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The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca", from "pícaro", for "rogue" or "rascal") is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. This style of novel originated in sixteenth century Spain and flourished throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It continues to influence modern literature.
Arabic literature, which was read widely in Spain in the time of Al-Andalus and also possessed a literary tradition with similar themes, is another possible formative influence on the picaresque style. Al-Hamadhani (d.1008) of Hamadhan (Iran) is credited with inventing the literary genre of maqamat in which a wandering vagabond makes his living on the gifts his listeners give him following his extemporaneous displays of rhetoric, erudition, or verse, often done with a trickster's touch. Ibn al-Astarkuwi or al-Ashtarkuni (d.1134) also wrote in the genre maqamat, comparable to later European picaresque novels.
While elements of Chaucer and Boccaccio have a picaresque feel and are likely to have contributed to the style, the modern picaresque begins with Lazarillo de Tormes, which was published anonymously in Antwerp and Spain in 1554. It is variously considered either the first picaresque novel or at least the antecedent of the genre. The title character, Lazarillo, is a pícaro who must live by his wits in an impoverished country full of hypocrisy.
The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, written in Florence beginning in 1558, also has much in common with the picaresque. Another early example is Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), characterized by religiosity.
Francisco de Quevedo's El buscón (1604 according to Francisco Rico; the exact date is uncertain, yet it was certainly a very early work) is considered the masterpiece of the subgenre by A.A. Parker, because of his baroque style and the study of the delinquent psychology. However, a more recent school of thought, led by Francisco Rico, rejects Parker's view, contending instead that the protagonist, Pablos, is a highly unrealistic character, simply a means for Quevedo to launch classist, racist and sexist attacks. Moreover, argues Rico, the structure of the novel is radically different from previous works of the picaresque genre: Quevedo uses the conventions of the picaresque as a mere vehicle to show off his abilities with conceit and rhetoric, rather than to construct a satirical critique of Spanish Golden Age society.
In other European countries, these Spanish novels were read and imitated. In Germany, Grimmelshausen wrote Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669), the most important of non-Spanish picaresque novels. It describes the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War. In France, this kind of novel declined into an aristocratic adventure: Le Sage's Gil Blas (1715). In England, the body of Tobias Smollett's work, and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) are considered picaresque, but they lack the sense of religious redemption of delinquency that was very important in Spanish and German novels. The triumph of Moll Flanders is more economic than moral.
The classic Chinese novel Journey to the West is considered to have considerable picaresque elements. Having been written in 1590, it is contemporary with much of the above - but is unlikely to have been directly influenced by the European genre.
The English-language term can simply refer to an episodic recounting of the adventures of an anti-hero on the road. Henry Fielding proved his mastery of the form in Joseph Andrews (1742), The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), but, as Fielding himself wrote, these novels were written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, not in imitation of the picaresque novel. Likewise Charles Dickens, who was influenced by Fielding, wrote his first six novels in the picaresque form, with Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) being the transitional novel to his later more serious and mature works.
Cervantes himself wrote a short picaresque novel, Rinconete y Cortadillo part of his Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Novels). J.B. Priestley made excellent use of the form in his enormously successful The Good Companions and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.
Other novels with elements of the picaresque include the French Candide, the Canadian Solomon Gursky Was Here and the English The Luck of Barry Lyndon. An interesting variation on the tradition of the picaresque is The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, a satirical view on early nineteenth century Persia, written by a British diplomat, James Morier.
Some modern novelists have used some picaresque techniques, as Gogol in Dead Souls (1842–52). Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) combined the influence of the picaresque novel with the modern spy novel. Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk (1923) was the first example of the picaresque technique in Central Europe. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was consciously written as a picaresque novel , as were many other novels of vagabond life, such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
The Enormous Room is E. E. Cummings' 1922 autobiographical novel about his imprisonment in France during World War I on unfounded charges of "espionage", and it includes many picaresque depictions of his adventures as "an American in a French prison".
Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March is a picaresque novel with bildungsroman traits. George MacDonald Fraser's novels about Harry Flashman combine the picaresque with historical fiction.
Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism" can be seen as a hybrid of fictional picaresque with memoir and traditional reporting. The picaresque elements are especially prominent in Thompson's less journalistic, more literary and psychotropically themed works, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Great Shark Hunt.
Sergio Leone identified his spaghetti westerns, more specifically his Dollars trilogy, as being in the picaresque style.
Recent examples are Camilo José Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942), Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959), John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Isabel Allende's Eva Luna (1987), Robert Clark Young's One of the Guys (1999), Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend (1991), Christian Kracht's Faserland (1995), Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (2003) and Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger" (Booker Prize 2008).
Some science fiction and fantasy books also show a clear picaresque influence, transported to a variety of invented worlds—for example, "The Dying Earth" series of Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser", James H. Schmitz's "The Witches of Karres" and L. Sprague de Camp's "Novarian series". The genre-bending fiction of Gene Wolfe combines strong elements of the picaresque with a catalog of other forms of fiction—bildungsroman, memoir, mythic poem, classical drama, modernist fiction, and others. This is the case particularly in his Book of the New Sun, the tale of Severian the Torturer's rise to the monarchy in a remote future world that is probably Earth.
The illustrated The Magic Pudding (1918), by Australian author Norman Lindsay, is an example of the picaresque adapted for children's literature.
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