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The Death of Lazarillo de Tormes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Stephen Gilman
Stephen Gilman*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
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Extract

In Contrast to the apologetic and ambiguous prologue of the Libro de buen amor, that preceding the Lazarillo de Tormes shocks us with its forthright arrogance: “Yo por bien tengo que cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas vengan a noticia de muchos y no se entierren en la sepultura del olvido.” The evasive ego of Juan Ruiz—an ego which, as Alfonso Reyes notes, is comic by mediaeval definition and slips with childish glee into one role after another—has been replaced by an explosion of self: “Yo por bien tengo …” The “soy quien soy” of the hero-braggarts of the “comedia” seems to have been combined with the autobiographical complacency of an Alonso de Contreras or a Pedro de Baeza. The result is that the reader, as soon as he becomes aware of the insignificance of the events so pompously announced, tends to read the prologue as a parody. If Lazarillo is an anti-hero, the prologue is appropriately an anti-prologue. The oral bombast of “cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas” sounds almost as if it were designed to hawk the “pliegos sueltos” of a “romance.” Prologues are by definition self-conscious, but in this one self-consciousness is driven to self-caricature.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , June 1966 , pp. 149 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 All citations are from the “Clásicos castellanos” edition (1941). Accents have been added. Curtius notes the topical nature of this beginning (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, New York, 1953, p. 86), but none of the examples cited have to do with the writer's own life. Nor are they as brazen in wording.

2 I have reproduced the text without paragraphing just as it appeared in the 16th-century editions. Cejador's artificial division tends to eliminate some of the purposeful awkwardness of the prologue.

3 “La disposición temporal del Lazarillo de Tormes,” HR, xxv (1957), 2644–279.

4 Juan del Encina (Berkeley, Calif., 1959).

5 Études sur l'Espagne, première série (Paris 1895), p. 112, cited by Marcel Bataillon, El sentido de Lazarillo de Tormes (Paris, 1954).

6 Thus Pármeno observes to Calisto that Celestina “se glorifica” in being called a “puta vieja,” “corno tú, quando dizen: ¡diestro cauallero es Calisto!” (Act i, pp. 67–68, Clásicos Castellanos, 1945).

7 Bacia Cervantes (Madrid, 1960), p. 137.

8 Castro comments on this phrase as follows: “Del ánimo de los hispano-hebreos brotó, por vez primera, la expresión del sentimiento de la negra honra y la violenta crítica social, fundidas en la eterna figura del Escudero del Lazarillo” (La realidad histórica de España, México, 1954, p. 531). The same phrase emerges naturally from the pen of the professional physician and “chocarrero,” Franciso de Villalobos: “¿Qué trabajos son los de la honra y ambición, que un punto de sosiego no dejan a su dueño? Si no, véase por los que andan en bandos sobre esta negra honra, que por sostenerla la derriban mil veces con mil traiciones y fealdades hechas en servicio de la honra” (“Canción de Villalobos con su glosa,” Curiosidades bibliográficas, BAE, Madrid, 1871, p. 456). As a self-conscious and resentful “converso,” Villalobos shared in the sardonic irony and alienation from social values (the concept of alienation is related to the picaresque tradition by Guillén, “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” Proceedings of the Third Congress of the ICLA, The Hague, 1962, pp. 252–266) of the authors of La Celestina and the Lazarillo. See also my “Case of Alvaro de Montalbán,” MLN, lxxviii (1963), pp. 113–125.

9 Unlike that least ironic of novels, Robinson Crusoe (presented and accepted as a true autobiography) the reader of the Lazarillo is supposed to be fully aware of the documentary pretense. To believe, as some readers have believed, that Lazarillo really wrote the story of his own life is to miss the point entirely, to overlook the author's intentional inversion of “la visión estimativa de los valores” (Castro, Eacia Cervantes, p. 138).

10 For example, that of John Middleton Murry, “the condemnation of society by reference to an ideal.” In The Problem of Style (London, 1922) Murry goes on to point out that if the writer of comedy chastises deviation from a social norm, the satirist makes more radical demands. Such a distinction may help to classify a Quevedo, but Rojas and the author of the Lazarillo, proposing neither social norm nor ideal, elude this venture at definition.

