[In the following essay, Wicks outlines the history of the picaresque narrative, and surveys current debates regarding the specific characteristics of the picaresque.]

It has become a critical commonplace in generic theory to make an obligatory acknowledgment of vicious circularity before being forced to proceed within it. The frustration of this part of the hermeneutic task is succinctly put by Paul Hernadi (paraphrasing Günther Müller) in Beyond Genre (1972): “How can I define tragedy (or any other genre) before I know on which works to base the definition, yet how can I know on which works to base the definition before I have defined tragedy?” (2). Inside this circle is still another problem, which Alastair Fowler in Kinds of Literature (1982) calls “ineradicable knowledge”: “In order to reconstruct the original genre, we have to eliminate from consciousness its subsequent states. For the idea of a genre that informs a reader's understanding is normally the latest, most inclusive conception of it that he knows. And unless he can unknow this conception, it seems that he cannot recover meanings that relate to the genre's earlier, ‘innocent’ states” (261). The first of these activities is essentially synchronic, seeking to create a paradigm or hypothetical Ur-type in the context of which individual works might be better understood. The second is primarily diachronic, aiming to trace the evolution of an identifiable genre or type in specific historical contexts. Together such literary activities only formalize theoretically and critically what is absolutely unsuppressible in even the most cursory acts of reading: trying to assimilate a new text into the familiar community of our accumulated reading experiences.

Even the child reading (or being read) her first stories gropes for connections, for the most rudimentary generic signals. In the act of reading, a text yields meaning only in the context of its co-texts from other acts of reading; these cotexts in turn alter their meanings and slightly rearrange themselves with the addition of every new text. The reading of each new text is therefore of necessity also a rereading of already familiar texts; the reading of the new and this rereading of the old often combine to form an extratext, a generic construct, or type, or kind against which the strangely new text can be familiarized while simultaneously reassessing the old texts. The reading experience is always implicitly and sometimes explicitly generic, and the whole of genre theory springs from this dynamic process, which T. S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917) captured in an assertion that itself resonates like the phenomenon it describes: “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it” (50). Fifty years later, Eliot's statement finds an echo in Julia Kristeva's description of the structuralist concept of intertextuality, as quoted in Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics (1975): “Every text takes shape as a mosaic of citations, every text is the absorption and transformation of other texts” (139). Culler himself adds, “A work can only be read in connection with or against other texts, which provides a grid through which it is read and structured by establishing expectations which enable one to pick out salient features and give them a structure.” Both Eliot's statement and the structuralist variations of it describe the creation and reception of literary texts as a process of continual generic readjustment, of constant reformulation of the literary frame of reference within which we read.

The very imprecision and circularity of Eliot's assertion (“what happens … is something that happens”) are particularly appropriate to a phenomenon that is always process. Just when we think we have the “what” pinned down, the “something” proves elusive and forces us back to reformulate the “what,” which in turn impels us to reassess the “something,” and so on. The circle is not vicious after all, for it is hardly closed. As more texts are added to the collectivity of experienced texts, it resembles more an ever-expanding spiral, with each new text (or new reading of a previously read text) at its center for the duration of the reading. The centrifugal force of the new reading and the centripetal force of all accumulated readings (the “ineradicable memory”) automatically—and dynamically—interact, creating the generic process that leads to an understanding of texts in the only way that we can understand them: in relation to other texts.

Or should lead. Genre theory, unfortunately, has more often than not in literary history been rigidly prescriptive rather than flexibly descriptive, for both maker and reader. When genre theory exists primarily as a pigeonholding or classification system for its own sake, it soon becomes tiresome to all but the hyperorganized reader, as individual literary works are coerced through formulaic reduction into available slots. Rigid genre theory actually undermines literature by squelching what we most admire in literary texts: the innovative, the unpredictable, the experimental—in short, the new, for which there may be no existing pigeonhole. When genre theory cannot or will not do what individual texts are constantly doing, then one of the two must make way for the other; either the new text is rejected as an unacceptable mutation, or genre theory must refine or expand its categories.

When literature thrives on experimentation, as it has in the twentieth century, prescriptive genre theory must make room or else make way. That the latter has been the case—that the theory of genres has not been at the center of literary study and reflection in this century—is diagnosed by René Wellek at the beginning of his “Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis” (1967): “Clearly this is due to the fact that in the practice of almost all writers of our time genre distinctions matter little: boundaries are being constantly transgressed, genres combined or fused, old genres discarded or transformed, new genres created, to such an extent that the very concept has been called in doubt” (225). If genre theory adapted itself to what Wellek describes literature as doing—if, that is, it conceived of itself in Eliot's terms or along the lines of structuralist conceptions of intertextuality—it could again be at the heart of literary study, where in fact it should be, given that the act of reading is inherently generic.

