SOURCE: Frohock, W. M., Gregory Fitz Gerald, and Eric Steel. “Picaresque and Modern Literature: A Conversation with W. H. Frohock.” Edited by Philip L. Gerber and Robert J. Gemmett. Genre 13, no. 2 (1971): 187-97.

[In this interview, Frohock discusses the characteristics of the picaresque novel and the possibility of a modern picaresque.]

[Steel:] Mr. Frohock, you have said that you feel the term picaresque has been used for too loosely in describing modern fiction. At the same time you admit that many modern works contain features that can be legitimately classified as picaresque. Since some modern works of fiction exhibit characteristics of the old picaresque it might be a good procedure for the critic to indicate the picaresque features in the novels that he's criticizing and then proceed from there to a further discussion of the novel.

[Frohock:] That's the only way you can proceed when you're talking about literature: from what you know to what you don't know. And this process is going to call very often for the use of old terms, digging them up sometimes out of the scrap heap and applying them where they'll do the most good. I don't really feel, though, that this is a justification for being sloppy with the old terms, for using them to mean something that they actually didn't mean in the first place.

[Fitz Gerald:] How then would you define the term picaresque?

[Frohock:] I tend not to define it very closely. I'd much rather describe than define. Let's say that when I say picaresque, I'm thinking of a kind of fiction that began to flourish in Spain in the 1550's. It's a fiction which takes the form of pseudo-autobiography, the narrator being the hero, telling his own story. It always assumes the form of a journey; the hero gets out on the road, goes from place to place, has various adventures, works for various masters and thereby sees a great deal of society. It uses the road-novel pattern. You know, we go here and something happens; we pack up and go to the next town and something else happens; one town, one episode; and on we go. It may be that we no longer appreciate the road novel because we no longer appreciate the road. We no longer have roads in the sense that the Spaniards did; we have records that show that in 1550 they were accustomed, many of them, to walking eighty kilometers a day—they must have trotted, that's fifty miles! When they went out on the road, they weren't going to get home soon. They were changing their way of life; all sorts of things were going to happen to them. Nowadays, when you go out on the road—the New York Thruway—everything is so beautifully regulated to keep you away from adventure. That is not a road in the Spanish sense. No picaro could go very far on the Thruway!

For a novel to be picaresque, the hero himself has to be a picaro, that is a rogue, not a born criminal, but somebody who has to live by his wits, by thinking faster than the rest of the world does; he will steal, play tricks on people, do various things that we would probably call immoral, and his fortunes will go up and down. Along with this, an essential feature is that the hero has to have a “worm's eye view” of society, looking up from the very bottom. No matter how low somebody else is, he's always above the picaro on the social scale.

Then too, there are the overt ironies drawn from the contrasts that the old Spanish picaro discovers between what established society assumes life to be and what it turns out to be in actual fact. In recent interpretations, not much is made of the character of the picaro either as a social type or as the unwilling product of a society bemused by its own concept of honora, that outrageously unrealistic kind of self-esteem. We find today almost nothing of the inherent interest in life on the criminal fringes that the old picaresque shares with many patently unpicaresque works. In short, attention has been immeasurably diverted from the “plot, character, and verisimilitude” of the picaresque.

[Fitz Gerald:] Would you give us a few examples of some genuinely picaresque novels?

[Frohock:] Well, there are the four great Spanish novels. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes was the first, though some people say that it isn't really picaresque, but proto-picaresque. Then The Life of the Rogue (La vida del buscon) by Quevedo, Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán, and a fourth, Marcos de Obrégon, which was written by Vincente Espinel.

[Fitz Gerald:] And how does Don Quixote fit into this picture?

[Frohock:] Very poorly, because it's not narrated in the first person. Furthermore, the hero is not a rogue or a villain. The old man is a knight, which is well up the social scale; he's not worried about eating. The great motivation of the picaro, after all, is to keep the wrinkles out of his belly.

[Fitz Gerald:] Then you would not consider Sancho as a picaro either?

