The Critic as Witness for the Prosecution: Making the Case against Lazaro de Tormes

Abstract

La vida de Lazarillo de Tonnes is a coherent and fully realized fiction. Its eccentric shape is craftily designed by its autobiographical narrator to serve his current needs by swelling the narration of his early years while masking the recent “Toledo Years” with wit, expedient renaming, and ellipses. By this apparently generous and certainly amusing “recontextualization” of his current involvement in a scandalous ménage-à-trois the narrator seeks to attenuate his culpability: his corruption merely represents Toledo's and his society's generally. The puzzling short chapters (iv-vii) are coded allusively to deceive innocent readers and amuse malicious readers in Lázaro's Toledo; these chapters are as detailed as they can and need be. The narrator exercises a freer hand in setting down his version of long-ago and far-away Salamanca; Lázaro exploits this advantage in the four fifths of the narrative that comprises Chapters i-iii.