SOURCE: Parker, Alexander. “Zenith and Nadir in Spain.” In Literature and the Delinquent: the Picaresque in Spain and Europe, 1599-1753, pp. 53-74. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

[In the following excerpt, Parker focuses on Historia de la vida del buscón and the development of the character Pablo.]

The first conscious attempt to find a middle-way solution to the problem of presenting delinquency in polite literature led the genre in a new direction. The next novel to appear was Marcos de Obregón (1618)¹ by the poet and musician Vicente Espinel (1550-1624), who, after an adventurous and peripatetic youth, took orders and became choir-master of a Madrid church. His novel is to a considerable extent a genuine autobiography and it has proved possible to disentangle the fact from the fiction.² Espinel cast his memoirs in the form of fiction in order to make them more palatable, for his story links up with Guzmán de Alfarache in being the tale of a repentant sinner. He does not therefore eschew a moral purpose, but he is very conscious that he must steer a path between two extremes. Thus he writes in the Prologue:

It was my aim to see whether I could succeed in writing in prose something that would be of profit to the commonwealth by giving both pleasure and instruction, following the precept of my master Horace; for some books have been published by men of great literary learning and reputation who cling so exclusively to doctrine that they have no opportunity for the mind to recover breath and feel some pleasure; and other books have appeared, so intent on giving pleasure by jests and farcical tales, that after being stirred and sifted are found to be so vain and futile, that nothing substantial or profitable is left for the reader, and no credit is won for their authors.³

These are the extremes of an exclusively religious literature on the one hand and such works as Justina and La hija de Celestina on the other. It is legitimate to think that he included Guzmán among the former, for it is certain that Espinel would not have thought it fulfilled his own aim, which was to tune the right note between the too tightly stretched string of doctrine and the too loosely stretched string of entertainment. He is therefore consciously aiming at something different from any picaresque novel published till then, and this he succeeded in producing; for Marcos de Obregón is more discreet and restrained than its predecessors: the harshness and dark colours of Alemán, the exuberant burlesque of Úbeda, the flippant sensationalism of Salas Barbadillo—all these disappear. This necessitates an alteration in the conventions. The work is much more an adventure story than a picaresque novel, and Marcos is not a picaroon or delinquent at all; he is an observer of low life, of adventures that are neither crude nor cruel. This detached position of the protagonist is achieved by a device that, from the start, establishes the gentler tone.

In the case of Guzmán I emphasized the difficulty Alemán had in avoiding incongruity between the tone of his comments on life and the tone in which the misdeeds of his delinquent had to be narrated, this incongruity arising from the novelistic inadvisability of revealing at the beginning that the man who was writing his life-story was a reformed character. Espinel's technique is different: at the beginning we see Marcos as he is when he is writing his story, a wise but not pedantic old man, one who, without condoning wrong-doing, has a sympathetic understanding of human weakness. When he begins his life story, we retain this impression of him all through the adventures of his youth; he thus appears as a detached observer, because behind the narrating voice we sense the calm experience of an old man. We see, too, a protagonist who is usually able to right wrongs or to give picaroons a taste of their own medicine, but who is never a picaroon himself. This new tone and this new technique really remove the work from the picaresque class, because there is no delinquency in the protagonist and what there is in the environment is very much watered down. In the endeavour to create profitable entertainment, Espinel, in fact, destroyed the special significance of the genre. Instead of a psychological, spiritual, and social tension between good and evil, he produced an agreeable enough, but rather commonplace, balance that points directly to the neo-classical world of Lesage, on whose Gil Blas he exercised the greatest single influence.

A similar result is obtained in the religious sphere, by exactly the same change of narrative technique, in the next so-called picaresque novel. This is Alonso, mozo de muchos amos (Alonso, Servant of Many Masters)⁴ by Jerónimo Alcalá Yáñez (1563-1632), the First Part of which was published in 1624 and the Second in 1626. It is in dialogue form, Alonso narrating his life in answer to questions and comments from his interlocutor, who in Part i is the prior of the friary in which Alonso is an unprofessed lay-brother, and in Part ii the parish priest of the district where Alonso is living as a hermit. The device of first presenting the narrator as he is at the end of the life he is describing has the same result as in Marcos de Obregón, that of providing detachment from a world that we know has been left behind. The fact that the narrator is attached to a religious house, and is later a hermit, gives the book a religious focus and aim throughout. Its main interest is its return to the point of departure of the picaresque genre with Alemán, and its attempt to do again what Úbeda had said was impossible: to place this novelistic material in a religious setting. Alemán's method, as regards his narrative plot, was the subtle one of keeping the religious doctrine implicit symbolically in the tension of the picaresque action, gradually making it show through until it becomes fully explicit in the act of submission to the divine law, the reader being involved, like the protagonist, in the picaresque action and in the painful process of climbing the mountain of misery in order to reach up to heaven.

In Alonso, mozo de muchos amos, however, the method is much simpler, and is, in fact, entirely obvious. The world of religion is explicit from the very start as the goal of the human journey, and from this safe vantage point both protagonist and reader watch mankind's procession through the world without taking part. This non-involvement and sense of security from first to last robs the story of any tension, of any suffering or anguish. For this reason it is not to my mind a genuinely religious book, or at least not significantly so, whereas Guzmán de Alfarache is; for in the former, religion is an escapist refuge, at life's beginning so to speak, while in the latter it is the meaning to life that emerges at the end out of the existential agony of having to act by the mere fact of being free, of not being in a refuge. Alcalá's vantage-point of the religious house, and later of the hermitage, colours the narrative: there is an atmosphere of peacefulness, an air of innocence in the adventures, and the work is very chaste, not because there is any real apprehension of the ideal of purity but merely because the women who appear are generally ugly. From the point of view of this book, which is to see whether picaresque literature could come to grips with the problem of delinquency, Alonso, mozo de muchos amos is an evasion of the issue.

None-the-less, despite these symptoms of decline, it is at this point, chronologically, that the genre reaches its zenith at the hands of a genius of the first order, Francisco de Quevedo Villegas (1580-1645), in the form of his only novel, La vida del buscón.⁵ This appeared in 1626, but on the basis of a remark in the text indicating that Ostend is being besieged, it is generally thought to have been written in 1604, since the city was finally captured in September of that year. This would mean that Quevedo wrote it at the early age of twenty-four, which is very hard to believe even for a man of his genius, for the work has a depth of psychological insight and a mature control of a complex style beyond the capacity of a young man. A close comparison of its style with that of other satirical works of his whose dates of composition are known would not be likely, in my opinion, to point to a date much earlier than 1620.

