Picaresque Tradition Research Articles

The Margin Speaks: A Study of Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch from a Post-Colonial Point of View by Gunilla Florby

Book Review s The Margin Speaks: A Study of M argaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch from a Post'Colonial Point of View. By Gunilla Florby. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, Lund Studies in English 93, 1997. 252 pages. Price not available. Reviewed by Frances W. Kaye University of Nebraska-Lincoln In this monograph, as the subtitle indicates, Gunilla Florby sets out to demonstrate how two very different prairie writers participate in the postcolonial enterprise of what Florby calls the “Second World,” the Europeandescended majority inhabitants of such former English colonies as Canada and Australia. While this provides useful insights into the writings of both Laurence and Kroetsch, it scants what would seem to me to be crucial to postcolonialism: indigeneity, or, in the cases of the African and Asian diasporas , bondage. Kroetsch and Laurence are both writing back to the center, engaged in a dialogue in which they fully own their blood and intellectual lineages to Europe, no matter how irrelevant those lineages have become to the “here” of the prairies. In this sense, they can be distinguished from someone like Thomas King, who is writing back against the center as some­ thing still dangerous to the cultural and personal survival of indigenous peo­ ple. Usages like Florby’s, in fact, have prompted King to announce that what he is writing is not postcolonial at all. This is not simply a semantic question, however, because Florby’s defi­ nition does not allow her to do justice to Laurence’s principled but difficult refusal to appropriate indigenous culture, or to either recognize how risky or Illustration by Mary Hallock Foote. Reprinted fromScribner’s Magazine 16 (Aug. 1878). 4 2 8 W A L 3 3 ( 4 ) W in t e r 1 9 9 9 gauge how successful Kroetsch’s incorporation of indigenous characters into his narratives and his use of the idea of the Native North American Trickster are. The greatest strength of Florby’s monograph lies in her discussions of individual works and her unraveling of the ways each writer writes back to the myths of Europe. She skillfully synthesizes existing criticism and points out how brilliantly and insistently each author has used and naturalized to the prairies the European metanarratives. Kroetsch writes an Alberta Odyssey in The Studhorse Man or revises the entire picaresque tradition in Badlands. Laurence gently revisits the stories of Abraham and Hagar, Rachel and Jacob, Prospero and Miranda, and even Agamemnon and Clytemnestra from a fem­ inist point of view, showing us that the patriarchy never has worked, “old” world or “new.” These readings, however, though they do deal with naturalizing old tales in a new landscape, are not particularly postcolonial. Given Florby’s relative lack of attention to indigeneity and each author’s treatment of it, I wish either that she had distinguished between the rewriting of the central myths of the colonizing culture and the two writers’ treatment of various events that do distinguish Canada as a colony or had dealt with the current heritage of imperialism in regard to indigenous peoples. Laurence has insis­ tently told and retold two tragedies in her Manawaka books: the story of Dieppe, a pre— D-Day raid on France by Canadian troops, most of whom were killed or captured (an episode that has continued to define for Canadians the sense of being “colonials” and expendable to British or American generals), and the fire that overtakes Piquette Tonerre’s shack, killing her and her two children, people who, because they are of indigenous descent, seem equally expendable to most of the descendants of the colonizers of Manawaka. As for Kroetsch, I wish that Florby’s study of his writing back to the myths of Europe had included some discussion of his section of Seed Catalogue that talks about the “terrible symmetry” of fighting back against one part of the center on behalf of another; there, Kroetsch tells the tale of his cousin, shot down while flying in service of Canada, allied with the British, to drop bombs on the city of Cologne, where his great-grandmother had been bom. Speaking to the difficult relationship between empire, colony, and the rest of Europe, this story deals with...

Smollett's Women: A Study in an Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility (review)

REVIEWS 161 For a historical account of Elizabeth Canning, in my opinion, one should tum to John Treherne's The Canning Enigma (1989); for the bibliography, to Lillian Bueno McCue's "Elizabeth Canning in Print," expanded, updated, and chronologically reordered in my Harvard Law School exhibition catalogue, The Virgin and the Witch (1988). For a canny, partisan, and imaginative rendering of the "mystery," I can recommend Moore, but I long for some future account of the politics of the case: who were the "Canningites" and why was the Lord Mayor so opposed to them? That seems to me to offer more gripping narrative possibilities than any mystery. Hugh Amory Houghton Library, Harvard University Robert D. Spector. Smollett's Women: A Study in an Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility. Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 1994. 196pp. US$55.00. ISBN 0-313-28790-2. The title of Robert D. Spector's most recent book on Smollett seems to announce a fascinating project: a study of an early modem "masculine sensibility" through the lens of an important writer's representations of women. Unfortunately, although the book contains some fresh readings of a number of Smollett's female characters, it fails to live up to its enticing title. Too often the author fails to connect his discussions of individual characters and narratives to larger questions about either gender roles in eighteenthcentury literature or the nature of the novel or the relationship between these two issues. Since the material itself seems to demand consideration of such points, Smollett's Women, although revealing Spector's deep knowledge of and appreciation for Smollett's fiction, finally strikes one mainly as a series of missed opportunities. Spector presents his book as a modest corrective to the prevailing "critical opinion [which] has consistently denied Smollett's ability to deal with women and their emotions" (p. 6). Citing his subject's "strongly male personality," his belief that women were naturally "attendant upon men," and his "admiration for the manly [i.e., heterosexual] values of his time," Spector acknowledges the limitations of Smollett in this area but nevertheless asserts, quite correctly, that his novels contain a rich variety of female characters (pp. 8, 10, 13). In separate chapters, Spector classifies and analyses three basic types of women in Smollett's fictional world: idealized heroines, fallen women and victims, and comic and grotesque figures. Along the way, Spector uses his discussion of these characters to reflect upon the status of women in eighteenth-century Britain as well as on Smollett's attitude towards women. Since Spector has worked on Smollett for many years, it is not surprising that he has some sound things to say about this material. His discussions of Emilia in Peregrine Pickle and Lydia in Humphry Clinker, for example, demonstrate that Smollett's heroines are not all of a piece and that at least those two, like some of his fallen women and victims, are reasonably complex figures possessed of strength and wit. Similarly, Spector's treatment of the women traduced by the dark protagonist of Ferdinand, Count Fathom reminds us why A.R. Humphries argued forty years ago that no novelist gives us the harsh reality of eighteenth-century life better than Smollett, and at the same time shows how Smollett used his many women characters as vehicles for satire on a variety of subjects. But Smollett's Women never rises above the level of an amply annotated taxonomy of Smollettian character types of the female persuasion. 162 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 Some intriguing questions are raised by Spector about the relationship between the ways Smollett represented women and the kinds of fictional narratives that he wrote. Spector argues that the idealized heroines are the product of "Smollett's addiction to the romance tradition that he repeatedly satirizes in his work" (pp. 44-45), that the relative complexity of Lydia is due to the author's use of the epistolary form in his last work of fiction, and that Emilia must be understood as a response to Richardson's Clarissa. Also, according to Spector, many of the fallen women in these fictions are characters that indicate their author's debt to the picaresque tradition. But a...

Gordimer’s rendition of the picaresque in A Sport of Nature

The aim of this article is twofold: firstly, to explore the picaresque elements present in Nadine Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature and secondly, to relate them to her more pronounced stance on feminism which has evolved since the 1980s. I suggest that an appropriate reading strategy would not only foreground these issues but also highlight A Sport of Nature as one of her most underrated novels. Following the example of the Latin American authors Isabel Allende and Elena Poniatowska, Cordimer has appropriated the picaresque tradition as an ideal vehicle to depict the elements of social critique and feminist assertion which characterize A Sport of Nature. The ironic retrospective stance on society, conventionally represented by a picaro as a social outcast, is reinforced by the introduction of a picara, thereby underlining the double marginalization of women as subjects and sexual objects. I propose that a feminist-oriented reading of the text which recognizes this subversive quality, would lend a different dimension to its interpretation. The character of Hillela serves as an implicit example of female ingenuity which attains political equality through devious means despite, and as a result of, the constraints of a hypocritical society and an entrenched patriarchal system. Seen from this perspective, the seemingly disparate elements of the novel coalesce to present a damning picture of contemporary society.

Post‐colonial Picaresque

Ronald BLABER and Marvin GILMAN, Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian, Canadian and Indian Fiction. Springwood, NSW: Butterfly Books, 1990.

Tobias George Smollett (review)

168 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Robert Donald Spector. Tobias George Smollett. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989 (Twayne's English Authors Series), xvii + 155pp. This is an "updated edition" of Spector's earlier volume on Smollett in the Twayne series, published in 1968. The term updated is Spector's own, and it is accurately descriptive. The book has not really been revised at all; here and there new sentences and paragraphs have been introduced, usually for the purpose of acknowledging recent Smollett scholarship and criticism; accordingly the notes have increased in number and the Selective Bibliography has lengthened. Spector has not budged an inch from his original position in the 1968 book, where he argued with a kind of relentless logic from the premise (mistaken, many have since concluded) that Smollett was a picaresque writer whose novels could only be fully understood within the context of the picaresque tradition. The argument was problematical then, especially but not exclusively with respect to Humphry Clinker, it remains problematical now, notwithstanding Spector's quarrelsome nods here and there in the direction of such Smollettians as PaulGabriel Boucé and G.S. Rousseau, who have taken issue with him on the matter of Smollett's picaresque and have tried (successfully, on the whole) to broaden discussion of the subject. Spector is not exactly wrong in his views, but he is unwilling to see beyond their limitations. And so he continues in 1989 to insist, as he did in 1968, that (for example) the hero of Smollett's avowed imitation of Cervantes, Sir Launcelot Greaves, is a picaro—when in fact he is an unmistakably quixotic figure (Robert Alter long ago, in 1964, established the clear difference between the two character types); and he still believes that Humphry Clinker is "essentially picaresque," its several correspondents forming a "group of picaros" replacing "the individual rogue-hero" (pp. 129-30, 1968; pp. 106-7, 1989). Sir Launcelot Greaves and Humphry Clinker, like all of Smollett's fiction, contain strong elements of the picaresque , but it is a troublesome question whether any one of the novels should be defined rigidly in terms of that "genre," as Spector repeatedly calls it. It is, indeed , doubtful whether the picaresque is a "genre" at all. In several important reconsiderations published since 1968, most notably those of Claudio Guillen (Literature as System, 1971), Richard Bjomson (The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction, 1977), and Alexander Blackburn (The Myth of the Picaro, 1979), the conception of the picaresque as genre has been convincingly challenged and replaced by the conceptions of mode and myth. Spector takes no notice of such reconsiderations, which, if he had consulted them while preparing the new version of his book, might have persuaded him to revise towards a less restrictive and more balanced approach. In fairness it ought to be said that Spector's approach does have the virtue of conviction. The argument for it is lucid, vigorous, even provocative at times. In its current incarnation his book possesses the additional interest of those references to recent Smollett criticism mentioned earlier. For the most part these REVIEWS 169 references are, however, no more than scattered interpolations. The chapter on Ferdinand Count Fathom includes two fresh paragraphs describing commentary since 1968 (pp. 67-68); the chapter on Sir Launcelot Greaves adds three paragraphs written to similar purpose (pp. 85-87); and so on. Spector does not engage much with what he describes, despite occasional disagreements; and when his descriptions end, back he goes to 1968 and dependency (it now seems excessive) on the works of Lewis Knapp, Louis Martz, and George Kahrl— all published in the 1940s. The only substantial original material appears in the opening chapter ("From Grub Street to Parnassus"), where there is expanded discussion of Smollett's journalistic, historical, and travel writing. Those who found Spector's study praiseworthy in 1968 will find it praiseworthy now; those who found it unsatisfactory will do so again. Nothing much has changed—so little, in fact, as to call into question the justification for this "updated edition," which is hardly more than an exercise in redundancy. The truth is that Spector, a very able critic and the compiler of an authoritative bibliography , Tobias Smollett...

Jerzy Kosinski'sThe painted bird and the picaresque tradition

Jerzy Kosinski'sThe painted bird and the picaresque tradition

The Picaresque Novel in France, England, and Germany

HE HISTORY of the European picaresque novel has not yet T been written. When it has, the complex interactions between Spanish literary models and seventeenth-century social realities in France, England, and Germany will perhaps finally receive the emphasis they deserve. There exist excellent studies of the Spanish picaresque tradition,1 but most attempts to discuss the picaresque as a genre of European fiction have failed to consider the actual historical process by which translations were gradually assimilated into alien contexts and associated with indigenous works which themselves contributed to the evolution of the novel much as the Spanish originals had done.2 In France,

Fenimore Cooper and the Picaresque Tradition

Research Article| December 01 1972 Fenimore Cooper and the Picaresque Tradition A. Owen Aldridge A. Owen Aldridge Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1972) 27 (3): 283–292. https://doi.org/10.2307/2932891 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A. Owen Aldridge; Fenimore Cooper and the Picaresque Tradition. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 December 1972; 27 (3): 283–292. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2932891 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1972 By The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Smollett's Development as a Novelist