11 Burlesqued peasant genealogies were almost a commonplace in the satirical war against the presumption of “cristianos viejos,” and abound in the theatre of Torres Naharro, Juan del Encina, and Lucas Fernández. (See my article forthcoming in the NRFH on “Converso Portraiture in the Comedia Jacinta.”) J. Silverman, in his review of Bataillon's introduction to a French translation (Paris, 1958), agrees with this point when he speaks of “the genealogical satire of the Lazarillo” (RPh, xiv, 1961, 91). In any case, if there is some element of aggressive “converso” irony in the description of Lazarillo's lineage (Maritornes, who shared both his mother's professions, was maliciously described by Cervantes as an Asturian “hidalga”), its expression differs radically from the gross satire of the stage.

12 Hacia Cervantes, p. 138.

13 Mockery of pretentious nomenclature was not confined to foreigners. There are many instances in the “comedia” and the novel of the Golden Age. In the Tía fingida, for example, the reader, the author, and the mocking students all enjoy the protagonist's name, “Señora Doña Esperanza de Torralba, Meneses y Pacheco,” repeated in full at appropriate moments throughout the narrative.

14 In “La disposición temporal.”

15 El sentido, pp. 5–6.

16 “Cuatro notas sobre el Lazarillo,” RFE, xlii (1960), 111.

17 Cited by Bataillon, El sentido, p. 14.

18 See Guillén, “Toward a Definition.” Lazarillo as a “pícaro” is original in that his estrangement is psychological rather than social, less from society (which he finally succeeds in joining) than from his previous self. In Lukacs' terms, having been cast out from classical participation in the universe into a situation in which the ego and the world are separated by “unüberbrückbare Abgründe,” “we” (as possible “heroes” of a novel) are also separated from ourselves: “darum musste unser Wesen für uns zum Postulat werden und zwischen uns und uns selbst einen noch tieferen und gefahrdrohenderen Abgrund legen.” Die Theorie des Romans (Berlin: Spandau, 1963), p. 27.

19 Guillén was the first to point out that since the powerful personage to whom the book is directed was a friend of the Archpriest of San Salvador, he was probably aware of the shame of Lázaro's present existence—thus redoubling the irony of the prologue's end (“La disposición temporal,” p. 269).

20 The Latin “casus,” meaning primarily “fall,” “chance,” or “accident,” took on moral connotations when applied to human life in such works as Boccaccio's De casibus. That is to say, it indicated punishment by fortune. The concept is thus doubly reversed in the Lazarillo. In his own mind, he rises and is rewarded for virtue, in the reader's, he falls (in the act of rising) and is punished (with dishonor). The first reversal—that is to say, nobility and good fortune as the reward of virtue—is itself a commonplace of Stoic morality and is repeated with equal irony by Sempronio in Act ii of La Celestina, and by Areusa in Act ix.

21 “La disposición temporal,” p. 270, n. 14. F. Courtney Tarr notices the similarity between the fates of mother and wife but does not relate it to the proverb—“Literary and Artistic Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes,” PMLA, xlii (1927), 419. Bruce W. Wardropper, who in his “El trastorno de la moral en el Lazarillo” (NRFH, xv, 1961) fails to cite either Guillén's or Castro's comment on the inversion of “la visión estimativa de los valores,” notices the approximation but interprets the whole almost as a naturalistic novel: “el libro es un ensayo por investigar las consecuencias sociales y personales de una moral pervertida” (p. 444), and again “La novela nos enseña la corruptión moral de un muchacho fundamentalmente bueno” (p. 447). Structural irony is necessarily overlooked by this view.

22 Pedro Serrano of the Puebla de Montalbán was accused of having consoled “reconciliados” in this fashion, and there are a number of other instances which will be cited in my work on Rojas' biography.

23 In this case the irony may be of a slightly different nature since “la justicia” has acted with at least external justice. Lazarillo's mother has received stolen goods and must have been aware of their origin. A deeper question is, of course, implicitly present: why should a horse have “mantas y sáuanas” when people have to do without?

