POSTCOLONIAL MODERNISM AND THE PICARESQUE NOVEL

230 Pages·2017·1.9 MB·English

by  ELZE

J E N S E L Z E
Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel
Literatures of Precarity
Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel
Jens Elze
Postcolonial
Modernism and the
Picaresque Novel
Literatures of Precarity
Jens Elze
Berlin, Germany
ISBN 978-3-319-51937-1 ISBN 978-3-319-51938-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933855
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A
cknowledgments
This book has been many years in the making and various individu-
als and institutions contributed immensely to its coming into existence.
The main portion of it was written and conceived as part of my doctoral
studies at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at
the Free University of Berlin between 2009 and 2012. This period of
focussed research and writing was generously funded by the German
Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). I wish to thank
my fellow graduate students for the enlightening and critical discus-
sions during that time and the administrative staff and advisory board
of the Graduate School for their support. Prof. Joachim Küpper of the
Graduate School provided valuable mentoring at that time and helped
to turn the dissertation into a truly comparative project. Important revi-
sions to the original dissertation have been made during my time at the
Department of English at the Free University of Berlin. I want to thank
in particular Prof. Andreas Mahler for inspiring discussions that have
expanded my understanding of the possibilities of literary scholarship,
even if not all the insights may be discernable in this book. Prof. Sabine
Schülting’s colloquium offered a valuable framework in which I was able
to discuss my work. Since 2014, the Graduate School for the Humanities
at the University of Goettingen has provided me with the opportunity to
pursue other research projects, while generously and patiently granting
me the time to also finalize this long overdue book project. Particular
thanks is owed to the administrative director and her staff.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
On a more abstract note, I would like to thank the various libraries
of Berlin and Göttingen for providing space, resources, and a focussed
atmosphere that benefitted the writing of this book and my friends for
extended lunch breaks that offered both input for and respite from the
writing process.
Most importantly, however, I would like to thank my supervisor and
mentor Prof Russell West-Pavlov for his unrelenting support, his intellec-
tual guidance, and his encouragement over the span of many years.
Berlin, 2017 Jens Elze
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Biography 33
3 Style 73
4 Identity 105
5 Narration 145
6 Abjection 177
7 Conclusion 213
Index 221
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Cosmological Capitalism, Postcolonial Modernism,
and the Picaresque
In the first chapter of the very first picaresque novel (1554) the epon-
ymous protagonist Lazarillo de Tormes steals a sausage from his first
master, a blind beggar. What ensues not only points to the poverty that
requires him to steal and to the form’s continuous relation to abjec-
tion, but also displays the utmost precariousness that picaros experi-
ence when it comes to securing objects, property, and identity. One of
the basic premises of property is to be able to keep something without
destroying it: to secure its value and retain its potential for later use.1
Lazarillo, however, is so afraid of his greedy master that as soon as he
takes hold of the sausage ‘I wolfed the sausage in a flash’ (14) [‘no tardé
in despacharla longaniza’ (38)], thereby destroying its potential for later
use, but at least summoning its nutritional energy. Or so he thinks. The
blind master, however, smells his theft: literally. When he tries to prove
his suspicion and puts his nose into Lazarillo’s mouth to olfactorily prove
the theft, he finds evidence, with the unintended side effect that he gets
more than—or all—he was looking for, as Lazarillo vomits what he has
eaten onto the blind man:
He stood up, seized me by the head, and bent down to smell me. He must
have got the scent like a bloodhound, for to satisfy himself, and because
he was so angry, he grasped me firmly, forced my mouth wide open, and
thrust his nose down my throat. His nose was long and sharp and his rage
had made it a lot longer so its tip touched my gullet. What with that, my
terror and the brief space of time which had not let the sausage settle, and
© The Author(s) 2017 1
J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_1
2 J. ELzE
most of all with the awful feeling of that enormous nose almost chok-
ing me, the deed and my greed were revealed and my master received his
property back; for, before he could get his trunk out of my mouth, my
stomach was so upset that I brought it all up, and his nose and the half-
digested sausage came out at the same time. (14–15)
