Quevedo’s El Buscón: Picaresque Masterpiece
Quevedo’s El Buscón
El Buscón: The life of a con man named Don Pablos was first printed in 1626. It was a great success. Quevedo tested his pen as a writer within the genre of the picaresque novel, but rather than simply following generic models, he wrote a very original text.
Influences and Structure
El Lazarillo provides the overall structure of the work. It coincides with both novels (Lazarillo and Guzmán de Alfarache) in its epistolary form and features the protagonist’s zeal for social mobility, hunger as a motive, and the dialectic between appearance and reality as core themes. Also notable is the influence of the first part of Guzmán de Alfarache, as well as the apocryphal by Saavedra, in the use of specific motifs.
Purpose and Social Commentary
The language seems held in abeyance, as if transcending anecdote and conventional narrative traits inherited from its models. The rogue hero of the novel recounts episodes of his life. The various narrated events are not unified to explain something, but are rather a series of scenes or tableaux in which Quevedo displays all his wit and mastery as a writer. The work seems to have a primarily aesthetic purpose; its constant aim is to draw attention to language, to reveal maximum sharpness. When an event, incident, or circumstance is explored, the narrator moves on to another topic to re-express his linguistic possibilities through subtlety and wit.
It is likely that Quevedo is satirizing in the Buscón the desire for social mobility and the desire to join the ranks of the nobility. The protagonist confesses that desire from the very beginning of the novel, but his claims were unsuccessful. The author always puts false words in his mouth. The protagonist is always punished when trying to get rich or pass for noble, in stark contrast to the absence of punishment for cases as serious as the death of two constables in the last episode of the work. Quevedo in this novel reveals his outspoken opposition to social mobility and his defense of the rigid stratified society in which everyone should stay within the limits of their original social status. It is logical that Quevedo directs his tirade against the many conversos who aspired to ennoblement through wealth at that time.
El Buscón is basically a literary showcase where Quevedo displays his finest stylistic talent.
Quevedo’s Literary Style
Style: Some features analyzed in the Buscón have general validity for Quevedo’s prose: linguistic sharpness, his constant tendency toward exaggeration, caricature based on hyperbolic comparisons, etc.
Conceptual features are also representative of Quevedo’s style: contrasts, paradoxes, hyperbole, misunderstanding and ambiguity, polysemy, paranomasia, ellipsis, various word plays…
Quevedo is the literary genius that gathers an earlier tradition of oral language use in courtly environments. That ingenuity that permeates many 16th and 17th-century literary texts culminates in Quevedo. Quevedo is thus the synthesis of an entire oral literary tradition, having cultivated the tradition of humanism, of which he would also be one of its last representatives. He is a figure of literary capital, as his expertise allows for unexpected stylistic and aesthetic creations. The Castilian language in his hands is an endless source of surprising verbal findings, always with the clear intention of achieving the reader’s admiration. His aestheticism is inseparable from his ideology. He tends to present his characters without compassion or tenderness, even with some cruelty or indifference to their suffering. Rhetorically, this is reflected in the dehumanization processes to which the author subjects the characters. Grotesque exaggeration leads to objectification. This devaluation goes so far as to depict the characters sometimes as purely visual reality. The grotesque and the strange have a marked presence in Quevedo’s art.
Context of the Grotesque
This can be explained by the proliferation of madmen, dwarfs, clowns, and other grotesque characters who inhabited the court. This would have its root in the deep crisis of 17th-century Spanish society.