The picaresque novel is a genre of prose fiction that depicts the adventures of a roguish but appealing hero, usually of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. Picaresque novels typically adopt the form of "an episodic prose narrative" with a realistic style. There are often elements of comedy and satire.
The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), which was published anonymously during the Spanish Golden Age because of its anticlerical content. Literary works from Imperial Rome published during the 1st–2nd century AD, such as Satyricon by Petronius and The Golden Ass by Apuleius had a relevant influence on the picaresque genre and are considered predecessors. Other notable early Spanish contributors to the genre included Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604) and Francisco de Quevedo's El Buscón (1626). The Golden Ass by Apuleius nevertheless remains, according to various scholars such as F. W. Chandler, A. Marasso, T. Somerville and T. Bodenmüller, the primary antecedent influence for the picaresque genre. Subsequently, following the example of Spanish writers, the genre flourished throughout Europe for more than 200 years and it continues to have an influence on modern literature and fiction.
Defined According to the traditional view of Thrall and Hibbard (first published in 1936), seven qualities distinguish the picaresque novel or narrative form, all or some of which an author may employ for effect:Thrall, William and Addison Hibbard. A Handbook to Literature. The Odyssey Press, New York. 1960.
A picaresque narrative is usually written in first person as an autobiographical account. The main character is often of low character or social class. They get by with wits and rarely deign to hold a job. There is little or no plot. The story is told in a series of loosely connected adventures or episodes. There is little if any character development in the main character. Once a pícaro, always a pícaro. Their circumstances may change but these rarely result in a change of heart. The pícaro's story is told with a plainness of language or realism. Satire is sometimes a prominent element. The behavior of a picaresque protagonist stops just short of criminality. Carefree or immoral rascality positions the picaresque hero as a sympathetic outsider, untouched by the false rules of society.
In the English-speaking world, the term "picaresque" is often used loosely to refer to novels that contain some elements of this genre; e.g. an episodic recounting of adventures on the road. The term is also sometimes used to describe works which only contain some of the genre's elements, such as Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), or Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837).
Etymology The word pícaro first starts to appear in Spain with the current meaning in 1545, though at the time it had no association with literature.Best, O. F. "Para la etimología de pícaro". IN: Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Vol. 17, No. 3/4 (1963/1964), pp. 352–357. The word pícaro does not appear in Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the novella credited by modern scholars with founding the genre. The expression picaresque novel was coined in 1810.Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, p. 936. Merriam-Webster, Inc.Rodríguez González, Félix (1996). Spanish Loanwords in the English Language: a tendency towards hegemony reversal, p. 36. Walter de Gruyter. Google Books. Whether it has any validity at all as a generic label in the Spanish sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Cervantes certainly used "picaresque" with a different meaning than it has today—has been called into question. There is unresolved debate within Hispanic studies about what the term means, or meant, and which works were, or should be, so called. The only work clearly called "picaresque" by its contemporaries was Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604), which they considered "El libro del pícaro" (English: "The Book of the Pícaro").
History
Lazarillo de Tormes and its sources While elements of literature by Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio have a picaresque feel and may have contributed to the style, the modern picaresque begins with Lazarillo de Tormes, which was published anonymously in 1554 in Burgos, Medina del Campo, and Alcalá de Henares in Spain, and also in Antwerp, which at the time was under Spanish rule as a major city in the Spanish Netherlands. It is variously considered either the first picaresque novel or at least the antecedent of the genre.
The protagonist, Lázaro, lives by his wits in an effort to survive and succeed in an impoverished country full of hypocrisy. As a pícaro character, he is an alienated outsider, whose ability to expose and ridicule individuals compromised within society gives him a revolutionary stance.Cruz, Anne J. (2008). Approaches to teaching Lazarillo de Tormes and the picaresque tradition, p. 19. ("The pícaros revolutionary stance, as an alienated outsider who nevertheless constructs his own self and his world"). Lázaro states that the motivation for his writing is to communicate his experiences of overcoming deception, hypocrisy, and falsehood (engaño).MacAdam, Alfred J. Textual confrontations: comparative readings in Latin American literature, p. 138. Google Books.
The character type draws on elements of characterization already present in Roman literature, especially Petronius's Satyricon. Lázaro shares some of the traits of the central figure of Encolpius, a former gladiator,The life of Lazarillo de Tormes: his fortunes and adversities (1962) p. 18. though it is unlikely that the author had access to Petronius's work.Martin, René (1999) Le Satyricon: Pétrone, p. 105. Google Books. From the comedies of Plautus, Lazarillo borrows the figure of the parasite and the supple slave. Other traits are taken from Apuleius's The Golden Ass.Chaytor, Henry John (1922)La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes p. vii. The Golden Ass and Satyricon are rare surviving samples of the "Milesian tale", a popular genre in the classical world, and were revived and widely read in Renaissance Europe.
