Serial Space-Time As a New Form of National Consciousness: The Case of Lizardi's El Periquillo...

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Bulletin of Spanish StudiesHispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America

ISSN: 1475-3820 (Print) 1478-3428 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbhs20

Serial Space-Time As a New Form of NationalConsciousness: The Case of Lizardi's El PeriquilloSarniento (1816)

Amy E. Wright

To cite this article: Amy E. Wright (2015): Serial Space-Time As a New Form of NationalConsciousness: The Case of Lizardi's El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), Bulletin of Spanish Studies,DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2015.1078123

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2015.1078123

Published online: 11 Sep 2015.

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Serial Space-Time As a New Formof National Consciousness:

The Case of Lizardi’sEl Periquillo Sarniento (1816)

AMY E. WRIGHT

St Louis University

By 1816, Spain’s three-century rule over the ancient empire of theMexicawascreeping tortuously toward its end, although it would be another full decadebefore the colonials would begin to call themselves Mexicanos. In the yearsfrom the beginning of this struggle until 1821, the Spanish crown,desperate to forestall the imminent collapse of empire, repeatedly revokedand reinstated freedom of the press. It was from these vicissitudes that thefirst novel of Spanish America was born. This novel, and the earliest Latin-American novels that followed, rose directly from the revolutionaryjournalism appearing in the front pages of newspapers delivering anti-colonial decrees (novela-folletín) or, piggy-backing on the established formatof brochures, pamphlets, or broadsheets issued periodically and distributedin the streets (novela por entregas).

From the start, the two births—of the nation and of the Latin-Americannovel—were linked. The novel arose out of this moment of discursivepossibility, then provided a symbiotic space in which writers couldexperiment with the linguistic politics that would educate and shape thenation. The first Mexican novel, El Periquillo Sarniento—first published in1816 as a series of pamphlets—can be seen as one of the principalmidwives in the birthing process of the Mexican nation-to-be. How itsauthor, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, used the novel at a politicallystrategic moment in Mexico’s history to encourage education and reformillustrates not only the liberating effects of decolonization on literaryproduction, but also its reverse: the novel’s potential for creating a viableand desirable decolonized entity in the minds of newly ‘nationalize-able’readers. We must attempt to examine these early works within theparticular context of their publication if we are to fully grasp their

ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/15/00/000001-19© 2015 Bulletin of Spanish Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2015.1078123

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importance and function for the young nations of Latin America. Indeed,serial publication exacerbated the very effects emphasized by BenedictAnderson as crucial to the temporal and spatial shifts that made possiblethe creation of a nation.1 Anderson’s analysis, however, tends to separatethe novel and the newspaper into two distinct spaces, rather than explorethe enhanced impact of their combination in terms of content (in theparticular case of the novela-folletín) and in terms of distribution (in theparticular case of the novela por entregas; the difference in these twoterms will be discussed in further detail below). I argue that, in spite ofthe lack of material (the original unbound pamphlets, as well as desirablearchival information regarding readership and reception), it is importantto try to grasp the particular implications of El Periquillo’s initialserialized publication (1816) on the colonial mindset. What we do knowabout its original form of distribution should remain present in ourinterpretation of the text, particularly with regards to understanding howit was used towards the creation of Mexican national identity as positedby Anderson; this is true even as we are left with so many clues regardingthis initial form of publication within the book-bound editions of the text(1816, 1830–31, and some bibliographical comments on the now-missing1825 text by Ernest Moore).2 If journalism and narrative were each potentin this creation of a national identity, how is their effect increased whencombined in the form of a serialized fiction? I argue that the ritualizedconsumption of a novel with a linear, horizontal storyline in which thereader regularly and repeatedly ‘interacted’ with characters who were‘familiar’ (like family) and formed part of their own daily reality wasespecially potent to the reconfiguration of time and space that Andersontheorized as necessary for the nation. Despite the difficulties of recreatingthese original conditions, this article intends to remember and recognizethese material realities in an attempt to understand how they might haveaffected the original readers of the first Latin-American novel.

El Periquillo Sarniento (1816) is, in fact, the inaugural (serialized)nineteenth-century novel of the Spanish-speaking world, preceding thephenomenon in Spain by a full two decades. (The first novels published inSpain after Don Quixote appeared in the late 1830s as translations ofFrench and English works; original Spanish serial novels did not appearuntil the early 1840s.)3 We attribute the precocious appearance of thepublication of serialized fiction in Mexico to a need to avoid censorship, as

1 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006 [1st

ed. 1983]).2 Ernest R. Moore, ‘Una bibliografía descriptiva: El Periquillo Sarniento de José

Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’, Revista Iberoamericana, 10 (1946), 383–403 (p. 387).3 Elisa Martí-López, Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the

Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2002), see Chapter 1, ‘MarketConditions in a Peripheral Literary Space’.

2 BSS, (2015) AMY E. WRIGHT

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well as to ameliorate the high costs of publishing full-length books in thecolonies. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, serialization of novels inthe Hispanic world rose out of a widespread practice of pamphletpublication in England and France during the latter part of the eighteenthcentury. From there it was but a small step to the publication of narrativefiction in pamphlet or instalment form: here we distinguish the term novelapor entregas (the serialized delivery of a fictional narrative at regularintervals through separate pamphlets/instalments sold in public spaces,bookstores or later on through subscription and delivery to individualresidences, in which the author/editor usually availed himself of subscriberlists and distribution of local newspapers) from the novela-folletín (theserialized delivery of a fictional narrative at regular intervals through itspublication in a newspaper, usually on its front-bottom page, often toattract new readership).4

