Violence and the Trajectory of Early Modern Subjection in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades

Abstract

Francis Barker's work, The Tremulous Private Body, provides a useful theoretical framework for the examination of violence and subjection in three canonical texts of Spanish Golden Age literature: the anonymously written picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes; Lope de Vega's play, Fuenteovejuna; and Luis de Góngora's long lyric poem, the Soledades. While Fuenteovejuna affirms hegemony by incorporating the rebellion of peasants and women, the Soledades does so obliquely by incorporating the critique of the agrarian aristocracy who were Góngora's patrons. In contrast, the Lazarillo stands out as the most radical of the three in its subversion of the official discourse of church and state. All are contradictory works of transition that depict a common violence toward the body—the violence toward the older sacramental body that Barker saw as a marker for the development of early modern subjectivity—and anticipate creatively both the birth of the modern subject and its negation.

Acknowledgments

Crystal Chemris is visiting assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Góngora's Soledades and the Problem of Modernity (Tamesis, 2008) and a recent article on the pilgrimage topos in Spanish Baroque and modern Latin American texts.

Notes

¹These are Raymond Williams's terms (121–27).

²This is Jaime Vicens Vives term (308–09). Beverley's thesis parallels Claudio Guillén's observation that “generally speaking, the rise of the novel in sixteenth-century Spain seems to have been rooted not in the triumph but in the frustration of the bourgeoisie” (Literature 144).

³See also Rodríguez Puértolas 194.

⁴Molho argues that Lazarillo, the picaresque swindler of the ancien régime, in his negation of the heroic mode anticipates the robber baron of bourgeois society; in this sense, he confirms Alberto Del Monte's characterization of the pícaro as a “borghese mancato” (“El pícaro” 201, 222). See R. W. Truman's argument that the work is a parody of the homo novus topos. See also Maiorino's study, which reads the Lazarillo in the context of Renaissance visual culture within the theoretical approach of “econopoetics.”

⁵On this point, see Rouselle. As Maiorino suggests, some of Lazarillo's jobs combine elements of “gift economy,” “medieval work obligations,” and “even economic practices typical of slavery” (85, 69).

⁶Molho, Introducción 58; Cros, “Semántica” 83 (Cros also uses the term “reversibilité des concepts” [“Le folklore” 15]); Beverley “Lazarillo” 37. See also Rodríguez Puértolas 160.

⁷See especially Cruz, Tirado, and Herrero on this point.

⁸See especially Cruz 21–29.

⁹As Dunn remarks, “Nothing redemptive can be read into the circularity of its plot” (42). Lázaro Carreter calls the narrative “una peregrinación inútil” (95).

¹⁰Benjamín Torrico (most recently) and Rabell (on the sexual connotations), among many others, discuss different aspects of this Eucharistic parody.

¹¹George Shipley notes that the water seller comes from the Biblical account of the Last Supper, yet he circles the city repeatedly for mercenary purposes without ever signaling that sacred ritual; here, the text evinces its tendency, as Dunn has noted, to replicate its overarching structure in miniature. See Shipley 232–35, citing Mark 14: 13–18; see Luke 22: 10–13; and Dunn 36. Such “self-miniaturization” has been noted by Beverley in Góngora's Soledades as well (Aspects 37).

¹²See Dorothy Severin on Tratado I (26); see Sifuentes Jáuregui 133 and Sieber on Tratado IV (45–58).

¹³Sifuentes Jáuregui, citing comments by Paul Julian Smith (139n10). In sixteenth-century iconography of brothels, a jug or a pitcher symbolized a sexual receptacle; its shattering here might be taken to refer to the homosexual rape/defloration of Lazarillo. The coding of the description of sexual abuse is consistent with the use of an exclusionary marginal language of sexuality by Lázaro throughout his ostensible confession in an effort to ridicule his inquisitor, which Rabell has observed (20). See also Aldo Ruffinatto's discussion of “heroismo y erotismo subversivos” (359–70).

¹⁴Ruffinatto notes the sexual connotations of this passage in a discussion of symbolic defloration and penetration (369).

¹⁵This objectification of his throat is later echoed by the notion of his mouth as a purse (Wolfenzon 11). Rico notes in his edition the critical consensus that the source for this passage is Apuleius (42n128); Lida de Malkiel cites the folkloric origins of the sausage episode (5), and Del Monte lists many suggested precedents (30–31). See also Lázaro Carreter (120–21). As Molho points out, the author may borrow from various sources but uses the material for different ends through the device of artful juxtaposition (Introducción 30).

¹⁶In “El pícaro,” Molho states: “El pícarismo español es un discurso antiseñorial que se enuncia desde un enfoque y mediante un lenguaje claramente señoriales” (207). For Molho, self-parody in the text reveals the ideological perversion of the dominant discourse. See Sieber: “Saying something prohibited but not accepting responsibility for having done so requires a mode of discourse that is made to appear severed or dissociated from the speaker by the speaker himself” (48–49). See also David Castillo, who calls Lazarillo de Tormes “an anamorphic picture puzzle that unveils the real within the Law, and therefore, the arbitrariness and violence of the mechanisms of reproduction and transmission of authority” (134).

