The Picaresque

Harry Sieber

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138233782
• eBook ISBN: 9781315299617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1977, this book studies the picaresque as a literary genre. It begins by discriminating between the literature of roguery and the picaresque in particular before discussing the origins of the genre in Spain and tracing its development into Europe. The book concludes with a brief description of 'contemporary' works which belong to the same tradition.

In tracing the itinerary of the picaro in Europe and in America, it attempts to define a 'myth' of the picaresque which consists of two phases: the first being the traditional Spanish model of the picaresque and the second comprising of an 'anti-picaresque' myth, in which the 'hero' or 'anti-hero' no longer remains alienated but instead is the figure in which the 'new' society is formed.

1

Prologue: some definitions

Picaresque: ‘Belonging or relating to rogues or knaves: applied esp. to a style of literary fiction dealing with the adventures of rogues, chiefly of Spanish origin.’ OED

The word ‘picaresque’ seems to have shared the same fate as other literary, critical and descriptive terms such as conceit, irony, satire, naturalism, classicism and romanticism, in that attempts at precise definition have produced more confusion than understanding. The Oxford English Dictionary, while in no sense the ultimate authority, suggests three essential characteristics which help to locate a point of departure. First, the picaresque is a literary phenomenon, a work of fiction which is concerned with the habits and lives of rogues. Secondly, it is a style of fiction, that is, a kind or type of work which is distinguishable from other fictional styles. And third, its origins are found in Spain, implying that it has a ‘history’ whose genesis can be located in space and time.

Few definitions of the picaresque have improved on the brief description found in the OED. In 1895 Fonger de Haan (An Outline History of the Novela Picaresca in Spain, not published until 1903) defined picaresque fiction as ‘the autobiography of a pícaro, a rogue, and in that form a satire upon the conditions and persons of the time that gives it birth’ (p. 1). He makes two important additions to the OED account, seeing it as an autobiography and its ‘style’ as a ‘form’ of satire, an idea recently taken up and fully explored by Ronald Paulson in The Fictions of Satire, 1967. Soon after de Haan had defended his dissertation at Johns Hopkins, Frank Wadleigh Chandler presented his Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University. The first part, ‘The Picaresque Novel in Spain’, was published with the title, Romances of Roguery: An Episode in the History of the Novel, 1899. Chandler’s book on the picaresque novel is still viewed, particularly by non-Hispanists, as the best authority on the subject. His description of the rogue narrator, the pícaro, is now a commonplace in literary criticism of the picaresque:

The picaresque novel of the Spaniards presents a rogue relating his adventures. He is born of poor and dishonest parents, who are not often troubled with gracing their union by a ceremony, nor particularly pleased at his advent. He comes up by hook or crook as he may. Either he enters the world with an innate love of the goods of others, or he is innocent and learns by hard raps that he must take care of himself or go to the wall. In either case the result is much the same; in order to live he must serve somebody, and the gains of service he finds himself obliged to augment with the gains of roguery. So he flits from one master to another, all of whom he outwits in his career, and describes to satirize in his narrative. Finally, having run through a variety of strange vicissitudes, measuring by his rule of roguery the vanity of human estates, he brings his story to a close. (pp. 45–6)

Chandler’s characterization of the Spanish rogue is accurate for the most part, although it actually defines an ‘ideal’ type of rogue rather than any particular pícaro. This kind of generalization anticipates the attempt of Stuart Miller (The Picaresque Novel, 1967) to define an ‘archetypal’ picaresque novel in terms of its most salient features, leaving little room to consider the changing elements of the genre from country to country over an extended period of time. Chandler’s definition, however general it may be, clearly distinguishes the picaresque novel from a larger body of fiction which he calls the ‘literature of roguery’. The latter includes criminal biographies, beggar books, vocabularies of thieves’ cant, cony-catching pamphlets and jest books. Very simply put, the picaresque as a narrative genre, as distinct from these ‘anatomies’ of rogues, tricksters and beggars, has both a plot and a single narrator. The subject-matter is often shared by both traditions, but only in the picaresque novel is it shaped into an ‘artistic’ form and narrated from the viewpoint of the pícaro.

