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Picaresque novel, early form of novel, usually a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish pícaro) as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive.
In its episodic structure the picaresque novel resembles the long, rambling romances of medieval chivalry, to which it provided the first realistic counterpart. Unlike the idealistic knight-errant hero, however, the picaro is a cynical and amoral rascal who, if given half a chance, would rather live by his wits than by honourable work. The picaro wanders about and has adventures among people from all social classes and professions, often just barely escaping punishment for his own lying, cheating, and stealing. He is a casteless outsider who feels inwardly unrestrained by prevailing social codes and mores, and he conforms outwardly to them only when it serves his own ends. The picaro’s narrative becomes in effect an ironic or satirical survey of the hypocrisies and corruptions of society, while also offering the reader a rich mine of observations concerning people in low or humble walks of life.
The picaresque novel originated in Spain with Lazarillo de Tormes (1554; doubtfully attributed to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza), in which the poor boy Lázaro describes his services under seven successive lay and clerical masters, each of whose dubious character is hidden under a mask of hypocrisy. The irreverent wit of Lazarillo helped make it one of the most widely read books of its time. The next picaresque novel to be published, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), became the true prototype of the genre and helped establish realism as the dominant trend in the Spanish novel. The supposed autobiography of the son of a ruined Genoese moneylender, this work is richer in invention, variety of episode, and presentation of character than Lazarillo, and it too enjoyed extraordinary popularity.
Among Guzmán’s numerous successors were several short novels by Miguel de Cervantes in the picaresque manner, notably Rinconete y Cortadillo (1613) and El Coloquio de los perros (1613; “Colloquy of the Dogs”). Cervantes also incorporated elements of the picaresque into his greatest novel, Don Quixote (1605, 1615). Francisco López de Úbeda’s La picara Justina (1605; “Naughty Justina”) tells the story of a woman picaro who deceives her lovers just as the picaro does his masters. Francisco Gómez de Quevedo’s La vida del buscón (1626; “The Life of a Scoundrel”) is a masterpiece of the genre, in which the profound psychological depiction of a petty thief and swindler is underlain by a deep concern for moral values. After Buscón the picaresque novel in Spain declined gradually into the novel of adventure.
In the meantime, however, the picaro had made his way into other European literatures after Lazarillo de Tormes was translated into French, Dutch, and English in the later 16th century. The first picaresque novel in England was Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke Wilton (1594). In Germany the type was represented by H.J. von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1669). In England the female picaro was revived in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), and many picaresque elements can be found in Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1725), Joseph Andrews (1742), and Tom Jones (1749) and in Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753). The outstanding French example is Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715–35), which preserves a Spanish setting and borrows incidents from forgotten Spanish novels but portrays a gentler, more-humanized picaro.
In the mid-18th century the growth of the realistic novel with its tighter, more-elaborated plot and its greater development of character led to the final decline of the picaresque novel, which came to be considered somewhat inferior in artistry. But the opportunities for satire provided by the picaresque novel’s mingling of characters from all walks of life, its vivid descriptions of industries and professions, its realistic language and detail, and above all its ironic and detached survey of manners and morals helped to enrich the realistic novel and contributed to that form’s development in the 18th and 19th centuries. Elements of the picaresque novel proper reappeared in such mature realistic novels as Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842–52), Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull (1954).
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