[Frohock:] He would come nearer in some ways. He has the right social level; he has a very realistic attitude toward existence. But even Sancho isn't out making his way by stealing or by playing tricks on society. Certainly not the kind of thing we find in Lazarillo de Tormes. Poor Lazarillo becomes the serving boy of an old blind man. The old blind man won't give the young hero any wine with his supper, so Lazarillo bores a hole in the wine gourd and plugs it with wax. The wax plug is in the bottom of the gourd and as the old man holds it in his lap, covering the gourd with his hands, Lazarillo slides down under the blind man, pries out the wax and gets his wine that way every night until, of course, the blind man catches him doing it and breaks the container on Lazarillo's head.

[Fitz Gerald:] Is there any modern fiction that you would classify as picaresque?

[Frohock:] If we identify recent fiction as any fiction published since 1930, I would say that we do have some works which attempt to be self-consciously picaresque. Felix Krull and The Adventures of Augie March are examples which come immediately to mind. In both cases, we know that the author intended a picaresque novel because he said so beforehand. We also know that both Mann and Bellow are very literate men who have read their Spaniards and know the picaresque tradition.

[Fitz Gerald:] Would you include Huckleberry Finn in the same group?

[Frohock:] I don't know how much Mark Twain had in mind doing anything self-consciously picaresque, but I really doubt that his book belongs in the same category as, say, Felix Krull.

[Fitz Gerald:] It occurs to me that Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee shows an example of a shrewd man coming from a less than middle section of society, a man who has some of the characteristics of the picaro even though, perhaps, we might not be willing to assent to defining the whole work as picaresque.

[Frohock:] I think you're probably right. In fact, you're really heading toward a solution to the critical dilemma by using this adjective picaresque about aspects of the fiction and not about the whole of the fiction itself. The fundamental question is how well any critical term—such as picaresque—characterizes the writing it's applied to. In other words, the criterion is usefulness. I have not read all the works that have been called picaresque by one critic or another. But I've read enough to be afflicted with some enduring doubt as to the usefulness of assigning these books to the picaresque category, particularly when insistence on real or imagined picaresque elements in the story obscures the presence of some other element which more accurately defines its type. You can find several traits of the picaresque hero in A Connecticut Yankee, though not as many as in the traditional European picaresque novels. You know picaresque spread over Europe very fast. There were translations of Guzmán de Alfarache out within a year after the original publication. The picaresque emerged in Germany in a fine way at the end of the seventeenth century with the publication of Simplicissimus. By this time picaresque novels were already appearing in England. Now I've taken you away from the question about A Connecticut Yankee, but in so doing I've tried to suggest a ploy for getting at the meaning of this word.

[Fitz Gerald:] Actually, I was leading up to the following question: Do you see any essential differences between the American picaresque as it has developed and the European tradition which you've just described?

[Frohock:] I would prefer to narrow that question down a bit before attempting an answer. Could we take it this way? How does American picaresque compare with what is called picaresque in Germany? Focusing on books contemporary with each other, such as Bellow's Augie March and Heinrich Böll's The Clown or Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, I would say that the obvious split between the two has to do with the American's being more a comic novel. Bellow obviously strives to be funny in places and sometimes he succeeds in being funny when he doesn't necessarily intend it. Whereas, the Germans' works in the picaresque vein tend to be less humorous and much more deeply and violently satiric.

[Steel:] The word picaresque was used recently to characterize a new American novel, Setting Free the Bears. You may be familiar with it.

[Frohock:] I am, and I would have brought that novel into the conversation sooner or later it you hadn't, because I like it so well. It's the first novel by a young man named John Irving. He is a thoroughly American writer, who chooses to place his story in Vienna and make it the adventures of two Europeans. He has modernized the picaresque, if this is picaresque, by setting his main characters on the road on a tremendous Enfield motorcycle and sending them off on a wild adventure across country. Most unfortunately, this part of the story ends with the death of one of the heroes, which is not in the picaresque tradition.

But then the story becomes almost a fantasy, when the remaining hero attempts to realize a long-cherished desire of letting loose all the animals in the Vienna zoo. Thus the rest of the novel deals mostly with this and the first chap's autobiography, a very interesting one, and one that is in the picaresque tradition. The book is actually brought together into one very closely laced-up thing, and the element of picaresque will be evident to everyone who reads it. Time magazine chose to give it quite a long review. The reviewer liked it because he said it took advantage of what was already strong among Americans, a sort of picaresque tradition.

[Fitz Gerald:] Mr. Frohock, in 1950 you published a book called The Novel of Violence in America; it seems to me that if we don't too strictly adhere to the term picaresque, but talk about the picaro instead, we might find him in some of the novels of violence: I have in mind such characters as Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, or the protagonists of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, especially the latter's private detective, Marlowe—the whole hard-boiled school, including some of Hemingway's characters.

[Frohock:] I was hoping you'd mention one other writer. It seems to me that the best picaros in that generation can be found in Steinbeck's work. Steinbeck's best known novel, The Grapes of Wrath, does take the form of a road novel in which people who are on the very bottom of society get out on the road in their jalopies on Highway 66, after they've been driven out of Oklahoma. There are even some of the old picaro's tricks in this book, especially when the characters get hard up for food. The tough detective type you mention, the fellow who always gets beaten up or who beats somebody else up, does not have the comic element about him that a good picaro always seems to have. Also—and this seems to be particularly true of Cain's heroes—they're not very clever.

[Fitz Gerald:] But Spade and Marlowe are very clever. Would you still say the application of the term picaresque to these detective novels is incorrect?

[Frohock:] Yes. It would be misleading.

[Steel:] For that matter, The Grapes of Wrath is outside the tradition in that it is not autobiographical.

[Frohock:] That's true, it's not.

[Fitz Gerald:] What works in your opinion give the truest picture of the picaresque tradition in contemporary literature?

[Frohock:] Probably the most legitimate use of the word would be with reference to Böll's The Clown and Grass' The Tin Drum.

[Fitz Gerald:] Would you include Catch 22 with these two works?

[Frohock:] Catch 22 shows a good deal of what's in the picaresque tradition. But it's not autobiographical, and it's strangely taken up with some pretty serious stuff about the war. Yet, I think everyone who talks about our moment as one when the picaresque seems to be coming back will mention this novel.

[Fitz Gerald:] In describing the picaro as character type, you've mentioned several characteristics. One that occurs to me as we talk about Catch 22 is the picaro's enormous amatory success. Not, of course, the idealistic kind of love that we're accustomed to find in Wordsworth or Coleridge.

[Frohock:] Oh, it's a long way from Wordsworth to Heller! But, actually, when you go back to the old picaresque novels, there is not a great deal of love in them, in the Spanish ones, for instance, or in Simplicissimus, or even in Moll Flanders. Although Moll Flanders is amorously active, as we're all aware, there is very little attention to love as such. You know, there are a couple of picaresque stories that have women in the major role. I don't mean just Moll Flanders. There's La picara Justina in Spanish, for example. The picaro, when he meets a lady, assumes that he can expect from her in the way of treatment what he would expect from any other person like himself. He understands only the “rogue character.” A woman has one advantage over the male picaro in that she can also trick people with her attractiveness.

[Fitz Gerald:] There's an American cinema called Cat Ballou that focuses on a real picara—a woman who lives by her wits and who is the leader of a gang of rogues.

[Steel:] That makes me feel that Tom Jones is a pretty good example of the male and female picaro.

[Frohock:] Sooner or later, everyone wants to bring Tom Jones into the tradition, but it's very difficult. The problem is, of course, that Tom Jones is an eighteenth-century English novel which was written by Henry Fielding. That's a bad combination for picaresque, because Fielding after all was as much a dramatist in his own mind as he was a novelist, and a comic dramatist at that. Fine, but English comedy always requires the happy ending. What are you going to do with your rogue? You have a nice girl like Sophia Western, but you can't have her marrying a cad; so you discover at the end that the picaro isn't really a picaro at all. Tom Jones is, we discover, a nice boy who comes from a nice family with plenty of money. He can support Sophia as she wants to be supported. He's no rogue, after all, but the equivalent of a college boy out on pranks. The same thing happens at the end of Roderick Random. Roderick is in love with a woman, but he can't rise to her social level. The reader doesn't see how this is all going to turn out until Roderick, while traveling in South America, meets a man in a hostelry who looks at him across the room and says “Roderick” and in Roderick's mind rings the man's name, which he's heard before: Rodrigo. “Father!” “Son!” “Money-bags! you're a nice guy after all; you can marry the girl.” And your picaresque has gone out the window in a hand basket.

[Fitz Gerald:] Does Kerouac's On The Road fit into the picaresque category at all?

[Frohock:] Pretty well, as such things go. Kerouac finally managed to tell a story about the American road in which he kept off the main roads for his adventures. Besides being a road novel, it's a first-person narration, more or less pseudo-autobiographical, which lets in quite a lot of the tradition.

[Fitz Gerald:] The central character is certainly a roguish type of fellow, who has sexual prowess, and spends his time traveling back and forth in America.

[Frohock:] Yes. I think you've got to let in a great deal heavier admixture of sex in any formula for modern picaresque because we just see life that way. Americans wouldn't understand a sexless picaro. Then there are other novels, like Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, and Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's lovely job. My reasons for thinking of these novels as picaresque are somewhat more compelling. They are road novels and autobiographies of heroes with appropriately low social origins, and the heroes move through a world that beats them about the ears with more brutal experience than they can bear. There is one towering difference. Céline's hero, Bardamu, and Ellison's man, who has no name that I can remember, are on the road because they want to get away from something, something either in themselves or in the ethos around them. Bardamu's a paranoid whose case is complicated because people actually do persecute him. Ellison's character carries about in his pocket a letter of introduction which tells recipients to keep this boy running.

[Steel:] Are there other instances you'd like to point out?

[Frohock:] Calling certain other recent novels picaresque has the double result of saying nothing significant about them and at the same time of blurring the term's meaning. For example, James Purdy's Malcolm is a string of episodes in the life of a wealthy adolescent who somehow has been abandoned by his father. He meets a gallery of human types, most of them phonies, and finally lets himself be married to a nymphomaniac nightclub singer who shortly kills him by exhaustion. He does not tell his own story, he is not a criminal, he is almost completely passive, and he is, from one end of the story to the other, too naive to be capable of defending himself. And the atmosphere he moves in feels less like traditional picaresque than like the nightmares of the disciples of Nathaniel West. Malcolm is episodical and satirical and full of grotesques, but so have been many books over the ages that no one has thought of calling picaresque.

[Fitz Gerald:] Then Terry Southern's The Magic Christian is not germane either.

[Frohock:] No, The Magic Christian is not even in the genre. Guy Grand, the hero, is a very rich man who devotes wealth and great ingenuity to devising enormous tricks that are designed to reveal how much cheaper, viler, and more perverse humanity is than we have commonly thought. In one episode he builds a gigantic cesspool in the Chicago Loop, fills it with the most revolting slop he can concoct, strews the surface with bank notes, and chortles over the willingness of people to undergo, for a little money, what Dante once saw fit to make a punishment in hell. But Guy Grand—that Grand Guy, that's why he is named this, by the way—is much less like anything anyone ever took for a picaro, until these last years, than a member of a long line of tricksters and twisters that includes Falstaff, various medieval allegory types, characters in the old Folksbücher, and Eulenspiegel. It might be advisable to distinguish between the trickster who exists only for and by virtue of his tricks and merry pranks, and the picaro, whose roguery is at most the by-product of a way of life and no more.

[Fitz Gerald:] Considering these variant approaches to the picaresque, could you tell us something about your new book on the subject?

[Frohock:] It will involve a survey of present fiction written in Germany, France, America, England, Italy, and Spain. The book will try to say something, not so much about the old picaresque—that's been raked over a great deal—but actually about this present literature that we're trying to describe by calling it picaresque, but which is obviously something new, something different from what we've had in the past. We do have a new kind of fiction, a very interestingly new kind of fiction, being written around us. We've named a considerable number of its writers, but we've not named John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut and all the rest who are also contributing. It's a fiction that is richly, and sometimes wildly inventive, with alienated, withdrawn, or dropped-out heroes living in a world where only the neurotic—if even he—can feel at home, and often it is deeply, perhaps totally, subversive of institutions and basic cultural values. This is why it sells so well.

My book will be saying that this literature is new and different, and it will be trying to describe that difference, which is what I think criticism is largely about. Some of the traits in this literature, in some degree, can be found in the old picaresque literature. But it is different enough so that maybe we can't quite handle it with this awkward term that I've been using so much this morning. I doubt that taking over the concept of picaresque really helps much. What we have is a new kind of literature.