The Picaresque and the Writing Life in Mexico

By Jorge Téllez

This book studies picaresque narratives from 1690 to 2013, examining how this literary form serves as a reflection on the material conditions necessary for writing literature in Mexico.

In The Picaresque and the Writing Life in Mexico, Jorge Téllez argues that Mexican writers have drawn on the picaresque as a device for pondering what they regard as the perils of intellectual and creative labor. Surveying ten narratives from 1690 to 2013, Téllez shows how, by and large, all of them are iterations of the same basic structure: pícaro meets writer; pícaro tells life story; writer eagerly writes it down. This written mediation (sometimes fictional but other times completely factual) is presented as part of a transaction in which it is rarely clear who is exploiting whom. Highlighting this ambiguity, Téllez’s study brings into focus the role that the picaresque has played in the presentation of writers as disenfranchised and vulnerable subjects. But as Téllez demonstrates, these narratives embody a discourse of precarity that goes beyond pícaros, and applies to all subjects who engage in the production and circulation of literature. In this way, Téllez shows that the literary form of the picaresque is, above all, a reflection on the value of literature, as well as on the place and role of writing in Mexican society more broadly.

The Picaresque and the Writing Life in Mexico is a unique work that suggests new paths for studying the reiteration of literary forms across centuries. Looking at the picaresque in particular, Téllez offers a new interpretation of this genre within its national context and suggests ways in which this genre remains relevant for reflecting on literature in contemporary society. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American studies, Mexican cultures and literatures, and comparative literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: May 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268200169

Jorge Téllez

Jorge Téllez is assistant professor of romance languages in the Department of Hispanic and Portuguese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Poéticas del Nuevo Mundo.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Between 2011 and 2013, the Mexican cultural magazine Nexos ran a monthly section called Así escribo [This is how I write], in which guest authors reflected on their creative processes and on the aspects that surrounded their writing routines. Later published in book form, these pieces stand as evidence of the many myths that are kept alive in order to maintain a romanticized image of the writer as either a tortured individual or an enlightened visionary, as the volume editor’s opening remarks illustrate: Lo que revelan todos estos textos es el esfuerzo, el desvelo, el rigor, la disciplina, la paciencia que subyacen a toda obra importante: poetas, cuentistas, novelistas, dramaturgos se enfrentan a la oscuridad y, al mismo tiempo, a la extraña luz de la creación literaria (Juárez 2015, 14) [What all these texts reveal is the effort, the long hours, the rigor, discipline, and patience that underlie every important work: poets, short story writers, novelists, playwrights confront the darkness, and at the same time, the strange light of literary creation].¹ Judging the book by these words and considering the many writers who state that they simply cannot write unless there is a window nearby, one might feel tempted to propose sunlight as the hidden source of a significant portion of contemporary Mexican literature.

To be fair, not all the pieces subscribe to and reproduce this romanticized image of the writer. Some authors relate writing to their childhood, thus making literacy a central topic in their accounts. There is also a shared concern about materiality—chairs, desks, notebooks, typewriters, laptops—and in this concern it is possible to read the precarization of the profession: while people born between 1950 and 1970 talk about their first Mont-blanc, younger writers mention their Pilots or their Bics. Yet the issue of writing as a spiritual act keeps fighting back: Más que los instrumentos de la escritura—lápiz o pluma fuente, máquina de escribir o computadora—lo que importa en el acto de escribir es la predisposición de ánimo (55) [More than instruments of writing—pencil or fountain pen, typewriter or computer—what is important in the act of writing is the predisposition of the spirit]. The idea of writing as a task subject to providential forces seems so inscribed in the writer’s mind that throughout the book it is not hard to find a high number of phrases that sacrifice depth or even sense in order to privilege catchiness, for example, La escritura es el arte de convertir la tensión nerviosa en estilo (19) [Writing is the art of transforming nervous tension into style], or slightly more elaborated accounts of the rapture of writing: Así escribo: dejando que una polifonía viva, invocada pero no menos sorpresiva, se apodere de mi cuerpo y de mis palabras y, en difícil y paradójica armonía que se alimenta de los latidos del caos, deje escuchar todas sus voces poseídas, posesivas (38) [This is how I write: by allowing a living melody, invoked but no less surprising, to take over my body and my words and, in a difficult and paradoxical harmony that feeds on the beats of chaos, to set free all its possessed and possessive voices].

