The Monstrous Guide to Madrid:
The Grotesque Mode in the Novels of the Villa y Corte (1599-1657)
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Bethany Marie Gilliam
Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese
The Ohio State University
2014
Dissertation Committee:
Professor Elizabeth B. Davis, Advisor
Professor Jonathan Burgoyne
Professor Emeritus Donald Larson
Copyright by
Bethany Marie Gilliam
2014
Abstract
This dissertation examines the relationship between the literary grotesque mode
and the growing pains of Madrid during the first century of its status as Villa y Corte,
capital of the Spanish empire. The six novels analyzed in this study – Guzmán de
Alfarache (1599, 1604), El Buscón (1626), Guía y avisos de forasteros (1620), Las
harpías en Madrid (1633), El diablo cojuelo (1641) and El Criticón (1651, 1653, 1657) –
are significant because their authors employ the grotesque mode to show their
perspectives on the changes that they witnessed in Madrid.
The central goal of this project is to examine the continued presence of the
grotesque mode in these novels and how the use of this mode was motivated by the
historical crisis that took place during the years following Philip II’s decision to move the
court to Madrid. In this vein, Philip Thomson recognizes that moments of change are
particularly conducive to the use of the grotesque in art and literature. Using studies on
the grotesque by Thomson, Wolfgang Kayser, Henryk Ziomek, James Iffland and Paul
Ilie, this dissertation will present a definition of the grotesque mode as it applies to a
carefully chosen grouping of seventeenth-century Spanish novels. This definition is based
on three pillars. The first is the tension produced by the combination of the comic and a
“sphere of negativity,” the term that Iffland utilizes to signify something that is
incompatible with the comic. The second is the grotesque conceit, an exaggeration or
distortion of the conceit as formulated by Baltasar Gracián. The third pillar of the
ii
grotesque mode is distortion of characters and their actions, which is accomplished
through a variety of means. In the selected novels, the most frequent device used to
distort the subject is zoomorphism, or the combination of elements of the human, plant
and vegetative spheres to describe a single object.
The first chapter of this study examines the grotesque picaresque images in
Guzmán de Alfarache. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s “material bodily concept” as a
methodological framework, it demonstrates the increasing connection between the
grotesque mode in literature and urban spaces.
Chapter Two examines El Buscón and utilizes Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope
to examine how the grotesque mode is used in the narrative creation of two new
chronotopes in the court city: the “road to Madrid” and the “streets of Madrid.”
Chapter Three analyzes the use of the grotesque mode in the immigrant stories
included in the courtly novels Guía y avisos de forasteros and Las harpías en Madrid. In
these novels, a darker side of Madrid emerges from the shadows of the “land of
opportunity” of Madrid, where grotesque descriptions of the upper social classes, while
lacking in the picaresque novel, abound.
Chapter Four concludes this study with a discussion of how the grotesque mode is
used to describe the fight for survival that the inhabitants of Madrid experience in El
diablo cojuelo and El Criticón. In this chapter, I propose that Gracián consciously
produces a true grotesque aesthetic in El Criticón. In both of these novels, the city of
Madrid itself is filled with abnormal, even monstrous, images that show that the Villa y
iii
Corte suffered immensely during its growth towards a city worthy of housing the court of
the Spanish empire.
iv
To Brenda Gilliam.
For everything, thank you.
v
Acknowledgments
I would sincerely like to thank the following people:
•
The individuals of the Fulbright Program and the Comisión Fulbright, whose
support allowed me to research this dissertation topic in the Biblioteca Nacional
Española, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and the Archivo de la Villa de Madrid.
•
My advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Davis; without her dedication, advice, and push to
succeed in the face of unforeseen setbacks, this dissertation would have remained
unfinished. Your caring words helped me to feel pride in myself and in my work.
•
My professors and colleagues in at The Ohio State University, especially
Professors Elizabeth Davis, Jonathan Burgoyne, Donald Larson, Geoffrey Parker,
and Stephen Summerhill. Thank you for your interest in my professional
development and your positive influences on my dissertation project.
•
Bud and Brenda Gilliam, Matthew Gilliam, and Jennifer Sanchez-Huerta, who
never stopped encouraging me to write this dissertation despite the thousands of
miles of distance that it put between us. “Thank you” isn’t enough to show my
gratitude.
•
My husband Jorge Declara García, who taught me to love. Thank you for your
unconditional patience.
vi
Vita
2002 ..............................................................Lord Botetourt High School
2006 ...............................................................B.A. Spanish, Roanoke College
2008............................................................... M.A. Peninsular Spanish Literature, The
Ohio State University
2011 ..............................................................ABD in Iberian Literatures and Cultures,
The Ohio State University
Publications
Gilliam, Bethany. “Review.” Rev. of El teatro del Siglo de Oro: Edición e interpretación,
by Alberto Blecua, Ignacio Arrellano and Guillermo Serés. The Sixteenth Century
Journal 42.2 (2011): 630.
Fields of Study
Major Field: Spanish and Portuguese
vii
List of Abbreviations Used in Notes
AGS = Archivo General de Simancas
AHN = Archivo Histório Nacional
AVM = Archivo de la Villa de Madrid
BNE = Biblioteca Nacional Española
f.(f.) = folio(s)
viii
Table of Contents
Abstract................................................................................................................................ii
Dedication............................................................................................................................v
Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................vi
Vita....................................................................................................................................vii
List of Abbreviations Used in Notes................................................................................viii
Introduction: Introduction to the Grotesque Mode in the Novel of Seventeenth-Century
Madrid..................................................................................................................................1
Chapter One. The Journey to Madrid in Guzmán de Alfarache: The Development of the
Grotesque Picaresque.........................................................................................................27
Chapter Two. Mapping Madrid in El Buscón: The Grotesque Narration of the
Chronotopes of the Court City...........................................................................................65
Chapter Three. Immigrant Stories in the Maremágnum of Madrid: Guía y avisos de
forasteros que vienen a la Corte and Las harpías en Madrid.........................................108
Chapter Four. Monstrous Madrid: The Development of the Grotesque Aesthetic in El
diablo cojuelo and El Criticón.........................................................................................155
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................206
Bibliography....................................................................................................................212
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Introduction to the Grotesque Mode in the Novel of Seventeenth-Century Madrid
In June 1561, Philip II changed forever the fate of Madrid by proclaiming the city
as the new, permanent home of the previously itinerant court. David Ringrose studied the
installment of the royal family and its entourage in the Alcázar, a military fortress hastily
converted into a royal palace for the occasion. Yet even the title that he gives to a section
of his work, “Sólo Madrid es Corte,” suggests the ambivalent reputation of the new court
city. The small town at once gained international importance as the hub of what was
arguably the most powerful European empire; there was no confusion about the very
claim that only Madrid was court brought with it a privileged status that immediately
made the city rival other economically-stronger cities with a prouder lineage and more
established history, such as Seville, Toledo and Valladolid. However, as Ringrose points
out, the phrase “Sólo Madrid es Corte” was soon used in a mocking way, pointing out
that Madrid was nothing but the court. With relatively little history – much of which was
dominated by the Moors, century-long enemies of the Spanish Crown – and a small,
uncultured population, some stated that the only bragging rights to which Madrid was
1
entitled was its prized status as court city. Clearly, Philip II and his successors had a long
road to travel to create a prosperous urban Madrid worthy of its title.
The physical and social evolutions of seventeenth-century Madrid are expressed
not only in scholarly monographs that look back on Madrid’s history but also within the
novels written during this period.1 Although these are different types of narratives, the
stories that the novels tell dramatize in their own unique way the historical situations of
scholarly sources. The characters of these novels discuss the changing demographics of
the city, its reputation as a land of opportunity, and even its polemical nature as a city
both wonderful and sordid. Let us consider the following representative observations of
the Villa y Corte:
“hallé […] los niños, mozos; los mozos, hombres; los hombres, viejos, y
los viejos, fallecidos.”
- Guzmán
Guzmán de Alfarache, 1604
“-Pésame, señor don Diego, de veros fuera de la comodidad de vuestra
casa y regalo, en tiempo tan riguroso, y veros expuesto a la descomodidad
y confusión de esta Babilonia de Madrid.”
– Don Antonio,
Guía y avisos de forasteros que vienen a la Corte de Madrid, 1620
1
For historical studies on the growth of Madrid from the medieval period until the late
seventeenth century, see María Asunción Fernández Hoyos, María F. Carbajo Isla,
Virgilio Pinto Crespo and Santos Madrazo Madrazo, Santos Juliá Díaz and María José
del Río Barredo, David Ringrose and Cristina Segura, and Ricardo García Cárcel.
2
“Finalmente, Teodora, la corte es el lugar de los milagros y el centro de las
transformaciones.”
- Teodora’s neighbor,
Las harpías en Madrid, 1633
“Yo veo […] a Madrid madre de todo lo bueno, mirada por una parte, y
madrastra por la otra; que assí como a la corte acuden todas las
perfecciones del mundo, mucho más todos los vicios, pues los que vienen
a ella nunca traen lo bueno, sino lo malo, de sus patrias.”
- El Sabio,
El Criticón, 1651
These four examples show that Madrid is enjoying a phase of expansion and that it is a
place where one might experience miracles and the opportunity to thrive. Yet
simultaneously, the court city is also represented as an uncomfortable, Babylon-like
urban center. In the seventy years following the declaration of Madrid as the capital of
Spain, the face of the city and its society changed drastically. From a literary standpoint,
one of the problems that scholars face is tracing the narrative of this socio-historical
change within the pages of the literature that writers during this period produced.
However, it is important to respond to this challenge, since an analysis of this narrative
3
allows the scholar insight into the reactions of authors who lived these historical
moments, who felt the changes in Madrid as part of their everyday lives.
Because of its unique situation as Villa y Corte, Madrid faced a rapid change from
town to growing urban center. In this dissertation, I will be arguing that the literary
grotesque mode is a strong element of narrative response to the simultaneous growth and
corruption of the city of Madrid. The novels that I analyze show a critical perspective of
the emerging national capital of Madrid, when read in a particular way. As in the
examples above, two sides of Madrid emerge from the pages of these novels; on the one
hand, the city is a land of growth and opportunity, and on the other hand, it is a sordid
world of corruption. The authors in this study critique these two sides of Madrid, and the
grotesque mode emerges as a vehicle for their critique. It is interesting to see that the
same grotesque elements that pícaros use to narrate their histories crop up in various subgenres of the seventeenth-century novel in Madrid. I do not wish to claim that the
grotesque mode is the only response to this changing urban hub of empire. It is but one
possible response, yet I will argue in this dissertation that the critical vision of these
authors is a large piece of the cultural history of Madrid, and that they often express this
vision through the use of the grotesque mode. In a very reduced form, the aim of my
dissertation is to analyze the grotesque mode in various seventeenth-century novels of
Madrid as a response to the growing pains of a new urban center.
Therefore, this dissertation is not a historical account of Madrid. Rather, my
reading of these novels shows the socio-cultural environment of Madrid that is informed
by its unique historical situation. In that light, I will offer brief historical descriptions of
4
Madrid during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when appropriate. A pícaro’s
struggle with poverty in Madrid gains new perspective when one takes into account the
historical plague of poverty in the capital. In order to include this important perspective, I
offer historical contextualization both in the Introduction and throughout the chapters of
this study. Philip II declared Madrid capital of Spain in 1561. In Madrid: Historia de una
capital, Ringrose discusses the various reasons for this decision. In the first place, Madrid
was previously a military enclave, and its alcázar made it a prime location for selfdefense (15). Secondly, Madrid enjoyed a fruitful position within the Peninsula, which
allowed for easy access to raw materials necessary to support the court and its
inhabitants: “el paso de mercancías y el abastecimiento, el consiguiente desarrollo de un
mercado y, por tanto, un crecimiento económico continuo” (17). Finally, Madrid was a
relatively small town up until the 1560s, and the absence of established ecclesiastical or
noble personages, or “grandes intereses nobiliarios y eclesiásticos,” meant that Philip II
could act without being obligated to answer to important political families or to Rome for
his everyday decisions (17). Perhaps Philip II chose Madrid as the capital for his empire
for the advantages the city offered, but also because there were certain controversies that
he could avoid by choosing Madrid as the capital.
It is important to remember that Madrid was not a booming city before it became
a capital. The sudden influx of immigrants that came with the court challenged the
existing infrastructure of the town. Jonathan Brown and John Elliott illustrate this point:
“When the court moved to Madrid in 1561, it was a town with only some 2,500 houses,
and the arrival of a swarm of royal officials and courtiers naturally placed an acute strain
5
on its limited resources” (3). This “acute strain” caused problems for Madrid’s
inhabitants ranging from inadequate hygienic resources and poverty to starvation and
illness. Poverty and starvation are two elements that are integral to the picaresque novel,
as the pícaro’s prime concern during much of his narrative is where he will attain his next
meal. Hunger goes hand-in-hand with the urban nature of the picaresque beginning with
the Lazarillo de Tormes and continuing throughout the picaresque genre, in novels
included in this study and others that are not.2 The buildings constructed in Madrid
showed the haste to build sufficient housing for those who flocked to the city with limited
natural resources for building: “Feverish building failed to keep pace with the demand for
new houses, most of them mean constructions of brick and mud, reflecting the local
shortage of lime and the lack of stone quarries any nearer than the Escorial” (4). Archival
resources show that the frenzy to build often directly resulted in personal economic
decline. Diego López, a silversmith in Madrid, complained to municipal services that
during the demolition of buildings necessary to expand the Calle de Platería (one of the
four names given to the current main thoroughfare Calle Mayor), his workshop was
demolished and he was left without a means to work and earn money.3 The pícaro
Guzmán de Alfarache notes that the development that he sees during his final trip to
2
Nina Cox Davis explores the topics of poverty and starvation in her article “Indigestion
and Edification in the Guzmán de Alfarache.”
3
AVM, Secretaría, Sección 1, Legado 280, Número 2. This document is not dated, but I
believe it would have been written between 1597 and 1656. The earliest dated documents
in the same archival case are dated 1597, and Pedro Texeira’s Plano de Madrid shows an
expanded Calle de Platería located between the Plaçuela de la Villa (today the Plaza de la
Villa) and the Puerta de Guadalajara (located in what is today an area of Calle Mayor
slightly northwest of the Plaza Mayor). The houses are all two stories, suggesting that
Diego López’s silversmith shop would have been demolished in order to build these new
structures.
6
Madrid is an improvement over the old city and that it displayed “mucha mejoría en
todo” (Alemán 358). But physical improvement of the city’s poor buildings wreaked
havoc on some of its inhabitants, such as the silversmith Diego López.
Beatriz Blasco Esquivias also examines how the population boom exceeded the
capabilities of the existing waste removal sewers, stating that those responsible for city
planning had not foreseen the need for “una infraestructura higiénica suficiente; este puso
en evidencia las graves consecuencias de dicha decisión [de elegir a Madrid como
capital]” (7). Even the streets were filled with muck and dirt that prevented adequate
hygiene and health: “The streets were filthy and crowded” (Brown and Elliott 4). The
residents of the Calle de la Reina wrote to the King, asking that he clean and pave their
street. They state that half of the street was “llena de inmundicias por no haberse
limpiado de algunos años,” and they complain that the filth of the street gives shame to
its name, which invokes the Queen herself.4
Because of the shoddy building techniques and insufficient infrastructure, Madrid
began to expand, not upwards, but outwards towards the hinterlands. The medieval walls
were torn down in 1625 to accommodate the growth of the town and were replaced with
city gates (4). The hastily constructed buildings that flanked the largest roads mixed with
the large, austere brick houses built by the various aristocrats that came to Madrid and
created a visual illustration of the same ambivalent nature of Madrid as land of
opportunity and land of squalor that is seen in the novels studied in this dissertation.
4
AVM, Secretaría, Sección 1, Legado 280, Número 2. This document also lacks a date,
but judging by its proximity to the document cited in the previous note, it was probably
written at some point between 1597 and 1656.
7
Because of the competition for food, income and housing, the novels that narrate
this atmosphere show many individuals as competitive and greedy, to the point of being
compared with beasts that fight over the basic needs for survival, but these novels reflect
a real historical phenomenon. For example, the false appearances that the pícaros use to
get ahead were not an isolated literary trope. One only need look to the casas de malicia
– homes that were built to look as though they had one story from the outside in order to
be exempt from the obligation to “reserve the upper stories of their houses for the
accommodation of officials” – to see an architectural example of how madrileños
sometimes used false appearances in order to cheat the system and get ahead (Brown and
Elliott 3). These behaviors appear constantly throughout the courtly novel, for example
when Doña Feliciana dresses up her maid as a dueña in order to arrive in style at her new
lodgings: “En una de las calurosas noches del mes de Julio, que hacía la luna clara, hizo
Feliciana poner el coche, y vistiéndose de gala con el mejor vestido que tenía, quiso
llevar consigo una criada vieja a la cual vistió de dueña” (Castillo Solórzano 70). Pablo
Jauralde Pou notes that the figure of the dueña was easily recognizable by her clothing
and that her purpose of caring for wealthy young women was well known in Madrid (70).
Taking advantage of the light provided by the full moon, Doña Feliciana is able to
support her appearance as a wealthy lady by dressing up her maid, a technique that
perhaps would not have worked in broad daylight. This is one of the hundreds of
examples of the use of false appearances in the novels included in this dissertation.5 The
5
Paul Julian Smith explores the topic of the rhetoric of representation in the picaresque
novel in his article “The Rhetoric of Representation in Writers and Critics of Picaresque
Narrative: Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, El Buscón.”
8
court was aware of these behaviors and attempted to remedy them, as Brown and Elliott
demonstrate:
During the final years of the reign of Philip III the demand for reform was
becoming irresistible – reform for the Crown’s finances, and of the whole
system of government by favorite; economic reform, which would bring
about the restoration of Castilian agriculture and industry; and the reform
of manners and morals, the corruption of which were held responsible for
Castile’s declinación. (11)
The examples of grotesque behaviors that I will analyze throughout this dissertation –
from the employment of false appearances to committing morally corrupt actions– and
the squalor of life in Madrid, such as the use of sewers to collect rainwater, presumably
for drinking or bathing, are echoed in the novels that occur in Madrid. These behaviors of
the protagonists do not appear out of thin air, but rather I would argue that they are a
result of the difficult environment in which the characters are “created.”
All of the authors considered in this study lived in Madrid, at least temporarily,
during the early-to-mid seventeenth century, and they all experienced for themselves the
difficulties of surviving in Madrid. In this light, their narratives, though not historical
accounts of the true goings-on in Madrid, can perhaps be considered a form of reaction to
the changes that they observed. These authors lived and breathed the ethos of the era of
change that brought numerous growing pains to the society of Madrid. It is perhaps no
surprise that the grotesque mode became an outlet for those reacting to this change.
Indeed, Philip Thomson argues that moments of socio-historical change are particularly
9
conducive to the use of the grotesque mode: “It is no accident that the grotesque mode in
art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical
change or disorientation” (11). I propose that the grotesque mode that I will analyze
throughout this dissertation is an important vehicle for reactions to and critiques of the
changes that took place in seventeenth-century Madrid.
James Iffland, Paul Ilie and Henryk Ziomek have studied the grotesque style in
Spanish literature. Their important studies identify grotesque moments within the
literature of a specifically Spanish culture, rather than studying a more global context of
this mode within literature. Their work is foundational to this dissertation, yet I wish to
expand upon their framework for new purposes. I propose that examining the use of the
grotesque style as one possible response to the socio-cultural changes that took place
during the construction and expansion of Madrid as Villa y Corte will benefit scholars of
cultural and literary studies during the Spanish Golden Age. None of these three scholars
study this particular aspect of the grotesque, rather they focus on finding examples of the
mode in question in the novels that they study without always justifying why the
examples are representative of the grotesque and how this mode evolves taking into
account its socio-cultural context. I aim to study the grotesque mode at the linguistic level
within these novels, explaining why each chosen passage is an example of the grotesque
mode and how we can formulate a definition of this style based on commonalities seen
across these different novels. This dissertation will expand on the definitions set forth by
Iffland, Ilie and Ziomek, establish an alternative and comprehensive definition of the
grotesque mode in the novel of seventeenth-century Madrid, and analyze this mode
10
within novels not currently included in the discussion of the grotesque mode. In addition
to contextualizing this mode within the unique situation of the court city, which will
allow us to expand our understanding of the ethos of social criticism that arises out of this
period, this study will introduce new novels in the discussion of the grotesque mode.
The history of the grotesque begins in the fifteenth century with the rediscovery
of frescoes in the ancient Baths of Titus. Built in Rome in 81AD by the Emperor Titus,
these public baths were adorned with paintings that were given the name grottesque
(taken from grotto, or cave-like) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries due to the fact
that Baths of Titus were found in a hollow underground space.6 Ilie states that the lexical
origin of the Spanish term grotesco is found in the sixteenth-century Tesoro de la lengua
castellana o española by Sebastián de Covarrubias. The term, spelled grutesco, was
defined as “painting in the style of ‘follajes, figuras de medio sierpes, medio hombres,
syrenas, sphinges’ that evoke the painter Bosch” (Ilie 8). While Covarrubias restricts his
definition to painting, it is clear that the same set of shared allusions that Covarrubias
includes in his definition of grutesco and that have attracted audiences to Bosch’s El
Jardín de las delicias and other such paintings are present in other art forms, such as
literature.
The grotesque, although encyclopedic in nature, is the term that I have chosen to
describe a unique narrative style that I have observed in the seventeenth-century novel of
Madrid. For the purposes of this study, this style is called the grotesque mode and
grotesque style, and in Chapter Four, the grotesque aesthetic. I believe that the terms
6
For complete histories of the term “grotesque,” see Kayser and Barasch.
11
“mode” and “style” are justified because, although examples of the grotesque style
evolve throughout the novels included in this study, they frequently include several basic
elements: the tension created by combining comic and non-comic elements, the use of
grotesque conceit and the distortion of physical and abstract attributes of the narrative
object.
These characteristics create a set of shared images that appear consistently within
the narratives analyzed in this study, thus creating a style that evolves throughout the
seventeenth-century Spanish novel. The definition of the grotesque mode that I propose
in this study does not necessarily encompass the grotesque in all of Spanish literature;
perhaps it is not as easily perceived or does not appear in other Golden Age genres, such
as the pastoral novel or the comedia. The formulation of the grotesque style that I
provide, however, can be observed consistently throughout the novels presented in this
study.
The three pillars of this mode that I identified above are not immutable, nor are
they the only grotesque elements that will be presented in this dissertation. Because the
grotesque mode is such an expansive topic, and it would be difficult if not impossible to
identify a rigid set of defining properties for one author, let alone an entire sub-section of
the novel, I do not claim that these are the only elements that may be observed in these
novels. Iffland states this best when he says that what “we have [is] a set of ‘family
resemblances’” rather than a hard and fast set of unchanging characteristics (1, 56).
While I happily recognize that a discussion of the grotesque mode in literature will
undoubtedly lead to modifications of the hypotheses that I set forth, I will attempt to
12
characterize the “family resemblances” seen across the texts that form part of this
dissertation.
The combination of the comic and something that is incompatible with the
comic will be observed repeatedly throughout this study, and it is one of the main
elements of the grotesque mode. In this vein, Thomson identifies “the unresolved clash of
incompatibles in work and response” as the primary characteristic of the grotesque (27).
Thomson’s two-pronged definition suggests that the text itself may contain grotesque
language (“in work”) or that the grotesque effect may be produced by the reader’s
reaction to it (“response”). The latter, the audience response, is key to understanding the
tension created between comic and non-comic elements, and often gauging the
audience’s response creates a challenge when attempting to justify why a text is
grotesque. As each reader’s experiences may lead him to interpret the text in a particular
way, this feature of the grotesque mode is subjective, to some extent. Even Thomson
concludes his work by reinforcing the subjective nature of the grotesque: “we do well to
remember that in the matter of aesthetic categories the classification is very much in the
eye of the beholder, however much, by a process of consensus, comparison and
argument, we may be able to establish certain guidelines” (70). Therefore, when
discussing the clash created between comic and non-comic elements in a text, I will
cautiously suggest the grotesque audience reaction available from a text.
Thomson explains the “unresolved clash of incompatibles” as the combination of
something comic and something that conflicts or creates tension with this comic image.
Often, a text may cause the audience to laugh, but it is important to note that if laughter is
13
the only reaction that the text produces, it is not grotesque. However, if the author
introduces a second element – something that disgusts the reader or causes pity or
perhaps sadness in the reader –, the passage departs from the comic and becomes
grotesque language. For example, when Guzmán de Alfarache leaves home as a young
child, he quickly finds that the reality of running away is not as glamorous as he
imagined:
Alentábame mucho el deseo de ver el mundo, ir a reconocer en Italia mi
noble parentela. Salí, que no debiera, pude bien decir, tarde y con mal.
Creyendo hallar copioso remedio, perdí el poco que tenía. Sucedióme lo
que al perro con la sombra de la carne. Apenas había salido de la puerta,
cuando sin poderlo resistir, dos Nilos reventaron de mis ojos, que
regándome el rostro en abundancia, quedó todo de lágrimas bañado. Esto
y querer anochecer no me dejaban ver cielo ni palmo de tierra por donde
iba. (1: 163-4)
Guzmán states that he was fueled by the desire to explore the world and find his “noble”
relatives in Italy. However, he embarks on his journey like a child, without thinking of
the logistics of such a long trip or taking care to provide for his body. Since he has
always been provided for by an elder, he thinks that life will be the same on the road.
However, as he leaves Seville and glances back on the city gates, he is overcome with
tears and nostalgia for his home. His journey is off to a rocky start, and the reader
perhaps feels, on some level, pity for a young child who does not have the experience to
prepare for a proper journey. Mateo Alemán attempts to elicit this response from his
14
audience by emphasizing Guzmán’s naivety; he cries like a baby and feels as though he
has lost his way. Yet the narration also includes comic elements, such as the use of the
phrase lo que al perro con la sombra de la carne, which explains how a dog is fooled by
the “shadow,” the tantalizing idea of a piece of meat, and gets rid of what he already has
in the hope of obtaining something better, even though it is an illusion. The reader
chuckles at the ignorance of Guzmán, who has left the comfort of home to see the world,
and this conflicts with the pity elicited by the pícaro’s reminder that he is a young child,
incapable of providing for himself. This tension of emotions indicates that we are reading
a grotesque passage. The combination of pity for Guzmán and the chuckling at his
childish ignorance produces two opposite reactions in the reader.
Thomson’s definition of the grotesque shows that this clash is a principal element:
“What will generally be agreed upon, in other words, is that ‘grotesque’ will cover,
perhaps among other things, the copresence of the laughable and something which is
incompatible with the laughable” (3). Other scholars have also identified this feature as
an integral part of the grotesque mode. In Quevedo and the Grotesque, Iffland
emphasizes that the grotesque generally involves “a clash between the comic and
something which is incompatible with the comic” and he attempts to categorize these
“non-comic elements,” while the non-comic remains more abstract in Thomson’s work
(61). Iffland calls the non-comic elements spheres of negativity, and they fall into three
groups: the creatural, the ersatz and confusion or struggle.
Iffland adapts the term creatural from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which Iffland
uses to signify “everything related to the normal function of the human organism” (64).
15
The topic of bodily functions is a popular constant among scholars of the grotesque.
Mikhail Bakhtin also treats this subject in his study on the grotesque in Rabelais, but he
refers to it as the material bodily principle.7 Generally, scholars agree that the normal
function of the human body is not grotesque in itself, even if particular instances of
bodily functions, such as defecating, urinating, belching and passing wind, can be
repulsive. However, when the body’s system begins to break down, the creatural (or the
material bodily) becomes grotesque because it no longer functions properly. This can be
caused by the passage of time, by illness or by a human vice, such as gluttony or excess.
The perversion of the properly functioning body is often narrated in the novels in this
study using grotesque language.
For Iffland, the ersatz is synonymous with that which is fake, fraudulent and
bogus. The ersatz can be an attempt to fight the natural decay of the creatural:
The varied phenomena included under this rubric extend from the myriad
devices man invents to disguise his creatural decadence to those he invents
to appear more physically blessed than he actually is, from masking one’s
moral shortcomings to pretending that one belongs to a higher social class.
(1, 66)
Within the scope of this dissertation, this ersatz can take two forms. The first follows
Iffland’s framework and concerns the use of ornaments – wigs, eyeglasses, dyes,
perfumes, etc. – to cover up the normal decay of the body. The second, however, appears
much more frequently throughout the novels in this study, and I have elected to call this
7
See Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World, 18-21).
16
phenomenon the use of false appearances. More deceptive perhaps than the ersatz, false
appearances are constantly used when describing the struggle of Madrid’s population to
represent themselves as something other than what they truly are. The “tools” available to
do so can be false pedigrees, invented family backgrounds, clothing that allows one to
pass as part of another social class, etc. In the case of both the ersatz and false
appearances, the grotesque often appears when the reader becomes aware of such
devices. This discovery is generally narrated using comic touches that clash with the
deceptive nature of the narrative subject.
It seems that Iffland’s third sphere of negativity, confusion or struggle, appears
less frequently in his analysis of El Buscón and often relates to violence. However, his
framework is particularly useful for examining the later novels in this study, especially El
diablo cojuelo and El Criticón, which are not picaresque novels, per se. Iffland admits
that this confusion or struggle is present “more in the grotesque situation than in the
image,” or in situations that push back against the audience’s – or perhaps the narrator’s –
sense of normalcy and morality, rather than in passages that use comic touches to clash
with a non-comic element (70). Iffland defines the grotesque situation as a narrative
passage that does not simply contain a grotesque linguistic style, but rather something
more serious that conflicts with the audience’s sense of what is normal. It is “a violation
of the basic norms of experience pertaining in our daily life” (34). The picaresque novel
certainly contains grotesque situations, but they appear even more frequently in El diablo
cojuelo and El Criticón. The entire narrative of Madrid’s society is, as I will argue in
Chapter Four, one large grotesque situation. In these novels, the world is truly upside
17
down – “el mundo al revés” – and the subjects live in constant struggle to regain their
balance in a world that is out of control (70).
These three negative elements, identified by Iffland as “spheres of negativity,” are
frequently accompanied by comic touches in the grotesque narrative. By combining these
spheres of negativity and elements of the comic, the author is able to create tension
between laughter and some feeling that is incompatible with laughter – fear, horror, pity,
sadness, etc. Throughout this dissertation, I will utilize the framework of Thomson and
Iffland, with modifications of my own, as indicated, to analyze the numerous narrative
passages that employ this important grotesque device.
The second grotesque element that is used frequently throughout the novels that I
have chosen for this study is the grotesque conceit. The first formal Spanish
theoretization of the concepto, or conceit, is found in Baltasar Gracián’s Agudeza y arte
de ingenio (1648). His treatise focuses on the various modes of the conceit, which for
Gracián means the intellectual pleasure derived from finding a hidden link between two
distinct, apparently unrelated objects: “Consiste, pues, este artificio conceptuoso en una
primorosa concordancia, en una armónica correlación entre los cognoscibles extremos,
expressa por un acto del entendimiento” (140, emphasis added). Just as even the most
inexperienced palate can find similarities between sweet and sour tastes, Gracián argues,
one can find connections between two objects that appear to be very different at first
glance. For Gracián and, as K. K. Ruthven argued in The Conceit, for many other
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors, the conceit was originally synonymous with
thought, and the key to the conceit lay in the mental exercise that it took to discover the
18
hidden connection between the two objects of the conceit (Ruthven 1). There are many
kinds of conceit; Gracián divides his treatise into proportionate and disproportionate
conceits, similar and dissimilar ones, conceits that originate in proper names and still
others that originate in fictitious texts. K. K. Ruthven examines seven distinct types of
conceit. The form of conceit that I will examine in this dissertation is the grotesque
conceit.
The grotesque conceit involves a cerebral connection between two objects that, at
first glance, appear to share no relationship. However, the narration of the image is
exaggerated or distorted so that it becomes a grotesque deformation of an object that,
without this distortion, would remain an example of metaphor or conceit. In this vein, the
grotesque conceit is not intrinsically grotesque, but rather it is dependent on the context
to make it so. These two elements set the grotesque conceit apart from what Gracián
would perhaps consider an example of the conceit as he formulates it. For example, when
Pablos arrives in Segovia to collect his inheritance from his uncle, who – as hangman –
has hanged his father for a crime, he encounters the remnants of his father’s body by the
city gates: “Llegué al pueblo, y a la entrada vi a mi padre en el camino, aguardando ir en
bolsas hecho cuartos a Josafad” (Quevedo 146). The grotesque conceit of Pablos’s
narration lies in the fact that his father is aguardando ir en bolsas hecho cuartos a
Josafad, or waiting to be taken in small bags (in his mutilated state) to his final
judgement. Pablos does not really enjoy a family reunion with his father, as his statement
suggests, but rather encounters his father’s decaying, “quartered” body. The disgust that
the reader feels when imagining walking into a town with carrion riddling the roadway
19
elevates the conceit to the level of the grotesque. It is this emotional response in the
reader – laughter, disgust, pity, repulsion, etc. – that confirms the grotesque conceit. In
addition to the pleasure derived from “solving” the conceit, the grotesque conceit
involves an exaggerated emotional reaction to “cognoscibles extremos,” to use Gracián’s
phrase, due primarily to context. Iffland established the term grotesque conceit as a way
to distinguish the grotesque from the ironic. He based his argument on the work of
Thomson, who proposed that the difference between the grotesque and the ironic is that
the grotesque is primarily emotional in its “function and appeal,” while the ironic is
primarily intellectual (47). The ironic depends on the “resolvability, intellectually, of a
relationship (appearance / reality, truth / untruth, etc.),” (50) and the grotesque produces a
shock in the reader because it is an “intolerable mixture of incompatibilies” (47).
Thomson proposes that the ironic is a puzzle, so to speak, the solving of which produces
pleasure. Iffland expands Thomson’s arguments by stating that the difference between the
two lies in the fact that the grotesque produces a primarily emotional response, while the
ironic produces a cerebral one. In Iffland’s model, when these combine, an extravagant
grotesque metaphor, or “grotesque conceit,” is present, which elicits a “primarily
emotional response as well as the type of intellectual activity that irony demands of us”
(Iffland 1, 113). In other words, as in the passage above from El Buscón, we have to
solve the puzzle and find the relationship between the two apparently unrelated objects
before we can “see” the visual grotesque imagery. Iffland identified the use of the
grotesque conceit in Quevedo’s work, but its presence in Golden Age literature is much
greater. The grotesque conceit is used frequently in every novel that I have chosen to
20
include in this study, and it forms one of the pillars of my definition of the grotesque
mode.
The final principal element of the grotesque mode, as I have defined it for this
study, is distortion which, like the term grotesque or comic, is so omnipresent that it
almost defies definition. In the study The Grotesque, by Justin Edwards and Rune
Graulund, a full chapter is devoted to the topic of grotesque distortion, and the term is
divided into three fields: exaggeration, extravagance and excess. While there are certainly
other types of distortion – such as the distortion of the natural order of life or “how things
should be,” a favorite subject of Gracián –, Edwards and Graulund present a solid
framework for the concept of distortion, particularly for demonstrating that distortion is
multi-faceted and that it changes based on the context in which it is used. An important
finding of my research is that the level of distortion becomes more stylized as the
seventeenth-century novel develops. In many cases, distortion is accomplished through
the use of zoomorphism.
Zoomorphism is the term that I use in this study to refer to the combination of
elements from the human, animal and vegetative spheres of life to describe one single
object. Wolfgang Kayser argues that, during the Renaissance, the grotesque was
characterized by the combination of inanimate objects as well as objects from these three
spheres: “a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from
those of plants, animals, and human beings” (21-2). The combination of these elements
distorts the natural order, mixing spheres that create unreal and grotesque images. For
example, when Don Cleofás first sees the Diablo Cojuelo in El diablo cojuelo, the
21
narrator describes him using references to the body of a human, to animals and to
vegetables:
Vio en él un hombrecillo de pequeña estatura, afirmado en dos muletas,
sembrado de chichones mayores de marca, calabacino de testa y badea de
cogote, chato de narices, la boca formidable y apuntalada en dos colmillos
solos, que no tenían más muelas ni diente los desiertos de encías, erizados
los bigotes como si hubiera barbado en Hircania; los pelos de su
nacimiento, ralos uno aquí y otro allí, a fuer de los espárragos, legumbre
tan enemiga de la compañía, que si no es para venderlos en manojos no se
juntan… (78)
The Diablo Cojuelo has human qualities about him, although he is a devil. He is short in
stature and walks on two legs assisted by crutches, as he was the first angel to be thrown
out of Heaven, and all subsequent exiles fell on him as they descended to Hell. However,
his head, which is called a testa (a word also used to describe the outer casing of a seed),
is described as a calabacino, or hollow like a gourd that is dried and used to carry liquids.
The description of his mouth, which contains only two sharp fangs, is reminiscent of the
mouths of animals. Finally, his hair grows sporadically and in isolation from other
strands, like asparagus. This is one of the more detailed zoomorphic passages from the
novels that I have studied, as many passages combine one element of the animal and one
element of the human world, while Vélez de Guevara combines all three spheres in this
single passage.
22
The majority of scholars of the grotesque identify this phenomenon as the
combination of animate and inanimate objects, and they see its origin in the ornamental
quality of the grottesque. Kayser, cited above, identifies this tendency in scrollwork and
architecture in sixteenth-century Europe (22). Gargoyles, figures that combine human and
animal parts, are a perfect example of this ornamentalism, as are the pages of illuminated
manuscripts that contain creatures that are half-man and half-beast. Ilie associates this
phenomenon with arabesque ornamental artwork, and he is the first scholar to later refer
to the trend as zoomorphism, but he mentions it only in a list of elements that characterize
grotesque literary art (267). The identification of zoomorphism as an element of
distortion is of primary importance in my study as there is relatively little attention given
to this aspect of the grotesque in the novels that I have chosen to analyze. In fact,
zoomorphic images overwhelm the reader and increase exponentially in number with
each novel. It is my hope that my study will call attention to the zoomorphic
phenomenon, particularly in the picaresque and courtly novels, where it is used to distort
the narratives’ subjects.
With the evolution of the novels included in my study, the zoomorphic references
become more fantastic and supernatural in nature. Beginning with the courtly novel, there
are more comparisons of characters to mythological or monstrous beings. Edwards and
Graulund suggest that this supernatural or fantastic element is part of the nature of the
grotesque; the hybridity of man and beast is one of the key elements of the abnormality of
the grotesque.8 These monstrous figures become more frequent and more fantastic in El
8
Edwards and Graulund (36-51).
23
diablo cojuelo and El Criticón, and they contribute to another level of distortion seen in
these two novels: the distortion of the natural order of life. This can mean a distortion of
the cosmological forces at play in the novels, such as the Diablo Cojuelo being freed
temporarily from Hell to walk through the streets of Madrid, or a distortion of the daily
habits of the human being. For example, Gracián’s novel shows that Madrid’s society has
distorted every aspect of daily life, even the schedule of sleeping at night and working
during the day:
no sólo anda el mundo al revés en orden al lugar, sino al tiempo. Ya los
hombres han dado en hazer del día noche y de la noche día: ahora se
levanta aquél, cuando se había de acostar; ahora sale de casa la otra con la
estrella de Venus y volverá cuando se ría della la aurora. Y es lo bueno
que los que tan al revés viven, dizen ser la gente más ilustre y la más
luzida. Mas no falta quien afirma que, andando de noche como fieras,
vivirán de día como brutos. (145)
This passage shows that man, instead of going to bed when the sun goes down, as he
should, prefers to leave his home and stay out until the sunrise. When he should be
attending to his business during the day, he is sleeping to recover from the night before.
Of course, since he is “prowling the streets” of Madrid at night, he is useless the next day
and unable to attend to his responsibilities. Furthermore, Gracián is not describing the
habits of one individual. He is talking about the whole population of Madrid, rendered
worthless during the day due to their abnormal nocturnal habits. This is only one example
of the ways in which the characters in El Criticón have distorted the natural ways of life,
24
yet this distortion represents a key element of the grotesque in Gracián’s work, as I will
show in Chapter Four.