The principal episodes of Lazarillo are based on Arabic folktales that were well known to the Moorish inhabitants of Spain. The Arabic influence may account for the negative portrayal of priests and other church officials in Lazarillo.Fouad Al-Mounir, "The Muslim Heritage of Lazarillo de Tormes," The Maghreb Review vol. 8, no. 2 (1983), pp. 16–17. Arabic literature, which was read widely in Spain in the time of Al-Andalus and possessed a literary tradition with similar themes, is thus another possible influence on the picaresque style. Al-Hamadhani (d.1008) of Hamadhan (Iran) is credited with inventing the literary genre of maqāmāt in which a wandering vagabond makes his living on the gifts his listeners give him following his extemporaneous displays of rhetoric, erudition, or verse, often done with a trickster's touch.James T. Monroe, The art of Badi'u 'l-Zaman al-Hamadhani as picaresque narrative (American University of Beirut c1983). Ibn al-Astarkuwi or al-Ashtarkuni (d.1134) also wrote in the genre maqāmāt, comparable to later European picaresque.Monroe, James T. translator, Al-Maqamat al-luzumiyah, by Abu-l-Tahir Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Tamimi al-Saraqus'i ibn al-Astarkuwi. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
During the 17th century, Islamic picaresque tales found renewed popularity in Western Europe. The One Thousand and One Nights were popularised in Europe by authors such as Hanna Diyab, Jean de La Fontaine, and Antoine Galland. These tales featured roguish and cunning protagonists who succeeded by subverting social conventions and dramatic acts of guile, such as Scheherazade, Sinbad the Sailor, and Morgiana the Slave-Girl. The new popularity of the Thousand and One Nights coincided with the development of the fairy tale (conte de fées) as a genre of popular literature, and the works of such fabulists as Charles Perrault and the Madame d'Aulnoy.
The curious presence of Russian loanwords in the text of the Lazarillo also suggests the influence of medieval Slavic tales of tricksters, thieves, itinerant prostitutes, and brigands, who were common figures in the impoverished areas bordering on Germany to the west. When diplomatic ties to Germany and Spain were established under the emperor Charles V, these tales began to be read in Italian translations in the Iberian Peninsula.S. Rodzevich, "K istorii russkogo romantizma", Russky Filologichesky Vestnik, 77 (1917), 194–237 (in Russian).
As narrator of his own adventures, Lázaro seeks to portray himself as the victim of both his ancestry and his circumstance. This means of appealing to the compassion of the reader would be directly challenged by later picaresque novels such as Guzmán de Alfarache (1599/1604) and El Buscón (composed in the first decade of the 17th century and first published in 1626) because the idea of determinism used to cast the pícaro as a victim clashed with the Catholic Revival doctrine of free will.
Other initial works
An early example is Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), characterized by religiosity. Guzmán de Alfarache is a fictional character who lived in the city of San Juan de Aznalfarache, in Seville, Spain.
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 absolute masterpiece of the genre by A. A. Parker, because of his baroque style and the study of delinquent psychology. However, a different school of thought, led by Francisco Rico, rejects Parker's view, contending instead that the protagonist is an unrealistic character and that—as the structure of the novel is radically different from previous works in the picaresque genre—Quevedo is using the form as a mere vehicle to show off his abilities with conceit and rhetoric (rather than to actually construct a satirical critique of Spanish Golden Age society).
Miguel de Cervantes wrote several works "in the picaresque manner, notably Rinconete y Cortadillo (1613) and El coloquio de los perros (1613; "Colloquy of the Dogs")". "Cervantes also incorporated elements of the picaresque into his greatest novel, Don Quixote (1605, 1615)","Picaresque", Britannica online the "single most important progenitor of the modern novel", that M. H. Abrams has described as a "quasi-picaresque narrative". Here the hero is not a rogue but a foolish knight.
In order to understand the historical context that led to the development of these paradigmatic picaresque novels in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries, it is essential to take into consideration the circumstances surrounding the lives of conversos, whose ancestors had been Jewish, and whose New Christian faith was subjected to close scrutiny and mistrust.
The Spanish novels were read and imitated in other European countries where their influence can be found. In Germany, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen wrote Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669), considered the most important of non-Spanish picaresque novels. It describes the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War. Grimmelshausen's novel has been called an example of the German abenteuerroman (which literally means "adventure novel"). An abenteuerroman is Germany's version of the picaresque novel; it is an "entertaining story of the adventures of the hero, but there is also often a serious aspect to the story."Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, Publishers. Springfield, Massachusetts, 1995. Page 3. Grimmelshausen wrote several sequels in the same genre, notably The Life of Courage and Tearaway, both from 1670.