If every act of reading is fundamentally, inherently, and inescapably generic and yet genre theory is not at the center of literary study, then somewhere theory must have gotten seriously out of whack with practice. It did so primarily by not changing as literature itself changes. This is precisely the point Fowler makes in refuting those who hold genre theory to be irrelevant because they misapprehend genres as simple and immutable permanent forms, established once and for all:

But … genres are actually in a continual state of transmutation. It is by their modification, primarily, that individual works convey literary meaning. Frequent adjustments in genre theory are needed, therefore, if the forms are to continue to mediate between the flux of history and the canons of art. Thus, to expect fixed forms, immune to change yet permanently corresponding to literature, is to misunderstand what genre theory undertakes (or should undertake).

(Kinds of Literature, 24; emphasis mine)

As Fowler suggests, genre theory must be conceived in rhythm with what actually happens in our individual acts of reading, which are only superficially guided by a genre theory that limits itself to the prescriptively taxonomic or the historically cartographic. When genre theory acknowledges the rudimentary generic groping of the reading experience itself, it can help us understand a text as the act of reading blends imperceptibly into interpretation. Here, too, generic identity is absolutely fundamental. It is also unavoidably consequential, as E. D. Hirsch points out in Validity in Interpretation (1967) when he says that “an interpreter's preliminary generic conception of a text is constitutive of everything that he subsequently understands, and that this remains the case unless and until that generic conception is altered” (74). It is this process of constant alteration that generic theory should concern itself with, as Thomas Kent proposes in Interpretation and Genre (1986) when he calls for a holistic theory of genre that will attempt to see each text as both an unchanging body of words and a continually developing cultural artifact: “The holistic genre critic, then, should see both the part and the whole, the synchronic and the diachronic conventional elements, constantly interacting together to form new patterns of meaning, and generating a descriptive model of this kind of activity requires a substantial shift in attitude about the critic's role in the study of literary texts” (27). Yet such a shift would only bring critical theory into line with literary practice; it would simply and rightfully acknowledge what actually happens to and in the text as it is being made and whenever it is being received. The term holistic genre theory ought to be something of a redundancy, but its necessity for Kent's purpose emphasizes how fragmenting and distancing our received concepts of genre have become when we bring them into our actual encounters with literary texts. Genre theory that has a healthy respect for how literature actually works should by its very nature be holistic, always keeping the text and its kind in a carefully balanced and mutually respectful relationship, which Rosalie Colie in her conclusion to The Resources of Kind (1973) captures in an almost aphoristic way: “Significant pieces of literature are worth much more than their kind, but they are what they are in part by their inevitable kind-ness” (128).

What concept of kind-ness was going through the mind of the reader in 1554 who picked up a slim volume called La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades? And what kinds of kind-ness had been at work in the mind and imagination of the anonymous author when he wrote it a year or two earlier? What prompted 1599 readers of the first part of Guzmán de Alfarache to make a conscious connection with Lazarillo? How aware were these readers of the generic newness of what they were reading, and how consciously did they have to sift through their accumulated reading experiences in order to assimilate these new texts? What generic signals were the texts themselves giving these readers? Was it only something as crude as mere content or subject matter? Who, in fact, were these first readers, and how did they respond interpretively to these fictions?

Unfortunately, the further back in literary history we go, the more elusively hypothetical the answers to such questions become. Thus far, we know relatively little about the actual readers of the fictions that soon came to be called picaresque. We know that Lazarillo was considered to be a subversive book. (In 1559 it was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of books forbidden by Church authority to be read by Roman Catholics.) We know that Guzmán became an unprecedented best-seller. In the wake of the popularity of Guzmán, Lazarillo was reissued at least nine times in the four years between 1599 and 1603—as many editions as there had been in the whole forty-five years since its initial publication. King Philip II had died in 1598, and the new reign of his son Philip III resulted in some relaxation of censorship. For several years, then, until the publication of the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache must have been the most talked-about books of the decade, if not of the century. But the actual composition of this sizable literate audience has not yet been explored. It seems reasonable to conclude that almost none of this large readership coincided with the lower class, among whom were the hordes of vagrants and beggars roaming the roads of Spain and congregating in some cities in such huge numbers that they had to be periodically expelled. The poor, as Lionel Trilling has said, do not read about the poor. One may imagine then, as Helen H. Reed does in The Reader in the Picaresque Novel (1984),

a reading public comprised of aristocrats, courtiers, conversos, country gentry, the urban bourgeoisie, clergy, students, some women, and virtually no pícaros. … No doubt the individual novels varied in their appeal to different social groups as well as to different tastes, but the early picaresque novel might be described as a new genre in search of a readership, or a genre in the process of formation that created its own readership.

(17-18)

That it was a democratic intended readership we know from the hypothetical readers set up in the prologues to both Lazarillo and Guzmán. Lazarillo not only addresses a specific narratee (“Vuestra Merced”), to whom he has been asked to explain his life, but he also invites a homogeneous readership to listen in, as it were, for “anybody can read my story and enjoy it.” Alemán in Guzmán provides two direct addresses to readers—one “al Vulgo,” the other “al discreto lector”—and then adds a “Declaration for the Understanding of this Book,” which is addressed to all readers. No actual reader is going to admit belonging to the mob at whom the first prologue is aimed, and so Alemán shapes his readers by making them feel privileged, above the incorrigible rabble—a narrating strategy that justifies his subject matter by short-circuiting any objections to it. Ironically, the reader becomes part of an in-group looking at society's down and out. In both Lazarillo and Guzmán, all readers (“anybody”) are discreet; this flattery aimed at the self-images of readers makes them paradoxically both willing and wary participants in a narrative confidence game that enables picaresque narration to function between author and reader.

In two of his three addresses to readers in the 1599 first part, Alemán uses pícaro (which does not occur in Lazarillo), a word choice he would come to regret by the time he published the second part of Guzmán de Alfarache in 1604, when he has Guzmán (in the sixth chapter of book 1) lament the epithet by which he has been known since writing the first part. The etymology of pícaro is troublesome. Corominas (1954-1957) dates its first appearance in 1525 in the expression pícaro de cozina (“kitchen boy,” or “scullion”), a relatively neutral word with none of the associations Guzmán is complaining about. But around 1545, the meaning of pícaro shifted from designating a lowly profession to describing immoral and antisocial behavior. In Eugenio de Salazar's Carta del Bachiller de Arcadia (1548), pícaros are explicitly contrasted with courtiers. In a morality play of that time, the word is used in a context clearly of mischief and wrongdoing. Harry Sieber in The Picaresque (1977) suggests that the semantic shift may have had something to do with the vast armies of pike-men (picas secas and/or piqueros secos, from the verb picar) needed in Spain's defense of its territories. Some of them were recruited from among criminals, and many deserted. “Deserting soldiers … 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” (6). Another explanation for the later meaning of pícaro is by association with Picardy, a region near Flanders where Spain was engaged in wars from 1587 to 1659. To a Spaniard, a Picard was a rogue. Whatever its precise origins, the word pícaro achieved wide currency by the end of the sixteenth century. In dictionaries compiled in 1570 and 1593, a pícaro is defined as a shabby man without honor. This was the popular meaning of the word when Alemán applied it to his literary creation, and from then on the meaning of the word has been inextricably bound up with the various literary characters who are called pícaros. A dramatic interlude called Testamento del pícaro pobre, which must have been written before 1605, when the author to whom it has been attributed (Pedro Láinez) died, has a sonnet in praise of the picaresque life; it begins, “Gozar de libertad, vivir contento” (“to enjoy freedom, to live content”), which emphasizes the picaro's outsider status positively as a freedom from responsibility and tiresome social obligations. A similar tone dominates a poem from about the same time, La vida del pícaro, in which “sólo el pícaro muere bien logrado, / que desde que nació, nada desea” (“only a picaro dies successful, because from birth he desired nothing”). By 1611 in Covarrubias's Tesoro de la lengua castellana, as Bjornson points out in The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (1977), the word pícaro meant a vulgar, rootless person willing to perform menial tasks, but there begins to be associated with him “a characteristic freedom from duty and responsibility” (262).

A year after Guzmán de Alfarache complained of his epithet, Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote, in the twenty-second chapter of which Quixote encounters the galley slave Ginés de Pasamonte, who says that he is writing a book:

“It's so good,” replied Ginés, “that Lazarillo de Tormes will have to look out, and so will everything in that style that has ever been written or ever will be. One thing I can promise you, is that it is all the truth, and such well-written, entertaining truth that there is no fiction that can compare with it.”

“And what is the title of the book?” asked Don Quixote.

