Discourses of poverty: social reform and the picaresque novel in early modern Spain

Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque in Early Modern Spain. By Anne J. Cruz. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. 297 pages. This study aims to provide a new understanding of picaresque fiction by reading it against the reports, controversies and (mostly ineffectual) legislative programs for the relief of poverty and control of vagrancy, and the debates on whether the poor should be enclosed along with the sick, or given outdoor relief. This richly documented material, and Professor Cruz's Foucauldian theorization, form the principal substance of the book. Beginning with Lazarillo de Tormes, Professor Cruz picks up the allusion (lazar-leper) in the protagonist's name and briefly traces the history of leprosy as a social phenomenon, noting that the marginalization of lepers shifted in the mid-- sixteenth centrury to vagrants, prostitutes, conversos and moriscos (16). Of all the fictions that carry the label `picaresque,' Guzman de Alfarache is the one that most directly and insistently presents the experience of poverty, both real and feigned, and also meditates upon begging and vagabondage as corrosive elements in society. father-shady Genoese financier of vaguely east Mediterranean origins, bisexual seducer of women, twice renegade,-transgressed all the norms of Spanish society. So Guzman's bastard status fails to define an essential or even specific ethnic, social or economic category. His is, instead, an status, one that encompasses all the dubious circumstances of the `other' (100). In a Spain beset with racial and religious, and other anxieties, the overdetermined discourse ... points to the picaro as the expiatory element in the narrative, as the scapegoat that must be sacrificed to safeguard the nationstate (106). This is interesting speculation; it presupposes knowledge of the subject position of readers, their response to the protagonist's strategies of survival, and their attitude to the real world of the poor and the vagrants. Aleman was close to Dr Perez de Herrera and other proponents of organized relief. After a century of debate, little had been achieved, and his frustration is evident in a letter to Herrera and in his novel. What did the readers of novels know about those high level discussions? How many saw poverty as a fact of Nature and shared the common prejudice that beggars were either lazy or criminal? Cruz's book focusses with great thoroughness on the activists; it does not acknowledge inertia in the shared world of readers. …

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