The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach

Abstract

Contemporary usage of the term “picaresque” has blunted its usefulness as a literary concept. What once referred to the historically identifiable genre of la novela picaresca in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is now applied whenever something “episodic” tied together by an “antihero” needs a label. One way to reconcile these extremes is to approach the problem from the wider perspective of narrative types in general: a modal approach, which can account both for a specific kind of narrative whose exclusive preoccupation is an exploration of the fictional world of the picaresque and for a primitive fictional possibility which may be part of much fiction outside that genre. The modal perspective leads next to generic awareness, which yields the strict attributes of the genre—the “total picaresque fictional situation”—some of which are: (1) dominance of the picaresque mode, (2) panoramic structure, (3) first-person point of view, (4) the picaro figure, (5) the picaro-landscape relationship, (6) a gallery of human types, (7) parody, and (8) certain basic themes and motifs.