In summary: El Buscón narrates Pablos's failure in the face of a society obsessed with lineage, appearance and honor. Quevedo's satire turns the picaresque novel into an implacable criticism of the Golden Age.

Pablos and the society of the Golden Age

There are books that age and others that, with the passing of the centuries, seem to acquire an even greater capacity to make people uncomfortable. History of the searcher called Don Pablos undoubtedly belongs to the latter. Written by Francisco de Quevedo in the first decades of the 17th century and published for the first time in Zaragoza in 1626, the novel is one of the undisputed summits of Spanish picaresque literature and, at the same time, one of the most ruthless satires that the Golden Age produced.

Whoever approaches Buscón Waiting simply for a succession of comic adventures you will find much more. Beneath the verbal wit, caricature and grotesque humor a deeply bitter vision of society unfolds. Quevedo does not contemplate the world of Don Pablos with indulgence. He observes it as if each character, each job, each aspiration and each social gesture revealed a deeper moral crack.

Pablos is born marked by an origin that he desperately wants to abandon. His father is a barber and thief; His mother, a character with a more than dubious reputation, appears associated with superstitious and criminal practices. From the first pages, one of the great conflicts of the work is imposed: the protagonist's desire to escape from the condition that has been assigned to him by birth.

Pablos wants to promote. He wants to be recognized. He wants to become someone different from what society says he is.

And it fails.

That failure constitutes the heart of the novel.

The protagonist's itinerary can be read as a succession of frustrated attempts to abandon marginality. Pablos changes his city, his company, his appearance and even his social identity, but he always ends up returning to the place he intended to flee from. Geographic displacement does not produce any moral transformation. Flight does not lead to regeneration.

Quevedo formulates this idea with extraordinary forcefulness at the end of the work, when the protagonist decides to leave for the Indies in the hope of improving his fortune. The conclusion immediately disproves that hope: changing location is not enough when you do not change your life and customs.

It is one of the most severe lessons in all picaresque literature.

But he Buscón It is not just a story of individual failure. It is also the deformed portrait of a society obsessed with appearance, lineage, money and honor.

The characters that Pablos encounters during his journey form an unforgettable gallery of human types: cruel teachers, miserable students, hungry gentlemen, false knights, criminals, frauds and aspirants to a respectability that is almost always sustained by deception.

One of the most famous episodes is the one starring Mr. Cabra, a pupillage teacher whose greed reaches almost monstrous dimensions. Quevedo's description of his emaciated body and the food misery to which he subjects his students constitutes one of the great pieces of literary caricature of the Spanish Baroque.

In Quevedo, the body is never simply the body. It becomes language.

Extreme thinness, dirt, deformity, illness or hunger are procedures by which the writer converts physical reality into a moral accusation. The world of Buscón He appears degraded because the society he represents is also degraded.

Hence the importance of style.

Quevedo was one of the great masters of conceptism, that baroque trend that concentrated meaning through unexpected associations, intellectual games, double meanings, violent metaphors and extraordinary expressive condensations.

In it Buscón, practically no description is neutral. Each sentence may contain an exaggeration, irony or semantic displacement. Words do not simply represent the world: they deform it.

Reality passes through Quevedo's language and emerges from it converted into a caricature.

That's why read the Buscón It also means facing one of the most brilliant linguistic experiments in Spanish prose. Many pages function simultaneously as narrative, social satire, and an exercise in verbal virtuosity.

But behind that brilliance lies a more uncomfortable issue.

Can we consider Pablos a victim?

In part, yes.

He was born into an extraordinarily rigid society, in which honor and lineage deeply condition the possibilities of promotion. The protagonist understands very soon that his origin functions as a social condemnation.

However, Quevedo resists turning him into an unjustly persecuted hero.

Pablos cheats, steals, lies and manipulates. Their desire to ascend socially is not usually based on effort or moral transformation, but on simulation. He wants to seem like what he is not.

This ambiguity makes the novel extraordinarily modern.

The reader can understand the violence of the social structure that oppresses the protagonist and, at the same time, recognize his own responsibility for many of his misfortunes.

Therein lies a decisive difference with respect to other works of the picaresque tradition.

In Lazarillo de Tormes, the reader usually perceives clearly how need and hunger condition the protagonist's behavior. In it Buscón, Quevedo tightens the mechanism. Poverty continues to be essential, but the story is permeated by a much more severe moral outlook.

The laughter that the novel provokes is rarely completely innocent.

We laugh at humiliated characters, degraded bodies and destroyed aspirations. Comedy often arises from cruelty.

This element forces the contemporary reader to approach the work with a certain critical distance.

He Buscón He belongs to a deeply hierarchical society and reproduces many of its prejudices. Some descriptions and certain characters incorporate stereotypes typical of the historical and cultural context of the 17th century that today require a contextualized reading.

But precisely there also lies the interest of reading the classics without turning them into decorative objects.

The classics do not have to confirm our sensibilities. Sometimes its function consists precisely in confronting us with moral universes different from our own.

Reading Quevedo today means entering a baroque Spain crossed by deep tensions: economic decadence, obsession with blood purity, social inequality, hunger, honor, religiosity, violence and permanent contradiction between appearance and reality.

Pablos's world is inseparable from that context.

Spain still retained the external image of a great imperial power, but internally the economic and social difficulties were increasingly evident. The literature of the period responded to this contradiction through an extraordinary ability to show the fragility hidden behind appearances.

And few writers took that operation as far as Quevedo.

Their society is full of characters who represent something they are not.

The gentleman appears rich while he is hungry.

The criminal seeks respectability.

The poor guy tries to look like a gentleman.

The ignorant want to appear wise.

The coward presents himself as brave.

The whole world seems to participate in a performance.

This baroque obsession with the opposition between being and appearing runs through the entire novel.

Pablos doesn't just want to improve his life. He wants to build a different identity. Its failure reveals the limit of that enterprise.

That's why he Buscón can be surprisingly close to the contemporary reader.

Although social structures have changed radically, we continue to live in societies where public identity, prestige, appearance and representation have enormous value. Social networks have even taken that logic to an intensity that Quevedo would probably have observed with satirical fascination.

The desire to appear richer, more successful, more cultured or more powerful than one really is does not belong exclusively to the 17th century.

Perhaps that is why Pablos continues to be recognizable to us.

Not because we share their world, but because we know their desire.

The desire to escape from oneself.

The desire to be accepted.

The desire to become what others admire.

And also the danger of believing that it is enough to change appearance to transform reality.

Four centuries after its publication, History of the searcher called Don Pablos It retains intact its ability to entertain, surprise and disturb.

It is a short, dizzying and linguistically prodigious novel. But it is also a much darker work than its humorous fame may initially suggest.

Behind every mockery appears a society that excludes.

Behind every adventure, a frustrated attempt at promotion.

Behind each mask, the impossibility of completely escaping one's own origin.

And behind all this remains the voice of Francisco de Quevedo, one of the sharpest literary intelligences in our language, observing the world with an unrepeatable mix of lucidity, erudition, humor and ferocity.

Read the Buscón It does not just mean returning to one of the great classics of Spanish literature.

It means entering a society that has disappeared and discovering, with some disquiet, that some of its vanities are still ours.

Continue reading with the Alba Longa edition of History of the life of Buscón called Don Pablos, ready to return to the full text.

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