The Picaresque Novel and Other Spanish Literary Genres

Posted on Sep 5, 2024 in Language

The Picaresque Novel

The main works of the picaresque subgenre are: Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzman de Alfarache by Mateo Aleman, and The Life of the Buscon by Francisco Quevedo. All of them are defined by the following characteristics:

  • Narrate the misadventures of a low-status character, the rogue, who lives to serve several masters.
  • The story is presented as a fictional autobiography and retrospective of the protagonist. The reader witnesses the rogue’s psychological development, which is gradually losing its innocence.
  • The narrator writes about his past when he is a rogue adult. In the course of his life alternating luck and misfortune. He is always encouraged by the desire of social ascension. Each of the chapters usually presents the adventures with a different master.
  • Convergence is a story in which the various events and episodes are designed and subject to a final project: to explain the dishonor the character lives at the end of the story.
  • The picaresque works are realistic and offer a wide and varied social portrait.

Lazarillo de Tormes

Lazarillo de Tormes, the first of the picaresque novels and giving rise to the subgenre. Authorship: The Lazarillo is an anonymous novel. Why hide the author’s name? This has led to various interpretations:

  • Due to the critical load of the novel, it has been attributed to a writer of Erasmian ideology or a converted Jew.
  • Some scholars have spoken of a senior priest, who silenced his identity as the work is clearly anti-clerical.
  • The autobiographical nature of the novel encourages anonymity. Lazarillo is the story of a rogue told by himself, and the events described do not correspond to an educated author. This gives credibility to the book, since nobody would look good if a cultured author told the story of a character as less than exemplary.

Structure and Argument

The Lazarillo is designed as a letter that Lazarus sends to someone unknown to justify why he supports such a dishonorable state. The work consists of a prologue and seven treatises, each focusing on a master that takes us from the birth of the protagonist to this narrative. In the course of each chapter, the adversity, bullying and deceit that he suffers is narrated, and how this is gradually changing his initial naive character. It draws an educational process in reverse to take you to shame: at the end of the work, he is a preacher and must cynically consent to the adultery of his wife in exchange for survival. Of the seven treatises of the work, the first three are more developed after the completion of the personality of Lazarus; the other chapters are more schematic.

Theme and Intention

The book is built around the following themes and motifs:

  • Honor: Already in the prologue it is made clear that this is the central motif of the work. At that time, honor meant honoring the opinion others have of yourself and only those born with it and know how to maintain it have it. Lázaro cannot aspire to such honor. The work raises strong criticism of the social structure.
  • Criticism of the clergy and the nobility: Of Lazarus’ nine masters, five belong to the ecclesiastical world and none of them behave in an exemplary manner.
  • One of the recurring motifs is hunger and lack of food.

Extracts of each master teach us nothing edifying, which will prevent social improvement.

Style

The book is an autobiography and belongs to the epistolary genre. A striking feature is the use of humor in the service of the author’s critical interest. In contrast to the idealist narrative of his century, with its artificial and affected style, Lazarillo is also famous for its natural language and its simplicity.

Significance

The Lazarillo inaugurates the modern novel for several reasons:

  1. For having a protagonist of humble origin and an antiheroic character.
  2. For the psychological treatment of the protagonist. Lázaro develops as he experiences events that make him change.
  3. For his realistic style, he tells of contemporary events, takes place in a known place, with believable characters who use language appropriate to their social rank.

Other Narrative Genres

Ideal Narrative

The ideal narrative shows an idealized world, populated with fantastic characters and implausible, archetypal arguments.

1. The Chivalric Romance

The chivalric genre originated in medieval times. During the sixteenth century, this genre reached a great development due to the spread of the printing press. Some notable works include:

  • Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell, written in Catalan and translated into Castilian in 1511. According to Cervantes, it is the best book in the world for its style; he praises the lack of fantastic episodes.
  • Amadis of Gaul by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, published in 1508. It is characterized by both fantastic elements and its teaching, always oriented towards the defense of chivalric virtues: honor, courage, faithfulness, religiosity. It reached great popularity.

2. The Pastoral Novel

The Renaissance pastoral novel is of Italian origin, and started in 1504 with L’Arcadia by Jacopo Sannazaro. These are works that tell the romantic misadventures of idealized shepherds living in an idyllic space. There is a presence of lyric verse fragments, closely related to the Eclogues of Garcilaso de la Vega. In Castilian, the first novelist of the genre is Jorge Montemayor. His work entitled Diana, presents a utopian world populated by shepherds who relate their experiences and their sentimental disappointment in love. Gaspar Gil Polo published Diana Enamorada, a continuation of Montemayor’s work. In 1585, Cervantes published the first part of his pastoral novel, La Galatea. Lope de Vega published The Arcadia.

3. The Byzantine Novel

Byzantine novels are stories of love, travel and adventures in which a pair of lovers suffer the misfortune of separation, living strange and complicated adventures that always end happily with a reunion of the lovers. The Story of the Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe by Achilles Tatius, translated into Spanish by Alonso Núñez de Reinoso, is the first novel of this genre in Spanish. Cervantes’ posthumous work, Persiles and Sigismunda, also belongs to this genre.

4. The Moorish Novel

These are narratives that arise as a matter of the evolution of the frontier ballads of Granada in the 15th century. The Moorish novel raises love stories featuring Muslims and Christians. Habitually, it presents an idealized image of Muslims and idyllic relations between the two cultures, which is a deformation of reality. The first of these works is The History of the Abencerraje and the Beautiful Jarifa, by an unknown author. It is really a sentimental novel, in which the lovers are two young Muslims from a noble Granada family. The idealization of the characters is evident. It is developed in a sublimated scenario. The core values of the work are also simplicity and naturalness. Another Moorish novel of note is The History of Ozmín and Daraja, interspersed in the picaresque novel Guzman de Alfarache by Mateo Aleman.

Cervantes

Cervantes lived in the same time as William Shakespeare. Work: He tried his hand at all genres.

  • He wrote a pastoral novel, La Galatea, of which he wrote the first book and which was one of his favorites.
  • He also composed ten works of theater, among which are The Siege of Numantia and The Bagnios of Algiers, and eight interludes.
  • He was also the author of twelve short stories which he called exemplary novels, short stories recounting the vicissitudes of one or more special characters in a not too broad time course. They lack quotes and comments that seek to distract the reader and from which ultimate consequences can be extracted, as morally exemplary.
  • At the end of his life he published a Byzantine novel, The Works of Persiles and Sigismunda, which was released posthumously in 1617.
  • His fame comes from Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Prose of Cervantes: The Exemplary Novels

They appeared in 1613, eight years after the publication of the first part of Don Quixote. These twelve short stories focus on one or more characters with which the author seeks to educate readers. Hence the name of exemplary. From all of them, a lesson or life experience can be learned. Love is the central axis of the twelve and, from the perspective with which it is observed, we consider three groups:

  1. Novels in which love is the starting point and takes a character to be worthy of the relationship (The Gypsy Girl, The Liberal Lover, The Spanish-English Lady)
  2. Novels in which love is subject to the need for marriage (The Two Damsels and The Lady Cornelia)
  3. The third group consists of Rinconete and Cortadillo, The Licentiate of Glass… In these works, love and marriage are relegated to a mere episode.