“The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte,” replied that hero.

“Is it finished?” asked Don Quixote.

“How can it be finished,” replied the other, “if my life isn't? What is written begins with my birth and goes down to the point when I was sent to the galleys this last time.”

(Trans. J. M. Cohen, 176-77)

There are two allusions here: a direct one to Lazarillo and an indirect one to Guzmán de Alfarache, who writes while serving a sentence in the galleys. Not only is an explicit link made between Lazarillo and Guzmán, but a sense of genre distinctly emerges in Ginés's comparing his effort with “everything in that style” that has been or is yet to be written. Ginés de Pasamonte the writer is generically conscious of his narrative task, and the genre he is actively being shaped by and shaping is the emerging picaresque genre as thus far articulated in Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache. “One witnesses here,” writes Claudio Guillén in “Genre and Countergenre” (1971), “the spontaneous discovery of a class by a reader-critic belonging to the most vast of the audiences. … Ginés, as a reader neither cultured nor ignorant, as a layman (or ingenio lego), combines a bold ability to recognize novelty with the generic mentality of his time, that is, with an immoderate fondness for classification, be it within or without the pale of traditional poetics” (Literature as System, 151-52). The essential point here is that Ginés is not merely expressing the imitative urge of a hack copycat; he is not spinning off Lazarillo but rather improving on the kind or “style” or class of which he sees Lazarillo as a specific example (Cervantes's word is actually género, but it did not then mean “genre” in the modern sense). Ginés has a strong, if rudimentary, sense of genre, both diachronically and synchronically, as he posits the future development of this kind of fiction. And Cervantes assumed that his own readers would catch the allusions and understand the implications without further explanation.

This passage from Don Quixote establishes as strongly as any contemporary evidence can a generic awareness of the emerging picaresque genre in both writers and readers. The passage also emphasizes major characteristics of the structure, content, style, and readership of works in that genre. A work of this kind is, first of all, a vida, and thus narrated by its protagonist; as such, it is true to life in the sense of being empirically valid, as compared to the chivalric romances, which were not and which the emerging picaresque must have dealt a considerable blow (when Cervantes has a friend in his prologue to part 1 of Don Quixote describe the book as “una invectiva contra los libros de caballerías,” he may have been beating a dying or already dead horse). When Ginés insists on the need to live out his life before writing about it, he emphasizes the empirical impulse in this kind of writing. A vida is, moreover, chronological in structure. It should be entertaining and well written. Its content is determined by the shady, shifty—even criminal—behavior of characters like Ginés de Pasamonte himself (who later validates his status as a picaro by turning the galley slaves against Don Quixote, stealing Sancho's donkey, and robbing the priest and barber; in disguise as Maese Pedro in part 2, he reappears as a full-fledged trickster). And, finally, such vidas can be read—and indeed written—by everybody, including the Ginés de Pasamontes of the world: the “anybody” Lazarillo addresses in his prologue.

Even if we accept the by-now almost conventional interpretation of the Ginés de Pasamonte episode in Don Quixote as expressing Cervantine hostility against the new picaresque narrative form (as expounded perhaps most influentially in Carlos Blanco Aguinaga's 1957 article, “Cervantes y la picaresca. Notas sobre dos tipos de realismo”), we have to assume that in the dialogue between Ginés and Don Quixote, Cervantes is relying absolutely on a rudimentary generic awareness on the part of his readers. As reader Ginés converses with reader Quixote, their exchange is listened to by a third: the readers of Don Quixote who, whether they interpret the discussion as critical parody or not, are nevertheless expected to bring to it an intertextual and intergeneric awareness of the picaresque, which is as necessary for understanding this episode as an even more fundamentally assumed generic familiarity with the chivalric romances is for the whole of Don Quixote. Thus, by 1605, the emerging picaresque is already “defined”—implicitly, if not explicitly—as a distinctly recognizable kind of writing, and it is so defined by a picaro himself. By 1605, a huge (by any previous standard) audience has been responding to, and by that very response further engendering, a specific narrative type, if not a literary genre in the formal sense of a traditional literary kind familiar to educated Renaissance readers. A regulative concept must have been at work, though its “poetics” will remain informal for several more centuries, until literary historians in the nineteenth century begin to formulate it a posteriori.

