SOURCE: Reed, Walter L. “The Advent of the Spanish Picaresque.” In An Exemplary History of the Novel: the Quixotic Versus the Picaresque, pp. 43-70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

[In this essay, Reed discusses the development of the picaresque as an aspect of the development of the novel.]

He has chosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order.

1 Corinthians 1:28

Lazarillo de Tormes, published in three separate editions in 1554, appeared just before the onset of the Counter Reformation in Spain, and it shows some distinctive features as a picaresque novel. Most notably, it is closer to the spirit of humanistic satire, with its critique of ecclesiastical abuse, than the later Spanish novels were to be. Scholars have frequently suggested that the author of the anonymous Lazarillo was a Spanish follower of Erasmus. Although this hypothesis has been discredited,¹ one can see a number of structural and imaginative affinities between this first instance of the novel and a satirical encomium like Erasmus's Praise of Folly. Both works present an ambiguously colloquial address by a speaker of doubtful integrity, a situation that Barbara Babcock calls the framing paradox of the Cretan liar.² Like Lazarillo's obviously self-serving apology, the praising of folly is done by “Folly” herself. Both works also pay special attention to the sins of the church, a critique which goes beyond medieval clerical satire by invoking the reforming authority of the New Testament. The attack on religious orders is oblique in Lazarillo and direct in The Praise of Folly, but it is an attack on the corruption of the office more than simply on the corruption of the officeholder. The protagonist's name in Lazarillo alludes to the biblical Lazaruses in the Gospels of Luke and John, both of whom are resurrected after death; Folly's claim that “all Christian religion seems to have a kind of alliance with folly and in no respect to have any accord with wisdom” more forcefully recalls Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.³ In both these texts we see the alliance of a low secular spokesman with a high religious authority, an alliance that conspires against the authority, dignity, and self-sufficiency of the existing order, of church as well as of state. The spokesman is not himself (herself) religious; he or she alludes to the generic humility of the Christian vision without embodying it.

This autonomy of the speaker in Erasmus, grounded in the classical techniques of satire, helps prepare the way for the sudden and virtually accidental appearance of the kind of writing we now call the novel. Yet Lazarillo de Tormes moves in a different direction from The Praise of Folly. It gives the autonomous voice a more radical freedom. Erasmus insists on the traditional oratorical medium of his discourse, and dramatizes a particularly responsible audience by addressing an introductory letter to Sir Thomas More. He cites numerous classical precedents for his playful exercise—Homer, Democritus, Virgil, Ovid, Lucian, and others—at the beginning and alludes directly to numerous precedents in Scripture for valuing “folly” as the discourse proceeds. Indeed, the fiction that a pagan goddess named “Folly” is speaking becomes quite thin by the middle of the text. The author of Lazarillo, on the other hand, has his character address an anonymous “Vuestra Merced,” an ambiguous character who seems himself implicated in Lazarillo's morally dubious situation. The arch-priest, to whose mistress Lazarillo is married, is the interlocutor's friend, and on one level Lazarillo is trying to defend himself against the rumors circulating against this ménage à trois. But Lazarillo also has his eye on a broader kind of audience when he cites Pliny's maxim that “there is no book, however bad it may be, that doesn't have something good about it” (23). He makes a gesture in the direction of classical literature by citing Pliny and Cicero, but these authorities are merely pretexts for his advertisements for himself. If anything, the allusions only serve to undermine the notion of the classics as morally improving literature; a little of such learning is a dangerous thing.⁴ And where Folly increasingly reveals the biblical subtext behind her rhetorical pretext, Lazarillo shows his spiritual potential only fleetingly in his narrative, when he shares his food with his indigent hidalgo master. Thereafter he becomes more worldly, as he serves more venial and more reliable employers, which leads one critic to speak of his social success as his spiritual “death.”⁵ Such religious judgments are rendered secondary by the text, as I will show later on, but the narrative voice in Lazarillo de Tormes does detach itself from the scriptural chorus and speak of the low and humble world, the material and social realities, as things in and of themselves.

It is useful to compare Lazarillo in this regard with another prose fiction that comes out of the Erasmian matrix, the books of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. In Rabelais's five books one can see a structure broadly similar to that of Lazarillo and The Praise of Folly: an alliance of high moral ideals and low secular clowning, of the spiritually elevated and the physically debased. High and low together attack a pretentious and inadequate middle, an established order that no longer mediates but rather, with its prohibitions and its nonsense, oppresses both mind and body. One can also see how Rabelais, like the author of Lazarillo, tips the Erasmian balance toward the realities of the lower world, where flesh is flesh and not merely a vehicle for the Incarnation, where folly is foolish and not merely a trope for God's truth. Food and drink have some sacramental associations in Rabelais but are more significant as a means of celebrating or sustaining the life of the physical man. And the spokesmen for these realities achieve a subversive freedom from all apparent rules, defeating the official hierarchy by appeal to popular culture.⁶

It is sometimes proposed, and has been increasingly of late, that Gargantua and Pantagruel be considered as an early example of the novel.⁷ The terms of the previous chapter suggest why I do not agree with this view. While reacting in unprecedented ways to the revolution of the book, Rabelais's narratives are deeply committed to the humanist ideals of the Renaissance and are also deeply involved in the oral media of literary presentation. The critique in Rabelais is not so much of the institution of literature per se as of the official norms of academic scholastic culture in general. I will have more to say on the question of Rabelais and the novel in the following chapter on Don Quixote. But I would like here to insist on the important differences between the two types of innovation represented by Rabelais's Oeuvres and the anonymous Lazarillo.

The most obvious difference involves the physical and imaginative scale on which the two narratives operate. Gargantua and Pantagruel are giants, human in form but grossly larger than life, and although Rabelais is not consistent in his use of his fiction, even exploiting the incongruity of normal and gigantic proportions, the gigantic is the norm against which most of the actions and achievements are to be judged. Lazarillo is of ordinary stature; the attention to his childhood and the diminutive of his titulary name render his presence particularly unimposing. He is notable for his lacks rather than for his fulfillments, and his bouts with hunger and thirst contrast markedly with the surfeit of food and drink in Rabelais.

The contrast between excess and minimality functions on an intellectual level as well. The figure in Rabelais most like the picaro is Panurge, the trickster whom Pantagruel encounters begging and in rags, whom he takes on as his servant. But Panurge's quest for food is imaginatively redundant. He begs in twelve different languages, several of them literally unheard of, in a staggering display of erudition rather than a practical sharpening of the wits. Panurge becomes Pantagruel's comrade more than his menial; his tricks are exuberant and gratuitous, motivated by a sense of comic play, where Lazarillo's are calculating and constrained, motivated by physical and psychological needs. As Thomas Greene observes, the pranks of Panurge belong to a widespread Renaissance “art form,” a traditional trickster behavior common in poetry and drama.⁸

The differences between these two fictions, then, are a function of the difference in ethos: of all-inclusiveness in Gargantua and Pantagruel, of deprivation in Lazarillo de Tormes. As Erich Auerbach puts it, “everything goes with everything” in Rabelais—high culture with low culture, the body with the spirit, modernity with antiquity. Auerbach's comments on Rabelais's humanism are particularly relevant to my argument on the origins of the novel:

His humanistic relation to antique literature is shown in his remarkable knowledge of the authors who furnish him with themes, quotations, anecdotes, examples and comparisons; in his thought upon political, philosophical, and educational questions, which, like that of the other humanists, is under the influence of antique ideas; and particularly in his view of man, freed as it is from the Christian and stratified-social frame of reference which characterized the Middle Ages. Yet his indebtedness to antiquity does not imprison him within the confines of antique concepts; to him, antiquity means liberation and a broadening of horizons, not in any sense a new limitation or servitude; nothing is more foreign to him than the antique separation of styles, which in Italy even in his own time, and soon after in France, led to purism and “Classicism.”⁹

Rabelais's fiction is thus prior to neoclassicism rather than being anti-neoclassical. It attacks the established order not from the excluded and humble viewpoint of the half-outsider, to use Guillén's phrase, but from the all-inclusive vision of the polymath and the polyglot, a vision that overwhelms structure, inverts hierarchy, and subverts significance in its sheer plenitude. It is the world in Pantagruel's mouth, not the world from Lazarillo's jaundiced eye. As we have been discovering, the novel is a critique of the neoclassical purification of literature; such a separation of the old and the new had not become a significant enough adversary for Rabelais.

As I shall argue in the next chapter, with Don Quixote the novel later developed its own strategies of inclusiveness, by channeling the multiplicity of literary forms through the consciousness of a character who is himself a reader of texts. But at this earlier point of departure it is fair to describe the difference between Lazarillo de Tormes and Gargantua and Pantagruel as a difference between novel and satire. Rabelais anticipates the novel in interesting ways, and he is reinterpreted novelistically by later writers like Sterne and Melville. But the ethos of his prose fiction is finally the ethos of satire, before his time and after. I would describe this as an ethos of exaggeration, as distinct from the ethos of displacement peculiar to the novel. The label of “satire” is certainly not definitive of Rabelais's work, but at the level of definition on which I have been discussing the novel so far, it is clearly the more appropriate term.¹⁰

The type of satire known as Menippean or Varronian includes many examples of narratives in prose, in which characters and incidents predominate and in which contemporary manners and morals are directly represented. Gargantua and Pantagruel shares many features with Lucian's dialogues and stories, with Petronius's Satyricon, with Erasmus's colloquies and with Swift's later Gulliver's Travels and A Tale of a Tub. Such satires resemble novels in many ways, not the least of which is their generally subversive and antinomian quality. As Alvin Kernan notes, satire seems to disregard the formal order and decorum of good literature so-called.¹¹ But it is in the question of literary rules that the difference between satire and the novel is most important. Satire deliberately violates the rules of literary decorum and of representational form; physical and moral faults are grossly exaggerated, while conventional aesthetic distinctions between one kind of form and another are deliberately confused. “The scene of satire is always disorderly and crowded, packed to the very point of bursting,” writes Kernan.