The word buscón, which means ‘thief’ and ‘swindler’, has been variously rendered in translations of the novel as ‘sharper’, ‘rascal’, and (quite incorrectly) ‘scavenger’. Although there are five different English translations⁶ it must be emphasized that much of the work is untranslatable. For instance, the description of Cabra, the miserly schoolmaster, in cap. iii contains the sentence la nariz, entre Roma y Francia, porque se le había comido de unas bubas de resfriado, que aun no fueron de vicio, porque cuestan dinero; which means, ‘his nose [lay] between Rome and France, because it had been eaten away by sores from colds; they weren't even from vice, because those cost money.’ Roma also means a flat or snub nose; venereal disease was called ‘the French illness’; therefore, ‘his nose lay between Rome and France. …’ The most recent translator renders this: ‘His nose, which had once been a Roman one, had been worn flat by sores, from colds, but which one would have thought to come from the French disease except that that illness involves the price of a girl.’ The startling geographical witticism evaporates. Consider this sentence from the same paragraph⁷: Traía un bonete los días de sol, ratonado con mil gateras, y guarniciones de grasa. The same translator has: ‘On sunny days he wore a cap; it was riddled with holes and had a trimming of grease.’ But bonete is the clerical biretta; it is also the bastion of a fortified wall (with protruding angles like the corners of a biretta); ratonado means riddled by mice, and the holes, gateras, are the openings in walls or roofs for cats to pass through, so that we have a momentary vision of cats and mice, chasing themselves in and out of the biretta; guarniciones does mean ‘trimmings’, but it also means ‘garrison’ and so connects with the ‘bastion’ of the biretta; it is garrisoned only by grasa, which in the sense of lard or bacon fat is suitable food for mice, who therefore ‘riddle’ it, but which in the sense of grease stains means that the wearer's unwashed head transfers to the biretta its only ‘trimmings’. The novel is full of this complex playing on words, brilliantly sustained, which is either lost or falls flat in translation. For virtuosity of language, Quevedo has no equal in Spanish literature.

El buscón is essentially, in intention and execution, a humorous work. It represents the culmination, in the picaresque novel, of the ‘low’, or comic, style, doing to perfection what Úbeda had thought was demanded by the subject-matter. But, in contrast to La pícara Justina, Quevedo's humour is not inappropriate to, or incompatible with, a serious interest in delinquency, for it is not festive or sprightly but pungent and sardonic; rather than humour proper, it is wit of a sharp-pointed kind. It stretches and distorts realism into caricature, creating a grotesque world of surrealist fancy. When the two boys were carried home after being starved at Cabra's boarding-school, they were so emaciated that ‘spies’ had to be brought to search for their eyes ‘all over their faces’; the dust had to be removed from inside their mouths with foxtail brushes as if they were the easily damaged statues on the retables of altars; the doctors forbade anyone to speak in more than a whisper in their bedroom so that the words should not echo in their hollow stomachs; their cheeks had become so wrinkled through lack of chewing that each day the inside of their mouths had to be slowly moulded back into shape with pestles.⁸ Isolated examples like this would suggest an extravaganza for its own sake, but when wit and plot are interrelated and the novel looked at as a whole, it becomes clear that this world is made grotesque in order to reveal the distortions and unreality of human social life in the self-conceit and hypocrisy of men.

Thus, the grotesque description of the miserly Cabra concludes with the outward signs of his priesthood. First his biretta already referred to, then his cassock: this is called ‘miraculous’. We think of Christ's garment which healed the woman who touched it and of Christ as the exemplar of the priestly life, but this first impression is immediately shattered. The cassock is miraculous because ‘you couldn't tell what colour it was. Some, seeing it so threadbare, thought it was made of frogskin; others said that it was an illusion; close by it seemed black, from afar bluish; he wore it without a girdle.’ In the literature of the time the sky was sometimes called a falsehood because its blue colour is illusory; the cassock, so worn as to be shiny, and so changing from black to blue as the light catches it, is an ‘illusion’ like the colour of the sky as it changes from night to day—in other words, Cabra's priesthood was a sham. The girdles round religious habits were used as ‘disciplines’, for doing penance by self-flagellation. Cabra's cassock is worn without a girdle because there is no penance in his priesthood. His description concludes: ‘with his long hair and his short cassock, he looked like the lackey of death. Each shoe could have been the tomb of a Philistine.’⁹ A priest should be the guide to salvation, but Cabra is the opposite—the guide to death. He is the opposite because a priest's head ought to be shaven and his garment long, but Cabra's hair is long (largos) and his cassock short (mísera); but largo also means ‘generous’ and mísero ‘stingy’: Cabra is generous to himself because he encourages his private interests by stinting his priesthood, which should be charity to others. Since he is turned into a guide to death (the death of the spirit), the last parts of him to be described are turned into gigantic tombs so that our final image may be that of the grave swallowing him and all men who are the opposite of what they should be. The wit is brilliant, but it is wit directed to a serious satirical end.

The exposure of human self-conceit is apparent also 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. A simple example is the meal served at the miserly Cabra's boarding-school: the pupils, he says, ‘ate an eternal meal’; but since the definition of eternity is that it has no beginning and no end, the food was conspicuous by its virtual absence: comieron una comida eterna, sin principio ni fin. This joke must be placed in the context of the clerical schoolmaster who is not a guide to salvation (eternity) but to death. At the end of the novel, the delinquent protagonist is enjoying a social prosperity that is illusory because it contradicts his moral condition; to ape the well-to-do by hanging tapestries on his walls, he buys cast-off armorial hangings from taverns; these, he says, ‘were more worth seeing than those the King had’. But the idiom Quevedo uses for ‘worth seeing’ means literally ‘for seeing’, so: ‘they were more for seeing than those the King had, for you could see through mine because they were so full of holes, while through his you would see nothing.’¹⁰

This type of joke is applied to every character in the novel except Don Diego Coronel (who is the symbol of reality and goodness contrasted with the illusory world of delinquency). The picaroon's father ‘came of a very good stock’—‘and considering how he drank one can well believe it’; his brother ‘stole everybody's hearts’ and was ‘a little angel’, a term of endearment that would be justified by his being dead, were it not for the fact that he had died in prison because of his powers of attracting objects from other men's pockets. His mother ‘had so much charm that she enchanted everybody she dealt with’—‘only they said something about a he-goat and flying through the air. …’¹¹ Variants of this type of joke are euphemisms that characters apply to themselves in order to hide the mean reality. The picaroon's father ‘was a barber by trade; although his thoughts were so elevated that he was ashamed to be called that, claiming that he was a shearer of cheeks and a tailor of beards.’¹²

So frequent are these jokes, so strong an impression is left on the reader by the phantasmagoria of Quevedo's grotesque world, that most critics have succumbed to the temptation to see nothing more in the plot and the characterization than the occasion for a prolonged display of flashing wit. But just as the grotesque descriptions disclose a serious satirical purpose below the surface of distortion, so, too, are these jokes directed to a similar end. They all show the same technique of pricking a bubble of illusion; since human beings have an infinite capacity for self-conceit, reality can only be reached by exposing their illusions. This is how Quevedo focuses the problem of the delinquent. He writes what is above all a sarcastically funny book, but the psychology of delinquency is seriously conceived and the wit has a structural pattern which harmonizes with the psychological presentation of the protagonist; and not only the wit, for the way the plot itself is constructed contributes to this over-all unity. In common with all other Spanish picaresque novels, El buscón has been accused of having no structure but only a jumble of disconnected incidents; C. B. Morris, however, has now demonstrated that it has a structural unity of a subtle and original kind, based on a series of recurring motifs, which, as it were, project the past into the present and the future, ‘entrapping’ the protagonist, who, seeking to escape from the past, is in effect constantly reenacting it.¹³ The significance of this will be soon apparent.

Quevedo's characteristically laconic Prologue bluntly states the problem of hypocrisy, which, as we have seen, was raised as a crucial issue by Alemán's attitude to his material and by Úbeda's reactions to it. ‘Here you will find’, says Quevedo to the reader, ‘every kind of roguery—which I think most people like—astuteness, deceptions, ingenuities and ways, born of idleness, of living by trickery; and you will be able to derive no little profit from this if you heed the moral lesson—and if you don't derive profit from this then go and listen to sermons, for I doubt whether anyone buys a jocular book to escape from the temptations of his depraved nature.’¹⁴ Readers of novels do not turn to picaresque stories for sermons and Quevedo is not going to pretend that they do by offering them any. They want the excitement and the fun of picaresque knavery, and that is what he will give them. But this does not mean another ironical work like La pícara Justina, or another Hija de Celestina, because behind the fireworks of the wit there lies a profound insight into the character of a delinquent. Since this character is revealed as one that gradually empties itself of anything positive until only a void is left, and since the wit itself is so devised that it exposes an empty world behind the social self-assertion of men, the picaresque narrative carries its own moral within it and requires no sermons. The triumph of Quevedo—what helps to make El buscón the peak of the picaresque novel—is that the values of morality are intrinsic to the narrative, and that it is impossible to read it correctly without reading it as a profoundly moral story. But to be read correctly, it cannot be read superficially, as it often has been and still is.¹⁵ For it is a novel rich in human truth, one that gives us a psychological study of a delinquent that is far in advance of its time, an analysis of the relationship between character and environment that reaches through the pressure of external circumstances into the heart of the conflict between the individual and society, and probes the inner, deep-seated motives that make a delinquent choose that manner of life rather than another.¹⁶

Quevedo's picaroon is called Pablos. His father is a thief and his mother a witch. They are notorious figures in Segovia. As a boy, Pablos suffers mercilessly from the taunts of the other boys in the town, who make constant mocking allusions to his parents:

I put up with everything, until one day a boy dared to shout after me that I was the son of a whore and a witch; because he said this so clearly—for I would not have minded had he said it darkly—I picked up a brick and broke his head. I ran to my mother for her to hide me … I asked her to tell me whether I could truthfully tell the boy he lied, or whether she had conceived me by giving many men a share, or whether I was the son of my father alone. She laughed and said: ‘Gracious me! Do you know about those things already? You're going to be no fool; you've got a sense of humour; you did right in breaking his head, because such things, even though they be true, should never be said.’¹⁷

The cynicism of this answer is a cruel blow to the boy, leaving him with no defence against the mockery of his companions except flight. ‘When I heard this I was as if struck dead; I determined to collect what belongings I could within the next few days and to leave my father's house, so strong was the shame I felt.’¹⁸

This shame and the accompanying fear of the hostility of society produce in Pablos a deep-seated feeling of inferiority. To cancel the superiority of others he takes refuge in an ideal world of fantasy, in which he eliminates the factor that oppresses him in real life. He lifts himself out of his actual situation as far as his fantasy can possibly take him.¹⁹ Just as his inferiority feeling derives from shame at his parents' social standing and notoriety, so his dreams for the future take a social form, placing him in a social position as far removed as possible from theirs. ‘My parents had long arguments about whose profession I was to follow; but I, who had always from childhood had the idea of becoming a gentleman, never applied myself to either.’²⁰ A pathetic ideal, indeed, harmless at this stage, but potentially dangerous.

The first step to becoming a gentleman is to be educated. ‘I pacified them, saying that I was firmly determined to learn to live a virtuous life and to persevere in my good resolutions; I therefore asked them to put me to school, because if one couldn't read or write, one wouldn't be able to do anything.’²¹ His entry into school brings to the fore another trait in his character which, together with his compensatory fantasy, is to be decisive for his future development. The timid Pablos, requiring the practical compensation of actual praise, goes out of his way to curry favour:

[The master] gave me a cheerful welcome, and told me I had the look of a sharp-witted and intelligent man. Because of this, in order not to prove him wrong, I learned the lessons well that morning. The master used to make me sit by his side; on most days, as a reward for being the first to arrive, I was given the cane to wield; and I was the last to leave because I ran errands for ‘Madam’, as we called the master's wife. I was in their good graces for being so obliging. They showed me too much favour, and this made the other boys envious.²²

This pathetic attempt to compensate for his timidity and shame only accentuates the unpleasant behaviour of his schoolmates, who make cruel fun of him.

Pablos's first efforts to realize his goal of a gentleman, combined with this toadying, also bring failure. He abandons the boys of his own class and makes up to those of a higher:

I sought out the sons of gentlemen and people of quality, and particularly a son of Don Alonso Coronel de Zúñiga, with whom I shared my lunches. On holidays I went to his house to play with him, and I kept him company every day. But the other boys, because I didn't speak to them, or because they thought I was being too snobbish, kept on giving me nicknames that recalled my father's profession.²³

His failure here is not only social. Since he cannot approach this young gentleman on terms of equality—because of his class, but still more because of his timidity and shame—he makes up to him by a form of flattery, seeking to win his favour by always denying himself pleasure in order to give it to his friend:

During all this period I was constantly visited by that son of Don Alonso Coronel de Zúñiga, who was called Don Diego; naturally he liked me, because I exchanged my tops for his if mine were better; I used to give him part of my lunch, never asking for any of his in return; I would buy him picture cards, I taught him to wrestle, I played at bull-fighting with him and kept him constantly amused.²⁴

At last Pablos has won for himself affection, and affection from a person of high social standing, but at the cost of laying the seed of servility. This flattery is here natural enough, but it is pointing forward to what Quevedo will later make the decisive factor that plunges him into the career of a delinquent—the willingness to barter moral independence and self-respect for the praise of others.

Such conduct leads Pablos into a vicious circle. His efforts to compensate for the hostility of society serve only to increase it. One day the two boys see in the street a man called Pontius Aguirre, who was rumoured to be a Jew. ‘Call him Pontius Pilate and run’, says Diego, and Pablos does it ‘to please him’; the result is a beating. Another such disaster, which immediately follows, is recounted with a remarkably subtle touch. At the Shrovetide carnival boys used to tilt at a hanging cock; one was chosen to be their leader, the ‘Cock King’, and was dressed up appropriately. The honour falls to Pablos, to whose timid and repressed spirit it provides a tremendous satisfaction; with ill-concealed pride he leads the procession ‘bowing to one side and the other like a Pharisee on the march’. His horse seizes a cabbage as it passes a greengrocer's stall; the vendor sets up a hue and cry, Pablos is pelted by the market-women, his horse rears, and he is thrown into a privy. His self-satisfaction thus ends in a greater humiliation than any that he had previously suffered; but there is more in the episode than that:

And I want to confess to you in passing that when they started throwing eggplants and turnips at me, since I was wearing feathers in my hat, I thought that they had mistaken me for my mother, and that they were throwing at her as they had done on other occasions. And so, being simple-minded and only a boy, I said: ‘Sisters, although I am wearing feathers, I am not Aldonza de San Pedro, my mother’, as if they couldn't see that from my clothes and face. The fear I felt excuses my ignorance, and the fact that this calamity befell me so suddenly.²⁵

Witches were punished by being tarred and feathered, which is the reason for this strange confusion in Pablos's mind. The suddenness with which everything happens makes Pablos's reaction a purely spontaneous one; no defences are interposed, and fear—fear of the ill-treatment that society is constantly meting out to him—brings to the fore the dominant element in his character: his self-identification with his mother's guilt. This family guilt, he thinks, is what provokes the brutal hostility of society; it results in a humiliation and a shame so overpowering and so lasting in its effects (‘even to recount it makes me feel afraid’, he says), that the memory of it is later to influence him decisively at a critical moment in his moral development. For the time being, his only refuge is to escape from his family and his home town:

I resolved never to return to school or to my parents' house … I wrote home saying that I no longer needed to go to school even though I couldn't write well, because the first requirement for my intention to become a gentleman was to write badly; and that I was therefore abandoning school to save them expense, and their house to save them displeasure.²⁶

The hostility of society, in other forms, dogs his steps despite the change of environment. He follows Don Diego, as his servant, first to Cabra's boarding-school and later to the University of Alcalá; at the former he is all but starved to death; at the latter, hostility in the form of practical jokes reaches the extreme of heartless cruelty. In self-defence he is driven to assert himself, to decide on a course of action that will make life bearable. Since it is difficult for this timid youth, obsessed with a fear of society, to stand up to ill-treatment in a resolute or valiant way, he is more likely to adopt a weak than a heroic course. There are two weak courses: either he can evade coming to terms with his environment by shrinking into despair, or he can rise superior to it by excelling it according to its own standards. Pablos finds himself in the society of students; what they seem to admire most is roguery of the practical joker's kind. Among them, he can gain significance only by outrivalling them at their own game, and it is this decision that he comes to. He determines to develop that form of cunning and astuteness that consists in ‘getting away with it’.²⁷ ‘“When in Rome do as the Romans do”, says the proverb, and it says rightly. After turning it over and over in my mind, I eventually decided to be a rogue among rogues, and more of a rogue than all of them if I could.’²⁸

This is the first of two major decisions that are to lead him along the path of delinquency. It is a further, and now a pernicious, example of the weakness that had made him curry favour as a child. Then his success had been only partial, now it is complete; for he wins from all sides the praise he has always yearned for. On the one hand his skill in thieving arouses the admiration of Don Diego for what he takes to be the faithfulness and honesty with which their money allowance is made to go so far; on the other hand, it delights and astonishes the rest of the students, whose applause spurs him on to ever more of these meretricious triumphs. But behind this self-assertion there lies a deeper motive than the quest for flattery—that of revenge for the humiliation of his childhood: ‘In order not to be tedious I shall refrain from telling how I turned the town square into a forest, for from the boxes of the cloth-shearers and the silversmiths, and from the stalls of the fruiterers—since I shall never forget the disgrace I suffered when I was the Cock King—I fed the fire of our house all the year round.’²⁹ Pablos is thus revenging himself for the hostility of society by declaring war on it. His actions are antisocial, not by accident but of set-purpose; it is not only praise he seeks but vengeance.

Pablos makes the second major decision when Don Diego is forced to dismiss him from his service. With the newly-won self-confidence that would appear to make his social ambitions realizable, he rejects the offer of useful work befitting his station. Don Diego ‘was distressed at dismissing me. He said he would find me a situation with another gentleman among his friends. I, laughing, said to him: “Sir, I am now another man with other ideas; I am aiming higher and need a more influential position.”’³⁰ His own master, he will be a servant no longer: society will be made to accept him as a gentleman. Yet this presumptuousness is still a pathetic day-dream in whose smug and pleasant picture of himself he overcomes the hardness of reality: ‘I kept on thinking how difficult it would be for me to live a life of honour and virtue, since it was first necessary to hide how little my parents had had, and then to have so much myself that no one would recognize in me what I had been. So much did I approve of these honourable thoughts that I was grateful to myself for them. I said to myself: “I, who have not had anyone from whom to learn virtue, or any virtuous person to imitate, shall deserve more thanks than one who has inherited virtue from his ancestors.”’³¹

In his home town where, unrecognized, he passes himself off as ‘a gentleman of rank’, he is soon made to suffer agonies of shame from the patronage of his disreputable hangman uncle, whose brawls he is forced to witness: ‘When I saw how honourable were the people who were conversing with my uncle, I confess that I blushed, unable to hide my shame … I was on tenterhooks to get the dinner over, collect my money and flee from my uncle.’ ‘All this abomination and depravity that I was witnessing made me ever more impatient to be among gentlemen and people of quality.’ Pocketing his father's legacy, he therefore departs for Madrid, turning his back on his family shame: ‘what most comforted me was the thought that I was going to the capital—where nobody knew me’. ‘I must repudiate my kin’, he writes in his farewell letter to his uncle.³²

But it is precisely his kin—his ancestral stock—that makes his ambition impossible. He cannot consort with the upper classes on terms of equality, for he has neither birth nor wealth. Inevitably, therefore, he enters into association with those aristocrats who, through penury, have sunk to his own level, and who ludicrously strive by every manner of artful and dishonest deception to keep body and soul together while maintaining genteel appearances. Pablos's ambition, therefore, leads him into delinquency, and his special form of self-confidence confirms him in it. In no other sphere can he hold his own and excel. His cleverness brings him to the verge of success—he gets himself accepted as an equal by ‘people of quality’ and is about to marry an heiress—but the extravagance of his ambition is his undoing.

There is cruel, if poetic, justice in the manner in which his imposture is unmasked, for this is brought about by the very person to whom, as a boy, he first humbly turned in his efforts to rise above his family shame. It is Don Diego who exposes him—Don Diego who, before establishing his identity, recalls his social stigma when apologizing to the impostor for having thought him to be Pablos: ‘You will not believe it: his mother was a witch, his father a thief, his uncle a hangman.’ After exposure, Pablos meets his punishment at the hands of the gentlemen with whom he had tried so hard to consort. His arrogant but all too understandable endeavour to ‘repudiate his kin’ recoils upon him. Attempting to compensate himself for his sense of guilty inferiority, he had pitched his aims inordinately high and is, as a result, plunged into the depths of social disgrace. Because of a moral weakness that had begun as the fruit of ingrained fear and that had grown through indulgence in self-conceit into the pride of unscrupulous over-confidence, he attempts to impose himself upon a hostile society by cunning and fraud, and becomes a socially unadapted person, a moral reprobate. At the end he is one of a gang who, in a drunken brawl, murder two policemen. Hunted by the law, he can only go out at night disguised. Tiring of this harassing existence, he emigrates to the Indies with the whore who had shared his home, only to find, as he tells us in his closing sentence, that he fared even worse across the sea.³³ By letting the novel peter out in the hint of continuous decline Quevedo is going to disturb his French translator, but he is in fact giving it an ending that is perfectly fitted to his theme, for by pricking the bubble of the delinquent's inflated ambition, he makes him gradually, as it were, shrivel away into nothingness.

This analysis has been concerned only with the character of the protagonist, but there is still more to El buscón than that. No one has written more profoundly on its wider significance than T.E. May, and one of the points he adds to its interpretation should not be overlooked here.³⁴ Pablos is presented by Quevedo as bearing a burden of guilt and shame that seems to have been imposed upon him from without. The reality and meaning of a guilt of this kind, and its concomitant suffering, could not, says May, be imaginatively sought by Quevedo except in a context of religious belief. The crisis in Pablos's life is the persecution to which, as a freshman, he is subjected on arrival at the university. This brings him to the momentous choice whether he is to seek adjustment to society by accepting his suffering, or reject his suffering and so turn against the society that inflicts it. The form in which Quevedo presents this crucial experience and decision is seen by May as a kind of internally experienced allegory.

As the freshman Pablos makes his way to the lecture rooms on his first morning, the students gather round him, hold their fingers to their noses and say: ‘This Lazarus is ready to be raised from the dead, he stinks so much.’ They then follow up this mockery of Christ by spitting on Pablos. Christ, mockery and spitting symbolically recall the Passion: Pablos is thus thrust into a situation which parallels that of the suffering Christ. That the Crucifixion is reproduced as a possibility in his mind is revealed by the fact that when, after this torment, he returns to his lodging and to his landlord who looks with astonishment at his shocking appearance, Pablos says: ‘I am not Ecce Homo.’ ‘Behold the Man’ were the words spoken by Pilate as he brought out the scourged Christ to be shown to the people; and ‘Ecce Homo’ is the name traditionally given to pictures of Christ at that stage of the Passion. Pablos thus recalls the Crucifixion, but only to repudiate any connexion between himself and the suffering Christ. He then enters his room, goes to bed, and falls asleep. Since there is no reason why he should sleep in the middle of the morning, May sees this as symbolical of the entombment of Christ that precedes the Resurrection; and, in fact, his master, returning from lectures and astonished to find Pablos asleep in bed, wakes him with the words: ‘This is now another life.’ (Later, after Pablos has decided to seek revenge on society by becoming a delinquent, he says to his master: ‘I am now another man.’) This crisis in Pablos's life consequently takes a form which links his sufferings with those of Christ. Thus, according to May, Quevedo sees the supernatural as not only present in the delinquent's world but as actually thrust upon him. The grief of Pablos is the grief of humanity and this grief is apprehended in a Christian way. The words ‘I am not Ecce Homo’ preface the choice of delinquency and represent the rejection of Christ—Pablos's refusal to take up his cross. The new life to which he awakes is, in accordance with the mockery of the students, a travesty of spiritual resurrection: it is the life of the sinner, not of the saved.

This interpretation is so subtle that one accepts it only after an initial resistance, since the pointers to this symbolism seem too few and too undeveloped to carry so deep a seriousness. Such seriousness, also, might seem incompatible with the wit that describes the episode and the crudity with which the students enact it. But wit (especially in the seventeenth century) is not synonymous with irreverence; everything human, even jesting and depravity, has a bearing on the ultimate seriousness of life; further, this symbolism need not have been present to Quevedo's conscious mind at all—his imagination, the servant of an acute intelligence, could have seized on these images of the Passion for their inner appropriateness while the conscious mind saw their potential wit. It is not necessary to accept this symbolism in order to accept the character study of a delinquent, since the two are independent; but if it is accepted, then El buscón is linked, like Guzmán de Alfarache, to the religious conscience of the age (which is not to say that it is a religious work); that it is linked to it without any sermonizing, but only by the strength of Quevedo's imaginative vision, is a measure of the greater brilliance of his novel. The brilliance lies also in the way its satirical wit is harmonized with the theme, and above all in its insight into the psychology of a delinquent. The protagonist moves through a stylized world of caricature, but his character is human. Despite what has nearly always been repeated since Chandler, the individual character is here, as in Guzmán de Alfarache, more important than the society through which he moves. The character drawing in El buscón, though always concise, is consistent and complete. Because Pablos is a rounded character he can arouse our understanding and compassion, all the more so because of the unflinching hardness of the world in which he is placed.

For these reasons, El buscón must be considered the masterpiece of the picaresque tradition. It is the zenith to which Guzmán marked the rise. Both these two major Spanish picaresque novels show how misguided are those historians of the novel in France and England who dismiss the Spaniards for the incompatibility of their professed moral aims with the nature of their picaresque material. This shows both an ignorance of the historical causes of the picaresque genre in the Counter Reformation and a misunderstanding of the first approach to picaresque material. Alemán and Quevedo turned to this kind of material because they were profoundly interested in the causes of sin and crime. For Alemán, the causes of sin are explained by moral theology, but an interest in this theology leads him to an interest in practical psychology. Thus he shows insight into the clash between temptation and conscience, and he gives a moving analysis of the psychological and emotional factors behind the process of conversion. In Quevedo, the psychological insight is much more remarkable and it is autonomous; it explores the influence of environment upon the development of character without the intrusion of moral theology.

Both novels must be classed as significant explorations of the problem of the delinquent, and thus as novels that give the new genre of the picaresque both literary validity and human depth. What comes after El buscón marks only a decline in one or other of the two directions mapped out by Marcos de Obregón and La hija de Celestina—either that of toning down the harsh colours or that of facetiousness. The middle-of-the-road good-mannered treatment of picaresque material is continued by Alonso de Castillo Solórzano (1584-1648?), a fairly prolific novelist who is a contemporary of Quevedo's, but who is quite lacking in the latter's intelligence and passion. He attempts to make of the picaresque novel an artistic literary form. We find unity of plot and a style with pretentions to elegance. There is no didactic moralizing, no acid wit; neither is there any crude farce or facetiousness; instead, the genre assumes an air of refinement in order to amuse polite upper-class readers without shocking them or touching their consciences on the raw. Castillo Solórzano does achieve a consistent level of artistry, but only one of polished mediocrity.³⁵ The world of criminal life thus becomes something to be treated with well-bred gentility.

The actual nadir of the genre in Spain is reached, appropriately enough, by the last work to exemplify the basic elements of the tradition, Estebanillo González (1646).³⁶ Although the end is now reached, forty-seven years after the beginning, and although the French realistic novel has come into existence, an independent picaresque novel, properly speaking, has not yet been born abroad. This last Spanish example is, however, a bridge that leads out of Spain into Europe, into a wider sphere of human delinquency—that of international warfare.

Notes

1. Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (Madrid 1618).

2. George Haley Vicente Espinel and Marcos de Obregón: A Life and its Literary Representation Brown University Series xxv (Providence, Rhode Island 1959).

3. ‘El intento mío fue ver si acertaría a escribir en prosa algo que aprovechase a mi república, deleitando y enseñando, siguiendo aquel consejo de mi maestro Horacio; porque han salido algunos libros de hombres doctísimos en letras y opinión que se abrazan tanto con sola la doctrina, que no dejan lugar donde pueda el ingenio alentarse y recibir gusto; y otros tan enfrascados en parecerles que deleitan con burlas y cuentos entremesiles, que después de haberlos revuelto, ahechado y aun cernido, son tan fútiles y vanos que no dejan cosa de sustancia ni provecho para el lector, ni de fama y opinión para sus autores.’

4. A Madrid edition of 1804 changes the title to El donado hablador, vida y aventura de Alonso, etc.; the novel is now commonly called by this title, which means ‘The Talkative Lay-brother’.

5. Historia de la vida del buscón, llamado don Pablos, ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños (Saragossa 1626). It has been alleged by Felicidad Buendía that the Inquisition ‘persecuted’ El buscón after Quevedo's death, since she publishes a document of 1646 in which an official of the Inquisition reports that the novel is on sale at a bookshop, despite the fact that the latest Index has prohibited all Quevedo's works except those he has acknowledged to be his, which do not include this novel. (Quevedo Obras completas, ii, Obras en verso, Aguilar, Madrid 1960, 1103-4). While it is possible that Quevedo may have found difficulty in publishing El buscón as he did his Sueños, because some of his jokes were on the border-line of irreverence, once it was published the Inquisition never interfered with any of its numerous editions, either during Quevedo's lifetime or after his death. The only probable explanation of this document is the following. We know that on his release from captivity in 1643, Quevedo began to prepare an edition of his Collected Works, for which he obtained a licence in 1644. Since he had been often attacked for the alleged malice and virulence of his satires, he would now have been anxious, knowing himself to be near to death, to exclude any such works from his projected edition. He therefore ‘repudiated’ El buscón; but since he died in the following year, his repudiation had no effect.

6. In 1657 (from the French), 1707 (by John Stevens in The Comical Works of Don Francisco de Quevedo) and three modern ones: by Charles Duff The Life of the Great Rascal, included in the volume of Quevedo's Choice Humorous and Satirical Works in the Broadway Translations (London and New York 1926); by Frank Mugglestone (under the pseudonym Francisco Villamiquel y Hardin), The Life and Adventures of Don Pablos the Sharper (The Anglo-Spanish Library, Leicester 1928); and by Hugh A. Harter, The Scavenger (Las Americas Publishing Co., New York 1962).

7. Harter, op. cit., 32.

8. ‘Trajeron exploradores que nos buscasen los ojos por toda la cara; y a mí, como había sido mi trabajo mayor y la hambre imperial—que al fin me trataban como a criado—en buen rato no me los hallaron. Trajeron médicos, y mandaron que nos limpiasen con zorras el polvo de las bocas, como retablos, y bien lo éramos de duelos … Mandaron los doctores que por nueve días no hablase nadie recio en nuestro aposento, porque como estaban huecos los estómagos, sonaba en ellos el eco de cualquier palabra. Con estas y otras prevenciones comenzamos a volver y cobrar algún aliento; pero nunca podían las quijadas desdoblarse, que estaban magras y alforzadas, y así se dió orden que cada día nos las ahormasen con la mano del almirez.’ (Cap. iv, pp. 46-8. All references are to the edition by Américo Castro in Clásicos Castellanos; the current edition, 1960, has several printing errors which I have corrected from the first edition of 1927 in the passages I quote. The critical edition of Fernando Lázaro Carreter, La vida del buscón, llamado don Pablos, in Clásicos Hispánicos, Salamanca 1965, did not come to my notice until after the completion of this book.)

9. ‘La sotana era milagrosa, porque no se sabía de qué color era. Unos, viéndola tan sin pelo, la tenían por de cuero de rana; otros decían que era ilusión; desde cerca parecía negra, y desde lejos entre azul; traíala sin ciñidor. No traía cuellos ni puños; parecía, con los cabellos largos y la sotana mísera, lacayuelo de la muerte. Cada zapato podía ser tumba de un filisteo’ (Cap. iii; 34).

10. The joke is introduced through a pun on real: ‘costáronme veinte o treinta reales, y eran más para ver que cuantos tiene el rey, pues por éstos se veía de puros rotos, y por esotros no se verá nada’ (Cap. xxii; 245).

11. ‘Dicen que era de muy buena cepa; y, según él bebió, puédese muy bien creer’ (p. 16). ‘Murió el angelito de unos azotes que le dieron dentro de la cárcel. Sintiólo mucho mi padre (buen siglo haya), por ser tal, que robaba a todos las voluntades’ (p. 17). ‘Un día alabandómela una vieja que me crió, decía que era tal su agrado, que hechizaba a cuantos la trataban; sólo diz que se dijo no sé qué de un cabrón y volar, lo cual la puso cerca de que la diesen plumas con que lo hiciese en público’ (p. 17).

12. ‘Su oficio fue de barbero; aunque eran tan altos sus pensamientos, que se corría que le llamasen así, diciendo que él era tundidor de mejillas y sastre de barbas’ (p. 16).

13. C.B. Morris ‘The Unity and Structure of El buscón: desgracias encadenadas’, Occasional Papers in Modern Languages i, University of Hull, 1965.

14. ‘Aquí hallarás en todo género de picardía—de que pienso que los más gustan—sutilezas, engaños, invenciones y modos, nacidos del ocio, para vivir a la droga, y no poco fruto podrás sacar de él si tienes atención al escarmiento; y, cuando no lo hagas, aprovéchate de los sermones, que dudo nadie compre libro de burlas para apartarse de su natural depravado.’ The sentence ‘cuando no lo hagas, aprovéchate de los sermones’ can be taken to mean ‘if you don't profit from my book's moral lesson, then profit from its sermons’. Since it contains none, this would be a wittier comment on Guzmán de Alfarache than interpreting it as a reference to the sermons preached in churches; none the less, it seems to me more natural to take it in this latter sense.

15. E.g. Fernando Lázaro Carreter, ‘Originalidad del Buscón’ in Studia Philologica, Homenaje ofrecido a Dámaso Alonso (Madrid 1961) ii, 319-38. I find myself in disagreement with almost everything in this paper. It denies that there is any moral intention in the novel, seeing it as essentially a display of wit behind which there is a cold and impassive vision of a hard world. The author had not read any of the three earlier papers which offered abundant evidence to refute this interpretation: the papers by T. E. May and myself, mentioned below, and P. N. Dunn ‘El individuo y la sociedad en La vida del buscón’, in Bulletin Hispanique, lii (1960) 375-96.

16. In what follows I reproduce a substantial section of an early paper of mine, ‘The Psychology of the “Pícaro” in “El Buscón”’, in Modern Language Review, xlii (1947) 58-69. The validity of my thesis has been accepted by those critics who have read it, but these have been few. Lázaro Carreter, op. cit., did not have access to it; del Monte, op. cit., refers to it but gives the wrong journal, and his treatment of El buscón shows no awareness of the existence of my interpretation; neither S. Serrano Poncela ‘El buscón, ¿parodia picaresca?’, in Insula, No. 154 (Sept. 1959) nor Fritz Schalk ‘Über Quevedo und El Buscón’, in Romanische Forschungen, lxxiv (1962) 11-30, refer to it, or to May or Dunn, and have really nothing new to say on the novel, repeating the conventional statements about its ‘amorality’ which have been refuted for the last twenty years. No writer on the picaresque novel in France, England or Germany, as far as I know, has shown any knowledge of my paper. Since my interpretation is cardinal for the revaluation of the Spanish picaresque novel offered in this book, I reproduce the relevant section here, together with the supporting quotations from the text of the novel.

17. ‘Todo lo sufría, hasta que un día un muchacho se atrevió a decirme a voces hijo de una puta hechicera; lo cual, como me lo dijo tan claro—que aún si lo dijera turbio no me pesara—agarré una piedra y descalabréle. Fuime a mi madre corriendo, que me escondiese … Roguéla que me declarase si le podía desmentir con verdad, o me declarase si me había concebido a escote entre muchos, o si era hijo de mi padre sólo. Rióse y dijo: “¡Ah, noramaza! ¿Eso sabes decir? No serás bobo; gracia tienes; muy bien hiciste en quebrarle la cabeza; que esas cosas, aunque sean verdad, no se han de decir.”’ (Cap. ii, 24-5).

18. ‘Yo, con esto, quedé como muerto, determinado de coger lo que pudiese en breves días, y salirme de casa de mi padre: tanto pudo conmigo la vergüenza’ (ibid.).

19. There is a correspondence between this psychological situation as presented by Quevedo and the findings of the school of Individual Psychology. According to these, the compensation by which the sufferer from an inferiority feeling strives to overcome it never takes the form of actual compensation, but always of over-compensation; the goal of perfection, which is never attainable in practice, becomes the aim, and the possibility of disaster looms large. ‘This mechanism of over-compensation in the sphere of unreality, which plunges a man in the depths in direct proportion to the height of his aims for the future, plays a decisive rôle in abnormal development. If the child experiences situations that he interprets in terms of prejudice, oppression and inferiority, the mechanism of over-compensation proportionately raises his future aims to inordinate heights. … It is reality that decides whether the goals a man sets before himself are attainable …’ (Rudolf Allers The Psychology of Character, Engl. trans. (London 1939) 89). Quevedo gives us exactly this situation in the case of Pablos. By setting himself an unattainable goal, he will land in disaster.

