[In the essay below, Wicks defends the notion of a picaresque tradition, while acknowledging the difficulty in defining the characteristics of the genre.]

I

—Es tan bueno—respondió Ginés—, que mal año para Lazarillo de Tormes y para todos cuantos de aquel género se han escrito o escribieren.

—Don Quijote (Part I, Chapter 22)

The awareness of picaresque fiction as a genre begins almost simultaneously with the first (though not universally accepted) prototype, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). In an essay called “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque,” Claudio Guillén has shown that with the publication of the first part of Mateo Alemán's best-selling Guzmán de Alfarache in 1599, a “common género picaresco” came into being. The success of Alemán's book resurrected Lazarillo de Tormes which, after its initial popularity, had been reprinted only five times during the second half of the century. From 1599 to 1603 at least nine editions of Lazarillo were published. The direct link, therefore, is that Guzmán sparked “a double acceptance, a convergence, from which there arose, during the years immediately following the publication of Guzmán (1599), the idea of a género picaresco. …”¹ The words of the rogue Ginés de Pasamonte in the first part of Don Quixote (1605) echo and affirm this awareness:

“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.”²

There are two allusions here, one direct (to Lazarillo), the other indirect (to Guzmán de Alfarache, who writes while serving a prison sentence in the galleys). (In “La ilustre fregona,” one of his Novelas ejemplares [1613], Cervantes mentions Guzmán as the model of picaros.) Whether Ginés' use of the word género, as Guillén points out, is to be read in the technical sense of “literary genre” is impossible to say. In his edition of Don Quixote (New York: Las Americas Publishing Company, 1958), Martín de Riquer does in fact annotate the word as referring to the picaresque genre (p. 208). But the point is that Ginés (and, of course, Cervantes) is aware of another book that is dynamically influencing a book in progress (and perhaps influencing the book that contains the book—as Guillén goes on to show).

In his anthology La novela picaresca española (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968), Angel Valbuena Prat uses as frontispiece a famous illustration from the first edition of La pícara Justina (1605) in which we see Lazarillo and the bull of Salamanca in a small boat which appears to be towing a larger one called La nave de la vida picaresca whose passengers include Guzmán, Justina, and Celestina. A. A. Parker in Literature and the Delinquent (Edinburgh: University Press, 1967) uses this illustration to prove that Lazarillo, being separated from the others, is not a full-fledged pícaro and the book Lazarillo de Tormes is really a precursor, not a prototype, of the picaresque genre. Whether we agree with that thesis or not, the point is, again, that the picture is yet another contemporary indication of awareness of the picaresque as a distinct kind of narrative—if not a literary genre in the formal sense.

Further proof of this awareness is provided in an essay by Helmut Petriconi, “Zur Chronologie und Verbreitung des spanischen Schelmenromans.”³ Petriconi chronologically lists thirty-seven works of fiction published between 1528 (La lozana andaluza) and 1680 (Trabajo del vicio) and in a parallel chronology he lists the editions of Lazarillo de Tormes—thirty-one between 1554 and 1664. This bibliographical evidence convinces him that there is indeed a thoroughly traceable development, which peaks around 1620. While we may dispute some of the works he includes in his picaresque list, the point is, yet again, that historical evidence proves the existence of a body of works which were seen as belonging to a class or genre.

