Picaresque Comedy and Its Discontents Maximilian C. Maier A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Reading Committee: Marshall Brown, Chair Donald Gilbert-Santamaria Raimonda Modiano Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Comparative Literature University of Washington Abstract Picaresque Comedy and its Discontents Maximilian C. Maier Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Marshall Brown Department of Comparative Literature The emergence of Lazarillo de Tormes in sixteenth-century Spain represents not only the birth of the picaresque genre but also a new comic sensibility—picaresque comedy. The critical new dimension of picaresque comedy is ambivalence derived from the self- deprecation of the picaresque narrator and a newfound sense of pathetic identification with the plight of the poor. Lazarillo artfully interweaves divergent comic traditions into a synthesis, but in the next significant picaresque novel, Mateo Alemán’s massive Guzmán de Alfarache , the picaresque comedy of Lazarillo is called into question. Alemán’s novel draws on some of the new comic energy of the picaresque, but it ultimately suffocates picaresque comedy under the heavy weight of Counter-Reformation ideology. A fault line is therefore created in the nascent genre, and the source of this rift is the problem of picaresque comedy. The remainder of the study uses this initial contrast in sensibility to trace the trajectory of the picaresque in Spain and elsewhere. Cervantes’ critique of the picaresque and its comic sensibility is considered, as are the reactions to the heavy-handed didacticism of Alemán in subsequent Spanish picaresque texts. But the study expands beyond the Spanish tradition to consider the influence of the picaresque in Germany, England, and the United States. Another chapter considers the problem of the feminine picaresque in Úbeda’s La Picara Justina , Grimmelshausen’s Courasche and Defoe’s Moll Flanders . In these works, the picaresque comedy of earlier texts is rendered problematic by the introduction of the female narrator who introduces a special dynamic to picaresque comedy. Later, the epic comedy of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews is contrasted with the picaresque comedy of Smollett’s Roderick Random . The study concludes with a reading of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March —a text that demonstrates both the persistence of the picaresque and its churning internal contradiction. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: 1 Chapter One: Picaresque Comedy Emerges: Comic Confluence in Lazarillo de Tormes : 11 Chapter Two: The Neurotic Picaresque: Guzmán de Alfarache ’s Guilty Comedy: 34 Chapter Three: Cervantes and the Problem of the Picaresque: 55 Chapter Four: Picaresque Comedy and Misanthropy in Quevedo’s Buscón : 81 Chapter Five: Picaresque Comedy and the Pícara: 105 Chapter Six: Picaresque Comedy Tamed: The Cases of Smollett and Fielding: 145 Chapter Seven: Picaresque Comedy in America: The Case of Augie March : 188 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to express his deepest gratitude to all those who have made this dissertation possible. Professors Robert Solomon, Wayne Rebhorn, and Louis Mackey at the University of Texas at Austin inspired me to pursue a Ph.D., and all are remembered with great fondness. At the University of Virginia, I was most inspired by the intellectual zeal of Benjamin Bennett, a Dr. Faustus from Brooklyn. In the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, I first pursued serious study of the picaresque in an independent study with Professor Donald Gilbert-Santamaria. Over the years, Professor Gilbert-Santamaria has been enormously helpful and his keen insights and wit will be missed. Professor Raimonda Modiano in English has likewise been tremendously supportive and it is no accident that she is one of the most loved professors at the university. I owe deepest thanks of all to Professor Marshall Brown, whose consummate skill as an editor and scholar have greatly improved the quality of this study. His guidance in matters academic and personal have likewise enriched me as a scholar and individual. ii 1 Introduction Two theses are the subject of this study. The first is that the work generally understood to be the first picaresque novel introduces a new comic sensibility, which I label picaresque comedy. Picaresque comedy shares the confluence of comic energy in Shakespeare or Molière, but the distinctive feature of picaresque comedy is its internal opposition between the ludic quality of the comedic art and the weighter matters within it that militate against this free-spirited comedy. The reasons for this internal strife are numerous, but of great significance is the fact that the narrator of the picaresque text most often lavishes himself with a curious admixture of pity and scorn. Another key ingredient is the inherent unreliability and rhetorical savvy of the picaresque narrator. The history of comic