This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
A. A. Parker's essay “The Psychology of thePícaro in theBuscón,” (Modern Language Review, XLII (1947), 58–69. It also reappears in his book,Literature and the Delinquent. Manchester: University Press, 1968), is a fundamental contribution in clarifying thepícaro's individual psychological motivation. See also Sherman Eoff's useful essays that treat this critical theme: “The Picaresque Psychology ofGuzmán de Alfarache,” Hispanic Review, XXI (1953), 107–119; “The Tragedy of the Unwanted Person in Three Versions: Pablos of Segovia, Pito Pérez, and Pascual Duarte,”Hispania, XXXIX (1956), 190–196.
This theme is dealt with extensively by Américo Castro in many of his investigations. See the introduction of his edition of Quevedo'sHistoria de la vida del Buscón, N. Y., Paris: Nelson, 1971.
Ortega y Gasset, J. “La picardía original de la novela picaresca,” inObras completas, II. 6th ed. Madrid:Revista de Occidente, 1957–1962. See pp. 121–125.
Most recently, criticism on the Spanish picaresque novel has underscored the link between the Jew and the convert living in 16th and 17th-century Spain and the birth and flourishing of the picaresque as a literary genre. For an orientation to this theme see my unpublished U.C.L.A. dissertation:Towards a Definition of the Picaresque ... 1966; pp. 155–156; 323–324; 390–392. A very useful treatment of the application of this theme to theGuzmán de Alfarache is to be found in Alberto del Monte'sItinerario del Romanzo Picaresco Spagnuolo. Firenze: Sansoni, 1957.
See hisEl pensamineto de Cervantes. (Anejo VI,Revista de filologia espanola) Madrid: Hernando, 1925, pp. 230–239. For useful definitions of the picaresque genre and of thepícaro see my dissertation (op. cit.) on Hofmannsthal and East Asia (Toronto, 1971) and C. Guillén,Towards a Definition of the Picaresque. Proceedings of the International Comparative Literature Association, 1962, pp. 252–266.
Alemán, Mateo.Vida de Guzmán de Alfarache Il. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, Clásicos castellanos, 1955, p. 22. The same sad tone which high-lights life as a profound struggle is found in the boy's utterance when contemplating one of his Russian heroes. “How I envied Mitka! I suddenly understood a good deal of what one of the soldiers had said in a discussion with him. ‘Human being-that's a proud title. Man carries in himself his own private war, which he has to wage, win or lose, himself his own justice, which is his alone to administer’” (p. 235 — excerpts from Kosinski's novel are taken from the Houghton Mifflin edition of 1965).
The contemporary cultivators of the genre are legion. Among them one finds such novelists as Camilo José Cela (La familia de Pascual Duarte, andNuevas andanzas de Lazarillo de Tormes) and Nelson Algren (“The face on the Barroom Floor” as well as his superbly picaresqueA Walk on the Wild Side), B. Malamud (“The Magic Barrel”), to mention just a few. An area in which the picaresque anti-hero as well as picaresque adventures are expressed are in many contemporary films, a tradition which one witnesses as far back as Chaplin characters, gangster types of the Roaring Twenties, and reaches the itinerant adventures of “Easy Rider,” “Midnight Cowboy” and the rollicking satire of “M.A.S.H.”
I wish to disavow those critics who sought to identify an episodic technique as a literary failing. F. Courtney Tarr (“Literary and Artistic Unity in theLazarillo de Tormes”,PMLA, LXII (1927), 404–421) and R. S. Willis (“Lazarillo and the Pardoner: The Artistic Necessity of the Fifthtratado”,Hispanic Review, XXVII (1959), 267–279) have both dispelled such an erroneous notion as far as it has been applied toLazarillo de Tormes. In spite of its episodic structure,The Painted Bird, like its Spanish predecessor, displays an undeniable literary unity.
See Stuart Miller'sThe Picaresque Novel (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1967) for a studious treatment of the structure of the picaresque novel.
Later in the life of the central character, after he has been re-united with his parents, he is sent to a mountain area to convalesce. As he contemplates a skiing instructor praying, the boy thinks: “The instructor kneeled down for prayer while I looked on indulgently. Here was a grown man, educated in the city, who acted like a simple peasant and could not accept the idea that he was alone in the world and could expect no assistance from anyone. Every one of us stood alone, and the sooner a man realized that all the Gavrilas, Mitkas [his Russian friends] and Silent Ones [his mute companion in the orphanage] were expendable, the better for him. It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone thought only of himself ...” (268–8). This statement articulated in maturity but arrived at only after much experience, is a repitition of thepícaro's first intuition concerning his understanding of the world. Lazarillo says after he fell prey to the Blindman's wiles, “Verdad dice éste, que me cumple aviviar el ojo y avisar, pues solo soy, y pensar cómo me sepa valer.” (La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes. Claudio Guillén, ed. N. Y.: Dell-Laurel Language Library, 1966, p. 58). In theBuscón thistopos is similarly repeated when Diego Coronel informs Pablos: “Pablo, abre el ojo que asan carne; mira por ti, que aquí no tienes otro padre ni madre.” (Quevedo, F. de.El Buscón, Madrid: “La lectura”, 1927, p. 67. Edición de A. Castro.) Solitude and loneliness become, then, for the rogue the initial and most salient characteristic of the world he moves in.
See above, Ortega y Gasset, J.op. cit.“.
