Ilustrando la Nueva Espana, Texto e imagen en el Periquillo Sarniento de Fernandez de Lizardi

Abstract

Ilustrando la Nueva Espana, Texto e imagen en el Periquillo Sarniento de Fernandez de Lizardi. Por Beatriz de Alba-Koch. Caceres: U de Extremadura, 1999. 190 pages. Beatriz de Alba-Koch's title promises something other than what the book delivers. Thirty illustrations, which reproduce pictures from the first edition (1816) of the Periquillo but also works by Spanish and Mexican painters and engravers from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, would seem to corroborate the author's interest in showing how the novel set parameters for mirroring New Spain. Chapter iv is devoted entirely to looking at the Periquillo's illustrations and seeing how they reveal, in particular, the colony's racial diversity. Instead, the author declares in the introduction: El presente estudio busca restituir al Periquillo a la sociedad y la cultura que le dio origen, dando especial enfasis no solo a las caracteristicas genericas y a la construction narrativa de la obra, sino a las ideas political del autor expresadas, sobre todo, en su presentation de los conflictos raciales de la Nueva Espania y en su propuesta de una sociedad ideal (2). She is especially concerned with proving the thesis that criollos of Lizardi's day were closely connected to Peninsular cultural and literary traditions because, she says, present-day lizardi scholarship has negated these continuities and thus separated Nueva Espana from the European culture and even Spanish language that formed that world. She blames this orientation on a mistaken application of colonial studies, as formulated by theorists from other worlds, to the colonial situation of Lizardi. Thus, she is at pains in her chapters i and ii to rehearse the genealogy of the picaresque genre in order to reconnect Lizardi with that genre's tradition. She begins by repeating the judgment of Jose Mariano Beristain de Souza, just as the Periquillo was going to press, that lizardi's novel bore a resemblance to the Guzman de Alfarache. Most critics have seized on this early linkage as evidence of Lizardi's indebtedness to that Golden Age variety of novel, finding it easy to classify the work in this way. However, no matter how extensive the list of critical authorities one invokes to justify the assertion that the Periquillo is a picaresque novel, the fact remains that that term was not in use in Lizardi's day; instead lizardi described his work as part of a satirical tradition, thus affirming antecedents in the classical and various national traditions of Europe (Spain, but also Italy and France), yet also opening up connections with a popular oral tradition in Mexico. De Alba-Koch herself says (14) that it has been the critic, a privileged reader, who has determined that the Periquillo is a picaresque novel. …