[In this essay, Meeker considers the character of the picaro from the vantage point of the pastoral tradition in literature.]

The world has often seemed like a scary place for people. Ours is not the first period in history to notice that there is much corruption in social and political structures, that conventional moralities do not address our real problems, that there are too many people for comfort, that the technologies that promised us ease have also damaged our lives and environments, and that crime and violence are escalating. It is not that the world is itself malevolent or that the gods are angry, for most modern people are well aware that the threats to human well-being are of our own making.

As people have invented their unhappiness, so they have invented means for relief. Since the Renaissance began to unfold the new ages of humanism and technology, Western culture has sought to evade their destructive consequences by using a variety of psychological and intellectual devices. Pastoral and picaresque literature represent two important patterns of response to an unacceptable world. Both terms are commonly applied to conventional literary genres, but both also identify modes of human behavior and systems of human values. Both are currently in use as models for human responses to contemporary social, intellectual, and natural environments. The choice between them is therefore of some usefulness in deciding what to do about the difficult world around us.

The pastoral tradition is the older of the two, and its historical credentials are impressive. Some find its roots in the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden, where the proper human environment appears as a fertile and pleasant natural setting characterized by peace and innocence. But the Roman poet Virgil of the first century b.c. gets credit for perfecting the literary form of the pastoral poem with its conventions of sylvan glades, peaceful animals, and happy shepherds who live in love and kinship with nature. Virgil's pastoral was revived at the Renaissance and has since been the model for countless literary works and a major influence upon modern attitudes toward both nature and human society.

The picaresque tradition has no such classical pedigree. Scholars differ over its literary origins, its definition, and the kind of evidence that might be needed to interpret it. There is general agreement that the term derives from the Spanish picaro, “rogue,” and that the genre comprises tales about socially deprived people. The first clear example of the form is the anonymous little book Lazarillo de Tormes, which appeared in Spain in 1554. Lazarillo is the story of a young man's adventures as he struggles to survive in a hostile world that seems bent upon destroying him. To endure, he must adapt himself somehow to the given conditions of his environment, however many rules of decorum and ethics must be ignored in the process. The picaresque, at its origins, is a mode of survival against odds in a world that is hostile or indifferent.

Simply put, escape from the mad world or adaptation to its conditions are the choices offered by the pastoral and picaresque modes. Both presuppose some necessary relationship between human social and biological environments, but differ in their assessment of that relationship. The pastoral looks longingly at biological nature as an alternative to society, while the picaresque sees society itself as a natural environment—a wilderness. Civilization has been in a perpetual state of social and biological crisis at least since the Renaissance. Perhaps these two literary traditions can help to reveal whether they are in fact two different crises, or only one.

THE PASTORAL FANTASY

The pastoral tradition is rooted in imperial Rome, although it has significant antecedents in Hellenistic Greece and is reinforced by weighty influences from the Hebrew Old Testament. It was Virgil, however, who set the pastoral tone of greatest influence. Virgil's Eclogues, published in 37 b.c., reflects the weariness of sensitive Romans to the excesses and injustices of their society and their quest for solace and sense in a rural setting. “Lo, to what wretched pass has civil discord brought us,” exclaims Meliboeus in the first Eclogue.¹ Expelled from his farm by war and its political aftermath, he laments the future and admires his friend who has managed to retain land to grow old on: “Happy in thy old age, here, amid familiar streams and holy springs thou wilt woo the coolness of the shade.”² Rural repose is contrasted throughout the Eclogues with “the thankless town,” the symbol of anxiety and misery. Virgil's pastorals show people being oppressed by urban life, but comforted by nature.

Rome inspired many besides Virgil to seek relief on the farm, and for many of the same reasons that move modern urbanites to take refuge in the country. Romans of the first and second centuries often found in their city the same features that cause New Yorkers and Los Angelenos to dream of pastoral settings. The Roman satirist Decimus Junius Juvenalis, in his Third Satire (ca. a.d. 110-130), presents a familiar catalogue of urban ills: degrading poverty in the ghettos, high taxes, inflated prices for poor goods and services, corrupt government, crime and vice in the streets, poor schools and wicked teachers, pressures of social conformity, traffic congestion, police brutality, and environmental pollution. “Rome, the great sewer” seems to Juvenal beyond redemption, and his only solution is to go back to the farm:

Tear yourself from the games, and get a place
          in the country!
One little Latian town, like Sora, say,
          or Frusino,
Offers a choice of homes, at a price you pay here,
          in one year,
Renting some hole in the wall. Nice houses, too,
          with a garden,
Springs bubbling up from the grass, no need for
          windlass or bucket,
Plenty to water your flowers, if they need it,
          without any trouble.
Live there, fond of your hoe, an independent
          producer,
Willing and able to feed a hundred good vegetarians.
Isn't it something, to feel, wherever you are,
          how far off,
You are a monarch? At least, lord of a
          single lizard.(3)

Juvenal's rhetoric, like that of contemporary suburban real estate developers, stresses the goodness of life in the country, and the final lines reveal another familiar motivation: It is better to be lord of a single lizard than a victim of urban exploitation. The city degrades people and the country restores their sense of power and dignity; in the city we are controlled, but in the country we control. A rural setting symbolizes both the purity of nature and the power of people, a conjunction whose paradoxes were present two thousand years ago. Juvenal was hardly a pastoral poet, although he did share Virgil's belief that amid flocks and fields, trees and birds, one might find both the spiritual peace and the personal satisfaction that cities couldn't offer.

The pastoral goal has always been to find in rural nature an alternative to the ills of civilization. With the decline of Rome, pastoral literature and its attitudes became scarce, perhaps for lack of oppressive cities from which escape was needed. But when the cities arose again with the early Renaissance, pastoral values were revived to meet the needs of harried humanists. Both the pastoral literary genre perfected by Virgil and the antiurban conventions of jaded Romans such as Juvenal seemed to express perfectly the sentiments of many of the new people of the Renaissance.

Disease was one of the more dramatic evils of city life in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. Epidemics of black plague were environmental disasters partly attributable to environmental pollution, humanly induced ecological imbalance, and overcrowding in the newly great cities. When the plague struck Florence in 1348, the aristocratic young men and women of Giovanni Boccaccio's collection of tales, the Decameron, sought refuge from death and social disorder in a genteel tour of the Italian countryside where they told one another risqué stories to pass the time. Although the Decameron is not properly a pastoral tale, its framework shows the pastoral motivation to flee from the pain and danger of the city to the solace and pleasure of rural life.

Boccacio's introduction paints a grim picture of the diseased city where “everyone felt doomed and had abandoned his property,” where “the authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared,” and where “people cared no more for dead men than we care for dead goats.”⁴ The alternative to all this misery, sought out by Boccaccio's young people, is a rural garden described in traditional pastoral images: “The sight of this garden, of its beautiful plan, of the plants, and the fountain and the little streams flowing from it, so much pleased the ladies and three young men that they said, if Paradise could be formed on earth, it could be given no other form than that of this garden, nor could any further beauty be added to it.”⁵ The young people weave garlands from the garden plants, listen to the twenty different birds who serenade them, and delight in the hundreds of beautiful rabbits, goats, deer, and “many other kinds of harmless animals running about as if they were tame.”⁶ To the classical image of a domesticated rural landscape composed of beautiful plants and harmless animals, the Renaissance can add the dimension of moral innocence that derives from the biblical Garden of Eden and the medieval view of heaven as a divinely created pastoral scene. To the pastoral eye, society is bewilderingly complicated and dangerous while nature is beautifully simple and congenial.

The pastoral flourishes in times of urban crisis, or in those periods often called decadent, when traditional forms and rituals of society have become inappropriate but continue to hold the allegiance of large numbers of people who can find no alternative. One result is a general sense, especially among privileged and intellectual people, that the world is unmanageable, unintelligible, and doomed to self-destruction. Those who have the means to escape begin to look for places to hide from the foreseeable apocalypse, either in a new physical setting or in their fantasies. The pastoral tradition provides both.

Rural life seems rational at such times because it is thought to be governed by natural rather than human laws. Crops sprout, mature, and are harvested for human sustenance in dependable cycles. Animals graze placidly in their pastures without all the jostling and conflicts generated among people who crowd the marketplaces. And the rustic farmer who supervises nature's nourishing processes appears to be a contributing part of the sensible system surrounding him, unlike his socially alienated urban brother. To a tired and frustrated aristocrat, agriculture is a symbol of tranquility and order, God's image of what life should be like everywhere.

Nostalgia for a lost Golden Age is satisfied in part by the discovery in the present of simplified forms of order in agriculture and gardening. Agriculture becomes symbolic of both structural integrity and moral innocence. Eden, after all, was merely a small farm characterized by abundance, purity, and simplicity until its agrarian tenants noticed the existence of some awkwardly polarized contradictions, like good and evil, male and female, obedience and rebellion, and as a result were sent off to build cities where such conflicts belong. The pastoral hope is to reclaim that lost simplicity by escaping present complexity, whether its imagery is that of a classical Golden Age, a biblical garden, a rural landscape, a national park, or merely a suburban lawn with its small vegetable and flower garden to represent the good and natural life in contrast to the evils of civilization.

The pastoral impulse is utopian in its assumption that suffering and chaos are unnecessary and that strategies that will overcome such ills are possible, indeed natural. Adam's unfortunate choice to leave the garden behind was also an abandonment of reason, of common sense, and of orderly administrative structure, but God has generously permitted vestiges of the original plan to persist in the form of farms and gardens that people may imitate in order to regain Eden. If society can only be organized according to the proper principles of organic gardening, peace and stability will surely follow. The utopian vision, like the pastoral, sees nature at work in agriculture and seeks to reproduce the fertility, peacefulness, durability, simplicity, and moral innocence of gardens among the social structures of humanity.

Ebenezer Howard, the influential nineteenth-century English landscape architect and city planner, built his utopian Garden City upon a pastoral foundation:

The key to the problem how to restore the people to the land—that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it—the very embodiment of Divine love for man—is indeed a Master Key, for it is the key to a portal through which, even when scarce ajar, will be seen to pour a flood of light on the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty—the true limits of Governmental interference, ay, and even the relations of man to the Supreme Power.⁷

Howard's alternative to the pain and degradation of city life, like Juvenal's, is the garden. The difference is that Howard wants to rebuild cities to incorporate the virtues of gardens, not merely to escape from the city. Howard had hope for humanity. He was confident that the influence of the garden upon the city would provide a solution to psychological, social, political, and even theological problems common to urban environments. His utopian vision sought relief in fantasies of future gardens, not merely in a change of geography or a return to a previous golden-age garden.

The United States may be the world's largest-scale utopian experiment in creating a nation on the model of a pastoral garden. Many of its earliest settlers looked upon the new land as a green refuge from the oppression they had suffered in European cities. The American pastoral ideal has been studied in detail by Leo Marx in his book The Machine in the Garden. Marx traces the pervasive pastoral strain in American thought and shows the painful contradictions that developed as the American garden was gradually transformed into an industrialized farm, then into a national factory: “Beginning in Jefferson's time, the cardinal image of American aspirations was a rural landscape, a well-ordered green garden magnified to continental size.”⁸ An agricultural America must be both beautiful and morally pure, for, according to Jefferson, “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God … whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”⁹ Marx also shows that the snake of industrialism that was to corrupt the garden was also known to Jefferson. Foreign competition and the War of 1812 forced America to abandon its gardening project in order to defend itself. Jefferson knew that the garden would never be the same again: “Our enemy has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise: from a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one.”¹⁰ With the machine in power, the garden was doomed.

