[In the essay which follows, Babcock discusses the social role of the picaresque hero, focusing on early Spanish picaresques as well as the film Easy Rider.]

In one of the most recent picaresque fictions, my colleague Zulfikar Ghose's The Incredible Brazilian, his picaro-narrator informs his reader in the prologue:

I am aware of the danger of fantasies, of adding spice to situations which were no more memorable than a frugal meal of rice and beans. I am aware, too, that since the reader is inevitably going to consider some aspects of my narrative as unbelievably impossible, I have the temptation before me of straining incredibility still further by making incredibility a kind of literary convention, by suggesting, say, that the reader can only believe in my story if he first accepts the proposition that everything I say is unbelievable. This is an interesting notion, no doubt. But let me say it categorically once and for all: what ensues may seem incredible, but there is not one word of untruth in it.

[1972:10]

This is precisely the problem faced by the writer of picaresque narrative that defines itself through dramatic inversions of social, moral, and literary orders: how to speak the truth about society, but from an ironic, inverse perspective. The writer wants to amaze and yet be believed at the same time, and so rather than talking for truths he must speak in double negatives of not untruths. This “not not” is the mainspring of the rogue's hit-and-run style; he maintains his position of constant mobility, his half-outsider stance, by being able to say to the reader-listener when asked “Is it true?”, “Well, it's not untrue, is it?”¹

The picaro-narrator establishes this perspective by playing with the conventions of the travel book and the confessional, both of which rely upon the trustworthiness of the narrator. But we can seldom attribute this trait to the picaro, the unwitting traveler, the rogue and trickster who is forced onto the road. Thus his confessions have the ring of the lurid, the voyeuristic, and they can never be regarded as illustrating the moral insights of a reformed individual, despite his claims to that effect. To the contrary, it is precisely the amoral tone which marks the genre and provides it with its sense of the fantastical, or at best, ambiguous. The force of this ostracism may be lost on us today, for we have come to idealize gypsying as a symbolic means of asserting our freedom from social constraints. But we haven't completely lost the sense of existence in a disapproved moral vacuum which is attendant upon such declassifying or dismembering moves; even Peter Fonda, who participated in the picaresque film of the 1960s, Easy Rider, noted that “my movie is about the lack of freedom, not about freedom. My heroes are not right, they're wrong” (Hardin and Schossberg 1969:28). But to us they are both, and it is how picaresque narrative creates this ambiguity, this “nondisjunction” of values, by inversions on various levels that I will examine in this essay.

The term pícaro was first documented in 1525 with the meaning of “kitchen boy” and the connotation of “evil living.” In the first dictionary of the Spanish Academy of 1726, pícaro is defined as an adjective meaning “low, vicious, deceitful, dishonourable and shameless” (Parker 1967:4). By way of literary definition, it could be said that the pícaro is one of the first “low” characters in written narrative who is not just a supernumerary, but is a hero or antihero. The first protagonist of a novel to whom the word is applied in the novel itself is the title character of Guzmán de Alfarache (1599-1604). Since then pícaro has generally been translated as “rogue” or “delinquent,” notably by A. A. Parker in his monograph on the picaresque novel, Literature and the Delinquent. The word, however, was first used in reference to a real social type rather than a literary one, and while it usually designates one who violates social and human norms, picaro always has the connotation of “prankster,” and does not mean “criminal” in the serious sense in which we use that term.

The word “picaresque” was first used in English in 1810. It has since described a type of satirical novel, originating in Spain in the sixteenth century, whose hero is an amusing vagabond or rogue who tells of his life and adventures in a loose, episodic fashion. The “picaresque novel” is at best a problematic literary concept. In its narrowest sense the term refers only to certain novels of the Spanish Golden Age (ca. 1550-1650); in its broadest sense it is used to describe any first-person, episodic, on-the-road novel, and at times is erroneously used as a synonym for plotless, formless, or structureless.² In the hope of mediating these extremes, I will use the term to refer to a basic narrative form or pattern, that is, “an essential situation or significant structure derived from the novels themselves” (Guillén 1971:71), which can account both for a specific kind of literary narrative and for a general narrative pattern characteristic of a variety of expressive forms. I think this shift of focus toward viewing the picaresque synchronically as a particular narrative pattern is essential to any description of the distinctive features of the form and to an initial outline of generic distinctions.³

When performances define themselves primarily in terms of the inversion of social and moral order and of the form and content of accepted literary genres, the very act of inversion creates such confusion that these enactments are generally accused of being formless. This is, of course, the charge often leveled at the picaresque.⁴ Yet on closer examination, this formlessness seems more apparent than real, more an initial impression created by somehow turning the world upside down than the actual embodiment of chaos.

In the first place, there is an order, almost a hierarchy, to the norms and institutions which are upended and thereby satirized—that is, to the masters the picaro serves or the collective conditions he observes. The order of inversions generally corresponds to (1) the relative importance of the norms and institutions in a given society, (2) the degree of “reality” or necessity of such social fictions in contrast to their artifice, and (3) the chronological development of the protagonist. And since the picaro is generally a social climber, this sequence also corresponds to his vertical movement through levels of society. Couple this with his horizontal movement through space and away from home, and you can also predict, as Guillén has pointed out, that his adventures will become increasingly cosmopolitan. Second, such unifying devices as recurrent images, thematic contrast sets, circular patterns, and a “dance pattern” of reappearing secondary characters superimpose an order on the picaro's seemingly random episodic adventures.⁵ Third, episodes are frequently related through the structural mirroring or interior duplication of stories-within-the-story which reflect, duplicate, invert, and otherwise comment upon the episode within which they are told. Fourth, as the preceding implies, there are frequently causal or logical connections among two or more episodes even though the overall structure of the narrative may not be causal or developmental. Fifth, the antisocieties of rogues with whom the picaro associates are, contrary to assumptions about the motley state of the underworld, often more highly structured than the dominant society.

Underlying the episodic and antidevelopmental narrative of the picaresque is yet another important pattern of organization: the structure of the narrative genre (or genres) being parodied. While numerous critics have discussed the picaresque as “antiromance,” as a “countergenre” that develops dialectically as an inversion of the pattern of chivalric romance, few have realized that it embodies the structures or the romance at the same time as it inverts them. The code which is being broken is always implicitly there, for the very act of deconstructing reconstructs and reaffirms the structure of romance. This formal, generic nondisjunction is central to the picaresque's problematic ambiguity: the pattern of expectation created by the inverted form (i.e. the picaresque) competes with the still somewhat operant, formal constraints of the genre or genres that have been inverted. In other words, the reader receives at least two sets of competing formal metacode signals: “this is a romance”; “this is a picaresque antiromance.”⁶ As a consequence, even a reader familiar with the tradition is somewhat confused and frustrated, and the narrative “message” has an initial appearance of chaos. These conflicting systems of formal constraints or inherent expectations create some specific problems with regard to the picaresque (especially its ending) which I will discuss later.

As both Wicks and Guillén have pointed out, parody of other fictional types (notably, romance, pastoral, travel book, and confession) and of the picarseque tradition itself is a distinctive feature of the genre. In addition to explicit inversions of accepted social norms and institutions, judgement and satire of a society is implicitly made through a critical lampooning of some of its favorite literature. The impulse to parody is fundamental to the satiric mode, for nothing comments so fully on hypertrophied and banal formalism as the overimitation of the form. The “as-if” quality of all our necessary social fictions is repeatedly expressed in the critical parody of our accepted literary ones. While we tend to dissociate criticism and satire, defining the former as literary critique and the latter as social critique, it is interesting to note with regard to the picaresque that Roman satire (satura), from which picaresque narrative ultimately derives, was the traditional vehicle for literary criticism. The satura or “plate of mixed fruit” consisted, like the picaresque, of an admixture of genres and their reciprocals.

Historically, the picareseque dialectically develops and distinguishes itself as an inversion of the patterns of the chivalric romance and the pastoral.⁷ The base transformation of the romance is the substitution of a lowlife delinquent for a princely hero. This initial inversion is developed by a mocking perversion of the hero's career pattern. The romance hero is born into a firm place in society, usually noble. He is then forced because of circumstance (often the loss or questioning of patrimony—patrimony operating here as a symbol of social place) into a physical and spiritual exile, in which he faces at least two tasks (usually the defense of a lady and the killing of a beast) that he must and does complete through his courage, intelligence, and hard work. Thus endowed with special power, he returns from the wilderness to society and reachieves social status through marriage to a noble's daughter or some other ceremonial conferral of renewed status.⁸

This exile-and-return pattern emphasizes the necessity for the hero to go beyond the margins of society and there undergo a liminal experience to find his sense of self and thus realize (often with the aid of mediating figures) symbolic power through victory in his tasks. This attainment of power makes possible the status change which is realized upon his reentry into society. The parallel between the hero's career pattern and the pattern of status change in rites of passage as described by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner is patent. But it is precisely this serious pattern of status passage which is perverted in the total extension and elaboration of liminality into a rhythm of “continuous disintegration” characteristic of picaresque narrative. Liminality with all its “betwixt and between” aspects is perhaps the most important distinctive feature of this countergenre.⁹

The picaro's parentage, in contrast to the hero's, is low and “marginal” (e.g., Don Pablos' father in the classic El Buscón is a thief, his mother a witch)—if it is specified at all. If the picaro is not orphaned through the agency of jail or execution, he orphans himself by disowning his parents (or parent) at an early age. In so rendering himself fatherless and statusless, he inverts the hero's pattern of loss of patrimony through the agency of society—what Wicks calls the “ejection motif.” This symbolic social suicide is comically exemplified in Huckleberry Finn when Huck frees himself from father and society by faking his own murder. More recently, Easy Rider expresses an even more radical deracination: there is no mention of Captain America's or Billy's homes or families; all we know is that they “come from L.A.” This canceling of connections is underlined by “a stranger” they meet who, when asked where he's from, replies “It's hard to say. … A city” (Hardin and Schlossberg 1969:72-73), and by the rejection and mockery of his All-American past by the drunken lawyer, George Hanson.

Once the picaro has been ejected or has ejected himself from society, he sets out to eliminate economic and status privation by ingratiating himself to a noble friend, continuing his formal education as a manservant (as in El Buscón), or by apprenticing himself to a series of “masters” and learning a “trade” to make his way in the world (as in Lazarillo), or by doing both. In any case, there is a mockery if not an explicit inversion of the educational system, the system of mentorship, the master-servant relationship,¹⁰ and, I should add, of the benevolent mediating figures of romance.¹¹ In contrast to the latter, the picaro's preceptors present an appearance of virtue and a reality of corruption (see Guedj 1968:83). Even if not a servant to many masters in recent renderings, the picaro encounters a number of collective conditions; through his naive and uncomprehending initial response he exposes basic hypocrisy and duplicity. He soon becomes accomplished in the art of deceit and deception, outwits his masters, and sets out on his own to “live by his wits.” In contrast, however, to the marked urban-rural contrast in the exile of the romance, the picaro seems to hang on the fringes of the city, for when he goes “on the road” he encounters only a greater variety of marginal types. He attains only the special power of the art of deceit. The only status change attendant upon his return is the transition from deceived to deceiver. These changes occur within the city context (urban renewal, as it were); unlike the romance and the pastoral, the rural excursions of the picaresque are mere placebos, confirmations in roguery (Wadlington 1973).

This perversion of the hero's education is repeatedly illustrated in the satire of religion endemic to the picaresque. That religion is singled out is not surprising given its predominance as a cultural system and its control of education in early modern Europe. For instance, Lazarillo de Tormes' second master is a priest who “presented a living portrait of the utmost niggardliness” (Flores 1957:41). He hypocritically preaches temperance in eating and drinking and virtually starves Lazarillo to death. Lazarillo, in turn, begins to pray for people to die, for only at funeral feasts does he truly eat, or, as he says, “in nothing could I find relief except in death.” From a tinker (who is traditionally a marginal, wandering figure endowed with dangerous powers, but is described by Lazarillo as an “angel sent by God”), the starving Lazarillo obtains a key to the priest's chest or arca (also meaning Holy Ark) in which are kept the loaves of communion bread. The ironies and inversions continue to multiply.¹² Finally the priest suspects mice and boards up the chest, but “necessity is a wondrous sharpener of wits” (Flores 1957:48), and what the priest does by day Lazarillo undoes by night and vice versa. One night the priest beats the “snake” to which he now attributes the desecration and discovers that the mouse/snake is Lazarillo, whom he turns out to suffer an ever worse master, an impoverished hidalgo.

