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Universality and Unity in the Lazarillo De Tormes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Norma Louise Hutman
Norma Louise Hutman*
Affiliation:
Wilson College, Chambersburg, Penn.
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Extract

The qualities of universality and unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes are interrelated factors through which the reader perceives and reacts to the reality presented although he does not identify himself in any way with the characters and scenes. This perception and reaction depend primarily upon three aspects of the novel: (1) the visualizing element, (2) multiple levels of humor, and (3) the unified concept of the total experience of a human being. Obviously the unknown author of the Lazarillo did not invent these characteristics, but rather fused qualities present in various literary types of his age. We shall be concerned here not with the relation of each aspect to a larger literary tradition, but with the manner in which each is utilized in the novel itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 5 , December 1961 , pp. 469 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 469 Angel Valbuena y Prat (ed.), La Novela Picaresca Española (Madrid: Aguilar, 1956). All quotations from the Lazarillo are taken from this edition of the text. All italics in quotations from the text are mine.

Note 2 in page 470 “Lazarillo and the Pardoner: The Artistic Necessity of the Fifth Tractado,” HR, xxvii (July 1959), 267–279.

Note 3 in page 470 Punning was, of course, one of the most common stylistic traits of the sixteenth century. Thus the verbal ingenuity of the Lazarillo, in addition to its particular function in the novel, is symptomatic of this contemporary tendency.

Note 4 in page 471 Frank W. Chandler, Romances of Roguery (New York: Macmillan, 1899), p. 202.

Note 6 in page 471 “Literary and Artistic Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes,” PMLA, xii (June 1927), 404–421.

Note 6 in page 471 “La disposición temporal del Lazarillo de Tormes,” HR, xxv (Oct. 1957), 271.