24 In The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, La., 1941), Kenneth Burke analyzes at length the purgative function of the act of creation. In writing the author does not merely project his life into the character in such a way that the one directly reflects the other; rather he unloads his “burdens” upon him, burdens which reappear in ever new guises and circumstances.

25 Precisely for this reason the Lazarillo takes such a long step forward generically speaking. In La Celestina, only in Pármeno's and Celestina's reminiscences of the past does the world afford the density of immediate experience expected by the reader of a novel. During passages of dialogue the speakers are much too intent upon their words and upon each other to pay much attention to their circumstances. The city is nameless, vague, and seemingly empty. The Lazarillo, on the other hand, being a total act of memory, can and does relate the rememberer to a world remembered. That is to say, until the end of the third tratado, it is built as a crescendo of ever more intense and more meaningful experience. Lukacs makes this same point about the novel in general. Only in this genre, he points out, can “creative memory” hold object and subject together in one meaningful relationship. The estrangement of the world and the self merges in remembered duration—in such a way that the reader can convert a story into lived and shared experience (Die Theorie, p. 131). In spite of their close relationship we should not identify autobiography with confessions and interpret Lazarillo only as an anti-Saint Augustine (as does H. R. Jauss, Ursprung und Bedeutung der Ich-Form im “Lazarillo,” Jahr, 1957). Confessional writing tends necessarily towards an analysis of personal motivation; genuine or fictional autobiography, towards re-creation of experience. Francisco Márquez points out suggestively (in a review of Bataillon's introduction to La Vie, RFE, xlii, 1958–59) that “La técnica autobiográfica es el gran descubrimiento de la quinta década del siglo (Abencerraje, Viaje de Turquia, etc.) y constituye de por sí una fuente de realismo” (p. 288). Which is to say that although the book has (here Guillén is in accord with Jauss) an element of sardonic confession, its development of the art of fictional autobiography as a way of conveying experience is what still entrances us today.

26 Introduction to Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait d'un inconnu (Paris, 1956), p. 9.

27 Perhaps the one aspect of Rojas' art about which recent critics are in agreement is his treatment of commonplaces with an irony as sharp and intentional as that of a Stendhal or a Galdós. But mere observation of this trait is insufficient; it is also necessary to try to comprehend (as an historical possibility) the relationship thereby suggested between the writer and his society. A tentative essay in this direction may be found in my “The Case of Alvaro de Montalbán” (see n. 8 above) where, following lines of investigation indicated by Américo Castro, Rojas is presented as a “converso” outsider, a 16th-century “marginal man,” ironically estranged from the society in which he dwells. These notions find support in Guillén's view of the picaresque novel as a genre of “ambiguous estrangement from society, reality, or established values” (“Towards a Definition,” p. 262) and in Lukacs' definition of the novel (as against the epic or the romance) as a genre of exile. There is a coincidence of art and attitude between Rojas and our anonymous author in precisely this connection which, to my mind, makes Castro's belief that the latter was also a “converso” almost self-evident.

28 As Guillén points out, in the context of the Lazarillo the word “confesar” has judicial and social as well as personal connotations (those “reconciled” by the Holy Office were frequently called “confesos”): “El referir o explicar su vida por obediencia adquiere especial intensidad en el mundo que retrata el Lazarillo. Respiramos la atmósfera rarificada de una sociedad basada en el engaño, la sospecha, la persecución, el temor al qué dirán, la calumnia … los personajes de esta novela están forzados no pocas veces a ‘dar cuenta de sí mismos’ ” (“La disposición,” pp. 269–270). Although “converso” existence is never mentioned directly, these acute remarks indicate the extent to which what Burke would call the “burden” of that experience may have been transferred to the narrative.

