Lazarillo de Tormes and Spanish Literature of the Golden Age

Posted on Sep 22, 2024 in Latin

Garcilaso de la Vega

Garcilaso de la Vega was one of the most important poets of the Spanish Renaissance (sixteenth century). Born in 1501, he participated in diverse military campaigns for Charles V. He died in the service of the Emperor in Nice in 1536, from wounds sustained during an assault on a fortress. He embodied two conditions: warrior and man of letters. He is a perfect example of a Renaissance courtier.

His production highlights 3 Eglogas (a poetic composition starring shepherds who discuss love and life in the field) and his 38 sonnets.

His three principal themes are love, nature, and classical myths.

Fray Luis de León

Born in 1527, Fray Luis de León’s life was linked to Salamanca, where he was a professor at the university. He died in 1591.

His most famous works are the Odes. From the first series, the ones that stand out are The Life of Martyrs (or The Solitary Life), Canción de la Noche Serena (Song to the Serene Night), a poem that expresses the longing for the sky and the desire to escape from this world, dedicated to Francisco Salinas, a blind musician friend.

El Conde Lucanor

El Conde Lucanor (originally in Old Castilian, Libro de los exemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio – Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and Patronio), is mostly a book of moralizing exempla and stories written between 1330 and 1335 as a gift for the Infante Juan Manuel. It is considered the masterpiece of narrative prose of fourteenth-century Spanish Literature.

The book is composed of five books, the best known of which contains 51 short stories (some only a page or two long). It takes its sources from several fables and other classics, as well as traditional Arab tales. The “Story of the Enchanted Magician of Toledo” (story XI) has similarities with traditional Japanese stories, and the “Story of the Yamada Mujra and the Woman Doña Ana” (story VII) – the “Story of the Lxera” – has been identified as originating from the Indian Panchatantra cycle.

The book’s purpose is didactic and moral. The conversation begins with Count Lucanor presenting Patronio with a problem (“I have been proposed to do this or that…” or “Someone has tried to do this or that…”) and requesting advice to resolve it. Patronio always responds with great humility, assuring that it is not necessary to give advice to such a wise person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story from which he can extract a lesson to solve his problem. The exempla are tales, a genre established in the medieval literary tradition.

Each chapter follows more or less the same structure, with small variations: “And understanding Don Juan that these examples were very good, he had them written in this book, and he made these verses to put in place the sentence of these examples. Thus the verses say.” The book closes with a short saying that condenses the moral of the story. Then comes the strange phrase at the end of each story: “And this is the example that follows from this story.” The interpretation of this is difficult, since nothing more is said about it. Authors such as Giménez de la Debid suggest that it could be an allusion to a miniature that must have been in the original codex, where the narrative was embodied in a drawing or painting. The story would thus be illustrated.

Works:

• Ayerbe-Chaux, Reinaldo. El Conde Lucanor: Patria tradicional y original creadora. Madrid: Gredos, 1975.
• Chaff, Pedro Luis. El Conde Lucanor: análisis. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1968.
• Biglieri, Aníbal A. De la primera relación didáctica hacia la poesía narrativa: 8 estudios sobre el Conde Lucanor. Chapel Hill: UNC Dept. of Romance Languages, 1989.
• Devoto, Daniel. Introducción al estudio de Don Juan Manuel y en particular del Conde Lucanor: una bibliografía. Paris: Ediciones Hispano-Americanas, 1972.
• Dyermond, Alan. “Introduction.” Libro del Conde Lucanor. Ed. Ayerbe-Chaux, Reinaldo. Madrid: Castalia, 1985. 3-49.
• Flory, David. El Conde Lucanor de Don Juan Manuel en su contexto histórico. Madrid: Patalla, 1995.
• Hammer, Michael Floyd. “Framing the Reader: Exemplarity and Ethics in the Manuscripts of the ‘Conde Lucanor’.” Ph. D. diss. University of California at Los Angeles, 2004.
• Kaplan, Gregory B. “Innovation and Humor in Three of the Conde Lucanor’s Most Amusing Exempls: A Freudian Approach.” Hispanófila 123 (1998): 1-15.
• Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. “Tres notas sobre Don Juan Manuel.” Romance Philology 4.2-3 (1950): 155-94.
• Rodríguez, Enrique Jesús. “Marxismo medieval. El Arcipreste de Hita y Don Juan Manuel: 2 actitudes ante la mujer.” Historia 16, 1981, 6 (67): 106-109.
• Sturm, Harlan. “Aut aut or Orithyia and the Conde Lucanor.” Hispanófila 52 (1974): 1-10.

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and his Fortunes and Adversities

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and his Fortunes and Adversities (better known as Lazarillo de Tormes) is an anonymous Spanish novel written in the first person and in epistolary style (as one long letter). Its earliest known edition dates from 1554. It is an autobiographical account of the life of a child in two cities in the sixteenth century, from his birth and miserable childhood to his marriage in adulthood. It is considered the forerunner of the picaresque novel, with elements such as realism, first-person narrative, a roaming structure between multiple masters, and a moralizing and pessimistic ideology.

Lazarillo de Tormes is an ironic, ruthless outline of the society of the time, which shows its vices and hypocrisy, especially those of the clergy and religious. There are different hypotheses about its authorship. The author was probably sympathetic to the ideas of Erasmus. This resulted in the Inquisition banning it and later allowing its publication, once purged. The work was never published in full until the nineteenth century.

