(An old paper from my Utah days, posted in hopes of rectifying the incorrigible moralistic reading of a novel that is obviously anything but.)
Francisco
de Quevedo’s 1626 picaresque novel El
Buscon (The Swindler) famously ends with the line,
I
thought things would go better in the New World and another country.
But they went worse, as they always will for anybody who thinks he
only has to move his dwelling without changing his life or ways, as
Your Honor will see in the Second Part.
(Quevedo 197)
The
protagonist Pablos, after a narrative full of swindles and crimes, finishes with this out-of-nowhere decicion to acknowledge the error of his ways and hold his
life up as a moral model for readers to avoid.
It’s a sudden tonal shift incongruent with the rest of the novel,
and one that is never followed through with the promise Second Part.
As Dale B.J.
Randall comments, “The tale closes with a moral tag which, though
more or less obligatory for the picaresque genre, is none the less
out of place” (Randall 101-2). For nothing precedes this moral tag; the line feels appended as an
afterthought.
But more than just an odd appendage, that final line also reframes the entire preceding novel: the
slap-stick, amoral tenor of the rest of the story is undermined
by this sudden didactic ending. But that's only if you actually believe our little swindler at this last moment: I propose the oft-controversial last line is actually a continuation of
the swindles that Pablos has performed throughout the novel,
including, even especially, on the reader.
The last line becomes, then, the final swindle of Quevedo’s
Buscon.
This
final swindle does not exist in isolation; it is foreshadowed at the
beginning of the final chapter, wherein Pablos teaches his readers how to avoid card
tricks:
Don’t
think, my friends, that you’ll be safe if you use your own pack of
cards, because they’ll swap it as quickly as you can blink.
Watch out for cards which feel rough or scratched, because that’s
how they feel the suits.
If you’re a kitchen-hand, friend, you’d better know that in the
stables and kitchens they use a pin to prick cards, or bend them so
that they can recognize the suits.
If you like playing with better-off people, watch out for cards
which were actually conceived in sin at the printer’s and have
watermarks in them for their owner’s own benefit.
Don’t trust a clean card because even the best washed one is dirty
for a player who’s got good eyes and a good memory.
(Quevedo 193)
This
passage is significant in that Pablos has for once broken from the
main narrative, no longer reminiscing but speaking to the reader in
the present tense, long after the events of the narration have
concluded.
In fact, the only other time when Pablos breaks the retrospective
narration to directly address the reader is the final line, and the
two passages’ tones couldn’t be more different.
The above passage isn’t the words of a moralizer, but rather the
words of a card shark explaining how to play with other card sharks.
He is not teaching how to avoid the swindler’s life but how to
participate in it.
Given then that, chronologically speaking, the speaker of this
passage is contemporaneous with the speaker of the final line (even
bookending the same chapter), the finishing speaker must have either
completely repented within the space of one chapter, or remains this
unrepentant card shark.
The textual evidence weighs in favor of the latter given that the
above passage finishes with a warning to “not trust a clean card;”
thus, one must therefore assume that the “clean card” that
finishes the novel is the final swindle warned about. The reader who
therefore mistakes the final “clean card” for anything but
another swindle has neither “good eyes” nor a “good memory”
for the beginning of the chapter.
“The best washed card becomes
dirty,” just as the final moral tag becomes dirty in the buscon’s hands. One
who takes the closing line at face value becomes the very victim that
Pablos warns against being.
The
reader who interprets Pablos’ lines literally is like the Galician
servant girl who, hearing Pablos the playwright compose the lines
“Watch out for the bear, the bear” (Quevedo 188), promptly
panics, tips the pot, breaks all the plates, and tells everyone a
bear is tearing someone apart upstairs.
Soon the entire neighborhood is in his room, and Pablos reflects
with some chagrin, “Even when I explained how stupid the girl had
been and what had actually happened, they still refused to believe
me. I didn’t eat at all that day” (Quevedo 188).
The naïve reader who takes words, like cards, at face value is not
only as stupid as the Galician girl, but as foolish as the entire
neighborhood that believes her.
Also significant is that Pablos is here misunderstood specifically
while composing lines of fiction, a fiction he is once again
composing at the end of the novel.
A dramatist’s bear should not be confused for a real bear, nor
should a swindler’s moralistic ending be confused for a real one.
