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The Deceptiveness of Lazarillo de Tormes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Howard Mancing
Howard Mancing*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia
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Abstract

The anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes is a master of deception. He makes his protagonist supremely attractive to the reader by contrasting him with unlikable characters (the blind beggar, the priest, the squire) and by the intimacy of autobiography. The reader increasingly sympathizes with Lazarillo, reaching in the third chapter a point of genuine admiration for the boy’s self-sacrifice at the time of greatest physical suffering. The author then creates an illusion of passing time to reach the book’s final scene, in which the mature Lázaro profits from the sexual exploitation of his wife. Lazarillo de Tonnes, comic only on a superficial level, presents a corrupt society that forces its materialistic values on even its most virtuous members; Lázaro, like all men, eventually compromises. The reader, so attracted by the young Lazarillo who dominates the work, often fails to see the odious Lázaro who finally emerges and obliterates his former self.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 3 , May 1975 , pp. 426 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

Notes

1 Historia de la literatura espanola, 13th ed. (Barcelona : Editorial Vicens-Vives, 1966), pp. 181–82.

2 Introd. to La Vie de Lazarillo de Tormès, trans. A. Morel-Fatio (Paris: Aubier, 1958), pp. 9, 13, 36.

3 “La actitud espiritual del Lazarillo de Tormes,” in Espiritualidad y literatura en el siglo xvi (Mairid: Alfaguara, 1968), pp. 118–19, n. 83.

4 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 325.

5 See also Ch. v, “General Rules, iv: Emotions, Beliefs, and the Reader's Objectivity,” pp. 119–47.

6 See Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964), pp. 179–80.

7 See Stephen Spender, World within World, cited by Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. 163. See also Pascal's Ch. xi, “The Autobiographical Novel,” pp. 162–78. In fact, a novelist must work hard at being offensive (as does, for instance, Quevedo in El Buscón) in order to overcome this natural reader sympathy and make his first-person narrator antipathetic.

8 See Claudio Guillen, “La disposición temporal del Lazarillo de Tormes” Hispanic Review, 25 (1957), 268–70.

9 Ed. Ciaudio Guillen (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 53. All subsequent citations in the text are from this excellent edition, lamentably out of print.

10 Stephen Gilman, “The Death of Lazarillo de Tormes” (PMLA, 81, 1966, 150), finds the Prologue shocking in its arrogance and bombast and concludes that “rather than enticing the reader, its balance defies and even repels him.”

11 For Bataillon this is mere “humorismo clerical de tipo perfectamente inofensivo.” El sentido del “Lazarillo de Tormes” (Paris: Librairie des Editions Espagnoles, 1954), p. 12. Gilman, however, reads it as a “mock commonplace” popular among New Christians (p. 154).

12 Undoubtedly, there are readers who do not enjoy the humor of blasphemy, who might be offended by the loose morality of Lazarillo's mother, or who might feel insulted by what they read as an attempt to place in the mouth of a small boy the mature narrator's ex post facto commonplace moralizing. An example of the latter is J. L. Woodward, “Author-Reader Relationship in the Lazarillo del Tormes” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 1 (1965), 46.

13 See Douglas M. Carey, “Asides and Inferiority in Lazarillo de Tormes: A Study in Psychological Realism,” Studies in Philology, 66 (1969), 124.

14 The feeling, of course, is mutual. Fernando Lázaro Carreter traces the growth of this intense, human, individualized emotion between master and servant: “Con-strucción y sentido del Lazarillo de Tormes,” Abaco, 1 (1969), 83–87.

15 Francisco Rico, however, records an encounter with such a reader. La nouela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barrai, 1970), p. 52, n. 66.

16 El “Lazarillo”: Nuevo examen de algunos aspectos (Madrid: Taurus, 1971), p. 39.

17 Alan Dundes, The Study of Folklore (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 133–36. See also Lázaro Carreter, pp. 70–72.

