POSTCOLONIAL MODERNISM AND THE PICARESQUE NOVEL [1st ed.] 978-3-319-51938-8, 3319519387, 978-3-319-51937-1

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-vii
Introduction (Jens Elze)....Pages 1-32
Biography (Jens Elze)....Pages 33-72
Style (Jens Elze)....Pages 73-104
Identity (Jens Elze)....Pages 105-143
Narration (Jens Elze)....Pages 145-176
Abjection (Jens Elze)....Pages 177-211
Conclusion (Jens Elze)....Pages 213-220
Back Matter ....Pages 221-225

Citation preview

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 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © Clive Watts/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making and various individuals 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 discussions 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 revisions 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 intellectual guidance, and his encouragement over the span of many years. Berlin, 2017

Jens Elze

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Biography  33 3 Style  73 4 Identity  105 5 Narration  145 6 Abjection  177 7 Conclusion  213 Index  221

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Cosmological Capitalism, Postcolonial Modernism, and the Picaresque

In the first chapter of the very first picaresque novel (1554) the eponymous 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 abjection, but also displays the utmost precariousness that picaros experience 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 J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_1

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2  J. Elze most of all with the awful feeling of that enormous nose almost choking 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 halfdigested 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 salieron de mi boca. (38)

This return almost literally contradicts the later narrative about the manifestation 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

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secure and indissolubly tied to him but can—unintentionally or not— be taken back. On every step of the scale that precedes digestion possession 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 accumulation of wealth or against inequality, but he insisted—though unfortunately 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 evaluate 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 protagonist 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)liberalism, 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

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Indian version of cosmological capitalism. He nostalgically evokes the static and hierarchical order of the caste system and the quasi-socialism of Nehruvian India as a well-ordered zoo, in which everyone had his place and was basically provided for; he complains that now ‘animal law has replaced zoo law’ and mourns that the entrepreneurial chimera of potential social mobility has ‘cheated him of his destiny’ and created a pseudomeritocratic social order where complex and timeless social hierarchies and national systems of allocation have, however, not been replaced by industriousness and labour, but by ‘two castes: Men with big bellies, and Men with small bellies’ (64).3 This entailed a certain democratization in terms of diversity as ‘it didn’t matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up’. Instead it was only important that you ‘were the most ferocious and hungriest’ in terms of pursuing your self-interest. While couched in the language of blind merit, the notion that in order to rise one had to have ‘eaten everyone else up’ quite explicitly estranges these modes of emergence from all equilibrating tendencies and the obligation not to do ‘injury to others’ of Lockean natural law and moral philosophy. Balram’s life narrative will eventually show how improbable social mobility remains in this clearly dichotomized new order, and highlight the complicit circumstances necessary for its promise of entrepreneurial self-realization to ever be realized. Setting out from these scenes of precarious devouring this book seeks to read the early modern and the postcolonial instances of the picaresque novel cross-historically as Literatures of Precarity. This focus on deprivation offers both a sociogenesis of the genre, but also a necessary re-perspectivization of some of the aesthetic principles of the picaresque that have been unduly conflated with the carnivalesque, with experimentalism, and, more recently, with modernism and postmodernism. While scholarship has focussed on the emergence of the picaresque in the hunger-ridden lower classes of early modern Spain, no study has consistently observed how this precarity translates into other social and formal aspects of the genre and how it defines the form across time. Instead, the picaresque novel is often evoked as the antiidealist other of the dignified Bildungsroman, but this anti-idealism tends to be pathologized or deployed for a postmodern critical and aesthetic project rather than grounded socially in the scarce landscapes of early modern Spain or the neoliberal shantytowns of the postcolony. These two periods, therefore, seem especially fruitful for the reconstruction of a distinctive typology of the form that intersects its precarious social and formal elements.

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With respect to postcolonial works of art, the term ‘picaresque’ has surged remarkably in popularity since the mid-2000s, coinciding with the commercial success and critical acclaim of two works in particular: Aravind Adiga’s (picaresque) novel, The White Tiger, an instant bestseller that won the Booker Prize, and Danny Boyle’s film, Slumdog Millionaire, based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup (2005), a box-office hit that won eight Academy Awards including best motion picture. What was it that prompted critics to refer to these fictions as picaresque? Both works feature descriptions of poverty and of life marked by the early loss of the character’s parents’, meandering, religious marginalization, and scatological carnivalesque encounters, which offers a clear continuity with the precarious and unprivileged lives of Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzman de Alfarache (1599), or El Buscón (1622) in the bleak landscapes of early modern Spain. Past scholarship has brought each of these sociological aspects into play as defining features of the picaresque novel.4 Like Lazarillo de Tormes, both postcolonial works are also marked by an existential narrative situation: in The White Tiger a letter addressed to the prime minister of China that advocates entrepreneurism; in Slumdog Millionaire the protagonist’s interrogation by a police officer conducted between two sessions of the Indian version of the global TV phenomenon Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? This interrogation, structured by the questions the protagonist has thus far, to the surprise of the upper-class producers of the show, been able to answer, prompts him to narrate his life. What has in my opinion most strongly contributed to the pigeonholing of these novels as picaresque is a concern of these texts with unreliability, impurity, with a comic voice, with anti-essentialism, with mimicry and indeterminacy, concerns that are critical of the developmental hypotheses of modernization and development. M.I.A.’s iconic track ‘Paper Planes’ also features prominently in the movie and further underscores this notion by celebrating migratory uprootedness and protean identity in its lyrics, which reference the fabrication of visas and the paperweight lightness of identity and hustling. These concerns resonate with a proclaimed ‘imaginedness of nationhood, the un-generalizable subjectivism of memory and experience, the instability of social identity, the volatility of truth, the narratorial constructedness of history’,5 which to a large extent have fuelled the success of other postcolonial novels since the 1970s and helped proliferate what Neil Lazarus has termed a ‘monopoly of legitimacy of modernism’ in postcolonial literatures.6 The picaresque was, however, either simply not mentioned in this modernist