29 So, too, she tells the blind man that Lazarillo “era hijo de vn buen hombre, el qual por ensalçar la fe auía muerto en la de los Gelves y que ella confiaua en Dios no saldría peor hombre que mi padre …” (pp. 75–76). From the narrator's point of view the equation of the two food pilferers, Lazarillo and his father, is ironic; yet at the same time, as in her parting speech, we sense the mother's candid sincerity. This, it may be further surmised, indicates a possibility of ironical significance to her naive mention of upholding the faith at the battle of Gelves. Although this reference has usually been used as an indication of the date of composition, we should not forget that in a time of staggering success at arms, Gelves was not only a disastrous defeat for the Christian cause but also a needless one provoked by the irrational military hubris of don Garcia de Toledo. Rather than merely reflecting the date of writing, is it not possible that the author sought out for special ironic mention the one occasion when official heroism had failed? The battle of Gelves could be interpreted as a kind of “squire” or “señor don fulano” among battles, a battle of fruitless and meaningless heroism. Castro indicates a possibility of the same ironical view of official glory in the mention of the Emperor's triumphant entry into Toledo, an entry which coincides with Lázaro's illusory “cumbre de toda buena fortuna” (Hacia Cervantes, pp. 140–141).

30 Again the irony is multiple. The bystanders mean simply that God will reward the blind man. Then, in view of the cruelty of the beating, the reader is tempted to think of the terms of Vossler's “zeugma” and to conclude that the “Io” refers to the concept of “castigo” in the verb and that the meaning is that God will punish him. But finally, after all is over, we begin to wonder whether—since He has created such a world—God may not reward the blind man after all.

31 Sartre makes the point that today commonplaces seem to represent an inner escape from the necessity of being oneself. Each man is solaced by the “présence de tout le monde” in his inner world, while the outer world “c'est le terrain neutre.” In the time of Alvaro de Montalbán, his son-in-law, Francisco de Villalobos, Francesillo de Zúñiga, and the author of the Lazarillo, on the other hand, the situation was reversed. One could dare to be oneself only to a certain extent because of the external aggression of commonplace thinking, particularly of that having to do with God and His beneficent providence or with honor, an imperative definition of the self imposed by society and against which even “comedia” heroes sometimes felt like revolting. To put it simply, commonplaces in newspapers, on television, and in advertisements, and commonplaces repeated by village tongues are two different orders of verbal reality.

32 In La Celestina the nameless city fills with society, events, and artifacts only when remembered. During the rest of the time the intensely present dialogue eliminates everything that is non-essential to the situation of the speakers. But the Lazarillo, being all memory, confirms Lukacs' intuition (see n. 25) that the novel, as a genre of experience, depends first of all on memory for its joining of inner and outer worlds.

33 To emphasize—more than the narration itself—Lazarillo's corrupted innocence is misleading. As a child he bears little relation to Oliver Twist, since his century gave no special rating to what he had to lose. In spite of what F. Garin calls “l'amorosa scoperta dell'infanzia e della vocazione educativa che caratterizza tutti i grandi maestri del 400” (Il pensiero pedagogico dell' Umanesimo, Firenze, 1958, p. xiv), in general, medieval failure to see in children anything more than inferior grown-ups continues into the picaresque novel.

34 “Converso” skepticism and agnosticism seem in many cases to have resulted from a reaction against the intolerable aggressiveness of religious belief of both Jews and Christians, and only in a few cases—Spinoza being the best known one—did an individual come to view his failure to believe in a positive fashion. See my “The Case,” cited in n. 8. It is typical that the author of the Lazarillo should attack a God believed in by others rather than in Himself. Although Bataillon is authorized to absolve the tale from Erasmism, in this aspect of its theme there is comparable irony.