But we need not stop with external evidence. If we glance at some representative works generally considered picaresque, we find internal evidence of such generic awareness. The influence—through imitation, borrowing, or modelling—of the structure and pattern of a group of other works on the writer in the act of writing is sufficient evidence of a rudimentary generic awareness at work. Guzmán de Alfarache moves to another work and becomes Justina's husband; Estebanillo González claims, in Vida y hechos de Estebanillo Gonzélez, hombre de buen humor (1646), to be writing a “true” story, not “la fingida de Guzmán de Alfarache, ni la fabulosa de Lazarillo de Tormes” (Valbuena Prat, p. 1721); Jonathan Wild's favorite book was The Spanish Rogue (that is, Guzmán); Head and Kirkman's The English Rogue (1655, 1668, 1671) is a deliberate imitation; Lesage shaped the Spanish tradition his own way in Gil Blas (1715, 1724, 1735); Smollett acknowledged (and translated) Lesage: in The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) there are explicit references to Guzmán, to Petronius, and to Gil Blas (Part I, Chapter 1); Grimmelshausen's Courage in Die Landstörtzerin Courasche (1670) is writing “trutz Simplex” to spite the portrayal of herself in Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669), which was clearly influenced by Guzmán (through Albertinus' translation); in 1822 we have Der deutsche Gil Blas, so titled and introduced by Goethe; there is a Russian Gil Blas (by Vassily Narezhny) and A. A. Parker mentions The Dutch Rogue, or Guzman of Amsterdam (1683) and Teague O'Divelly, or The Irish Rogue (1690); Pito Pérez, in La vida inútil de Pito Pérez by José Ruben Romero (1938), sees himself as a Periquillo, alluding to Periquillo el de las gallineras (1688) by Francisco Santos and to Vida y hechos de Periquillo Sarniento (1816, 1830) by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi; Hans Schmetterling, the picaroclown in Kern's Le Clown (1957), meets Thomas Mann's Felix Krull in Paris (“He's nothing but a crook!”) and Hans himself is referred to as “our Simplicissimus”; Günter Grass' Oskar in The Tin Drum (1959) has as ancestor the drummer Simplicissimus (II,4). And so on. While some of these are no doubt the work of hacks copying formulas—like the TV writers of our own day, who give us spin-offs of spin-offs—there is a literary genetics at work here from the sixteenth century to our own day, and, however crude the course of influence may be, the awareness of writing within—or even against—a specific kind of narrative fiction is internally traceable, especially outside Spanish fiction.

These examples provide us with both external and internal evidence that a picaresque tradition, a normative sense of genre, however rudimentary, did—and continues to—exist. Whether this sense of genre was ever codified into a conscious poetics, whether it ever became a regulative—even prescriptive—genre concept or remained “unwritten,” is another question. But we know that picaresque fictions were generating, influencing, and parodying other picaresque fictions. Both writers and reader, therefore, experienced these works in the context of other similar works, with generic awareness, however informal or unformulated. And every new work in a genre redefines our concept of that genre as a whole. T. S. Eliot said in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. A specific work not only signals its generic identity to us, directly or indirectly, but it also reshapes our concept of that very genre.

We can be reasonably sure that there was a specific picaresque genre, identified with a specific literature and a specific set of socio-cultural conditions at a particular time in history (siglo de oro Spain). The essential characteristics of this genre have become the core of an ahistorical concept of a narrative type we continue to call “picaresque”—a term which, as we know, is often used to describe contemporary works of fiction (and even films) that have no direct link with Spanish fiction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but have instead a formal, generic link. Such contemporary works as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man (1955), Günter Grass' Die Blechtrommel (1959) and Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965) belong—and are illuminated by the reader's awareness of their belonging—within a generic tradition that is still recognizably picaresque in the strict sense of the term. And some modern writers proclaim direct links with the picaresque fiction of the seventeenth century: John Hawkes, for example, who names Quevedo,⁴ and Thomas Mann, who composed Felix Krull in the tradition of Simplicissimus.⁵ W. M. Frohock would protest that such conscious imitation is “self-conscious and dependent upon an established tradition. Felix Krull and The Adventures of Augie March are, in this sense, learned works.”⁶ No literary work, however, is created in a vacuum, and Frohock seems to equate generic continuity with lack of creativity—a criterion which, ultimately, denies literary genetics altogether.

II

… the romance of roguery, in fact, rather evolved negatively from the notion of the anti-hero.

—F. W. Chandler, Romances of Roguery (1899)

There seems to be no problem in accepting the existence of a picaresque genre.⁷ But when we try to define that genre, the concept itself becomes problematic, especially when we expand the term ahistorically to include works outside the specific Spanish tradition. In his chapter “Originality: The New Literary Genres,” Otis H. Green is sure that the picaresque is a new genre and that it is still being cultivated: “[Lazarillo de Tormes] is the protopicaresque novel, and its fruitful entrance into the world of books created what might be called a subgenre, which is still cultivated.” Moreover, “it was necessary to surpass the ancients: … to create the picaresque novel, inferior in category to Don Quixote, yet a vehicle used by writers of many nations, and to our own day, for a certain type of satirical social analysis. …”⁸ But he is not very helpful in specifying which more modern works carry on the picaresque genre. In fact, an increasing bibliography of critical works on the picaresque leaves us confused; the accumulating approaches, instead of refining the genre concept, complicate it, as Lazarillo is included here and thrown out there, as the works to be included expand or contract geographically and temporally. I am not here going to concern myself with a comprehensive definition of the picaresque genre.⁹ Rather, I would like to focus on a recurrent aspect of the definition process—specifically, the tendency to define the picaresque negatively, by telling us what it is not, by comparing it to its antitype. Though this—like all genre theory—involves a good deal of vicious circularity (to define something by its opposite you have to know what that something “is”), I think we can make a case for the approach that the picaresque novel is most clearly defined when compared to romance.

Gerald Brenan in The Literature of the Spanish People (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1957) describes the imaginative fiction of the Siglo de Oro as consisting of “two quite distinct kinds—that which deals in an ideal way with high life and that which deals in a realistic way with low life” (p. 167). George Tyler Northup in An Introduction to Spanish Literature (3rd ed. rev. and enlarged by Nicholson B. Adams; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) calls picaresque fiction “a salutary reaction against the absurdities of the idealistic fiction of the time,” and adds that it “constantly reacts against, and often parodies, the idealistic fiction of the time, as when the anti-hero's family-tree is elaborated to ridicule the heroic genealogies in the romances of chivalry” (pp. 171-73). In “La picardía original de la novela picaresca,” Obras completas, 6th ed. (Madrid, 1963), Ortega y Gasset talks about a literature of the noble classes and a literature of the plebians; the theme of “love and fantasy” was developed in chivalric fiction, and the theme of resentment and criticism in the picaresque novel. Stuart Miller in The Picaresque Novel (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967) compares the plot of picaresque with the plot of romance, concluding: “The pattern and meaning of the romance plot contrast absolutely with the episodic plot of the picaresque novel” (p. 12). Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) trace the evolution of narrative forms from the time of the epic, after which narrative tends to dissolve into two antithetical types: the empirical and the fictional. Where the epic storyteller's allegiance had been to a mythos or traditional plot, the empirical type of narrative replaces this allegiance to tradition with allegiance to reality. Empirical narrative can be either historical, which owes its allegiance to truth of fact, or it can be mimetic, which owes its allegiance to truth of sensation and environment. The fictional type of narrative replaces allegiance to the mythos with allegiance to the ideal, and it can be either romantic, which is determined by an aesthetic impulse to portray an ideal world of beauty in which poetic justice prevails, or it can be didactic, which is ruled by an intellectual and moral impulse. Picaresque narrative, they say, “is the comic antitype of the romance. It approaches the mimetic, but for comic and satiric purposes mainly. It sets the contemporary world and a first-person narrator up against the never-never world and impalpable narrator of romance …” (p. 75). Elsewhere, in Elements of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), Scholes presents the six major plot patterns in narrative fiction, one of which is “the anti-romantic (picaresque) quest” (p. 13). André Jolles theorizes that fiction offers us vicarious escape by way of “play” into fictional worlds above, below, and outside the social norm—romance, picaresque, and pastoral, respectively; we become heroes, rogues, or shepherds by imaginatively removing ourselves from the pressures of the everyday through a special kind of travesty (in the original meaning of “dressing up”) that allows us to gain a therapeutic distance from them.¹⁰ And A. A. Parker in Literature and the Delinquent says that “The first Spanish novels can indeed be considered, historically, as reactions against pastoral novels and novels of chivalry, but as alternatives not as satires.” The picaresque novel arose “as a reaction to the romances—not as satire or parody, but as a deliberate alternative, a ‘truthful’ literature in response to the explicit demands of the Counter-Reformation” (pp. 19, 22).

And, finally (but actually first chronologically), Chandler, whose work on the subject is still the most comprehensive, says: “… the romance of roguery, in fact, rather evolved negatively from the notion of the anti-hero,” but “the picaresque novels in Spain had little direct invective against the romances of shepherds and of chivalry.” The title of his 1899 book, Romances of Roguery: An Episode in the History of the Novel (New York: Burt Franklin, 1961), seems to complicate the matter: did he mean these are romances in the way we would use the term today? The phrase “romances of roguery” appears at least some seventy times and seems to be interchangeable with “picaresque novel” (which appears about thirty times). Chandler indiscriminately uses terms such as “picaresque fiction,” “picaresque narrative,” “picaresque tale,” “novel of rogues,” and others synonymously with “romances of roguery,” making no generic distinctions between novel and romance. Though romance as a term once could have embraced all prose fiction (retained in the French roman and the German Roman), by Chandler's time a sharp distinction had developed. In fact, from Homer's gates of ivory and horn (Odyssey, Book XIX) to Clara Reeve's famous distinction between novel and romance in The Progress of Romance (1785) to Hawthorne's oft-cited preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), there has all along been a genuine distinction between fictions portraying ideal worlds and fictions portraying real worlds (ignoring, for our purposes, the difficulty of the term “real”). The term romance is itself problematic in its historical evolution as a critical term. In an essay called “The Romance of Novel / Novella”¹¹ Edith Kern points out: “‘Novel’ has become the generic term for all long fictitious prose narratives. Even retroactively, it has usurped the place of ‘romance,’ which now designates only a particular kind of long narrative, although it was once applicable to all of them. ‘Romance’ has been supplanted by ‘novel’ to such an extent that modern critics unflinchingly speak of chivalric and picaresque ‘novels’ where earlier critics would have used the term ‘romance.’” Not only is the term problematic in its changing historical meanings, it is problematic as a concept as well. (In Spanish literature, of course, romance refers to a specific kind of ballad in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but that usage does not concern us here.) As with the picaresque, romance is in the process of being defined. In contemporary generic usage, romance designates a particular kind of fictional world-vision or -construct. “In literature,” says Northrop Frye in The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), “we always seem to be looking either up or down. It's the vertical perspective that's important, not the horizontal one that looks out of life” (p. 97). And in The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) Frye writes: “The romance is the nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream …” and the “perenially child-like quality of romance is marked by its extra-ordinarily persistent nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space.” At its naivest, “it is an endless form in which a central character who never develops or ages goes through one adventure after another until the author himself collapses” (p. 186).¹²

Like picaresque, which is used historically to designate a special episode in the historical evolution of fictional forms and ahistorically to designate a universal kind of narrative, romance refers both to a specific group of medieval and Renaissance fictions and to a universal kind of fiction with certain characteristics. We should probably call the broader uses of each term modes, and the narrower, historical uses genres. Mode designates a fictional construct characterized by the qualities of the world it renders. A fiction in the romance mode (though not necessarily of the romance genre) would offer a word-world-construct in which harmony, integration, and perfection prevail: dream-like wish-fulfillment. The picaresque mode would offer a word-world-construct in which disharmony, disintegration, and chaos prevail: nightmarish anxiety. Thus both modally and generically, both qualitatively and historically, romance and picaresque are antitypes.

III

          La Vida de Guzmán, mozo perdido,
por Mateo Alemán historiada,
es una voz del cielo al mundo dada
que dice: Huid ser lo que este ha sido.
…
          El delicado estilo de su pluma
advierte en una vida picaresca
cual deba ser la honesta, justa y buena.
          Este ficción es una breve summa,
que, aunque entretenimiento no parezca,
de morales consejos está llena.

—Guzmán de Alfarache, II (1604)

But are they? Having looked at some substantial evidence, we can arrange the pieces in such a way that this traditional antithesis convinces us as self-evident. Is the picaresque really the inverse or converse of romance?—that is the question I would like to pose. My declarative title would seem to suggest that I've answered the question. But it is premature to prove anything just yet; rather, I would like to speculate about some aspects of picaresque narrative that prove troublesome if we accept the traditional definitions. Apart from the superficial structural similarities between romance and picaresque (episodes, adventures, journeys, unifying character, etc.) and the sometime inclusion of a romance within picaresque (the story of Daraxa and Ozmin, for example, in Part I, Book I, Chapter 8 of Guzmán de Alfarache), how do we integrate the following into our genre concept?

(1) What do we do with the “communities of roguery” that appear recurrently in picaresque? These brotherhoods of thieves, like the ones in Brecht's Dreigroschenoper and Fritz Lang's M, may serve as parody of the social order: but, paradoxically, these brotherhoods are much more ordered and structured than the social order which they both parody and undermine. We know that beggar books were a popular sub-genre,¹³ but when these structures become part of picaresque proper, what do they mean? In Rome, Guzmán tells about a charter concerning “The Laws and Ordinances that are inviolably to be observed amongst Beggers” (Part I, Book III, Chapter 2), the general and superintendent of whom is called “the Prince of Roguerie, and the Arch-begger of Christendome.” Pablos in Quevedo's El Buscón (1626) joins a group of beggars who are just as rigidly ordered (Book II, Chapter 6, Book III, Chapters 1-3). We find a similar organization in Cervantes' “Rinconete y Cortadillo.” In García's La desordenada codicia (1619) there is an elaborate genealogy of thieves which, like the lineage of the romance hero, is an outrageous justification of thieves, as the romance hero's lineage justifies his prowess and goodness. García traces thievery and thieves back to Adam (whose sin thieves partake of) and to Lucifer, the first thief, who stole from God (Chapter 5). In The English Rogue Meriton Latroon refers to his “comrogues” and talks about a brotherhood of rogues in which an elaborate hierarchy exists (Part II, Chapter 15). In Fielding's Jonathan Wild (1743) Wild can chastize one of his thieves on a point of honor: “He [Wild] said he was sorry to see any of his gang guilty of a breach of honour; that without honour priggery [thievery] was at an end; that if a prig had but honor he [Wild] would overlook every vice in the world” (III, Chapter 6). In Ellison's Invisible Man the hero joins a Brotherhood which “was a world within a world,” and which orders existence: “Life was all pattern and discipline …” (Chapter 17). And in The Tin Drum Oskar Matzerath becomes the leader of a group of pranksters called “The Dusters,” for whom he serves as an embodiment of Jesus. As a final example, we might note the parody of a battle in Simplicissimus (II, Chapter 28), where Grimmelshausen's hero juxtaposes a real battle with his own version of war against the fleas that are attacking him; and the dream in which Simplex sees a tree (I, Chapter 15) on which everyone has his designated place in a hierarchy of oppression which is all too metaphorically true of the Thirty Years' War landscape Grimmelshausen's character must cope with. Are these orders anti-societies, or perverse romance structures of orders within a disordered world?

(2) What about the larger pattern of picaresque, which A. A. Parker, connecting picaresque with pastoral and mystical writings, calls “the circle of existence”? Guzmán inherits original sin from his father and must find his way back to God the Father through a delinquent life. Simplicissimus begins life in total innocence in an Edenic forest and ends it, converted, alone, on a paradisiacal island. Along the way he experiences a romance—not just as a story, as Guzmán does, but as an absorbing, dynamic event: the Mummelsee, a paradise below the earth (Book V, Chapters 10-16). We can find this circle in modern picaresque too—for example, in Invisible Man, where the picaro is ejected from college, “this Eden” (Chapter 5). In fact, the “circle of existence” as Parker describes it has a lot in common with what Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism calls the “Genesis-apocalypse myth” in the Bible, in which “Adam is cast out of Eden, loses the river of life and the trees of life, and wanders in the labyrinth of human history until he is restored to his original state by the Messiah” (p. 191). This is one of the central myths of quest romance, which leads us to our third point.

(3) Is not the essential picaresque pattern a quest for “home”—home in the sense of material and social success (as in Lazarillo), or in the spiritual sense of union with God (as in Guzmán and Simplicissimus), or even in the mythic sense of a return to Paradise? Hesse's minor novel Knulp (1915) deals with such a cosmic homesickness, and Karl in Kafka's Amerika (1913) finds “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” Oskar in The Tin Drum wants to get back to the umbilical cord. It might even be said that contemporary picaresque, especially, is a fictional exploration of man's exile from and search for “home.”¹⁴