Early newspapers had begun to change colonial ways of thinking as earlyas 1805—a process initiated in that year by El Diario de México, the firstsuccessful alternative to Spain’s officially controlled gazette. The firstMexican daily newspaper, El Diario was both commercial and highlyparticipative in its origins, providing a template for innovation that Lizardiwould appropriate when he began his own paper in 1812.5 From the start,Lizardi was a participant in the editorial exchanges of El Diario, ‘the mostimportant organ of aspiring Mexican writers in the early years of the 19th

century’.6 Bibliographer Paul Radin reports that by 1810 Lizardi owned aprivate printing press and was earning a meagre living as a publishing‘maverick’, with poetry that he sold for a few cents per pamphlet, ‘the mosteffective form in which to reach the public ear and to provide [… ] at thesame time, a means of livelihood’.7

By the time freedom of the press was officially granted to New Spain in1812, Lizardi was well positioned to take advantage of the reforms. In thatyear the journalist launched himself into notoriety with his own weeklynewspaper, christened with his nom de plume, El Pensador Mexicano.While Spell describes the Diario de México as a forum ‘judiciously temperedto the requirements of censors, civil and ecclesiastical’, Lizardi’s newspaperserved as the inaugural space where real educational and social reformscould be discussed freely for the first time:

4 See Amy E. Wright, ‘Subscribing Identities: The Serial Novel in the Development ofNovel and Nation. Spain and Mexico from the 1840s to the 1860s’, doctoral thesis (BrownUniversity, 2006), Introduction and Chapter 1.

5 Ruth Wold, ‘El Diario de México’: primer cotidiano de Nueva España (Madrid:Editorial Gredos, 1970), 10–17.

6 Jefferson Rea Spell, The Life and Works of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), 92–93.

7 Paul Radin,An Annotated Bibliography of the Poems and Pamphlets of J. J. Fernándezde Lizardi: The First Period (1808–1819) (San Francisco: Sutro Library, 1940), 4–5.

SERIAL SPACE-TIME: THE CASE OF EL PERIQUILLO SARNIENTO 3

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In the work of no other writer are political, social and religious conditionsin Mexico in the early years of the nineteenth century subjected to suchscathing criticism as in the many pamphlets issued by El PensadorMexicano, who therein outlined for Mexico a constructive program,which, if adopted, would have placed the country a century sooner in theranks of modern nations.8

The paper enjoyed immediate success in spite of (or perhaps because of) theongoing travails of censorship. Lizardi was editor as well as author of eachissue and exercised sole control over style and content.

With these newly granted freedoms, the colonials of New Spain chargedinto the arena with Lizardi at the head. As newspapers flew off a limitednumber of printing presses, the overwrought viceroy responded to risingfervours by revoking freedom of the press within just two months of itsproclamation. It was this back-and-forth between censorship andfreedom that resulted in Lizardi’s decision, circa 1815, to find a differentvenue for his ideas: according to more than one account, avoidingcensorship was a major motivation for Lizardi’s initial interest in the novel,an interpretation corroborated by his rapid return to journalism uponMexico’s independence.9

Lizardi’s choice of the novel as his new forum was not coincidental. Beyondthe relative safety provided by fiction, the novel offered other discursivepossibilities. It was, as neoclassical literary critics deemed it, a ‘bastard genre’,not clearly defined in terms of the discourses it contained, and thus openterritory for experimentation in both form and content.10 Well before therelatively brief, four-year period of his novelistic activity, Lizardi honed certainnarrative techniques through his journalistic endeavours that he would soondeploy to great effect in his first novel. Many of the political pieces Lizardiwrote from 1810 until 1816 heavily relied on conversational dialogue. Thisconversational discourse suggests Lizardi’s early interest in the polyphony andheteroglossia that were later fore-grounded by Bakhtin as essential to themodern novel. Ochoa highlights Lizardi’s innovations in El Periquillo’s didacticdialogues, creating the effect of increased polyphony, or a ‘double voice’.11

Lizardi’s journalistic writings from this time also evidence much innovationwith fictional personae. In shorter-lived, more experimental newspapers thanEl Pensador Mexicano, Lizardi tried his hand at verse, dramatic invention,

8 Spell, The Life and Works of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, 92.9 Ernest R. Moore, ‘Un manuscrito inédito de Fernández Lizardi’, Ábside, 3:11 (1939),

3–13 (p. 4); also Spell, The Life and Works of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, 31.10 Marthe Roberts, ‘Origins of the Novel’, in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach,

ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 2000), 57–70 (pp. 57–58).11 John Andrés Ochoa, The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity (Austin:

Univ. of Texas Press, 2004), 59–62.


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allegory, dialogue and satirical fictional forms, techniques that were soon toappear in his first novel.12

In his seminal discussion of the symbiosis of nation, novel and newspaper,Benedict Anderson selects El Periquillo as one of four national novels thatillustrate the narrative shift that helps readers to (re-)imagine space, time,and their belonging to a community—the three (re)imaginings that Andersonposits as necessary to the creation of newly-‘national’ identities. In ElPeriquillo he sees the ‘national imagination at work in the movement of asolitary hero through a sociological landscape [… ] that fuses the worldinside the novel with the world outside’.13 But Anderson does not mention ElPeriquillo’s serial publication (nor does he stress the serialization of one ofhis other examples, Semarang Hitam, published in Sinar Hindia between 29March and 8 April, 1924).14

Anderson’s analysis tends to separate the book (novel) and the newspaperinto two distinct spaces. The newspaper, in Anderson’s assessment, is ‘merelyan “extreme” form of the book [… ] sold on a colossal scale’ but of ephemeralconsumption: the ‘one-day best-seller’. He views the book, on the other hand,as a durable good with its own hermetic self-sufficiency: a ‘distinct, self-contained object, exactly reproduced on a large scale’, a cultural productwith a slowly growing market as ‘the first modern-style mass-producedindustrial commodity’. But the novel-published-as-newspaper breaksthrough this dichotomy of book and newspaper, maximizing both genres’nation-building capacities. Anderson does note in his discussion ofSemarang Hitam (1927) the force of embedding within the novel an imageof a young man reading a newspaper: ‘the imagined community isconfirmed by the doubleness of our reading about a young man reading [… ]. It is fitting that in Semarang Hitam a newspaper appears embeddedin fiction’.15 What to say, then, of the embedding of entire novels in thepages of newspapers? Or, as in the particular case of Lizardi’s Periquillo, ofthe sudden substitution of a biweekly newspaper with a biweekly novel?The serial novel was a hybrid form that leveraged the nation-buildingcapacities of both book and newspaper, and in the Hispanic world, it wasthe most popular form of publication of the earliest original nation-buildingnovels.