18 See Anson C. Piper, “The Breadly Paradise of Lazarillo de Tormes,” Hispania, 44 (1961), 269–71.

19 This point is made by Lázaro Carreter: “el lector acompaña a Lázaro desde la confianza a las sospechas y a la evidencia de su pobreza, con pasos muy bien graduados” (p. 103). See also Rico, Punto de vista, p. 41.

20 See Lázaro Carreter, p. 73.

21 The squire is hardly a lovable figure—though he is an intensely human one—in his lengthy confession-within-a-confession characterized by a “bitter and querulous tone, … burning resentment and perversity” (Joseph H. Silverman, rev. of La Vie de Lazarillo de Tormès, ed. Bataillon, Romance Philology, 15, 1961, 93, n. 16).

22 For a discussion of how the death imagery of the first 3 chapters increases steadily until it reaches its zenith in Lazarillo's sojourn in the squire's house-tomb, see Gilman, pp. 161–66. For observations on the folk origins of the episode of the dead man, see Lázaro Carreter, pp. 101–02.

23 “Literary and Artistic Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes,” PMLA, 42 (1927), 410.

24 See A. D. Deyermond, “Lazarus and Lazarillo,” Studies in Short Fiction, 2 (1965), 353.

25 See Raymond S. Willis, “Lazarillo and the Pardoner: The Artistic Necessity of the Fifth Tractado,” Hispanic Review, 27 (1959), 271.

26 Lazarillo learns “la [lección] del callar y quedarse al margen cuando conviene, la del silencio en provecho propio,” thus preparing him for his role in Tratado Seven. Rico, “Introducción,” La nocela picaresca española, i (Barcelona: Planeta, 1967), xlviii. See also p. lxxvi; and, again, Punto de vista, pp. 34–35.

27 See C. B. Morris, “Lázaro and the Squire: ‘Hombres de bien,‘” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 41 (1964), 238–41.

28 See, respectively, Andrée Collard, “The Unity of Lazarillo de Tormes” Modern Language Notes, 83 (1968), 263; Guillén, “Disposición,” p. 275; and Carey (pp. 120–21), who observes that Lazarillo's asides to the reader, frequent in the first 3 tratados, virtually cease in this part of the book.

29 As Willis states, “Almost without our perceiving it, Lázaro has grown under our eyes near the start of Chapter vii from the barely adult to the fully mature man whom we can unreservedly accept as the actual narrator” (p. 277).

30 Tarr, p. 404, and Willis, p. 268, n. 3, offer summaries of the traditional view that these 3 chapters are faulty. It is perhaps surprising to find in some recent studies by perceptive critics, for instance Lázaro Carreter, pp. 56–57, 108–09, and Ayala, pp. 66–68, 72–74, the clichés that the author committed an esthetic blunder, ran out of inspiration, or was unable to complete more than a mere outline of what he had intended to write.

31 This is the first time in the book real optimism is expressed. See Lázaro Carreter, p. 116.

32 With his usual perceptiveness and concision, Guillén says that “Lázaro, más que Lazarillo, es el centro de gravidad de la obra” (“Disposición,” p. 271). See also Didier T. Jaén, “La ambigiüdad moral del Lazarillo de Tormes,” PMLA, 83 (1968), 130, n. 3.

33 “Problemas del Lazarillo,” Boletín de la Real Academia Espanola, 46 (1966), 287. See also “Introducción,” pp. xlii-liv, and Punto de vista, pp. 21–25.

34 To cite but one example, see Norma Louise Hutman, who states that since “it is the adult Lázaro relating his life, we can take as a declaration of theme his own statement: ‘saber los hombres subir siendo bajos.‘ The entire action thereafter … is a logical working out of this sentence.” “Universality and Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes” PMLA, 76 (1961), 472.

35 Introd. to La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (Manchester : Manchester Univ. Press, 1963), p. xxix.

36 See Jean Paul Borel, “La literatura y nosotros. Otra manera de leer el Lazarillo de Tormes,” Revista de Occidente, 46 (1967), 94–95.

37 See also Silverman, who cites the passage and says, “It seems to me that the author is saying: ‘For the superficial, for those who do not scrutinize my work, there is entertainment, but for those who read it attentively the rewards are much greater’ ” (pp. 92–93)