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context or used as an emblematic shorthand of this experimental and antiidealist trend in postcolonial literatures. This has led to its over-identification with all forms of non-developmental and playful biographical novels and extended the scope of its canon to the point where the designation has become unspecific, to be used ‘whenever something ‘episodic’ tied together by an antihero needs a name’.7 As its long-standing opposition to idealism seems to associate it closely with modernism,8 it has been a prominent genre frame with which to diagnose anti-idealist and anti-realist tendencies in second-wave postcolonial writing.9 Postcolonial modernism and the picaresque, however, require urgent distinction: as literary genres, in their politics vis-à-vis liberalism, and in their ways of engaging the critical capacities of readers. The sustained generic and cross-historical approach to the picaresque that this book will offer can help us understand more about the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of this specific rather than emblematic strand of postcolonial modernist literature and its relation to global capitalism. These specificities appear better nuanced when one also looks back at the genre’s history and origin in early capitalism. When reading early modern picaresque novels from the perspective of postcolonial or globalization studies it becomes immediately evident how many of the themes and concepts that have been dominant in the field in the past decades can also anachronistically be found in the early modern picaresque: cultural transition, negotiation of social hierarchies, mobility, marginality, and last but not least, autobiographical form.10 What then is the role and potential of the picaresque for postcolonial literatures in addressing the dilemmas of global capitalism through local precarity? In order to answer this question, one must also tackle the still-largely-unresolved poetics of the picaresque novel. This book will, therefore, also be a contribution to the typology of the picaresque novel, observing especially how its generic predisposition to precarity pertains to the early modern beginning and to the neoliberal end of the relation between modernity and capitalism and the subject formations, cultures of self, and narrative forms that came with it. Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel will reassess the picaresque’s relation to the Bildungsroman and to other modernist and postmodernist forms of postcolonial literature and will reintegrate the anti-metaphysical concerns implied in narratives of social survival and in postmodernism to review some of the picaresque’s formal concerns—which it may or may not share with other forms of postcolonial modernism and

1 INTRODUCTION 

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postmodernism—through the lens of precarity and precariousness. The distinction between modernism and postmodernism in postcolonial literatures is not always an easy one. I will use the terms almost indistinguishably—often written ‘(post)modernist’—whenever a literary and critical constellation is referenced that in an experimental idiom critiques universality, insists on the irreconcilability of individual and modern society, frowns on the epistemological naivety and suspiciousness of the struggle for inclusion into modernity, or celebrates the fragmentation that derives from these tensions. To counter what he perceived to be an anti-modern and experimental monopoly in postcolonial literatures, Neil Lazarus offered the view that modernism is inherently a project of communicating ‘disconsolation’ in modernity that need not necessarily be stylistically experimental or anti-humanist in outlook.11 The postcolonial picaresque’s modernism belongs to that kind of disconsoling project, as its precarious landscapes and modes of emergence ultimately mourn the absence and deformation of modern social goods under capitalism—socially meaningful autonomy, human sovereignty, material security, and dignity—rather than critique the allegedly unduly universalist assumptions of modernity, even though its precarious style may seem to gravitate towards other experimental and more thoroughly anti-modern strands of modernism and postmodernism. A central element in this distinction is the specifically ambivalent structure of the postcolonial picaresque, for which its role as extroverted global literature read in the West is decisive. This is not to celebrate subversion and ambivalence or to posit these as the only or ideal functions of literature. Quite the contrary, they seem to me to represent a rather limiting aesthetic principle and an impedingly overrated political tool. Rather, it is to show how the picaresque models subjects that rely on the narrow options of subversion and complicity to highlight that these are the only ones available to many precarious subjects, especially in the contexts in which continued deprivation is the only alternative. Both the Bildungsroman and the (post)modernist tradition in postcolonial literature ultimately offer trajectories of liberal critique either through emergence, tragic failure, or the ironic and situated rejection and disenchantment of discursively produced values, essentialisms, and social imaginaries. Picaresque plots, on the other hand, offer no safe place of social critique, neither through the unfolding, nor through the obstruction of development, nor through the embrace of difference. In the context of the more explicitly economic rather than cultural forms

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of emergence in the picaresque it is also more difficult for a Western reader to disengage, at least in a spirit of liberalism, from the practices of the picaros and from the landscapes of global capitalism, neoliberalism, and neo-imperialism in which they occur. They disallow identification as much as defamation, which reproduces the precarious and atopical demands and pressures in which the picaros usually operate onto a global reader. Picaros usually follow the demand to change oneself and the world, albeit in a world that seeks to reproduce itself, its class relations, and its cultural, ethnic, and racist hierarchies. They embrace the capitalist temporalities of entrepreneurial self-assertion (Adiga), the imperialist perpetuation of violence (Hamid), or the proto-neoliberal propagation of flexibility (Naipaul) and fully apply the questionable ethics of these practices to exceed the legal frameworks that protect their hierarchies. As such they may occasionally cross boundaries of class, but the systemic ethical principles are left fully intact. The precarious landscapes in which this questionable emergence takes place somewhat legitimate the picaros’ responses, but cannot excuse them. They offer no alternative ethical principle—which even postmodernism purported to do according to some12—but merely a figure of dubious reproduction. This, of course, is a rather bleak outlook, despite the comic idiom in which the novels are related, and refers back to the atopical and paradoxical mode of critique of Lazarillo de Tormes that I will discuss in Chap. 2. The five main aspects of the picaresque that are addressed in this book are biography, style, identity, narrative, and abjection. In all of these aspects the picaresque differs markedly from the aspirations of the Bildungsroman, but also from those anti-modern concerns of postcolonial (post)modernism that quasi-platonically seek to overcome the discursive falsities that structure reality to aim at a more meaningful (often understood as increasingly individual) reality. The picaresque’s specific modernist dimension, on the other hand, does not offer a critique of the universality of modernity or the temporalities of history, but exposes the material obstacles that prevent physical inclusion into the realm of modernity and the ‘cruel optimism’ that continues to enlist people’s hopes and efforts in a capitalist promise of permeability that is contained by the permanence of quasi-cosmological hierarchy.13