The serialization of El Periquillo is crucial both to our understanding of itscontent, as well as of its importance as a foundational text for the Mexicannation: elements present in the novel and in the newspaper as separate

12 Aníbal González, ‘Journalism and (Dis)Simulation in El Periquillo Sarniento’, in hisJournalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative (Cambridge: CambridgeU. P., 1993), 21–41 (pp. 37–38).

13 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 30.14 Andrew C. S. Fuller, ‘Jakarta Flânerie: Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s Writing of Urban

Indonesia’, doctoral thesis (University of Tasmania, 2010), 20.15 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33–34.


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entities become doubly potent in the hybrid form of the serialized novel. Yetits serialization does not constitute a substantial focus in any existing workon El Periquillo, perhaps due to the formidable difficulties presented by thelack of original manuscripts, the variations in its first four editions, andscant substantial information regarding original conditions of publicationand reader reception. Carmen Ruiz Barrionuevo provides a useful summaryof these obstacles in her article on the textual problems of the novel’s firstfour editions (‘es justamente, El Periquillo Sarniento, entre las obras delsiglo XIX en América, la que presenta mayores dificultades en la fijación desu texto’), problems that she attempts to mitigate in her 2008 edition of thenovel.16 In sum, the first four editions of the novel, published between 1816and 1842, present significant difficulties or omissions. The first edition(1816), a bound version of the original pamphlets, is incomplete: of the fourcompleted volumes of the work, only the first three were successfullyissued, while the fourth remained unprinted due to censorship. The secondedition (1825) was intended to be a corrected and completed version of thefirst, but perhaps due to the author’s financial difficulties, only the firstcorrected volume was issued. The third edition (1830–31) was the firstcomplete edition of all four volumes, but came out after the author’s death.The fourth edition (1842) was significantly altered by editors usingundisclosed ‘manuscripts’, but came to be the most popular and widelyreprinted in subsequent years. (Ruiz Barrionuevo’s edition is based insteadon the novel’s third edition, in consultation with the first and second.)

Like Ruiz Barrionuevo, I am most interested in the first (1816) and third(1830–31) editions, the third insomuch as it completes the first by providingthe missing fourth volume, with its conclusions and the moral of ElPeriquillo’s story; as such, all following citations will use her 2008 edition.The first edition of El Periquillo consisted of three volumes of 12 chapters(each was an original pamphlet ‘instalment’) comprising 36 chaptersaltogether; the third has a different distribution of the original 36 chaptersover 5 volumes, with the newly published material appearing in Chapters4–10 of Volume 4, and in the 9 chapters of Volume 5. Also of great interestis a summary of the originally censored fourth volume that Lizardi wroteand published in 1817. Handwritten by scribes contracted by Lizardi andappended to (some copies of) the third volume, the manuscript was entitled‘El Periquillo Sarniento, tomo IV, extractado por el Pensador Mexicano, añode 1817’.17

16 Carmen Ruiz Barrionuevo, ‘El Periquillo Sarniento de Fernández de Lizardi y losproblemas textuales de las cuatro primeras ediciones’, Siglo Diecinueve, 2 (1996), 147–62(p. 151); José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, El Periquillo Sarniento, ed. Carmen RuizBarrionuevo (Madrid: Cátedra, 2008); hereafter, references are to this edition, and are givenin parentheses after the quotation/allusion to the text

17 Moore, ‘Un manuscrito inédito de Fernández Lizardi’, 6–7.


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It is probable that Lizardi had begun to write the novel in 1815, because inDecember of that year he published his prospectus announcing thatinstalments were to be released twice weekly on Tuesdays and Fridaysbeginning the first week of February of the following year. There he alsoannounces that the work would be published in four volumes, each oneconsisting of 12 instalments (chapters) and 12 lithograph printings, with thecost of each bound volume anticipated at 4 pesos. The first edition containsboth a list of 102 subscribers (88 in Mexico City, 14 in the provinces) and atwo-page announcement to the subscribers (‘Advertencia a los señoressuscritores’). The second edition, which is now missing except for a defectivemicrofilm, also contained a 78-member ‘Lista de los señores subscritores quehay hasta el día de hoy 19 de octubre de 1825, en que sale a luz este tomoprimero’ (but no particular announcement to those subscribers).18 It has beenestimated that the first edition consisted of some five hundred copies, thoughLizardi makes a reference at the end of El Periquillo to the existence of ‘300copies in Mexico and beyond’. An editorial note to the 1842 edition surmisesthat Lizardi is indeed referring to the original number of bound editionsissued; the same editor avows that by 1842 the number would exceed 3,000:‘Es de creerse que las copias de que habla el Pensador son los ejemplares deeste tomo, del que mandó tirar trescientos para la primera edición. En estesentido pasan hoy las copias de tres mil’ (937). We also have some anecdotalclues that the pamphlets were ‘immediately popular’: ‘Mexicans eagerlybought the chapters as they came out and discussed Lizardi’s characters, asif they were real people, in the other popular literature permitted at thattime (newspapers, pamphletry, and so on)’.19 Lizardi’s 1817 effort to publishthe summary of the missing fourth volume seemed to arise from significantsubscriber interest, not just economic necessity:

La aventura más fatal que acaeció a Periquillo fue haberse encogido en sucuarto tomo [… ] He aquí la aventura más fatal, no sólo para Periquillo,sino para mí, para el impresor, para los suscriptores, y para el público.A todos nos interesaba la conclusión de la obra sacándola de aquellasdistantísimas regiones. A Periquillo para acabar de contar susdesgracias, y volver por su crédito cuando refiero su conversión ymudanza de conducta: a mí para quitarme de encima tantos curiososque todos los días me preguntan por su salud antes que por la mía: alimpresor para que se le pagara su dinero: a los señores subscritores [sic]para que se les completaran sus ejemplares: y al público para noquedarse con la obra trunca y la duda cabal del fin del triste Perico.20

18 Moore, ‘Una bibliografía descriptiva’, 386–88.19 Nancy Vogeley, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America (Gainesville:

Univ. Press of Florida, 2001), xix; 59; 70.20 Ernest R.Moore, ‘Unmanuscrito inédito de Fernández Lizardi’,Ábside, 3:12 (1939), 3–

30 (p. 4).