This first picaresque novel establishes a pattern of desacrementalization that virtually every narrative in the picaresque mode repeats. Even in one of the more recent renderings, Easy Rider, a meal in New Orleans during Mardi Gras becomes a mass; a church becomes a brothel; a whore, Mary; LSD, the sacred host; and a cemetary, the place of conversion—“turning on.” And in addition to such inversions of the sacred and the profane, there is a transvaluation of the more general religious and moral categories of good and evil which I will discuss later.

Rather than inheriting a place in society, experiencing a temporary period of liminality and exile, and rejoining the social order in a new and improved status, the picaro is born into what Victor Turner calls a position of “structural inferiority” (1974:234). He declines to climb the social ladder through the formula of hard work and reward (inverting through trickery the customary work-play distinction), and opts for the truly marginal position of being a “half-outsider” who can neither join nor reject his fellow-men (Guillén 1971:80).¹³ The marginal man is condemned and condemns himself “to live, at the same time, in two worlds and (is compelled to assume), in relation to the worlds in which he lives, the role of cosmopolitan and stranger” (Stonequist 1937:xvii). In short, he exploits and makes permanent the liminal state of being “betwixt and between all fixed points in a status sequence” (Turner 1974:232).

One of the major differences between the picaro and the hero, which is central to the former's maintenance of marginality, is his refusal or inability to reintegrate himself socially through marriage. He is either exposed in his attempt to marry (as in El Buscón) or his marriage (like Lazarillo's) is based on false premises and self-delusion. The picaro's behavior regarding marriage is indicative, moreover, of his general inability to form any abiding relationships, most especially with women, whom he uses and abuses. Despite his much touted sexuality the picaro ultimately fails to perform.¹⁴ This experience of a number of missed connections is echoed structurally in the “dance pattern” of “meetings and remeetings, … one character quickly slipping from another” (Miller 1967:14,17). And as Allan Janik notes, “the very point of the ‘dance’ motif [is that] sex without love is a meaningless, mechanical ritual” (Janik and Toulmin 1973:64).

In yet another contrast to the idealized and spiritualized realm of romance, the picaresque stresses the material level of existence. The monsters of the picaro's world are all too real and all too human, and he uses his wits as well as his religion simply to survive—physically and immediately—rather than toward some greater end. Beyond the subsistence level, the picaro, unlike the hero of spiritual pursuit, is a lover and pursuer of things found only in this world—the immediate gratification of material things, physical comforts, and delights of the flesh. The very processes of signifying in such narratives express both the extreme materiality and the lack of connectedness in the picaro's world: there is a proliferation of signifiers and a relative poverty of signification, of meaning (Guedj 1968:82-83).¹⁵ This too contributes to the meaninglessness or the reversibility of meaning of his experience, for those things which he covets have meaning only within a system which he has rejected.

The oft-repeated phrase “he lives by his wits” expresses yet another paradox of the picaro's existence. In this sense, too, he lives outside the ordinary feelings of the community: the hypertrophy of his practical intelligence replaces a full emotional development. Ironically, he usually just “takes over available patterns of feelings, and these are most likely to be conventional or orthodox” (Heilman 1958:549). In both a positive and negative sense the picaresque experience is an exercise of mind, a reveling in the mind as conqueror, a relishing of power through purely mental rather than physical or political or social means. Although necessity gives birth to the picaro's trickery and sharpens his wits, there is a point in every picaresque narrative beyond which trickery is indulged in for trickery's sake. In El Buscón, for example, Don Pablos joins and enjoys the band of “gentlemen” thieves despite the inheritance in his pocket. But, as Robert Heilman has pointed out: “In all literature that deals with the wit-conducted life there is, ultimately, ambiguity. Perhaps only detective stories naively exploit the passion for the mind's control of existence. Tragedy and picaresque set this passion in play; yet … both are penetrated by a sense of failure of mind alone. Picaresque heroes, at their best almost infinitely clever, nonetheless fall prey to … the irrationalities of circumstance” (1958:557-558). This ambiguity both delights and threatens us, for we cannot escape the fact that the picaro's intellectual virtue is also his vice, that his “shallowness” is both a disadvantage and an advantage.