prose fiction is rich in tricksters—Apuleius’ s donkey-man Lucius comes to mind, as do Till Eulenspiegel and Rabelais’ Panurge, but such figures lack the rhetorical slyness of the picaro who is at once trickster and author, and it is the rhetorical richness of texts like Lazarillo , Guzmán , and Moll Flanders that adds special significance to the question of comedy in those texts. An added dimension of picaresque comedy is the degree of pathetic identification, which goes hand in hand with the greater degree of verisimilitude offered in the picaresque. On this count we should remember that when Lazarillo emerged in 1554, novels of chivalry and pastoral novels were still the prevailing novelistic forms. The gritty, realistic detail of picaresque writing offers a degree of social urgency, an awakening to problems of poverty and an invitation to commiserate with the plight of the poor. The problem that arises is one of balancing pathetic identification and agape with the obvious waywardness of the picaro and, in the 2 case of the comic texts, with the natural tendency towards establishing distance between the laughing subject and the object of scorn and ridicule. The second, related thesis of this study is that this new comic sensibility creates a fault line in the nascent genre with the publication of Guzmán de Alfarache —a novel that wrestles with its own comic impulses and ultimately poses a serious problem to the continued practice of picaresque comedy. Put another way, the picaresque distinguishes itself from its earliest stages as a genre at odds with itself, perpetually in search of self- definition. The problem of picaresque comedy becomes the axis around which picaresque texts from Lazarillo to Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March organize themselves. As we shall see, each of the texts under discussion in this study will respond to the problem differently. The challenges of this study are numerous. First of all, basic concepts are under interrogation, and the foundation of the study’s broad subject, is undermined to an extent by the premises of its own argument. Which is to say that as much as the study promotes the idea of the picaresque genre as a meaningful concept, it calls into question the very notion of a unified picaresque. Moreover, understanding picaresque comedy as a phenomenon means not only distinguishing the picaresque from other novelistic creations but examining the slippery entity that we call comedy. The goal is therefore to distinguish the unique comic energy in the picaresque from the larger comic traditions that inform it. Yet comedy in the broad sense, perhaps more than any generic category, proves a vexing problem. For this reason, it seems fitting to step back and consider for a moment the difficulty in theorizing the comic more broadly. 3 The bias against comedy is a longstanding one and an important reason for it is mere accident. Significant portions of the Poetics dealing with the comic were lost to posterity, as was Homer’s supposed comic epic. Had these ancient texts passed onward, the comic might well have achieved a greater degree of respectability. What Aristotle does tell us is in the Poetics about comedy is of limited utility. For Aristotle, the comic is an expression of the base and ugly, and it features lower characters not refined or dignified enough to step on a tragic stage. Comedy for Aristotle knows neither tragedy’s grand emotions, nor anything like a catharsis of pity and fear. It is rather a preoccupation with the perverse, indeed with what he terms the aischros or “ugly.” This is no promising start for comic theory. In fact, it is not until the fourth century that Donatus draws on lost manuscripts of Cicero and adds another dimension to the debate. Rather than understanding comic solely in terms of the laughter it incites or the baseness behind that laughter, Donatus (and presumably Cicero) emphasize the social dimensions of laughter. The keyword here is comedy as a speculum consuetudinis , a mirror of custom. For the first time, comic art achieves a degree of genuine respectability, endowed with a verisimilitude not matched by tragedy. Tragedy might approach more closely arcane metaphysical truth, but it does not achieve the same honest portrayal of humanity in all of its laughable imperfection. And yet the bias against comedy initiated by Aristotle persists. A millennium after Donatus, Italian translators and commentators of Aristotle revert back to his succinct conception of the comic, and in an attempt to take it further, they arrive at fascinating but somehow equally nebulous understandings of the comic. Vincenzo Maggi accepts Aristotle’s notion of the ugly as a necessary condition for laughter, but discards it as a 4 sufficient one. He puts forth the argument that the comic springs from a marriage of the ugly and what he terms the “wondrous.” Yet what precisely accounts for this marriage is not spelled out. Ludovico Castelvetro approaches the problem from a different angle.