For the purposes of this study, the grotesque mode involves the repeated use of
three elements: the combination of comic and non-comic elements, the grotesque conceit
and distortion. As I have stated, these elements are complex and will be presented
differently in each novel in this study. It is my goal to show that the grotesque mode itself
evolves over the course of these six novels. While it never loses the elements of the
grotesque that are established in the picaresque, new combinations of these elements
appear in a way that is unique to a particular author. In this dissertation, I will
demonstrate that a true grotesque aesthetic has developed in the seventeenth-century
novel, one of which Gracián is aware, and that he uses this knowledge to practice his own
version of this grotesque aesthetic in El Criticón.
This dissertation is presented in four chapters, in addition to the Introduction and
Conclusion. The first chapter begins by establishing the concept of the grotesque
picaresque style in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604). In this chapter, I
discuss the various areas of critical focus on the picaresque novel as a genre, and I argue
that the grotesque is a fundamental element of the picaresque. In his work, Alemán
develops a picaresque grotesque style that will influence the rest of the novels in this
study. Chapter Two is a study of Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón (1626). This chapter
expands on Iffland’s in-depth study of the grotesque in El Buscón, which brought the
grotesque quality of this novel to light. But El Buscón is also important because it adopts
devices seen in Guzmán’s grotesque picaresque autobiography to present a new view of
25
Madrid. Chapter Three shows how the author of the courtly novels Guía y avisos de
forasteros que vienen a la Corte (1620) and Las harpías en Madrid (1631) echo the ethos
of the picaresque grotesque style and use this style to describe the atmosphere of Madrid
during the era of massive immigration to the court. Chapter Four analyzes Luis Vélez de
Guevara’s El diablo cojuelo (1641) and Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón (1651, 1653 and
1657). These novels not picaresque per se, yet they utilize some of the same grotesque
devices observed in Chapter One. El diablo cojuelo offers numerous satiric vignettes of
Madrid observed from popular vantage points within the city, often highlighting the same
behavior that is criticized in the picaresque and courtly novels. As the view of Madrid
zooms outward in El Criticón, and the reader is offered a more expansive view of the
court city, we see a society that has become so theatrical and affected in nature that its
individuals become more beasts than men. Gracián exaggerates and distorts the grotesque
devices utilized in the previous five novels to show that Madrid itself has become a
collection of a confusing agglomeration of beasts, a truly grotesque and monstrous city.
26
Chapter One. The Journey to Madrid in Guzmán de Alfarache: The Development of the
Grotesque Picaresque
The changing face of Madrid in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
is a prevalent topic in histories of Early Modern Spain, but it is also frequently discussed
in the literature of the era, for example in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache.1 After
leaving his birth city of Seville, the protagonist Guzmán arrives in Madrid as an
adolescent boy. He soon leaves Madrid and travels throughout Spain and Italy, returning
later to Madrid, where he becomes a merchant and suffers through a terrible marriage that
ultimately leaves him a widower. Guzmán travels to Alcalá de Henares to study to
become a priest, but his plans change when he falls in love with the woman who becomes
his second wife, at which time he discontinues his studies and marries, then travels to
Madrid again with his wife in search of fortune.
Upon entering Madrid for the third time, Guzmán notes how the city has changed
since his last visit:
1
For studies on the growth and expansion of Madrid, see María F. Carbajo Isla and
Virgilio Pinto Crespo and Santos Madrazo Madrazo. For information on the history of
Madrid within the context of the picaresque novel, see Pablo Jaraulde Pou and Miguel
Morán and Bernardo J. García.
27
Hallé poblados los campos; los niños, mozos; los mozos, hombres; los
hombres, viejos, y los viejos, fallecidos; las plazas, calles, y las calles muy
de otra manera, con mucha mejoría en todo. (1: 358)
Guzmán’s observation about mejoría, or improvement, upon entering Madrid
reflects real changes in the material spaces of the new capital city and its society at the
turn of the seventeenth century. Guzmán comments on the increased population of
Madrid, and he notes that the city has changed physically. Plazas are being converted to
streets, and streets are widening in order to accommodate the larger population of Madrid
and its excess of carriages. One only need think of the construction of the Calle Mayor in
the seventeenth century – which, on the map of Madrid completed by Texeira in 1656
had four different names, indicating both its size and importance – to see that the city was
physically changing to accommodate a new function as court city and a new society.2
Although it’s not immediately clear from Guzmán’s observation, his later
narrations of his own experiences as well as those of other pícaros in Madrid show that
this improvement is debatable. While construction and population are booming, there is a
subtle, perhaps darker, side of the changes that Madrid experienced in the seventeenth
century. Madrid will later be thought of as the Babylon of Spain, a confusing and
misleading labyrinth of “maravillas soñadas, tesoros de duendes, figuras de
representantes en comedias y otros epítetos” (Liñán y Verdugo 69). Literary characters
discuss how they must keep up their supposed “noble” appearances while admitting that
it is all for show and that they are penniless, while others comment on the waste that fills
2
The names were: “Mayor”, “Guadalajara”, “Platería” and “Almudena.”
28
the streets and soils their extravagant garments. The accounts of living in Madrid during
its most booming time – 1560 to the late 1620s – suggest simultaneously a land of
opportunity and an environment that makes survival difficult. As Madrid becomes more
grandiose, and at once more sordid, within the pages of the novel, the authors considered
in this study prominently feature grotesque language and grotesque situations in their
various narratives of Madrid. As we will see throughout the present and subsequent
chapters, the grotesque mode, with its stylized linguistic elements and grotesque
situations, is used to narrate the developing court city. In this chapter, I will study the use
of this mode in Guzmán de Alfarache, arguing that the grotesque style serves as the
thread that ties together Guzmán’s exhaustive narrative of his life in and out of Madrid.
Mateo Alemán wrote the first volume of Guzmán de Alfarache in 1599 and
followed it with a second volume in 1604. Born in Seville in 1547 with a converso past,
he studied medicine in Salamanca until his father died and he abandoned his career.3 In
1571, Alemán married Catalina de Espinosa, although José María Micó indicates that the
marriage was difficult for Alemán: “acabó por someterse al yugo del matrimonio, que no
fue muy feliz” (17). He migrated to Madrid in 1586, working as an accountant in the
Contaduría Mayor de Cuentas. He lived in and out of Madrid throughout the next fifteen
years, often participating in inspection journeys to other towns, such as his visit in 1593
to Almadén, a town in Andalucía, to inspect the mercury mines. While in Madrid, he
composed the first volume of Guzmán de Alfarache. The second volume was written and
published in Lisbon in 1604, where Alemán had traveled after leaving his lover and
3
For a detailed biography of Alemán, see Guzmán Alvarez and Edmond Cros.
29
cousin in charge of his will in Seville (22). Alemán experienced moments of financial
bounty and economic difficulty, such as 1586 to 1589 when “se le van buenos dineros en
la compra de un solar en el que va levantando, no sin demoras presupuestarias, una
vivienda” (18). However, his time in Madrid was brief compared to later authors
considered in this study, as he returned to Seville in 1601 and was imprisoned in 1602 for
his inability to pay his debts. He migrated to America in 1608 and died in Mexico,
presumably around the year 1615 (24).
The novel itself is the tale of Guzmán de Alfarache, a boy born to humble ends
and dubious parents in Seville, told in the first person at the end of his life – when he is
condemned to the galleys – as a record of his actions and a confession of his evil ways.
He narrates his family life, his childhood, his leaving home and the journeys he embarks
upon, while inserting various moral sermons that focus on a particular vice that he has
either observed or committed, or sometimes both. Francisco Rico points out that these
“sermons, moralités, theoretical meditations” interrupt the continuity of the protagonist’s
adventures (30). Because of this, the novel may seem discontinuous or episodic; Guzmán
passes through a new place every few chapters, traveling throughout Andalucía, CastillaLa Mancha, Madrid and Italy. Rather than experiencing one continuous journey to
Madrid, like later picaresque visitors examined in this study, he travels there three times.4
Interlaced with these trips to Madrid are accounts of trips to other major cities.
Throughout this chapter, I will suggest that the grotesque language flourishes in
4
The protagonists in El Buscón, Guía y avisos de forasteros que vienen a la Corte and
Las harpías en Madrid narrate lengthy experiences in Madrid, often occupying the
majority or the entire novel. Guzmán’s visits, however, are shorter and contain fewer
details about the city of Madrid.
30
Guzmán’s narration of his travels to major cities of seventeenth-century Spain and Italy:
Madrid, Toledo, Geneva and Rome. The novel was an immediate bestseller; in fact,
“tardó más en imprimirse que en hacerse famosa” (20). It solidified the picaresque genre
within the tradition of the Spanish novel and made the grotesque style an intrinsic part of
the genre, which influenced the authors of later novels.
The picaresque novel is a favorite object of study among Golden Age scholars as
evidenced by the many studies on both the thematic and formal aspects of the genre.5 One
of the questions frequently raised in scholarship on the picaresque is defining what novels
are included, or perhaps excluded, from the genre, which critics attempt to do based on
the commonalities of structure and themes seen across the three canonical examples –
Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604) and El Buscón (1626) –
and imitations of these works. The continued presence of the first-person narrative and
themes such as poverty and hunger suggest that the authors are imitating and modifying
previous picaresque works. Certainly Alemán was influenced by the structure of the
Lazarillo de Tormes, and Francisco de Quevedo by the Guzmán de Alfarache, using these
narratives to inspire his own masterpiece. Later authors, such as Antonio Liñán y
Verdugo and Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, wrote novels that bore a strong resemblance
to the works of Alemán and Quevedo. In order to decide whether or not these novels are
picaresque, inspired by the picaresque, or post-picaresque, first one must formulate a
definition of the picaresque structure. Frank Wadleigh Chandler was one of the first
scholars to formulate such a definition in English in his study Romances of Roguery: An
5
For several of the most canonical studies on the picaresque genre, see Richard Bjornson,
Anne Cruz, A. A. Parker, Francisco Rico, and Harry Sieber.
31
Episode in the History of the Novel (1899). For Chandler, and many subsequent scholars,
the form of the picaresque novel is as follows:
[The pícaro] is born of poor and dishonest parents […]. Either he enters
the world with an innate love of the goods of others, or he is innocent and
learns by hard raps that he must take care of himself or go to the wall. In
either case the result is much the same; in order to live he must serve
somebody, and the gains of service he finds himself obliged to augment
with the gains of roguery. So he flits from one master to another, all of
whom he outwits in his career, and describes to satirize his narrative.
Finally, having run through a variety of strange vicissitudes, measuring by
his rule of roguery the vanity of human estates, he brings his story to a
close. (45-6)
From this definition, we can characterize the pícaro as an individual born to a
family of little or no means, forced to educate himself about the harsh realities of the
world at a young age, and apt to resort to deviant behaviors in order to achieve what he is
ultimately seeking, whether that be monetary gains or a more comfortable lifestyle. Harry
Sieber sees the strength of Chandler’s work as its ability to distinguish the picaresque
novel from other rogue literatures by arguing that the picaresque is its own genre with
“both a plot and a single narrator,” which is “distinct from these ‘anatomies’ of rogues,
tricksters and beggars” (Sieber 2).6 Yet if we were to base a definition of the genre purely
on its narrative structure, we would overlook the important themes that appear
6
For an insightful analysis of Chandler’s study, see Sieber.
32
consistently in every picaresque novel. Hunger, poverty, the fight for survival and
marginalization from the social norm are recurring themes that A. A. Parker classifies in
Literature and the Delinquent as an “atmosphere of delinquency” (6). This is “the
distinguishing feature of the genre” according to Parker (6). Throughout Lazarillo de
Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón, it is impossible not to perceive the
materialism and immoral behaviors that result from the characters’ pursuits of resources
that form part of this “atmosphere of delinquency.” Clearly the definition of the
picaresque novel must take into account these thematic similarities.
However, the identification of the “atmosphere of delinquency” in the picaresque
novel should not cause us to neglect the genre’s narrative structure. By taking into
account the structure used to narrate the pícaro’s own experiences with these themes, we
can consider both the stylistics of the novel and its thematic content. Picaresque
narratives of poverty, travel and marginalization frequently employ grotesque elements,
yet there is no study that adequately discusses this grotesque style in the canonical
picaresque novels.7 James Iffland’s two-volume study, Quevedo and the Grotesque,
contains an excellent review of the grotesque in El Buscón, and his framework is useful
to inform any study on the grotesque language Spanish Golden Age literature. However,
because grotesque language forms part of the very fabric of picaresque and postpicaresque works, this is an important topic that merits further commentary, as I will
7
Henryk Ziomek’s section “La novela picaresca” in Lo grotesco en la literatura
española del Siglo de Oro discusses Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache and La
pícara Justina. The next section, “Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas,” contains some
discussion of El Buscón. However, this text gauges the grotesque based on reader
response and does not examine the grotesque style at the linguistic level.
33
show.8 Many grotesque elements are used throughout picaresque narrations, particularly
in those that concern the pícaro’s journey to and from cities, and a study of the grotesque
language of the picaresque novel would allow us to enhance existing definitions of the
picaresque. Furthermore, such a discussion could allow us to marry previous studies that
privilege either the structure or the themes of the picaresque genre.
The picaresque narrative style is well known for its narrative of the protagonist’s
life, filled with realistic images of the historical moment in which the text is written.
These narratives do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they all contain details that situate the
narrator in specific urban centers throughout Europe and in particular historical moments.
This raises the question of whether or not the verisimilar nature of the picaresque
narrative facilitates the use of the grotesque. In the case of the picaresque, the first-person
narrative of the novel is closely connected to this question of verisimilitude. Guzmán de
Alfarache is told in the style of autobiography, although it cannot be considered true
autobiography as the protagonist and the author are clearly different individuals.
However, the nature of first-person narrative carries with it certain expectations on behalf
of the reader, such as the authenticity of the narrator’s memories and the credibility of the
historical and cultural knowledge provided by the narrator through his work.9 If the firstperson narrator does his task well, that is he meets the expectations of the reader, his
8
Iffland (2: 76-140).
Although the picaresque novels cannot be considered true autobiography, the study of
autobiography has interesting ramifications for the picaresque novel due to the firstperson narrative structure. For more information about the reader’s expectations of
autobiography, see Smith and Watson (67-69; 77-80).
34
9
work might even glean information about his socio-cultural environment. This creates, on
some level, verisimilar moments in the text.
A verisimilar text, one in which the reader can identify the setting within his own
reality, allows for a more realistic and biting tone for the grotesque. Philip Thomson
argues that “the grotesque derives at least some of its effect from being presented within
a realistic framework, in a realistic way” (8). That is to say that the grotesque can have a
greater effect in a realistic environment than in a fantasy world, which Thomson
illustrates using the example of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Although the
transformation of man into an insect is unrealistic, the details about the protagonist’s
setting show the reader that the action is occurring in a realistic, rather than fantastic,
world. James Iffland notes that the grotesque has no such place in a fantastic world
because “anything can happen in it, any kind of monstrosity is ‘normal’ within its closed
bounds” (43). By including both historically-sensitive memories and details about
everyday life in the early modern period, the picaresque narrator in Guzmán de Alfarache
creates a verisimilar setting which the reader can recognize as compatible with his or her
own environment. For example, Guzmán refers to the drought that affected all of
Andalucía during the year that he leaves home on two different occasions.10 A
seventeenth-century reader might remember the drought and thus grant Guzmán
credibility as a narrator, recognizing the realistic moments in the novel. Therefore, the
10
“Digo, pues, que Sevilla […] padece de mucha esterilidad. Y aquel año hubo más…”
(1: 171). “De ayer tengo muerta una hermosa ternera, que por estar la madre flaca y no
haber pasto con la sequía del año, luego la mate de ocho días nacida” (1: 190).
35
question arises: Does the pseudo-autobiographical form of the picaresque novel lead to a
more grotesque narrative?
Francisco Rico, author of The Picaresque Novel and the Point of View, might
agree that the autobiographical form of the picaresque genre allows for a heightened use
of grotesque language in the pícaro’s narrative. In his discussion of Renaissance art, Rico
states that the Renaissance represented a time of heightened desire to reflect reality in art.
The importance of observation “by a particular person from a particular point of view at a
particular moment” characterizes this new artistic phenomenon, which influenced the
picaresque narrative style, according to Rico (16). Following his argument, the
heightened “realistic” quality of the pseudo-autobiographical picaresque narrative could
create a more verisimilar narrative, yet not all scholars agree with this opinion. Samuel
Gili y Gaya, in his study on the rise and fall of the picaresque novel, contradicts Rico’s
argument. He reasons that the marginalized status of the pícaro cannot offer perspectives
of certain social classes – such as the aristocrat, among others – and thus his narrative is
only partially realistic: “capta con certera intuición una parte de la realidad española de su
tiempo; pero no abarca la realidad entera” (85).11 Gili y Gaya might argue that because
the first-person structure restricts the narrator to a single perspective, we only learn his
reality. Therefore, the picaresque novels could only be verisimilar in showing the
experiences and perspective of the pícaro, not of a society in general. Gili y Gaya would
perhaps insist that the picaresque novel lacks verisimilitude and, following Thomson’s
argument that a more realistic narrative allows for the possibility of a more grotesque
11
Joan Arias comes to a similar conclusion on pages 2-3 in her study Guzmán de
Alfarache: The Unrepentant Narrator.
36
narrative, they might claim that the level of the grotesque is uninfluenced by the firstperson narrative structure of the picaresque novel.
If we look at the first-person narrative of the picaresque novel within the
framework of autobiography, however, we can offer an alternative to the debate of Rico
and Gili y Gaya. It is important to note that the picaresque novels are not true
autobiography, defined by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson simply as “life writing.” True
autobiography occurs when the author of the work writes his own life using the narrator
“I” to express himself. In other words, if the author upholds what Philippe Lejeune
denotes the “autobiographical pact,” or the recognition on behalf of the author and the
reader that the narrator of the story is a direct reflection of the narrative’s author, we can
say that the text is an autobiography (Smith and Watson 1). We know that Mateo Alemán
authored Guzmán de Alfarache and that the author of El Buscón is Francisco de Quevedo,
so it is impossible for these texts to be true autobiography. Rather, they are a type of
pseudo-autobiography, where the author is appropriating the autobiographical form to
create a narrative within that framework. Smith and Watson identify Defoe’s works Moll
Flanders and Robinson Crusoe as pseudo-autobiographical, but they associate this trend
with a modern bourgeois literary style when, in fact, the picaresque is arguably pseudoautobiographical and is written before Defoe.12
The pseudo-autobiographical nature of the work does not, however, remove all
verisimilitude from the narrative. It is true that the reader does not establish an
autobiographical pact with Guzmán and that his story is never confused with that of
12
Smith and Watson (93-5).
37
Alemán, the author. Gili y Gaya uses this fact as the genesis of his argument, concluding
that the limited perspective of the work does not allow for verisimilitude. However,
Smith and Watson state that even if the autobiographical “I” is suspect, he can still
provide information about his historical or cultural environment. Whether real or not,
“every autobiographical narrator is historically and culturally situated, each is a product
of his or her particular time” (61). Unless the narratives takes place in a supernatural
world with no relation to the reader’s own reality – in which case, the text would more
than likely exit the realm of autobiography and be considered true fiction – the memories
invoked in autobiography are grounded in a specific time and place (18). The text is filled
with details about the narrator’s historical setting, even in the case of Guzmán, in which
the setting is clearly Spain and Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These
details, specific to a particular historical moment, lend verisimilitude to the work even if
the narrator’s perspective is questionable. I submit that, while the pseudoautobiographical narrative structure of Guzmán de Alfarache takes the work outside the
realm of the autobiography, that is to say true “life writing,” the details provided in the
text do inform the reader about the socio-historical environment surrounding the text
during the time when it was written. I suggest that these details, which reflect in some
sense the reality of the reader’s environment, allows for a more heightened use of
grotesque elements than a work of true fiction, for example.
These grotesque techniques, such as grotesque conceit, zoomorphism and the
struggle between comic and non-comic elements are used throughout Guzmán’s narration
of his education in picardía. I have chosen to analyze the novel as a narration of the
38
process through which Guzmán learns about the cruel realities of the picaresque lifestyle
– that is, through the jokes that he suffers – and his own attempts to put his education to
good use, such as using deception and false appearances in an attempt to climb the social
ladder. This education is similar to the form of the Bildungsroman, a novelistic reflection
of the “development and social education of a young man” (Smith and Watson 189).
While the novel does not contain all of the qualities of a Bildungsroman – indeed, the
term was coined by Karl Morgenstern over two-hundred years after Guzmán de Alfarache
was written – Guzmán’s journey reminds us of the “coming of age” quality of the
Bildungsroman. Smith and Watson describe this genre as a story about “escape from a
repressive family, schooling, and a journey into the wide world of urban life where
encounters with a series of mentors, romantic involvements, and entrepreneurial ventures
lead the protagonist to reevaluate assumptions” (189). Guzmán escapes his family and
receives his “schooling” while on a journey around Spain and Italy. His education,
however, is more the school of hard knocks that takes place during his travels, and his
“mentors” are the various characters who play cruel jokes on him. As we will see,
Guzmán has repeated encounters with these “mentors,” romantic involvements that teach
him about different social classes and he even becomes an entrepreneur in order to land a
marriage that will allow him to climb into a higher social class, albeit temporarily.
Grotesque language is used to describe his experiences throughout his entire
education: it is the string that ties together the story of Guzmán’s life. In her article
“Indigestion and Edification in the Guzmán de Alfarache,” Nina Cox Davis argues that
“carnivalesque motifs or bodily functions,” especially eating and defecating, are repeated
39
throughout Books One and Two of Part I (305). She suggests that these motifs, seen
primarily through Guzmán’s obsession with food and his own body’s digestion of food,
provide “a more profound continuity to the narration of the Guzmán” (305). Cox Davis
identifies an important continuity within the first two Books of Part 1 based on bodily
functions, but it is interesting that this continuity is not limited to this section of the
novel. Rather, they permeate the entire work. If we consider the motifs in her arguments
as part of the larger grotesque context of the Guzmán and we analyze this context
throughout the whole novel, we will see that grotesque elements are utilized in the
narration of every major episode in Guzmán’s education. Grotesque language is
continuously woven into the very fabric of the entire novel; it ties together the disjointed
narrations that, when viewed without considering the role of these devices, might appear
discontinuous and episodic rather than one continuous narrative. In the remainder of this
chapter, I will analyze the style of language in several important episodes in Guzmán’s
education on picardía, showing that grotesque elements are part and parcel of each of the
selected moments.
When Guzmán leaves Seville, he seeks food and shelter at several inns on his way
to Madrid. The episode at the first in is one such moment that contains the grotesque
element of tension between comic and non-comic elements of a narrative. As I discussed
in the Introduction, James Iffland considers this element vital to the grotesque style (1:
61). Guzmán’s narrative of the inns contains deliberate reminders of his naïve youth in
40
order to provoke sympathy in the reader.13 Despite the rather comic circumstances that
befall him, this sympathy clashes with the tone of the narrative and renders the language
grotesque.
The ambience of the inns best shows the ambience of the world of the grotesque,
which Parker states is part of the “low,” or the comic mode (25). It seems that Parker is
working within the context of Norman Frye’s theory of the low mimetic comedy, in
which an everyday hero who is “ordinary in his virtues, but socially attractive” is
gradually incorporated into “the society that he naturally fits” (Frye 44). The pícaro, “the
comic counterpart of the alazon,” is one of the characters available in the low mimetic
style, and Parker’s statement that this low, comic style is the only level available to the
picaresque narrator echoes Frye’s theory of the low mimetic style (45). The inns, with
their lowlife, trickster characters, belong to the comic world of the low mimetic, and here
Guzmán receives a tough education that the reader learns about through his grotesque
narration.
In the first inn, Guzmán is fed an omelet made with bad eggs that contain
embryos of underdeveloped chicks: “Pedí de comer; dijeron que no había sino sólo
huevos. Sería la bellaca de la ventera, con el mucho calor o que la zorra le matase la
gallina, se quedaron empollados, y por no perderlo todo los iba encajando con otros
buenos” (1: 167). The innkeeper sees Guzmán as the perfect target for her rotten eggs
because he is so young: “Viome muchacho, boquirrubio, cariampollado, chapetón.
13
In Chapter Two, I provide a detailed analysis of the chronotope of the road to Madrid.
The argument does not bear repeating for our analysis of the Guzmán de Alfarache,
although Guzmán’s journey is another example of the chronotope of the road to Madrid.
41
Parecíle un Juan de buena alma y que para mí bastara quequiera” (1: 167). It is this naïve
quality in Guzmán that allows others to play jokes on him and that causes the reader to
feel pity for him. The words muchacho and cariampollado show that he is a young boy
with a fat face, like that of a baby. The word boquirrubio, or ingenuous and easy to fool,
also implies that Guzmán is young and naïve, and his actions reinforce this assumption.
However, the use of five adjectives to make the point that he is young exaggerates
Guzmán’s narrative. Each word is slightly more comic than the rest, beginning with
muchacho, or boy, and ending with Juan de buen alma, a colloquial reference to an
individual who is easily fooled, practically a simpleton. This progressive strain of
adjectives leaves the reader chuckling at Guzmán’s narrative, yet this laughter contrasts
with the sympathy that we feel for the naïve young boy. Due to this tension between the
comic language used to describe Guzmán’s youth and the pity that we feel for the young
pícaro, I submit that the passage moves into the realm of the grotesque as characterized
by Iffland.14
When Guzmán eats the rotten eggs, the reader has the same reaction to his
description: “sentía crujir entre los dientes los tiernecitos huesos de los sin ventura pollos,
que era como hacerme cosquillas en las encías” (1: 168). Although common sense tells
the reader that Guzmán should refrain from eating the food, he recognizes that he did it
because he was starving. He refers to himself as bozal, or clumsy, another adjective that
reminds the reader of Guzmán’s youth, and continues eating. His overly dramatic
description of the embryos (“the tiny bones of the unfortunate chicks”) and the tickling
14
Iffland analyzes this phenomenon in detail in his Introduction to Volume 1. See Iffland
(1: 41-2).
42
effect that they have on Guzmán’s mouth simultaneously produces disgust and laughter
in the reader (1, 168). This disgust clashes again with the laughter and renders the
passage grotesque.
When Guzmán takes to the road again, he slowly becomes overwhelmed with
food poisoning. He begins to think about the chickens, who begin playing a little tune in
his mouth: “aquel tañerme castañetas los huevos en la boca” (1: 172). He reminds himself
and the reader of the oil that was so black it was like burned candles (“el aceite negro,
que parecía suelos de candiles”), the filthy pan that looked so dirty that it might have
been kept in a pigsty and the innkeeper, plagued with rheum (“la sartén puerca y la
ventera lagañosa”) (1: 172-3). Eventually, he cannot help but vomit the contents of his
lunch so violently that he remembers years later the unpleasantness of it all: “aun el día
de hoy me parece que siento los pobrecitos pollos piándome acá dentro” (1: 173). Both
Guzmán and the reader are disgusted throughout the episode, thinking of the rotten eggs,
that the pícaro forces himself to eat to assuage his hunger, and his subsequent illness. The
reader is amazed at the inn’s unsanitary conditions and that the innkeeper would pull such
an awful prank on Guzmán, who cleverly emphasizes his youth and naivety throughout
the episode. But these negative reactions struggle with the comic nature of Guzmán’s
narration. His use of comic techniques, such as grotesque conceit – like when he
describes his chewing of the omelet to the tickling of the tiny chicken bones – keeps the
reader chuckling at his misfortune and creates the grotesque effect in his narration.
Guzmán begins his education with a hard lesson on the tricks that others will use on him.
When he literally rejects his lunch, the reader hopes that he is rejecting the trickster
43
behavior of the innkeeper and that he will use this lesson as a reminder to avoid his own
tricks in the future. As we will see throughout the remainder of his education, Guzmán
matures, but the lesson does not stick with him. Guzmán constantly reminds his reader of
his youth by using a variety of adjectives that indicate that he is naïve, clumsy and
uneducated, all provoking a sympathetic reaction to the fact that the innkeeper takes
advantage of a young boy and Guzmán pays a hefty price. However, the comic elements
in the passage allow for a lighter reading. The combination of the realm of the comic and
the realm of sympathy or pity is one of Guzmán’s frequent grotesque narrative techniques
used to describe his education on picardía.
In addition to this grotesque technique, Guzmán frequently incorporates the
grotesque conceit when describing the tricks that are played on him in Madrid and
Toledo. As I stated in the Introduction to this study, the grotesque conceit is the
deliberate exaggeration – which may produce laughter, repugnance, a feeling of tension
or abnormality, or other grotesque reactions – of the conceit. Guzmán uses the grotesque
conceit to discuss the importance of maintaining a certain physical and social appearance
in the court city when he briefly travels to Madrid and learns that such appearances are
often worth more than reality. He comments on the people that he sees in the streets of
Madrid: “Si salíamos por las calles, donde quiera que ponía la mira, todo lo vía de menos
quilates, falto de ley, falso, nada cabal en peso ni medida, traslado a los carniceros y a la
gente de las plazas y tiendas” (1: 296). Madrid’s society, like fake money (“falto de ley,
falso”), appears valuable at first, but it loses its luster when considered closely. Even
though the people that Guzmán sees appear to shine, they are de menos quilates, literally
44
containing less carats of gold than one may presume upon first impression. Guzmán
states that appearances are not always what they seem in Madrid by using a grotesque
conceit that compares the city’s society to the suspicious system of weights and measures
used by the butchers (“nada cabal en peso ni medida, traslado a los carniceros y a la
gente”). False systems of weights and measures were a historical concern in Madrid at
the end of the sixteenth century, or about the time that Guzmán would have “been there.”
A record in the Archivo Histórico Nacional written by Fernando Mendez de Campo, an
attorney in Madrid, denounces fishmongers for using false scales in all of the plazas, thus
cheating their customers.15 If we read Guzmán’s comment about Madrid’s society
through this lens, we understand that he is using a grotesque conceit based on a problem
unique to his historical moment to expose the fraudulent nature of the individuals that he
sees in the court city. The comparison between the people and the scales dehumanizes his
subjects. This element of comparing human subjects to elements that exist outside the
realm of the human renders the conceit grotesque rather than a mere metaphor. Guzmán’s
brief visit to Madrid ends when he robs a man and then trades the money for fine clothing
in Casa del Campo.16 His first brief narration of the court city establishes grotesque
language as an important tool for describing Madrid, which will be used both later in the
novel and in the novels of later authors.
Next, Guzmán travels to Toledo, where he appears to have forgotten about the
false nature of society that he observed in Madrid and gets tricked when he lets his guard
15
16
AHN, Consejos, Libro 1197, folio 67.
Alemán (1: 337-340).
45
down. Upon arriving, he parades around the cathedral in Toledo, wanting to show off his
new clothing rather than practice spiritual devotion:
Púseme de ostentación y di de golpe con mi lozanía en la Iglesia Mayor
para oír misa, aunque sospecho que más me llevó la gana de ser mirado;
paseéla toda tres o cuatro veces, visité las capillas donde acudía más gente,
hasta que vine a parar entre los dos coros, donde estaban muchas damas y
galanes. Pero yo me figuré que era el rey de los gallos y el que llevaba la
gala y como pastor lozano hice plaza de todo el vestido, deseando que me
vieran y enseñar aun hasta las cintas, que eran del tudesco. Estiréme de
cuello, comencé a hinchar la barriga y atiesar las piernas. Tanto me
desvanecía, que de mis viajes y meneos todos tenía que notar, burlándose
de mi necedad; mas como me miraban, yo no miraba en ello ni echaba de
ver mis faltas, que era de lo que los otros formaban risas. (1: 343-4)
Guzmán wants to be where everyone can admire his outfit. He feels like the king in the
game fiesta de los gallos, a popular carnivalesque game for children that is still practiced
today in Tordesillas.17 The tradition involves either stringing up a row of roosters or
burying them in the ground so that only the head is exposed. One child would be chosen
as the king and would decapitate the roosters, either on foot or on horseback. However,
Guzmán’s naivety once again produces laughter. He shows off his clothing as a proud
shepherd would show off his flock. He uses the adjective lozano, which can mean proud,
but can also signify the youthful health of a plant or animal. The word implies that he is
17
For more information on the fiesta de los gallos, see José Delfín Val Sanchez.
46
proud, but in a naïve, youthful way. When he describes how he parades around the
cathedral – stretching his neck as much as possible, inflating his chest and tightening up
the muscles in his legs – the reader realizes that Guzmán’s behavior is not that of the rey
de los gallos, but rather the poor rooster about to be sacrificed. Both the readers and the
men and women in the cathedral laugh at Guzmán’s ridiculous behavior, which shows
that that Guzmán is not, in fact, the king but rather the sacrificial animal.
Guzmán sets his sights on a young lady in the cathedral and quickly tries to woo
her. The pícaro has matured, attempting to use the devices of false representation that he
has previously seen during his short visit to Madrid in order to achieve what he wants. He
uses elaborate clothing and a false background – the two most common tricks of the
pícaro – in order to secure an invitation to dine with her that night. Although he appears
more mature and crafty, the reader remembers that Guzmán still refers to himself using
terms that indicate that he is naïve and incapable of following his plans through to
fruition.18
The young lady’s ploy against Guzmán happens that very night when he brings a
costly feast to her house. Under the guise that her unruly brother comes home for dinner
and that he cannot see Guzmán in the home, she tricks the pícaro into hiding out in a
large clay pot: “Y como si entonces le hubiera ocurrido aquel remedio, me mandó entrar
en una tinaja sin agua, pero con alguna lama de haberla tenido, y no bien limpia” (1:
18
In this chapter, Guzmán uses the following terms to imply that he is young and
inexperienced in the art of picardía: “lozanía” (343), “lozano” (344), “curiosidad” (344),
and “perdí la cuenta” (348).
47
346). He is forced to stay in the clay pot all night until he realizes that he has been tricked
and leaves the house:
Mas viendo que tardaba y la casa estaba muy sosegada, salí del vientre de
mi tinaja, cual otro Jonás de la ballena, no muy limpio. […] Di vueltas por
la casa, lleguéme al aposento, comencé a rascar la puerta y en el suelo con
el dedo, para que me oyera. Era mal sordo y no quiso oír. Así se fue la
noche de claro. Cuando vi que amanecía, lleno de cólera, triste,
desesperado y frío, abrí la puerta de la calle y dejándola emparejada, salí
fuera como un loco, echando mantas y no de lana, haciendo cruces a las
esquinas con determinación de nunca volvérselas a cruzar. (1: 347)
Like the previous jokes played on Guzmán, his narration contains various grotesque
elements. He uses a zoomorphic image to describe his behavior of scratching at the door
and the floor in front of the young lady’s room like a dog. This is a ridiculous image that
reaches the exaggerated level of the grotesque due to the comic touches in his narration.
He has already stated that he exited the clay jar like Jonas exited the belly of the whale,
covered in scum, so the reader imagines Guzmán covered in filth and creeping through
the halls of an unknown house. When he leaves, he becomes truly ridiculous, running
through the streets, swearing and blessing himself with the sign of the cross to protect
him against further peril. Imagining a filthy individual running like a crazy man (loco)
and blessing himself continuously produces laughter in the reader. The distortion of the
phrase echar mantas completes the comic element: echar mantas means to swear or to
speak badly about someone, but as blankets would have been made with wool, adding the
48
conceit of no de lanas strengthens the reader’s comic reaction. The passage is ultimately
grotesque because Guzmán narrates these comic elements in a situation in which he is
suffering. He felt vulnerable and lost in the jar, he passed a cold night without proper
attire, and when he loses all of the food that he has brought plus the company of the
young lady, he feels desperado y frío. The combination of his suffering and the comic
touches of the narration produces the tension of the comic and non-comic that Iffland
argues is essential to the grotesque mode.
Guzmán’s downfalls have, until this point, been narrated using common elements
of the grotesque: zoomorphic images, the grotesque conceit and the combination of
comic and non-comic elements. When he travels to Italy, the tricks played on him include
a new element of the grotesque: filth and squalor. While unclean images are perhaps
physically repugnant to the reader, they are not considered grotesque within the
framework of this project unless they include some other technique – like distortion or
exaggeration – that makes them grotesque. When Guzmán emphasizes his uncleanliness
as a result of jokes played on him in Geneva and Rome, the images he paints are
grotesque because they disfigure a positive image of the human body.
One of Mikhail Bakhtin’s tools for analyzing the grotesque world of Rabelais in
Rabelais and His World is the material bodily principle, which he defines as “images of
the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life” (18). These images are
frequently found in the grotesque, and many scholars discuss their function in the
49
grotesque.19 For Bakhtin, the material bodily principle is presented in the works of
Rabelais through grotesque realism, or a reflection of the human body and its actions that
is always rooted in the positive:
In grotesque realism, therefore, the bodily element is deeply positive. It is
presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres
of life, but as something universal, representing all the people. As such it
is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it
makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the
earth and body. […] The material bodily principle is contained not in the
biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people
who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily
becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable. This exaggeration has a
positive, assertive character. (19)
For Bakhtin, bodily functions are innately positive, but descriptions of these functions
become grotesque when they distort the natural hierarchy of the body, for example when
the author raises or lowers a particular body part to a sphere to which it does not belong.20
19
For example, James Iffland uses Erich Auerbach’s theory of creatural realism to
describe the human body and its functions in his analysis of the grotesque in Quevedo.
20
We see a perfect example of this distortion in El Buscón when Pablos describes Don
Toribio: “Yo, que vi que de la camisa no se vía sino una ceja, y que traía tapado el rabo
de medio ojo” (159). He is lowering the metaphorical eye in two ways. He describes the
ceja on Don Toribio’s shirt, which probably refers to a type of textile decoration but
certainly reminds the reader of the eye as the word also means eyebrow. To describe how
short his shirt is, Pablos says that it barely covers his rabo de medio ojo, a grotesque
reference to his backside. He refers to Don Toribio’s anus as a medio ojo, lowering the
eye to the buttocks, and takes advantage of the common circular shape of both body parts
50
The human body is a common subject of the picaresque novel; in fact, describing the
suffering of the human body is intrinsic to the narrative. Therefore, Bakhtin’s material
bodily principle helps us to see how the body is presented by the pícaro. Is it a positive
entity, or rather is the body represented in such a way that it perverts the material bodily
principle? When Guzmán travels to Italy, the disfiguration of the human body blooms, as
his narration of the two jokes that he suffers distorts the material body and creates a
grotesque image of the human body.
When Guzmán arrives in Geneva, he becomes such an annoyance by trying to
incorporate himself into high society that several boys decide to play a prank on him
while he is sleeping. One of them invites Guzmán to his house to spend the night,
claiming that he knows Guzmán’s relatives, and the servant warns him that there are
many spirits in the town that are only warded off by leaving the light on while sleeping.
After his long journey, Guzmán falls into a deep sleep and is awakened by four “spirits”
that strip him nude and trap him within blankets that they had previously set on the bed
for that purpose. They raise him in the air until he begs for mercy and faints from fear,
and then they quickly leave him. When he wakes up, although he is physically unharmed,
he sees the consequence of the joke surrounding him:
Yo quedé tan descoyuntado, tan sin saber de mí que, siendo de día, ni
sabía si estaba en el cielo, si en tierra. Dios, que fue servido de guardarme,
supo para qué. Serían como las ocho del día; quíseme levantar, porque me
pareció que bien pudiera. Halléme de mal olor, el cuerpo pegajoso y
to complete the image. Bakhtin points out this type of distortion as a perfect example of
the degradation of grotesque realism. See Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World 20-21).
51
embarrado. Acordóseme de la mujer de mi amo el cocinero y, como en las
turbaciones nunca falta un desconcierto, mucho me afligí. Mas ya no
podía ser el cuervo más negro que las alas: estreguéme todo el cuerpo con
lo que limpio quedó de las sábanas y añudéme mi hatillo. […] Y aunque
las costillas parece que me sonaban en el cuerpo como la bolsa de trebejos
de ajedrez, disimulé cuanto pude por lo de la caca, hasta verme fuera de
allí. (2: 382)
Guzmán does not know at first whether he is alive or dead; he feels caught between two
hierarchies, the low (Earth) representing degradation and the high (Heaven) representing
the spiritual and the abstract (Bakhtin 19-20). Bakhtin associates these two hierarchies
with the body, as the body has both low and high parts, a direct reflection of the “sphere
of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (20). Guzmán’s reference to the Heaven and
Earth, or the two cosmic hierarchies, extends to the bodily in the soiling of his bedclothes
because it places the low – in this case, the excrement, which comes from the buttocks –
over his entire body, including the high, like the shoulders and the head. His body
covered in fecal matter is a distortion of the positive image of the body that, for Bakhtin,
forms part of grotesque realism, as well as a distortion of his uncertainty about his body’s
vital state. While the image of Guzmán spending hours unconscious in his own waste,
and then having to wake up and clean himself using the sheets without alerting anyone, is
physically repugnant to the reader, it crosses into the realm of the grotesque because it
distorts the positive and orderly image of the material body.
