Anne J. Cruz. Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain.

Buffalo and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. xvii + 297 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-8020-4439-5.

This book attempts to answer one overarching question: why was the genre of the picaresque novel so popular in Golden Age Spain? The combination of attraction and repulsion exerted by this genre upon its readers is described by this author as a paradox: "While the genre fulfilled at least one of the enlightened reader's needs--the articulation and attempted resolution of pressing social problems--it must also have satisfied other, repressed desires by the majority of the public" (111). The thesis of the book is actually stated most succinctly in the third chapter: roughly, that picaresque novels formed a part of the cultural dialogue on poverty and participated in debates normally reserved for moral treatises. Furthermore, Cruz states that the ambiguity of the picaresque narratives often conceals their message; in this sense, her work shares a common goal with psychoanalytical criticism in that it seeks to fill in the blanks left open by this elusive genre.

The book consists of five chapters plus an introduction. The first chapter, "Charity, Poverty, and Liminality in the Lazarillo," uses Lazarillo de Tormes as a case study to make the convincing argument that Picaros took the place of medieval lepers as socially liminal figures in the Renaissance. The second chapter is largely a review of archival documents and early modern printed treatises on social questions surrounding poverty and outcast social groups. The third chapter, "The Picaresque as Pharmakos," uses a Derridian framework to examine Mateo Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache. The fourth chapter, "Textualizing the Other's Body," uses Bakhtin and others to explicate Quevedo's scatalogical Buscon as well as the equation of female picaras with prostitutes. The fifth chapter, "From Picaro to Soldier," shows how the military was another outlet for social refuse in Golden Age Spain.

Privileging social relevance over aesthetic concerns, Cruz's approach is ultimately anti-structuralist and even anti-new critical in focus. Although she never mentions the term "New Historicism," this critical movement is the ever-hovering phantom lurking beneath the surface of her text. She mingles actual soldiers' autobiographies with fictional picaresque narratives to the point that the boundaries between history and literature become very blurry indeed. It is always difficult to integrate archival research with literary criticism, but this author does a far-above-average job with this complicated task. She lives up to the calling of the New Historicism by doing the ditty archival work some of its proponents are unwilling to do.

Although the topic of this book is fairly specialized, the author touches on issues of concern to all scholars of the Renaissance, such as reader-response theory, categories of reading groups and literacy, and the proliferation of prologues as a means to control readers. Cruz also "opens up" the picaresque genre in new and surprising ways to include works not normally treated in this context, such as Rojas' Celestina and nonfictional soldiers' autobiographies.

The most appealing aspect of the book is its incorporation of relevant literary theory. Foucault is a constant presence throughout, although Derrida and Girard vie for dominance of chapter 3; unfortunately, the implied relationship between the pharmakon and the scapegoat is never made explicit. Chapter 4 is a rather diffuse assortment of many theorists, including Foucault, Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Derrida. On the whole, Cruz's study is a little uneven in its degree of successful integration of theory in terms of chronological compatibility. The use of Foucault seems strained in its insistence that sixteenth-century Spain was equivalent to Enlightenment France. The use of Bakhtin is more nuanced, as the author recognizes explicitly that "[h]owever much we may wish to read the two antithetical worlds as forming a continuous whole, we must take into account that Quevedo did not belong to Rabelais' century" (124).

The lack of any sort of conclusion makes for a rather abrupt ending. What are we to make of the plight of these marginalized Others, so eloquently given a voice centuries later by a critic sensitive enough to read these picaresque narratives and hear what they're not saying? Should we all go out and join Habitat for Humanity? Ultimately I am tempted to ask of this book more than I usually ask of scholarly studies: is it as socially engaged as it might have been? Buried in the middle of the book, at the end of the third chapter, is the sentence Cruz should have used to end this masterful survey: "We postmodern critics may opt either to distance ourselves from and dismiss the social problems engaged by the picaresque novel through the picaro's buffoonish acts, or to acknowledge and acquiesce to its social purpose" (115). Perhaps afraid of straying too far outside the Ivory Tower, Cruz denies to her book elsewhere any mention of the relevance it holds for our world's society. A recent issue of Newsweek contains an opinion piece titled "Charity Means You Don't Pick and Choose" (23 December 2002: 13). Its subtitle asks, "I know the arguments against giving handouts, but who am I to decide who deserves kindness?" These are the same questions as the ones being asked by Golden Age clerics, moralists, government officials, and picaresque novelists. More so perhaps than ever before, these stories have something to teach us today.

HILAIRE KALLENDORF

Texas A&M University