35 Hacia Cervantes, p. 26.

36 Manuel J. Asensio, in “La intención religiosa del Lazarillo de Tormes y Juan de Valdés” (HR, xxvii, 1959), studies this phenomenon and concludes: “Junto al efecto cómico que con todo esto se busca, hay algo mas serio; se apunta a quienes, si no de forma tan elemental, pretenden, imploran y rinden culto al verdadero Dios en concepciones religiosas próximas a la de Lazarillo” (p. 88). As indicated above, the existence of a satirical and therefore didactic intent in the Lazarillo seems questionable to me. As Northrop Frye phrases it, “The ironist fables without moralizing, and has no object but his subject” (The Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1957, p. 41). Like Rojas, the author of the Lazarillo offers no hope for reform or examples of virtue (aside from the spontaneous charity of Lazarillo and Azorín's “mugercillas hilanderas”). And it is well that they do not, for in both cases the profundity of their creations depends on the disinterestedness of their irony. Asensio goes on to attribute the lack of mention of Christ and the Virgin to doctrinal motives (citing a contemporary accusation against the “dejados”). This overlooks their equal absence in the dialogue of La Celestina, a coincidence which reinforces Castro's view of “converso” authorship. See also my “The Case,” p. 125.

37 Lazarillo had previously remarked to himself that the only way that he could possibly find a “buen amo” would be for God to create one for him specially: “Y adonde se hallará esse … si Dios agora de nuevo, como crió el mundo, no lo criasse?” It is a statement which underlines for the reader the notion of divine responsibility. For the “converso” implications of this phrase see Hacia Cervantes, pp. 21–23.

38 The “calderero” is “embiado por la mano de Dios,” and the idea of asking him for a key occurs to Lazarillo because he has been “alumbrado por el Spíritu Sancto” (p. 123).

39 “Das mystische Vokabulär rückt den Schelmenstreich in den Aspekt eines Gnadenerwieses und lässt Gott gleichsam als Komplizen des Schelmen erscheinen” (Ursprung, p. 299). Jauss's work (as indicated in n. 25), in spite of its intelligent and scrupulous literary analysis, suffers from its unbending effort to categorize the Lazarillo generically as a “Travestie der christlichen Lebensbeichte” (p. 310). That it is unconvincing to try to emprison such a complex work within one formula is attested to by Jauss's two critics, Margot Kruse (“Die parodistischen Elemente im Lazarillo,” RJahr, ix, 1959, pp. 292–305) and Peter Baumanns (Der Lazarillo de Tormes, eine Travestie der Augustinischen Confessiones?“ RJahr, ix, 1959, pp. 285–292). Both arrive at conclusions which resemble mine: ”Es handelt sich vielmehr um Parodie im weitesten Sinne des Wortes, um eine ironische Verwendung althergebrachte Begriffe und Vorstellungen“ (Kruse, p. 301); ”Wenn aber auf diese Weise ein eindeutiger Standpunkt umgangen wird, dann steht letzten Endes nicht recht eigentlich das Virtud-Ideal im Mittelpunkt des Lazarillo, sondern eine Ironisierung des ganzen Problemkomplexes von Fortuna, Virtud, Dios und demonio. Und könnte es nicht sein, dass der anonyme Verfasser, wohl kein Freund tiefsinniger Spekulationen, sondern eher ein gelassenspöttischer Skeptiker … wäre?“ (Baumanns, p. 291).

40 Lázaro, Don Juan, y Segismundo (Madrid, 1959), p. 23.

41 Robert Alter, in his Rogue's Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), discusses the “hardness” of picaresque experience, relating it to “a period of disintegration, both social disintegration and the disintegration of belief” (p. 84). His notion is not necessarily opposed to what I conceive to be the negative reaction of the author of the Lazarillo and others of his kind against the self-conscious affirmation of both.

42 It is easy to see how (following the above sequence) the course of human events, “los buenos,” “La justicia que persigue,” and the “bodigos” and “limosnas” of the first two masters are all interrelated in terms of pious invocation. But we have to strain our historical imagination a little bit harder to realize that loyalty to the Emperor (willingness to fight his battles “por ensalçar la fé” and to participate in the “grandes regocijos” of his entry into town) and personal honor (maintenance of one's expected image in the eyes of a community of believers, the squire's conspicuous devotions being as important as his gait and clothes) belong to the same cluster of divinely ordained and socially proclaimed values.

43 “Lazarillo and the Pardoner: The Artistic Necessity of the Fifth Tractado,” HR, xxvii (1959), 270.