52
Similarly, when Guzmán visits Rome, he again becomes covered in excrement
after having an affair with a matron’s maid. The matron is the object of his master’s
affection and, in an effort to preserve her honor and punish Guzmán for his affair with
her maid, she plays a joke on him. The matron calls Guzmán to her house late on a rainy
night, pretending she wishes to finally acquiesce to her admirer’s advances, but she traps
the pícaro in a patio and he is once again covered in mud. The next day Guzmán goes to
tell his lover about the joke that the matron played on him and, in order to get to the
window that he uses to talk with her secretly, he has to cross a very narrow alley, which
is filled with mud as a result of the rain the night before: “por ser calleja de mal paso,
angosta y llena de lodo; y entonces lo estaba tanto, que mal y con trabajo pude llegar a el
[sic] sitio” (2: 107). The alley is also used to house domestic animals, and while Guzmán
is talking to Nicoleta, a fatted pig suddenly charges him:
Yo estaba muy galán, pierniabierto, estirado de cuello y tratando de mis
desgracias, muy descuidados de las presentes, que mi mala fortuna me
tenía cercanas. Porque aconteció que, como por aquel postigo se servían
las caballerizas y se hubiese por él entrado un gran cebón, hallólo el mozo
de caballos hozando en el estiércol enjuto de las camas y todo esparcido
por el suelo. Tomó bonico una estaca y diole con ella los palos que pudo
alcanzar. Él era grande y gordo; salió como un toro huyendo. Y como
estos animales tienen costumbres o por naturaleza caminar siempre por
delante y revolver pocas veces, embistió comigo. Cogióme de bola. Quiso
pasar por entre piernas, llevóme a horcajadillas y, sin poderme cobrar ni
53
favorecer, cuando acordé a valerme, ya me tenía en medio de un lodazal y
tal, que por salvarlo, para que me sacase dél, convino abrazarlo por la
barriga con toda mi fuerza. Y como si jugáramos a quebrantabarriles o a
punta con cabeza, dándole aldabadas a la puerta falsa con hocicos y
narices, me traspuso – sin poderlo excusar, temiendo no caer en el cieno –
tres o cuatro calles de allí, a todo correr y gruñir, llamando gente. Hasta
que, conocido mi daño, me dejé caer, sin reparar adonde; y me hubiera
sido menor mal en mi callejuela, porque, supuesto que no fuera tanto ni
tan público, tenía cerca el remedio. (2: 107-9)
Guzmán’s narration of how the pig attacks him and displaces him to one of the major
plazas in Rome, in addition to being hilarious, is perhaps the best example of the
grotesque in the novel, as it includes all of the grotesque elements used throughout the
novel in one passage. Guzmán compares himself and the pig to inanimate objects when
he describes their positions, stating that they are like the stickpins in the game punto con
cabeza.21 This reference is also an example of a grotesque conceit as the reader must
connect the idea of stickpins being on their heads or tails in order to understand that
Guzmán is facing the opposite direction of the pig. Although Guzmán is in a perilous
position, and he ends up covered in slime and so embarrassed that he leaves Rome, the
reader cannot help but laugh at his predicament. The image of Guzmán riding the pig
21
Micó describes the game punto con cabeza in a footnote as a game where boys would
hide a stickpin in between their fingers and ask their opponent whether the stickpin was
on heads (cabeza) or tails (punto). If the opponent guessed properly, he won the stickpin.
Here, we imagine the pig with his head sticking one way and Guzmán with his head
sticking in the opposite direction, thus one is de punto and the other is de cabeza (108).
54
through a narrow alley and afraid to let go because he might fall in the mud is ridiculous
and evokes a comic reaction in the reader. Combined with the suffering that Guzmán is
experiencing, the narrative produces the tension typical of a grotesque situation that
combines comic and non-comic elements.
The episode also includes clear distortion of the material body, as the physical
positions of Guzmán and the pig displace the high and the low of both bodies. Guzmán
describes their position by saying that it looked as though they were playing
quebrantabarriles, which the editor notes was a game when two boys would hold each
other at the waist, with one standing normally and the other upside down, until they could
change positions by somersaulting over one another (2: 108). Even the game that
Guzmán references displaces the low and the high of the human body, but the image
becomes even more distorted when Guzmán states that he is holding on so tightly to the
pig that his own face is dándole aldabadas a la puerta falsa of the pig, or smacking
against the pig’s bottom. This image is the ultimate distortion of the body’s hierarchy;
Guzmán’s nose is against the pig’s backside and vice versa. Because it is an animal, and
Guzmán is at constant risk that the animal might defecate on his face, the grotesque
image is even more effective at repulsing the reader. Although this degrades the positive
concept of the body and its functions, the reader cannot help but laugh at Guzmán’s
misfortune.
The pícaro’s misfortunes in Geneva and Italy include not only the conventional
grotesque aspects of the picaresque narrative; they also distort the material body
principle, or the everyday functions of the human body. Defecation is a normal part of
55
this phenomenon, and Bakhtin emphasizes that it is deeply rooted in the realm of the
positive. The material body is not grotesque or repulsive. However, Guzmán’s
experiences of being covered in excrement are negative and grotesque because they
pervert the normal processes of the material bodily principle. When Guzmán soils
himself in Geneva, his excrement covers his entire body, disrupting the hierarchy of the
body that must remain intact in order to preserve the positive element of this bodily
function. Similarly, when Guzmán’s nose is next to the pig’s bottom, the lowering of the
face (the “high”) to the anus (the “low”) degrades the material bodily principle, which is
key to the grotesque. Guzmán maintains the essence of the grotesque in these episodes by
combining a feeling of pity, a sense of horror and disgust, and an uncontrollable laughter
at his misfortune. According to Henryk Ziomek, this three-pronged reaction to a text is
the ultimate proof of the grotesque’s presence.22 When Guzmán leaves Italy and
continues his education in picardía in Madrid, we will see that the tension between comic
and non-comic elements becomes even more complex.
During Guzmán’s second trip to Madrid, he achieves a kind of metamorphosis,
successfully representing himself as a merchant and securing a wife and household, thus
permitting him access to a social class which he had previously been denied. Bakhtin
utilizes the theme of metamorphosis to analyze the “adventure novel of everyday life,”
22
Ziomek believes that the key to the grotesque is the simultaneous reaction of horror,
laughter and amazement: “El triple efecto de lo grotesco en la literatura es provocar el
horror, la risa y el asombro. En este proceso, lo risible y el temor se interrelacionan entre
sí produciendo un efecto estrafalario” (14).
56
best represented by Apuleius’s The Golden Ass.23 Metamorphosis, according to Bakhtin,
“is a mythological sheath for the idea of development” that is strongly based in folklore
but that continues to influence literature (113). He explains that Lucius, the protagonist of
The Golden Ass, experiences a transformation when he magically turns into an ass, but
his true metamorphosis is the education that he receives from the information that he
gleans as an animal, suddenly able to eavesdrop without being detected. This is the true
essence of metamorphosis, a moment of crisis that shows “how an individual becomes
other than what he was” (115). Following Bakhtin’s framework, perhaps Guzmán
experiences a metamorphosis of sorts during his second trip to Madrid, one that allows
him to gain the perspective of a different social class but that – like Lucius’s
transformation – ultimately ends.
Once Guzmán becomes a successful merchant, he becomes an attractive match in
the eyes of many fathers who take for granted that his honorable exterior matches his
interior: “Parecióle que todo yo era de comer y que no tenía dentro ni pepita que
desechar. Aun ésta es otra locura, casar los hombres a sus hijas con hijos de padres no
conocidos” (2: 368). Guzmán’s narration of his assent to the social status of husband
begins by comparing himself to a drupe, one in which the pit is not easily seen by the
eater. His description of the engagement contains another grotesque conceit: “Tanto se
me vino a pegar, que me llegó a empegar. Casóme con su hija y otra no tenía. Estaba rico.
Era moza de muy buena gracia. Prometi[ó]me con ella tres mil ducados. Dije que sí” (2:
368). The verb empegar means to bathe or cover the interior and exterior or barrels,
23
For Bakhtin’s entire analysis of the adventure novel of everyday life, see “Forms of
Time and Chronotope in the Novel” (111-129).
57
animal skins that held liquids, or other containers meant for holding liquids with the oils
of rotten fish or similar substances.24 Guzmán is expressing the idea that his future fatherin-law was attempting to butter him up, but the distortion of the term pegar to empegar,
which brings with a comparison between a human and an inanimate object, produces a
grotesque conceit. He uses another zoomorphic image to his describe his wife and their
marriage which, due to his wife’s overspending, plagued Guzmán with debt that he was
unable to face:
con sus amigas en banquetes, fiestas y meriendas, demás de lo exorbitante
de sus galas y vestidos, con otros millares de menudencias, que como
rabos de pulpos cuelgan de cada cosa déstas, juntándose con la carestía
que sucedió aquellos primeros años y la poca corresponsión que hubo de
negocios, ya me conocí flaqueza, ya tenía váguidos de cabeza y estaba
para dar conmigo en el suelo. Faltaba muy poco para dejarme caer a
plomo. (2: 370-1)
Guzmán is describing a very different social class than those he faces in the inn and in
Italy. Here he is among a group of individuals for whom the appearance of wealth is
paramount, and pícaros will interact extensively with this group throughout later
picaresque novels. Here, because of Guzmán’s metamorphosis, he is privy to the negative
behaviors of his new social class. According to Bakhtin, the presentation of this
knowledge is typical of a metamorphosis, which allows the character to access a social
24
“Bañar o cubrir con pez derretida u otra sustancia semejante el interior o el exterior de
los pellejos, barriles y otras vasijas.” “Empegar.” Diccionario de la lengua española de la
Real Academia Española. Madrid: Espasa Libros, 2001. Web. 18 June 2013.
58
circle that he could not access prior to his transformation. In the case of Lucius, he
accesses the private details of a lower social class by spying and eavesdropping (Bakhtin
123). In the case of Guzmán, the pícaro narrates his observations of the actions of a
higher social class. Bakhtin notes that the rogue is one of the preferable characters to
present this type of literature because they are able to “pass through that life and are
forced to study its workings, all its secret cogs and wheels” (124). Guzmán narrates his
experience in this social class using elements of the grotesque. In the passage cited above,
he dehumanizes his wife and her friends by exaggerating their clothing, which is so
ornate and filled with thousands of menudencias, or trifles, that the women disappear
among their fripperies. He evokes animalistic imagery when describing this phenomenon,
as menudencias can refer to the many odds and ends that covered the dresses of these
ladies, but it also refers to the offal meat of a pig.25 Furthermore, he states that these
trifles hang from their clothes in such numbers that they appear like the many limbs of an
octopus. He makes the females ridiculous by ascribing animalistic images to their
wardrobe, causing the reader to chuckle, but as this laughter is mixed with disdain for
their lifestyle – which is literally running Guzmán into the ground –, the effect of the
narration becomes grotesque.
Guzmán’s transformation into husband and merchant does not last as his wife dies
and he is forced to return the dowry to her father, leaving the pícaro penniless and fleeing
Madrid. But even his last narration of his wife contains grotesque devices, perhaps in an
25
The dictionary specifies that when the term menundicias is used in the plural form, it
refers to offal meats of a pig. “Morcillas, longanizas y otros despojos semejantes que se
sacan del cerdo.” “Menundicias” Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia
Española. Madrid: Espasa Libros, 2011. Web. 18 November 2013.
59
effort to represent his wife as a greedy and uncontrollable force that caused nothing but
suffering in Guzmán’s life. Philip Thomson notes that one function of the grotesque can
be aggressiveness and alienation, showing hostility on behalf of the narrator – or perhaps
even the author – toward his subject.26 Due to the shocking nature of the grotesque, it can
be used as an “aggressive weapon,” and in the case of the following passage, Guzmán is
aiming that weapon at his late wife (58):
Ella sin duda no se debía de confesar y, si se confesaba, no decía la
verdad, y si la decía, la debía de adulterar de modo que la pudiesen
absolver. Engañábase a sí la pobre, pensando engañar a los confesores. No
faltaban con esto alguna gentecilla ruin, de bajos principios y fundamentos
y menos entendimientos, que por adular y complacerla, le ayudaban a sus
locuras, favoreciéndolas, no dándome oído ni sabiendo mi causa. Y éstos
fueron los que destruyeron mi paz y a ella la enviaron a el [sic] infierno.
Porque de una enfermedad aguda murió, sin mostrar arrepentimiento ni
recebir sacramento. (2: 400)
Guzmán uses ambiguous language that implies the grotesque behavior of his wife in this
passage. As I stated in the Introduction, a grotesque situation goes against either the
narrator’s or the reader’s sense of normalcy or “what is right,” and these situations can
contain – but do not necessarily contain – grotesque images. Guzmán’s wife violates two
norms of her socio-historical environment: confession and marriage. The narrator clearly
states that she does not confess properly, if at all, but her violation of marriage is much
26
For an analysis of the aggressive nature of the grotesque, see Thomson (58-9).
60
more ambiguously stated. Guzmán refers to her friends, who are all lowlifes with no
morals or culture and who find ways to flatter and please her, ultimately causing her
death. However, there are several key words in the passage that suggest that the pícaro
believes that his wife was unfaithful to their marriage. He uses the word engañar to
discuss her confessional habits, stating that she fooled her confessor and perhaps herself,
but the term engañar can also mean to commit adultery. Instead of saying that she lied
about her actions, Guzmán employs the term adulterar which, in addition to its more
common meaning of “to falsify,” could also refer to committing adultery.27 Finally, he
mentions that her friends destroyed the peace in his world and ultimately killed his wife,
saying that she contracted a swift illness. Guzmán’s ambiguous syntax could imply that
his wife was committing adultery and perhaps died from a communicable disease. His
description of her final moments is not only aggressive, it also shows the reader that his
wife’s behavior is abnormal and violates the norms of the society in which they live. His
ambiguous language allows Guzmán to save face in the wake of his wife’s death where,
instead of proclaiming himself a cuckold, he emphasizes his wife’s horrible behavior and
his own suffering.
During Guzmán’s second trip to Madrid, he experiences a metamorphosis into the
merchant class through which the reader gleans details about the immoral and
extravagant behaviors of the society that surrounds him. When his first wife dies and he
flees Madrid, he must again return to his status as pícaro, but when he returns one last
27
“1. Viciar, falsificar algo. 2. verbo transitivo desusado Cometer adulterio.”
“Adulterar.” Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española. Madrid:
Espasa Libros, 2001. Web. 18 June 2013.
61
time to the court city, he makes use of the education that he has experienced in order to
prosper. Guzmán is no longer the naïve butt of the joke, but rather the crafty pícaro,
capable of immoral behaviors that allow him to be the master of the joke.
While studying in Alcalá de Henares, Guzmán meets his second wife, abandons
his studies and travels to Madrid. His plan is to exploit his wife’s beauty in the court,
exchanging her sexual favors for money and gifts, thus providing a comfortable lifestyle:
Venía yo a mis solas haciendo la cuenta: “Conmigo llevo pieza de rey,
fruta nueva, fresca y no sobajada: pondréle precio como quisiere. No me
puede faltar quien, por suceder en mi lugar, me traiga muy bien ocupado.
Un trabajo secreto puédese disimular a título de amistad, ahorrando la
costa de casa. Y ganando yo por otra parte, presto seré rico, tendré para
poner una casa honrada” (2: 444)
Guzmán’s plan works, and as soon as he and his wife arrive in Madrid, men begin to take
an interest in her. A clothing salesman, or ropero, quickly offers the couple help in
finding a home and provides them with food because he thinks Guzmán’s wife is so
beautiful. In addition to comparing her to a piece of fruit in the passage above, Guzmán
compares himself to a mule and his wife to a goddess: “nos llevó a la de una su conocida,
donde nos hicieron todo buen acogimiento, no por el asno, sino por la diosa” (2: 444).
The affair continues for quite some time, all the while Guzmán leaving the house during
the day so that the lovers may be together, and coming home to a sumptuous meal and
gifts. He has very little interaction with his wife’s lover, except to accept his help to begin
a small business: “Con esto apartamos el rancho y puse mi tienda. El estranjero me hacía
62
mil zalemas y yo a el ropero la cara de perro” (2: 448). The image of Guzmán as the
ropero’s dog, showing the hierarchy between the two, suggests that Guzmán is the
ropero’s subservient slave. The idiom cara de perro – to look at someone with an air of
anger or ill will – also describes his frustration throughout his narration of the affair. He
suffers not because of his wife’s unfaithfulness but because of the risk that he runs that
others may discover that he is a cuckold: “No me pesaba dello; empero pesábame que tan
al descubierto se hiciese, pues no hay hombre tan leño que no entienda que, cuando
aquesto se hace, no es a humo de pajas ni por sus ojos bellidos” (2: 449). Guzmán’s
suffering produces tension with the few comic touches, such as the animalistic images
cited above, but more important than these grotesque elements is the grotesque situation
that he narrates. Guzmán is invoking the negative behaviors of his first wife, imitating her
and reaping the benefits, yet his behavior violates the reader’s sense of normalcy. He not
only endures his second wife’s affair, he encourages it despite his internal struggle. The
adultery, particularly with Guzmán’s knowledge and consent, violates the basic
foundation of marriage and clashes with the reader’s sense of morality. When the ropero
spends all of his money in wooing Guzmán’s wife, he is jailed for debt, and Guzmán and
his wife leave Madrid and travel to Seville. Guzmán’s education is complete: he has
learned his picaresque ways through the school of hard knocks, employing these tricks
later for his own personal gain and, like any good pícaro, he has learned to move along
once his fortune takes a turn for the worse.
Guzmán’s education in the ways of the pícaro is encyclopedic, encompassing the
majority of his youth and traversing the great urban centers of Spain and Italy, as well as
63
the rural road between these points. As I have shown throughout this chapter, Guzmán’s
narration – though expansive – is tied together by the use of the grotesque throughout the
novel. As Guzmán travels from city to city and suffers fortunes and misfortunes, he
consistently uses grotesque devices to enrich his life narrative. An analysis of these
devices in the Guzmán de Alfarache allows us to tie together the novel in a way that has
not yet been studied, and it simultaneously shows us that there is a growing connection
between the narration of the urban space and the use of grotesque language. As more and
more picaresque characters flock to the streets of Madrid, hoping to seek the same
fortune that Guzmán temporarily found in the court city, we will continue to see a
growing relationship between the grotesque style found here and later narratives of the
court. Guzmán de Alfarache introduces the elements of this narrative, from the economic
opportunity available to the immigrant in Madrid to the immoral behaviors of Madrid’s
society. He observes the mejoría of Madrid when he arrives one last time to the court
city, but his experiences suggest that there is a sordid side implicit in the city. In the
following chapters, we will explore this sordid side of Madrid and the evolving use of
grotesque language in its narration.
64
Chapter Two. Mapping Madrid in El Buscón: The Grotesque Narration of the
Chronotopes of the Court City
When Pablos, the protagonist of Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón, arrives in
Madrid, he joins a group of beggars and ventures into the streets of the court city wearing
the guise of a vagabond. His narration of begging in the area surrounding the parish of
San Luis, located at the time on what is today the corner of Calle Montera and Gran Vía,
is the first detailed picaresque description of a specific, historical space in Madrid.1
Pablos and his partner roam the streets around San Luis attempting to elicit charity not
only through their ragdoll appearances, but also through their actions: “A todos hacíamos
cortesías: a los hombres quitábamos el sombrero, deseando hacer lo mismo con sus
capas; a las mujeres hacíamos reverencias, que se huelgan con ellas y con las
paternidades mucho” (177). The reader immediately perceives the biting yet clever tone
characteristic of Quevedo’s novel in Pablos’s first actions as a beggar. The characters tip
1
In Madrid: Atlas histórico de una ciudad, Virgilio Pinto Crespo states that San Luis, or
San Luis Obsipo, was built in 1541 as an annex to San Ginés, the second oldest Christian
parish (132-4). Pablo Jauralde Pou notes that although the original parish of San Luis
burned in the seventeenth century, its reconstruction held such importance that even
today the corner of Calle Montera and Gran Vía is known as “la red de San Luis.” See El
Buscón (Quevedo 177).
65
their hats to show respect for the men who cross their path, but they really desire to take
the very clothes off the backs of these well-dressed men. The words Pablos uses to
divulge his true intentions catch the reader off guard and evoke laughter. The pícaro tells
how they bow to the women but, as Pablo Jauralde Pou observes, he is using a play on
words. Reverencias are an acceptable form of showing respect, but he insinuates a second
meaning of the word – a way to honor religious figures – by mentioning paternidades,
which can mean either the religious figure or the genetic heritage of the women (177). In
this short passage, Pablos makes the reader laugh, perhaps takes a jab at priests by
suggesting that the reverences shown to them are useless, and communicates that men in
Madrid are well dressed and women in Madrid remain unmoved by the bows of beggars.
The passage not only constructs an image of inhabitants of Madrid from several different
social groups, it shows a style that is used throughout the novel: a narrative filled with
grotesque language that frequently incorporates wit and wordplay and is certainly critical
and sometimes borders on the hostile.
If the novel is complex, the author is even more so. Born September 14, 1580 in
Madrid, Francisco de Quevedo Villegas was the son to parents who worked directly for
the court: his mother was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anna of Austria, and his father was
a secretary to María of Austria, sister of Philip II. Quevedo was baptized in Madrid in the
parish of San Ginés on September 26, 1580. At the age of six, he was orphaned and
began to study at the Colegio Imperial de la Compañía de Jesús. Quevedo was a true man
of Madrid in a way that Mateo Alemán was not. He moved to Valladolid with the court
from 1601-1606, and returned to Madrid until 1611. From 1613 to 1618, he worked as an
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assistant to the Spanish Viceroy of Sicily, Pedro Téllez-Girón, Duke of Osuna.2 He was
also made a knight of the Order of Santiago in 1618. Immediately following the death of
Philip III in 1621, the Duke of Osuna was one of many ministers arrested by the State
Council and was removed from his political position.3 Quevedo, as his friend and
assistant, was exiled to his estate in Torre de Juan Abad in Ciudad Real. After
establishing what would become a complex relationship with Don Gaspar de Guzmán,
the Count-Duke Olivares, he was allowed to return to Madrid in 1623.4 After another
shorter exile beginning in 1626, Quevedo would again return to Madrid, producing plays
and poetry that J. H. Elliott suggests show, if not a “personal association” between the
two men, certainly a “close proximity” (238). This “proximity” would lead to Quevedo’s
being welcome at court and even appointed secretary to Philip IV in 1632 (Elliott 241).
Nevertheless, as Elliott points out, Quevedo entered into disfavor with the court around
1635, around the same time that he began to feel that Olivares was no longer an asset, but
rather a hindrance, to the effective rule of the king. Quevedo began to subtly attack the
Count-Duke in his writings, and although Elliott does not claim that Olivares was aware
of these attacks, the political figure was shrewd and held heavy influence with the king.
Quevedo was arrested in 1939 as a “traitor” to the Crown and a conspirator with the
French (247-8). Elliott’s article shows Quevedo as a man of Madrid who was involved in
the politics of his age, with an opportunity for observation of the court’s society that other
2
For information on Quevedo’s stay in Venice, see James O. Crosby.
For a detailed biography and account of the Duke of Osuna’s fall, see Luis M. Linde
and Emilio Beladiez.
4
J. H. Elliott explores the complex relationship between Olivares and Quevedo in his
article “Quevedo and the Count-Duke of Olivares.”
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3
writers, such as Alemán, did not enjoy. As his opinions of the court and its members were
frequently subjects of his writings, perhaps some of the critical details of El Buscón came
directly from what he witnessed first-hand in Madrid. Quevedo died on September 8,
1645, in the Dominican convent Villanueva de los Infantes, to the southeast of Ciudad
Real.
Although involved with the court and aware of the political goings-on of his time,
Quevedo was also one of the great poets of the Spanish Baroque. He wrote poetry, prose
and theatrical works on a variety of topics from politics to philosophy to social satire. He
was also involved in literary circles that included many of the best authors of the time,
such a Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega. However, Quevedo frequently butted
heads with his contemporaries and became public rivals of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and
Luis de Góngora, whom he attacked in his poetry. The short novel El Buscón, one of
Quevedo’s most famous prose works, was published in 1626 but written much earlier by
a younger Quevedo. Pablo Jauralde Pou agrees that, while knowing the exact date for its
composition is impossible, the novel was written around 1604.5
The novel, whose protagonist is Pablos, “príncipe de la vida buscona” or “the
prince of rogues,” recounts the life of a young pícaro who is born in Segovia and,
through a string of trials and tribulations, travels throughout Spain and Italy, returning
later to Madrid and Toledo, and finally flees to Seville and embarks on a voyage to the
New World (59). Divided into three books, the first tells of his childhood, the second of
his early travels and apprenticeship in the ways of thieving picardía, and the third of his
5
See Jaraulde Pou’s introductory comments for information on composition and
publication of El Buscón (Quevedo 10-12).
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career as a pícaro until he decides he can no longer be successful in Spain and leaves for
the New World. The third book, which narrates Pablos’s many attempts to secure a
comfortable lifestyle within the anonymity of Madrid, is the first true picaresque
narration of Madrid. Guzmán de Alfarache spends time in Madrid over several trips and
even marries there, but it is Pablos who explores Madrid and the society that roams its
streets. These experiences are related through Pablos’s first-person narrative, which
contains witticisms like the one seen at the beginning of this chapter, as well as other
grotesque devices.
Complex and extravagant wordplay is one of the outstanding features of
Quevedo’s novel, and as we will see, it is a fundamental characteristic of the grotesque
mode in this work. James Iffland observed the importance of the grotesque in El Buscón,
and he dedicated a large portion of the second volume of his work Quevedo and the
Grotesque to the analysis of the grotesque in Quevedo’s novel. As I stated in the
Introduction, James Iffland believes that the grotesque style involves, above all “a clash
between the comic and something which is incompatible with the comic,” or a “sphere of
negativity” (1: 61-6).
According to Iffland, El Buscón uses the same spheres of negativity as Quevedo’s
poetry and other prose works, but Pablos’s story represents an important break with the
author’s previous works because it brings the realm of the grotesque into a profoundly
realistic environment: the streets of the court city of Madrid. There is no denying that
Quevedo’s Sueños and La Hora de todos are filled with grotesque imagery – in fact,
Iffland dedicates several chapters to their study –, but the grotesque in El Buscón takes
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place in an environment closer to our concept of reality. This “lends a greater ‘sting’ to
the […] grotesquery found within it” (Iffland 2: 76). As I argued in Chapter One, the use
of the verisimilar allows for a stronger presence of grotesque language in literature. The
“sting” of recognizing our own reality in a narrative would perhaps be less noticeable in a
fantastic or supernatural environment. Iffland observes that the grotesque is more
palpable in El Buscón, yet the discussion of Quevedo’s grotesque style would benefit
from an in-depth discussion of how Madrid is represented in the novel. Why do we
consider Pablos’s narration of Madrid to be representative of reality? How does
Quevedo’s novel help to modify – or establish – a concept of Madrid as court city? And
finally, what role does the novel’s grotesque style play in this concept?
There is no doubt that literature, that the words we read in a novel, can compose
an image of the city in the reader’s mind. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel De
Certeau proposes that literature can form a “concept” of the city, particularly when the
narrator walks through the city. While, according to De Certeau, these urban practices of
narrating the city are more modern, the concept of the city as a single unit or space
already existed in the sixteenth century (94). The idea that Madrid existed as a city-space
is not new in the picaresque. But because Madrid as the city of the court, a new
geographical space declared home to a previously itinerant court and its king with
functions unrealized by any other Spanish city, was a new concept in Quevedo’s time, El
Buscón’s descriptions help to develop the image or concept of the city that will be used –
perhaps even taken for granted – by later writers.
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Pablos creates a concept of Madrid as court city by walking through the streets of
Madrid and narrating his experiences. Walking, says De Certeau, “is to the urban system
what the speech act is to language or the statements uttered” (97). Therefore, if we
understand the concept of the city as a particular system, built on rules and operations –
as De Certeau understands it – then Pablos’s enunciations as he walks through the street
of Madrid help build the system that the reader will use to characterize Madrid as court
city. Pablos uses specific geographical references throughout his narration of his time in
Madrid, such as parishes and public spaces.6 These references are appropriated, to use
De Certeau’s term, by the narrator and used to “act-out” the space, or enunciate, his own
experiences in the city (98). These enunciations then contribute to the reader’s concept of
the city because he is able to assimilate Pablos’s descriptions and use them to form a
mental concept or image of Madrid. In addition to using geographical references to create
an acting-out of the city-space, this practice also makes the narrative verisimilar. Given
that Pablos specifically points out that he rides on horseback through the Prado, shops on
Calle Mayor near the Puerta de Guadalajara, and goes on an outing to the Casa del
Campo, the reader can establish a mental geographical trajectory of Pablos’s journey
through Madrid. He can recognize Pablos’s experiences and compare them to his own
experiences in the streets of Madrid or, if he has never seen Madrid, come to know the
court city through the narrative. The Madrilenian reader understands that the urban space
of Madrid is the same urban space of his own reality, thus creating verisimilitude within
6
Pablos specifically mentions San Salvador (172), San Luis (177), the Puerta de
Guadalajara (182), Calle Mayor (183), Calle de Carretas (183), Paseo del Prado (211),
Casa del Campo (213), San Felipe (218) and Calle Arenal (218).
71
the work. The verisimilar imagery creates the concept of Madrid as court city and, as
Iffland notes during his analysis of El Buscón, this heightened sense of reality also
strengthens the effect of the grotesque style.
All of these effects are seen during Pablos’s narration of his time spent as a
vagabond in the neighborhood surrounding the parish of San Luis. A mere description of
the movement of Pablos and his partner bring to mind details that are fundamental to the
city-space: “Andábamos haciendo culebra de una acera a otra por no topar con casas de
acreedores” (177). We can imagine the paths meant for foot traffic, which implies that
there must have been a road in the middle with enough traffic to merit a particular space
for pedestrians. On a purely physical level, Pablos has described one feature of a city, a
sidewalk, and has allowed the reader the freedom to imagine the other spaces that
logically must accompany it. From this one detail, we hypothesize that Madrid must be a
large city if it warrants specific paths for foot traffic, therefore helping us to create a
concept of the size of Madrid based on what Pablos narrates. Beyond the physical level,
the pícaro draws the attention of the reader to the nature of the street dwellers in Madrid.
Pablos must move like a snake, constantly crossing between both sides of the streets to
avoid the houses of credit, implying that there were quite a few of these establishments
and that many madrileños are involved in the business of borrowing and, perhaps, usury.
The implied frequency of debt and usury is no laughing matter, but the image of Pablos
snaking along so that his partner can avoid the creditors to whom he owes money (“Ya le
pedía uno el alquiler de la casa, otro el de la espada y otro el de las sábanas…”) adds a
touch of the comic to the description because we imagine Pablos moving in a ridiculous
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manner but for quite serious reasons (177). The combination of the comic and another
element that is far from comic, in this case the anguish caused by debt, produces the
mixed response in the reader that is fundamental to the grotesque, as Iffland describes it.
In this short description, the narrator uses grotesque language to provide both a physical
and a conceptual description of Madrid.
El Buscón is innovative in a variety of ways, such as the introduction of a firstperson narrative that does not belong to the pícaro himself – but rather to another
character – into the picaresque novel, but one of the most valuable aspects of the novel is
its description of specific spaces in turn-of-the-century Madrid.7 Guzmán de Alfarache
lived in Madrid and narrated his experiences there, but because Pablos’s journey is such
an important part of the novel – and is thus narrated in greater detail –, we see several
spaces in the new court city of Madrid presented in the novel. The road to Madrid, the
very public space of the Paseo del Prado, even the private space of the jailer’s home, are
examples of the spaces of Madrid that are specifically developed during the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Forms of Time and of the
Chronotope in the Novel,” the third essay in The Dialogic Imagination, is a useful tool
for examining these spaces. Using his theories, we can discuss the various spaces of
Madrid presented in El Buscón as “chronotopes” of the court city that Quevedo’s novel
7
First-person narrative, more specifically (pseudo)autobiography, is one of the defining
features of the picaresque novel. El Buscón is unique in this aspect because Don Toribio,
a character that Pablos meets on the road to Madrid, adopts the position of narrator and
uses the first person throughout Book II, Chapter Six to tell his own experiences. In
Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache, all other characters’ thoughts are
expressed through the lens of the pícaro’s own narrative. In El Buscón, the entire chapter
is Don Toribio’s narration, breaking with the autobiographical form of the picaresque
novel and making the pícaro part of the audience.
73
develops and that other novels will continue to use throughout the first half of the
seventeenth century.
The chronotope, literally meaning “time-space,” is a term used by Bakhtin to
express the intrinsic connectedness of time and space relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature (84). The chronotope can reflect isolated moments of a specific
space or time in the novel. Since Bakhtin sees time and space as mutually dependent, the
chronotope can be used to classify a specific space during an isolated moment in time,
such as a space unique to the historical moment when the novel was written. Therefore,
some of the chronotopes, particularly in literature written in the past, may have changed
and even become unrecognizable. Bakhtin’s essay traces the various novelistic
chronotopes throughout several genres of ancient and Renaissance novels: the Greek
romance, the “adventure novel of everyday life,” ancient autobiography and the novels of
Rabelais. In each genre discussed by Bakhtin, the concepts of time and space, and
subsequently the chronotope, evolve.
Because the concept of space, specifically the urban space of Madrid, is our
primary concern in El Buscón, space will be privileged in this chapter. Although Bakhtin
sees space and time as inseparable, he treats them individually in his analysis of each
genre, and his treatment of space is more useful for the purposes of this study. In the
ancient Greek novel, also dubbed by Bakhtin as the “adventure novel of ordeal,” space is
abstract. It is technically needed for anything and everything to occur, but it is
interchangeable with any other space. There is no reference to the geographical, concrete
space outside the novel; the action could just as easily occur in Babylon as in Greece
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without affecting the plot. Although a particular element of the geographical space, such
as a mountain or a river, might be described in great detail in the ancient Greek novel,
there is no connection of this element to the author’s or the audience’s own worlds. While
this concept of space is seen in other medieval and Golden Age Spanish novel genres,
such as the novelas de caballerías, the Byzantine novel and the novela pastoril, space in
the picaresque genre is more concrete as a whole, and it is quite concrete, even
verisimilar, in El Buscón.
In the “adventure novel of everyday life,” space is more complex than in the
Greek romance. Here, Bakhtin bases his observations primarily on Apuleius’s The
Golden Ass. In the story, Lucius’s metamorphosis changes him into an ass, allowing him
unmitigated observation of the private life of those surrounding him before he is again
turned back into a man. The most important chronotope in this novel is the road. For
Bakhtin, this is not the physical road that connects towns or over which traffic passes, but
rather a folklore-infused concept of the road as the “path of life” (120). The road of life is
a space that is “filled with real, living meaning, and forms a crucial relationship with the
hero and his fate” (120). The space in the adventure novel of everyday life ceases to be
abstract, as was the case in the “alien world” of the Greek adventure-novel, but the
concept of space is not yet concrete enough to allow the protagonist to interact with it.
The hero “merely observes this life, meddles in it now and then as an alien force,” but he
does not interact with the road itself or the “sideroads” surrounding his story (121).
Lucius, the hero of The Golden Ass, moves through his own path of life and observes the
“sideroads,” or the paths of those around him, but as an animal, he is unable to participate
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or influence the lives of others. He is restricted to mere observation. The picaresque novel
echoes the relationship between the hero and the road – both his own path and the path of
others – that Bakhtin first observes in The Golden Ass; in fact, Bakhtin argues that the
pícaro’s observations of those around him form a major part of the genre. But unlike
Lucius, the pícaro interacts with those around him, altering his own path or “road” based
on those he meets and the adventures that follow. Bakhtin even states that the hero of the
picaresque novel “replaces the ass” but makes extensive use of the role to observe and
narrate those around him (125).
As in Guzmán de Alfarache, Pablos’s path of life is heavily connected to the
physical roads that he travels. His experiences, his observations of the “sideroads,” are a
direct result of his exploration of the many different roads of the cities and towns of
Spain and Italy. Pablos narrates his experiences as he travels down his Bakhtinian road
using the grotesque, particularly when the road leads to Madrid. As I showed in Chapter
One, traveling the roads that lead to Madrid often results in suffering and negative
consequences for the pícaro, and these episodes are narrated using the grotesque style. In
El Buscón, Pablos’s narrative of his experiences on the physical road is a masterpiece of
the grotesque style and further develops the chronotope of the “road to Madrid” in the
picaresque novel.
While Pablos is in Alcalá de Henares, located just to the east of Madrid, he
receives a letter from his uncle Alonso Ramplón, a hangman famous in Segovia for his
diligent service:
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…hombre allegado a toda virtud y muy conocido en Segovia por lo que
era, allegado a la justicia, pues cuantas allí se habían hecho de cuarenta
años a esta parte han pasado por sus manos: Verdugo era, si va a decir la
verdad: pero un águila en el oficio; vérsele hacer daba gana uno de dejarse
ahorcar. (115)
Pablos sums up Ramplón’s personality with a succinct grotesque description. The
reader’s first instinct is to admire Ramplón when Pablos tells of his dedication to his
work by saying that he is a supporter of the law. Using the term allegado, Pablos even
states that his uncle diligently adheres to the law. He is compared to an eagle, an animal
associated with power and justice, but this first impression becomes problematic when
Pablos describes the countless men and women that his uncle has put to death with such
style that even those watching wish to be hanged. The macabre tone of the uncle’s letter
further problematizes Ramplón’s character. It pains his uncle to inform Pablos of his
father’s death (“Pésame de daros nuevas de poco gusto”) but his sincerity is questionable
because, as hangman, it is Ramplón who hangs the father, chops up the pieces of his
body, and literally spreads them on the open road leaving Segovia as carrion (115).
The description of the father’s mutilated body serving as a feast for the local fowl
is repulsive: “Hícele cuartos y dile por sepoltura los caminos. ¡Dios sabe lo que a mí me
pesa de verle en ellos haciendo mesa franca a los grajos!” (116). The macabre description
of death is easily identified, while the grotesque aspect of it is elusive. Because the
macabre frequently overlaps with the grotesque, it can be difficult to distinguish the two.
In his study The Grotesque, Philip Thomson defines macabre as “pertaining to death,” a
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style in which the gruesome element is the most important, but it intersects with the
grotesque because the macabre is often “the horrifying tinged with the comic” (37).
Because there is a mixture of comic and non-comic elements, the fundamental
characteristic of the grotesque according to Thomson, the macabre can be seen as a “subform of the grotesque” (37). The comic element of the letter is Ramplón’s choice of
words to describe the silver lining of the father’s death: “entiendo que los pasteleros desta
tierra nos consolarán, acomodándole en los de a cuatro” (116). The reader cannot help but
chuckle, even though it is a dark, sordid laughter, at the fact that Ramplón is consoled
because the father’s body will be put to good use by the town bakers, but the horrific
realization that the body is baked into los de a cuatro, or cheap meat pies that were made
with low-quality meat, and then sold for human consumption, trumps any comic touch
that the reader previously noted. Thomson’s connection between the macabre and the
grotesque is sound, but in the case of Ramplón’s letter, the element of the horrific is so
disproportionate with the comic that the letter remains an example of the macabre and
cannot truly cross the boundary into the grotesque. The letter is the most salient example
of the macabre in El Buscón and is another example of the emerging grotesque language
used to describe the road to Madrid.
Pablo leaves Alcalá and travels to Segovia to collect his meager inheritance. This
trip is an important moment during Pablos’s narration of the road to Madrid, showing
both the grotesque situations that occur on the open road and Pablos’s own grotesque
reaction to them. The dual nature of the grotesque, that is the mixing of the comic and the
non-comic, permeates the episode and is perceived from the moment Pablos enters
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Segovia: “Llegué al pueblo, y a la entrada vi a mi padre en el camino, aguardando ir en
bolsas hecho cuartos a Josafad” (146). Pablos sees his father on the road to Segovia, but
literally he sees the decomposing mutilated pieces of his father’s body in the path of the
road. His addition that his father is waiting to be transported in little bags to the Valley of
Josaphat, the place of final judgement mentioned in the Book of Joel, adds the human
element of waiting to the body of the father.8 The humanization of the corpse is comic,
although it is a macabre and sordid strain of the comic. It provokes a stunted laughter in
the reader, and the mixture of this laughter with the horrifying image of the body makes
Pablos’s entrance to Segovia grotesque. Because the laughter is more prominent and the
reader is prepared for the fate of the father’s body, the language can cross over into the
grotesque. The macabre element remains strong, but the comic element is more powerful
than in the first mention of the father’s death.