In a country that depends almost entirely on state funding for the production and circulation of literature, it is strange that just a few pieces openly discuss the grants and monthly stipends that have allowed the authors to dedicate themselves to literature.² Not only are these mentions scarce and fleeting, but there is actual pushback against the idea of being dependent on them in order to write: El que espera la beca para escribir no es escritor, es un becario (193) [Anyone who waits for a grant to write isn’t a writer but a grantee]. If, according to this nonsensical idiosyncrasy, someone who needs money to write is not a writer, then who is? We find an answer in another piece, in which the label is referred to as akin to a title of nobility: to be a writer, according to this account, is to belong to a closed, self-preserving, privileged aristocracy (173).

To regard writing as part of an economic transaction, and even more, to theorize literature as the result of specific socioeconomic circumstances, probably lies outside of what the authors who participated in this monthly section were asked to do. Yet the diffuse presence of the question regarding the specific conditions that make literature possible and, more important, the way the accounts that ask this question distance themselves from a discourse of providential writing suggest that it is a question worth asking.³ This book advances a theory of a specific literary form, the picaresque, as well as a critique of its ideology. The main argument of this study is that Mexican writers have drawn on the picaresque as a device for pondering what they regard as the perils of intellectual and creative labor. By surveying narratives from 1690 to 2013, I analyze the role that the picaresque has played in the presentation of writers as disenfranchised and vulnerable subjects. I propose that these narratives embody a discourse of precarity that goes beyond pícaros and applies to all subjects who engage in the production and circulation of literature, thus turning the picaresque into a reflection on the value of literature and on the place and role of writing in Mexican society.

My study focuses specifically on ten narratives that I revisit in all chapters, albeit with different emphases: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690); Fray Servando Teresa de Mier’s Memorias, published posthumously in 1856; José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (1816–31); Rubén Romero’s La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (1938); Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969); Luis Zapata’s El vampiro de la colonia roma (1979); Enrique Serna’s Señorita México (1993); Josefina Estrada’s Virgen de medianoche (1996); Xavier Velasco’s Diablo guardián (2003); and Valeria Luiselli’s La historia de mis dientes (2013).⁴ With the exception of Fray Servando’s writings, all these narratives are iterations of the same structure: pícaro meets writer. The situation that unfolds after this encounter includes pícaros willing to tell their life stories and writers eager to write them down. This written mediation, sometimes fictional, sometimes completely factual, presents itself as part of a transaction in which it is rarely clear who is exploiting whom. My book looks at this transaction as fundamental to understanding the picaresque as a reflection on the material conditions that make literature possible.

THE PICARESQUE IS THE PICARESQUE IS THE PICARESQUE

This is not a book of literary history. Its pages are not primarily concerned with what the picaresque is, what it has been, and what it should be. Rather, this book is about what the picaresque does and, more interestingly, what we can do with the picaresque. Many reasons lead me to stress this, the main one being the significant amount of scholarly work concerned with achieving what has proven impossible and perhaps not even necessary: namely, a sound definition of the picaresque. Although the bibliography dealing with this subject is in itself a problem in terms of its quantity, what transpires from current critical debates is an irreconcilable gap between scholars dealing with the picaresque from an early modern peninsular perspective and scholars working from a broader point of view. The difference between these perspectives is not defined by region or historical period as much as by a more complex relationship between scholars and literary tradition. At the core of this impossible dialogue lies not only an explicit position on literary history but also, more important, an implicit view of the role of literary and cultural studies today.

