The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts
Giancarlo Maiorino
“A positive aspect of the book is its strong synthesizing tendency: the author is able to combine analyses of texts drawn from philosophy, sculpture, painting, as well as literature into a coherent pattern without at the same time doing violence to the specificity of the works analyzed.”
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James Russell Lowell Prize presented by the Modern Language Association
At the Baroque point of origin, the inner vitality of Michelangelo's emphasis on creation as "process" rather than completed act taught a crucial lesson to Baroque artists. Their response to the infinite and open universe of the "New Science" was one that took part to be as dynamic and metamorphic as life itself. It is in the context of "open" forms within an "open" universe that this study moves from Michelangelo to Bruno. His poetics of immeasurable abundance set "process" at the very core of the Baroque art, thought, and science.
Applied to the forms of art, growth and metamorphosis are linked to what Maiorino calls (borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin) the Baroque chronotope of formation, which refers to forms responding to the dynamics of space-time interactions. Such interactions were exhaustive and even tested the boundaries between reality and fiction, creation and denial, conformity and criticism from picaresque Spain to middle-class Holland. And it is the painting of a Dutch artist—Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer— that is taken as a symbol of the Baroque reconciliation of humanist learning with human or humane understanding. Such a humanizing attitude also marked the final transformation of humanist ideals of perfection into the Baroque experience of human perfectibility.
This book will be of importance to all scholars concerned with the history of ideas, cultural history, and the Baroque in literature and art.
“A positive aspect of the book is its strong synthesizing tendency: the author is able to combine analyses of texts drawn from philosophy, sculpture, painting, as well as literature into a coherent pattern without at the same time doing violence to the specificity of the works analyzed.”
Giancarlo Maiorino is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. Born and raise in Rome, he did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds an MA in art history and a PhD ini Italian and Comparative Literature. He is the author of Adam "New Born and Perfect": The Renaissance Promise of Eternity (1987) and has published in such journals as Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Gazette des Beaux-Arts.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
In the Belly of Indigence
1. Econopoetics and the Great Chain of Handouts
Starved to Death
2. The Mousetrap: The Price of Staying Alive
3. Inconspicuous Consumption: Of Toothpicks and Leftovers
Out of Laceria
4. The Water Carrier: From Subsistence to Prosperity
5. The Economic Culture of Toledan Provecho
The Price of Onomastics
6. Lázaro de Tormes: What’s in a Name?
7. Will Lazarus Ever Be a Wage Earner?
Dividends of the Mind
8. The Cost of Education: A Tale of Two Cities
9. The Economy of Genre10 At the Margins: Whose Renaissance?
Works Cited
Index of Names
Index
1
Econopoetics and the Great Chain of Handouts
The novel . . . is part of the discursive totality of a given epoch, occupying a place
opposite its ideologically authoritative core. Its conception is itself a story about an
escape from authority, which is often its subplot.
—Roberto González Echevarría
This study centers on econopoetics, a term that considers how
socioeconomic factors are central to the poetics of literary works.
Although they may appear to be unrelated, mimesis and oikonomia bear
on the legitimacy no less than on the marketability of art. From food
and gifts to onomastics and fashion, parallels between economic and literary
modes of production turn mimesis into “econo-mimesis,” which
brings to the fore those precapitalist aspects of the Renaissance that
spurred exchanges between economic signs and noneconomic signifiers.
Much has been written about the art and literature of the culture of
affluence, which, from Florence to Amsterdam, upheld standards of academic
excellence as well as material wealth. This study claims that not
enough has been written about the much broader culture of Renaissance
poverty. Although indigence was widespread everywhere, only in sixteenth-
century Spain did low-life art and literature give voice to impoverished
noblemen and roguish youths—known as pícaros—who stood at
the margins of the grand narrative of the imperial Golden Age. The discourses
of poverty were social, religious, and economic. They encompassed,
to quote Anne J. Cruz’s recent study (1999, xi–xiii), reformist
treatises, state documents, and ecclesiastical writings. “From Lazarillo de
Tormes, who arrives in Toledo when the Poor Laws are enforced, to
Estebanillo Gonzáles, whose hunger compels him to join the Hapsburg
armies, the pícaros contend daily with both social disenfranchisement and
physical deprivation.”
Mateo Alemán, Francisco de Quevedo, Ribera, Murillo, and
Velázquez brought to the fore folks who begged at street corners,
worked for low wages, and starved in destitute hamlets. Literary texts
made room for the best and the worst, but not for the average or
mediocre. History teaches us that destitution has always shaped the
lifestyle of what we now call “popular culture.” Orations on human
dignity and praises of folly aside, no one wrote about the dispossessed
existence of common folks until the novelist gave them a voice.
Appropriately, Michel de Certeau (1988, v) dedicated his critical study
of everyday life “to the ordinary man,” who is “a common hero, an
ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the street.”
Because it downsizes “great men” theories of history, I extend his
emphasis to narratives that brought a new set of images to novelistic
texts.
Metaphorically speaking, Florentine anatomies of plenitude yielded
to the physiology of survival in Toledo and Seville, where artists and
writers took up the task of representing people who were never
“reborn” to the better life of material comfort. Thus I focus on the
prototype of the art of survival, the autobiographical and yet anonymous
La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades (written in
1530–34 and published in 1554).• This text stands out as the first modern
European novel, appearing almost two centuries before the genre
became a commonplace production of the English middle class. Lazarillo
de Tormes is also the earliest narrative about the low culture of a vagrant
who became a protagonist in the emergent genre of the picaresque,
which grew out of a culture of utter indigence on the arid plains of
Castile.•
In post-Renaissance landscapes, picaresque descriptions of poor people,
empty spaces, and absent objects—furniture, tools, food, clothes—
often traded the necessary for the wishful; even mimesis was starved to
death. Miguel de Unamuno (1976, 25) reminds us that “The land which
fed Don Quixote is a poor land, so swept and lashed by the downpours
of centuries that its granite entrails have cropped out at the surface.”
The accomplishments of capitalism and the industrial revolution
notwithstanding, poverty remains a central feature of most societies, so
much so that the picaresque has cast its long shadow over the twentieth
century and beyond. At the beginning of the third millennium, the rise
of global capitalism leaves no doubt that it still is with us.
Lazarillo de Tormes is about a destitute youth. Very much like the
pícaro of folklore, he embodies the lifelong toil of an outsider who rarely
transcends his impoverished circumstances.• Lázaro, the protagonist,
leaves his native hometown of Tejares after his father is arrested and sent
to prison for stealing wheat. Antona Pérez, the boy’s mother, is left
without an income and decides to move to the academic city of
Salamanca. Her hope is to mix “with respectable people”—“arrimarse a
los buenos”—on the assumption that people who own goods are good;
her standard of goodness is economic, not moral.
Things do not work out; good people are not good enough to
Antona. Finally she gives her son away to a blind beggar whose brutal
ways introduce the boy to the art of survival. “I won’t make you a rich
man,” says the blind man, “but I can show you how to make a living.”
Once he outsmarts his master, Lázaro moves to commercial Toledo,
where he tests will and wits, first in the service of a stingy priest and then
with a dispossessed escudero who introduces him to such values as honor,
pride, and social status. Having served a mundane friar (fraile de la Merced)
and a seller of false indulgences (buldero), Lázaro is hired by another
priest (capellán) who gives him the job of water carrier. Finally he
becomes town crier (pregonero) and marries the mistress of the local archpriest,
a woman who turns out to be the source of much of Lázaro’s
“good luck”:
Y, así, me casé con ella, y hasta agora no estoy arrepentido, porque, allende de
ser buena hija y diligente servicial, tengo en mi señor acipreste todo favor y
ayuda. Y siempre en el año 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. E hízonos alquilar una casilla par de la suya. (131–32)
We got married and I’ve never been sorry because, besides her being
a good and attentive girl, the priest is always very kind to me. Every
year I get 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.
He arranged to rent a house next to his. (78)
Job and marriage are intertwined, and Lázaro accepts the assets and liabilities
of a “profit-sharing agreement” that makes cuckoldry profitable.
After years of modest prosperity, a high ecclesiastical authority, identified
as Vuestra Merced, levels a vague indictment (caso) against Lázaro,
presumably having something to do with his unusual marital arrangement.
Lázaro answers the charge by writing his life story, producing in
the process the first extant picaresque novel. His defense, in short, is that
individual responsibility cannot be assigned without also acknowledging
the collective guilt of society. He narrates his social ascent as the
inevitable by-product of an economic system in which a parasitic aristocracy
exploits workers by using its hereditary privileges and the religious
institutions of Christendom to its advantage.• It would be unjust
to indict a lowly town crier, Lázaro argues, without indicting the culture
in which he was allowed first to starve and then to prosper.
As it deals with a blind man’s boy who becomes the town crier, the
story is one of unrelenting toil and modest achievement within a population
that has turned expediency into a way of life.• The protagonist’s
journey begins in Salamanca, the city of learning, and ends in Toledo,
the city of business.• The picaresque narrative thus depicts the common
migration from the peripheral countryside to the commercial hub of
society, where an enterprising “new Christian” bourgeoisie began to
erode the power and privilege of the landed aristocracy.• It was in the
city that resourceful outcasts stood a chance to build a better future for
themselves.
Street smarts were needed to survive in neighborhoods where economic
improvements were modest and education was a luxury that few
could afford. At the periphery of accademie, studioli, and patrician palaces,
the picaresque art of survival represented a popular kind of humanism,
which Boccaccio introduced in the opening words of his Decameron:
“Umana cosa è”—“It is human.” Here umano meant humane at the
ground floor of existence, not humanist in the academic enclaves of
learned scholarship. In this world of the streets, we roam with
Andreuccio through the Malpertugio neighborhood in Naples
(Decameron II, 5), witness Celestina pointing out familiar whorehouses,
and wander by the escudero’s ghostly lodgings in a Toledan district
crowded with weavers and prostitutes. This is the world of Cervantes’s
Seville, the criminal underworld of Rinconete and Cortadillo.• Against
all odds, Lázaro masters the art of survival and goes on to lead a secret
life of learning. His mimesis of “life-as-is” yields unhoped-for dividends
in the world of literary currency.
Especially in Spain, the literary corollary to the life of the street
included poesía cancioneril, teatro primitivo, refranes glosados, diálogos, as well
as imitations of Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina, which gave tragicomic
form to the bleak view of human life as mere doing. We thus confront
a literatura desesperanzada rooted in philosophical pessimism and
economic dispossession.• In fact, material and artistic modes of production
were as intertwined in the pit of economic destitution as they were
in the high culture of mercantile affluence and aristocratic privilege.•• As
Michel Butor (1964, 96) put it, the new genre exposed “the guts, the
underside, the margins of society.” Because it was known as the fountainhead
of the real as well as of the literary picaresque, Toledo represented
Spanish society at its cultural “lowest” as well as at its unproductive
“worst.”
• •
In 1492, the Catholic kings discovered the future on a new continent
where indigenous people had to pay dearly for the dubious gifts of a
new language and religion. Like the great navigators of this era, picaresque
writers charted journeys through the vast geography of poverty,
giving literary form to the indigent humanity that nobody wanted to
discover because everybody knew it. It took a long time to map the
outer reaches of the picaresque on the home front, where Lázaro and
Guzmán, the most popular of the pícaros, made omelettes with eggs as
rotten as their corrupt society. In the same year that Christopher
Columbus set out to discover new routes to old markets, a whole population
of productive non-Christians was forced into exile unless it
denied its religious beliefs. Accounts of imperial conquest were popular,
but few attempted to justify the materialist enslavement of indigenous
Spaniards on Spanish soil. Arab peasants and Jewish craftsmen and merchants
who became Christian to avoid persecution were called conversos,
and it is generally agreed that the nameless narrator of Lazarillo de Tormes
was one of them. These indigenous people were as radically marginalized
as their counterparts in the New World. In The Unfortunate Traveller
(1594), Thomas Nash wrote of picaresque vagrants who roamed the
seedy back alleys of derelict neighborhoods. Their tribulations proved
that the longest journeys often take place in the shortest distances.
While the economic base of society was changing throughout
Europe, aristocratic privilege rested on nobility of blood, which was
anchored at the unproductive center of the Spanish monarchy, where
old Spanish Christians enjoyed a kind of twilight splendor. The Holy
Roman Empire had vanished, and Charles V’s ecumenical mission
proved to be a bankrupt myth. At least for a while, the wealth coming
from the New World kept dreams of grandeur alive for the ruling class,
and voyages of discovery gave way to expeditionary armies whose mis-
sion was to conquer new territories. The upshot was the creation of
imperial languages, empires without sunsets, and Christian kingdoms
that gave an altogether modern resonance to experiences of, and escapes
from, authority.
While they lasted, imperial dreams were built on the exploitation of
the working classes and on the ingenuity of bankers and businessmen.
While the workers never got to share the wealth they produced, the
bankers never gave up on profitable ventures. A mercantile elite as wide
as Western Europe and more powerful than states and empires emerged
in the down-to-earth republic of money—republica del danaro. Its heritage
was in Florence and dated back to financial powerhouses such as
the Peruzzi, the Bardi, and the Acciaiuoli, whom the historian Giovanni
Villani (Cronica xi) called the “pillars of Christendom.” Bankers such as
the Medici, Welser, Hoechstetter, Lomellini, Centurione, Grimaldi,
Spinola, and Ruiz introduced a commercial mindset that challenged the
old, aristocratic concept of wealth as rooted in land ownership.
Spain was less receptive to such a development. By the turn of the
seventeenth century, Sancho de Moncada recommended that trading
companies should be organized according to the Dutch or Italian
model. Even the all-powerful Conte de Olivares conceded that
Spaniards had better learn to become merchants—this at a time when
Jakob Fugger was so powerful that Spain under Charles V became
known as the Age of the Fuggers. In spite of precious metals coming
from the New World, Spain eventually plunged into an unstoppable
decline.
Having visited Spain, the Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini
(1971, 32–34) wrote between 1512 and 1513 that Spaniards did not
“care to dedicate themselves to commerce—non si danno alle mercatantie”
because they scorned business activities that were censored by the
Church.•• While most artisans at court were foreigners, people in the
countryside “till the land and engage in trade only to satisfy need—così li
artifici loro lavorano quando la necessità li caccia, di poi si riposano che abbino
speso il guadagnato.” Prejudice against commerce and lack of mercantile
ingenuity spawned impoverishment. The population toiled in great
poverty—“con una somma strettezza”—and living conditions were harsh.
People “are extremely stingy, and, because they have no commercial
skill, they also are prone to stealing.” Modern scholars such as Castro
and Maravall have made less severe appraisals. According to Bennassar
(1979, 118), “Francesco Guicciardini—who wielded a venomous pen,
to be sure—wrote that Castilians although subtle and astute, were not
distinguished in the mechanical or liberal arts; all the artisans at the
court, if we believe him, were foreigners. He obviously exaggerated
when he claimed that Castilians regarded commerce as shameful, for at
the time he wrote the merchants of Burgos were looked up to in
Flanders. But his claim that the country’s poverty sprang not from the
quality of its soil but from the dislike of its inhabitants for labor has the
support of Spanish witnesses.” And Gonzáles de Cellorigo wrote at the
time, “the things that most hinders our people from engaging in the
legitimate activities so important to the public weal is the great honor
and authority enjoyed by those who shun labor.”
When the merchant, lured by the certain profits which the bonds will
yield, gives up his business, the artisan his craft, the laborer his field,
and the shepherd his flock; when the nobleman sells his lands in order
to exchange the amount they are worth for five times that sum in
Government bonds, then the real income from their patrimonies will
be exhausted, and all the silver will vanish into thin air, at the same
time as for his own needs, for those of the lord of the estate, the rentier,
the tax-farmer and so many others who have some claim to
make on the land. Thus, from the bottom of the scale to the top, one
may calculate that the ratio of those who work to those who do
nothing is of the order of one to thirty. . . . Wealth has not taken root
because it has remained, and still does remain, etherialized in the
form of papers, contracts, bonds, letters of exchange and gold or silver
coinage, and not in the form of goods able to bear fruit and to
attract wealth from abroad by virtue of the wealth within.••
Guicciardini spoke in the name of economics, whereas most Castilians
spoke in the name of Christian righteousness and imperial pride. The
socioeconomic landscape was split along the divide that separated the
tradition-based caste from the modern class structure. In a legalistic culture
that was vastly parasitic, the values of caste and ghost money were
pitted against those of class and material goods. The concept of commercial
profit is alien to the caste system, which places ultimate value on
social hierarchy. The Spanish social system, writes Anthony Cascardi
(1997, 1–3), slowed the pace of cultural change at a time when the
emergence of capitalism in the rest of Europe “tended to reorient social
differences along class lines.” And Américo Castro (1971, 365–66) asserts
that “the caste-determined condition was not a temporary or accidental
phase of Spanish life, but an introverted mode of perceiving that one
existed that way, as a person of one faith, of one law.”