44 Castro has recently defined the novel in these terms: “la novela … no consiste en la expresión de lo que acontezca a la persona, sino de cómo ésta se encuentre existiendo en lo que acontece” (De la edad conflictiva, Madrid, 1963, p. 223).

45 “Literary and Artistic Unity,” see n. 21.

46 Croce (Poesia antica e moderna, Bari, 1941) begins by saying “Per altro io non riesco a vedervi, né nel fatto né nell'intenzione, questa supposta satira sociale, ma unicamente vi vedo regnare l'assillante e tormentosa rappresentazione e ossessione della fame” (p. 223), but adds: “Lazarillo si solleva di tratto in tratto a osservare e giudicare e sentire in modo partecipe gli uomini con cui s'incontra in quella che è tutta la sua gran lotta per la vita” (p. 224). Guillén (in Toward a Definition, p. 259) states that in general “The total view of the pícaro is reflective, philosophical, critical on religious or moral grounds.” If, as a result, picaresque novels are very often satirical in intention, in the Lazarillo, as Croce's intuition led him to observe, the “pícaro” evaluates in terms of direct participation, not in society as a whole, but rather in the varieties of human existence lived by his masters.

47 “Ursprung und Bedeutung,” p. 303.

48 The reference is not only to Celestina, who combines an impressive simulation of prayer with the most sordid of calculations (ix, 24–25), but also to contemporary Inquisition records. Lack of skill at the art—as I try to illustrate in “The Case of Alvaro de Montalbán”—could frequently result in denunciation. The nature of prayer—the art or skill of praying as against sincere inner supplication and contemplation—was, of course, a key issue in the 16th century and after.

49 The irony is palpable. Lazarillo, as Castro notes, does not hear the Mass, but he does observe his new master, specially created for him by God, do so. The adverb “devotamente” can be interpreted as applying to either (or both) of them. That is, it is insinuated that the boy worships his master as a possessor of nourishment.

50 The same is, of course, true when Lazarillo prays for the priest to go blind with the marvellously laconic formula, described pompously as “secreta oración y deuociones y plegarias”: “Sant Juan y ciégale!” (pp. 125–126). The style of the second tratado at times is infected with the false piety of the environment of prayer in which the narrator is immersed: “Pues estando en tal aflición, qual piega al Señor librar della a todo fiel christiano” (pp. 122–123).

51 In this novel of exposure, shelter as well as food is constantly desired and commented on. Lazarillo and his first master shelter each other with their bodies (“entráuame entre las piemas del triste ciego,” p. 86); when caught with the sausage, Lazarillo wishes he were “sepultado”; in the rain the pair crouch under the “portales”; Lazarillo huddles against the wall when the funeral goes by; and so on.

52 He means the special Utopia of self-realization and self-knowledge, a situation of fulfillment which at the last overcomes the exposure of the hero to an alien world: “die äussere Form des Romans ist eine wesentlich biographische. Das Schweben zwischen einem Lebenskomplex, der niemals zur Ruhe seiner immanent-utopischen Vollendung zu gelangen vermag, kann sich nur in der erstrebten Organik der Biographie objektivieren” (Die Theorie, p. 74). But even though difficult or impossible fully to attain, this human situation can be defined: “nur ein Maximum an Annäherung, ein ganz tiefes und intensives Durchleuchtetsein des Menschen vom Sinn seines Lebens, ist erreichbar. Die formgeförderte Immanenz des Sinnes wird durch sein Erlebnis geleistet, dass dieses blosse Erblicken des Sinnes das Höchste ist, was das Leben zu geben hat, das einzige, was des Einsetzens von einem ganzen Leben würdig ist, das einzige, wofür sich dieser Kampf gelohnt hat” (p. 79). Thought about in these terms, the irony of Lázaro's negative “Utopia” (the simultaneous understanding and misjudgment of his whole life which characterizes the final summit of good fortune) becomes sardonically clear.

