Beverley Lazarillo Accumulation

Midwest Modern Language Association
"Lazarillo" and Primitive Accumulation: Spain, Capitalism and the Modern Novel
Author(s): John Beverley
Source: The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring,
1982), pp. 29-42
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association
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Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation:
Spain, Capitalism and the Modern Novel

John Beverley
My title specifies the modern novel, not the novel or narrative in general.
Yet it should be made evident that I mean more exactly the bourgeois novel.
Novels have been produced in many times and places: for example, in feudal
China and Japan, Hellenic Greece, the courts of the Muslim Caliphates, and late
Roman society. We also recognize today that a novel is not all that different
from the myths and fables of tribal or communal societies-i.e., a "good story"-
and that under late capitalism its functions are being absorbed by film and tele-
vision. By modem or bourgeois novel, then, I mean a particular kind of develop-
ment of the novel and a particular way of composing, disseminating and ab-
sorbing this form that makes its appearance in sixteenth-century Europe: the
printed book sold on the market as a quantum of what we have come to call
"reading pleasure." Although partisans of other national literatures may wish
to contest the claim, I take a small volume published anonymously in Spain in
I554, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de susfortunas y adversidades, as the parent of
the species. Those of you who have not read the Lazarillo may at least have heard
it mentioned as the model for the picaresque novel. Nevertheless, I am also
arguing that it is the first literary object in which there appear the constituent
elements of that endlessly repeated phenomenon that is our stock in trade as
literary critics. It is the first modern novel.
The modern novel-unlike oral epic or fable, or, for that matter, the sort of
aristocratic Bildungsroman represented by the Tale of Genjii or Byzantine ro-
mance-is a commodity publicly offered and purchased. Like any other com-
modity it has both a use value-"reading pleasure," edification, token of the
owner's culture-and an exchange value, a quantitative expression of the rela-
tion in which it stands to all other commodities. As such, it implies a society in
which market exchange of commodities is, or is beginning to be, the dominant
form of human interrelationship. Writing, printing, and merchandizing novels
are moneymaking activities in capitalist societies; the printing press that permits
the serial mechanical reproduction of a written text is one of the first forms of
mass production of commodities. Yet "the exchange of commodities is evidently
an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value," Marx argued in Capi-
tal: "As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as ex-
change values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not con-
tain an atom of use value." This is what permits the paradox that a copy, say,
of Don Quijote might be equivalent in value terms to a thriller, something that
John Beverley 29
Cervantes - an exploited "intellectual worker" if there ever was one - had occa-
sion to ponder more than once. If the commodity could but speak, and act, it
would seem to have the power to generate its own fabulation, to narrate its
fetish character:
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood.
Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in meta-
physical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is
nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that
by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that
those properties are the product of human labor. It is clear as noon, that man, by
his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a
way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered
by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that com-
mon, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is
changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the
ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and
evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than "table-
turning" ever was.1
The peculiar character of the modern novel is that it is this commodity which
speaks, which generates its own fabulation, and which reproduces in the form
of a pleasurable experience the commodification of human life in the era of the
hegemony of capitalist civilization. In his last adventure, Don Quijote visits a
Barcelona factory where books like Don Quijote are printed and bound. That is
the end of Don Quijote, the novel and the hero. Roughly three centuries later,
Mallarme declares in the Paris of the Arcades ("the Arcades are the stations of a
pilgrimage dedicated to commodity fetishism" - Walter Benjamin) that the
world exists to become a book. In this sense, as the young Lukacs proposed in
The Theory of the Novel, the novel is the epic of alienation.
