Knowing Fictions : Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World
Knowing Fictions : Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World
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Author(s): Fuchs, Barbara
ISBN No.: 9780812252613
Pages: 208
Year: 202102
Format: Trade Cloth (Hard Cover)
Price: $ 80.66
Dispatch delay: Dispatched between 7 to 15 days
Status: Available

Introduction Mi pluma y mi tintero me valen lo que quiero. --Spanish proverb From the relación to the captivity narrative, the Hispanic imperial project relies heavily on the first-person authority of genres whose authenticity undergirds the ideological armature of national consolidation, expansion, and conquest. At the same time, increasing pressures for religious conformity in Spain as across Europe require subjects to bare their interiority to external authorities, in intimate confessions of their faith. As it emerges in this charged context, the unreliable voice of the picaresque poses a rhetorical challenge to the authority of the witness, destabilizing the possibility of trustworthy representation precisely because he or she is so intimately involved with the material. The picaresque also limns itineraries beyond the metropole, transcending the limited range of foundational texts such as La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes to model alternative relationships to Spain and Spanishness from a distance. Via its imaginative geographies, it thus interrogates the conceptual and actual limits of nation and empire: while the texts themselves chart communities that transcend the nation, they also challenge the idea of a bounded polity from a transnational and imperial optic. Knowing Fictions shows, first, how the fictional serves as an early site of skepticism within Spanish letters, and second, how itinerant texts complicate both national and literary affiliations. It reveals the picaresque as both a writerly and a readerly strategy, problematizing truth and authority while implicating the broader textual apparatus of imperium in its fictionality and interestedness.


The picaresque is largely a retrospective critical construction, with Cervantes as an early and perspicacious adopter: not only is it famously debated and debatable, but there are as many examples of texts that might arguably be picaresques as those generally admitted to belong to the club. As Claudio Guillén notes, "No work embodies completely the picaresque genre"--and this seems to be even more true for the picaresque than for other kinds. Rather than reengaging this debate, my goal here is to examine the picaresque affiliations of complex, adjacent fictions--para-picaresques, if we were to imagine solid boundaries--as well as widely recognized picaresque texts, to examine the ideological work that they do. In their own moment and over a much longer history of reception, I will suggest, picaresques help to construct knowing readers, of the sort that Cervantes so often seems to address. My readings build on Guillén''s marvelously economic definition of the picaresque as "the fictional confession of a liar," to explore the historical and epistemological implications of the form. Beyond Guillén''s useful construction of genre as "a problem-solving model," for writers, he also characterizes the picaresque as "a procedure for ordering the continuum of individual literary facts; and, as a critical perspective, perhaps fruitful at the moment of reading." John Parrack extends Guillén''s insights to argue that the picaresque "underscores its own narrative silences," inviting a particular "''game'' of interpretation." Parrack locates the picaresque''s development in a historical context of print technology, increasingly widespread literacy, and the concomitant development of silent reading, all of which enable a more active--and even suspicious--reader.


As the individual reading subject is granted more authority, Parrack argues, "picaresque discourse not only acknowledges but invites and requires interpretation as an active force to challenge existing systems of authority and textual ''truths.''" Knowing Fictions proposes both a historical and a theoretical approach: it situates the picaresque in relation to imperial expansion and confessional suspicion, which render narrative authority singularly charged, and simultaneously proposes the form as a tool for reading. By venturing beyond the echt-picaresque, I explore what framing a text, rather than simply classifying it as picaresque or noting its inherent generic affiliation, can reveal. Picaresque Framing Some years ago I essayed the most radical version of this critical move, deliberately and perversely framing an English New World relation as a picaresque in order to complicate its construction of national and religious allegiances in a context of inter-imperial rivalry. The narrative of "one Miles Philips, Englishman, one of the company put on shoare Northward of Panuco, in the West Indies by Mr. John Hawkins" covers events occurring from 1567 to 1582, and was published in Richard Hakluyt''s Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589, 1598-1600). Hawkins''s voyages of the 1560s launched the triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the New World: the English took on human "marchandize" on the coast of Guinea, then sold the enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. On the third voyage, which was to prove so fateful for the young Philips, a storm forced the English ships into the port of Veracruz, New Spain, where the Spanish fleet largely destroyed them.