Through Ginés de Pasamonte, Cervantes gives us the first theory of the picaresque, defining it aesthetically by its autobiographical form, sociologically by its democratic readership—and authorship, and even ideologically by its subject matter—which is clearly subversive, given Ginés's arrogant character, his past behavior, and his present and future behavior as revealed in the tricks he will play on Don Quixote. The seasoned criminal, reader of picaresques and would-be author of them, confronts the self-deluded hidalgo, reader of romances who anticipates an historiador writing his life even as he sets out on his first sally. Having read Lazarillo, Ginés must see in Quixote much of the equally deluded hidalgo in the third chapter of that work; reading Don Quixote, Cervantes's reader cannot avoid making the connection. Lazarillo sees through his hidalgo (though with a great deal of sympathy) as much as Ginés sees through his. In their stances, the two picaros represent a new order defying an old. Their upstart tone must have satisfied a need in what Guillén suggests was the core audience of the picaresque: “the discontented middle class” (Literature as System, 144).

With the appearance of López de Ubeda's La pícara Justina in that same year, the picaresque as a narrative genre is firmly established, for Justina is among other things a parody of picaresque fiction itself. Parody assumes its audience's familiarity with the conventions of the literary tradition or specific work that is its parodic object, and Justina works successfully only in contextuality with Guzmán de Alfarache and Lazarillo de Tormes. In addition to its conscious (and self-conscious) parody, which demands generic awareness in the reader, and its introduction of a picara, or female rogue, Justina is also significant in the picaresque tradition for a more or less extratextual contribution, which has been much reproduced and from which a number of critics have drawn important conclusions about the picaresque genre: the frontispiece to its first edition, which depicts “La nave de la vida picaresca” (the ship of picaresque life). On board, the principal figures are Guzmán, Justina, and Celestina (Justina's literary “mother”); Lazarillo is by himself in a little rowboat connected by a rope to the larger vessel. Classical divinities, proverbial sayings, allegorical figures, and pictorial emblems constituting the paraphernalia of the picaresque life complete the crowded scene. We can derive a number of moralistic readings from this interesting engraving, some of them mutually contradictory; and the perspective is such that we cannot be entirely sure if Lazarillo is towing the ship. But what is most significant in this picture is that Lazarillo, Guzmán, and Justina are all inside the same frame. In both this engraving and its text, La pícara Justina establishes its genre; by bringing two superficially unlike texts into contact with a third—itself—Justina forces readers into seeking out deeper similarities, in the course of which they cannot avoid constructing a generic type, or abstract extratext, which governs all three. Once the third text acknowledges as models the first and second texts, generic identity and awareness regulate both the writing and the reading of the fiction, and a genre exists.

The works belonging to this genre were not fully enumerated until the late nineteenth century, when Fonger de Haan and Frank Wadleigh Chandler published their doctoral dissertations on the picaresque. The generally accepted canon of Spanish picaresque fictions was established by Angel Valbuena Prat who in 1943 produced a two-thousand-page anthology, La novela picaresca española. This anthology, which has gone through more than a half-dozen editions, contains twenty-three works of fiction in their entirety. In addition to Lazarillo, Guzmán, and Justina, Valbuena Prat includes Juan de Luna's Segunda parte de Lazarillo de Tormes (1620) and Juan Martí's Segunda parte de Guzmán de Alfarache (1602), published under the pseudonym Mateo Luján de Sayavedra; and four novelas ejemplares by Cervantes: “La ilustre fregona,” “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” “El casamiento engañoso,” and “Coloquio de los perros” (published in 1613 but written earlier). The other works anthologized are Salas Barbadillo, Le hija de Celestina (1612); Vicente Espinel, Vida de Marcos de Obregón (1618); Quevedo, El Buscón (1626); Carlos García, La desordenada codicia de los bienes ajenos (1619); Jerónimo de Alcalá, Alonso, mozo de muchos amos (El donado hablador) (1624, 1626); Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares (1632), Adventuras del Bachiller Trapaza (1637), and La garduña de Sevilla (1642); María de Zayas, “El castigo de la miseria” (1637); Guevara, El diablo Cojuelo (1641); Antonio Enriquez Gomez, Vida de don Gregorio Guadaña (part of El siglo pitagórico, 1644); the anonymous Vida y hechos de Estebanillo Gonzalez (1646); Francisco Santos, Periquillo el de las gallineras (1688); and Torres Villarroel, Su vida (1743, 1752, 1758). There is considerable lack of consensus among scholars that this collection indeed constitutes a generic canon. Torres Villarroel's Vida and Santos's Periquillo el de las gallineras, for example, are almost universally rejected as picaresques, or just simply ignored, while Guevara's El diablo Cojuelo is, more properly speaking and as Valbuena Prat himself says in his introduction, a formal satire with picaresque characteristics. The critical emphasis among scholars has been and continues to be overwhelmingly on Lazarillo, Guzmán, and El Buscón, with Justina trailing behind, and even lesser attention to the other writers except, perhaps, for Cervantes. As the only collection of its kind in any language, La novela picaresca española, immensely useful and helpful as it is, has proved frustrating to critics looking there for a clear genre definition. Putting twenty-three works together inside the same covers does not yield as strong a sense of generic identity as did putting Lazarillo, Guzmán, and Justina inside the same frame in the frontispiece to Justina, which Valbuena Prat also uses as his frontispiece.