Some of you are familiar with The Theory of the Novel, since it has enjoyed
something of a renaissance lately. Let me recall simply the main lines of its first
part, which attempts to provide a phenomenology of the form of the novel.2
Lukacs begins with the image of a moment when world and soul, meaning and
contingency, are one: "The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire
that burns in the soul is of the same essence as the stars."3 All paths are open.
It is the (imaginary) moment of epic, of classical Greece, Marx's "the normal
childhood of mankind." Yet there is a subsequent moment. In tragedy, the
literary form that corresponds to the consolidation both of the polis and of its
contradictions, essence is portrayed as separated from life. The tragic moment
is that in which the hero vainly demands meaning from hostile or capricious cir-
cumstances and is destroyed. In what Lukacs calls the "purely secular" (or
"roofless") modern world, tragedy as a form can continue to exist, for it does
not presuppose the existence of an equation of desire and circumstance, only
30 Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation
the existence of a drive toward this, of a demand for meaningfulness, an un-
realizable moral imperative. Epic narration, however, is impossible, for the raw
material of life no longer presents itself to narrative as a totality, the immanent
utopia of a union of world and soul, arena and human activity. Only fragments
of epic remain; and these in fact have become episodic and lyrical, even idyllic,
for they presuppose a subject that is chosen only from those materials offered by
its circumstances on which an appearance of meaning can be imposed.
The novel, therefore, assumes the function of epic in modern times. The
form of the novel will be a search, with neither paths nor goals given in ad-
vance. The hero of the novel will be a solitary psychology, as opposed to the
hero of epic whose character and activity signify a collective destiny. In the
fallen world of the novel, which is paradigmatically an urban or suburban world,
nature is alienated and to be apprehended only as fragments of sensation, mood.
Likewise the human world is alienated; it appears to the hero as an external ob-
jectivity that frustrates his desires and demands his conformity. The prototype
of the novel's hero is thus the "outsider": the insane, the criminal, the orphan
or runaway child.
In the novel, the story represents a continuing, and continually deferred,
process of reconciliation. That is why the novel is sometimes felt to be a doubt-
ful or imperfect form, because in it aesthetic problems are never pure but always
contingent on ethical ones. "The completeness of the novel's world," notes Lu-
kacs, "is an imperfection, and if subjectively experienced it amounts to resigna-
tion."4 Since the form of the novel always has its starting point in an alienated
subjectivity that embraces character, narrator and reader simultaneously, its
inner form is what Lukics calls romantic irony, a mode in which the subjectivity
of the author is indicated in the internal shaping and constructing forces of the
narration itself. Its external form is that of the biography: the life of the prob-
lematic individual who has to find himself, to prove his soul against and in an
inadequate world-something he can never really accomplish without submit-
ting to degradation or destruction, a loss of innocence. Thus the real subject of
the novel is the act of novelistic creation itself, which will come to constitute,
both for the novelist and the reader, a way of being in an alienated world: "The
irony of the novel is the self-correction of the world's fragility: inadequate rela-
tions can transform themselves into a fanciful yet well-ordered round of misunder-
standings and cross-purposes . . . within which things appear as isolated and yet
connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it."5 The irony of the novel-
ist is the negative mysticism of a godless age. The ultimate attainable human
freedom is not that of the novel's hero, who must remain unfulfilled, but that
of the novelist and the readers who are drawn into his story.
We may recall at this point Cervantes's remarks in the prologue to Don Qui-
jote:
John Beverley 31
Idle reader, you can believe without any oath of mine that I would wish this book,
as the child of my brain, to be the most beautiful, the liveliest and the cleverest
imaginable. But I have been unable to transgress the order of nature, by which
like gives birth to like. And so, what could my sterile and ill-cultivated genius
beget but the story of a lean, shrivelled, whimsical child, full of varied fancies
that no one else has ever imagined-much like one engendered in prison, where
every discomfort has its seat and every dismal sound its habitation?6
This is a good example of what Lukacs meant by the romantic irony of the novel-
ist applied to his own activity. Cervantes is recalling to himself the anonymous
author who speaks through his character in the prologue of the Lazarillo (all
