acts of theft, whether they involve a piece of sausage or a few breadcrumbs. The appearance of money, however, alters the mozo's behavior: “cuanto le mandaban rezar y le daban blancas, como él carecía de vista, no había el que se la daba amagado con ella, cuando yo la tenía lanzada en la boca y la media aparejada; que por presto que él echaba la mano, ya iba de mi cambio aniquilada en la mitad del justo precio (“when people asked him to say prayers and gave him blancas, as soon as they offered the coin I grabbed it, popped it into my mouth and handed him a half blanca. However quickly he stretched out his hand I had already halved the value of the offering”) (10, 29). First of all, half blancas, whole blancas, and maravedís immediately point to immaterial goods that could be gained by means of equally immaterial services. Unlike food, money could be halved, doubled up, stored, and exchanged with ever-varying speed.³⁸

By paying the priest thirty maravedís every day, Lázaro the waterseller introduces a clock-paced concept of time, which quickly becomes a commodity linked to the sequence ganancia-recaudo-ahorre-compre (earning-collecting-saving-buying) (Sieber 76). However pedestrian its way, the picaresque echoes an eventful shift. Rather than being linked to living experiences, time is divided into measurable units. That development replaced events that could be framed by approximation—à-peu-près—with models of conduct that subordinated time, work, and money to precise standards of evaluation. Whether on pagan or Christian grounds, the Deity was assumed to have created through numbers, weights, and measurement. Before the Renaissance, however, nobody bothered to implement those principles in the world of material existence. Lázaro is thus able to discipline the dynamics of his environment into a profitable routine. He saves money and gains confidence in himself; however meager his earnings, he has grown to a point where he could entertain ambitious projects; chance gives way to plan. Money brings regularity to the narrative; a steady income calls for a stable job in a place where picaresque mobility comes to a halt. While saving rushes in some “potential” for wealth, the appearance of prosperity would not yield substantial benefits.

Individual growth under the aegis of economics thus pivots around the concept of self-reliance. Ironically, its point of origin could be traced back to Lázaro's experience with the stone bull in the first tratado. The very fact that a blind beggar would teach self-reliance set the “educational process” on a rather slippery footing. It was imperative that “el mozo del ciego un punto ha de saber más que el diablo” (8). Literally and symbolically, the blindman could not but refer to a world of darkness where survival itself is nestled in the “darkened” pit of loss and privation. Because the world of darkness is irremediable by definition, self-reliance teaches Lázaro to outwit his master, even though society will prove to be crowded with legions of people blind at heart whose standards of survival would be ever more difficult to meet. In the sixth tratado, self-reliance shifts toward income-yielding work. As such, the devil's standard is both pervasive and unspoken. Once work, service, and income steer Lázaro's socioeconomic lot toward a kind of primitive marketplace economy where the evil of exchange proves to be a blessing, Lázaro finds that work empowers him to pursue values at bay of any ciego's reach. In a rather contradictory way, trade imposes the burden of regularity and efficiency on one's lifestyle; “in the name of work” is preferable to “in the service of.” The power of earning money by means other than begging and theft belongs to a devil unknown to the ciego. The hombre de bien is good and respectable also because he is a money-earning individual. Steady work and a legitimate job free self-reliance from the scourge of both alms and gifts.

At this point, we ought to bear in mind that money makes its appearance in the picaresque text sooner than one might expect. The blindman, in fact, “destas sacaba el grandes provechos con las artes que digo, y ganaba más en un mes que cien ciegos en un año—made a lot of money from these tricks and earned more in one month than a hundred blind men usually do in a whole year” (9, 28). Yet, all that money has no impact on his lifestyle. Master and servant keep on fighting over crumbs by the wayside, and the canvas bag shows evidence of little food and nothing else. What about all that money? By counting money, master and servant activate a “battle of wits” at once attractive and inconsequential. Once he hires Lázaro, the ciego's intake of maravedís dwindles because his mozo cheats him by switching half blancas for whole ones; and he gets away with it. Although theft as exchange succeeds, there is no evidence that money could change anyone's lot. Strife is between paupers; the biggest crust of bread is carried off by the one who begs best (Unamuno 409). Support for that downtrodden condition falls back on folkloristic cuentos. It is a pivotal moment in the narrative, one that would lead to Lázaro's appointment to the office of pregonero. His hopes come through, but at a price. Slowly, he would settle into a complacent routine whose goal is to maintain el estatismo de su estado (Prieto 30-33). Yet, the caso launched against him spurs the present toward a troublesome future. While updating adversities, the Prólogo also promises a follow-up. From an economic as well as a literary standpoint, the picaresque steered away from the indefinite, if not outright fabulous, past of romance.

