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Renaissance Poverty and Lazarillo's Family : The Birth of the Picaresque Genre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Javier Herrero
Javier Herrero*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
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Abstract

In the history of literature the change from the idealized worlds of the shepherd and the knight to the world of the pícaro; from arcadia and chivalry to the desolate urban landscape of misery and hunger; from romance to irony—in fact, the Copernican revolution that produced a new genre—could only have been born of an upheaval that affected men’s lives and forced educated writers to see conditions they had so far ignored. This change stemmed from an increased awareness of human misery, which the urban growth of the Renaissance had made highly visible. The genius of the Spanish author of the Lazarillo consists in his having found the literary voice for such a profound transformation of European society. The Lazarillo, of course, did not annihilate the past, but it gave artistic form to the all-pervading crisis that was destroying the basis of the traditional order.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 5 , October 1979 , pp. 876 - 886
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

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References

Notes

1 For a full discussion of Cervantes' text, see Claudio Guillén, “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque,” in his Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 135–58. Precedents for the Lazarillo can be found in classical works, such as Lucian's Lucius: The Ass or Apuleius' The Golden Ass, and in late medieval and early Renaissance descriptions of the life of beggars and vagrants, such as the Speculum Cerretanorum (c. 1484–86) and the Liber Vagatorum (1509 or 1510). Literary descriptions of low life were usual enough in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (La celestina. La lozana andaluza, Eulenspiegel, etc.). but none had the structural unity and sense of development and growth that could give birth to a genre (Guillén. “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” Literature as System, pp. 71–106).

2 Henry Kamen, The Iron Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 387.

3 Forma Subventionis Pauperum Quae apud Hyperas Flandorum Urbem Viget, Vniversae Reipublicae Christianae Longe Utilissima. I have quoted (modernizing the orthography) from William Marshall's English translation (1535) included in Some Early Tracts on Poor Relief, ed. F. R. Salter (London: Methuen. 1926), pp. 41–42. The Forma Subventionis Pauperum appeared in 1525; since Luis Vives' De Subventione Pauperum was not printed until Sept. 1526. it is impossible to prove that Vives influenced the Ypres scheme. But since that great thinker was living in neighboring Bruges, it certainly seems likely that it was he who elaborated the project, and not a group of town councillors.

4 My translation of Juan Luis Vives, De Subventione Pauperum (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia. 1942), pp. 84, 88–90:

Primum Natura, per quam volo Deum intelligi nam nihil est Natura aliud. quam illius voluntas … quaecumque prolulit, in hac proposuit domo nullis repagulis ant seris clausa. communia iis quos progenuit … ergo quod natura liberalitate sua dedit commune, nos obvium exposuit, nos avertimus, recondimus, claudimus, tuemur, arcemos alios poste, pariete. seris, ferro, armis denique legibus… . nihil esse cuiquam suum; fur, inquam, est et raptor, quisquis pecuniam in aleam prodigit, qui domini in arcis coactam detinet, qui in ludos effundit aut epulas, qui in preciosas admodum vestes, aut instructissimum vario argento atque auro abacum … denique quisquis. quod superest necesariis naturae usibus. non egenis impartit, fur est… .

All translations, when not otherwise indicated, are mine. For a well-documented study of Vives' relationship with Erasmus and More, see Carlos G. Noreña, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague: Martimus Nijhoff. 1970), esp. pp. 49–104. For the dependence of De Subventione Pauperum on More's Utopia, see Alain Guy, “Vives socialiste et l'Utopie de More.” Moreana. 31–32 (1971), 263–79.

5 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J., and H. H. Hexter, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, iv (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 63. 76. For the close relationship between Erasmus and More and for the radical character of More's thought, see the following sections in the editors' Introduction to Utopia: “Christian Humanism,” “Utopia and the Christian Revival,” and “A Window to the Future: The Radical ism of Utopia.”

6 For the Soto and Medina texts, see Fray Domingo de Soto, O.P., Delibeiación en la causa de los pobres, y réplica de Fray Juan de Robles, O.S.B. (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Polîticos, 1966). The Poor Law of 1540 can be found in Ordenanzas reaies de Castillo, included in Varios de legislation, published in 1541 (n.p.); this collection is reference R-10860 in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid.

7 Soto, pp. 122, 189. With regard to the legal and social background of the Lazarillo, see also Margarita Morreale's “Reflejos de la vida española en el Lazarillo,” Clavileño, 25 (1954), 28–31; Derek W. Lomax' recent article “On Re-reading the Lazarillo de Tonnes,” Studia Iberica: Festschrift für Hans Flasche (Bern: Franke, 1973), pp. 271–81; and Francisco Márquez Villanueva's Espiritualidad y literatura en el siglo XVI (Madrid-Barcelona: Alfaguara, 1968), pp. 120–28.

