Abstract
The chapter examines the idea of the individual as the normative subject of modernity, in a reading of Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (1816). It traces the novel’s invention of the Mexican individual to Rousseau’s view of the mind and education, but more radically to Christianity and monarchical absolutism. Sharman highlights Lizardi’s picaresque critique of the idle noble as a cypher for the Hispanic world’s failures of political economy. He identifies as the pivotal egalitarian gesture the shift in understanding from nobility as birth to nobility as quality. This permits the novel’s revalorisation of Indians, foreigners, slaves, and the mechanical trades. Sharman shows that, even if individual equality is trumped by the “natural” hierarchies demanded by political economy, the Hispanic Enlightenment’s “moderate” reforms are haunted by “radical” philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Astigarraga (2015).
- 2.
- 3.
See Herman (2002). Chapter 12 is called “Practical Matters: Scots in Science and Industry.”
- 4.
This is where I diverge from Lynch’s (2001) otherwise valuable work. He writes that the “Spanish version of the Enlightenment purged it of ideology and reduced it to a programme of modernisation within the established order” (p. 117). I would say that the programme of modernisation was the ideology.
- 5.
- 6.
For a fuller commentary on El Pensador Mexicano and on Lizardi’s periods of imprisonment, see Spell’s “The Life of Fernández de Lizardi” and “Lizardi as a Pamphleteer,” republished in Spell (1971, pp. 99–141, 247–261). For further background information on Lizardi and good commentaries on all his novels, see Vogeley (2001, 2004).
- 7.
The pamphlet is Cincuenta preguntas á quien quiera responderlas (Fernández de Lizardi 1821). Many of Lizardi’s publications are available online. See the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/fernandez_lizardi/ and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México at http://www.iifilologicas.unam.mx/obralizardi/#. For a heavily satirical comment on the Conquest and Mexican celebrations of it, see Fernández de Lizardi 1822b.
- 8.
See the opening chapter. As Pedro says: “va larga la lista” (p. 12).
- 9.
On Lizardi’s excommunication and its dire consequences, see Spell (1971, pp. 127–136).
- 10.
See Kicza (1982, pp. 429, 438, 448).
- 11.
This paragraph relies entirely on Martínez (2008).
- 12.
On the subject of virtue, particularly in Rousseau, I have benefited from conversations with my colleague Judith Still.
- 13.
See Entin (2013, p. 21) on late eighteenth-century Enlightenment patriotism as a “republicanismo católico,” an “amalgama entre valores republicanos clásicos y moral católica.” See Lomé (2013) in the same collection on the recovery of Antiquity that seized Europe and the North American colonies in the second half of the eighteenth century.
- 14.
Fernández de Lizardi (1987, p. 25). All unattributed page numbers will henceforth be to the novel.
- 15.
Shortly after his return to Mexico, Pedro takes lodgings in a street called Don Juan Manuel.
- 16.
The numbering of the book’s chapters is unusual. Without clearly indicating as much, the novel is divided into three parts, each part beginning with a Chapter I.
- 17.
In the later novel, La educación de las mujeres, ó, La Quijotita y su prima, Lizardi (Fernández de Lizardi 1897) deals with the education and upbringing of women, beginning once more with the issue of the feeding and care of babies. Baby girls are brought up in adjoining homes with a communicating door. One, Pomposa, is handed over to aunts and wet nurses as soon as she is born, is subsequently entrusted, with criminal abandono, to an inexperienced pilmama (a nanny, who accidentally drops her off a balcony) and goes on to be a vain and superficial woman; the other, Pudenciana, is tenderly breastfed by her mother, who keeps her with her for as long as possible, and goes on to be an intelligent, rounded woman. So we do not miss the point, the first chapter also tells of a woman who suckles two puppies in order to get rid of excess milk, while her three-month old child lies hungry on the floor, the chichi (chichagua, wet nurse) having left them the night before. Chapters III and IV embark on an entire discourse on women’s physical inferiority but spiritual equality, though according to the colonel who does the talking women’s merits derive principally from their role as mothers.
- 18.
One of the prominent Spanish voices against custom, habit, and tradition, specifically those of the pueblo , is that of Feijóo. See the essay “Voz del pueblo” (Feijóo 1923, pp. 93–121).
- 19.
Excusing his grotesquely ignorant explanation of comets, Pedro says it came from “las viejas y cocineras de mi casa.” The priest’s reply is that he is not the first “que mama con la primera leche semejantes absurdos” (p. 49).
- 20.