53 The association of life and death is commented upon by A. A. Sicroff (in his “Sobre el estilo del Lazarillo,” NRFH, xi, 1957, 163) as an example of the constant juxtaposition of opposites which characterizes the whole. The author plays with “the reality of things” (as a precursor of Cervantes) and ends by creating a “mundo equivoco.” These remarks are perceptive and illuminating, but they do not expose either the ambiguity of the name or the continual utilization in a multiplicity of forms of the presence of death in life. Only Góngora, in a curious sonnet cited by E. Carilla (“Cuatro notas,” p. 115), relates the name to the theme of resurrection.

54 The only discussion of the Lazarillo from this point of view of which I am aware is F. Maldonado de Guevara, “El niño y el viejo, desmitologización en el Lazarillo y en el Quijote,” Anales cervantinos, 1959–60, pp. 241–306. His vision of Lazarillo as representing “el mito infantil” of the “puer aeternus,” in the fundamental situation of “echazón en el lago de la existencia” and the novel as the genre of “irreverencia cuanto al tratamiento del mito, en la protesta ante el Epos antiguo y medieval” is so simple as to reduce his interpretation of the book to that of parody. On the other hand, he seems to go too far when he tries to relate the “culebra” of the second tratado to those killed by Hercules in his cradle. Perhaps more of a case could have been made for a parody of the Oedipus story in the first and last tratados. After all, the blind man is a prophet, and Lázaro, after being expelled into the world as a child and striking down his substitute father, does marry a woman who ironically resembles his mother. But ultimately Bataillon's insistence on folklore motifs should save the novel from such speculations. These patterns are too universal meaningfully to define anything more than the mere plot. As far as the intended meaning is concerned, I would maintain and hope to demonstrate here that in Alter's terms, “desmitologización” is really “desacramentalization” (see n. 59). That is to say, the aggression is primarily directed against the “myths” of the Lazarillo's own century, myths of providence and religious ceremony as well as those of heroism and honor.

55 Alter, in his Rogue's Progress, generalizes the observation: “As Lázaro learns about the world—for picaresque literature is very much a literature of learning, a literature of experience—he comes quickly to see in himself a creature that must be completely self-reliant if it is to get along in this world” (p. 3). One is also tempted to observe that Lazarillo's itinerary is not only geographical (in the tradition of the Poema, the Libro de buen amor, and the Don Quixote), but also that, in its movement away from Salamanca, it represents a journey away from education, in a sense a negative education. The tradition that the author, whether Fray Juan de Ortega or someone else, was, like Fernando de Rojas, a student at that University coincides with this notion. The “course” of humanistic (“per aspera ad astra”) and religious salvation at Salamanca creates by contrast an “anti-course” of physical salvation and spiritual perdition, that of Lazarillo's “carrera de vivir.”

56 Man's Place in Nature (New York, 1961), pp. 52–53.

57 This tactile or gustatory realism replaces the auditory realism of La Celestina, but is again relieved, as it is there, by a few moments of intense visual experience, intense because Lazarillo imagines touching or eating what he sees: the boiled sheep's head, the gnawed “bodigos,” or at one remove the slow movements of the squire opening the door to a house where Lazarillo hopes to be given a meal.

58 “The ‘Breadly Paradise’ of Lazarillo de Tormes,” Hispania, xliv (1961), p. 270.

59 Rogue's Progress, p. 5. Unfortunately Alter overlooks the stylistic and social ironies involved in the process: “When [Lazarillo] describes as divine inspiration his own divining of a plausible way to ask for a key, he is neither being ironic at his own expense nor making fun of revelation” (p. 7). I would maintain that, if not Lázaro, the author is doing both and—even worse—that he is being “ironic” at the expense of rather than “making fun” of “revelation.” Mircea Eliade, who discusses the whole notion of desacramentalization in The Sacred and the Profane (New York, 1961), might have interpreted the Lazarillo as a kind of initiation in reverse, a series of rebirths into non-sanctified existence. “For non-religious man [and Lazarillo was the first of us, whether he knew it or not] all vital experiences—whether sex or eating, work or play—have been desacralized. This means that all these physiological acts are deprived of spiritual significance, hence deprived of their truly human dimension” (p. 168). This quality of negative initiation (as well as negative education) is remarked on by Bataillon (El sentido, p. 15).

