Play and the Picaresque : Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel and Match Ball [1 ed.] 9781442678521, 9780802047045

Citation preview

PLAY AND THE PICARESQUE Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel and Match Ball

This page intentionally left blank

PLAY AND THE PICARESQUE Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel, and Match Ball

Gordana Yovanovich

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press 1999 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-80204704-1

Printed on acid-free paper University of Toronto Romance Series

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Yovanovich, Gordana, 1956Play and the picaresque : Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel, and Match ball (University of Toronto romance series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4704-1 1. Picaresque literature, Spanish - History and criticism. 2. Lazarillo de Tormes. 3. Cortazar, Julio. Libro de Manuel. 4. Skarmeta, Antonio. Match ball. I. Title. II. Series. PQ6147.P5Y69 1999

863.009

099-931321-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Canada'

As long as you catch what you yourself threw into the air all is mere skill and petty gain; only when you unexpectedly become the catcher of the ball that the Goddess, your eternal playmate, threw toward you, toward the centre of your being in a precisely calculated curve, in one of those arcs reminiscent of God building bridges: only then is being able to catch the ball an ability to be cherished not yours, but a world's. RAINER MARIA RILKE

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

PREFACE

IX

Introduction

3

1 Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order 2 Picaresque Realism and Magical Realism 33 3 Play in Lazarillo de Tormes 50 4 Manual for Manuel: How to Become a Picaro 68 5 Picaresque Love Games in Match Ball 97 Conclusion NOTES

121

129

WORKS CITED INDEX

149

141

15

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

I first noticed how play functions as a means of survival while watching scenes from the early days of the Yugoslavian civil war. Then, during visits to Latin America, it seemed obvious to me that play and coquetry are as much a source of empowerment for women in Latin America as protest and legislation are in North America. Research on the theory of play and reading Hispanic novels have confirmed my intuition that play is of supreme importance. In the recent 'humanitarian' war in the Balkans, Julio Cortazar's 'joda' was at play again. While a small nation cannot withstand an assault from nineteen world powers, Serbs played back for seventy-eight days. When civilians taped their windows to prevent glass from shattering from bomb blasts in their neighbourhoods, some wrote WINDOWS99 on the tape. Others commented on the destruction created by American air attacks with an equally spirited sense of humour: 'Damn you Christopher Columbus for being curious,' they wrote. Had Columbus not discovered America, there would not be a war! Humour served to overcome their obvious pathos and fear. Now that the war is over, the people will have to carry on life in Rabelaisian fashion - that is, through ingenuity, play, and humour - as the people of Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador, and other war-torn regions have done. As if to acknowledge that the war was part of a larger drama, it was often repeated that the Western alliance did not think of the 'endgame,' and NATO leaders insisted that ground troops would not be 'entering the theatre.' The picaro has a personal resonance for me. As an immigrant who started to learn English at the age of eighteen, I have frequently and instinctively resorted to some of Lazarillo's methods. Like the Spanish

x

Preface

picaro, 'me he arrimado a los buenos.' This book is an example, for I have had editorial help from Michaela Milde and Jonathan Lavery of the University of Guelph. Professor Alan Gordon of the University of Toronto patiently proofread my manuscript. I would like to thank all three of these unselfish people, and to extend my gratitude to John St James, copy-editor, and to Ron Schoeffel, editor-in-chief at the University of Toronto Press. I thank Denise Lafleur for typing the index. I would like to call attention to the cover design, based on a painting by Dragan Sekaric. The man in the painting, like Rainer Maria Rilke in the poem on page v, is catching the wind; when he became a refugee, the Bosnian Serb painter had nothing to go on but the sun and the air. As Rilke says, 'As long as you catch what you yourself threw in the air, all is mere skill and petty gain.' In light of the wisdom artistically expressed by Rilke, I would like to credit Canadian thinker David Orchard for his attempts to guide Canadian society with a holistic vision. Like Rabelais, this Canadian university-educated farmer-activist comes from a privileged class, but he understands that individuals and nations survive when they are in touch with natural and universal forces. Play within the natural world is a source of life. In this century we have seen what Jose Ortega y Gasset called 'dehumanization of art,' and we witness a reshaping of the world according to interests defined by the 'free market.' Nonetheless, in the words of Mihai Spariosu, 'like the vengeful ghost of Hamlet's slain father,' literature and play will continue to defy reductionist world-views and other life-limiting forces. It is easier to adopt an air of detachment and play economic, political, or military games than to engage and play with Don Quijote. But only a very small number of people can control abstract 'free market' games, To survive and to give meaning to their lives, ordinary people must turn to the Rabelaisian 'language of the market place' while engaging in 'carnivalesque laughter.' Hence, fiction and play persist.

PLAY AND THE PICARESQUE

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

It is not genres that have disappeared, but the genres of the past, and they have been replaced by others. Tzvetan Todorov

The most effective way to appreciate the social and human orientation of contemporary Latin American fiction is the apparently outmoded approach through genre. This route, however, puts us at odds with such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Octavio Paz, to name only a few, who have seriously challenged the notion of genre in the course of stretching even the rigorous and familiar essay form so that it has become simply, as Jaime Alazraki says, 'a voice one hears' ('una voz que se oye').1 The flouting of generic boundaries not only in Latin American fiction but also in contemporary literature in general requires that we justify a study of literature that invokes generic categories; at the very least, this mode of analysis demands a sophisticated approach that transcends the formuladon and deployment of a simple definition of a genre, in this case, the picaresque genre. From the point of view of the picaresque, it is additionally necessary to correct the impression that the picaresque is a genre of the past. W.M. Frohock, for one, believes that to approach contemporary works of fiction as picaresque, a concept historically associated with fiction from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, leads only to the 'sacrifice of an established concept.'2 'A book no longer belongs to a genre,' Maurice Blanchot has argued forcefully, because 'every book arises from literature alone ... Genres having dissipated, literature alone [is] affirmed.'3 And in

4

Introduction

his struggle to go beyond 'Aristotelian logic and Kantian categories' ('la logica aristotelica y las categorias kantianas'),4 Julio Cortazar himself has repeatedly declared 'the bankruptcy of genres' ('la bancarota de generos'). Still, systems and modes of thinking do not bankrupt as easily as some commentators might like. Even the most modern of critics still classify Cortazar's 'defiled' works as essays, as short stories, and as novels, because it is difficult to avoid what Paul Zumthor calls the inescapable bind: no system will hold but we cannot think without a system.5 Hence, I will approach two contemporary Latin American novels, Julio Cortazar's Libra de Manuel and Antonio Skarmeta's Match Ball, from the point of view of the picaresque along the line of Tzvetan Todorov's suggestion that 'it is not genres that have disappeared, but the genres of the past, and they have been replaced by others.'6 In other words, the traditional picaresque genre has been replaced by the modern picaresque genre. There are some obvious differences between the sixteenth-century picaresque novel and contemporary works, but because the essential mode of thinking in both is sufficiently similar, both 'picaresque' and 'genre' are illuminating concepts for understanding literature. Defining any genre requires a broad perspective because each genre is a way of seeing the world with all its textual and extra-textual attributes. Objecting to formalist modern criticism, Russian formalism in particular, Mikhail Bakhtin has argued that 'poetics should really begin with genre, not end with it,' because 'the thematic unity of a work is inseparable from its primary orientation in its environment.'7 I wish to emphasize the notion of thematic unity because traditionally genre has been defined primarily by form and structure. Only recently has genre been studied through what Ulrich Wicks calls the modal approach, which treats genre as a way of perceiving reality and a way of thinking.8 Formalists explain genre entirely as a specific grouping of devices with a defined dominant.9 However, it is also a social and historical phenomenon that presents a particular world-view. 'Each genre,' Bakhtin argues, 'possesses definite principles of selection, definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration' (131). Each has its internal textual characteristics and its external social and historical attributes. As Bakhtin points out, the ode, for example, is written with certain internal norms, but it was also created as part of a civic celebration and was directly connected to political life. Looking at this question from a philological perspective, Claudio Guillen observes, in 'Genre and Countergenre,' that genre develops also in relation to its countergenre, and that there are other extra-textual elements that contribute to the formation of a system. He shows that Lazarillo de Tormes started to be called a picaresque novel only after the publication of Guzman de Alfarache sparked its resurrection. Similarly, Lazarillo was pro-

5

Introduction

moted as an example of a distinct genre by Don Quijote in 1605, when a wandering criminal, Gines de Pasamonte, claimed that he had written The Life of Gines de Pasamonte, which would cast into shade Lazarillo de Tormes and 'all others of that sort that have been or will be written' ('mal afio para Lazarillo de Tonne, y para todos cuantos de aquel genero se han escrito o escribieren' [Part i, chap. 22]). Guillen also remarks that the emergence of the picaresque as a distinct genre was helped by a printer, Luis Sanchez, who printed Lazarillo and Guzman within nine weeks. Later, another extratextual element contributed to the genre's consolidation. Frank Chandler notes, in The Literature of Roguery, that the frontispiece of the first edition of Francisco Lopez de Ubeda's La picara Justina (1605) shows Celestina and Guzman accompanying Justina in The Ship of the Picaresque Life' sailing on the 'River of Forgetfulness' and steered by Time towards the 'Port of Death' with Lazarillo in a neighbouring boat. This grouping of a number of works of a similar world-view, plus the thematic element in the promised but never delivered sequel in which Justina was to marry Guzman, consolidated, Chandler believes, the picaresque canon. In order to emphasize individual texts and textual qualities, modern criticism moved away from the study of movements and genres, but the time has come when a literary work is recognized as more than its text because it embodies characteristics of the movement and genre in which it is created and received. The formation and the reception of the Latin American Boom, for example, was as complex as the creation of the picaresque canon. This 'movement' was not created only as a body of similar fictional works written by Latin American writers but also because most of its works were published by Seix Barral, a single publishing house. The movement was further consolidated by North American criticism and New York Times book reviews that categorized a diverse range of artistic creations under a single label: Latin American. Consequently, when we read individual works, we no longer believe that we read them without a larger context. Furthermore, the existence of a substantial body of modern criticism on the picaresque genre helps keep picaresque fiction alive. In Rogue's Progress (1964), Robert Alter attempts to bring picaresque literature into a contemporary perspective, arguing that it 'seems reasonable to assume that the picaresque novel is not simply a long-finished episode in Western literature but rather a permanent addition to the storehouse of literary resources, capable of regenerating and transforming itself in a surprising variety of new environments.'10 Alter's position has led critics to discover picaresque fiction thriving in contemporary literature and to speak of 'the return of the picaro,'11 of the 'actualite du roman picaresque,'12 of a 'renaissance du roman picaresque,'13 and of 'the neo-picaresque novel.'14 My study of two novels from the second part of this century, Cortazar's

6

Introduction

Libra de Manuel (1973) and Skarmeta's Match Ball (1989), in the light of the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tonnes (1554), will not only confirm the persistence of the picaresque mode of thinking, but it will also argue that modern literature can help critics understand better the picaresque genre of the past. Contemporary literature and theory have given critics the theoretical vision and terminology to explain picaresque intricacies that were not revealed before. The most obvious example of this collaboration between the present and the past can be seen in Guillen's use of Henry James's term 'tangle' to describe the most important characteristic of the picaresque. The concept 'picaresque' in turn helps us distinguish contemporary realist Latin American fiction from the fiction of nineteenth-century realism. Guillen observes that 'the picaro is not an independent hero who may be studied in vacua,' because 'the hero is involved from the start in what Henry James called, in Preface to the Portrait of a Lady, a "tangle.""5 The contemporary, more authentic realism, what I call picaresque realism, is driven by individual or human survival rather than by social and moral issues. The picaresque mode of engagement, furthermore, supplants class distinctions, and for this reason is also an alternative to Marxist and other social criticisms. An approach through the picaresque genre thus allows us to see that both Renaissance picaresque fiction and its modern avatars are not so much severe or serious indictments of social injustice as they are anarchic forms of Bakhtinian carnivalesque play that regenerate and redeem the picaro/plcara and his/her community. The unpredictable two-way relationship between the picaro/alf) and his/ her community incarnates the dynamism'7 that European and AngloAmerican modernisms sought to apprehend as they explored the relationship between the subjective and the objective worlds, dreams and reality, the subconscious and the conscious. While most branches of modernism excluded the everyday social and political issues in order to escape the nineteenth-century model of art as mimetic representation, the Latin American offshoot of modernism, what we call the Boom, does not shy away from overt discussion of political, social, and human themes. Modernists attempted to break away from bourgeois representational art, whose parasitic dependence on 'tradition' and the psychology of emulation underpinned a culture in which moral continuity was endured by institutionalized habits of imitation. Although Cortazar and Skarmeta (among other modern Latin American writers) embrace the modernists' break, their novels take a detour from the abstract or highly intellectualized avant-garde European route. As my study concentrates on the picaresque mode of thinking and the nature and function of play within it, the two modern novels will be discussed in the context of European and AngloAmerican modernisms because I want to argue that the picaresque mode

7

Introduction

of thinking and the spirit of play distinguish the Latin American works from their European and Anglo-American siblings. The dynamism in the Latin American novels stems not from the play in the text but instead from the readers' relationship to the story, in which the main link between the text and the reader is a 'tangle' of characters. Rather than proclaiming death to characters, as various modernisms did under the assumption that identification with others was something to be feared and resisted,18 Cortazar and Skarmeta recognize that characters the reader being one of them - are best able to stand on the liminal territory and face a plurality of worlds that are more authentic than the causeand-effect world presented by bourgeois art. I will discuss this aspect further in chapter 2, where it will become clear that the Renaissance picaresque discovery of perspective is related to the modernist and Boom obsession with the exploration of multiple points of view. But, while the European futurists and cubists played with this discovery predominantly on the political and abstract level ('Cubism was a school of painting, Futurism a political movement: DADA is a state of mind,'19 Andre Breton argued), the play of Latin American writers has artistic, political, and philosophical implications that first and foremost take place at the level of everyday human survival. Multiple perspectives are perfected not only by changing angles of vision or by changing states of mind; each perspective is represented by a different character, who primarily represents a human being. As these characters or textual constructs who resemble real people engage in a relationship, their association engenders a particular story that is primarily a human story rather than an abstract intellectual exercise. Skarmeta explains in an interview that 'one of the great virtues of the Chilean people, a virtue which at times also creates great tragedies, is its spontaneous and natural tendency to confuse poetry and polities' ('Una de las grandes virtudes del pueblo chileno, virtud que a veces ocasiona tambien grandes tragedias, es su tendencia espontanea y natural de confundir la poesia con la politica').20 This remark suggests that the picaresque mode of thinking and a natural propensity for play are delineating characteristics of Hispanic peoples and cultures. In other words, their spontaneity and their natural tendency to mix fiction and reality define Hispanic culture at all levels. Skarmeta also says that Chileans live 'through their skin,' which means that their personal experiences are marked by great flexibility, a defiance of fixed world-orders that is comparable to the Renaissance free interpretation of the Bible and tolerance for personal religion, both of which argued against rigid medieval distinctions between good and bad, body and soul, heaven and hell. Skarmeta thus uses 'la bona sperienza' as 'the foundation, [and] the origin of the artist's task,'21 whereas Cortazar provides theoretical and intellectual reasons why intelligent liter-

8

Introduction

ary works and political movements should be based on human experience. In its historical dimension, this study of three picaresque novels compares the general human and intellectual atmosphere of the Renaissance with the contemporary situation. In particular, I argue that Erwin Panofsky's view of the Renaissance also applies to the instability manifest in the second part of this century: 'The discovery of the vanishing point in perspective, in particular, confirms a new situation in which a work of art is no longer the result of mere obedience to a traditional code, and comes to be understood as a "segment of the universe" as it is observed - or, at least, as it could be observed - by a particular person from a particular point of view at a particular moment.'22 While a great number of artists in the early decades of twentieth-century literature explored the 'vanishing point in perspective' mainly for aesthetic, theoretical, and psychological reasons, these two contemporary Latin American novels build on this technical and psychological experimentation; however, as in the anonymous Renaissance work, the 'vanishing point in perspective' is not only a narrative device, it is also an inherent expression of spontaneous human, social, and political play. The changing points of view are comparable to the inventive stories Scheherazade tells in A Thousand and One Nights; they function as entertainment but, more important, they are a part of the character's (an individual's) attempt to save herself (one's life) and her (one's) kingdom. The relationship of the reader to the entertaining struggle of the protagonist is, as Andrew Hurley would say, that of a new father, a 'half-outsider,' who experiences sympathetic labour pains and shares the experience of birth in a profound degree as a co-participant.23 Chapter i, 'Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order,' strives to articulate a conception of picaresque play, but the historical account of the phenomenon of play in general is still sketchy despite the fact that twentieth-century literature has been playful and Dionysian. While modern criticism has considered play from the point of view of form, and in its relation to the question of mimesis in literature, a study of play as a human and social phenomenon remains to be undertaken. My inquiry aims to make a limited contribution towards this task, although I share Mihai Spariosu's belief that a definition of play is 'as elusive today as it was two thousand years ago.'24 No doubt it will remain elusive because play, like art and life, is not only intangible and complex, but it does not appear in a pure form. Those who have tried to explain play by way of taxonomy have been unsuccessful for the same reason, for categories hold only to a point. In a Rio carnival, Victor Turner humorously notes, Roger Caillois's neat classifications of play 'spark away furiously at once, like the plugs in a racing car, or the wheels of Ezekiel's chariot.'25 Caillois's formalized approach to play describes it in terms of two basic categories, which

9

Introduction

have generally been accepted: ludic or intellectual play and paidia or spontaneous play, both of which can further be divided into agon or competition, alea or chance, mimicry or simulation, and ilinx or vertigo. To avoid the limitations of Caillois's approach, I begin with the broad view that play is a close relative to rituals, games, art, laughter, and humour. Given that 'ludic' often means playful, and in order to avoid the pleonasm in 'ludic play' and the nostalgic naivete behind any notion of spontaneity when it comes to aesthetic productions, I will simply draw a distinction between play (Caillois's paidia) and games (Caillois's Indus). While (spontaneous) play is a paradigm of freedom, games (or organized play), by contrast, symbolize 'the willing surrender of absolute spontaneity for the sake of playful order. One remains outside the sphere of material necessity, but one must obey the rules one imposes on oneself.'27 Games in which there is an implicit obligation to 'obey the rules' have been preferred by politicians, by metaphysics, and by our Western civilization and intellectual history in general. Play, by contrast, since the subordination of art to philosophy by Plato and Aristotle, has been viewed as a foil to that which is serious and, thereby, more important. This view was explicitly challenged in Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga, who argued that play or game playing is the more important of the two because, in his view, even wars are a form of play. Still, Huizinga's, main concern was the ludic or formalized play that he linked to philosophical, ethical, and ideological systems, all of which are driven by reason and oriented towards civilization and progress. Spontaneous play or paidia has yet to be properly studied. Because it is not a civilizing agent in the way the ludic play is, but a lifeforce or a fermenting agent that is more visible in primitive culture, it will not easily reach centre stage. Nonetheless, 'like the vengeful ghost of Hamlet's slain father,' as Spariosu declares, 'literature will return to haunt philosophy, from the Church Fathers to the German Idealists, and from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Fink, Deleuze and Derrida' (21). I will discuss the contribution of Nietzsche, Fink, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Gadamer to the study of play, but above all I will look at the key literary works of this century that implicitly or explicitly are examples of different types of play. However, since my goal is not literary historiography, I will employ with some liberty examples from world literature as comparative touchstones. From the point of view of literary reception, I will examine the role of humour, the function of exhilaration in play, as well as the instinctive human propensity for engaging in contest. These are aspects of fiction that 'catch the reader off guard,' 'penetrate (his or her) usual defences,' 'set off uncontrollable reflexes,' and become a 'valid means of investigation'28 and personal transformation. Borrowing from Bakhtin's theory of laughter, I will argue that the cele-

1O

Introduction

bratory attitude in carnivalesque laughter is present in Lazarillo de Tomes, Libra de Manuel, and Match Ball, and that this element transforms negative personal, social, and even cosmic forces because it changes our perspective on them. However, it is important to emphasize not only that play and carnivalesque laughter are celebratory in the usual sense of the word, but also that grotesque figures and crude, violent language are inseparable components of play and laughter. In other words, play is positive and regenerative, but like all births, it has a necessary painful and violent dimension to its very essence. I will argue further that picaresque playful optimism and faith inspire political and human elevation; moreover, they animate life and political discussion without capitulating to the existential defeatism so prevalent in the literature of the first part of this century. To the extent that they strive to affirm and invigorate human life, our three novels embody and encourage a conception of game that is the antithesis of Samuel Beckett's 'endgames.' Furthermore, although these works are optimistic and encouraging, they are not Utopian games that advocate political illusions. They are engaged, spontaneous games that cultivate strong individuals, and through them, reduce sociopolitical alienation. Chapter 2, 'Picaresque Realism and Magical Realism,' tries to delineate not so much a subjective/psychological realism, which was sought by European modernism, but a realism in which magic, Fortune, psychology, and emotions are 'meshed' with naturalism. In this chapter I argue that the plcaro's zeal for competition is the most important link between the picaresque perception of the world and the world of play. The dynamic 'meshing' of the outside and the individual worlds, the 'self and the 'other,' is, I will argue, a way of expressing the modernist search for the living and the authentic. The scholarship of such influential critics as Frank Chandler, Claudio Guillen, Fernando Lazaro Carreter, and Francisco Rico will help relate the picaresque view of the world to the modernist, and the Boom attempts to restore the integral connection between consciousness and the unconscious so that human experience can become whole again. The human wholeness contains within itself a life-force capable of withstanding moral, social, political, and cultural oppression. In the last part of this chapter I will examine why picaresque literature and some European modernisms have excluded and even targeted women, or, rather, the sentimental and moral qualities that have traditionally been associated with women. Chapter 3, 'Play in Lazarillo de Tormes,' will be dedicated to the first Spanish picaresque novel. Since the picaresque genre has not been studied from the point of view of play and playing, it is necessary to revisit the anonymous novel and to show that spontaneous play is its organizing principle. From a vaguely Bakhtinian theoretical position on laughter, Antonio Gomez-Moriana has discussed what he calls 'the subversion of ritual dis-

11

Introduction

course' in Lazarillo. Although his excellent 'new philological' study clearly shows that there are deviations from the traditional genres, such as the autobiographical form, the so-called soliloquy, and general confession written for the confessor or spiritual adviser, I would like to argue that the main purpose of the deviations is not subversion. Rather, the character's and the narrator's competitive attitude creates a different relationship between the individual and his or her society. The readjustment of the point of view can also be seen in the novel's adaptation of popular tales. There is no doubt that the unique structure of Lazarillo gives a new twist to the old forms, that the novel assigns new meaning to the traditional folk tales the author has incorporated, and that therefore social norms and accepted codes are subverted, but if we free ourselves from the critical attitude imposed on us by this century's Marxist literary theory and last century's ethical concerns in criticism, we might be able to see that the recreative, carnivalesque laughter and popular spirit emblematic of folk episodes triumph in Lazarillo. Lazarillo is much more interested in his own survival and prosperity than in destroying his opponents and subverting the social norms that they represent. In chapter 4, 'Libra de Manuel: How to Become a Picaro,' I leap from the sixteenth century to 1973, to Cortazar's work, a novel that advocates the picaresque mode of seeing the world as a way to regain personal awareness and as a means to political empowerment. The novel shares many characteristics with Lazarillo, although it focuses on cultural and political issues unique to modern marginalized revolutionaries and quite remote from the social context of the sixteenth-century picaro's life. I view Cortazar's theoretical novel mostly as a manual that shows how and why the picaresque mode of seeing the world strengthens 'the self and captures the dynamic relationship between 'the self and 'the other.' Its guidelines may not offer much to readers who are conditioned by the North American obsession with dominance and strategic planning, but as Lazarillo says: T would like people who are proud of being high-born to realize how little this really means, as Fortune has smiled on them, and how much more worthy are those who have endured misfortune.' In Libra de Manuel, play is a force that sustains and invigorates. Chapter 5, 'Picaresque Love Games in Match Ball,' is a progression from chapter 4 because Skarmeta's Match Ball is a fictional depiction of Cortazar's theoretical and intellectual concepts. Both Cortazar and Skarmeta recognize the need to go beyond formalist and language-oriented literature, but as an action-oriented work that aims for a wide audience, Skarmeta's novel audaciously borders on the trivial and purely entertaining. In Antonio Skarmeta and the Post Boom Donald Shaw argues that Skarmeta is a post-Boom writer because he makes an effort to go further in

12

Introduction

the direction initiated by Boom writers such as Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, and Carlos Fuentes; the younger writer moves 'towards greater realism and sense of Americanness, more politico-social commitment, the exploration of new areas of society and different age-groups, including the urban working class, the incorporation of "pop" and youth culture, continued emphasis on humour and sex, the affirmation of life and renewed confidence in love.'29 The new confidence in love, I will show, stems from Skarmeta's reformed understanding of love, which is picaresque and anti-romantic in nature. The Chilean's perception of this profound human feeling is not a new revelation but is a result of the twentieth century's attempt to create a new, more authentic relationship between the individual human being and the outside world. In this attempt Skarmeta explicitly refers to Lazarillo, but he also draws upon a number of modern fictional works. Consequently, although he explicitly rejects writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Mann, Skarmeta's picaresque novel cannot be seen in isolation or in a vacuum, as Guillen would say. It may be read in the context of modernist and Boom fiction. As an overview, let me explain the direction in which this multidimensional approach will lead. The premise of my investigation is that in the picaresque world-view, humour/laughter and play meet and open a door to a complex human and social reality. Black humour, what Unamuno called 'bufo-tragico,' plays a crucial role in this process. In Latin America, the function of black humour was first explored by Jorge Luis Borges, then advanced as a social commentary by Cortazar, whom Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Carlos Fuentes label 'the great innovator.'30 Cortazar, for his part, explains that both he and Borges are participating in a larger, mainly surrealist exploration, whose direct ancestor, Alfred Jarry, a pre-symbolist French writer, 'was a man who realized perfectly that the gravest matters can be explored through humour. That was just what he tried to do with his "pataphysique" - to touch bottom via black humour.'31 To illustrate how black humour 'meshes' hilarity and seriousness, Cortazar's wellknown, excruciatingly funny wooden-board scene in Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) serves as a good example. The scene has 'every external appearance of being completely insignificant,'32 but in it the characters convey a moment of the most profound truth. Oliveira and Traveller occupy rooms on opposite sides of the same street; their windows face each other, and Oliveira, who has been setting up living quarters, asks Traveller, his friend and double, for some nails and some tea leaves. The two men charge Talita, Traveller's wife and Oliveira's potential lover, to deliver these things. To shorten her trip, Oliveira spans the distance between the two windows with a long wooden board, inviting her to cross by means of it. She accepts, putting her life in the men's hands. When she confronts

13

Introduction

Oliveira, who is already in love with her, halfway between him and her husband, hovering in mid-air, forty feet above the street, their masks drop. This chapter of the wooden board,' Cortazar says, 'is one of the deepest moments in the book. Because lives are in the balance. Yet, from beginning to end, it's treated as a wild joke.'33 It is this type of play that I wish to address as I apply the picaresque mode of thinking and living to two contemporary novels. As one of the most important writers of the boom generation, Cortazar (1914-84) does not need a lengthy introduction. His novel Hopscotch, a unique combination of formal experimentation and human concern, won him international acclaim. His short stories, such as 'The Pursuer' ('El perseguidor'), based on the life of the American jazz musician Charlie Parker, and 'Blow-up' ('Las babas del diablo'), which was the inspiration for Michelangelo Antonioni's film by the same name, show how closely his fiction relates to other arts. Cortazar started to write in Argentina but, discouraged by the Peron regime, he left his native country in 1952 for France. He died there thirty-two years later, shortly after the death of his Canadian partner, Carol Dunlop. Cortazar earned his living as a first-class translator, but he always wrote his fiction in Spanish. His last novel, Libra de Manuel, displays Cortazar's profound understanding of Latin American political difficulties, and reveals his deep esteem for the Latin American popular spirit. Skarmeta is a younger writer. Born in Chile (1940), he left for Europe in 1976, but returned to Santiago from Berlin in 1989 to live and work in the Chilean capital. He also works in Colorado Springs (U.S.), where he is the visiting professor for the Maytag Chair of Comparative Literature, and in Berlin, where he occasionally produces radio and TV shows. Like Cortazar, Skarmeta also started out as a short-story writer. In 1969 he won the prestigious Premio Casa de las Americas for his collection Naked on the Roof (Desnudo en el tejado], but he is better known for his later short stories such as 'The Cyclist from San Cristobal' ('El ciclista del San Cristobal'), 'Cinderella in San Francisco' ('La Cenicienta en San Francisco') and 'Stuck in the Mud' ('En las arenas'), a story in which a young man sells his blood and uses the money to enjoy breakfast with a girl after a night of love-making. Skarmeta's four novels, / Dreamt the Snow Was Burning (Sone que la nieve ardia) (1975), The Chilean (No paso nadd) (1980), The Insurrection (Lainsurreccion) (1982), and Burning Patience (La ardiente paciencia) (1985), have been translated into English. They have also appeared in film form, as radio scripts, and on stage. Michel Radford's and Massimo Troisi's adaptation of Burning Patience into the film IlPostino (Italy, 1994) was a great success. Skarmeta's last novel, Match Ball, was translated into English in 1996 under a new tennis term: Love-Fifteen.

14

Introduction

Like Cortazar, Skarmeta also writes layered texts in which modern theoretical debate about poetics is integrated with other themes. In Match Ball he highlights the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe who, through Baudelaire's interest and translations of his work in 1852, became an 'important prophet of the French Symbolism, and set the tone for the rise of Modernism.'34 Given that Skarmeta revives the early father of modernism and that Cortazar began his writing career with reviews of Rimbaud's poetry (1941), I shall discuss this return to Poe's Weltanschauung in which the irrational, the supernatural, the rational, the social, and the historical intertwine. In this context I shall also discuss violence and cruelty, which are portrayed not only as forms of awakening but also as integral and necessary for life, happiness, and art. Poe (1809-49) was the last Gothic romancer who wrote in an impressionistic fashion about the presence of mystery and horror in human life. Skarmeta, who has much less to deal with in the unfriendly and the unknown/mysterious geographical reality of the American frontier, does not portray supernatural horrors and violence, but instead concentrates more on the inescapability of aggression in everyday human and political life. The lesson that his protagonist learns is that to make a cake one has to break the eggs (161). Papst, therefore, forces himself on Sophie as she in turn aggressively intrudes into his life; like Nabokov's provocative Lolita, she enters his office, takes off her clothes, and involves him in an affair that profoundly shakes his social and personal stability. The intensity and pressure in these events, like the violence and coarseness in Rabelais's work, resemble the physical pain of real birth: pain/trauma/violence is an integral part of life. Skarmeta calls the moment of birth and pain 'the ultimate vertigo' ('el vertigo definitive'), while Cortazar searches in Rayuela for 'a whirlwind and not the cold and washed out dry leaves in a tea cup' ['un torbellino de viento y no sedimentacion lavada y fria'). The term/ image is not new because modern literature had already used the image of a vortex to express dynamic moments. As Hugh Kenner puts it, 'a Vortex is a circulation with a still centre: a system of energies drawing in whatever comes near.'35 A vortex for Ezra Pound 'is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster ... from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.'36 As we turn to our study, we should imagine a picaro at the centre or as the centre of the vortex. The cruelty that he endures and inflicts is the driving force that sets his life and the novel in motion. The thematization of cruelty, which was portrayed in earlier modernism merely as an assault on language and form, is another link between play and the picaresque.

1. Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

In its greatest frivolity play is at the same time the most sublime seriousness and the uniquely true. Hegel

Like the wooden-board scene in Cortazar's Rayuela, picaresque play is motivated by instinct and other energies of life, but in its operation it is sustained by shrewd (rational) strategies. Bizarre as the scene may be, there is no naivete in Oliveira's and Traveler's provocation and subsequent discovery of Talita's emotions and their place in life. There is no levity in their picaresque type of play despite the fact that it is played by reckless marginalized characters. In the wooden-board scene and in the picaresque mode of seeing the world, play is not only a means of discovery and entertainment, but an inseparable part of that reality which is revealed. Since the played reality is beyond the rational control of players, it exceeds the limits of a simple game. As Hans-Georg Gadamer says, 'Play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play.'1 Yet, the picaresque character-players and playing-authors are not simply passive playthings of inspiration, or pawns in a Fortune's game, despite the fact that they are not the sole subjects of play. Like dancers, they incarnate the to-and-fro movement that 'renews itself in constant repetition (93). They are participants and makers of their dance, if you wish, but they are also the dance itself, which keeps them dancing and living. As William Butler Yeats writes in 'Among School Children,' the dividing line between dancers and dance and players and play is not a sharp one: 'O body swayed to music, O bright-

16

Play and the Picaresque

ening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?' That playing is a being-played is evident also in all languages in which there is no manifest distinction between 'play' as a noun or a verb. In the context of literature, the question to be addressed is, To what extent are the author, characters, and readers creators/makers of play? Are they not all to some extent active participants, forces that work in conjunction with each other? If players assume the role of God-like 'creators,' what they make is only a game. To be players in a play they must be in tune with Anima Mundi, where the rules of playing emerge as circumstances and players interact with each other. The spontaneous and dynamic order that emerges is, thus, natural. Nature, Gadamer argues, 'inasmuch as it is without purpose or intention' is 'a constant self-renewing play' (94). Literature can be a mode of expression for this larger play. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke advocates participation in the larger play of the cosmos: As long as you catch what you yourself threw into the air all is mere skill and petty gain; only when you unexpectedly become the catcher of the ball that the Goddess, your eternal playmate, threw toward you, toward the centre of your being in a precisely calculated curve, in one of those arcs reminiscent of God building bridges: only then is being able to catch the ball an ability to be cherished not yours, but a world's.

However, the general tendency outside the arts has been away from participation in Nature's play, as the goal of Western civilization has been to control Nature and also natural human impulses. In its struggle to curb the power of play the official culture has argued that play cannot be serious. But there are good reasons to oppose this view and to argue with Gadamer that 'play itself contains its own, even sacred, seriousness' (91). What distinguishes the seriousness of play and the seriousness of the official culture is that play does not have an external purpose, since play is not driven by purpose. The concept of play has dominated modern discussion, because through its emphasis on the artist's crucial role in playing the purposefully antirepresentational, twentieth-century literature and criticism have used the emphasis on play to combat the stability and truthfulness in the institutionalized or the official culture. In search of deeper truth and reality, modernist writers and critics have focused on the state of mind of the creator and on the detective-like role readers undertake when uncovering the sub-

17

Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

conscious mind. In addition to analysing aesthetic consciousness, modern critics have also remarked on the subjective freedom expressed in play. However, the dynamism and freedom of a play were seldom sustained in modern works because the traditional conditioning through extreme (dry) intellectualism and metaphysics stood in the way. While the antipathy for holistic play peaks in the 'serious and responsible' age of Descartes and Calvin, the roots of discrimination against play in general and spontaneous play in particular go as far back as Greek antiquity. In their metaphysics, Plato and Aristotle acknowledge that in Homeric works, for example, heroes live in a cosmos that appears to be governed by a divine lottery (play as freedom) in which misery and happiness are allotted not according to merit but according to chance. The Homeric conception of the universe portrays it as being governed by chance and arbitrary 'amoral' gods, whereas Plato argues that the human world is really governed by Eternal Good, Beauty, Divine Order, and Universal Justice. It then follows as a natural consequence that philosophy and reason, being superior, must be preferred over play and the arts. Play is ascribed only instrumental value as something useful for teaching 'serious' subjects such as arithmetic, geometry, and dialectic. Mathematics, according to Plato, is superior to play and the arts. However, it is not so much the Greek philosopher who discriminates against play as it is later 'serious' politicians who in the name of abstract ideologies and dogmas use his philosophy as a rationale for suppressing the freedom to play. 'From Pericles to the modern technocrats,' Mihai Spariosu points out, 'rulers have always found it more convenient to rule in the name of an abstract idea (i.e., the People, the God, Communism, Universal Justice).'2 The spiritually impoverished and politically subjugated twentiethcentury 'homo faber,' as Cortazar jokingly calls those who are habituated to the Western work ethic, works 'seriously' five days and becomes a 'homo ludens' on the weekend. The spirit of play, euphoria, and playful activities in general are discouraged. In a legalistic culture that emphasizes work and productivity, this is done under the pretext that play implies levity and childishness, or that it is irresponsible. The consignment of spontaneity and freedom in play to weekends is also driven by economic reasons in an age that is characterized by commerce, technology, advance planning, and organized travel-tours. We are told that 'the bus leaves at seven,' 'the show ends at eleven,' and so on; rules encroach upon more aspects of modern life, and eventually they govern our behaviour. Consequently, rules and order in games have come to supplant the spontaneity and vigour of play. Allan Guttmann's definition of games as 'the willing surrender of absolute spontaneity for the sake of playful order'3 reveals how spontaneity of play is replaced by the order of games. Modern philosophy and Latin American

i8

Play and the Picaresque

Boom fiction disagree with the suggestion that it is a 'willing surrender' and that the loss of freedom is voluntary. They know that play is feared because of its impetuousness. Hence, in their attempt to enhance personal and sociopolitical realities they explore play's potential to empower individuals and societies. The long, uneven process of restoring play to its pre-Platonic position was started by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and the German idealists. In this effort they target metaphysics as play's worst enemy. This movement culminates in Nietzsche's work. In his later challenge to metaphysics Nietzsche expounds appearance, falsehood, fiction, unreality, and irrationality over essence, presence, model, truth, reality, and rationality. He thus creates a philosophical background in which 'the freedom of a subjectivity in play' is more important than the 'playful order' promulgated by metaphysics. Nietzsche's often quoted remark from Ecce Homo that he knows of 'no other way of coping with great tasks, than play' was definitely heard by the twentieth century. The relationship between play, metaphysics, and games can be compared to the relationship between war, military strategy, and military operations. The joy of playing and the pain of war are more than metaphysical rules and military strategies. As Jean-Paul Sartre says, 'The First World War was not, as Chevalier said it was, Descartes against Kant; it was the inexpiable deaths of twelve million young men,' and much of the human suffering and pain is unexplainable and immeasurable.4 Human pain and suffering as well as euphoria and enjoyment in play are difficult to explain despite Nietzsche's reversal of metaphysics. When Hamlet tells his friend: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ than are dreamt of in our philosophy,' he does not explain those 'things in heaven and earth' through reason but through yet another play. In the same light, in more recent times Ludwig Wittgenstein reminded those mainly concerned with structure and strategies that even when we play games as intellectual as chess, 'a move in chess doesn't consist simply in moving a piece in such and such a way on the board'; it includes 'one's thoughts and feelings as one makes the move' and it takes place in circumstances that we call 'playing a game of chess, solving a chess problem, and so on.'5 Lori Ducharme and Gary Fine echo Wittgenstein as they observe that, although games are governed by pre-established rules, 'strategies alone do not constitute games.'6 Led by Nietzsche's stress on subjectivity and by subsequent reservations towards views in favour of objectivity, deconstructionists have made it their business in recent times to expose human thinking and the tensions intrinsic to the thought of Plato, Galileo, Descartes, and other systems. Derrida and his disciples teach that discourse can 'deconstruct itself (se deconstruit), in other words, it contains in itself the seeds of its own refutation.

ig

Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

They reveal philosophical and political systems as human artefacts, quite as much as games are. But one must go beyond this conclusion, because in play deconstruction is inseparable from re-construction or new construction. Borges's stories, for example, reveal the world as a set of games that gods, politicians, librarians, authors, and other demi-gods play. However, as Borges de-constructs the supposedly 'stable worlds' and 'universal truths' to show the human hand and mind responsible for their making, his stories also reveal that play exceeds reason and human control. It is allencompassing and infinite. I do not wish to disprove that Borges's stories are highly intellectual fictional games, but I do want to indicate that they do not suggest that their author is the only thinking subject and that he is the ultimate creator. Borges's typical character, a librarian, participates in the formation of games/systems/catalogues, but the catalogue of catalogues is certainly not his creation but the universe's great mystery. The librarian sees its presence, but he does not understand it: 'Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of a malevolent demiurge; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic volumes, ... can only be the work of a god.'7 This position regarding the author's relationship to playful fictional and real worlds was advanced by Borges in short stories such as 'The Library of Babel,' and it influenced other writers of the Latin American Boom. Thus, these writers diverge from the position generally held by twentieth-century European writers and critics, such as the Russian play giant, Vladimir Nabokov, who portrays art and play simply as a human artefact. He makes the following famous invitation in Look at the Harlequins (1974): 'Come on! Play! Invent the world. Invent Reality.'8 The list of artists from the first half of the twentieth century who wrote in the spirit of this auctor ludens dictum that art is 'all make-believe' is quite long. John Fowles says in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969): 'I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.'9 This statement recalls Benito Perez Galdos's El amigo manso (1882), which begins with the main character's emphatic declaration: 'I do not exist... I swear, I solemnly swear that I do not exist' ('Yo no existo ... juro y perjuro que no existo'). Later works could also be listed, such as John Earth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and even Cortazar's 62. Modelo para armor (1968). Nabokov insisted, when he spoke to his students: 'When dealing with a work of art, we must always bear in mind that art is a divine game. These two elements - the elements of the divine and that of the game are equally important. It is divine because this is the element in which man comes nearest to God through becoming a true creator in his own right. And it is a game because it remains art only so long as we are allowed to remember, after all, it is all make believe.'10 In his own work,