To be a hombre de bien, Lázaro must avoid jobs that call for manual labor. Once he understands that words could earn him an income, Lázaro sets out to become a Homo loquens. Hence, he breaks free of archetypal models. Although he could flaunt only wornout clothes, his readers would not lose sight of him for generations to come. Once he makes it clear that his life's goal is other than his humble job, the economic makeup of the sixth tratado turns around. Jugs and whips fade in the background. The spatial gives way to the temporal, which sets up the value-loaded pace of “everyday—cada día” work. As soon as he adjusts to the pressures of money-yielding time, Lázaro's conduct becomes cronoe-conómico. While his daily routine is restricted to the socioeconomic confines of intrahistoria, no reference is made to the larger historical—if not macrohistoric—framework. The nameless author, in fact, did not date his autobiographical experience, except for the final reference to Charles V's entrance in Toledo (either in 1525 or 1539).

Hard work aside, Lázaro can buy only second-hand clothes, a worn out cloak, and an old sword. New forms of investment are called for. Although weekly earnings and weekened overtime draw a line between freedom and dependence, all he could show for four years of hard work is old stuff. Selling water is neither profitable nor honorable. Means and goals are disjointed. Hypothetically speaking, the escudero predicted that minor noblemen would pay with a sweaty doublet for his services. The barter of things prevailed over the exchange of money. Lázaro, instead, earns wages and makes profits on the side. Determined as he is to seek prosperity, he sets out to change jobs and break the archetypal life cycle of Velázquez's waterseller. For the old aguador, selling water was not just a job; it gave him identity, personal pride, and social respect. For Lázaro, instead, it is an economic task that he judges in strictly economic terms. He wastes no time in sizing up the limits of that humble job, which allows him to buy clothes and a sword meant to sketch out an image appropriate to his wished-for role in society. Whip, jugs, and donkey give way to the purchase of objects apt to fill symbolic needs. Money thus trades the necessary for the aesthetic. If we think of Karl Marx's remarks that money changes “representation into reality and reality into mere representation,” then we could agree that Lázaro is on his way to shift from the factual reality of waterseller toward the “representation” of himself in light of values he has inherited from the escudero. Whereas the aguador's healthy activities at the level of cost of living are reflected in the unblemished condition of jug and goblet, the incipient pursuit of standards of life begins with the acquisition of old and worn-out items, which echo the ruinous state of the escudero's alleged real estate back in Valladolid. Objects symbolic of a higher social standing betray the volatility—and vulnerability—of the very concept of standard, which could be neither defined with precision nor upheld with confidence. One variable was money, whose valuation and devaluation made the standard itself liable to continuous redefinitions. In a significant way, therefore, standards of life tend to measure frustration as well as success.³⁹ If we reflect on the analogy drawn between the novel's claim to represent reality and money's claim to represent things of enduring value, then we might agree that both claims shortchange fiction and reality alike. Lázaro's money, in fact, is invested at the periphery of the aguador's reality as well as the periphery of the escudero's anachronism. Much of Lázaro's earnings still are based on gifts and exchanges, his would-be provecho as a modern mercader turns out to be as misleading—if not outright fictitious—as the escudero's land-based wealth of times past. In light of such precedents, his ambitious plans are uncertain. Money could not buy the future, and the past had become worthless.

At night, the town crier has plenty of time to think about moral payoffs which neither wine nor sleep could ease; nevertheless, everybody teaches him that money moves people. He is neither a critic nor a reformer of society, but a survivor and an opportunist. The final words in the seventh tratado tell us that the pregonero has reached the peak of his buena fortuna. The Prólogo, however, makes it clear that his luck has been called into question. Once the indictment is launched against him, Lázaro falls prey to the wider circularity of Fortuna's rise and fall. At the top of the ladder, his steadfast growth stalls, and he begins to slip down.⁴⁰

