The first half of El Periquillo Sarniento was an amusing read as its hapless and irreverent protagonist gets into one calamity after another. The stories reminded me somewhat of Don Quixote in that they were short and more-or-less unrelated episodes in which the hero, or anti-hero, bumbles confidently into a situation he is not prepared for, risks his hide, then beats a hasty retreat on to the next misadventure. The difference is that one is a work of great literature about an ageing knight and the other is a novel about a young rouge that weaves moral preaching into bawdy and outrageous behavior. I wonder what audience this novel was intended for; it’s not aimed at highbrow readers but I don’t know who would have wanted to read a novel in which, as the editor says, “for every two or three pages of action there are twenty or thirty of moral digression.”
However, El Periquillo Sarniento serves us well as a historical text, for it tells us a great deal about Mexican society as it split off from Spain and grew into its own cultural entity. As we’ve been discussing in class, it was at this time that new social roles and racial identities were being negotiated, so it’s ideal that we read a novel in which the main character hops on and off a carousel of different trades and social positions. We also get a glimpse in what could have been common attitudes or popular knowledge of the day, like in the protagonist’s self-righteous account of his wayward upbringing. Here the protagonist links a person’s physical condition to his or her moral condition, which gives rise to all types of unfounded prejudices, and is deterministic in charting the progression from having sickly and vice-ridden nurses and being coddled as a child to turning out as an arrogant and lawless adult. Racial inequalities come through in this text as well, and it is clear by the authour’s language and the scenarios he creates that society was intensely stratified and marked by bigotry. For example, the protagonist boasts of his “limpia sangre” in the beginning of the novel and later describes making a brutal mess as a barber on “un pobre indio” as his second trial run after his first unsuccessful one on a dog.