The picaresque novel is a narrative genre born in Spain in the mid-sixteenth century that flourished in the seventeenth, during the Golden Age (see Spanish literature). Its hero is the pícaro: a young man of humble birth, often the child of disgraced parents, who lives by his wits, moving from one master to another, cheating and being cheated.
Features
- First-person narration: the pícaro, now an adult, tells his own life as an autobiography, often to justify his present situation.
- Episodic structure: the novel is a chain of adventures, each tied to a different master or place, allowing a journey through the whole of society.
- Social satire: through the pícaro's eyes we see the hypocrisy of the clergy, the vanity of impoverished nobles, corruption and the hunger of a Spain that ruled an empire yet was full of beggars and vagrants.
- Realism: after chivalric and pastoral romances full of idealised heroes, the picaresque shows everyday life, hunger, money and the body.
- Pessimism: the pícaro does not really improve, he only learns to survive.
The works
The model of the genre is Lazarillo de Tormes, published anonymously in 1554. The term pícaro, however, spread with Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599-1604), a huge publishing success in which adventures alternate with long moral digressions. Then came La pícara Justina (1605), with a female protagonist, attributed to Francisco López de Úbeda, and Francisco de Quevedo's Life of the Buscón (1626), the fiercest and most linguistically brilliant. Cervantes also approached the genre in some of his Exemplary Novels, such as Rinconete and Cortadillo, and with the character of Ginés de Pasamonte in Don Quixote.
Legacy
The picaresque deeply influenced the European novel: Lesage's Gil Blas in France, Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus in Germany, Defoe's Moll Flanders and the novels of Fielding and Smollett in England. Echoes of the pícaro appear in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and, in Spain, Cela's Family of Pascual Duarte.