In this brief monograph Barbara Fuchs explores how the picaresque creates skeptical readers attuned to narrative's subversive potential. The introduction examines Inquisition Spain's reliance on first-person narration through confession to ensure religious unity, and observation as a tool for imperial expansion. After sketching the notorious difficulties of defining the picaresque, Fuchs argues that captives’ tales fit within the picaresque tradition of unreliable narrators. Fuchs situates her work within Mediterranean studies and alongside scholars who demonstrate that forced conversion and other enforcement of religious conformity created skepticism of orthodoxy.
In the first chapter, “Imperial Picaresques: La Lozana andaluza and Spanish Rome,” Fuchs discusses the unreliable narration of the prostitute-protagonist Lozana and the author Delicado, a voyeuristic narrator implicated in the corruption he denounces. Fuchs asserts that the Spanish Empire defined itself as inheritor of the classical Roman tradition and that Delicado blames Roman decadence on Spaniards, foreshadowing the sack of Rome. Fuchs also juxtaposes the novel with Delicado's medical treatise on syphilis, a disease that afflicts the author and his protagonist Lozana. Fuchs concludes that Delicado demonstrates the messy consequences of empire such as exile and disease.
In chapter 2, “Picaresque Captivity: The Viaje de Turquía and Its Cervantine Iterations,” Fuchs outlines the Inquisition's imperial function of assessing returning captives’ narratives to claim fictionalized captives’ tales as picaresque. In the understudied Viaje de Turquía, the captive Pedro recounts his experience to two false pilgrims who utilize his knowledge to improve their deception, displaying the corruption concurrent with imperial power. Cervantes's plays Comedia famosa de Pedro de Urdemales, Los baños de Árgel, and La Gran Sultana locate the picaresque captive in Algiers and Constantinople. Fuchs demonstrates that though characters mock and belittle Muslims and Jews they also betray intimate knowledge of their culture through erotic liaisons and knowledge of dietary laws. Fuchs reads these literary captives as pícaros who are authoritative yet unreliable sources. Their survival in captivity depends on suspect intimacy with the religious other, and both pícaro and captive invoke religion opportunistically.
Chapter 3, “‘O te digo verdades o mentiras’: Crediting the Pícaro in Guzmán de Alfarache,” examines the multivalence of credit in the financial sense and as a synonym for trustworthiness. Suspicion that poverty could be feigned for economic gain, Fuchs argues, creates the perception that all systems of documentation are subject to imposture. Guzmán gains his victims’ trust, or credit, by investing his own resources in his deceptive schemes and using the proceeds from one scheme to fund the next. Fuchs also explores cambio (change/exchange) as either mercantile exchange or reformation of character. She concludes that Guzmán de Alfarache creates knowing fictions by demonstrating the illusions and artifice on which Spanish society relies.
In chapter 4, “Cervantes's Skeptical Picaresques and the Pact of Fictionality,” Fuchs examines how Cervantes's exemplary novels create knowing fictions through the ironic contrast between the exemplary novel format and the non-exemplary conduct of noble protagonists who wander the Mediterranean feigning picaresque life. In La ilustre fregona, Rinconete y Cortadillo, and the paired novellas Casamiento engañoso and Coloquio de los perros Fuchs suggests savoring Cervantine meandering middles rather than reading through the lens of denouement. She demonstrates that Cervantes encourages and rewards skepticism by insisting on the veracity of such absurdly unreal elements as talking dogs or a possibly hallucinating syphilitic narrator, alleging that for Cervantes the pleasure of fiction trumps mimetic veracity.
In the postscript, “The Fact of Fiction,” Fuchs concludes that the picaresque instructs the reader not to doubt everything but, rather, to read skeptically and discerningly. Fuchs highlights the picaresque's social critique and explicates imperial functions, such as reintegration of captives, mercantile exchange, and religious confession. However, her analysis tends to treat the Spanish Empire as a homogenous whole in an era in which the Spanish often saw themselves as members of a set of Spanish nations (Castilian, Catalan, Basque, etc.) rather than a single entity, and would benefit from some parsing of the distinction between nation and empire. Increased attention to gender and inclusion of the female picaresque might also enrich the argument. For example, in the analysis of the Ilustre fregona, the scullery maid of the title is barely mentioned. Overall, this work will be of great interest to scholars of early modern Spain and the picaresque genre. Given the picaresque's reach, Fuchs's contribution enriches early modern literary analysis in general and her analysis of empire, confession, travel narratives, and the unreliable narrator have broad interdisciplinary applicability.
