Some main ideas from this chapter
Addresses:
1. How the novels were intended/received
2. What posterity made fo them.
-Quijote IS related to the picaresque novel.
-Picaresque is born in 1554 with Lazarillo de Tormes (Anon.)
-1599-1615: Spanish fictional writing blooms
*Despite awareness of political decadence typified by Quevedo, most Spaniards still viewed Spain as a European power
Picaresque traits, per Lazarillo:
-disreputable drifter
-ignominous parentage
-employment as a servant
-acquisition of street wisdom
-scramble up social ladder
Lazarillo- ends up morally sunk though he claims "honorable achievement", marries servant of archpriest (had been his concubine). Becomes town crier for wines.
-many of the hoaxes depicted have their roots in tradtional proverbs, tales, etc.
-mimics the form of more notable bios by resembling a letter to an addressee
-comically droll, euphemistic phrasing of shameful events
More picaresque traits:
-brutal focus on drab/sordid aspects of life, "national brand of 'realism'"
Laz. becomes wandering servant of many masters, which partly accounts for why the novel can be so long rather than the short writing of the time.
Andrés in El árbol de la ciencia is a thought, critical, morose descendant of Lázaro. Later, picaresque style can be exploited to tell "quick witted struggle for survival in an urban jungle", sombre, socially critical and existentialist in more modern lit.
*past events can justify present (cynical) point of view
Info on Guzmán de Alfarache (who's not on the list)
In Don Quijote:
1. Inns as primordial theatres of conflict between hero's illusions and base reality
2. segregation of robust comedy from interpolated romance (why such big words?!?)
3. hero's alternation between lucid rationality and anarchic folly
4. choice of priests as beacons of enlightenment
D.Q.:
Launched by Amadis de Gaula, romances of chivalry (world of giants, knights, dragons)
Cervantes
-ridicules the genre because of it's improbability (thinks we should excite wonderment and not infringe verosimilitude).
-Later, Cervantes is ousted by Lope de Vega and his "pandering to vulgar taste" *public taste needed to be taught through parody how to discriminate good romance from bad* (This ideas seems important...pre-enlightenment feeling).
-strong objections to heavy didacticism of contemporary literature of entertainment as an offense against decorum.
Irony/mirroring to show typical traits of the época, e.g. D.Q.'s speech on Golden age which is a "poetic fable" and "rhetorical oration", shows bookish character and chivalric mania.
Speech leads in to love story between shepherdess, Marcela and her admirer, Grisótomo
*Notorious "metafictionality"-Cervantes alludes within the novels to it's own fictional status (DQ: the madman who believes he can live chivalric literature)
D.Q. begins to observe black as white, sheep as armies, windmills as giants, basins as helmets.
*overlooks a distinction that Cervantes takes for granted- difference between mad make-believe and really doing or being.
Since 1800, shift in conception about DQ's mania. No longer seen as ridiculous, albeit amiable, aberration but as a paradigm of the human imagination's struggle to transcend the pull of base reality, and thus to acheive some form of salvation, religious, artistic, or other
-by discussing humdrum aspects of the real world (menudencias), he opens up a whole new battery of things to become objects of fictional representation (e.g Knights who have time to write up wills)
-at the end of D.Q., DQ dies and leaves things to Sancho Panza in his will
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