picaresque novels are pseudoautobiographies):
Pliny says there is no book, however bad it may be, that doesn't have something
good about it, especially as tastes vary and one man's meat is another man's poi-
son ... In this childish little story I confess that I'm no better than my neighbor
and it doesn't worry me that anybody can read my story and enjoy it, if they do,
even if it is written in a crude way.7
Lazarillo really is a "childish little story," just like its hero (Lazarillo: diminu-
tive of Lazaro, or "little Lazarus," raising himself up from poverty and bad luck
rather than from the dead). It is in the form of a simple autobiography, written
for someone-a "Vuestra Merced" or "Your Grace"-in a position to offer the
narrator a better position than the one he has obtained at the end of his account.
Lazaro, if you will, is qualifying himself as a commodity: his story is a sort of
curriculum vitae; his telling of it becomes the latest in a series of acts of picaresque
cunning. Lazaro is proud to be a self made man. He tells Your Grace in the
prologue: "I'd also like people who are proud of being high born to realize
how little this really means, as Fortune has smiled on them, and how much
more worthy are those who have endured misfortune but have triumphed by
dint of hard work and determination." What the narration of his fortunas y ad-
versidades will show is that he has to offer his potential employer the qualities of
adaptation, persistence and ambition. The story tells of a small boy, born poor,
whose father dies in war after being exiled for theft and whose mother, unable
to support him, sends him off as the servant of a blind beggar (colloquially, a la-
zarillo). He works first for this beggar, then for an avaricious village priest, then
for an impoverished hidalgo or gentleman, all the while experiencing enormous
hunger and privation but learning how to "valerse por sf mismo" (literally, "to
give value to one's self"). In a series of subsequent jobs his fortunes begin to
improve. By the end, he has a wife and a home, which are given to him by a
priest, and a position as pregonero, or towncrier. He feels himself to be "at the
height of my good fortune," but his own telling allows the reader-Your Grace-
to see that the wife is the priest's mistress, that Lazarillo is what in Spanish is
called a cabron, a man who permits the infidelity of his wife for profit or advan-
tage. That perhaps explains why he is looking for another job, and why he has
undertaken to tell the story of his life.
If we take Lazarillo as a prototype and extend him through a genealogy that
runs, for example, through Cervantes's knight and squire, Fielding's Tom
Jones, Balzac's Lucien, Dostoevsky's gambler, Twain's Huckleberry, Joyce's
Stephen, the ubiquitous "stranger" of the existentialist novel, or "Joe of Pater-
son" in Doctorow's Loon Lake (to mention a recent best seller), we will have
little problem in assenting to Lukics's vision of the novel. Yet why is it the
case that the hero of the novel is a solitary and alienated soul? What compels
him to search for authentic value in a worthless or counterfeit world? And
how is this connected to the claim that the novel is a doubtful or problematic
form? Why is its achievement no more than the grimace of irony?
One answer to these questions, represented by the young Lukacs himself in
The Theory of the Novel, as well as by existentialism, argues that the novel is
the account of an ontological alienation built into the human condition-a "trans-
cendental homelessness" in which the human subject is seen as "thrown into the
world" (Heidegger), estranged within it, struggling to appropriate meaning
from a meaningless empirical facticity that is the work of the Other, or of blind
accident. This, however, is to pose the problem of alienation in metaphysical
rather than social terms. Lukics's own argument in The Theory of the Novel, as
Fred Jameson has shown, betrays a tension of which Lukics subsequently be-
came aware and that eventually led him to Marxism. The novel is a periodic
form; it occupies certain defined spaces in history. It corresponds, for example,
to the "purely secular" modern world, in which the "transcendental idealism"
of great epic is no longer possible. Yet if the alienation of the subject is some-
thing basic to the human condition in all its incarnations, why isn't the novel a
universal form? A different tack, the one we have been following here, starts
from the premise that the rise of capitalism and the rise of the novel are linked,
that the novel does not record alienation in general or the human condition in
general, but rather the forms these take in capitalist society. This involves the
recognition that the rise and fall of literary genres, or of internal tensions and
discrepancies in their deployment and evolution, are manifestations of distor-
tions in life patterns that result from unresolved, and therefore especially com-
pelling, social contradictions. This represents, of course, the lesson Lukacs was