Naïve
readers populate the pages of El
Buscon, and if there’s any set of
lives set up as warnings (moral or otherwise) to the reader, it’s
these characters.
For example, a lunatic fencing instructor that Pablos meets early
on, in defense of his laughable fencing skills he learned in a book,
maintains that “It’s in the book, it has the King’s permission
to be printed and I’ll maintain it’s true” (Quevedo 107). Our equivalent sentiment “they couldn’t print it if it wasn’t
true” is as laughable today as it was in Quevedo’s time, and the
implication is that anyone who accepts as truth whatever is written, is as crazy as this lunatic fencing
with soup ladles.
Whichever book the lunatic cited was no truer for having the King’s
permission to be printed than is the fictional narrative of El
Buscon, which would have also
required, in 1626, to have the King’s official permission to be
printed.
Pablos here is hinting that to believe every written word
is just as naive--and dangerou--as challenging a large, scarred mulatto to a
fencing match, as the lunatic ladle-fencer does.
The
folly of naïve reading is a lesson that Pablos himself learned the
hard way, when the priests who swindle Pablos and Don Diego out of
food and money ask Pablos if he is servant to a gentleman.
Pablos reports, “I thought they meant everything they said so I
said that I was, and so was the other lad” (Quevedo 82).
Needless to say, soon after he and Diego are swindled, Pablos learns
not to believe everything someone says. If there’s any actual
moral offered by Pablos’ life, it’s that one should never believe
that anyone means everything one says, least of all from him, and
especially not when he suddenly acts “clean” in his moralizing
final line. For
if supposedly “clean” Priests cannot be trusted, a buscon
like Pablos certainly cannot.
But
this final swindle is foreshadowed even earlier: in Book 2 Chapter 5,
Pablos is climbing across a rooftop in the night to sneak into the
room of a woman he’s tricked into thinking he is a nobleman, to get
her money.
Unfortunately he slips and falls through the roof of a lawyer, “and,
as lawyers are always on the lookout for thieves, they thought I was
one” (Quevedo 163).
The lawyer and his household tie him up right before the eyes of his
lover as he protests, but she, far from helping him, “thought I’d
fallen on purpose as a sort of performance for her benefit”
(Quevedo 163).
The irony, of course, is this fall is the one time he is not
performing for her, and is the one
time he is not acting
as a thief. But as comical as her misinterpretation is, we as
readers are in the same position; we think Pablos is performing when
he’s not, and more importantly, we think he’s sincere when he’s
pulling a swindle on all of us, such as with the last line.
The novel’s final line, in this context, is no more sincere than
Pablos’s protestations of love; naïve readers may have been the
bane of Pablos’ existence earlier, but as he improves at his
swindling skills, he is able to turn their naivete to his advantage.
But
besides the warning about naïve readership, there is something else
to be gleaned from Pablos’ debacle on the lawyer’s roof, namely,
the fact that Pablos is continually punished for the wrong crime,
never for what he deserves to be punished for, thus subverting the
role of Providential retribution that would have allowed the
moralizing ending to function. For example, in Book 2 Chapter 8, he
is counting out the money he owes his landlady, a notorious prostitute, when, “as I was giving it to her, it was just my
bad luck, as always, that they came to arrest her for offences
against public morals” (Quevedo 180).
The police who arrest her assume that Pablos is her “fancy-man,”
or pimp, and proceed to give him a beating.
Pablos was certainly guilty of near countless swindles up to this
point, but being a mistress’s “fancy-man”, at least, was not
one of them.
The most egregious example, however, occurs immediately before,
when Don Diego tricks Pablos into wearing his cloak to alert Diego’s
own thugs to beat him.
But, reports Pablos,
no
sooner had I left him, wearing his cloak, than it was just my bad
luck that a couple of fellows who wanted to beat [Don Diego] up over
a woman, ran up and rained blows on me with clubs. (Quevedo 177)
Before
Don Diego could punish Pablos for being a liar, Pablos was beaten for
something that Don Diego did, not him.
Nevertheless, Pablos does not rail against the injustice of his
beating, but instead tries to figure out which deserved beating he is
finally receiving:
I
didn’t know who had attacked me, though from what I reckoned it
might be the landlord I hadn’t paid…or the jailer I tricked, or
my companions who had disappeared. In fact I expected to be knifed
by so many people that I didn’t know who to blame it on.
