Picaresque novel  

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"Cervantes entered into rivalry with makers of the picaresque when in Don Quixote he drew a memorable rascal, Ginés de Pasamonte, whose autobiography, he declared, if ever written, should excel Lazarillo's and Guzman's. In the delightful Novelas Exemplares (1613) he further told such tales of roguery as Rinconete y Cortadillo, La ilustre fregona, El casamiento engañoso, and the El coloquio de los perros, and several of his pieces for the stage — notably the Rufian Dichoso and the farce Pedro de Urdemalas — proved their kinship with the genre."--The Literature of Roguery (1907) by Frank Wadleigh Chandler


Lazarillo de Tormes (1808-1812) by Francisco Goya "Before the blind man could withdraw his long nose that was choking Lazarillo, his "stomach revolted and discharged the stolen goods in his face, so that his nose and that hastily chewed sausage left (Lazarillo's) mouth at the same time".
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Lazarillo de Tormes (1808-1812) by Francisco Goya
"Before the blind man could withdraw his long nose that was choking Lazarillo, his "stomach revolted and discharged the stolen goods in his face, so that his nose and that hastily chewed sausage left (Lazarillo's) mouth at the same time".

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The picaresque novel (Spanish: picaresca, from pícaro, for "rogue" or "rascal") is a genre of prose fiction. It 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 a realistic style. There are often some elements of comedy and satire. While the term "picaresque novel" was only coined in 1810, the picaresque novel originated in Spain during the Spanish Golden Age in 1554. Early contributors included Mateo Alemán and Francisco de Quevedo and flourished throughout Europe for more than 200 years. It continues to influence modern literature.


Contents

History

The genre has classical precedents in the Sanskrit legend Baital Pachisi, in Petronius's fragmentary "Satyricon", and in Apuleius's "The Golden Ass". The last two are rare surviving samples of a mostly lost genre, which was highly popular in the Classical world, known as "Milesian tales".

Medieval Arabic literature possesses similar themes. Al-Hamadhani (d.1008) of Hamadhan (Iran) is credited with inventing the literary genre of maqamat 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. Ibn al-Astarkuwi or al-Ashtarkuni (d.1134) also wrote in the genre maqamat, comparable to later European picaresque novels.

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. Another early example is Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), 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. However, a more recent school of thought, 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.

The classic Chinese novel "Journey to the West" is considered to have considerable Picaresque elements. Being written in 1590, it is contemporary with much of the above - but is unlikely to have been directly influenced by the European genre.

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), Robert Clark Young's One of the Guys (1999), Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend (1991), and Stewart Home's Cunt (1999). 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.

In Dutch

Een voorbeeld van een schelmenroman uit de Nederlandstalige literatuur is Den Vermakelyken Avanturier door Nikolaes Heinsius the Younger uit 1695. Gerbrand Adriaensz. Bredero schreef een toneelstuk, De Spaanschen Brabander, dat gebaseerd is op de Spaanse schelmenroman Lazarillo de Tormes. De 19e eeuwse roman over de 16e eeuwse figuur Tijl Uilenspiegel, met een Vlaams-nationalistische inslag, is een ander Nederlandstalig voorbeeld. Een recent voorbeeld is Jan Cremer's Ik Jan Cremer (1964).

See also

References




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Picaresque novel" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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