Picture This Picaresque

picaresque--a form of narrative usually episodic in nature, featuring a male or female protagonist who is of uncertain origins or from a lower social ranking and who is not motivated to a work ethic but rather earns his keep by skulduggery, wits, and deception; often satiric and ironic in nature, the picaresque form allows a close look at a type of society that is, by comparison with the protagonist, even lazier and more corrupt.

The protagonist of the picaresque tale--the picaro--is usually seen to be more upright and moral than those in whose company he is cast. He (or she, because DeFoe's Moll Flanders certainly fits the picaresque rubric) emerges more victorious and with greater integrity at the denouement, a dramatic demonstration that too much virtue is unbearable. Thus consider Huckleberry Finn, in the eponymous novel wherein his behavior is put in constant question, by himself and by others, causing him at the end to pretty much write off the societal norms and potentials he sees about him as he lights out for the territory ahead.

True enough, the Horatio Alger novels sold extremely well in their day, their prototype protagonist becoming a secular saint of grit, good cheer, hard work, and politeness. Equally true, such gritty individuals as Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo from The Midnight Cowboy attracted their share of devotees, largely because readers can recognize more of these characters in themselves than can recognize examples from the Alger novels.

The picaro or picara may appear to be short on wit or incentive as in Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Schweik, and thus more vulnerable. Ironically, such a character nevertheless emerges ahead of the game, the winner by a narrow-but-discernible margin over "them," the characters representing the less marginalized segments of a society. For all practical purposes, William Goldman's screen version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is an episodic trope of two bank robbers and the woman they both love, dancing picaresquely across the American West and parts of Bolivia, meant to convey the message that individuals at that historical time didn't have many opportunities for advancement and adventure. Similarly, the book and the screen version of Monte Walsh presented an episodic romp of a man whose primary ability in life was his talent for managing and breaking horses.

Picaresques have appeared in times of war and peace, in such specific locales as the American West, branches of the military (in war and in peace), and in the academic world such as the one portrayed by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim and the more extended worlds of academe as set forth by David Lodge. The underlying formula might be expressed as: Roguish character makes good in spite of himself. It is in many ways a thumbing of the authorial nose at the Horatio Alger or virtue rewarded tale. An underground legend of such a picaresque character persists in Richard Farina's compellingly antic Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, featuring Gnossos Papadopulis, who rides in--and then out--on a motorcycle.

Picaresque novels are deceptive because they seem to rely on the comedic, which is by definition one or two steps removed from humor because of its physicality. Such tales deftly move beyond the physical into the visceral, the intensity of the sad revelations of humor taking us by surprise to the point of burning the characters and the story into our memory. A number of The Canterbury Tales make this segue from the comedic to the more deeply felt; notable among these are The Pardoner's Tale and The Knight's Tale, each of which pays off in revelations of self-awareness in the principal characters at the expense of their self-esteem.

A little less fish, a lot bigger barrel, please

fish in a barrel--a metaphor for removing the need for skill in a contest or competition; tilting the conditions of a confrontation to a degree that insures easy solution; purging the doubt of final outcome from a dramatic narrative, thus an easy outcome from an endeavor.

This trope is an important one for the writer to remember. Readers do not want--cannot abide--results that come too easily. Even now, in the twenty-first century, there are those who think David got off too easily in his "contest" with Goliath, whom they try, in their revisionist history of the legendary sling-shot event, to represent as overly given to hubris. While it is true that readers respect and admire skill and cunning, they want these qualities to bring results after some pattern of trial and error. The scientist should not be allowed to come forth with a cure for cancer after spending only a week or two in the lab; she should have some added burden or incentive as a goal or as part of an emotional partnership approaching that of Capt. Ahab and Moby-Dick or Santiago and the great marlin.