The deformed faces of depravity, stupidity, greed, venality, ignorance, and maliciousness group closely together for a moment, stare boldly out at us, break up, and another tight knot of figures collects, stroking full stomachs, looking vacantly into space, nervously smiling at the great, proudly displaying jewels and figures, clinking moneybags, slyly fingering new-bought fashions. The scene is equally choked with things: ostentatious buildings and statuary, chariots, sedan-chairs, clothes, books, food, houses, dildoes, luxurious furnishings, gin bottles, wigs.¹²

The effect of such formal confusion and proportional excess, paradoxically, is to affirm the validity of the formalities in question, to reaffirm the rules by dramatizing their necessity. Norms and ideals themselves are represented only fleetingly in the satiric fiction, and when they do appear at any length they often seem thin and inadequate. The real force of rules in satire, which belong more to the domain of custom than to the domain of ethics,¹³ is only revealed in the flagrant violation of them that the satirist depicts. A kind of negative jurisprudence is thus entailed. A satire is an adversary system, a case for the prosecution, and the particular rule that is violated is given all the force of law—of the spirit of the law rather than its letter. Satire presents offenses against customs and mores as if they were violations of a legal covenant.

The legal sanction that satire lends to literary rules is by no means a simple one. There are innumerable reversals, dialectics, and shiftings of logical ground in the case presented. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, for example, the exaggerated human scale of the giants is frequently itself the law by which the physical pettiness and false modesty of ordinary human beings are implicitly condemned—a complex equation of physical excess and moral largesse that Swift reproduces in the Brobdingnagians in Gulliver's Travels. Or there is the self-defense of Folly in Erasmus's Encomium, which impreceptibly turns into a defense of Christian humility and an attack on Stoic philosophical pride. In these early humanistic satires, the overestablished order of the medieval church is the chief offender, and the simpler virtues of Scripture, the classical authors, and folk tradition are the main sources of a countervailing principle or spirit of the law. Nevertheless, the relation of exceptional instance to normative standard is essentially judicial. A particular character, action, or expression is considered as if it were trying to live up to a particular standard of wisdom or virtue—which in point of fact it often is not—and failing miserably in the attempt.

Thus where the institution of literature is concerned, satire pretends to regard the rules of “good literature” as more legally binding than mere generic convention. To write bad epic verse is not simply to be an indifferent poet but to commit a crime against the literary community. Furthermore, satire pretends to regard other forms of human culture and behavior as if they were aspiring to the status of “good literature.” The strategy of the mock-heroic is to look at a particular modern sub- or extraliterary phenomenon as if it were trying consciously to emulate canonical forms like the epic—as if it were trying to crash the cultural gate. The strategy of the carnivalesque in Rabelais is to regard medieval theology as if it were trying to take part in a classical symposium, as if scholastic logic, with its intricate formalities and terminologies, were trying to join the convivial colloquium, with its free speculation, drunken rapture, and popular laughter.

In the novel, on the other hand, exception and norm are placed in a different kind of relationship. The exception, like the excluded servant Lazarillo, is given a new autonomy and becomes another norm, a new law unto itself which to a significant extent eludes the embrace of the canonical law that would judge it and find it wanting. The relation between competing or conflicting forms is thus not judicial, rather it is diplomatic. The novel takes a stand outside a particular system of values, or between competing systems, and while its apparent norms are more visible than the norms of satire, they are also more problematic. The dialectical relationship of the novel to literary tradition entails a conflict of rules, a competition among values, and a general lack of codified precedent for the formal result. It seems to me that the term which best describes the relation of divergent forms in the novel is a diplomatic rather than a legal one; forms are arranged according to a protocol.

The word “protocol,” in English, is used outside the general legal vocabulary. Coming from a Greek word meaning “a flyleaf glued to a manuscript describing its contents,” it refers to an original record of a particular negotiation carried on outside the authority of a given system of law. It is a record that serves as the basis for further negotiations that may become more binding, as in a treaty. The term has been used in analytic philosophy to describe the syntax of basic statements of truth. Protocol sentences are models of verifiable scientific observation of the world. But I would like to use it in this study to define the kind of rules by which the novel, as distinct from other types of literature, tends to operate. A protocol is an agreement sui generis, but its terms are rendered formal and public. A novelistic protocol informs the text on a number of different levels, but it does not establish order or unity in any widely shared literary sense. A protocol is formal, but its form is not necessarily organic, harmonious, or logically coherent. The protocol of a particular novel is often adopted and adapted in subsequent novels, but it is also considerably less normative, as I will argue shortly, than what is generally understood by the term “genre” in literature more oriented toward tradition. If a genre is “a challenge to match an imaginative structure to reality,” as Rosalie Colie suggests, a protocol may be said to reverse the definition: it is a warning against the attempt to match reality with a preexistent literary form.¹⁴

Finally, a secondary meaning of “protocol” helps to explain the way in which the original diplomacies of the novel may easily become highly conventionalized themselves. The term also refers to the rigid rules of ambassadorial precedence, behavior, and dress, which are necessary where no deeper, more organic system of rights and privileges obtains. As in the mass of “popular” novels which remain comfortably and predictably within the formulas of the detective story, science fiction, or the historical romance, a protocol, when it is followed, often produces a proliferation of examples in which even the dialectical tension of traditional literary genres is never achieved. The so-called “realism” of the novel is best seen as a series of protocols in which novels reach out to engage new areas of sign and structure beyond the domain of literary convention, beyond even the cumulative conventions of the novel itself. But the realism of one novel or group of novels may easily become a matter of convention or cliché in novels that exploit the original terms—plot formulas, settings, character types, manners of speech—on a superficial level. The concept of the protocol thus captures one of the paradoxes of the novel that this study had not yet dwelt on sufficiently, the paradox of a kind of writing inherently committed to innovation which at the same time seems so prone, in the mass of its examples, to the stereotypical and the formulaic.

One might say, then, that the novel and satire are opposing revaluations of the nature of literary rules. Satire is conservative and reactionary in the way it appeals to an earlier standard, to literary rule as a spirit of the law. The novel is liberal and progressive in the way it dramatizes a negotiation between new and old species of writing, juxtaposing rather than subordinating one kind to another. Such political labels, of course, can be misleading. One might put the contrast in terms of economics and say that satire affirms standards of value by radically bankrupting the currency of the modern, where the novel describes with more relativity the mechanics of devaluation and exchange. Or one might use categories of logic, as Julia Kristeva does, and say that the novel deals with the “nondisjunction” of logically opposite terms.¹⁵ Whatever terminology is preferred, it should convey the idea that the novel is countersystematic: beyond a system, between systems, or against system altogether. Thus it is finally to the protocol of particular novels that one must turn, and to the way in which these protocols are renegotiated by subsequent novelistic texts.

Lazarillo de Tormes is a text that emerges from the matrix of satire, as I have already noted. It is in this sense not fully novelistic, and some critics have insisted that it is more a precursor than a true example of the picaresque.¹⁶ There is no point in exaggerating its resemblances to later instances of the novel. As a narrative it is quite short; its precision and economy are effective but rarely expand either character or setting with the plenitude of Guzmán de Alfarache or even the relatively economical El Buscón. None of the other characters besides Lazarillo is given a proper name, and Lazarillo's masters are a gallery of social types familiar from the medieval satire of “estates”: the conniving blind man, the miserly priest, the false pardoner.¹⁷ Similarly, the language is not particularly committed to objective description; it is rather made up of conventional phrases and proverbs. As Lazarillo says of his first master, “He relied on the proverb which says that a hard man will give more than a man who hasn't anything at all” (32).

Nevertheless, there are subtle but important dislocations of this apparently traditional material. We have a character who is both knave and gull, who is exploited by others and who deceives them in turn, with no clear standard of virtuous conduct or superior wit. As Francisco Rico has argued, we have in Lazarillo a primary instance of novelistic “point of view,” in which the individual perspective is a primary constituent of value and significance, placing rather than placed within the world.¹⁸ The proverbial and conventional language is ironically twisted, recombined, and misapplied. “I think it's a good thing that important events which quite accidentally have never seen the light of day, should be made public and not buried in the grave of oblivion,” the narrator says, slyly and pompously, of his own paltry vida (23). The wise words of the community are revealed as detachable clichés and can be manipulated to the speaker's advantage. “God (to grant me revenge) had blinded his good sense for that instant” (36), Lazarillo says of his success in luring his blind master to smash his head into the stone pillar. A major theme of Lazarillo is “the opposition of authentic and uniquely personal experience (resulting in this case from the hero's exposure to hunger, cold, blows and justice) and the commonplace terms which the community applies to experience and with which it hopes to dismiss experience,” writes Stephen Gilman.¹⁹

Yet to call Lazarillo's experience “authentic” and “uniquely personal” is to miss the protocol of the novelistic text. In fact, Lazarillo de Tormes is a systematic exploration of the inauthentic; it is informed throughout by a protocol of the ersatz, in which a substituted object or experience is made to serve, provisionally, as a replacement for something else. The substitute is offered deliberately, with an awareness of its lesser value and reduced efficacy. But it serves as a challenge to the intrinsic worth of that which it replaces, a challenge to the status of the status quo.