(Quevedo 177)
Pablos’
beating is undeserved, but it might as well have been deserved. In
fact, in a perverse sort of way, the proper role of fate, or karma,
or divine providence, what have you, has been supplanted by sheer
dumb luck, and has performed its office just as effectively.
Taken together, these events add up to a collective swindle on the
reader’s expectations, wherein the role of divine
retribution is substituted for a string of random events that fail to
mete out a satisfying poetic justice, even when the protagonist is
still over all punished. Quevedo undermines at every possible opportunity the possibility for a
moralizing example by substituting divine justice for mere chance,
making the final line all the more out of place.
This
discrepancy between the imagination’s expectations and actual cause
and effect is discussed by Northrop Frye, who writes in The
Secular Scripture,
The
long-standing association between the worlds of imagination and fancy
may suggest that the imaginative, by itself, tends to be fantastic or
fanciful.
But actually, what the imagination, left to itself, produces is the
rigidly conventionalized.
(Frye 36)
According
to Frye, what the imagination expects is not the fanciful, but rather
a unified structure; for Frye, one of the imagination’s
“functions…is to present an illusion of logic and causality”
(Frye 48).
Pablos himself spends much of the initial narrative believing in the
illusion of reality’s logic and causality, as he attempts to become
a gentleman first by accompanying Don Diego to school, and then by
trying to scam his way into the aristocracy, imagining at every stage
that if he follows certain prescribed steps, then he will attain
respectability.
But, as T.E. May said about El
Buscon, “here is uncovered the
fundamental problem, which has little to do with mere scruples. What
must come in some way into question…is the imagination itself”
(May 320).
The imagination itself is the problem; Pablos keeps expecting
reality to conform to the rigid logic of his own imagination, but his
imagined expectations are thwarted by the messiness and random
happenstance of dumb chance; in other words, Pablos’ imagination
has been swindled by reality.
He has been a naïve reader of reality, but Pablos, once again,
turns this naivety to his advantage. Thus, he likewise swindles the
imagination of his readers; he abandons the rigid conventionality of
both imagination and society, and instead embraces “the conception
of human life itself as much more a series of ‘and thens’ than a
continuous narrative” (Frye 52).
Thus, at every stage of his narrative Pablos excises any possibility of the
poetic justice inherent in Romance, swindling the imagination’s
expectations at every opportunity. Having thus violated his
audience’s imagination’s expectations, the only swindle left for
Pablos to pull is to suddenly shoe-horn in a moralizing final line
that conforms to the rigid convention that he has spent so much of
the novel dispelling.
The reader who still believes this conventionalized ending after
such a thoroughly anti-conventional text is as swindled in one’s
expectations as Pablos often was in his own.
But
Pablos doesn’t just violate Romance’s rigid conventionality, but
also Romance’s representational tendencies. Frye also states that
“the romantic tendency is antirepresentational” (Frye 38), which
is a relevant statement considering that if there’s one thing that
Pablos does consistently, it’s represent himself as something he is
not.
To represent, by definition, means to substitute a true thing for
something else, which is not only what Pablos spends most the text
doing, but is also a fair description for how Pablos, in his
narrative, has substituted divine providence for dumb luck.
Pablos even explicitly declares his allegiance to the substitute
for Providence when he declares, “I became a follower of
AntiChrist, which is the same as saying I began to chat up nuns”
(Quevedo 189).
In this particular context, he has substituted nuns with vows of
chastity for nuns who only appear to
be chaste; more generally, he substitutes the sacred for a profane
which only appears sacred.
Pablos’ swindles parody Christianity itself.
Not
only does Pablos parody Christianity, but in fact he himself becomes
the parody himself; he becomes the substitution.
As Dunn observes quoting T.E.
May,
The
student’s derisive ‘This Lazarus is ready for resurrection, to
judge by the stink’…when he appears among them; Pablos’
inexplicable falling asleep in the middle of the day and his being
awakened by Don Diego’s voice saying ‘This is another life’…These
details form part of a whole sequence of unmotivated suffering and
humiliation.
Putting all this together, May sees a deliberate travesty of the
mockery and crucifixion of Christ not, of course, so as to ridicule
the Christian story, but in order to measure the inadequacy of
Pablos.