Classic studies on the subject have articulated the Spanish picaresque as a genre based on features seen as constitutive of a series of narratives that were published, roughly, between 1554 and 1668.⁵ From the abundant corpus of such scholarly work, Claudio Guillén’s sharp distinction between books that he proposed as picaresque novels in the strict sense (1971, 74) and picaresque novels in the wider sense of the term (93) is the one that seems to have had more impact in subsequent studies outside the field of what at that time was still called the Golden Age.⁶ Moreover, his suggestion of a picaresque myth (99) that allowed for an understanding of the picaresque beyond the early modern time frame made room for the theorization of the neopicaresque, a concept that aims to explain modern and contemporary narratives according to a picaresque tradition.⁷ Current critical debates on the subject have distanced themselves from this kind of formalistic approach. Florencio Sevilla Arroyo, for instance, in the prologue to his anthology La novela picaresca española, has pointed to the tautological nature of definitions of the picaresque based on features from a literary corpus demarcated aprioristically and has called out what he labels taxonomical vices and deductive methods that in his view fall short in offering a working definition of the genre (2001, vi–xi). Pablo Jauralde Pou, in the prologue to another anthology published the same year, stresses the importance of understanding literary models not as constraints but as possibilities (2001, xv). J. A. Garrido Ardila signals to the controversial nature of the picaresque genre that like any genre [is] a malleable mould (2015, 15). Yet these same critics have not provided better tools for understanding the picaresque beyond an early modern peninsular perspective.

They all agree on the need for a new framework to study these narratives, but they seem reluctant to theorize the picaresque outside of a fixed, perfectly demarcated literary corpus. Sevilla Arroyo’s work illustrates aptly the relevance of national pride to the construction of the picaresque as a closed canon that represents uno de nuestros legados literarios más genuinos y popularizados desde siempre (2001, v) [one of our most genuine and ever popular literary legacies]. On the one hand, the picaresque is portrayed as a narrative with simple, recurrent features: autobiography, a character who serves many masters, and alternation between narration and digression, just to name a few. On the other hand, there is always a limit that prevents these general characteristics from being applied to a broader corpus of narratives; hence Sevilla Arroyo’s comprehensive anthology that takes pride in including "todas las novelas picarescas, pero nada más que las novelas picarescas" (vi; emphasis mine) [all the picaresque novels but nothing more than picaresque novels]. Along with the aporia that involves the impossibility of thinking in the particular what is rendered in general terms, there is also a biological side to these conservative takes on the picaresque that conceive this literary form in terms of birth, development, and death. Jauralde Pou’s prologue offers an example of this way of thinking: La novela picaresca nace como relato en España, entre 1554 y 1599, se desarrolla de modo fecundo, pero irregular, durante la primera mitad del siglo XVII y languidece después, una vez que ya ha prefigurado un ‘género’, que reaparece en tiempos y espacios culturales muy diversos (2001, xi) [The picaresque novel is born as a story in Spain between 1554 and 1599; it sees fertile but irregular development during the first half of the seventeenth century and then languishes, once it has already prefigured a genre]. What makes possible the thinking of the afterlives of the picaresque, in his account, is the transition from the picaresque novel to what he deems a picaresque matter (xi), a transition based on a sharp distinction between the early modern peninsular corpus and narratives from other traditions, genres, languages, and regions. Once the Spanish picaresque novel dies, he seems to suggest, its subsequent resurrections are picaresque without being completely picaresque. At this point, the circular explanation becomes apparent: there are narratives that are picaresque because they belong to a picaresque corpus, and there are others that are not picaresque because they do not belong to a picaresque corpus.

The contradictory nature of these positions is fully visible in the work of one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the history of the genre, Garrido Ardila, who is right when he points to the problem of the "overwhelming lack of critical consensus regarding the understanding of picaresque as a literary category (2010, 2). To resolve this issue, he advances a definition based on what he regards as three essential features of the genre: (1) the narration of a life expounding the circumstances leading to a final situation; (2) the implicit satire of the novel that reflects the social bias of the author; (3) the picaro as protagonist" (15–16).⁸ I have two caveats to this proposal. First, suggesting that a picaresque narrative is one that includes a pícaro does not solve the tautological problem of defining the picaresque based on a preselected corpus; rather, it just displaces the tautology from the genre to the main character. Second, his idea about the social bias of the author is based on Antonio Rey Hazas’s suggestion of a poética comprometida [committed poetics] in the picaresque, through which he explains the picaresque as a genre that questioned the emptiness of values dear to early modern Spanish society, such as limpieza de sangre [purity of blood] or the relationship between honor and honra, that delimited social mobility and encouraged an environment that rewarded appearance and pretentiousness more than anything else (2003, 34–35). Yet what Garrido Ardila misses is the fact that Rey Hazas’s term is an interpretation of the picaresque rather than a fact, just as Anne J. Cruz has eloquently shown in speaking about two possible interpretations of the picaresque as a discourse of social critique or as a discourse of reaffirmation of social inequalities.⁹ In like manner, Joan Ramón Resina has stressed the fact that even though there seems to be an implicit social critique in these narratives, pícaros ultimately fail to escape the social determinism that governs the genre.¹⁰ Imposing an interpretation as a category to delimit a narrative corpus, then, falls into the same circular explanation that believes in the preexistence of features that in reality represent an interpretation rather than a fact.

