[In the essay below, Guillen reviews the development of the picaresque novel as a model for a theory of genre.]

Bibliographical research, of which the works of Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino offer today an eminent example,¹ provides the student of literature with a very substantial problem: that of the relationship between a poem and its readers. As everyone suspects in the most generic way—scripta manent—art can and often does succeed in conquering time. But how does literature, in addition, traverse space? Is one of these dimensions a condition of the other? This is what a certain branch of the sociology of literature, of which Robert Escarpit is the persuasive advocate, attempts to clarify. These studies deal with the aftermath of poetic creation by examining the history of books. As a poet's words are published, multiplied, and distributed among other men, the main instrument of publication, the book, develops into the vehicle not of mere one-to-one communication but of broad social diffusion. A book, in this sense, “is neither more nor less than its diffusion,” as Professor Escarpit explains:

“Since, in a little space, it has a high density of intellectual and formal content, since it can easily be passed from hand to hand, since it can be copied and reproduced at will, the book is the simplest intrument which, from a given point, can liberate a multitude of sounds, images, feelings, ideas, facts, by opening the gates of time and space to them—and then, joined with other books, can reconcentrate those diffused data in countless other points scattered through the centuries and the continents in an infinity of combinations, each different from any other.”²

These changing combinations require the passage of historical time. Moreover, they imply a temporal process on an aesthetic level. The publication of a poem is comparable to the performance of a drama or of a symphony only to the extent that it makes possible a series of future readers. A theatrical performance can bring about an immediate contact between author, director, actor, text, and audience. Where written literature is concerned, an extensive process unfolds that is both temporal and spatial. The book requires certain intermediaries in order to make its appearance—the editor, the printer, the bookseller—but it can only presume or anticipate a reader. As the real readers multiply, a collective sort of communication begins to take place. A second printing, and a third, or a fifth, particularly if these spread out in space, tend to prove that the audience has ceased to be hypothetical. Thus, the publishing history of a book manifests a process of actualization that is both aesthetic and sociological. The “after-the-fact” sociology of literature does not show how poetry reflects or refracts social patterns (usually a circular issue). It highlights, rather, the power to affect those patterns, that is, the ways in which literature alters a society's awareness of itself.

Bibliographical data allow us to reconstruct decisive links in the process of actualization of single works. As an example, I will examine in the first part of this article the early career of Lazarillo de Tormes. The study of this career, which coincided with the birth of the picaresque narrative—a crucial step, in turn, in the rise of the modern novel—will draw us into the orbit of the theory of genres. In fact, it may very well be that of all the “combinations” and “reconcentrations” that Robert Escarpit indicates, the most stable and the most significant is the formal model usually called genre.

I

In 1554 three little books entitled La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades appeared in Antwerp, Burgos, and Alcalá de Henares. None of the three is in all certainty the first edition. The hypothesis that an earlier edition, now lost, was published in 1553, has been advanced but never proved. Modern critics concur in rejecting the Alcalá version, which deviates most often from the other two and is marred by no less than six interpolations, obviously spurious. This leaves Antwerp and Burgos—two notoriously mercantile towns in the sixteenth century.³ It should not be forgotten that printers were good businessmen from the start. Two centuries later Voltaire would point out that Dutch booksellers earned millions because certain Frenchmen had been blessed with wit and intelligence (“les libraires hollandais gagnent un million par an parce que les Français ont eu de l'esprit”).⁴ Toward the middle of the sixteenth century there were witty Spaniards too, as well as discriminating Flemish merchants.

Lazarillo de Tormes has had a genuine audience since the end of the sixteenth century and the start of the seventeenth. Why not since 1554, one might ask, that is, since the beginning of its existence as a book? A most competent student of the subject, A. Rumeau, has shown how limited the popularity of Lazarillo actually was during the reign of Philip II (1556-1598).⁵ Four editions were offered to the public within the span of two years: in Antwerp (by the printer Martín Nucio), Burgos (Juan de Junta), and Alcalá de Henares (Salcedo), in 1554; and a second time in Antwerp (Guillermo Simón) in 1555. An early success is evident. Hence the odd contrast with what follows, or rather, fails to follow. The anonymous Segunda parte (published in Antwerp in 1555 by Martín Nucio and Guillermo Simón) is immediately forgotten. (It will only be reprinted, together with the first part, in Milan in 1587 and 1615; in Spain it will be published for the first time in 1844. This Flemish sequel clearly has played no part whatsoever in the history of the Spanish picaresque novel.) And even Lazarillo itself, after the flare-up of popularity in 1554-1555, will be reprinted rather seldom during the second half of the century—five times, to be exact, twice in Spain: Madrid, 1573; Tarragona, 1586; Milan, 1587; Antwerp, 1595; and Bergamo, 1597.⁶ Furthermore, Rumeau explains that the Italian edition of 1597 (Bergamo) owed its existence to the fact that the editor, Antonio de Antoni, was anxious to sell the remaining copies of the 1587 Milanese printing, which had not been doing well, even though the Bergamo dedication tried to suggest the very opposite; and that one should also not take at face value the publicity-minded declarations found among the preliminaries of the 1573 censored edition (edición castigada), brought out in Madrid by the royal chronicler, secretary, and cosmographer Juan López de Velasco, according to whom Lazarillo had always been well received, particularly abroad (“fue siempre a todos muy acepto, de cuya causa, aunque estaba prohibido en estos reinos, se leía y imprimía de ordinario fuera dellos).”⁷