2O

Play and the Picaresque

Nabokov, like God, plans every detail and plays stylistic games that reach to the absolute limits of grammar. Humbert, in Lolita, adopts this God-like role when he describes the murder of Quayle: 'Oh, nothing of the I-justblacked-out sort that your common criminal enacts; on the contrary, / want to stress the fact that I was responsible for every shed drop of his bubbleblood (emphasis mine).11 Milan Kundera plays similar games in the cultural domain. When comparing the Czech writer to Julio Cortazar, Jaime Alazraki doubts that Kundera can become a major 'world player' in any game that might have a general impact: ' [Kundera] can play where people have always played, but careful not to step on the grass ... It is dangerous because from this interstice a tiger may jump out' ('puede jugar donde siempre se ha jugado, pero cuidado con pisar el cesped ... Es peligroso porque de ese intersticio puede saltar un tigre').12 In the theoretical arena that specifically addresses play, the separation of play/fiction from reality was debated particularly byjohan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Jacques Ehrmann. Huizinga's ground-breaking Homo Ludens (1938) operates on the premise that play is a basic existential phenomenon, preceding culture and permeating all aspects of social and cultural reality. The work of Huizinga and his disciples has challenged the common belief that play implies levity and pure frivolity. However, his definition of play as a 'stepping out of "real" life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition of its own'13 has not done complete justice to play. By placing play in a dominating position and giving it a civilizing function, Huizinga subverts the ludic spirit to the spirit of seriousness and purpose. While Huizinga argues that play is superior to reality and that Western civilization has successfully imposed itself on nature, Jacques Ehrmann vehemently rejects the view of Huizinga, and particularly of Huizinga's disciple Caillois, that isolation distinguishes play from ordinary life. Ehrmann argues that 'play cannot be defined by isolating it on the basis of its relationship to a priori reality and culture. To define play is at the same time and in the same moment to define reality and to define culture.' Ehrmann continues: The distinguishing characteristic of reality is that it is played. Play, reality, culture are synonymous and interchangeable.'14 This somewhat quixotic view is shared by other major European writers, as Warren Motte says when elaborating Ehrmann's position in his study of play as language in the 'playtexts' of Gombrowicz, Nabokov, Sarrazin, Calvino, Reyes, and others.15 I say quixotic because although play is, as Gadamer says, a 'bringing forth' (103) of reality, reality is not synonymous with play and culture but with plays and cultures (in the plural). Furthermore, when reality is played it is played not only by all those historians and librarians Borges names, but also by itself or by its mysterious gods. Julio Cortazar explains, in an interview, that reality is not so much played

21

Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

with but that reality expresses itself through a number of different plays. He also explains that art and play use language, but they go beyond linguistic and stylistic games. Borges's 'Circular Ruins' is a playtext for the author and the reader, but it also speaks of a much larger reality. As the father invents his son, he also finds out that he himself is an invention of someone else, that he is a player in a much larger set of circular games. To be a part of that larger play we must press beyond the limits of grammar and of what lies in the author's conscious control. For this reason Cortazar reminds us of Borges's ridicule of art that plays with language in a simplistic fashion: I believe that there are two ways to perceive language: there is the bookish type of language, language for the sake of language ..., a verbal masturbation or, as I believe Borges said, a form of 'disordering the dictionary.' Masturbatory language in the sense of a snake which feeds on its own tail, everything happens at the level of language, without a true objective correlation. Creo que hay dos maneras de entender el lenguaje: esta el lenguaje de tipo libresco, el lenguaje por el lenguaje mismo ..., la masturbation verbal o, como creo que dijo Borges, una forma de 'desordenar el diccionario.' Lenguaje masturbatorio en el sentido de la serpiente que se muerde la cola, todo sucede en el piano del lenguaje, sin autentica correlation objetiva.16

The view held by this extremely erudite and careful author, who claims to be mainly an instrument acted upon by external and internal forces to write works in which he signs his name, stands in contrast to the view of Nabokov and Ehrmann. It stands closer to Gadamer's understanding of play and art. The German phenomenologist begins with Friedrich Schlegel's idea that 'all the sacred games of art are only remote imitations of the infinite play of the world, the eternal self-creating work of art' (94). An author's imitation of the play of the world is not a simple representation but a 'recognition.' In the classical theory of art, Gadamer reminds us, 'the idea of mimesis and imitation has started from play which, in the form of dancing, is the representation of the divine' (102). Wittgenstein's 'language-games,' and for that matter Derrida's understanding of 'language,' are analogous to the idea that literature and art are expressions of the larger play of the world. In his struggle with realists (those who know what is reality and what is play) and with sceptics (those who believe that all is play), Wittgenstein draws the attention of realists to the fact that when they talk about reality they are talking about language, not the world. The speaking subject is not independent of the language he

22

Play and the Picaresque

or she speaks, nor does the language (play) exist independently of its speakers (players). For Wittgenstein, language is not a phenomenon independent from the world; the two are mutually constitutive, with changes in one necessitating changes in the other. The change is gradual and occurs in response to social forces as well as in response to linguistic innovations created by linguistic masters like Nabokov. In his Blue Book, Wittgenstein metaphorically explains the 'world in motion' through the changes of his body: 'My body changes its appearance only gradually and comparatively little and likewise my voice, characteristic habits, etc.'17 The same is true of language, but in this domain we are able to influence the change a bit more: 'if we imagine the facts otherwise than they are, certain languagegames lose some of their importance, while others become important. And in this way there is an alteration - a gradual one - in the use of the vocabulary of the language.'18 In Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman, the sociologist, would agree with Wittgenstein that social frames, like language-games, change gradually, and the change is occurring all the time. In light of our ontological and sociological situation, Nabokov's advice that we 'invent the world' as we play our 'divine' games should extend beyond our general 'play-inthe-world,' or else we run the risk of fabricating artificial games. In articulating the position that play is a phenomenon in itself, yet embedded within other phenomena and aspects of the world, it is helpful to bring in the view advanced by Eugen Fink, who holds that play is not 'a real thing among other real things, but it has an absolute need of real things as a point of departure.'19 In a 'mother-daughter' game, for example, as a girl plays with her doll, she transforms the toy into a let's-pretend or 'make believe' baby, but at no time does she become schizophrenic so as to separate the let's-pretend baby from a 'real' doll; she is fully aware that the doll has a double reality: it is a toy and a baby at the same time. In the same way, play (like language) is not totally separate from reality but is related to it in a metonymic mode. When in the first chapter of Lazarillo, for example, the blind man is perceived by the picaro as a let's-pretend bull, Lazarillo knows that he gets a helpless old man to leap into a stone post and that the blind master experiences real pain. However, in a metonymic fashion, he transforms the old man into a bull and injects a playful dimension into his cruel revenge. From the point of view of the novel, the let's-pretend circumstance discourages the observing public or the reader from feeling emotional pathos; a dimension of humour and fun is integrated with the feeling of revenge, and the reader/observer jeers with the picaro - 'ole, ole' - despite the fact that this is not the attitude he or she would otherwise have. In other words, the playful situation, or the act of playing, 'catches the reader off guard,' as Cortazar says, and takes him or her into a new reality that would be difficult to accept from the ethical point of view.20

23

Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

The nature of play, according to Cortazar and Gadamer, is such that it draws the player (be it the author, the character, the reader, or a common observer) into the play and has the ability to keep him or her playing. Gadamer explains, for example, that a procession is a part of a religious rite and that as such it is more than a demonstration, 'since its real meaning is to embrace the whole religious community' (98). In secular 'processions' such as political campaigns, politicians intelligently exploit 'the openness of play towards spectators' (98), as Gadamer says, when they often use music to acquire support. Neruda's poetry in Allende's campaign in Chile, for example, embraced, no doubt, most of 'the religious community.' The openness of the picaresque play towards readers in the post-Borgesian, post-Nabokov works, Libra de Manuel and Match Ball, goes beyond artistic excellence demonstrated in the craftsmanship of plot and form. The two novels are no longer technical charades in which authors gradually reveal information and let the reader play a guessing game, but are works/play in which the author, the characters, and the readers are in a non-hierarchical relationship. In his study of Borges's narrative techniques, Jaime Alazraki focuses on what he calls the 'resolved guessing' ('adivinanza resuelta') and explains that 'at the end of his short story, Borges reveals verbatim to the reader what is slightly insinuated throughout the story' ('Al final de su cuento, Borges revela literalmente al lector lo que estaba apenas insinuado a lo largo del relate').21 Of course, the real games of guessing are to be found in French literature, where writing is often a detached aesthetic exercise that respects Mallarme's dictum that 'to name an object is to do away with three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem which is derived from the satisfaction of guessing little by little.'22 As suggestiveness in the games of guessing, and 'thingness' or 'chosisme' later became the goal of the nouveau roman,23 literary 'playtexts' became self-parodic. This led to the complete destruction of the characters. Instead of writing 'John is nervous,' Salvador Clotas mockingly tells us, Alain Robbe-Grillet, for example, would write: 'John smokes a cigarette, John stubs out the cigarette, John smokes another cigarette,'24 and the reader would then conclude for herself or himself that John is nervous. Georgy Lukacs complained less humorously that for Thomas Mann the 'monologue interieuris simply a technical device,'25 while Virginia Woolf disapproved that a great number of 'materialists' like Mann 'spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring ... Life escapes, and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while.'26 Of course, it has also been questioned how much she herself, Joyce, and Faulkner succeeded in securing life as they attempted 'to reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its message through the brain.'27

24

Play and the Picaresque

In the post-Borgesian Latin American version of modernism there is an important difference: characters regain the importance that they lost in the first part of the century and become again more than just textual constructs.28 The reader's identification with the characters is an intimate and thereby efficacious - mode of communication, without which literature/play is dry and impersonal. As Bakhtin says, 'Readers happen to be human beings who identify with human figure more readily than with trees, rocks, and the weather, even if all of these elements are fictional elements.'29 Dunn also finds in his new literary history, which studies the picaresque genre from the reader-reception point of view, that one of the essential characteristics of the picaresque genre is that 'readers commonly seek the "real" person,' and that 'nowhere is the illusion of presence cultivated so assiduously by writers and sought with such fervour by readers as in autobiography,'30 which is the seed of the picaresque genre. While picaresque works are not straight-forward autobiographies, they have autobiographical dimensions that captivate readers, turning readers into extensions of the picaro and his or her play with life. As Gomez-Moriana argues in Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism, Aleman aimed in Guzman de Alfarache not merely to instruct by illustration and example but also to force readers to examine their own motivations and conscience at every turn. As picaresque works mirror their readers' knowledge and basic human drives, they bring these readers into their play. Then, they turn the familiar images in such a way that readers begin to see what is familiar in a new, often amoral light. This profoundly educational quality, which has always been an underlying feature of picaresque literature according to Dunn, goes beyond simple use of play to teach 'serious' subjects to children. The Spanish picaresque works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries originated a unique genre because they developed from, and together with, devotional and confessional writings in which confession was not confined to the privacy of the confessional but was part of the spectacle of public executions and autos-da-fe. 'The inner and the outer worlds meet and overlap, more exactly, the inner world of spirituality is projected onto a public stage, given a dramatic role, reminded that it has no claim to autonomy but must be exposed to public scrutiny and even to public gaze.'31 Dunn then points out that the narrator of Lazarillo's story has many opportunities to press the button of pathos, to amplify the protagonist's fear, hunger, and physical suffering, 'but he does not do so.'32 I call this narrative device the semidistance characteristic of play. This tone is maintained in order to engage readers' emotional and rational faculties in such a way that, as in the wooden-board scene, emotion and reason do not overshadow each other. This atmosphere, I will argue, is the most important aspect that brings spontaneous play and the picaresque genre together.

25

Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

As Rilke writes, the Goddess throws the ball to us in such a way that her move automatically provokes a countermove. In everyday life we shift perspectives and counterplay more than we actually realize. In Frame Analysis, Goffman explains how context determines meaning, and how much we play with this knowledge. As Goffman illustrates, a woman normally removes her clothes, allows her doctor to examine her body, and feels no excitement. Yet, if she repeats the same action in the bedroom with her lover, the same physical activities acquire a new meaning and produce a totally different effect. As we have the power to behave differently in the doctor's office and in the bedroom, it is conceivable that a woman may switch these frames, and in a situation where she has to make love to a man she does not love, she may pretend, in order to make the experience less unpleasant, that the lover is only a doctor examining her. Similarly, in Skarmeta's novel, Sophie Mass chooses to have a bit of fun and treats her doctor as if he were her lover. In both of these cases, we would not say that the woman is schizophrenic or unaware of the difference between her lover and her doctor. We might say that she is playing. In her actions, she is simultaneously conscious of her own creative imagination and of her surroundings and partners. The simultaneous perceptions of external reality and her internal world shape each other - although it is quite difficult to play in the course of rape or other forms of torture, as we shall see in Cortazar's novel. On the basis of these simple examples, it is easy to see that play is a widespread form of integration, or 'meshing,' as Claudio Guillen would say in picaresque terminology, and this is true not only for children but for adults as well. To play adult games spontaneously, one has to have a good measure of maturity, as Lonstein and Andres emphasize in Libro de Manuel For, in playful situations one has to know well the rules of established social games in order to alter social frames to one's benefit. The blind master recognizes in Lazarillo that the only way marginalized people can survive and get the upper hand is to mature. Such maturity stems not from obedient adaptation of what is considered to be responsible behaviour, but from an ability to react to specific situations: 'you'll have to learn that a blind man's boy has got to be sharper than a needle' (27) ('aprende que el mozo del ciego un punto ha de saber mas que el diablo' [43]). In this enterprise, players are bound only by the limits of their imagination and by the resistance of their opponents (another person, society, or life itself). The blind man chooses play as his principal means of teaching the picaro how to be a good servant. His teaching is not driven by acquisition of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but mainly serves the purpose of survival in the play called life. Complaining about metaphysics, Wittgenstein argues that philosophers put too much emphasis on need for cer-

26

Play and the Picaresque

tainty and definitions: 'We teach a child "that is your hand," not "that is perhaps your hand." That is how a child learns the innumerable languagegames [and social frames, Goffman would say] that are concerned with his hand. An investigation or question, "whether this is really a hand" never occurs to him. Nor, on the other hand, does he learn that he knows that this is a hand.'33 Similarly, a picaro does not ask great philosophical questions about why things happen, but accepts his circumstances as they are: 'I have two hands,' a picaro says; then he thinks what he can do with them, and does it. I do not want to imply that the picaresque world-view was a concern of Wittgenstein's investigations, but his observations reinforce some aspects of die picaresque world-view, namely, that the average person is not as inquisitive as philosophers would like, and that experiences are valued for their own sake rather than for the sake of knowledge. As we discuss further the type of play that employs reason and knowledge but is driven by natural life-forces, or the instinct for survival, Bakhtin's study of play in popular, carnivalesque situations will prove helpful. In Rabelais and His World Bakh tin describes a type of play in which distorted figures and coarse language are prominent, but which also celebrates positive forces in life. The medieval popular grotesque play distorts social realities through the humorous and playful figure of a clown or a dwarf, and through humorous linguistic games that reflect the dynamics of the market place and a folk mentality. However, despite the distortion and the violence in the character and conduct of the clown, the fool, and the dwarf, the overall tone of the performance was not ridicule and mockery. Distortion was merely a way to expose the weaknesses and the imperfections of the ruling class. The transformed or reshaped reality is grotesque, but in its essence it is positive and recreative. Bakh tin also explains how 'the regenerative aspect of play' has gradually been lost in the development of Western culture, thus providing us with a background in which Cortazar's and Skarmeta's novels stand out as works that attempt to recover the moment lost in the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a time in which the popular spirit had the opportunity to merge with the classical intellectual tradition, as it did in Rabelais's work, for example. Unfortunately, that opportunity was lost then, but it resurfaces again in the twentieth century in modernism. In the behaviour of the clowns, masks, dwarfs, and other folk-grotesque beings of the medieval play, Bakh tin recognizes a form of madness, but it is a 'festive madness' (39) that functions as a gay parody of the narrow seriousness of official truth and reason. Later, in the Romantic grotesque, this madness loses its positive spirit and acquires a sombre, tragic aspect of individual isolation: Tt became, as it were, an individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation. Laughter was cut down to cold humour, irony, sarcasm. It ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity,' Bakhtin says (37).

27

Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

Medieval clowns are displaced and the focus turns to the puppet or the existentialist hero as the victim of alien inhuman force, which rules over human beings by turning them into marionettes. If we compare these puppets to Shakespeare's fool, for example, we see how much more festive and playful the Renaissance was even in the most profound tragedies.34 The fool in King Lear, for example, reveals painful truths but he shows simultaneously that not all is gloom. Sancho Panza is also an example of the medieval carnivalesque clown who re-emerges in a learned Renaissance work. His character-type and appearance recall the Spanish chivalresque hero's vulnerability in a way that is humorous, but not dehumanizing. In their role as buffoons, the fool and the squire are 'play things,' but they are sharp contrasts to Beckett's twentieth-century gloomy puppets - in Endgame, for instance - and Valle-Inclan's esperpento characters. A picaro is not exactly a fool or a buffoon, but he belongs to the same family of characters. Heinrich Boll's twentieth-century picaro, for example, is a clown, and in Giinter Grass's The Tin Drum he is a dwarf. In essence, these characters belong to the family of mischievous, delinquent characters who expose hypocrisy in the ruling order, but in a way that is humane and not mean-spirited. Their main goal is not broad social protest; they simply expose weaknesses and try to take advantage of them. Like fools, clowns, and buffoons, picaros play with the social world in the festive mode of a carnival, but they also act with a purpose of survival. In the second plane of their actions they hope to make some material gain or some political impact, or to obtain some other benefit. However, material gain is not their main goal, but a consequence of their contest. Their main goal is physical and spiritual survival and emotional alleviation. We shall return to Rabelais when I discuss how Lazarillo de Tonnes incorporates numerous stock scenes from folklore and captures the popular spirit of survival. For the moment it is worth indicating that in Cortazar's Libro de Manuel, Lonstein is explicitly described as a 'bufon,' and there are other characteristics in the novel which suggest that the novel embraces the Latin American popular carnivalesque spirit. In Skarmeta's Match Ball, Raymond Papst explicitly calls himself a picaro. Moreover, he says that while Nabokov gave himself or his characters the power to create their own fictional worlds, over which they have complete control, he, Raymond Papst, by contrast, is a rational player who has the freedom to make some moves, yet he must operate in a world that lies beyond his or his author's control. He says: 'Nabokov wrote a book, and I only my life' ('Nabokov escribia un libro y yo solo la vida').35 The return to vida or life links him, no doubt, to the carnivalesque spirit. As the roles and the types of the carnivalesque figures have changed in history, so has the type of humour that accompanies them. In modern

28

Play and the Picaresque

times play and humour either turn into harsh satire, Bakhtin says, or they become what he calls 'gay, fanciful recreational drollery deprived of philosophical content.'36 Independently, Donald Shaw draws a similar conclusion regarding the humour in modern Latin American fiction. Of the three types of humour Shaw distinguishes, satirical, black, and ludic, only black humour expresses life's multidimensionality and the tragicomic quality characteristic of Rabelais's Renaissance laughter and picaresque fun. In 'Los funerales de mama grande,' for example, Garcia Marquez prefers satiric humour because he strives at once to entertain and to criticize social injustice and corruption. Satirical humour is so widespread among Boom writers that Alfred MacAdam speaks of a new tradition in Latin American fiction.37 Linda Hutcheon also tells us in A Poetics of Postmodernism that in modern literature in general, the modern and postmodern approach to life and literature is predominantly ironic, satirical, and parodic. Ludic humour is also common, particularly in more recent fiction. Cabrera Infante's 'chemically pure humour,' unlike satirical humour, is 'exempt from all social and existential preoccupations, and stems directly from the free creative imagination' ('humor quimico puro, exento de toda preocupacion social o existencial, y que brota directamente de la libre fantasia creadora').38 For this reason, his works are closer to Nabokov's fiction than to the fiction of the Latin American Boom. If we, the critics, take the position of Marie Antoinette and are more concerned with cakes than with bread, we welcome Cabrera Infante's levity in the same way that we appreciate Nabokov's linguistic ingenuity and, no doubt, his artistic genius. Skarmeta, who chronologically belongs to Cabrera Infante's generation of writers, chose, however, to observe the world from the bread-eaters perspective. Following Cortazar's example, he uses the black humour that I explained earlier. The black humour of which Cortazar was a true master is related to medieval grotesque laughter because it laughs in moments that are not light. It also criticizes, but condemnation is not its main goal. Bakhtin's claim that carnivalesque play and laughter 'celebrate' positive aspects of life may, by a slightly misleading choice of words, suggest more than Bakhtin really means; let us remember that the 'celebration' of life in medieval grotesque play is expressed by means of violent language and in market-place situations. There is little idealism associated with the celebration. Bakhtin argues that although the Rabelaisian world is marked by harsh language, coarse humour, and sharp satire, Rabelais himself was a profound humanist who had a deep affection for life and human beings, and through this link he was in touch with his readers. We shall examine this humanistic attitude in the first picaresque novel, which is not only a collage of popular tales but also a work shaped by the popular picaresque/grotesque/humanist spirit. Our study of the two

