Autobiography as Burla in the Guzmán de Alfarache

Nina Cox Davis

1991
ISBN 0838752217

This book examines the portrayal of self in the autobiographical narrative of Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, Spain's first picaresque novel, by analyzing the communication through which the subject is made to represent society and to define his existence within it. This study concludes that the terms for critical reevaluation of the novel's relationship to other narratives of the Spanish picaresque lie in its discursive burlas and the ambiguous assessment made in Alemán's text of the implications of their communication for society. Davis suggests that later picaresque novels demonstrate an increasing tendency to diminish the trickster figure's narrative authority by portraying him or her as a court buffoon, clearly separating and ranking the voices of character and real author and, in many cases, by denying the pícaro linguistic self-representation as an autobiographer whose words, though fully fictive, may threaten the society that reads them.

About the author:

Nina Cox Davis is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis.