by Steven Moore
Around the time Justina was published, a brilliant but quarrelsome writer/courtier named Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) produced what is considered the finest example of the Spanish picaresque, The Swindler (La Vida del Buscón llamado Don Pablos), which circulated in manuscript for 20 years until a bookseller bootlegged it in 1626.27 An arrogant aristocrat who was proud of his pure blood, his royal connections (his mother was a lady-in-waiting at court), and his mastery of a half-dozen languages, Quevedo despised upstarts and let them have it with both barrels in this ferocious, cruel book. (Velásquez painted his portrait, looking like nobody you’d want to mess with.) His pícaro is named Pablos, whose disreputable family—father a barber/thief, mother a Moorish witch/prostitute, his uncle a hangman—condemns him to the dregs of society, which he is foolish enough (in Quevedo’s baleful eyes) to aspire to leave, not to become an honest tradesman, which would indicate he knows his place, but “a man of leisure” (1.1).
Fate and an unforgiving author frustrate him at every turn: he goes to school around age twelve, where he is taunted by other students, then to a private tutor who starves him, then to the University of Alcalá (where Quevedo was educated), the setting of many misadventures involving spit, shit, piss, and vomit. Justina had some disgusting scenes—a dog chews the ear and part of the face off Justina’s dead father, and her mother dies from suffocation while trying to stuff a large sausage down her throat—but The Swindler is relentless in its depiction of disgusting scenes and grotesque characters, though Quevedo makes it all entertaining in a black-humorous way. At one point Pablos refers to Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings (2.2), and The Swindler has the same lurid, nightmarish quality.
Pablos leaves school around age 16, already something of a thief and shoplifter, and spends the next two years graduating to an accomplished buscón (swindler). Still intent upon joining the upper classes—which he seems to think requires little more than wearing the right clothes and knowing the right people—he tries and fails to marry into money, becomes a professional beggar for a while, joins a theatrical troupe and becomes a hack playwright, then is strung along by a flirty nun, and finally joins a gang of thieves in Seville, where he gets drunk one night and kills two policeman. Rescued by a whore named Grajales, the couple escapes to America, hoping “things would go better in the New World and another country. But they went worse, as they always will for anybody who thinks he only has to move his dwelling without changing his life and ways” (2.10).
To hell (or America) with him, the reader is tempted to say. Quevedo makes sure the reader shares his disgust with Pablos, unlike our reaction to earlier pícaros. Lázaro has our sympathy until he sells out at the end, Guzman appeals to us for forgiveness, Justina charms our socks off (as she steals our watch), and Cervantes’ four-legged pícaro is a good doggy. But even if you don’t share Quevedo’s reactionary views on heredity, Pablos elicits little more than a sense that he gets what he deserves. The vulgar converso learns to suck up to others at an early age and thereafter pretends to be something he isn’t, often changing his name but never considering changing his ways, as he admits in the novel’s final line. (And his announced destination of America sends a chill down the spine; what’s the future of that brave new world with such people in it?)