The actual phrase "shooting fish in a barrel" has many possible meanings, beginning with the obvious question, is there any water in the barrel? Fish in a waterless barrel would likely be dead, making them a stationary target for the shooter. If there is indeed water in the barrel, discharging a gun into it would probably kill all the fish, thanks to the reverberation of sound. The common denominator in the concept is the absolute ease of outcome. The applicable dramatic denominator here is: Never take the reader where the reader wants to go, which is to say make things such as risk, misunderstanding, reversal, and surprise exponentially more likely to join the party as the story progresses.

A fish-in-a-barrel narrative is one in which the goal was not exquisite enough or was achieved too quickly and/or too easily, leaving some doubt in the reader's mind whether it was actually a "real" story or merely a shaggy-dog story. When a reader comes upon a story where some stated goal is achieved early on, the reader intuits the sinister hand of consequences, reaching metaphorically out to bring big time complication raining down on the protagonist. The reader waits for these complicating consequences.

Thomas Hardy rode into the twentieth century with a number of notable anti-fish-in-a-barrel novels, notable among them Jude, the Obscure, in which the protagonist had a specific goal for which he was emotionally and intellectually qualified and which, had Horatio Alger been the author, Jude would have at last achieved. But Hardy was Hardy, and Jude's seemingly reasonable goal met some fatal complications.

Bottom line: Something has to be given up, lost, or at least tempered before the goal is achieved, an observation that can lead to the ironic ending comparison between what has been gained and the price paid to achieve it. Not all endings are or need be ironic, yet it is nice to know that irony is there, waiting to be invited in.

I'll Never Forget...

iconic characters--individuals who exert transformative influence on the stories in which they appear; adults and young persons who are simultaneously focused on a goal, imbued with stoical good humor and empathy, should either be needed; persons whose responses under stress create a lasting impression with readers.

Whether they are of the ilk of Cormac McCarthy's sociopath killer, Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, the squeaky clean moralist, Sir Galahad of Arthurian legend, or the rather plain-appearing Jane Eyre, iconic characters have their eyes cast not on their immediate problems but seemingly fixed in intimate gaze with the reader. Appropriately enough, readers carry with them the images of such characters, long past the time their exploits in dealing with the entanglements of their plots are remembered. Even the wooden puppet, Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to become a real boy, is iconic not because of the choices he made but because of his goal.

What the character wants and the path he or she pursues in order to achieve these ends are often the most magnetic qualities for readers. Each goal becomes a pole star for the character, influencing direction and behavior. A good approach to examining the qualities of these icons, male and female, young, middle-aged, and old, is to start with the more simplistic ones, the Dorothy Gales, wanting to get back home from Oz; the Horatio Alger shoe boy in the eponymous Ragged Dick, wanting to work his way upward toward success and self-esteem; the quintessential male free spirit, Huckleberry Finn, wanting to get away from an abusive father and an overly structured social environment. From there move on toward stories in which the moral landscape is grayer, the issues less likely to settled with one last-chapter speech from the likes of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.

Some notable icons and what they want, which includes the real-life Joan as rendered by the Irish dramatist, George Bernard Shaw:

1. Emma Bovary excitement
2. Nora Helmer equality
3. Captain Ahab revenge
4. Jeffrey Spaulding lunch
5. Ratso Rizzi an angle--any angle
6. The Wife of Bath a husband who values her
7. Madam Arcarti a spell that actually works
8. Anton Chigurh people to play by the rules
9. Hester Prynne a good life for her daughter
10. Florentino Ariza Fermina Daza
11. Heathcliff Kathy Linton
12. The Pardoner respect

There are of course hundreds of icons to study, the better to assess what it is about them to cause them to stand out in the readers' memories. Hint: it is not necessarily their professional goals so much as it is the way they go about achieving their aims, their emotional responses to other characters, thus their empathy. Added hint: it is often the way they behave when they are feeling the most vulnerable--and make no mistake about it, they are vulnerable at various times--every one of them.

Final hint: make two lists of iconic characters, the first including all those you see as being conventional icons, the other list being entirely your own favorites, which may include favorites from stories you encountered in any medium.