On the mainland, the ostentatious display of wealth was prized over
the commercial ingenuity and diligence that characterized the bourgeoisie
in other European countries. The arrogance and lack of productivity
of the Spanish nobility created negative perceptions abroad that
generated what came to be known as the Black Legend. Commenting
on the materialist background of the “Age of Discovery,” Jules
Michelet, the nineteenth-century historian who gave critical currency
to the term Renaissance, liked to quote Christopher Columbus, who
believed that gold could buy paradise itself. In Spain the “golden century”
drew strength from the “cycle of gold” that financed it.•• Many
Spanish soldiers spent most of their lives in Italy and the Low Countries
defending the grandeur of the golden century, but they never got to
know what was so precious about the age in which they lived.•• Similar
experiences took place on both sides of the Atlantic.•• In spite of military
conquests, the gold and silver coming from the New World quickly lost
their luster and raised the rate of inflation, to the financial ruin of many
escuderos and hidalgos. There were times when the king himself could not
pay the bills—not that this curtailed the conspicuous consumption of
the court and the nobility. Scholars have probed the role that wealth has
played in the creation of a “high culture” based on the alliance between
business and aristocracy under the blessing of the Church. This powerful
elite ignored the mediocre, overlooked the normal, and exaggerated
the best.•• The parasitic nobility was bound to tumble, and tumble it did.
• • •
Guzmán de Alfarache, at the apex of the picaresque genre, set out to
describe
Un hombre perféto, castigado de trabajos y miserias, después de haber bajado
a las más ínfima de todas, puesto en galera por curullero della. (467)
A man, perfect in his parts and person, punished with troubles, and
afflicted with miseries, and falling afterwards into the basest roguerie.
(3, 5)
But the travails of existence dragged him to the Gallies, “where his
wings” were clipped. Guzmán had no choice but to trust the “basest
roguerie” amid the trabajos y miserias of existence, which reduced the
perfect man to a poor wretch weighed down by the same fortunas y
adversidades that Lazarillo had endured. Whereas the Renaissance writers
Leon Battista Alberti and Pico della Mirandola glorified human perfection
in treatises and orations far removed from life at street level, Mateo
Alemán opted for the novel; theory gave way to practice, and grand
ideas were abandoned in favor of life as it was lived by the majority:
Es el pobre moneda que no corre, conseja de horno, escoria del pueblo,
barreduras de la plaza y asno del rico. . . . Nadie le ayuda, todos le impiden;
nadie le da, todos le quitan. (353–54)
The Poore man is a kinde of money, that is not currant; the subject
of every idle Huswives chat; the off-scumme of the people; the dust
of the street, first trampled under foot, and then throwne on the
dung-hill. In conclusion, the Poore Man is the Rich mans Asse. . . .
None helpe him, all hinder him; none give him, all take from him.
(2, 128)
Alemán’s subject is not man in general, but man as an economic subject:
homo oeconomicus.
The discourse of money is the discourse of both empowerment and
enslavement, which weigh one’s social standing on the scales of appreciation
and depreciation. In De subventione pauperorum, the pious Luis
Vives, whose Jewish family had migrated to Bruges, called for a sharing
of basic goods in the belief that God had given everything in common
to everybody. On more practical grounds, he also recommended that
the poor should be registered and interrogated as to why they begged.