If we read Garrido Ardila’s work in retrospect, we find some contradictions in his contentions about this form, which at one point he sees "alive 400 years after the publication of Lazarillo (2010, 19) and at another he declares nonexistent in the present: No existe la nueva picaresca" (2008, 163) [There is no such a thing as a new picaresque]. His main objection to the idea of a neopicaresque stems from a historical argument. According to him, the role of the picaresque as a genre that dealt with marginalized social and ethnic groups (such as the conversos in Spain) is rendered meaningless once the French Revolution sets legal principles for states to follow the rule of law (2008, 162). Thus, arguing against an interpretation of Eduardo Mendoza’s 1986 novel, La ciudad de los prodigios, as a picaresque narrative, Garrido Ardila aims to remove any possible doubt in the following terms: Mendoza, muy por el contrario, escribe en un estado de derecho, que no censura su obra, que no lo margina por pertenecer a una minoría social y étnica . . . , que no lo amenaza por medio de la Inquisición (2008, 162) [Mendoza, very much to the contrary, writes in a state of law, which does not censor his work, which does not marginalize it for belonging to a social and ethnic minority . . . , [and] which does not threaten it via the Inquisition]. In other words, you are not writing a picaresque novel unless the Spanish Inquisition is after you, or so seems to be the final message of a passage that, furthermore, wrongfully implies that any kind of racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination and persecution ended after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789. More to the point, as Resina argues to support what he sees as the orthodoxy of picaresque novels, just a few of them were indeed forbidden and expurgated by the church during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹¹ Garrido Ardila’s final message is one of exclusion and hierarchy: The picaresque cannot be a catchall term and cannot be applied randomly to any texts because a particular critic finds it convenient to do so (2010, 7). What advocates of this perspective seem to forget is that even theoretical, formalistic approaches to literature, such as Russian formalism and reader-response theory, have long questioned the idea of renaissances of genres as an essentialist perspective that leaves out the new meanings that arise when forms make a comeback.¹² Contentions that conceive literary criticism as a form of gatekeeping call to mind what Guillermo Mariaca, in a completely different context, argued on the task of literary criticism in Latin America: ¿Por qué se hace de la crítica una institución que funda cánones y no una comunidad que formula problemas . . . ? (1993, 13) [Why is criticism made into an institution that founds canons and not a community that formulates problems . . . ?].

With a more nuanced understanding of literary genres and traditions, Erik Camayd-Freixas studies Latin American narratives from the Spanish chronicles to twentieth-century literature and suggests the existence of a picaresque paradigm, an epistolary, confessional and didactical frame that channels a reflection on social mobility as its main subject (2015, 234). I comment further on Camayd-Freixas’s work in chapter 3. For now I want to point out that his opening gesture toward a picaresque canon potentially takes us to the opposite side, in which we find pícaros, or picaresque characters, everywhere: in Sigüenza y Góngora’s Infortunios and Fernández de Lizardi’s Periquillo, but also in Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz, Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo, and even in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (229). In any case, what seems evident is that a focus on what is or is not picaresque has fueled studies for a long time and that those studies tend to be the ones interested in narrowing the picaresque corpus to its early modern Spanish component.