to give in his later work on the great tradition of the bourgeois novel and its
collapse.
Javier Herrero, in a recent article on "Renaissance Poverty and Lazarillo's
Family," makes this point in a telling way for our concerns here. Contrasting
the Lazarillo to the narrative genres that preceded it in Renaissance Spain, he
writes:
The change from the worlds of the shepherd and the knight to the world of the
picaro; from arcadia and chivalry to the desolate urban landscape of misery and
hunger; from romance to irony-in fact, the Copernican revolution that produced
a new genre-could only have been born of an upheaval that affected men's lives
John Beverley 33
and forced educated writers to see conditions they had so far ignored. This change
stemmed from an increased awareness of human misery, which the urban growth
of the Renaissance had made highly visible ... 8
But it was not only the awareness of poverty as an unresolved and compelling
social problem that changed with the Renaissance; the nature and extent of
poverty itself also changed dramatically, so that it could no longer be contained
as a theme within traditional arguments and forms of representation. Lazarillo's
Spain-and in a larger sense the whole social world of the early picaresque novel
in Europe-offers a concrete instance of that general process of transition be-
tween the feudal and the capitalist modes of production which Marx called "the
primitive accumulation of capital."
We have already heard from Marx on the subject of exchange value and com-
modity fetishism. Let us bear with him a bit longer to discover the meaning of
this mysterious phrase, "the primitive accumulation of capital."9 Capitalism,
Marx held, was a mode of production based on the extraction of a surplus value
from the production and sale of commodities; this is why within capitalism hu-
man relations and human needs come to be increasingly mediated by, or trans-
formed into, the commodity form. The fact that today, for example, large cor-
porations can purchase freely the creativity, time and energy of thousands of hu-
man beings all over the world is a necessary condition for the production of sur-
plus value. Yet the actual secret of surplus value is that the value of this crea-
tivity, time and energy as a commodity (that is, of the wages or salaries working
people can command in given enterprises) is less than the value its effective use
newly creates in a process of production controlled by its owners, the capitalists.
It is, therefore, the transformation of the human capacity and propensity for
creative labor into a commodity which can be bought and sold-labor power-
that essentially distinguishes capitalism from other social systems and epochs. A
mature capitalist economy runs on its own steam, so to speak, since the revenues
needed for accumulation and expansion are provided by the buying and selling
of labor power and its ordinary employment in production of commodities.
Yet what conditions are necessary in order that some persons in a society are in
a position to purchase and use the labor of others as a commodity? This re-
quires, on the one hand, that a significant mass of the population be juridically
free to dispose of their capacity to labor by offering it for sale in the market-
place (which is not the case with slavery, serfdom or other forms of obligatory
labor or labor debt), and, on the other, that they have no other real option in
life to provide for their needs and desires than to offer their labor for sale (that
is, not have the possibility themselves to sell or barter commodities in which
their labor is incorporated, as in the case of the independent farmer or the arti-
sans of the medieval guild systems). In other words, the rise and development
of a capitalist society presupposes the increasing separation of an existing labor-
ing population from traditional forms of servitude and, at the same time, from
all property in the means of which it can realize the product of its own labor.10
Yet, again, how is this separation achieved, when the status quo ante is precisely
that of a culture and society in which the majority of the population lives in the
feudal mode of production?
To inaugurate itself, capitalism cannot rely, as it does in more advanced stages,
on purely economic means, since it lacks the precondition of a laboring popula-
tion that is subject to a free market for its means of subsistence. Its initial forms
of accumulation are thus "primitive," because they require forms of exploita-
tion and social change that depend on the use of an extraeconomic coercion that
will eventually give way to the "normal" operations of a market society. The
Renaissance urbanization of which Professor Herrero speaks in reference to the
Lazarillo is itself the symptomatic effect of these early forms of capitalist activity.
It implies in particular:
I) "The expropriation of the agricultural producer from the soil," that is, the
proletarianization of the peasantry, or of a significant section of it.
2) The parallel creation of a home market for commodities produced by capitalist

