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chapter 1 History through Roguish Eyes

Non avevo ancora capito che, ad immaginare altri mondi, si finisce per cambiare anche questo. Eco, Baudolino1 … Thus it was history itself that became our subject, our enemy, our ambition. Together we hammered at its pages, windows, doors. carey, Parrot and Olivier in America2 ∵

Foreword

The picaresque novel is an account of the life and adventures of ordinary, humble characters, exploring the crudest, most disenchanting aspects of their lives with the covert purpose of delivering themselves from anonymity or in- famy. Through their mock-autobiographies, social outcasts and rejects aspire to a place among the great heroes of history. Interestingly, as it happens with the pedigree of many real historical celebrities, picaresque novels of all times are crowded with aliases, sobriquets and noms de plume which can sometimes conceal the pícaros’ humble parentage, or refer back to episodes in their lives. Lazarillo de Tormes, for instance, was born ‘in’ the river Tormes; the rogue of Alemán adopts the title of Guzmán de Alfarache, reminiscent of both a no- ble family (the Guzmáns) and the place where he was conceived (Alfarache); El Buscón (‘petty thief’), finds inspiration in the verb ‘buscar’, ‘to search’. Even Saint Baudolino has a strange connection with his namesake: the

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1 Umberto Eco, Baudolino (Milano: Bompiani, 2000) 104; Baudolino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002) 99: “I hadn’t yet realized that, imagin- ing other worlds, you end up changing this one.” 2 Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2009) 83 (original italics).

14 Chapter 1 protagonist claims that the Saint appeared to him in a forest near Terdona, but he then explains that “the problem of my life is that I have always confused what I saw with what I wanted to see” (29–30) (“il problema della mia vita è che io ho sempre confuso quello che vedevo e quello che desideravo vedere” [35]). In Carey’s novel, Olivier himself attaches to John Larrit, aka Parrot, a plethora of titles connected to his ungraceful conduct or his physical flaws: “Perroquet” (parrot in French), “Captain Larrit”, “Great Bird of the Antipodes”, “Mr Stasis”, “Holy Rooster”. Parrot, in his turn, does not spare Olivier nicknames: “Lord Mi- graine”, “Lord Pintle d’Pantedly”, “Lord Snobsduck”, “Lord Compte nez pointu”, or “duck legged aristo”. These attributions, far from being simple caricatures of physical traits, suggest a clash between two nationalities (a Frenchman and an Englishman), and two social ranks (aristocracy and middle-lower class). As Alexander Blackburn contends, a pícaro plays an archetypal role and is far from revealing a clear-cut personality;3 however, multiple nicknames attached to a character often incorporate a cluster of archetypes, defying generalisa- tions. Therefore, how can this eccentric private dimension be reconciled with a super-individual historical context with which, willy-nilly, rogues are con- fronted? What happens when historical figures access the make-believe micro- cosm of fiction? Writers are willing to recruit a star among a cast of unknown actors with the intent of providing their stories with a veneer of credibility; elsewhere, this contamination of fiction by history may be a simple exercise in the deconstruction, or even desecration of a public icon. The postmodern novel, with its fancy for pastiche and sequels of literary works by other writers, could not avoid the temptation of merging history and fiction. Sometimes history may suggest an ideological recreation of events, while fiction, however enclosed in the Coleridgian pact of the “suspension of disbelief”, strives to as- sert a more genuine flair for credibility. The last thirty years have seen a renewed interest in the historical novel, to which Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa4 can be considered one of the most relevant contributions. The focus has shifted not only to the passage from history to fiction, but also towards the essence of history as a particular kind of narrative. Hayden White contends that historians must look for meaning be- yond a maze of unconnected facts, and this can only be attained by encoding the sources within a limited range of plot structures inherited from creative literature. For example, the tragic, comic, romantic, satirical deployment of a piece of news is not intrinsic in the reconstructed event, but it is the outcome

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3 Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel. 1554–1954 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979) 25. 4 Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa (Milano: Bompiani, 1980).