Discourses of Poverty. Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain, and: Play and the Picaresque. Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel, and Match Ball (review)

REVIEWS narrative procedures such as replication, simulation, formalization, and so on, offered in chapter five?). One also wonders whether the analysis ofthe Gulag poetic could not have been taken even further, for example by finding explicit intertextual borrowings where the narrative's claim is of literal individual experience; or by showing, if such could be done, that after a certain point in Soviet history the inmate's very perception ofhis or her experience began to be colored by alreadyexisting accounts of the camps (even if only the ur-account Dostoevsky's Notes from the House ofthe Dead), suggesting an even higher degree of literary mediation . But the more fundamental question is whether the kind of Genette-ian dictionary ofdevices toward which the work at times seems to be striving is the best way to address Toker's declared interest in the "ethics oftheform ofthe literary work" (9, at which point she invokes Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum). To show that ethically-pointed works such as these possess literary qualities is not quite the same thing as analyzing the ethical functioning oftheir peculiar literary forms. The impression one comes away with, however, is that Toker's true sympathies lie with the ethical side of the genre, with that mode ofreading in which it portrays something "integral to what a modem intellectual has to know about the history of the twentieth century" (3) and "fills a gap in the literary representation ofthe human experience of evil" (245—in which, as she points out, it partly overlaps with Holocaust literature), urging us to tum cognitive awareness into ethical sympathy. As it happens, the idea ofan aesthetically accomplished text that also teaches us to be less callous was central to Toker's excellent Vladimir Nabokov. The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989). That idea occasions the best remarks in this present, very significant study ofthese works produced in the night ofRussia's recent past. Thomas SeifridUniversity ofSouthern California ANNE J. CRUZ. Discourses ofPoverty. Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1999. 618 pp. + GORDANA YOVANOVICH. Play andthe Picaresque. Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel, and Match Ball Toronto: Toronto UP, 1999. ? + 152 pp. In her terse treatment ofthe picaresque Cruz studies the genre through the question ofpoverty. Her view extends from Lazarillo to picaras and soldierly picaros to the end ofthe genre. Relying heavily on Foucault, Cruz searches for social paradigms that will allow her to go beyond "formalist parameters" (xii). She hopes to do what Maravall's book did not do: bridge the gap between sociology and literary function and to avoid Parker's "theological exposition ofthematics offreedom" (xiii). Her reading is a composite ofhistoricist, gender, and reader-response theories. Focusing on Lazarillo, Cruz notes that poverty therein is more than just Lazarillo's poverty—it is poverty in general. He embodies a bitter protest against poverty and hunger. To strengthen her case ofpoverty as a generalized preoccupation in Spain, Cruz studies the work of such figures as Soto, Robles and later Giginta, Pérez de Herrera, and Cellorigo for their treatises dealing with poverty. She also points to Lazarillo's parents as being probable conversos (this represents a meaningful advance over the view ofPeter Dunn for whom the converso theme is of scant meaning in his theory). Cruz believes that the Lazarillo could be read against various discourses on poverty circulating in Spain, and she is correct in noting the widespread unemployment that encouraged vagrancy. VcH. 26 (2002): 166 THE COMPAKATIST In Guzman de Alfarache, she reasserts the role of the pharmakon where the poorare relegated to being demonic figures and social outcasts. In dealing with the Guzman she takes support from the works ofCavillac and Cros. As for the Buscón, Cruz sees Pablos as a social climber; however, she does not read any efforts by Quevedo at social reform in the text. She further analyzes the excremental episodes of Pablos as "liberating" him to go forth in life. Her best effort is in dealing with picaras. Along with Friedman's analysis it is reflective ofa solid feminist theoretical grounding. She also studies prostitution, which she sees as deriving from poverty and mistreatment. Essentially, for Cruz...