29

Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

contemporary novels will also concentrate on the question of attitude, namely, the capacity to appreciate life amidst personal and political chaos. Tragicomedy, or carnivalesque play in grotesque, violent situations, has been a particular challenge for a number of Hispanic authors, not all of whom have been successful in incorporating a primitive spirit in their sophisticated, highly intellectual works. While elements of popular music (flamenco songs, lullabies) are thoroughly incorporated in the sophisticated literary texts of Garcia Lorca, tangos and 'porteno' vocabulary and the figure of the 'compadre' are less natural in Jorge Luis Borges's metaphysical works such as 'Hombre de la esquina rosada' (1935) or the anthology El compadrito; su destino, sus barrios, su musica (1945). In Garcia Marquez's Erendira, for example, or in One Hundred Years of Solitude, there are detailed descriptions of episodes from carnivals. The Colombian Nobel laureate has in fact claimed that his literature is nothing but stories he heard from his uneducated grandmother, who passed on to him the rich Caribbean folk repertoire of Galician, African, and Indian tales, in which are variations of remarkably similar human truths. But to what extent these stories are the modus operandi of Garcia Marquez's work remains to be studied. The same is true of Alejo Carpentier's work. In Alazraki's study of the theme of the 'compadre' and 'porteno' vocabulary in Borges's and Cortazar's works, he indicates that Borges only superficially incorporates the material from the marginalized outskirts of Buenos Aires. Cortazar, by contrast, succeeds in capturing the popular spirit of his native country: 'No Argentinian writer has succeeded, as Cortazar did, in recreating in literature the tone of voice so natural to Argentinians ... The authenticity which Cortazar achieved (and Borges does not) comes from the assimilation of the "porteno" type of voice which is not different from the one he uses out of necessity in his narrative' ('ningun escritor argentine ha logrado, como Cortazar, recrear en la literatura el tono de voz natural de los argentinos ... La autenticidad que logra Cortazar [y Borges no] proviene de la asimilacion de la voz de un tipo porteno, no muy diferente a la suya, a las necesidades literarias de la narracion').39 This 'adaptation' of the Argentinian popular voice, as well as the fact that 'Cortazar puts himself in the adventure of life' ('se centra en la aventura de la vida')4° will be examined throughout this study. My next task is to explore what political implications and personal advantages lie in the ludic integration of the subjective and objective worlds, of history and personal experiences, and of European intellect/reason and Latin American popular spirit. With no hint of a Marxist slant, or glorification of the working people, Bakhtin demonstrates in Rabelais and His Work that popular games, and above all the spirit of play, were potent popular weapons in medieval culture against the official dogmatism that threatened the people's survival.

3O

Play and the Picaresque

Why else would Rabelais, the son of a relatively prosperous government official and the personal physician of two of the most powerful figures in the political establishment, have taken such an interest in the culture of the people and have made 'the popular marketplace aspect offcasts' the central issue around which his Gargantua and Pantagruel are built? In the Middle Ages laughter and popular play, Bakhtin indicates, were 'forbidden in every official sphere of Life and Ideology.'41 Umberto Eco also illustrates in The Name of the Rose that they were a threat to the establishment. According to Eco and Bakhtin, the two cultures, the popular and the official, were clearly divergent and the latter may not have been as formidable as has been believed. The 'official culture,' the culture of the power establishment, was (like our own) serious, dogmatic and fixed. The official feast asserted all that was stable, unchanging, perennial: the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values, norms and prohibitions ... The tone of the official feast was monolithically serious and ... the element of laughter was alien to it' (9), Bakhtin says. By contrast, folk culture is essentially comic; its spontaneity and its ability to see life as a positive and rejuvenating force sustained the marginalized and the oppressed so that they could survive the seriousness of the official culture. Hence, highly educated Rabelais includes in his 1542 edition of Gargantua 217 games taken from the popular culture. The violent dimension of the medieval games and carnival can be linked to the early modernist understanding of violence, the main purpose of which was to agitate individuals and thus strengthen their sense of self and lead to a better society. For this reason Baudelaire contested George Sand's 'good heart' and her 'love of the working class,' and approached the underprivileged not from the superior position of bourgeois pity, but from the respectful position of 'an equal.' In his poem 'Bash the Poor,' Baudelaire deliberately responds to the entreaties of a beggar with an onslaught of violence, and subsequently rejoices because, 'thus, by means of the vigorous treatment I subjected him to< I had restored to him his selfesteem and zest for life.'42 The primitive spirit in Picasso's 1907 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' also shows that crude energies and desires which are violent and Dionysian can be a profound source of empowerment.43 This vision of the world is further developed by Cortazar and Skarmeta. Andres's violent act with Francine in Libra de Manuel provokes the turbulent emergence of a new woman who is born from the destruction of a conventional bourgeois person. As disturbing as it may be, violence is a necessary part of creation, just as chaos was a precondition for the creation in the Judaeo-Christian interpretation of the world. For this reason, in Match Ball, Papst agrees with Sophie that to make a cake one has to break the eggs (161). Papst, therefore, forces himself on Sophie as she in turn

31

Play and Games: Recreative Disorder and Intellectual Order

aggressively intrudes into his life. The intensity and pressure in these acts, like the violence and coarseness in Rabelais's work, resemble the physical pain of real birth: they are an integral part of life. One of the major differences between the formal games (grammar, metaphysics, social orders) of the ruling class and the spontaneous games of popular celebration (everyday language) emphasized by Rabelais and Bakhtin is that official games are based on controlling the distance between players and the outside world, while in popular games there is a 'natural solidarity' that is much less idealized than the one presented by Marxism. Bakhtin explains medieval popular laughter and play through ornaments found in the fifteenth-century excavation of Titus's baths. The bath ornaments, or 'grottesca' from the italian 'grotta,' are made up of a number of figures that are interwoven as if giving birth to each other. The boundaries of these figures are visible, but they are also boldly infringed as the inner movement of being itself and its ever-incomplete character are expressed in the violent passing of one form into the other. In Rabelais's work, Bakhtin shows, the 'abusive language of the marketplace' has the function of infringing boundaries in a way that violence is visible, but the degree of violence is not superfluously destructive. The grotesque images of the body infringe upon each other as an expression of the desire for continuity. The stress is laid on those parts that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the body goes out to meet the world: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, and the nose. In modern works, forceful sexual encounters serve a similar function. The violence, the crudeness, and the open-ended movement forward in carnivalesque laughter bring to mind Claudio Guillen's vision of the picaresque and his insistence that a picaro cannot be studied in a vacuum because he is a part of a larger whole. This notion is elaborated further in Joseph Meeker's explanation of picaresque literature in terms of the ecological whole and in its relation to comedy. Meeker departs from Susan Langer's claim that comedy is truly amoral, and argues further that comedy demonstrates that human kind is 'durable,' as he says, even though specific people may find themselves in a weak and undignified position: 'Comedy is careless of morality, goodness, truth, beauty, heroism, and all such abstract values men say they live by. Its only concern is to affirm man's capacity for survival and to celebrate the continuity of life itself, despite all morality. Comedy is a celebration, a ritual renewal of biological welfare as it persists in spite of any reasons there may be for feeling metaphysical despair.'44 The celebratory aspect of the whole in comedy was transformed through the morally loose La Cekstina into the amoral picaresque novel. La Cekstina in itself is not a comedy but a tragicomedy, at the end of which

32

Play and the Picaresque

almost all of the characters are dead. But Menendez y Pelayo, that most Catholic and conservative of all critics, has said that he almost feels indignation when Sempronio and Parmeno slay Celestina,45 a woman who disobeys all social rules in the course of destroying and remaking women's virginities. Cervantes saw the novel as a divine book, 'had it concealed more the human' ('Libro, en mi opinion, divino si encubriera mas lo humano').46 Stephen Gilman has written, in a memorable prologue to a contemporary edition of La Celestina, that 'we can only admire Rojas for his discovery of the way to balance the sublime and the ridiculous in intimate and complex coexistence, not as polarized possibilities of life.'47 This balancing was encapsulated in the later picaresque mode of seeing the world, and it is illustrated in Cortazar's wooden-board scene. This selective and incomplete trip through history shows that the link between comedy or tragicomedy, spontaneous play, black humour, and carnivalesque laughter is indisputable. These rejuvenating phenomena that have stood on the periphery of Western philosophy and civilization are no longer viewed as naive or only barbarian. Nor should they be contrasted to reason and metaphysics, because when in union with reason they enhance the struggle for both individual and sociopolitical survival. The coexistence of instinct and reason, and of the ridiculous and the sublime, that was captured in the precursor of the picaresque novel, La Celestina, was lost after the Renaissance to be recaptured again in the twentiethcentury modernist art that emerged in Picasso's primitive masks of 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' and in Woolf s and Joyce's subconscious mind or, as Virginia Woolf says, in the 'flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its message through the brain.' The same life-forces re-emerge again in a less obscure fashion in Cortazar's and Skarmeta's violent black humour and their recreative play.

2. Picaresque Realism and Magical Realism

The development of picaresque criticism has led to the realization that neither an exclusively social nor an exclusively ethical point of view could do justice to the literature of roguery. Claudio Guillen

As Francisco Rico has argued, the picaresque is defined by the picaresque point of view, where a 'point of view' in not a technique, a category of an atemporal 'rhetoric of fiction,' but a way of perceiving and manipulating reality. By examining the picaresque point of view or this attitude towards reality, we find the link among the picaresque, comedy, carnivalesque laughter and play, and Latin American Magical Realism. Rico explains that in picaresque fiction 'the alluded reality and the way it is presented are meaningless unless they refer to Guzman [or Lazarillo].' The essence of a picaresque book, Rico insists, 'consists not so much in showing us reality as in showing [a picaro] in the act of perceiving and appropriating it.'1 This view of the picaresque could not be unrelated to the modernist concern with the relationship of the individual (the player/picaro) and the other, or to the attitude found in Magical Realism. According to Luis Leal, the Magical Realism that characterizes most of Boom fiction is 'more than anything else, an attitude towards reality that can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in closed or open structures' (emphasis mine) .2 In light of this observation we can argue that in nature and purpose, the relationship of the magical to the real in the more dynamic novels of the Latin American Boom is comparable

34

Play and the Picaresque

to the playful relationship in picaresque works of the let's pretend to the real. In the picaresque world-view, as in the view of Magical Realism, the imaginary world is not created to avoid historical reality; rather, as Luis Leal says, it 'confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts' (121). Leal then goes on to add that 'the principal thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstance' (122). Borges's fiction, which sets the tone for the modern Latin American movement,3 accentuates the 'mysterious relationship' between man and his labyrinth-like circumstances, and thus undermines false certainties also challenged by the European modernist writers. Later Latin American writers who were influenced by Borges begin with the understanding that 'mystery' or the unknown 'Fortune,' as Lazarillo would call it, has a strong hand in human life. Then they go beyond Borges's astute insight, empowering the individual to cope with cosmic and political mystery and chaos. In their efforts to empower the individual, Latin American writers endorse the modernist emphasis on the 'self,' which developed along the lines of the expressionist attempt to render 'soul states and the violent emotion swelling up from the innermost recesses of the subconscious.'4 Although subjective experience is important for Latin American writers, Cortazar's and Skarmeta's individuals assert themselves not so much through their rich interior lives as through their natural inclination to survive in an oppressive, unpredictable, and mysterious world. Their two works suggest that the inspiration to endure and compete comes from Latin American history and first-hand experience surviving in chaotic political and socio-economic circumstances. It has been argued that, in their struggle for survival in the unfriendly new land, those clever marginalized adventurers who initiated Latin American history and culture embody the spirit of the Spanish picaro, Lazarillo de Tormes. Similarly, a struggle on the Western frontier produced Huckleberry Finn, an archetypal North American picaro. However, Mark Twain's (1884) work was an isolated example, and it did not have the same widespread impact on North American culture that the abundance of picaresque Latin American chronicles had on Latin American literature and culture. Like Lazarillo's report to Vuestra Merced, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria tells us, the chronicles of early conquistadors are embellished accounts to Spanish authorities that incorporate invention and observation in an inseparable blend. Their tendency for narrative manipulation and the blending of history and subjectivity prefigure the modernist attempt to meaningfully integrate 'the self with 'the other.' Critics have debated whether the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) is the first picaresque novel or a precursor of the form. Although experts on Golden Age picaresque literature hold with aggressive certainty that Mateo

35

Picaresque Realism and Magic Realism

Aleman's Guzman deAlfarache (first part published in 1599, the second part in 1604) and Francisco Quevedo's La vida del buscon (1626) were in their time the two most influential texts of the Spanish sixteenth-century picaresque, Lazarillo de Tonnes is, no doubt, the novel that has the most influence on modern criticism and fiction. While its brevity and simplicity (on the first level) make the novel teachable to Hispanic schoolchildren, timeless themes have made Lazarillo de Tormes the most read Spanish picaresque novel today, not only in Latin America and Spain but also abroad.5 From the point of view of modern literature, this short anonymous novel is much more important than the other two canonical texts. Quevedo's El buscon is too condescending to lower classes and too misogynist for modern egalitarian tastes. Similarly, the modern reader would find outdated the lengthy ceremonies in Guzman de Alfarache. Furthermore, although a Spanish text, the seventeenth-century Guzman de Alfarache, which was quickly translated into French, German, and English, was more readily accepted in the broader circles of European literature than in Hispanic letters. It directly influenced Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669) in Germany and Lesage's Gil Bias (1715, 1724, and 1735: three parts) in France. Among modern German picaresque novels that seem to follow most closely the line of influence from Guzman de Alfarache are Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull (1954), written directly in the tradition of Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, and Giinter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959), in which Oscar is a direct descendant of the drummer boy Simplicissimus.6 From the point of view of modern Latin American fiction, there is no doubt that Lazarillo eclipses other Spanish picaresque works. Antonio Skarmeta specifically refers to it in Match Ball, and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier declares that this little novel has inspired every Latin American to be a picaro, and not merely because every Spanish and Latin American schoolchild knows the story of Lazarillo, but primarily because it resonates with the vibrant core of Hispanic culture. In Myth and Archive (1990), Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria argues that picaresque literature in general and Lazarillo in particular are incidental models for the beginning of Latin American history and culture. Like Lazaro's letter to Vuestra Merced, the early historical letters, such as Hernan Cortes's letter to Emperor Charles V, are 'documents' simultaneously bearing witness to the discovery and settlement of the New World (El Caso in Lazarillo) and answering to a higher authority. In most cases, these letters, like the letter the picaro writes in Lazarillo de Tormes, were 'an act of defiance as well as one of compliance.'7 Gonzalez Echevarria focuses on the issue of simultaneous defiance and compliance in works such as Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967) by the Colombian Garcia Marquez and Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps) (1953) by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier. Still, Gonzalez Echevarria does not

36

Play and the Picaresque

discuss our two authors, Julio Cortazar and Antonio Skarmeta, most likely because they are less concerned with questions about truth in its relation to official authority. While Garcia Marquez and Carpentier combine history and fiction in a fashion that imitates Lazarillo's ambiguous attitude towards authority - thus following one line of picaresque fiction Cortazar's and Skarmeta's novels attempt to promote Lazarillo's other tendency: that is, his playful attitude, which functions as a means of spiritual/ ontological and material/physical survival in a world that is, as Gonzalez Echevarria says, a world of 'myth and archive.' As we relate the sixteenthcentury picaresque world-view to the main attitudes of Boom and Magical Realism, we must take into consideration four hundred years of human cultural and artistic development. However, we can still argue that the selfconscious and self-preserving attitude taken by Lazarillo is echoed in the Latin American modern human struggle for self-reassertion in a world driven by enigmatic social and cosmic forces. This chapter does not address the complete history of the development of the picaresque genre, but it considers some key fictional picaresque works and some principal issues in picaresque criticism which suggest that some trends in twentieth-century fiction and criticism and the picaresque mode of seeing the world complement, or mutually reinforce, each other. We must remember that not until the mid-nineteenth century were there significant studies of the immensely popular picaresque fiction. It is evident from the boom of the picaresque criticism of this century that with the emergence of modernist literature criticism has become sufficiently receptive and linguistically and theoretically equipped to decipher this deceivingly simple genre. There were three simplistic tendencies that had to be overcome: the 'positivistic' tendency, which saw the picaresque novel only as deliberate anti-romance, and as a socio-historical document of decadent times; the 'period perspective,' which explored the picaresque in the light of Renaissance and baroque characteristics, and which saw the fiction didactically as an ideological weapon of humanism and the CounterReformation, with the picaro ushering in a new image of man; and, finally, Americo Castro's theory that the picaresque novel reflected the discontent of the racial outsider or 'converse.' The contemporary perspective does not reject earlier critical observations so much as it synthesizes issues of 'anti-romance,' of 'new individual,' and of 'marginalized character.' The typically Spanish notion of 'converso,' for example, can easily be related to any modern marginalized character who functions as a model for the 'new image of man' living in socio-historic 'decadent times.' The picaro's anti-romantic attitude becomes, in modernist language, a disdain for sentimentality. Traditional discussions of the picaresque form especially lend themselves to modern

37

Picaresque Realism and Magic Realism

criticism, except that now traditional views are evaluated in a different light. While modern critics give credit to Frank Chandler's end-of-the-century pioneering work for its recognition of the picaresque genre, they only partially agree with his views, which were formed by the nineteenth-century realist tradition. Chandler, who considered the picaresque novel as an open series of adventures, observed that a 'formless plan'8 (243) was the genre's major drawback, which explains his assessment of the picaresque form as 'the lowest type of book organism.' In his opinion, the unity of a picaresque novel is 'an inferior unity, not that of time or place of action, but merely the identity of the hero' (16). Sharing Chandler's view, Juan Chabas states as late as 1953 that because picaresque novels had no architectural structure, one could add or suppress episodes or alter sequences without violence to the narrative.9 In the same spirit, Jules Remain maintains that the picaresque novel's characteristic lack of logic and of internal guidelines correlates with its lack of organization and structure. However, if we reconsider these dismissive comments regarding the flexibility of structure from the point of view of modern expandable works such as Cortazar's Rayuela, the undeniably flexible structure of the picaresque novel takes on the quality of a strength rather than a drawback. Furthermore, if we add to this observation Chandler's comment that in Spain the romances of roguery were mainly 'libros de entretenimiento' we might suspect that the relationship between the picaro and the historical world portrayed in the novel is that of spontaneous play, where both the character and the setting are players. The rules of their games are not determined by logically pre-established systems such as governmental policies, military planning, religious doctrines, ethical philosophies, and so on. Rather, they are established in the process of playing - hence the flexible structure and the general empowering (even entertaining) atmosphere that overrides all the pain and suffering the picaro must endure. Chandler argues that at the heart of the picaresque tale there is a special notion of the hero: 'he must contrast the obviously real with the obviously fantastic.' This view may also suggest that the role of the hero is to probe the question of truth and to expose hypocrisy in established social and religious practices. Hence, the claim that the picaresque novel 'contrasts' the obviously real with the obviously fantastic is still a subject for discussion. What Lazarillo contrasts is not the real and the fantastic but the authentic and the false, as modernist discourse suggests we should. Chandler and his followers fail to observe that most episodes in Lazarillo are exaggerated and that, for this reason, they go beyond a simple nineteenth-century type of representation. Furthermore, these critics fail to appreciate the obvious fact that the novel masterfully uses fictional tales from the Spanish folk repertoire, or classical literature, and these are evident not only in the

