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Victoriano Roncero López De bufones y pícaros: La risa en la novela picaresca De bufones y pícaros: La risa en la novela picaresca . Victoriano Roncero López. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010. Pp. 325.

2013; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/670283

1545-6951

Antonio Sánchez Jiménez,

Literary and Cultural Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeVictoriano Roncero López De bufones y pícaros: La risa en la novela picaresca De bufones y pícaros: La risa en la novela picaresca. Victoriano Roncero López. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010. Pp. 325.Antonio Sánchez JiménezAntonio Sánchez JiménezUniversité de Neuchâtel Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Spanish picaresque novel has been the object of the attention of many critics that in recent years have produced some of the most useful and innovative studies on Spanish Golden Age literature. It is the case of the classic contributions by Claudio Guillén, Fernando Lázaro Carreter, Francisco Rico, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, and Anne Cruz or, more recently, of essential studies by Valentín Núñez Rivera, Enriqueta Zafra, and Robert Folger.1De bufones y pícaros: La risa en la novela picaresca (Of jesters and pícaros: Laughter in the picaresque novel) deserves, for its erudition and usefulness, a choice position within this list, especially given the fact that Victoriano Roncero López’s book draws on some of these studies mentioned above (Márquez Villanueva and Núñez Rivera) as important sources.Like Núñez before him, Roncero brings the critical focus on the picaresque back to its backbone, laughter: De bufones y pícaros singles out laughter as the element that shapes this genre, one of the most important contributions of Spanish literature to Western letters. Roncero contextualizes the picaresque within jester humor, as it was practiced in early modern Spain in texts such as the mock chronicle of Don Francesillo de Zúñiga, court jester to Charles V, or Antón de Montoro, a poet jester better known as the Ropero de Córdoba (the clothier of Córdoba).In this attention to jesters and their written production Roncero admittedly follows the lead of Márquez Villanueva and especially of Núñez Rivera, who had already studied the Lazarillo de Tormes as a begging epistle, a genre very common among buffoon writers, and had deemed Lazarillo a buffoon-like character. Exploring this possibility to its fullest consequences, Roncero demonstrates that not only the Lazarillo, but all the Spanish picaresque up to the Estebanillo González, in 1646, must be read as jester literature or, in the very least, as literature inspired by jester humor.Roncero enumerates and explains the characteristics of jester humor throughout the book (rather than in one introductory chapter), elucidating that picaresque writers chose this humor out of respect for decorum, because, according to this literary dogma of the time, lower characters like the pícaros should behave in a lowly manner and therefore exhibit a humor typical of the lower classes. In one of the most informative chapters of the book (chapter 1, “Antecedentes de la risa picaresca: La risa popular y el bufón”), Roncero explains that since Ancient Greece, Western humor has oscillated between the poles of high and low laughter and that high laughter was based in the Aristotelian concept of eutrapelia, that is, painless and harmless fun, moderated by education and not directed against others. In contrast, the ancients deemed low laughter (bodily, cruel, and fueled by the physical or moral suffering of victims) slavelike and even buffoonish. This first chapter reads like a cultural history of laughter and draws heavily on an article that Roncero himself published in 2006,2 but it is nonetheless interesting and essential to the book’s argument, because the author aptly proves that the same division of laughter (high-class eutrapelia vs. low, cruel humor) reached Ancient Rome, where Cicero, within his ideology of moderation, insisted that eutrapelic humor was the only proper laughter for the educated man. In fact, what Rome contributed to the history of laughter was satire, a genre that used (base) humor as a weapon against everything new, everything that threatened the current social order. In that respect, Roman popular laughter (as Roncero styles it) could be considered a development of Greek Aristophanic laughter, which was also used conservatively, to foment social cohesion chastising innovative or deviating elements.During the Middle Ages, the Church Fathers generally rejected laugher till Aquinas accepted its Aristotelian version, eutrapelia, the harmless laughter that was the only possible humor for the good Christian. At the same time, nonetheless, noneutrapelic popular laughter survived in carnivals, festivities that Roncero shows full of violence. Contrary to what Mikhail Bakhtin affirms, Roncero demonstrates that laughter usually appeared in conjunction with scatological elements and violence and not in the positive, creative, and generative contexts that Bakhtin finds in popular carnivals. Carnivalesque figures that they were, buffoons adopted this aggressive kind of humor and took it to court.During the Renaissance, eutrapelic humor of Aristotelian and Ciceronian descent found its way into Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) and became a staple of Renaissance high-class education. Nevertheless, eutrapelia never gained much terrain, because, as Roncero explains, even in courtly settings low, the practice of aggressive humor prevailed over theoretical eutrapelia and because aggressive humor became incarnated in the successful figure of the jester.In chapter 2, “El inicio de la risa picaresca: El Lazarillo de Tormes,” Roncero explains that Spain produced a rich jester literature in which buffoons first humiliated themselves and then others, regardless of their status. In fact, Roncero sees this marriage of literature and jesters as a peculiarity of the Spanish courts and one that accounts for the birth of picaresque literature in the Iberian Peninsula. Roncero observes that when buffoon literature disappeared from the Spanish scene (in the 1550s), the Lazarillo de Tormes was published, a fact that he interprets to mean that the Lazarillo, the first picaresque novel, continued and took the place of jester literature. Roncero further proves this point by analyzing humor in the novel and contrasting it to jester laughter, finding that it is the same at every point: they are both aggressive and noneutrapelic, use scatology, are conservative (punishing social deviance), and are based on self-humiliation. This chapter evidences one of the peculiarities of Roncero’s book: instead of narrowing his corpus of jester literature and defining its traits in an introductory chapter, the author chooses to introduce them as he analyzes the picaresque novels and compares their respective passages to jester