Just as the picaro as protagonist has been criticized by literary commentators for his “shallowness,” “flatness,” and lack of self-awareness, so too the picaro as narrator is criticized for his limited and distorted perspective. While this is usually pointed out as a flaw—another instance of the rudimentary nature of this type of narrative—this convention of limited or restricted perspective is actually one of the virtues of the genre and is essential to its total inverse effect. This particular limitation is both a distinctive feature and a source of the vitality of the narrative form. Were the narrator-protagonist aware of his defects, much of the humor, irony, and ambiguity would be diminished, contaminated by dull and explicit social criticism or the typical self-righteousness of the satirist. The picaro's defects create an equivocal perspective which functions as an unknown, unexpected source of vitality to constantly repair the solvent effects of a critical attitude within the narrative itself.

In this regard, it is no accident that almost every picaresque narrative presents itself as a first-person autobiographical reminiscence. This mode of narration underlines the picaro's isolation and estrangement as well as the narrative's questioning, if not rejection, of norms, of authority, of objective reality. As Guillén points out, the use of the first person is “more than a formal frame. It means that not only are the hero and his actions picaresque, but everything else in the story is colored with the sensibility, or filtered through the mind, of the picaro-narrator” (1971:81).

The first-person point of view, which is split between an experiencing “I” and a narrating “I,” calls our attention to the radical estrangement between inner and outer man and inserts the tale into “a double perspective of self-concealment and self-revelation” (Guillén 1971:82).¹⁶ This difference between narrative attitude and events narrated is the major structural irony of the genre: he (narrator) who tells the reader to trust the credibility of his tale then describes himself (protagonist) as the master of deception and deceit. The narrator's statement to the reader about his narrative and his seeming contradiction of it, like the metacommunicative statement, “this is play,” “generates a paradox of the Russellian or Epimenides type—a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastatement” (Bateson 1972:179-180). The liar's assertion that “this is not an untrue story” establishes a paradoxical frame comparable to Epimenides' “Liar” paradox: “All Cretans are liars. I am a Cretan” (Colie 1966:6). Like all paradoxes, the paradox of the picaresque is both a direct criticism of itself as narrative statement and an oblique criticism of absolute judgement or absolute convention in general. Ultimately, of course, the reader, like the picaro himself and his other victims, is taken in, caught in the vertigo of infinite reflection and the play with human understanding. The first-person prevarication of the picaresque is intimately connected with the charges of formlessness, for it is almost impossible not to confuse the paradoxical and “unreliable” mode of presentation with the events that are presented, and hence to regard them and their organization as improbable and illogical. How else, when language has become the instrument of dissimulation and irony (Guillén 1971:81)?

There is yet another irony in the double perspective of first-person reminiscence if we think of “remembered” in the literal sense of the presumptuous autobiographical re-membering of something which is basically dismembered and disjointed. For, as Oskar Seidlin has pointed out, there is an ironic discrepancy between the lowly, marginal picaro and the effrontery with which he dares to say “I,” to reconstruct his life and adventures, and to offer them to the public with high moral seriousness (Seidlin 1951:191).

It is significant, therefore, that this public revelation may become even more self-conscious—the picaro finding his fullest expression of self as a performer-illusionist, either as one who identifies himself as a maker of illusions or as one who throws himself into a world of illusion in which misrule (or at least poetic license) is the rule. In El Buscón Don Pablos' career culminates in the profession of actor and playwright; in Thomas Mann's novel, Felix Krull is identified as an artist; and in Easy Rider the destination of Captain America and Billy is New Orleans' Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is, of course, carnival, the period of license before Lent, and is defined in terms of masking, transformation, and inversion of norms and perceptions. The repeated identification of picaro and artist in modern expressions of the genre indicate that the preceding examples are not simply episodes or temporary professions in the life of the picaro, but synecdoches or base metaphors representing the entirety of the picaresque pattern in life and in art—fiction as a way of life.¹⁷ That this lowlife delinquent is a master of many masks should not surprise us, for it is very likely that there is a positive correlation between marginality and fantasy. “Maybe groups and individuals who are cut out of the benefits of a given society are the ones who most often dream about another, and sometimes act to bring it about” (Cox 1970:64). We can at least say with certainty that in the picaresque, “fantasy thrives among the dissatisfied” (Cox 1970:64).¹⁸