The macabre atmosphere permeates the banquet that Rampón holds in his house,
which occupies the bulk of Pablos’s visit to Segovia. Pablos sees his uncle’s tools of
torture when climbing the stairs to the house: “Colgó la penca en un clavo que estaba con
otros de que colgaban cordeles, lazos, cuchillos, escarpias y otras herramientas del
oficio” (149). As they climb the stairs, Pablos is reminded of stairs leading to the galley:
“Subimos por una escalera, que solo aguardé a ver lo que me sucedía en lo alto para ver
si se diferenciaba en algo de la horca” (149). He secretly hopes that his own outcome is
different than those his uncle has accompanied up the galley stairs in the past. Although
the tools lining Ramplón’s entrance have provoked many deaths – perhaps even that of
8
21st Century King James Bible, Joel 3.2.
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Pablos’s own father –, Pablos’s tone adds a comic touch that conflicts with the macabre
overtones of the whole episode. The tension between these two elements produces the
grotesque as Iffland understands it.
In addition to this grotesque device, the subject matter of this episode is quite
abnormal, producing what theorists identify as a grotesque situation. In fact, this episode
is the most detailed narration of a grotesque situation on Pablos’s journey to Madrid.
Today, we might say that an episode that produces repugnance in the reader, such as
cannibalism, is a grotesque situation. Although they often are repugnant, like Ramplón’s
banquet, these situations may be grotesque, not due to their language, but rather because
they deviate from the norms of society or what society considers “normal.” Because
Ramplón’s banquet appears in literature, it is important to ask whose sense of normalcy
must be violated in order to say that the situation is grotesque: the reader, the narrator, or
even the banqueters themselves? Ramplón tells Pablos that they are waiting for his
honorable guests, and as they begin to arrive, Pablos describes them as a motley crew:
En esto entró por la puerta con una ropa hasta los pies, morada, uno de los
que piden para las ánimas, y haciendo son con la cajita, dijo: “Tanto me
han valido a mí las ánimas hoy como a ti los azotados, ¡encaja!”
Hiciéronse la mamona el uno al otro. Arremangose el desalmado animero
el sayazo y quedó con unas piernas zambas en gregüescos de lienzo, y
empezó a bailar y decir que si había venido Clemente. Dijo mi tío que no,
cuando, Dios y enhorabuena, devanado en un trapo y con unos zuecos
entró un chirimía de la bellota, digo, un porquero. Conocile por el,
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hablando con perdón, cuerno, que traía en la mano. Saludonos a su
manera, y tras él entró un mulato, zurdo y bizco, un sombrero con más
falda que un monte y más copa que un nogal, la espada con más gavilanes
que la caza del rey, un coleto de ante; traía la cara de punto, porque a
puros chirlos la tenía toda hilvanada. (149-150)
The first guest’s high-five directed at Ramplón, celebrating how he has successfully
earned money as a false beggar, brings into question how honorable a character he may
be if he is begging without need. The second guest, a swineherd, holds a position not
normally held by honorable members of society, and his actions are inconsistent with his
“honorable” reputation when one imagines his entering the room and greeting the guests
with a blow on his horn used for shepherding. The final guest to arrive is a cross-eyed
mulatto with a terribly scarred face. Their appearances and their behaviors upon entering
Ramplón’s house go against the reader’s idea of how “honorable” characters should look
and act, and even Pablos, a marginal pícaro, is embarrassed at the sight of them: “Yo, que
vi cuán honrada gente era la que hablaba mi tío, confieso que me puse colorado, de suerte
que no pude disimular la vergüenza” (151). Their appearance shames Pablos, a pícaro
born to dishonorable parents, who is constantly victimized by cruel jokes, and who
associates with lowlife members of society. He is so ashamed of them that he cannot hide
it, and because we know Pablos’s background, his embarrassment magnifies our own for
him. The grotesque situation violates not only the reader’s sense of normalcy, but also
that of the narrator. Pablos’s embarrassment is an example of a “sphere of negativity”
that clashes with the comic touches in the language of the passage. This episode is the
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best example in Quevedo’s novel of a grotesque passage that contains elements of
grotesque language as well as a grotesque situation that clashes against a society’s sense
of what is normal.
In addition to the description of the banqueters, which represents the type of
grotesque situation described by Jennings, Ramplón’s banquet is grotesque on a different
level. The motley crew is quick to laugh, enjoy the food and drink to excess. Upon first
glance, it appears that Pablos is narrating a carnivalesque feast as described by Bakhtin in
Rabelais and His World.9 The feast is a festival celebrated by the lower, marginal classes,
and based on the description of Ramplón and his friends, we see that the banqueters
certainly represent the lower echelon of society. According to Bakhtin, the essence of the
feast is always overwhelmingly joyous, a chance to turn the norms of society upside
down momentarily and celebrate the low, the base, through the sharing of the functions of
the body: eating, drinking, belching, defecating, urinating and reproducing (9). All of
these actions relating to the body are profoundly positive, and even a death in the spirit of
carnival is seen as a rebirth instead of as decay (9). Often, the feast involves the parody of
religion and aristocracy – the dominant social institutions – as it reinforces the
importance of laughter (7). While the banquet in El Buscón appears on the surface to
represent the Bakhtinian carnival, a detailed reading shows that the banquet is a
degradation of the carnivalesque spirit rather than a fulfillment of it.10
9
For a detailed description of the joyous and carnivalesque ambience of the feast, see
Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World: 9-21).
10
Carmen R. Rabell explores the theme of the failed Carnival using Nietzsche rather than
Bakhtin as her methodological framework in “Carnaval, representación y fracaso en El
Buscón.”
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Let us explore the topic of food and drink in Ramplón’s banquet, reminiscent of
Bakhtin’s “eating and drinking series” in his analysis of the Rabelaisian chronotope.11 In
the Bakhtinian sense of the feast of carnival, eating and drinking should be cheerful and
controlled. In Ramplón’s feast, eating is repulsive and drinking is excessive:
No quiero decir lo que comimos, solo que eran todas cosas para beber.
Sorbiose el corchete tres de puro tinto; brindome a mí el porquero, me las
cogía al vuelo y hacía más razones que decíamos todos. No había memoria
de agua, y menos voluntad de ella. Parecieron en la mesa cinco pasteles de
a cuatro, y tomando un hisopo, después de haber quitado las hojaldres,
dijeron un responso todos, con su requiem aeternam, por el anima del
difunto cuyas eran aquellas carnes. Dijo mi tío: “Ya os acordáis, sobrino,
lo que os escribí de vuestro padre.” (152)
Pablos’s uncle downs three glasses of wine and the swineherd spends more time toasting
his drink than all of the banqueters spend talking. They are selective in their choice of
drink; while they imbibe wine freely, they refrain from water. Alcohol is fundamental to
the concept of a carnivalesque feast, but the excess that Pablos describes goes beyond the
limits of the joyous, yet controlled, drinking of carnival. Likewise, the consumption of
food should be fulfilling for the body, but controlled. Bakhtin cites the feasts of
Pantagruel as an example of the formation of a culture of eating and drinking, always
founded in the necessity of food and drink to living a “healthy life.” The banqueters in
the Pantagruelian feast are not “idlers or gluttons,” but rather celebrate the importance of
11
Bakhtin (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”: 178-186).
83
measured feasting as a renewing and joyful part of life (186). The consumption of the
meat pies in Ramplón’s feast is a degraded, grotesque reflection of eating as Bakhtin
describes it. The famous meat pies echo the macabre as the reader, in addition to Pablos,
is reminded that the filling is probably made from the bodies of the victims of his uncle.
Instead of blessing the meal, the banqueters mutter requiem aeternam, a phrase common
in Roman Catholic liturgy for a Requiem mass praying for eternal rest of the dead. The
banqueters are clearly aware of the source of the meat, and Ramplón reminds Pablos
directly of the possibility that his father’s own flesh fills the meat pies by calling attention
to the letter that Pablos received in Alcalá. The eating and drinking of the banquet fail to
represent the Bakhtinian concept of the feast as a time of renewal. Even if Pablos’s
father’s death could represent a renewal of life, as the meat is feeding the bodies of the
banqueters, the sense of the macabre is so overwhelming that the joyous and celebratory
nature of the feast is completely removed from the narration and all that remains of his
death is the image of his decay. The scene is not, however, without comic touches, such
as when Pablos refers to his uncle as a corchete. During the Golden Age, a bailiff was
called a corchete, and keeping in mind Ramplón’s profession, the reader knows that he is
the subject of the sentence. However, a corchete is also a clasp or hook used to fasten a
garment or jewelry. The term, when speaking of Pablos’s uncle, brings to mind the many
hooks and tools that line the wall of the room and perhaps even the shape of a noose. The
possible double meaning introduces an element of the comic but, as in the rest of the
episode, any comic element can only be overwhelmingly sordid and tinged with the
macabre here. The grotesque is present because of the mixture of the comic and the non84
comic, but the macabre triumphs throughout the episode. Here, the distortion of the
joyous nature of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque feast adds another element of the grotesque to
this already grotesque situation. Pablos quickly leaves Segovia with his inheritance,
embarrassed about what he has witnessed, and the reader is left with the feeling that the
behavior that Pablos narrates violates our sense of normalcy in addition to violating the
essence of the Bakhtinian feast. The banquet is truly a grotesque situation because it
perverts the true feeling of carnival and celebration.
Pablos leaves Segovia and heads for the anonymity of Madrid with his inheritance
bolstering his decision to leave his only remaining family and fend for himself. On the
road to Madrid, he meets Don Toribio, an hidalgo whose fortune has disappeared and
who must attempt to maintain the appearance and reputation of an aristocrat despite his
nonexistent means. Don Toribio reminds us of the squire in Lazarillo de Tormes, a man
for whom appearance – particularly the appearance of belonging to a social class to
which he no longer rightfully belongs – trumps the rest of life’s necessities. Don
Toribio’s use of clothing is particularly interesting, because at first glance, Pablos
believes that he is a wealthy man who has left his carriage and accompanying servants a
little ways behind him. However, when Pablos references his carriage, Don Toribio turns
quickly, surprised that Pablos sees a carriage, and his clothing falls apart. Pablos then
realizes that Don Toribio is a fraud: “Yo, que vi que de la camisa no se vía una ceja, y
que traía tapado el rabo de medio ojo, le dijo: “¡Por Dios, señor, si vuestra merced no
aguarda a sus criados, yo no puedo socorrerle” (159). By piling on various layers of
ripped cloth, Don Toribio momentarily fools Pablos into believing that he is wealthy, but
85
at the first uncalculated movement, his disguise literally falls to his feet. As Iffland states,
“Don Toribio is a person completely dependent upon appearance, a person who is
appearance” (2: 122). For Iffland, Don Toribio perfectly represents the grotesque element
of the ersatz, or the use of tricks “to cover up congenital defects or the many signs of
decay which appear as time takes its toll” (1: 66). As Iffland states through his study of
Quevedo’s sonnets – such as his biting verses entitled “A una nariz” –, the author is
obsessed with the use of these devices, from wigs to false teeth to makeup, as an attempt
to cover up the ugly nature of decay (1: 66). But in the case of Don Toribio, the ersatz is
taken to a new level: while Don Toribio is not using his disguise to conceal bodily decay,
he is using every trick possibly to cover up the decay of his social status. Iffland also
identifies this technique as the use of the ersatz, although in my Introduction, I proposed
that the term “false appearances” is more useful to this application of Iffland’s theory.12
Iffland provides a very complete analysis of the use of the ersatz in the description of
Don Toribio, but the importance of Don Toribio as an oracle of Madrid – a character who
helps establish both Pablos’s and the reader’s concept of Madrid’s society – merits
further study.
The sixth and final chapter of Book II is narrated entirely by Don Toribio, who
takes advantage of the time that Pablos and he spend traveling on the road to Madrid to
inform Pablos of the tricky society that he will encounter in the court city. Don Toribio
tells Pablos that he should be careful, as madrileños often take advantage of tactics such
12
“The varied phenomena included under this rubric extend from the myriad devices man
invents to disguise his creatural decadence to those he invents to appear more physically
blessed than he actually is, from masking one’s moral shortcomings to pretending that
one belongs to a higher social class.” See Iffland (1: 66).
86
as those that Pablos observes in the hidalgo himself to maintain appearances. While
consistent with a high social standing on the outside, they are not to be trusted:
Lo primero ha de saber que en la corte hay siempre el más necio y el más
sabio, más rico y más pobre, y los estremos de todas las cosas: que
disimula los males y esconde los buenos, y que en ella hay unos géneros
de gentes, como yo, que no se les conoce raíz ni mueble ni otra cepa de la
que descienden los tales. Entre nosotros nos diferenciamos con diferentes
nombres: unos nos llamamos caballeros ‘hebenes,’ otros ‘güeros,’
‘chanflones,’ ‘chirles,’ ‘traspillados’ y ‘caninos.’ Es nuestra abogada la
industria; pagamos las más veces los estómagos de vacío, que es gran
trabajo traer la comida en manos ajenas. Somos susto de los banquetes,
polilla de los bodegones, cáncer de las ollas y convidados por fuerza.
Sustentámonos, así, del aire y andamos contentos: somos gente que
comemos un puerro y representamos un capón. (163)
Don Toribio is painting the picture of a larger culture of Madrid dedicated to the art of
false appearances, which he develops throughout the remainder of the chapter. His
narrative frequently contains grotesque techniques when describing Madrid, which
suggests that as Pablos gets closer to Madrid, he will encounter even more grotesque
characters and situations. For example, the terms that hidalgos like Don Toribio use to
refer to one another all invoke lacking and need. Hebenes and chirles are synonymous
with ‘hollow,’ while chanflones are coins with no value. Traspillados and caninos both
refer to starvation and destitution, common afflictions of poverty in the court city. The
87
comparison of these objects to the inhabitants of Madrid is an example of one the most
important elements of the grotesque novel: zoomorphism. By using these terms, Don
Toribio dehumanizes the society of Madrid. Because he mixes the comic element of
zoomorphism – after all, imagining the streets of Madrid filled with coins, dogs and
hollow beings, behaving like humans, has a comic touch – with the affliction of poverty
that Don Toribio implies runs rampant through Madrid, the narrative becomes grotesque.
This introductory statement about Madrid’s society is innovative due to its use of
false appearances as a way of looking at the problem of poverty. Throughout the rest of
the trip to Madrid, Don Toribio entertains Pablos and the reader with instructions on how
to use techniques related to false appearances, from improving clothing to improving
one’s image by lying, that I suggest form part of the ersatz. The passage suggests that the
culture of false appearances is strong among the destitute in Madrid, which is confirmed
in historical legislation of Madrid that frequently addresses the various ways in which
people are living beyond their means in an attempt to heighten their public appearance
and status. A pragmática, or written law, from 1623 regulates the large dowries that were
common in order to secure marriages that might improve the social standing of one of the
spouse’s family. The pragmática limits the dowry based on the income of the father and
states that such limitations are necessary because of the financial excesses of society.
Also included in the pragmática is a ban on all clothing made with gold and silver
threads, an embargo on importation of foreign raw materials for the manufacturing of
clothing, and the limitation of household staff of any one person, no matter their status, to
88
eighteen servants.13 The Council of Castile repeats throughout the document that an
abuse of the luxuries mentioned above “solo sirue de ostentacion, y de algunos
inconuenientes”.14 This pragmática is an effort to eradicate the same false appearances
that Don Toribio reveals to the reader and shows that living beyond one’s means was a
real problem in a seventeenth-century Madrid. Don Toribio’s narration has comic
elements, particularly in its use of zoomorphism, but the grotesque effect is ultimately
achieved because of the contrast between comic elements and the anguish felt by the
poverty-stricken individuals he describes. Even Pablos, who by this point in his narration
is used to all sorts of trickery, is moved by Don Toribio: “Confieso que, aunque iban
mezcladas con risa las calamidades del dicho hidalgo, me enternecieron” (160). Pablos’s
reaction is grotesque; his own laughter is stunted by the pity that he feels for Don
Toribio. This mixture of comic and non-comic elements is, for Iffland, the essence of the
grotesque, and Pablos’s grotesque reaction as he ends his journey on the open road to
Madrid implies that he is heading for a space where the grotesque will become part of
everyday life.
From Alcalá to Segovia to Madrid, this excerpt of Pablos’s journey has described
the chronotope of the road to Madrid and makes frequent use of grotesque language to
establish the grotesque nature of this space. Similarly to Guzmán de Alfarache, we see
that the grotesque is fundamental to the narration of the road to Madrid, and as we will
see in El Buscón, the grotesque continues to occupy a place of importance in the next
chronotope we will examine: the streets of Madrid. Although it may be difficult to see
13
14
BNE, VE/37/55.
BNE, VE/37/55, f. 7r.
89
such an expansive area as one space, I submit that the streets of Madrid may be seen as
the chronotope of Book Three and that Pablos’s narrative paints a picture of this
chronotope. De Certeau argues that the concept of a city as a single unit existed in the
sixteenth century, thus the development Madrid as a unified court city in the seventeenth
century allows us to analyze this space as one unit: the chronotope of the streets of
Madrid. Bakhtin argues that the most important chronotope in the ancient
(auto)biographical novel is the agora, or the public square, which was the space of the
entire state in ancient times.15 The essence of this chronotope is two-fold: the
representation of the nature of man, and the public and the private spaces, which become
separate entities for the first time in this genre (132). In El Buscón, the function of the
ancient agora reappears in Pablos’s narration of the everyday occurrences of public life
in Madrid while wandering the streets. It is important to note that not all of the spaces
within the chronotope of the streets of Madrid are located physically “outside” in the
street; the room where Pablos stays when he first arrives in Madrid and joins up with the
brotherhood of beggars is an indoor space, but due to its public nature – beggars are
constantly coming and going and access is granted freely to anyone who is interested –
the space is an extension of the chronotope of the streets of Madrid. Some of the spaces
that might not be included in the chronotope of the streets of Madrid are private, singlefamily homes, but Pablos only includes one scene that takes place in a private home.16 It
15
For a more detailed description of the role of the agora in ancient (auto)biography, see
Bakhtin (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”: 130-2).
16
The house of the jailer in Book III, Chapter Four is the one space in Madrid where the
only characters present are the family members and Pablos. In all the rest of the homes
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is the only space in Pablos’s account of Madrid that lacks a multitude of transitory
individuals who are constantly coming and going.
If one feature of the chronotope of the streets of Madrid stands out among all of
the various aspects, it is poverty. Pablos and the reader become acquainted with the
epidemic of poverty beginning on the road to Madrid through the narrative provided by
Don Toribio, but Pablos’s existence is Madrid is constantly motivated and challenged by
poverty. Using a language riddled with grotesque elements, Pablos describes the streets
of Madrid as a space where poverty afflicts everyone in some way.
In reality, poverty was heavily present in the court city, not only because
economic difficulty was one negative consequence of the growth and expansion of the
court city, but also because the government that attempted to deal with and eradicate
poverty was housed in Madrid. As we see in the case of Don Toribio, these attempts were
largely unsuccessful and poverty, or the lack of the important social catalyst of wealth,
became not just a matter of physical survival – eating, tithing, renting or buying a home –
but also a means of social survival; that is to say that the fulfillment of basic necessities
of human life also reflected on one’s social reputation. The pícaro is obsessed with social
survival, particularly the use of trickery to improve his social status. Perhaps for this
reason, money and poverty also served as common themes in the picaresque novel. Harry
Sieber affirms this by arguing that poverty was an important topic to the authors of the
picaresque novels like Mateo Alemán, who wrote a letter to a popular social reformer, or
arbitrista, called Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, stating that his primary interest behind
that Pablos visits, there are a multitude of guests, servants, and other individuals that
make the space seem more public than private.
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revealing the tricks of false beggars in Guzmán de Alfarache was to “call the public’s
attention to the plight of real paupers who were in desperate need of help” (Sieber 18).
The genesis of the picaresque novel and the intrinsic role of poverty within the genre is
too large a topic to be adequately treated in this project, yet it is clear that poverty is part
and parcel of the picaresque novel.
Anne Cruz studies this topic in her monograph, Discourses of Poverty: Social
Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. The most complete recent
study of poverty and the picaresque, Cruz’s text is innovative because it incorporates
historical sources, such as the arguments of social reformers regarding poverty, to
detailed analysis of picaresque novels from the Lazarillo de Tormes to Estebanillo
González. Cruz purports that the picaresque novel “discloses the authors’ preoccupations
with increasing disenfranchisement of the poor” (xi) and that the pícaro’s narrations
served as “ominous reminders of the precariousness of economic and social positions”
(xv). She also discusses the reaction of the economically dominant classes to the
picaresque novel. Cruz reads El Buscón through a Bakhtinian lens, yet I believe that the
in-depth discussion of the grotesque language used to describe poverty within the
picaresque novel will expand on the fundamental ideas set forth in Cruz’s examination of
the concept of poverty in the early modern period. An analysis of the grotesque elements
of El Buscón through the lens of poverty will enrich the ideas that Cruz proposes in her
own study.
The concept of poverty, of what it meant to be poor, changed during the sixteenth
century, as the number of poverty-stricken individuals soared and made clear the severity
92
of the economic crisis affecting Spain. The 1623 pragmática restricting dowries and
other financial excesses that I previously mentioned serves as historical evidence that this
phenomenon strongly affected Madrid. Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson’s study Early
Economic Thought in Spain, 1177-1740 traces the economic trends of the last half of the
sixteenth century in Spain that prompted an increase in the number of poverty-stricken
individuals and caused an evolution of the meaning of poverty. The evasion of poverty
and the upkeep of a certain public appearance are observed not only in the picaresque
novels but also in historical sources, such as archival records and historical monographs.
In her own study, Cruz describes argues that poverty in the sixteenth century described
those individuals “in need of public assistance, their indigence impelling the movement
from one location to another in search of labour and sustenance,” all of which resulted
from illness, lack of food and an increased disenfranchised population (21). While the
socially marginalized in Spain previously consisted of other ethnicities (Moors, Jews and
other foreigners) and lepers, during the sixteenth century, the poor began to assume the
marginalized place previously occupied by these groups and “their status in society came
increasingly into question” (21). Vagrants and vagabonds became the new social
scapegoat, as society was quickly convinced that these disenfranchised groups “were to
blame for the rise in criminality” (5). The concept of beggars as a social plague, one that
must be cured at all costs, became a major focus of arbitristas, or social projectors who
produced writings focused on the economic decline of Spain and how to avoid it, during
the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How to avoid this “plague,” however, was
highly debated.
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One such social reformer, who focused on the poor – and their historical
“picaresque” counterpart, the false beggar or vagabond – was Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera.
Born in Salamanca, Pérez de Herrera later lived in Madrid and worked as a physician, a
poet, a soldier and as protomédico in Philip II’s galleys, where he witnessed first hand the
effects of economic decline on the truly disenfranchised. He was also exposed to “false
beggars,” or vagabonds, individuals who were punished for attempting to take advantage
of charity meant for the truly impoverished. Ironically, Pérez de Herrera died penniless in
Madrid in 1620, as the Crown did not consider his publications to be true “royal service,”
and he remained uncompensated for his ideas.17 In addition to Pérez de Herrera’s printed
works, which first appeared in 1595, there are documents referencing his active
contributions to poverty reform dating to 1609 in the Archivo Histórico Nacional.18 His
reform ideas about vagabonds were well received by Philip II, but the efforts of Pérez de
Herrera and other like-minded reformers ultimately failed to move the government to
action, and poverty remained a prominent social problem throughout the seventeenth
century.19 Because he lived in Madrid and actively contributed to debates on poverty for
close to fifteen years, Pérez de Herrera is an important historical figure in seventeenthcentury poverty in the court city.
17
There are two interesting documents in the Archivo General de la Villa de Madrid
written by Pérez de Herrera in 1598 and 1599, in which he asks the Crown for
compensation for his works and admits that he is suffering from the plague of poverty. To
my knowledge, these documents are not cited in any other source. See AVM, Secretaría,
Sección 10, Legajo 232, Número 88; AVM, Secretaría, Sección 10, Legajo 232, Número
87.
18
AHN, Consejos, Libro 1200, ff. 443-445.
19
For Philip II’s approval of Pérez de Herrera’s Discvrsos del amparo de los legitimos
pobres, see BNE, U/1058, f. 2v.
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In Madrid, the first attempt to eradicate the problem of vagabonds consisted in
removing them from the city. A pregón, or edict typically communicated via oral decree
by a town crier, from 1592 states that all “forasteros que piden limosna” (beggars not
native to Madrid) must leave the court and surrounding area up to five leagues within two
days.20 It states that those who do not do so will be punished; men will be subjected to
corporal punishment and sent to the galleys, while women will be beaten and exiled.
Those who are native to Madrid must carry a license to beg. Another document in the
same collection states that those in need of help must go to hospitals instead of begging
for charity.21 Folio 42 of a different group of documents from the Sala de Alcaldes, a
government institution responsible for administrative and judicial concerns, specifies that
the poor must apply to the priest of his or her parish in order to receive the required
license and repeats the stipulation that those not native to Madrid must leave the court
and its surrounding five leagues22. When these expulsion orders were ineffective, the Sala
de Alcaldes tried another tactic; they stated that those capable of work must do so instead
of begging: “mandaban y mandaron ese pregón en esta ciudad que todas las personas que
estubieren sanas y en edad de joven […] no puedan pedir ni pidan limosna de noche ni de
20
AHN, Consejos, Libro 1197, folio 436.
AHN, Consejos, Libro 1197, f. 61. For a discussion on the connection between
hospitals and poverty in seventeenth-century Madrid, see Teresa Huguet-Termes,
“Madrid Hospitals and Welfare in the Context of the Hapsburg Empire.” Medical History
Supplement. 29 (2009): 64-85. Rachael I. Ball also explores the financial relationship
between hospitals and public theaters in her doctoral dissertation entitled “An Inn-Yard
Empire: Theater and Hospitals in the Spanish Golden Age” (2010, Ohio State
University).
22
AHN, Consejos, Libro 1198, f. 42.
95
21
dia por las calles”23. The government even went so far as to place a brand, reminiscent of
those used to mark slaves, on those identified as vagabonds; this physical mark
permanently identified the bearer as a social pariah. Interestingly, at the same time, the
vagabond is celebrated in the picaresque novel. The vagabond in Madrid is the focus of
the first three chapters of Book Three of El Buscón and fills Pablos’s narration of the
streets of Madrid. In fact, his first action when he arrives in the court city is joining up
with a brotherhood of false beggars.
Utilizing a narrative that is always tinged with grotesque elements, Pablos
describes the life of the vagabond in detail, from how they alter their clothing to appear
poor to how they eat and sleep. The technique that he uses most frequently to describe
vagabonds in Madrid is zoomorphism. The beggars are frequently compared to nonhuman objects such as animals or inanimate objects, suggesting perhaps that poverty
turns Madrid into a dog-eat-dog world. In the following passage, we see a reappearance
of Quevedo’s technique of comparing bodily features to objects, which he used so
frequently in his poetry:24
Llegó a la puerta, llamó; abriole una vejezuela muy pobremente abrigada,
rostro cáscara de nuez, mordiscada de facciones, cargada de espaldas y de
años; preguntó por los amigos, y respondió, con un chillido crespo, que
habían ido a buscar. A las doce y media entró por la puerta una estantigua,
vestida de bayeta hasta los pies. […] Era de ver llegada la noche cómo nos
23
AHN, Consejos, Libro 1199, f. 387. This law was written in Valladolid, where the
court was moved from Madrid from 1601-1606. Even the temporary establishment of the
court there resulted in an increase of vagabonds in the area.
24
Iffland (1: 71-111).
96
acostamos en dos camas, tan juntos que parecíamos herramienta en
estuche. Pasose la cena de en claro en claro; no se desnudaron los más,
que con acostarse como andaban de día, cumplieron con el preceto de
dormir en cueros. (169-73)
The narrator describes the mother figure of the brotherhood using language that Iffland
associates with Quevedo’s grotesque caricatures.25 His fascination with the face and the
decaying body is evident, but it is also important to note that Quevedo dehumanizes his
subject by comparing her face to a nut shell, nibbled by her facial features in much the
same way that a nut shell would be wrinkled and misshapen. She is weighed down by her
large back, perhaps a humpback, but the verb cargada suggests that she is being
compared to a vessel for hauling things, such as a cart or a mule. Lastly, her voice is
described as a crespo, which means altered or difficult to understand, yet is also used to
describe twisted vines of a plant or twisted curls of human hair.26 In a single sentence,
Quevedo uses three zoomorphic images in his grotesque caricature of the old lady. He
compares the sleeping beggars to inanimate objects, saying that they sleep as if they were
herramienta en estuche, or arranged like tools in a toolbox. The description of the
beggars crosses into the realm of the grotesque because the narrator dehumanizes his
subjects. Additionally, the tension between the harsh reality poverty and the comic
25
For Iffland’s analysis of Quevedo’s grotesque portraits, see Volume 1: 134-174.
“1. Dicho del cabello: Ensortijado o rizado de forma natural. 2. Dicho de las hojas de
algunas plantas: Que están retorcidas o encarrujadas. 3. Dicho del estilo: Artificioso,
oscuro y difícil de entender. 4. Irritado o alterado.” “Crespo.” Diccionario de la lengua
española de la Real Academia Española. Madrid: Espasa Libros, 2001. Web. 14 April
2014.
97
26
images produced by the comparisons between human and non-human objects renders the
narrative grotesque.
The phenomenon continues when Pablos joins the brotherhood and takes to the
streets surrounding the parish of San Luis to beg. When he is overcome with hunger,
Pablos uses images that evoke the animalistic while narrating the episode:
Afligime yo considerando que aún teníamos en duda la comida, y repliqué
afligido por parte de mi estómago. A lo cual respondió [su compañero]: Poca fe tienes con la religión y orden de los caninos. No falta el Señor a
los cuervos ni a los grajos, ni aun a los escribanos, ¿y había de faltar a los
traspillados? Poco estómago tienes. […] Pues dan agora las doce, ¿y tanta
prisa?; tenéis muy puntuales ganas y ejecutivas, y han menester llevar en
paciencia algunas pagas atrasadas. No sino comer todo el día, ¿qué más
hacen los animales? No se escribe que jamás caballero nuestro haya tenido
cámaras, que antes, de puro mal proveídos, no nos proveemos. Ya os he
dicho que a nadie falta Dios, y si tanta prisa tenéis, yo me voy a la sopa de
San Jerónimo, a donde hay aquellos frailes de leche como capones, y allí
haré el buche. Si vos queréis seguirme, venid, y si no, cada uno a sus
aventuras. […] Iba yo fiado en mis escudillos, aunque me remordía la
conciencia de ser contra la orden comer a su costa quien vive de tripas
horras en el mundo. Yo me iba determinado a quebrar el ayuno, y llegué
con esto a la esquina de la calle de San Luis, adonde vivía un pastelero.
Asomábase uno de a ocho, tostado y con aquel resuello del horno:
98
tropezome en las narices, y al instante me quedé del modo que andaba,
como el perro perdiguero con el aliento de la caza; puestos en él los ojos,
le miré con tanto ahínco, que se secó el pastel como un aojado. (179-80)
Pablos’s companion uses three animal images when chiding Pablos for his hunger; he
refers to charity as orden de los caninos – a primal hierarchy implying that the most
powerful gets the lion’s share –, another reference to the animalistic behavior of Madrid.
He states that God has never failed to provide for crows or ravens, so he will also provide
for Pablos.27 This means going to San Jerónimo to the sopa de pobres, a charity provided
by the church to give food to those who are destitute. His companion tells Pablos about
the frailes de leche, a type of pastry, but the addition of como capones uses animal
imagery to add a touch of the comic to the topic of hunger. He could be referring to the
pastry as large in size, as a capón is a chicken that is castrated young in order to grow
larger and fatter. Yet he might also be poking fun at the friars who run the sopa de
pobres, suggesting that they are meek like castrated animals. The ambivalence of the
language makes it possible for the reader to laugh at the joke made at the friars’ expense,
yet Pablos’s suffering evokes negative feelings that contrast with this comic touch. The
reader is once again confronted with a grotesque tension between laughter and suffering.
Pablos’s adventure after parting ways with his companion is arguably the best
example in all of the picaresque genre of the use of animal imagery to produce grotesque
imagery. While he is walking down a street near San Luis, he is overcome by the smell of
27
In the Book of Job, the Lord cites his feeding of the raven as part of a longer
monologue about God’s place in the world. Verse 41 reads “Who provides food for the
raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?” This passage is
later echoed in Psalms 147:9 and Luke 12:24.
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freshly baked pastry in a baker’s window. He begins to walk like a hunting dog, un perro
perdiguero, and the reader can imagine him practically crawling down the street, guided
by his sense of smell fixated on the pastries. He proceeds to stare at the pastry with such
intensity – just as a dog does if he is looking at food that is out of his reach – that he dries
up the pastry. Quevedo’s description makes it easy for the reader to imagine Pablos
imitating a dog, driven by his hunger and his inability to pay for a meal when he has no
money. As in the example above, the ridiculous image created by use of animal behaviors
to describe Pablos clashes with the negative emotion that the reader may feel while
sympathizing with Pablos’s hunger.
The description of poverty in the narration of Pablos’s experiences in the streets
of Madrid, such as the passage above, suggests the gravity of the economic situation of
the lower classes. Filled with zoomorphic images and the constant struggle between the
comic and the non-comic, it appears that the very language of poverty in Pablos’s
concept of Madrid is grotesque. This becomes more evident when Pablos leaves the
brotherhood and attempts to incorporate himself into high society in the Paseo del Prado.
He meets two gentlemen on horseback who are accompanied by their servants, and since
Pablos lacks a servant – a mark of low social standing – he takes advantage of their
company so that the onlookers will not know which man on horseback is traveling
without a servant. Pablos reminds us of Don Toribio, showing us that appearance is more
important than reality, but unlike Don Toribio, his appearance fails to fool the madrileños
around him: “Mirábanme todos; cuál decía: ‘Este yo le he visto a pie’. Otro: ‘Hola, lindo
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va el buscón’. Yo hacía como que no oía nada, y paseaba” (211). It appears that Pablos
has a lot to learn about the art of false appearances during the rest of his stay in Madrid.
He quickly meets a young lady accompanied by her aunt, who is intent on
arranging a marriage between the lady and Pablos in order to secure the finances that he
brags about when he lies about his background. Since he looks like he belongs to their
social class, he is able to blend in with their family and friends as Don Felipe Tristán. He
takes them to the Casa del Campo and, by chance, runs into his childhood master, Don
Diego Coronel. Don Diego complicates “Don Felipe’s” performance by saying that he
reminds him of the young boy who used to serve him. Mortified, Pablos quickly recovers
by damning himself in front of a crowd of aristocrats: “Yo decía, con unos empujoncillos
de risa: ¡Gentil bergantón! ¡Hideputa pícaro!” but his laughter here is forced and there is
no comic element to what he narrates. Both Pablos and the reader are aware of the
precariousness of Pablos’s situation, and when the pícaro tells the reader how he feels
(“Y por de dentro, considere el pío letor lo que sentiría mi gallofería. Estaba, aunque lo
disimulaba, como en brasas.”) it is clear that this is no laughing matter (218). Pablos is
terrified, and there is no clever wordplay to smooth over the pity that we feel for him.
The language of Pablos’s high-society reunion with Don Diego doesn’t reach the level of
the grotesque.
Interestingly, the scenes in Madrid that involve Don Diego are almost grotesque,
but never quite include the comic element typical of the grotesque as seen in the rest of
the novel. Even when the banqueters were eating meat pies filled with human flesh in
Segovia, there was a comic element in the narrative that caused the scene to be grotesque.
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As we see in the scene above, there is no comic element to produce tension with this
negative emotion. Similarly, when Pablos’s true identity is ultimately discovered and he
is beaten by Don Diego, the scene produces an emotional response in the reader, but there
is no comic element in the narrative and thus no reaction in the reader that would indicate
the use of the grotesque as Iffland understands it. Don Diego spies on “Don Felipe” until
he finds out that he is truly Pablos, his childhood servant, and he plots a revenge for that
night. He arranges for a group of friends to beat Pablos, recognizing the pícaro by the
cape that he would wear. Don Diego tricks Pablos into wearing the cape and then leaves
Pablos alone. When Don Diego’s friends see him, they attack him savagely, telling him
that he deserves what he is getting: “Así pagan los pícaros embustidores mal nacidos”
(224). Pablos narrates the scene of the beating:
Comencé a dar gritos y a pedir confisión, […] yo esperaba de tantas partes
la cuchillada, que no sabía a quién echársela, pero nunca sospeché en don
Diego ni en lo que era. Daba voces a los capeadores; a ellas, vino la
justicia: levantáronse, y viendo mi cara con una zanja de un palmo y sin
capa ni saber lo que era, asiéronme para llevarme a curar. Metiéronme en
casa de un barbero, curome; preguntáronme dónde vivía y lleváronme allá.
Acostáronme y quedé aquella noche confuso, viendo mi cara de dos
pedazos, y tan lisiadas las piernas de los palos que no me podía tener en
ellas, ni las sentía: robado y, de manera, que ni podía seguir a los amigos,
ni tratar del casamiento, ni estar en la corte, ni estar fuera. (224)
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The scene is disturbing because he describes the fear that he feels, even to the point of
believing that he will be murdered, and the injuries that he suffers. Yet the absence of a
comic touch in this passage makes it difficult to argue that the language is grotesque. The
narration lacks something clever or funny to make this scene an example of black humor,
a type of violence that is closely related to the grotesque, which becomes comic only
because we know that the character isn’t really hurt. The reader is horrified at the
violence, and the only reaction that is available to him is pity for Pablos. It is a tense pity,
because the reader has just read all of the ways that Pablos has tricked and lied in order to
fit in with a lifestyle to which he doesn’t truly belong; still, the narrative style used in this
passage leaves the reader with the impression that the punishment far outweighs the
crime. If we think of this passage in contrast with another flogging of Pablos, such as
when he is “initiated” in Alcalá de Henares and ends up covered in slime and filth, we see
that in this case, nothing in the narration of Pablos’s ultimate downfall makes us laugh.28
When Pablos says that he never expected that Don Diego – a childhood friend – could
beat him so violently, the reader feels true pity for the pícaro despite his past errors. The
fact that the moment in which Pablos suffers most is at the hand of his childhood friends
breaks with the expected “natural bonds” of friendship, thus rendering the passage even
more violent and preventing the language from crossing into the grotesque style.
While the high-society characters of the streets of Madrid can be described as
ridiculous and self-absorbed, descriptions of Don Diego and his social circle are free of
grotesque devices. Pablos’s journey into the upper class of Madrid is entertaining, and
28
For the episode regarding Pablos’s “hazing” at school, see El Buscón (73-4).
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there are comic moments, but these are never presented in tension with any non-comic
element, such as anger or pity for Pablos. In fact, when Pablos wants the reader to pity
him, such as in the scene describing his beating, he speaks directly and without the
wordplay that entertains the reader throughout the rest of his narrative. The higher social
classes, or even Don Diego, are perhaps not part of the groups of grotesque pícaros seen
in the novel, and thus they are not described in the same way. They are laughable,
dishonest and practice false appearances, but they are not truly grotesque like the
vagabonds and Don Toribio. In El Buscón, Pablos describes the lower classes of the
streets of Madrid using a narrative filled with grotesque techniques, but the grotesque as a
style is unnecessary to describe high society. The image that Pablos creates of the streets
of Madrid is complex, and survival for the poverty-stricken is difficult, if not impossible.
Pablos’s narration of his experiences within the chronotope of the streets of Madrid helps
the reader to conceptualize the city as an agglomeration of vagabonds and false
appearances, from which the only respite is to flee, as Pablos does in Chapter Nine of
Book Three
At the end of Pablos’s time in Madrid, he returns again to the chronotope of the
road. Instead of the wide-eyed, naïve pícaro who is ashamed of the drunken behavior of
his uncle’s friends in Segovia and who listens intently to Don Toribio’s lecture on how to
move through society, Pablos leaves Madrid a broken man, a victim of the streets of the
court city. Once able to morally distance himself from the behavior of the grotesque
situation as he does by leaving his uncle in Segovia, Pablos is now infected by the
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grotesque behavior of madrileños and becomes an actor in his very own grotesque
situation:
Íbamos barajados hombres y mujeres, y una entre ellas, la bailarina, que
también hacía las reinas y papeles graves en la comedia, me pareció
estremada sabandija. Acertó a estar su marido a mi lado, y yo, sin pensar a
quien hablaba, llevado del deseo de amor y gozarla, díjele: -A esta mujer,
¿por qué orden la podremos hablar, para gastar con su merced unos veinte
escudos, que me ha parecido por ser hermosa? –No me lo está a mí el
decirlo, que soy su marido – dijo el hombre, - ni tratar deso; pero sin
pasión, que no me mueve ninguna, se puede gastar con ella cualquier
dinero, porque tales carnes no tiene el suelo, ni tal juguetoncica. Y
diciendo esto saltó del carro y fuese al otro, según pareció, por darme
lugar que la hablase. […]. Yo gocé de la ocasión, hablela, y preguntome
que adónde iba, y algo de mi vida. Al fin, tras muchas palabras, dejamos
concertadas para Toledo las obras. Íbamonos holgando por el camino
mucho. (234)
Pablos leaves Madrid with a traveling group of actors and finds the lead dancer attractive.
The dancer is referred to as sabandija, a term used to describe both an undesirable person
and a reptile, much like calling someone a snake, but it adds comic touch in this scenario,
as the term perhaps alludes to her snake-like dances. Instead of adhering to protocol of
establishing a courtship – as he might have done before his experiences in Madrid – he
asks a man how he can seduce her. Even though the man he asks is the woman’s
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husband, the man complies and prostitutes his wife to Pablos. No longer does the
behavior violate the morality of the pícaro Pablos, but the affair does go against the sense
of normalcy of the reader. The comic elements, such as the zoomorphic references to the
dancer, produce tension with the adultery. For example, the phrase íbamonos holgando
por el camino is comic because holgar can mean to enjoy oneself and pass the time, yet it
is also an antiquated term meaning to lie down intimately with a man or a woman.
Therefore, Pablos is insinuating that he passed the time well with the dancer, but suggests
that they had repeated carnal interactions. The ambivalence of the language allows for the
comic, but as in the case of the Ramplón’s banquet, the immorality of the behavior
renders any possible laughter on the part of the reader distasteful.
El Buscón is a favorite subject within the scholarship on Spanish Golden Age
literature, and through this chapter, I have demonstrated that the novel is incredibly
important because it is the first picaresque novel that provides a detailed narration of the
spaces of Madrid and the society that occupies these spaces. Pablos’s narration of his
adventures helps the audience to conceptualize these new spaces in the city of the court.
Using Bakhtin’s theories set out in his essay “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the
Novel,” I have analyzed the two most important chronotopes in Pablos’s narrative: the
road to Madrid and the streets of the city. The difficulty of surviving in a society where
poverty is a serious concern, as in Madrid during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
can be seen not only in Pablos’s narration of the new chronotopes of Madrid but also in
historical publications designed to eradicate the problem, such as those published by
Pérez de Herrera and the legislation that I have cited. I have analyzed the use of the
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grotesque style in El Buscón to show that this style is an integral component of the
language of poverty in the picaresque genre, which I hope can shed a new light on the
historical phenomenon of poverty and offer the reader a new understanding of the
literature of poverty and vagabonds in seventeenth-century Madrid. This novel, as well as
its predecessor Guzmán de Alfarache, narrates the experiences of pícaros who attempt to
survive in a poverty-stricken society and interact with some of the very problems that
were prevalent in historical seventeenth-century Madrid, such as a society full of false
appearances, where the sunlight shows that the clothing they wear to save face is truly
nothing more than rags. As we will see in the following chapters, the grotesque language
that we have observed in Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón becomes more complex,
more dynamic, and more frequent during the years 1620-1660. The picaresque novel has
introduced us to a dark and sordid Madrid that lurks in the shadows of aristocratic luxury.
In the next several decades, a novel emerges that brings this marginalized figure out of
the shadows and makes him walk among the rest of a society that, in the end, is guilty of
the same behaviors attributed to the vagabond at the turn of the century.
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Chapter Three. Immigrant Stories in the Maremágnum of Madrid: Guía y avisos de
forasteros que vienen a la Corte and Las harpías en Madrid
Maremágnum:
1. Abundancia, grandeza o confusión.
2. Muchedumbre confusa de personas o cosas.1
In the picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache, Guzmán comments on the mejoría,
or improvement, of Madrid at the turn of the seventeenth century. He notes that the
physical face of Madrid is changing and that the population is growing. In Alonso de
Castillo Solórzano’s novel Las harpías en Madrid (1631), Madrid is seen as a harbor for
those in need, one that embraces its growing population. Teodora is told by her elderly
neighbor that Madrid “es el refugio de todo peregrino viviente, el amparo de todos los
que la buscan; su grandeza anima a vivir en ella, su trato hechiza y su confusión alegra”
(48). This passage suggests that seventeenth-century Madrid had a reputation as a land of
1
Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española. Madrid: Espasa
Libros, 2001. Web. 28 June 2013.
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opportunity, a growing city where one might be excited to live and thrive, and it comes as
no surprise that waves of Spanish and European immigrants flocked to Madrid during the
years 1561-1630. Yet the immigrant stories in the two novels that I explore in this chapter
suggest that Madrid was not always a safe harbor and that the transformations that took
place there were not exclusively positive. Thus, Madrid is represented ambiguously, both
as a land of opportunity and a destructive city in which immigrants suffer. While the
passage above shows Madrid as a refuge for immigrants, the following passage from
Antonio Liñán de Verdugo’s novel Guía y avisos de forasteros que vienen a la Corte
(1620) presents a different image of the court city:
pero en esta Babilonia de confusión de la vida de Corte, de cuatro cosas
que se ven, no se han de creer las dos. […] Todas son apariencias
fabulosas, maravillas soñadas, tesoros de duendes, figuras de
representantes en comedia y otros epítetos y títulos pudiera darles más
lastimosos. (96-7)
Madrid is a confusing Babylon in which one cannot believe most of the things he sees.
The narrator cautions that nothing in the court can be trusted; what one sees is simply a
mirage. The fictional immigrant stories of these two novels dramatize the real
phenomenon of immigration to Madrid in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century.
During this time, Madrid became inundated with such a wave of immigrants from
all social ranks and places of origin that the city was unable to support the population.
The immigrant’s experience varied widely depending on his or her social status and
activity in the city, and the picaresque novel celebrated the lower echelon of society that
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frequently shows itinerant characters who sojourn for a time in Madrid while on a larger
journey. These pícaros are characterized using the grotesque devices that I explored in
Chapters One and Two, while the members of the elite existed outside of the framework
of the grotesque language. In Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid, immigrants from
all social ranks will be described using grotesque devices employed by the authors.
However, the historical experience of immigration in Madrid showed that the lives of
immigrants from the lower and higher social classes varied greatly. In his book chapter
“Madrid, capital imperial (1561-1833),” David Ringrose pointed out that Madrid went
from a population of about 25,000 when Philip II declared it the capital in 1561 to over
150,000 by 1630 (197). The infrastructure, the buildings, even the streets, were ill
equipped to deal with the hoards of people who flocked to the refuge of the court, and the
result was increased poverty, as we observed in the picaresque novel, as well as a new
resourcefulness when it came to representing oneself in a favorable light in order to
ensure one’s social success. Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid, two novels that
are not usually included in the canon of Spanish Golden Age literature, offer similar
narratives of the immigrant’s experience in Madrid, which are narrated using grotesque
devices similar to those observed in the picaresque novel. These novels are important not
only because they manifest the same grotesque devices seen in the picaresque novel and
use it to narrate the immigrant experience in Madrid, but also because they form a bridge
between the picaresque and later grotesque novels of the seventeenth century. The
immigrants in Madrid are part and parcel of both novels, and since the authors were
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surely influenced by their own experiences as immigrants to Madrid, the novels are rich
with fictional counterparts to the real, historical immigrants in the court city.
The population of Madrid increased consistently from 1560 until 1630. Statistics
on the population of Madrid are estimates, and given the transient nature of immigrants to
Madrid, errors are inevitable. However, they show steady population increase from the
time it was declared the capital until the mid-seventeenth century.2 In 1560, the year
before Philip II moved the court to Madrid, there were between 5,000 and 10,000
inhabitants of Madrid. One year later, the population jumped to 20,000-30,000. By the
end of the century, Madrid was “la ciudad más populosa de España” (Ringrose 197). The
biggest wave of immigration took place from 1606-1630, when the population boomed
from 100,000 to 150,000. These figures are based on archival evidence and are only
estimates. It is impossible to know the true population of Madrid during this time period
because of the transient nature of its population, yet archival documents give us an idea
of how many people inhabited the court city. For example, manuscript 2.274 in the
Biblioteca Nacional Española (“Relación de las personas de comunión que hay en la villa
de Madrid, Corte de España, un año con otro y en particular las que hubo el año pasado
de 1617. Y cuántas parroquias y conventos y cuántos frailes y monjas hay en ellos.”)
states that in 1617, there were 105,690 individuals that took communion, divided among
13 parishes. In addition, there were 1,602 monks and 943 nuns in the convents of
2
All population statistics are taken from the following sources: María Carbajo Isla,
Bartolomé Bennassar, Carmelo Viñas y Mey, David Ringrose (“Madrid, capital
imperial”), José Luis De los Reyes Leoz, and María Paz Calvo Lozano and Ursula de
Luis-André Quattelbaum.
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Madrid.3 The actual population of Madrid would have been higher than indicated in this
document, as it does not account for the immigrants who came to Madrid and either
stayed only a short time or did not become a registered inhabitant of Madrid, or vecino.4
Immigrants came to Madrid from other parts of the Peninsula and beyond, as
Madrid was both the court city of Spain and the capital of a large empire. The first
immigrants to Madrid were bureaucrats, those who took up residence because they
formed a part of the previously itinerant system of government. Next, hundreds of
employees of the Crown – from advisers and scribes to civil servants – moved to the new
capital city. Ringrose suggests that, as their relocation to Madrid became permanent,
“encontraron y construyeron casas, y se trajeron a sus familias consigo” (200). As Madrid
grew and showed economic and political promise, it attracted the aristocracy, who moved
from their estates (“fincas”) to the court. With the aristocrats came the demand for the
construction of palaces and workers to maintain them, thus a flow of day workers,
servants and skilled laborers came to Madrid.5 Logically, as more money and
opportunities came to Madrid, there were more chances for the destitute, and many
vagabonds and retired soldiers flocked to the anonymity of the streets of Madrid. While a
large number of Spaniards immigrated from the North, such as Galicians and Asturians,
3
BNE, MSS/2274, f. 7r.
For more information on being a vecino of Madrid, see Ringrose (“Madrid, capital
imperial”: 200-2).
5
For a detailed description of this process of migration, see Ringrose, (“Madrid, capital
imperial”: 200-1”) and Viñas y Mey (3-31).
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4
many Castilians left their already depopulated fields and made Madrid their home.6 The
phenomenon of immigration begins with the establishment of the court and the arrival of
the bureaucrats, but subsequent waves of immigration bring members of all social classes
and all regions to the court city.
However, Spaniards were not the only immigrants to Madrid. While a Spaniard
from elsewhere may have been referred to as a forastero, many foreigners, or extranjeros,
also left their home countries to migrate to Madrid. Bartolomé Bennassar pointed out that
“España recibió igualmente entre los siglos XVI y XVII un número considerable de
inmigrantes extranjeros, sobre todo franceses” (97). He explained that Madrid offered
higher salaries while other European cities, such as Paris and Rome, had experienced a
lowering of salaries. These extranjeros are seen in the courtly novel, such as when
Milanese immigrants are dubbed the “contagiosos polvos de Milán” (Castillo Solórzano
51). Seventeenth-century Madrid is an international city, not only filled with Spanish
immigrants, but with other Europeans as well.
The experience of the immigrant in Madrid would have depended largely upon his
reason for being there and his social status. It is easy to think that Madrid’s immigrants
were mostly bureaucrats and court employees. However, this was not the case. In fact,
Ringrose points out that less than 10% of the population of Madrid was employed by or
supported by the Crown (203). This included the bureaucrats and the aristocrats of
Madrid who lived off a salary granted by the Crown and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle
6
For more information on the migration of campesinos to Madrid from depopulated areas
of Spain, see Viñas y Mey (5-6); Fernández Hoyos (10); Bennassar (80); and Ringrose
(“Madrid, capital imperial”: 197).
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in a newly constructed home or palace in the court city. Ringrose estimates that 30% of
the population was comprised of vecinos who had a stable trade or offered a valuable
service and thus managed to survive in Madrid. These were the artisans, scribes, doctors
and skilled laborers who served the city’s needs (203). An additional 11% of the
population was comprised of the clergy, leaving approximately 40% of the population,
made up of unskilled day workers, domestic servants, and the underbelly of society made
so popular by the picaresque novel.
In the end, the immigration boom of Madrid of 1606-1620 was temporary.
Ringrose states that by 1630, immigration to Madrid slowed to a trickle, and the
population continued to decrease over the remainder of the seventeenth century. By 1714,
Madrid housed about 100,000 inhabitants, quite a drop from the estimated 150,000
inhabitants in 1630 (197). María Paz Calvo Lozano and Ursula de Luis-André
Quattelbaum argue that the Castilian crises during the years 1629-1631 halted
immigration and, in combination with soaring infant mortality rates, that the population
was simply unable to expand as it had done in the previous years (147). Foreign
immigration decreased beginning in 1640, when salaries fell even lower than in the home
countries of foreign immigrants (Bennassar 101-2). In any case, the wave of immigration
ended, and it seems that few people were able to survive or prosper in Madrid. Even the
characters in Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid leave Madrid at the end of the
stories. Whether they die, experience such embarrassment that they must return to the
homeland, or – in the case of the harpies – are triumphant and decide that they can no
longer get anything else, everyone ultimately leaves Madrid. Both in the real, historical
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situation of Madrid and in the novels considered in this study, Madrid is a magnet that
both attracts and repels immigrants. The court is not an ending for any of the characters
in these novels; it is but a stopover in a larger journey.
Guía y avisos de forasteros que vienen a la Corte is a collection of avisos, or
warnings, that are all told by the main characters: the “Maestro” and three suitors, Don
Antonio, Don Diego and Don Leonardo. They are all immigrants to Madrid, and while
they represent the aristocrat’s experience, they share stories about immigrants from all
social classes. The first three meet one day at court, decide to share a meal and strike up a
conversation which serves as the content of the novel. Don Leonardo arrives later and
joins in the conversation. Their lunch serves as the framing device for the avisos.
Although they may tell stories about characters from another place or social status, the
four main characters are always present as both the narrators and audience of the stories
in the novel. The Maestro serves as the teacher figure, delivering the lessons to be learned
from the text to the “students” (Don Antonio, Don Diego and Don Leonardo) and to the
reader. Virtually every aspect of immigrant life is addressed throughout the avisos, from
choosing a respectable residence to which streets to avoid. Each of the eight avisos is
divided into sections. The first is always an introduction to the topic that will be
addressed, often introduced with an axiom or story that the protagonists connect to the
main idea of the aviso followed by subsequent applications, or examples, of the main
idea. These applications take the form of short stories with a plot that is isolated from the
framing device of the meal shared between the protagonists. They tell stories of other
immigrants who encounter problems because of their naivety about the ways of Madrid.
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For example, Don Filarco – the main character of the eighth short story – comes to the
court to attend to business but gets distracted by a beautiful woman. After spending years
and countless resources on their courtship, she rejects his marriage proposal and, when he
tries to kill her other suitor, he gets killed himself. The story illustrates the warning that
immigrants to Madrid should attend exclusively to their business and not become
distracted by the entertainments of the court city. Each short story ends with a reflection
of one of the protagonists that explains what the audience – both internal and external –
should take away from the story.
Guía y avisos is supposedly authored by Antonio Liñán y Verdugo and published
in 1620, but the authorship of the novel is highly debated.7 Luis Fernández Guerra and
Jean Sarrailh attempted to use archival records from Vara del Rey, Cuenca, to prove
Liñán y Verdugo’s existence since the only archival record of the author states that he
was a vecino, or citizen, of Madrid.8 Archival evidence proved inconclusive, as many
parochial records from the sixteenth century are unreadable. Fray Julián Zarco Cuevas
tried another tactic when he attempted to trace the authorship of the Guía y avisos by
comparing it to another contemporary work, Baltasar Mateo Velázquez’s El filósofo de
aldea (Madrid, 1625). Because of the structural similarities and attacks on similar topics,
such as marriage and the misuse of the title don, Zarco Cuevas proposed that the author
of El filósofo de aldea also authored Guía y avisos under the pseudonym Antonio Liñán y
Verdugo. J. A. Van Praag supported this argument because, he argued, both supposed
7
For studies on the author of Guía y avisos, see Luis Fernández Guerra, Jean Sarrailh,
Fray Julián Zarco Cuevas, J. A. Van Praag, and Manuel Fernández Nieto.
8
AHN, Consejos, Libro de Despachos, f. 645e. See also Fernández Nieto (“Nuevos datos
sobre la novela cortesana”: 425).
116
authors were born in Vara del Rey (Van Praag 19). However, despite several notable
attempts by scholars, the authorship of the novel remains unclear.
Manuel Fernández Nieto’s article “Nuevos datos sobre la novela cortesana”
considers the authorship of Guía y avisos from a new angle. Fernández Nieto stated that
no critic had explored the works of another author contemporary to Liñán y Verdugo and
Velázquez: Alonso Remón. A friar in Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy (Orden
de la Merced), Alonso Remón was born in Vara del Rey in 1565 and attended the
University of Alcalá in 1577.9 Remón’s novel Relación de la ejemplar vida y muerte del
caballero de Gracia (Madrid, 1620) contains numerous similarities to both the Guía y
avisos (supposedly authored by Liñán y Verdugo) and El filósofo de aldea (supposedly
authored by Mateo Velázquez).10 Remón’s Relación de la ejemplar vida y muerte del
caballero de Gracia was published in the same city and year as Guía y avisos, and
Fernández Nieto argues that this supports his hypothesis that Alonso Remón authored all
three novels in question. Furthermore, he analyzes a passage from Remón’s Vida del
caballero de Gracia in which the narrator explains why the Caballero wanted to record
his life. The narrator states that the Caballero began with liturgical and autobiographical
writings, but among his papers the narrator found a work of fiction:
9
For further information on Alonso Remón, see Fernández Nieto (Vida y obra de Alonso
Remón).
10
The “Caballero de Gracia” reappeared in later works, such as Tirso de Molina’s El
caballero de Gracia (1619) and the zarzuela “La Gran Vía” (1886). Both are based on the
life of the dubious cleric Jacobo de Grattis (Modena, 1517 – Madrid, 1619), the papal
secretary to Philip II who was known for his lascivious behavior with the women of
Madrid. He is buried in the Oratorio del Caballero de Gracia (“Chapel dedicated to
Jacobo de Grattis”) on the street Calle del Caballero de Gracia, between the streets Calle
de Montera and Calle de la Virgen de los Peligros. Alonso Remón’s work Relación de la
ejemplar vida y muerte del caballero de Gracia is not about Jacobo de Grattis.
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pero entre otros papeles se halló uno que intitulava Guía importante para
los forasteros que vienen a esta Corte, a negociar, pretender, para que no
se distrayan, ni anden ociosos, ni caygan en los peligros en que suelen
caer, los que se dexan llevar de los vicios y libertades de esta vida de
Corte y para esto hazia en el principio del libro una descripción de Madrid
de esta forma. (Fernández Nieto 30)
According to Fernández Nieto, this textual reference is key to identifying Remón as the
author of Guía y avisos. Although he does not use the same title in this passage, the
description of the book describes exactly the intentionality of Guía y avisos: to warn
immigrants who come to Madrid to attend to their affairs and not become distracted by
the vices of the court. This theme is repeated constantly throughout Guía y avisos. Unless
Remón and Liñán y Verdugo were very close friends who shared their developing
narratives, or they were the same person (Alonso Remón), it is unlikely that this textual
reference to Guía y avisos would have appeared in Remón’s work since they were both
published in 1620.
Due to his detailed study of the work of Alonso Remón and his comparisons of all
three novels cited above, I believe that Fernández Nieto is correct in naming Remón the
true author of Guía y avisos. His argument is further strengthened if we consider the
eighth aviso entitled “Á donde se le enseña al forastero cómo ha de repartir el tiempo y
acudir á sus ocupaciones cristianamente.” This final aviso on the importance of
upholding a Christian lifestyle is most peculiar, as it does not fit the tone or format of the
other avisos. It is narrated exclusively by the Maestro, and the other protagonists do not
118
intervene. He states that Roman Catholic mass must be of utmost importance to the
immigrant, and the bulk of the chapter is a description of the parishes, hospitals and
monasteries of Madrid – all considered places of worship – and where they are located.
The eighth aviso is more like a map written in words of Madrid circa 1620, which the
immigrant could use as a tool to look for his house of worship, just as he might use the
rest of the book as a guidebook on how to survive in the court. Fernández Nieto states
that Alonso Remón was a friar in a prominent convent in Madrid, and if we hypothesize
that the eighth aviso was written by a religious figure who may have wanted to inform
immigrants in Madrid of the names and locations of all the places where they could
uphold their Catholic duties – such as attending mass and tithing to the Church – then the
structure of the final aviso makes more sense. The Maestro even calls attention to the
monastery of Nuestra Señora de la Merced, the religious order of Alonso Remón.11
Although the eighth aviso appears at first glance to be an oddity within the novel, this
peculiarity disappears if we consider that the author might have been a religious figure, as
Alonso Remón was. Although more substantial proof is needed, I propose that the
detailed religious content of the final aviso supports Fernández Nieto’s argument that
Alonso Remón, a friar who lived and died in Madrid, authored Guía y avisos.
Scholars have found much more information on the author of Las harpías en
Madrid than on his contemporary, Liñán y Verdugo. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano was
baptized on Monday, October 1, 1584, in Tordesillas, located slightly southwest of
11
Van Praag identified Alonso Remón’s religious order as the Orden de la Merced (13).
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Valladolid.12 His father, mother and aunt died prematurely, leaving Castillo Solórzano
sole heir to their property in Tordesillas. He lived comfortably, yet he began to sell off his
lands in 1617, perhaps in preparation for his move to Madrid in 1618.13 In the court, he
became actively involved in literary circles and academias, or literary societies. He was
the secretary of the Academia de Madrid until 1622, an environment that provided him a
sounding board for his own literary creations, which he frequently shared in the academy
and in public functions (Castillo Solórzano 10-11). Castillo Solórzano left Madrid and
traveled to Valencia in 1628 as a servant to the Marquis of Villar. He spent the next
fifteen years traveling throughout Spain and Italy. The cause and date of his death are
uncertain, although the last trace of his life places him in Sicily in 1647 (20).
Castillo Solórzano was a prolific writer. He penned five full-length novels, seven
plays and over fifty novellas, published in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona and Zaragoza.
Although he enjoyed an active literary career in Madrid, his position as a servant required
him to live in “outlying provincial cities where he might have wished personally to
remain close to Madrid literary circle” (Soons 16). Although he never resided in Madrid
for an extended period after moving to Valencia in 1628, while he lived there he was an
active “residente en la Corte” and constructed characters that both represented and
12
Castillo Solórzano’s birth certificate is reprinted by Emilio Cortarelo y Mori on page
vii of his Introduction to La niña de los embustes.
13
For a detailed biography of Castillo Solórzano, including his time in Madrid, see Pablo
Jauralde Pou’s introduction to his edition of Las harpías en Madrid.
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appealed to the society he saw first-hand in the court city.14 This phenomenon is seen in
his work, particularly in Las harpías en Madrid.
The novel was published in 1631 in Barcelona, yet it is clear from the narrative
that Madrid is still very much alive in the author’s mind. Las harpías en Madrid consists
of four chapters, or short stories, united by the framing device laid out in the Introduction,
entitled “Las harpías en Madrid y coche de las estafas.” The novel begins in Seville
where Teodora, the mother of two daughters and a widow to a man who died “en la
carrera de las Indias,” (while working in trade and transportation on the Atlantic) is left
with no income or means of maintaining her home and family. Her neighbor suggests that
she relocates to Madrid, “el lugar de los milagros y el centro de las transformaciones,”
and she and her daughters sell their possessions in Seville, move to Madrid and take up
housing in Estefanía’s boarding house. Estefanía also has two daughters of the same age
and caliber of beauty as Teodora’s daughters (48). The six women decide to band
together and trick as many men as possible in order to improve their fortune. The four
chapters narrate each of the four daughter’s adventures and how they swindle men out of
money, clothing and jewels.
The behavior of the young ladies reminds us of the pícaros that we saw in the
pages of Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón. Indeed, both Guía y avisos and Las
harpías en Madrid show that the picaresque novel has left a mark on later seventeenthcentury Spanish novels. While I do not wish to argue that the authors of these two novels
most certainly read the picaresque and wished to imitate it, it is probable that they were
14
In his second will and testament published in Madrid in 1618, Castillo Solórzano refers
to himself as “residente en la Corte” (Castillo Solórzano 10).
121
familiar with the picaresque. Therefore, the echoes of situations and grotesque devices
previously seen in the picaresque novels to narrate the immigrant’s experience in Madrid
in Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid are compelling. They suggest that these two
authors are familiar with an ethos that comes out of the picaresque novel and that it has
perhaps influenced their own narrative style. For example, as I discussed in Chapters One
and Two, the grotesque device used most frequently in Guzmán de Alfarache and El
Buscón is the tension created between comic and non-comic elements. In many cases, the
comic elements of the pícaro’s narrative mix with the suffering that he feels or the pity
that the reader feels for him. I also argued in Chapter One that the pseudoautobiographical structure of the picaresque novel makes it easier to feel pity or to
empathize with the pícaro’s plight, and that without this implied contact between
protagonist and reader, it would be more difficult to sympathize with the victim of a joke.
In Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid, on the other hand, the pseudoautobiographical narrative structure disappears and while the characters in these novels
do not provoke the same level of pity in the reader, whatever pity the novels elicit is
generally directed towards the victims of the protagonists’ jokes. Because the novel
evokes pity in the reader in a different way in these novels, the grotesque device of
creating tension between the comic and the non-comic does not disappear entirely.
Rather, it is used in a different way than in the picaresque novel.
Other grotesque elements in the pages of these two novels remind us of the
picaresque grotesque, although they evolve and change under the pen of Liñán y Verdugo
and Castillo Solórzano. For example, the role of Madrid gained new importance in the
122
picaresque novel: the pícaros flocked to the anonymity of the court, they mentioned the
names of the specific streets they walked, and through their narratives, readers could
formulate a mental image of Madrid at the turn of the century. In Guía y avisos and Las
harpías en Madrid, the court city becomes paramount to plot development. If Teodora
and her daughters had remained in Seville, where their neighbors knew their true
backgrounds, they could not have fooled their victims as easily as they do in Madrid. It is
because of the anonymity of the court city, as well as their special status as immigrants,
that they are successful tricksters. Madrid as a city was important in the picaresque novel,
but these two authors magnify this importance and make the court itself a contributing
factor to their characters’ successes and failures. They also use grotesque tactics to
narrate the court city, and while most of these are also seen in the picaresque novels, the
authors modify these grotesque elements to create their own narrative of Madrid.
It is interesting that the court city holds such importance in both of these novels
even though they were published more than a decade apart from one another and,
although both authors likely lived in Madrid around 1620, there is no evidence that they
were in contact with one another or had read one another’s work. Because of the active
literary lives of both authors, it is likely that Castillo Solórzano had read Guía y avisos,
but since I have found no evidence verifying this hypothesis, I cannot argue a genetic link
between the two novels. No scholar has attempted to establish this link; in fact, in spite of
the many structural and thematic similarities within the two novels, they are often
separated into different sub-genres of the Spanish novel. Furthermore, I have not found
one study that analyzes both of these novels together. However, to allow such a distinct
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separation of the two novels can lead one to neglect the facts that both novels show
influences from their picaresque predecessors and that they offer similar grotesque
narratives of Madrid during the first half of the seventeenth century. Throughout the
remainder of this chapter, I will explore the use of grotesque elements to narrate the
immigrant’s experience in Madrid in both novels, showing that their similar use of the
grotesque mode unifies both of the novels under a sub-genre of Spanish Golden Age
literature called the courtly novel.
One of the problems of the quite brief scholarship on Guía y avisos and Las
harpías en Madrid is that, rather than seeing these two novels as part of the same genre
(or sub-genre), scholars often complicate the matter by including a variety of terms in a
debate about the novels’ classifications within seventeenth-century Spanish literature. I
submit that this debate has led the already brief scholarship on these two novels to focus
on a topic that has limited benefits for an in-depth study of their surprisingly similar and
interesting narratives. Whether these novels are part of the novela corta, or short story, or
the novela cortesana, or courtly novel, their classification does not take away from the
wealth of knowledge about seventeenth-century Madrid that the reader finds in their
pages. Nevertheless, most studies on these novels focus on their genre.
Several scholars look at the structure of the work when trying to classify it as a
particular sub-genre of the novel. For example, Caroline Bourland’s The Short Story in
Spain in the Seventeenth Century (1927) compares the framework of the Spanish short
story with Boccaccio’s The Decameron, in which ten young individuals flee plagueridden Florence and pass their time during the evening telling stories. A distant echo of
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Bocaccio’s framing device appears in both Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid, but
this Italian influence is not enough to separate the novels from existing sub-genres of the
Spanish novel, such as the novella. Later scholars disagree with Bourland’s term “short
story,” or novela corta, and propose alternative labels based on their own readings of the
novel’s narrative structure.15
Still other scholars study the content of the work more closely than its structure
when trying to find an adequate term to classify these novels. For example, María
Soledad Arredondo argued that post-picaresque moralizing novels such as the Guía y
avisos should be classified as literatura de avisos o costumbres, or literature with a moral
intentionality.16 Certainly the narrators of these two novels are concerned with
moralizing, either directly through their characters (like in Guía y avisos) or through
summaries at the end of each chapter that interpret the lesson for the reader (like in Las
harpías en Madrid). Still, while Arredondo’s label literatura de avisos o costumbres is
interesting for a study on morality in two novels, it is simply too limited in scope to
justify using her term to classify these novels.
The studies that I have mentioned created a debate about where Guía y avisos and
Las harpías en Madrid, among other works, fit within the seventeenth-century Spanish
novel. In short, there is no agreement on whether or not a select number of seventeenthcentury Spanish novellas that are episodic in nature and contain Italian influence should
15
For further studies on the debate of the terms novela corta and novela cortesana, see
Evaristo Correa Calderón, Agustín González de Amezúa y Mayo, María del Pilar
Palomo, María Isabel Román, Angel Raimundo Fernández González, and Juan Ignacio
Ferreras.
16
Arredondo (11).
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be referred to as novelas cortas or novelas cortesanas. Alternative labels, such as
Arredondo’s, have been proposed but novela corta and novela cortesana remain the
dominant terms in this debate.
The truth is that, despite the controversy over these labels, both novels offer an
enormous amount of information about Madrid and its immigrants in the early
seventeenth century, a fact that has been practically ignored in the study of these works.
Furthermore, the narrative styles of both novels show traces of the picaresque grotesque.
I do not wish to imply that the novels are identical; in fact, they have many differences in
structure and content. However, I believe that the similarities outweigh the differences
and that we neglect these important commonalities by separating the novels into multiple
genres when they so naturally fall into one sub-genre of the seventeenth-century Spanish
novel. Manuel Fernández Nieto’s article “Nuevos datos sobre autores de la novela
cortesana” proposes a convincing modified definition of the novela cortesana that
encompasses both Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid. Following his criteria, I will
show that both works are representative of the novela cortesana and that both novels
derivate from the grotesque picaresque to form a new narrative of Madrid.
Fernández Nieto identified three key characteristics of the courtly novel: 1) the
ambience of the novel is one of peace and opulence, directly related to Madrid’s situation
in the historical moment of the writing of the novel, 2) the novel occurs first and foremost
in Madrid, and 3) the novel features a virtual parade of Madrid’s society within its pages
(424). Fernández Nieto’s summary of the novela cortesana is a useful tool for thinking
about these two novels as representative of a single genre, yet the characteristics that he
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identifies are presented in a simplified way. It is true that all three features are present in
Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid, but his article does not focus on the language
that each author utilizes to present Madrid and its society. Whether discussing the court
or events that take place there, both authors present these elements using a grotesque
narration that has its roots in the grotesque picaresque style. I will examine each
characteristic of the courtly novel individually, attempting to point out the influences of
the grotesque picaresque on each novel and how each author derivates from them and
creates his own grotesque narrative of immigrant stories in Madrid.
The first characteristic of the courtly novel that Fernández Nieto acknowledged is
a general feeling of peace and opulence in Madrid that followed the death of Philip II. He
argued that the novel “surge en una época de paz, de expansión de la corte de los
Austrias, propicia a la opulencia y confusión que siguió a Felipe II” (424). Particularly in
Guía y avisos, we see this peaceful ambience from the beginning of the novel, when the
protagonists sit down for a meal together. The conversation – that is, the content of the
avisos – is the main focus, rather than the food, as the Maestro points out: “parece que os
valisteis del dicho de Séneca, que dijo, que más se ha de mirar con quién se come y bebe,
que no lo que se bebe y come” (56). On first glance, the fact that the protagonists are
paying more attention to the conversation than to the food suggests that times are good
and food is plentiful. This is not the same poverty-stricken environment that causes
Guzmán to eat rotten eggs just to put food in his belly.17 While Guzmán is clearly from a
different social class than the suitors and the Maestro, and I do not wish to imply that
17
Mateo Alemán: 169-73.
127
Madrid was free from poverty and starvation, the fact that the protagonists of the novel
appear to want for nothing material shows a side of Madrid that we did not see in the
picaresque novel, a side of bounty and plentiful resources. It is this side of Madrid that
attracted many immigrants to Madrid during the seventeenth century. The feeling of
peace and opulence that Fernández Nieto identified in his article is not restricted to the
novel; rather it identifies a historical feeling in the court.
However, we must remember that Madrid is a land of “opulencia y confusión.”
The city was not simply a site of material bounty. The historical reality of Madrid is that
immigrants did not always share the material bounty suggested by the Maestro and the
suitors when they sit down to lunch in Guía y avisos. This does not invalidate Fernández
Nieto’s claim that the courtly novel conveys a feeling of peace and luxury in the court, as
the general ambience of the framing device is one of relaxation, of enjoying a meal and
conversation. But if we look to the avisos and the stories of the harpies’ tricks, we see a
more accurate representation of the difficulties that the immigrant faced in Madrid. The
immigrants in Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid are cheated out of money,
tricked by those who prey on the naïve immigrant, and sometimes even killed before they
can escape the court city.
The stories of immigrants that occupy the pages of the courtly novel are diverse,
with each immigrant experiencing his own fortune or misfortune, but they all have one
element in common: Madrid serves as a backdrop for all of the action. Fernández Nieto
observes the importance of Madrid in the seventeenth century: “[Madrid] es el centro de
toda España, donde acuden gentes de todas partes” (424). The city was important
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historically, but it occupies a critical place in the novel, serving as the setting for the
action as well as the reason that many of the tricksters succeed. They take advantage of
the size and confusion of Madrid as well as the immigrant’s unfamiliarity with the court
city, which ultimately leads to their benefit. Despite the differences in the structure and
content of these novels, it is interesting that both authors use the metaphor of Madrid as
sea to create a grotesque conceit to describe the immigrants exploring uncharted waters. I
have set the terms for this discussion in the Introduction, pointing out that the conceit is
the comparison of two different elements that, at first glance, appear to have very little in
common, yet upon further consideration, are combined to produce an enriched metaphor
about the subject.18 As I argued in Chapters One and Two, the grotesque conceit is used
in the picaresque novel, but in Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid, the device
reappears in each author’s narration of the atmosphere of Madrid.
This use of grotesque conceit is innovative, as the device was used in the
picaresque novel primarily to characterize the pícaros or those who crossed their paths. In
El Buscón, when Pablos is begging in the streets near San Luis, he says that his partner is
a “caballero de alquiler, como mula” (178). A mula de alquiler was a mule that one could
rent to carry things, such as a load of construction materials or belongings, but they were
distrusted by everyone because they were either unable to carry what the owner stated or
because they were difficult to control. They were so suspect that they were associated
18
For further information on the grotesque conceit, see Iffland (1: 45-50) and Ziomek
(14).
129
with the craftiness typical of the picaresque world.19 The saying “No te fíes de mujer, ni
de mula de alquiler” is still popular today in Spain and implies that neither the woman
nor the mule can be trusted. Pablos does not call his partner a hired mule, but rather a
caballero de alquiler. By adding como mula, he activates a set of grotesque allusions
which compare the beggar to an animal, thus dehumanizing his partner and implying that
his character is crafty and not to be trusted. As I argued in Chapters One and Two, there
are many examples of the grotesque conceit throughout the picaresque novel similar to
the passage cited above, and the device is generally used to characterize an individual in
the novel.
The grotesque conceit resurfaces in the courtly novel in place descriptions; it is
used to characterize the ambience of the city of Madrid rather than its individuals.
Whenever the court is discussed by one of the characters, he or she uses grotesque
metaphorical language to describe the city. In the picaresque novel, the streets of Madrid
are often called simply by names and metaphorical language is reserved to describe those
who walk the streets. We remember that Pablos explored the streets of Madrid, first as a
beggar in the streets surrounding the parish of San Luis and later under the false guise of
a cortesano in the Paseo del Prado and Casa del Campo, where his focus was clearly on
the members of society with whom he interacted. In the courtly novel, it appears that the
streets of the court city take on a new life. In Guía y avisos, the streets of Madrid –
19
Included in Tomás de Iriarte’s collection of fables in verse Colección de obras en verso
y en prosa de Don Tomás de Iriarte (Madrid, 1787) is a fable entitled “El caminante y la
mula de alquiler,” which tells the tale of a traveler who could not control his hired mule
(“y tanto empezó a correr, / que apenas el caminante / la podia detener”). He questions if
the animal is purposefully disobeying his orders by associating him with picardía, or
slyness associated with the pícaro (“¿Si lo hará de picardía?”).
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particularly the dangers they represent for the naïve immigrant – are the subject of the
entire third aviso. They almost come alive in the Maestro’s warning:
que como cosas inanimadas, parece que no prometen peligro al que las
pisa de nuevo; y para decir verdad, no es menor peligro el que trae á los
forasteros en la Corte el pisar las calles que no han menester; bástales
andar por las que les es forzoso, para ver á aquellos de quién penden, ó sus
pretensiones ó pleitos y para acudir á la solicitud de sus negocios, sin
distraerse por las demás; porque las calles pisadas en Corte, al que pisa las
que há menester traen descanso al que le busca y provecho al que le desea;
pero calles de Corte, pisadas del que no tiene necesidad de ellas, suelen
acarrear unos gastos no deseados y otros disgustos no imaginados; y
podríamos decir de estas calles al revés, lo que de la albahaca, que ella
cuanto más pisada huele más bien y ellas más mal. (123-4)
The Maestro tells his audience that they, the immigrants, must stick to the streets that are
necessary to complete their business and ignore the distractions of the others which, to
those who explore them without just cause, bring costly consequences. He compares the
streets to basil, an herb that smells better the more it is crushed, or pisada. However,
unlike basil, the streets of Madrid smell worse the more they are walked. This conceit,
which connects basil and the streets of Madrid by means of the sense of smell, is
grotesque because it produces the reaction of disgust in the reader when he imagines the
smells of the filthy streets of Madrid. The disgust, combined with the intellectual delight
of solving the conceit, produces the unsuspected connection between a comic and a non131
comic element that is typical of the grotesque. The description of the city itself and its
active streets have a grotesque air about it. Madrid was an important focal point for the
pícaros’ journeys, but in these courtly novels, the city seems to have a life force of its
own, as I stated earlier. It seems that the city itself is critical to the action of the novels.