(4) Is not the strong didactic or moral and intellectual impulse of picaresque a romance characteristic? Guzmán creates a deliberate tension between the appeal of personal experience and sensation and the allegiance to an ideal of moral conduct in a world shaped by God, which is also true of Simplicissimus. Alemán and Grimmelshausen are, on the narrative level, writing essentially philosophical works, pointing out directly the illustrative quality of the represented life. Mimetic portrayal of ugly life and moralizing ideals of conduct provide a continuous dualism and tension which, in modal-generic terms, means romance vs. picaresque.¹⁵ In an introductory sonnet to Part II of Guzmán we read (in Mabbe's version):

Poor Guzman's life, the mapp of Vice and Sinne,
          Story'ed by Aleman, is as a Voyce
From Heav'en, shewing how thou shouldst make thy choise.
          The word, Shunne thou to be what I have bin.
Who stands here as a Marke; that thou maist see
Where his ship was drown'd; How the same was split,
More through lacke of Wisedome, then want of Wit.
          Which was the cause of all his Misery.
The dainty style of this his pleasing quill
By Guzmans roguish life, adviseth thee
What an upright and honest life should be.
          How this, doth leade to good; how that, to ill.
How slight so e're this fiction seeme to be,
          None, can be fuller, of Morality.

And Otis H. Green points out (in the chapter from Spain and the Western Tradition referred to earlier) that in “all the works of the period there remains intact the belief in an over-all harmony—Christian with Platonic overtones—in the ultimate goodness of God's universe, the ultimate justice of His will. The paths trod by mankind have a destination which is none other than the chief end of man as defined by Christian doctrine in all centuries” (IV, 283). This would seem to be as true of the picaresque as it is of romance and pastoral.

(5) Isn't the picaro's impulse to tell his story itself a yearning for order? Shaping one's vida in words satisfies the form-completion impulse to impose aesthetic and moral order on the chaotic past which is re-membered now as a structure. The re-membering “I” tries to balance the chaos of experience-as-lived with the moral order-now-contemplated. In Simplicissimus and Guzmán we are suspended between two modes—romance and picaresque; the picaro's role in the actual narrating process is thus a kind of double-exposure—superimposing the shaping artist over the objectified character in the chaotic past. To some extent, the picaro “cosmeticizes” himself, a word which comes from the Greek kosmos, which means an “order.” Robert Jay Lifton, in “Protean Man,” Partisan Review, 35 (1968), describes two contemporary behavioral patterns, one of which is “the mode of transformation”—the need to disrupt all things and make them constantly new; and the other is “the mode of restoration”—the yearning for a mythical past of perfect harmony. To illustrate this, he in fact uses two modern picaresques, The Tin Drum and The Ginger Man. In our terminology Lifton's modes of transformation and restoration could be picaresque and romance.

(6) If we consider the picaro as a literary version of the trickster archetype in myth, what then is his role in the total scheme of things? According to Kerenyi, “Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted.” And, “Picaresque literature has consciously taken over this function.”¹⁶ Jung says the trickster myth was “supposed to have a therapeutic effect. It holds the earlier low intellectual and moral level before the eyes of the more highly developed individual, so that he shall not forget how things looked yesterday.” At the end of the trickster myth, “the savior is hinted at.”¹⁷ This notion is not unlike that of Jolles, or that of Robert Heilman, who, in “Felix Krull: Variation on Picaresque,” The Sewanee Review, 56 (1958), points out that one of the main traits of the picaro is his ability to find willing victims; the picaro thus gratifies certain desires of ours to be tricked. Though the picaro's function is chaotic and disordered, his effect is healthful and therapeutic—certainly an effect associated with romance order.