Yet, it is in the sixth tratado that Lázaro transcends the wanderer, the jester, and the have-not. He thus takes notice of his environment, whereas the Sevillan aguador of Velázquez did not (Alter 6). Segovia and Toledo were manufacturing towns, and it was through Seville that precious metals from the New World were pouring into Europe. While chapters of human history followed the migratory rhythm of gold and silver across the oceans, there were social enclaves which held on to the timelessness of archetypal lifestyles. Mythic resistance and economic adventurism stood side by side, much as the primeval stability of “material life” was set against the mercantile growth of “economic life.” Material life is rooted in the steady pace of daily routines that have remained unchanged for centuries. For Américo Castro, that is the history that only needs to be “described;” it refers to the mere facts of living, the plain linen of life without embroidery. What is at stake here is the lives of people whose existence rests on elementary motivations—physiological, psychic, and economic.⁴¹ Within boundaries of that sort, economic matters could not exceed the cost of living, which set strict limitations on the life of pícaros, beggars, millers, and water carriers old or new. Their menial tasks are typical of an economy that is oriented neither toward production nor surplus goods, but toward the satisfaction of elementary needs. As Antonio de Guevara wrote at that time, “It is a privilege of villages that those who dwell in them have flour to sift, a bowl for kneading, and an oven for their baking.”⁴² At such a basic level, existence relies on those economic institutions that restrict human potential to survival. As the third tratado unfolds, Lázaro's need to find a master tests the materialist core of cost of living. Quickly, the narrative makes it clear that the servant has to provide for himself as well as for his master, who is bound to play a twofold role in the youth's growth. While he introduces Lázaro to a world of values, the unity-duality of master and servant proves that utter poverty still treasures a kind of hierarchical order. Antona Perez, in fact, believed that his son would not stand a chance in life unless he served someone, even as hopeless a character as a blind beggar. To be himself, Lázaro needed a master, and his ascent in society traded one form of dependence for another. Medieval ideology called for man to earn only what was necessary to let him live in his given place. Any gain in excess of need was a sign of greed—turpe lucrum. In light of that doctrine, Lázaro's meager savings as waterseller foreshadow doom, exceeding as they do the cost of living.

Cost of living becomes problematic the moment it is linked to lifestyles that rest on cultural values. Lázaro reaches that threshold in the sixth tratado. Thereafter, he tries to convince himself that his buena fortuna has drawn cost of living and standard of life into a favorable equation; although needs measure the first and achievements the second, they are both materialistic. Yet, the latter gives goods a metaphorical depth which could be at once humanizing and dehumanizing. As a water carrier, Lázaro lived on the ground floor, as it were, of material life. But he found that the bottom level was neither comfortable nor satisfactory. Through care and calculation, he thus proceeded to set standards of life for himself. To set Lázaro's choice in historical perspective, we ought to turn to one of Don Quixote's “educational” axioms: “I tell you, Sancho, that no man is worthier than another unless he does more than another” (Don Quixote I: Chapter 18). That lesson may have fallen on deaf ears in the Cervantine text, where the hidalgo alone “did” more than most to “make himself”—hacerse—into a better Other. But such a self-creating impulse was absent in pre-Cervantine fiction. In the picaresque mode, however, the mozo from Tormes made himself into a better Other; if not as pregonero, certainly as author. That his “worth” was ultimately deficient should not diminish his achievement. Even the undistinguished Don Quijano the Good, after all, denied Don Quixote and regained sanity. Such different, and yet parallel, ascents shed light on Renaissance polarities; courtly versus picaresque, anachronistic versus contemporary. Whereas Lázaro espoused values that were concrete and led to specific actions, Don Quixote never stopped charging windmills. In the elementary marketplace of basic services, the waterseller, whether he be a pictorial image or a literary figure, operated within a socioeconomic enclave that ushered in a rather independent, though narrow, sense of self-reliance. The old aguador had always known that; young Lázaro, instead, was in search of social status. He based his future on the stability of societal structures whose authority was institutional. However pegged to a legitimate job, Lázaro's self-reliance would remain largely parasitic. It was the “Other” that validated the self, whose fortunes were bound to remain at risk.

In the immemorial time of myth, man thrives on nature; in the remembered time of human experience, he exploits the mechanisms of civilized society. Lázaro's surname—sobrenombre—stems from a river; it is a place-name. His roots are linked to water, which would yield temporary as well as permanent benefits. Whether it be in literary texts or ritual codes, water stands for life-sustaining values. By contrast, wine remains a carrier of shame, income, and punishment. Wine caused Lázaro's early beatings, but wine also healed him. From El Buscón to La Hija de Celestina, the antigenealogy of parental indignity often is linked to wine consumption. And the ciego's prophecy about wine spells trouble for Lázaro.