A little over halfway through the novel, Pedro is tricked by certain individuals, whom he groups together as the gentuza. Rare is the man without education who is not “vicioso y relajado” (p. 195). It is Aguilucho who fires back the lesson a few pages later: “esa dulzura e idiotismo que adviertes en los indios, mulatos y demás castas, no es por defecto de su entendimiento, sino por su ninguna cultura y educación. Ya habrás visto que muchos de esos mismos que no saben hablar, hacen mil curiosidades con las manos, como son cajitas, escribanías, monitos, matraquitas, y tanto cachivache que atrae la fición de los muchachos y aun de los que no lo son.” What they make with their hands sells for a good price. Which proves that they have more ability (talento) than you credit them with. “Pues de la misma manera debes considerar que, si los dedicaran a los estudios, y su trato ordinario fuera con gente civilizada, sabrían muchos de ellos tanto como el que más, y serían capaces de lucir entre los doctos no obstante la opacidad de su color” (pp. 196–197).
- 21.
- 22.
See Portillo Valdés (2000, p. 88).
- 23.
See Guerra (2009, p. 120).
- 24.
Siedentop (2015, pp. 54–152).
- 25.
See Habermas (1999, p. 36).
- 26.
See Part II, Chapter XV, p. 333 for the disparaging discourse on the egoísta.
- 27.
The father restates his position in Chapter IX: “Es una verdad que se introduce sin violencia dentro de nuestros corazones, que no todos podemos todo; pero la lástima es que aunque conocemos su evidencia, la conocemos respecto de los demás, mas no respecto de nosotros mismos” (p. 67).
- 28.
According to Greek myth, as punishment for an inadvertent murder, Hercules was ordered to serve as a slave to Omphale for one year. Hence the (comic) theme of the inversion of sexual roles.
- 29.
The Editorial Porrúa edition provides an editorial footnote defining the lépero: “Pillo, zaragate” [rascal, rogue, malevolent person] (p. 76).
- 30.
“Ya veis, pues, queridos míos, cómo ni los oficios ni la pobreza envilecen al hombre, ni le son estorbo para obtener los más brillantes puestos y dignidades, cuando él sabe merecerlos con su virtud o sus letras” (p. 123).
- 31.
The novel is obsessed with clothes, or more precisely, with the idea that clothes are not the sure-fire sign of the merits of the person within.
- 32.
Spell (1971, p. 253) notes that this was a quarter of a century before Uncle Tom’s Cabin “roused the abolitionists” in the United States.
- 33.
The metaphor of the seed was used earlier on, when Pedro rehearses the familiar idea that qualities, or good qualities, are of no use unless they are “cultivated.” “¿Qué, con que la tierra sea fértil, si la semilla que en ella se siembra es de cizaña?” (p. 193).
- 34.
The theme of premature burials is, as Spell (1971, p. 146) notes, shared with Feijóo.
- 35.
I am grateful to my colleague, Stephen Roberts, for pointing this out.
- 36.
- 37.
Naughty children and pícaros pick up such books to amuse themselves but unexpectedly imbibe “una porción de máximas morales que jamás hubieran leído en un estilo serio y sentencioso.” These books are like “las píldoras que se doran por encima para que se haga más pasadera la triaca saludable que contienen” (p. 463). Books on morality only teach via the ear (por los oídos), and thus get forgotten, while entertaining books instruct via the ear and the eye (por los oídos y por los ojos). They portray (pintan) man as he is and paint the ravages of vice and the rewards of virtue in everyday occurrences. When we read such things, we think we are looking at them, and thus retain them in our memory and benefit from their teaching (instrucción) (p. 464).
- 38.
This “truth” is spelt out by the colonel, in a lengthy discourse in Part II, Chapter XV prompted by the sorry tale of the egoist, it being understood that the egoist represents the opposite of the good of the patria . Scholars have “proved” that wealth does not lie in la plata (literally, “silver”; figuratively, “money”) but rather in “las producciones de la tierra, en la industria y en el trabajo de sus habitantes.” If happiness and abundance do not come from el campo (the countryside, i.e. from agriculture), a wise Englishman (or was it a Scot?) says (dice un sabio inglés), “es en vano esperarla de otra parte.” Many nations, he continues, have been and are rich without owning a single gold or silver mine. The Americas, which have chosen the extractive route, are in a “deplorable” state (p. 337).
- 39.
The priest who rumbles Pedro early on is the one who in Chapter VII provides one such list of authorities, on physics and natural history: works by Para, Nollet, Almeida, Brisson, Pluche, and Buffon (p. 50).
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Sharman, A. (2020). Literature: The Idle Noble and the Noble Citizen: El periquillo sarniento and the Invention of the Mexican Individual. In: Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37019-0_6
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