(A)Wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque

Chapter Two The Gaze of another in Guzm

35 Chapter Two The Gaze of an-Other in Guzmán de Alfarache A Watchtower View In his introduction to the recent volume The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement (1996), Giancarlo Maiorino theorizes the picaresque as a countergenre that is rooted in a “centerperiphery dialogics.” According to Maiorino, the picaresque countered canonical standards while supporting itself in what it violated (xvii). In this precise sense, picaresque marginality would imply “neither exclusion nor alienation […] Instead, it fostered dialogism” (xvii). In my re-examination of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, I connect this dialogism or center-periphery dialogics with the double image that, as we have seen, is characteristic of the anamorphic form. I would like to suggest that Alemán stages a confrontation between two different (and ultimately opposed) perspectives in his drive to expose the deceptions of the world and to warn individuals against a life of disorderly freedom. I am thinking of the marginal worldview of the pícaro, on the one hand, and the morally correct perspective of the watchtower of human life (“atalaya de la vida humana”), on the other. While both these perspectives are convincingly presented in the text, the narrative voice clearly privileges the watchtower’s view, which produces the same effect as the additional perspective in Holbein’s Ambassadors. To be sure, while the protagonist sees only the surface of things and thus remains blind to the spiritual truth of the world right up to the moment of his conversion, the narrator provides a watchtower’s view that allows the reader to see beyond the deceptive nature of appearances . One could say that the “truth” that is revealed from this additional perspective is “the face of death” that, as in 36 Chapter Two Holbein’s anamorphic portrait, makes its ghostly appearance against the background of fading worldly deceptions. Thus, while it is true that Guzmán de Alfarache presents a dialogic structure, it is important to note that the focus of the narrative is not the experience of uncertainty per se or even the problematic or unsettling nature of the world. Rather, Guzm án’s autobiographical account privileges the experience of “desengaño” that allows for a moralistic interpretation of the protagonist’s life. This is why, as Rico says, the pícaro’s conversion goes hand in hand with the consolidation of the dominant perspective of the narrative: “Es importante caer en la cuenta de que el proceso de la conversión del pícaro se identifica con la paulatina consolidación del punto de vista que preside la novela” (71). Hence, the superimposition of worldviews and/or voices in Guzmán de Alfarache results in the creation of a vantage point from which the life of the pícaro is re-evaluated “objectively” from a morally correct perspective. The reader is thus called upon to complete the picture of Guzmán’s life under the supervision of the watchtower’s gaze. From this external (nonsubjective) viewpoint, the pícaro appears as an abject social element, a cancerous cell that threatens to corrupt the entire social body. Both Castro and Maravall coincide in linking the pícaro to positions of social abjection even as they focus on different aspects of the official mechanisms of exclusion. While Castro highlights the ethnic and religious aspects in his explanation of the marginalization of the pícaro, Maravall links the pícaro’s “desvinculación” to the socioeconomic implications of the modern redefinition of the poor. Thus, in La picaresca desde la historia social, Maravall documents the appearance of a new conservative discourse that redefines the poor—especially those who are not physically impaired—as deviant, idle, and criminal parasites. Regarding the so-called blood factor highlighted by Castro, Maravall maintains that in seventeenthcentury Spain the system of exclusion is not grounded in two different mechanisms—nobility and ethnicity—but only one: “No hay más que un sistema de participar en la exclusividad de la clase distinguida: el de la nobleza […] Lo que sucede es que se utilizó la ‘limpieza’ como una difícil barrera más a vencer para penetrar en el sistema de exclusión” (Poder 118–19). 37 The Gaze of an-Other in Guzmán In his book Romans picaresques espagnols (1968), Molho maintains that the honor code works as a mechanism of exclusion that goes well beyond the boundaries of “purity of blood...