enterprises. Marx notes in this respect, "Only the destruction of rural domestic
industry can give the internal market of a country that extension and consistency
which the capitalist mode of production requires."1
Marx illustrates primitive accumulation, in what he considers its classic form,

by depicting the various stages of the destruction or limitation of feudal and
communal agrarian property in England from the fifteenth century to the In-
dustrial Revolution. The process involves a sometimes contradictory alliance
between the interests of nascent capitalist groups and those of the absolutist
state. This alliance is forged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the ex-
pense of the privileges and power of the independent nobility; only what Marx
called "bloody legislation," combined with the state's fiscal power and its monop-
oly on the means of violence, could bring about such a massive social transfor-
mation.12 The effect is the formation of the English working class; disentail-
ments throw successive masses of "free" laborers, no longer bound by feudal ob-
ligations and no longer protected by feudal law and custom, onto labor markets
of the metropolis. Between this expropriation of agricultural workers and their
eventual employment by urban capital, however, there emerges a lag, since the
growth of capitalist enterprises and markets tends to be extremely uneven in
these initial phases. A process of primitive accumulation thus assures, in Marx's
words, "the constant generation of a relative surplus population which keeps
the law of supply and demand, and therefore wages, in a rut which corresponds
with the wants of capital for cheap labor power."13 The focus of human activity
shifts from the countryside to the city; from production for consumption to
production for the market. The city becomes a new center for accumulation of
wealth and power, but also for accumulation of poverty and social disease in
John Beverley 35
the shape of this "relative surplus population" -what contemporary sociologists
call marginalized social groups-that has been expelled from its traditional
forms of life in the countryside but not yet absorbed by the developing capitalist
labor market.14
There is a second aspect of primitive accumulation that feeds into the first:
the mercantilist colonial policies of the new absolutist nation states. In Spain's
case these policies account for the massive influx of American gold and silver in
the sixteenth century and its farreaching consequences for traditional forms of
life in that country (consequences that have been extensively detailed by authors
who range from such Hapsburg arbitristas as Gonzalez de Cellorigo to Earl
Hamilton and Pierre Vilar today). If we look more closely at the Spain of La-
zarillo's day in light of Marx's account of primitive accumulation, two things
are evident. On the one hand, Spain shows all the signs of having undergone
at least the initial stages of such a process and, indeed, is almost exemplary of its
two basic elements: the generation of a surplus or "marginal" population clus-
tered in cities, and the institutionalization of mercantile imperialism. On the
other hand, far from becoming one of the centers of capitalist development that
this might lead us to suppose, Spain enters in the I55os a period of incomplete,
even regressive capitalist development that coincides with a hypertrophy of the
power of the landed aristocracy and of its forms of both cultural and legal hege-
mony. Bartolome Bennassar, in his detailed demographic study of Valladolid in
the sixteenth century, composes the following paradox.15 In the Valladolid
area ten to twenty per cent of the population was attached to no productive
property and was therefore chronically under- or unemployed. This relative
surplus population, produced by an initial but far from final crisis of Castilian
feudalism, was comprised by impoverished hidalgos who had lost their property
to debt, expropriated tenants or small peasant proprietors, urban subproletarians
such as the p'caro, seasonal day laborers, beggars, etc. It constitutes the socio-
logical equivalent of the floating world of the cast of the Lazarillo.
But at the same time, a whole series of business enterprises that had blossomed
forth a generation earlier was being either abandoned or left to stagnate. Profits
were not "held back"-as the logic of Weber's thesis on the relation of Protes-
tant asceticism to capitalist accumulation and investment would have it. The
nuclei of the local bourgeoisie followed the lead of the aristocracy and Church
in investing their wealth in bonds floated by the state against its share of gold
and silver imports from America; and this, rather than business itself, provided
over time an income satisfactory to the desires of the entrepreneur (which might
include the purchase, by hook or by crook, of a title). In this form, that of
what the Spanish historian Vicens Vives called the "bourgeois meteor" of the early
sixteenth century, Spain burned out. In significant ways, traditional forms of
livelihood had broken down, for society had become urbanized, marketoriented.
