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The Critic as Witness for the Prosecution: Making the Case against Lazaro de Tormes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

George A. Shipley
George A. Shipley*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle
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Abstract

La vida de Lazarillo de Tonnes is a coherent and fully realized fiction. Its eccentric shape is craftily designed by its autobiographical narrator to serve his current needs by swelling the narration of his early years while masking the recent “Toledo Years” with wit, expedient renaming, and ellipses. By this apparently generous and certainly amusing “recontextualization” of his current involvement in a scandalous ménage-à-trois the narrator seeks to attenuate his culpability: his corruption merely represents Toledo's and his society's generally. The puzzling short chapters (iv-vii) are coded allusively to deceive innocent readers and amuse malicious readers in Lázaro's Toledo; these chapters are as detailed as they can and need be. The narrator exercises a freer hand in setting down his version of long-ago and far-away Salamanca; Lázaro exploits this advantage in the four fifths of the narrative that comprises Chapters i-iii.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 2 , March 1982 , pp. 179 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

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References

1 I quote throughout from Francisco Rico's edition of Lazarillo de Tonnes in La novela picaresca espanola, i (Barcelona: Planeta, 1967). Concerning the most serious charges scholars have brought against this novel, see n. 16 below. Several scholars have commented on juridical language in the text, which has recently come to be viewed as a judicatory document of some sort. See Francisco Marquez Villanueva, “Sebastian de Horozco y el LazariUo de Tonnes” Revista de Filologia Espanola, 41 (1957), 269–71; Claudio Guillen, “La disposicion temporal del LazariUo de Tonnes,” Hispanic Review, 25 (1957), 269, and LazariUo de Tormes and El Abencerraje (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 14; Stephen Gilman, “The Death of LazariUo de Tormes,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 155, n. 28; Francisco Rico, “Problemas del LazariUo,” Boletin de la Real Academia Espanola, 46, No. 178 (1966), 279, n. 8; and esp. Douglas M. Carey, “LazariUo de Tonnes and the Quest for Authority,” PMLA, 94 (1979), 37, 38, and 44, n. 10, where Bruce Wardropper is quoted as viewing LazariUo as “the first of a new genre of depositions”; Lâzaro is “giving evidence that would be used in a court of inquiry.”

2 “Lâzaro, in effect, first surrenders himself to a corrupt world and afterwards ironically redefines it as Utopia,” Gilman, p. 160; see also Carey, p. 38, and Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 54.

3 The present study falls into the category of moral readings that M. J. Woods finds worrisome; see his “Pitfalls for the Moralizer in LazariUo de Tonnes” Modern Language Review, 74 (1979), 580–98. Woods is right to warn us of the dangers of self-deception; Lâzaro's narrative is calculated to reward the reader for a variety of misreadings.

4 Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto devista (Barcelona: Seix Barrai, 1970). Rico's work is a refinement of Guillen's, cited in n. 1. Only Gonzalo Sobejano among recent critics doubts the identification of the caso mentioned in the Prologue with Lâzaro's situation in the final chapter; see his “El Coloquio de los perros en la picaresca y otros apuntes,” Hispanic Review, 43 (1975), 25–41, esp. pp. 30–31, and Rico's response, on p. 93 of his “Apéndice: Elementos para una retractatio,” published with his reprinted edition of LazariUo de Tormes (Barcelona: Planeta, 1976).

5 Hacer la cama is but one of many euphemisms in Chapter vii that mask the facts of the matter from some readers and reveal them, amusingly, to others whose already corrupted imaginations are prepared to grasp this sort of information. For other erotic uses of hacer la cama, see Pierre Alzieu et al., Poesia erotica del sigh de oro (Toulouse-Le Mirail: France-Ibérie Recherche, 1975), p. 79, and José Maria Alin, El cancionero espahol de tipo tradicional (Madrid: Taurus, 1968), p. 602.

6 Gilman, p. 153, and Alan D. Deyermond, LazariUo de Tormes, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts (London: Grant and Cutler, 1975), p. 47.

7 Also, in his splendid analysis on pp. 271–72, Guillen tells us that “el proceso de seleccion a que Lâzaro somete su existencia nos muestra aquello que le importa manifestar: los rasgos fundamentales de su persona…. No solo desde el présente, sino con él, [Lâzaro] se construye un pasado” ‘the selection process to which Lâzaro subjects his existence shows us those things that are important for him to show: the basic features of his person…. Not only from the present but with it [Lâzaro] constructs his past.‘ I suggest that there is much fiction in Lâzaro's autobiography. That is, not only is what the anonymous author wrote properly called a pseudoautobiography, the same label should be applied to what Lâzaro wrote, the design and content of which are influenced more by his present than by his past.

