Revisiting the Circuitous Odyssey of the Baroque Picaresque Novel: Reinaldo Arenas'sEl Mundo Alucinante

Abstract

IT IS A CRITICAL COMMONPLACE that Lazarillo de Tormes's appearance in 1554 engendered a literary tradition, usually referred to as the (be that the picaresque novel, genre, mode, frame, style, or strain), that played a dominant role in Hispanic letters during Spain's Renaissance (here, chiefly designating the sixteenth century) and the baroque period (mainly the late sixteenth and entire seventeenth centuries).' However, the picaresque has not remained restricted to the Peninsula during the peak of its empire. Rather, we shall find that the picaresque novel-specifically one written in a decidedly baroque fashion-has resurfaced as recently as 1969 in the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas's El mundo alucinante (Hallucinations).2 In this transtemporal, trans-Atlantic investigation, I first demonstrate that the baroque picaresque is a Hispanic literary constant or, at a minimum, that it cyclically reappears. I examine how El mundo alucinante engages in dialogues with two canonical baroque picaresque novels of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Spain: Mateo AlemBnn's Guzman de Alfarache (1599/1604) and Francisco de Quevedo's El busc6n (The Scavenger, 1626). I also briefly examine how Arenas employed his primary historical source, Fray Servando's Memorias (The Memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier). Ultimately, I attempt to explain why Arenas, a Cuban who reached maturity un-