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Genre and Texts Some of the phrases and subheadings of this book and its introduction clearly require—and will receive—further explanation and may at first glance even tend towards the oxymoronic. Even the seemingly least problematic term ‘picaresque novel’ needs initial typological and historical clarification, especially so for readers of postcolonial literatures. The designation ‘picaresque novel’ has had a particularly volatile career, especially in English-language literatures. Studies of the picaresque novel have often differed radically in their treatment of the picaresque canon, with canonical inclusion or exclusion seemingly decided according to arbitrary standards.14 In 1986 Ulrich Wicks articulated his hope that ‘a general “poetics of picaresque narrative” will someday be written,’15 a wish that merely euphemized the still lurking question of how to conceive of a picaresque genre, further attesting to the observation that ‘the field of the picaresque […] is roiling with problems of definition and method’.16 From assertions that ‘the picaresque sensu strictu are only a few Spanish novels and their European translations and imitations’,17 and that it does not make sense, therefore, to apply the term to anything created beyond early modern Spain; to defeatist assertions that any novelistic form simply changes over time, so that one cannot expect to find picaresque novels beyond their original literary and social context; to assertions that the picaresque has been the most successful and long-lived genre of Western literature18;wide-ranging disagreements as to its impact and ‘nature’ are observable. These discussions of the picaresque genre have gone so far as to ask, ‘Does the picaresque novel exist?’,19 or have alternatively mourned and tried to redefine the ‘failing center’ of the picaresque.20 The introduction to a volume on The Transnational Picaresque recently identified the picaresque’s ‘most controversial aspects—its definition and its transcultural continuity across the centuries’.21 In postcolonial contexts the term picaresque has sometimes come to designate behaviourally the political irresponsibility of autocratic leaders, opportunism, or the complex structures of corruption and bureaucracy in which typically roguish traits help one to thrive. Thereby, it has become a somewhat exoticizing concept focussing on the carnivalesque, disorganized, and unofficial aspects of postcolonial political orders, as evidenced by a 2008 article—with no apparent focus on literature—entitled ‘Pakistani Picaresque’ that bore the subheading ‘A surreal encounter in an Islamabad office reveals in an instant why billions of

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dollars spent on aid in Pakistan have made so little difference in the lives of the countries poor’.22 Such disenabling conflations may be among the reasons why the Bildungsroman—as Chap. 2 of this book will argue in detail—with its possibility of asserting affirmative political claims, has been the more prominent biographical form, at least in academic discussions of postcolonial literature. Literatures of Precarity addresses these ongoing controversies and seeks to understand and define the picaresque by tying its transhistorical and transcultural impact and relevance to the ways in which it is continuously expressive of, and reactive to, widespread precarity while itself remaining allegorically enigmatic and rhetorically precarious. While the picaresque genre is susceptible to change in terms of its setting, style, length, or language, this study is not concerned with the transformation of the picaresque archetype or the expansion of the concept in a specific literary historical instance, but rather with the thematic, formal, and ethical continuity of precarity in the picaresque. In order not to ‘misjudge certain transformations originating from an archetypal text as structures of genre’,23 I will focus on distinct and surprisingly stable continuities, or reverberations, between these texts to establish the ‘precarious’ as a generic marker of the picaresque. For this reason, careful readings of early modern Spanish picaresque novels are indispensable to this book, even though its main concern is the picaresque of postcolonial modernism. This book is also not about consistently pigeonholing single texts as picaresque, but rather, about developing the central cultural and literary, aesthetic and ethical categories of a precarious picaresque. Therefore, it will set out from five eminent categories of literary and cultural studies, and through them turn to those picaresque texts that expose the precarity of the respective category most explicitly. Accordingly, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) as the genre prototype and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger receive a somewhat privileged treatment in this book, especially in Chaps. 2 and 3. Chapter 2 will read the precarious picaresque in the context of the Bildungsroman and its theories, and juxtapose the temporalities of development with the logics of post-adjustment entrepreneurism. Postcolonial entrepreneurism is often exoticized and connected with practices like hawking, but it is also closely related to the ideologies and post-developmental practices of global neoliberalism. Chapter 3 will then work out the picaresque’s stylistic similarities with modernism and postmodernism. These similarities derive from a highly episodic style

