V.V. (1) Picaresque novel

[Ron Meiners]

At 07:15 PM 10/11/00 +1100, jbor wrote:

>Prior to the *Satyricon* by Petronius Arbiter (1st century AD), Daphnis and
>Chloe* by Longus and *The Golden Ass* by Apuleis (both 2nd century AD) there
>is *The Milesian Tales* (2nd century BC). But from Middle Kingdom Egypt (c.
>1200 BC) there is also *The Princess of Backstaw*, *The Predestined Prince*
>and *Sinuhe*, all of which are literary fictions which nowadays would be
>described as novels. I'm not too sure what the relevance of value judgements
>such as "richly developed" is.

Richly developed as taken as the original prototype and picarro.  The 
religious themes are more clearly intended to extend outward, to the 
personal, social, political, philosophical, and even semantic qualities of 
being alive, literature, what-have-you.  Just to clarify, if you take the 
Spanish works as a resumption of the form of these original works, which 
is, given the thematic and structural similarities, fairly easy to do, it 
seems to me, at least, that elements in the original experiments with the 
form were not continued.  Mind you, in lots of later works, Hopscotch and 
Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me and, yes, Burgess, and GR- I seem 
to see the return to consideration of these elements.

>I agree with Vaska's comments about the somewhat equivocal nature of the
>pícaro's (or pícara, a la Moll Flanders or Oedipa Maas) tale of frustration
>and failure -- the narrator's obsessive self-involvement, the
>misunderstandings and lapses of judgement or insight to which she or he is
>often prone, and the broad comedy of the plot, enact, or potentially enact,
>an ironic distance between the author/reader and the narrative viewpoint,
>and this tends also to undermine the social satire. (Or, at least, these
>factors *allow* the reader enough space to interpret the narrative and
>perspective as unreliable or antagonistic and to discard whatever implicit
>social critique or overt moral lessons might be contained therein, *if he or
>she so chooses*.) These character-narrators are very much the archetype for
>all those problematic (anti-)heroes and flawed EveryMen and EveryWomen
>protagonists in literature -- the schlemihls and outsiders and so forth --
>in the tradition of the European novel which ensues. Further, the role of
>the pícaro/a vis a vis the fictional narrative and his or her place in (or,
>more generally, outside) the society depicted are *precisely* those of
>an/the author -- she or he is a partisan tale-teller who is excluded from
>societal and vocational norms, more often an observer than a participant
>(though always aspiring to participate), and constantly reduced to seeking a
>fortune (or, more often, bare subsistence) by bowing and scraping (or having
>to "entertain") the general public she or he secretly scorns.

I think- of what relevance I leave to your judgement- that the original 
position of the Goddess and Goddess Cults, in these works, indicates a view 
of society as incomplete, and thus the picaresque journey becomes one of 
spiritual growth, enlightenment, etc.  As such it ties into all manner of 
things, and, hopefully, out of the realm of literature as speculation and 
into a sphere where really there's an attempt to communicate some very 
important and obscure things about being alive.  I have never been able to 
convince myself Don Quixote has that stature.

>What is far more interesting than the development of literary genres
>considered in isolation is looking at the way that reading and culture have
>developed in concert with these. Developments in the rhetorical manipulation
>of language and literary style go hand in hand with theoretical responses
>(philosophy and criticism) which expose or explicate same, both of which go
>hand in hand with the changing aspect of literacy in the society and the
>purport or effect of what being "literate" actually means (eg. "critical
>literacy") -- all of which engenders a more sophisticated and thoroughgoing
>social and cultural awareness across the board and, ultimately (hopefully),
>socio-political change.
>
>best

One of the observations of one of my professors- of what provenance I know 
not- was that periods of great drama seemed concurrent with great 
historians.  Agreed- the value is in the interconnection, the application, 
as it were, of the ideas in other, or wider, arenas.

thanks-
rm