With an eye to spatiotemporal coordinates, the chronotope of the road exhausts its itinerant potential in the sixth tratado. The escudero's lesson at last bears fruit, even though the pregonero would not further his career amid the hypocrisy and corruption of Toledan society. By growing into a writer, however, he would break free of everyday mediocrity, reaching out toward that sublime du quotidien that disrupts routine to the advantage of transcendence. Questions of meaning vis-à-vis picaresque quotidianity at last touch on central aspects of literary fictions somehow aimed at “realism.” Tomé Gonzales's work as a miller who provided for his family year in and year out ended the moment he was caught stealing. Hence, “fue preso, y confesó, y no negó, y padeció persecución por justicia—they arrested him, and he confessed, denied nothing and was punished by law” (5, 25). The verbal sequence strings out three complementary actions whose conciseness points to John and Matthew. A tone of stoic endurance couples theft with a sense of inevitability that plagues the social landscape of poverty. In a rather parodic mode, the indignity of theft is diminished by the steadfast acceptance of punishment. Later on, Lázaro's own routine of waterseller exhausts the “literary potential” of such an insignificant practice. Miller and waterseller make it clear that transgression and transcendence are part and parcel of picaresque teleology. From the very beginning, the text mixes literalness with literariness.

At the fountainhead of picaresque textuality, sheer descriptions of life-as-is tend to be negative. Tomé, the escudero, the fraile de la Merced, and the buldero suggest that the praxis of life could not support itself without sliding toward degeneration one way or another. In Tomé's case, criminality edged on incredulity when Antona told the ciego that his son was “hijo de buen hombre, el cual por ensalzar la fe había muerto en la de los Gelves—the son of a good man, who had been killed for the greater glory of the Faith at the battle of Las Gelves” (7, 27). Before Cervantes, therefore, “mills” needed not be just mills. Like stone bulls and old stockings, they all upheld ambiguity. On Sanchopanzesque matters of unidealized existence, Miguel de Unamuno wrote that “fear and only fear made Sancho see—makes the rest of us simple mortals see—windmills where impudent giants stand … those mills milled bread, and of that bread men confirmed in blindness ate” (57). The sixth tratado thus ends with a self-aggrandizing, though wishful, sense of materialist transcendence, which glorifies the power of privilege and protection (Parret 18-19, 168-69). Although nurtured in poverty of body, aesthetic consciousness and literary creation could not fail to set Lázaro's mills of the mind in motion.

From beginning to end, Mateo Alemán insists that Guzmán de Alfarache began as a pícaro and ended as maestro pícaro. In his case, the writer tells his discreto lector “lo que hallares no grave ni compuesto, eso es el ser de un pícaro.” As a matter of fact, the verb picardear calls for random appreciations on matters of literary taste, which the pícaro would just as well extend to conduct: “Las tales cosas, aunque seran muy pocas, picardea con ellas.”⁴³ It is, in other words, a life deficient in direction as much as in ideology. Lázaro de Tormes reaches that stage in the sixth tratado, where the job of waterseller teaches him discipline and points to a safe harbor. He trades indigence for sufficiency. Perhaps unbeknownst to himself, Lázaro faces up to ideology. His decision to give up his job made of picardear an intransitive verb, which he replaced with ameliorative pursuits.

III

Velázquez's old waterseller wears a humble and tattered jerkin. Lázaro, instead, buys a second-hand cloak. Sinners and criminals, so we are told, wore a jubón de azotes as sign of punishment; and Lázaro's father had worn one. In light of the caso hanging over his head, one might wonder whether Lázaro would ever wear a new cloak or rather something more appropriate for a pregonero who had been Tomé Gonzales's son back in Tejares and who would walk criminals to their punishment in Toledo. Although the life of criminality was not a choice for Lázaro, the picaresque offered fertile grounds to the epidemic humus of delinquency.

Among people involved in some kind of economic service, the miller and the buldero body brought forth pathological aspects of work ethics; they cannot keep their greed under control. Amid picaresque infrahumanidad, honesty often is shortchanged. But one could bet that the old waterseller in Velásquez's painting is an exception. To borrow from Miguel de Unamuno on matters of lifestyles based on humility, there exists a sublime form of activity that converts work “into prayer” for “the greater glory of God.” The painter captured that spiritual commitment when he painted his old aguador. Below that standard, Sancho is encouraged to be the first in “his craft,” so as to make of work a point of honor that could dignify “the artisan.” At that point in the narrative, we could surmise that Lázaro discharges his job with honesty and efficiency, but in the name of materialist profit rather than God's greater glory. At the fountainhead of picaresque textuality, sheer descriptions of life-as-is tend to be negative. And it could not be otherwise, since the social mimesis at stake here is the life of ethical and material poverty. Tomé the escudero, the fraile de la Merced, and the buldero suggest that the praxis of life could not support itself without degenerating one way or another. Perhaps the very notion of common men leading common lives under the guidance of ordinary values is itself a fiction. For sure, the picaresque test could not endorse that premise. Its socioeconomic structures, in fact, are based on strife between production and consumption, ingenuity and parasitism. It is thus indicative that as soon as the arts began to deal with econopoetics, Renaissance artists concerned themselves with the novel as well as with pastorals, utopias, romances, and fables. At the very time that economic concerns became ever more paramount, such “unnovelistic” textuality relished forms of socioeconomic escape against forms of socioeconomic success.