Ultimately, the effect of such masking, transformation, and inversion as is characteristic of the picaresque is to render ambiguous or “nondisjunctive” (as Kristeva terms it) primary categories which are usually distinguished, such as good and evil, fidelity and treason, sacred and profane, life and death, and “high” and “low” style, and to negate these disjunctions as they are commonly maintained in the older genres of epic and romance.¹⁹ When such basic discretions are inverted, the absolute separation of the discretion is called into question and, in terms of perception and behavior, a continuum of indistinction is created. Thus the utility, if not the validity, of such distinctions becomes a matter of debate. In El Buscón, for example, evil is initially equated with unreality and deception, and good with the real and the normal. But, as T. E. May points out, the “reality” that young Pablos confronts is so grotesque and deformed that he can only cope with this evil by assuming a role which is not a true one, by opting for “unreality” or inauthenticity (1950:322). Through this nondisjunction Quevedo raises the moral or metaphysical question, “What does it mean to choose unreality with one's eyes open?” Such transvaluations of values are characteristic of what happens when the hero of a novel must define his rebellion, his alienation from society, in terms which take their meaning from the very authorities he has come to reject (Poirier 1968:101). A reversibility of meaning is both the cause and the effect of a discontinuous world.

Nondisjunction both of meaning and of formal generic constraints—that is, the coexistence of two or more metacode signals and thus of several sets of expectations—also contributes to the “problematic” ending characteristic of the picaresque. Simply stated, the problem is this: If you don't have a developmental and an end-determined plot, if you parody the conventions and narrative structure of other literary forms, and if you deny the validity of all either-or categories, how do you conclude the picaro's life and adventures and yet maintain the novel's fundamental ambiguity? The narratives I have discussed here offer three alternatives:²⁰ (1) the picaro reenters society, sometimes through marriage, and is apparently reintegrated into the social structure; (2) the picaro is killed or punished; and (3) the picaro's adventures are “to be continued.”

The first of these alternatives is the expected end of the romance or comic pattern. It is an unsatisfactory conclusion to the picaresque which has in other respects parodied and inverted the romance pattern. Unless the author has depicted a society which offers alternatives and the possibility of change, or evidence of an official culture that has an historical dignity, which the picaresque does not, reaggregation is not a viable or credible conclusion (Poirier 1968:101). When a picaresque narrative does end with reintegration, it is based upon false premises or self-delusion: for example, Lazarillo de Tormes marries the priest's whore and deludes himself regarding her fidelity as well as the importance of his social role as towncrier; Huck Finn is “reborn” in the form of Tom Sawyer and then uses the latter's literary lies to secure Jim's freedom. Such perversions of the romance ending result in little more than a deceptive and temporary restoration of equilibrium. It won't be long until Huck “lights out for the territories.”

The second alternative expresses another vector of formal influence: the violation-punishment pattern of melodrama and tragedy in which the individual who violates social and human boundaries is punished, the social order preserved through “the sacrificial principle of victimage,” and the victim elevated as martyr. Since picaresque narrative intermittently mocks this very pattern and is itself based on a violation of boundaries, this conclusion is also unsatisfactory if not gratuitous, as illustrated in the violent ending of Easy Rider.

Fonda's comments about his movie, its ending, and what he regards as the audience's misinterpretation, are illustrative of the problems of picaresque conclusions:

My movie is about the lack of freedom, not about freedom. My heroes are not right, they're wrong. The only thing I can end up doing is killing my character. I end up committing suicide; that's what I'm saying that America is doing. People go in and they think, “Look at those terrible rednecks, they killed those two free souls, who needed to love, blah, blah, blah.” That's something we have to put up with.

We don't give out any information through dialogue. We have a very loose plot, nothing you can follow. You can't predict what's going to happen, and that puts everybody off. People want it predicted for them, they want violence to happen when they expect it to happen, so they can deal with it, they want sex to be a certain way and drugs to be a certain way and death to be a certain way. And it ain't. Neither is freedom. “Easy Rider” is a Southern term for a whore's old man, not a pimp, but the dude who lives with a chick. Because he's got the easy ride. Well, that's what happened to America, man. Liberty's become a whore, and we're all taking an easy ride.