Levantóse y asióme por la cabeza y llegóse a olerme; y como debió sentir el
huelgo, a uso de buen podenco, por mejor satisfacerse de la verdad, y con
la gran agonía que llevaba, asiéndome con las manos, abríame la boca más
de su derecho y desatentadamente metía la nariz, la cual él tenía luenga y
afilada, y a aquella sazón, con el enojo, se había augmentado un palmo;
con el pico de la cual me llegó a la gulilla. Y con esto, y con el gran miedo
que tenía, y con la brevedad del tiempo, la negra longaniza aún no había
hecho asiento en el estómago; y lo más principal: con el desiento de la
cumplidisíma nariz medio cuasi ahogándome, todas estas cosas se juntaron
y fueron causa que el hecho y golosina se manifestase y lo suyo fuese vuelto
a su dueno. De manera que, antes que el mal ciego sacase de mi boca su
trompa, tal alteración sintió mi estómago, que le dio con el hurto en ella,
de suerte que su nariz y la negra mal maxcada longaniza a un tiempo sali-
eron de mi boca. (38)
This return almost literally contradicts the later narrative about the mani-
festation of secure and naturally ordained ownership that John Locke put
forth in his Second Treatise on Government and that is still often recruited
to legitimate the allegedly meritocratic principles of liberal capitalism.
Locke asked:
He that is nourished by the acorns he picked under an oak, or the apples
he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to
himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did
they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled
or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? and it is
plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could.2
The question of when an item of produce really belongs to someone
must in Lazarillo’s precarious instance—fully contrary to Locke’s implied
trajectory—clearly be answered with ‘when he digested it’.1 Nothing, it
seems, could have enabled Lazarillo to keep the object for later use, and
only complete digestion could have at least guaranteed the short-term,
immediate usufruct the sausage could have provided through its energy.
Even what he has already swallowed and completely introjected is not
1 INTRODUCTION 3
secure and indissolubly tied to him but can—unintentionally or not—
be taken back. On every step of the scale that precedes digestion pos-
session remains highly precarious, cannot translate into property, and is
still likely to be lost. The scene in Lazarillo displays an utter precarity in
which all potential principles of property and security are undermined by
the fact that objects may always be taken back or be withheld. Lazarillo
may have stolen the sausage instead of having picked it from a tree, but
his master has so seriously underpaid and withheld food from him that
his theft is acceptable both morally and from the perspective of natural
law. As one of the often referenced philosophical founding fathers of
modern liberal capitalism, Locke, indeed, was not against the accumu-
lation of wealth or against inequality, but he insisted—though unfortu-
nately considered it a given—on the proof of merit, and on an equitable
transformation of nature without waste, hoarding, and ‘injury to others’,
that constituted the moral right to property. Regardless of how we evalu-
ate these meritocratic principles ethically and politically, they are usually
violated by the cosmological, exploitative, and containing tendencies of
capital and of actually existing capitalism. The scene shows how in the
picaresque—which a few pages earlier has violently introduced its pro-
tagonist to the newly emerging principles of self-interest—the claims of
merit, labour, and industry that Locke so valued are especially contained,
to the paradigmatic point at which not even larger quantities of earned
calories can be safely digested, thus, unmistakably, highlighting an actual
severing of moral philosophy from economics that haunts us to this very
day. The untamed agonistic self-interest that is advocated by (neo)lib-
eralism, in order to best govern economic relations and allegedly create
sociality as a by-product, is here literally blind and does not serve as an
invisible producer of social cohesion, but manifests utmost precarity by
even interfering with introjected and earned edibles.
Lazarillo’s highly precarious meal opens a trajectory that will be
prominent in many picaresque texts throughout literary history, even
though they will not interfere with the physical integrity of the individual
in as literal a sense as this. Everything the picaro possesses is always likely
to collapse or be taken away and is often only accessible through theft.
While the protagonists may at times dispose of money or goods of value,
they can never securely store or defend these items let alone secure them
against loss under operative property law. Balram Halwai in Aravind
Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) also evokes digestion, though in his case
metaphorically, to point to an absence of equilibrium in the neoliberal