Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Torres Villarroel's self-portrait: the mask behind the mask

1978; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382782000355321

1469-3550

Henry Ettinghausen,

Historical Studies on Spain

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. ‘De entre todos los maestros pretéritos Torres siente una particular afinidad con Quevedo en espíritu, gustos, propósitos, opiniones, estilo y hasta cree parecérsele en los trabajos y persecuciones de su vida terrenal’ (Juan Luis Alborg, Historia de la literatura española. Siglo XV111 [Madrid 1972], 332). In El ermitaño y Torres, Quevedo's works are given fulsome praise (see Quevedo, Obras, ed. A. Fernández-Guerra y Orbe, I [BAE, XXIII], cxxxiv–cxxxv). 2. Cited in Torres, La barca de Aqueronte, ed. Guy Mercadier (Paris 1969), p. 33, note 40. 3. Cited from the critique of Torres' Los desahuciados del mundo y de la gloria published in the Diario de los literatos de España of 1737, in Antonio García Boiza, Don Diego de Torres Villarroel. Ensayo biográfico (Salamanca 1911), 117. The printer of the first edition of the Visiones asserted that at court ‘todos a una voz dicen que [Torres] excede en cultura, moralidad y gracia al hasta hoy inimitable don Francisco de Quevedo, gloria y honra de nuestra nación’ (see Torres, Visiones y visitas de Torres con Don Francisco de Quevedo por la corte, ed. Russell P. Sebold [Madrid 1966], lvii–lviii). 4. Sebold (Visiones, ed. cit., xxx) remarks that the fifth Trozo of the Vida recalls such ascetic treatises as Quevedo's La cuna y la sepultura as well as one of Quevedo's sonnets; and in his edition of Torres' Sueños morales y barca de Aqueronte (Madrid 1960) José María Altozano speculates that ‘el modelo de "El buscón", de su admirado Quevedo, era sin duda una fuerte incitación’ (12). These are the most precise references to Quevedo's influence on the Vida that I have seen. For comparisons of Quevedo's satirical techniques with Torres' in the Visiones, see, in particular, Paul Ilie, ‘Grotesque portraits in Torres Villarroel’, BHS, XLV (1968), 16–37, Nigel Glendinning, A Literary History of Spain. The Eighteenth Century (London/New York 1972), 33–38, and I. L. McClelland, Diego de Torres Villarroel (Boston 1976), esp. pp. 106–13, which I read after completing this study. 5. See, in particular, Sabine Kleinhaus, Von der ‘novela picaresca’ zur bürgerlichen Autobiographie. Studien zMr ‘Vida’ des Torres Villarroel (Meisenheim am Glan 1975), 25–48, and Eugenio Suárez-Galbán, La ‘Vida’ de Torres Villarroel: literatura antipicaresca, autobiografía burguesa (Chapel Hill 1975), ch. 1. 6. Torres, Vida, ascendencia, nacimiento, crianza y aventuras, ed. Guy Mercadier (Madrid 1972), 69. All quotations from the Vida in this essay are taken from Mercadier's edition. 7. Quevedo, Obra poética, ed. José Manuel Blecua, II (Madrid 1970), 1 7. Later in the same paragraph Torres, too, uses baby words: ‘Mi madre cuenta todavía algunas niñadas de aquel tiempo … el papa, caca y las demás sencilleces que refieren todas las madres de sus hijos’ (70). 8. Commenting on the passage under discussion, Suárez-Galbán remarks: ‘Imposible aquí hablar de un contagio quevedesco que incline la Vida en este sentido hacia una visión picaresca’ (45), his mistake being to assume that Quevedo could have influenced the Vida only by way of the Buscón. 9. The second Trozo takes Torres up to his twentieth year (i.e. 1714), and he claims in this description of himself that he is 46 at the time of writing (see Vida, 98), which would indicate that he was writing the description in 1740. Mercadier gives no reason to support his suggestion that the description may have been written nearer the date of publication of the first four Trozos three years later (see Vida, p. 98, note 76). 10. This passage should perhaps be related to Mercadier's remarks on Torres' literary activity in 1738–39: ‘Exasperado tanto por los plagiarios que no cesan de robarle sus escritos, como por los que usurpan su firma para que se despachen mejor folletos a veces peligrosos, Torres decide recoger sus obras sueltas para reunirías en una colección de siete u ocho tomos’ (Vida, 17). If the ‘envidiosos carcomidos’ referred to by Torres at the beginning of the third Trozo are to be identified in part with these plagiarizers, this would support his statement that he wrote his self-portrait in 1740. 11. See Edmond Faral, Les arts poétiques du XII e et du XIII e siècle (Paris 1924), 80. 12. Quevedo, La vida del buscón llamado Don Pablos, ed. Fernando Lázaro Carreter (Salamanca 1965), 32–33. The quotations from the Buscón which follow are all taken from pp. 32–34 of this edition; those from the Vida are from pp. 98–99 of Mercadier's edition. Leo Spitzer notes that Quevedo's description of Cabra is written according to the ‘schulmässig-humanistischem Rezept’ and shows how the description of the horse in the ‘rey de gallos’ episode follows a similar pattern (see ‘Zur Kunst Quevedos in seinem Buscón’, in Picarische Welt. Schriften zum europäischen Schelmenroman, ed. Helmut Heidenreich [Darmstadt 1969], 43 and 51–52). In her treatment of Torres' self-portrait, I. L. McClelland notes: ‘Even had Torres not amended his earlier accounts of himself when he came to paint a truer picture of his character and appearance in the Life, anyone acquainted with Quevedo could hardly have failed to relate the pupil's self-sketches to those of his master’ (49); however, she says nothing more specific than this on Quevedo's influence upon Torres' self-portrait in the Vida. 13. Visiones, ed. cit. 206. This jocular inclusion of himself among the butts of his satire is comparable to Quevedo's references to his own implication in his satire on poets in the Sueños, e.g. in the Sueño del infierno where, in response to the strictures of a devil on love poets, he remarks: ‘—Si mucho me aguardo—dije entre mí—, yo oiré algo que me pese’ (Sueños y discursos, ed. Felipe C. R. Maldonado [Madrid 1972], 141). 14. This and the following passages from the Visiones are taken from Sebold's ed., 205. 15. The ‘compás de carretero’ is, presumably, a compass for drawing cartwheels; the ‘tijera de aserrador’ is the cross-shaped stand on which wood is rested while sawn. Another possible borrowing is to be seen in the contrast made between the appearance of these figures from close up and from afar: Cabra's sotana ‘desde cerca parecía negra, y desde lejos entre azul’; the abate is ‘tan magro y descolorido de semblante, que a lo lejos parecía tarjeta sin dorar’; and Torres maintains that ‘Mirado a distancia, parezco melancólico de fisonomía …’ Both Ilie and Glendinning (works cited above, note 4) comment on the fact that, unlike Quevedo, Torres uses satire not in order to characterize human types but simply to pillory them. Glendinning (35–37) makes the point by contrasting the description of Cabra with another caricature from the Visiones of ‘an equally lean and hungry individual’ (36) which also seems to be inspired by Cabra. I. L. MeClelland (111–12) notes some of the parallels between the portraits of Cabra and the abate. 16. The engraved portrait is reproduced as the frontispiece to Mercadier's edition of La barca de Aqueronte. 17. The engraving of Quevedo is reproduced in Sueños y discursos, ed. cit., plate facing p. 73, and in Juan Antonio Tamayo, ‘Las ediciones ilustradas de los Sueños, de Quevedo’, in Aportación a la bibliografía de Quevedo. Homenaje del Instituto Nacional del Libro Español en el 111 centenario de su muerte (Madrid 1945) , 11. Other representations of Quevedo dreaming are reproduced on 21, 27 and 35, but they are quite unlike the Torres portrait. 18. Several details shared by the two engravings confirm the dependence of Torres' portrait on Quevedo's: the bookshelves behind the sitters, the tiled floors, and the openings in the background (a window in the former, a doorway in the latter). 