Alexander Blackburn - The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel, 1554-1954

Since the birth of the modern novel more than four hundred years ago, the myth of the picaro has been a continuous part of fiction, though often in modified form and frequently as an implied polarity to the literature of unity and love. The major literary genre of modern centuries thus not only has a recognizable birth but also has always contained within itself both the distant, undifferentiated human past and a creative present that continues to tell a story of social disorder and psychic disintegration.

The origin of most literary forms remains obscured in antiquity. We conjecture possibilities from magnificent survivors. What epics came before Gilgamesh and The Iliad, what tragedies before Job and Prometheus, are known to us as but shadows, but even were they solidly known, that knowledge would not lead to an understanding of the modern novel. Homer was not first to sing tales, nor Aeschylus to write plays, nor the author or authors of Genesis to compose Creation poems. Mans power of imagination is so great that we may presume the existence of many a mute, inglorious Milton before Babylon. Yet even if our knowledge were to expand to make known the entire course of culture, there will still be a mystery, for the story of literature has its ubi sunt.

The first novelists created their readers, and we are still among them. Although, as a literary form, the novel is notoriously mixed with folk tales and history, epic and romance, drama, lyric, sermons, letters, biographies, and so forth, although there is no single Platonic form by which novelistic fiction may be measured, although, in short, no one is absolutely sure what a novel is beyond its being a prose narrative of length and of realistic import, there is nonetheless a historical moment when the novelcall it a modern novel, a conscious art of narrationdifferentiates itself from all the literature preceding it and gives similar shape thereafter to literary creations.

That moment, beyond any doubt, occurred in Spain in the first half of the sixteenth century. For a long time, of course, there have been American and European scholars who could not or would not peek over the Pyrenees. Consequently, literary nationalism has made some heavy weather concerning the rise of the novel. A prevalent belief, for example, is that the first real novels are English of the eighteenth century. According to this belief, Spanish novels are subgeneric primitives like Lazarillo de Tormes or embarrassing monuments like Don Quixote. However generously their art or tradition are acclaimed, Spanish novels have usually received, outside Spain, less than their due recognition as the first modern novels. Of course, the heyday of printing technology and, more important, of the European bourgeoisie, both significant for the rise of the novel, occurred in the eighteenth century. But it does not follow that the novel is exclusively an art form devoted to the middle class and rooted in capitalist economics. Nor does it follow that the great tradition of the English novel is then the greatest, greater than the Spanish, the French, the German, certainly greater than the American, and only overshadowed, apparently by an act of God, by the Russian. To be sure, the English novelists from Defoe to Dickens to Conrad and Lawrence, including the Irishman Joyce and the American James, form a tradition of the great, but the critical attempt to equate the English novel with the novel suffers from a lack of focus. To place the novels authentic origin in Spain in the sixteenth century does, I hope, extend our awareness of a subtle literary art.

Surveying the origin of novelistic fiction, we begin to see nuclear themes that for their elucidation require the resources of myth criticism. Yet, perhaps fortunately, there is no generally agreed-upon definition to apply to all instances of myth in art and literature. As Francis Fergusson writes, One of the most striking properties of myths is that they generate new forms... anthropologists and ethnologists have recorded different sets of myths from other cultures, some of them possessed of qualities without Greek parallel. Myth, then, may mean a story from any number of cultures includingto anticipate my argumentthe culture of the recent West.