Ryan and Don Roger

12

Lure of the Picaresque Novel

            Let us begin by asking – what is the picaresque novel? According to Wikipedia, “the picaresque novel, is a genre of prose fiction that depicts the adventures of a roguish but appealing hero, usually of a low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. Picaresque novels typically adopt the form of an episodic prose narrative with a realistic style.”

            Is Don Quixote a picaresque novel? It has been called a picaresque novel by English standards, but rarely, if ever, by Spanish ones. Yes, Don Quixote is prose fiction that relates the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. However, while Sancho is of low social class, Quixote himself most certainly isn’t. He is a landowner, with an expensive library, and a solid education. He is literate, though Sancho is not. Does Don Quixote live by his wits? Good question. Some would say yes, he does. Others, including the first-person narrator in DQI, I/1, would say his brain was so decayed with his all-night readings that it had dried up and he had no wits left to lose. Is the society around him corrupt? This is a much more difficult question to answer.

            In an earlier discussion, The Golden Age, we saw that Don Quixote, in his speech to the goat herds, contrasted the idyllic golden age of the Edenic pastoral with the corruption of contemporary society. As we mentioned earlier, neither description is truly accurate. As for the society in which Don Quixote moves, he meets, in the course of the novel, more than 600 characters, many of them unforgettable, some of whom are good, and some bad. More, Cervantes’s description of Spanish society is so wide and it is painted in such depth that it is hard to generalize and call that society corrupt. In addition, while Don Quixote meets low class characters in his travellers, he also mingles with judges, high ranking churchmen, country gentlemen, and even dukes and duchesses. Case made, I would hope.

            One further point on the picaresque, while the peripatetic novel may be considered picaresque in English, it is not picaresque in Spanish unless it is narrated in the first-person singular. The first word in Quevedo’s Buscón is ‘Yo’ / ‘I’ – “Yo, señor soy de Segovia.” / “I, sir, am from Segovia.” Then Pablos goes on to tell his own life story. On the other hand, the first-person narrator at the beginning of Don Quixote tells the story of the knight. He does not tell his own story, even though elements of his personal life are included within the knight’s tale.

            That said, elements of the picaresque do occur in the Quixote. The most important sequence can be found in DQI, XXII / 22, The freeing of the galley slaves. In this chapter, Don Quixote and Sancho meet a chain gang of low-class criminals who are en route to the coast to serve penal sentences chained to the oars of the King’s galleys. When Sancho tells his master that these men are forced, against their will, to serve in the galleys, Don Quixote sees an opportunity to employ his knightly skills – “this is a case for the exercising of my profession, for the redressing of outrages and the succouring and relieving of the wretched.”

            Don Quixote then asks each criminal in turn about the crimes they have committed. Big problem – in the same way that the goat herds have not understood a word of Don Quixote’s learned language, the knight is unable to understand the thieves’ slang of the galley slaves. There follows a series of misinterpretations. The first slave fell in love, the second had been singing, the third was short of a small sum of money, the fourth paraded the streets in state and on horse back, and the fifth had been caught up in an intricate tangle of relationships. Don Quixote cannot comprehend any of this and interprets each word in its literal, dictionary meaning.

            He doesn’t understand that the man in love was in love with someone else’s belongings, the singer had ‘sung’, ie confessed under torture, the third didn’t have enough money to bribe the judge, the fourth had been whipped through the streets, guilty of procuring, and possibly witchcraft, and the fifth had been involved in irregular sexual adventures with a wide range of people, some related and others not. Poor Don Quixote is baffled by this language.

            The sixth prisoner, the famous Gines de Pasamonte, is a different kettle of fish, for he has, in true picaresque fashion, written his own life story with his own fingers. Translated – he has written his own picaresque novel with himself in the starring role. When Don Quixote asks if the book is good, Gines replies that “it is so good … that Lazarillo de Tormes will have to look out, and so will everything else in that style …” “Is it finished?” Don Quixote asks him. “How can it be … if my life isn’t?” is the reply.  

            So, that is the story of Don Quixote’s encounter with the picaresque. It is a style that Cervantes tended to avoid, preferring at this stage the Italianate, the pastoral, the romance, and his own invention of the novel as a reinvention of the epic poem that can be written in prose. The picaresque was certainly a temptation for Cervantes, for he leaned towards that style from time to time in Don Quixote, and also in a couple of his exemplary novels (1612), namely Rinconete y Cortadillo and El Coloquio delosPerros, among others. That said, Don Quixote is certainly not a picaresque novel, in the Spanish sense of the word.