Uses of the past: Variations on the picaresque in the Spanish postwar novel.

The dissertation examines references to the picaresque tradition present in postwar narrative, particularly as it manifests itself in four novels published between 1942 and 1963. While each of the writers Camilo Jose Cela ( La familia de Pascual Duarte), Dario Fernandez Flores (Lola, espejo oscuro), Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio ( Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhui), and Juan Marse (Ultimas tardes con Teresa), invokes the picaresque literary and cultural tradition, each author tinkers with selected elements of the picaresque in a distinct way, incorporating pieces of it as part of his individual novelistic project. In all of these novels, features of the Golden-Age picaresque are reconfigured and re-incorporated in such a way as to achieve a common effect: they undermine the reader's assumptions about the nature of socially-constructed categories inherited from the Hapsburg past, and consequently, they question the validity of the contemporary organizing social, political and economic structure. Through a combination of narrative techniques, the four novels point to the historical present (i.e., postwar Spain), and at the same time evidence a conscious effort to mark a certain distance from their disillusioned protagonists and their desolate environment. A possible explanation for this tension is related to censorship, in a very broad sense; because the novelists under analysis were under considerable constraints of expression, the literary tools at their disposal were necessarily limited. I suggest that their use of available tools included the recovery of elements from the shared cultural and literary past of the picaresque. The result of this process of synthesis is a narrative that originates in a concrete historical present, that works against the constraints of a repressive socio-political climate, and that moves toward a recasting of perceptions of shared Spanish experience.PhDLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureRomance literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131743/2/9929912.pd