The operation of the protocol can be seen most easily in the peculiar treatment of objects in the narrative. In a well-known incident, in which the hero is initiated into the picaro's way of life, Lazarillo is asked by his blind master to put his ear close to a stone animal that resembles a bull: “put your ear close to the bull, and you'll hear a loud noise inside it” (27). Lazarillo obeys and has his head smashed against it. In place of the promised sound, which suggests a special message or revelation, he discovers the brute materiality of the object, an object which is itself a replica of something else. The experience acts as an ersatz revelation, nevertheless: “at that moment I felt as if I had woken up and my eyes were opened. I said to myself: ‘What he says is true; I must keep awake because I'm on my own and I've got to look after myself’” (27-28). His curiosity is satisfied in a way that he did not expect.

Lazarillo learns this lesson of substitution very well. He gives his blind master smaller coins than the ones actually donated by passersby, putting a blanca into his mouth and passing a half-blanca on to the beggar who has been saying the prayers. In a more complicated series of substitutions, he steals the blind man's sausage, takes the sausage from its pan and puts a thin rotten turnip in its place. When the blind man discovers the switch and suspects his servant, he pokes his long sausage- (and turnip-) like nose down Lazarillo's throat, which prompts Lazarillo to vomit “his property” back up: “his nose and the half-digested sausage came out at the same time” (34). Lazarillo has the last word in these exchanges when he lures the blind man to jump head-on into the pillar, as an appropriate reprisal for the stone bull. He jeers at the beggar as he runs away, “What! You smelled the sausage and you couldn't smell the post? Olé! Olé!” (37). Just as the physical objects can replace one another, they can also turn out to serve radically different functions. The blind man's wine jug brings Lazarillo pleasure when he sips through a straw from a hole he has made in the bottom of it, but it brings him pain when the blind man discovers the trick and smashes the jug down on his face: “the jug, which had been the source of pleasure and was now to be the instrument of pain” (30).

On the level of character as well, this protocol of the ersatz informs Lazarillo's relationships with his different masters. With the miserly priest he is forced to act like vermin by breaking into the chest that contains the priest's supply of bread. The priest finally catches him, beats him, and tells him, when he regains consciousness, “By God, I've hunted down the mice and snakes that persecuted me” (48). With the impoverished hidalgo, his third master, the master changes places with his servant. The hidalgo ends up depending on Lazarillo for his food and it is finally he who runs away from Lazarillo. In Lazarillo's marriage to the archpriest's mistress in the last chapter, the husband becomes a knowing replacement for the lover, part-time.

Thus on the level of plot, in the interaction of characters and objects, we see a series of bad bargains being made, exchanges which are instrumental rather than ends in themselves and whose success is either temporary or highly ambiguous. Nevertheless, these exchanges are not purely ironic or absolutely devaluing. They involve dubious likenesses that dramatize the instability of life in the social and psychological world, but they do not reveal, even negatively, a clear otherworldly standard of truth. To speak of Lazarillo's success and dishonor simply as his spiritual “death,” as Gilman and others do, is to overemphasize the vertical reference of the text and to overestimate the force of Christian precept in the horizontal relationships of society. The sympathy Lazarillo shows for the impoverished hidalgo is like Christian charity but it is finally not the same. As with the other forms of ersatz, a potential metaphoric identity keeps collapsing into metonymic proximity or juxtaposition. In fact, there is even a scriptural precedent for this frustration of religious message in the Lucan parable of Lazarus to which the novel alludes. In Luke the beggar Lazarus dies after being ignored by the rich man (dives in the Vulgate); the rich man also dies and finds himself in hell. When he sees Lazarus far off in the bosom of Abraham and is denied any relief for himself, the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth to warn his five brothers. “But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them listen to them.’ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he replied, ‘but if someone from the dead visits them they will repent.’ Abraham answered, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets they will pay no heed even if someone should arise from the dead.’”²⁰ The idea of the resurrected beggar as a stand-in for the prophets is explicitly rejected here; Lazarus is a type for the rejection of new typologies.

Nor is it clear on a more practical level that, as some critics have tried to argue, Lazarillo's wits become less sharp as he becomes less hungry. Gilman describes the Prologue, delivered by the older man, as a dull performance, an “epilogue post-mortem,”²¹ but it is equally possible to argue that Lazarillo is here, as elsewhere, the creator rather than the butt of the irony. Thus R. W. Truman considers that Lazarillo “comes before us as one who feels he had made substantial material progress in life and yet is so far conscious of the limited nature of what he has achieved that he enjoys the comedy of pretending to have achieved more than he has in fact done.”²² Even at the end of his narrative, when he accepts his wife's adultery with apparent unconcern, he shows that his wits are still alive and his tongue still sharp. When the archpriest has told him to ignore the gossip about his wife, he reports his reply: “‘Sir,’ I said to him, ‘I made up my mind a long time ago to keep in with respectable people. It's quite true that my friends have said something to me about my wife. In fact they've proved to me that she had three children before she married me, speaking with reverence because she's here.’ Then my wife began to swear such fearful oaths that I was sure the house was about to fall down about our ears” (78). What we see here is not so much an irony directed at Lazarillo, who remains too evasive to be anyone's dupe, but an irony directed at the social concept of honor itself. Lazarillo wears the manners of the socially respectable as a disguise, in a way that exposes the fictionality of these manners. Thus he says to anyone who would hint at his wife's infidelity, “I swear on the Sacred Host itself that she is as good a woman as any in Toledo. If anyone says the opposite I'll kill him” (79). The boundary between ‘worse than’ and ‘as good as’ is challenged, and the ersatz man of honor installs himself in the midst of respectability. “That was the same year as our victorious Emperor entered this famous city of Toledo and held his Parliament here. There were great festivities, as Your Honour doubtless has heard. At that time I was at the height of my good fortune” (79).

The reader, of course, is made a party to the protocol of the text. The book that he holds in his hands is a substitute for the letter to “Vuestra Merced”—a replacement underlined in Spanish by the general use of Vd. as the polite form of the second-person address. It is not a case of someone's private letters being presented to the world by an editor, as in the later fiction of the epistolary novel, but of a self-confessed public performance presenting itself as a private communication—and vice versa. Similarly, Lazarillo's life story or vida is a surrogate for the explanation of his dubious circumstances or caso that his fictional correspondent has supposedly requested: “And since Your Excellency has written to ask a full account of this subject I thought best not to begin in the middle but at the beginning, so as to present a complete narrative of myself.” The idea of beginning at the beginning rather than in the middle implicitly disclaims any epic ambitions on Lazarillo's part, yet the final phrase of his prologue ironically presents him as an ersatz Aeneas: “how much more they have accomplished who have had Fortune against them from the start, and who have nothing to thank but their own labor and skill at the oars for bringing them into a safe harbor.”²³

The protocol of substitution in Lazarillo de Tormes thus suggests from the start a view of the novel as surrogate literature, as a humble yet arrogant pretender to cultural respectability. Its pretense, at the same time, lays the respectability of literature open to question. If there is no book however bad that does not have some good in it, as Lazarillo reminds us Pliny has said, it may be that the greatest of books have some bad in them as well, or—more to the point—can be used for morally dubious ends like self-advancement in the hands of a vulgar class of readers.

This is not to say that all its readers, especially the initial ones, responded to Lazarillo according to the terms of the protocol I have sketched out here. On the contrary, there is evidence that the book was read along quite different lines—for example, by the author of an anonymous and spurious “sequel,” who went on to describe Lazarillo's transformation into a tuna fish in the manner of Apuleius and to report his scholarly disputations with the doctors of the University of Salamanca in the manner of Rabelais.²⁴ Though less popular than the original, which appeared in four separate editions within two years, parts of this spurious sequel found their way into translations from the Spanish for some time. Other evidence of the fact that Lazarillo was misunderstood—or rather read unsympathetically—is its appearance on the Index Expurgatorius in 1559 and the appearance of a censored edition in 1573, which cut out the chapters with the worldly friar and the false pardoner but left the chapter with the miserly priest. The Council of Trent itself abolished the granting of indulgences for offerings of money and thus got rid of pardoners, but the Inquisition was apparently most sensitive to criticism of the itinerant functionaries and mendicant orders. In spite of its initial popularity, Lazarillo had to wait until the end of the century until it was widely recognized as a new species of writing; until, that is, it became more than one of a kind.

The argument over the novelistic status of Lazarillo de Tormes—whether it belongs to the class of subsequent picaresque novels or whether it is merely a “prototype” of the genre—has been resolved, for all intents and purposes, by Claudio Guillén, who shows that historically considered, it is both.²⁵ Guillén traces the publication history of Lazarillo and observes that its popularity dwindled in the half-century after its publication, until the appearance of Guzmán de Alfarache in 1599. Then it went through nine editions in four years, and in most cases it was the editors of Guzmán who produced the new Lazarillos. The final seal was put on the process of recognition, Guillén argues, when Cervantes's character, Ginés de Pasamonte, speaks in the First Part of Don Quixote of his own life story, “so good … that Lazarillo de Tormes will have to look out, and so will everything in that style that has ever been written or ever will be” (176).²⁶ The form of the novel as a particular literary kind is constituted not by one example or even by two, but by a reader who singles out the kind (género, says Cervantes) and commits his recognition to the medium of print.