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and paradigmatic narration, which in the picaresque is not an experimental refutation of the social imaginaries of modernity, but an emplotment of the concrete experience of social precarity in global capitalism and its onto-epistemological consequences. To make its point, the chapter will also offer a reading of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) in the context of the picaresque to further elaborate these overlaps and distinctions between the precarious picaresque and postcolonial (post) modernism. V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967) and Francisco de Quevedo’s Historia de la vida del Buscón (1626) serve as the primary sources for observing picaresque precarious identities in Chap. 4. They have been chosen for this chapter because as conservative parodies of the picaresque Naipaul’s and Quevedo’s texts hyperbolize and satirize the specificities of protean picaresque mimicry to such an extent that its operations become observable even in the current theoretical context of ubiquitous performativity, where the reading of role playing would otherwise pose methodological and epistemological problems. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013)—the story of a terrorist narrating his conversion from business consultancy to Islamic fundamentalism, and a novel written as a postcolonial entrepreneurial self-help book with the reader’s ‘you’ as its projecting protagonist—will be read in the context of narrative unreliability and its precarious strategies of reader implication and plot denial in Chap. 5. Chapter 6 will return more explicitly to the problems of postcolonial deprivation and pollution and its representation across a global divide. By focussing on the prominence of industrially induced abjection in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) this chapter will highlight the representational problems of humanitarianism and the modes of precariousness that result in its ethical and narrative suspension of the political. I have chosen to place these six postcolonial novels by five authors at the heart of this book, not only because they lend themselves to a systematic discussion in which each of them allows us to examine one of the specific formal and social aspects of picaresque precarity, but also because they all share common concerns that merit the designation picaresque, without risking a loss of clarity in regard to that term. All of them can also be read in the context of postcolonial modernism more broadly, but they also have to be differentiated from its concerns, as my reading of Rushdie will demonstrate. The focus on precarity also helps to distinguish the precarious picaresque from those semi-picaresque works of the

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eighteenth and the early twentieth century that may be more suitably designated as adventurous and modernist rather than picaresque. This relative narrowing of the genre is important in order not to conflate the form with all the modes of strategic anti-essentialism and experimentalism that have appeared throughout the modern era. At the same time, many of the concerns developed here can of course be transposed to other works, to either understand picaresque aspects within them or to extrapolate their ethical perspectives precisely in distinction to the picaresque. My aim and method in this book is not to offer strictly economic readings. Precarity refers rather generally to the disenabling material conditions that have shaped the early modern Spanish picaresque and that now have given rise to the postcolonial picaresque and its precarious subjects and narrative forms. I will occasionally refer to socio-economic developments and trajectories, even though the novels usually do not thematize them explicitly, but rather perform the ways of life and social emergence that are only possible within the landscapes these developments have produced, materially and ideologically. The economic dimension of my readings will largely pertain to the tension between cosmology and capitalism, which creates spaces of destitution and temporalities of emancipation that are unviable and highly contradictory.

Pretexts, Contexts, Subtexts Though this study is not primarily about reconstructing potential contexts for the picaresque, the proposed transhistorical notion of precarity makes some initial observations on social and (trans)historical context necessary, especially to illuminate and historicize further what is meant by cosmological capitalism. The issue of the social, economic, and literary climate or context of the Spanish novela picaresca has been extensively—though by no means conclusively—discussed. Many critics have insisted on the picaresque novel’s unprecedented novelty and fecundity [novedad y fecundidad],24 as attributable only to the brilliance of its anonymous author: ‘Literary criticism of Lazarillo […] has noted the work’s originality and its contribution to the modern novel without troubling itself over the discursive models imitated, parodied, or subverted’.25 I do not concur with these assumptions of a ‘spontaneous generation’; nevertheless, some recent approaches convincingly read both the social realism and the pseudo-autobiographical form of the novela picaresca as—somewhat spontaneous—aesthetic and/or

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rhetorical reactions to very concrete social and communicational contexts. Most important for our context is the ‘economopoetic’ approach, which considers the picaresque novel to have emerged in the specific material and economic scarcity of early modern Spain.26 Sixteenthcentury Spain was simultaneously marked by a declining population, droughts, and by an influx of colonial products and precious metals from the Americas, which flooded the Iberian mainland and subsequently led to inflation,27 and which ‘destabilized crafts and trade’.28 Furthermore, the imperial wealth emanating from colonies overseas was not used to develop pre-industrial or advanced agricultural structures as it was in Northern Italy, some Southern German countries, or France and England.29 Rather, those riches were invested speculatively abroad and expended for mostly ostentatious consumption by an aristocratic elite heavily caught up in maintaining and expressing traditional hierarchies. This privileged class insisted on Catholic morals, purity of blood, and knightly honour over emerging notions of capitalism, wage labour, productivity, and social mobility.30 Due to the unproductiveness of the unenterprising Spanish elites, a large-scale development of wage labour in agriculture and industry was foreclosed and swathes of the lower class were thrown into indigence.31 The situation intensified as this large-scale non-productivity—which was derisively referred to as ‘spagnolismo’ in Italy throughout the seventeenth century—conflicted with an emergent discourse of economic self-reliance, which questioned the stable and meritless earthly roles assigned as part of the worldly representation of a cosmological order. The stability of this order was partly indebted to a relatively widespread system of charity that had provided basic necessities to the poor and that considered poverty an ontological category. Now, the ‘relationship between society and its poor’ was deeply affected by ‘the changing ideologies that leave the two groups no longer beneficently interrelated, but in conflict with each other.’32 Poverty was invested with self-responsibility and changed from a divinely ordained lot to a personal failure, anticipating capitalism’s logic of punishing and excluding all those who acted without the sufficient motives and ‘appropriate motivations’.33 Outside of these changing discourses on poverty, the old timeless hierarchies of feudalism remained unquestioned, which helped to eventually hamper the emergence of a fully-fledged capitalist system of production in Spain. The resulting lack of industrial and agricultural development that could have provided the means of proletarian (in its original sense of ‘wage-earning’)