The Swindler is a superb novel in every way. The narrative flows smoother than the episodic picaresques it modeled itself on, the style is witty and sophisticated (without overdoing it like Justina), the settings are described with dirty realism (while in jail Pablos takes precautions to avoid anal rape), the psychology of the delinquent/parvenu is insightful, and the satire is wide enough to encompass not only swindlers like Pablos but society at large as he meets other chancres on the Spanish body politic. The assorted members of the justice system he runs up against are invariably corrupt, a Genoese banker he meets leads him to aphorize “conscience in business men is a bit like virginity in whores—they sell it when they haven’t got it any more” (1.10), and the clergy is mocked throughout as Pablos regularly compares his actions to a priest’s, as when a fellow criminal accompanies him on a new scam: “This was just to make sure I knew the tricks, like a priest saying his first Mass” (2.2). As an accomplished poet, Quevedo pours scorn on “that species of vermin called poets” and inserts “A Proclamation Against All Idiot, Useless and Rubbishy Poets” that, among its articles, would “impose perpetual silence on them regarding the sky and establish close[d] seasons for the Muses, just as for hunting and fishing . . .” (1.10). Pablos’ brief career in the theater unleashes another storm of outrage from our author, and even Pablos comes to regard it as a “wicked profession” (2.9). Like the novels of Céline and Genet, The Swindler depicts a sordid world with sardonic humor and occasional flights of fanciful imagery, as in this description of the private tutor who almost starves Pablos to death:
His eyes were sunk so deep in his head that they were like lamps at the end of a cave; so sunken and dark that they looked like a draper’s windows. His nose was partly Roman and partly French, because it was poxy with cold sores (not the real pox of course; it costs money to catch that). His whiskers were pale, scared stiff of his starving mouth which was threatening to gnaw them. I don’t know how many of his teeth he had missing: I suppose he had dismissed them as there was never any work for them to do. His neck was as long as an ostrich’s and his Adam’s apple looked as if it had been forced to go and look for food. (1.3)
It goes on, hilariously. Quevedo deals with caricatures, not characters, because he is intent on humiliating types, not individuals. The short novel is a delight to read, even in a watered-down translation—the original is so rich in wordplay that it has been deemed untranslatable—despite Quevedo’s snobbery, prejudices, xenophobia, elitism, and antiquated determinism. As in Justina, the author’s voice overrides that of the protagonist—we aren’t expected to believe Pablos went to America and became a brilliant comic novelist—but whether Quevedo intended to write the definitive picaresque or convert the novel into a weapon for class warfare, The Swindler is a brutal triumph.
Spanish writers (and readers) continued to invest in the picaresque genre for another 50 years, but with diminishing returns. In 1612, Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo (1581–1635) published La Hija de Celestina—expanded in 1614 as La Ingeniosa Elena, hija de Celestina—featuring a slicker, more criminal version of Justina who, after a brief career in swindling, murders her male accomplice and is strangled to death. Unlike other picaresques, it is told in the third-person and the origins of Elena’s delinquency are postponed until later in the short novel, but otherwise it adds nothing to the genre. (The title was chosen to cash in on the evergreen popularity of Rojas’s Celestina, just as other hacks at this time were writing sequels to Lazarillo, which was enjoying a revival.) Between 1624 and 1626 Jerónimo de Alcalá Yañez (1563–1632) published a lengthy, two-part novel in dialogue form entitled Alonso, mozo de muchos amos (Alonso, Servant of Many Masters). An 1804 edition changed the title to El Donado hablador, The Talkative Lay Brother, for Alonso is recalling his earlier life long after he’s retired from the world. It contains plot elements familiar from Lazarillo, Guzman, and The Swindler, but the protagonist is a colorless, unreflective drifter who doesn’t develop or learn anything from his experiences (including a short stint in Mexico). Alonso de Castillo Solórzano (1584–1648?) cranked out a number of picaresques in the 1630s and ’40s, but his contribution to literary history is enshrined in the title of Peter Dunn’s book Castillo Solórzano and the Decline of the Spanish Novel. El Diablo cojuelo (The Limping Devil, 1641) by Luis Vélez de Guevara (1579–1644) is sometimes lumped in with picaresques because the protagonist is a delinquent student like Quevedo’s Pablos, and because after he frees the devil from an astrologer’s bottle he is shown the seamier side of life in Madrid. (The novel is better known in Lesage’s adaptation The Devil upon Crutches, which we’ll meet in the next chapter.) In the same occult vein, La Vida de Don Gregorio Guadaña (1644) is the last and best-known
section of a novel of reincarnation called El Siglo pitagórico (The Age of Pythagoras) by a Spanish Jew named Antonio Enríquez Gómez (1600–63), featuring a character who gets mixed up in a number of intrigues. Its wit and ingenuity remind some critics of Quevedo, but the novel is more a satire on social types than a true picaresque, and more influenced by French versions of picaresque than by Spanish originals.