These conventional definitions of the picaresque are virtually forgotten by more recent critics who tend to stretch the term to include ‘any novel in which the hero takes a journey whose course plunges him into all sorts, conditions and classes of men…’ (Walter Allen, The English Novel, 1954, p. 18). Robert Alter (Rogue’s Progress, 1964) virtually repeats earlier definitions whereas Claudio Guillén (Literature as System, 1971) distills the picaresque narrative to the ‘confessions of a liar’ (p. 92). A. A. Parker (Literature and the Delinquent, 1967) counters the confessional element, claiming that the autobiographical viewpoint ‘is not essential; the distinguishing feature … is the atmosphere of delinquency’ (p. 6). And Ihab Hassan (Radical Innocence, 1961) goes so far as to deny even its Spanish origins by seeing it as an English phenomenon. Christine J. Whitbourn (ed., Knaves and Swindlers, 1974) goes to the other extreme by locating the roots of the picaresque in the fourteenth-century Spanish Libro de buen amor or the fifteenth-century Catalan work, Lo spil, 0 libre de les dones.

It is obvious that a great deal of confusion still exists both in locating the Spanish origins of the picaresque and in defining the extent to which the term is applicable to fiction outside Spain. My purpose will be to clarify these issues by approaching the picaresque in its strict sense as a literary genre and then by following its itinerary outside Spain via ‘translations’ and ‘imitations’ of specific novels. I will thus spend a good deal of space outlining and describing themes and plots in order to obtain a cluster of ‘picaresque conventions’. I will also stay close to the history of the genre by weighting my discussions with dates and places of publication in order to sketch a profile of the picaresque tradition. I will then attempt to define a ‘picaresque myth’, that is, a story, plot, or ‘situation’ which can be seen working in certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. Here my assumption is that reading them in a specific ‘mythic’ tradition will add to their appreciation and understanding within the wider contexts of fiction. My intention is constructive. If revitalized and properly understood, the term ‘picaresque’ can still be of some use as a literary-critical category in the general domain of the critical idiom. Finally, an anonymous seventeenth-century reader referred to one Spanish picaresque novel as being a mixture of ‘burlas y veras’ (‘jests and truths’), pointing out perhaps the genre’s internal uneasy blend of humour and seriousness. My interpretation will emphasize the latter at the expense of the former.

2

The picaresque in Spain: origins and definition

The English word ‘picaresque’ is borrowed from the Spanish picaresco (Mateo Alemán, 1599) or from picaresca (Alfonso de Pimentel, c. 1587). These first attestations in Spain are adjectival forms of the noun pícaro, usually translated into English as ‘rogue, knave, sharper,’ into French as ‘gueux, voleur’ (‘beggar, thief), into German as ‘Schelm, Abenteurer’ (‘rogue, adventurer’) and into Italian as ‘pitocco, furbone’ (‘vagrant, rogue’). Unfortunately, pícaro is a word whose etymology is uncertain and whose semantic history is complex. Joan Corominas, having reviewed several theories, concludes that it comes from some form of the verb picar (‘to prick, puncture; nibble, bite’) which at some point came into contact with thieves’ cant (germania) to give it the general meaning we ascribe to it today. From there it made its way into the public linguistic domain. When the word first appeared (1525) in the expression ‘pícaro de cozina’ (‘scullion’), however, it seemed to have nothing to do with the notion of delinquency or immorality. The pícaro was involved in menial jobs and was usually found in and around kitchens, stables or out on the streets as a basket-carrier. This original meaning still existed much later when Rinconete and Cortadillo, self-defined pícaros in Cervantes’ tale of the same name, became ‘esportilleros’ (‘basket-carriers’) upon their arrival in Seville. It was only c. 1545 that pícaro began to take on explicitly pejorative connotations. Eugenio de Salazar’s Carta del Bachiller de Arcadia (1548), the first reliably dated text to include the word in this sense, contrasts the ‘pícaros de corte’ with the ‘cortesanos’ (‘courtiers’), referring to the former as ‘ruines’ (‘wicked, low, vile’) and to the latter as ‘buenos’ (‘good, worthy’). Corominas correctly reminds us that implicit within this semantic shift is a change in emphasis from the pícaro’s social situation to his immoral and delinquent behaviour. It is interesting to note in passing that even at this early stage, the ‘heroic’ courtier was being confronted by the ‘anti-heroic’ pícaro, a point we will take up later.