The 1587 Milan edition opens with a dedication that is rather more honest. There the novel is presented as nearly forgotten, and worm-eaten with age: “la vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, ya casi olvidada, y de tiempo carcomida.”⁸ Thirty-three years, it is true, had passed. The censored edition was not being reprinted in Spain, actually, nor the uncensored text outside of the peninsula. Besides, I should like to call attention to yet another fact, which completes the picture without modifying it. The first French translation, published in Lyon in 1560, adds to the conclusion of the tale one more chapter—dealing with Lazaro's friendship with certain wine-loving Germans—which happened to be the first chapter of the Segunda parte or sequel published in Antwerp in 1555. The same addition can be found in the Antwerp editions of 1595 and 1602, by the heirs of the famous Plantinus, and in numerous later reprints (until Bordeaux, 1837). It would have been odd for the Flemish printers to decide to copy the innovation of a French translator (whose starting point had been the Antwerp original of 1554 or 1555). The opposite probably happened, as Gabriel Laplane suggests,⁹ and one may postulate the appearance of an additional Flemish edition between 1555 and 1559, of which no copies are extant today, and to which the editor (perhaps Guillermo Simón) had added for the first time the opening chapter of the Antwerp sequel. We may also recall in passing that the Flemish original of Lazarillo—not the Burgos or the Alcalá text—was the basis for the 1573 edición castigada, the 1587 and 1597 reprints in Milan and Antwerp respectively, and the first French and English translations (the latter by David Rowland, in London, 1586). The version of Lazarillo which attained real temporal and spatial diffusion during the Siglo de Oro in Spain and Europe—and thus became really a “book”—was the Antwerp text, whether complete or truncated, of 1554. Everything suggests that the first “discoverers” of the novel were living in Flanders.¹⁰

In Spain, the book was banned and condemned by the Grand Inquisitor's Cathalogus librorum qui prohibentur (Valladolid, 1559). The story was consistently irreverent, of course, and one may surmise that it was enjoyed as such by its first readers: the longest interpolation we encounter in the Alcalá text (1554) offers still another false miracle by the swindling pardoner. But these components were not enough to make Lazarillo steadily popular anywhere. The touches of anticlerical satire were not new—in this sense, they were the least original parts of the novel¹¹—and their effect was likely to be short-lived. López de Velasco's cuts in 1573 did not affect the essential structure of the tale, that is to say, the sequence of situations and the narrative method on which the future picaresque novel, and its immense European success, would ultimately be based.

Today we know that Lazarillo de Tormes marked a crucial moment in the rise of the European novel. We know that this tale of a small boy's partial but enduring disaffection with a scandalous world has lent itself to numberless variations from the sixteenth century to our time. In the passages where we see Lazarillo wandering from town to town, looking for a shelter and a master, we recognize easily enough an early figuration of the freedom and the quest that are the burden of modern novelistic heroes. There is no doubt but that Lazarillo inaugurated with singular skill, within the Spanish literary curve spanning La Celestina and Don Quixote, the presentation of the hopes and failures of men who, orphan-like but inquiring, far removed in practice from any abstract canon, test their knowledge as they grow older and confront or work out the compromises that will determine their lives.

Yet, as we return to the sequence of events in the sixteenth century, all such developments become virtual once more. The historical view forces us to conjecture that what did take place might not have happened at all. At best, we are justified in singling out the factors that were most favorable to a particular series of possibilities. During the decades of the Siglo de Oro, a Spanish novel, or any Spanish text, enjoyed exceptional conditions for influence and propagation. We have seen that the original Castilian text of Lazarillo was printed not only in Spain but in the Low Countries and in Italy—and shortly afterwards in France as well. This initial “space”—the dimensions of a publishing world—coincided with the mercantile support for the Hispanic conquest and colonization of America. Nevertheless, the rhythm of acceptance of Lazarillo was slow. A genuine audience, as Robert Escarpit will remind us, presupposes the convergence of the factors of space and time. To the spatial diffusion of our proto-picaresque novel, in other words, a certain temporal continuity was still to be added.

To decipher an absence is always hazardous. Why, one asks, was this rhythm of acceptance so slow? In its day, of course, the position of Lazarillo was truly singular. That is to say, in the middle of the sixteenth century, a novel, or a genuine pre-novel, was unusual and isolated indeed. The fact that an original work remains without immediate effect or consequences, surely is an ordinary occurrence in the history of the arts. (Lazarillo, as Marcel Bataillon has stated, was “un commencement absolu.”)¹² Also, it often happens that a new work stimulates a great deal of interest at first, only to be forgotten just as quickly, for it has not been understood or assimilated. Thus, the first triumph of Lazarillo was followed by decades of relative indifference. Particularly in the career of the visual arts, there are a number of similar cases—for example, the delayed impact of Goya in the nineteenth century. The great Giotto, who died in 1337, remained without successors for almost a century in the midst of one of the most intense periods of creativity in the history of painting. “For a hundred years after Giotto,” Berenson observed, “there appeared in Florence no painter equally endowed with dominion over the significant.”¹³

The author of Lazarillo had no successor for nearly fifty years. In 1599 Mateo Alemán—the humanist, cristiano nuevo, and businessman from Serville—published his Guzmán de Alfarache, ending the isolation of the earlier novel. Today the thematic and formal differences between Lazarillo and its followers seem worthy of consideration. On a certain level, Guzmán de Alfarache (a didactic and dogmatic monolith) and Lazarillo de Tormes (compassionate and pluralistic) seem nearly antithetical. But the seventeenth-century reader very probably had his eye on another level, where the two works converged. The result of this convergence was a common género picaresco, which did not come into being until 1599, of course—just as the heroic couplet did not exist until Chaucer had enough admirers and imitators, as John Livingston Lowes once pointed out: “‘The heroic couplet,’ says Professor Manly, with the utmost truth, ‘originated … suddenly. Chaucer wrote heroic couplets, and there they were.’ But when Chaucer wrote heroic couplets, and there all at once they were, the heroic couplet did not thereby spring into existence as a convention. It became that later, when other poets, following Chaucer, looked upon it and saw that it was good, and wore it threadbare.”¹⁴ What matters to us here, likewise, is the reaction of Mateo Alemán's contemporaries. As we shall see in a moment, the acceptance of either Lazarillo or Guzmán was second to the main development: the surge of popularity of the model, the pattern, the genre, which they sustained not singly but conjointly.

Guzmán de Alfarache was one of the first authentic best sellers in the history of printing. Its huge success immediately transformed a narrative form—in Lowes's terms—into a convention. The evidence suggests that Luis de Valdés was not far from the truth when he affirmed, in the “Elogio” heading the Segunda parte of 1604, that twenty-six different editions and no less than fifty thousand copies had appeared in four or five years: “¿De cuáles obras en tan breve tiempo vieron hechas tantas impresiones, que pasan de cincuenta mil cuerpos de libros los estampados, y de veinte y seis impresiones las que han llegado a mi noticia?”¹⁵ The success of Guzmán de Alfarache around 1600 is well known. But critics have not observed that it also resulted in the resurrection of Lazarillo de Tormes; and that it sparked a “combination” (to use Escarpit's word), a double acceptance, a convergence, from which there arose, during the years immediately following the publication of Guzmán (1599), the idea of a género picaresco—an idea which was formulated for the first time by Ginés de Pasamonte in a passage of Don Quixote (1605): “mal año,” said Ginés in a defiant moment, “para Lazarillo de Tormes, y para todos cuantos de aquel género se han escrito o escribieren” (Part 1, Chap. 22). We shall return later to these provocative words.

Four editions of Lazarillo had appeared in 1554 and 1555. Then, for as long as a second phase lasted, from 1573 to 1595, the book had five reprintings. Now a third, very different phase begins: within four years, from 1599 to 1603, at least nine editions of Lazarillo will be published. Basically, its public will be the same as Guzmán's. I cannot venture a guess as to its composition. But we do know that it was large. And a large literate audience of Spaniards around 1600 could not possibly coincide with the lower class. It was probably most akin not to the heroes of picaresque novels but to their authors, particularly Mateo Alemán. Its core, in other words, would have been the discontented middle class. (Generally speaking, the rise of the novel in sixteenth-century Spain seems to have been rooted not in the triumph but in the frustration of the bourgeoisie.)

The king, Philip II, had died in 1598. The start of a new reign had brought either fresh hopes or a greater degree of boldness to writers and printers. The Primera parte de Guzmán de Alfarache was published for the first time in Madrid, “en casa del Licenciado Várez de Castro,” a printer's shop where it began to be sold around the first week of March 1599. The tasa (or right to charge a certain price) was fixed by Gonzalo de la Vega on March 4. (Curiously enough, the aprobación—or ecclesiastical license—had been granted on January 13 of the previous year.)¹⁶ Now, exactly nine weeks later, the printing house of Luis Sánchez in Madrid offered to the public an edition of Lazarillo de Tormes. The tasa for it was authorized by Gonzalo de la Vega on May 11.¹⁷ In the meantime, Guzmán de Alfarache had begun to appear in the other kingdoms of the peninsula, as several alert publishers outside of Madrid tried to capitalize on the success of the Castilian edition. Sebastián de Cormellas, “a costa de Angelo Tabano, mercader de libros,” brought out Alemán's long novel in Barcelona, with a license delivered on April 27.¹⁸ (By this time a certain specialization had taken place in the trade, with the printer and the bookseller becoming two separate persons with different functions.) A second businessman from Barcelona, Miguel Menescal, followed suit, working with the printers Gabriel Graells and Giraldo Dotil.¹⁹ In Aragon we find that it was Juan Pérez de Valdivielso, “a costa de Juan Bonilla, mercader de libros,” who issued Guzmán de Alfarache, in Zaragoza, the aprobación having been granted on June 21, 1599. Besides, it seems that Sebastián de Cormellas proceeded to sell still more copies of the novel in his own printing shop; and that the original edition by Várez de Castro was immediately pirated in Madrid.²⁰

We can now observe that Lazarillo de Tormes followed precisely the same itinerary. Luis Sánchez, as we just noted, brought it before the public in Madrid a few days after the initial success of Guzmán de Alfarache. Sebastián de Cormellas and Juan Pérez de Valdivielso, Alemán's editors in Barcelona and Zaragoza respectively, published Lazarillo too, also in 1599. (There is no tasa or aprobación in either printing, obviously because the edition by Luis Sánchez was pirated.)²¹ These were not the sole occasions on which Lazarillo appeared to follow closely in the steps of the illustrious Guzmán. In Paris Nicolas Bonfons would print the latter in 1600, and Lazarillo in 1601; in Milan, Juan Baptista Bidelo brought both novels out in 1615, and so on.²²

Yet—the story is not finished—Lazarillo was not reprinted between 1603 and 1607. This surprising pause may be attributed to the sudden advent of three competitors: the two sequels to Guzmán de Alfarache (the spurious continuation by Mateo Luján de Sayavedra in 1602, and Alemán's own Segunda parte in 1604); and, above all, the publication of Don Quixote in 1605. The success of Miguel de Cervantes' entry in the publishing race was so irresistible that Guzmán de Alfarache, the best seller, would not reappear until 1615, in Milan. If what most of these bibliographical data seem to indicate is the rise of a new genre, then an important consequence of this rise was the emergence of a diametrically opposed masterpiece, which itself was able to serve as seed for a “countergenre.” Surely the facts of the case are unequivocal. On the editorial and literary levels, Cervantes' seminal novel was an inspired response to the challenge of the newborn picaresque genre.

II

These “negative” impacts or influences à rebours, through which a norm is dialectically surpassed (and assimilated) by another, or a genre by a countergenre, constitute one of the main ways in which a literary model acts upon a writer. Yet this is an aspect of genre theory we tend to overlook. Since the early nineteenth century and the breakdown of normative systems of poetics, the subject has become more and more a province of historical scholarship. Thus one neglects the equally historical fact that the life of poetic norms and models has involved above all the poets, the dramatists, and the storytellers themselves.

With this fact in mind, I have tried to discuss in another essay (“On the Uses of Literary Genre”) three perspectives or distinctions of some relevance not only to theorists or critics but to writers and readers as well. Briefly, these distinctions can be reduced to three questions: Is the norm under consideration a model that could have affected the writer (exerted an influence upon the work in progress), or is it a critic's “afterthought” and an a posteriori category (though liable as time passes to become an a priori model)? Is it an explicit norm and an accepted part of the authoritative systems of the day, or does it belong to the “unwritten poetics” of the period? Has it come into being by means of a process of definition on the part of critics and theorists, or as a result of the decisions of writers, readers, and audiences?

Let us now return to our practical example. We have just seen that the parallel publication and success between 1599 and 1605 of two Spanish novels created the appropriate circumstances for the emergence of a new model and for its immediate impact on an incipient countergenre: Don Quixote (1605) and its successors. Curious though I am about those exact “circumstances,” there is little I can add, unfortunately, to the bibliographical-historical data presented in the first section of this essay. I propose the following comments less as evidence for a real sequence of events than as illustrations of a theoretical approach toward the subject.

Our best clue, I think, is fictional—for we find it in Don Quixote. The problem at hand, after all, is literary; and it even has to do with fiction. It might be argued that no evidence could be truer than that of one of Cervantes' own characters (since he himself played the main role), or more likely to illuminate what actually took place in the minds of the “real” readers of Lazarillo and Guzmán. But it would complicate matters unduly to introduce here one of the main topics of Don Quixote itself.

In the chapter following the adventure of Mambrino's helmet, Don Quixote meets a chain of galley slaves on the road, engages them in conversation, and undertakes finally to liberate them (Part i, Chap. 22). Not the least articulate of the galley slaves is the famous Ginés de Pasamonte, otherwise known as Ginesillo de Parapilla:

“Señor comisario,” dijo entonces el galeote, “váyase poco a poco, y no andemos ahora a deslindar nombres y sobrenombres: Ginés me llamo y no Ginesillo, y Pasamonte es mi alcurnia, y no Parapilla como voacé dice, y cada uno se dé una vuelta a la redonda, y no hará poco.”

“Hable con menos tono,” replicó el comisario, “señor ladrón de más de la marca, si no quiere que le haga callar, mal que le pese.”

“Bien parece,” respondió el galeote, “que va el hombre como Dios es servido; pero algún día sabrá alguno si me llamo Ginesillo de Parapilla o no.”

“¿Pues no te llaman así, embustero?”, dijo la guarda.

“Sí llaman,” respondió Ginés; “mas yo haré que no me lo llamen, o me las pelaría donde yo digo entre mis dientes. Señor caballero, si tiene algo que darnos, dénoslo ya y vaya con Dios, que ya enfada con tanto querer saber vidas ajenas; y si la mía quiere saber, sepa que soy Ginés de Pasamonte, cuya vida está escrita por estos pulgares.”

“Dice verdad,” dijo el comisario, “que él mismo ha escrito su historia, que no hay más que desear, y deja empeñado el libro en la cárcel en doscientos reales.”

“Y le pienso quitar,” dijo Ginés, “si quedara en doscientos ducados.”

“¿Tan bueno es?”, dijo Don Quijote.

“Es tan bueno,” respondió Ginés, “que mal año para Lazarillo de Tormes, y para todos cuantos de aquel género se han escrito o escribieren: lo que le sé decir a voacé, es que trata verdades, y que son verdades tan lindas y tan donosas, que no puede haber mentiras que se le igualen.”

“¿Y cómo se intitula el libro?”, preguntó Don Quijote.

“La vida de Ginés de Pasamonte,” respondió el mismo.

“¿Y está acabado?”, preguntó Don Quijote.

“¿Cómo puede estar acabado,” respondió él, “si aun no está acabada mi vida? Lo que está escrito es desde mi nacimiento hasta el punto que esta última vez me han echado en galeras.”

(“Señor Commissary,” spoke up the prisoner at this point, “go easy there and let us not be so free with names and surnames. My just name is Ginés and not Ginesillo; and Pasamonte, not Parapilla as you make it out to be, is my family name. Let each one mind his own affairs and he will have his hands full.”

“Speak a little more respectfully, you big thief, you,” said the commissary, “unless you want me to make you be quiet in a way you won't like.”

“Man goes as God pleases, that is plain to be seen,” replied the galley slave, “but someday someone will know whether my name is Ginesillo de Parapilla or not.”

“But, you liar, isn't that what they call you?”

“Yes,” said Ginés, “they do call me that; but I'll put a stop to it, or else I'll skin their you-know-what. And you, sir, if you have anything to give us, give it and may God go with you, for I am tired of all this prying into other people's lives. If you want to know anything about my life, know that I am Ginés de Pasamonte whose life story has been written down by these fingers that you see here.”

“He speaks the truth,” said the commissary, “for he has himself written his story, as big as you please, and has left the book in the prison, having pawned it for two hundred reales.”

“And I mean to redeem it,” said Ginés, “even if it costs me two hundred ducats.”

“Is it as good as that?” inquired Don Quixote.

“It is so good,” replied Ginés, “that it will cast into the shade Lazarillo de Tormes and all others of that sort that have been or will be written. What I would tell you is that it deals with facts, and facts are so interesting and amusing that no lies could equal them.”

“And what is the title of the book?” asked Don Quixote.

“The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte.”

“Is it finished?”

“How could it be finished,” said Ginés, “when my life is not finished as yet? What I have written thus far is an account of what happened to me from the time I was born up to the last time that they sent me to the galleys.”)²³

If is of course impossible to know exactly what Ginés de Pasamonte means when he boastfully talks of a “género” of which Lazarillo is the prototype. We may notice, however, that the existence of such a genre was a matter of experience for him. Where theorists are inclined to “define,” writers are rather more likely to “decide”: Ginés de Pasamonte the writer (and Cervantes with him) is strongly determined not only to equal but to surpass Lazarillo and its successors (“It is so good … that it will cast into the shade Lazarillo de Tormes and all others of that sort”). In fact, the nature of his decision—that a group of works exists with which he proposes to compete—seems immeasurably less vague and more pertinent than the nature of the group itself (“all others of that sort that have been or will be written”). In this context, a genre is above all a challenge to the writer's will, and in that sense an inspiration or an influence. Ginés does not refer to it by means of any technical or cultured term (such as “especie,” since “género” was usually reserved for the genus of imitation),²⁴ but with ordinary words (“all others of that sort,” Putnam correctly translates). One witnesses here the spontaneous discovery of a class by a reader-critic belonging to the most vast of audiences. This vastness is what Cervantes, in his perspectivistic, illusion-creating, and problem-producing fashion, is able to stress and even exaggerate through the fiction of Ginés de Pasamonte.

It is difficult to ascertain today whether it was feasible for a real thief or a real galley slave to identify, as Ginés does, with the fictional galley slave Guzmán de Alfarache and to begin writing a book comparable to the real Mateo Alemán's. As I noted earlier, a large literate audience in seventeenth-century Spain could not have coincided with the lower class, and those who identified with the pícaro must have been mostly members of the discontented middle classes. But on a fictional level, and especially in Don Quixote, where the hero imitates the romances of chivalry and where literature becomes not a separate art but the environment and condition of living, the fact that a certain character feels that the picaresque existence is very near his own appears credible and almost reasonable. In this case the “realistic” narrative genre based on Lazarillo is doubly worthy of imitation—by Ginés de Pasamonte in his fictional life as a thief and also by Ginés the writer, who is fictional too, but whose Vida is moreover a narrative within a narrative. Ginés de Pasamonte may be viewed as a Don Quixote who not only experiences (without losing his mind) but writes down his life (a life which, as Don Quixote finds out early in Part ii, another wrote for him): hence the amusement Cervantes obviously derives from the dialogue between the two novel-imitators, which may justify his having cast here Don Quixote as the straight man. Between the man and the writer, besides, one finds the reader or the critic, who is called upon to determine the existence of the literary genre to be imitated. Ginés, as a reader neither cultured nor ignorant, as a layman (or ingenio lego), combines a bold ability to recognize novelty with the generic mentality of his time, that is, with an immoderate fondness for classification, be it within or without the pale of traditional poetics.