The term “genre,” as applied to the picaresque in particular and the novel is general, is misleading, however. It implies a more stable set of rules than in fact ever pertained, and a greater commitment to the idea of such rules than can be discerned from the texts. As the spurious sequels to Lazarillo, Guzmán, and Don Quixote attest, the novel was from its inception a particularly open invitation to other authors; it encouraged expropriation more than imitation, a cashing in on the marketable material rather than an observation of literary decorum. Both Guzmán and Don Quixote were immediate and unprecedented best-sellers, and respect for tradition or rules seems to have played a small part in the proliferation of narratives “in that style.” The novelistic protocol, as I have suggested, allows considerably more latitude in the observance of literary formalities than do poetic or dramatic genres. Similarly, the novelistic series, as I would prefer to call the succession of novels bearing family resemblances to one another, is a more open-ended affair than a generic tradition, however much genres might themselves have been combined or transformed. As Rosalie Colie argues, it was “the concept of generic form” that was important for the Renaissance humanists, much more than the definition of specific generic norms. And that concept had a “social force and function,” setting forth “definitions of manageable boundaries, some large, some small, in which material can be treated and considered.”²⁷

It is precisely the lack of such a shared belief in separable (and combinable) literary kinds that gives the novel its impetus in literary history. Instead of conforming to a generic type, a novel follows another novel in a historical series. The novelistic series may be a matter of explicit sequels: The Second Part of the Life of the Picaro, Guzmán de Alfarache; Lazarillo de Manzanares; James Hind, the English Guzmán; The Spiritual Quixote; Sir Launcelot Greaves. The changes are rung on a local habitation or a name.²⁸ Or the series may be made up of less explicit successor novels that exploit a plot and setting formula (the Gothic novel, the sea story, the Western), a character-type and professional role (the detective story, the Bildungsroman, the portrait of the artist). As I noted earlier, many of these series resemble genres in their tendency to the stereotypical and the formulaic, but the conventions have much more to do with their subject matter than with any formal characteristics—plot structure, mode of characterization, diction, or “point of view”—and have much less normative power than the rules of genre. Novelistic series are by nature more loosely defined, in part because of their focus on the “history” or “adventures” of a particular character or group. Such a focus promotes the idea of additive sequence. How can my book be finished, asks Ginés de Pasamonte, when my life isn't over yet? No matter what sense of an ending is given by a particular novel, there is an implicit “to be continued”—a promise that is explicit from Lazarillo onwards: “I will inform Your Honour of my future in due course”; “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”²⁹

Recent scholarship on the picaresque novel has unfortunately blurred this distinction between novelistic series and poetic or dramatic genre. The most lucid and informed discussion of the subject is again that of Claudio Guillén, in “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” where distinctions are drawn between (1) picaresque novels “in the strict sense,” (2) “another group of novels [that] may be considered picaresque in a broader sense of the term only,” and (3) “a picaresque myth: an essential situation or significant structure derived from the novels themselves.” For the strict sense of the term, Guillén offers a list of seven shrewdly chosen characteristics. These however exclude a number of early Spanish successors to Lazarillo and Guzmán (such as Salas Barbadillo's La hija de Celestina and Espinel's Marcos de Obregón, both influential abroad). Furthermore, these defining characteristics are somehow independent of “the picaresque genre,” which Guillén identifies only as “an ideal type, blending, in varying degrees or fashions, Lazarillo de Tormes with Guzmán de Alfarache … with the addition of other novels according to the case.” In other words, the normative genre, with its supposedly “stable features” is kept in isolation from specific criteria in Guillén's analysis, and has only a putative existence in the possible community of texts. In spite of his keen insight into the dynamics of literary history, Guillén here finally refuses the novel its full literary difference.³⁰

At the other extreme of Guillén's historical flexibility lies the procrustean attempt of Stuart Miller in The Picaresque Novel, which frankly avows its model in Aristotle's Poetics: “a forthrightly systematic attempt to construct an ‘ideal genre type’ for the picaresque novel, showing how a number of coherent formal devices unite to produce a specific picaresque content and emotional response.”³¹ There is something deeply contradictory about Miller's desire to formalize the rules of a genre that he finds reflecting “a total lack of structure in the world, not merely a lack of ethical or social structure” (p. 131). He abstracts, or chooses examples, from eight different picaresque novels, from Lazarillo to Roderick Random; he sees 1550-1750 as the “classic period” of the picaresque (p. 4), and thus surreptitiously canonizes the anticanonical form.

Like attempts at a poetics of the novel discussed in Chapter 1, most definitions of the picaresque as a genre go astray in considering it on the model of poetry, of drama, or even of myth, rather than as an early instance of the novel. Ulrich Wicks is in fact specific on this point: “I suggest that … we leave out of consideration for the time being one half of our term, namely novel, a formidable job of definition itself.”³² Like so many of the nets cast by literary criticism, genre theory allows the novel, in its genuine yet not unlimited novelty, to escape.

It is more accurate, therefore, to think of Lazarillo de Tormes as a pretext for Guzmán de Alfarache and certain other novels than to think of it as a prototype for a genre. There is, in fact, little direct evidence that Alemán had Lazarillo foremost in his mind, or that he considered resemblances worth advertising. There are reminiscences in the form of the title and in the occasional references to “Guzmanillo”; there is an allusion to the trials of being a blind man's servant, although Guzmán never has a blind master. And there is a picaresque conversion that recalls Lazarillo's, though it lacks the specificity of the stone bull. “I plainely began to perceive,” Guzmán says, “how Adversitie makes men wise: in that very instant, me thought, I discovered a new light; which as in a cleare Glasse, did represent unto mee things past, things present, and things to come” (Mabbe, I, 236). But as one critic puts it, Alemán's novel is most notable for the way it enlarges the scope of Lazarillo—its geography, its social spectrum, and its range of cultural reference.³³ Thus Ben Jonson wrote in a dedicatory poem to Mabbe's translation:

Who tracks this Authors, or Translators Pen
Shall finde, that either hath read Bookes, and Men;
To say but one, were single. Then it chimes,
When the old words doe strike on the new times,
As in this Spanish Proteus; who, though writ
But in one tongue, was form'd with the worlds wit.

(I,31)

The neoclassicizing rhetoric of Jonson's verse, the assumption that books and “old words” are a primary source for describing the “new times” and that Guzmán is a Proteus redivivus, misrepresents Guzmán as a novel, perhaps, but it does describe the greater bookishness and broader worldliness of Alemán's text.

The major problem for a modern reader, in fact, is in coming to terms with the overabundance of commentary on the simple story line of Guzmán's adventures. Instead of the spare understatement of Lazarillo, we have a voluminous moralizing on the part of the older narrator, a moralizing that takes off from the behavior of the picaro or of the characters he encounters, but extends itself into general expositions of doctrine, proverbs, sententiae, exemplary anecdotes, and other narrative digressions. The digressions are not made without a certain self-consciousness on the narrator's part; some of the asides anticipate Tristram Shandy. “O what a gentle disparate, what a pretty absurdity is this of mine, yet well grounded in Divinity? how am I leapt from the Oare to the Helme? What a Saint John the Evangelist am I become on the sudden that I reade you such a lecture?” (I, 83), Guzmán remarks ironically at one point. And at another: “I treat in this of mine owne life, and therefore will not meddle with other mens; but I doe not know, whether I shall be able, when a ball offers it selfe so fairly, to pull backe my hand or no? For there is no man that is Master of himselfe, when he is on horsebacke” (I, 103). English and French translations, particularly in the eighteenth century, frequently omit this homiletic material, but a historical reading of the novel must take it into account.³⁴

If we cease to look for traditional literary form and search instead for the peculiar protocol of Alemán's narrative, however, we need not apologize for the lack of unity or symmetry. There is clearly a double structure or duality at least in the narrative, but it is not simply a “precarious equilibrium” in which both sides “lessen” or “weaken” one another.³⁵ There is a function and purpose in the pervasive dichotomy, a symbolic action that may best be identified as that of punishment, chastisement, or castigation. The edition of Lazarillo that was approved by the Inquisition was the edición castigado. Alemán, in effect, makes such “chastisement” an integral part of his text, the dominant protocol of his own version of the picaresque. As Guzmán says himself at one point, “It stood with me as with prohibited bookes” (II, 60). A new novelistic protocol is simply written over the older protocol of Lazarillo de Tormes.