38

Play and the Picaresque

character's speech but in the narrator's discourse as well. The dimension of fictionality is not used simply as a contrast to the picaro's own harsh reality. As was the tradition at the time, it is adapted to the picaro's colourful imagination or is evoked simply in his play, to help him cope with social injustice and 'ill fortune.' Chandler also suggests that picaresque literature is the earliest form of realist fiction: 'a study of actual life was thus his [picaro's] aim, observation the method, and the most striking things of everyday experience the subject, as those of imaginary experience had been the matter of antecedent types' (Romances of Roguery, 14-15). We can agree with Chandler that picaresque literature looks at daily happenings as most people know them to be, but it is difficult to agree that a picaro, such as Lazarillo, is a passive observer. Chandler says at one point that 'we do not much look at the rogue as borrow his eyes with which to look at the world' (60), and he suggests that a picaresque narrator, such as Lazarillo, is a straightforward storyteller. This view was corrected by a modern comparativist, Francisco Rico, whose excellent 1970 study of the point of view shows that Lazarillo is not only an observer in society and in the novel, but is also (as much as it is possible) a maker of his own destiny and his own story. However, while the modern theoretician opens new avenues in Lazarillo criticism, Dunn has observed that Rico's work is so much driven by the unbalanced modernist preference for formal craftsmanship that it does not do complete justice to Lazarillo. Chandler's view that picaresque literature has an inferior form of unity may be another factor that pushed Rico and his followers to adopt the extreme opposite position, insisting that everything in Lazarillo is tightly connected to the 'case' ('el caso') and the narrator's point of view. Rico's emphasis on narrative skills and the narrator's unreliability, as well as his excessive search for hidden meanings that reduces everything to one point, bring us to the place in the discussion in which the picaresque mode of being and writing resemble the goals and practices of modernism. It is for this reason, Dunn suggests, that the modern readings of Lazarillo 'have shifted the centre of interest from the boy to the man, from the actor to the writer, from the person who lives the story to the artful planner and justifier of his life as representation.'10 Lazarillo, however, is not only a skilful narrator - the assessment favoured by modernist critics - he is both the boy actor and the man narrator; furthermore, he is inseparable from his actions, which expose the social conditions in which he lives. As Antonio Gomez-Moriana proposes in his Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism (1993), Lazarillo must be analysed in a multifaceted way, employing an approach that marries philology and semiotics: 'What the new philology - what diachronic semiotics - must study,' Gomez-Moriana says, 'is the dialectic interaction between what is intrinsic and extrinsic to every text considered

39

Picaresque Realism and Magic Realism

as a kind of transtextual anaphora, inasmuch as it is a dialogue with stimuli of various origins.'" Lazaro Carreter (1968) is less defensive than Rico when he argues that the adventures in Lazarillo, far from being ordered into a disconnected sequence, are interconnected and do not elude the character's mind. As they condition the picaro's character, adventures are inseparable from the character in the novel, and the relationship of the 'individual' and the 'other' is not static. Let me contrast this situation to the static relationship of character to society in naturalism and Anglo-American modernism. While naturalists believed that social conditions were the major factor shaping human character, and for that reason characters are unexplainable without them, modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot and Henry James 'use' the visible objective world mainly to portray the intangible emotional, psychological, and moral dimensions of their characters. The social and objective worlds are primarily 'objective correlatives,' as Eliot says, of characters' (individuals') inner being. In his discussion of the inseparability of individual's (character's) being from the environment, Henry James says: 'What shall we call our "self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! One's self - for other people - is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garment, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive."a The integration of social context and characters can be found not only in James's works, but also in the novels of other Anglo-American 'Men of 1914,' as they are called. However, the relationship of the self and the other is not as dynamic as it is in Lazarillo and in our two contemporary Latin American novels. In other words, the modernist search for the dynamic kernel of life is still the unachieved goal in the fiction of the Men of 1914. A year before the appearance of Lazaro Carreter's study, Alexander Parker (1967) addressed the issue of the influence of society on the picaresque character. From the point of view of the theme of freedom and in the development of this theme, he identified in picaresque works 'the atmosphere of delinquency,' which he links to the Renaissance concern for freedom. Parker argues convincingly that the picaresque novel 'arises as an exposition of the theme of freedom, including the concept of moral freedom"3 (also an essential characteristic of play according to Johan Huizinga), but he concludes, in a manner similar to Chandler, that 'a man enters into die world along what he thinks is the path to freedom, only to find that it is the road of enslavement to passion and the senses' (9). While Parker sees the search for freedom in the picaresque novel in negative terms - his view being conditioned by the nineteenth-century ethical

4O

Play and the Picaresque

approach - Frutos Gomez (1950) viewed the genre in the light of a promulgation of a 'philosophy of freedom' which recognizes that there are difficulties in acquiring freedom, but that nevertheless it should be sought.14 His point of view is taken up later by Robert Alter (1964), who observes that 'perhaps the most basic assumption underlying the picaresque world view is the conviction that while life is hard, life is also good.'1^ The goodness and freedom of life are relative, and the feeling of freedom is innate to the picaro. 'It would be a rather pretentious exaggeration to describe the picaroon as an individual "in quest of a personal truth,'" Alter argues, 'but one can safely say that the anti-hero does instinctively reject the stale and inapplicable truths accepted by the generosity of men' (71, emphasis added). I will discuss this attitude of the picaro in greater detail as part of my textual studies of Libra de Manuel and Match Ball. I will argue here, nonetheless, that the picaresque semi-personal 'philosophy of freedom' discussed above, and the picaresque positive belief that 'while life is hard, life is good,' are aspects that distinguish some works of the Latin American Boom from European and Anglo-American modernisms. In the preface to The Boom in Retrospect, a 1987 special issue of Latin American Literary Review, Raymond L. Williams reiterates: The Spanish-American new novel from the mid-i940s to the present can be seen as a modified version of the Modern novel, written in Spanish, published in Latin America, and later translated throughout the world ... The Latin American Modernists appropriated from the United States and Europe the techniques of Modernism (fragmentation, collage, multiple point of view, etc.) and have used these techniques to seek order and express the ineffable in a world lacking order and awaiting to be named.'16 Cezanne's and especially Picasso's decentralization in art, or the use of multiple perspective, which was a means of struggle in European art against bourgeois representation, is certainly common in Latin American novels of the Boom. However, while Cezanne, Picasso, and the Boom writers use decentralization to 'express the ineffable,' Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot use juxtaposition, or super-position, as Pound held, not so much to capture authenticity as to find forms of developing models of psychic order in North American fiction; that is, this was their way of imposing new order on chaos, created by the liberation of the point of View. Furthermore, in the modernist literature of Europe and North America, it was not as common to believe that 'life is good' despite the fact that 'it is hard.' There were murmurs of this idea: Paul Claudel, Andre Gide, and Marcel Proust, for example, objected to the symbolist, and particularly Mallarme's, 'special atmosphere of suffocation and stagnation,'17 as Claudel says in a letter to Gide. Cubism, to some extent, adopted the optimistic futurist love of dynamism and the simultaneous, and Breton's surrealist manifesto sought to redefine Dadaist negativity as a critique capable of

.

41

Picaresque Realism and Magic Realism

opening the way to more re-creative enterprises. All the same, the overall attitude in Anglo-American and European modernisms is not comparable in degree to the Latin American tragicomic zest for laughter and life. If we go back to Leal's observation, the Latin American Boom offered a more receptive attitude towards modern instability and chaos. In the Boom's view, chaos is integral to nature, while sexual play and penetrating encounters are an animal and human mode of affirmation. As Alejo Carpentier attempted to translate French surrealism into the language of Latin America's astonishing history, geography, Afro-Cuban spirit, and American Indian primitivism, he not only 'discovered' the Marvellous Real (Realismo Maravilloso), but he also found in Latin America a 'superior reality.' In fact, in the introduction to The Kingdom of This World he argued that 'those countries that possess vestiges of primitive life are the most abundant in original contributions and are the richest in creative potential.' During his trip to Haiti he came to see that surrealism is a common everyday presence in Latin America. In his novel The Lost Steps (1953), written after this trip, he finds in this milieu that the modern European disrespect for life is distasteful. He discovers in his detour from European civilization that life affirms itself through sex and in the human and animal ability to play. This ritualistic dimension of sex heightens the bare instinct. It gives, as it were, a dimension of the marvellous to the real. Carpentier's clearly modernist character/narrator thinks: Opposed as I am to all sexual restraints, to all hypocrisy in things of the body, nevertheless I am irritated by any writing or language that degrades physical love with mockery, sarcasm, or vulgarity. It seems to me that in his mating man should share the ELEMENT OF PLAY that characterizes animals in heat, giving himself up joyously to his pleasant occupation in the knowledge that seclusion behind closed doors, the absence of witnesses, the mutual search for pleasure excludes everything that might give rise to irony or jest... I find pornography as intolerable as certain bawdy stories, double meanings, words metaphorically applied to the sexual act, and I am revolted by a type of literature greatly in vogue in our day which seems to have as its objective the degradation and distortion of all that might contribute, in hours of difficulty and discouragement, to a man's finding compensation for his failures in the affirmation of his virility.18

Lazarillo de Tormes is hardly a macho who affirms himself through his virility. However, he does possess that animal instinct for self-preservation. As Alter says, a picaro is not a philosopher or a Hamlet who wonders whether 'to be or not to be'; Lazarillo is instinctively determined not to be conquered, and he uses his intelligence to play his moves and 'be' in his

42

Play and the Picaresque

play. Lazarillo's 'being' in the world, Carpentier's 'affirmation of virility,' and the Rabelaisian grottesca converge when we view them from the point of view of Meeker's The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology, which contemplates the picaresque world as a part of a larger ecological system. Like Alejo Carpentier, Meeker argues against all idealistic philosophies and against, as Huizinga views it, a somewhat religious notion of humanity which holds that everything that is noble and ethical in man derives from his spiritual, distinctly non-animal nature, while everything that is instinctual and inherited from non-human ancestors is automatically regarded as worthless, if not 'bestial' and evil. He compares a picaro to an intelligent animal and writes: 'He objects to the society into which he is born no more than wolves or ants or whales object to theirs, and like these animals, he tries merely to adapt himself to his circumstances in the interest of survival ... He is so completely absorbed as a participant in life that it never occurs to him to be a critic of it or to escape into fantasies.'19 This description of the picaresque view of the world certainly applies to Rosario in Carpentier's The Lost Steps because her behaviour is governed, in Meeker's words, 'by an internalized acceptance of universal flux as the basic nature of the world' (25). When Mouche disturbs Rosario's love-making with her learned but artificial surrealist rambling, the primitive woman does not hesitate to kick her. However, while Rosario possesses this fundamental picaresque quality, The Lost Steps is not a picaresque novel because its main character desires this natural woman and her natural ways of life only in an abstract way, since the nameless narrator remains imprisoned by civilized culture, which he is trying to disregard. The roughness and roguery that define the picaresque novel may be related to the struggle of modernist individuals to affirm themselves, 'to wake up within the dream and impose one's self on the oneiric reality,' as Cortazar says in the interview with Luis Harss.20 Chandler initiated this discussion in 1907, pointing out that although the picaresque anti-hero makes his way in the world through the service of masters and satirizes their personal faults, picaresque works are not just social satires. According to Chandler, they are 'comic biography (or more often autobiography)' in which 'the rogue and his tricks' and 'the manner he pillories'21 are at centre stage. In his definition of picaro, Guillen argues further that a picaro as such can be distinguished from three older types: the wanderer, the jester, and the have-not. The picaro is only partly a wanderer, and the reflective, introspective, changing picaro cannot be confused with the static, happy hero of a jest-book, nor is he always the have-not of a lower class. The picaro both incorporates and transcends all three types. Essentially, a picaresque novel deals with lives, with evolution, with the unfolding in historical time of individual destinies. It offers not a conflict but 'a process of

43

Picaresque Realism and Magic Realism

conflict between the individual and his environment, inwardness and experience, whereby one element is not to be perceived without the other'22 (emphasis mine). Guillen goes on to add that the picaro is not someone who belongs to the lower class only, but that he or she is a person or a comment on how it felt to be a 'man among men' or rather to become one, against all economic and social odds, 'whether one was a beggar, a merchant, or a hidalgo, in post-Renaissance Europe' (85). In a study in which he argues that the picaresque is a dominant form in modern fiction, Paul West argues that the principal function of the picaresque is to 'repudiate the organized mind.' West further argues that the picaresque world-view 'gives the iconoclast, as well as the man who can connect nothing with nothing, an ideal medium. When a coherent world-view is lacking, the picaresque can still make points with the minimum of manipulation and communicate the flavour of experiences that seem incapable of being interpreted"2* (emphasis mine). West's twentieth-century position can be related in its general oudook to Renaissance practice as explained by Erwin Panofsky, where literary works are guided by la bona sperienza rather than by obedience to traditional codes. It is noteworthy how many titles of picaresque works reflect the idea that picaresque literature is modelled on human experience rather than on ideological, philosophical, religious, or social issues. The word 'vida' ('life'), which often appears in the title, may be an ironic echo of the life of a saint, a genre common in medieval literature, but it may also be an indication that life rather than an ideology or a philosophical concept is the organizing principle in the picaresque, While Don Quijote, Alter indicates, lives/plays 'by the book,' the picaro 'lives by ear.'24 He takes life as it comes to him, and makes the appropriate moves as he involves himself in society and the game called life. In adopting this view, critics run the risk of jumping freely from literature to life and vice versa, and of calling picaresque almost any novel that closely reflects life, as R.W.B. Lewis does, for example, in his The Picaresque Saint. Lewis divides all contemporary prose into what he calls the two generations of writers: the 'artistic' generation (Joyce, Proust, and Mann), for whom aesthetic experience is supreme, and a generation concerned with the human predicament and exploring what it means to be human (Silone, Camus, Faulkner, Moravia, and Greene). He shows a clear preference for the second generation, and observes that 'the old-fashioned picaresque novel ... has been revived and greatly modified for contemporary narrative purposes.'25 Unfortunately, Lewis undertakes no real investigation of the picaresque tradition. He is scarcely concerned with the nature of the picaro or the development of the Spanish Golden Age novel as he contrasts the two tendencies within modern fiction. Nevertheless, he makes an insightful comment that conveys the complexity of modernist

44

Play and the Picaresque

novels and Magic Realism when he says that 'a picaresque saint [a modern hero] tries to hold in balance by the very contradiction of his character, both the observed truths of contemporary experience and the vital aspiration to transcend them' (31). The basis for such comment is the tension between Guzman's aspiration to be a good Christian and his borderline criminal behaviour. Although the desire to transcend manifest reality is not explicit in Lazarillo, it is nevertheless present in a covert form. The two levels, the historical and the personal, are neither parallel (as in allegory) nor contrasted (as in irony and sarcasm), but instead are related to each other metonymically, I propose, as a doll in a game might be related to a child's make-believe world: the toy is endowed with a new dimension in the transformed reality, yet at the same time it remains a toy that limits the creative boundaries of the make-believe world. If we examine this relationship from the point of view of the reader, it becomes obvious that the reader plays an important role in the construction of the text, for he or she is in a better position than a character to carry out the process of transcending 'observed truths.' The picaro, no mere artificial link to which everything in the text is related, is the device that brings in the reader, as Lazaro draws in Vuestra Merced. The reader is in a position that allows him to see, like Vuestra Merced, the whole picture 'from the beginning,' as Lazarillo says. Then Lazarillo takes pains to minimize the distance. The confessional form, which is characteristic of picaresque fiction, and the reader's position as a judge make the reader that element which confers unity to the text. The intimate relationship between the reader and the picaresque character fulfils a function more significant than that of simple identification or pathos. In picaresque literature, the confessional form in itself supplies the atmosphere of confidence, but it places the confessor and confidant (the reader) one level above the person making a confession. Gomez-Moriana suggests that 'the illusion of closeness allows us to forget the personal and concrete character of the addressee of Lazaro's tale, to the point that we identify ourselves with Your Worship and consider ourselves appealed to by Lazaro' (41). Gomez-Moriana recalls Americo Castro's impression (1935) that in reading Lazarillo 'we are given the illusion that we are looking at life itself without any intermediary' (ibid.), and he reminds us of Guillen's astute (1957) description of the novel as a 'spoken letter.' The immediacy described here is not characteristic of modern fiction in general, but it is what Cortazar sought desperately in his modernist novel, which he names after a children's game, Rayuela: ... making an accomplice of the reader, a travelling companion. Simultaneanize him, provided that the reading will abolish reader's time and substitute author's time. Thus the reader would be able to become a copar-

45

Picaresque Realism and Magic Realism ticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing at the same moment and in the same form. All artistic tricks are of no use in obtaining it: the only thing worth anything is the material in gestation, the experiential immediacy (transmitted through words, of course, but the least aesthetic words possible). (Gregory Rabassa's translation) ... hacer del lector un complice, un camarada de camino. Simultaneizarlo, puesto que la lectura abolira el tiempo del lector y lo transladara al del autor. Asi el lector podria llegar a ser coparticipe y copadiciente de la experiencia por la que pasa el novelista, en el mismo momenta y en la misma forma. Todo ardid estetico es inutil para lograrlo: solo vale la materia en gestacion, la inmediatez vivencial (transmitida por la palabra, es cierto, pero una palabra lo menos estetica posible.*6

Cortazar's suggestion that the reader is 'the most important character in the novel' inverts the Aristotelian account of the relationship between character and action; characters are not only elements that help build the story, they are players who are driven by luck and the tangled interplay of circumstances. On a higher level, the reader, on the basis of the author's clues, assimilates the text by means of his own sensitivity and an awareness that he joins a much larger open-ended play engendered in the text. The absence of women in picaresque literature is related to modernist antagonism towards women and Cortazar's solicitation for male readers. Although modernism has more female writers than any other movement, its attack upon women was undisguised. Futurists, for example, coined the phrase 'scorn for women,' and Eliot and Pound rejected the 'feminine writing' of Virginia Woolf and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Still, we ought to ask, is this a rejection of women as human beings, or is this an attack on 'the sentimental significance' that modernism attributed to women? Marinetti explained that the futurist book The Death of Woman (1925) only meant to say that 'love as sentiment is absurd' because it is 'an enemy of modern existence where there are no differences between male and female and where the atmosphere is so rich in sensual sensations.'27 This egalitarian transcendence of sexual differences in futurism unfortunately led to 'purely mechanical genital contact,' as the sexual act was 'metallised,' as Peter Nicholls says (Modernisms, 98). However, the Latin American attempt to portray women as equal to men has been much more successful than the earlier European attempts. More will be said about this in my analysis of the two Latin American texts. Here, I need only explain that in the history of the picaresque novel there are so few strong female characters, or true picaras, because the picaresque mode of seeing the world, like modernism, is devoid of sentimentality, which traditionally has

46

Play and the Picaresque

been associated with women, and it rejects specifically defined roles such as those of mother and wife. In addition, there are few picaras because norms regarding female sexual conduct prevented women from leaving the home. If they did, they became, as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders says, simple 'whores.' Gustavo Pellon, similarly, argues that the Spanish heroines were not picaras, 'but primarily whores trying to live by their wits.'28 This view is also shared by Parker, who believes that the literary decline of the picaresque novel in Spain began with Lopez de Ubeda's La picara Justina (1605). Parker views Alonso de Salas Barbadillo's La hija de Cekstina (1612) in a somewhat more favourable light because the novel explores the particular type of sensationalism inherent in a female delinquent, but he criticizes the novel's 'frivolous joking' (50) and laments the absence of any serious moral concern. With Justina and Elena (La hija de Cekstina} there is no attractive side, no parallel to Lazarillo's and Guzman's underlying transforming ethos. The so-called Spanish picaras are very much like Defoe's Roxana they cannot truly repent. Roxana regrets committing the crime not for its intrinsic evil, but because she is to be hanged for it. Of course, the appearance of syphilis in Europe during the sixteenth century and the spread of venereal diseases contributed to the tightening of bourgeois morality. A woman was perceived and portrayed either as a true heroine or a whore, but never as something in-between. As a consequence, the female protagonist, Celestina (who was the role model for the male picaresque character), almost disappeared from literature. In both Catholic Spain and Puritan England it was almost impossible for a woman to be a 'half outsider.' Furthermore, women did not travel alone; the picaresque situation is often presented in the context of a journey. As Dunn observes, no young girl would be put out by her mother to serve a series of masters, as was Lazarillo. Nor could a girl leave home, as Guzman does, to seek her fortune on foot unless she were disguised as a man. Similarly, she would not be able to enrol in a university as Pablos does in El buscon (1626), and she certainly never had the freedom or the opportunity to earn large sums of money through sports, as Sophie does when launched on the world by her mother in Skarmeta's Match Ball Similarly, rare are grandmothers who would openly 'carry [their granddaughter] from town to town, putting her to bed for twenty cents in order to make up the value of the burned house,' as the old woman does in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nor are there many granddaughters who would openly take such a business-like attitude towards prostitution: 'According to the girl's calculations, she still had ten years of seventy men per night, because she also had to pay the expenses of the trip and food for both of them as well as the pay of the Indians who carried the [grandmother's] rocking chair.'29

47

Picaresque Realism and Magic Realism

Critics are in general agreement that the first important picara in the history of picaresque literature is Grimmelshausen's seventeenth-century Runagate Courage, who was influenced by La picara Justina. Christine J. Whitbourn denies any similarity between the German seventeenth-century picara and her Spanish predecessors: 'It is difficult to think of a character in any of the Spanish novels who is in any way comparable to Grimmelshausen's [Courasche] (1670). Some picaras display a certain degree of initiative and strength of character, but none can approach Courage in interest and complexity, or in the power to dominate. Courage is strong, positive, masterful - in every way, as Ritchie says, "a magnificent beast."'30 Courage is saved from the sort of moral disgrace exemplified in the eighteenth century by Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) because Courage continually acquires new husbands, as her partners are killed in the course of the Thirty Years War. She is simultaneously inside and outside society, while Moll seldom feels solidarity with the world in which she lives. Furthermore, Moll marries her brother and thus is guilty of incest. Moll also abandons her children, while Courage is childless. But most important, Moll is avaricious, concentrating her efforts on financial gains, while Courage shows real enjoyment of life and sex - money is only an added bonus.3' In discussing women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we must be careful not to argue along with Anne Kaler that a woman who sold her body for money was 'an early entrepreneur investing her capital - her time, experience and efforts.'32 If a woman offended sexual mores, she was devalued in the eyes of society regardless of her intellectual talents. A mitigating circumstance was admitted only if her enjoyment of sex was more important than whatever financial gain she acquired by means of it. It is important to note that Grimmelshausen's character does not gain her famous nickname because she exchanges sex for money. Rather, she sees sex as a virtue, calling her vagina her courage. In Skarmeta's novel, as well, the young heroine gains her freedom as she follows her sexual drive with courage. She has a heroic quality, but, as with Courage, it manifests itself in an anti-heroic, picaresque form because she does not strive for a higher ideal in the manner of a heroine. She only enjoys sex as something selfish and earthly: in order to combat the loneliness of her trips and hotel rooms and the boredom brought on by routine in a relationship. The nineteenth century did not produce important picaresque works with either male or female characters, although Dickens and Gogol wrote works that were close to the picaresque genre. There are a few exceptions, such as Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in the United States, and Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi's El periquillo sarniento (The Itching Parrot) (1816) in Mexico, but in general the nineteenth century is a period of non-picaresque literature.