Linda Martz (1983, 9) tells us that “anyone who claimed infirmity as a
cause for begging was to be inspected by a doctor, and anyone who
resisted these proceedings was to be put in jail.” Fray Domingo de Soto,
Fray Juan de Medina, and Miguel Giginta argued that riches carried
moral responsibilities, and their writings on the culture of poverty
included arguments against the Poor Law (1540), which ruled on the
expulsion of the poor from the cities.•• Poor laws were one more burden
on the poor throughout Europe.
Historical and fictional writings by Procopius of Cesarea, St. Basil,
Angelo Beolco, Raimundo Llull, and Giovan Battista Segni have highlighted
the role of hunger in the dynamics of history.•• Throughout the
Renaissance, people starved to death. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted
the Battle between Carnival and Lent, and Tommaso Garzoni wrote about
“Re di Cuccagna” in Piazza Universale, in the knowledge that poverty,
not prosperity, was the rule of life. Luigi Pulci and François Rabelais
linked food to outsized figures with outsized appetites. Literary descriptions
of the poor concerned themselves with food intake, whether food
actually eaten or only conjured up by the imagination. Because food
defines humanity in itself as well as in relation to life at large, picaresque
diets have been indicators of social status.•• In fact, the economics of
food consumption are an apt, if pitiless, barometer of communal habits.
What Italo Calvino has called the dialectic of sapore (flavor) and sapere
(knowledge) has been central to a genre as complex and eclectic as the
novel.
However bright the veneer of imperial grandeur, more than onethird
of the Spanish population was destitute. Mateo Alemán called
Seville the Babilonia de pícaros, and the new genre alerted readers to the
causes of poverty as well as to the exploitive thinking of those who bore
some responsibility for it. Even Erasmus (1965, 1:251, 211) wrote, “for
living well, it’s particularly important that a man accustom himself to
being content with little.” To Erasmian praise of folly, the picaresque
added its own praise of the low-life world of vida buscona. Since no
rhetorical currency was available for sketching a portrait of the “valueless”
as such, the poor were presented as the negative of the socially
“valuable.” Without calling for open revolt, the picaresque was both
parodic and revolutionary in its depiction of strategies of survival that
turned humanist education on its head.••
By and large, paupers took deprivation as a fact of life, and Peter
Dunn (1993, 295) writes that, among picaresque texts, Lazarillo de
Tormes “makes us stare at” poverty, which the majority of people
accepted as the given lot of humankind. In the consumption-oriented
economy of Renaissance Spain, the power of labor never gathered
enough strength to instigate changes of any consequence for the lower
classes. When legitimate employment was not available, people resorted
to temporary, if not clandestine, work, which introduced the world of
beggars, cutpurses, parasites, and the seedy humanity of germanía. In
their midst, the culture of the picaresque broke ground and produced
artworks about people who spent most of their lives on the edge
between the lawful and the lawless. While Francisco de Quevedo
instructed anyone who would “attend to the lesson” of low-life behavior
(género de Picardía), picaresque and Cervantine characters proclaimed
that stealing was “a free trade,” and some of them played center stage in
the Prologue of Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499). For Buscón’s
father, Clemente Pablos, “esto de ser ladrón no es arte mecánica sino liberal”
(being a thief isn’t just a job, it’s a liberal profession) (86).
At issue here are ingrained attitudes toward work itself. Throughout
the Middle Ages society was divided between maiores et potentiores and
minores et infirmiores. Physical work and mechanical arts were held in low
esteem vis-à-vis intellectual ingenuity and moral strength. The Spanish
nobility lived on inherited wealth and enforced socioeconomic discriminations.
Thus we can pit the profitable arte della mercatura (art of business)
and the aristocratic arte della cortigiania (art of courtiership) against
the picaresque arte de furtar (art of stealing), which also produced a mock
encomium on the freedom of the beggar’s life.•• The traditional rhetoric
of praise was based on exaggeration. Its counterpart, the rhetoric of
blame, reversed direction without mitigating its intensity.
In Spain the anticanonical discourse of the picaresque gave voice to
criminals, prostitutes, water carriers, town criers, and outsiders at large.