The protocol of castigation is most obvious in the moralizing commentary, which functions almost as a gloss or marginalia on the primary narrative line of autobiography. Indeed, the “discreet reader” is invited to collaborate: “In this Discourse, thou maist moralize things, as they shall be offered unto thee, Thou hast a large margent left thee to doe it” (I, 18). The prodesse is intrinsically separated from the delectare in the Horatian formula; moral “profit” is to be brought in from beyond any unified literary text.³⁶ A characteristic moralizing sequence in Guzmán is the report on an immoral act by the protagonist, followed by a criticism of that act, followed by a general condemnation of the offense as common to all mankind, followed by proverbs and a brief exemplum. It is this moral policing of literature that Cervantes mocks so brilliantly in his picaresque fantasia “The Dog's Colloquy”: “All this is preaching, Scipio my friend,” Berganza interrupts his canine companion. “I agree with you, and so I'll be quiet,” Scipio replies—whereupon Berganza launches into a long moralizing digression of his own.³⁷

Yet the chastisement is not merely extrinsic to Guzmán de Alfarache. It is also represented, vividly and realistically, in the psychology of the picaro himself. Realism in the novel, I have suggested, is simply a certain type of protocol, one that engages certain formalities of an extraliterary world. In Lazarillo it is most fully rendered in the attention to physical objects, to their manipulation and substitutability for one another. The thoughts and feelings of the character are more hidden, more ambiguous. In Guzmán, the world of objects is of less concern; the focus of novelistic realism is the emotional and cognitive experience of the corrected offender. We see clearly Guzmán's ambivalence toward morality, and his psychological dependence on the approval of others. He becomes addicted to certain gratifications beyond all physical need, as when he compulsively steals sweetmeats at the house of the Cardinal. He experiences humiliation and then struggles to assuage it. His response to correction is a mixed one, involving rationalization, self-condemnation, and criticism of the offense in other people. The older narrator, supposedly converted and redeemed at the end of his story, looks back on his earlier self and belabors it with moral truths, but the earlier self has internalized the psychic drama of crime and punishment as well.

It is important to see that the scene of this crime and punishment is the self rather than society; Guzmán is considerably less than a hardened criminal. Alexander Parker rightly insists that a picaro is a “delinquent” rather than a felon, a character whose social acts are more in the nature of misdemeanors than gross violations of the law. The law Guzmán is most concerned with is moral and religious, and when he is finally sent to the galleys it is for misappropriation of funds rather than robbery or murder. While he is in the galleys he is most severely punished for a theft he did not commit. There is considerable attention to Guzmán's family as causal factors in his delinquency—to his father, a converted Jew and a merchant of varying fortunes and shady practices; to his mother, who is a fortune hunter and a whore; and to his one-time wife, whose death causes him multiple hardships. He is often punished for and by the failings of those he depends on, yet Alemán conveys little sense of protest at the injustice.

Guzmán's own attitude might be called both pessimistic and masochistic. He even has some insight into the way his attitude limits his prospects. “I have learned long agoe couragiously to suffer and abide the changes of Fortune with an undaunted minde, for I alwayes suspect the worst, looking for the hardest measure she can give me, and prevent her better usage, by expecting no good at her hands” (III, 131-32). But in Alemán's imagination the precise justice of a particular punishment is less important than the rough justice of human suffering for human sinfulness. As one critic has suggested, the religious stress of the novel is less on the New Testament law of love and redemption than on the Old Testament law of persistent original sin.³⁸

The castigation or chastisement that is so pervasive in Guzmán's experience is a means of preserving the intrinsically wayward self. As Guzmán says at one point, “All which I did, that by correcting my selfe, I might conserve my selfe” (II, 35). Dissipation is more than a metaphor; it becomes a threat to one's very identity. Or as Guzmán says to the reader, “My only purpose was (as I told thee before) to benefit thee, and to teach thee the way, how thou mightest with a good deale of content and safetie, passe thorow the gulph of that dangerous sea wherein thou saylest. The blowes I shall receive, thou the good counsels” (III, 28). Guzmán is a scapegoat for the self in Counter Reformation society, one in whose sacrifice every reader may vicariously participate, just as he, in his moral castigation of the sins widespread in that society, participates vicariously in the survival of the reader.

Thus we see in the structure of Guzmán de Alfarache the picaresque's characteristic alliance of the high and the low against the middle, but the alliance works in a different way than in Lazarillo de Tormes. Here high religious doctrine continually chastizes low secular practice, subjecting it to corrective punishment. Low practice does not insinuate itself into the honorable middle estate, as in the ironic upward mobility of Lazarillo; rather it drags this middle estate down with it, into its own abasement. Thus in Guzmán the picaro and the novel are allowed many of the trappings of humanistic dignity and culture. There are dedicatory poems and prefaces advertising the artistry of Mateo Alemán, and we are told in one of them that Guzmán has “(by his study) come to be a good Latinist, Rhetorician, and Grecian” (I, 19). Guzmán spends a good deal of time in cultivated Italy, and pursues a degree in the liberal arts at the University of Alcalá de Henares. Yet all this residual humanism is of little consolation as Guzmán continually experiences the collapse of his higher aspirations. He visits Florence at one point in his travels and marvels for a time at the beauty and fine artistic form of the city. But his aesthetic valuation is soon subjected to an economic one as he runs out of money; Florence “began now (me thought) to stinke, I could not endure the sent of it; every thing seemed so foule and filthy to my sight, that I did now long to be gone. … You may see (my masters) what wonders want of money can worke” (III, 213).

It is a similar case with the three interpolated romances that Alemán introduces into Guzmán's narrative, a device uncharacteristic of other picaresque novels. They are, in their mode, more idealizing and “entertaining” than Guzmán's picaresque adventures, but they also deal, thematically, with more cruel and unusual punishments. The first, a Moorish romance, allows the hero to convert to Christianity and escape his execution. The third, taken from Masuccio, involves a rape which revenges itself and leaves the husband in blissful ignorance of his wife's violation. The middle tale, “Dorido and Clorinia,” is a macabre story in which a man cuts off the hand of a woman and has both his hands cut off in return. The hands are nailed to the dying woman's door with some verses in which the first offender proclaims the “sentence / … too small a punishment for my Offence” (II, 291). In effect, Alemán creates a fictional arm of the Inquisition itself through his protocol of corrective punishment. But like the irony of the impetus given to modern capitalism by the theology of Luther and Calvin, the irony of Alemán's project is that his didactic religious purpose considerably extended the developing secularity of the novel as a literary form.

The publication of a spurious Second Part of Guzmán de Alfarache by a certain Juan Martí apparently led Alemán to intensify and complicate, though not essentially to change, the protocol of the First Part. There is not the major transformation of the rules of the First Part that we see in the Second Part of Don Quixote, but like Cervantes, Alemán manages to incorporate the counterfeit sequel into his continuation of the novel while taking an imaginative revenge on its author. Alemán's revenge is indirect. He has Guzmán meet a character named Sayavedra (Martí's pseudonym) who identifies himself as Juan Martí's brother. Sayavedra first robs Guzmán, but then becomes his servant; he recounts his life to his master, which is a pure, unmoralized version of the picaresque. Finally, during a storm at sea, Sayavedra goes mad, claims that he is Guzmán de Alfarache, jumps overboard, and drowns. Guzmán laments his death with apparent sincerity, making Alemán's punishment of his rival seem an impersonal fate:

It would have griev'd a mans heart and moved much compassion, to see the things that he did, and the fooleries which he uttered; … he would crye out in a loud voyce, I am Guzman de Alfarache's ghost, I am that ghost of his, which goes thus wandering up and downe the world; whereat he made me often both laugh and feare. … he would not leave his talking, but by flashes would fall a ripping up of my life, and bolt out by fits, all that which I had formerly recounted unto him concerning the courses I had taken, composing a thousand extravagancies.

(IV, 38-39)

Whether Martí's sequel is the main cause of the change or not, we can see how Alemán's Second Part of Guzmán further criticizes and corrects the narrative energy of the simple picaresque vida. Guzmán is himself the master in this relationship, not the servant. The picaresque account of trickery and deceit is attributed to another character, and this understudy is then killed off. The picaresque scapegoat is given a picaresque scapegoat of his own. Alemán complains in the Second Part that he does not want his book to be known as the book of the picaro, but as “The Watch-Tower of mans life” (III, 127). The subtitle Atalaya de la vida humana (the “watchman” is borrowed from Ezekiel), appears on the title page, and though one may well question Guzmán's status as a latter-day prophet, there is a substantial increase in moralizing in this sequel. Whole chapters go by with only the briefest allusion to specific events from Guzmán's life story, and the narrator loses all self-consciousness about his digressions. As a character, Guzmán is also a more public and official figure than in the First Part—he is a courtier, a master of servants, a husband, a merchant, and a scholar. His final position is that of a convict in the galleys, but this dramatic degradation can also be seen as part of the heavier castigation of the picaresque in the Second Part. He does undergo a conversion in the galleys but, as Norval notes, “Guzmán's most spectacular conversion has been followed by his most hideous act of revenge,” the entrapment and betrayal of Soto, a convict who had earlier borne false witness against him.³⁹ “Soto, and one of his Companions, who were the Ring-leaders of this rebellion, were condemned to be drawne in pieces with foure Gallies; and five others to bee hang'd: Which sentence was executed. And as many as were found to have a finger in this businesse, were confined to the Gallies for terme of life, being first publikely whipt, passing from Gally to Gally, till they had rounded the whole Fleete” (IV, 352-53). After this orgy of correction, Guzmán himself is pardoned and set free, and his narrative comes to an end. The clearest thing about his conversion is that it finally enables the old offender to join forces with the police. Alemán promises a third part of Guzmán de Alfarache but it seems never to have appeared. His only subsequent works were a book on spelling, a life of the archbishop of Mexico, and San Antonio de Padua, a saint's life.