In contrast, scholars working with the picaresque in relation to other regions and periods have proven either utterly uninterested or unconsciously unaware of these kinds of debates. Take, for instance, Philip Joseph’s 2016 comparatist study of Grimmellshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985), in which he explores the relationship between the picaresque, autobiographical war narratives, and a reflection on vernacular languages; or Matthew Garrett’s suggestion to study the pícaro not as a character but rather as a situation, or even as a social relation in which he sees the basis for a modern discourse that poses reading as a static, ecstatic, and absorbent practice (2015, 97–98); or a recent, insightful study by Annie McClanahan on television shows that stage precarious forms of labor such as tipwork, in which the picaresque plays a significant role in understanding not only the narrative structure of these visual tales but also the characters whose working lives are defined by multiple and fragmented social relations and by temporary, uncertain, and fluid working conditions (2019). What these three examples share is a minimal interest in providing a sharp, infallible definition of the picaresque, as well as an investment in defining it by (Spanish) national criteria. By sidelining an innocuous discussion on the features of a literary form that in many accounts has been dead for centuries, they offer new critical insights about why this literary form still matters.

The same gesture toward a broader understanding of this literary form can be found in recent histories of literature. Roberto González Echevarría’s singling out of the sparse attention that the picaresque received in histories of Western literature as a significant part of the rise of the novel no longer holds true twenty-five years later (1993, 45). Guido Mazzoni, in Theory of the Novel, locates the picaresque as part of a series of narratives that he labels the first corpus leading to the constitution of the novelistic form (2017, 67–71). In like manner, Michael Schmidt, in The Novel: A Biography, asserts the relevance of the picaresque in the formation of the novel and declares it still alive and well (2014, 50). Moreover, Schmidt suggests Lazarillo’s first-person narrative device is constitutive of the modern stream of consciousness approach in James Joyce’s and Virginia Woolf ’s writings (50). Resina, in The Short, Happy Life of the Novel in Spain, situates the picaresque, along with Don Quijote, as an irrefutable argument against scholars who insist on positioning the novel as an eighteenthcentury English cultural product (2006, 292–93).

Among many other accounts of the importance of the picaresque in the development of the novelistic form, Thomas Pavel’s The Lives of the Novel raises two relevant points: first, that literary genres, despite being linked to the social and intellectual life of their time, . . . also enjoy a qualified autonomy (2013, 19); and second, that a proper understanding of the picaresque needs to consider two major historical events: The conquest of America and the gold rush that followed had severe social and economic consequences in Spain, destabilizing crafts and trade, and exacerbating poverty (57). While this is not a new argument, the fact that a global history of the novel such as Pavel’s highlights Spanish colonial expansion as a major influence in the development of the picaresque form signals the need to break with scholarship that aims to restrict the picaresque to specific regions and times and to approach the problem from a quite different perspective, one that considers disruptions and discontinuities rather than essential features and origins. This kind of perspective informs the work of Joseph Laurenti, who, in the two volumes that comprise his Catálogo bibliográfico de la literatura picaresca, suggests that the twenty or so books that make up the Spanish picaresque corpus are just a small part of a much broader, globalized corpus. More to the point, he sees Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de México as the primera manifestación de la picaresca y pícaros mexicanos (1997, 163) [first manifestation of a Mexican picaresque and Mexican pícaros], in tune with other scholars that have studied Spanish chronicles as picaresque texts.¹³

For this book I have found it more productive to think with scholars who go beyond an aprioristic, circular, and restrictive interpretation of the picaresque. In this regard, Cruz’s Discourses of Poverty stands as a touchstone study on the subject, not only because of her compelling reading of the picaresque from a gender perspective, but also because to her the decline of the picaresque in Spain does not mean the death of the genre but its spread and rise in different regions and temporalities (1999, 206). In the same manner, Francisco J. Sánchez and Nicholas Spadaccini argue for an understanding of the picaresque from a contemporary perspective: If picaresque narratives and the whole phenomenon that we have called here the discourse of marginality in early modern Spain may still appeal to us today, it is precisely because they reveal a deep doubt at the heart of modernity, a doubt that refers to the questioning of the universal validity of the social structure that comes with this modernity (1996, 304). The picaresque, in this view, has not passed away and then risen from the dead but has been reinvented within different traditions and territories, a feature of the form that Wilfried Van der Will has linked to periods of social, economic, and political transition (1994, 483). Finally, I am particularly interested in what Franco Moretti has dubbed the great symbolic achievement of the picaresque, that is, defining the modern nation as that space where strangers are never entirely strangers—and at any rate don’t remain so for long (1998, 51). Building on Moretti’s idea, the two types of strangers that consistently share the same spaces in the Mexican picaresque are pícaros and writers. In fact, it is their encounter that makes possible the picaresque account.