Without uprooting either economic privilege or social injustice, the
anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes started a novelistic discourse
that pushed the material concerns of the lower classes to the forefront of
art. At its most prosaic, the semantics of picaresque “insignificance”••
described the economic condition of the underprivileged. Ordinary
folks survived the rise and fall of empires as well as the waning of the
Renaissance exactly because they had mastered the art of survival under
the most adverse circumstances.
In his recent study of Cervantes’s material world, Carroll Johnson
(2000, 16–17) confirms that labradores and villanos represented 80 percent
of the total population. While treatises and dictionaries associated them
with “everything gross, malicious, and lowly,” Fray Benito Penalosa de
Mondragón wrote that such common folks “are the objects of city people’s
amusement, and they are depicted on the stage in a way that makes
them seem even more unfit for society, with their coarse mannerisms
exaggerated for the amusement of the audience.” More educated readers
were perhaps less amused. Then as now, not everyone read pica-
resque texts as comic stories. What is funny to some can be deadly serious
for others; in Lázaro’s own words, “one man’s meat is another man’s
poison—lo que uno no come, otro se pierde por ello” (23, 4). Mikhail Bakhtin
(1981, 23) also warns us that laughter itself “means abuse, and abuse
could lead to blows.” Likewise, José Antonio Maravall (1990, 156)
agrees that picaresque laughter has worked as an instrument of social disintegration.
And we know that parody and satire mark the first lines of
attack against the established order. The “abused” may have been slow
to see themselves as such, but when they did, picaresque literature
helped them to become conscious of socioeconomic discrimination in a
new way. Even those in charge of the master narratives must have realized
that Lázaro’s autobiography was more than a simple “comic” story,
or why else was it placed on the index of forbidden books in 1599?••
Lazaro’s story exposed and at times discredited the wealthy and powerful
at a time when nobody paid much attention to the lives of ordinary
people. Picaresque novels tested “canonical” boundaries by celebrating
the unremembered, their joys, pains, and struggles to survive. Yet the
poor looked at their ordinariness as the negative sign of the humanist
ideal described in Florentine panegyrics or in those chivalric romances
which, to Don Quixote’s dismay, were printed by the hundreds in
Barcelona.
Popular culture stood beneath the exclusive center of aristocratic
privilege. But the materialist “flowering” of the Renaissance was rooted
as much in mercantile ingenuity as in profiteering off manual laborers.••
George Boas’s (1969, 74) reminder is instructive: “The People are not
always the poor, but the poor are usually an important part of the
People. . . . If the People are the plebs or the vulgus or the multitudo,
they will almost by definition be those men who have no inherited
property, no individual political power or influence, no experience of
the arts or pastimes of the leisure class, and none of the prestige that
comes from wearing the proper clothes.” Praises of poverty were at
once inspirational and incongruous. By blending together the discourse
of social privilege with that of religious purity, Petrarch (1991, 3:35)
sounded rather awkward when he put his rhetorical skills at the service
of religious propaganda: “She [poverty] is an ever watchful sentinel
against burglars and pleasures . . . against the shame of greed or extravagance
which seldom dwells anywhere else than in the doorways of the
rich.” Both the acquisition and the ownership of things encourage theft,
vice, and sin. As long as poverty occupies one’s house, Petrarch went
on, “there will be no space for pride in it, nor for envy, nor for disastrous
losses . . . nor for deceit, indigestion, and the gout, which are permanent
guests in the house of the rich.” In its alleged deliverance from
moral shortcomings, indigence drew on biblical references in which
temptation upheld the dualism of survival and steadfastness. Having
equated material loss with spiritual gain, these rhetorical strategies were
meant to convince the poor that poverty was a blessing after all.
Affluence, conversely, was an institutional attribute of the nobility
and, however disguised, of the Church. The clergy preached the rightness
and naturalness of social and economic inequality, and promised a
heavenly reward for the dispossessed poor. Ordinary people accepted
poverty as their reality, and the rich viewed it as a social disease that was
to be kept under control; it could be alleviated but not eliminated. And,
of course, charity was the approved means of dealing with poverty,
which conveniently kept the poor poor and created a cheap labor
force.•• At the same time, the institutionalized practice of begging was a
reminder that one could fall into destitution. In Spain and elsewhere,
workers and artisans were seen as crowds to be flattered or to be threatened
—but always to be taken advantage of. As a source of cheap manpower,
the poor were crucial to everyone else’s prosperity. Charity was
the flip side of exploitation; the hand that gave a little had taken a lot to
begin with. Compassionate reformers such as Luis Vives, Juan de
Medina, Miguel Giginta, and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera favored
employment over charity, which would have the benefit of curing idleness.