48

Play and the Picaresque

In the early twentieth century, the best-known picaras are to be found in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1949) and Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (1936). In these works we find two women who do not have a bit of sentimentality and who rival men in their ingenuity. Brecht adopted the picara figure from Grimmelshausen in order to expose the chaos of his age. Mother Courage suffers the loss of her own children as a result of her effort to make a living from the war. At the same time, the audience cannot help but admire her courage and fortitude as she perseveres, never ceasing to struggle. For the same reasons, readers admire Scarlett O'Hara, the archetype of the strong Southern woman who insists on making her own way. She has no scruples about pursuing money once she realizes that the social status of merchants has been elevated and that money, not breeding, dictates the new society of Atlanta. To save her land, this attractive, intelligent, and astute woman swears 'never to be hungry again' and marries Frank, not only to pay her taxes and save Tara but also to establish the sawmill. The sawmill enables her to keep Ashley near her, but ultimately it destroys Frank. She sacrifices her husband for the man and family she loves, and thus becomes what Anne Kaler calls 'the first picara to become ... the prime figure in our modern tapestry' (39). The social changes in the twentieth century opened opportunities for women to participate in business and other areas formerly exclusive to men, and in consequence to rival men. As Scarlett competes with Rhett, they both use their sexuality as a weapon, so that their personal and social lives become completely entangled. Scarlett's sexual flirtation with Rhett mixes sex and love with business and money, but it is far removed from being a simple exchange of sexual favours for money. Their relationship redefines the conventional understanding of romantic love. Skarmeta's picara, Sophie Mass, does not exploit her good looks and sex appeal for wealth, but, like Scarlett O'Hara, she certainly uses them as assets, as bargaining chips one might say, that help her to move on in life as well as to be a capable partner in her love affairs. To adequately assess the place of women in Spanish culture, we must go back to the Middle Ages, the period in which a Spanish woman's sexuality was not always viewed as evil. In her essay 'Moral Ambiguity in the Spanish Picaresque Tradition,' Whitbourn argues that the Spanish medieval vision of women is expressed in the bawdy characters of 'trotaconventos' in Juan Ruiz's Libra de Buen Amor (The Book of Good Love) (1330-43) and Fernando de Roja's Celestina (1499), both of which prefigure the creation of the picaresque genre. Frederick Monteser, in The Picaresque Element in Western Fiction (1975), argues that it is 'quite proper to consider La Celestina a legitimate predecessor of the picaresque novel.'33 Roberto Gonzalez

49

Picaresque Realism and Magic Realism

Echevarria's study, Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (1993), shows that although Celestinawas routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the tragicomedy, nonetheless, resonantly echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American fiction. The moral ambiguity of female sexuality that we find in Skarmeta's modern novel can also be seen in the works of Chaucer and Boccaccio, where earthly, sexual love is so attractive that it too could be considered, as in Juan Ruiz's work, the 'Good love,' almost on a par with religious love. In fact, Lynne Lawner points out that the Renaissance female attendant at a royal court 'had a "sacramental" function for the lover because the offering of her body united the earthly love and the spiritual planes in a consubstantiation similar to that of the bread and wine of the Eucharist.'34 In Christian doctrine a prostitute was often used to teach a moral lesson. This is particularly true of Mary Magdalene, who may be considered one of the first important picaras. She was described by Luke as a 'woman of the city who was a sinner' whose 'many sins were forgiven her because she loved much.'35 This two-fold attitude towards the woman is not different from the general picaresque world-view in which objective reality and the 'make believe' reality coexist. Let us first look at the earliest picaresque work, Lazarillo de Tonnes, which was influenced, we are told, by La Celestina. Playfully speaking, we may call this influence the first significant 'meshing' of picaros and picaras.

3. Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

I'd also like people who are proud of being high born to realize how little this really means, as Fortune has smiled on them, and how much more worthy are those who have endured misfortune. Lazarillo de Tormes

Chandler's views are as significant for the development of Lazarillo criticism as the blind man's teaching was for the development of the young Lazarillo. Critics who disagreed with Chandler's assessment that Lazarillo is 'a simple entertaining book' were exercised not only to prove that the novel is not simple but also to camouflage its entertaining and playful qualities because, as we have seen, Western culture views the adjectives 'simple' and 'entertaining' as nearly synonymous. To place Lazarillo in a category of meritorious literature, modern critics such asJ.H. Silverman acknowledge the presence of play and laughter in the novel, but they find it necessary to disagree with Bataillon's assertion that Lazarillo is, a 'livre pour faire rire,' a 'livre facetieux,' arguing that its humour conveys social satire.1 In his edition of Lazarillo, LJ. Cisneros similarly recognizes that humour and playfulness are forces in the novel, but he maintains that the novel's humour has tragic undertones and associates it with the bleak humour of Machiavelli's works.2 The modern Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, by contrast, sees nothing funny in the politics of the genre and argues that in its basic conception the picaresque is the rancorous, embittered view of the underdog contemplating those more fortunate than he.3 For her part, Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel recognizes that popular stories and popular playfulness

51

Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

are the stuff Lazarillo is made of. But, in order to emphasize the author's craftsmanship and narrative skills, she, perhaps unintentionally, disassociates Lazarillo from its popular sources. This, of course, drains the work of all the qualities essential to carnivalesque laughter. Working from a critical perspective that is not ethically and politically oriented, I do not wish to deny that Lazarillo questions and ridicules established norms. However, I propose that criticizing social practices and moral corruption is not the novel's principal goal. Its manifest playfulness and humour give Lazarillo a specific vital dimension that takes the novel beyond the limits and aims of satirical social criticism. The story is narrated from the point of view of the underprivileged, yet the picaro is not presented as a victim, but as someone who is empowered through play; moreover, his empowerment comes without the destructive and critical disdain for the privileged that is characteristic of social satire. Joseph Ricapito, in 'Lazarillo de Tormes and Machiavelli: Two Facets of Renaissance Perspective,' demonstrates how Machiavelli's politically empowering work influenced the anonymous author of the first picaresque novel.4 He also argues: 'Like Machiavelli, the author of Lazarillo de Tormes also reveals a view of life which sees no one as immune from self-interest, greed, and malice.' However, his remark about the picaresque novel is forced. He writes: 'It is on the basis of this destruction of all positive human values that the picaresque as a genre will come into existence and upon which it will thrive.'5 No doubt the picaro's escapades are not an ideal sequence of events governed by strong principles; as in Machiavelli's Prince, in Lazarillo there is a realization that, in Felix Gilbert's words, 'it is impossible to establish one permanent order which mirrors the will of God or on which justice is distributed in such a way that it fulfils all human needs.'6 But the absence of divine or man-made order and absolute justice does not necessarily mean that the picaresque world is nihilistic, nor need it mean that the Spanish novel is 'characterized by bitterness and deprecation,'7 as Ricapito says. If we go back to our first reading of Lazarillo, we see that there is no doubt that the individual in Lazarillo, like the man of virtue in the Prince, has the power to resist the forces of Fortune and the establishment. However, he responds to this situation not with destruction and war but with play. Critics like Ricapito and Cisneros find it necessary to transform picaresque moments, which Lazarillo describes as 'childish trifles' (23), into serious matters, and to equate playful humour in Lazarillo with the black humour in the Prince. They attempt to impose upon Lazarillo a tragic dimension because tragedy as a genre has always seemed weightier and nobler than comic and up-beat works. Ricapito's point, however, is undermined by his own side remark that, 'like an embryonic prince, a natural man in the midst of the human republic, Lazaro knows what the basic rules

52

Play and the Picaresque

of the game of life are; and they apply to himself as they do to all others king, princes as well as paupers' (163, emphasis added). Had Ricapito followed this line of thought he would have stressed that Lazarillo proceeds as a natural man, and he would have seen that as such Lazarillo is more complex than the intellectual, power-driven schemer whom we see in Machiavelli's Prince. For despite his cruelty to the blind man and his marriage to an adulterous woman, Lazarillo cannot be put in the same category of men like Cesare Borgia, or Julius II, the warrior pope of Machiavelli's time, or Henry Kissinger,8 for example, of our time. However scheming and antagonistic, he is not a power-hungry warrior and politician. His skilful manoeuvring is characterized not by the bitterness, indifference, or detachment distinctive of Machiavellian political games, but by recreative laughter and optimism, which inverts Aristotle's subordination of comedy to tragedy and Plato's subordination of spontaneous play to serious contemplative political activity. There is no doubt that Machiavelli's analysis of 'Fortune's power in human affairs' has proved to be valuable advice to those who seek political power. In his attempt to answer the key question originally posed by Roman moralists - How can we hope to forge an alliance with Fortune, how can we induce her to smile on us? - Machiavelli stresses that 'she is the friend' of the brave. And he develops the idea that she is chiefly excited by, and responsive to, the VIRTUS of the true VIR.9 Lazarillo's life is also an encounter with Fortune, as the title 'La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus Fortunas j sus adversidades' indicates, but he does not attempt to change the macroworld. His courage and skilful manipulation of other people operate on a micropolitical and personal scale, ensuring his survival within the political games of his society. As he contests his antagonists, Lazarillo taps into vital forces that are accessible in daring play but not in political manipulation. This play helps abate the picaro's hunger, vitalizes his mental resilience, and, in a number of situations, undermines the superior status of his masters. Lazarillo's vital game-playing is most clearly manifest in the chapter with the squire. The picaro finds himself in a situation which resembles that in which modern existentialist heroes are often portrayed. Yet he transforms the situation, using his primal (re) creative energy to endow it with meaning. At the beginning of the chapter Lazarillo sees himself as neither his master's victim nor as the victim of an unjust society. Instead, he is a 'plaything' of unjust fate: 'I almost fainted, not so much from hunger as from realization that Fortune had its knife right into me' (51) ('que estuve en poco de caer de mi estado, no tanto de hambre como por conocer de todo en todo la fortuna serme adversa' [86]). But Lazarillo acknowledges his misfortune without either despair or indifference. He converts into a let's-

53

Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

pretend mode, reconceiving himself as a player in a game whose outcome he does not know. Without losing his grip on life and his own situation, he believes that he is going to create a situation better than the one Fortune offered him. So Lazarillo dissembles ('disimulando lo mejor que pude'), and in the let's-pretend world that he eventually makes real, he chooses to serve the impoverished squire: 'Sir, I'm a boy that doesn't worry about his belly' (51) ('Senor, mozo soy, que no me fatigo mucho por comer' [87]). As he chooses a role that is clearly embedded in a hierarchical society, Lazarillo takes on his fate in the same way that Camus's Sisyphus overcomes absurdity when he chooses to push his stone in the face of futility. However, the Renaissance picaresque hero is not a lonely existentialist figure, but instead an intelligent, emotionally engaged, yet marginalized, person who instinctively seeks survival, personal affirmation, and human solidarity. Lazarillo's folkloric roots and the spontaneity and naturalness with which he approaches life invite us to examine the novel in Bakhtinian terms of recreative play and carnivalesque, festive laughter. The popular laughter of medieval oral culture, like the general attitude in the picaresque book, is positive without being naively optimistic. An observation of Marquez Villanueva's encapsulates the novel's complex combination of optimism and melancholy: 'How wrong is the judgement of those who find Lazarillo to be an optimistic book, without anything sad or underhanded, or a simple facetious booklet of ridicule' ('cuan erroneo nos parece el juicio de los que encuentran en el Lazarillo un libro optimista, nada triste ni desenganado, o simple obrita de burlas o facecias').10 The novel is analogous to Rabelais's abusive language of the market place, and the imperfect but continuous figurines in the grottesca.11 The penetrating movement and togetherness in the grottesca, like the violent but not hateful moments in the novel, are perhaps as aggressive as the wars Machiavelli advocates as a necessary evil. They are suggestive of both the social criticism that Silverman emphasizes and what Ortega y Gasset calls the 'rancorous embittered view of the underdog' - all examples of disturbing aspects in life that are clearly integrated with the optimistic outlook and the playful attitude in the novel. The moments of despair, like the violently penetrating encounters in the grottesca, do not obliterate the vitality and the tone of hilarity in the novel as a whole. As Francisco Rico observes in his study of the genesis of picaresque literature, the genre absorbed from the epistolary tradition both kinds of writing: 'gravis et severe' and 'otiosa.'12 Consequently, like La Cekstina, which integrated tragic and comic elements at the time of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the hybrid picaresque Renaissance work also reveals a particular Spanish tradition that is unorthodox because, like the oral culture, it is not pure in its form. It is relatively easy to find examples of play in Lazarillo. It is not difficult

54

Play and the Picaresque

to recognize the Machiavellian type of power play in the novel, and it is relatively easy to see the integration of the playful and the serious in its first part. The challenging task is to explain the last chapter from the point of view of play and competition, because rhetoric and persuasion take precedence over the action and the visible play that dominate the earlier chapters. Similarly, it is difficult to maintain that in the last chapter Lazaro does not capitulate to social corruption and hypocrisy, that he does not only 'play along' for the sake of material gain. However, we begin to suspect that the persuasion in the last chapter is part of a larger play when we ask, 'How much prosperity and "good fortune" is there really in being a town crier and in being the husband of an adulteress? When we take into consideration that Lazarillo is not a novel of innocent confession, but an answer 'y pues vuestra merced escribe que se le escriba' ('your Honour has written to me to ask me to tell him') - we begin to see that the last chapter presents not only a disclosure of Spain's social degradation and Lazarillo's moral capitulation; it is, rather, another round in a game in which Lazarillo now plays against the biggest 'master,' proving that even in his rhetorical games he can stand up and be a worthy playmate to authority. In other words, he does not answer submissively Vuestra Merced's request for explanation, but contests him by asserting himself. The many scenes from folklore in Lazarillo indicate an obvious link between Spanish popular culture and this Renaissance work. In addition, one may argue that the carnivalesque 'suspension of all hierarchal rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions'13 can be related to Lazarillo's daring response to Vuestra Merced and several instances when the author, the character, and the reader play on the same level.14 A chapter-by-chapter study will also show that the humour and laughter, which are produced as perspectives shift, are like the folk humour that 'denies, but revives and renews at the same time.' The shifts fall into a dialectical relation to each other because, as Bakhtin writes, 'Bare negation is completely alien to folk culture.'15 The following popular elements and scenes may be found in the novel, some of them in their stock form: the figure of the blind master, the practical joke of the stone bull on the Salamanca bridge, Lazarillo's revenge at the post, the trick with the wine jar, the boy's confusion of the empty house with a tomb, the counting of the grapes, the priest's onions, the play with the chest of bread, the escape of the squire from his creditors, the master's abandonment of his servant boy, and the theatrical deceptions of the public by the pardoner in the sale of indulgences. Lida de Malkiel recognizes that the novel is, above all, a collage of anecdotes that are the product of a collective folk genius.16 However, in order to underline the artist's contribution, she separates the novel from the popular spirit because, like Huizinga, she works under the familiar assumption that

55

Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

in art there is a marked progression and evolution away from popular culture.17 However, today we can argue differently. There are strong indications that the anonymous author of Lazarillo, like Rabelais, was an erudite craftsman, an acute observer, and a sophisticated critic of his society. The fact that he chose to tell the story not from a learned, intellectual perspective, but from the point of view of a boy and a man guided by no one other than his uneducated mother and her popular wisdom, demonstrates the author's great respect for popular culture. What the learned author of the first picaresque work finds attractive about the experience of the underprivileged folk is the commoners' ability to survive difficulties. They possess this competence because they are in tune with larger forces in life, and because they know how to transform a harsh world into a 'let's-pretend reality' that allows them to cope with the actual reality. We have seen how Lazarillo rearranges the harsh outside world he encounters with the squire, so that in the let's-pretend world he is a player who gains control, at least partially. His transformation of difficult reality takes place not only in the context of a struggle for power and control, but also in the context of his instinctive need for solidarity and human community. This need for solidarity and for integration within a larger whole is present not only in Lazarillo but also in picaresque literature in general. Gil Bias's tears are often cited as an indication of the picaro's essentially humanistic nature. The French picaro tells the duke that in a certain situation: 'I myself cried as well, so natural is it to feel concern for the unfortunate' ('Je pleurai meme aussi, tant il est naturel de s'interesser pour les malheureux') . l8 Of course, this is only one side of Lazarillo and Gil Bias. Their violent side is equally present, like the abusive language amidst the general celebration of life in popular culture. If we briefly compare Lazarillo to Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, for example, we see that the aim of the Spanish novel is not to appeal to readers' emotions, nor does it attempt to portray a clear-cut victim-villain situation/For, despite the fact that Lazarillo suffers the same extreme poverty and abuse as Oliver Twist, the readers of the picaresque novel do not cry as Dickens made the whole of England cry. Instead, they laugh and cry simultaneously as they are drawn into a situation in which the picaro violently meshes with members of various social strata. While Dickens criticizes the well-to-do class in England, without disturbing the social hierarchy, in Lazarillo social institutions and poor people are placed on the same level, on one playing field, in the same way that the ugly masks and the pretty ones, kings and laymen, are equated in a carnival. As in polyphonic discourse, the voices of different players remain independent, but they are also 'combined in a unity of a higher order than a homonymy.'19 This unity or 'levelling' is made possible mainly because laughter dispels fear and consequently undermines hierarchy.