(Dunn 72)
In
other words, Pablos becomes himself the profane substitute for Christ
himself. In fact, Pablos himself explicitly measures his own
inadequacy against Christ when he pleads, to his beaters, “Please
don’t, I’m not the Ecco Homo [Christ on the cross], you know” (Quevedo 88).
Pablos is fully cognizant of his status as a substitute for Christ,
and a poor one at that.
Any moralizing he performs, therefore, is but a poor substitute for
the actual moralizing of the Christian religion.
The final moralizing line of the novel, then, is fully
self-conscious of its inadequacy and parody of an authentic moral
tag, and the most delicious last swindle he can therefore pull is to
make the reader think this poor substitute of a moral tag is
authentic, that is, to substitute the sacred for the profane the way
a card shark substitutes a clean card for a dirty one.
Parodying and appropriating sincere language is something that Pablos
already has experience with, from his time as a hack playwright.
Playwrights in general write lines for actors to pretend to recite
sincerely (as Pablos himself often does in non-dramatic situations).
But Pablos not only writes inherently false lines to be recited
sincerely, he specifically writes plays by stealing others’ plays,
“adding some nonsense and removing the good lines” (186).
He is an insincere plagiarist of
insincere recitations. Any play Pablos writes is inherently a parody
of whatever the original writing was.
In fact, Randall believes the final line itself was ripped off.
He writes,
Reared
on the classics as many early readers were, some may well have heard
in Quevedo’s final sentence an echo of the eleventh poem in Book
One of the epistles of Horace.
Toward the end of this poem, which he addresses to his wandering
friend Bullatius, Horace writes…caelum,
non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt
[“skies, not minds, change, that cross
sea currants”].
Bullatius is one who would go sailing to distant lands rather than
rest at home because he is heedless that content, at least for the
man of reason and prudence, lies within.
Between Bullatius and Quevedo’s Pablos an instructive parallel may
be drawn.
(Randall 103)
Randall
sees an instructive parallel in that Pablos, like Bullatius,
continually thinks that if he can merely change his social
circumstance that his lot will finally improve, moralizing about how change comes only from within.
The implication is that if Pablos would just mend his wicked ways,
he would finally improve his situation.
Such a comparison ignores the text, which finds Pablos turning into
a swindler only after his
attempts to improve himself are rebuffed by a hypocritical society;
remember that Pablos begins the novel disavowing his wicked family
and following Don Diego to school to receive a better education.
He even goes in the capacity of a servant, thus conforming to the
dominant power structure, a conformity he assumes will get him
accepted by same power structure. He is by all accounts
honestly trying to better himself, and only turns buscon
when acting good fails to make him
good.
This Bullatius/Pablos comparison assumes the fallacy of a reality
governed by logic and causality, wherein if one becomes good, then by
logical causation, his lot will improve; this is a reality both Pablos and the text reject as inaccurate.
Rather
than see the final line as an instructive parallel to a classical
text, I see the final line as yet another example of Pablos the
hack-playwright’s wholesale theft of others’ writings.
If Randall is right, and
Quevedo’s readers recognized the final line as an allusion to
Horace, then Pablos here is merely demonstrating his skills once more
as a literary thief.
Also significant is the fact that he only quits writing and calls
being a playwright “that wicked profession” (Quevedo 188) after
he’s made his money and someone
else is arrested.
In other words, he only calls his writing wicked once he’s gotten
away with the money scot free.
It is the same with the final line; Pablos, far from lamenting his
wicked life with that final line, is actually diverting attention
from himself while he gets away scot free with the money.
That final line is his last sleight of hand and misdirection, his
final swindle, not just for the fun of getting one over the audience,
but as a way to get away with the money without suspicion.
I
am aware that my positing that the sleight of hand by which Pablos
gets away successfully runs counter to the traditional critical
reading of Quevedo’s El Buscon as
“the satiric means by which the self-consciously aristocratic
author continues to persecute an upstart who had ideas of rising
above his station” (Dunn 72). Quevedo does indeed subject his
protagonist to almost sadistic levels of punishment; and Quevedo was
in fact a thorough conservative proud of his “pure” northern
Christian racial heritage, intolerant and disdainful of young upstart
“New Christians,” converts, rich merchants, and especially Jews,
all of which he blamed for subverting the fortunes of the old
aristocracy to which he belonged. Certainly Quevedo’s racism and
anti-Semitism are all on full display in El
Buscon, as shown in such spiteful,
off-hand comments as “The owner and landlord was one of those who
believe in God, out of good manners and not sincerely…Of course I’m
not hinting at any impure blood among the aristocracy, oh no!”
