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This chapter attempts to show how the comic mentality in Spain during 1600 unified the contrasting positions adopted by Miguel de Cervantes and his contemporaries. It suggests that the Spanish comic genre was able to overcome the crisis around 1600 because of Mateo Alemán's publication of the picaresque classic Guzman de Alfarache, the lifting of the ban on the comedia, and the socio-genetic and ideological pressures of the period. This chapter contends that the fiction written by Cervantes during this period was a reaction to existing social and cultural conditions.

A version of this chapter has appeared previously in print (“Guzmán de Alfarache’s ‘Other Self’: The Limits of Friendship in Spanish Picaresque Fiction” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700). In a brief episode from the longer fictional autobiographical narrative of Guzmán de Alfarache, Mateo Alemán explores the isolation of his picaresque protagonist through the device of friendship. Echoing concerns that go back as far as Cicero’s De amicitia, Guzmán’s formulation of the problem of finding friends highlights the social isolation of urban picaresque existence, that is, of life in a world in which deception and misrepresentation serve as the currency for almost all human interactions. After several chapters in which Guzmán only partially succeeds in finding friendship, the episode ends with the suicide of the protagonist’s only friend. Despite its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recalibrate the expectations of Aristotelian perfect friendship to the demands of the picaresque world, the novel nevertheless anticipates aspects of Cervantes’s more ambitious literary experiment with the representation of friendship in Don Quixote.

The publication of Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554 marked a significant point in the development of European narrative. Paralleling its titular protagonist, this short work transgressed a number of boundaries. Lazarillo defies the conventions of the idealistic fiction of the time as it helps to define new forms of realism and advances toward the realist novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As demonstrated in Don Quixote, Cervantes seems to have learned a valuable lesson from picaresque narrative (Lazarillo and its successor, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache) in terms of underscoring process along with product. This chapter focuses on early forms of the picaresque, the creation of a subgenre, the archetypal picaresque narratives (Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, and La vida del buscón), other picaresque narratives of Early Modern Spain, including feminine variations, the picaresque and realism, the picaresque and Cervantes, and the continuity of the picaresque.

This chapter examines the history of translation in/of the picaresque novel in relation to the concepts of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1935) and intertextuality (Kristeva, 1984), studying the systematic strategy of borrowing intertexts that may be said to have played an important role in the development of the picaresque novel in Spanish, French, and Portuguese as a heteroglossic genre. The first part discusses the theoretical framework and designates as intertexts the translated fragments inserted as episodes or intercalary short stories into Spanish, French, and Portuguese picaresque novels. The chapter contends that the identification of such (translated) intertexts allows picaresque novels from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to be described as eclectic translations (Ringmar, 2007). The second section dialogues with previous critical works on Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35) that have demonstrated the presence of a strong component of translation in the making of the picaresque novel, first in Spanish (Berruezo, 2011) and later in French (Cavillac, 1984). The last section uncovers alien discourses within four picaresque novels published in Portuguese in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.