I might add that Cervantes presents here the operations of “unwritten” poetics. One can say that Ginés de Pasamonte, like many Spanish readers after 1599, of whom he could be considered a fictional symbol (both by ourselves and by Cervantes) establishes a category a posteriori (i.e., a category which did not exist when Lazarillo was written) when he speaks of a newly born genre (“todos cuantos de aquel género se han escrito”); while mentioning at the same time a class of books in the process of becoming an a priori model, to be imitated by others in the future (“todos cuantos … se … escribieren”: “will be written”). From Gil Blas to Felix Krull, the evidence proves abundantly the correctness of Cervantes' guess, or rather of Ginés de Pasamonte's.

For the two are of course distinct, as the same dialogue makes clear. A dialogue in Cervantes is a joining of critical perspectives, and it would be impossible for him to embrace fully either the technical simplicity of Don Quixote, as far as the narrator's craft is concerned, or Ginés de Pasamonte's allegiance to the picaresque form. It is Ginés, not the real author, who imitates Lazarillo and Guzmán de Alfarache. For it must be realized that although this passage refers explicitly to the former, it tacitly alludes to the latter. Mateo Alemán's hero, at the end of the very long last part of Guzmán de Alfarache (1604), writes his autobiography while serving a sentence in the king's galleys, as Alemán had announced he would in one of the preliminaries to the first part (1599). “He himself writes his life in the galleys,” Alemán had said, who went on to explain that this is quite proper, and not incompatible with the expression of moral doctrine:

“El mismo escribe su vida desde las galeras, donde queda forzado al remo, por delitos que cometió, habiendo sido ladrón famosísimo, como largamente lo verás en la segunda parte. Y no es impropiedad ni fuera de propósito, si en esta primera escribiere alguna dotrina; que antes parece muy llegado a razón darla un hombre de claro entendimiento, ayudado de letras y castigado del tiempo, aprovéchandose del ocioso de la galera. Pues aun vemos a muchos ignorantes justiciados, que habiendo de ocuparlo en sola su salvación, divertirse della por estudiar un sermoncito para en la escalera.”²⁵

(He himself writes his life in a galley, where he has been forced to row as a consequence of the delinquent acts he had committed, having been a very famous thief, as the Second Part will copiously show you. And it is not improper nor untimely that he should write down matters of moral doctrine in the First Part; it seems quite reasonable, rather, for a man to do so who has a clear intelligence, some education and many years' experience, while taking advantage of his idle hours in the galley. We even know of ignorant men brought to justice who, instead of devoting those last idle hours to the salvation of their soul, spend their time studying a little sermon for use on the staircase to the gallows.)

Thus the adventures of Ginés de Pasamonte resemble Guzmán's much more than they do Lazarillo's, at least in their literal dénouement. On another plane, however, the differences are quite substantial. At the end of Part ii Guzmán undergoes a sudden religious conversion, though not so profound a one as to prevent him from recounting his former existence with considerable sympathy for the rogue and the swindler he once was. Doubtless Cervantes does not miss an opportunity to remember ironically Mateo Alemán, that great and crucial opponent who is alluded to not only in Don Quixote but in several of the Exemplary Novels.²⁶ It may be that one of these ironies points to the questionble authenticity of Guzmán de Alfarache's religious conversion, since Ginés de Pasamonte appears to associate himself with Guzmán without the slightest intention of ceasing to be the genuine rogue and swindler that he is. A second allusion is quite explicit, and has to do with the narrative uses of the first- and third-person forms of the verb. Joaquín Casalduero is one of the few critics who has observed that Cervantes is stressing in this passage the pseudoautobiographical aspect of the picaresque genre,²⁷ while suggesting a basic polarity between this aspect and the techniques of the “countergenre” for which Don Quixote stands. With his well-known ambiguity, Cervantes both praises and ridicules Lazarillo, Guzmán, “and all others of that sort that have been or will be written.”

The dialectics of genre and countergenre are essential to the understanding of a particular axiological structure. In the context of the dialogue between Don Quixote and Ginés de Pasamonte, género means essentially “fictional autobiography”—as implicitly opposed to the third-person narrative or “fictional history.” (This is a polarity, I need not stress, that will dominate the poetics of the novel, from Alemán-Cervantes to Defoe-Fielding, Werther-Scott or Balzac, etc.) As such, La vida de Ginés de Pasamonte is supposed to exhibit indubitable virtues as well as defects. On the one hand, its title, like those of Lazarillo and Guzmán (La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades and Primera parte de la vida del pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache), begins with the words “La vida de.” The novelist's task, to paraphrase Ginés, does indeed consist in prying into other people's lives. His purpose cannot be grasped by means of any pre-Renaissance emphasis on “character.” For the novel presents, recounts, unfolds not characters but lives—even as Ginés refuses to identify himself independently from the vida that he has written down. (Hence the wonderfully loose and apparently inconsequential exchange concerning his name and surname: Ginés merely wishes to be as responsible for his name as he is for his identity as presented in La vida de Ginés de Pasamonte.) To this end, i.e., the presentation of a life, the autobiography or pseudoautobiography is most effective: it reproduces the original chronology of events (“from the time I was born up to the last time that they sent me to the galleys”) and gives the impression of being truthful or true to life—in Ginés' words, “que trata verdades” (“that it deals with facts”). The use of the first-person form of the verb adapts itself singularly well to the concealment of all thematic deceptions and lies (“mentiras”). Since Lazarillo, the most eminent example of this is the picaresque genre, whose roguish hero need not respect the truth of other people's lives as a storyteller, any more than he does their property in everyday practice.