60 See Carmelo Samonà, Il retoricismo nella “Celestina” (Rome, 1953), pp. 208–209, as well as my “The Fall of Fortune; from Allegory to Fiction,” FR, xxx (1957), pp. 327–354.

61 Cejador, in a page note, and Norma L. Hutton (“Universality and Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes,” PMLA, 1961, lxxvi, 471) both remark on the parallelism, particularly the suggestive “comencelo de adorar, no osando recebillo,” but without developing the organic relation of the desacramentalization to the whole and without perceiving its full ironic gravity. Castro, on the other hand (Hacia Cervantes, pp. 26–29), interprets this and other similar phenomena (the commonplace treatment of God, the failure to mention Christ, etc.) as expressing the sardonic alienation of the “converso.” Piper (see n. 58) inclines towards the notion of an anonymous heretic, perhaps an “alumbrado,” concerned with portraying indirectly the hypocritical and relentless war of the Church against his kind through the conflict of the priest and his servant. However, his identification of the “arca” first as a symbol of the altar and then of the Church itself doesn't seem to me convincing. Demythification both in La Celestina and the Lazarillo is characterized by the specific concrete quality of its reduction. The ladder of fortune is a real ladder and the fall a real fall. It is not a process of inventing new symbols.

62 The phrase is repeated twice, presumably for greater emphasis (pp. 124 and 128), the second time being qualified specifically as a commonplace of childhood: “otra cosa no hazía en viéndome solo sino abrir y cerrar el arca y contemplar en aquella cara de Dios, que ansí dizen, los niños.” The fundamental irony is again based on the cynicism of the well-fed grownup remembering and subverting the language and sufferings of his childhood. Specifically it is implied that Lazarillo's childish faith in God (his belief that the parishioners were killed through the power of his prayers, for example) really amounted to the worship of food.

63 See my “Tres retratos de la muerte en las Copias de Jorge Manrique,” NRFH, xiii (1959), 317–319.

64 The Sacred, pp. 193–195.

65 It is nevertheless worth noting that this phrase should have been expanded upon at great length in the two continuations. In both, the hero (in the tradition of Apuleius) enters the body of a great fish and is at length restored to his original form. That is to say resurrected. Both authors seem to have sensed that a narrative so denuded of myth offered great possibilities for being “remythified.”

66 For a brilliant discussion of this kind of human portrayal as a literary innovation (“en estos cuadros literarios, nunca antes ejecutados en España, la imagen de la persona presenta dos caras o dimensiones”), see Castro, Hacia Cervantes, p. 33.

67 The myth of “limpieza” is mercilessly reduced when the squire asks Lazarillo if the bread which has been begged for him and which has been transported in the presumably filthy “arca de mi seno” (a reminder of the previous tratado) was kneaded by “manos limpias.” Again, when the priest presents Lazarillo with the gnawed portion of the bread, he remarks with his usual mellifluous hypocrisy, “Comete esso que ratón cosa limpia es” (p. 130). As for lineage, the comparison of the squire's figure to that of a “galgo de buena casta” speaks for itself.

68 The phrase is Bataillon's (El sentido, p. 23).

69 El sentido, p. 25.

70 Cejador, following the Burgos edition, gives “hablaua.” The more grammatical infinitive of Antwerp and Alcalá seems preferable.

71 As we have already seen in the case of “la negra que llaman honra,” the adjective “negro” is significantly ambiguous throughout the Lazarillo. Its range of meaning seems to run from miserable, poor, and wretched, through evil, to the color black with its implications of dirt. Played against it in this complex verbal structure are “bianco” and “bianca” (a small coin—see pp. 117–118), “luz” (“para hallar estos negros remedios … me era luz la hambre, p. 132), and ultimately ”limpieza.“

72 In addition to Guillén's indispensable analysis, see Willis, and Zamora Vicente, Qué es la novela picaresca (Buenos Aires, 1962), p. 33.

73 “Lazarillo and the Pardoner,” p. 272.

74 Ibid., p. 272.