[Hardin and Schlossberg 1969:28]

In terms of picaresque conventions, Fonda's interpretation, the typical audience interpretation, and the ending are all in error in that they deny or cannot tolerate the fundamental ambiguity of the genre—they want things “to be a certain way”—which the movie does set up in its sympathetic and humorous treatment of antisocial characters and values. His movie is about both freedom and the lack of freedom; his heroes are both right and wrong, and we would have gotten that message had the film ended with that penultimate bit of dialogue, “We've done it” “No, we blew it,” rather than motorized sacrifice.

This third alternative, the inconclusive conclusion exemplified in El Buscón's “to be continued,” is appropriate to the formal and ideological “openness” of picaresque narrative; it is also the logically probable ending of a first-person account of one's life and adventures.²¹ In this sense, it doesn't really matter that Thomas Mann never finished Felix Krull. Further, I would suggest that “to be continued” is a conventional exit formula for any symbolic process or literary structure based on inversion and on formal and moral nondisjunction. The refusal to end maintains the ambiguity and the vitality of the form but, in most cases, is not meant to be taken literally. And yet, paradoxically, with the picaresque as with all “play” forms (see Bateson 1972) it doesn't work unless we do take the threat of inversion and the violation of boundaries seriously, seeing it in this case as a realistic reflection of the underlife of the group. As Frank Kermode has pointed out in The Sense of an Ending: “Men … make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle. … But they also, when awake and sane, feel the need to show a marked respect for things as they are; so that there is a recurring need for adjustments in the interests of reality as well as of control” (1967:17)—a need which the openness and infinite possibilities of picaresque structure fulfills. The absence of plot in Aristotle's sense is the result neither of carelessness nor of ineptitude, for there is, as Howell once said, “an art to not arriving.”

To question why we continue to write and to read and to enjoy the picaresque pattern of inversion is tantamount to asking why are there always “social bandits”? Perhaps the old brigand had the last word when he said, “We are sad, it is true, but that is because we have always been persecuted. The gentry use the pen, we the gun” (Hobsbawm 1969:13). Or, as Vita Sackville-West said of Virginia Woolf when she called her gamekeeper's coat a poacher's, “The poacher would naturally be dearer to her mind than the gamekeeper” (Noble 1972:136). Such literary poachers remind us that even the gamekeeper's laws are man-made fictions.

Notes

1. I am indebted to my colleagues Avrom Fleishman, Anthony Hilfer, Gordon Mills, Warwick Wadlington, and Susan Wittig, all of whom read an earlier version of this paper and made extensive and valuable criticisms and suggestions. And to Roger Abrahams, I owe thanks for criticism, encouragement, and moral support.

2. For discussions of the uses and abuses of the concept of the picaresque see especially Frohock 1967:43-52, Dooley 1957-1958:363-377, Wicks 1972:153-216, and Guillén 1971:71-106. The last two essays are especially important efforts to redefine picaresque and to restore its usefulness as a critical concept.

3. My concept of the picaresque as a synchronic narrative pattern is closely related to Guillén's concept of “picaresque myth” and Wicks' notion of “picaresque mode” (derived from Scholes' modal perspective) as developed in the essays cited above. Wicks' essay appeared when I was in the final stages of revision, and I have indicated those places in which we seem to agree on the description of the genre.

4. See, for example, Chandler 1899 from which succeeding similar criticisms of formlessness largely derive. The low regard for episodic narrative generally derives from Aristotle, who remarked in the Poetics that “of all plots and actions the episodic [i.e., without probable or necessary sequence] are the worst.”

5. The concept of the dance pattern is developed by Miller 1967:13-20. This structuring has ideological significance with regard to the quality of the picaro's social relationships, especially his relations with women, which I will discuss later in this essay.

6. The term “metacode” is derived from Roman Jakobson's six-element model of a speech act, which he sees as consisting of: sender, receiver, message, code, channel, and context (1960). What literary critics term a “generic pattern of expectation” may be defined in Jakobson's terms as the “code” of a given type of narrative. A metacode signal is a statement which explicitly refers to the code or generic pattern(s) being used and manipulated, e.g., “This incredible story is a true confession.”