Should Ginés (if this is his name) the writer be more honest than Ginés the thief? The reader is led to ask himself this question, and to interpret in his own way the facts: La vida de Ginés de Pasamonte is presented by its author, with the commissary's consent, as a truthful autobiography. Nevertheless, Cervantes stresses most explicitly the problem of narrative structure. A dramatic or epic character possesses, to be sure, some sort of identity; but how does one shape a “life”? The supposed proximity to “life” of the autobiographer is exacted at a very high cost: that of formlessness—and perhaps, as a consequence, of meaninglessness. Any life that is narrated by its own subject must remain incomplete and fail to achieve artistic unity or, very simply, the status of art.

Narrative form demands a “second” or “third” person expressing a consciousness that is extrinsic to the sequence of events. Only such a consciousness can make possible the writing, in Aristotelian terms, of either “poetry” or “history.” The saturation of the picaresque with the narrator's individual and willfully limited point of view is most remote from history. And it is one of the ironies of Cervantes that Don Quixote, as told by the Arabic chronicler Cide Hamete Benengeli, apparently emulates the structural and presentational virtues of history. It seems to me, to a large extent, that it actually does; and that this is an irony one cannot afford to take too lightly. The novel as it emerges in the sixteenth century, after the great Florentine historians and the chroniclers of the conquest of America, owes much to this crucial rapprochement between literature and history—to the organization and detailed recreation and tolerant understanding of the concrete wealth of experience by a “third” person. Cervantes, at any rate, penetrated deeply into these polarities. He quickly saw and judged that the most daring and characteristic feature of the picaresque story was its pseudoautobiographical nature, while his own work as a whole would prove that he had chosen to reject the techniques which Ginés de Pasamonte had so enthusiastically embraced.

The acceptance of a genre is normally an extended process, embracing several stages. The elevation of a single book or of a series of books to the rank of a formal model is secured above all by the readers (or by the writers and critics before they write, i.e., as readers). In our case, we may regard Ginés de Pasamonte as the representative or the fictional symbol of this reading public. Yet still another symbol would be needed for an earlier stage in the acceptance of the picaresque, that is to say, for the intermediaries who brought the novels to a particular audience: the printers. Toward the beginning of the sixteenth century, printers fulfilled all three of the functions that would subsequently be divided into a number of different specialties or professions: the selection, the printing, and the sale of books. In other words, they were editors and booksellers as well. Later in the sixteenth century, as I showed with regard to the editions of Lazarillo and Guzmán, printers would begin to delegate the actual sale of books to special dealers. But they did not relinquish as yet the crucial editorial or selective role. As Robert Escarpit stresses in his Sociologie de la littérature, “les premiers imprimeurs sont déjà des éditeurs-accoucheurs. Leurs choix ont un caractère créateur. Ainsi c'est à Caxton, qui les a imprimés parmi les premiers, que Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Malory, etc., auteurs déjà anciens, doivent une résurrection à la vie littéraire que leur maintien en manuscrit leur eût probablement interdite.”²⁸

In the Spanish context of my subject, the representative of this creative function could be Luis Sánchez, who was responsible not only for the resurrection of Lazarillo in 1599 but for its association in Madrid with Guzmán—a pairing that was imitated immediately in Barcelona, Zaragoza, Paris, and elsewhere²⁹—thus grouping physically the two masterpieces and promoting the rise of a model. Unfortunately, we do not know enough about him. His father, Francisco Sánchez, had run a modest printing shop in Madrid during the second half of the sixteenth century. Luis, who inherited the shop, distinguished himself by publishing a number of very fine works. According to Pérez Pastor, he was said to employ the best craftsmen available: “tuvo en su imprenta los mejores oficiales en aquella época.”³⁰ Luis Sánchez, moreover, was an educated person. We know that he composed Latin poems as preliminaries for some of the books he printed.³¹ We may suppose that he possessed a measure of humanistic learning and an effective interest—whether critical or commercial—in the newer trends in writing. It was, at any rate, men like Ginés de Pasamonte and Luis Sánchez who made possible the birth of a genre.

Notes

1. This chapter is a translation (and a development) of “Luis Sánchez, Ginés de Pasamonte y los inventores del género picaresco,” in Homenaje al Prof. Rodríguez-Moñino (Madrid, 1966), i, 221-231.

2. Robert Escarpit, The Book Revolution (London and Paris, 1966), p. 19.

3. Cf. J. Denucé, Inventaire des Affaitadi, banquiers italiens à Anvers, 1568 (Antwerp, 1934); R. Doehaerd, Etudes anversoises. Documents sur le commerce international à Anvers de 1488 à 1514, 3 vols. (Paris, 1963); J. Finot, Etudes historiques sur les relations commerciales entre la Flandre et l'Espagne au Moyen Age (Paris, 1899); J. A. Goris, Etude sur les colonies marchandes méridionales à Anvers (Louvain, 1925); V. Vazquez de Prada, Lettres marchandes d'Anvers, 4 vols. (Paris, 1960); R. Carande, Carlos V y sus banqueros (Madrid, 1943), vol. 1.