8 Many of Soto's ideas on poverty come from Luis Vives, as does the concept of poverty in the Poor Law itself (which is a distortion of some of Vives' propositions). Soto refers to the Ypres Forma Subventionis Pauperum and to the study that the Sorbonne made of it, thus showing that he knew perfectly well what was going on in the north of Europe. In fact, his failure to cite Vives is another remarkable example of the growth of the official anti-converso policy: it was dangerous and counterproductive to mention him.

9 An excellent and exhaustive description of the most significant theories on the picaresque can be found in Joseph V. Ricapito's “Société et ambiance historique dans la critique du roman picaresque espagnol,” in Actes: Picaresque espagnole: Etudes sociocritiques. Collection du Centre d'Etudes Sociocritiques, U.E.R. ii (Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 1976), pp. 9–36. For a balanced examination of the critical output on the Lazarillo, see A. D. Deyermond, Lazarillo de Tonnes: A Critical Guide (London: Grant and Cutler, 1975). Although it would be out of place to digress extensively on this vast bibliographical body, it seems pertinent to sum up the conclusions of the major studies in order to place the present analysis in the framework of contemporary criticism. Leaving aside the critics concerned primarily with structure and form (such as Claudio Guillen, Francisco Rico, Stuart Miller, and Robert Alter), we can distinguish three groups of critics who approach the origin of the picaresque from a historical point of view: (1) For Américo Castro and the critics who follow him, the picaresque stemmed from the conversos' compassionate understanding of the suffering of the dispossessed and from the rebellion of the converts against sixteenth-century Spanish society. (2) For Alexander A. Parker and Francisco Marquez Villanueva, the picaresque was born of religious spirituality; Villanueva emphasizes the Erasmian criticism of ecclesiastical corruption; Parker, the Council of Trent's moral and theological teachings. (3) For Alberto del Monte, Maurice Molho, Enrique Tierno Galván, and Jean Vilar—critics who tend to underline the socioeconomic forces of Renaissance Spain—the origin of the picaresque is generally related to the rise of a new bourgeois class with close similarities to Puritanism, in contrast to the opposition to work and commerce implied in the Spanish concept of “honor.” Contemporary criticism is indebted to the rigorous research and analysis of the scholars in all three groups for the greater confidence with which it can now approach the complex problem of the formation of the picaresque. While I am convinced that each of the causes advanced by these critics has contributed in greater or lesser degree to this literary development, their analyses deal essentially with Spanish problems and Spanish society and do not explain the universal dimension of the genre.

10 For an extended study of the different meanings of “Lázaro,” see Erik von Kraemer, Les Maladies désignées par le nom d'un saint, Commentationes Human-arum Litterarum, No. 15, Pt. ii (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1949), 94–96; Yakov Malkiel, “La familia léxica Lacerar, Laz(d)rar, Lazeria: Estudios de paleontología lingüística,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 6 (1952), 209–76; Marcel Bataillon, Novedad y fecundidad del Lazarillo de Tormes (Madrid: Anaya, 1968), pp. 27–28 and Bibliog. It is impossible to establish a date of composition for the Lazarillo; the extant evidence makes any date between 1525 and 1553 possible. For an up-to-date discussion of this problem, see Deyermond, pp. 12–13.

11 Translated from Giginta, Tratado del remedio de pobres (Coimbra: Antonio de Mariz, Impressor y librero de la Universidad, 1579), p. 88:

[T]an desventurados pobretos, que no han menester poco favor del señor para no morirse desesperados, o rabiando, de considerar que estando ellos pereciendo en tan varios extremos de miserias, gasten los ricos cristianos en edificios, aderezos, cocina. bestias, y otras demasías, superfhiamente, y que muriendo tantos pobres de frío, haya tantas gualdrapas y mantas para sus caballos, en buenas caballerizas, dejándoles a ellos en la calle.

12 For the religious symbolism of the name “Lazarus,” see Deyermond, pp. 27–32. After completing the present study, I read Bruce W. Wardropper's “The Strange Case of Lázaro González Pérez,” Modern Language Notes, 92 (1977). 201–12, in which the metaphoric identification of Lázaro with the Lazarus of the Gospel is presented as a central theme of the book. I am pleased to find myself supported by Wardropper's authority.

