Picaresque Mythology

Kerényi introduces the term picaresque mythology in his 1956 essay to name a genus the depth tradition had previously lacked a word for. “In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in sacred and magical rites, in man’s religious fears and exaltations, this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages” (Jung 1956, quoting the shared vocabulary). “We are concerned with here is picaresque mythology. It has always existed, only the proper name for it was lacking” (Kerényi 1956, p. 175).

The category connects the Spanish picaro — the rogue-hero of the novel from Lazarillo de Tormes through Rabelais to Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull — to the archaic mythological substrate of which it is, on Kerényi’s reading, a survival. The trickster is “the timeless root of all the picaresque creations of world literature, ramifying through all times and countries, and not reducible to a merely literary entity” (Kerényi 1956, p. 175). The Rabelaisian drastic, the carnival reversal, the lazzi of the commedia dell’arte, the Reynard the Fox cycle Goethe rewrote during the French Revolution — each is a register-shift of the same picaresque substrate.

The concept is load-bearing because it lets the depth tradition read literary forms — the picaresque novel, the satirical comedy, Old Comedy’s Dionysus in Frogs — as continuous with archaic mythology rather than as its secular replacement. The picaresque is “a vivid example of a characteristic of style common to both: the predominance of drastic entertainment” (Kerényi 1956, p. 179). Where the trickster survives, he survives in the drastic, the obscene, the irreverent — the register Jung finds again in the medieval Feast of Fools and the alchemical mercurius.

Relationships

Primary sources

radin-trickster-study-american (Kerényi 1956, pp. 175–183)
the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, §§465–470)