In the case of the Russian soldiers, Gavrila and Mitka, they are less masters than they are friends, although one can sense that the author has preserved the feature of the mentor-apprentice relationship. At this point in the novel, the author relinquishes the format of the master-servant relationship that he has used earlier. In spite of the fact that the boy becomes associated with another mute in the orphanage (The Silent One) one should not try to plead too strong a case for friendship in the novel. In the life of thepícaro there is little room for friendship, or other positive human values. One might argue that the German soldier's act of allowing the boy to escape when he was supposed to kill him is an act of charity (pp. 85–86). It, no doubt, is, but there is also an ambiguity here that one must reflect on. His early death, as tragic as it would have been, would havefreed him from the world; the author is committed to bringing the character into adulthood in a world in which malice and pain occupy an eminent place.
See above note 4.
For the character, the world is full of strange paradoxes and mistakes, his being taken for a Jew and gypsy being the most incomprehensible of all. This strangeness and the intuition of the world as unjust and “sin sentido” is crystallized in his mind when he studies a picture of Stalin: “He looked more of a gypsy than I did, more Jewish than the Jew killed by the German officer in the black uniform, more Jewish even than the boy found by the peasants on the railroad tracks. Stalin was lucky not to have lived his youth in the villages where I had stayed. If he had been beaten as a child all the time for his dark features, perhaps he would not have had so much time to help others; he might have been too busy just fending off the village boys and dogs” (214).
For a cogent development of this idea in the Renaissance and its applicability toLazarillo de Tormes, see G. M. Bertini'sIl Teatro Spagnolo del Primo Rinascimiento: seguito da uno studio suLazarillo de Tormes. Venezia: Montuoro, 1946.
The episode with the cruel carpenter ends in a manner all-too-reminiscent of the first chapter ofLazarillo. The reader will recall that Lazarillo has him jump into a post. The carpenter, through a quick movement of the boy (who has been tied to a string), falls into the ratfilled abandoned pill-box and is devoured there. The motif of “mocker-mocked”, also a common theme in the picaresque, is fulfilled here.
The partisans' treatment of dogs might also be noted in this same vein. At first, they played with the dog, then they threw him a bone and once he was won over by their apparent affection they would kill him (p. 84).
SeeEl Buscón, op. cit., F. de.El Buscón, Madrid: “La lectura”, 1927, p. 30
Bestiality and nymphomania are only two aspects of the complex sexual relationship between Makar and his two children. There are also hints of homosexuality and incest in their relationship.
“Life at the orphanage was full of unexpected attacks and brawls. Nearly everyone had a nickname. There was a boy in my class called the Tank because he pummeled with his fists anyone who stood in his way. There was a boy called the Cannon because he threw heavy objects at people for no particular reason. There were others: the Saber, who slashed the enemy with the edge of his arm; the Airplane who knocked you down and kicked you in the face; the Sniper, who aimed rocks from a distance; the Flamethrower, who lit slow-burning matches and tossed them into clothing and satchels. The girls also had their nicknames. The Grenade used to lacerate the faces of her enemies with a nail hidden in her palm. Another, the Partisan, small and unobtrusive crouched on the ground and tripped passersby with a neat leg snatch, while her ally, the Torpedo, would hug a prostrate opponent as though trying to make love, and then deal him a professional knee kick in the groin” (245–6).
Further examples of human behavior or human acting-out in a bestial or animalesque manner is seen at a fight which takes place at a wedding. The contenders are truly turned into beasts, accenting the bit with their teeth like enraged dogs, tearing off pieces of clothing and flesh (84). When the boy is dragged to various functions as a type of spectacle he begins to see animals in the faces of others. The process of metamorphic brutality takes solid shape in his mind: “The faces around me began to take on the features of the animals in the stories I recited ...” (95). So much of his contact with others is framed in hunting references, where the boy is, naturally, the prey: “... Taller than I, they closed over me like a living net trapping a bird ...” (104). As the boy formulates a picture of himself he begins to see himself as an animal and his contact with others as within a bestial framework: “Until now I had been a small bug that anyone might squash. From now on the humble bug would be an unapproachable bull ...” (143).
Lazarillo when he marries takes as a spouse the mistress of the Archpriest of San Salvador. Guzmán, in his second marriage, carries the love theme to its grossest conclusions, which is very much in consonance with the treatment of sex and love that one finds in Kosinski's novel. Guzmán ends up prostituting his wife (See my “Love and Marriage inGuzmán de Alfarache”, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, XV (1968), 123–138). Pablos ends his days with a prostitute, La Grajal. His other previous adventures offer no spark of love or tenderness, merely a wish for a better position in life (an understandable striving for acristiano nuevo) or simple gain. G. Alvarez studies thepícaro's love adventures in hisEl amor en la novela picaresca española. El Haya: Van Goor Zonen, 1958.
The boy does not forget the beating he suffers at the hands of the movie ticket-man. When he takes vengeance he does so only after some preparation so that the punishment will be better savored by the boy (264).
In theLazarillo de Tormes, the corrupt, inner world of Charles V; the decadent world of the Philips in theGuzmán and theBuscón; the Thirty Years War inSimplicissimus; inThe Painted Bird, the Second World War with all the attendent political, social and moral issues.
The episode of Labina's husband in an excellent case in point. In fact, it functions almost like an interpolated novel (189–195).
This is verified by the boy's admiration of the SS officer, resplendent in his uniform, the Russian soldiers covered with medals, or the boy's hero-worship of Mitka and his cherished rifle.
See above, note 12.
Quevedo, F. de.El Buscón, op. cit., F. de.El Buscón, Madrid: “La lectura”, 1927, p. 288.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ricapito, J.V. Jerzy Kosinski'sThe painted bird and the picaresque tradition. Neohelicon 5, 217–237 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02093355
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02093355