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P R O D I G A L S O N S , P R O D I G I O U S D A U G H T E R S : I R O N Y A N D T H E P I C A R E S Q U E T R A D I T I O N E d w a r d H . F r i e d m a n Vanderbilt University The discourse of picaresque narrative is almost always ironic. Firstperson narration would seem to give autonomy to the speaker, but the more one studies the message systems within the texts, the more perceptible the interplay of the narrator with an implied author.1 Fictional autobiography is hardly unmediated; the authorial overlay, as it were, often sets itself up to counter and to contradict the speaker's words. The early Spanish picaresque novels—including the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Mateo Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache, and Francisco de Quevedo's La vida del Buscon—demonstrate the dialectics of constructed and deconstructed discourse. In novels that feature female protagonists, such as Francisco Lopez de Obeda's La picaraJustina and Alonso de Castillo Solorzano's Teresa de Manmnares, male authors create female narrators, and the gender gap intensifies the manipulation of the discourse, and thus foregrounds the irony of the ventriloquized voices. Men writing as women was a focus of my study entitled The Antiheroine's Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque. In this essay, I accentuate three novels, written and narrated by women, which relate to the discursive levels of the picaresque. My premise is that the narrative structure of the early modem Spanish picaresque is predicated upon irony, in thematic and technical terms, and that twentieth-century writers—notably, women writers—appropriate and invert the initial premises. They use the ironic foundation to exalt the antiheroine, and thereby to redefine the discursive parameters and the socio-historical contexts of the fiction. Irony is trope and troped, a sign of dialogical discourse and a sign of object turned subject. I will point to three types of irony in contemporary variations of the feminine picaresque, and I will put forward an example of each.2 In Francisco Delicado's La lozana andaluza of 1528, the dialogue gives voice to the protagonist, a Spanish prostitute who resides in Italy, and to an authorial figure, the auctor. His commentary is not extratextual or extraneous ; rather, it forms part of a polyphonic structure, where sin and moralization intersect. Delicado can have his cake and eat it, too. He is the moralizer, Lozana the sinner. He can violate the boundaries of taste and decorum through her, but he is, of course, her inventor. He controls her much as society controls her, and, to a degree, he is able to maneuver CALIOPE Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (2000): pages 123-138 124 «5 Edward Friedman literary protocol, and censorship, by separating himself from his creation and by adding a veneer of morality. Lozana's power, in turn, comes from her very presence in the text. Proper society would erase her from the picture,but Delicado immortalizes her,her point of view, and her idiolect. He engages her in a battle with society, a battle that she is destined to lose but that marks her individuality and the force of the opposition. Within the dialogical format, he represents but a single voice, but as "author," editor, and organizer of the materials, he devises the frame for Lozana's story and, significantly, for her discourse. La lozana andaluza captures the push-and-pull between author and character that typifies picaresque narrative. It demonstrates, as well, a comparable phenomenon along gender lines, wherein the male author occupies a position superior to the female protagonist, who nonetheless gains, in the fictional enterprise, a discursive space that society denies her. The mechanisms of control win out, but in doing so they expose their seams. From a distance—and irony generally operates at a distance—the power structure seems less a natural order than an imposed order. By the same token,woman's place seems to be more profitably problematic, more open to scrutiny...

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