Yet no new form of social and economic organization stepped forward to take
their place. Lazarillo's Spain is thus a society subject to a double and contra-
dictory process of determination. It freezes up, so to speak, at a crucial point in
the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism. By the eighteenth cen-
tury, it has become the negative example-the Black Legend-for the ideo-
logues of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
We may return here to the concerns with which we began. The Lazarillo is,
to borrow Lukics's phrase, the biography of a problematic individual. The story
depicts a freedom or possibility shaped by the exigencies of a particular situation
in a particular society. It is about how someone grows up and what he can as-
pire to become in such a society. In this sense, it allows us, at the level of char-
acter formation itself, an insight into the paradox of primitive accumulation in
Spain. It is clear, first of all, that Lazarillo's situation as a character corresponds
exactly to the two conditions of proletarianization suggested in Marx's account.
His capacity to labor (in the form of the offer of service) is juridically "free,"
for he can dispose of it as he sees fit: hence the theme of valerse por st mismo,
elevating his commodity value. Yet he is bound to survive economically only
by working for others, since he has no wealth or productive property of his
own and lives in a world where the necessities of life must be purchased (or stolen).
Moreover, his odyssey develops in a totally urban environment in which the self
subsistence economy of peasant producers, still the mass of the population at the
time, is barely alluded to. Lazarillo is the product of that still familiar disinte-
gration of the family unit as it passes from an agrarian milieu, where its func-
tions and forms are consecrated by centuries of tradition, into the city life of a
marginal subproletariat. His predicament presupposes a separation from agrarian
community life and mutual aid systems like the compadrazco;16 he is, from pu-
berty onwards, "on his own." As such he constitutes a new form of freedom
and mobility, but also of degradation, made possible by market society: the in-
dividual. He embodies structurally the ambiguity of that relative surplus popu-
lation collectively divested of its traditional livelihood but not yet fully inte-
grated into its new social context; but he lives his destiny as a solitary one.
Crime is, of course, a characteristic solution to this sort of quandary. Yet, as
Claudio Guillen has aptly noted, the picaro is more a "half-outsider" than some-
one who through crime, madness or rebellion has passed beyond the immediate
space of social determination.17 Like the Jewish-Muslim converso, he is at once
both inside and outside the social fabric, and at home in neither dimension.
Therefore he can exercise his freedom only within a very narrow range of possi-
bilities that involves a tradeoff between moral integrity and material wellbeing,
dependence and independence.
The various steps of Lazarillo's sentimental education, which appear as acci-
dental and episodic in his narration, nevertheless replicate a primitive process of
proletarianization and the specific form of alienation that accompanies subjec-
tion of human energies and capacities to commodity status. From this perspective,
John Beverley 37
it would be logical for the novel to end with the sixth tratado, or chapter, in
which we are shown how Lazarillo finds a job that pays a living wage-a wage,
he tells us, that allows him to "fill his mouth" for the first time.18 As we have
seen, however, Lazarillo's Spain is not a society completely subject to the mech-
anisms of the market and the values of capitalist enterprise. Four years of scrimp-
ing and saving allow him to purchase a secondhand suit of clothes "para me
vestir muy honradamente" ("to dress myself quite honorably"). The self in-
flicted irony is obvious: in Golden Age Spain honor was still by law and custom
an attribute exclusive to the hereditary nobility, the hidalgos. Yet if Lazarillo
can never aspire to become a hidalgo, he can at least abandon through these
clothes the status of ajomalero or day laborer. The suit in effect deproletarian-
izes him, equips him for what we might euphemistically call "another sort of
work." This other sort of work is itself mediocre, poorly paid, and consists of a
position at the very bottom of the huge state bureaucracy erected by Spanish ab-
solutism; it involves Lazarillo's acceptance of the role of a cuckold. Yet, for all
that, it is an "oficio real": i.e., "a royal job"/"a real job." Thus the outsider
becomes the voice of the Law and the Market:
I realized that you can't get on unless you are in a government job. I've still got
it today and I live in the service of God and of Your Honour. Now my job is to
make public announcements of the wines that are to be sold in the town, and of
auctions and lost property. I also accompany criminals being punished for their
misdeeds and shout out their crimes. In other words, I'm a town-crier.19
"A government job!" A corrupt and parisitic bureaucracy-an apparatus to