The nadir of the Spanish picaresque was reached by an eponymous novel called La Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor (The Life and Deeds of Little Stevie González, a Man of Merry Humor, 1646).28 He’s less a pícaro than a snotty punk, a petty criminal with no self-esteem, a drunk who stumbles from one episode to another, and who eventually rubs elbows with royalty by playing the buffoon. As a kid, Stevie earned enough of an education to toss around classical references and irreverent biblical allusions, and he’s waggish enough to entertain his betters, but he has no illusions about himself: he admits he’s a base coward, coldly selfish—“Experience having taught me to look to my own” (4)—and confesses he enjoys the vagabond life, despite its hardships: “I lived at my ease, and my debts were paid [usually by skipping out on them]; I valued not punctilios of honor, and made a jest of the notions of reputation; for in my opinion there is no life like that of a rake” (5).
One character calls Estebanillo “a second Lazarillo de Tormes” (2), but the novel lacks the earlier work’s concern with social criticism or Guzman of Alfarache’s concern for the Catholic soul. “But what have I to do with that,” Estebanillo sneers, “or who can mend a depraved generation? It is better for me to deliver my own follies than rail at the faults of others” (10). This is why many critics regard Estebanillo González as the nadir of the picaresque, for it abandons the genre’s capacity for puncturing society’s pretensions and settles for roguish adventures and cheap laughs. Here, an author is no longer a social critic but a clown.
The novel is entertaining enough: much of it reads like a comic police report, tracking Estebanillo’s crime spree as he zigzags all over Europe (as far north as Poland), and Estebanillo’s impudent, self-deprecating style is amusing. The novel gives a historically accurate account of life behind the lines during the middle of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), and as the contemporary Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo notes in a backhanded compliment: “By restoring cowardice and baseness as necessary parts of human life, Estebanillo does us all a service.”29 As a veteran conman, Estebanillo has probably been playing the reader for a fool all along, for near the end of the novel, he becomes the court jester to a Spanish viceroy and tells us: “Every night [an] abundance of Navarroise gentlemen, and among them Don Pedro Navarro, came to wait upon the viceroy, among whom I played all my pranks, telling them the most unaccountable lies that ever were heard, always placing the scene in Germany or Poland, for fear they should find me out” (12). Earlier picaresque novels were confessions; Estebanillo González is a con.
By this point the picaresque had lost its primary meaning as the confession of a distressed character, ashamed of his or her delinquency, and had become the boast “by someone who delights in being a real-life example of it,” as Parker complains. He goes on to bring down the curtain on the once-earnest Spanish version of the genre:
The cynical and frivolous insensitiveness to anything that is dignified and decent, the total absence of an atom of self-respect in this last Spanish picaresque work is the justification for the earnestness with which the genre began, for it is precisely the degradation of human nature that Alemán felt so intensely and strove with such seriousness to redeem. Less than fifty years, therefore, witness the rise and fall of the picaresque novel in Spain. Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) and Estebanillo González (1646) are not only the first and the last, they are also the two extremes—the one, man’s anguished awareness of his need for redemption; the other, man’s frivolous insensitiveness to his own degradation. (77–78)
The one exception to this downward spiral from art to entertainment might be The Life of the Squire Marcos de Obregón (Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón, 1618) by Vicente Espinel (1550–1624), a poet and guitarist highly regarded by Cervantes, Quevedo, and the other leading writers of his generation. Marcos de Obregón differs from other picaresques first in its structure, which is much more convoluted. Instead of the linear, childhood-to-adulthood narrative arc common to the genre, Espinel’s novel begins when his autobiographical protagonist is in his mid-sixties (c. 1615), who then tells a story about when he was 50 and attached to the household of an arrogant physician and his randy wife. Leaving the doctor, he finds refuge from a storm in a hermitage, and only then, in the 10th chapter, does he begin to relate to a hermit his life story, beginning when he left home for college in the early 1570s. At the end of part 1 we return in time to the hermitage, and the next day, at the further prompting of the hermit, Marcos resumes his story, which he continues up to his fifties, when he runs into the physician again, who tells a lengthy traveler’s tale of what became of him and his wife after Marcos left them (desert island, one-eyed giants). Second, the novel differs in its moral orientation. Marcos’s delinquent behavior is milder than that of Guzman, Justina, Pablos, and the rest, and far from embracing the criminal life (as they do), he frequently chastises himself for his lapses from prudent behavior, and indulges in what might be called picaresque behavior only to right a wrong.