In his “Zur Chronologie und Verbreitung des spanischen Schelmenromans” (1928), Helmut Petriconi chronologically lists thirty-seven works of fiction published between 1528 (La lozana andaluza) and 1680 (Trabajo del vicio) and in a parallel chronology lists the thirty-one editions of Lazarillo de Tormes published between 1554 and 1664. With a basic definition of the picaresque guiding his selection of fictional works, Petriconi demonstrates that there is a thoroughly traceable development, which peaks around 1620. Lazarillo continues to be widely read as new picaresque fictions appear, reinforcing its position as generic prototype and suggesting a generic impulse in readers to connect with what must have been perceived even then as the earliest text in the tradition.

Among a certain group of readers, the picaresque even became what today we would call trendy. Bjornson says that picaresque life as viewed by the upper-class reader “exercised an undeniable appeal in the increasingly secular atmosphere at Philip III's court, where women even adopted the custom of disguising themselves in ragged clothes and claiming to be dressed ‘a lo picaresco’ (in picaresque fashion)” (The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction, 69). Works that parodied the picaresque, such as La pícara Justina and El Buscón (the latter already circulating in manuscript before Justina was published), were thus intended in large part as in-jokes for a highly select audience, and the more frivolous picaresques, like the adventure stories of Salas Barbadillo and Castillo Solórzano, were aimed at a leisure-class readership seeking vicarious excitement. It has therefore sometimes been argued that highly self-conscious, even precious, works such as Justina and El Buscón and superficially derivative works such as La hija de Celestina and La garduña de Sevilla, for example, cannot be considered genuine picaresques. Specifically targeted for an elite audience, such works either caricature their genre through clever exaggeration of its characteristics or seek to cash in on the genre's success by spinning off its most popular conventions. Such arguments, valid though they may be in some cases, are primarily value judgments of individual works rather than generic assessments. In the end, such a line of thinking leaves us with a genre comprised of a mere two or three works. But a new genre does not remain naive for long; after Lazarillo and Guzmán, generic self-consciousness itself becomes a major convention of the picaresque genre. A genre would be truly sterile if every work in it recapitulated the prototype. Genres evolve through the tension between generic constraints and the demands of the unique work, a tension that itself may become the center of interest, as it does in Justina and El Buscón, or that may be erased altogether in favor of emphasizing and embellishing those characteristics of the genre that were proving most popular, as it is in the superficial imitations. Both kinds of generic perpetuation rely on and in turn enhance the reader's generic awareness. A parody is probably one of the most revealing things that can happen to a genre. By their very act of expending clever literary force against a grouped body of literary works, parodies like Justina and El Buscón sharpen the reader's sense of the genre being spoofed—just as we have a better grasp, for example, of the gothic novel after reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey or just as through Don Quixote we get an excellent sense of what a libro de caballería is without ever having read one. The copycat works are equally revealing generically. By their formulaic reduction of generic conventions, they can give us a more coherent understanding of a genre than can the more complex and creative works in that genre.

When Guzmán de Alfarache becomes Justina's husband in La pícara Justina in 1605, the picaresque genre has fully emerged in Spanish literature. The frontispiece to the book explicitly connects both of them with Lazarillo. In that same year, readers were also meeting Ginés de Pasamonte, whose life closely resembles Guzmán's and whose literary goal is to surpass Lazarillo de Tormes when he finishes writing his own vida. In the course of the development of the picaresque genre, both Lazarillo and Guzmán remain exemplary fictions; they continue together to be the generic prototypes, providing the models against which many subsequent works measure themselves, no matter how freely they play variations on the genre through self-conscious parody, unauthorized continuation, exploitive mimicking, and epigonic imitation. In 1646, the picaro in Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor still measures his work (albeit ironically) against the generic models when he claims to be writing a “true” story, not “la fingida Guzmán de Alfarache, ni la fabulosa de Lazarillo de Tormes.”