But theirs were the proverbial voices in the wilderness. By and
large, the poor accepted that life without physical and cultural hunger
was beyond their reach.
••
As the sixteenth century unfolded, the materialist heterogeneity of lifeas-
is made time biological and space phenomenal. Once artists and writers
responded to the demands of existence, picaresque humanity began
to operate in “chronotopic” conditions, a term that highlights the diversity
no less than the dynamics of life in the making. Michael Holquist
defines the Bakhtinian chronotope as “literally ‘time-space.’ A unit of
analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the tem-
poral and spatial categories represented. The distinctiveness of this concept
as opposed to most other uses of time and space in literary analysis
lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent.
The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the
forces at work in the culture system from which they spring.”•• To put
it in Bakhtinian terms (1981, 388, 84), “the testing” of Lazaro’s survival
as well as his pursuit of a place in society set off “the most fundamental
organizing idea in the novel.” And “testing” occurs in spatio-temporal
conditions in which “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes
artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the
movements of time, plot and history.”•• Textuality thus responds to the
external pressures of laughter, parody, the plurality of high and low genres,
the diversity of languages, and, last but not least, the never-ending
contest between canonization and heteroglossia.•• The dynamics of
chronotopic interactions guide my approach to Lazarillo de Tormes,
which, published in the mid-sixteenth century, bridged the gap
between a waning humanism and an emergent baroque. The humanist
treatise and the system of linear perspective gave way to picaresque and
quixotic novels, illusionistic perspectives, and the phenomenal spaces of
Caravaggio and Velázquez.
Keeping in mind the novelistic lessons of nineteenth-century Realism
and Naturalism, we must view the emergence of the novel with an
awareness of its socioeconomic complexity. If we read Dickens or Zola
without paying attention to econopoetics, we will miss much—perhaps
too much. The traditional tendency to exclude economic factors from
works of art mystifies their very nature, and few would deny that the
concept of value is contingent upon one’s material milieu.••
After Werner Sombart singled out luxury as one of the engines of
capitalism, Richard Goldthwaite (1987) found in conspicuous consumption
an opening into processes of cultural change.•• I focus on the opposite;
it is conspicuous destitution that makes Lázaro de Tormes dream of
becoming a consumer amid laborers who toil at the periphery of affluence.
•• Since I question the privileges that “high culture” enjoyed at the
exclusion of “popular culture,” my aim is to call attention to those layers
of society that fall outside the bounds of humanist learning and aristocratic
elitism. Thus I intend to explore how a network of material
practices called on human ingenuity to cope with indigence. My
econopoetics weaves together literary narrativity with the politics of
narrativity, and the picaresque offers historical evidence for probing into
the nomenclature of poverty.
Since it would be difficult to deny that “official” history has represented
the past in a way that flatters and celebrates the attitude of the
dominant class, the texts that have come down to us are those that reinforce
establishment ideologies. The sheer fact that the poor have been
“established” as much and as long as the rich gives priority to the issue
of dominance over that of longevity. By drawing on treatises on mercantile
affluence that financed the humanist best, as well as from the
novelistic indigence of the Darwinian fittest, econopoetics takes a step
toward a more comprehensive assessment of the Renaissance.
Because it was so self-righteous, humanist elitism raises fundamental
questions: Was the literature that outlined “ideal types” truly representative
of society at large? How inspiring could such hypothetical figures
be for the population at street corners? Successful merchants, scholars,
and courtiers aside, what did humanist literature say about ordinary people?
Above all, how much of culture, and how many people, did
humanist texts exclude? We must keep these issues in mind before we
raise questions about the “other” Renaissance of picaresque indigence.
When the voices of “low” culture are silenced, we must probe the range
and depth of their silence. And economic concerns can effectively test
the scope of their absence.
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