THE PICARESQUE AND THE WRITING LIFE IN MEXICO

Just because this is not a book about literary history does not mean that I have sidelined the historical component of the narratives that I study. In loose terms, this book traces the position of writers in Mexican society from the lettered city to the creative economy. What I mean is that I focus on how the idea of intellectual work—which I study through picaresque narratives—as a marginalized and undervalued occupation has transformed from the moment when Latin American letrados [lettered people] bore a supposedly privileged and powerful position in colonial times to the professionalization of writing in the nineteenth century to the dissemination of the public intellectual and the instrumentalization of culture in the late twentieth century—a moment, in Jean Franco’s words, when the intellectual’s relation to power also changed[,] . . . when literary celebrities began to lose some of their influence to professional economists, educators, and image makers (2002, 187). Specifically, I have linked these narratives to three critical moments in Mexican history: first, the colonial period (Sigüenza y Góngora’s Infortunios) and its crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Fray Servando’s Memorias and Fernández de Lizardi’s Periquillo); second, the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath during the first decades of the twentieth century (Romero’s La vida inútil; Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte); and third, the period marked by the implementation of neoliberal polices (Zapata’s El vampiro; Serna’s Señorita México) and a subsequent moment marked by a crisis of representation of that same neoliberal model (Velasco’s Diablo guardián; Luiselli’s La historia).

That picaresque narratives in Mexico are related to a reflection on the lettered city was suggested years ago by Mabel Moraña in a study on Infortunios and El Periquillo, in which she argued, first, for the autonomy of these narratives that portrayed sujetos y formas de conciencia social americanos [American subjects and forms of social awareness] rather than just mere imitations of peninsular pícaros; and second, for an interpretation of these narratives as a reflection on the ambivalent position of writers in society. According to her, authors took advantage of the representación de la marginalidad como dispositivo anti-hegemónico [representation of marginality as an antihegemonic device] in order to advance a discourse that aimed to conseguir una mayor entronización en el aparato institucional ya sea a través de una mayor remunerización, reconocimiento de su pensamiento ‘iluminado’, control de mercado, etc. [gain a greater foothold in the institutional apparatus, whether through greater remuneration, recognition of their enlightened thinking, market control, etc.]. For these authors, writing, according to Moraña, implied both an instrumento de desmontaje y a la vez de penetración dentro de los límites del poder impuestos por la ciudad letrada (1989, 124) [instrument of deconstruction and simultaneously of penetration within the limits of power imposed by the lettered city]. What I am proposing in this book is that the Mexican picaresque consistently displays this ambivalence throughout time, what Josefina Ludmer would characterize as an alliance to the weak (1991, 90) that puts forward an agenda that in a way questions but also longs for the powerful position of letrados within the lettered city.¹⁴ Throughout the book I engage with the notion of the lettered city, as Ángel Rama proposed it in his posthumous book, from both a functional and a critical perspective. While it is clear, thanks to Julio Ramos’s and Aníbal González’s writings, that Rama mischaracterizes the powerful position of Latin American letrados as a transhistorical category that needs revision from a more focused perspective that takes into consideration the mutability and specificity of writers and written culture in Latin America, it is undeniable that their position in early modern times was often linked to a position of power regardless of the level of literacy of vassals, who had to obey their lords within the period’s wide spectrum of legal obligations, as Fernando Bouza affirms (2004, 40).¹⁵ In this sense, the notion of the lettered city affords me a starting point, regardless of its precise and factual nature, in which letrados bore a privileged position in society.