The enormous popularity of the picaresque in Spain soon spread to other European countries as translations made the major works widely accessible to English, French, German, and Italian readers who could not read Spanish. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the picaresque was an international literary phenomenon as translations gave way to narrative attempts to perpetuate the genre while simultaneously integrating it with indigenous literary conditions and conventions. In 1655 in England there was Head's The English Rogue, with a dedicatory verse that mentions Lazarillo, Guzmán, and El Buscón. In 1669 Germany produced its own major contribution to the picaresque genre in Grimmelshausen's The Adventurous Simplicissimus, which was just as explicitly influenced by Aleman's work (through Albertinus's translation) and a year later spun off one of its minor characters into The Runagate Courage, with a formidable picara who is successor to Justina and predecessor of Moll Flanders and whose birth out of the pages of Simplicissimus is the obverse of Guzmán's absorption into the pages of La pícara Justina. In 1683 and 1690, respectively, according to A. A. Parker in Literature and the Delinquent, appeared The Dutch Rogue, or Guzman of Amsterdam and Teague O'Divelly, or The Irish Rogue. In the eighteenth century, the picaresque underwent a significant transformation as Lesage in France shaped the Spanish tradition his own way in The Adventures of Gil Blas (1715, 1724, 1735). It is his version of the picaresque that became normative throughout the rest of the century and well into the nineteenth, especially in English literature. Lesage's English translator was Smollett, who was primarily responsible for establishing Gil Blas as the picaresque prototype, although in his own The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) he made explicit references to Guzmán de Alfarache and Petronius's The Satyricon in addition to Gil Blas. In the early nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott perpetuated the French model; he and Smollett were responsible for many of the major misconceptions of the picaresque that still haunt theory and criticism in English. The confusion was confounded by the English novelists' love for Cervantes, and in using both Don Quixote and Gil Blas as models for their own fiction, the eighteenth-century novelists created a case of literary mistaken identity that continues today in the misapprehension of Don Quixote as a picaresque novel even among well-read critics, an error that Hispanists (despite their own lack of unanimity about the nature of the Spanish picaresque genre) would never make. Although the original Spanish picaresques continue to be read—there is evidence that Defoe read them, and in Fielding's The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) Wild cites The Spanish Rogue (that is, Guzmán) as his favorite book—the indigenous narrative tradition of the criminal biography shapes whatever influence they may have had as distinctly as Gil Blas had shaped them.

Meanwhile, in 1822 there was Der deutsche Gil Blas, so titled by Goethe, and at midcentury there was even a Russian Gil Blas, by Vassily Narezhny. In the New World, Mexican writer José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi wrote The Itching Parrot (Vida y hechos de Periquillo Sarniento, 1816, 1830), which alludes directly to Periquillo el de las gallineras; and a century later, also in Mexico, José Rubén Romero in The Futile Life of Pito Pérez (La vida inútil de Pito Pérez, 1938) alluded to both when Pito referred to himself as a Periquillo. Toward the end of the nineteenth century in the United States, William Dean Howells suggested that the picaresque might provide the appropriate narrative structure for rendering the American experience, but Howells read Lazarillo through Don Quixote and conjured up an image true to neither, like the earliest American attempt to mix the Cervantine and the picaresque, Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry, the first two volumes of which had appeared a century before (1792). Nonetheless, a stable sense of the historical Spanish picaresque genre persisted, even in otherwise casual and unpretentious fictions like, for example, The Picaroons (1904), by Gelett Burgess and Will Irwin, which is prefaced by this note:

Picaroon—a petty rascal; one who lives by his wits; an adventurer. The Picaresque Tales, in Spanish literature of the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, dealt with the fortunes of beggars, imposters, thieves, etc., and chronicled the Romance of Roguery. Such stories were the precursors of the modern novel. The San Francisco Night's Entertainment is an attempt to render similar subjects with an essentially modern setting.