Indeed, the setting of Madrid is essential to the success of the harpies in Las
harpías en Madrid. They could not have survived without the coach they steal, facilitated
by the sheer size and confusion of the city, which are described using the extended
metaphor of the sea. This metaphor is used repeatedly throughout both novels, although
Teodora’s elderly neighbor offers one the richest examples throughout both novels:
Es Madrid un maremagno donde todo bajel navega, desde el más poderoso
galeón hasta el más humilde y pequeño esquife; es el refugio de todo
peregrino viviente, el amparo de todos los que la buscan; su grandeza
anima a vivir en ella, su trato hechiza y su confusión alegra. (48)
Madrid is referred to as a maremagno, or maremágnum, an enormous, confusing,
abundant crowd, yet the selection of the word maremagno includes the word mar, or sea,
and fortifies the metaphor of Madrid as sea. The origin of the Latin words mare magno,
meaning “Great Sea,” evokes the Mediterranean Sea. The rest of the description contains
maritime references to describe the inhabitants of Madrid – a powerful galleon or a
humble skiff, citizens with power and citizens from the lower strata of society,
respectively – which dehumanize them, because the individuals are associated with
inanimate objects. Due to the linguistic exaggeration of the ancient metaphor of the city
as sea and the dehumanization of the inhabitants, the conceit is consistent with Iffland’s
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characterization of grotesque.20 Teodora’s crafty neighbor narrates her own experiences
in Madrid, where she took advantage of her niece’s beauty to amass the treasures offered
by her suitors: “nada me faltó y todo lo hallé, y durara esta dicha, si este negro amor no la
hechizara con el empleo de un capitán, que fue su total destruición [sic] y la mía” (48).
The old lady describes the feeling of love that overcame her niece, noting its
effectiveness, comparing it to the diligence of a captain, another nautical reference to the
dangers of Madrid. Finally, Teodora adds that many treasures can be found in Madrid for
those who know how to navigate her waters:
En la más bien proveída [tienda] de la Corte, pidió Dorotea un tabí de oro
para ver; sacáronsele, y habiéndole descontentado pidió un espolín negro;
llevósele la tela al coche y estándola viendo acertó a pasar por junto a él
un caballero recién venido a la Corte de cierta ciudad de la Andalucía […].
Vio este caballero a nuestra Dorotea que estaba divertida con el espolín y,
como a chapetón en la Corte, diole el dios de los arpones con uno
(pequeñísimo debió de ser por serlo mucho el sujeto), y quedó palpitando
por la moza y en contemplación de su beldad. (161-162)
The conceit of Madrid as sea continues not only the description of the city itself, but also
in the description of her victims. The young Andalusian gentleman whom she “fishes
out” of the sea is referred to as a chapetón, or a novice in the court.21 The andaluz is just
20
Iffland (1: 113).
“chapetón” 1. Inexperto, bisoño, novicio. 2. Dicho de un español o de un europeo:
Recién llegado a América. “chapetón” 1. (México) Rodaja de plata con que se adornan
los arneses de montar. Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española.
Madrid: Espasa Libros, 2001. Web. 1 July 2013.
133
21
such a chapetón, recently arrived in the “New World of Madrid,” thus a sailor. A small
piece of silver decoration on a riding saddle is also referred to as a chapetón, reminding
the reader of the horse, which reminds us again of the New World. The description of the
young man is a grotesque conceit that invokes a nautical journey and an animal that the
Spanish took to the New World, which the narrator uses to imply that he is a naïve
immigrant in the court, “land of marvelous riches.” Finally, Dorotea – the young lady
who will play the joke on the young Andalusian – makes such an impression on the
young man that it is as if the dios de los arpones, or Cupid, shoots a harpoon through his
heart. While Cupid is typically associated with the bow and arrow, here the narrator uses
the harpoon as his weapon, yet another element adding to the extended metaphor of
Madrid as a sea. The connection in the mind of the reader between the inanimate
maritime objects and the expansive, turbulent court – two ideas that at first appear to be
unconnected – produces the effect of the grotesque conceit.
In contrast, Don Diego tells that Maestro in Guía y avisos that the warnings he has
heard over lunch, that is throughout the novel, have opened his eyes to the dangers that
await the naïve immigrant in Madrid. He states that Madrid is not a town where an
inexperienced individual can prosper, but he expresses this idea using a maritime
reference: “en el gran mar se cría el gran pez” (223). Although this is the only reference
in Guía y avisos that invokes the sea, it is interesting that we see this association in both
of the courtly novels explored in this chapter. When Teodora and her daughters arrive in
Madrid, the narrator describes her search for housing using the grotesque conceit: “Esta
reconoció la anciana Teodora por el curso donde habían de andar sus dos galeras, de que
134
esperaba ser astuta pirata sin dejar bolsa segura de piante ni mamante” (53). The
comparison of the daughters to galley ships combines human and non-human images as
well as the confusion of male and female roles – Teodora becoming a pirate and captain,
a male-dominated environment during the time – produce the grotesque conceit.22 The
author strengthens this metaphor by describing the protagonists’ first victim, Don
Fernando, as a fish caught in a net: “procuró que este pez no se le fuese de la red, pues
tan a propósito era, si no para sustento de su comida, para que las sustentase” (57). The
victims are referred to several times as fish in the net, strengthening the illusion of
Madrid as sea.23 Luisa is glad to see that César Antonio falls into the trap that she has set
for him, “dijo ella con no poca alegría viendo que el pez caía en el anzuelo,” and that he
will loan her the money that she has requested, unaware that she will never pay him back
(113). In summary, the grotesque conceit was most often used in the picaresque novel to
characterize individuals, while multiple maritime associations in Guía y avisos and Las
harpías en Madrid characterize both the city of Madrid and its victims. The reader
perceives the confusing nature of the court, an active agent in the lives of immigrants
who seek a fruitful harbor within it.
The gamut of individuals that we see in the confusing setting is even more
extensive than in the picaresque. As Fernández Nieto points out, the courtly novel
parades the population of Madrid before the eyes of the reader (424). The protagonists
22
We remember that Ziomek states that the grotesque conceit is formed when two
opposite concepts are combined (14).
23
In Las harpías en Madrid, Don Fernando is referred to as a fish in a trap (57), Luisa
hopes that César Antonio takes the bait and swims into the trap that she has set (113) and
Constanza is also referred to as a fish that the priest hopes he can trap (136).
135
are members of the elite; they are neither the noble nor the vagabond. Fernández Nieto
asserts that the characters are tipos, or individuals with very little personal development
who simply serve the action of the work: “no son más que un pretexto para ir engarzando
los relatos” (424). The true focus of the work is not on the individuals, but rather on the
situations in which they find themselves. While I agree that the characters lack personal
character development, I believe that they are more than just a “pretext.” Through these
characters, the reader learns an extensive amount of information about immigrant
Madrid. The characters are more than just a parade; they dramatize the immigrant’s
experience within various social classes of seventeenth-century Madrid. In Guía y avisos
and Las harpías en Madrid, the characters represent two social ranks: the city’s
underbelly of pícaros and the city’s higher echelon of cortesanos. Immigrants come from
both classes; they are not always poor, down-and-out individuals. Indeed, even the
nobility were immigrants in Madrid. Different social ranks are present in both the
picaresque and the courtly novels, but the language used to describe each one changes.
Although society’s elite is laughable in the picaresque, they are not described using
grotesque language in Guzmán de Alfarache or in El Buscón. As I argued in Chapter
Two, Pablos never describes his childhood master don Diego Coronel using grotesque
devices. While it seems that this social class was “off limits” to the gamut of the
grotesque, in Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid, members of high society come
into focus and are represented using the same devices used to describe the lower social
classes in the picaresque. Perhaps the courtly novel utilizes grotesque language
136
previously seen in Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón to open up all of Madrid’s
society for commentary in a way that these novels did not.
Society’s underbelly, with its vagabonds and thieves, is often represented as the
threat in the courtly novel. While the vagabond was privileged in the picaresque novel –
he was even given the authoritative voice of the narrator – here, marginalized characters
like pícaros are always narrated through the point of view of a member of a higher social
class. In the case of Guía y avisos, the Maestro tells about three groups of individuals that
the immigrant would be wise to avoid in the court: pegadillos, milites, and capigorras.
His extensive discourse enumerating the problems associated with the pegadillos contains
grotesque language, and he warns throughout the sixth aviso that interaction with any of
the groups will leave the immigrant penniless, suffering or some combination of the two.
He uses a grotesque conceit to explain how pegadillos received their name:
Primeramente hay una manera de hombres en la Corte, que quien los
conoce bien les ha dado el nombre que se les debe, y así les llaman
pegadillos, porque bien así como entre la obra de manos de Medicina y
Cirugía se usan para contracaídas y dolores una manera de emplastos ó
parches á que llaman pegadillos porque no se despegan ni desasen de la
parte á que los aplicaron hasta que, ó chupan el humor ó quitan el dolor,
así este género de hombres que digo, si una vez se os hacen encontradizos
y se arriman á vos y os huele que sois forastero, no se despegarán de vos
hasta que os acaben, ó la paciencia ó la bolsa, y muchas veces entrambas.
(185-6)
137
The Maestro explains that these individuals are called pegadillos because they stick to
their victim, just as a plaster adheres to a part of the body that it is meant to heal. Doctors
used a type of cast, made with plaster, to heal a wound or broken bone, and in the same
way that the cast will stick to the body, the pegadillos will be found constantly “stuck” to
the victim’s side. The comparison of these tricky individuals with a medical treatment
produces a grotesque conceit, not only because the Maestro is dehumanizing the
individual by comparing him to a cast, but also because he includes language that
produces repugnance in the reader. He says that the cast is used to chupar el humor, or to
literally suck the infection from a wound, just as the pegadillo would drain his victim of
resources. The Maestro also uses a zoomorphic image when describing the pegadillo,
stating that he will latch onto, or arrimarse, anyone that he can identify as a naïve
immigrant, extracting both his patience and his money. The verbs arrimarse and oler (to
smell) bring to mind the actions of a dog. The zoomorphic phrase used to characterize the
pegadillo, as well as the grotesque conceit between the pegadillo and a cast, express the
Maestro’s hostility toward this group of individuals. He proceeds to narrate his own
experience with a pegadillo, who helps him in the filing of paperwork when he first
arrives in the court. But the pegadillo does not stop there; he follows the Maestro on his
shopping trip, to his house for lunch, to the city center in the afternoon, and when the
Maestro wakes up the next morning and leaves his home to attend mass, he sees the same
pegadillo waiting for him in the street (186-7). After several failed attempts to rid himself
of his new companion, he gives up and accepts that he will be sharing his meals
throughout his stay in Madrid. Not until he leaves the court does the pegadillo finally
138
detach himself: “que en la mula estaba para irme, y en el camino, y allí entendí que no se
desasiera y despegara de conmigo” (187). Because the Maestro is naïve to the dangers of
the court, he does not understand that the pegadillo is taking advantage of him and stick
up for himself. Although we feel sorry for the Maestro because of his ingenuity, we
ultimately laugh at the image of the pegadillo stuck to his side until he leaves the court.
The Maestro has used grotesque conceit and zoomorphism to describe the group of
pegadillos that lie in wait in every nook and cranny of the court (“de que no hay poca
abundancia en esta Corte”), and his narration of his own experiences with a trickster
pegadillo produces tension in the reader between feeling sorry for the Maestro during his
young and naïve years and laughter at the ways in which the pegadillo takes advantage of
him (187).
In Las harpías en Madrid, these marginalized figures of the lower class are not
treated with the same distance that we observed in Guía y avisos because the protagonists
themselves form part of this group, although they physically appear and behave as part of
the gentry. They get away with their tricks because they have the right clothing, they
invent the right stories about their backgrounds, and they have a stolen coach to
legitimize their façade. However, they maintain their connections to the wily individuals
of the lower classes, such as their servants. Mogrobejo, the coachman who teams up with
the Teodora and her brood during the Introduction to the novel, is narrated as a crafty
member of the trickster underworld. He understands the importance of being discreet to
get away with a trick, and when Constanza – the heroine of the third chapter – enlists his
help to cheat a priest, the narrator remarks that Mogrobejo is the perfect choice for the
139
job: “No se lo encargó a persona lerda, que en estos casos era el escudero una águila, y
así a la noche ya tenía las dos cosas prevenidas” (155). The narrator describes Mogrobejo
as an eagle, a powerful bird associated with leadership and resourcefulness, implying that
he is a powerful weapon for the success of Constanza’s plot. When he accompanies
Constanza on her entrance in Madrid, where she must represent herself perfectly in order
to convince her victim of her high social status, Mogrobejo also dresses up for his part:
“Mogrobejo no se descuidó, que para no ser conocido acortó la barba y púsose unos
venerables antojos con que disimuló la fachada” (132). The ersatz, a trick used so
commonly in the picaresque novel to adopt a false disguise, makes a reappearance here in
Castillo Solórzano.24 Mogrobejo cuts his facial hair and uses glasses so that he can travel
through Madrid without being recognized as anything other than a servant to the young
“aristocratic widow,” Constanza. In addition to the use of the ersatz, or false appearances,
immigrants are described in the courtly novel using the grotesque conceit and
zoomorphic images. I explored the use of these devices in Chapters One and Two, but it
is interesting that the language seems to resurface in the courtly novel. However, these
authors modify the tradition by including new social groups within the realm of the
grotesque.
While the pícaros did not describe the elite using grotesque language, Guía y
avisos and Las harpías en Madrid do use grotesque devices when narrating the
appearance and behaviors of the higher echelons of society. They are frequently
described using animal imagery, either as zoomorphism or as part of a grotesque conceit.
24
Iffland (1: 66).
140
The desires of the elite are often narrated as grotesque situations, primarily involving
trickery or carnal relations outside of matrimony, and the characters often employ the
ersatz or false appearances in order to get what they want. The courtly novel opens up the
world of high society in a way that the picaresque novel did not, and the narrative of this
social class utilizes the same grotesque devices that were used in the picaresque novel to
describe the marginalized social classes.
In Chapter Two, I discussed the use of zoomorphism to describe pícaros, such as
when Pablos is so overcome by hunger that he appears to metamorphose into a dog,
guided only by his sense of smell that leads him to a window filled with pastries.25
According to Ilie, zoomorphic images are often used in a narrative to signal a character’s
“metamorphic change,” and in the case of Pablos, his behavior becomes so similar to that
of a dog that he arguably undergoes a “metamorphic change” (275). In Guía y avisos and
Las harpías en Madrid, the immigrant suffers a change in lifestyle upon migrating to
Madrid, and the use of zoomorphism reinforces this transformation. The first aviso of
Guía y avisos narrates the change that Don Feliciano experiences throughout his time in
the court. An innkeeper tricks him into starting a courtship with his beautiful daughter
Juana, although he soon falls in love with Brianda, another cortesana who does nothing
more than toy with his emotions. After a very complex love triangle, Don Feliciano is
forced to honor his promise to marry Juana, but he escapes Madrid during the middle of
the night, leaving his honor and his fortune in the court. The characters are described
using animalistic images in this episode, but here the images are restricted to different
25
Francisco de Quevedo (180).
141
types of fowl. When Don Feliciano arrives in Madrid, he boasts to Brianda that he is very
important in his hometown, but he expresses this idea by comparing himself to a
powerful rooster: “yo allá en mi tierra, como tierra corta, soy uno de los que llaman el
gallo del pueblo” (73). Things change when he arrives in Madrid, not only for Don
Feliciano, but for many immigrants who are famous back home: “[los mozos] no reparan
en que en su tierra y patria son los gallos, y en la extraña y no conocida, pollos agenos”
(122). As the narrator explains, all of the immigrants who ruled the roost at home lose
their status in the court. Doña Brianda is also compared to an owl, saying that she was so
beautiful and praised by men and women alike that all the women tried to imitate her: “y
se andaban tras las visitas que ella hacía, ó le hacían, como tras de los ojos del buho las
otras aves” (80). Just as smaller birds attempt to imitate the formidable owl, friends of
Doña Brianda followed her every move.
Zoomorphism has its very roots in the origins of the grotesque. As I explained in
the Introduction to this study, the grotte of the Baths of Titus were the first images to be
called grotesque. These illustrations often mixed images of humans and animals, such as
replacing the head of a human with that of an animal. Henryk Ziomek, in his introduction
to the grotesque style, argues that these grottesque images from the Baths of Titus were
quickly imitated in art and literature, which we see in the novels in this dissertation (9). In
the picaresque novel, characters were compared with a wide range of animals, but in the
courtly novel, the animals used in comparisons are overwhelmingly fowl, fish and canine.
In addition to the above examples, the first aviso of Guía y avisos contains other images
142
commonly associated with fowl, such as when Don Feliciano realizes that he has fallen in
the trap set by Juana’s father, the old innkeeper:
todo venía a parar en que aquel mal viejo tenía aquella mozuela en aquella
posada por añagaza, para que alguno de los forasteros mozos que viniesen
á posar allí, picasen el cebo y cayasen en el lazo, y él saliese de cuidado, y
su hija se hallase con marido mejor que mereció. (86)
Juana is described as an añagaza, or a hunting trap used to catch birds, a word that can
commonly mean an article used to fool someone.26 Don Feliciano is compared to a bird
through the use of the word posada. This word has a double meaning, used for lodging in
an inn or home, but also used to describe how a bird lands after flying.27 Finally, picar el
cebo (“taking the bait”) and caer en el lazo (“falling into the trap”) both invoke the
actions of a hunted bird. In her study on seventeenth-century Madrid entitled El Madrid
de los Austrias, María Asunción Fernández Hoyos emphasized the transient nature of the
immigrant, “que en general reside en la ciudad temporalmente” (11). Given the migratory
nature of the two, it is fitting that one of the repeated animals associated with the
immigrant is fowl. These images appear in the first aviso of Guía y avisos as well as
26
“añagaza.” 1. Artificio para atraer con engaño. 2. Señuelo para coger aves.
Comúnmente es un pájaro de la especie de los que se trata de cazar. (origen: árabe
clásico: naqqãz – “pájaro saltarín”). Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real
Academia Española. Madrid: Espasa Libros, 2001. Web. 27 June 2013.
27
“posar.” 3. Alojarse u hospedarse en una posada o casa particular. 5. Dicho de un ave u
otro animal que vuela, o de un avión o aparate astronáutico: Situarse en un lugar o sobre
una cosa después de haber volado. Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real
Academia Española. Madrid: Espasa Libros, 2001. Web. 27 June 2013.
143
throughout both novels.28 The influence of describing characters using zoomorphic
images echoes the grotesque language of the picaresque novel, but in the courtly novel,
the scope of the characters is widened to include higher ranks of society, and they are
described using a select few animalistic images.
In addition to the use of zoomorphism, grotesque language is used to describe the
immigrants’ behaviors, which seem to revolve around sexual gratification, either via
prostitution or extra-marital affairs. Fernández Nieto states that the protagonist of the
courtly novel is a “caballero galán, rico, culto, noble y sin otra ocupación que el logro de
una cita con una dama”, which suggests that the preoccupation of the cortesano was often
of an amorous nature (424). In the novels, these amorous episodes are narrated as
grotesque situations, or situations that go against the reader’s or society’s sense of
normalcy or morality. They are intrinsically grotesque, in the sense that they may contain
– but do not always contain – grotesque literary elements and that they go against
seventeenth-century Spanish society’s norms regarding promiscuity. In the picaresque
novel, we saw the grotesque situation of prostitution of a spouse, but the frequency of
these scenes and the flippant attitudes of the characters towards such events in Guía y
avisos and Las harpías en Madrid suggest that the nature of the grotesque situation has
perhaps changed. In the picaresque novel, grotesque situations are isolated moments, and
their specific details are stated succinctly. In the courtly novel, they are woven into the
very fabric of the narrative; they are often the focus of and the driving force behind the
plot of many of the novels’ episodes. For example, in the first chapter of Las harpías en
28
For examples on the comparison of the characters to fowl, see Guía y avisos (74, 80,
86, 103, 122) and Las harpías en Madrid (116-7, 118, 121, 155, 178-9).
144
Madrid, the plot of the novel is structured around the eight months in which don
Fernando spends more than twelve-thousand escudos in clothing and jewelry while
pursuing his lust, not love, of the young harpies.29 Without this love interest, the harpies
would not have had the opportunity to steal the coach which allows them to dress the
parts necessary to victimize naïve immigrants.
This grotesque situation is one among many in the courtly novel that stretches out
over a long section of the narrative rather than occurring quickly and with very few
details. In his discussion of the grotesque in Quevedo’s work, Iffland divides the
grotesque situation into two branches: ‘dynamic’ and ‘static’ grotesque situations. He
explains that the distinction between the two is important because:
on the one hand there are grotesque situations which develop across time,
situations which involve an extended interaction between a number of
parties; on the other, there are situations in which there is no action as
such, those in which temporal development does not have an important
role. These would include grotesque tableaux or fixed visual scenes.
These may involve the interplay of various entities, but there is still no real
development as an episode, no truly narrative dimension. (17-8)
Iffland would probably categorize the grotesque situations involving prostitution and lust
in the picaresque novels as ‘static’ situations, in that they were relatively brief, isolated
moments in the character’s life. While I do not wish to imply that the consequences of
29
“Bien se pasarían ocho meses que don Fernando gozaba deste empleo, en los cuales
gastó más de doce mil escudos con su dama, en joyas, vestidos y dineros que les dio, y
aunque sus amigos le iban a la mano en esto, estaba tan enamorado de su dama que no
reparaba en gastos.” Castillo Solórzano (61).
145
Guzmán’s decision to prostitute his wife were minimal – after all, the results of the affair
caused Guzmán and his wife to leave Madrid for Seville –, his decision was made quickly
and narrated in one paragraph.30 Similarly, Pablos’s entire affair with the actor’s wife was
narrated over two pages and took place without any detailed description.31 While they are
both grotesque situations, they are ‘static’ because they are “fixed visual scenes” in the
novel, rather than extensive narrations of a major event in the pícaro’s life.
According to Iffland’s definition of ‘static’ grotesque situations, it might seem at
first glance that the stories of prostitution and immoral sexual relations in Guía y avisos
and Las harpías en Madrid are likewise ‘static.’ In fact, the episodic nature of the courtly
novel might suggest that the narratives lack a true “narrative dimension” (2: 18). But
upon closer consideration, the frequency of grotesque situations – particularly those that
involve sexual relations – in these two courtly novels suggest that there is a larger
narrative of the controversial desires of the characters to take part in carnal activities that
spans the entire novel. The grotesque situations of these novels are more consistent with
Iffland’s formulation of ‘dynamic’ situations because they develop across the narrative
time of the novel and involve “extended interaction between a number of parties” (2: 17).
Due to the “extended narration” of each episode, it is likely that Iffland would believe
that dynamic grotesque situations are more interesting than static ones, although he does
not say this directly in his study. Although Pablos’s two-page affair with the actor’s wife
in El Buscón contains several moments that cause the reader to laugh or that derive
intellectual pleasure from Quevedo’s use of the conceit, the passage in general offers less
30
31
Alemán (2: 445).
Quevedo (233-4).
146
opportunity for analysis than an entire novel filled with grotesque situations simply due
to its length.
The dynamic grotesque situations that occupy whole chapters of the courtly novel
offer more opportunity for analysis precisely because of the length of the narratives, the
characteristic which makes them ‘dynamic.’ In Las harpías en Madrid, don Fernando
attempts to secure a love affair with Doña Luisa based purely on physical attraction. He
openly admits to Teodora that he is not interested in marrying her daughter. Rather, he
wants to enjoy her with no strings attached: “mi designio sólo se enderezó a servir a mi
señora Doña Luisa, de modo que por firme y generoso mereciese llegar al fin de mis
deseos con los vínculos del amor, no del matrimonio” (59). Not only does the grotesque
situation involve a level of promiscuity that would have been unacceptable by society’s
standards, the narration of Don Fernando’s quest for Doña Luisa’s affection is sprinkled
with grotesque elements. He describes her as “huraña,” meaning unwilling or shying
away from something or someone (59). However, huraña, derived from the Latin
foraneus, meaning stranger or immigrant, is also a hurón, or ferret. Teodora’s reaction to
Don Fernando’s proposal is also narrated using a grotesque conceit: “le procuró dar a
entender la entereza con que estaba Luisica, las obligaciones que le corrían caso que
hubiese de ser el Colón della, y, sobre todo, le encargó el secreto” (60). Teodora explains
to Don Fernando that Doña Luisa is a virgin, guaranteeing her entereza (“virtue”).
Because Don Fernando will be her first lover, the narrator compares him to Christopher
Columbus, as he will be the first to sleep with her, just as Columbus was the first to set
foot on the New World. Again, the metaphor of the sea resurfaces in this immigrant story
147
in Madrid. The comparison of Don Fernando to the explorer Columbus is a comic
element that elicits laughter on behalf of the reader despite the conflict between the
humor and the immoral intentions of Don Fernando. In addition to this grotesque conceit,
the episode is also a grotesque situation because of the openness of Don Fernando
regarding his own promiscuity. Since it occupies a large part of the Introduction and
serves as the basis for the actions during the rest of the novel, it is a ‘dynamic’ grotesque
situation based on Iffland’s definition. The episode involves all four of the young harpies,
their two mothers, don Fernando and two domestic servants, thus the situation contains
“extended interaction” among various characters (Iffland 1: 17). Without this key
relationship and the coincidence of don Fernando’s assassination at the end of the
Introduction, the protagonists would have never received a carriage and their plans to use
the carriage to trick men for money and goods would have been impossible. The plot of
the rest of Las harpías en Madrid depends on the occurrence of this grotesque situation
and, without it, the novel would have changed dramatically. While the extramarital
affairs in Guzmán de Alfarache or El Buscón affect a portion of the pícaro’s journey, the
narrative plot has so many elements that one episode would not likely affect the entire
novel. Perhaps, in this sense, the grotesque situations are essential to the overall narrative
of the courtly novel in a way that grotesque situations were not in the picaresque novel.
The same grotesque situation – the desire to have an affair without committing to
marriage – occurs four times in the two novels, and the participants are always members
of the higher ranks of society.32 The grotesque situation of promiscuity is rooted in the
32
For other episodes involving carnal grotesque situations, see the first and second avisos
148
picaresque, but prostitution and carnal affairs is a general problem, not just limited to
society’s sleazy lower strata.
In order to achieve these controversial desires, the elite resort to misrepresenting
themselves. The escudero, Lazarillo’s third master in the first picaresque novel Lazarillo
de Tormes, most likely sets the precedent for the use of false appearances for social gain,
which reappears throughout the picaresque novel as well as in Guía y avisos and Las
harpías en Madrid. Although Lazarillo’s escudero is starving and counts on his own
pícaro servant to provide food for him – when it should be the other way around –,
Lazarillo states that his outward image reflects the illusion of an honorable gentleman:
¿A quién no engañará aquella buena disposición y razonable capa y sayo?
¿Y quién pensará que aquel gentil hombre se pasó ayer todo el día sin
comer con aquel mendrugo de pan que su criado Lázaro trajo un día y una
noche en el arca de su seno, do no se le podía pegar mucha limpieza, y
hoy, lavándose las manos y cara, a falta de paño de manos, se hacía servir
de la halda del sayo? Nadie por cierto lo sospechará. ¡Oh Señor, y cuántos
de aquéstos debéis Vos tener por el mundo derramados, que padecen por
la negra que llaman honra, lo que por Vos no sufrirán!33
When Lazarillo meets the squire, he learns that he cannot expect lunch from his new
master, who sees light eating as a mark of an hombre de bien, or honorable individual.
of Guía y avisos, as well as the first, second and fourth chapters of Las harpías en
Madrid.
33
Anonymous. “Tratado tercero: Cómo Lázaro se asentó con un escudero y de lo que
acaeció con él.” La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades.
Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2004. Web. 15 April 2014
149
Lazarillo soon discovers that the squire’s light appetite is due to his financial
circumstances; he cannot afford to buy food and survives from meal to meal by taking
advantage of the hospitality offered by friends and acquaintances in Toledo, reminding us
of the pegadillos that the Maestro attacks in Guía y avisos. Even Lazarillo – a pícaro
fluent in the art of trickery – is amazed at the squire’s ability to hide this fact under his
razonable capa y sayo, or impressive clothing. But the escudero’s reality is very far from
this gentlemanly appearance. He only has one change of clothing and lacks basic
household necessities, such as a paño de manos, or hand towel. Instead, he uses part of
his tunic to wash his hands and face. Even his philosophy on eating is a farce; the squire
is so hungry that he quickly accepts a dirty mendrugo de pan, or crust of bread, that
Lazarillo has brought with him. As the pícaro states, no one would imagine the squire’s
true circumstances based on his outward appearance (“Nadie por cierto lo sospechará.”).
At the end of the passage, Lazarillo suggests that the use of false appearances is a
widespread phenomenon, and the tactics utilized by the escudero crop up again
throughout the picaresque novel.
The upper crust of society imitates the squire’s behavior in the courtly novel
through their use of physical devices, such as clothing, as well as stories portraying a fake
background in order to achieve the false appearance necessary to get what they want. In
the second chapter of Las harpías en Madrid, Doña Luisa wishes to attract the affection
of the lecherous César Antonio and trick him into giving her money before she
disappears, leaving him with nothing. She chooses to represent herself as a widow of
good social standing who came to the court to collect the inheritance left by her uncle: “le
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dijo ser una señora de Zaragoza llamada Doña Ángela de Bolea, que había sido casada
con un gran caballero de aquella ciudad” (102). She arrives in Madrid wearing clothing
typical of mourning, which the narrator describes in detail; she wears thin garments made
of black silk and wool that cover her entire body, leaving only a few wisps of hair that
can be seen extending out of the veil (102). But the harpies are not the only ones guilty of
using false appearances in order to achieve their desires. César Antonio, an old immigrant
from Geneva, tries to appear younger in order to attract Doña Luisa by forcing himself to
read without his glasses: “Tomó la carta de la mano de la dama, y esforzándose a leer sin
antojos, por no confesar edad en la presencia de la dama” (112). César Antonio is an
aristocrat using tricks common to the ersatz, behavior that was previously employed by
marginalized characters, in order to seduce his prey. Ultimately, Doña Luisa tricks César
Antonio into lending her 4,000 reales by producing a false letter of credit. Although
César Antonio thinks that she will pay him back, Doña Luisa escapes Madrid before he
has the chance to reclaim his money. His use of false appearances has not helped him to
achieve his desires – an affair with the young and beautiful “widow” – but Doña Luisa
has used her guise expertly in order to rob her victim.
The characters in the picaresque novel used elements of the ersatz and false
appearances in order to survive, best exemplified in El Buscón by Don Toribio’s ragdoll
appearance as an attempt to uphold his social status. However, although the picaresque
characters were less noble, in a sense, because they were often connected with the
marginalized, poverty-stricken lower class, their use of false appearances was not as
deceitful as the example cited above. The pícaros adopted a guise to escape poverty and
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hunger, while upper-class individuals in the courtly novel use false appearances to fulfill
their carnal desires or to trick their victims. In the courtly novel, false appearances
combine the essence of the grotesque situation with distortion, making the false
appearances even more grotesque than in the picaresque novel. The characters’ use of
clothing or lies to cover up their physical or social reality – that is, their own version of
false appearances – is a dissimulation of their social status rather than their bodies. We
see an echo of the use of false appearance in the picaresque novel in the courtly novel,
but here the novel has amplified and extended the use of false appearances to higher
social classes and for new purposes. Whereas the reader laughs at Don Toribio’s rags, the
characters’ misrepresentation of their social classes – which they use to achieve their own
desires rather than to survive – seems more repugnant than comic in the courtly novel.
Distortion and exaggeration are part and parcel of the grotesque, according to
Paul Ilie. He argues that the grotesque in the pastoral novel is seen primarily through
distortion, magnification and exaggeration (16). The distorted giants contrast with the
idealized, harmonious ambience of the pastoral novel (17). Although he does not discuss
the courtly novel, his argument is useful for analyzing false appearances in this genre.
The distortion of characters through the appropriation of clothing or social statuses that
do not belong to them is like the pastoral giant, displaying a social illness of false
appearances. The courtly novel is filled with similar phenomena, and these grotesque
behaviors appear to contrast with the peaceful and opulent nature that Fernández Nieto
suggests forms the environment of the novela cortesana. Lasciviousness, dissimulation,
trickery and thieving are all behaviors that one might not associate with the backdrop of
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peaceful Madrid, yet they are the true subject matter of Guía y avisos and Las harpías en
Madrid. Fernández Nieto’s article “Nuevos datos sobre la novela cortesana” offers the
scholar a great deal of useful information for the continuing discussion of the courtly
novel, particularly regarding its authors and structure. If we consider the framing devices
of each of the courtly novel, for example the lunch shared by the Maestro and courtiers in
Guía y avisos, there is an ambience of peace that was more difficult to detect in the
picaresque novel. However, when we analyze the narratives themselves, perhaps there is
very little peace and opulence present in the courtly novel.
It seems that the ethos of the picaresque world has left its mark on this genre.
While Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón hinted at a growing sordid side of the court
city, Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid discuss at length the negative
consequences experienced by the characters, immigrants to Madrid from all walks of life.
Their narrative stories are told using grotesque devices, such as grotesque conceit, a
highly stylized form of zoomorphism, and false appearances. While most of these
grotesque devices were seen in the picaresque novel, they re-emerge in the courtly novel,
and the authors then utilize these devices to include new social groups in the discussion
of immigrant Madrid. Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid are key to the study of
the grotesque in the seventeenth-century novel in Madrid because they form a bridge
between the picaresque novel and later grotesque novels, such as El diablo cojuelo and El
Criticón. The grotesque situation becomes more rampant throughout the novels, bringing
to light the controversial behaviors of society. The novels describe this society and its
behaviors using grotesque language that presents and distorts some of the social illnesses
153
afflicting the confusing environment of seventeenth-century Madrid. These illnesses will
be explored in a more fantastic, exaggerated environment in future novels, when the
narrative of Madrid becomes monstrous.
154
Chapter Four. Monstrous Madrid: The Development of the Grotesque Aesthetic in El
diablo cojuelo and El Criticón
In the picaresque and courtly novels, Madrid was seen as a land of opportunity,
and simultaneously the narratives also showed that the court was a dangerous place for
naïve immigrants. The city appears to have two very different faces in the novels that I
have studied previous chapters, which represent approximately the first thirty years of the
seventeenth century. On the one hand, Madrid was a shelter for pícaros and cortesanos
alike, providing them with an urban space experiencing booming development in
response to the city’s new position as Villa y Corte, and some of the characters thrived in
this environment. Looming in the shadows, however, were dangers that would attack the
unprepared individual. The courtly novel develops this wretched side of Madrid under the
veil of, as Manuel Fernández Nieto states, a “peaceful and opulent” city.1 Financial
challenges and insufficient urban infrastructure will change the face of the court city once
1
Fernández Nieto (424). As I argued in Chapter Three, Fernández Nieto’s summary of
the ambience of the courtly novel as fueled by the feelings of bounty and opulence in
post-Philip II Madrid does not always accurately reflect the content of the novels
themselves. These, on the other hand, show characters in turmoil despite the feeling of
peace that Fernández Nieto identifies.
155
again over the next thirty years. During the years 1640-1660, a new narrative style – the
grotesque aesthetic – will show Madrid in an entirely new light.
In Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón (1651, 1653, 1657), the young and
inexperienced Andrenio marvels at Madrid: “Veo – dixo él – una real madre de tantas
naciones, una corona de dos mundos, un centro de tantos reinos, un joyel de entrambas
Indias, un nido del mismo Fénix y una esfera del Sol Católico, coronado de prendas en
rayos y de blasones en luzes” (235).2 Madrid, the center of so many kingdoms and
nations, the shining light of the Catholic sun, the glittering gem of the New World,
maintains its positive qualities observed in novels of the early seventeenth century. But
those who are wise to the true nature of Madrid, such as Andrenio’s tutor, Critilo, and
their traveling companion, el Sabio or “the Wise One,” see Madrid in a different light. El
Sabio refuses to enter the court, saying that Madrid is “madre de todo lo bueno, mirada
por una parte, y madrastra por la otra; que assí como a la corte acuden todas las
perfecciones del mundo, mucho más todos los vicios, pues los que vienen a ella nunca
traen lo bueno, sino lo malo, de sus patrias” (235). Here, el Sabio summarizes the true
nature of seventeenth-century Madrid according to him: the city is beneficial to some, but
is vastly overtaken by evil that fills its streets and makes survival difficult, if not
impossible. The city of Madrid and its inhabitants are subject to biting criticism and
hostility, fueled with a unique grotesque aesthetic codified by Luis Vélez de Guevara and
Gracián. Vélez de Guevara’s El diablo cojuelo (1641) and Gracián’s El Criticón are two
of the most interesting narratives of Madrid, showing that the city itself has become a
2
Santos Alonso chooses to maintain the original spelling of El Criticón. I quote his
edition directly throughout this chapter.
156
monstrous amalgamation of bestial individuals that made survival difficult for all of
Madrid’s society, not just the marginalized classes. The novels overflow with grotesque
language and show a city filled, no longer with individuals from different social classes,
but human-beast hybrids that did not exist in the picaresque or the courtly novels. In this
chapter, I will analyze the historical circumstances that produced this feeling of
stagnation in the court that is perceptible in the narrative of these two authors as well as
an evolved grotesque aesthetic that Gracián consciously develops in his narrative of
monstrous Madrid. In these novels, we will see for the first time that an author is aware
of a budding grotesque aesthetic in literature. Gracián demonstrates awareness of this
aesthetic, and in the pages of his novel, he will establish his own unique stylization of the
grotesque mode.
By 1630, the initial growth of the city in response to the installation of the court
came to a halt, and the waves of immigration slowed to a trickle. In addition to the
negative economic consequences that resulted, the infrastructure of Madrid was no longer
able to handle the population, and survival became difficult even for the most privileged
classes. Contrary to the stereotypical opulent image of Baroque Madrid that comes to
mind, the reality of the mid-century court city was characterized by poverty, squalor and
competition for resources. David Ringrose describes the city in these terms:
Era [Madrid] también, como ya indicábamos, una ciudad de casas bajas,
de mala construcción y de uno o dos pisos, habitadas por unos cuantos
miles de familias que tenían rentas holgadas y por decenas de miles de
familias y personas que eran miserablemente pobres incluso para criterios
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del siglo XVII. Calles estrechas, sucias, sin empedrado, que hacían las
veces de cloacas, un puñado escaso de fuentes públicas de agua limpia, un
abastecimiento alimentario limitado y errático, y las enfermedades
endémicas formaban parte de la vida cotidiana de la mayoría de los
madrileños. (183)
Physically, Madrid was not a land of palaces and parks, it was a town of poorlyconstructed small houses that held an inappropriate number of tenants. Many of the
streets were unpaved, small and filled with dust and mud. The few public drinking
fountains and the “erratic” supply of foodstuffs challenged basic survival needs.3 The
failing economy exacerbated this difficulty of survival.
Madrid, because it was Villa y Corte – that is, a growing city as well as home to
the Crown – felt these economic challenges in a unique way. I do not wish to argue that
other regions of Spain were exempt from hardships, but since Madrid was the financial
center of Spain, and all business associated with the court sooner or later ended up in the
court city, these hardships were felt here on a different level than other regions of Spain
and the New World. Copper coins called vellón were one of the most common forms of
currency, but their value rapidly decreased in the seventeenth century. Martín Fernández
Zambrano, author of a chronicle that detailed peculiar events that happened in Madrid
from 1621-1651, noted that the value of silver increased while vellón was worth half of
3
For more information on Madrid’s regulated water system and the problems that arose
from lack of control during the seventeenth century, see Fernando Arroyo Ilera (257278).
158
its previous value.4 Another chronicler contemporary to Fernández Zambrao, Juan de
Miesses y Guzmán, wrote a treaty on all of the court’s vices and how to cure them, and
he included the misuse of vellón as part of his work.5 The failing economy worked its
way into the novel; the protagonist of El diablo cojuelo criticizes Spaniards for allowing
their capital to escape to other countries in the hands of foreign immigrants: “-Hanse
pasado [las bolsas] a los estranjeros porque las trataban muy mal estos príncipes
cristianos – dijo el Cojuelo” (81). Even the naïve Andrenio, who has been raised in a cave
away from reality, comments on the economic struggles in Madrid: “-¡Cosa rara – dixo
Andrenio -, aun economía no hay!”(132). The Greek origin of the word economy,
oikonomíā, connotes household management, as oiko in Greek means house and the
suffix -nomia (“-nomy” in English) means distribution or management.6 Gracián is
perhaps using a pun to point out the apparent lack of “household management” on behalf
of the Crown. Gracián’s work, with its eloquent wordplay, suggests that the economy
faced severe challenges in the seventeenth century, which served as an object for
criticism in the novel.
