picaresque

For the album by the Decemberists, see Picaresque (album).

The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca", from "pícaro", for "rogue" or "rascal") is a popular subgenre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. This style of novel originated in Spain and flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and continues to influence modern literature.

History

The genre has classical precedent in the Sanskrit legend Baital Pachisi, in Petronius's fragmentary "Satyricon", and in Apuleius's "The Golden Ass". While elements of Chaucer and Boccaccio have a picaresque feel, the modern picaresque begins with Lazarillo de Tormes, published anonymously in Antwerp and Spain in 1554 and variously considered either the first picaresque novel or at least an antecedent to the genre. The title character Lazarillo is a pícaro who must live by his wits in an impoverished country full of hypocrisy. The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, written in Florence beginning in 1558, also has much in common with the picaresque. The first unquestioned picaresque novel was published in 1599: Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, characterized by religiosity. Francisco de Quevedo's El buscón (1604 according to Francisco Rico; the exact date is uncertain, yet it was certainly a very early work) is considered the masterpiece of the subgenre by A.A. Parker, because of his baroque style and the study of the delinquent psychology. A more recent school of thought, however, led by Francisco Rico rejects Parker's view, contending instead that the protagonist, Pablos, is a highly unrealistic character, simply a means for Quevedo to launch classist, racist and sexist attacks. Moreover, argues Rico, the structure of the novel is radically different from previous works of the picaresque genre: Quevedo uses the conventions of the picaresque as a mere vehicle to show off his abilities with conceit and rhetoric, rather than to construct a satirical critique of Spanish Golden Age society.

In other European countries, these Spanish novels were read and imitated. In Germany, Grimmelshausen wrote Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669), the most important of non-Spanish picaresque novels. It describes the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War. In France, this kind of novel declined into an aristocratic adventure: Le Sage's Gil Blas (1715). In England, the body of Tobias Smollett's work, and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) are considered picaresque, but they lack the sense of religious redemption of delinquency that was very important in Spanish and German novels. The triumph of Moll Flanders is more economic than moral.

Influence on modern fiction

In the English-speaking world, the term "picaresque" has referred more to a literary technique or model than to the precise genre that the Spanish call picaresco. The English-language term can simply refer to an episodic recounting of the adventures of an anti-hero on the road. Henry Fielding proved his mastery of the form in Joseph Andrews (1742), The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), but, as Fielding himself wrote, these novels were written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, not in imitation of the picaresque novel. Cervantes himself wrote a short picaresque novel, Rinconete y Cortadillo part of his Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Novels). J.B. Priestley made excellent use of the form in his enormously successful The Good Companions and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Other novels with elements of the picaresque include the French Candide, the Canadian Solomon Gursky Was Here and the English The Luck of Barry Lyndon. An interesting variation on the tradition of the picaresque is The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, a satirical view on early 19th century Persia, written by a British diplomat, James Morier.

Some modern novelists have used some picaresque techniques, as Gogol in Dead Souls (1842-52). Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) combined the influence of the picaresque novel with the then new spy novel. Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Svejk (1923?) was the first example of the picaresque technique in Central Europe. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was consciously written as a picaresque novel, as were many other novels of vagabond life, such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March is a picaresque novel with bildungsroman traits. George MacDonald Fraser's novels about Harry Flashman combine the picaresque with historical fiction. Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism" can be seen as a hybrid of fictional picaresque with memoir and traditional reportage. The picaresque elements are especially prominent in Thompson's less journalistic, more literary and psychotopically themed works, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Great Shark Hunt. A rather darker use of picaresque tradition can be found in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965).

Sergio Leone identified his Spaghetti Westerns, more specifically his Dollars trilogy, as being in the picaresque style.

Recent examples are Camilo José Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte (1951), Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959), Isabel Allende's Eva Luna (1987), Robert Clark Young's One of the Guys (1999), Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend (1991). Sarah Waters recreated the classic picaresque in Tipping the Velvet (1998), following the life of a young Victorian lesbian through highs and lows of society and personal degradation.

See also

• Adventure novel

References

• Alexander A. Parker: Literature and the delinquent: The picaresque novel in Spain and Europe, 1599-1753.

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