14  J. Elze

self-reliance drove many from neediness into utter destitution. That was the socio-economic climate into which the picaresque emerged: ‘Picaresque marginality […] echoed throughout the […] unchartered landscape of a low life society teeming with human mediocrity and afflicted by economic indigence’.34 This formative tension between a dominant cosmology and an emergent ideology of capitalism that produced widespread indigence is termed ‘cosmological capitalism’ throughout this book. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has explicitly conceived of Lazarillo de Tormes as a novel that stands between cosmological time and historical time.35 Lazáro’s selfnarrative, through which he attempts to explain to a high authority how he came to be what he is, relies on a notion of history and actualization that overcomes the auspices of guaranteed reality and cosmological time according to which everyone and everything was secured by and contained in a divinely ordained place. At the same time his narrative also demonstrates the impermeability of social rank—except through favouritism, which also secures him his final position as a town crier—and the endurance of the economies of prestige and timeless being. My phrase ‘cosmological capitalism’ relies on Gumbrecht’s observation of this interstitial position, but replaces ‘history’ with ‘capitalism’ to focus on that aspect of social life that was most imminently impacted by this inconsequential turn towards history and self-realization. The seemingly oxymoronic phrase ‘cosmological capitalism’, then, denotes the paradoxical simultaneity of the historical temporality officially inherent in capitalism that assumes the meritocratic potential to change one’s lot by will and work, which collides with a dominant system of estates steeped in prestige, timeless hierarchy, cultural authenticity, and cosmological time, for which social mobility—not to speak of equality—is an utter disruption. If picaresque novels ever project any change of status, they achieve arrangements—often through larceny—that are highly precarious and ‘never secure and certainly not providentially ordained’.36 The second model of a precarious picaresque sociogenesis concerns the emergence of the ‘I’ form of the picaresque. In terms of the history of individualism for which the picaresque has often been recruited, the reign of Carlos V (1518–1555) was marked by the relative ‘free play’ of Erasmist humanism, including an emerging self-authorizing individualism that conflicted with the timeless authority of nobility.37 This relative openness initiated the cultural flourishing captured by the famous notion of the Spanish Golden Age (el siglo de oro) and coincided with

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

what Ramon Resina has called ‘The short and happy life of the novel in Spain’ during which, among other forms, the picaresque novel developed.38 Conversely, the following era of Phillip II was marked by the Counter-Reformation, re-feudalization, and ethnic homogenization, which resulted in the expulsion of the economically productive groups of the Judeos and Moriscos in 1609. Resina has maintained that, ‘the unified background of belief […] may have bolstered Castilian theatre of the seventeenth century’, but in its privileging of essence over actualization ‘it ravaged the possibilities of the novel’.39 Indeed novelistic production had completely broken down by the end of the seventeenth century‚ following a period of conservative imitation and epigonic novels which had ended by‚ at the very latest‚ 1650. From that time to the mid-nineteenth-century proliferation of Galdos’ realism, hardly any Spanish novels appeared that are known today. In these contexts, the urge to conform that affected many converted Jews and Muslims who were occasionally successful in the emerging parvenu economies of the time can be seen as a model for the paradoxical inclusion strategies and ‘impression management’ of the picaresque.40 Cultural identity and status became more pervarsively negotiable and performative throughout the seventeenth century when emerging bourgeois economies progressively, though contested by the resilient system of estates, turned class and caste into a potentially transformable and purchasable category, as titles of nobility could increasingly be bought or acquired by merit, a development that was heavily critiqued by Francisco de Quevedo, author of El Buscón, and by other proponents of the old order of estates. Among those who were under constant suspicion of transgressing the traditional social boundaries were, in particular, cristianos nuevos and conversos, whose ‘loyalty to Roman Catholicism and to the Spanish Monarchy was open to question.’41 Based on its contemporaneity with these ubiquitous structures of suspicion in an officially mobile, though highly prohibitive and traditional society, the narrative situation of Lazarillo de Tormes can be grounded in a rhetorical and bureaucratic act of questioning. While Lázaro’s ‘writing in obedience to a command’ had already been tentatively associated with the ‘autobiographical confessions responding to admonitions by the Inquisition’,42 Susanne Zepp, using a range of archival material, has provided more conclusive philological evidence of the structural similarities between the prologue and narrative situation of Lazarillo de Tormes with concrete inquisition protocols.43 Besides a report from an inquisition officer these

16  J. Elze

protocols included the so called informaciones genealógicas (genealogical information), which consisted of a confession and a family genealogy by the accused person. These narrative self-defences convey a major structural similarity between these two forms of writing, as Lázaro also narrates his family history to explain and make plausible how he has come to be in a certain situation. The shared economic precariousness is also striking, as Lázaro stands to lose his income and means of living should his self-defence be unsuccessful. Similarly, the property of a person implicated in an Inquisition trial was always, if only temporarily, confiscated. This perspective further supports the long-held assumption that the anonymous writer of Lazarillo de Tormes was, like Mateo Aleman, author of Guzman de Alfarache (1599), a converso: a Jew converted to Catholicism. The form of the picaresque novel has been modelled on this indispensable communicational pattern of a highly existentially motivated narrative. It can be read as an aesthetic, or even rhetorical response to situations in which one’s life, its prehistory, and preconditions, and a narrative that is supposed to relate a coherent personal substance, have to be etiologically geared towards one specific situation of utterance. The consistent ‘I-form’ of the picaresque, whose emergence always seems somewhat premature and surprising in its early modern Spanish socioliterary-historical context, may be grasped as the aesthetic projection of such an existential and rhetorical autobiographical act. Both its economopoetic and confessional aspects link the emergence of the picaresque to forms of precarity and precariousness: economically as socio-economic insecurity that sparks certain modes of survival artistry that are not governed by substantial personal and professional ethics, and rhetorically as ‘a line of argument, inference, opinion’ that is ‘insecurely founded or reasoned, doubtful, dubious’.44 Both aspects, one thematically as literature of precarity, the other formally or performatively as precarious literature, will be central to this book and have, hitherto, if at all, been treated in isolation. The long career of the picaresque raises the above-mentioned questions regarding the formal and thematic continuity and transformation of those novels that are said to participate in the genre of the ‘picaresque novel’. This continuity does not necessarily have to be an active intertextuality. Such an intention is not only difficult to prove, it also does not necessarily contribute to a better understanding of the form. More important is that ‘all of them arrived at narrative solutions for addressing