Money was a frequent subject in the picaresque novel. For example, when
Guzmán robs a courtier and hides in the Casa del Campo, he exchanges his spoils for
clothing before leaving Madrid for Toledo.7 The importance of money is also seen in the
courtly novel, where the narrators tell how naïve immigrants are cheated out of it when
they get distracted in Madrid. The harpies of Las harpías en Madrid use their good looks
4
BNE, MSS/2419, ff. 508-509.
BNE, MSS/1092, ff. 65-67.
6
"economy." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
7
Alemán (1: 336-340).
159
5
and wiles to trick men into giving them enough resources to provide a rich lifestyle.
Money, or the lack of money, determines the success or failure of almost every character
in these novels. However, there are virtually no examples of money being exchanged in
Madrid in either El diablo cojuelo or El Criticón. Rather, cash is substituted with jewels,
goods and even dirt. The trash looks like gold at first, but upon approaching it, Andrenio
and Critilo find that it is heaps of golden trash, or “basura dorada” (132). In the
picaresque novel, currency is a means for survival. Simply put, if pícaros had money,
they could fill the void in their bellies. However, the characters in the courtly novel are
often motivated by the comforts and social standing that having bountiful resources
entails. They do not need money in the same way that the pícaros do, although it
motivates them and, in the case of the harpies, rewards them for their crimes. In El diablo
cojuelo and El Criticón, it is the lack of money that is interesting. While the absence of
currency may not be immediately noticed, I suggest that its absence perhaps indicates that
its role has changed. The characters no longer need cash in order to prosper in the way
that the pícaros and cortesanos needed it. However, as the reader delves deeper into the
narrative, he begins to wonder if the characters can prosper. I will show throughout this
chapter that prosperity is no longer an option within these two novels. They are no longer
about thriving; they are about surviving.
The authors of the two novels experienced first hand the economic challenges
faced in Madrid during the seventeenth century, as they both lived there during a time
and neither experienced financial bounty during his life. Luis Vélez de Guevara lived a
160
servant’s life, born in Écija, to the east of Seville, on August 26, 1578.8 After completing
his studies at the University of Osuna, where he was exempt from paying tuition because
of his financial situation, he entered a life of service, which took him all over Spain and
to Italy. He served in the military for six years under the Archbishop of Seville, Rodrigo
de Castro, and in 1603, he left his military service and headed to Valladolid, the home of
the court at that time. When the court was transferred back to Madrid in 1606, Vélez de
Guevara went along, where he remained for the rest of his life. There, he served the
nobility, finally becoming a wardrobe assistant to Philip IV in 1625. He died on
November 10, 1644, probably from a kidney infection, as the only memory of the
incident states that he died from “un aprieto de orina” (Rodríguez Cepeda 11). He was
married four times and, while his professional life consisted of serving various
employers, he enjoyed success as a writer in Madrid. He wrote over four hundred plays,
one hundred of which survive today, and he was celebrated among his contemporaries as
an superb playwright: “fue celebradísimo de sus contemporáneos, así por la amenidad de
su trato, que le ganaba amigos en todas partes, como por su facundia poética y su florida
e inagotable ingenio” (Rodríguez Marín 20-22).
Even though he was primarily a dramatist, Vélez de Guevara’s only novel, El
diablo cojuelo, met with resounding success. The novel was so popular in Madrid that it
was published three times in 1641, yet Enrique Rodríguez Cepeda insists that the work
was written by a talented playwright, not a talented novelist (14). Rodríguez Cepeda
dedicates a large portion of his Introduction to debating the novel’s genre: elements of the
8
For studies on the life of Vélez de Guevara, see Emilio Cortarelo y Mori, Francisco
Rodríguez Marín, and Enrique Rodríguez Cepeda.
161
picaresque, folklore, and even future tendencies, like costumbrismo and the esperpento,
are all seen in the work. The novel contains two prologues, one focused on criticizing the
Mosqueteros de la Comedia de Madrid, or the penniless groundlings who watched
Golden Age plays on foot instead of seated in the theater, and the other asking for mercy
from the cándido o moreno lector. The pun of moreno, in this case meaning literally
“well done” (or metaphorically, “well studied”) in comparison to the cándido, or “green,
inexperienced reader,” suggests that Vélez de Guevara’s intended audience was the wellread members of the higher echelons of society. Following these two prologues are the
ten trancos, or chapters, that tell the story of Don Cleofás, a young student from Alcalá
who is roaming the streets of Madrid late at night when he crosses paths with the Diablo
Cojuelo, a limping devil who is trapped by an astrologer. Don Cleofás frees the devil,
who then takes him on a fantastic journey beginning in Madrid and ending in Seville,
where don Cleofás is arrested with a dubious warrant taken out by his shady lover Doña
Tomasa – although the Diablo Cojuelo successfully bribes the officer and secures Don
Cleofás’s freedom – and the Diablo Cojuelo is taken prisoner by Cienllamas, a devil who
must drag him back to hell for having escaped the astrologer’s clutches. The novel is
filled with satiric vignettes and, at first glance, lacks a strong plot to tie together the
various focal points of the Diablo Cojuelo and Don Cleofás. In his article “Thematic
Structure in El diablo cojuelo,” Richard Bjornson says that the “the dizzying montage of
grotesque characters” obscures the work’s novelistic unity (13). Bjornson notes that the
novel is basically the same at the beginning and at the end; we assume that Don Cleofás
returns to Alcalá to finish his studies after being freed by the Diablo Cojuelo and “the
162
‘diablo cojuelo’ is returned to his subordinate position in the hierarchy of devils” (14).
Bjornson suggests that the unifying factor of the novel is not the journey of the
protagonist, but rather the education of Don Cleofás on the ways of the world, which
ultimately help him to see the evil ways of his manipulative lover Doña Tomasa and
return to Alcalá as a wiser man.9 It appears that Vélez de Guevara appropriated the
teacher-student trope also seen in Guía y avisos – and, if we consider the pícaro as the
teacher-figure and the reader as the student-figure, we also see the phenomenon in the
picaresque novel – as a structure around which to build the author’s biting criticism of
society. Gracián also utilized the teacher-student trope as the basis for the protagonists’
relationship in El Criticón.
Gracián’s biography differs greatly from that of Vélez de Guevara, but they both
shared a common bond: while they were both celebrated authors, neither achieved the
grand success he desired and ultimately, both died as a subordinate to a higher order. Yet
Gracián was a servant to the Catholic Church. He was born on January 8, 1601, in
Belmonte de Calatayud, Zaragoza, and it seems that religious service might have run in
his family.10 His father was a doctor, but all of his brothers and his uncle were clerics.
Information on his early life is scarce, but more is known about his life after 1619, when
he entered a Jesuit apprenticeship in Aragón and, in 1621, took his first religious vows.
He traveled extensively from 1619-1640, living and studying in Zaragoza, Valencia,
Gandía and Huesca. Gracián moved to Madrid in 1642, where he focused on his religious
9
For more information on Don Cleofás’s educational process, see Richard Bjornson (1519).
10
For studies on the life of Gracián, see José Luis López Aranguren and Santos Alonso.
163
service and writing, publishing the first edition of Arte de ingenio (Madrid, 1642). From
1644-1657, Gracián continued to travel wherever the Church sent him, including
Valencia, Lérida, Huesca and Zaragoza, where he published the first part of El Criticón
in 1651 and the second part in 1653. He returned to Madrid in 1657 and published the last
part of El Criticón in that same year. Gracián was criticized by Father Jacinto Piquer for
his satiric writings and for his poor teaching skills, and he was publicly reprimanded and
stripped of his post as Catedrático de Escritura following the publishing of the three
parts of El Criticón as one novel. He spent the year 1657 performing penance as a result
of Father Piquer’s accusations, restricted to a diet of bread and water and without access
to pen and paper.11 He died on December 6, 1658, after serving briefly at a school in
Tarazona, Zaragoza.
Gracián published seven full-length books over his twenty-one years of writing, a
small number in comparison to his counterpart Vélez de Guevara, but Santos Alonso
argues that the content of his work shows that each novel was meticulously written and of
excellent quality (16). As his biography suggests, Gracián died during a moment of crisis,
when he was rejected by the Church for his writings and forced to abandon part of his
religious service. José Luis López Aranguren suggests that this was not the only moment
of crisis in his life, that Gracián was, above all, “un pensador de crisis” (331). López
Aranguren’s article “La moral de Gracián” proposes an evolution of Gracián’s worldview
11
The following statement by Santos Alonso in his Introduction to El Criticón suggests
that it was Gracián’s decision to publish the novel that led to his professional demise: “La
publicación de las tres partes de El Criticón le ocasiona una reprensión pública, con
ayuno a pan y agua, el cese en su cátedra de Escritura y el salir ‘desterrado’ de Zaragoza”
(Gracián 15).
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in his work, which changes based on his own professional failures.12 The first phase of
the author’s work shows Gracián as a cleric who accepted the world as it is, with its vices
and challenges, and attempted to formulate a set of morals consistent with his religion
that responded to the state of the world as he perceived it. Later, Gracián’s worldview
became increasingly pessimistic, and López Aranguren suggests that he wrote El Criticón
at this time as a way to criticize and judge the world around him and those in it. The third
phase of his work is purely religious, and López Aranguren implies that this phase was
motivated by the criticism Gracián received after publishing El Criticón. In the novel,
Gracián describes Madrid as a city of beasts, lacking in men and honor. This hostility
could be a result of Gracián’s difficult situation of preaching a Counter-Reformation form
of Catholic doctrine in Madrid. In his work, it seems that Gracián no longer saw the court
as “escuela de cortesanía y cortesía,” but as a confusing and threatening place for the way
of life to which he ascribed (333). Although the novels analyzed in this study are
dramatizations of the real, historical situation of Madrid and cannot be understood as true
to life, the situations that we find within the novels – such as promiscuity and crime –
most certainly go against the very doctrine that Gracián preached. If we accept that these
fictitious, novelistic representations of Madrid on some level reflected social behaviors
that Gracián witnessed first-hand as a priest and inhabitant of Madrid, then we can
understand his frustration with trying to disseminate a morality that he failed to see
reflected in the everyday life of the court.
12
For a detailed description of the three phases of Gracián’s work, see López Aranguren
(331-3).
165
El Criticón was published first in three parts (1651, 1653 and 1657) and later
published as a single novel shortly before Gracián’s death. Each part is divided into a
number of crisi, or chapters. The novel perfectly represents the “second phase” of the
author’s style, characterized by Santos Alonso as “su crítica mordaz, su pesimismo, su
doctrina existencialista” (23). Critilo is the teacher-figure, and – as he later finds out –
father, to Andrenio, a boy who grew up in a cave removed from reality. The novel
narrates the boy’s education and journey into the world, represented by the progression of
the four seasons, and is strongly interlaced with philosophy, social satire and Christianity.
The action takes place both in metaphorical places, such as Artemia’s Palace, and real
countries (Spain, France, Germany and Italy). The novel is a compendium of references
to philosophers, the Bible and contemporary writers, as well as a critical novelistic
expression of Gracián’s worldview. For the purposes of this study, I have chosen to focus
on the sixth crisi and the eleventh crisi, as these two chapters narrate Critilo and
Andrenio’s discovery of Madrid. Their first entrance to Madrid is preceded by Critilo’s
determination to show Andrenio what the world and its inhabitants are like, as he has
previously existed in an “abstract space” removed from the human world. During this
journey, the protagonists are led through the bestial streets of Madrid by their centaur
guide, Quirón. The narration of their second journey to Madrid takes place in a
bookstore, where a courtier criticizes the lessons offered in El Galateo Cortesano, a
guidebook to courtly etiquette that Critilo has chosen to help him navigate the confusing
mass of Madrid.
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El diablo cojuelo and El Criticón are quite different from the novels previously
studied in this dissertation, yet there are interesting connections not only between the two
novels’ respective narrations of Madrid, but also how these are informed by styles that
we have previously seen in the picaresque and courtly novels. For example, the
environment of Madrid in these two novels is reminiscent of the picaresque novel. The
abnormal, perhaps immoral, behavior and the poverty and starvation that is intrinsic to
the picaresque novel is also the principal characteristic of these two novels’ perspectives
of Madrid. The sordid nature of the court city is heavily picaresque, even if the structure
is not that of a picaresque novel, as Gustavo Alfaro stated in his article “El diablo cojuelo
y la picaresca alegorizada.” Because there is no pseudo-autobiographical structure and
the young protagonist is a student, not a pícaro, El diablo cojuelo “no puede considerarse
como novela picaresca” (1). Alfaro admits that the characters are picaresque in nature,
particularly the “busconas, alguaciles, mesoneros,” or the riffraff of the dregs of society.
However, these characters are merely secondary characters. The protagonists are not
pícaros, but they do undertake a journey or education similar to those narrated by
Guzmán de Alfarache and Pablos in El Buscón. If we consider the main element of the
picaresque novel to be its structural characteristics, particularly the autobiographical
format, then we cannot say that El diablo cojuelo and El Criticón are picaresque novels.
However, if we take into account Francisco Rico’s term “atmosphere of delinquency,”
which I described in Chapter One, as part and parcel of the picaresque genre, then it’s
clear that these novels are reminiscent of the picaresque genre. Furthermore, the same
grotesque narrative tactics that we observed in the picaresque and courtly novels crop up
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again in these novels with a new twist. El diablo cojuelo and El Criticón exaggerate these
elements, making them larger than life. What might have been a passing criticism of the
dirty streets of Madrid in El Buscón becomes a city filled to the brim with filth under the
influence of Vélez de Guevara and Gracián. A grotesque description of an immigrant in
the courtly novel becomes an exaggerated and biting grotesque sketch of an entire society
in these two novels. Vélez de Guevara and Gracián utilize some of the same techniques
used by the authors of the picaresque and courtly novels, and they intensify them to such
a point that almost unrecognizable grotesque vignettes form the pieces of an image of the
monstrous agglomeration of individuals in Madrid.
In the picaresque and courtly novels, the uncleanliness of the city is often
observed in a passing comment. As I pointed out in Chapter Three, El Maestro contrasts
the sweet smell of basil to the odor of the streets of Madrid in Guía y avisos. The filth of
Madrid is discussed in this courtly novel, but El Maestro does so in a playful way, using a
conceit that shows a distortion of the plant’s natural odor and provokes laughter in the
reader. However, as the population increased, the filth and squalor in Madrid was also
exacerbated. Without a proper infrastructure to help remove the waste, in addition to the
large population crammed together in too-small streets and homes, Madrid became a
ghastly city. Beatriz Blasco Esquivias, in her excellent study of hygiene entitled ¡Agua
va! La higiene urbana en Madrid (1561-1761), lists only a few of the everyday elements
– from human and animal waste to kitchen scraps to entrails – that would have been
thrown into the streets of Madrid, as there was no official waste removal system
implemented until the eighteenth century:
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el estiércol de caballeriza, moco de herrero, y retazo de sastre, zapateros,
carniceros, papeles rasgados, cortaduras dellos, cascos de ollas, y tinajas, y
qualesquier vasos, estiércol de gallinas, palomas y conejos, cáscaras de
huevos, esteras viejas, ceniza, acepilladuras de carpinteros, y entalladores,
todo género de mondaduras de confiteros, yerba de boticarios y las que
sobraren de las fiestas de las Iglesias, frutas podridas, y plumas de aves...
(16)
According to Blasco Esquivias, the alarming situation became a favorite subject of
literature written in or about Madrid (14). This is seen in El diablo cojuelo and El
Criticón, where the narration of grimy Madrid is no longer as playful as it was in the
courtly novel. In El Criticón, the narrator interlaces Madrid’s repugnance with the very
real situation of poverty in Madrid. Andrenio and Critilo are walking through the streets
near the Plaza Mayor when they see heaping golden piles, and Andrenio walks up to
them thinking they are gold (“¡Oh, qué de oro!”). Quirón, the protagonists’ centaur guide,
cautions him that not all that glitters is gold (“Advierte que no lo es todo lo que reluce”)
and when he gets close, he sees that the piles are yellowed refuse (131). The streets are
filled with so many piles of waste that they complicate the flow of foot and carriage
traffic, particularly the gaping holes where the “golden trash” is removed from the ground
and added to a pile. Although Andrenio and Critilo know that the piles are refuse,
inhabitants of Madrid are fooled into believing that they are valuable, and the rich begin
to take from the poor. Andrenio asks Quirón if it would not be better to distribute the
“resources” evenly: “¿No fuera mejor echar toda esta tierra en aquellos grandes hoyos de
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los pobres, con que se emparejara el suelo y quedara todo muy igual?” (132). However,
Quirón recognizes that, while equal distribution of wealth is ideal, it does not happen in
Madrid: “No se da ya en el mundo a quien no tiene, sino a quien más tiene. A muchos se
les quita la hazienda porque son pobres, y se les adjudica a otros porque la tienen. Pues
las dádivas, no van sino a donde hay, ni se hazen los presentes a los ausentes” (132). As I
mentioned above, there is no exchange of cash in El Criticón, but here we see that the
filth that littered the streets and homes of Madrid has become a substitute. In the same
way that money was the distinguishing factor between the rich and the poor in the
picaresque novel, here the “golden trash” has become the new economy of Madrid. And,
although the pícaros were very human characters who evoked pity from the reader, the
courtly “figures” in El Criticón are hybrid forms of humans and beasts:
Al contrario, a las puertas de los pobres y desvalidos había unas tan
profundas y espantosas simas, que causaban horror a cuantos las miraban;
y assí, ninguno se acercaba de mil leguas: todos las miraban de lexos. Y es
lo bueno que todo el día, sin cessar, muchas y grandes bestias estaban
acarreando hediondo estiércol y lo echaban sobre el otro, amontando tierra
sobre tierra. (132)
They live in filth much as a pig lives in a pigsty, yet they retain the human vice of
avarice, as demonstrated in the passage above. They are taking the “golden refuse” –
which they consider to be valuable – from directly in front of the homes of the poor and
invalid and adding it to the piles in front of the homes of the rich. They use tools as
humans would, such as transporting the trash in carts (“acarrear”), and because they are
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motivated by poverty and greed, Gracián implies that they have human characteristics.
However, they are beastly characters, bestias that lack the logic that shows them that they
are economizing dirt. They continue in their pointless labor, failing to understand that the
removal of so much land will endanger the structure of their homes. Even other
individuals fear them in much the same way that they would fear savage animals, not
wanting to get closer than one-thousand leagues and preferring to view them from afar
(“todos las miraban de lexos”). Gracián’s characters are no longer the sensible courtiers
of the courtly novel; they are not even the scoundrels of the picaresque world. They are
hybrid individuals, grotesque conglomerations of human and bestial elements, that
contribute to the greater divide between the poverty-stricken and the rich simply by
failing to understand their own motives and the consequences of their actions.
Here, the uncleanliness of Madrid that was occasionally mentioned in the
picaresque and courtly novels has been magnified to the point where it is seen
everywhere and is constantly exacerbated by the city’s inhabitants. While the content of
the novels echoes the themes that we first observed in the picaresque novel, their
treatment of this content is much more exaggerated and fantastic than before. In fact, the
picaresque novel influences many of the descriptions of Madrid and its society in these
two novels, but Vélez de Guevara and Gracián present these descriptions in a new way.
For Gracián, Madrid’s society is composed of savage beasts fighting for survival in a city
where the grotesque devices previously seen in the picaresque and courtly novels are seen
constantly and in every facet of daily life. Vélez de Guevara and Gracián are masters of
the grotesque language, which they revolutionize, ultimately constructing a pure
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grotesque aesthetic in their work. In El Criticón, it is clear Gracián is aware of the use the
grotesque as artistic expression, and he use this knowledge to create his own grotesque
aesthetic, which interestingly has much in common with Vélez de Guevara’s grotesque
style. Throughout the remainder of this chapter, I will analyze the grotesque devices used
in El diablo cojuelo and El Criticón in an attempt to show that, while they are influenced
by the picaresque grotesque, they distort Madrid and its society in such a way that the
court city itself becomes a monster.
As I stated in the Introduction to this study, the main element of the grotesque
aesthetic created in El diablo cojuelo and El Criticón is distortion. Almost every
grotesque reference in these two novels can be classified as some type of perversion of
the natural order, or the relationship between a Divine Creator (God, in the belief of
Gracián) and Nature (Ilie 26). Unlike the picaresque and courtly novels included in this
study, it is no easy task to point out specific grotesque moments in these two novels
because the grotesque is rampant throughout the entire novel. As Paul Ilie states in his
book chapter “Gracián and the Moral Grotesque,” it is very difficult to separate the
grotesque and non-grotesque moments in El Criticón because, for him, “the grotesque is
a function of context” (25). It does not appear in some episodes and disappear in others,
like in the picaresque and courtly novels, but rather it permeates the entire work. This is
because, as Ilie states, Gracián’s perception of natural harmony influences the entire
novel. Ilie believes that Gracián possessed a very established idea of the natural order
influenced by his theological formation, and any time that a character or situation
deviates from Gracián’s concept of the Christian nature of order is distortion – which
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happens constantly in the novel –, the narrative becomes grotesque (25). Although Ilie
does not reference López Aranguren directly, the latter makes a similar claim that
Gracián’s moral perspective – influenced by the attempt to formulate a morality based in
his Catholic teachings that would work for the world around him – is deformed
throughout all of El Criticón (333). Although Ilie and López Aranguren write specifically
about Gracián, their arguments are useful to an analysis of Vélez de Guevara’s novel,
since distortion of the natural order or “how things should be” is a main focus of his
satiric vignettes. Almost every grotesque device at work in El diablo cojuelo and El
Criticón is some form of distortion, from exaggeration to utter confusion, which the
authors utilize to discuss Madrid and its society. They often repeat themes that were
already present in the picaresque and courtly novels, twisting them to fit their own
narrative.
For example, the grotesque conceit of Madrid as a sea appeared in the courtly
novel and is repeated in the novels of Vélez de Guevara and Gracián. In Las harpías de
Madrid, nautical terminology is used in the characterization of Madrid. The city is a
maremágnum – a confusing mass – of immigrants. The victims are referred to as fish
caught in the trickster’s nets, and even the term harpías, or harpies, given as a nickname
for the thieving girls evokes the sea.13 In the first chapter of El diablo cojuelo, Don
Cleofás Leandro Pérez Zambullo is similarly described using nautical terminology. He is
13
In mythology, Zeus punishes Phineus for overusing his gift of prophecy by exiling him
to an island full of food that he can never enjoy, as the harpies always arrived to steal the
food from him just as he was about to eat. The arrival of Jason and the Argonauts
prompted his freedom from the torture of the harpies. Book II of the Apollonius of
Rhodes’s Argonautica tells the story of the Phineus and the harpies. Because of their
association with the Greek islands, the harpies are associated with the sea.
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called an “hidalgo de cuatro vientos, caballero huracán y encrucijada de apellidos, galán
de noviciado y estudiante de profesión” (73). The narrator uses a conceit to show that his
social status of hidalgo is dubious, that it changes with each of the four winds, and stating
that he is a “a hurricane gentleman” – a reference to his impetuous nature. Even the name
Leandro brings to mind Leander, the hero who would swim across the Hellespont every
night to be with his lover, Hero.14 Unlike Leander, braving the seas of Madrid has landed
Don Cleofás in the stormy situation of fleeing from the sheriffs who are trying to arrest
him using a warrant taken out by his dishonorable lover. When he is trying to escape, he
jumps from roof to roof, and the narrator describes these actions using maritime
terminology: “no dificultó en arrojarse desde el ala del susodicho tejado […] a la buarda
de otro que estaba confinante, nordesteado de una luz que por ella escasamente se
brujuleaba, estrella de la tormenta que corría” (73). Don Cleofás jumps to another roof
that is positioned, or nordesteado, in the direction of a dim light that guides him, such as
the North Star. The word brujulear evokes the image of a ship’s compass, guided by the
estrella de la tormenta que corría, or the guiding star. He escapes the sheriffs by falling
into the astrologer’s home and landing on his hands and knees, as if to kiss the floor as a
shipwrecked sailor might upon returning to port, “saludándolo como a puerto de tales
naufragios” (73). When he enters the astrologer’s home, which is illuminated by a farol,
or a storm lantern, he admires the desk, covered in papers filled with mathematical
calculations, compasses and quadrants and realizes that he is in the home of an astrologer,
“dueño de aquella confusa oficina y embustera ciencia” (73). However, the items
14
For more information on the meaning of Don Cleofás’s full name, see Bjornson (14).
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occupying the astrologer’s desk are also tools that one might find on the desk of a ship’s
captain. The conceit of Madrid as sea that I analyzed in Chapter Three reappears here to
show Don Cleofás’s stormy situation in Madrid at the beginning of the narrative. The
nautical images are not strewn throughout the text, unlike in Las harpías en Madrid.
Here, the metaphor of Madrid as sea is consolidated in a single description of the
protagonist’s situation at the beginning of the novel. Because of its concentration in one
image, perhaps Vélez de Guevara’s adaption of the metaphor of Madrid as sea can be
understood as an example of how the author exaggerates the devices that already existed
in literature in his own work. The repetition of the image in the novels of Vélez de
Guevara and Gracián also shows its appropriateness for talking about Madrid as a hub of
empire.
Gracián seizes the metaphor of Madrid as a sea and exaggerates it even further in
El Criticón. The eleventh crisi of Part I includes constant maritime references, beginning
with the chapter title “El golfo cortesano.” Gracián’s play on words is discovered as the
reader advances in the chapter, as he is referring both to Madrid as a gulf full of courtiers
and to the silly and perhaps devious behaviors of Madrid’s society, using the term golfo
to mean immoral or useless.15 Critilo and Andrenio enter a bookshop, hoping to find a
15
The term golfo to mean “useless” or “scoundrel” is a commonly used slang term in
modern Spanish. The Diccionario de la lengua española defines the term in this sense as
“1. deshonesto. 2. pillo, sinvergüenza, holgazán. 3. prostituta” and states that this
connotation of golfo is a derivative of the Latin delphin, or dolphin. Ricardo Soca states
in his book La fascinante historia de las palabras that ancient fishermen and sailors
harbored a fear of dolphins, since they were carnivorous animals that could jump out of
the water. Although I have not found an exact date when the word golfo began to be used
to mean “immoral” or “useless,” I believe that Soca’s argument supports the hypothesis
that the word could have carried this connotation in the Golden Age. Certainly, if there
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guidebook – perhaps something similar to Guía y avisos de forasteros que vienen a la
Corte, which was aimed at orienting the immigrant within the court city – that will help
them navigate the choppy waters of the court that they first saw in the fifth crisi. A
courtier, called only El Cortesano, hears the confusion of the shopkeeper, and he explains
what Critilo is searching for: “-¡Eh!, que no piden – le dixo – sino una aguja de marear en
este golfo de Cirçes” (236). El Cortesano refers to the guidebook as an aguja de marear,
or a ship’s compass, to guide him through the gulf of Circes that have overtaken Madrid.
The image of Circe, a mythological goddess who tricked Odysseus’s crew into eating
from a feast laced with a magical potion that turned them into pigs in The Odyssey, is
used by El Cortesano to imply the tricky nature of women in the court, a danger about
which the courtly novel also cautions. Gracián also plays with the verb marear, evoking
the image of the sea, but also implying the dizzying confusion of the court.
The metaphor continues when El Cortesano suggests that the only guidebook that
is useful for knowing how to navigate Madrid is Homer’s Odyssey. The use of this text as
a “road map to Madrid” is significant, as it is a story filled with, among other things, the
dalliances and obstacles of travel. El Cortesano has just described the individuals that
Andrenio and Critilo will encounter in the court, beasts that remind us of the
mythological waters of the Odyssey. Even their guide Quirón tells the protagonists that
these are no longer times of men, but of beasts: “que no es éste siglo de hombres” (128).
However, El Cortesano believes that the challenges that Odysseus and his crew face on
the turbulent seas are comparable to those that the naïve immigrant faces in Madrid. He
were a double meaning for the word golfo, Gracián would have been aware of it and
probably used it to his advantage.
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argues that the poem’s dangerous seas are not those of Sicily, but of the court: “¿Qué,
pensáis que el peligroso golfo que él describe es aquel de Sicilia, y que las sirenas están
acullá en aquellas Sirtes con sus caras de mugeres y sus colas de pescados, la Cirza
encantadora en su isla y el soberbio cíclope en su cueva? Sabed que el peligroso mar es
la corte” (244-5; emphasis added). This is no longer a tranquil sea of opportunity nor the
confusing maremágnum of the courtly novel. This is a dangerous sea, one in which the
monsters in Homer’s Odyssey walk the very streets of Madrid, and Andrenio and Critilo
must take care to avoid the evil mermaids, with their womanly faces but fish tails, the
Circes and the Cyclops during their journey. Gracián is working with the metaphor of
Madrid as sea, but he proposes that Madrid is a different sea, thus changing the metaphor.
He does this with a heightened exaggeration of the conceit that has reached the point of
the monstrous. The metaphor is charged with the mythology of these destructive beasts,
implying to the protagonists – as well as the reader – that Madrid is no longer the placid
sea that attracted Teodora and her “harpies” to its bounty, but a turbulent gulf filled with
monsters of all kinds.
The courtly novel does not present its characters as monsters, but many
individuals behave in such a way that the characters’ actions conflict with the author’s –
or the reader’s – sense of morality. In the case of Guía y avisos, this negative behavior is
directly criticized and justice is often served, while in Las harpías en Madrid, the
harpies’ tricks appear to be celebrated, since they get away with their crimes and leave
Madrid with a coach and stolen riches. Vélez de Guevara and Gracián also include
grotesque situations in their criticism of court society but, as in the case of the metaphor
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of Madrid as sea, these grotesque situations are magnified, exaggerated, so numerous that
it appears that every nook and cranny of Madrid contains delinquent behavior. The
second tranco of El diablo cojuelo shows some of the abnormal behavior from a
perspective not used in the courtly novel, but perhaps suggested in the picaresque.
Guzmán de Alfarache calls himself the moral watchtower, as if he were looking down
upon the narrative from above. Vélez de Guevara expands this idea by propelling the
Diablo Cojuelo and Don Cleofás to the top of the tower of San Salvador, a parish that
was located near the Plaza Mayor – in the center of Madrid – before its destruction.16
The use of the tower, playing off of Guzmán’s moral watchtower, brings to mind
Michel Foucault’s theory of Panopticism. A Panopticon, according to Foucault, is an
“enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are
inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised […] according
to a continuous hierarchical figure” (197). The single most important feature of the
Panopticon when used for control is vision; the observed individuals must not be able to
tell whether or not they are seen in any moment. This causes a permanent modification of
negative behaviors, since the interned cannot tell when they are being watched. Because
of the central location of the tower of San Salvador and the cover provided by the
darkness of the night, the protagonists can see all of Madrid, but cannot be seen by their
16
The exact location of the Tower of San Salvador was located at the current address of
Calle Mayor, 70. A plaque placed by the Ayuntamiento de Madrid reads: “En este lugar
estuvo la iglesia de San Salvador en cuya torre Luis Vélez de Guevara situó la acción en
su novela El diablo cojuelo – 1641 –.”
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subjects.17 Although El diablo cojuelo precedes Jeremy Bentham’s design of the
Panopticon by several centuries, the novel shows madrileños that their behaviors behind
closed doors are being observed, not only by the Diablo Cojuelo, but also by Vélez de
Guevara himself. In this way, although the Tower of San Salvador is not a pure
Panopticon, it is possible that the both the novel and the prison produced similar
consequences: modification of undesired behaviors. Vélez de Guevara uses the tower as a
context for the observation of many of the same grotesque behaviors seen in the
picaresque and courtly novels. Cheating, adultery and robbery are seen throughout all of
the novels in this study, but they permeate the pages of El diablo cojuelo in an
unprecedented manner. The narration of the second chapter is an observation of one
grotesque behavior after another with very little reflection on the part of the protagonists.
Whereas Guzmán’s moralizing sermons are often lengthy and interrupt the action of the
novel, Vélez de Guevara is piling example on top of example of negative behavior. The
narrators of the courtly novels, like Guzmán de Alfarache, end most chapters with a
direct moral statement about what the reader should take from the story. Here, Vélez de
Guevara departs from this practice and produces a cumulative social discourse of
immorality without offering his interpretation of the behavior. El diablo cojuelo shows a
strong and biting criticism of Madrid’s society, communicated using grotesque
techniques.
17
It is important to remember that the location of the Tower of San Salvador was a
central location in Madrid during seventeenth century and, because of its height, would
have allowed an unmitigated view of the Plaza Mayor and surrounding areas as well as
the royal residence, the Alcázar, located slightly northwest of the parish.
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The very description of how the Diablo Cojuelo and Don Cleofás observe
madrileños from the top of the tower of San Salvador sets the tone for the behaviors that
they will observe and includes the grotesque as part of the developing narrative:
por arte diabólica, lo hojaldrado, se descubrió la carne del pastelón de
Madrid como entonces estaba, patentemente, que por el mucho calor
estivo estaba con menos celosías, y tanta variedad de sabandijas en esta
arca del mundo, que la del diluvio, comparada con ella, fue de capas y
gorras. (80)
The Diablo Cojuelo uses his magic to pick apart the filling of the “cake of Madrid,”
which is referred to as flaky, or hojaldrado, easily breaking apart at the slightest touch.
The narrator implies that the court is fragile, suggesting that some part of the recipe has
gone awry. The ripping apart of a cake, especially when compared to the very city of
Madrid, is a grotesque conceit for the scrutiny of the city and its sabandijas (critters), as
it arouses in the reader a sense of unease or tension which will conflict with the laughter
that follows the Diablo Cojuelo’s criticisms and Don Cleofás’s naivety. The cake
contains so much “meat,” or people, that it pours out of the crust; it is impossible for
society to hide from Vélez de Guevara’s scrutiny. The arca del mundo, or Noah’s Ark,
seems insignificant in comparison with the variety of individuals in Madrid. Furthermore,
the reference to the Great Flood as being a mere shower in comparison to the one that
would need to overtake Madrid in order to wash away the sins of its people shows that
grotesque situations are magnified in number in comparison to those in the picaresque
and courtly novels.
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These grotesque behaviors, however, smack of those presented by the pícaros.
Guzmán de Alfarache and Pablos both take part in extra-marital affairs; in the case of
Guzmán, he even arranges for his wife’s affair with a clothing salesman in order to secure
financial bounty.18 The Diablo Cojuelo shows Don Cleofás a similar love triangle, but
one that has resulted in a child born out of wedlock: “Allí está pariendo doña Fáfula, y
don Toribio, su indigno consorte, como si fuera suyo lo que paría, muy oficioso y
lastimado; y está el dueño de la obra a pierna suelta en esotro barrio, roncando y
descuidado del suceso” (82). The married couple that the Diablo Cojuelo scrutinizes is
called by names used during the time period to refer to ridiculous individuals, and their
behavior obviously goes against society’s moral norms. As we see, the father of the baby
is across the city, sleeping a pierna suelta, or as soundly as a dog. Vélez de Guevara
utilizes the same grotesque techniques – zoomorphism, grotesque conceit, and the tension
between laughter and horror – seen in the picaresque to develop a narrative of grotesque
situations in Madrid. But because the objects of his criticism are so numerous, and he is
attacking everyone (attorneys, beggars, robbers and aristocrats) regardless of their social
status, Vélez de Guevara’s discourse departs from the grotesque situations present in the
picaresque and courtly novels. Certainly, there are similar behaviors in these genres, but
here, they are literally everywhere and practically no one is innocent.
Similarly, both Vélez de Guevara and Gracián include more episodes involving
false appearances than seen in the picaresque or courtly novels. The unique situation of
Madrid as the home of the court led to a historical phenomenon that is dramatized in
18
Alemán (2: 444-52).
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seventeenth-century novels: the use of false appearances in order to get ahead and
maintain one’s reputation. Although Madrid was dependent on the court for its very
survival and social activity – without which, according to Ringrose, the city would not
have been important –, only ten percent of the population was maintained financially by
the Crown: “Sólo algo más del 10 por ciento de los receptores de ingresos de la ciudad
formaban la Corte, la aristocracia y la burocracia” (203). The rest of the inhabitants had
to compete for resources in order to survive, thus they were forced to develop tricks and
gimmicks to help them get ahead. By the mid-seventeenth century, it appears that society
took a cue from the ever-popular theater of Madrid, and appearances became so
important to survival that life took on an essence of theatricality. In his study El teatro y
la teatralidad del Barroco, Emilio Orozco Díaz comes to the similar conclusion that,
during the Golden Age, “todo el mundo se convierte en teatro, porque la vida toda es
teatro” (20). According to him, this phenomenon is intrinsic to the Baroque, as both the
Baroque aesthetic and the theatricality of life represent an overflowing
(“desbordamiento”) of contradictions to the classic harmony of the Renaissance (19). The
impulsive, disruptive quality of Baroque art and literature is echoed in the desire of
presenting oneself in a particular light in front of the stage of society, and in El diablo
cojuelo and El Criticón, these practices are satirized.
The picaresque and courtly novels had already included the use of false
appearances for personal benefit before these two novels were written. Pablos uses false
clothing and backgrounds in order to fit in with Madrid’s high society before he is
discovered and punished by Don Diego Coronel. The harpies adopt the clothing and false
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façades of virgins, widows and aristocrats in order to trick their victims, and even the
victims themselves use false appearances in order to win over the young beauties. The
lecherous César Antonio attempts to read a letter without his glasses in order to appear
younger to Luisa.19 But false appearances are distorted and stylized in such a way in El
diablo cojuelo and El Criticón that they are no longer presented in the novels as the tricks
of individuals, but of society, in general. When the Diablo Cojuelo and Don Cleofás
come down from the tower of San Salvador and begin to walk among the streets of
Madrid, they observe several interesting places that are havens for all madrileños wishing
to adopt a false pedigree. The first of these, the mercadillos de apellidos y familiares
(“marketplaces for surnames and relatives”) show men and women who shop for their
surnames and family histories in the same way that one would shop for fruit:
-Este es el baratillo de los apellidos, que aquellas damas pasas truecan con
estas mozas albillas por medias traídas, por zapatos viejos, valonas, tocas
y ligas, como ya no las han menester; que el Guzmán, el Mendoza, el
Enríquez, el Cerda, el Cueva, el Silva, el Castro, el Girón, el Toledo, el
Pacheco, el Córdova, el Manrique de Lara, el Osorio, el Aragón, el
Guevara y otros generosos apellidos los ceden a quien los ha menester
ahora para el oficio que comienza […]. Y, a mano izquierda, entraron a
otra plazuela al modo de la de los Herradores, donde se alquilaban tías,
hermanos, primos y maridos, como lacayos y escuderos, para damas de
19
Castillo Solórzano (112).
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achaque que quieren pasar en la Corte con buen nombre y encarecer su
mercadería. (94-5)
Vélez de Guevara utilizes the same grotesque techniques that Francisco de Quevedo used
in El Buscón to describe his characters when he calls the old ladies damas pasas,
referring to their old age and to their wrinkled bodies, reminding the reader of raisins.20
The young ladies, in contrast, are referred to as albillas, which can imply that they are
pure, as albillo means white. Yet Gracián, a master of stylization, is likely prolonging the
grotesque conceit of the women as grapes, as uvas albillas are white grapes. However,
even though Quevedo – as well as the authors of the courtly novels – includes the topic of
false appearances in his narrative of Madrid, it is not as public as the mercadillos de
apellidos y familiares. While the previous characters go to great lengths to hide their false
lineages, the characters that the Diablo Cojuelo and Don Cleofás observe acquire their
false backgrounds shamelessly, in broad daylight and before the eyes of other individuals
who, after all, are doing the same. Family histories and last names are not the only
commodities in demand; the pila de los dones is a place where one can go and pay to be
“baptized” with the title don (95-6). Perhaps the most unsettling place that the Diablo
Cojuelo shows Don Cleofás is the ropería de los agüelos (“the grandparents trading
post”), a type of graveyard where coffins are “stripped” of their recently deceased bodies,
adopted by those in need of proof of a more noble ancestry. While the idea of utilizing
dead bodies in such a way is physically repugnant, the Diablo Cojuelo introduces some
20
We are reminded of the old woman who answers Pablos’s knock on the door to the
brotherhood of beggars when he arrives in Madrid. Her face is described as wrinkled
chestnut, with her facial features having been nibbled away by the passing of time. See
Quevedo (169).