use up wealth rather than to employ it productively-was precisely one of the
solutions Spain offered to the paradox of its own development in the sixteenth
century. Incapable of passing forward into the brave new world of capitalism,
yet no longer the smiling Castile of the Libro de buen amor, what was its alterna-
tive? Pierre Vilar writes: " . . . in Spain, and around I600, feudalism enters its
final crisis without there being anything at hand to replace it. And this drama
will go on and on. It is going on today; that is why Don Quijote is still a sym-
bol."20 Offstage, but implicit in the end of the Lazarillo, are the defeat of the
Comunero rebellions in Spain, the foreign and domestic policy of the Counter
Reformation, the genocide of the native populations in the mines and fields of
America. Erasmism was the ideology of the aspiring bourgeoisie of the Spanish
Golden Age, the partisans of primitive accumulation. The young Lazarillo
echoes themes of Erasmism in his critique of appearances, inherited wealth, ra-
cial prejudice and aristocratic vanity in the early chapters of the novel. It is
commonly noted in the critical literature on Lazarillo that these critiques are
conveniently forgotten in the hero's own rather compromised situation at the
end, that he himself has become that which he despised. But then it is not ac-
cidental that Spanish Erasmism follows the same curve as the "bourgeois meteor"
of the Golden Age, and that its ideologues-including, it is sometimes conjec-
tured, the author of the Lazarillo itself-suffer a rapid eclipse at the precise mo-
ment the novel appears. As for the text, it is quickly placed on the Index of
prohibited books by the Inquisition (though it undoubtedly continued to circu-
late in samizdat form). With the death of Philip II in I598, the ban on Lazarillo
and other books is lifted and a period of relative liberalization in literary policy
ensues. The Jesuits have won their case that the suspect new genres of Renais-
sance vernacular literature can be mobilized in the service of posttridentine or-
thodoxy and the defense of Spain's Catholic empire. Among the products of
this liberalization are Don Quijote and the body of novels known in Spanish litera-
ture as the baroque picaresque. But Cervantes is the last major Spanish novelist
until Gald6s almost three centuries later, in a Spain turned topsy turvy by the
twin impact of revolutionary Liberalism and British imperialism; and the baroque
picaresque in Spain, to all intents and purposes, is rather a sort of antinovel,
bent on deconstructing the primitive humanism of the Lazarillo in an anguished
attempt to reconstitute the ideological coherence of aristocratic hegemony.
The history of the novel passes to those countries that are the destinaries of
Spanish gold, where the primitive accumulation of capital is already gestating
its next stage: the Industrial Revolution.
The Lazarillo is the first modern novel because it is the first to show on the
level of both form and content how human life is shaped by the forces that the
emergence of the capitalist mode of production conjures up. Yet it is also the
novel of the impasse of capitalism in Spain. It is fitting, then, to call it the novel
of primitive accumulation. I would like to conclude with a not unfamiliar hy-
pothesis. If what I began by calling the modern novel is the product of those
tensions in life, feeling and thought which accompany capitalism at its failsafe
point - the ordeal of the sixteenth century-what does this imply for the future
of the novel, since I think it is only fair to say that capitalism is showing signs
of a "final crisis" (though like the "final crisis" of feudalism, this may be a rather
protracted agony)? The answer is not immediately clear, although I do think
Lucien Goldmann was on the right track when he argued that the problems of
narration and narrative form evident in the modernist novel betrayed a larger
crisis of bourgeois subjectivity in an age of monopoly capitalism, imperialist
war, stagflation, and the commodification of even the most intimate recesses of
human desire and imagination. We live and work today at the other end of
that genetic crisis of the sixteenth century which Spain, and the populations of
America it dominated, lived with a special and ultimately sterile intensity, and
which is reproduced for us in that "primitive" ancestor of the contemporary
novel, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de susfortunas y adversidades. Yet primi-
tive accumulation goes on as capitalism continues to transform those areas
which have not completely fallen under its sway. And Lazarillo's predicament
is a very current one in the great rings of slums which surround the cities of the
John Beverley 39
Third World (or in Detroit, Youngstown, Harlem, the steel towns of Pitts-
burgh's Mon Valley-places that the magic wand of capitalism has conjured up
only to abandon, the ruins of commodity fetishism). So there are moments
when we can still glimpse in Lazarillo the outline of our own achievements and
limitations. We are in that sense his contemporaries, his hypocritical readers.
University of Pittsburgh
Notes
i. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, I96I),
p. 71 (chapter I, section 4-"The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof").
2. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trs. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press,
I971). My version depends heavily on Fred Jameson's chapter on Lukics in his Marxism
and Form. Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton University Press,
I97I). The Theory of the Novel was written during the early years of the First World
War. While its incisive and apocalyptic style makes it a good companion piece to Lenin's
Imperialism, it predates Lukics's conversion to Marxism and was the subject of one of his
celebrated self criticisms (reproduced in the MIT edition). It first appeared in I920.
3. The Theory of the Novel, p. 29.
4. The Theory of the Novel, p. 7I.
5. The Theory of the Novel, p. 75.
6. I cite J. M. Cohen's able translation, Don Quixote (London: Penguin Classics,
1975), p. 25.
7. I cite Michael Alpert's translation in Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (London: Pen-
guin Classics, 1969), pp. 23-24. On ironic perspectivism in the construction of Lazarillo
see Claudio Guillen's seminal "Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Pica-
resque," in his Literature as System (Princeton University Press, I971), pp. I35-58.
8. Javier Herrero, "Renaissance Poverty and Lazarillo's Family: The Birth of the Pi-
caresque Genre," PMLA, 94 (I979), p. 884.
9. Marx's presentation of primitive accumulation occurs not at the beginning but at