texts. For example, when analyzing the Lazarillo, Roncero very perceptively reads the episodes about the blind man as a battle of wits between the protagonist and his deceptive master and only then explains that such battles of wit featuring two jesters that vied to outdo each other with insults or tricks were common courtly entertainment. It is a choice that in a book less erudite and in an author less familiar with the topic could be interpreted as not scientific, but both Roncero and De bufones y pícaros show such control over the subject matter (both picaresque and jester literature), and such depth in his analysis, that we must conclude it is a conscious stylistic decision to keep the interest of the reader, who is thus constantly confronted with new material.In subsequent chapters, Roncero explores how the picaresque embraced the buffoon traits that Lazarillo introduced to the genre. Thus, in the greatest hit of the Spanish picaresque, the Guzmán de Alfarache (chapter 3, “La risa moralizante: El Guzmán de Alfarache”), Mateo Alemán made his protagonist a literal jester during a key part of the novel and included several passages reflecting on the properties of humor and jesters. Similarly, in the Pícara Justina (chapter 4, “La risa aristocrático-bufonesca: La Pícara Justina”) López de Úbeda writes a roman à clef destined for the court of Valladolid, a novel in which the protagonist assumes her buffoon-like status and, at the same time, eliminates the moralistic features of the Guzmán. This same tradition is the one chosen by Francisco de Quevedo in El Buscón (chapter 5, “La risa como humillación social: El Buscón”): the writer creates a character that is a buffoon and a sort of literary punching bag subject to all sorts of humiliations to amuse the conservative reader, who would be delighted at the elaborate suffering of the would-be-social-climber protagonist. Last, but not least, the Estebanillo González (chapter 6, “Estebanillo González: Pícaro y bufón”) reinforces the jester tradition of the picaresque by making the protagonist a buffoon in the court at Antwerp, and by being published in an exclusive, noncommercial first edition destined to courtly readers. That is, the literary buffoon returns to the origins of the picaresque genre, origins that, as Roncero skillfully proves, lie in the jester literature of the Middle Ages and sixteenth century.To sum up, De bufones y pícaros is an extremely convincing and enjoyable book. It is erudite but accessible to nonspecialists, due to the logical and perspicuous style of the author. As is natural with any academic book, the readers may sometimes disagree with some particular and secondary points that Roncero makes here and there in the course of his argumentation. For example, Roncero insists that the Lazarillo’s hidalgo is in fact a lowly commoner, maybe even a New Christian, posing as a knight, and he bases his thesis, among other things, on the hidalgo’s reference to the Costanilla street, in Valladolid, a commercial thoroughfare in which many descendants of Jewish people had their shops. Nevertheless, the hidalgo only uses the Costanilla as a term of comparison, saying that, were his lands on that street, he would be rich, a statement that seems far from a reference to his New Christian blood. Some other minor points of disagreement may be Roncero’s use of Elias’s “civilizing process” to refer to eutrapelia,3 which seems rather loose, or his assumption that medieval kings adopted low laughter as a means of social control, for denigration of the lower classes. As far as this last thesis is concerned, some kinds of medieval humor (troubadouresque, for example) come to mind in which royal control seems far from likely. In addition, even cases of low, bodily humor taking place in medieval royal courts throughout Europe appear void of social meaning. For example, what would be the social reading of Roland le Petour (Roland the Farter), buffoon of Henry II of England? How would his most famous feat be a means of royal control, his “saltum, siffletum et pettum” ( jump, whistle, and fart), acts that we must presume he (skillfully and perforce dangerously, caveat audens lector) performed at the same time?4 Nevertheless, the reader must remember that these are but very minor and secondary points and that in his main argument and textual analysis Roncero is extremely convincing and informative. After reading De bufones y pícaros, readers will never again forget that the picaresque owes its main characteristic, humor, to jester literature, and that this buffoon laughter was aggressive (noneutrapelic) and conservative, that is, used to deride elements of social change. Roncero achieves this objective through his elegant and transparent style, erudition, astonishing dominion of primary and secondary literature, and, of course, good doses of humor that are most welcome in an academic book. Thanks to these characteristics, and also to the foreword by Ignacio Arellano that nicely summarizes the book and critically examines it, Roncero López’s De bufones y pícaros turns out to be an essential work on the Spanish picaresque and an important study on the culture of the European Baroque in general. It is a great book, one every person interested in Spanish literature ought to read. Notes 1Claudio Guillén, “La disposición temporal del Lazarillo de Tormes,” Hispanic Review 25 (1957): 266–79; Fernando Lázaro Carreter, “Lazarillo de Tormes” en la picaresca (Barcelona: Ariel, 1972); Francisco Rico, La novella picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1973), introduction to Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. Francisco Rico (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987), 11–139, Problemas de “Lazarillo” (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988); Francisco Márquez Villanueva, “Picaresca: Lazarillo de Tormes,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 34 (1985–86): 520–22; Anne Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 1999); Valentín Núñez Rivera, “Claves para el segundo Lazarillo, 1555: El continuador anónimo interpreta su modelo,” Bulletin Hispanique 105 (2003): 333–69; Enriqueta Zafra, Prostituidas por el texto: Discurso prostibulario en la picaresca femenina (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009); Robert Folger, Picaresque and Bureaucracy: “Lazarillo de Tormes” (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009).2Victoriano Roncero López, “El humor y la risa en las preceptivas del Siglo de Oro,” in Demócrito áureo: Los códigos de la risa en el Siglo de Oro, ed. Ignacio Arellano Ayuso and Victoriano Roncero López (Seville: Renacimiento, 2006), 285–328.3Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York: Pantheon, 1983).4Ruth E. Harvey, “Joglars and the Professional Status of the Early Troubadours,” Medium Ævum 62 (1993): 227. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 1August 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/670283 Views: 413Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.