56

Play and the Picaresque

In Rabelais and His World, his study of laughter, Bakhtin observes that carnival imagery was used, 'although differently and to a different degree by Erasmus, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Guevara, and Quevedo, by Hans Sachs, Fischart, Grimmelshausen and others' (11). However, he does not discuss the work of any of those writers in any detail. Given that Americo Castro sees Lazarillo as an Erasmian work, and that the picaresque novel shows the same concern for the individual as does Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, Lope's work can throw some light on this kind of play in which representatives of social institutions are portrayed as competitors. The commander's social rank in Lope's play is recognized as such, but it does not make him superior to simple folks when it comes to the question about general human values. Similarly, a picaro serves his master, but he is never less important as a person than the master. Alter observes that a picaro 'will not let the social system pin him down,' but at the same time 'he willingly accepts a position of subservience within the social system.' Alter comments that 'this submission to servitude is an aspect of the picaresque hero which is not likely to sit well with the modern reader' (Rogue's Progress, 15). We must keep in mind that, just as a carnival is not a social protest, a picaro is not a socialist rebel. Social differences are accepted, then the significance of these differences is demystified through play and laughter. Lazarillo serves his masters but, because he is able to laugh with them as a human being, he puts himself on the same level with priests and squires. Bakhtin says: 'The people's [carnivalesque] laughter expresses the point of view of the whole; he who is laughing also belongs to it' (Rabalais, 12). When Lazarillo leaves home, his mother tells him to try to get along with his masters, but her equally important advice is, 'Now you must look after yourself (27) ('valete por ti' [43]). Lazarillo keeps in mind both pieces of advice: he shows respect for his master, and he maintains the sportsman's solidarity with him - but only as much as the master deserves - and he looks after himself when confronting antagonists. In Lazarillo the character's and narrator's points of view do not simply unify the novel around the 'caso,' as Rico points out, but they also convey Lazarillo's distinctively spirited approach to life. Dunn observes that modern critics concentrate exclusively on Lazaro, the grown-up narrator, and focus mainly on his manipulation of Vuestra Merced and, by extension, the reader. Consequently, considerable efforts have been made to find Lazarillo guilty and to mistrust him. And rightly so. Lazaro the narrator and Lazarillo the character are manipulative. The question is, Are manipulation and play bad if they give life both to the character and to the novel? G.M. Bertini argues that the blind man is 'homo homini lupus' because he is a concrete manifestation of the principle that people must become like wolves if they are to survive adversity.20 Survival becomes primary for

57

Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

both the blind man and Lazarillo; 'vida' or life is much more important than 'honor' or any formal moral issue.21 As Guillen first indicates in his Harvard Ph.D. thesis, Lazarillo's main concern is to affirm himself and, as his mother does, to survive all difficulties. Consequently, he does not reproach the Bulero on moral grounds, but feels true admiration for his capacity to survive by playing games and tricks on a corrupt society. Consequently, as we look for hidden meanings and as we recognize the narrator's unreliability, it is extremely important not to prejudge Lazarillo's words. Readers should let the first-person narrative create the intimacy typical of the confessional genre from which the picaresque novel developed, and they should get closer to the person who is confiding in them. But at the same time they should be on guard (check for their wallets from time to time), because the narrator can upend their expectations in much the same way that Lazarillo disrupts the stability of the established social order. As Guillen asserts, Lazarillo is a novel not about Spanish society, but about a dynamic relationship of a particular individual (a picaro) with the world surrounding him. For this reason Bataillon had argued before Guillen that Lazarillo is neither a social critique nor an Erasmian commentary. If we analyse Lazarillo chapter by chapter, we see that play and games abate pain and hunger and they convey social criticism, expressing the 'joie de vivre' characteristic of popular art and carnivalesque festivity. The scenes from folklore, such as the Salamanca bridge incident, the post smashing, the grape eating, the jug dropping, and the burial scene, are playful in themselves, but more important, they are arranged and narrated in such a way that the novel as a whole maintains its balance by means of tension, which is so characteristic of play. The Salamanca bridge scene revolves around an act of extreme cruelty in which a poor, innocent child is physically hurt. But the emotional impact of the incident is turned into play as the narrator controls the distance from which the incident is viewed. First we see it from the blind man's point of view and then as a factual and removed recollection of the event, so that the scene is removed to a (semi) distance: - Lazaro, put your ear close to the bull and you'll hear a lou noise inside it. I was so simple that I did just that, and when he felt that my head was against the stone, he straightened his arm and gave me such a blow that my head crashed against that blasted bull so hard that it hurt me for three days and more. - You silly little nitwit! You'll have to learn that a blind man's boy has got to be sharper than a needle! (27) - Lazaro; llega el oido a este toro y oiras gran ruido dentro del. Yo simplemente llegue creyendo ser asi. Ycomo sintio que tenia la cabeza

58

Play and the Picaresque par de la piedra, afirmo recio la mano y diome una gran calabazada en el diablo del toro, que mas de tres dias me duro el dolor de la cornada y dijome: - Necio, aprende que el mozo del ciego un punto ha de saber mas que el diablo. (43)

The play with words - 'y oiras gran ruido dentro del' (Lazarillo thinks inside the bull, and the old man means inside the boy's ear) - is only one level of the game that is being played, the linguistic. On the thematic level, the old man plays an educational game with his servant. He creates an artificial situation, a let's-pretend world that takes care of Lazarillo's innocence and, above all, revives his personal awareness. As his ear rings, Lazarillo is simultaneously aware of the stone bull and of his internal self external and internal realities. The world's multidimensionality is also seen in the blind man's relationship to Lazarillo. Despite the fact that he treats Lazarillo as if he were a plaything or a toy, the old man also plays the role of a parent because he recognizes that Lazarillo has intellectual potential that should be put to a good use: 'You're bright, that's why I like you' (36) ('Discrete eres; por esto te quiero bien' [59]), he tells him. So while the old man's blow is in one respect a matter of personal necessity (he needs a sharp guide), it is in another respect a lesson for the boy whom he values for his keen intellect. The world is multifaceted and therefore offers the possibility of ducking or finding new solutions, something Lazarillo comprehends: 'What he says is true; I must keep awake because I'm on my own and I've got to look after myself (28) ('Verdad dice este, que me cumple avivar el ojo y avisar, pues solo soy, y pensar, como me sepa valer' [44]). But just in case there is some doubt, Lazarillo later returns the favour, inducing the old man to jump against a stone post. When at the end of the first chapter Lazarillo leads the old man to the post and asks him to jump, the relationship between the two characters has been transformed. Although they are still playing, Lazarillo is no longer a child who is learning through play, but a seasoned rival, now in competition with his master. Again, the incident is portrayed not only as an act of cruelty against an old blind person but, above all, as a scoring moment in a game: I put him straight facing the pillar, took a leap and darted behind it like a bullfighter avoiding a charge, and cried: - Now, jump as far as you can and you'll get over. (36) Yo le puse bien derecho enfrente del pilar, y doy un salto y pongome detras del poste, como quien espera tope de toro, y dijele: - jSus! Salta todo lo que podais, porque deis deste cabo del agua. (59)

59

Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

And while the old man lies flat on his back, Lazarillo still pretends he is in a bullfight. Hence the jeers: 'jOle! jOle!' But, as Eugen Fink explains in The Oasis of Happiness,' unlike a schizophrenic, a player understands that a toy simultaneously occupies two levels of being; Lazarillo is aware that the person lying half-dead beside the post is not a bull but his cruel master, an old, blind man. The atmosphere and attitude of play is present in other incidents in the first chapter. The jar episode, for example, is another stock oral anecdote that is interpolated into the novel to sustain the atmosphere of competition that can be defined in terms that date to Homer - 'always be the best and excel others' (Iliad). The competitive context transforms what would ordinarily be morally unacceptable transgressions (cheating and stealing) into something acceptable, given the circumstances. It is important to note that Lazarillo and the blind man receive equal attention - consequently the jar game is balanced - and that little emphasis is placed on the emotional aspect of the incident in order that the readers may perceive it as play and not as violence. In the game's final move the blind man drops the jug on Lazarillo's face, breaking his teeth, but within the context of their game this act of seeming brute violence functions as a countermove to Lazarillo's own trickery: he used to insert a long rye straw and drink from a distance, until finally he made a little hole in the base of the jug. At the moment the jug makes contact with Lazarillo's face and teeth, the narrative perspective quickly changes from the first person to the third person; consequently, the tone changes from emotional to semi-distant. The 'camera' does not fall on Lazarillo's broken teeth and the blood gushing out of his mouth, but on the fact that he, as a player, was not ready to receive the move: 'Poor Lazaro wasn't expecting this; in fact he was relaxed and enjoying himself ?& before' (30) ('el pobre Lazaro, que de nada desto se guardaba, antes, como otras veces, estaba descuidado y gozoso [48, emphasis mine]). When in the next sentence the narrative returns to the first person, the emphasis again is not on the character's injured face, but on his impression of what happened to him: 'I really felt as if the roof and everything on it had fallen right on me' ('verdaderamente me parecio que el cielo, con todo lo que en el hay, me habia caido encima'). The first-person narrative then describes the blow in a detached tone, informing readers about the consequences of the old man's move: The blind man's little tap was so hard that I was knocked right out and had bits of broken jug stuck in my face and was cut all over. My teeth were broken and that's why I haven't got any in my head today. (31) Fue tal el golpecillo, que me desatino y saco de sentido, y el jarrazo tan

60

Play and the Picaresque grande, que los pedazos de el se me metieron por la cara, rompiendomela por muchas partes, y me quebro los dientes, sin los cuales hasta hoy dia me quede. (49)

These two players are neither noble nor cruel. The narrative focus diverts from blood and violence, focusing, as do spectators at a boxing match, on a game that will continue to be played. The narrator emphasizes the interplay as one player executes a move and the other one returns it: Lazarillo loses the current round, but he will even the score in the final scene when he makes the blind man jump against the post. Huizinga argues that wars can be perceived as play. However, there is an important difference between play and war that is not erased by the fact that both employ similar strategic moves. What distinguishes play from war is the degree of distance and the degree of emotional engagement. In his study of ritualization in U.S. politics and government, Erik Erikson explains that in (corrupt) political games the players draw a complete separation between the person and the political image.22 Similarly, in wars soldiers completely depersonalize their opponents, calling what they shoot at 'the target,' and invoking an abstract notion such as 'the enemy' to camouflage their opponents' humanity.23 The Gulf War provides a recent example of tactical distancing. To distance the war from its tragic human implications, the 'war' was portrayed as a strategic operation in which victory was achieved by means of modern 'desert storm' technology; in an array of carefully crafted euphemisms, dead human beings became 'collateral damage,' for example. But in a game of sport, in popular carnivals, and in children's games, one does not create such distance. Little girls, as Fink points out, see their dolls simultaneously as toys and babies, which means that they are at a half-distance from their toys/babies. Similarly, in competitive games the opponents are supposedly enemies, but a certain amount of mutual respect and good will is expected and demonstrated at the beginning and at the end of a match when the players shake hands. During the game, as soon as one player strays too close to contravening these conditions, the judges intervene. Julio Cortazar observes in Rayuela that children turn their play into a real fight when they get tired, and thus are unable to maintain the semi-distance necessary for play. As it has been argued, Lazarillo is an important early example of realism in literature, and its characters are, as Bataillon claims, modelled after ordinary human beings. So they are immersed in 'ordinary reality.' But at the same time, in their interactions, the characters 'lift' that reality out of the ordinary and perceive each other not as suffering innocent children or crippled old people or cruel torturers, but as opponents in a game. They tfien bear no malice towards each other, since the main aim is not to hurt

6l

Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

the other, but to score for one's own personal victory (and incidentally also for material gain). In chapter two, Lazarillo survives the priest's miserliness only because he is able to play on him tricks that he perfected with the blind man. The chapter is modelled after the story of Penelope in Homer's Odyssey. It has commonly been argued that this chapter is a social commentary on clerical hypocrisy, extreme selfishness, and greed. However, if we examine the amount of space in the chapter that focuses on the priest, we note that of the approximately ten pages, fewer than two pages at the beginning of the chapter are dedicated to Lazarillo's starvation and the priest's stinginess. The remaining eight pages recount a Homeric intellectual agon, or competition, between a cunning miserly priest and a smart hungry boy: 'in the end we seemed to be following the same plan as Penelope and her weaving because whatever he wove by day I tore at night' (45) ('pareciamos tener a destajo la tela de Penelope, pues cuanto el tejia de dfa rompia yo de noche' [75]). But while Penelope is driven by higher ideals of heroic fidelity, in the game with the priest, Lazarillo is guided by the simple physical drive of hunger. The heroic and the anti-heroic scenes are juxtaposed not only to put Lazarillo's or the priest's behaviour in a critical light, but also to show primarily the similarity between Lazarillo and the great Greek heroine: they are both able to survive through cunning, she for the sake of an ideal, and he for an anti-heroic cause: 'After all, they say it [hunger] sharpens the wit' (44) ('que me era luz la hambre, pues dicen que el ingenio con ella se avisa' [73]). In this chapter Lazarillo suffers the worst hardship, but he is seldom demoralized because he is able to distance himself from the priest, though never to the point of seeing him as a true enemy. It is interesting to follow Lazarillo's switch to the let's-pretend world as he deals with pain and hunger. It is also important to note that the narrator goes along with Lazarillo when he has to justify his behaviour. To create a sense of balance, the narrator paints the priest in unflattering colours when Lazarillo deals him the strongest blows. At the beginning the priest is described simply as a 'clerigo.' But when Lazarillo begins to enjoy food at funerals and prays for more people to die, in order to rationalize his morbid hope, the narrator describes the priest as 'the bastard' ('el lacerado' [66]), and when Lazarillo needs to rationalize the decision to make a key for the trunk, the priest becomes a 'stingy mean old bastard' (41) ('ruin y lacerado' [68]). When he does not need to justify himself, Lazarillo prefers to see the priest as a human being and as an employer: 'thinking about this and how I could open the chest, I could hear my employer was asleep' (44) ('pensando como me podria valer y aprovecharme del arcaz, sent! que mi amo dormia' [73])- But when the treatment becomes bloody, Lazarillo completely switches into the let's-pretend world because he is not a martyr. When the

62

Play and the Picaresque

priest beats Lazarillo with a stick, he is not referred to innocuously as 'master,' but as a snake-killer, 'el matador de culebras' (79). Again, he is a cruel hunter, 'cruel cazador' (79), when he dismisses the boy because he cannot find a way of combating his craftiness: 'Que yo no quiero en mi compania tan diligente servidor' (80). Although Lazarillo is cast into the street, he does not adopt the identity of a victim but instead retains the selfconception of a capable individual who has been 'a blind man's boy' ('mozo del ciego'). Finally, the chapter ends not on an emotional note, but with a simple stage description: Then crossing himself as though I was bewitched by the Devil, he went into his house and shut the door' (48) ('Y santiguandose de mi, como si yo estuviera endemoniado, se torna a meter en casa y cierra su puerta' [80]). In chapter three, play as competition becomes play as mimicry, and the setting changes from the lower ranks of society to the impoverished nobility. This change gives us an opportunity to compare play as survival mode, as seen in the first two chapters, to play that functions as a civilizing agent and as a means of social manipulation. We may compare Lazarillo of the first two chapters to Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights because, just as Scheherazade involuntarily becomes a player in the Persian king's game, Lazarillo has no choice but to become the blind man's servant. The two characters are cornered and both know equally well that if they do not play they are going to die (of hunger in Lazarillo's case and by execution in Scheherazade's), and the closer they are to death, the more imaginatively seductive and clever they must become if they are to survive. Scheherazade uses both cunning and seduction in her encounter with the king who, though in many ways rational, is quite irrational in his uncontrollable desire to kill his brides after their wedding night. Lazarillo similarly plays games that require (rational) ingenuity but, in the case of the intelligent maiden, his reason functions in conjunction with instinctive and emotional reactions. As with Scheherazade, his entire being is at stake while he plays, and the risks are great because the rules of his games are established only as the games are being played. In chapter three of Lazarillo, by contrast, play becomes less spontaneous and more calculated and disengaged. Lazarillo learns about conventional games surrounding honour that, as Huizinga believes in Homo Ludens, have a civilizing effect because they give meaning to bare human existence and control the crude forces of nature. In this chapter the squire hides his poverty in order to save his honour, which is 'all that decent men have left today' (62) ('eres muchacho, y no sientes las cosas de la honra, en que el dia de hoy esta todo el caudal de los hombres de bien' [104]). Out of respect for the squire's dignity, Lazarillo quickly learns to imitate his master's art: never to let on about the squire's poverty. When he suspects that

63

Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

the pretentious but hungry squire craves some bread and cow's foot, Lazarillo is compelled to push the squire to admit that he is starving. But in the end he forsakes unpleasant truth for an ennobling game, suggesting that the squire eat not because he is hungry, but because the food is irresistibly appetizing: Still, I thought I ought to help him. He was helping himself and showing me the way to invite him, so I said: - Sir, they say that good tools make a good workman. This bread is really very tasty and the cow's foot is very well cooked and seasoned. Anybody's mouth would water at its smell. (57) Con todo, pareciome ayudarle, pues se ayudaba y me abria camino para ello, y dijele: - Senor: el buen aparejo hace buen artifice. Este pan esta sabrosisimo y esta una de vaca tan bien cocida y sazonada, que no habra a quien no convida con su sabor. (96)

The saying 'good tools make a good workman' reveals that Lazarillo is not a naive Samaritan, but a conscious and capable pretender. Lazarillo sees the squire's pretence as a pathological response to the conditions in Spain at the time. It represents a form of alienation from one's true self. Consequently, he comments as he watches his master go down the street: 'Oh Lord. And how many men like him must be scattered around the world, who suffer for the sake of their ridiculous honour what they certainly wouldn't suffer for your sake' (54) ('jOh Senor, y cuantos de aquestos debeis vos tener por el mundo derramados, que padecen por la negra que llaman honra lo que por vos no sufririan' [92]). At the end of the chapter the squire explains that in the upper levels of society, simulation can be very advantageous. He tells Lazarillo that rich men 'don't want honest men in their houses' ('no quieren ver en sus casas hombres virtuosos'), and that 'clever men these days make the best out of their employers' (63) ('y con estos los astutos usan, como digo, el dia de hoy' [ 107]). Manipulation and game-playing, in other words, are part of the normal state of affairs. If Lazarillo wants to survive he must take note of this. To highlight and ridicule the pretentious games of the 'hidalgo' class, which, like the rising bourgeois class, only imitates the appearances of the aristocratic class, the anonymous author interpolates a folkloric scene that accentuates the separation of appearances from reality. When Lazarillo runs to hide from the procession in the squire's gloomy house, hearty laughter is produced not only for the reader but also for the starving and persecuted squire. As in Don Quijote and Tristram Shandy, laughter is the

64

Play and the Picaresque

result of figurative language being taken literally. Lazarillo hears a widow say: 'Oh my darling husband, where are they taking you? To the sad and accursed place, to the gloomy and dark dwelling, to the domain where there is no food or drink!' (60) ('Marido y senor mio: ^adonde os me lievan? jA la casa triste y desdichada, a la casa lobrega y obscura, a la casa donde nunca comen ni beben!' [102]). He takes this to mean that they are bringing the dead body to the squire's gloomy house. As in Cortazar's wooden-board scene, the misunderstanding and play in this scene underscore - by virtue of its humour - the true reality of the hunger and poverty in the squire's house and in every house in Spain. We may interpret this scene as a criticism of the 'hidalgo' class, but at the same time we should also see humour as one of the few resources available to the poor to lighten their gloom. As everyone bursts into laughter, they forget, at least temporarily, their painful misery. That is why, perhaps, comedy is the genre of the poor. In the next three chapters of the book, as Lazarillo adopts simulation as his principal game, he stops being an active player of the folkloric world and becomes a passive player in corrupt Spanish society, at which point the novel loses the vigour of its first three chapters. In the long fifth chapter Lazarillo interacts very little with other people, at one point passively observing the pardoner and the constable stage a false miracle in order to sell papal indulgences. Lazarillo knows that their fight is not real, but he never reveals this to anyone, and he admits to Vuestra Merced that he was impressed by it: T was only a boy then, but his trick impressed me very much and I said to myself: - I wonder how many others there are like him swindling innocent people' (75). ('Y, aunque muchacho, cayome mucho en gracia, y dije entre mi: - Cuantas de estas deben hacer estos burladores entre la inocente gente' [132]). In chapter six, when he earns enough money, Lazarillo imitates the squire, buying 'a cloak which had a fringe once, and an old sword made when they used to make them in Cuellar' (76) ('una capa, que habia sido frisada, y una espada de las viejas primeras de Cuellar' [136]). As the squire had told him earlier, honour is 'all that decent men have left today.' However, Lazarillo is at the height of his powers in chapter seven, although he attributes to chance or alea the role of key player: Things have gone so lucky for me' (77) ('Hame sucedido tan bien' [141]). He becomes a town crier, marries the Archpriest of San Salvador's servant, and leaves hunger behind him. But chance is not the only force at play here. He has learned various roles and skills from all of his masters, and he has embraced his mother's advice to be flexible and harmonize with forces stronger than himself. He acknowledges his luck but links it to his own resourcefulness: 'and I've been able to use my opportunities so well' (77)