(The Picaroons, p. v)

In the twentieth century, such self-conscious use of tradition continued. Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, composed over a forty-year period, was written directly in the tradition of Simplicissimus. Oskar in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959) is a direct descendant of the drummer boy Simplicissimus. Hans Schmetterling, the character in Alfred Kern's only peripherally picaresque Le Clown (1957), is referred to by the circus performers as “our Simplicissimus” and runs into Felix Krull in Paris. John Hawkes has acknowledged Quevedo as a major influence on his fiction. Camilo José Cela continues Lazarillo's life almost four hundred years later, in his Nuevas andanzas y desventuras de Lazarillo de Tormes (1944). At midcentury in the United States, works such as Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Donlevy's The Ginger Man (1955), Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Purdy's Malcolm (1959), and Pynchon's V. (1963) were linked back to Nathanael West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) and A Cool Million (1934) to signal the apparent emergence of a contemporary American picaresque as an assertive strand of twentieth-century narrative. In Canada, there is Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). In England, fictions like Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong (1959), and John Wain's Hurry on Down (1953) were grouped with such works as Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall (1928), eliciting similar speculations about a “neopicaresque” in contemporary British fiction. In Germany, Felix Krull and The Tin Drum, already linked extra- and intertextually with Simplicissimus, were compared to a whole roster of new fictions, including Heinrich Böll's The Clown (Ansichten eines Clowns, 1963). The new fiction there was studied under such titles as “Picaro Today,” “The Return of the Picaros,” and “The Eternal Simplicissimus.” In Spanish literature itself, the persistence of the picaresque in twentieth-century fiction is demonstrated by the more than one hundred pages devoted to this topic in the proceedings of what billed itself as the First International Congress on the Picaresque (Madrid, July 1976), edited by Manuel Criado de Val as La picaresca: Orígenes, Textos y Estructuras (1979). In addition to Cela and Pio Baroja, writers like Ricardo León (Los Centauros, 1912), Juan Antonio de Zunzunegui (La vida como es, 1954), Sebastián Juan Arbó (Martín de Caretas, 1955), Darío Fernández-Flórez (Lola, espejo oscuro, 1950), and Juan Goytisolo (Fiestas, 1958) wrote fictions often explicitly rooted, through generic self-reference or indirect allusion, in the seventeenth-century Spanish picaresque narrative tradition. Among fictions written in French, Alfred Kern's Le Clown tries deliberately to be picaresque, and in France, too, there is talk of a renaissance du roman picaresque as critics look at Kern and at some of the new fictions being produced in Germany, England, and the United States.

Even this sketchiest of surveys over three and a half centuries of several major literatures makes it clear that the picaresque genre of siglo de oro Spain left a historically robust and geographically diverse narrative legacy. This culturally very coded narrative structure, which emerged, peaked, and declined under specific social, economic, political, religious, and literary conditions in Spain over the relatively short span of the first three decades of the seventeenth century (there being no genre until Guzmán and Lazarillo together created it in 1599), proved universally appealing to readers and writers outside Spain and has continued, despite a number of sea-changes, with traceable continuity up to the present. Today book reviewers, literary critics, and even film critics call works “picaresque” with such frequency that any objective observer of the literary and film scenes cannot help but conclude that the picaresque is a thriving contemporary narrative form. Such an observer would also automatically assume that the term's ubiquity reflected unanimity about its meaning. But, in fact, disagreement about the precise nature of the Spanish picaresque genre, the definition of the concept picaresque, and the narratological usefulness of the term picaresque novel has never been more intense than it is now in the immediate wake of the perceived surge of contemporary picaresque fictions, as a brief survey of the picaresque in literary scholarship will illustrate.

Books and Articles

Bjornson, Richard. The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.

Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos. “Cervantes y la picaresca. Notas sobre dos tipos de realismo.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 11 (1957): 313-42. (Trans. and abr. as “Cervantes and the Picaresque Mode” in Cervantes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lowry Nelson, Jr. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.)

Guillén, Claudio. “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque.” In Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, 135-58. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. Translation and expansion of “Luis Sánchez, Ginés de Pasamonte y los inventores del género picaresco,” in Homenaje a Rodríguez-Moñino: Estudios de erudición que le ofrecen sus amigos o discípulos hispanistas norteamericanos, vol. 1, 221-31. Madrid: Castalia, 1966.

Reed, Helen H. The Reader in the Picaresque Novel. London: Tamesis, 1984.

Sieber, Harry. The Picaresque. The Critical Idiom 33. London: Methuen, 1977.

Genre Theory, Narrative Technique, Literary History, and other Related Studies

Colie, Rosalie L. The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance. Ed. Barbara K. Lewalski. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1917. In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 47-59. 1928. University Paperbacks. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960.

Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Hernadi, Paul. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967.

Kent, Thomas. Interpretation and Genre: The Role of Generic Perception in the Study of Narrative Texts. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1986.

Wellek, René. “Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis.” In Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism, 225-52. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970. Orig. in Festschrift für Richard Alewyn. Ed. H. Singer and Benno von Wiese. Cologne: Böhlau, 1967.