7. For reasons of time and space, I have limited the discussion that follows to the picaresque's inversions of the romance. For an historical discussion of the picaresque's emergence in counterdistinction to the romance and the pastoral, see Guillén 1971:135-158. His concept of “countergenre”—and his statement that these negative impacts or influences à rebours, through which a norm is dialectically surpassed (and assimilated) by another, or a genre by a countergenre, constitute one of the main ways in which a literary model acts upon a writer (pp. 146-147)—is especially relevant to the present discussion.

8. For a discussion of the exile-and-return, quest-and-test pattern of romance, see Rank 1914 and Lord Raglan 1936.

9. If, as Victor Turner suggests in his commentary in this volume, we reserve the use of the terms “liminal” and “liminality” for ritual proper and use the term “liminoid” for nontribal, modern industrial leisure-time genres, then the perpetual betwixt-and-between situation of the picaresque would more properly be defined as an extended liminoid state.

10. This particular inversion has ideological implications that go beyond the scope of this essay, and yet are ultimately relevant thereto. Hegel's classic discussion (1964: 228-267) of the inversion of the master-servant relationship, the process of self-enfranchisement, and the resultant “unhappy consciousness” is especially pertinent to the situation in the picaresque.

11. On the basis of her work with medieval romance, my colleague Susan Wittig has speculated that what we have in the hero-preceptor or hero-mediator dyad is a latent avuncular relationship. The fact that the hero usually marries his “uncle's” daughter implies a cross-cousin marriage, which medieval European culture explicitly denied but implicitly allowed. This suggests that in the picaresque the protagonist who refuses to marry, refuses to live within the community's kinship patterns and is outcast for his refusal. Thus this inversion of the educational system may imply a more profound inversion of kinship rules.

12. For a brilliant discussion of the innumerable ironies and inversions generated by the controlling inversion of the meaning of life and death in Lazarillo, see Gilman 1966:149-166.

13. In addition to Guillén, see Kolakowski 1962 on the jester's similar relationship to society and Cox's discussion of a “theology of opposition” and Christ as jester (1962:133-138).

14. This failure to perform sexually and to establish lasting, meaningful relationships with women together with the picaro's assumption of female roles and clothes among his many masks connotes both transvestism and homosexuality. In several novels, moreover, the protagonist is a picara. This creative androgyny characteristic of trickster types finds its fullest expression in Virginia Woolf's neopicaresque Orlando, in which the title character changes sex every century.

15. In another essay, “The Novel and the Carnival World (1974), I have discussed the uses and effects of a “surplus of signifiers” in symbolic processes, notably as an inversion, a mockery of the mode of signification of serious discourse.

16. See also Wicks 1974:244-245.

17. On the art of illusionism and manipulation as a vital part of the picaresque tradition, and the picaro as a man of imagination who “handles experience much the say an artist handles the materials of his art,” and so on, see Alter 1965:126-132.

18. The connection between fantasy and marginality is of course exemplified in the tales and myths of the Trickster, and the picaresque could be regarded as the written version of this in the modern Western world. For further discussion of the correlation between the marginal and the creative, see my “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered” (1975). This creativity is notably expressed in the marginal's delight in the activity of disguise, his quick-change artistry denying the garment as a fixed symbol of class and the fixity of the social system (see Alter 1965:41-44).

19. Kristeva (1970) sees just such nondisjunction of values and of generic patterns of expectation as essential to the development of complex prose fiction in the form of the realistic novel. With regard to the Spanish picaresque novel in particular, Whitbourne (1974:1-24) regards moral ambiguity as “one of its most essential and persistent characteristics, and which may account in some measure for its considerable popularity” (p. 16).

20. There are at least three other possible endings: (1) the wanderer reenters society but refuses to abandon his antisocial, antinormative behavior, in which case he is incarcerated in jail or the insane asylum—the modern version of banishment; (2) the deviant returns and remakes the society which expelled him—the pattern of idealistic, revolutionary narrative; and (3) the exile in his wanderings finds a society structured according to his own values, or returns home to find that the society he left has been transformed—the pattern of utopian literature. In all three cases there is a triumph of one set of values which reduces the ambiguous nondisjunction of social and antisocial values upon which the picaresque is predicated.

21. On the impossibility of ending a picaresque novel, see Alter 1965:33-34.

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