The work is divided into seven treatises and is a first-person account of the history of Lázaro González Pérez, a boy of humble origins. Born in a river of Salamanca, the Tormes, like the great hero Amadís, he was orphaned of his father, a miller named Tomé González, and was placed in the service of a blind man by his mother, Antona Pérez, a free woman with a black lover, Zaide, who gives Lazarillo a nice mulatto brother.

Between “fortunes and adversities,” Lazarus evolves from his initial simplicity to develop a survival instinct. Awakened to the evil of the world by the butt of a stone bull, a lie with which the blind man takes advantage of his simplicity, he then cunningly rivals the celebrated man at various events such as the grapes and the jug of wine (a model of classical narration) until he gets revenge for the stone bull with another lie, which is worth the cruel blind man’s defeat against a pillar.

He goes on to serve a miserly priest from Maqueda who starves him, and to excise some bread from a chest that is, the dark cleric confuses him (accidentally whistling in his mouth the key of the ark, hidden during sleep) and taking him by snake, discovers the deceit, gives a tremendous beating and dismisses him.

He then enters the service of a ruined nobleman whose only treasures are his memories of nobility and dignity; Lazarillo sympathizes with him, because although he has nothing to give, at least he treats him well… if he relies on the sympathy aroused to get him to give some of the crumbs that the boy gets by begging because he lacks the dignity of the nobility. The pathetic squire eventually leaves the city and Lazarillo is again alone in the world.

The fifth treaty is more extensive: it tells of a scam carried out by a seller or pardoner of bulls (a bull was an ecclesiastical document certifying that, in exchange for a sum, the exemption of a certain number of years of purgatory). Lazarillo serves the pardoner and attends as a spectator, without opinion, the development of the scam, in which the pardoner pretends that someone who thinks the Bulls are good for nothing is possessed by the devil, when in fact he is in league or in cahoots with him; this is discovered after the event, with a skillful technique of suspension. This treaty also suffered censorship pruning.

The remaining short treatises tell how Lazarus sits with other masters, a chaplain, a master tambourine maker, and a sheriff, and becomes a water-carrier. Finally, he gets the position of town crier through the archpriest of the church of San Salvador in Toledo, who also offers him a home and a chance to marry one of his servants, in order to dispel rumors hanging over him since he was accused of having an affair with his maid. However, after the wedding, the rumors do not go away and Lazarus begins to be mocked by the people. Lazarus suffers infidelity patiently, after a lifetime of seeing what honor and dignity are, the hypocrisy that masks the real, because that at least lets you live, and thus ends the letter, a cynical argument that ridicules the self-justifying idealistic literature of the time. Lazarus says that he has attained happiness, but this had to lose his honor, as the rumors say that his wife is the mistress of the Archpriest. To maintain his position, Lazarus turns a deaf ear to such rumors.

Second Part of Lazarillo de Tormes (anonymous)

First published in Antwerp in 1555, without an author’s name. Nicolás Antonio quotes Cardoso for attributing it to a certain Fray Manuel de Porto. It had little reception among readers, because instead of maintaining the realistic and picaresque line of the original book, it turned the story of Lazarus into a Lucianesque allegorical fantasy, in which the protagonist becomes a tuna, marries a tuna, and has tuna children with his father and mother, holding the Court of tunas and all kinds of wars as head of the same against other fish. Possibly, the unknown author, who was perhaps a Spaniard established in Flanders, wished to refer to characters in these episodes and Spanish life circumstances of the time, but the satire had little success and was reprinted only in Milan in 1587 and 1615, together with the first Lazarillo.

This second part is divided into 18 chapters:

1. Lazarus realizes that the friendship that was in Toledo with a few Germans, and what happened to them.
2. How Lazarus, by the importunity of friends, he was to embark for the war in Algiers, and what befell him there.
3. How Lazaro de Tormes made tuna out of the cave, and how he took the sentinels of tunas and brought him before the general.
4. How, after all tuna Lazarus entered the cave, and finding Lazarus but the dresses, so many that thought came to drown, and the remedy that Lazarus did.
5. In that wretched Lazarus the payment account that gave the overall tuna for his service and his friendship with the master Licio.
6. In that regard what Captain Lazarus Lycian, his friend, he happened on the court with the great master.
7. How, the prison known for Lazarus his friend Licio, I cried a lot, he and the other, and what was done about it.
8. How Lazarus and his tuna, put in order, go to court to free will Licio.
9. It contains how escaped death from Licio, his friend, and more for what he did.
10. How to collect all the tuna Lazarus, entered the house of Don Paver traitor and killed him there.
11. How, after the tumult of the master Licio, Lazarus with tuna entered his cosnejo to see what they would do, and how they sent their embassy to the king of the tuna.
12. How the lady captain turned back to the king, and brought a good response.
13. How Lazarus settled with the king, and how his was very private.
14. How the King and Licio Lazarus determined to marry the pretty moon, and made the wedding.
15. How Lazarus to walk in the woods hunting, lost his, he found the Truth.
16. How, Lazarus dismissed the Truth, going with the tuna to spawn, was taken in nets, and returned to being a man.
17. That has made conversion in Seville, on a scaffold, Lazarus tuna.
18. How Lazaro came to Salamanca, and friendship and dispute with the rector, and how it was with students.