(7) Finally, how has the picaresque merged with other narrative forms in the evolution of narrative types? There are some fictions that synthesize picaresque and romance visions, as Guzmán and Simplicissimus really do. Eichendorff's Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing, 1826) is a curious synthesis of the picaresque fragmented world of wandering existence and its deceiving appearances on the one hand, and the ordered, harmonized and divine world of romance on the other. Picaresque is both parodied and contrasted with romance, and romance is parodied and contrasted with picaresque. That the random world of chance and disorder should turn out to have been ordered by an elaborately designed plot is romance's mockery of picaresque. Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) and Ferdinand, Count Fathom begin as picaresques and end, with marvelous coincidences, as romances. The tendency of picaresque and romance modes to blend into the genre known as the Bildungsroman in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German fiction is another example. In the Bildungsroman what at first appears to be a disconnected picaresque world slowly takes shape as an emerging world of order and moral goodness, in short, as a world of romance. The picaresque, even in its “purest” form, often has an eye on romance; and, conversely, the Bildungsroman has an eye on picaresque.¹⁸ For Felix Krull and for Gulley Jimson in Cary's The Horse's Mouth (1944) art itself provides a romance vision to counteract a world that is in flux. And in The Tin Drum two Oskars are telling stories about Oskar's two selves in the past—a frenzied blend of Dionysian and Apollonian visions that gives us perhaps the best recent example of the mixing of the modes of romance and picaresque.

Well, let us end with questions and turn to some speculative conclusions. Perhaps the picaro has more to do with Amadis and other romance heroes than being their negative image or antitype. Perhaps the picaro is very much like the romance hero, the difference being one of degree, not type. Let us return to Ginés de Pasamonte. In freeing the galley slaves, Don Quixote acts according to a higher concept of justice than that which operates in the “real” world. He says, “It seems to me a hard case to make slaves out of those whom God and nature made free.” Quixote's romance vision and Ginés' picaresque stance are in sharp contrast here—but they also implicate each other: the picaresque episode of the galley slaves takes place within a structure of romance perceived and projected by Don Quixote on to it. Significantly, Ginés reappears in Part II as Maese Pedro, who performs a puppet-show romance which Don Quixote demolishes, a reversal of roles from their earlier encounter (Chapters 24-26). If the story of Ginés de Pasamonte is a picaresque inside a novel that is also a romance, then perhaps we ought to look more closely at the romances within the picaresque.¹⁹

It is not enough to treat romance and picaresque as a sharp antithesis generically, and to define picaresque as the antitype of romance. The make-up of picaresque narrative is more complex than our definitions perhaps admit (though we do frequently admit that our definitions are inadequate). Romance visions of order are integrated into the picaresque vision in a way that makes the concept of antitypes false. For Guzmán and Simplicissimus, in fact, the narrative vehicle is in tone, stance, and temporal vantage point distinctly romance-like. Though the romance and the picaresque may, superficially, be the inverse or converse of each other, their relationship, as I have tried to suggest, is such that one implies the other rather than absolutely opposes it. The very chaos and fragmentation rendered in the world-vision of the picaresque actually direct our eyes toward an alternative. In this sense, every picaresque is romantic; every explicit picaresque contains within it an implicit romance. Perhaps Chandler said a good deal more than he consciously intended to when he titled his seminal study Romances of Roguery. In any case, we need to look more closely at the romance-picaresque dichotomy as our critical acts continue to refine the generic concept of the picaresque. That generic impulse to structure and order these fictions of disorder is itself a romance desire.

Notes

1. In Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 135-58. This is a translation and development of “Luis Sánchez, Ginés de Pasamonte y los inventores del género picaresco,” in Homenaje a Prof. Rodríguez-Moñino (Madrid, 1966), I, 221-31. Compare Harry Sieber's observation, built on Guillén's essay, that “the picaresque novel as a genre emerges, as Cervantes clearly perceived, out of the confluence of the Lazarillo and of the autobiography of a criminal [Guzmán]” and “It was the combined popularity and publication of the Lazarillo and the Guzmán which generated imitations, emulations and parodies of the new genre”; Harry Sieber, The Picaresque (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 24.

2. Trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1950), pp. 176-77.

3. In Volkstum und Kultur der Romanen, 1 (1928), 324-42; reprinted in Helmut Heidenreich, ed., Pikarische Welt: Schriften zum europäischen Schelmenroman (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), pp. 61-78.

4. See Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), Ch. 4, “Fabulation and Picaresque,” pp. 59-94. Hawkes' remarks appeared originally in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature.

5. Nachlese, Prosa 1951-1955 (Berlin and Frankfurt, 1967), pp. 194-95.

6. “The Idea of the Picaresque,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature (1967), 43-52.