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

specific problems germane to human self-understanding in the particular context that have vital features in common with the Spanish precursors’.45 These ‘particular contexts’ or ‘cultural climates’, I maintain, are always marked by structures of precarity in cosmological capitalism, which I consider to recur whenever strong capitalist ideologies of selfreliance conflict with the containing and cosmological tendencies of capital as that which is held by a few and enables them to generate further wealth, while inflicting a cruel optimism of social mobility and meritocracy on those whose labour cannot effectively result in their predictable social emergence.46

The Picaresque, Postcoloniality, and Neoliberalism While the early modern Spanish picaresque emerged socially from both an impenetrable order of prestige that was aporetically combined with self-reliance and from a general suspicion of cristianos nuevos as threats to the social body, similar economic demands and cultural exclusionisms are discernible in more recent postcolonial writing. Recent postcolonial studies—at least those indebted to the tradition of subaltern studies— are also largely concerned with the margins of an officially penetrable global order and the accompanying notions of economic self-reliance as well as of ethical and legal self-responsibility. These concepts conflict with the effectively impenetrable imperialistic and neoliberal structures that replaced official colonialism only to secure the very same hierarchies under another guise. Likewise, not only potential terrorists (as in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist) but transnational migrants and members of minorities more generally—supposedly unwilling to integrate and unable to participate meaningfully in metropolitan economies47—are inclined to give accounts of themselves, to provide aetiologies and apologias, at times with their rights suspended. This resonates with some of the narrative structures and the paranoia that were already at stake in the Inquisition genealogies. The postcolonial picaresque is not usually resistant in any political sense, but, like the early modern picaresque, or rather in a state of paradox. The conflicting demands and radical gaps in this social and economic landscape leave little room for action, conveying the haunting proximity to each other of abjection and wealth and the sense of ‘a widening chasm—within and between nations—that separates the mega-rich

18  J. Elze

from the destitute’.48 In this context, the postcolonial picaresque, like its early modern predecessor, exposes a precarity induced by what I have termed cosmological capitalism. Especially after the demise of the Bandung era in the 1970s and the subsequent neoliberal reforms of the World Bank and the IMF, postcolonial economies were forced to open themselves to the influx of global capital and were urged to abandon state-based systems of allocation. These changes were also spurred by the exoticist belief that the postcolonial world is fraught with corruption and incompetence and cannot be developed without constant control and performance standards set by the West. Large public sectors were radically downsized, enforcing liberalization of markets, austerity, and entrepreneurial ideology without, however, providing the infrastructure for economic self-reliance or social mobility. An expansion of the wage labour market in some former colonies and a certain amount of revenue from exploiting and exporting natural resources are now often cited as the visible positive effects of these processes, even if the last few years have again demonstrated the precariousness of an enforced specialized reliance on raw materials. At the same time, Western companies profited in much greater measure by their access to the cheap human and natural resources of these countries; the global inequalities in living standards worsened dramatically after these economic policies were implemented; and poverty in many parts of the former colonial world even became more severe.49 This growing discrepancy—in tandem with the increased economic discrepancies within the West that it helped mitigate—served to uphold a capitalist system based on perpetual growth (rates), while hierarchies between the metropolis and the postcolony were not subject to historical change through systemically implemented development. Instead debt, global governance, and austerity led to what Vijay Prashad explicitly termed a ‘new cosmology’50 with a clearly assigned place for the postcolony and strictly plotted temporalities of southern economic emergence that were largely geared towards securing ‘the flow of tribute from the rest of the world’ to the West.51 The ideological, political, and theoretical demise of the notion of large-scale development, partly propagated through postmodern and postcolonial theory itself, contributed further to translating ‘history into hierarchy’.52 Of course capitalism has always—though perhaps with less severe effects than in early modern Spain and the contemporary postcolony— been cosmological, in the sense that it has never delivered on the promise of radical historicity, meritocracy, and self-reliance. World-systems

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

analysis has suggested that historically capitalism has always preferred monopoly, or at least oligopoly, in order to best realize its priority of endless accumulation.53 More importantly, from a standpoint of social mobility capitalism usually operates within already existing structures of capital ownership, inheritance, and constrained accessibility—not to mention recent corporate bailouts—that always corrupt its historical and meritocratic pretensions. The paradox here connoted by cosmological capitalism in some instances resembles Chomsky’s popular notion of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. This idea, which describes the practices of corporate welfare through tax breaks etc. is also visible on the surface of many picaresque novels. The White Tiger, for example, constantly, though of course polemically, refers to bribery, tax cuts, and legal favouritism awarded to comprador elites. Despite the appeal of Chomsky’s terminology, however, the juxtaposition of cosmology and capitalism conflates more clearly the unrealized historical premise of capitalism with its operative social imperative. Historically, cosmological capitalism has a special relation to the modes of accumulation that Giovanni Arrighi, in The Long Twentieth Century, describes as phases of financial expansion. Both the heyday of the early modern picaresque (1550–1610) and the postcolonial picaresque (1980-present) fall into such phases of ‘discontinuous change’.54 Financial expansion is marked by the tendency of ‘capital to revert to its money form’, as compared to phases of ‘material expansion … during which the capitalist world-economy grows along a single developmental path’.55 Through bypassing, or at least, by outsourcing production, financial expansion typically results in a dissociation of economic growth and job creation and on ‘descending flows of labour seeking investment’,56 as it relies on discrepancies of living standards and tends to monopolize the benefits of economic growth among those who hold capital. Not only does this systemic reliance on lowest-wage labour and standards of living conflict with the universally proclaimed ethics of inalienable human rights, as advocated in the global Bildungsroman, but its complete departure from the development path perhaps also requires other literary modes of expression.57 What we call neoliberalism is of course an important reference point in this context, though cosmological capitalism is not historically reducible to neoliberalism. In its orthodoxy neoliberalism may even contradict cosmological tendencies not based in pure entrepreneurial merit, unbiased competition, and the unimpeded free operations of the market. In