There were many successors to Guzmán, however, in the series of picaresque novels that developed in Spain. The series became not a single line of development but a branching in several directions. Ignoring for the moment the picaresque novellas of Cervantes, which will be taken up in the following chapter, one can describe three different lines of succession. The first was inaugurated by La Pícara Justina (1605), more properly a parody of the picaresque. It is “an implicit satire on the aims and structure of Guzmán de Alfarache,” Parker notes, “whose appearance was, as the Prologue states, the spur of its own publication.” “Its style … is a treasure-house of the language of burlesque, a riot of verbosity in which popular speech is given an exuberant ornamentation by being overladen with the language of polite literature.”⁴⁰ But this parody was reclaimed by more straightforward picaresque novels, as Parker shows, like Salas Barbadillo's Hija de Celestina (1612) and Castillo Solorzano's La Garduna de Sevilla (1642), in which the protagonist is female, the narrative is in the third person, and there is little or no moral emphasis. As one critic points out, Salas Barbadillo tries to give his version of the picaresque a unity of form and a coherence of effect that would bring it in line with neo-Aristotelian principles.⁴¹

A second line of succession tended to bypass Guzmán de Alfarache and hearken back to Lazarillo de Tormes. The ironic tone of Lazarillo becomes more playful and comic, and there is a notable lack of moral commentary. The lower-class rogue continues to survive on the fringes of society by his wits alone. Examples of this line include Jean de Luna's “corrected and emended” second part of Lazarillo de Tormes (1620), Tolosa's Lazarillo de Manzanares (1620), and the apparently eponymous Estevanillo Gonzalez (1646). In Estevanillo in particular, the hero becomes a more traditional jester, and the spirit of the Counter Reformation is conspicuously absent.

Finally, there are a number of Spanish texts that adopt certain forms or themes of the picaresque novel for essentially other kinds of writing: Espinel's Marcos de Obregón (1618), a largely autobiographical series of adventures with a minimal emphasis on deceptive transactions; Carlos García's Desordenada Codicia (1619), combining one rogue's confession with a general anatomy of thieves and thieving, extending to classical and biblical precedents; and Enríque Gómez's El siglo pitagorico (1644), probably based on a satire of Lucian, which deals with the transmigration of a picaro's soul. Though these last works clearly derive from the picaresque, they move well beyond the novel into the miscellaneous “literature of roguery,” as Chandler calls it. The novel arose in Golden Age Spain, but it was perfectly capable of declining then as well, or of passing into other kinds of literature. Estevanillo Gonzalez was the last picaresque novel of any significance written in Spain until the nineteenth century. It is probably this curious loss of the novelistic initiative in Spanish literature itself that has led literary historians to underestimate its importance in the reorganization of the novel in France and in England, when the challenge of the novel to canonical literature was to become more permanently established.

The most brilliant of all the successors of the original Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache was Quevedo's El Buscón—La vida del Buscón llamado don Pablos, which may have been begun as early as 1604 but which was not published until 1626. What is most interesting about this version of the picaresque is that Quevedo appears quite hostile to the values and techniques of Lazarillo and Guzmán, indeed to the idea of the novel itself. He was one of the most learned classical scholars of his time and a virulent defender of aristocratic privilege. As far as editors can tell, he never authorized the publication of El Buscón as a book, but instead had it circulated in manuscript, in the older courtly manner of transmission.⁴² The narrative is literarily self-conscious; its stylistic brilliance is heavily indebted to the baroque conceit rather than to literal description. The story is “The Life of the Swindler, Called Don Pablos,” a generic rather than a specific title and one that calls attention to the hero's unreliability and social pretensions rather than to his proper name and birthplace. Quevedo's reception of the picaresque resembles that of Cervantes, who saw the emergent novel as a literary kind rather than as something unique.

Nevertheless, Quevedo's literary mimicry is such that he produces a novel of his own—not a parody like the Pícara Justina, nor a satire like his own Sueños, which freely mingle the natural and the supernatural in their visionary denunciation of human vice and folly. Unlike Cervantes, Quevedo did not create the broadly different counterfiction to the picaresque that Don Quixote represents, but, like Ginés de Pasamonte in Cervantes's novel, he turns out one of the best of the kind ever written.⁴³ To use a current theoretical term, Quevedo deconstructs the picaresque novel as he knew it, dismantles its formality and its ideology from within. Yet in the ongoing history of the novel as a form, this deconstruction is virtually indistinguishable from a new novel in the series, another novel informed by a different protocol. As we have seen, in the emergence of the novel such opposition became the rule rather than the exception.

The stance of El Buscón toward its predecessors can be seen most clearly in a preface “To the Reader,” which is apparently not Quevedo's own but was added by the bookseller, Roberto Duport, who arranged for the first printed text.⁴⁴ If such is the case, Duport is an attentive reader of Quevedo, making explicit what the author leaves his audience to discover on its own: that the reader of this text will pick it up expecting entertainment but will find his pleasure quickly turning to embarrassment and pain. “Here you will find all the tricks of the low life or those which I think most people enjoy reading about,” the preface advises. The admission of our pleasure becomes somewhat unsettling as we follow the list: “craftiness, deceit, subterfuge and swindles, born of laziness to enable you to live on lies.” The pleasure principle becomes a still more disturbing kind of profit: “and if you attend to the lesson you will get quite a lot of benefit from it.” Such benefits one would hardly want to acknowledge. The final humiliation comes as we are advised to reform ourselves, on the basis of something not even in the text: “Study the sermons, for I doubt if anyone buys a book as coarse as this in order to avoid the inclinations of his own depraved nature.” The nonexistent “sermons” are a jibe at Guzmán de Alfarache, but the more serious accusation is leveled at the hypocrite lecteur.⁴⁵ It is not only the picaresque novel that Quevedo calls into question but the picaresque reader who would consume them, the “idle reader” treated so much more liberally by Cervantes.

Thus while there are many signs of Quevedo trying in El Buscón to outdo Lazarillo by presenting exaggerated versions of episodes in the earlier text,⁴⁶ and while there is much evidence that El Buscón is a thoroughgoing thematic rejection of the social and moral values of Guzmán (in the version of Juan Martí as well as of Alemán),⁴⁷ the most powerful assault is made on the expectations and the sensibilities of the reader. The protocol of this novel is a protocol of mortification, like the chastisement of Guzmán in some respects, but different in the means and the purpose of the punishment meted out. Where Alemán intends the punishment as corrective and finally beneficial to the self, Quevedo holds out little hope for anyone's reform. And where Alemán effects his chastisement by a heavy application of moral wisdom from outside and beyond, Quevedo mortifies the pleasure of the text by subversion from within. The focus of this protocol is not on objects in the world, nor is it on psychology of the main character as an actor in the world. It is rather on the vicarious experience of reading a first-person novel, where we experience objects and psychology through the medium of another self, or, more strictly speaking, through the medium of another's printed discourse. Pablos's first initiative in the novel is to reject the careers his parents envision for him—his father wants him to be a thief, his mother a male witch—and to pursue an education: “I told them I wanted to learn to be an honest man and that they ought to send me to school, because you couldn't do anything without knowing how to read and write” (87). Literacy is easily acquired, but honesty (virtue, virtud in the Spanish) is not. As readers we are quickly led to sympathize with Pablos's desire to escape his demoralizing origins, but we are repeatedly shown the impossibility of his doing so.

As recent critics of the novel point out, there is a persistent pattern in Pablos's adventures of the past returning to haunt him, humiliate him, and finally destroy him. “The structure of the Buscón, based on a repetition of motifs, is designed to block Pablos' exit from the family of which he is so ashamed,” writes C. B. Morris.⁴⁸ Thus Pablos's moment of picaresque awakening comes from the realization that the insults other children have heaped on his mother—that she is a witch and a whore—are true. “When I realized the truth it was like a kick in the stomach” (89). Thus he is “paralyzed with shame” in the middle of his career by the fact that his uncle is a hangman (142) and he is forced to leave Madrid. And thus toward the end of the novel, when he is trying to pass himself off as a nobleman, his childhood friend Don Diego reappears and inadvertently reveals his antecedents. Speaking of the remarkably similar person he used to know, Don Diego exclaims, “You won't believe this, sir, but your mother was a witch, your father a thief and your uncle a public executioner, and he was the worst and most unpleasant man you ever saw” (189). Of course Don Diego soon discovers the truth of Pablos's identity.

Nevertheless, as Leo Spitzer observed long ago, it is difficult to maintain that a coherent moral judgment on Pablos is being elicited from us as readers.⁴⁹ In the first place, such a judgment is so easily passed as to be uninteresting. Pablos's wrongdoing and dullness are obvious and self-confessed, and his singular lack of success as a trickster can hardly evoke the indignation of satire. Secondly, the main impetus of his adventures is the emulation of someone else's example. Much more than Guzmán, Pablos is overanxious to please; he is less a servant of many masters than a student of many teachers. “I went to school,” he says, “and the master greeted me very cheerfully, saying that I looked a quick bright lad. As I didn't want to disabuse him I did my lessons very well that day” (88). He adopts the role of picaro later on out of a similar desire to conform: “‘when in Rome do as the Romans do,’ says the proverb, and how right it is. After thinking about it I decided to be as much a tearaway as the others and worse than them if I could. I don't know if I succeeded but I certainly tried hard enough” (112). And even at the lowest moral point in his career, when he kills two policemen in Seville, he has been inspired by the example of others, in particular by a former classmate, Mattoral, whom he calls “the master of novices” (212). Pablos is an incurable reader of other persons' vidas. Conversely, the reader of his vida is continually and disarmingly solicited to identify with Pablos's emotions, rather than to pass judgment on his acts. “How can I explain my feelings?” he asks rhetorically (96). “You can imagine what sort of life we led under these conditions” (97). “You can't imagine how disgusted I was,” he says of a meal with his uncle where the meat pies are made of human flesh—an understatement more effective than any exaggeration (143).

