Freedom, Libertinism, and the Picaresque Maximillian E. Novak A. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS on the picaresque compiled in 1966 listed over six hundred titles suggesting surprisingly di verse theories about the genre,1 yet most critics probably feel they have some notion of what the word means. Frank Chandler, one of the earliest writers on the picaresque, dealt with it as the ’’literature of roguery,” a body of subject matter which could encompass Guz man de Alfarache, Moll Flanders, the Eoman Comique, and Vanity Fair, while Dunlap, in his History of Fiction published in 1814, saw fit to group picaresque fiction with Gargantua and Pantagruel as a species of comic romance. However much one might envy the simplicity of Chandler’s approach, few modern critics would ac cept Vanity Fair or Gargantua as picaresque works, yet the need to classify them remains. E. D. Hirsch has demonstrated that as readers we are forced to think in terms of an ’’intrinsic genre” and as scholars, we inevitably think in terms of historical genre.2 Plain ly those who read Moll Flanders, not as an example of the novel or the picaresque, but rather as a member of the same literary species as the Confessions of Saint Augustine, will experience it differently from those who read it as a member of the same species as Castillo Solorzano’s La Garduna de Sevilla, which though told in the third person has, in Rufina, a female rogue very much like Moll.3 What I intend to do in this paper is, first, to examine three recent prescriptive theories of picaresque fiction which have tended to drop the fiction of Lesage, Defoe, and Smollett as either unpicaresque or trivial (as I see it, these theories misunderstand the ways in which the eighteenth century modified the picaresque to suit its 55 Racism in the Eighteenth Century own sensibility). And secondly, to argue that the picaresque is not so much a narrow genre as, like satire, a universal mode which, while it shares with the novel of manners a concern with the real world, represents the very opposite of that form in its organizing principles: its free movement, its free form, and its view of middle and upper-class social and political conventions through a character who, as a result of circumstance or choice, has been partially or fully liberated from those conventions. What I am offering, I should add, is less a general theory of the picaresque than an interpretation of the English response to it during the Restoration and eighteenth century, when translations from the Spanish and the French made picaresque fiction the chief rival to romances and novellas. The clearest statement of problems involved in defining the pi caresque appears in several essays by Claudio Guillen, now collected in a volume called Literature as System4 At times, Guillen is will ing to speak of the picaresque "in the wider sense of the term,” and then to ask the key question "How wide is that?” In the essay "Genre and Counter-genre,” Guillen takes a sensible attitude to ward genre as completely separate from universal models. In this broad sense genres are seen as shifting in different eras and occasion ally becoming obsolete. Since he accepts Croce’s argument that "genres” have little or nothing to do with external form, one could assume that he might accept the idea that the picaresque might be found in poetry as well as prose, though from the definition he ad vances in this essay, it would seem impossible to have a picaresque drama. He writes: Let us say—hastily—that the picaresque model can be described in the following way: it is the fictional confession of a liar. Be sides the writer knows that the picaresque tale begins not in medias res but with the narrator’s birth, that it recounts in chron ological order the orphaned hero’s peregrination from city to city, and that it usually ends—that is, it can end—with either the defeat or the conversion of the inner man who both narrates and experiences the events.5 There seems to be nothing very hasty about this definition, but under careful scrutiny its credibility...