8 Gilman, esp. pp. 156–58, and Deyermond, pp. 22–23, 39.

9 For comment but not consensus on this agadardeleitar-dar provecho-ensenar matter, see Gilman, p. 149; Rico, p. lxiv; Joseph H. Silverman, rev. of M. Bataillon, éd., La Vie de LazariUo de Tormes (Paris: Aubier, 1958), in Romance Philology, 15 (1961), 92–93; Frank Durand, “The Author and Lâzaro: Levels of Comic Reading,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 45 (1968), 89–90; Martin de Riquer, éd., La Celestina y Lazarillos (Barcelona: Vergara, 1968), pp. 122–23; Donald McGrady, “Social Irony in LazariUo de Tormes and Its Implications for Authorship,” Romance Philology, 23 (1969–70), 557; Howard Mancing, “The Deceptiveness of LazariUo de Tonnes,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 431; Joseph Ricapito, ed., LazariUo de Tormes (Madrid: Câtedra, 1977), pp. 91, n. 3, and 92; and M. J. Woods, p. 595.

10 Derek W. Lomax found, “On Re-reading the LazariUo de Tormes” (Studia iberica; Festschrift fur Hans Flasche [Bern: Francke, 1973], pp. 371–81), that “really [the narrative] is a minefield covered with daisies” (p. 372). For Gilman LazariUo is “less a confession than a cynical self-absolution of grown-up ignominy” (p. 154). Other denouncers of Lâzaro's deceptions include Blackburn, p. 36; Carey, pp. 39, 45, n. 12; Harry Sieber. Language and Society in La vida de LazariUo de Tormes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), passim; L. J. Woodward, “AuthorReader Relationship in the LazariUo del [sic] Tormes,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 1 (1965), 43–53; R. W. Truman, “Parody and Irony in the Self-Portrayal of Lâzaro de Tormes,” Modern Language Review, 63 (1968), 600–05; Richard Hitchcock, “LazariUo and ‘Vuestra Merced,‘ ” Modern Language Notes, 86, No. 2 (1971), 265–66; A. Bell, “The Rhetoric of Self-Defense of Lâzaro de Tonnes,” Modern Language Review, 68 (1973), 84–93; Beverly J. De Long-Tonelli, “La ambigiiedad narrativa en el LazariUo de Tormes,” Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, 10 (1977), 378–89; Richard Bjornson, in Ch. ii of his The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1977), esp. pp. 35–36; and Colbert Nepaulsingh, “Lâzaro's Fortune,” Romance Notes, 20, No. 3 (1980), 1–7.

11 The words are richly conventional; see Alberto Blecua, éd., La vida de LazariUo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades (Madrid: Castalia, 1972), p. 87, n. The question is: for whom is the material here and throughout the Prologue working conventionally? The answer: for Lâzaro, the narrator. There may be points at which narrator and author coincide in their objects of attack, Lâzaro being at those points an unwitting agent provocateur for the author but still and always the author's foil as well.

12 Obvious instances include the anti-Semitic riots of 1449 and 1467 and the intense inquisitorial persecution of the mid 1480s; toward 1520 “the city seems somehow to have exemplified, in heightened form, all the tensions and conflicts within Castile …” (J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 [New York: Mentor, 1966], p. 146). The late-date hypothesis, which seems to me persuasive, puts composition of Lazarillo close to the year of its publication (in 1553 or 1554, the latter being the date of the three earliest extant editions) and makes Lazarillo contemporaneous with yet another bitter struggle in Toledo, that occasioned by the tenacious and successful efforts, in the years 1546–47 and afterward, of the Archbishop Primate Siliceo to discredit the many Judeo-Christian converses among his clergy and to exclude that eminent minority from chaplaincies in his cathedral. That church is the historical counterpart of the iglesia mayor of Lazarillo,Ch. vi, in which Lazarillo contracts with a Judaizing capelldn for their mutual advantage. (On this last point, see below, n. 21.)