The ruling passion of Pablos as a character, and the dominant affect with which the reader finds himself involved, is the feeling of shame. With Guzmán, it is more proper to speak of a sense of guilt, of the internalization and partial grasp of the sense of wrongdoing and suffering for wrong. But in Pablos's case the sense of self is bound up with externals and surfaces, with the image reflected to the self by others. This personal shame-culture of the main character is reflected in the hyperbolic conceits and understated euphemisms that pervade the narrative style. As Parker puts it, “The exposure of human self-conceit is apparent … in a particular type of verbal witticism that is a constant thread running through the style. In describing people or objects connected with them, Quevedo uses an epithet or a phrase that ennobles them, and then, by word-play, shatters the illusion by turning it into its opposite.”⁵⁰ For example, Pablos mentions his younger brother, who picks pockets in their father's barbershop. “He was caught in the act,” Pablos says, “and the little angel died from a few lashes they gave him in prison. My father was very upset, because the child stole the heart of everybody who saw him” (85). We are mortified by our initial assent to the sentimental metaphors.

The focus on surfaces can also be seen in the emphasis on clothing in the novel, on disguises which dignify temporarily but which only heighten the sense of shame when they ultimately fail. Pablos dresses up as the “boy-king” in carnival time and ends up smeared with excrement. Don Torribio and his beggars' fraternity dress in bits and pieces of respectable attire, and their “honor” depends on only being seen from the right angle. Don Diego insists on trading cloaks with Pablos at the end, only to set him up for a beating and slashing by Don Diego's men. As a picaro, Pablos is for the most part a bad imitation, a parody of the more honest and honorable substance of the aristocrat. But as readers we are forced to identify with the parodic figure; we are given no access to the character of authentic social value.⁵¹

This mortification of character and reader is intensified by Quevedo's specific denial of religious transcendence to this lowest of the low. The alliance of the high and the low found in Lazarillo and in Guzmán is explicitly rejected in El Buscón, as when Pablos is spat upon and beaten. “Please don't,” Pablos protests; “I'm not Christ on the Cross, you know” (108). In a theological as well as an emotional sense, Quevedo's narrative is merciless. One might argue that the ultimate purpose of Quevedo's mortification of Pablos's flesh and of the reader's spirit is religious salvation, as in the autos da fé which allowed the heretic to recant. But such a prospect would be radically extrinsic to the text, which ends instead in a confirmation of mortal hopelessness. Like Lazarillo, Pablos ends his story joined up with a proven whore, but, unlike Lazarillo, Pablos is radically displaced from European society.

When I saw that this situation was going to be more or less permanent and that bad luck was dogging my heels, I made up my mind, not because I was intelligent enough to see what was going to happen but because I was tired and obstinate in my wickedness, to go to America with Grajales. … I thought things would go better in the New World and another country. But they went worse, as they always will for anybody who thinks he has only to move his dwelling without changing his life or ways.

(213-14)

The manuscript versions of the text promise that we will see this worsening in a “second part,” but Quevedo apparently thought better of a sequel. It is perhaps proper to speak of El Buscón as a dead end of the Spanish picaresque, as it is hard to envision any sequel following its particular lead into any further negation.

Notes

1. See Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne (Paris: E. Droz, 1937), pp. 652-53; Francisco Marquez Villanueva, “La actitud espiritual del Lazarillo de Tormes,” Espiritualidad y literatura en el siglo XVI (Madrid-Barcelona: Alfarguana, 1968), pp. 67-137. Ann Wiltrout argues for the influence of one of Erasmus's satiric colloquies on Lazarillo in “The Lazarillo de Tormes and Erasmus' ‘Opulentia Sordida,’” Romanische Forschungen 81 (1969), 550-64, and R. W. Truman suggests a confluence of motifs in “Lazarillo de Tormes, Petrarch's De remediis adversae fortunae, and Erasmus's Praise of Folly,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 52 (1975), 33-53.

2. “‘Liberty's A Whore,’” The Reversible World, p. 108.

3. The Praise of Folly, trans. John Wilson (1688) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), p. 141. Cf. 1 Cor. 3:18: “Make no mistake about this: if there is anyone among you who fancies himself wise—wise, I mean by the standards of the passing age—he must become a fool to gain true wisdom. For the wisdom of this world is folly in God's sight” (NEB).

4. The allusion to Cicero recalls an accusation that Cicero himself came from “low and obscure ancestors and from modest and unworthy parents,” a piece of information retailed by Torquemada in Spain in 1553; see Harry Sieber, The Picaresque, The Critical Idiom (London: Methuen & Co., 1977), p. 15.

5. S. Gilman, “The Death of Lazarillo de Tormes,” PMLA LXXI (1966), p. 161.

6. See in this regard Mikhail Bakhtin's broad and compelling study of Rabelais in the tradition of the folk carnival, Rabelais and His World. The more sparing, though still significant, folk elements of Lazarillo are noted in A. D. Deyermond, Lazarillo de Tormes: A Critical Guide, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts, no. 15 (London: Grant and Cutler, 1975), pp. 34-35, 81-87.

7. Bakhtin uses the term, for example. See also Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, “The Novel and the Carnival World: An Essay in Memory of Joe Doherty,” Modern Language Notes 89 (1974), 911-37; Alice Fiola Berry, “‘Les Mithologies Pantagruelicques’: Introduction to a Study of Rabelais' Quart livre,” PMLA 92 (1977), 471-80; and Gabriel Josipovici, “A Modern Master,” New York Review of Books, 24, no. 16 (Oct. 13, 1977), 34-37.

8. Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 30.

9. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 277-78.

10. Greene claims, for example, that the term satire “shrivels up” before Rabelais (Rabelais, p. 10), and Bakhtin insists on the broader and more integral humor of Gargantua and Pantagruel as distinct from the narrow and disintegrating quality of satire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Rabelais and His World, pp. 59-144, passim). Ronald Paulson, on the other hand, argues for the essentially satiric nature of Rabelais and extends the term to the Spanish picaresque novel and Don Quixote as well; see The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 58-73, 80-86, 98-104. The theory of satire is only slightly less vexed than the theory of the novel.

11. The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance, Yale Studies in English, vol. 142 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 3-4.

12. Ibid., pp. 7-8.

13. See Leonard Feinberg, Introduction to Satire (Ames: The Iowa State University Press, 1967), p. 11: “In actual practice, satirists usually apply a standard not of morality but of appropriateness—in other words a social norm. It is a norm concerned not with ethics but with customs, not with morals but with mores; and it may be accepted by an entire society, or only one class of that society, or just a small coterie.”

14. The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 7; she is paraphrasing Claudio Guillén here. As Colie goes on to argue, the mimesis of Aristotelian genre theory was often interpreted to mean the imitation of the formal models themselves, or as Alexander Pope put it in his Essay on Criticism, “Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; / To copy Nature is to copy Them.”

15. Le Texte du roman, pp. 45 ff. Kristeva does not distinguish adequately, however, between the structure of the novel and the structure of satire (“la menippée”).

16. See, for example, Parker, Literature and the Delinquent, pp. 28-31. Francisco Rico, on the other hand, regards Lazarillo and Guzmán de Alfarache as the prime examples of the picaresque novel and Quevedo's El Buscón, which Parker regards as the “zenith” of the picaresque, as a dead end; see La novela picaresca y el punto de vista, 2d ed. (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1973), pp. 129 ff.

17. See Bataillon, Introduction, Le roman picaresque (Paris: Renaissance du Livre, 1931), p. 5.

18. La novela picaresca y el punto de vista, esp. pp. 45-55.

19. “The Death of Lazarillo de Tormes,” p. 158.

20. Luke 16:28-31 (NEB). It is arguable that Lazarillo is an allusion as well to the Lazarus in John 11, who does arise from the dead and who does “bring glory to the Son of God”—as well as precipitating the Crucifixion. But the parabolic nature of the story in Luke and the way in which Lazarus is seen as inferior to Moses and the prophets is closer to the spirit of the Spanish novel than is the dramatic and compelling miracle described in John. Some biblical scholars suggest that the Johannine episode may in fact be a reshaping of the Lucan parable, though the borrowing may have proceeded in the other direction; see the commentary on John 11 in the Anchor Bible, Gospel According to John (i-xii), ed. Raymond E. Brown, S.S. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 428 ff.

21. “The Death of Lazarillo de Tormes,” p. 153. See also Richard Hitchcock, “Lazarillo and ‘Vuestra Merced,’” Modern Language Notes 86 (1971), 264-66, and L. J. Woodward, “Author-Reader Relationship in the Lazarillo de Tormes,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 1 (1965), 43-53, for different versions of this normative approach.

