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

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Corte suffered immensely during its growth towards a city worthy of housing the court of the Spanish empire.

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To Brenda Gilliam.

For everything, thank you.

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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.

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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

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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)

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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 sub- genres 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

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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 self- defense (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).

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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.

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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

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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.

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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, Castilla-

La 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 post- picaresque 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 first- person narrator does his task well, that is he meets the expectations of the reader, his

8 Iffland (2: 76-140). 9 Although the picaresque novels cannot be considered true autobiography, the study of autobiography has interesting ramifications for the picaresque novel due to the first- person narrative structure. For more information about the reader’s expectations of autobiography, see Smith and Watson (67-69; 77-80). 34 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 first- person 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 pseudo- autobiographical 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 pseudo- autobiographical 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 AHN, Consejos, Libro 1197, folio 67. 16 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 father- in-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.

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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

66 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. 3 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.” 67 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). 68 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

69 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.

70

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

72 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 first- person 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

74 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

75 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:

76

…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

77 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 “sub- form 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

78

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. 79

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,

80

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

81 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.” 82

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 non-

84 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 BNE, VE/37/55. 14 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, single- family 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 90 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. 91 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.

93

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 seventeenth- century 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. 94

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. 21 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 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 non- human 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. 26 “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 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. 99 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

100 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.

101

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)

102

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). 103 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

104 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

105 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

106 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. 108 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

109 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

110 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. 111

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. 4 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). 112 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). 113 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

114 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. 117

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). 119

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. 120 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 seventeenth- century 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 pseudo- autobiographical 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 pseudo- autobiographical 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

123 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 plague- ridden Florence and pass their time during the evening telling stories. A distant echo of

124

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 seventeenth- century 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). 125 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

126 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

128 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?”). 130 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 non-

131 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

132 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). 21 “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 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 Alemán (2: 445). 31 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

150 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

151 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

152 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

157

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 poorly- constructed 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 (257- 278). 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. 5 BNE, MSS/1092, ff. 65-67. 6 "economy." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. 7 Alemán (1: 336-340). 159 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 well- read 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

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‘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 (15- 19). 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). 164 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

167 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

169 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

170 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

171 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

172 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. 173 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). 174 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 175 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. 176 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

177 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 –.” 178 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. 179

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.

180

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). 181 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

182 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). 183

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). 184 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

185

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). 188 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). 189 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

190 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

191 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

or “poisonous ,שָׂרָף Seraph, or the plural seraphim, is a transliteration of the Hebrew 27 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 193 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 well- proportioned” (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. 197 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). 198 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 199 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

201 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

202 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)

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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

207 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

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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 three- and-a-half centuries earlier.

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