¹⁷Guillén, “Introduction” 13; see also Dunn 174–75.

¹⁸Colahan 54; see also Rodríguez Puértolas 195.

¹⁹See Dunn 162 and Michael Iarocci.

²⁰On the parody of the Confessions, see H. R. Jauss as cited by Gómez Moriana (32); on Augustinian pedagogy, see El Saffar, “The ‘I’” 180; see also her “The Making of the Novel.”

²¹Here I am following Pinkus's readings of these emblems (1–6, 14–15).

²²See Cruz (20) on the pícaro as pharmakos and Castillo (29) on the oblique quality of Lazarillo's viewpoint.

²³See Blue, Salomon, and Gasta.

²⁴Gasta 12; Díez Borque 311; and Cohen 261–63, 319.

²⁵Cohen points out that Lope converted the chronicles which are the source of the play back into popular poetry (182); Connor discusses the work's incorporation of commentary on the clash between oral and print culture (50).

²⁶Cascardi 17; Castillo and Egginton 422.

²⁷Cohen 323; see also Cascardi 23 on the willful self-domination of the masses.

²⁸Yarbro Bejarano sees unity among males of different classes on the basis of race, but this unity extends to the old Christian women as well; note Pascuala's anti-semitic remarks in I.249–64 (221). See Gutiérrez Nieto 502 and Childers 33.

²⁹Cohen cites Friedrich Engels on a 1486 uprising against serfdom in Catalonia, in which peasants won concessions from King Ferdinand against the right of the first night (324); see also Cañadas 142.

³⁰In her classic essay, “The Evolution of Psyche under Empire,” El Saffar suggests that in Fuenteovejuna the “rule by king over the modern state” “encourages […] the parallel power of every man over his wife” (177). El Saffar's essay is enhanced by an understanding of the function of the female face of hegemony.

³¹See Lauer, Cohen, and Blue on the play's historical underpinnings.

³²See Larson, Kirschner, and Weimer on modern refundiciones of the play.

³³See Beverley on the political implications of the “modal friction” between epic and pastoral in the Soledades and on the trauma of the peregrino (Aspects 29, 32, 62). Frederick de Armas locates Góngora's use of the Ganymede figure within a humanist tradition of homoerotic imagery which could play a role in the poetic celebration of empire as well as of the poet's patrons. See Chemris 38.

³⁴See Jammes's edition of the Soledades, Dedicatoria 5–21.

³⁵The term “cruel decorativeness” was shared with me in conversation by Harold Skulsky; see also Mario Praz on this point. Spitzer comments that in this passage, “we witness a conversion of the horrific and bloody into beauty and serenity” (97).

³⁶In his edition of the Soledades, Beverley cites Góngora's contemporary Pellicer's suggestion that the gyrfalcon represents Holland (155–56). Munjic has recently demonstrated a parallel between this passage in the Soledades and Books Two and Eleven of Ovid's Metamorphoses, suggesting that Góngora reworks Ovid's treatment of greed as political critique, associating “the greed involved in commercial navigation with the greed punished in the falconry scene” (“A Reflection on Greed” 263).

³⁷In his edition of the Soledades, Jammes argues that the Soledad segunda, absent the final forty-three lines, was completed shortly after 1617 (19–20); J. H. Elliot dates the twelve-year truce at 1609 (287).

³⁸Beverley, Aspects 7; see also Chemris 36–38.

³⁹See Deyermond on the imagery of dehumanization in the Lazarillo (68); such imagery could be viewed more generally as what Rodríguez Puértolas calls “la cosificación” (188, 147–68).

⁴⁰Here also there may be a parallel with the Lazarillo. As Del Monte states, “su aventura es la de España, tal como ésta se le aparecía al anónimo escritor del siglo dieciséis, una España derrotada en Gerba, olvidada de la propia misión de guerra cristiana contra los moros, y encaminada, por el contrario, en la guerra contra otras tierras cristianas, a una gloria aparente y a una auténtica ruina” (56). Del Monte assumes the reference to Lazarillo's father fighting the Moors is meant to be an Erasmian assertion of Spain's mythic Reconquista past (against its contemporary decline through war in Europe). However, if one takes the position, à la Ruffinatto, that the work is a parody of Erasmian parody, the meaning of this passage might be taken more critically (see Ruffinatto 328). This tension between a kind of “axiological nihilism,” to use Stephen Gilman's term in reference to the Celestina, and a reforming impulse is also evident in the Soledades (see Gilman 14 and Chemris 41–42). Arturo Marasso's conjecture (159) that the reference to Carlos V's triumphant entry into Toledo at the end of the novel was modeled on the ending of the Georgics suggests a possible further parallel with the Soledades in the use of Virgilian pastoral to encode a political agenda of agrarian reform. See Chemris on the relationship of the Soledades to arbitrista reform projects (33–38). Regarding the issue of sexual violence, Góngora suggests the possibility of a transcendence of gender in the combination of male identification with female abjection evoked by the Ganymede figure and the possibility of female enactment of patriarchal violence evoked by the Éfire figure. See Chemris 67–70.

⁴¹See Beverley, Against Literature on the notion of the Soledades as a private sphere and a defamiliarizing affirmation of hegemony (59).