The conflict between the pastoral garden and the industrial machine is a fundamental polarity of American thought that has tormented Americans from the beginning. As the machine has achieved greater dominance, the American garden has gradually disappeared, and with it American hopes for realizing a pastoral utopia of peace and purity.

Unfortunately, pastoral gardens are usually made by the same machines that will eventually destroy them. In order to maintain the human dominance and safety required by pastoral values, it is necessary to assert human technological advantage over nature. Predatory or dangerous animal competitors must be exterminated or expelled; poisonous, ugly, or inedible plants must be rooted out; land must be cultivated and sown to nourishing crops or used as pasture for fattening human sources of meat. Whether the machine is the hoe that Juvenal's Roman is so fond of, the rifle and railroad that cleared the prairies of buffalo, or the bulldozers, chemicals, and irrigation systems of modern farming, the machine is an indispensable part of the pastoral garden, for it alone gives people the power to civilize nature. Gardens are not images of nature, but of the human management of nature.

When anthropologists talk about “the pastoral age” they are not referring to a poetic period, but to the stage of human evolution when plants and animals were domesticated, thus encouraging permanent settlements and changing humanity's nutritional relationship with the environment. That kind of pastoralism freed people from the need to hunt and pick berries, and made it possible to pay attention to such things as theology, politics, philosophy, art, and science. Pastoral poetry expresses a longing for this early stage of civilization when agriculture had given people leisure and sufficiency, but before the development of elaborate social and political structures. What the pastoral tradition calls “nature” is merely simplified civilization. No pastoral poet ever gets nostalgic thinking about Paleolithic hunters or australopithecine apes, nor does he long for unimproved wilderness or for violent aspects of natural processes.

The pastoral symphony is a thoroughly domesticated score orchestrated solely around human themes. Its central images—farm, garden, pasture—show nature at the service of the farmer and husbandman. Pastoral scenes include plants valuable for their nutritional or ornamental qualities and animals that have been tamed for human use, such as sheep, cattle, and dogs. The only wild animals are noncompetitors, like songbirds whose music is assumed to be designed for human entertainment. Dangerous or competitive plants and animals are strictly excluded. The pastoral landscape does not permit thistles or loco weed, wolves, lions, eagles, vultures, mosquitos, or poisonous spiders. And when a snake appears in such a garden, it is a sign that the place has been corrupted already. Pastoral values glorify anthropocentric agriculture and rigidly reject the possibility that wild nature has any independent integrity.

Pastoral literature demonstrates the futility that must result from the full exploration of pastoral motives. The pastoral hero is never an image of human success or greatness, and he never achieves what he has been longing for. As his career begins in fear, self-pity, or self-indulgence, so in the end we are likely to see him “either dead or totally alienated from society, alone and powerless, like the evicted shepherd of Virgil's eclogue.”¹¹ The pastoral epiphany is a recognition that neither human society nor wilderness is a suitable environment for people, and that the garden, trying to mediate between the two, merely separates us from other humans and from nature.

Inherent contradictions in pastoral values lead typically to frustration and despair. The sensitive aristocrat who turns toward Arcadia and away from Rome often discovers that Rome is really within him. Although he can leave behind the fearsome environment of civilization and its cities, yet the psyche of civilization remains to guide his responses to nature. He cannot reject civilization without rejecting his own humanness, so he seeks a compromise in the halfway house of a pastoral Arcadia, somewhere midway between the horrors of wilderness and the horrors of the city. His choice of the garden-farm is this exact midpoint, a place of mediation between nature and civilization, but also the point where the two worlds make contact and where both continually tug at him. His fear of wilderness is as intense as his fear of cities, and the garden merely intensifies the contrast without providing a resolution. In his total alienation from both worlds, his only response is self-pity and despair at ever resolving the contradictions that he has now discovered to be internal as well as environmental. He cannot even achieve tragedy, for he has not risked enough. The end of the pastoral cycle is pathos.

PICARESQUE STRATEGIES

The picaresque world is a natural system in which humans are one of the animal species. The picaro suffers from no conflict between society and nature simply because he sees society as one of the many forms of natural order. He objects to the society into which he is born no more than wolves or ants or whales object to theirs, and like these animals, he tries merely to adapt himself to his circumstances in the interest of his own survival. He does not altruistically strive for the welfare of all humanity, but merely lives his life as well as he can with little regard for distant idealisms. He is so completely absorbed as a participant in life that it never occurs to him to be a critic of it, or to escape into fantasies.

Picaresque nature is not a garden, but a wilderness. Its most obvious features are multiplicity and diversity, for within the picaresque world everything is tied to everything else according to complex interdependencies that defy simplification. Pain and pleasure are equally real, as are birth and death, peace and war, hunger and a full belly, love and hate. To attend to only one side of these polarities while rejecting the other would be to distort the truth, which the picaro knows he must not do if he hopes to endure. Instead, he takes each as it comes (often they come mixed) and deals with it according to its demands, enjoying the pleasant and enduring the painful as best he can. His world is an ecosystem and he is but one small organism within it. How he fits into the whole or what its purpose may be are beyond him, but he doesn't worry much about such questions.