The only way fully to grasp the dynamics of Smollett's development as a novelist is through examination of his continuing efforts to create a unified art work. Recently, in support of this concern, attention has been drawn to the kinetic nature of his search for form.1 As a further step in a reassessment of Smollett's career, we should see that his quest involved a redefinition of his philosophic attitudes as well as changes of a more purely formal nature. Throughout his career he searched for new modes of expression to mirror his insights about life in a fully coherent work of art; only gradually did he recognize and respond to the inevitability of transforming that insight itself into something more congenial to the novel form and to the historical circumstances that give rise to this genre. In a general way, Smollett's experiments with novel form reveal a movement away from a satiric anatomy largely derived from the picaresque tradition toward a more coherent novel world in which character, plot, and authorial assessment work together in a unified manner. Smollett's evolution thus follows a general trend of his period which came to reject looser forms of fiction in favor of those which were at once more lifelike and coherent. But in emphasizing formal realism, as Ian Watt has pointed out, the novelists of this period raised crucial and persistent problems about matters of aesthetic and moral evaluation. How was one to achieve a tale that was both lifelike and yet an evaluation or moral assessment of that life? How was one to reconcile the different, and apparently opposing, demands of a realism of presentation and a realism of assessment?2 Smollett's solution to this problem, finally, in his last novel cannot be divorced from his search for a philosophical stance on the problem of how we come to know reality. His career can be seen as reflecting a struggle to come to terms with the implications of Lockean epistemology for both his conception of reality and his novel form.

The Failing Center: Recent Fiction and the Picaresque Tradition

As recently as ten years ago everyone knew fairly well what he meant by and could assume that someone else who used the word meant approximately the same. Not that has ever been a neat, tightly defined concept. The more Crocean critics, who have insisted that the Spanish novels in which the tradition originates are disconcertingly unlike each other at many points, have been difficult to refute. But whoever used a label like picaresque novel could be taken to refer to a kind of pseudo-autobiography of a special kind of miscreant hero, a simple episodic form, a perspective that saw society from the bottom up, and a report on life that recorded many adventures and rapid changes of fortune in a wryly ironic style full of satirical overtones. The formula fitted the great monuments of the tradition at least as well as most formulas fit individual masterworks, and the term that subsumed it was as useful as such terms can be expected to be. But ten years can be a long time. The critics who have spent the intervening decade telling us that we are living through a major revival of the have adapted the word to their own purposes, sometimes so radically as to create a semantic problem. For example, a reviewer in a recent New York Times Book Review:

The Style of Bellow's Comedy

In Augie March, Henderson, and Herzog, Bellow has created an open style of ideological comedy that relates him to Rabelais, Burton, Sterne, Melville, and Joyce, earlier masters of an encyclopedic comedy of knowledge. The lively voice and intellectual probing in Augie March can be more fully valued when the book is related to such predecessors rather than to the picaresque tradition. Bellow's comic characters have an individual idiom, voice, and range of concern that unobtrusively unify his apparently formless books. What emerges in Augie March and Herzog—the comedy, suffering, and encyclopedic speculation; the concern for personal fates, social facts, and cosmic issues; the interest in observed actuality and abstract symbol; the tension between a cruel, deterministic reality and the impulse toward creative freedom and joy; the precarious reliance on metaphoric probing and an open form—all suggest that against great odds, both public and personal, Bellow has succeeded in reanimating a style of intellectual comedy that illuminates and celebrates the present even as it connects us and Bellow with some of the most powerful imaginations of the past.

Juan Goytisolo's "Fiestas," an Analysis and Commentary

the people, which he attributes largely to Ortega's theories on the deshumanizacidn del arte. He feels very strongly the necessity to renew the dialogue which should exist between the author and his public. This is a means of communication which he would grant to few of the writers of the modernista and dictadura movements, and it is the lack of this communication which he thinks explains the presence of the two types of novel current in Spain: one a refined, esthetic novel of the type written by Jarnms, and the other, popular, by such writers as Pedro Mata or Felipe Trigo. This communication may be reestablished, he believes, by once again facing problems, by discussing and writing about them, by avoiding evasive and ivory-tower literature for ithe elite, and by writing about and directing the writing toward the pueblo. Goytisolo makes it eminently clear who his literary heroes are. He admires Gald6s and B roja, who write about types; Quevedo, Cela, and the writers of the picaresque tradition in Spain; and, in fact, all the writers who have contributed to the strong current of realism which has been present in Spanish literature from its beginning. In refutation of the criticism that the picaresque-and, as it may be equated, the realistic-has served to degrade the national image of Spain, Goytisolo says: Si estA de acuerdo en reconocer que la Novela Picaresca es un reflejo, un espejo a lo largo de un camino, deberi admitir que no es ella la que crea el mal; que el picaro y la sociedad que lo origina, existen; que Quevedo y Torres de Villarroel (o Baroja y Cela) se limitan a retratarlos.2 To follow the tradition of those writers