65

Play in Lazarillo de Tormes

('Yo le he usado tan facilmente' [140]). Can he be equally successful in the contest with his own conscience, with the authority of Vuestra Merced, and with readers? In his unsurpassable study of the narrative point of view, Rico demonstrates that 'the language of [Lazarillo] captures the polysemy of life in a delightfully mischievous way (22, emphasis added). While linguistic games are a part of the overall structure of Lazarillo, I will discuss the novel only from a general thematic perspective, leaving aside the linguistic cleverness of its final chapter. In his letter to Vuestra Merced, which begins in the introduction of the novel, Lazarillo makes a serious attempt 'to show how commendable it is for lowly people to rise in the world' (28) ('mostrar cuanta virtud sea saber los hombres subir, siendo bajos' [44]). As it has been said, someone who is low-born cannot demonstrate his virtues in war and fighting, as the medieval knights did, for example, but he can garner esteem by means of his natural ability to play. Of its nature, this mode of self-expression cannot be a solitary exercise, nor does the novel, therefore, satisfy the twentieth-century expectation and expression of subjectivity. There is abundant evidence in the book to show that the picaresque world is defined by multiple perspectives, but these perspectives are not unconnected, nor is the individual, as Rico argues, 'the only effective criterion of truth' (24). Lazarillo is not a confession of personal sin but an exchange between a marginalized individual and a figure of authority. The novel is therefore polyphonic and, as Rico says, polysemic not only on the level of discourse but also at the level of story, as Chatman would say.24 Despite his frequent references to God, Lazarillo learns early in life that the only way God will help him is that wine will disinfect his wounds. Consequently, he abandons traditional morality and, for the sake of survival in a corrupt world, acts with the understanding that it is absurd to aspire to heroism or sainthood. His amorality does not, however, degenerate into immorality or insensitivity. He is personally unhappy because he must agree to have his wife go in and out of the Archpriest's house 'any time of night or day' ('de noche y de dia'). He lives in an adulterous marriage, yet without ever debasing fidelity, as he also recovers the notion of friendship in his relationship with the squire. His optimistic attitude is part of his general approach to life, in which he tries to adapt to difficult circumstances by mentally transforming potentially demoralizing experiences to make the best of difficult circumstances. He devises some strategies that in his circumstances are the best available means to preserve his dignity: as he tells Vuestra Merced, he has a deal with his wife and the Archpriest not to discuss their arrangement; he also asks his friends not to remind him that his wife is fickle. He justifies the situation to himself by pointing out that he has peace at home. When he remembers the blind man's prophecy that he

66

Play and the Picaresque

will wear horns, he rationalizes the memory, saying that the devil has brought it to his mind deliberately to upset his marriage: 'pienso que el diablo me lo trae a la memoria por haberme malcasado, y no le aprovecha' (141). He also claims to love his wife and rationalizes that she is not different from other women of Toledo. Consequently he writes to Vuestra Merced: I love her more than anything else in the world, even more than myself. Thank God, life is marvellous for me with her, much better than I deserve. I swear on the Sacred Host itself that she is as good a woman as any in Toledo. If anyone says the opposite I'll kill him [should be: I will die fighting with him]. (79) (Mi mujer) es la cosa del mundo que yo mas quiero y la amo mas que a mi. Yme hace Dios con ella mil mercedes y mas bien que yo merezco. Que yo jurare sobre la hostia consagrada que es tan buena mujer como vive dentro de las puertas de Toledo. Quien otra cosa me dijere, yo me matare con el.' (143)

This declaration of love and its tone of heroism reveal Lazarillo's let'spretend world, which transcends the crude reality of her infidelity, of which, however, he is not unaware. The picaro knows that his material benefits come at the cost of closing his eyes to his wife's duplicity. He accepts the situation because all the women of Toledo are as loose as his wife, and, in addition, he does not want to conceive of himself in terms of defeat and dishonour. The last chapter of Lazarillo, therefore, must be seen in light of the competitiveness that we see in the earlier chapters, where the picaro emphasizes his individual abilities to make the best out of the worst. Material gain and moral loss are a part of the package, but they are the result of certain actions rather than their cause. At the beginning of the chapter Lazarillo reminds Vuestra Merced and the reader that he must prepare for old age, but even in this situation, he emphasizes, he did not need to marry the girl for money because the Archpriest had recognized him as a successful and able civil servant before his marriage: 'Soon after I got the job, the Archpriest of St Salvador's heard about me and saw how sharp and ready-witted I was, because I used to announce that his wines were for sale. So he arranged a marriage for me with a maid of his' (77) ('En este tiempo, viendo mi habilidad y buen vivir, teniendo noticias de mi persona el senor arcipreste de San Salvador, mi senor y servidor, y amigo de vuestra merced, porque le pregonaba sus vinos, procure casarme con una criada suya' [140]). Once he is married, he readily accepts all of the Archpriest's

67

Play in Lazyrillo de Tormes

favours ('tengo en mi serior arcipreste todo favor y ayuda' [141]), which shows that Lazaro is not proud Odysseus. But with the dexterity of the great Homeric figure - himself an antihero - he writes the novel 'from the beginning' to remind Vuestra Merced and us that had he been an idealist and a good Christian, he would have perished amidst the corruption around him. The early chapters show that Lazarillo's games and manipulation literally save him from death. From the point of view of literature, the play 'catches the reader off guard,' as Cortazar says, and thereby tricks readers into accepting a way of life and a mode of thinking that would be difficult to appreciate from a purely ethical point of view. It would be unwarranted to glorify Lazarillo and to call him a picaresque saint, as R.W.B. Lewis refers to the antiheroes of the modern picaresque novels. Lazarillo knows why the Archpriest gives him every year 'a whole load of corn; I get my meat at Christmas and Easter and now and again a couple of votive loaves or a pair of old stockings' (78) ('le da en veces al pie de una carga de trigo; por las Pascuas, su carne, y cuando el par de los bodigos, las calzas viejas que deja' [141]). However, we have to admit that Lazarillo 'tries to hold in balance by the very contradiction of his character, both the observed truths of contemporary experience and the vital aspirations to transcend them,' as Lewis says (31). Lazarillo appreciates the value of his love, fidelity, and friendship with the squire, but unlike the squire he will not go hungry for the sake of those ideals. He accepts and welcomes, therefore, the material benefits, but he does not debase human values altogether. He 'transcends' difficult and compromising situations by creating a let's-pretend world in which he is in a competition with the world for survival. The novel as a whole concentrates on his skills or 'virtus,' as Machiavelli would call them, and, above all, on his restless underlying carnivalesque kinetic will to clash when necessary with whatever comes his way - as the continuous figurines in the grottesca violently protrude onto each other in their continuous and varied movement. The same willingness to approach life as a challenge, as a difficult, spontaneous, unpredictable game, is evident throughout Lazarillo, even in the very last sentence that Lazarillo writes to Vuestra Merced: 'I will inform Your Honour of my future in due course' (79) ('De lo que aqui adelante me sucediere avisare a vuestra merced' [ 143]). He implies that, however difficult his current situation may be, he shall move on, pushed by the invincible force of life.

4. Manual for Manuel: How to Become a Picaro

It makes me tender and I don't want that, tonight I don't want tenderness, baby, I don't know what I need but in any case it's not tenderness, I don't ask for it and I'm not looking for it. Libra de Manuel

The picaresque playfulness in Julio Cortazar's last novel is closely related to the intellectual ludidte initiated in the early decades of this century. In light of modernist philosophical and aesthetic concerns the novel exploits modernist collage techniques, but it takes modernism one step further as it turns modernist intellectual concerns into advanced political and humanist activism. The contemporary text, like Lazarillo de Tonnes, is self-aware, but it is not independent of its larger socio-political context nor of its historical circumstances. The novel transcends the parameters of self-contained textual autonomy by means of emphasis on the common and the familiar. Cortazar's fictional world extends to his audience because the characters are presented on an ordinary scale, not as great heroes whom readers are supposed to emulate. They are anti-heroic (human) players who stimulate co-participation in the way athletes involve the audience in a sports match. While Linda Hutcheon observes that in general postmodern art is 'didactic' only 'if we are willing to listen,'1 Libro de Manuel does not follow this general trend. It is as aggressive and persuasive as Lazarillo. It is transparently'designed to stimulate a reader's imaginative participation as it reactivates the innate impulse to play. The act of playing/reading is not a disengaged aesthetic or ontological exercise, it is an attempt at living in a

69

Manual for Manuel: How to Become a Picaro

less artificial and less oppressive way. It is also a training ground, empowering readers for encounters in their own personal, political, and social arenas. The open ending in the Argentinian novel functions like the open ending in the anonymous picaresque work: it is designed to 'spill' the story into the life of its reader. In Cortazar's case we are told explicitly that Libra de Manuel is written for little Manuel as an educational guide. But, like Lazarillo, the novel has more to offer than a set of didactic rules. Hacia Cortdzar (1994) by Jaime Alazraki, traces Cortazar's artistic, theoretical, and political evolution. Alazraki argues that the Argentinian writer is as much immersed in twentieth-century European culture as Maria Lida de Malkiel finds the author of Lazarillo to be immersed in the intellectual debates of the Renaissance. But. both authors, like Rabelais, attempt to transform bookish debate into something more lively. Alazraki begins his study with Cortazar's 1941 reviews of Rimbaud's symbolist poetry and then discusses Cortazar's encounter with French structuralism, his early embrace of existentialism, and his later interest in surrealism. Alazraki also examines Cortazar's interest in pataphysics and Eastern religions. He considers Cortazar's visit to Cuba in 1961 as a significant step in his overall growth. He deems Cortazar's travels from Paris to Marseille at the end of his life to be an expression of wisdom, the accumulation of all the artistic/ intellectual phases of his life. This minimally controlled journey is jealously cheered by the critic as a form of play and the highest form of living: 'jugar como la forma mas alta de vivir.'2 Accordingly, the final chapter of the book, 'La postmodernidad de Julio Cortazar,' presents Libro de Manuel as a work with many threads of modernism and an unreserved human and socio-political dimension. The development of formally sophisticated fiction that strives to embrace life and history is not peculiar to Cortazar. It can be seen, for example, in Kafka's picaresque novel America and in other fictional works in which Kafka masterfully integrates the personal and the socio-political. Milan Kundera draws the following contrast between the European modernist movement and the later, postmodern,3 practices: 'The time was passed when man had only the monster of his own soul to grapple with, the peaceful time of Joyce and Proust. In the novels of Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch, the monster comes from outside and is called History; it no longer has anything to do with the train the adventurers used to ride; it is impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible, and it is inescapable.'4 Cortazar learned from the inescapable and painful Latin American experience of the 19605. Private life in Cortazar's Latin America, like private life in Kafka's Germany, had no luxury to exist as an independent option. History, in his work, is 'inescapable, uncontrollable, impersonal,' but what distinguishes Cortazar's picaresque world from Kafka's5 absurd

yo

Play and the Picaresque

universe and Kundera's political nightmare is the fact that life for the Latin American writer, while undoubtedly full of difficulties, is essentially a force that rebuilds itself like the phoenix. In his treatment of corruption and abuse, Cortazar views them as obstacles that must be faced as one would confront opponents in a game. After all, Lazarillo survives the pretentious squire not because he runs away from him, but because he comes to understand the squire's game. Most critics would not label Libra de Manuel a picaresque novel because the external characteristics of the picaresque genre are not obviously manifested. However, Cortazar's view of the world is picaresque because, to begin with, the essential dynamic principle of the story is that 'the individual meshes with the social,' which according to Claudio Guillen is the principal characteristic of the picaresque genre. Individuals view themselves simultaneously as subjects and objects and, in the course of experience, mesh the social and the individual - or in modernist terms, there is awareness of both the 'self and the 'other.' Furthermore, the Argentinian novel is, to some extent, what Guillen calls pseudoautobiography. The firstperson voice in sixteenth-century picaresque works and in contemporary novels is more than a formal frame, for everything in the story is coloured with the sensibility, or filtered through the mind, of the picaro-narrator. Guillen's remaining six aspects of the picaresque genre can be applied easily to Cortazar's semi-subjective, fragmented (episodic) modernist novel. In 'Toward a Definition of the Picaresque' Guillen writes: '3. the narrator's view is partial and prejudiced; 4. the total view of the picaro is reflective, philosophical, and critical on religious or moral grounds; 5. there is a stress on the material level of existence; 6. the picaro observes a number of collective conditions (social class, cities, professions); 7. he moves horizontally through space and vertically through society; 8. the novel is loosely episodic' (87). Cortazar's contemporary picaros are 'reflective' and 'critical' on grounds that are more political than religious, but that is only because the twentieth-century world is driven by politics more than by religion. Just as the picaresque novel of the sixteenth century was a reaction to the idealized world of chivalry, Cortazar's novel works as a foil to both Utopian communism and bourgeois ethics. It spurns romantic love, and it questions austere estheticism and other artificial world-views that, like the chivalric world-view, overshadow the unheroic human individual in the name of an elevated ideal. In both Lazarillo and Libro de Manuel the narrated episodes pivot around a real individual - 'real,' Robert Alter says, 'because he is an anti-heroic hero, a plebeian, a resourceful but limited human being who has to face the human problem of getting food in his stomach.'6 Food is not so great a problem for Cortazar's characters (although they are marginalized), but their concern for overall survival with 'a stress on the mate-

71

Manual for Manuel: How to Become a Picaro

rial level of existence' definitely makes them anti-heroes and puts them in the category of picaros. The relationship between individuals and their social, political, and cultural surroundings is symbolized directly in Lazarillo by different masters. However, this is not as direct in Libro de Manuel because the characters who play in Cortazar's novel are only indirectly victims of torture, death, poverty, and psychological abuse. Still, the characters in Cortazar's novel are in full solidarity with the French and Latin American university students who directly suffer consequences of their search for freedom. In one telling incident, Susana translates to newcomers an article from a French newspaper that describes how a bystander was taken by the police. The bystander is forced to exclaim 'viva Mao, viva Mao' while he is beaten, and he is finally sent to a hospital after losing consciousness three times during the ordeal. The lisping newcomer from Chile lumps together the entire Latin American picture with the one Susana reads about: 'Well,' he says, 'at least they don't kill them the way they do in Guatemala or Mexico.' 'Or in Cordoba and Buenos Aires, angel of love' (40) ('bueno, de todas maneras no los matan como en Guatemala o en Mexico.' 'O en Cordoba y Buenos Aires, angel de amor' [45]), Patricio adds ironically. Characters like Susana and Patricio, who have been in Europe for some time, then explain to the Chilean that the French police are not as brutal because the European world has more subtle means of control: There's still heavy industry, international relations, facades that have to be preserved' (40) ('Todavia hay la industria pesada, las relaciones internacionales, fachadas que cuidar' [45]) • A number of similar articles are translated by Susana from French into Spanish for the newcomers and for the readers of Cortazar's novel. Sara's letters are another set of 'borrowed eyes,' as Chandler says, through which we see the social and political conditions that hippies face as they try to live peacefully and freely. She writes about how she and her travelling companions are beaten and abused because they have long hair, carry knapsacks, and wear jewellery. She says ironically: The whole thing is that in these countries where poverty, prostitution, sickness, and filth eat your life away, they've begun a cleanup in the name of morality, religion, and law. Down with hippies! Filth, addicts, criminals. This on the part of customs officials, politicians, and the people, I just don't know. (45) Se trata de que en estos paises donde la miseria, la prostitucion, la enfermedad y la roria te comen la vida, han empezado la limpieza en nombre de la moral, la religion y la ley. jMueran los hippies! Sucios, drogados, criminales. Eso en la parte aduana y politica, y la gente no se. (50)

72

Play and the Picaresque

She is distrusted not only by the government authorities but also by everyone because the Latin American political situation has eroded human trust. She also writes: 'Some people think I'm an emissary of the United Fruit company, others an emissary of Castro (horror), and others that I'm travelling with a load of good grass' (50) ('Hay quienes creen que soy una emisaria de la United Fruit Company, otros una emisaria de Castro (horror), y otros que viajo con cargamentos de yerba buena' [54]). But Sara functions not only as a social commentator, she also acts like a true picara. It is interesting to note that in 1968 Diaz Plaja compared hippies to picaros in a newspaper article: 'Gitanismo y picaresca - genealogia de los Hippies.'7 What makes Sara comparable to picaresque figures such as Grimmelshausen's Courage and Brecht's Mother Courage is the fact that, despite all her suffering, she does not become embittered and she never gives up. Her letter is a mixture of emotions, but her last words hold some hope of human togetherness: 'Life is a mixture and it goes on, sometimes too much for me to take, I love you both, I really do, a lot, and I miss you' (48) ('La vida es una mixtura y goes on, sometimes too much for me to take. I love you both, de veras, con mucho amor, y los extrario' [52]). She ends the letter with 'Sarita,' an endearing diminutive, demonstrating thus the same human characteristics as Gil Bias when he expresses solidarity with his fellow human beings despite the fact that his difficult conditions, as those of any other picaro, call for bitterness and anger. Claudio Guillen uses the term 'half-outsider' to describe picaresque characters who conduct themselves as detached observers and engaged actors at the same time. Robert Alter elaborates on the hero's dual function: 'The picaresque hero is a figure both detached from the society of men and possessing a profound sense of involvement in the human condition.'8 Similarly, Alexander Parker has observed that Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus superimposes upon its portrayal of war and hardship the 'compassionate awareness of the suffering and exploitation of the lower classes.'9 With a general attitude of solidarity that extends across the globe, Cortazar's characters read about hardships and empathize with victims who are not close compatriots or friends, but who are, nonetheless, their doubles. A long interview is reprinted in the novel as a historical document of systemic crimes against humanity. A short fragment will suffice to demonstrate that the corruption generated by U.S. domination goes beyond the selling of papal indulgences or the Vatican's blessing of the Inquisition in Lazarillo's time. The following quotation is an excerpt from a newspaper interview: CHUCK ONAN, FROM N E B R A S K A

Lane: Were you ever given training in the interrogation of enemy prisoners?

73

Manual for Manuel: How to Become a Picaro Onan: Yes. L. Where? O. At all of the bases. But during the last month, when I was being prepared for imminent shipment to Vietnam, we got a lot of it. It was in Beaufort infantry marine base (in South Carolina) where we were given junglesurvival courses. We were told how to torture prisoners. L. Who gave you those instructions? O. Mostly the sergeants. But some officers also participated. Lieutenants and in more than one case the captain. L. What were you told to do? O. To torture prisoners. L. How? O. Removing a person's shoes and beating him or her on the soles of the feet. That was pretty mild alongside of some of the others. L. What other methods were taught? Can you give me one more example? O. We were told to make use of electrical radio equipment. We were told to attach the electrodes to the genitals. L. Did they demonstrate that technique or just talk about it? O. They had drawings on the board showing exactly how to clamp the electrodes into the testicles of a man or the body of a woman. L. What other methods were taught? O. Various things you can do with bamboo. L. Like what? O. Stick them under the fingernails and into ears. (373-4) CHUCK ONAN, DE NEBRASCA

LANE: (jAlguna vez se le dio instruction acerca de como interrogar a prisioneros enemigos? ONAN: Si. - £D6nde? - En todas las bases militares. Pero durante el mes previo a la partida hacia Vietnam esa ensenanza se intensified. En Beaufort, base de la infanteria de marina (en Carolina del Sur), se nos prepare para sobrevivir en la selva. Y nos explicaron como se tortura a los prisioneros. - (iQuien les daba esas instrucciones? - Por lo general los sargentos, pero tambien algunos oficiales, tenientes, y en mas de un caso el capitan. - iQue les explicaban? - Como se tortura a los prisioneros. - 96, 103, 105-6, 107, 108, 121; readercharacter relationship 24, 122 Ricapito, Joseph 51 Rico, Francisco 33, 38, 53, 76 Rilke, Rainer Maria v, 16, 89 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 100 Sabato, Ernesto 113 Sartre, Jean-Paul 18 Sancho Panza 27 Scheherazade 8, 62 Schlegel, Friedrich 21 'self and the other' 10, ll, 34, 39, 70, 125 semi-distance 24, 57-8, 59, 106 Shaw, Donald 98, 108 Shklovsky, Victor 90 Skarmeta, Antonio 7, 13 Smith, Paul Julian 96 social frames 22 Sosnowsky, Saul 80 Spariosu, Mihai 8, 9 Stein, Gertrude 122 system 4

'tangle' 6, 7, 77-8, 122,123 Todorov, Tzvetan 4 Tolstoy, Leo 103 Turner, Victor 8 Unamuno, Miguel de 122 Velazquez, Diego de 79

152

Index

vertigo/vortex 14, 114, 123 West, Paul 43, 124 Whitbourn, Christine J. 6, 100 Wicks, Ulrich 4, 124 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 18, 21, 22, 25 women's liberation 115-18,127

Woolf, Virginia 23, 32, 45 Yeats, William Butler 15 Zumthor, Paul 4