the end of the first volume of Capital, coinciding in a sort of conceited identity of be-
ginnings and ends with Marx's prediction that "the knell of capitalist private property
sounds." There has been a lively contemporary debate on the subject, anthologized in
part by Rodney Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso-
New Left Books, 1976).
o1. Marx amplifies this: "The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose
of his own person after he has ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave,
serf or bondman of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who carries his
commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime
of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their
labour regulations ... But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of
themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production and of
all the guarantees of existence offered by the old feudal arrangements." Capital, p. 715.
I. Capital, p. 748. Marx comments: "Formerly, the peasant family produced the
means of subsistence and the raw materials, which they themselves, for the most part,
consumed. These raw materials and means of subsistence have now become commodities.
Yarn, linen, coarse woolen stuffs-things whose raw materials had been within the
reach of every peasant family, had been spun and woven by it for its own use-were
now transformed into articles of manufacture, to which the country districts at once
served as markets" (p. 747).
12. The nature of the relationship between the emerging mercantile and manufacturing
bourgeoisie and an absolutist state structure still tied in many ways to feudalism is a
much vexed question in European historiography. It may be sufficient to note here only
two major points. First, since the feudal nobility was generally exempt from direct
taxation in the period of absolutism, the state itself as an institution depends for its sur-
vival and development on taxes or loans that derive in significant measure from profits
of capitalist and colonial enterprises. Here there is a clear relationship between the
monarchy and the new banking system that emerges with the Renaissance. Such taxes
also fall heavily on the mass of small producers-artisans, yeoman farmers, guilds and
the like-who are often driven out of business by the burden of such obligations, thus
speeding up the proletarianization of sections of the laboring population (e.g., the effect
of the alcdbalas on small producers in sixteenth-century Spain). Second, it is clear that
the alliance between absolutism and the bourgeoisie has a transitory character. The les-
son of both the English and the French Revolutions is that absolutism in its "pure"
form was to prove incompatible with the full development of capitalism.
13. Capital, p. 737. In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, wages rose sharply during the
sixteenth century, but not as sharply as the rise in prices of commodities. As a result,
even that portion of the population which could be said to be gainfully employed ex-
perienced a relative impoverishment.
14. My friend Carlos Johnson has brought to my attention a very recent debate among
Latin American social scientists concerning the question of marginalization and "sur-
plus" population. See F. H. Cardoso, "Comentarios sobre los conceptos de superpobla-
ci6n relativa y marginalidad," Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, I-2 (I97I), pp. 57-
76; and Carlos Johnson, "Critical Comments on Marginality: Relative Surplus Popula-
tion and Capital/Labor Relations," Centre for Developing Area Studies Working Paper
Series (Montreal: McGill University, I980). Some standard accounts from the point of
view of American sociology are E. V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man. A Study in Person-
ality and Culture (New York: Scribners, I937); and David Riesman, Individualism Re-
considered (New York: The Free Press, I954).
I5. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid au sicle d'or (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, I967).
For those who read French and Spanish, this is a masterful piece of "micro" social re-
construction, indispensable for an understanding of the Spanish Golden Age.
John Beverley 41
I6. In a comment that should be placed alongside Herrero's discussion, quoted above,
of the relation between Renaissance urbanization and the rise of the picaresque genre,
John Merrington observes that the rise of the city in the Renaissance involves "not only
a massive shift of human and material resources in favor of urban concentrations, but
also a conquest over the countryside . . . From being a center of all kinds of production,
the country becomes 'agriculture,' i.e., a separate industry for food and raw materials."
"Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism," in R. Hilton, op. cit., p. 171.
I7. In "Toward a Definition of the Picaresque," Literature as System, pp. 7I-I06.
I8. I reproduce Lazarillo's account of this job in full, since it is one of the first descrip-
tions of wage labor I am aware of in fiction:
I was a well set-up young man by now and one day, when I was in the cathedral, one of
the priests gave me a job. He provided me with a donkey, four jugs and a whip and I be-
gan to carry water around the city. That was my first step towards becoming a respectable
citizen because now my hunger was satisfied. Every day I gave my employer thirty marave-
dis (a small coin) and on Saturday I worked for myself. I kept whatever I earned every day
if it was more than thirty maravedts. (Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, p. 76)
I9. Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, p. 77.

20. Pierre Vilar, "El tiempo del Quijote," in his Crecimiento y desarrollo: reflexiones sobre
el caso espanal (Barcelona: Ariel, I964), p. 441. Translation mine.

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Midwest Modern Language Association

Spain, Capitalism and the Modern Novel

30 Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation

32 Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation

34 Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation

2) The parallel creation of a home market for commodities produced by capitalist

Marx illustrates primitive accumulation, in what he considers its classic form,

36 Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation

"A government job!" A corrupt and parisitic bureaucracy-an apparatus to

38 Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation

40 Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation

I9. Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, p. 77.

42 Lazarillo and Primitive Accumulation

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