The term pícaro should also be considered within the wider social and historical contexts of the sixteenth century, a period of profound social change. The Habsburg kings were committed to empire-building and waged war on a scale that the world had never seen before. Vast armies of Spanish pike-men (picas secas and/or piqueros secos, from the verb picar) had to be provisioned, garrisoned, transported and occasionally paid to defend Spain’s far-flung territories. Geoffrey Parker has recently assessed the difficulties the Spanish military faced in the late sixteenth century:

The increasing resort to criminals as a source of recruits can only have accentuated the innate unruliness of the troops, especially when the men were lodged in overcrowded private houses away from the supervision of their officers. The soldiers soon came to exhibit the same picaresque values which invaded Spanish society in the late sixteenth century: idleness, brutality, and bravado, the thirst for gambling, the urge for falsification. (p. 180)

The efficiency of the Spanish military decreased in the second half of the century. The change is perhaps best illustrated by the history of the wars in Flanders where Spanish troops were engaged off and on for eighty years (1587–1659). Parker states that when Don John of Austria took command of the Spanish armies in Flanders (1576), the troops had diminished in numbers from 60,000 to 11,000 men through death, disease and desertion: ‘The Army had lost 80 per cent of its men in eight months’ (p. 207). Deserting soldiers joined the ranks of other countries, but many attempted to return home, begging and stealing on the way. It is possible that some of the deserters carried their previous military title of piquero with them into ‘civilian’ life.

Alfonso de Pimentel, a young lieutenant who accompanied the Duke of Alba’s military expedition to Flanders in 1567, wrote about his experiences in an epic poem, Guerras civiles de Flandes(The Civil Wars of Flanders). He composed this work over twenty years later; as a result, his use of the word pícaro may reflect its late sixteenth-century usage. None the less, he explicitly identifies pícaros with the beggars he encountered during his previous military service, comparing them to the French ‘gueuz’ or ‘guses’ as he spelled the older form of gueux. In the context of his poem pícaros are real as well as false beggars. They also are viewed as evil-doers, mischief-makers and robbers. What is important about de Pimentel’s remarks is not so much their connection with Flanders as the fact that most ‘literary’ pícaros become at one time or another beggars and vagrants during their careers.

In the same general region of Flanders was Picardy, a name whose Spanish form ‘Picardía’ was synonymous with roguery. Spanish pícaro, Corominas informs us, could have developed at least phonetically from French picard (a native of Picardy), thus possibly echoing the pattern of the Spanish word for Hungary: Hungrialhungaro; Picardía/pícaro. There is no concrete evidence that such a development took place, but the fact that both Picardy and Piedmont were traditionally the areas of Franco-Spanish conflict over many years lends some support to such an explanation. Sebastian de Covarrubias, a Spanish lexicographer of the early seventeenth century, under the heading ‘Picardia’ states that ‘at some point a few poor people might have come from there to Spain because of their poverty, bringing us the name.’