As a pregonero, Lázaro would stand at the right side of the law, even though he could not keep too far from criminals. Actually, they never lost sight of each other (Cros 178, 189).⁴⁴ Even more than his heir Buscón, Guzmán was privileged with formal education. It included “latino, retórico y griego—a good Latinist, Rhetorician, and Grecian,” and his goal was to become a churchman. But things turned out otherwise. He ended up in prison, where he set out to write his memorias. Learning was prominent in the pícaro's carrera de vivir. Yet, it would not yield social and materialist benefits in the tradition of Florentine Humanism. Somehow, the more punishing circumstances of vivir had the best of education. Only the written texts of pícaros' lives survived. None of them grew to establish himself as either a scholar or a civic leader. Once human nature began to respond to the trials of growth, time castigated people to an extent that humanist treatises on merchants (Alberti) and courtiers (Castiglione) bypassed. Whereas the Italian humanists presented virtual figures whose potential was never tested by life, the picaresque put the learning of Guzmán and Buscón to the test of existence. They could never afford the leisure of scholarship in the studiolo. Instead, they had to write in prisons or lonely rooms where criminality and indignity afforded them a downgraded version of otium's privileged idleness. None of them emerged victorious, but they all survived.

For sure, Lázaro was bound to dress up for better “employment.” The elementary field of primeval facts made room for deeds that would yield greater profits. To put it in terms of Clemente Pablos, the barber who sired Buscón, Lázaro was about to trade a mechanical for a liberal art; at least he so believed. Yet, we all know that Clemente Pablos was executed by his own relative, Alonso Ramplón, the hangman. And Alonso never claimed that his trade was more than a mechanical art, whose equipment of “cordeles, lazos, cuchillos, escarpias y otras herramientas del oficio—rope, nooses, knives, meat-hooks and other tools of the public executioner's trade” (162, 142) made a compelling case for rhopography at its crudest.

When all is said, is Lázaro's divestiture as a waterseller an ominous premonition? Wine earned him the first beating. Would his rise to the oficio of town crier charged with the sale of wines be prophetic of greater punishments? While the bureaucratic title of pregonero refers to function rather than origin, Lázaro's surname is rooted in nature, which he tries to leave behind. Nominally at least, the town crier would be appointed by the king, who is mentioned at the end of the book. But Toledans would never forget that he came from Tormes. Short of either epiphanic or fateful rescues, his ascent would be bound to flow downstream amid muddled waters.

Notes

1. Histoire de France (Paris, 1898), vol. vii; as translated in Wallace Ferguson's The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1948) 176.

2. On classical precedents, see Victor Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes: A Sociology of Old Attic Comedy (219) and Fernand Braudel, The Structure of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (3). On the more archetypal grounds of pre-verbal cultures, Giambattista Vico has made an observation whose semiotic implications are important: “Since its has been demonstrated that the first gentile nations were all mute in their beginnings, they must have expressed themselves by gestures or by physical objects having natural relations with their ideas. They must have used signs to fix the boundaries of their estates and to have enduring witnesses of their rights. They all made use of money. All these truths will give us the origins of languages and letters, and thereby of hieroglyphs, laws, names, family coats of arms, medals, money, and of the language and writing in which the first natural law of the gentes was spoken and written” (The New Science par. 434).

3. Having noted that such a standard was upheld by Sainte-Beuve, Curtius noted: “What a tidbit for a Marxist sociology of literature!”

4. In his exemplary study, Marc Shell writes that his “book seeks to understand dialectically the relationship between thought and matter by focusing—for reasons I shall now consider—on economic thought and literary and linguistic matters” (2).

5. See Peter Burke, Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth-Century Elites; Basil S. Yamey, Art and Accounting; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital; Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Stephen Greenblatt finds the same complexity at work on more focused matters of Renaissance individualism: “There is no such thing as a single ‘history of the self’ in the sixteenth century, except as the product of our need to reduce the intricacies of complex and creative beings to safe and controllable order” (8).