Like Alemán, Espinel regards his novel as a vehicle for instruction: “my principal aim is to teach people how to endure troubles and misfortunes patiently.”30 And again like Alemán, he includes an allegory of critical reading in his prologue: two students on their way to Salamanca come across the burial stone of two lovers with the Latin inscription Conditur unio (union is formed) repeated twice; the first student hastily dismisses it as a redundancy, but the second broods on it and realizes the repeated phrase could mean “A great pearl is hidden,” and beneath the stone finds an invaluable pearl on the neck of a skeleton. Espinel is asking us to read deeper than the surface adventures of a pícaro to uncover his pearls of wisdom. To be honest, they’re not hard to find: most of Marcos’s misadventures are followed by a lecture on responsible behavior, shorter and more secular than Alemán’s tedious Catholic sermons. Most of these episodes are mildly amusing—Espinel may have borrowed some from Boccaccio and other sources, but most are autobiographical—his many digressions are diverting, and his moral lessons are sensible enough. For example, after a short period of gambling, Marcos lectures against it, pointing out that even those who win tend to squander the money on eating, drinking, and wenching—or as Major Langton renders it, “at taverns of gluttony, feasts of Bacchus, and sacrifices to Venus” (1.14).31 Several times Marcos falls for a wily seductress with humorously humiliating results, followed by a what-was-I-thinking postmortem. His class-consciousness often gets him in trouble, for even though he’s little better than a vagabond, he proudly tells a superior: “I am not of any trade, for in Spain gentlemen do not learn any trade, preferring rather to suffer want, or to go into service [to a nobleman], to engaging in trade” (2.7). His frequent lapses from gentlemanly standards lead to pages and pages of “self-condemnation” (3.10), which at times gives Espinel’s work the introspective tone of a modern novel.
But Espinel departs from picaresque novelists by treating his protagonist not as a delinquent or buffoon but as an ordinary person. Espinel insists “there is scarcely a being whose life would not furnish a grand moral history, provided a proper use were made of them” (1.15). This represents a significant shift in the history of the novel, away from royalty and extraordinary characters (high and low) to the average citizen, who would soon become the preferred protagonist of most novels. Consequently, Espinel self-consciously defends his sometimes mundane narrative choices: “It may seem that the object with which I write this book [moral instruction] is partly defeated by relating these trifling circumstances, but if the matter be well weighed, they will be found not deficient in substance; for I
am not recounting the achievements of great princes and valiant generals, but the life of a poor squire . . .” (1.23).
Marcos de Obregón is appealing and, yes, instructive, but is not entirely successful because the author often forgot he was writing a novel, not his memoirs. As George Haley shows in his book-length study, “Marcos de Obregón, at once a partial autobiography of Vicente Espinel and a novel cast in the form of the autobiography of Marcos de Obregón, rests upon a mixture of several rhythms imperfectly coordinated, of several temporal planes that are never completely synchronized” (101). At several points, Marcos even relates adventures “which happened to the author of this book” (1.5; cf. 3.3, 3.14), which might sound like a metafictional flourish but is merely laziness, a failure on Espinel’s part to aestheticize his memories to the requirements of fiction. While finding an almost Proustian quality in the discursive nature of the author/narrator’s recollections, Haley goes on to state, “Espinel evidently could not keep his convoluted narrative straight in his own mind, probably because he wrote intermittently and rarely revised” (110). Espinel’s remembrance of things past is complicated by his antagonistic view of memory and the burden it places on those (like him) who have had a rough life:
Memory certainly appears to be a divine gift, for that it makes past events present; but still I consider it as the scourge of unfortunate men, for it is continually bringing before them their bad success, their past injuries and present misfortunes, suspicious as to the future, and the want of confidence they are apt to feel in everything. And as life is, at any rate, short, it is rendered shorter by this constant recurrence to distressing subjects. And consequently, for such [men] as these, the art of forgetting would be preferable to that of remembering. (3.14)