Organized guilds of beggars were a European phenomenon, and one etymological theory of the word pícaro attempts to link it to the word bigardo, a later development of the name of a religious sect, Pyghard, some of whose members seemed to form a mendicant order. Such a development is especially weak – at least etymologically – when compared to the Picardía/pícaro explanation. There was, as we have seen, a strong and persistent semantic connection between beggars and pícaros. Vagrancy was not limited to northern Europe alone. Fernand Braudel eloquently describes the Spanish scene:

In Spain, vagrants cluttered the roads, stopping at every town: students breaking bounds and forsaking their tutors to join the swelling ranks of picardia, adventurers of every hue, beggars and cutpurses. They had their favourite towns and within them their headquarters: San Lucar de Barrameda, near Seville; the Slaughterhouse in Seville itself; the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. The mendigos formed a brotherhood, a state with its own ferias and sometimes met together in huge gatherings. Along the roads to Madrid moved a steady procession of poor travellers, civil servants without posts, captains without companies, humble folk in search of work, trudging behind a donkey with empty saddle bags, all faint with hunger and hoping that someone, in the capital, would settle their fate. (II, 740)

The investigations of some ‘legal’ historians suggest that as European society changed in the sixteenth century, attitudes toward vagrancy and criminality also changed. Even a cursory glance at the growing number and frequency of promulgated laws against criminals indicates a hardening attitude which seems to peak toward the end of the century. Joel Samaha, although dealing exclusively with Elizabethan England, points out that

as early as the sixteenth century, contemporaries claimed that the roots of crime lay in the soil of an unstable society. Vagabonds and criminals they believed, were stamped from the same mold. Idleness bred poverty, and poverty spawned crime according to contemporary commentators – English and continental alike. Criminals, they claimed, stemmed from the poverty-stricken ranks of decayed gentlemen, uprooted peasants, ruined craftsmen, unpaid soldiers, and unemployed or underpaid laborers. (p. 112)

It is difficult, of course, to determine if reporting techniques or actual rising crime resulted in a growing awareness – and fear – of lawbreakers. Samaha suggests that both were important factors:

Hardening community attitudes toward lawlessness, swelling ranks of law-enforcement personnel, and revamped machinery of justice have at least two meanings. They not only mean more and better records of crime, but they also represent a change in society’s response to a real increase in deviance. (p. 112)

The emphasis of the picaresque on poverty, delinquency, ‘upward mobility’ (self-improvement of the pícaro), travel as an escape from despair, social satire of a system unresponsive to the needs and desires of a growing active community of ‘have-nots,’ all reflect the socio-historical contexts profiled by Parker, Braudel and Samaha. The ‘literature of roguery’ has always been of interest to literate society but it reached the proportion of an international obsession precisely at the end of the sixteenth century. As we will see, the liber vagatorum tradition, criminal biographies and cony-catching pamphlets found an enthusiastic audience, especially during the first half of the seventeenth century. Our special interest is with a particular kind of narrative which first appeared in mid-sixteenth-century Spain, whose full flowering as a literary genre, however, took place almost fifty years later.

The etymological, semantic, social and historical references mentioned above provide the contexts for an understanding and an appreciation of the picaresque novel, but tell us virtually nothing about it as a genre of narrative fiction. The uncertainty surrounding the origin of the word and the figure of the pícaro fortunately does not apply to the ‘birth’ of the genre itself. In 1599 Luis Sanchez, an enterprising Madrid book publisher, brought out editions of Lazarillo de Tormes, Castigado. Agora nueuamente impresso y emendado and of the Primera parte de la vida de Guzmán de Alfarache, atalaya de la vida humana (Lazarillo de Tormes, Corrected. Now newly printed and emended; The First Part of the Life of Guzman de Alfarache, Watch-Tower of Man’s Life). The first book had already been published anonymously in 1554; Mateo Alemán (1547-1616?) was the author of the second.

That these narratives were seen as constituting one ‘type’ of fiction is established in the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1605), chapter 22, where Cervantes has his knight-errant encounter a group of ‘unfortunate ones who, much against th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• 1 Prologue: some definitions
• 2 The picaresque in Spain: origins and definition
• 3 The picaresque novel in Europe: a literary itinerary of the pícaro
• 4 Epilogue: pícaros in the Promised Land
• Bibliography
• Index