7. I am grateful to Daniel Eisenberg for supplying me a copy of his paper, “Does the Picaresque Novel Exist?”—presented at a session on the picaresque novel at the 29th Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, The University of Kentucky, Lexington, April 22-24, 1976. Eisenberg, with very persuasive arguments and documentation, points out how impossible it is to define the picaresque genre inductively; moreover, it is equally impossible to define the genre in terms of the meaning picaresque may have had in the seventeenth century because subsequent use of the term has been so broad, especially outside the framework of Spanish literature. Eisenberg's precise delineation of the seventeenth-century Spanish literary situation is convincing and I can't help but agree with him. I am not, however, persuaded by his solution to the problem: dropping the term altogether, or at least de-emphasizing it in favor of specific works themselves, or at the very least qualifying the term when we do have to use it. Whatever the pitfalls of genre theory, surely common sense tells us that there must be something useful in a term which has had such widespread currency; there must be something which books like Lazarillo and Felix Krull have in common, for which the concept “picaresque” has been serving. My inclination, whatever the inadequacies of the term as applied to the historical situation of Golden Age Spanish fiction may be, would be to continue the a posteriori process of definition. The term has simply gone too far, either to abandon it or to stop pursuing it.

8. Spain and the Western Tradition: The Castilian Mind in Literature from El Cid to Calderón (Madison, Milwaukee, and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), IV, 214, 283.

9. I have made an attempt in “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” PMLA, 89 (1974), 240-49.

10. “Die literarischen Travestien: Ritter—Hirt—Schelm,” Blätter für deutsche Philosophie, 6 (1932/ 33) [originally a lecture delivered in Holland, 1931], reprinted in Heidenreich, Pikarische Welt, pp. 101-18.

11. In The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 511-30.

12. See also his “The Archetypes of Literature” [originally in The Kenyon Review, 13 (1951)] in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, 1963), pp. 7-20. For a historical survey of romance see Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970). See also C. S. Lewis, “On Myth” and “The Meanings of ‘Fantasy’” in An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), Chapters 5 and 6 respectively. For an excellent treatment of the romance mode see Kathryn Hume, “Romance: A Perdurable Pattern,” College English, 36 (1974), 129-46.

13. See Claudio Guillén, “The Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature,” Diss., Harvard University, 1953; and Parker, Literature and the Delinquent, pp. 10-13.

14. I've tried to explore this aspect in “Onlyman,” Mosaic, 8 (1975), 21-47.

15. The didactic dimension of picaresque was first emphasized by Miguel Herrero, “Nueva interpretación de la novela picaresca,” Revista de Filología Española, 24 (1937), 343-62. See also Enrique Moreno Baéz, Lección y sentido del Guzmán de Alfarache (Madrid, 1948).

16. Karl Kerenyi, “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology,” in Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 185.

17. C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,” trans. R. F. C. Hull, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Sir Herbert Reade, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), IX, 255-72. Originally published for the appendix of Paul Radin's The Trickster (see note 16).

18. See Ralph Freedman's theory of the novel based on the picaresque: “The Possibility of a Theory of the Novel,” in The Disciplines of Criticism, pp. 57-77.

19. The integration of romance and picaresque conventions shows up as early as 1555, in the sequel to Lazarillo, but it is more prominent in later, non-Spanish fictions. In The Picaresque Hero in European Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), Richard Bjornson sees this as a recurrent characteristic of picaresque works outside the Spanish tradition: “The ambiguity of bourgeois attitudes toward individualism and social mobility is even suggested by the fact that romance conventions and aristocratic assumptions reappear in picaresque novels which depict real-seeming heroes, situations, and geographical locations” (p. 17). Bjornson goes on to perceive romance patterns in such works as Charles Sorel's Histoire comique de Francion (1623, 1626, 1633) (pp. 151-53, 160-61), in Simplicissimus (p. 167), in Alain-René Lesage, especially in his Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715, 1724, 1735) (pp. 210-13, 226), in Defoe's Moll Flanders (p. 192), and in Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) (p. 230). Bjornson concludes that because the original Spanish picaresque works were read “according to French genius and taste, they themselves came to be regarded as comic novels in which typically picaresque panoramas of representative vices and follies were superimposed upon romance patterns and adventure-story plots. It was in this form that many of them were introduced to English and German audiences” (p. 161).