22. “Parody and Irony in the Self-Portrayal of Lázaro de Tormes,” Modern Language Review 63 (1968), 605. Cf. Frank Durand, “The Author and Lázaro: Levels of Comic Meaning,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 45 (1968), 89-101, esp. p. 100: “To acknowledge specific social or clerical criticism, clearly stated moral observations, is to accept the obvious; to limit one's conclusions to the fact that Lázaro feels he has reached the ultimate heights of success when he has, in fact, descended to the lowest moral depths, is to remain on the surface of the work at the easiest ironic level.”

23. I owe this allusion to my friend Alfred MacAdam, now of the Spanish Department of the University of Virginia. The quotation, and the previous one as well, are from W. S. Merwin's translation, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), p. 39.

24. See Chandler, The Romances of Roguery, pp. 205-9. But by 1620 Jean de Luna had “corrected and emended” this sequel, making the tuna-fish transformation a trick rather than a metamorphosis and in general reproducing quite effectively the realism and irony of the original.

25. “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque,” Literature as System, pp. 135-38. An earlier version of this essay appeared in 1966.

26. Literature as System, pp. 146 ff. The publication of what amounts to a parody of the picaresque novel, La Pícara Justina, in the same year as the First Part of Don Quixote should be mentioned as a further element in the recognition process.

27. Resources of Kind, pp. 12, 115 (her italics). Colie argues that some genres are defined by subject matter alone, but this is simply an overextension of the term. As Alistair Fowler claims, “Strictly speaking, only motifs with a formal basis, such as the singing contest, are securely genre-linked,” although Fowler admits that there is a tendency for “genre” to become a more loosely defined “mode” (“The Life and Death of Literary Forms,” New Literary History 2 [1971], 203, 214). For a stimulating Marxist critique of genre theory, see Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7 (1975), 135-63.

28. A precedent for such sequels was provided by the chivalric romances (Amadis of Greece following Amadis of Gaul, Orlando Furioso following Orlando Innamorato). It is interesting that Cervantes ends the First Part of Don Quixote with a line from Orlando Furioso, “Forse altri cantera con miglior plettro” (“Perhaps another will sing with a sweeter tone”), after promising to relate more of Quixote's adventures himself. He perhaps anticipated a worthier imitator than he got in Avellaneda. The idea of the novelist as “sole proprietor” of his fictional characters and terrain, as claimed by William Faulkner for his Yoknapatawpha County, has yet to be recognized by modern copyright law.

29. The endings of Lazarillo and Melville's The Confidence-Man, respectively—though modern editors of Lazarillo regard the promise of a sequel as the work of an interpolator.

30. Literature as System, pp. 71-106, passim.

31. The Picaresque Novel (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1967), p. 4.

32. “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” PMLA 89 (1974), 240. Wicks does discriminate levels of generality and abstraction similar to Guillén's, however. And he advocates a hermeneutic circularity of interpretation, in which the reader moves from “the total picaresque fictional situation” (243) back to specific texts. Richard Bjornson's The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), which appeared too late for me to profit from in this chapter, proceeds under the aegis of Wicks's modal approach. It combines historical and critical commentary on a series of picaresque narratives from Lazarillo to Roderick Random, but avoids the question of the novel per se.

33. Sieber, The Picaresque, pp. 22-23.

34. Donald McGrady calculates that the moralizing alone makes up 13 percent of the First Part of Guzmán and 23 percent of the Second Part (Mateo Alemán [New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968], p. 74). Lesage's translation, Englished in turn by Motteux, is the clearest example of the paring away of the moralizing. On the other hand, translations like those of Barezzo Barezzi's Italian, Gaspar Ens's Latin, and even Mabbe's English add considerably to the so-called digressive material; see James Fitzmaurice-Kelly's introduction to Mabbe, The Rogue, pp. xxx-xxxvi, and Edmond Cros, Protée et le gueux (Paris: Didier, 1967), pp. 104-26. Cros, for his part, over-emphasizes the moralistic commentary. He treats Guzmán not as a picaresque novel but as a rhetorical anatomy of beggary, not “The Life of Guzman de Alfarache” but “The Book of the Beggar” (Le livre du gueux).

35. The phrases are J. A. Jones's in “The Duality and Complexity of Guzmán de Alfarache: Some Thoughts on the Structure and Interpretation of Alemán's Novel,” in Knaves and Swindlers: Essays on the Picaresque Novel in Europe, ed. Christine J. Whitbourne, University of Hull Publications (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 44.

36. See Lawrence Lipking, “The Marginal Gloss,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977), 609-55, for a useful discussion of literary marginalia, esp. pp. 621-25 on the gloss in the Renaissance and its dependence on biblical commentary.

37. Exemplary Stories, trans. C. A. Jones (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 205.

38. M. N. Norval, “Original Sin and the ‘Conversion’ in the Guzmán de Alfarache,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 51 (1974), 346-64.

39. Norval, “Original Sin,” p. 363. He offers a detailed critique of Alexander Parker's position (in Literature and the Delinquent) that Guzmán has been psychologically changed by his conversion, though one must acknowledge the theological ambiguity of any conversion experience.

40. Literature and the Delinquent, pp. 50, 46. The only English translation, in The Spanish Libertines, trans. Captain John Stevens (London, 1707), unfortunately simplifies the diction and strips down the plot. Marcel Bataillon shows that the parody was a roman à clef for the society of the Court at Madrid (“Recherches sur la Pícara Justina,” Annuaire du Collège de France 59 [1959], 567-69, and 60 [1960], 416-20).

41. Leonard Brownstein, Salas Barbadillo and the New Novel of Rogues and Courtiers (Madrid: Playor, S.A., 1974), pp. 85-94. Brownstein notes that a laudatory poem by a friend compares La hija de Celestina to “los Poemas” of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius.

42. See the critical edition of Fernando Lázaro Carreter, Acta Salmanticensia, Filosofía y Letras, vol. XVIII, no. 4 (Salamanca, 1965), pp. lxv-lxvii.

43. The term “counterfiction” is used in an article on El Buscón by Michele and Cecile Cavillac, “A propos du Buscón et de Guzmán de Alfarache,” Bulletin Hispanique 75 (1973), 124. But I would like to reserve it for the more independent antithesis of Don Quixote, as a substitute for what Guillén calls “countergenre.” Cf. T. E. May, “Good and Evil in the Buscón: A Survey,” Modern Language Review 45 (1950), 321: “Pablos shows the old pícaro of literature undergoing a transformation basically similar to that suffered by the knight of romance in becoming incarnate in Don Quixote.”

44. This is the conclusion of Lázaro Carreter in his critical edition, pp. xv n., lxxviii.

45. The insult is compounded in the Spanish by the use of the second person singular rather than the polite and proper “Vuestra Merced.” Carreter includes a brief “Carta Dedicatoria” that appears in two of the manuscripts and that he considers more likely to be by Quevedo himself, which does use the polite mode of address. Nevertheless, the self-presentation is peculiarly evasive and the politeness elaborately self-effacing, especially as compared to Lazarillo's prologue, on which it is most likely based. It reads, in its entirety: “Having known your honor's desire to hear the various discourses of my life, in order not to leave room that someone else (as in other cases) may lie, I have wanted to send you this account, which I hope will be not merely a small relief for your sad moments. And because I intend to be long in the telling of how short I have been of good fortune, I will cease to be so now.” I am indebted to my colleague Ramón Saldívar for help with the translation.

46. E.g., the miserly priest who keeps the bread from Lazarillo becomes Dr. Cabra, “the High Priest of Poverty and Avarice Incarnate” (94) who actually starves boys to death; the poor hidalgo, Lazarillo's third master, becomes Don Torribio Rodriguez Valligo Gomez de Ampuero y Jordan, the nobleman-beggar, whose honor consists in his patchwork clothing. See R. O. Jones, The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry, A Literary History of Spain (London: Ernest Benn, 1971), pp. 135-36.

47. The most obvious element of Guzmán that El Buscón rejects is the lower-class critique of aristocratic honor; others include the ideas of social mobility, moral self-scrutiny, the need for social reform, and the possibility of the picaro's conversion. The critique is detailed by M. and C. Cavillac, who describe it as “une réaction systématique a l'encontre du modèle élaboré par Mateo Alemán avec la contribution abusive de Mateo Luján. … Son intention ne semble pas avoir été celle, positive, de rivaliser avec Alemán en fertilité d'invention et en puissance créatrice, mais bien celle, négative, de détruire la fiction alémanienne” (“A propos de Buscón,” pp. 124-25). The fact that Quevedo does try to rival Lazarillo is perhaps a sign that he regards it as less of a threat than Guzmán.

48. The Unity and Structure of Quevedo's Buscón, Occasional Papers in Modern Languages, no. 1 (Hull: University of Hull Publications, 1965), p. 7. Cf. Parker, pp. 61.ff.

49. “Zur Kunst Quevedos in Seinem Buscon,” Archivum Romanicum 11 (1927), 511-80.

50. Literature and the Delinquent, pp. 59-60.

51. May speaks of Pablos as the “shadow self” of Don Diego, and of Don Diego as the “conscience of Pablos, before which he is weaponless” (“Good and Evil in the Buscón,” pp. 327-28). The doppelgänger effect is undeniable, although Quevedo's version of self-alienation is quite different from the nineteenth-century versions in such writers as Hoffmann, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and later in Kafka: the social definition of the self is both all-powerful and completely inaccessible, a kind of societas abscondita.