(Quevedo 86) (as though impure blood should have any bearing on one’s
faith), and “our cards, like the Jewish Messiah, never came”
(Quevedo 119). Such lines betray the Quevedo behind the Pablos. As
many critics have noted, just such an upstart as Pablos
is precisely the sort of character Quevedo would have demonized and punished as a buscon.
But
then, Quevedo was a critic of the marginalized, but
also of what he saw as the decadence of Spain in general. Clergy and
nobility are treated with no greater respect in the world of El
Buscon than are the crooks and
swindlers. Perhaps, if Quevedo’s biography is to be considered
relevant at all, what the author railed against was how the whole of
Spain is an enabler of such wicked behavior, and that famous final line doubles as a criticism of a Spain that is so naïve that, if they really believe
Pablos did not get away with the money, then perhaps Spain deserves
to be swindled.
I
also base my claim that the final line actually indicates Pablos gets away
rich in part by tracing Pablos’ trajectory as a career criminal.
Throughout most of the novel, Pablos is constantly beaten, knifed,
robbed, ripped off, arrested, humiliated, tricked, and imprisoned;
he’s falling through roofs, being exposed by former friends, and
generally failing at whatever venture he puts his mind to, whether
honest or dishonest.
But he does improve
at swindling, eventually.
By the last couple chapters, Pablos is successfully play-writing,
acting as a beggar, kidnapping children, sleeping with nuns, and
card-sharking, all while evading detection and turning a handsome
profit.
And right at the end of Book 2 Chapter 10, just before his famous
last line, Pablos is even killing the cops and getting away with it.
The text reports:
When
we came to, I realized with astonishment that two men and the
sergeant had been killed or had run away from our wretched little
mob.
We had a good time in the Cathedral because, at the smell of
criminals on the run, came plenty of whores, who stripped to cover
our nakedness.
(Quevedo 196)
Whereas
earlier in the novel Pablos was being summarily rounded up and
arrested by cops “where our status as gentlemen was not respected”
(Quevedo 152), and then having to bribe his way out of the jail cell
with the latrine, here Pablos is brazen enough to murder the police
who threaten him.
Not only does this action not take him to the gallows (which, given
his disavowed uncle’s status as a hangman, would have possessed a
certain poetic symmetry), but he escapes to the cathedral and is
visited by whores aplenty, and then again escapes to the West Indies.
Getting away with murder and prostitution are hardly the laments of
a repentant, failed criminal.
All
of which brings us back to the end. The contrast between these clean
get-aways and the final line make the moral tag all the more out of
place, and we should justly be suspicious of it, given the swindler
who recites it.
In contrast to Peter Dunn, who writes that Pablos’s account
“represented his inability to escape, and the futility of his life”
(Dunn 69), it is Pablos who indeed has the last laugh.
He has escaped to the New World with his stolen goods and rap sheet
a mile long, and the reader is left on the shore, waiting in vain for
the promised comeuppance in Part Two, neither of which ever come.
I of course cannot read Quevedo’s mind, but I can’t help but
conjecture that he never even intended to write a Second Part, that
he intended Pablos’ final swindle to be on the very reader’s
expectations, one last sleight of hand and misdirection, to cause the
reader moral introspection so that, as you look within yourself, you
don’t see Pablos sneaking away with your wallet.
The perfect swindle is the
swindle the victim doesn’t even realize, and in that sense, the
last line is not only Pablos’ final swindle but also his most
successful, the perfect apex to his career arc as a criminal.
Works Cited
Dunn,
Peter N. “Quevedo’s Pablos, El
Buscon” The
Spanish Picaresque Novel.
Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1979.
Frye,
Northrop. “The Context of Romance.” The
Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.
May,
T.E. “Good and Evil in the ‘Buscon’: A Survey” The
Modern Language Review 45.3
(1950): 319-335.
Quevedo,
Francisco de. “The Swindler.” Lazarillo
de Tormes and The Swindler: Two
Spanish
Picaresque Novels. New York: Penguin
Books, 2003.
Randall,
Dale B.J. “The Classical Ending of Quevedo’s Buscon” Hispanic
Review. 32.2
(1964): 101-108.