20  J. Elze

practice, however, neoliberalism in particular has ‘cosmologically’ undermined these principles by fostering rather than abandoning the inherited asymmetries of power and information on which its liberal and meritocratic orthodoxy is built; by allowing monopoly and oligopoly in the interest of capital; and by constantly allowing interventions in the market in favour of capital or the bailing out of banks, while otherwise holding (welfare) states to the principles of frugality and austerity. Neoliberalism historically emerged—or rather was set up—in response to a crisis of capital. It ended—at least in the West—a ‘strategic compromise between capital and Labour’ that had created unprecedented degrees of equality in the years following World War II, though this was an equality undoubtedly still firmly steeped in capitalism.58 By the early 1970s growth rates were slowing down and the well-lobbied political response was to increase the vertical pressure by abandoning mitigating measures of the state, reducing the state apparatus and its services, and by providing the conditions for rising profits, placing the power of wealth creation for all as dependent on the growth of corporations and the mitigating ideology of trickle-down. Neoliberalism is a form of cosmological capitalism because of the demands of self-responsibility it places on the individual in a context in which economic improvement without capital becomes increasingly difficult and in which labour— where it is at all possible—does often not suffice to accumulate property and capital. Neoliberalism, first and foremost, denotes the aspiration of capital to foster its class interests and implement a series of policies aimed at a restructuring of the relation between the state, the economy, and the individual in the United States and Europe.59 It was then exported globally through the policies of global institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, as well as through corporations who acted globally, seeking ever more favourable conditions of production to further increase profit margins. Privatization, austerity, and low taxes are among neoliberalism’s primary principles to increase revenue for capital holders and corporations. At the same time, neoliberalism likes to camouflage itself as non-ideological, and emphasizes the potential and responsibility of the individual as long as it is equipped with the highest degree of entrepreneurial freedom and celebrates the power of the market to regulate all interactions in the most effective and just manner. It recruits an anthropology that sees humanity as motivated entirely by competition and the desire to avoid deprivation, and as averse to homogeneity and explicit

1 INTRODUCTION 

21

sociality, a world view that makes it easier to translate inequality into difference. Social regulations—when they exceed the frameworks necessary to conduct business and protect property—and the fiscal and political instruments to achieve them are considered obstructive and overbearing, rather than meaningful and just. Neoliberalism thus operates by associating itself with a strong notion of individual freedom that has been instrumental in helping it to enter the realm of ‘common sense’.60 This emphasis on freedom does not primarily serve either the individual, or communal emergence from repression—though it capitalizes on these positive ideas and opposes them to socialism and social democracy—but promotes an entrepreneurial dissociation from all social obligations that effectively leads to a suspension of sociality altogether.61 Neoliberalism’s notion of individual and entrepreneurial freedom often operates in tandem with a self-congratulatory conflation of the moral with the legal, which leads to forms of exploitation and repression that are easily refuted as such because they are being sanctioned by the letter of the law. This suspension of the ethical, which is also displayed and exploited in the postcolonial picaresque, also hints at the anti-democratic and cosmological tendencies of neoliberalism and its ‘strong preference … for judicial decision rather than democratic and parliamentary decision making’.62 Meritocracy, though effectively suspended in such a system based on capital ownership, serves as the primary ideological vehicle with which that system uses to ridicule socialist and welfare movements, to marginalize the unemployed, and to punish alleged violations of the principles of hard work and frugality. As such it has direct ontological implications as it changes the relation between the human and the social totality and succeeds in thoroughly economizing all aspects of human life and human relations. Moreover, the effort one invests should not be expected to result in old-fashioned and overbearing trajectories of ‘formalized work routines’ and ‘predictable careers and pathways through life’ but in an embrace of ‘Lifelong Learning, Flexibility, the Mobile Workforce, the Primacy of the Short Term’.63 Ideologically, therefore ‘individual success or failure are interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings … rather than being attributed to any systemic property’.64 This is even manifest in neoliberalism’s most laudable aspect, namely its ostensibly empowering deployment of education and equal opportunity (deeply embraced by the left-liberal camp) that did however also serve to replace social struggle and welfare, by allegedly enabling everyone to acquire the skills to isolate oneself and transcend social heritage. Not

