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The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel, 1554-1954 by Alexander Blackburn (review)
- Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature
- Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
- Volume 34, Number 4, Fall 1980
- pp. 269-270
- Review
- Additional Information
Book Reviews out the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connection between America's self-imposed role as the chosen land coincided with the growth of democracy and capitalism, illustrating, as Bercovitch points out, that the jeremiad "wed self-interest to social perfection." As it became one of the prominent themes in America's literature, Bercovitch discusses this incorporation of Biblical history into the American experience in the writers of the American Renaissance and the later nineteenth century and shows that they felt compelled to use that vision in their writings. In short, what emerges from Bercovitch's study is a new and exciting reinterpretation of the Puritan influence on both American literature and American culture. Bercovitch is our generation's Perry Miller and his work will surely affect our conception of our heritage. JEFFREY B. WALKER, Oklahoma State University Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel, 1554-1954. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 267 p. $16.50. Much of genre criticism has served the picaresque novel poorly. Alexander Blackburn's answer may be termed metageneric. His elaboration of a picaresque myth provides a viable model for a literary mode which begins in the sixteenth century and continues to the present. For Blackburn , myth is both a universal story and a creative narrative structure; in the picaresque novel, the archetype is the trickster and the fundamental situation is the loneliness of the picaro isolated within society. Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzman de Alfarache, and El Buscón show the inevitable failure of the picaro's quest to enter society and the illusory integration which ultimately leads to disintegration (within a disintegrating socio-religious order marked by a relativistic view of reality). The picaro creates an external self which seems to have faith in existence, but which is reduced to spiritual nothingness. He is alone, unloved, and deformed by a hostile society. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Blackburn contends, a new myth of rational man and society converts the picaresque novel into a novel of manners. Many conventions remain in force, but rationalism (and capitalism) offers worldly salvation. Social integration is no longer an illusion, but a recognizable option in such works as Gil Bias, Colonel Jack, Jonathan Wild, and Ferdinand Count Fathom. As man loses faith in the power of reason, the picaresque myth reemerges as a symbol of renewed spiritual frustration. From a dialectical phase in which picarism is antithetical to the bourgeois faith in science and society, the picaresque myth takes a nihilistic turn to symbolism. The phenomenon is most pronounced in countries in which the novel is less bound by historical commitment, and examples include Melville's The Confidence-Man, as well as Dead Souls, Huckleberry Finn, Felix Krull, and Invisible Man. The legacy of the Spanish novelists "is not just the way of life of vagabonds and juvenile delinquents but any way of life that seems to lead away and down from meaning and full humanity" (p. 205). ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW269 Book Reviews By defining a structure for Spanish picaresque novels, Blackburn provides a base from which to examine transformations and re-creations. The Myth of the Picaro is impressive in scope and critical strength. As in all provocative works, one may find points of contention. Blackburn's analysis of the self-society dichotomy in the Spanish novels implies that either servile conformity or non-conformity is an alternative for the picaro, without explaining the possible manifestations or consequences of these courses. Lázaro can only be considered "base and repulsive" (p. 48) if he is a self-made victim. The treatment of Guzman de Alfarache depends too much, I believe, on an interpretation of Alemán's intention, subordinating Guzman's own narrative voice. Despite the breadth of the study, it is unfortunate that Blackburn could not relate the feminine picaresque tradition and recent Spanish novels to his scheme; a reading of Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte would seem crucial. And finally, while Blackburn wisely underplays the importance of superficial external criteria, he seems to lose sight of the fact that the novels studied in the symbolic...