4. Quoted by Robert Escarpit, Sociologie de la littérature (Paris, 1966), p. 61.

5. Cf. A. Rumeau, “Notes au ‘Lazarillo.’ Des éditions d'Anvers, 1554-1555, à celles de Milan, 1587-1615,” Bulletin Hispanique, lxvi (1964), 272-293.

6. These data are in E. Macaya Lahmann, Bibliografía del Lazarillo de Tormes (San José, Costa Rica, 1935). All bibliographical facts mentioned without a special footnote are to be found here.

7. Quoted by Rumeau, “Notes au ‘Lazarillo,’” p. 274.

8. Ibid., p. 284.

9. Cf. “Les anciennes traductions françaises du ‘Lazarillo de Tormes’ (1560-1700),” in Hommage à Ernest Martinenche (Paris, 1936), p. 148.

10. Cf. Rumeau, “Notes au ‘Lazarillo,’” pp. 285-287; Laplane, “Les anciennes traductions,” p. 149, note 10; The Pleasant History of Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. J.E.V. Crofts (Oxford, 1924), p. viii.

11. Suffice it to mention the names of Juan de Lucena, Juan Maldonado, Gil Vicente, Torres Naharro, Diego Sánchez de Badajoz, Cristóbal de Castillejo as links within “una tradición ininterrumpida de sátira anticlerical y antimonástica cuyo más celebre representante en España es el Arcipreste de Hita,” in the words of Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España (Mexico, 1950), i, 251.

12. Le roman picaresque, ed. Marcel Bataillon (Paris, 1931), p. 5.

13. The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (New York, 1909), p. 20.

14. John Livingston Lowes, Convention and Revolt in Poetry (Boston and New York, 1919), p. 48.

15. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, ed. S. Gili Gaya (Madrid, 1953), iii, 59. See R. Foulché-Delbosc, “Bibliographie de Mateo Alemán. 1598-1615,” Revue Hispanique, xlii (1918), 481-556. Foulché-Delbosc did not see an edition in-4° of Guzmán, similar to the princeps, published by Várez de Castro in Madrid in 1600 (there is a copy in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid); nor a reprint by Sebastián de Cormellas in Barcelona, 1599, where one reads at the bottom of the title page not “A costa de Angelo Tabano,” but “Véndense en la mesma Emprenta” (Biblioteca Menéndez y Pelayo, Santander); nor another by Juan Mommarté, Brussels, 1600, with a title page that is slightly different from the one in the Biblioteca Nacional or that in the British Museum. Counting these editions, then, in addition to those Foulché-Delbosc saw, I obtain a total of twenty-five editions (of the Primera parte alone) previous to 1605.

16. This editio princeps can be found in a number of libraries: the Biblioteca Nacional both in Madrid and Lisbon, the British Museum, Widener Library (Harvard University), the Hispanic Society (New York), and elsewhere.

17. Cf. Lahmann, Bibliografía, p. 64.

18. I have seen the copy in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid.

19. It has the same aprobación as the edition by Cormellas (copy in the Hispanic Society).

20. The Zaragoza edition has aprobaciones by Licenciado Mateo de Canseco (June 21, 1599) and by the Asesor Galván (June 22) (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; Wiener Hofsbibliothek).

21. Cf. Lahmann, Bibliografía, pp. 67-68. I owe the data concerning the edition by Cormellas (Hispanic Society) to the courtesy of Professor Homero Serís. Valdivielso's Zaragoza edition is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

22. Cf. Lahmann, Bibliografía, pp. 69, 74.

23. I quote from the translation by Samuel Putnam (New York, 1949), i, 172-173.

24. Cf. above, p. 117.

25. Guzmán de Alfarache, ed. Gili Gaya, i, 36, “Declaración para el entendimiento deste libro.”

26. As far as Don Quixote and La ilustre fregona are concerned, this is a problem that demands detailed study. I will limit myself here to a critical conjecture and a biographical fact: it seems that many of the literary-structural ironies and censures formulated in El coloquio de los perros (regarding the abuse of sermons and moral discourse, the tendency to digress, the lack of form, the wordiness, the fact that if the dogs in the story turn out to be pícaros, the pícaros themselves, mutatis mutandis, should be regarded as dogs, or rather, as mere “cynics”) have Guzmán de Alfarache as their object. Secondly, it is suggestive that when Mateo Alemán emigrated to America in 1608, never to return to his native country, he read during the crossing and brought to Mexico with him a copy of the recently published first part of Don Quixote—which was confiscated upon arrival by the Inquisition. Cf., on the latter, A. S. Bushee, “The ‘Sucesos’ of Mateo Alemán,” Revue Hispanique, xxv (1911), 421-422, note 2.

27. Cf. Joaquín Casalduero, “Notas sobre ‘La ilustre fregona,’” Anales Cervantinos, iii (1953), 6; and Sentido y forma del Quijote (Madrid, 1949), p. 113.

28. Sociologie de la littérature, p. 60.

29. Cf. above, p. 145.

30. Cristóbal Pérez Pastor, Bibliografía madrileña (Madrid, 1891), i, xxix.

31. Cf. ibid., i, nos. 465, 670.