13 Along with Alberto Blecua (p. 91) and Francisco Rico (p. 9), I believe that the divisions and epigraphs of the text are of the anonymous author's making. Furthermore I believe we are to consider them styled by the narrator to be parts of his design for giving agreeable shape to a disagreeable life. Sevens are fundamental structural and symbolic ingredients in many Judeo-Christian, and also Pythagorean and Neoplatonic, representations of completion, fulfillment, and perfection. The rhetorical possibilities of the number are well understood by the buldero of Lazarillo, Ch. v, who, in his fraudulent but spectacularly efficacious prayer implores God to reveal His truth; “que si es verdad … que yo traigo maldad y falsedad, este pvilpito se hunda comigo y meta siete estados debajo de tierra …” ‘if it is true … that I am being evil and false, let this pulpit sink down into the earth and bury me seven estados [a measure, 1.85 yards] deep’ (p. 71). Clearly he and also Lâzaro (who after all, either remembers or devises the prayer) hope to tap the magical persuasive power of seven, which is linked in the minds of the credulous with God's own way of talking and measuring.

14 After the five introduced in Chs. i-v, two figure in Ch. vi. In Ch. vii Lazarillo is a porqueron ‘petty police assistant’ to the alguacil ‘sheriff's deputy’ before gaining the position of pregonero ‘crier.‘

15 1,470 lines of print (in Rico's edition) for blindman, priest, and squire; 16 for the four years of upward mobility. Following is the line count (and corresponding percentages) for the several divisions in Lâzaro's vida (lines containing but a single word are dropped): Prologue: 44 lines (2.3%); Ch. i: 467 (24.4); Ch. ii: 417 (21.8); Ch. iii: 661 (34.5); Ch. iv: 12 (.6); Ch. v: 206 (10.7); Ch. vi: 20 (1.0); Ch. vii: 90 (4.7); total: 1,917 lines. Chs. i-iii constitute 80.6% of the text and 82.5% of the seven chapters.

16 We owe the locus classicus of this tradition to Fernando Lâzaro Carreter: “… hace mâs de medio siglo, escribio Bonilla San Martin: 'a partir del tratado cuarto, la narracion se précipita y el interés decae notoriamente.' Es una observacion incontrovertible, y … ninguna justificacion que se intente, por muy sugestiva que sea, puede paliarla. Ya hemos expuesto nuestra opinion de que, al agotarse el tema del hambre y la gradacion que vertebra los très primeros capitulos, una especie de fatiga impotencia creadora parece aduenarse del autor. Y sin embargo, necesita equilibrar el texto con algunos episodios mâs, para conseguir una transicion aceptable que conduzca al desenlace. Los tratados IV, V, y VI son, pues, de necesidad arquitectonica; … todo esfuerzo de composicion ha cesado” 'more than half a century ago Bonilla San Martin wrote that “beginning with the fourth chapter the narration speeds and interest fails remarkably.” His observation is incontrovertible, and … no attempt at justification, no matter how suggestive it may be, can palliate it. We have already expressed our opinion that, when the hunger theme and its graduated treatment, which give structure to the first three chapters, give out, a kind of creative fatigue or impotence seems to possess the author. Nevertheless he needs to bring balance to the text with a few additional episodes to achieve an acceptable transition leading to the conclusion. Chapters IV, V, and VI, then, satisfy an architectural need; … all effort at composition has ceased' (“Construccion y sentido del Lazarillo de Tormes,” Abaco, i [Madrid: Castalia, 1969], 109; this important essay is reprinted in Lâzaro Carreter's Lazarillo de Tormes en la picaresca [Barcelona: Ariel, 1972], pp. 61–192). Blecua, pp. 27–31 and 38, and Deyermond, pp. 35 and 97, accept Lâzaro Carreter's reading. Other significant links in this tradition of attributing the text's anomalies to the anonymous author are F. Courtney Tarr, “Literary and Artistic Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes,” PMLA, 42 (1927), 404–21, esp. 413–15, 420; A. A. Sicrofï, “Sobre el estilo del Lazarillo de Tormes,” Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispanica, 11 (1957), 157–70, esp. 166–67, 169; Raymond S. Willis, “Lazarillo and the Pardoner: The Artistic Necessity of the Fifth Tratado” Hispanic Review, 27 (1959), 268, 275–77; and Francisco Ayala, El Lazarillo: Nuevo examen de algunos aspectos (Madrid: Taurus, 1971), pp. 66, 73–75, 82–83. At least three attempts have been made, in passing, to suggest organic explanations for these problems of proportion and pace. Gonzalo Sobejano, pp. 32–33, reminds us that “es propio de la carta el procéder selectivo: demorada informacion de unas pocas cosas, y râpida insinuacion de otras” ‘it is normal in letter writing to proceed selectively, tarrying over a few matters, rapidly insinuating others’; but he too views the selection as effected “desde el punto de vista del autor anonimo” 'from the point of view of the anonymous author.' Francisco Rico, in his discerning commentary, observes: “la rapidez narrativa de los tratados IV y VI a nadie debiera sorprender mâs que la morosidad mamfiesta otras veces…. Morosidad rapidez son dos aspectos de un mismo ideal artistico…. Toda la novela da fe de idéntico criterio selectivo, en su 'progreso unilinear continuo de andadura y velocidad cambiantes' ” 'The narrative rapidity of chapters IV and VI should surprise us no more than the deliberate slowness manifest at other points…. This deliberate slowness and rapidity are two aspects of one artistic ideal…. The whole novel testifies to a single criterion of selection in its “continuous, unilinear progress which changes speed and gait” '(pp. xlvi-xlvii; the quote within the quote is from Guillen's “La disposicion …,” p. 278). De Long-Tonelli outlines, all too briefly, a cogent psychosocial hypothesis: “Lejos de descubrir una falta de unidad artistica, creemos que la brevedad y aceleracion de estos ultimos tratados corresponde a la interiorizacion del narrador, el cual se ha dado cuenta de que su personalidad puede sobrevivir solo gracias a un compromiso con la realidad” 'Far from revealing a lack of artistic unity, brevity and acceleration in these last chapters, we believe, respond to the interiorization of the narrator, who has realized that his personality can survive only by virtue of a compromise with reality' (pp. 388–89).