Having lost most of his ships, Hawkins chose to abandon a portion of his crew to fend for themselves in New Spain while he tried to reach England with his remaining human cargo. Richard Helgerson--whose insights in person and in print I sorely miss--argued that Philips''s text asserts the emergence of an English identity that survives multiple trials--abandonment by Hawkins, wandering in the New World wilderness, interrogation by the Inquisition, the lure of Spanish riches. Yet the narrative''s retrospective quality and its deliberate re-presentation of its protagonist''s adventures simultaneously cast that identity into doubt. My reading explores how the use of a Spanish literary frame--the picaresque--to read this English text serves to interrogate its construction of English identity, revealing the rhetorical maneuvers involved in performing and sustaining English national difference after the fact. For Philips is caught in a bind: his survival in New Spain clearly depended on his adaptability and even his ability to pass as a Spaniard, yet his reintegration into English society as he tells his story rests on proving that he remained distinctly English while among the enemy. At the heart of Philips''s account lies a harrowing interrogation of the ragged company of suspected "Lutherans" by the Inquisition, during which the English are asked to confirm their belief in transubstantiation and other Catholic dogma. Yet in narrating these events, Philips sidesteps his disavowal of reformed religion, and instead stresses the perilous alternative to acquiescence with his captors: "To which if we answered not yea, then was there no way but death." While older or perhaps less pragmatic members of the crew die for their true beliefs, Philips serves five years in a monastery.


The retrospective narrator must thread a fine rhetorical needle here, persuading his readers that whereas he needed to lie during the interrogation to survive, his present account of what transpired is completely trustworthy. We are meant to believe that his repudiation of Protestantism in New Spain was a necessary fabrication, yet the account we read is, if not heroic, at least fully authentic. Framing Miles Philips''s narrative as a picaresque is an extrinsic critical move: his account is not formally a picaresque, or even a literary text, nor do we have any evidence that Philips was familiar with texts such as Lazarillo . Yet as an "allegory of legitimation" for a deracinated subject, the picaresque productively frames Philips''s transatlantic narrative of vexed allegiances and protean transformations. The Spanish form elucidates this peculiar English narration of adventures in New and Old Spain both by revealing its distinct shape and by casting suspicion upon the narrator''s claims. Thus a willfully perverse formal contextualization within a precise historical setting highlights the rhetorical maneuvers involved in performing and sustaining English difference, and reveals in the text ambiguities and hesitations that are occluded even by other literary referents, such as the epic, with which Helgerson frames the text. In Knowing Fictions , I return to the Old World, tracing Mediterranean itineraries of diaspora, captivity, and imperial rivalry in a corpus that engages picaresque conventions to contest narrative authority. I focus on texts that fit uneasily within standard categories of genre and geography: in addition to Mateo Alemán''s Guzmán de Alfarache --one of the few texts generally agreed by critics to represent the picaresque--I explore Francisco Delicado''s La Lozana andaluza , the anonymous Viaje de Turquía , Cervantes'' plays of captivity, and his various versions of the picaresque in the Novelas ejemplares .


My canon is provisional rather than exhaustive: I offer it as a first sally beyond the lines of genre, a model for how reading with and through the picaresque might transform our understanding of a broad range of texts. My goal is not to lard the canon of the picaresque with runners-up and wannabes; I am less interested in how we delimit the form than in what we can do with it, mobilizing genre as a tool for our own reading. Intensive close reading in a picaresque vein, I argue, reveals connections and operations that cumulatively challenge not just social verities but their epistemological grounding. At the same time, although Knowing Fictions deals exclusively with texts explicitly engaged in literary play, I want to suggest how recognizing their strategies may prove useful in rereading historiographic materials often marked by similar ambiguities. Critics have effectively charted the close connections betwe.


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