From the Epic Poet to the Master of Prudence: Juan Rufo or the Fabric of Fame in Life and Death

Abstract

The literary and social ambitions of Juan Rufo, a gifted and restless scion of a wealthy, plebeian Cordovan family of Jewish descent, were encouraged by his encounter, because of political hazards, with Don Juan de Austria, who took him into his service. Hence came the impulse of a vast and laborious poem, La Austríada (1584): we claim that the choice of the epic genre and the aesthetic solutions adopted by Rufo, as well as his strategy of legitimation as an epic poet, were constrained by his social profile in a specific political, ideological and literary conjuncture. To support this thesis, we rely on his second work, Las Seisceintas Apotegmas (1596), which contains personal confidences and statements extremely revealing of the author's world view. This second work did not compensate the frustration and desengaño motivated by the mediocre success of the first; and yet, it was oriented towards the future. We demonstrate it through an investigation, still partial, of his fame in the second half of the seventeenth century, moment in which arises, thanks to anthologists and commentators, a Rufo according to the taste, typical of these decades, for a moral literature based on wit, brevity and singularity.