Picaresque Novel Inception AND Evolution PDF

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PICARESQUE NOVEL INCEPTION AND EVOLUTION.

AN INTRODUCTION TO PICARESQUE NOVEL

The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca," from "pícaro," for "rogue" or "rascal") is a popular genre of novel, usually a first –person narrative that depicts the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who drifts from place to place, one social milieu to another in his effort to survive and lives by his wits in a corrupt society. The picaresque novel is a genre of prose fiction that originated in 16th-century Spain and flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and has continued to influence modern literature. According to the traditional view of Thrall and Hibbard, seven qualities distinguish the picaresque novel or narrative form, all or some of which an author may employ for effect:

 A picaresque narrative is usually written in first person as an autobiographical account.  The main character is often of low character or social class. He or she gets by with wit and rarely deigns to hold a job.  There is 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 picaro, always a picaro. His or her circumstances may change but they rarely result in a change of heart.

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 The picaro's story is told with a plainness of language or realism.  Satire is sometimes a prominent element.  The behaviour of a picaresque hero or heroine 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 its episodic structure the picaresque novel resembles the long, rambling romances of medieval chivalry, to which it provided the first realistic counterpart. Unlike the idealistic knight-errant hero, however, the picaro is a cynical and amoral rascal. The picaro wanders about and has adventures among people from all social classes and professions, often just barely escaping punishment for his own lying, cheating, and stealing. He is a casteless outsider who feels inwardly unrestrained by prevailing social codes and mores, and he conforms outwardly to them only when it serves his own ends. Characteristically, the picaresque novel is anti-romantic in nature. It sharply attacks the romance, courtly marriage and chivalry of the medieval literature. Dr. Kettle is of the opinion, “What made their novel possible was the new attitude to the world brought about by the decadence of feudal society.” The picaro’s narrative becomes in effect an ironic or satirical survey of the hypocrisies and corruptions of society, while also offering the reader a rich mine of observations concerning people in low or humble walks of life. The picaresque novel, a reaction against the absurd unrealities and idealism of the pastoral, sentimental, and chivalric novels, represents the beginnings of modern Realism.

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ORIGIN OF PICARESQUE NOVEL AND ITS ARRIVAL IN ENGLISH LITERARTURE

The word picaro first starts to appear in Spain with the current meaning in 1545, though at the time it had no association with literature. The expression picaresque novel was coined in 1810. While elements of Chaucer and 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. Though the word picaro does not appear in Lazarillo de Tormes, 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. Lázaro states that the motivation for his writing is to communicate his experiences of overcoming deception, hypocrisy, and falsehood. The character type draws on elements of characterization already present in Roman literature, especially Petronius' Satyricon. The picaresque as a generic category originates in the Spanish Siglo de Oro, with the two novels that constitute the core of its canon—the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604). From a historical point of view, though, it is certain that the Spanish picaroons actually existed in the sixteenth century Spain, in a society that gave very little freedom to individuals, as it was a powerful, concentrated monarchical system. Thus, from a social point of view, the picaroon was a trouble-maker, one who wanted to transgress his social position and find another, a more satisfactory one in terms of living conditions, especially. In order to find such a better social standing, the picaroon had to be very attentive

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to what was happening around him, so, even unwillingly, he became a social commentator. After the other Spanish rogue stories appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Guzmán de Alfarache, La picara Justina, La hija de Celestina, Marcos de Obregon, picaresque fiction soon spread all over Europe, exerting a particularly important influence during the 17th and 18th centuries in Germany, France and above all England. A study of the picaresque calls for a dynamic, flexible, and open-ended model. In France, Gil Blas became the iconic rogue, and in England, Tom Jones and Moll Flanders. From now on, for many scholars the Spanish models started to be less interesting, they gave more attention to the French and English stories, to Le Sage, Defoe, and Fielding, as well as to Smolett, who with his Roderick Random set a new type of discussion about the picaresque, which led to the conclusion that the picaresque narratives are in a way “disjointed, episodic, high-spirited and adventure stories”.

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PICARESQUE NOVEL IN ENGLISH

It is Geoffrey Chaucer, and his superb effort to summarize, construct and deconstruct the writings of his age in order to undermine them, and then show what literature was going to become. Bearing in mind that The Canterbury Tales were written much before the emergence of the novel and that the picaresque itself only appeared almost two centuries later, it is amazing to notice that five of the seven points on Thrall and Hibbard’s list can be traced in this book. After the unique case of Chaucer, one can consider the forefather of the British picaresque, the first famous rogue tale in English is Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller(1594). Besides Nashe, there were also Head and Kirkman with their The English Rogue, a series type of stories about criminals, about roguish villains that was also very popular. Of the canonical authors connected with the rise of the British novel, Defoe, Fielding, and Tobias Smollett display the greatest debts to the picaresque. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders had appeared before the great picaresque creations of Smollett and Fielding. The main difference between Moll and the other rogues, except for her being a woman, is the fact that her author has her change her heart when she sees the possibility of being punished for her crimes. Her wit, though, her capacity to adopt to any situation, her irony and her invariable choice to survive even if she has to sacrifice ‘values’ and ‘moral integrity’, as well as her inclination towards mobility make her one of the best examples of British rogues. In Defoe’s roguish novels, there is not just an indictment of society, as in older picaresque but an earnest effort to reform it, as witnessed by the social projects and legislative reforms advocated in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack(1722).

