Gods, Monsters and Windmills

Dave Warren’s concept art for Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote

Illustration by Gustave Doré

Illustration by Gustave Doré

An important predecessor of the later novel was the picaresque narrative, which emerged in sixteenth-century Spain … “Picaro” is Spanish for “rogue,” and a typical story concerns the escapades of an insouciant rascal who lives by his wits and shows little if any alteration of character through a long succession of adventures. Picaresque fiction is realistic in manner, episodic in structure (that is, composed of a sequence of events held together largely because they happened to one person), and often satiric in aim.

Cervantes’s great quasi-picaresque narrative Don Quixote (1605) was the single most important progenitor of the modern novel; in it, an engaging madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric romance in the everyday world is used to explore the relationships of illusion and reality in human life. (Abrams and Harpham 227)

Metafiction is a term used for a novel that departs from realism and foregrounds the roles of the author in inventing the fiction and of the reader in receiving the fiction.

Peace-Burial at Sea (1842) by Joseph Mallord William Turner

Prospero by John Bramblitt

The Voyage of Life: Manhood (1842) by Thomas Cole

Pietà (1497-1500) by Michelangelo

The word “essay” stems from the French word “essayer,” which means to attempt or try something out. Montaigne’s Essays comprises 107 essays written in a didactic style to engage the reader, though he insists his work is for domestic and private use. He relies on Greek and Roman philosophy in his humanistic work, which explores the human race and man’s paradoxical, if imperfect, behavior. In “To the Reader,” Montaigne tells us the subject matter of his work. What is it?

The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870-3) by Ilya Repin

Mona Lisa with Bazooka Rocket by Banksy

On set for “In Voluptas Mors” (1951) with Salvador Dali – photograph by Philippe Halsman

The Wave or My Destiny (1857) by Victor Hugo

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943) by Salvador Dali

The Face of War (1940) by Salvador Dali

Joel Velis

Stanczyk (1862) by Jan Matejko

Roberta’s Image

From Abrams and Harpham, “A Glossary of Literary Terms”

Renaissance humanism assumed the dignity and central position of human beings in the universe; emphasized the importance in education of studying classical imaginative and philosophical literature, although with emphasis on its moral and practical rather than its aesthetic values; and insisted on the primacy, in ordering human life, of reason (considered the universal and defining human faculty) as opposed to the instinctual appetites and the “animal” passions. Many humanists also stressed the need, in education, for a rounded development of an individual’s diverse powers–physical, mental, artistic, and moral–as opposed to a merely technical or specialized kind of training. (144)

Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in “personal satire”), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even the entire human race. (320)

The term utopia designates the class of fictional writings that represent an ideal, nonexistent political and social way of life. It derives from Utopia (1515-16), a book written in Latin by the Renaissance humanist Sir Thomas More which describes a perfect commonwealth; More formed his title by conflating the Greek words “eutopia” (good place) and “outopia” (no place). The first and greatest instance of the literary type was Plato’s Republic (late fourth century BCE), which sets forth, in dialogue, the eternal Idea, or Form, of a perfect commonwealth that can at best be merely approximated by political organizations in the actual world. Most of the later utopias, like that of Sir Thomas More, represent their ideal state in the fiction of a distant country reached by a venturesome traveler. (378)