Inside Guzman de Alfarache by Carroll B. Johnson (review)

INSIDE GUZMAN DE ALFARACHE BY CARROLL B. JOHNSON (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. 258 pages, $10.00.) Carroll Johnson's exploration of interiority has a dual function: to analyze Guzman de Alfarache's psyche while studying the first-person account of the protagonist's life. Johnson attempts to disprove the a priori assumption that the work is first and foremost the record of a spiritual evolution and that the final conversion is motivated by pure faith. He demonstrates the need to attribute the narrative perspective ofthe picaresque adventures, as well as the moral digressions, to the mature Guzman. If the conversion occurred before the narration was begun, the description of the picaresque misdeeds should reflect this conversion, but Guzman offers rather a retrospective view which displays more resentment than contrition. Simply stated, there is a marked discrepancybetween what Guzman says and what he feels, and this tension is caused bya figure who looms beneath Guzmanillo the picaro and Guzman the gallery slave and narrator, a figure who operates on the subconscious level to reconstruct events as a defense mechanism. Through rationalization, perhaps self-deceptive rationalization, Guzman may turn unpleasant realities into positive factors and invent his own system ofvalues, characterized by hierarchical interchangeability between the human and the divine. The dominant economic framework which defines society transfers to the spiritual level; applying what Johnson terms "the cash nexus," Guzman works horizontally to accept the travails God inflicts upon him as the rate of exchange for eternal life. The conversion is thus more pragmatic than stoic, the culmination of Guzman's inner conflict. Johnson's study shows, in sum, that the narrator's unreliability stems from his own vacillation, a simultaneous need and resistance to come to terms with past experience. Combining the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment and psychoanalytic theory with an innovative approach to hierarchical structures and the intricacies of narrative stance, Johnson provides a dramatically new and valuable view of Guzman de Alfarache. His venture "inside" Guzman and inside the text truly makes Guzman (and Guzman's heart) an open book. EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN* •EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Arizona State University, with degrees from the U niversity of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University. His research is primarily in the field ofGolden Age literature, with emphasis on the comedia and Cervantes. 74VOL. 33, NO. 2 (SPRING 1979) ...