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From these words and other sources we can glean that instalments were notonly read by those who subscribed to the work, but went beyond that literatefew to be shared between readers and listeners in public spaces, extending thenovel’s reach. Escalante notes this growing tendency in early nineteenth-century Mexico:

La politización iniciada en 1808 y la constitución del nuevo Estadofavorecieron la impresión de periódicos, folletos y hojas volantes decarácter político, favoritos de grandes grupos que, ansiosos de enterarse,los pasaban de mano en mano o escuchaban su lectura en voz alta enpulquerías, cafés y plazas públicas.21

Lizardi himself records that his novels circulated in much the same way as hisnewspapers: in announcing the publication of his second serialized novel LaQuijotita (1818), Lizardi warns subscribers that they should take good careof their weekly chapters and, if they should lend them, ensure that theborrowers would take good care of them, since ‘not everyone knows how totreat a piece of paper’.22 In the same text, Lizardi says he knows that thereare many readers left with a dirty or incomplete Periquillo some two yearsafter its initial publication, indicating that his debut novel was widelycirculated in pamphlet form in the years between 1816 and 1818.

As a serial novel, El Periquillo Sarniento combines the nation-buildingpotency of narrative fiction with that of the newspaper (each amplytheorized by Anderson). It avails itself of all of the imaginative resources ofthe novel that helped readers perceive themselves as part of a communitysuch as the mimesis of everyday realities and didactic modelling of idealand undesirable national traits. At the same time it shares an even moreintimate link with the newspaper, providing a two-in-one punch towardsthe reimagining of time and space that Anderson sees as essential to theconstruction of the nation. A novel published in instalments shares a closerrelationship with the newspaper than a novel published as a book, both inthe mode in which readers consumed the material, as well as in theheterogeneity of the material itself. For Anderson both novel andnewspaper allow for the collapse of a vertically structured, messianic timeinto a horizontal timeline that is linear, causal, chronological, or successivein nature.23 The serial novel combined this effect, not only in its narrativecontent, but also in its form: the successive publication of instalmentslinked by ‘temporal coincidence’ and meted out in calendar time. SoniaMarta Mora has talked about the effect of continuity created by this text

21 Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo, Nueva historia mínima de México (México D.F.: El Colegiode México, 2005), 187.

22 Vogeley, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America, 36.23 See the section titled ‘Apprehensions of Time’, in Imagined Communities, 24–26.


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with its ongoing and at times seemingly endless succession of connectedevents, linked as if in a chain—or, like the serial publication that it was, ina series of instalments. Each instalment was interlaced with the one thatfollowed, renewable or terminable, according to the needs of the author oreditor. Mora has also discussed how picaresque autobiographiesconceptualize time on a line that focuses all events through the final lens ofdeath: the endpoint of the serialized narrative is the endpoint of the pícaro-rogue protagonist and his career. El Periquillo holds true to this structure,a structure congruent with the horizontal conceptualization of timerequired for the emergence of the nation and emphasized by the novel’sserialization.24

Serialized novels emulated the newspaper, not just in terms of theirperiodical delivery, but in terms of their content as well. Heterogeneousmaterial is presented under an arbitrary date of publication; editorials,almanacs, current events, discourses, sermons are all linked in a givenedition, if only by the date on which they appear. To Anderson thisimaginary linkage is emblematic of the certain level of ‘fictiveness’ thatcharacterizes both novel and newspaper:

[… ] if we turn to the newspaper as cultural product, we will be struck byits profound fictiveness. What is the essential literary convention of thenewspaper? [… ] If we were to look at a sample front page of, say, TheNew York Times [… ] the arbitrariness of [the events’] inclusion andjuxtaposition [… ] shows that the link between them is imagined.25

This heterogeneity is exacerbated in the case of the serialized novel andmirrors the content of the newspaper tradition from it arose.

Likewise, readers consume the serial novel in a similar fashion as thenewspaper, and thus this essential effect of dosification and its subsequentbuilding of an imagined community are exaggerated in serialized (versusnon-serialized) fiction. The regular and relatively predictable delivery of theserialized narrative emphasizes horizontal time as linear, causal andprogressive in its development, in contrast to the messianic time exemplifiedin a monolithic text such as the Bible or Don Quixote. In these tomes, whichare revealed to the reader in a dense, final form, time is vertical, top-down,understood through epiphany. The novel-published-as-newspaper, on theother hand, arrives as a series of singular pieces, each flowing into the next—in opposition to the hermetic self-sufficiency of the published book—yetdivisible into measurable mathematical quantities. In that sense, theserialized novel is the perfect literary embodiment of Benjamin’s

24 See Sonia Marta Mora, De la sujeción colonial a la patria criolla. ‘El PeriquilloSarniento’ y los orígenes de la novela en Hispanoamérica (Heredia: EUNA, 1995).

25 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33.