13 Francisco Rico, ed., Lazarillo de Tormes and Mateo Alemán, Guzman de Alfarache, Vol. i of La novela picaresca española (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1967), p. 5. The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes, trans. Robert S. Rudder (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973), p. 5. All quotations follow these editions. The Spanish text, “y confesó y no negó y padesció persecución por la justicia,” is much more complex than expected. It is, in fact, compounded of two biblical quotations: “confessus est et non negavit” (John i.20) and “beati qui persecu-tionem patiuntur propter iustitiam, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum” (Matt. v.10). The first, “confessus est,” refers to John the Baptist facing the Pharisees, and thus, to the sixteenth-century Spanish reader, who was extremely well versed in the Gospels, it would immediately suggest the innocence of Lázaro's father and the hypocrisy of his persecutors; this impression would be reinforced by the echo of the second biblical quotation, in which iustitiam connotes both the righteousness of Tomé Gonzalez and consequently, and ironically, the injustice of the official justice that is destroying Lázaro's family. That the Spanish Inquisition was aware of the author's sarcasm is proved by the omission of this reference from the expurgated edition of 1573.

14 Corresponds to Rico, pp. 11–12:

No nos maravillemos de un clérigo ni fraile, porque el uno hurta de los pobres y el otro de casa para sus de-votas y para ayuda de otro tanto, cuando a un pobre esclavo el amor le animaba a esto.

The phrase “para ayuda de otro tanto” has not been satisfactorily explained by any critic.

15 With regard to Zaide, although the name is Morisco (Rico, p. ii) it is obvious from the text that he is a Negro slave. Lope de Vega calls him “negro” (La Dorotea [Valencia: Castalia, 1958], p. 67), and only his black color can explain why he and his child produce such a shocking contrast in the racially mixed society of sixteenth-century Spain. A final remark about goodness as an exception in the book. It is true that a few generous bystanders help the starving Lázaro, but they have an anonymous and vague existence that marks them as marginal, not only to the story but to the world itself as portrayed in the book through the great figures of the blind man, the hidalgo, and the ecclesiastical characters (for whom the author reserves his most venomous arrows).

16 The author here uses a proverbial expression: “Por no echar la soga tras el caldero” ‘In order not to throw in the rope after the bucket.‘ Alberto Blecua, in his excellent edition of the Lazarillo (Madrid: Castalia, 1972), has shown that its meaning is to avoid being hanged after the bucket of melted lard has been thrown on the wounds bleeding from the lash (p. 95).

17 Alexo de Venegas, Declaración de la diferencia de libros que hay en el Uni verso (Toledo: Juan de Ayala, 1540), fols. 162–71.

18 Marco Antonio de Camos, Microcosmia: Gobierno Universal del hoinbre cristiano, para todos los estados y cualquiera de ellos (Madrid: Casa de la Viuda de Alonso Gómez, 1595), pp. 2–15. 139–46, 156–64, 170–78, 188–91, 208–36.

19 Américo Castro, Hacia Cervantes (Madrid: Taurus, 1960), p. 118.

20 Fernando Lázaro Carreter, “Construcción y del Lazarillo de Tonnes,'” Âbaco: Estudios sobre litem titra española, i (Madrid: Castalia, 1969), 73–74.

21 Translation of Giginta, pp. 87–88:

Ahí verán mozuelas y mozuelos perdidos, flacos, dolientes, sarnosos, llagados, estropeados y enfermos de varias maneras viejos y no viejos. con tan mal color los más. y mortecinas caras muchos, que a bien constderarlo parecen de los que pintan penando … Sâlganse otras mañanas a los hospitales las horas de recibir enfermos, y verán cuantos llegan ya tales de esas calles que pueden con tarse por muertos en ellas; y cuantos se han de volver por falta de cama y comida y han de irse desolados a echarse por esos muladares, o caerse en el primer lugar que de desvalidos tropiezan, y morirse allí de aborrecidos, sin querer aguardar más remedio en vano… .

22 Corresponds to Rico, p. 55:

Y fue, como el año en esta tierra fuese estéril de pan, acordaron el Ayuntamiento que todos los pobres estran-jeros se fuesen de la ciudad, con pregón que el que de allí adelante topesen fuese punido con azotes. Y así, ejecutando la ley. desde a cuatro días que el pregón se dio. vi llevar una procesión de pobres azotando por las Cuatro Calles. Lo cual me puso tan gran espanto, que nunca osé desmandarme a demandai… .

23 It is true that bourgeois and low-class settings, as well as scenes of low living, had been appearing since Boccaccio, but, as explained in n. 1. they lacked the literary dimension that could give birth to a new genre (as literary history plainly shows).

24 For Erich Auerbach the world of courtly romance had as its main aim the creation of a background of fantasy where the aristocratic class could find, through adventure, a justification of its mission and its power. For this reason the economic forces supporting these courts (peasants, artisans, etc.) are absent from the landscape of the knight (“The Knight Sets Forth,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature [Berne, 1946: rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1968], pp. 123–42). William Empson asserts that the shepherd, as an idealized freeman in an idealized nature, replaced the worker in such a way that aristocratic power could ignore the painful reality of poverty (“Proletarian Literature,” Some Versions of Pastoral [New York: New Directions, 1968], pp. 3–23).