Picaresque
The effect of the picaresque novel - seeing things through the eyes of a traveling, rough diamond - would influence, outside of Spain, Voltaire (Candide), Kipling (Kim) and umpteen Westerns. It also led, I think in no small part, to the creation of the most recent album I have bought, Picaresque by the Decembrists. I would recommend listening to ‘We Both Go Down Together’, here courtesy of Last.FM, where you can listen to some of their other songs.
As I mentioned in the comments to my earlier post on the western literary canon, a book called Lazarillo de Tormes by an anonymous, sixteenth-century Spanish author. The plot is relatively simple; the son of the widow of a Spanish soldier recounts, from adulthood, his family life and then how he served as apprentice to a “variety of higher-ups”.
The book is “important” and worth reading for a few reasons. For one thing, the Catholic church placed it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which is usually a good sign of a book that should be read. It also breaks new ground in a few different ways. In a time when only nobles traveled around, it was impossible to have a good story that dealt with commoners as, for the most part, nothing happened except being hit on the head by the occasional passing knight errant. The Lazarillo introduced the picaro, and gave the ability to wander and tell a story through a series of events to the commoner and the peasant. The protagonist was a boy treated as a boy, not a short adult. The book deals with women and non-whites as people, bearing in mind the previous sentence and the innocence of the child, equal to white men. It also shocked a lot of people as it portrayed the good and the great as being just like everyone else. It was a biting satire. Going back to the literary canon, I wonder how much it is actually a canon of works that have had an effect on the Anglo-Saxon world.
xD.
