The Historical Function of Art and Morality in Quevedo'sBuscón

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: BUSCÓN, HISTORIA DE LA VIDA DEL [F. DE QUEVEDO]CONCEPTISMOQUEVEDO, FRANCISCO DE (1580–1645)SATIRESENECA/SÉNECA [LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA] [SENECA THE YOUNGER] (4BC?–65AD)SPAIN — LITERATURE — GOLDEN AGE/16th–17th CENTURIES — PROSESTOICISM/NEOSTOICISM Notes 1. Neither literary scholars who defend the so-called purity of texts nor historians of ideas who trace the constants of Stoic thought have dealt adequately with the complex interaction between fiction and ideology and ideology with history. Though most pertinent scholarship has been consulted, this study avoids footnotes or bibliographical references in order to highlight the key arguments without distractions. I have relied, above all, on historians like J. H. Elliott while taking for granted various technical or thematic problems of the Buscón already analysed by Golden-Age specialists. Most studies are listed in James O. Crosby's Guía bibliográfica para el estudio crítico de Quevedo (London: Grant and Cutler, 1977). Valuable references to pertinent historical works are found in C. Blanco Aguinaga, J. P. Puértolas, and I. Zavala, Historia social de la literatura española (Madrid: Castalia, 1981), I, 274–75, 318–19, 422–31. Besides Maravall, Vilar and Elliott, other historians consulted for this study are J. Vicens Vives, Domínguez Ortiz, F. Braudel, J. Lynch, H. Kamen and E. J. Hamilton. 2. Domingo Ynduráin's edition, La vida del Buscón llamado Don Pablos (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1980), 284. The text is the famous one edited by F. Lázaro Carreter while Ynduráin's Introduction reviews the touchy issues of manuscripts, revisions and dates of composition. The approximate dates 1604–1605,1609–1614 and 1626 represent the probable time lapses from a possible first draft of the Buscón to later corrections or additions until its publication in Zaragoza. But see Gonzalo Díaz-Migoyo, ‘Las fechas en y de El Buscón de Quevedo’, HR, XLVIII (1980), 171–93 and ‘El Buscón, Reseña bibliográfico-crítica’, Anuario de Letras, XIII (1975), 165–87 and my ‘Quevedo's Buscón: Structure and Ideology’, Homenaje a Julio Caro Baroja (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1978), 1055–89. 3. I have relied on Henry Ettinghausen's indispensable study, Francisco de Quevedo and the Neostoic Movement (London: Oxford U.P., 1972). He discerns in the Buscón attitudes related to Christianized Stoicism, especially since Pablos, as an ‘obstinado pecador’, is the antithesis of the Stoic sage, clearly admired by Quevedo. 1 discussed some of the historical implications of Ettinghausen's findings in a long paper, ‘Quevedo's Neostoicism as Ideology’, prepared for a Quevedo Symposium, ‘Don Francisco de Quevedo: Texts in Context’, UCLA, Nov. 20–ll, 1980. My concerns expressed were that Stoicism itself has as yet to be exhibited as an integrated part of the social and political life of Quevedo's Spain; that Quevedo's Stoicism in fiction must be more subtly distinguished from treatises about Stoicism; that literary critics have overlooked Ettinghausen's strong conclusions on how Stoicism was used to counter the effects of vulgar greed for money, honour and power while consoling the nobles on their sense of moral superiority; that Quevedo critics (with little objectivity) tend to sympathize excessively with Quevedo's Stoical doctrines instead of examining them; that Quevedo's thought has not as yet been dealt with in standard histories of ideas by Hiram Haydn, Bertrand Russell or R. H. Popkin. 4. ‘Algunos problemas de sociología de las literaturas de lengua española’, in Creación y público en la literatura española (Madrid: Castalia, 1974), 20. Quevedo's picaresque vida and sueños called juguetes are both witty ‘libros de burlas’ and more than that. Pablos, for example, can be seen on a wider canvas than M. Bataillon's view of him as a satire on conversos who tried to enter the ranks of Spain's new aristocracy by hiding their origins. The fact that Pablos can be any and every boy born at the time into poverty and social ignominy (A. A. Parker's and C. B. Morris’ view), never permitted to forget his origins, gives him a certain symbolic function, true, but this symbolism can be fully understood only within the text's implied historical context. Pablos, seen as the type of a converso, would be one such victim, but he clearly typifies all the other ‘hustlers’ (or medros) of the social system who, as Maravall has clearly documented, were not only conversos but social climbers.