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homogenous, empty time, itself made up of identical and interchangeable units:instalments that are calendrical and chronological—minutes, seconds, hoursand days—that mirror and reinforce the shift in temporality theorized byAnderson.26

Like a soap opera or the modern-day sitcom, the serial novel alsoexaggerates the creation of community through mass consumption that wasinitiated by the daily reading of the newspaper. This ritual is described byAnderson as an ‘extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost preciselysimultaneous consumption (“imagining”) of the newspaper-as-fiction’. Thisceremony becomes even more potent with the simultaneous reading of eachnew fictional instalment. The serialized novel served to unite a largercommunity whose members partook of the narrative, discussed with eachother what happened in the last instalment, and speculated about whatmight happen in the next. To Anderson’s rhetorical question regarding thenewspaper—‘What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked,imagined community can be envisioned?’—the most obvious response is ‘theserialized novel’.27 The serialized presentation of narrative exaggerates thevery characteristics that Anderson presents as essential to the newspaper’snation-building properties.

This intimate connection between newspaper and book was certainly notlost on Lizardi, who was, indeed, a master of the inverse version ofAnderson’s newspaper-as-form-of-novel: he was the inventor of the novel-as-form-of-newspaper in Mexico. Aníbal González explains that in Lizardi’s time

newspapers in Mexico and the rest of the Hispanic World made use ofgenres currently considered ‘literary’ in presenting their information,since [… ] journalism up to the late nineteenth century was lessconcerned with objectively presenting news than with self-expression,opinion, and ideological debate. 28

Lizardi purposefully packed each chapter of El Periquillo with as diverse arange of genres and topics—entertainment, morality, erudition andinformation—as he could fit in one instalment. In this respect, El Periquillo is

fundamentally a pamphlet passing itself off as narrative fiction [… ] Savefor its plot, there is little to distinguish El Periquillo from the hundreds ofother pamphlets Lizardi had already published and would continue topublish after the restrictions on his journalism were lifted in 1840.29

26 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), in German 20th-Century Philosophy: The Frankfurt School, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (New York:Continuum, 2000), 71–80; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 30.

27 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35.28 González, ‘Journalism and (Dis)Simulation’, 37–38.29 González, ‘Journalism and (Dis)Simulation’, 37.


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When the instalments were published together as a book, Lizardi annotatedthem, referring readers to specific editions of El Pensador Mexicano foradditional information on some topics. These notes were omitted insubsequent editions as extraneous. However, their original presence in thefirst edition highlights the crucial interplay that Lizardi himself perceivedbetween his novel and his newspaper writings.

Within this chronological, narrative structure, the gradual assumption ofa newly national identity was constructed over time. The reader incorporatedthe ‘reality’ of El Periquillo into his daily life, and got to know the character ofthe Mangy Parrot as an intimate family member, over the prolonged periodthat the book was consumed, in steady doses, twice weekly, over months.The work-in-progress nature of serial publication made it more of aparticipatory process for readers, more closely mirroring the experience ofthe national subject watching his or her place in the nation-under-construction unfold. As the narrative instalments are linked together, soare the national subjects, and both are embedded in the larger fabric of thenovel and the nation in progress.

As we no longer have any remaining copies of the original serialinstalments of the first edition of El Periquillo—only their posteriorpresentation in the bound volumes of 1816 (four copies of this sort are stillin existence, while the original clothbound pamphlets of the 1825 versionhave been lost, and exist only on one defective microfilm)30—we must lookto the narrative for certain indications of, and references to, its originalserialized publication. These residual signs of serialization are mostapparent in the numerous prologues to the work, as well as the openingpages and the concluding pages. In these narrative spaces that frame theautobiographical voice of the pícaro, the serialized Periquillo reconfiguresreaders’ conceptions of space and time to allow for the creation of the newentity of the Mexican nation through an overarching focus on the familyunit as an inclusive allegory for the nation.

The various prologues of El Periquillo stress the importance of this familyunit and of the past-present-future relationships among a family of readers(Periquillo’s putative children and grandchildren), and provide instructionson how the book should be read. Vogeley refers to ‘family’ as the ‘imperialmetaphor that had been used to foster ties between the Spanish king andhis two sets of sons (one on the Iberian peninsula and the other in his far-flung colonies)’ prior to the narrativization of the new, American communitythat Anderson describes.31 The autobiographical voice of El Periquillodevelops this theme, as he first chronicles the failure of relationships withhis now-deceased parents (an allegorical reference to Spain), then the

30 Moore, ‘Una bibliografía descriptiva’, 387; Ruiz Barrionuevo, ‘El Periquillo Sarnientode Fernández de Lizardi’, 153–54.

31 Vogeley, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America, 2.


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episodes of his fallen life and the shortcomings of his own generation, and endswith a focus on changing the behaviour of future generations of his family whomight learn from his mistakes. In these prologues, Lizardi and his characterEl Periquillo effectively appropriate the voice of a new, secular father figure tospeak directly to his family (the Mexican nation-to-be) as to how thecommunity might learn from its mistakes and evolve into towards a moreprosperous future. The fatherly voice induces readers, not to wait passivelyfor a rapturous messianic moment to safeguard their future (vertical time),but instead to perceive Mexico’s history as an ongoing chain of cause andeffect (horizontal time) for which their own actions were ultimatelyresponsible.

The first of the novel’s three prologues, ‘Prólogo, dedicatoria y advertencia(s a los lectores)’, reminds us of the work’s initial serialization and theimportance of that innovative format to this text’s creation, propagationand survival. It appears in all of the first three editions (under slightlyvarying titles and page lengths, and ranging from six to eight pages). Itbegins with the authorial voice of a fictionalized Lizardi directly confrontinghis readers with a radically new proposal: the need for a new mecenas forthe nation. He first pokes fun at the tradition of dedicating the book to awealthy aristocrat who funds its publication. He then records aconversation with his ‘unnamed friend’ (in a device reminiscent of theprologue to the Quijote) regarding the considerable difficulties that criollowriters faced in their efforts to publish books in the colonies. The ensuingdebate essentially foregrounds the need for a serialized novel in thecolonies, in order for a national literature to flourish. The cost of publishingsuch works in book form represents the most formidable obstacle:

—¿Y a quién piensas dedicarle tu obrita?, me preguntó mi amigo.—A aquel señor que yo considerase se atreviera a costearme la impresión.—¿Y a cuánto podrían abordar sus costos?, me dijo.—A cuatro mil y ciento y tantos pesos, por ahí, por ahí.—¡Santa Bárbara!, exclamó mi amigo todo azorado. ¿Una obrita de cuatrotomitos en cuarto cuesta tanto? (90–91)

The friend suggests the Mexican public as Lizardi’s new patron. Those whohave supported his newspapers in the past will now finance his novel:

¿A quiénes conmás justicia debes dedicar tus tareas, sino a los que leen lasobras a costa de su dinero? Pues ellos son los que costean la impresión,y por lo mismo sus mecenas más seguros. Conque aliéntate, no seasbobo. (93)

Lizardi proposes a series of instalments (cuadernos) as a viable alternative tothe expense of book publication, which he refers to as


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una de las trabas más formidables que han tenido y tendrán los talentosamericanos para no lucir, como debieran, en el teatro literario. Losgrandes costos que tiene en el reino que lastarse en la impresión de lasobras abultadas retraen a muchos de emprendarlas [… ] los pobres nodebemos ser escritores. (91)

Serial publication is portrayed as the surest way around these formidablefinancial obstacles.

The commercial pact proposed between author and subscribers will alsoopen the novel up to the broadest possible readership. In book form, thenovel’s readership would be reduced from an already small group of literatereaders to those few who could afford to buy a complete volume for theirpersonal libraries. Lizardi had made direct reference to this problem onother occasions, as when stating, ‘[m]any poor persons [… ] who buy thePensador don’t have the Quijote or have [n]ever [sic] read it’.32 The firstprologue to El Periquillo reminds us of the book’s initial distribution ininstalments (or pamphlets, indicated by Lizardi’s use of the wordcuadernos), which could be purchased individually or by subscription aspart of the reader’s subsidizing of the work:

Dignaos, pues, acogerla favorablemente, comprando cada uno seis o sietecapítulos cada día, y subscribiéndoos por cinco o seis ejemplares, a lomenos [… ] aunque hagáis cartuchos o servilletas con los libros; quecomo costeéis la impresión con algunos polvos de añadidura, jamás mearrepentiré de haber seguido el consejo de mi amigo; antes desde ahorapara entonces, y desde entonces para ahora, os escojo y elijo para únicosmecenas y protectores [… ] pidiendo a Dios que os guarde muchos años,os dé dinero y os permita emplearlo en beneficio de los autores,impresores, papeleros, comerciantes, encuadernadores y demásdependientes de vuestro gusto. (95)

The proposal becomes even more revolutionary when we consider thesociological composition of Lizardi’s public. According to the author himself,the intended readership is a motley crew indeed:

Muy bien sé que… tenéis relaciones de parentesco con los Caínesfratricidas, con los idólatros Nabucos, con las prostitutas Dalilas [… ] ycon una multitud de pícaros y pícaras que han vivido y aún viven en elmismo mundo que vosotros. Sé que acaso seréis, algunos, plebeyos,indios, mulatos, negros… (94)

32 Cited in Vogeley, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America, 76; JoséJoaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Obras, comp., ed. & notas de María Rosa Palazón & JacoboChencinsky, intro. de Jacobo Chencinsky, 14 vols (Mexico D.F.: UNAM, 1963–1997), III(1968), Periódicos. ‘El Pensador Mexicano’, 171.


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This catalogue of readership, while sardonic, speaks directly to a swathe ofsociety that read only minimally, and explains Lizardi’s frequent cautionsthroughout El Periquillo on how to best read the novel. It also demonstratesthe author’s acute awareness of these new readers’—and soon-to-becitizens’—interpretive limitations.

Considering the broad range of readership articulated in the firstprologue, the feat of Lizardi’s second prologue—of subsuming these readersunder the rubric of one big family—, is quite remarkable. The secondprologue, written in the paternal voice of the reformed rogue Periquillo,appears consistently in all of the first three editions under the title ‘Elprólogo del Periquillo Sarniento’ (approximately 3–4 pages in each). In thissecond prologue, El Periquillo speaks lovingly about his two most importantcreations: his hijos and his cuadernos, and articulates their fate asintertwined. Both are under certain threat. His children run the risk ofmaking the same moral mistakes as their father. The purpose of thecuadernos is to prevent this downfall, as articulated in the secondprologue’s opening lines: ‘Cuando escribo mi vida, es sólo con la sanaintención de que mis hijos se instruyan en las materias sobre que les hablo(95). But it is the children’s responsibility to protect the teachings of theirfather from unsympathetic minds and hands: ‘No quisiera que salieranestos cuadernos de sus manos, y así se los encargo’ (95).

Serialization optimized a broad diffusion of content to readers and non-readers, sympathetic and unsympathetic, and these concerns reflect theimmense distributive capacity of serialized literature. El Periquillo servesto voice Lizardi’s real concern for misreadings, misuse and censorship at thehands of wider and less than supportive readership, i.e. those outside of ElPeriquillo’s ‘family’. At the same time, El Periquillo voices doubt that hisoffspring will obey his words; he anticipates that they will break the firstrule by lending these cuadernos beyond the family circle: ‘no sé si meobedecerán, ni si se les antojará andar prestándolos a éste y al otro’ (96).Here we may suspect both the power of suggestion at work in the hands ofthe savvy businessman Lizardi, as well as a real anxiety about the need for‘right readings’ of his work. This concern for censorship is even moreadamantly articulated at the beginning of Chapter 1, where El Periquillo’svoice reiterates:

Últimamente, os mando y encargo, que estos cuadernos no salgan devuestras manos, porque no se hagan el objeto de la maledicencia de losnecios o de los inmorales; pero si tenéis la debilidad de prestarlosalguna vez, os suplico no los prestéis a esos señores [… ] Por tanto, oleed para vosotros solos mis cuadernos, o en caso de prestarlos seaúnicamente a los verdaderos hombres de bien, pues éstos, aunque comofrágiles yerren o ayan errado, conocerán el peso de la verdad sin darsepor agraviados. (104–5)


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The express role of the second prologue is to provide such disclaimers, and tomake clear, once more to all, the nature of his intended audience as reflectedin his teachings:

me veo precisado [… ] a hacer yo mismo, y sin fiarme de nadie, una especiede prólogo; porque los prólogos son tapaboca de los necios y maliciosos, y almismo tiempo son [… ] unos remedios anticipados de los libros, y en virtudde esto digo: que esta obrita no es para los sabios, porque éstos nonecesitan de mis pobres lecciones; pero sí puede ser útil para algunosmuchachos que carezan, tal vez, demejores obras en que aprender. (95–96)

In this second prologue, El Periquillo repeatedly voices the importance of thecuadernos to the fate of his children: ‘Mucho menos que no escribo para todos,sino sólo para mis hijos, que son los que más me interesan, y a quienes tengoobligación de enseñar’ (97). We also see his fatherly concern that his words beuseful to them. For that reason, he states his intention to speak using ‘our’language (‘nuestro idioma’) in a natural style (97). Unlike the past traditionof European novels imported to the colonies, this new novel is meant tospeak directly to his children’s needs and unique reality, and it is therepetition of this concept that closes the second prologue:

En fin, tengo un consuelo, y es que mis escritos precisamente agradarán amis hijos, para quienes, en primer lugar, los trabajé, si a los demás no lesacomodare, sentiré que la obra no corresponda a mis deseos. (98)

Vogeley claims that colonial ambivalence toward colonizers was mirrored intheir mistrust of the book as cultural product: ‘colonials [… ] seem to havecome to a consciousness of language’s importance through their perceptionthat European books did not match American life’. She concludes that ‘[m]any [colonials] distrusted books, yet they remained powerful symbols ofEuropean civilization’.33 This would indicate that a novel distributed inpamphlets would have particular appeal to Lizardi’s readership on the eveof Independence.

The last of the three prologues appears over three pages in each of the firstthree editions with slight variations to the title ‘Advertencia(s) general(es alos lectores)’. This third prologue is written in the first-person voice of afictionalized Lizardi. In its introduction of Lizardi as the editor of thedeceased Periquillo’s cuadernos, this final prologue serves as the brief butcrucial set-up for the metafictional trope that will reappear in the book’sending chapters, again highlighting the novel’s serialization. It featuresLizardi’s assurances as ‘editor’ that he has followed the desires of hisdeceased ‘friend’ Periquillo ‘en obsequio de la amistad que le profesé’ in hisamendments to the original cuadernos (99). This prologue is connected to

33 Vogeley, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America, 51, 55.


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the book’s penultimate chapter, where El Periquillo describes the ‘new friend’Lizardi who mysteriously appeared to him at his deathbed:

En este tiempo me visitaban mis amigos, y por una casualidad tuve otronuevo que fue un tal Lizardi [… ] escritor desgraciado en vuestra patriay conocido de público con el epíteto con que se distinguió cuando escribióen estos amargos tiempos, y fue el del Pensador Mexicano. (920)

The serial nature of the text is also underscored in the intimate scenesinvolving Lizardi and El Periquillo’s family surrounding the reformedrogue’s deathbed, where one of El Periquillo’s final mandates is ‘[t]oma esoscuadernos para que mis hijos se aprovechen de ellos después de mis días’(921). In so saying, the moribund pícaro bequeaths Lizardi with theinstalments in which he has recorded his life story. At this point thefictionalized Lizardi claims complete editorial authority as don PedroSarmiento’s life passes safely into his hands. These metafictional touchesclearly distinguish El Periquillo from its European picaresque antecedents.(That genre often functions as open-ended autobiography, in which thenarrator remains alive; there is frequently suspense as to whether the roguewill lapse into his former ways, so that sequels were possible and oftenpublished.) In El Periquillo, however, the omniscient editor soundly shutsthe door on the mistakes of the past, assuring the reader of the authenticityof the pícaro’s repentance by the end of El Periquillo’s final chapter.

Finally, in the ‘Notas de El Pensador’ that close the novel (in its firstcomplete edition of 1830–31), the fictionalized Lizardi directly addresses ElPeriquillo’s now extended ‘family’ of readers for the first time. In theseclosing notes, the authoritative voice of the journalist Lizardi guides thereaders’ final interpretations as well as the future of the text, stepping intothe void left by El Periquillo’s passing: ‘Hasta aquí escribió mi buen amigodon Pedro Sarmiento, a quien amé como a mí mismo’ (921). His role is notonly to annotate, correct and order the serial instalments, but also to sealthe protagonist’s tale—to literally have the last word. By the time thereader arrives at this last instalment, she is aware that the tale will be re-released in book form to an even broader audience, as the fictionalizedLizardi has convinced El Periquillo’s widow of the necessity of publishingthese cuadernos beyond the circle of their now well-instructed children:

Pasados tres años, y ya más serena la señora, le pedí los cuadernos queescribió mi amigo [… ]—No lo permita Dios, decía la señora muy escandalizada, ¿cómo había yode permitir que salieran a la plaza las gracias de mi marido… ?—Nada de eso ha de haber, le contesté; [… ] [son] gracias dignas de leersey publicarse…Es verdad que don Pedro escribió sus cuadernos con eldesignio de que sólo sus hijos los leyeran; pero por fortuna éstos son los


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que menos necesitan su lectura, porque ya tienen el espíritu bien formado.En México, señora, y en todo el mundo hay una porción de Periquillos aquienes puede ser más útil esta leyenda por la doctrina y la moral queencierra. (937–38)

This deliberately cultivated confusion between reality and fiction,exacerbated by the metafictional Lizardi’s investment in the future of thecuaderno that the reader then held in her hand, facilitates the materialmerging of that creation with the reader’s life, thus increasing its influencewithin her reality. This casual progression from the interior space of thenovel to the exterior space of the reader’s everyday life grants that ‘hypnoticconfirmation of the solidity of a single community embracing characters,author and readers, moving ever forward through calendrical time’ of whichAnderson speaks.34 The three nested prologues of the serialized ElPeriquillo assure—as they bounce between a fictionalized author and hisliterary creation—that fiction seeps quietly and continuously into thereaders’ reality, creating that confidence of community in anonymity, thatfor Anderson is a hallmark of the modern nation. Serial publication, alongwith the measurable, predictable reading habits it created, is the perfectembodiment of a literary practice that fostered this new mentality, orcommunity, in its readers.