This background offered Henry Fielding the proper momentum for his novelistic debut. Henry Fielding proved his mastery of the form in Joseph Andrews

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(1742), The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). He “...employed the genre of criminal biography in Jonathan Wilde, which is of course in the picaresque mode. ...Tom Jones... is cleverly cast by his creator as a rogue”. Another picaresque novel is Fielding’s The Journey from this World to the

Next, which prefigures insofar as its quixotic narrative is concerned. Besides the use of the rogue as a mirror, Fielding also introduces another very important element for a true rogue story — the metamorphoses of the character under the pressure of the conditions and adventures he goes through. Fielding etches a theory of morally mixed characters, neither wholly good nor bad, which is indebted to picaresque techniques. Nevertheless, Fielding’s most important heritage is Quixotic rather than picaresque; he depicts heroes who act benevolently in a world that is not too corrupt for goodness. It is Smollett to a greater extent than Fielding who tackles – and masters --the picaresque tradition in the mid eighteenth century. He wrote The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) are Smollett was coarse and drew a sharp, critical caricature of society, because he actually followed the tradition of the picaresque: the picaroon is characterized by this total lack of morals and by this sharp look upon society that he sees with no illusions at all, as it is, nude and real. George Orwell speaks about this formidable quality of the eighteenth century writers, generally, and Smollett’s particularity, to show reality as it is, unlike the ‘modern’ writers, less skilful, but more effective. The Adventures of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle are two of the best satires of English society, farcical and witty.

Fortunate or unfortunate, immoral or amoral, redeemed or not, the picaros and picaras of the eighteenth century British literature are at the foundation of literature in English as we know it today. At the same time, they brought with them

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a few of the immanent characteristics of British literature: an inclination towards satire, towards oddity and acid laughter, and towards social critique mixed with benevolent comedy. They invented a gallery of memorable and emblematic characters, very specific for the society of their times. After a time lapse of century, with Dickens and his extraordinary talent for inventing characters, the rogue is not necessarily only the title-hero of his novel, for example Pickwick Papers. In the Critical Approaches to Fiction, Shiv Kumar and Keith McKean consider that all these novels, from Smollett to Dickens, “Share one important ingredient: the adventures are arranged as a series of consecutive time units. History assumes a progressive linear form.”

Charles Dickens is always cited in connection to the English picaresque, by mentioning hi ‘American’ novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Obviously, Martin’s journey to America, with all his observations belongs to the picaresque, both in style, and in the themes it engages. After having named the two most commonly and widely appreciated novels in terms of the picaresque, there come other critics saying that, in fact, there are some picaresque elements in Nicholas Nickelby, too, as well as in David Copperfield, and especially in Oliver Twist, with all that infamous gallery of low-casts. John Jordan in The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens considered that he combined the picaresque imagination with the melodramatic imagination.

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CONCLUSION : CONTINUITY OF THE GENRE “I grow up — am hated by my relations — sent to School — neglected by my Grandfather — maltreated by my Master — seasoned to Adversity — I from Cabals against the Pedant — am debarred Access to my Grandfather — hunted by his heir — I demolish the Teeth of his Tutor” ( Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, 21).

The first person narrative, the general disposition, or initial predicament of the rogue-hero, his natural inclination towards violence, cheating and escapism — all are present in this short reference, as it is a very good illustration of how most of the eighteenth (and nineteenth century, subsequently) looked like. Gogol occasionally used the technique, as in Dead Souls (1842–52). Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was consciously written as a picaresque novel. Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) combined the influence of the picaresque novel with the modern spy novel. Pío Baroja's novel Zalacain the Adventurer, published in 1909, used the picaresque format in the context of the Carlist Wars. The illustrated book The Magic Pudding (1918), by Australian author Norman Lindsay, is an example of the picaresque adapted for children's literature. Recent examples include Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch, Thomas Berger's Little Big Man (1964), Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965), Vladimir Voinovich's The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1969), Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984), Edward Abbey's The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel (1988), Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend (1991), C. D. Payne's Youth in Revolt (1993), Christian Kracht's Faserland (1995), Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (2003), and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (Booker Prize 2008).

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REFERENCES: Name of books which is used:  ELEMENTS OF THE PICARESQUE IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION by Ligia Tomoiagă  THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BRITISH LITERATURE 1660 - 1789 Set, Volume 1 by Gary Day 

THE PICARESQUE NOVEL IN WESTERN LITERATURE edited by J. A. Garrido Ardila...