6. On sociological grounds, I refer to the paradigmatic scholarship of Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money. Richard Goldthwaite writes that the historian ought “to look outside his discipline at some of the larger problems of cultural history—at the wellhead of demand and at the nature of material culture; and with a different perspective of this kind he can perhaps reorient his own research on purely economic problems to raise new questions that will—at last—get him out of the greatest gaps that divide the disciplines in Renaissance studies” (2: 39).

7. Within the province of cultural aesthetics, in fact, Fernand Braudel and the French school of the Annales have set money and business at the core of historical studies. For a comprehensive analysis of the monde Braudellien vis-à-vis historiographical method and economic factors, see J. H. Hexter (61-148) and Hayden White's discussion of the Annales in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (32-45). On matters of Spanish historiography, Américo Castro has warned against Braudel's concentration on “economicomaterialistic reasoning.” Although important, the “historicomaterialistic vision” could not account for the unifying forces that made the Reconquest possible. In fact, “the economic dimension came later; it was not the primary and unifying ‘logos’” (Spaniards 5-6).

8. Peter Dunn takes structural elements such as “I,” the various “others,” and Vuestra Merced to “serve as points of entry into the text” (91). Susan Sniader Lanser has spearheaded an encompassing notion of point of view, and her detailed study of the matter opens with a chapter in which she proposes “A Philosophy of Point of View” (11-63).

9. With a Marxist outlook on the whole concept of the Renaissance, Agnes Heller has consistently set the ideal against the real within the humanist tradition itself: “Everyday life was at least as important a theme of Renaissance thought as the problems of ontology, epistemology, art, or ethics; more accurately, there was a constant and fruitful interaction between those ‘technical’ matters and the study and analysis of daily life. The former were, for the most part, an outgrowth of the examination of the latter” (157-58). For Heller, Montaigne, Bacon, and the development of science and technology were representative of the age's adherence to the practice of life.

10. I paraphrase here Elias L. Rivers, whose concise but clear pairing of two counter-genres, the pastoral and the picaresque, is worth quoting: “The two different sets of fictional conventions underlying these two works constitute a perfect binary opposition. The Spanish pastoral romance, deriving from Garcilaso's eclogues and Sannazaro's Arcadia (1504), present a utopian world of shepherds, who, with a readily accessible and seldom-mentioned diet of natural foods such as acorns and cheese, devote themselves to a leisurely life filled with music and with dialogues about love; the shepherds are courtiers in disguise, placed in an idealized world of natural art, which is free of social and economic pressures. Conversely, the Spanish picaresque novel, with roots in exemplary (ex contrario) folktales about sly tricks and deceptions, presents an urban society of paupers who, under the constant pressure of hunger and economic necessity, learn to defend themselves by hook and crook, trying to rise in a harsh world of free enterprise” (66-67).

11. “Dos linajes sólos hay en el mundo, como decía una abuela ma, que son el tener y el no tener; aunque ella al de tener se atenía; y el día de hoy, mi señor Don Quijote, antes se toma el pulso al haber que al saber.”

12. For historical background, J. H. Elliott writes that Spain was unique because it lacked a “middling group of solid, respectable, hardworking bourgeois to bridge the gulf between the two extremes … The contempt for commerce and manual labour, the lure of easy money from the investment in censos and juros, the universal hunger for titles of nobility and social prestige—all these, when combined with the innumerable practical obstacles in the way of profitable economic enterprise, had persuaded the bourgeoisie to abandon its unequal struggle, and throw in its lot with the unproductive upper classes of society” (305-6).

13. As Walter L. Reed puts it, “Thus in the literary history, the literary politics, and the literary sociology of sixteenth-century Spain one can see similar structures, structures of polarization with a relatively weak middle between the two extremes. I would argue not that these structures are a direct cause of the early Spanish novel but that they are homologous with the form of the novel in a culturally significant way. They both reflect and produce the structure of the Spanish picaresque, where divine transcendence and human degradation conspire against the middle estate of man. They also mirror and project the structure of Don Quixote, where an incorrigible idealistic imagination keeps colliding with an incontrovertibly material world. In these novels and in this society, it is a game of both ends against the middle. And it is in the book itself, that mechanically reproduced and privately consumed text of uncertain authority and value, that these extremes are brought most intriguingly together” (35). A while ago, a pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of the sociology of art, Arnold Hauser, wrote that Cervantes wavered “between the justification of unworldly idealism and of worldly-wise common sense” (2: 147).