The picaro's birth is generally obscure, often illegitimate, suggesting both his lack of social status and the absence of any sense of continuity with the past. The chaotic social environment in which he grows up has no niche prepared for him, and he soon discovers that he must create whatever success he can from the rawest of materials at hand. Early in life he goes on his own. His experiences quickly awaken him to the realization that no one will help him, that there is no obvious plan or order in the world, and that his survival or failure will depend upon his own inventiveness.

Lazarillo de Tormes, the Spanish novel already mentioned, is the prototype for later picaresque novels. Its hero, Lazarillo, is tricked and beaten by his first master and promptly achieves the realization that defines the picaresque perspective: “It is full time for me to open mine eyes, yea, and to provide and seek mine own advantage, considering that I am alone without any help.”¹² Eyes wide open upon the world around him, looking to avoid danger and to exploit advantages, the picaro lives life as an infinite game played with the world, the only prizes for which are more life and an occasional hearty laugh. Lazarillo and the picaresque nonheroes modeled upon him live in risky play with their surrounding social order.

The picaresque hero perceives that the world is particularly dangerous to those who are poor, weak, or defenseless. The high moral and cultural values mouthed by powerful people are merely platitudes that do not in fact govern their actions and so they cannot be taken seriously. Those who live within the established social order are well fed, pious, educated in abstractions but often stupid in practical matters, and vindictive to all who do not conform to their ideals. The picaro is an outsider to this system, practical, clever, amoral, self-sufficient, and dedicated to making do by the best means available. Staying alive is his most important purpose, and having a good time comes second. He does not rebel against his society, nor does he try to reform it or escape from it. Rather, he looks for weaknesses and loopholes in the system that he can use to his own advantage.

The picaro notes the chaotic complexity of society as keenly as his pastoral counterpart, but he reasons that he must meet it by becoming more complex himself, not by seeking simplicity. He learns early in his career that the elaborate mechanisms of social order do not serve his basic human needs, but that does not lead him to hate society. It simply means that he will have to assume full responsibility for his own welfare and that he can expect no help from others. The picaro is alone, not in the lofty and self-indulgent way of the pastoral hero, but in the modest manner of one who simply assumes that no one really cares about him. The problems around him seem too great to be solved or even understood, but since they were not of his making he need not feel guilty. He does need to live in the world that is defined by these problems, however, so he needs intelligence and wit.

William Faulkner's novel The Reivers is marginally a picaresque novel. A statement made by the narrator of that story could serve as a definition of picaresque intelligence: “I rate mules second only to rats in intelligence, the mule followed in order by cats, dogs, and horses last—assuming of course that you accept my definition of intelligence: which is the ability to cope with environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty.”¹³ The intelligence of mules, rats, and picaresque heroes is directed not toward puzzling out the rational elegance of pastoral utopias, but toward coping with the given circumstances of daily life. There is little room for nostalgia, fantasy, or abstract intellectual speculation in the mind of the picaro, for he is occupied with present actions and events, and with the maintenance of his own precarious liberty.

The picaro (or occasionally, picara) is thus an opportunist rather than an escapist, a person of wit rather than of contemplation, a realist rather than an idealist. His commitment to endure must often be served by breaking or ignoring the laws and rules of his society. He is often an outlaw and vulgar in the eyes of society's aristocrats.

DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES

The world in which the picaro must make his way is often at war. Two picaresque war novels from different historical periods will illustrate the consistency of the picaresque genre: Simplicius Simplicissimus by the seventeenth-century German writer Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, and Catch-22 by the twentieth-century American novelist Joseph Heller. Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus and Heller's Catch-22 represent typical picaresque responses to the questions that war always raises: How can one live in a time of total social disruption, and what is one to do about the omnipresent threat of injury and death? The picaresque answers are always the same: Adapt to circumstances and take evasive action.

What the black plague was to Boccaccio, the Thirty Years' War was to Grimmelshausen. All Europe suffered near total collapse of civilized amenities, ostensibly over the resolution of religious differences between Protestants and Catholics. Grimmelshausen's picaresque novel begins with scenes of carnage and brutality that define the world in which young Simplicius must make his way. “This introductory entertainment almost spoiled my desire to see the world,” remarks Simplicius after witnessing the brutal destruction of his village by a cavalry troop: “If this is the way things are, the wilderness is far more attractive.”¹⁴ Although he tries to hide in the forest, events always force him back into human company, where he begins to learn the tricks of survival.

Like most picaresque novels, Simplicissimus represents a young man's initiation and education. Simplicius's first teacher is a minister whose message is that “the foolish world wants to be fooled. Use what intelligence they have left you … for your own advantage” (80). Intelligence in service of deception is the picaro's basic strategy for survival. But the picaro deceives only so that he may save himself, never intentionally to injure others. Simplicius adopts whatever disguises seem appropriate in order to avoid trouble. His protective coloring makes him into a court jester, a minister, a soldier, a doctor, or an animal as his situation warrants. Each role saves him from some danger, and each teaches him something new by providing a fresh perspective upon events. Although he deceives others, he never gives in to the temptation to take his own disguises seriously.

The picaro does not treat his fantasies as if they were realities, as pastoral heroes tend to do, but regards each new role as one possibility out of the many available to him, useful for solving a particular problem and perhaps interesting for the new insight it may offer, but in no way a limitation to be accepted. Picaresque life is not lived in search of the One True Way, but is rather an endless series of roles to be played in response to ever-changing circumstances.

Simplicius often compares himself to animals and even adopts animal disguises. He becomes a goose to avoid punishment, and later enjoys for some time the role of calf. As a talking animal he lectures his masters on the virtues of animals, praising them for their moderation, responsiveness to environment, and peacefulness compared to humans. Animals are congenial images to the picaro, for like him they live in the present and are not subject to self-deceptive illusions. Superior human mentality merely permits the picaro to become a better animal, not to transcend his animality.

The metaphysics of the picaresque world is relativistic and fluid. Simplicius early perceives that “nothing in the world is more constant than inconstancy” (84). Uncertainty and continuous change are not, however, oppressive to the picaro, for he does not expect or admire permanence. Change means that the world consists of endlessly varied opportunities for new roles to be played and new advantages to be gained. Change may of course work to the picaro's disadvantage, as when Simplicius is transformed by smallpox from a handsome courtier admired by all the ladies to a pock-marked pariah, “so ugly that dogs would pee on me” (153). Neither condition is assumed to be definitive of his destiny or identity; each is merely one more condition that must be explored for its potential. Simplicius simply accepts his ugliness and learns to make his way by begging and fraud rather than by the seduction of wealthy ladies. Picaresque behavior is governed by an internalized acceptance of universal flux as the basic nature of the world. The picaro's philosophy is thus “to go with the times and make use of the inevitable” (215).

War is so often the setting for picaresque novels because its conditions intensify the problems to which the picaro must always adapt himself: rapid change, social disorder, irrationality, and constant threat of injury or death. War merely exaggerates normal social conditions. It matters little whether it is the Thirty Years' War or World War II, for in either case the personal problems of the picaro are the same. Joseph Heller's modern picaro, Yossarian, faces the same challenge as his counterpart Simplicius three centuries earlier: “It was all a sensible young gentleman like himself could do to maintain his perspective amid so much madness. And it was urgent that he did, for he knew his life was in danger.”¹⁵

Yossarian struggles for survival in a world of aerial bombing rather than cavalry charges, but this merely means that his strategy must be more complex and quicker than that of Simplicius. Its principles are the same. Yossarian rejects the heroics expected of him in his role as a bombardier, preferring to survive as a coward: “He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive” (30). He becomes a consummate master of the art of “evasive action,” the erratic maneuvering of an airplane to avoid antiaircraft fire. Evasive action becomes a way of life for Yossarian whether on a bombing mission or on the ground, for threats are everywhere: “The enemy … is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on” (24). The American generals who plan bombing missions are as great a threat to his welfare as the German gunners who try to shoot him down. Questions of right and wrong, good and evil, friends and enemies dissolve into irrelevancy before the demanding task of survival in a world at war.

Evasive action means that Yossarian chooses to avoid danger rather than to destroy its source. In the picaresque manner, he assumes the state of his world to be a given condition that is beyond his power to improve. He accepts the irrational rules of war even when they change with every mission, and he tries to survive within them. He lives from minute to minute, limiting his vision of the world to the cockpit or whorehouse or briefing room, each with its own threat to his welfare and challenge to his ingenuity. Whatever the threat, he must adapt himself to its conditions with no hope of achieving peace and no idealistic delusions about his own capacity to triumph over adversity.

Ironically, Yossarian's evasions and fears are taken to be signs of his failure to adapt to the traditions of his culture. “You've been unable to adjust to the idea of war,” his psychiatrist tells him. Yossarian agrees, then listens to a further exposition of the kind of adaptation that his society expects of him:

“You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you're at war and might get your head blown off any second.”

“I more than resent it, sir. I'm absolutely incensed.”

“You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.”

“Consciously, sir, consciously,” Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. “I hate them consciously.”

“You're antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated, or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Slums depress you. Greed depresses you. Crime depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a manic-depressive!”

“Yes, sir. Perhaps I am.”

“Don't try to deny it.”

“I'm not denying it, sir,” said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. “I agree with all you've said.”

“Then you admit you're crazy, do you?”

“Crazy?” Yossarian was shocked. “What are you talking about? Why am I crazy? You're the one who's crazy!”

(312)

Picaresque sanity is recognition of the world's madness, not approval or emulation of it. The picaro cannot join forces with the agents of disaster and misery, for he does not share their ideologies, but neither does he seek to destroy them. Rather than hating the source of evil, he has compassion for its victims, among whom he numbers himself. He is thus out of step with the dominant power structure, in relation to which his actions seem insane. The picaro is a rogue partly because he refuses to endorse the ideologies of his time or their destructive consequences.

Yossarian is a responsible man, but not to the abstract values to which his corrupt society professes allegiance. Dignity, honor, morality, and patriotism are to the picaro the empty words behind which people hide their greed, vice, and treachery. Yossarian in the end runs away from the war and its pretenses of heroic nobility, choosing instead to save his own life and to help another victim of violence, the kid sister of a Roman whore. When he is condemned as an escapist for evading his patriotic duties, Yossarian insists: “I'm not running away from my responsibilities, I'm running to them. There's nothing negative about running away to save my life. You know who the escapists are, don't you?” (461). The escapists, of course, are the people who lie to themselves about human perfectibility, the righteousness of warfare, the importance of their own egos, and the sanctity of conventional morality.

The picaresque evasion of pain is radically different from the pastoral retreat in search of peace. Picaresque peace is merely a temporary avoidance of danger, never the permanent security sought in pastoral literature. As Yossarian prepares to desert from the army at the end of Catch-22, his friends caution him that “no one will ever be on your side, and you'll always live in danger of betrayal.” “I live that way now,” replies Yossarian (463). His future will be as dangerous as his past, but more on his own terms and with a better likelihood of survival than can be found within the war. Yossarian's life henceforth will be a calculated risk. When last seen, he is still running to avoid death.

Such inconclusive conclusions are typical of picaresque novels. The world's problems are never solved, no enemies are defeated, no new truth is realized, no peace is attained. In the course of the picaro's career he has gained only greater competence at survival, acceptance of responsibility for his own life, and a clearer understanding of the many threats surrounding him.

PICARESQUE ARTISTRY

Picaresque action is not always defensive, but sometimes becomes highly creative. The wit necessary to save the picaro's life in time of war is applicable to the creation of beauty in times of relative peace. As a master manipulator and creator of illusions, the picaro has much in common with the artist, a conjunction that is explored by the twentieth-century German novelist Thomas Mann in his picaresque novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.

As a young man, Felix Krull ponders the implications of various available perspectives upon the world. Great heroes and empire builders, he reasons, must see the world as a small place, like a chessboard upon which they expect to win their identity by managing the various pieces. The world of saints and hermits must also be a small and insignificant place from which it is best to withdraw in the hope of discovering a better one through mental fantasy or religious transcendence. Krull prefers to see the world as “a great and infinitely enticing phenomenon, offering priceless satisfactions and worthy in the highest degree of all my efforts and solicitude.”¹⁶ The vastness and complexity of the world is for Krull an endless source of opportunity for exploring his own potentials and talents. His motive is neither mastery of the world nor escape from its conditions, but the full utilization of his own talents to create a life rivaling the world itself in variety and excellence.

“He who really loves the world shapes himself to please it” is Krull's motto (65), and this defines his strategy as a member of society and as an artist. Adaptation to the given conditions of reality becomes more than the defensive technique of wartime picaros, for Krull regards himself as material to be shaped according to the potential richness and beauty of his circumstances. It is not the world that must be made to suit human pleasures, but humans to suit the world's. This does not just mean meeting the expectations of others, for Krull's conception of the world is not bounded by his contemporary society but includes the total context of natural and human history. The world he seeks to please includes both humanity and nature.

In order to please this larger world, it is often necessary to disappoint the expectations of contemporary society. Krull bends and breaks the conventions of his social context when they prevent him from exploiting his potential for creative experimentation. His idea of aristocracy, for instance, is based upon the observation that nature provides a graded hierarchy of beings according to innate gifts of talent and beauty. He early perceives that nature has endowed him with both: “I could not conceal from myself that I was made of superior stuff” (11). Yet his modest social position does not conform to his natural gifts, for society grades its members according to the artificial criteria of wealth and family, both of which are accidental. In order to bring his social position into agreement with his innate superiority, therefore, he must acquire money and rank by means of theft and deception.

There is no rancor or greed involved in these acts, and Krull takes pains to be sure that no one is hurt by them. His technique is to make himself so pleasing and attractive to others that they are moved to give him favors and gifts; while he profits, others feel no loss but give to him willingly. His fortune is acquired from a wealthy woman, slightly perverse, who gets a sexual thrill from being robbed of her jewels by a handsome young man like Krull, and his aristocratic rank is bestowed upon him by a profligate marquis whose identity Krull takes over in order to leave the young nobleman free to pursue anonymously his love affair with an actress. In spite of his unfortunately obscure birth, Krull thus earns the social credentials of superiority that correspond to his innate excellence.

When Krull finds social standards to be false, he corrects them—not for everyone, for that would produce equal falsity—but for himself. Krull is consistent with the picaresque code in his acceptance of the given social order, and in his belief that rank and order are natural hierarchical systems, not false social conventions. He rejects, for instance, the notion that nudity is democratic in that it abolishes the social ranks established by clothing styles. On the contrary, he argues, “Nakedness can only be called just in so far as it proclaims the naturally unjust constitution of the human race, unjust in that it is aristocratic” (90). Clothing displays false social status; its absence abolishes only the falsity and proclaims the natural rank order based upon beauty and agility of body.

The picaro is never a rebel against society, but merely a manipulator of its conditions for his own welfare in accordance with the principles of nature. When asked if he is a socialist, Krull answers, “No, indeed! … I find society enchanting just as it is and am on fire to earn its good opinion” (90). Of course he earns society's admiration by deception and illusion, thus earning the title “rogue,” but his deceptions resemble those of art more than those of crime. He is an actor portraying the roles appropriate to his immediate context: “I seemed not only able to put on whatever social rank or personal characteristics I chose, but could actually adapt myself to any given period or century” (22). His social roles as elevator boy, waiter, pimp, and nobleman are played in order to fulfill the potential inherent in each role, not only to serve Krull's personal needs. He is a professional illusionist glorying in his adaptive skill.

Yet for all his admiration of society, his life remains by choice alone and isolated. Isolation is a necessary condition of picaresque action that emphasizes the dependence of the picaro upon his own devices. And it is not a cause for sorrow, as it is for the pastoral hero, but rather an opportunity. The picaro takes pride in his independence, even though it requires some sacrifice of personal intimacy. Krull accepts the fact that “close associations, friendship, and companionship were not to be my lot, but that I should instead be inescapably compelled to follow my strange path alone, dependent entirely upon myself, rigorously self-sufficient” (106). Although he remains on a congenial footing with those around him and even proves to be a master lover with women, Krull never permits intimacy to progress to the point of a dependency that might restrict his freedom to respond to new threats or opportunities.

Picaresque life is animal existence augmented by the imaginative and adaptive powers of the human mind. Unlike the pastoral mode, in which the mind is used to create alternatives to a dangerous present reality, the picaresque mode expresses acceptance of the present and adaptation to its conditions without concern for abstract ideologies or sentimental moralities. The comparison of the hero to animals, an almost universal feature of picaresque fiction, emphasizes the picaro's acceptance of biological limitations that define the nature of life and suggest the proper purposes that should govern the human use of intellect. Faulkner's rats and mules, Grimmelshausen's calf and goose, and the many other animals that recur in picaresque literary art are most often used as models of appropriate action rather than as images of debased life that threaten some conventional standard of human dignity.

The final chapters of Mann's Felix Krull are devoted to the hero's exploration of his own relationship to animal and biological existence as he is conducted through the Lisbon Museum of Natural History by its director. The first animal Krull sees inside the museum is a magnificent white stag mounted against a forest background. He enjoys the likeness between himself and the stag, not only because both are well-formed and beautiful, but also because of their common attitude toward their environments. Stag and Krull are “dignified and alert … calm yet wary,” and ready to “disappear at a bound into the darkness” at the slightest sign of danger (298). The stag is a handsome picaro, adept at evasive action like his human counterpart Felix Krull.

The record of evolution displayed in the museum further shows Krull his kinship with the animals as well as his separation from them. He sees “the contrast between my own fineness and elegance and the primitive crudity of many of the uncanny-looking fossils, the primitive crustaceans, cephalopods, brachiopods, tremendously ancient sponges and entrail-less lily-stars. … These first beginnings, however absurd and lacking in dignity and usefulness, were preliminary moves in the direction of me—that is, of Man” (301). Higher evolutionary forms, mammals and primates, further confirm Krull's joy at his newfound unity with all animal life: “In the end they all prefigured me, even though disguised as in some sorry jest” (304). When his tour brings him to the displays of early humans, his pleasure in evolutionary continuity is further confirmed, for in primitive people he sees “what had been striving toward me from the grey reaches of antiquity” (304). He is confirmed in the perception that he had earlier derived from his conversations with the museum director: “Men are descended from animals in just about the same way that the organic is descended from the inorganic. Something was added” (271). Consciousness was added, the gift that augments the process of evolution but does not separate humanity from that process.

Consciousness permits people to enjoy their animal powers and beauties more than the other animals can. As Krull sees it, people do by will only what other animals do by instinct, and so people become responsible for what they are. Unattractive animals cannot be blamed for their ugliness, but among people it is “culpable to be ugly.” Krull finds ugliness “a kind of carelessness” that offends him and that contrasts sharply with his own artistic attitude toward himself: “Out of innate consideration for the world that was awaiting me, I took care while I was being formed that I should not offend its eyes. … I'd call it a kind of self-discipline” (317). Krull has here restated the law of creative picaresque behavior with which his career began: “He who really loves the world shapes himself to please it.”

Consciousness, intelligence, language, imagination—these are to the picaro the means for artistic adaptation to his environment. He uses his gifts for self-defense, but also for playing with others and with his surroundings. Dominance over his environment is not a goal, nor does he use imaginative powers for the creation of idealistic fantasies. Accepting the accidents of natural and social history that have produced him and the environment that defines his possibilities, the picaro applies his intelligence toward making the best of whatever the world may offer.

ROGUES AND SAINTS

The roots of pastoral and picaresque go deeply into Western cultural traditions, the collective psyche, and perhaps into human evolutionary origins. It is not easy to tell whether the two modes reflect differences in human temperament and personality or are expressions of beliefs that people hold. The pastoral mode looks something like an ideology, for pastoral writers often claim to know how people should live and expect them to mend their ways; they often assume life to be perfectible, however great their despair at discovering that people often reject their chances for perfection. The picaresque, on the other hand, is more descriptive than prescriptive. Picaresque stories are not much help in the search for what ought to be because they are concerned only with what is. They offer a mirror of behavior, not a model for imitation.

The pastoral hero is born an aristocrat, socially superior to others and highly sophisticated. His anthropocentric world exists for the purpose of perfecting human welfare and elevating the human spirit. Confident that he is at the center of creation, he yet sees the failure of his fellow humans to achieve their potential and he is oppressed by this discovery. He regretfully turns away from his society and its unnecessary miseries, accepts his isolation as a painful consequence, and looks for renewal from an agricultural version of nature. Nature, he hopes, will renew human nobility through her pastoral hero.

The picaro begins life with no credentials of dignity or status. Neither his social status nor his metaphysics supports a claim to superiority over anything. His main concern is with survival. He quickly learns that survival is a tricky process requiring that he attend closely to his immediate environment for both threats and opportunities. Since the world has no plans for him, he is free to become whatever seems appropriate or interesting. He lives as an intelligent animal, interested in the present, and ready to play when the opportunity arises.

Morality is a cornerstone of pastoral life. People are assumed to be naturally good, and if they nevertheless seem corrupt, it must be because the institutions of civilization have made them so. The experience of nature is seen as therapeutic, restoring people to the natural goodness with which they began. Pastoral literature loves noble savages, and urges people to regain the purity that has been sacrificed to civilization.

The picaresque vision usually discovers early that exalted moral postures can quickly lead to someone's death or undoing. Morality is often dangerous to the picaro, either because it limits his flexibility, or because he runs the risk of suffering from the rigidities of others. The picaro is skeptical of moral abstractions, and he rarely thinks about good or evil. If survival is a moral principle, he is enthusiastically in favor of it.

Pastoral emotions tend toward the melodramatic. Self-pity is a common beginning for a pastoral narrative. The hero is despondent because the world has not treated him as well as he deserves. He finds solace in nostalgic fantasies about the good old days of his own youth or of humanity's in the Garden of Eden. His belief that life has been beautiful inspires him with hope that it can be good again if only he can restore the proper conditions. The pastoral quest is a sentimental journey away from present pain in search of past peace. It is never a successful quest. The emotional cycle of pastoral experience normally moves from nostalgia to hope, to disillusionment, to final despair.

Compassion for suffering may be the most serious emotion experienced by picaresque heroes. The picaro makes little distinction between his own misfortune and that of others, treating both with solicitude and resignation. He sees pain as the consequence of his own errors rather than evidence of the world's malice, so he is more likely to be self-mocking than self-pitying. He more often laughs at the world's absurdities than cries over its inequities. As he has no hope, he need never suffer despair. His career does not proceed in a cycle, but is merely an ongoing account of his increasingly adept durability as he responds to a series of surprises. Picaresque narratives do not reach neat conclusions and their heroes never achieve either fulfillment or discovery, for the picaresque mode presents life as a continuous process, perhaps meaningless but compellingly interesting.

Pastoral life is polarized, presenting mutually exclusive alternatives between which a choice must be made. The good must be achieved, the evil rooted out; peace is excellent, war is hell; elegant simplicity is preferable to fearful complexity; purity is our goal, pollution our punishment; society is corrupt but nature is sinless. Pastoral motivation is always in the direction of positive goals that are believed to be attainable if only their opposites can be avoided. The pastoral world is a battleground between God and Satan, and the pastoral hero is enlisted among the angels. He is, to be sure, a rear-echelon angel not involved in the battle itself, but he prays fervently for God's side to win.

The picaro does not positively search for peace but merely hopes to avoid war. He is rarely able to distinguish between good and evil except in their most basic forms, pleasure and pain—and even these are often mixed. His world is systemic rather than polar. Many gods, many Satans, and many beings of indeterminate moral status contend before his eyes, all holding both threats and promises. He does not expect the world to meet his conditions, but he will do all he can to meet its. His constant motivation is to blend into the system where he finds himself.

Images of environment and metaphors of behavior reflect the separate value systems of the pastoral and the picaresque. Garden and farm are the dominant figures in the pastoral mode, while wilderness and the city are the basic images of the picaresque. These images have carried far beyond their literary origins and have become influential habits of the modern mind.

Botany dominates the pastoral scene. Plants symbolize the kind of life most desired by pastoral seekers: rooted, placid, beautiful. The only animals admitted to pastoral landscapes are those domestic creatures whose behavior is similarly calm; nervous and aggressive animals are fenced out. The pastoral psyche yearns for the peace of vegetative life. The typical stages of pastoral narrative begin with the desire to retreat to a simpler life, followed by recognition of helplessness before the world's cruelty, and ending in sad resignation or despair. The attempt to achieve the values of the garden—nourishment, beauty, peacefulness, stability—leads inevitably to disappointment in a perverse and competitive world.

The picaresque wilderness, of course, leads to no great goals either, but since the picaro has no expectations he can hardly be disappointed about that. Picaresque literature does not express the kind of hopelessness implied by tragedy or existential despair, for these traditions seem to hold the world responsible for being reasonable and just to humans and regard its failures as somehow an affront to humanity. The picaro is hopeless only in the sense that he sees hope to be an irrelevant concept, an unjustifiable expectation of the future that offers no help in dealing with present problems. The picaro's only “hope” is that he may succeed at the day-to-day business of keeping himself alive; if a wolf can be said to hope for a meal each day and the avoidance of trappers who want his pelt, then the picaro can be said to hope. In the picaresque tradition, people are shown living as other animals live, confronting the present defensively and opportunistically, without expectations or illusions, proud of strength but accurately aware of limitations, mistrustful but not cynical or malicious, and above all adaptive to the immediate environment.

Perhaps the major difference between pastoral and picaresque lies in the application each makes of human intelligence. The pastoral intellect uses the rational capacity of the mind to criticize the inadequacies of present experience and its imaginative talents to create alternatives to the present. It is characterized by abstract ideas—truth, justice, goodness, love—intended to lead toward a fulfillment of human potential at some future time. The picaresque intellect instead concentrates upon the study of immediate reality, and its imagination upon the creation of strategies for survival. Picaresque liberty is not escape from misfortune, but confidence in one's ability to persist in spite of it.

Modern cities, like ancient Rome, are messy, expensive, chaotic, and dangerous. Those who flee them in search of rural peace and quiet are following a pastoral way that Western culture has endorsed since Virgil. The pastoral tradition also makes it plain that this quest is likely to fail, for the seeker of peace and simplicity is likely to carry inner conflict and anger, and these will govern his or her life more than the rural environment will. Escape into fantasies is not a workable solution to urban and existential ills.

What the picaresque tradition lacks in dignity and respectability, it makes up for in clear-eyed practicality. In the picaresque eye, cities and wild places are all full of both danger and opportunity, and wherever one finds oneself is the place where life must be lived as well as possible. Picaresque life is infinite play, with no hope of winning much, but endless enthusiasm for keeping the play alive.

Notes

1. Works of Virgil, trans. J. W. MacKail (New York: Random House, 1950), 267.

2. Virgil, 266.

3. Satires of Juvenal, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 42.

4. Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Richard Aldington (New York: Dell, 1962), 32, 35.

5. Boccaccio, 173.

6. Boccaccio, 174.

7. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 44.

8. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 141.

9. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 19, quoted in Marx, 124.

10. Jefferson to William Short, November 28, 1814, quoted in Marx, 144.

11. Marx, 364.

12. The Pleasaunte Historie of Lazarillo de Tormes, trans. David Rowland (London, 1586), ed. J.E.V. Crofts (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1924), 11.

13. William Faulkner, The Reivers (New York: Random House, 1962), 121.

14. Johann von Grimmelshausen, Simplicius Simplicissimus, trans. George Schulz-Behrend (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 27; further references are cited parenthetically in the text.

15. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Dell, 1955), 21; further references in text.

16. Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, trans. Denver Lindley (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1955), 13; further references in text.