The need to create the narrative continuity that characterizes a familyfrom generation to generation is mirrored and reinforced by connectedepisodes among a family of contemporaries with whom the reader hasbecome intimate, a community linked through temporal coincidence. Byestablishing temporal and causal links between the Mangy Parrot’s baddecisions in the recent past and his endangered present, it becomes possibleto predict and even change the future in a way that will best benefit his‘family’, in the march toward progress that Walter Benjamin describes as‘homogenous, empty time’. In Benjamin’s critique, this shift in temporalityis a product of capitalistic society, governed by clock and calendar, withtime advancing in equal, measurable, even predictable units toward anever-perfectible future.35 (Benjamin saw such progress as risible, writing in1940 from the perspective of a Jewish refugee living through the horrors ofWorld War II, and longed for a return to the prophetic promise of messianictime, a vertically structured ‘simultaneity-along-time’ that imagined thepast and future to coexist in a single rapturous moment.)36 ThoughAnderson adopts Benjamin’s terminology, he is more concerned withestablishing the origins of ‘homogenous empty time’ at the beginning of the

34 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 27.35 See Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 77–80 (p. 79).36 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,

1969), 265.


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nineteenth century in one of the conceptual shifts that made the nation-statepossible, than with judging the later outcomes of its emergence.37 Lizardi’surgent concern, on the other hand, was most visibly the historicization ofthe present, a ‘now’ that makes the best use of the past and is pregnantwith future possibility. It was this specific and explicit linking of Mexico’spresent moment with a palpable future that produced such immense readerassociation with the author and the narrative voice that he created. Thenarrative voice imbues the present moment with a sense of the ripenessthat is passed on to El Periquillo’s ‘children’: it is only in the present-time ofhis narrative that El Periquillo’s children are capable of change, and only inthis recognition is there any hope for their future.

The little we know of El Periquillo’s reception upon first publication (1816)tells us that Mexicans were not associating the text with past or foreignelements in Mexican culture, but instead, with their present-day realitiesand the recognizably Mexican human beings whom they saw in the book’spages. Lizardi’s contemporary popularity indicates that Mexicans claimedthe book as made by one of them and as a means by which they couldrelate to their countrymen. Any overt linkage to a European culture or aliterate tradition seems to have been ignored. Mexicans eagerly bought thechapters as they came out and discussed Lizardi’s characters in otherpopular literature as if they were real people. Vogeley notes anecdotallythat the sheer number of ‘references to [Lizardi’s] books in politicalpamphlets’ suggests their circulation went beyond what print statisticsindicate. El Periquillo came to be valued in those years at two to threetimes its original price; Lizardi himself reported it at three times more,while Vogeley has stated that it was at two times the original price by thetime of Lizardi’s death in 1827. In reality, the author Lizardi was able tomake the decision to publish the cuadernos in further book editions basedon the gradual reception of the instalments as they were published.After its initial publication in 1816, a new edition of El Periquilloappeared in almost every decade until the end of the century, includingprintings in 1825, 1830–1831, 1842 (two printings), 1865, 1884 (520printings), 1896, and 1897.38 In the closing pages of the book, thefictionalized Lizardi himself declared the imminent success of El Periquillo’swritings:

Jamás esperaba yo que semejantes mamarrachos tuvieran la aceptaciónque lograron. De unas en otras se aumentaron tanto las copias que en eldía pasan seguramente de trescientas las que hay en México y fuera deél. (936–37)

37 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24.38 Vogeley, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America, 59, 70–71, 278 n. 12;

xxii.


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We see continued indications of its contemporary influence as late as the endof the century, when an anonymous writer calling himself ‘Un devoto delPensador Mexicano’ published a reformist novel in instalments in a MexicoCity newspaper, entitled Perucho, Grandson of Periquillo. Its publication isbut one proof of the intergenerational vitality of El Periquillo that Lizardihad aimed for in his careful prologues bequeathing a reformist legacy to hischildren. His grandchildren were speaking, showing the influence of ElPeriquillo in the Mexican literary imagination almost one hundred yearsafter its initial serial publication. It is precisely through the overlookedinitial serialization of this novel—its creation of a community joinedthrough the ritual habit of biweekly reading, its drawing upon alreadyextant print media structures to reach the broadest possible readership,and its serial reinforcement of the calendrical clocking of homogenousempty time—that El Periquillo’s final wishes have been vindicated: hismessage made Mexicans out of his readers and reformists of hisgrandchildren, the reason that we continue to read El Periquillo as Mexico’sfirst national novel, through successive generations, up to the presentmoment and into the foreseeable time and space beyond. In conclusion, oneof the most interesting, important, and inherent connections between thetwo quintessentially nineteenth-century cultural artefacts of novel andnewspaper is the augmented and amplified effect of their synthesis in thenineteenth-century phenomenon of the serial novel. The fact that Lizardi’sEl Periquillo was first published serially—and likely marketed to the samesubscribers as his previous journalistic endeavours, while aiming for aneven larger audience—reinforces the inextricable link between LatinAmerica’s first novel and the newspaper and encourages further study ofthe effects of this phenomenon.*

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.


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Serial Space-Time As a New Form of National Consciousness: The Case of Lizardi's El Periquillo...

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