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The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Ulrich Wicks
Ulrich Wicks*
Affiliation:
University of Maine, Orono
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Abstract

Contemporary usage of the term “picaresque” has blunted its usefulness as a literary concept. What once referred to the historically identifiable genre of la novela picaresca in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is now applied whenever something “episodic” tied together by an “antihero” needs a label. One way to reconcile these extremes is to approach the problem from the wider perspective of narrative types in general: a modal approach, which can account both for a specific kind of narrative whose exclusive preoccupation is an exploration of the fictional world of the picaresque and for a primitive fictional possibility which may be part of much fiction outside that genre. The modal perspective leads next to generic awareness, which yields the strict attributes of the genre—the “total picaresque fictional situation”—some of which are: (1) dominance of the picaresque mode, (2) panoramic structure, (3) first-person point of view, (4) the picaro figure, (5) the picaro-landscape relationship, (6) a gallery of human types, (7) parody, and (8) certain basic themes and motifs.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , March 1974, pp. 240 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 248 “Picaresco Romances,” The Southern Review, 2 (July 1867), 170.

Note 2 in page 248 The English Novel: A Short Critical History (New York : Dutton, 1954), p. 18.

Note 3 in page 248 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. ix.

Note 4 in page 248 “The Idea of the Picaresque,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 16 (1967), 43–52; and “The Failing Center: Recent Fiction and the Picaresque Tradition,” Novel, 3 (1969), 62–69. See also Philip L. Gerber and Robert J. Gemmett, “Picaresque and Modern Literature: A Conversation with W. M. Frohock,” Genre, 3 (1970), 187–97.

Note 5 in page 248 See, respectively, Helmut Gunther, “Der ewige Sim-plizissimus: Gestalt und Wandlungen des deutschen Schelmenromans,” Welt und Wort, 10 (1955), 1–5; D. J. Dooley, “Some Uses and Mutations of the Picaresque,” The Dalhousie Review, 37 (1957–58), 363–77; J. Praag-Chantraine, “Chronique des lettres espagnoles: Actualité du roman picaresque,” Synthesis, 14 (1959), 121–33; R. W. B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction (Philadelphia : Lippincott, 1959); Alter, Rogue's Progress; Willy Schumann, “Wieder-kehr der Schelme,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 467–74; Wilfried van der Will, Pikaro heute: Metamorphosen des Schelms bei Thomas Mann, Dbblin, Brecht, Grass (Stuttgart: W. Kohl-hammer, 1967); R. M. Albérès, “Renaissance du roman picaresque,” Revue de Paris, 15 (1968), 46–53; and Bruno Schleussner, Der neopikareske Roman: Pikareske Elemente in der Struktur moderner englischer Romane 1950–1960 (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1969). There is a substantial—and growing—bibliography on the picaresque and it is beyond the scope of this paper to acknowledge a good deal of it.

See my bibliographical survey, “Picaro, Picaresque: The Picaresque in Literary Scholarship,” Genre, 5 (1972), 153–216.

Note 6 in page 248 “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” in his Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 71–106. This is a revised and expanded version of the paper that appeared in Proceedings of the Illrd Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), pp. 252–66. Guillen's approach is somewhat similar to mine here, though we name significantly different characteristics. Compare his concept of “picaresque myth” with the idea of mode offered here.

Note 7 in page 248 “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Genre,” Novel, 2 (1969), 101–11.

Note 8 in page 248 Das sprachliche Kunstwerk: Eine Einfiihrung in die Literaturwissenschaft, 11th ed. (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1965), pp. 356–65.

Note 9 in page 248 Eighteenth-Century British Novelists on the Novel, ed. George L. Barnett (New York: Appleton, 1968), pp. 65, 62.

Note 10 in page 248 I quote from the most accessible edition of Spanish picaresque fiction, La novela picaresca espahola, ed. Angel Valbuena y Prat, 6th ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968), p. 539. Subsequent quotations from the Spanish works are indicated (where necessary) by part, book, and chapter, followed by a page reference to this anthology.

Note 11 in page 248 The Rogue, or The Life of Guzmàn de Alfarache, trans. James Mabbe, 4 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1924), iv, 220.

Note 12 in page 248 These terms are explained in Bertil Romberg's Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel, trans. Michael Taylor and Harold H. Borland (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962), pp. 3–32, 95–117, et passim. See also Kâte Friedemann, Die Rolle des Erzàhlers in der Epik (Berlin: H. Haessel, 1910; rpt. Darmstadt: Wissen-schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965).

Note 13 in page 249 “Picaresque Elements in Thomas Mann's Work,” Modern Language Quarterly, 12 (1951), 183–200.

Note 14 in page 249 See Robert B. Heilman, “Variations on Picaresque (Felix Krull),” Sewanee Review, 46 (1958), 547–77. Compare André Jolles's theory of vicarious escape via “play” into fictional worlds above, below, and outside the social norm (romance, pastoral, and picaresque, respectively): “Die literarischen Travestien: Ritter—Hirt—Schelm” [1931], in Pikarische Welt: Schriften zum europdischen Schelmenroman, ed. Helmut Heidenreich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), pp. 101–18.

Note 15 in page 249 La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barrai, 1970), p. 36. Some other studies of first-person narrative in the picaresque are: Hans Robert Jauss, “Ursprung und Bedeutung der Ich-Form im Lazarillo de Tormes,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 8 (1957), 290–311; Lothar Schmidt, “Das Ich im 'Simplicissimus,' ” Wirkendes Wort, 10 (1960), 215–20; and Peter Baumanns, “Der Lazarillo de Tormes, eine Travestie der Augustinischen ConfessionesT' Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 10 (1959), 285–91.

Note 16 in page 249 Grimmelshausen, Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus . . ., in Neudrucke deutscher Litteraturwerke des XVI. und xvii. Jahrhunderts, No. 19–25 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1902), p. 223.

Note 17 in page 249 Guillen's concept of “countergenre” is pertinent here; see his “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque,” in Literature as System, pp. 135–58, 74, 97.

Note 18 in page 249 The Picaresque Novel (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 70–71.

Note 19 in page 249 Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe 1599–1753 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 23, 14, 136–37. In this connection see also Hans Gerd Rôtzer, Picaro—Landstortzer—Simplicius: Studien zum niederen Roman in Spanien und Deutschland (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972).

Note 20 in page 249 This paper was delivered at a symposium on “The Picaresque Novel” at Syracuse Univ., 30 April-1 May 1971. I have made some minor revisions.