20. ‘Hubo grandes diferencias entre mis padres sobre a quién había de imitar en el oficio; mas yo, que siempre tuve pensamientos de caballero desde chiquito, nunca me apliqué a uno ni a otro’ (Cap. i, 19).

21. ‘Metílos yo en paz, diciendo que quería aprender virtud, resueltamente, e ir con mis buenos pensamientos adelante; y así, que me pusiese en la escuela, pues sin leer ni escribir no se podía hacer nada’ (ibid.).

22. ‘… recibióme muy alegre; díjome que tenía cara de hombre agudo y de buen entendimiento. Yo con esto, por no desmentirle, di muy bien la lección aquella mañana. Sentábame el maestro junto a sí; ganaba la palmatoria los más días por venir antes, e íbame el postrero por hacer algunos recados de “señora”, que así llamábamos la mujer del maestro. Teníalos a todos con semejantes caricias obligados. Favorecíanme demasiado, y con esto creció la envidia de los demás niños’ (Cap. ii, 22).

23. ‘Llegábame a los hijos de los caballeros y personas principales, y particularmente a un hijo de don Alonso Coronel de Zúñiga, con el cual juntaba las meriendas. Íbame a su casa a jugar las fiestas, y acompañábale cada día. Pero los otros, porque no les hablaba, o porque les parecía demasiado punto el mío, siempre andaban poniéndome nombres tocantes al oficio de mi padre’ (ibid.).

24. ‘En todo esto, siempre me visitaba aquel hijo de don Alonso Coronel de Zúñiga, que se llamaba don Diego; queríame naturalmente, porque trocaba con él los peones, si eran mejores los míos; dábale de lo que almorzaba, y no le pedía de lo que él comía; comprábale estampas, enseñábale a luchar, jugaba con él al toro y entreteníale siempre’ (Cap. ii, 25).

25. ‘Y de paso quiero confesar a v.m. que cuando me empezaron a tirar las berengenas y nabos, que, como yo llevaba plumas en el sombrero, entendí que me habían tenido por mi madre, y que la tiraban, como habían hecho otras veces; y así, como necio y muchacho, dije: “Hermanas, aunque llevo plumas, no soy Aldonza de San Pedro, mi madre”, como si ellas no lo echaran de ver por el traje y el rostro. El miedo me disculpa la ignorancia, y el sucederme la desgracia tan de repente’ (Cap. ii, 29-30).

26. ‘… determinéme de no volver más a la escuela ni a casa de mis padres … Escribí a mi casa que yo no había menester más ir a la escuela, porque, aunque no sabía bien escribir, para mi intento de ser caballero lo que primero se requería era escribir mal; y que así, yo renunciaba la escuela por no darles gasto, y su casa por ahorrarles pesadumbre’ (Cap. ii, 31).

27. Here, too, there is a clear parallel with the Adlerian psychologists' analysis of the effects of an ingrained inferiority feeling. See, for example, Rudolf Dreikurs An Introduction to Individual Psychology (Eng. trans., London 1935) 29-33.

28. ‘“Haz como vieres” dice el refrán, y dice bien. De puro considerer en él, vine a resolverme en ser bellaco con los bellacos, y más que todos, si más pudiese’ (Cap. vi, 69).

29. ‘Por no ser largo, dejo de contar cómo hacía monte la plaza del pueblo, pues de cajones de tundidores y plateros, y mesas de fruteras—que nunca se me olvidará la afrenta de cuando fui rey de gallos—sustentaba la chimenea de casa todo el año’ (Cap. vi; 84; italics mine).

30. ‘… a él le pesaba de dejarme. Díjome que me acomodaría con otro caballero amigo suyo. Yo riyéndome, le dije: “Señor, ya yo soy otro, y otros mis pensamientos, más alto pico y más autoridad me importa tener”’ (Cap. vii; 89-90).

31. ‘Iba yo pensando en las muchas dificultades que tenía para profesar honra y virtud, pues había menester tapar primero la poca de mis padres; y luego tener tanta, que me desconociesen por ella; y parecíanme a mí tan bien estos pensamientos honrados, que yo me los agradecía a mí mismo. Decía a solas: “Más se me ha de agradecer a mí, que no he tenido de quién aprender virtud, ni a quién parecer en ella, que al que la heredó de sus abuelos”’ (Cap. ix; 105-6).

32. ‘Yo, que vi cuán honrada gente era la que hablaba con mi tío, confieso que me puse colorado, de suerte que no pude disimular la vergüenza … Yo rabiaba ya por comer y por cobrar mi hacienda, y huir de mi tío’ (Cap. xi; 135). ‘Con estas infamias y vilezas que yo veía, crecíame por instantes el deseo de verme entre gente principal y caballeros’ (139). ‘Consideraba yo que iba a la corte, donde nadie me conocía—que era la cosa que más me consolaba’ (Cap. xii; 141). ‘… me importa negar la sangre’ (142).

33. A ms version, which is the text published in Clásicos Castellanos, concludes with the promise of a Second Part which will show how he fared worse in America. The novel was, however, printed as being in two parts and the reference to a continuation was dropped. Whatever Quevedo's original intention might have been, the work was published as complete.

34. ‘Good and Evil in the Buscón’, in The Modern Language Review, xlv (1950). The section summarized is 331-3. Though this brilliant paper is mentioned by del Monte (who does not seem to have grasped its significance), it appears to have remained unknown to every one else who has dealt with El buscón.

35. See Peter N. Dunn Castillo Solórzano and the Decline of the Spanish Novel (Oxford 1952).

36. La vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen amor. Compuesto por él mismo. Dedicada al Excelentísimo Señor Octavio Piccolomini, Duque de Amalfi … (Antwerp 1646). Angel Valbuena Prat, in his anthology La novela picaresca (4th ed. Madrid 1962), includes two works later than this: Periquillo el de las gallineras (1688) by Francisco Santos and the autobiography by Diego de Torres Villarroel (1743, 1752, 1758). The former is not, properly speaking, a picaresque novel because it has a saintly hero; the latter is far too remote to form part of the literary movement initiated by Guzmán de Alfarache.