17 Both as readers and as critics we are so intrigued by what Lâzaro puts before Ch. vii that we scarcely notice how short he falls of fulfilling his promise to explain the principal and initial cause of his writing, the core intrigue, the caso. As De Long-Tonelli puts it, Lâzaro tells only “los chismes que sin duda el oyente ya habrâ oido antes de pedirle la relacion del ‘caso’; le refiere en pocas palabras su estado présente, el cual sin duda el oyente ya conoce …” ‘the gossip that [Vuestra Merced] doubtless must have already heard before asking [Lâzaro] to relate his “case”; [Lâzaro] informs [Vuestra Merced] in a few words of his present state, with which [Vuestra Merced] is already without doubt familiar’ (p. 388).

18 This consistency is asserted concentrically in the final five sentences of the text: Lâzaro achieves “paz in mi casa” (at the negligible cost of his honesty and self-respect), claims that his wife is as good a woman as lives “dentro de las puertas de Toledo” ‘within the gates of Toledo,‘ and dates this situation by reference to the emperor's official visit to the city—a coincidence in spatial alignment that symbolizes the commensurate interests and conditions of narrator, city, and empire.

19 The regular scheme in the pattern of Lâzaro's experience is discussed by Carey, pp. 36–38.

20 Actually the pretended suggestion of hard work and exhaustion in “ni yo pude con su trote durar mas” is but a cover masking the sordid primary meaning, which is Lâzaro's confession of his participation in the fraile's heterosexual and homosexual commerce; for the unmasking of this affair, see Sieber's Ch. iv. On the anonymous author's adjustment of an inherited proverb to strengthen its suggestion of social ambition and protection, see Richard Bjornson, “Lazarillo ‘arrimândose a los buenos,‘ ” Romance Notes,19 (1978), 67–71.

21 Guillen, in Lazarillo de Tormes and El Abencerraje, p. 169, suggests circumspectly the Jewish descent of this chaplain and the relation of this descent to the Siliceo affair mentioned in my n. 12. I confirm Guillen's reading in a separate study, as yet unpublished.

22 The services Lâzaro renders this master are similar to those he also was reluctant to detail in Ch. iv; I examine this coded relation in another unpublished essay, “Lazarillo de Tormes, Tr. VI: ‘Un maestro de pintar panderos.‘

23 On the three estates in Lazarillo, see Rico, Punto de vista, pp. 46–50; Lomax, p. 374; Sobejano, p. 33; Deyermond, pp. 16–17.

24 On Lâzaro's gradual mastery of the word, first spoken, now written, see the many sharp observations in Sieber, p. 93 et passim.

25 I study Lâzaro's manipulation of humor and comic form in a companion essay, called “Resting the Case against Lâzaro de Tormes,” scheduled for publication in 1982 in a festschrift titled Creation and Re-Creation:Experiments in Literary Form in Early Modern Spain.