19. These elements include Torres' long face, prominent nose, and shoulder-length hair (which contrasts with his short hair in the engraving in the almanach El mesón de Santarén), his cravate and dress coat with wide cuffs and braiding at the buttonholes, and the open book, mathematical instruments, astrolabe and quill and inkwell (the last two objects also appear in the Quevedo portrait). Both the Gran Piscator and Mesón portraits are reproduced in the Vida, between pp. 72 and 73. 20. See Visiones, ed. cit. p. 10, note. 21. See Ludwig Goldscheidcr, Five Hundred Self-Portraits from Antique Times to the Present Day (Vienna/London 1937). 22. See Suárez-Galbán, ch. 2. 23. For Torres' unentitled use of the title doctor, see Vida, p. 144, note 145. 24. See Mariano and José Peset Reig, ‘Un buen negocio de Torres Villarroel’, CHA, XCIII (1973), 514–36. For a masterly commentary on the caricature of Cabra, see A. A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent. The Picaresque .Novel in Spain and Europe 1599–1953 (Edinburgh 1967), 57–60. If Harry Sieber's argument is accepted that Cabra is associated with the devil, wc also have a possible parallel with Torres' interest in astrology and the occult (see ‘The Narrative Art of Quevedo in El Buscón’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation [Duke University 1967], 174–77). 25. Suárez-Galbán, 63; Giuseppe di Stefano, ‘Mito c realtá nell' autobiografia di Diego de Torres Villarroel’, Miscellanea di Studi Ispanici, X (1965), 175–202, p. 178. 26. Mercadier refers to ‘las numerosas máscaras bajo las cuales se disimula—y se manifiesta—el inasible Diego’ (Vida, 33), and Randolph D. Pope entitles chapter 4 of his book, La autobiografía española hasta Torres Villarroel (Bern/Frankfurt am Main 1974), ‘Los enmascarados’, including in it Estebanillo González and Torres. 27. Suárez-Galbán, 74. 28. Suárez-Galbán, 57. 29. ‘Dudo que en todo el siglo XVIII haya un escritor que haya sabido vender su tiempo y escribir libros como objetos vendibles mejor que Torres Villarroel’ ‘Juan Marichal, ‘Torres Villarroel: autobiografía burguesa al hispánico modo’, PSA, XXXVI [1965], 297–306, p. 300.) Torres himself had declared in his Prologue: ‘He salido con la invención de venderme la vida’ (50). 30. See the works cited above, note 5, and the article cited in note 29. 31. See Pope, ch. 3, ‘Los aventureros’, which deals with Alonso de Contreras, Diego Duque de Estrada, Miguel de Castro and Domingo de Toral y Valdés. 32. While rightly arguing against the traditional view of the Vida as the last classical picaresque novel, the critics mentioned above, note 5, fail to notice many parallels between Torres' picaresque persona in several episodes in the Vida and the pícaros of the novels. Commenting on Torres' account of how as a youth he fought other boys at the instigation of a weaver, Suárez-Galbán remarks: ‘la actitud valiente que se trasluce ahí no puede ser más antipicaresca’ (45); yet, the parallel between this passage and the Poncio de Aguirre episode in the Buscón is striking. 33. Suárez-Galbán calls Torres a ‘rebelde integrado’ (56). But, although Torres certainly felt the urge to conform, the Vida depicts him as unsuccessful in achieving consistent social integration. Suárez-Galbán is nearer the mark when he talks of ‘la filosofía del self made man que quiere manifestarse a toda luz en la Vida’ (43). Di Stefano remarks acutely on Torres' ‘successo e … fortuna sociale costruiti sul delicato equilibrio di scienza ed improvvisazione, di stravaganza e cultura, di misurata picardia e conformismo, di buffoneria e moralismo’ (182). 34. See Suárez-Galbán esp. p. 67, note. The view expressed there seems to rule out Suárez-Galbán's contention that Torres is ‘simple y llanamente … un burgués español del siglo XVIII’ (11). There is nothing ‘simple’ or ‘llano’ about Torres!