As a broad topic, the picaresque not only allows me to reflect on the position of writers from a sociological perspective, but also from an economic one. The emphasis on the picaresque as a transhistorical form has yielded thought-provoking ideas on the socioeconomic roots of picaresque literature, such as John Beverley’s contention that the Lazarillo is a novel of primitive accumulation (2008, 93); or, more recently, Bernhard Malkmus’s suggestion that the history of the picaresque reflects the development of money-based economies (2007, 180). In Malkmus’s view, the pícaro’s desire for mobility could be read from a socioeconomic perspective in which the picaresque itinerary . . . emphasises the concept of circulation rather than accumulation (196). This idea has at least two outcomes. First, it offers a theoretical framework to think about the afterlives of the picaresque throughout history, for according to him, this emphasis on circulation makes the picaresque genre a literary reflection of cultural transition rather than consolidation (196–97). And second, it situates the pícaro in a context of production of commodities and value: The success of the picaresque itinerary throughout social and political territory is measured by the circulation of material goods and rhetorical currency—created by the pícaro of nothing (179). The two outcomes are central to my argument on the picaresque in Mexico as a form whose iterations have consistently focused, implicitly or explicitly, on the value of literature and on the role of writers in society.

While critiquing essentialist approaches that read the picaresque merely as a reflection of reality, Paul Julian Smith poses a relevant question in terms of understanding picaresque narratives from a perspective similar to what I propose in this book: What conditions enabled such a text to be produced? (1988, 117). Perhaps unintentionally, he signals to what Rama articulated as the double nature of letrados by asserting that the picaresque, "more perhaps than any other genre, reveals the action of the parergon; that is, the element in any system which is at once essential and superfluous, dominant and subordinate, inside and outside the confines of relevance; and which . . . may be seen as analogous to the ‘frame’ which surrounds all representative space (121). In the case of the Mexican picaresque, I would argue, this element is literature or, more precisely, mainstream literature. What I mean by this is that I am well aware that the narratives studied in this book provide us with a portrayal of writers who, if they do not already belong to the Mexican literary canon, indeed appeal to a wide audience. In this sense, Rama’s idea of letrados as a powerful clique still holds some of its trueness in a time when, as Ignacio Sánchez Prado has put it, in contemporary Mexico we find a highly institutionalized field in which most of its practitioners belong to an elite stratum" (2018c, 9).¹⁶ In any case, the position of literature as essential and superfluous mirrors, in my view, the one of intellectuals perceived as both founding pillars of modern Mexican society and dilettante members of a conservative clique.¹⁷

My engagement with the concept of precariousness, applied to the narratives that I study in this book, is based in this double position of letrados in Mexican society. Whether in the form of an ontological condition of vulnerability or as the economic insecurity that stems from economic production after Fordism—or even as a class category—plenty of works have developed precariousness and precarity as a well-established area of scholarly research.¹⁸ Rather than commit to these concepts as a theoretical approach or as a subject of analysis, I am interested in them as a departure point that allows me to group all these novels according to a general interpretation of the picaresque as a narrative that puts forth a discourse of the individual as a marginalized subject. Yet, as is made clear in the chapter overview that follows, what interests me the most is how writers have channeled their sense of marginality through the well-known plotline of the pícaro’s fragile condition of existence. Precariousness, in these narratives, is a relational circumstance that entails vulnerability and economic insecurity. However, this is a story told from the perspective of letrados, and it is precisely this point of view that I study and critique in this book.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

The main argument of this book unfolds around four concepts—genealogies, value, colonialism, and bodies—that organize the book into four chapters, plus an epilogue. In chapter 1, I deal with a question that underlies all these narratives: Why tell a story? I do so by focusing on what makes these picaresque narratives possible: namely, the written mediation of the pícaro’s life account by fictionalized or actual writers, poets, and journalists. By shifting attention from the pícaro to the pícaro’s addressee, I aim to provide the picaresque with a narrative that distances it from the obsession with genealogies, origins, and lineage and that focuses, rather, on how Mexican writers have taken on the picaresque as a literary form to advance a portrait of letrados as marginal, precarious characters. The picaresque, in this view, becomes more a hermeneutical device than a series of fixed, essential features, a gesture that allows me to approach this literary form from the perspective of its social function rather than its formal features.

Along with the question of why a story is told, there is also the question of who tells the story. Just as pícaros, in Guillén’s classic study, are described as half-outsiders (1971, 80–81), letrados can also be seen as such insofar as they are present in all these narratives, albeit in an eccentric situation: although they are only visible—and audible—a few times throughout the narrative, those moments confirm that they have been there all along. Take, for instance, the abrupt irruption of Sigüenza y Góngora’s voice at