Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History.

The unquestioned influence of the Spanish picaresque in European literature has been accompanied by continuous debate over the genre's very nature. More than any publication in decades, Peter Dunn's Spanish Picaresque Fiction sorts out for us the complexities and contradictions inherent in this field of study. Dunn pulls back the chronological layers of picaresque criticism and literary history that have been shaped by rather rigid notions of genre, canon, and socio-cultural relations. His study demonstrates that many of the current problems of picaresque criticism result from nineteenth-century concepts of the moral value of literature, the struggle of the individual, and the biological views of social and literary development. Dunn laments the tendency to ignore "othered" cultural forms such as oral and lowlife "literature" that are not easily categorizable but which are essential to understanding picaresque phenomena. At the same time, however, he does not uphold the picaresque as a precise mirror of socio-economic and political conditions of the times. For examples: the unknown author of Lazarillo de Tormes did not intend to inscribe a political ideology of poverty; Guzman de Alfarache is too complex to be understood within converso culture alone; and the Picara Justina is a comic mask for a male author who never questions the status of marginalized types. Neither does Dunn believe that there is a picaresque essence founded in contemporary notions of subjectivity. The self found in the early modern picaresque texts is not an inalienable self nor a totally alienated being but a subject constructed within discursive systems of the era and each particular text. Hence, the Buscon Pablos has no self-consciousness other than that of ridicule heaped on him by Quevedo's satiric preoccupations with status and hierarchy. Lazarillo, rather than an existential being foregrounded by textual gaps and indeterminacies, is an early modern self structured in social parodies from oral and learned traditions. Guzman's selfhood must be read through discursive systems of the sermon, confession, and other components of a theological language of the soul. Nevertheless, Dunn does not see the Guzman text dominated by Counter-Reformation moral reform, but rather by reform-minded social justice of the sort found in Mateo Aleman's other texts. In his broad survey of a variety of texts contending for picaresque status, Dunn maintains that transcendent definitions of genre distort the flexible and interlocking relationships of texts and readers in particular historical moments and the sense of genres as interlocking and flexible systems. He rejects rigid positioning of the picaresque as the historical separation of novel from romance, preferring to show how forms interact. In this context, Dunn rescues Cervantes' texts from the anti-picaresque label, holding that his quasi-picaresque characters arc part of a Cervantine concern for a social and literary polyphony. After Guzman, there is no stable practice of picaresque writing. The genre becomes an "elastic zone" in which one finds a "frivolous picaresque" catering to upper class prejudices and fantasies and belying its earlier status as reform-minded social satire. Dunn's highly instructive book goes far in revealing how the pieces of the picaresque puzzle fit together, and in concluding, suggests new critical paths for picaresque studies. Rather than emphasizing sociological approaches, Dunn proposes that the symbolic systems of anthropology (particularly carnival and liminoid practices) can bring us closer to understanding the picaresque's position between society and literature. These ideas are only tenuously traced, however, and one would hope that Dunn and others will continue to explore more contemporary anthropological approaches to the problematic picaresque.

Catherine Connor UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON