The Mangy Parrot - Place in Lizardi's Work

Place in Lizardi's Work

José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi is emblematic of the generation of intellectuals, artists, and writers who led Mexico into the modern era. His own life history resonates with the ambivalences and outright contradictions of a world between colonial rule and independence. His writings — four novels, several fables, two plays, dozens of poems, over 250 articles and pamphlets — are important in three ways: as artistic expressions in themselves; as texts that contributed in vital ways to the intellectual life of Mexico early in its independence; and as windows into the daily life of that period.

Of Lizardi's many published works, El Periquillo Sarniento remains the most important. It typifies the dual impulse of his writing: to entertain and to edify. It is also a lively, comic novel that captures much of the reality of Mexico in 1816. In his subsequent novels Noches tristes (1818) and La Quijotita y su prima (1818–19), Lizardi's didactic side won out over his will to entertain. La Quijotita in particular is an exercise in moralizing, populated with flat characters whose function is to model particular foibles or virtues. Lizardi's last novel, Don Catrín de la Fachenda (1820), has on the contrary been held up by some critics as superior to El Periquillo. In Don Catrín, Lizardi took pains to respond to critics of the overt moralizing in his first novel. The result is a slimmed-down, artistically unified, more ironic, and darker picaresque (Nancy Vogeley, "A Latin American Enlightenment Version of the Picaresque: Lizardi's Don Catrín de la Fachenda," in Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala, eds., The Picaresque, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994, pp. 123–46). Yet El Periquillo retains its importance. As Antonio Benítez-Rojo writes, citing Benedict Anderson's use of El Periquillo as an exemplar of the anti-colonial novel, "the illusion of accompanying Periquillo along the roads and through the villages and towns of the viceroyalty helped awaken in the novel's readers the desire for nationness." Don Catrín "is artistically superior to El Periquillo Sarniento," Benítez-Rojo continues, "yet for all its defects the latter, because of its great vitality, is a major work of Mexican literature." ("José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and the Emergence of the Spanish American Novel as National Project," p. 335; p. 336.)

Finally, El Periquillo has the virtue of being the first, as Lizardi himself noted: "I am far from believing that I have written a masterpiece that is free from defects: it has many that I recognize, and must have others still that I have not noticed; but it also has one undeniable distinction, which is that of being the first novel that has been written in this country by an American in three hundred years." (Cited in Jefferson Rea Spell, Bridging the Gap, Mexico City: Editorial Libros de México, 1971, p. 267.) Because of its status as the first novel written by a Latin American and one emulated by generations of Mexican novelists, El Periquillo Sarniento appears on many "must-read" lists for graduate programs in Latin American literature, and it is of equal interest to students of Latin American history.