14. I draw here from Cervantes's “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” Exemplary Novels (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) 94-95.

15. The term has been popularized by Pedro Salinas in Ensayos de literatura hispánica (72). To set such a social level within the context of Renaissance society at large, it could be helpful to point to Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, which centers on a higher middle-class plateau, where none of the figures he analyzes “inherits a title, an ancient family tradition or hierarchical status that might have rooted personal identity in the identity of a clan or caste. With the partial exception of Wyatt, all of these writers are middle-class” (9).

16. On the subject of New Historicist criticism, I refer to the programmatic collection of essays assembled by H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism (xi, xiv). On strictly picaresque matters, José Antonio Maravall recommended back in 1976 that “a study of the picaresque novel in relation to the rapidly advancing precapitalist spirit has yet to be done” (40).

17. The full passage reads: “The recurrent impulse and effort to define aesthetic value by contradistinction to all forms of utility or as the negation of all other measurable sources of interest or forms of value—hedonic, practical, sentimental, ornamental, historical, ideological, and so forth—is, in effect, to define it out of existence; for when all such utilities, interests, and other particular sources of value have been subtracted, nothing remains” (33).

18. Quotations from Lazarillo de Tormes are from the edition by Everett W. Hesse and Harry F. Williams; translations are from Two Picaresque Novels with page numbers indicated in the text.

    “Fueme tan bien en el oficio que al cabo de cuatro años que le usé, con poner en la ganacia buen recaudo, ahorré para me vestir muy honradamente de la ropa vieja. De la cual compré un jobón de fustán viejo, y un sayo raído de manga tranzada y puerta, y una capa que había sido frisada, y una espada de las viejas primeras de Cuéllar.”

19. Gene Brucker gives a retrospective overview on that historical school, to which he contributed his Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: “The story of Giovanni and Lusanna fits into a genre of historical writing, microhistory, that has recently achieved some notoriety in the discipline” (vii-viii). Other noteworthy examples of the genre that have recently appeared include Carlo Ginzburg's tale of the Friulian miller Menocchio (The Cheese and the Worms, 1980), Natalie Zemon Davis's account of the footloose peasant Martin Guerre, and Judith Brown's poignant story of the nun Benedetta and her tribulations in a Tuscan convent.

20. On more strictly literary grounds, Paul Julian Smith has drawn a parallel distinction between the inclusiveness of pictorialism and the fragmentariness of representation in Writing in the Margin: Spanish Literature of the Golden Age (78-88). The critic would consider Francisco Rico's The Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Point of View as one that enforces a humanistically unifying, validating, and authentic point of view (81). See also John F. Moffitt (5).

21. In his treatment of the “nocion del ‘popular’ en literatura,” Maurice Molho refers to, and paraphrases, Gramsci on matters of popular literature (Cervantes 18-19).

22. Patricia Fumerton writes that “trivial” is “my general term for an analytic of the fragmentary, peripheral, and ornamental addressed at once to the context of historical fact and to the texts of aesthetic artifact” (1).

23. By way of contrast, such edible items were foreign to the geometric and textured theatricality of those untouchable still lifes that Francisco de Zurbarán or Juan Sánchez Cotán have made us familiar with. For “spiritual” interpretations of these still lifes, see Edwin Mullins's comments (19-21) and Bryson (60-69).

24. Marcelin Defourneaux so describes such activities: “A degree above those who lived by begging came the pícaros, who, with the aid of a little work sufficient to keep them from the offence of vagabondage, applied themselves to scrounging and petty theft; such as the pinches de cocina (scullions), who could always find enough to feed themselves and their friends plentifully at the expense of the kitchens where they were employed, and the esportilleros (street porters and errand boys), who being responsible for delivering to the homes of customers goods of all kinds, pinched anything that could be hidden easily under their clothes. Alongside them were the peddlers (buhonero), a calling carried on for some time by Estebanillo after being, he says, ‘degraded’ from his status of pilgrim, and investing his capital in the purchase of knives, combs, rosaries, needles, and other shoddy wares, which he sold in the streets of Seville, an obligatory stage in every picaresque life” (219).

25. “Pidiome el jarro del agua, y díselo como lo había traído. Es señal que, pues no le faltaba el agua, que no le había a mi amo sobrado la comida. Bebimos, y muy contentos nos fuimos a dormir como la noche pasada” (38).

26. The French term was used by Louis Marin (Etudes 91).

27. On specific matters of literature, see Alban K. Forcione (98).

28. See also Javier Herrero, “Renaissance Poverty and Lazarillo's Family: The Birth of the Picaresque Genre” (882).

29. On hunger in the picaresque, see Pedro Salinas, Ensayos de literatura hispánica. Joaquín Casalduero wrote: “En los tres primeros tratados, la crueldad de la vida, la avaricia, el orgullo son solamente la modulación del mismo tema: el hambre. Lazarillo no es nada más que el punto donde a través de varias representaciones converge la misma necesidad de subsistencia, esa necesidad que siente la humanidad de conservarse” (65).

30. On Croce's comments on Lazarillo de Tormes and La Celestina, see Benito Brancaforte (118-24). Until 1948, Marcel Bataillon maintained a similar thesis in his lectures at the university, but then gave priority to the theme of honor (see Pícaros y picaresca: La pícara Justina).

31. On food in the Italian novel from Alessandro Manzoni to Primo Levi, see Gian Paolo Biasin, I sapori della modernità: Cibo e romanzo. D. H. Lawrence wrote a couple of essays on Verga, and he so commented on I Malavoglia: “There is too much, too much of the tragic life of the poor, in it. There is a sort of wallowing in tragedy: the tragedy of the humble. It belongs to a date when the ‘humble’ were almost the most fashionable thing. And the Malavoglia family are most humbly humble. Sicilians of the sea-coast, fishers, small traders—their humble tragedy is so piled on, it becomes almost disastrous. The book was published in America under the title of The House by the Medlar Tree (273).

32. See Maurice Molho, The Politics of Editing (Introducción 35, 42); George A. Shipley, “Lazarillo and the Cathedral Chaplain: A Conspiratorial Reading of Lazarillo de Tormes, Tratado VI” (231); Harry Sieber, Language and Society in “La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes” (78).

33. The Illustrious Kitchen Maid, in Six Exemplary Novels (Great Neck, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Series, 1961) 261.

34. An excellent essay on the sixth tratado is George Shipley's “Lazarillo de Tormes Was Not a Hardworking, Clean-Living Water Carrier” in Hispanic Studies in Honor of Alan D. Deyermond: A North American Tribute.

35. To put it in Georg Lukács's critical terms, such images of primeval simplicity would confirm that “biological and sociological life has a profound tendency to remain within its own immanence” (90).

36. To expand on the socioeconomic conditions of classes of manual workers, the aguador shared with many a lifestyle of subsistence, as Erich Fromm clarifies for us: “Although there were always some who had to struggle hard to earn enough to survive, by and large the guild member could be sure that he could live by his hand's work. If he made good chairs, shoes, bread, saddles, and so on, he did all that was necessary to be sure of living safely on the level which was traditionally assigned to his social position. He could rely on his ‘good works,’ if we use the term here not in its theological but in its simple economic meaning” (43-44).

37. On the relationship between economics and sociology, see Stephen R. G. Jones (10-11).

38. Having divided the text into two parts, each containing three tratados, Joaquín Casalduero made the fourth tratado pivotal inasmuch as it stressed “el aumento de movilidad, el tempo rápido que va a introducir en la segunda parte” (63).

39. On the connection between frustration and realism, see Jon Romano, Dickens and Reality (94). On the representation of objects in Balzac and Dickens, see John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (75-79).

40. George A. Shipley writes that Lázaro's story “is more exactly the chronicle of an initiation into a vile and degraded world. He represents as an arrival in safe port and, later, as a rise to a pinnacle of satisfaction what is scarcely more than a lateral move of incorporation into the debased city of man in the fallen world” (“The Critic as Witness” 179-80).

41. It is worth quoting Castro's assessment of description: “This is life with a minimum of significance, devaluated life—when compared with the lives of those people who created the great cultures of the earth. In this, as in all questions of value, there is gradation. The lowest level corresponds to groups now called primitive, groups that have arrived at dead ends of human self-realization and who mark time down the centuries. For such life as this description is quite adequate … There are no deeds or triumphs of any sort to incite the children of the future. Such primitive peoples may, in effect, be thought of as residing at the end of blind alleys, as excluded from the broad avenues of future possibility available to others” (Idea 293).

42. Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (Madrid: Calpe, 1967) 71-72. I follow the translation and commentary in José Antonio Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia in the “Quixote” (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1991) 45.

43. Guzmán de Alfarache edición, introducción y notas de Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Planeta, 1983) 94.

44. Cros refers here to the social and moral frontiers of the picaresque.

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