V.V.(1) Carnival and the picaresque (2 of 2)

[jbor]

(cont.)

Many critics have discerned in the picaresque narrative form the incipience
of the tradition of the novel in Western literature. See, for example,
Blaber and Gilman, *Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian,
Canadian and Indian Fiction*, Butterfly, Springwood, 1990, pp. 14-15 ff;
Reed, op. cit., pp. 28-29 ff; and, Claudio Guillén, *The Anatomies of
Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and Nature of Picaresque
Literature*, Garland, New York, 1987 (1953), pp. 1-5 ff, 48-61.

Mikhail Bakhtin views the gradual marginalisation of the popular tradition
of "carnival" -- the ritual spectacles, grotesqueries, comic verbal parodies
and billingsgates -- as a product of the rise of the state and class
structure in the Middle Ages. In its relocation and metamorphoses,
particularly to written narratives, the carnival forms are "more complex,
until they become the expression of the folk consciousness, of folk
culture." Bakhtin nominates Rabelais' *Gargantua and Pantagruel* along with
*Don Quixote* as the classical literary expressions of the carnival spirit,
and attributes its subsequent re-emergence in the European comic novel of
the eighteenth century (with *Tristram Shandy* as the exemplar) to the
rediscovery of these texts. See for eg. *Rabelais and his World*, pp. 5-6
ff, 33-38 ff.

Celebrations of the vitality and redemptive power inherent in manifestations
of carnivalesque disorder are evident in works such as Updike's *The
Poorhouse Fair*, Barth's *Floating Opera* and, obviously, much in Burroughs'
and Pynchon's works respectively.

To my mind there is enormous appeal in the notion that postmodern fiction
inserts itself into what Claudio Guillén calls "an incoherent tradition" of
the novel. With Shakespeare's Falstaff as one of the earliest English
counterparts of the pícaro, the "English anatomies of roguery",
predominantly literary forms extending back to the tradition of medieval
satire and popular jest books, culminate with comic and parodic variations
on the picaresque in the work of Defoe (Moll Flanders could be classed as
the first example of a *female* pícaro, a category into which Oedipa Maas
also falls), Gay, Fielding and Smollet in the eighteenth century. (See
Guillén, pp. 183-184, 210, 228-229 for more on this.) The appropriation,
from popular culture, of vulgar and bawdy thematic material, of crude
vernaculars in speech and in literary form, and of the identification of the
narrator's viewpoint with that of the reader's own, thus establishing a
textual dynamic wherein both the narrative protagonist and aspects of social
arrangement are perceived satirically, are characteristic features of the
tradition so disclosed, as well as a source of its general appeal and
durability. Indeed, it is these circumstances and characteristics which
herald the novel's emergence as the pre-eminent literary form in English
since the middle of the eighteenth century.

The genealogy can be extended: Sterne, Melville, Hawthorne and Joyce figure
prominently in postmodernist critiques, and each in turn assimilates aspects
of the picaresque mode into their fiction. In the latter part of the
twentieth century Ellison's *Invisible Man* -- a novel which is of huge
importance to Pynchon, and to Gaddis and DeLillo as well -- has been
nominated as an archetype of the modern picaresque novel (by Harry Sieber,
Brian Stonehill, Helen Daniel, Stuart Miiller, among others). Sieber notes
that it "is the autobiography of a failed and rejected outsider", and that
the protagonist's "invisibility" is confirmed metafictively in that he
remains unnamed for the entire duration of his own narrative:

   *Invisible Man* is the story of an "invisibility" (loss or absence of
   soul) out of which emerges an awareness of individual value. Ellison
   takes picaresque conventions to their ... most profound development by
   revitalizing their original functions. The pícaro's "tainted" ancestry
   defines him as an outsider in the same manner that a black man's colour
   determines his position in twentieth-century America. The picaresque
   novel finally becomes what it intended to be all along: the autobiography
   of a "nobody" and his adventures in a "repressive" society. (Sieber, *The
   Picaresque*, London, Methuen, 1977, pp. 73-4)

The first person narrative and internal monologues, the ardent self-
consciousness of the invisible man and his assumption and rejection of
various roles, the overwhelming and denaturalised social structures which
encroach threateningly, the series of deceptions and misprisions, accidents
and betrayals which befall him in his hapless career; all typify Ellison's
protagonist as a modern pícaro. And, this character's shadow looms large
over the postmodern novel as, variously, the outsider or underground man,
the lunatic, the idiot-savant, the artist, the schlemiel. As this listing
suggests, elements of Dostoevskian and Kafkaesque alienation are
incorporated into the characterisation of the pícaro in the postmodern
novel.

   Just as the pícaro is not only an observer of society but a
   representative of general forms of action, his own nature is not simply
   social. Like the criminal, the hermit and the monk, his position is far
   more asocial. There is no picaresque class, the pícaro is deracinated,
   independent, *atípico*, *declasificado*. (Guillén, pp. 114-5)

According to Frederick R. Karl there has been a revival of this "fool or
passive individual whose very resistance and fixedness become a threat to
the status quo," and in his terms the "schlemiel" figure in the post-war
Jewish-American novel is very much a manifestation of the picaresque mode.
In its contemporary guise "possessing qualities of the 'holy innocent'," the
character type first reappears in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bellow
and Malamud, and is brought to prominence in the 60s by both Roth and
Pynchon. (See Karl, *American Fictions 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History
and Critical Evaluation*, Harper & Row, New York, 1983, pp. 84, 304-306.)
Karl describes Benny Profane and his society as follows:

   Benny Profane is the dysfunctional man of the fifties, an oddball because
   of his inability to achieve affluence; anti force when everyone else is
   pro; a profanation not of God but of God's culture. The surrounding world
   ... is dead, dying, diminishing." (p. 304)

Karl also nominates Ellison's invisible man as a "prototypical schlemiel".
(p. 305) I think that many other pomo (anti-)heroes such as Heller's
Yossarian or Bruce Gold, Updike's Henry Bech and even 'Rabbit' Angstrom, fit
this mould as well.

Both Frye and Edward Mendelson propose literary traditions or canons which
are comparable to the picaresque genealogies traced elsewhere. While Frye
posits Menippean satire as a form persisting through the history of
literature (*Anatomy of Criticism*, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
1957, pp. 308-311) he discriminates Menippean satire "from the picaresque
form, which has the novel's interest in the actual structure of society."
(p.309) This is an important distinction and should not be overlooked,
particularly in reference to Pynchon's work and other postmodern
"historiographic metafictions". Mendelson's category of "encyclopedic
fiction" also comprises a similar chronology and range of works. (See
Mendelson's Introduction to *Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays*,
Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1978, p. 182)

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