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comic elements of his narration by saying that the good-for-nothings try out different
grandparents to see which fits best. When one grandfather is too big for the client (“se
está vistiendo otro agüelos, y le viene largo de talle”), he tries on another until he finds
one that fits. The comparison of the deceased to suits that one might use to pass as a
member of the elite is quite grotesque, as it compares dead bodies to clothing and then
commercializes them. The disgust that this produces contrasts with the laughter in
reaction to the touches of humor, such as the grandfather being too big – or too noble –
for the client, just as a suit may be too big.
Vélez de Guevara shows more than just the marketing of false appearances in his
novel. He also shows them in practice, such as the pareja encochada, or the married
couple who has spent so much money on their carriage – a symbol of high social rank –
that they are forced to live inside it and have not set foot outside their carriage in so long
that they catch a cold just by hanging a hand out of the window.
Vuelve allí, y acompáñame a reír de aquel marido y mujer, tan amigos de
coche, que todo lo que habían de gastar en vestir, calzar y componer su
casa lo han empleado en aquel que está sin caballos agora, y comen y
cenan y duermen dentro dél, sin que hayan salido de su reclusión, ni aun
para las necesidades corporales, en cuatro años que ha que le compraron;
que están encochados, como emparedados, y ha sido tanta la costumbre de
no salir dél, que les sirve el coche de conchas, como a la tortuga y al
galápago, que en tarascando cualquiera dellos la cabeza fuera dél la vuelve
a meter luego como quien la tiene fuera de su natural y se resfrían y
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acatarran en sacando pie, pierna o mano desta estrecha religión; y pienso
que quieren ahora labrar un desván en él para ensancharse y alquilalle a
otros dos vecinos tan inclinados a coche que se contentarán con vivir en el
caballete dél. (87)
The couple’s carriage has fallen into disrepair and they no longer have horses to pull it,
thus the vehicle is dysfunctional and only for show, much like the many false
appearances that are being used in the court. The carriage was the ultimate status symbol
in seventeenth-century Madrid, and the city streets were filled with these vehicles.
Bernardo J. García called this phenomenon the “plague of carriages,” which he suggested
arose because of the growth of the court and the “importance of appearances” in this new
space.21 The overload of carriages created such a problem in Madrid that a premática was
written in 1611 that stipulated that all coaches must be registered with the Royal Council
and drawn by four horses or fewer.22 Additionally, carriages could not be rented or sold
without the King’s approval. The document further lists who is allowed to ride in
coaches; for example, women may ride in coaches if their faces are uncovered and men
or servants accompany them, but a prostitute riding in a carriage is strictly forbidden.
Interestingly, a memoria, or memorandum, was included in the records of the Royal
Council dating 1611-1613 that exempted several groups of people from the guidelines of
21
“Esta sensación de que había un tráfico excesivo de coches, sillas y literas por las
calles de Madrid es un fenómeno que se aprecia especialmente en el siglo XVII y que
podemos vincular al crecimiento de la capital y a los lujos y apariencias que imponía el
entorno social de la corte” (29). For García’s complete analysis of the problems posed by
carriages in seventeenth-century Madrid, as well as their connection to the work of
Quevedo and El diablo cojuelo, see El Madrid de Quevedo y Calderón (28-34).
22
BNE, VE/34/50.
186
the 1611 premática.23 All Council presidents, secretaries, ambassadors, nobility, and
royal doctors were allowed to use coaches, and the document lists individuals with the
number of horses that their carriages were allowed to use. It appears that power in the
court could exempt one from the following the laws, thus it comes as no surprise that
individuals used every resource available to them to create the appearance that they had
power, such as the couple in the passage above. The use of the carriage to feign social
status was already utilized by Castillo Solórzano, as the coach in Las harpías en Madrid
serves as the main catalyst for the young ladies’ success. However, Vélez de Guevara
uses the grotesque mode to criticize this behavior. For example, he states that the pareja
encochada has been living in their coach for four years and carrying out the tasks of daily
life within the confined space. One can only imagine the stench of the carriage, as they
remain trapped with the remnants of their bodily functions (“sin que hayan salido de su
reclusión, ni aun para las necesidades corporales”). However, this repulsion contrasts
with the ridiculous image of the couple that the narrator presents by describing them as
turtles, with the coach serving as their shell, and by saying that they are emparedados,
which can mean that they are locked away as a form of punishment, but is also used as
the name of a small sandwich, suggesting that they are sandwiched within the confines of
the small carriage. Vélez de Guevara uses the grotesque technique so frequently used in
the picaresque of combining a comic and a non-comic element to produce a grotesque
reaction in the narration of the carriage, one of the foremost methods of using false
appearances to present oneself as part of a privileged social category.
23
AHN, Consejos, Libro 1201, ff. 76-78.
187
Gracián dedicates an entire crisi to the criticism of false appearances in Madrid,
which he presents through El Cortesano’s commentary of the social etiquette guidebook
El Galateo Cortesano. Gracián is clearly referring to the guidebooks – books designed to
stipulate and regulate the behavior of all well-to-do- courtiers – such as Gracián
Dantisco’s Galateo Español or Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier.
Castiglione’s text takes the form of fictional conversations that take place among
courtiers of the Duke of Urbino. The author himself formed part of this court around the
time that he composed The Book of the Courtier, in which four fictional courtiers attempt
to describe the ideal courtly gentleman. They specify which physical and intellectual
qualities the courtier should possess and how he should practice them.
Gracián’s imitation of these guidebooks suggests that they did exist in Madrid and
that there was an expectation of how one must behave as a gentleman of the court. José
Ortega y Gasset, in his study entitled Velázquez, proposed that this expectation is called
formalismo and that it was integral to seventeenth-century Madrid’s society.24 He argued
that formalismo was the result of living within a set of restricted expectations formed by
society and culture; we are influenced by these expectations just by living within a certain
culture, and our only options are to conform to or fight them. Ortega y Gasset offers
examples from the seventeenth century that show that individuals were affected by these
expectations, even to the point where one captain whose ship was sinking spent his last
few hours dressing in extravagant clothing and reading a sonnet that was written for him
by Lope de Vega (235-6). His argument confirms that there were certain expectations
24
For Ortega y Gasset’s full discussion of formalismo, see Velázquez (233-265).
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imposed by society for the behavior of courtiers, and they were so stylized in the
seventeenth century that books were written on how to achieve the perfect image by
following these expectations. Gracián was aware of this and criticized it through the
voice of El Cortesano, who makes fun of El Galateo Cortesano, the guidebook invented
by Gracián to parallel those that were famous, such as the writings of Baltasar
Castiglione and Gracián Dantisco.25
In his analysis of the education given on how to act like a proper member of the
court, Gracián distorts the functions of the body. In Chapter One, I discussed how
Guzmán de Alfarache’s narrations of the tricks played on him in Italy distort Mikhail
Bakhtin’s concept of the material bodily principle. Guzmán distorts the material bodily
principle by inverting the high and the low, which Bakhtin parallels with heavenly and
base, respectively. We saw this phenomenon when a pig drags Guzmán through the
square with the pícaro’s face next to the pig’s backside.26 In El Criticón, Gracián
achieves an inversion as well, not of the material bodily principle, but rather of the
positive and negative behaviors of the courtier. El Cortesano explains to Andrenio and
Critilo that the only way to succeed in the court is to invert the instructions offered by El
Galateo Cortesano. For example, El Cortesano says that the guidebook states that it is
unsightly to blow one’s nose and look at the rheum in the handkerchief. Certainly
examining one’s mucous in public is unsightly, yet El Cortesano states that it is necessary
in the world of Madrid. He proposes that one should examine what he expels, because
25
Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio Alvariño discusses how El Criticón shows Gracián’s
awareness of the science of being a courtier, or una ciencia áulica, in his article “El
cortesano discreto: Itinerario de una ciencia áulica (ss. XVI-XVII).”
26
Alemán (2: 107-9).
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then he will see what he is made of: “que miren todos y vean lo que son en lo que echan”
(238). By doing this, even a university graduate will see that he is a “rapaz mocoso,” or a
snotty brat (238). Following El Cortesano’s logic, if every individual sees that he
produces the same substance as everyone else when he blows his nose, he will understand
the true nature of man: “¡Eh!, conozcámonos todos y entendamos que somos unos sacos
de hediondez: cuando niños mocos, cuando viejos flemas y cuando hombres postemas”
(238). For El Cortesano, everyone is part of the same stinking pile of mankind, and while
this worldview is repugnant and pessimistic, it does correct the “distortion” of the human
body presented in El Galateo Cortesano, because everyone is equal in his or her bodily
functions, such as the production of rheum. While the grotesque is still present, such as
when El Cortesano uses a zoomorphic image to compare the university student to a
rapaz, or bird of prey, his criticism manages to overturn the advice of the Galateo
Cortesano that he considers to be impractical in Madrid’s society. How interesting that El
Cortesano is attempting to formulate a set of values that will work for the “mass of
monsters” in Madrid, values that will correct behaviors that he sees as undesirable.
Perhaps El Cortesano represents the voice of Gracián, who attempted in his daily life to
preach a doctrine that would be useful to Madrid’s incorrigible society.
Another example of El Cortesano’s inversion of “proper etiquette” is the
trimming of one’s fingernails in public. El Galateo Cortesano says such an action is
inappropriate, but El Cortesano takes exception with this teaching. He associates long
nails with robbery. As Santos Alonso notes, long nails are a sign of thieves, and El
Cortesano implies that this behavior needs to stop immediately, symbolized by the
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cutting of nails: “Que sí, sí saquen tixeras, aunque sean de tundir, mas no de trasquilar, y
córtense essas uñas de rapiña y atúsenlas hasta las mismas manos cuando las tienen tan
largas” (239). He insists that the nail clipping be done often and properly, not with
scissors de trasquilar, or a tool used for shearing sheep but ineffective at precise cutting,
but with any scissor capable of stopping the robbery associated with having long nails. El
Cortesano is contradicting the guidebook, which says that one should not cut his nails in
public, and he simultaneously calls for the reform of crime in Madrid. Similarly, El
Cortesano plays on this element when he comments on the picking of ear wax, the proper
way to eat and the proper distance to stand from someone to avoid spitting on them while
talking. All of his contradictions are filled with sarcastic and biting criticism of society’s
behavior in Madrid, and almost all contradict the teachings of the etiquette guidebook, El
Galateo Cortesano. Although the courtier’s body functions properly due to El
Cortesano’s suggestions – nails are clipped, rheum is expelled, wax is removed from the
ears – the “internal problems” of abnormal behavior are not so easily cured.
While the use of false appearances and stylized behaviors developed in literature
long before the novels of Vélez de Guevara and Gracián – we must remember that James
Iffland termed these behaviors the ersatz in the picaresque novel –, they are distorted in
El diablo cojuelo and El Criticón in such a way that they seem to have become a publicly
accepted element of society. The use of false appearances is no longer as simple as a brief
narration of César Antonio’s use of glasses to appear younger; it is an epidemic that
warrants the creation of particular spaces in Madrid, such as the mercadillo de apellidos
and the pila de los dones, that provide everyone with the tools to disguise their true
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identities. The use of these resources is widely accepted, even to the point that it is
expected that everyone take part. This reminds us of Ortega y Gasset’s sense of
formalismo, or a set of guidelines that everyone is expected to follow in order to fit in
with society. Vélez de Guevara and Gracián criticize these practices, creating a sense of
the theatrical to life in Madrid reminiscent of Orozco Díaz’s statement that theatricality in
Madrid was not merely a literary phenomenon but a universally social one as well in the
Golden Age. Even the Diablo Cojuelo refers to Madrid as a theater, where everyone is
acting out his or her own life: “Advierte que quiero empezar a enseñarte distintamente, en
este teatro donde tantas figuras representan” (81). Like in the picaresque novel and the
courtly novel, these appearances are often narrated using grotesque techniques, such as
the combination of comic and non-comic elements and zoomorphic images. As we have
seen in the examples above, these grotesque devices are stretched to the limit in El diablo
cojuelo and El Criticón. Zoomorphic images are not created by using an adjective that
gives an air of the animalistic to a character, but rather entire sentences are dedicated to
the comparison of, for example, a marriage so plagued by the couple’s love of the status
symbol of the carriage that they literally become turtles, ensconced within the shell of the
only possession they have.
In fact, Vélez de Guevara and Gracián add a new dimension to the zoomorphic
tendencies that are so popular in the picaresque and courtly novels. The authors branch
out from comparisons of humans and animals, or humans and inanimate objects, to
include the monstrous and the bestial. This grotesque device did not exist in the
picaresque novel but was hinted at in Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid. In the
192
sixth chapter of Guía y avisos entitled “El Mequetrefe,” a farmer comes to Madrid to take
care of some paperwork and gets cheated by El Mequetrefe. When the farmer is arrested
on false charges, he pleads with the guards to let him go, referring to them as señores. He
is corrected by the guards, who insist on being called secretaries, or ministros, instead of
sirs. His comment includes the first use of the term “monstrous” in the novels in this
study: “-Ministros ó monstruos – replicó el Labrador – perdónenme que de turbado no sé
lo que me digo” (150). The farmer calls the ministros monsters, although he admits he
makes this mistake because he is disturbed by their presence. The author of Guía y avisos
introduces monstrous terminology into the dialogue of the courtly novel, which reoccurs
in Las harpías en Madrid. In this novel, Castillo Solórzano never calls his characters
monsters, but he does introduce elements of mythological and Christian monsters in his
narration, particularly to describe the thieving harpies. Indeed, the narrator states that
there are so many women in Madrid who, like serpents, prey on men, that they could
serve as models for an altar to Saint George, famous for slaying dragons and beasts: “que
no había cosa más vista en la Corte que damas sierpes, que lo pudieran ser en un retablo
de San Jorge” (125). The young women are also referred to several times as serafines, or
seraphim, a word used as a synonym for serpents in the Bible.27 Seraphim are celestial
27
Seraph, or the plural seraphim, is a transliteration of the Hebrew ‫שָׂרָף‬, or “poisonous
serpent.” The Hebrew Bible yields seven references to seraphim in Numbers and
Deuteronomy (Num. 21.6-8 and Deut. 8.15.) For example, in the Jewish Orthodox Bible,
Numbers 21:6 reads “And Hashem sent fiery nechashim among the people, and they bit
the people; and Am rav miYisroel died” (Orthodox Jewish Bible, Bamidbar. 21.6,
emphasis added). In the English Standard Version of the Bible, the verse reads: “Then
the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many
people of Israel died” (English Standard Version. Num. 21.6). While English versions of
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beings, angels of the highest heavenly choir, but their frequent depiction as snakes with
six wings make them a controversial image, as snakes are associated with evil in
Christian theology.28 While the zoomorphic images in the picaresque novel do not
include any influence of the mythological or the monstrous, and the references are scarce
in the courtly novel, it is clear that Vélez de Guevara and Gracián stylize the use of
mythological or biblical images to describe characters to the point that the pages of their
novels are filled with monsters.
The concept of the monstrous evolves drastically from El diablo cojuelo to El
Criticón, but it is an important element of the grotesque mode that, strangely enough,
appears in the courtly novel and in these two novels. Unlike many other grotesque
devices, there is no imagery in the picaresque grotesque that provides an exact precedent
for the monstrous grotesque that is so abundant in the novels of Vélez de Guevara and
Gracián. However, the monstrous has become more and more a part of the grotesque over
the centuries, since the two concepts are interlaced in current conceptions of the
grotesque. The first part of the definition of the word grotesque in the Random House
Dictionary is “odd or unnatural in shape, appearance, or character; fantastically ugly or
absurd; bizarre.” The words unnatural, fantastically ugly, and bizarre all invoke the
monstrous, and it is no coincidence that the monstrous and grotesquerie often converge. It
the Bible only use the word seraphim in two verses of the Book of Isaiah, the Hebrew
Bible strongly connects the term seraph to the concept of a fiery snake.
28
For a description of the physical appearance of a seraph, see Isaiah 6:1-2. The verses
read “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a
throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with
six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and
with two they were flying.” (New International Version, Isa. 6.1-2).
194
is important to understand that monstrous does not refer to a purely fantastic being that is
unrelated to the realm of the human; rather, as Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund
state in their study Grotesque, the monstrous arises “out of the combination of human and
non-human” (36). The monstrous is unnatural, yet it combines elements of the natural
world. Basing their arguments on Wolfgang Kayser’s fundamental study on the grotesque
The Grotesque in Art and Literature, they argue that the monstrous is synonymous with
abnormal, images that combine human elements with “animalistic or, in some cases,
vegetative life forms” (37). For Edwards and Graulund, any image that deviates from the
symmetrical standards of classical aesthetics and combines some characteristic of the
realms of the human and the non-human, is monstrous.
Vélez de Guevara’s monsters appear more like the characters of the courtly novel,
in that they are still humans but with ridiculous or inhuman qualities. For example, the
Diablo Cojuelo shows Don Cleofás an obese woman from the top of the tower of San
Salvador, and Don Cleofás is surprised that her nightshirt, her house and even Madrid
seem too small for her. She is extremely wealthy, with six houses, more than 20,000
ducados of income from the shopping market of the Puerta de Guadalajara, and her own
chapel built for her burial (84). However, her gluttony makes her so fat that she will have
a difficult time ascending to Heaven when she dies: “y con una capilla que ha hecho para
su entierro y dos capellanías que ha fundado se piensa ir al cielo derecha: que aunque
ponga una garrucha en la estrella de Venus y un alzaprima en las Siete Cabrillas, me
parece que será imposible que suba allá aquel tonel” (84). The Diablo Cojuelo jokes that
the woman weighs so much that, even if there were a rope and pulley system in the stars,
195
it would be impossible to lift her enormous body into the heavens. The use of words like
tonel, or a colloquial term to describe an obese individual, provoke the reader’s laughter,
but the image of the woman becomes monstrous due to the sheer size of her body. She is
even referred to as a rhinoceros, or abada, a word that also brings to mind an abbot, no
doubt due to her charitable works. The large woman has not lost her human qualities, but
the exaggeration of her gluttony, in addition to the association of the woman and a
rhinoceros, stretch this zoomorphic characterization into the world of the monstrous
grotesque, described by Kayser as “a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no
longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where laws of
statistics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid” (21). The woman is clearly
disproportionate with her surroundings, even against the backdrop of the expanding city
of Madrid. She is compared not only to an animal but her bodily actions are exaggerated;
for example, the sound of her snores are compared to the turbulent waters of the Bermuda
triangle (“hace roncando más ruido que la Bermuda”) and she eats enough meat to fill
bóvedas, a huge cavernous space (“bebe cámaras de tinajas y come jigotes de bóvedas”)
(84). The description of this woman fits Kayser’s description of the monstrous in the
grotesque; she is both human and animalistic, and it seems that the laws of physics and
symmetry do not apply to her. However, unlike the images in Kayser’s formulation of
monstrous world – where there is no longer separation of human, animal and vegetative
creatures –, the woman represents an exception to the rest of Madrid. The world of El
diablo cojuelo itself is not monstrous, but the elements of the monstrous are beginning to
crop up in the narration.
196
The monstrous in El Criticón is very different from that of the courtly novel and
El diablo cojuelo. Whereas the previous novels presented the monstrous in isolation –
perhaps a reference to a character as a monster, a comparison of a character to a
mythological beast, or a character who combines the spheres of the human, animal and
vegetable – the setting of Madrid is filled with monsters and beasts who show very few
elements of the human. For example, when Quirón guides Critilo and Andrenio to the
Plaza Mayor of Madrid, they find it filled with beasts, not men: “Fuelos guiando a la
Plaça Mayor, donde hallaron passeándose gran multitud de fieras, y todas tan sueltas
como libres, con notable peligro de los incautos: había leones, tigres, leopardos, lobos,
toros, panteras, muchas vulpexas; ni faltaban sierpes, dragones y basiliscos” (131). While
some of the beasts are common animals – even if not common to Madrid –, such as lions,
tigers, bulls and panthers, there are more fantastic monsters: serpents, dragons and
basilisks. As I previously stated, Edwards and Graulund understand the monstrous
grotesque as an opposition to the symmetrical classical aesthetics: “the grotesque lies in
juxtaposition to the common conceptions of classical aesthetics, which focus on
symmetrical representations of bodies and figures that are unified, harmonious and wellproportioned” (37). While it appears that Edwards and Graulund refer to the Greek
classics when discussing “classical aesthetics,” other scholars, such as Orozco Díaz, have
similarly compared the Baroque grotesque as a rupture of Renaissance aesthetic.29 These
29
We remember that Orozco Díaz describes the Baroque as a rupture against the
harmony of the Renaissance: “de una manera consciente e intelectual, rompe y contradice
el armónico equilibrio de las formas de la tradición clásica renacentista” (18-9). In the
same way that the monstrous goes against the tradition of Classical symmetry and
harmony, the Baroque contradicts these features of the Renaissance aesthetic.
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monsters oppose the classical aesthetic that prized symmetry and harmony, which makes
their use ideal for Baroque grotesque literature. Indeed, all of the monsters in El Criticón
represent deformation of symmetry, of harmony, of the natural order of things. For
example, Andrenio and Critilo spot a group of figures who they believe are human, but
upon closer inspection, they see that the figures walk upside down, dragging their faces
through the trash that litters the streets of Madrid:
Assomaban ya por un cabo de la plaça ciertos personages que caminaban,
de tan graves, con las cabeças hazia baxo por el suelo, poniéndose del
lodo, y los pies para arriba muy empinados, echando piernas al aire sin
acertar a dar un passo: antes, a cada uno caían, y aunque se maltrataban
harto, porfiaban en querer ir de aquel modo tan ridículo como peligroso.
Començó Andrenio a admirar y Critilo a reír. (132-3)
The narrator does not even call the figures personas, but personajes, distancing them
from the realm of the human even further. These characters produce a grotesque reaction
in Andrenio and Critilo, who are both dumbfounded by their method of walking upside
down and entertained by their stupidity. Andrenio is astonished, or admirado, and Critilo
begins to laugh. Their reaction to the comic and non-comic elements in the presentation
of these monsters is the typical grotesque reaction present in the picaresque novel. We
remember that Pablos himself presented this grotesque device when he simultaneously
laughed at and felt pity for Don Toribio in El Buscón.30 However, Gracián has created his
own stylization of the grotesque tension between comic and non-comic elements with the
30
Quevedo (159-161).
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addition of the monsters. According to Ilie, this conscious act of distorting or
exaggerating a grotesque device already used in literature is what makes Gracián’s work
so unique: “Gracián’s moral grotesque breaks the form of the conventional animal
allegory. The author is clearly on the verge of a formal exercise here, juxtaposing
animalistic parts at will without concern for an immediate one-to-one relationship
between those parts and their possible symbolic meaning” (34-5). I agree with Ilie that
Gracián’s use of the monstrous is a far reach from the “conventional animal allegory,” or
what I have called zoomorphism, of the picaresque and the courtly novels. Ilie is also
correct in stating that Gracián is “on the verge of a formal exercise here, juxtaposing
animalistic parts,” but I believe that Ilie does not carry this argument to fruition. Gracián
is clearly aware of the use of the animalistic and the monstrous in art and literature.
Quirón even states that the inverted figures that they are witnessing remind him of
Bosch’s paintings, the art that best represents the use of the ornamentalism of the
grotesque before the paintings of Goya: “¡Oh, qué bien pintaba el Bosco!; ahora entiendo
su capricho. Cosas veréis increíbles” (133). Gracián understands the capricho of Bosch’s
paintings – “whim, fantasy, chimera, grotesque humor” – as a style and, in my opinion,
he is utilizing these elements in his own novel (Ilie 33).31 One could easily see the
31
I do not wish to use the term capricho anachronistically to say that Bosch or Gracián
were influenced by Goya’s technique of the capricho. Rather, I wish to convey that the
capricho, as defined by Ilie, was already accepted as an aesthetic possibility in Gracián’s
time. The paintings of Bosch were already cited in Miguel Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la
lengua castellana o española entry for “grutesco.” In this sense, perhaps the capricho
that we view in Bosch’s paintings and in Gracián’s novel later influence Goya’s own
aesthetic. Goya would certainly have been aware of the use of this aesthetic in previous
art, and since the elements of the capricho (“whim, fantasy, chimera”) were present in the
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graphic representation of Gracián’s narration of Madrid’s Plaza Mayor as a similar image
to that of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Due to the fact that Gracián is citing
Bosch, who produced paintings within the framework of the grotesque aesthetic that we
have observed in the novel, I believe that Gracián is the first author to demonstrate a
working knowledge of the combination of the human, animal and vegetative spheres in
art. He is the first author of those that I have analyzed in this study to use hybrid figures
that are consciously influenced by artistic antecedents in his narrative to serve his critical
and, at the same time moralistic, purposes. Certainly, the authors of the courtly novel
echo the grotesque techniques of the picaresque, and these devices reappear in Vélez de
Guevara’s novel, but Gracián is the first author to cite his source – the paintings of Bosch
– for his grotesque framework in his own work. This framework, in my opinion, consists
of using the monstrous grotesque to construct a social discourse on the moral ills of
Madrid. As I have previously argued, zoomorphic images in the picaresque novel are
utilized to describe the personality of a character, and the courtly novel utilizes later
utilizes this device to describe the physical elements of the city Madrid. Perhaps Gracián
is creating a highly stylized grotesque device – his own use of the monstrous grotesque –
in the same way, but instead of describing a single subject, the author could be using this
device to describe the morality, or lack thereof, of Madrid’s society. This hypothesis is
supported by Ilie’s chapter, in which he dubs Gracián’s grotesque aesthetic the moral
grotesque, which “upholds the moralistic idealism of the Golden Age while rejecting
many of the aesthetic ideals of that age” (25). Jorge Checa also argues that Gracián used
ornamentalism of the very earliest examples of grotesque art and architecture, it is likely
that he would have been familiar with these antecedents.
200
monstrous imagery intended to show a moral void in Madrid (“el desorden moral
contemporáneo”) in his article, “Figuraciones de lo monstruoso: Quevedo y Gracián”
(196). Quirón constantly points out that the monsters that the protagonists see in Madrid
are acting illogically, such as the inverted figures who prefer to drag their heads through
rubbish than to walk on their feet. When they see a group of characters who are allowing
a blind man to guide them through the streets, they cannot contain their shock. But
Quirón explains that this is common in Madrid: “y ésta no es la octava maravilla, el
octavo monstruo sí, que el primer passo de la ignorancia es presumir saber, y muchos
sabrían si no pensassen que saben” (139). Quirón is criticizing the characters for not
thinking independently, for assuming that they know everything. This leads to ignorance,
not knowledge, according to Quirón. Perhaps Gracián is attempting to help his
contemporaries understand their own ignorance and cease their abnormal behaviors. This
hypothesis could be a possible consequence of Gracián’s moralistic intentionality.
However, he does this with such stylization that the reader must truly analyze his
narrative in order to discover the message. Gracián removes the characters so far from
reality by making them monsters rather than humans, that it allows him to portray them
as completely abnormal and ridiculous. In this way, he is not directly attacking Madrid’s
society. Yet if one reads deeper into Gracián’s monstrous allegory of Madrid, he is able
to connect to the author’s moralistic purposes, rather than simply seeing a monster-filled
mass of individuals.
In fact, Andrenio and Critilo encounter so many monsters throughout their
journey through Madrid that, despite their efforts and Quirón’s assistance, they cannot
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find a single human being. Madrid is filled with monsters, innumerable distortions of
Madrid’s society. Ilie states that this is a consequence of Gracián’s aesthetic: “his formal
expression depends upon allegories that break away from Classical restraint and
proliferate their animal motifs until the entire structure becomes swollen and deformed”
(25). Indeed, Gracián deforms not only Madrid’s society, but also the harmony of Nature.
Ilie agrees that Gracián’s style is often “anti-natural, so to speak, conceived in opposition
to the natural workings of the universe,” which he seems to show in the narrator’s first
description of the world (25). He says that the term mundo means clean and pure, like a
palace where reason and good will reign (Gracián 127). He compares the world to a home
created by God that is perfect in its conception: “De suerte que mundo no es otra cosa
que una casa hecha y derecha por el mismo Dios y para el hombre, ni hay otro modo
cómo poder declarar su perfección” (127). However, the reality of the world is not as
perfect as the palace that he describes: “pero cuán al contrario sea esto y cuál le haya
parado el mismo hombre, cuánto desmienta el hecho al dicho” (127). The world is
completely upside down in Gracián’s narrative and contradicts the harmony and good
will with which it was created. The numerous references to the confusing agglomeration
of monsters suggests that, not only is Madrid filled with monsters and beasts, but that
Madrid itself has become a monstrous city. The world is “confusión y fiereza,
espectáculo verdaderamente fatal y lastimero,” or a sordid and beastly space (117).
Madrid is even more so, shown in the many ridiculous and monstrous figures that the
protagonists encounter there. Ilie remarks that Gracián’s grotesque figures are hybrids:
“more often they are mongrel, or else they sprawl unrecognizably, with their individual
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parts identifiable but their general appearance remaining beyond recognition” (37). All of
the monsters in Gracián’s vision of Madrid are recognizable. Quirón is clearly a centaur,
and the inverted figures’ heads and legs are easily distinguished from one another.
However, if we step back and consider the entire image of Madrid that is presented in the
fifth and eleventh crisis, Madrid becomes an unrecognizable agglomeration of monsters
and beasts where man no longer has a place. In this sense, the city itself becomes
monstrous.
The narrator and characters of El Criticón also present Madrid as a confusing
whirlwind of which they cannot make sense. When they see the inverted figures walking
on their heads, Quirón cries that everything is broken and out of order: “No hallaréis cosa
con cosa. Y un mundo que no tiene pies ni cabeça, de merced se le da el descabeçado”
(133). The phrase no hallar cosa con cosa communicates that everything is chaotic and
haphazard, while descabezado implies that everything is upside down. Quirón is
lamenting the lack of order and harmony that he observes in Madrid. This topic was seen
in the picaresque, as Guzmán de Alfarache makes a statement during his first trip to
Madrid that is so similar to Gracián’s narrative, it seems as if Guzmán’s words came
from the pages of El Criticón:
Todo anda revuelto, todo apriesa, todo marañado. No hallarás hombre con
hombre; todos vivimos en asechanza los unos de los otros, como el gato
para el ratón o la araña para la culebra, que hallándola descuidada se deja
colgar de un hilo y, asiéndola de la cerviz, la aprieta fuertemente, no
apartándose de ella hasta que con su ponzoña la mata. (1: 298)
203
It appears that Gracián echoes Mateo Alemán’s observation of Madrid, particularly in the
repetition of the expression no hallar hombre con hombre, a deviation of the phrase
quoted above. Gracián repeats this sentiment again in the words of El Cortesano, who is
discussing the suggestions offered by the courtier’s guidebook El Galateo Cortesano. He
concludes his ideas on when one should remove his hat by saying “A esta traça, os
aseguro que no hay regla con regla” (240, emphasis added). These statements all convey
the same idea: Madrid itself is upside down. The court city is inverted, distorted and
filled with beasts. Alemán hinted at this idea in the passage above, but it is Gracián who
brings it to fruition by showing a city filled with beasts and monsters, bearing no
resemblance to the inhabitants of Madrid in appearance, but who behave so similarly that
the novel must have left madrileños shocked and uneasy.
In my analysis, I hope to have shown that Gracián has completed the sordid vision
of Madrid set out in the picaresque novels. Guzmán hinted at this side of the court, but
mostly he praised its anonymity and possibilities for personal gain, which he briefly
achieved through marriage. The image of an ambiguous Madrid continued in the courtly
novel, where the city was seen simultaneously as a land of opportunity for immigrants
and as a space where danger lurked around every corner for the naïve visitor. Vélez de
Guevara showed how ridiculous characters and their immoral behaviors were in every
nook and cranny in Madrid, using false appearances in order to maintain a reputation
demanded by the challenges presented by a failing economy and strict social order. But it
is Gracián who completes this journey through seventeenth-century Madrid. He develops
a grotesque aesthetic that, while echoing the grotseque devices observed in the five other
204
novels included in this study, ultimately prizes the distortion of the “natural order of
things.” While he uses the same grotesque devices that we observed in the picaresque and
courtly novels, as well as in El diablo cojuelo, he exaggerates them to such lengths that
they become the bulk of his narrative of Madrid. In El Criticón, Madrid is no longer
populated with individuals who practice abnormal or grotesque behaviors, nor is it
peppered with ridiculous characters that spur laughter and pity simultaneously in the
reader. The city itself is a monster, filled with beasts that are only just recognizable in
isolation but, when seen from a distance, become an agglomeration of distorted
individuals.
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Conclusion
After Critilo and Andrenio listen to El Cortesano’s discourse on proper etiquette
of a courtly society in El Criticón, Critilo leaves the bookshop where they have been
talking and attempts to pawn some precious stones that he brought with him to Madrid:
Sacólas a luz, mostrólas, y al mismo punto obraron maravillosos efectos,
porque començaron a ganar amigos: todos se les hazían parientes y aun
había quien dezía eran de la mejor sangre de España, galanes, entendidos y
discretos. Fue tal el ruido que hizo un diamante que se les cayó en un
empeño de algunos centenares, que se oyó por todo Madrid, con que los
embistieron enjambres de amigos, de conocidos y de parientes, más
primos que un rey, más sobrinos que un papa. 245
The mere act of taking these stones out of his pocket appears to have magical effects.
Critilo arrives in Madrid without knowing anyone, but as soon as he shows the stones to
someone who appraises them, he is practically overwhelmed by new “friends” and
individuals who even claim to be family. This single show of material wealth brings with
it the suspicion that Critilo is from noble blood (“de la mejor sangre de España”) and that
he is an admirable courtier. His conversation with the stones’ appraiser resounds all over
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Madrid, bringing out of every nook and cranny new acquaintances who claim to be
cousins of royalty and nieces and nephews of the pope and who want to befriend Critilo.
The exaggeration that characterizes Gracián’s novel is evident until the very end
of Andrenio and Critilo’s stay in Madrid, and in this passage, Gracián uses this device to
intimate the influence of several precious stones over an entire society. No longer does a
large display of material wealth entice a pícaro to attempt to arrange a marriage with an
unknown woman, as it did in Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón. Here, several small
but valuable jewels cause the entire city to salivate, in a manner of speaking, and to
attempt to impress their owner, claiming connections to powerful royal and religious
figures. It appears that Gracián’s passage shows a Madrid that is so economically
challenged that Critilo’s precious stones attract all of society, as if they were the only
material resource in the city. And in fact, they are the only things of value shown during
his journey to Madrid. This is a far cry from the costly silks of the Puerta de Guadalajara
that characters admired in the picaresque and courtly novels. Rather, these individuals are
so enthralled with material resources that they invent a false pedigree in order to get
closer to the owners of the goods. In this passage, it seems that the entire population of
Madrid is “hungry” for any semblance of wealth that they can get their hands on.
Something is amiss in the society of Gracián’s narrative.
In the Introduction to this study, I stated that Philip II undertook quite a challenge
in his attempt to convert a humble town into Villa y Corte, the heart of the Spanish
empire, after declaring Madrid capital in 1561. One hundred years after Philip II’s
decision, Gracián writes a critique of Madrid – including the passage above – that makes
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the reader question whether or not the court city has earned its victorious byword “Sólo
Madrid es Corte” (“Only Madrid is the Court”). Certainly, this victorious statement
appears ironic, at least, and farcical, at worst, in light of Gracián’s observations. The
passage above does not represent a healthy court society, but rather a struggling, greedy
group of individuals that prize material goods and false appearances above all else. I
stated in the Introduction that one of the problems Golden Age scholars face is
uncovering the social narrative from the pages of the novels of authors who write about
the socio-historical changes that Madrid underwent in the seventeenth century.
Throughout this dissertation, I have undertaken this challenge and shown that the
grotesque mode is one of the ways in which authors respond to the changes that they
witnessed first hand as inhabitants of Madrid.
This dissertation has shown an evolution of the grotesque mode within novels
written about seventeenth-century Madrid that reflect the authors’ perspectives on
historical changes of the court city during this period. In what I have termed the
grotesque picaresque – the starting point for this study – , we see an increasing
connection between the use of grotesque devices and urban centers, particularly in
Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón. In a way, the use of the grotesque mode ties
together the pícaro’s journey around major cities in Spain and Italy, and I have
demonstrated that grotesque devices appear throughout narratives of these cities. During
the protagonists’ time in Madrid, their narratives include a multitude of grotesque
devices. While on the surface, the picaresque characters seem to admire the growth and
expansion of Madrid as court city, the use of the grotesque mode suggests that perhaps
208
the city is not, in reality, as grandiose as it appears upon first glance. Attracted to the
opportunities offered by the growing court city, the pícaros seem to fill the shadows of
expanding Madrid with questionable behaviors. However, the focus of the narrative is not
on the city of Madrid, but rather on the behaviors of the pícaros when they arrive there,
all of which are abnormal and immoral. Only the nobility and aristocracy seem to escape
the clutches of the grotesque narrative that flourishes in the picaresque novel.
In the courtly novel, however, the image of Madrid changes. No longer is it a
backdrop for the pícaros’ journeys; the court city becomes a magnet for immigrants from
all backgrounds and social groups. The expansion of Madrid presented in the picaresque
novel offers a land of opportunity for immigrants who are willing to travel to the court
city, but it also provides anonymity that makes the court a dangerous place for those who
lack the knowledge of how to navigate her streets. At times, it seems that the city has a
life force of its own, determining the success or failure of the characters. The grotesque
mode of the courtly novel shows the same devices that are presented in the grotesque
picaresque, yet the authors of Guía y avisos and Las harpías en Madrid modify these
devices to create their own unique narrative that presents the growing sordid side of
immigrant stories in Madrid.
I have demonstrated that this sordid aspect takes over the entire narrative of El
diablo cojuelo and El Criticón. In a historical moment when survival in Madrid was
complicated by illness, shortage of basic supplies and lack of infrastructure to support the
population, all created or exacerbated by mass immigration, a novel emerges that brings
the bizarre behaviors hinted at in the picaresque and courtly novels into the narrative
209
foreground. Madrid has become a confusing urban center where individuals must resort
to false representations of themselves in order to survive, like in the passage cited above
about the effect of Critilo’s precious jewels on the individuals in El Criticón. Although
these false appearances formed part of the picaresque and courtly novels, they are
practiced so shamelessly in public that it seems that Madrid’s society – perhaps both in
the novels and in the real city – has accepted lies and deceit as a part of everyday life. In
this way, Madrid becomes a city of monsters, stylized in the grotesque aesthetic of
Gracián as hybrid human-beasts that live in a “mundo al revés,” a world so out of control
that it has literally turned upside down and lost all sense of logic and normalcy.
Throughout my analysis of the novels presented in this study, I hope to have
shown that the use of the grotesque mode is a continuous and evolving phenomenon
rather than a literary oddity in various Golden Age Spanish novels written about Madrid.
I submit that they represent an important piece of the cultural history of Madrid because
of the connection between the authors and the developing court city. For this reason, I
believe that the results of my research will be useful not only to literary scholars, but also
to others interested in historical and cultural studies of seventeenth-century Madrid, as
well as those scholars interested in urban development within narrative. The final goal of
my dissertation is to propose that the questions that concern me in these narratives do not
simply resolve themselves with the publication of Gracián’s El Criticón. Instead, the use
of grotesque devices in literature continues well beyond the Golden Age. Indeed, one
cannot help but feel the echoes of Gracián’s grotesque aesthetic in Diego de Torres
Villarroel’s eighteenth-century novel Visiones y visitas de Torres con don Francisco de
210
Quevedo por Madrid (1727-1751). While I do not intend to argue a genetic link between
the work of Gracián and Torres Villarroel, I assert that the novels that I have analyzed in
this dissertation establish a shared set of grotesque images of the city created during a
time of important historical change. These images did not simply fade away, but rather I
believe that the ethos of these images influenced later Spanish authors. I believe we can
still see Gracián’s monstrous city alive in today’s Spanish novel. Although the
individuals of today’s Madrid, as described by Fernando Benzo Sáinz in his recent novel
Los náufragos de la Plaza Mayor (2012), are “animalillos perfectamente amaestrados”
(perfectly-trained little animals), they nonetheless call to mind the human-animal hybrid
creatures that amazed Critilo and Andrenio as they gazed upon the Plaza Mayor threeand-a-half centuries earlier.
211
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