22  J. Elze

only does such a mode of social politics build on a dubious and atomizing form of sociality through individual emergence, it also operates by assuming conditions that have certainly not been indifferently administered across barriers of class, race, gender, or region. Neoliberalism and the global politics of adjustment it has endorsed are certainly the political and economic cause of many of the bleak realities of precarity to which the postcolonial picaresque novel responds. Whenever I use the term later in this book, however, it refers not so much to explicit political programmes as to the climates of precarity and the precarious ontological conditions, civil societies, and temporalities of emergence that they have produced materially and through the diffusion of their ideology, especially in the postcolony. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger explores how in these precarious circumstances excessively materialist entrepreneurism thrives as the only strategy of social mobility. The novel’s protagonist explores the full potential of neoliberal entrepreneurism’s suspension of the ethical, even if his ‘ultimate act of entrepreneurism’—the murder of his boss—is of course registered as a crime by the letter of the law. His ultimate entrepreneurial action and its legitimation is reminiscent of the ‘histories of taking’ of the criminalized members of the exploited working classes in eighteenth-century Britain, who according to Peter Linebaugh, either adopted an antinomian viewpoint that, given the moral depravity of the upper classes, ‘there is no law—or one of cynical, individualistic materialism’.65 While cosmological capitalism and neoliberalism are not historically and systematically reducible to one another, the latter has certainly proven a privileged instrument for increasing the cosmological, hierarchical, and timeless tendencies of the former and provided the ground for the postcolonial picaresque. Proponents of World-systems theory have even noted that the current monopolization of benefits in fact tends towards an actual re-feudalization, albeit without spelling out the name. The need to seek for the ever lower production costs that Western capitalism since the 1970s has so strongly relied on may ultimately only be resolved by a questioning of the century-long proliferation of wage labour. According to Immanuel Wallerstein this may either tend towards anti-capitalist social movements who aim at larger systemic transformation, or result in the need of the imperative of economic growth to explicitly reroute production through forms of labour that are excluded from the payment of wages, but rely on other forms of remuneration, thus severing completely the two sides of capitalism: expansion of wealth

1 INTRODUCTION 

23

and its meritocratic premise (and promise). Within the latter trajectory the current discrepancies are only a last step towards an official neo-feudalism and a truly cosmological capitalism, in which the adjective ‘cosmological’ turns from a marker of paradox into an actual epithet.

Precarity, Contingency, and Postcolonial Modernism It follows from the differentiation between the postcolonial picaresque and postcolonial (post)modernism that precarity is not synonymous with the general contingency or volatility of meaning, language, and society that has been the object of postmodernist and post-structuralist critique. Precarity designates how, within stabilized and stabilizing economic, social, and symbolic systems, certain subjects are produced as unstable, as unprotected, unable to rely on progressively building a ‘good life’ on those programmatically safe—if historically contingent—premises of modernity. Modernization has certainly failed in the endeavour to create perpetual justice and equality and equip humanity with the immanent power to fabricate its conditions of living consciously and transparently. Nonetheless, the nexus of democracy and modern capitalism has been experienced and naturalized by many as stable. At the margins of those systems, or within its clefts, these meanings and stabilities, however, remain precarious and do not operate to include—or even operate by not including—just any subject. Experiencing structures of precarity may heighten the awareness of a system’s contingency and—especially in the context of neoliberal globalization—the costs and exceptions that contribute to a felt stability elsewhere. This condition, however, is not one of living contingently, but of living precariously. ‘Precarious’ is the ideal concept with which to describe and integrate the specific configurations of the picaresque in terms of formal, topical, and sociogenetic aspects. It is a term that has gained currency in social debates and has even been introduced into the realm of theory, most notably by Judith Butler.66 Having been used primarily in the realm of ‘object relations’ (e.g. a precarious ladder), its semantic core has shifted recently through its mostly being used in social and economic contexts, instances of which I will highlight throughout, but especially in Chaps. 2 and 6 (‘she made a precarious living by writing’). Semantically, it can be extended into areas of confessional credibility (Chap. 5), tenuous emplotment (Chap. 3) and protean identity (Chap. 4): literally, as in a disguise, a mask may sit precariously on a face, a piece of cloth may

24  J. Elze

hang on a string, as much as a ladder may stand on shaky ground. The concept’s dimension of ‘dubious’ discourse has already been mentioned above. Historically, the term has had a strong legal dimension: originating in Roman law and extending into the Middle Ages, precarium designated an order of law in which rights were given upon request. They were granted by one person to another under specific circumstances, and could be revoked at will. As a mode of property law, the related German practice of Prekarie was vital to feudal structures and to agricultural production in the early Middle Ages, when the church or feudal lords gave land to subjects—sometimes land that had been previously donated by those same subjects—who could then use it without owning it.67 It, therefore, conflicts with the guarantee and rigidity that is usually applied in modern law, and contrasts starkly with the aprioristic and universal notion of human rights. This precarious configuration is replicated in the apologia form of picaresque narratives, which always request a certain exception and/or exemption from accountability in consideration of the hardships that the heroes experience throughout their lives. Not incidentally, the etymology of ‘precarious’ dates back to the Latin word preces, which means ‘to request’. This aspired-to bilateral arrangement is central to the relationship between the rhetorical precariousness of the picaresque, the undeniable existential precarity of its protagonists, and the ethical suspensions that they conduct and that point to the precariousness of social values under the auspices of cosmological capitalism. Recent public interest in everything connected with the word stem ‘precarious’ seems to stretch a notion that has also been emphasized for the semantics of the adjective ‘picaresque’: ‘Of a lifestyle, etc.: wandering, drifting; transitory, impermanent’.68 Especially in Europe, but also increasingly elsewhere, public debates concerned with the ‘social question in the twenty first century’ and a structural lack of a positive and developmental social and economic outlook have taken place.69 In their wake, the term ‘precariat’ was coined, but is however not fully clear in its social reference: on the one hand, it designates the lack of long-term contracts for well-educated urban professionals, who increasingly work on project-based jobs, commissions, or short-term-contracts. Less prominently, the term describes the more radically unprivileged situation of the structural unemployment of sections of (former) lower-working-class populations in the metropolis that have in addition been unfavourably affected by an ‘adjustment’ of the extent of the welfare state signifying more control of these populations, and fewer benefits and less dignity

1 INTRODUCTION 

25

for them. This section of the ‘underclass’, which is permanently unable to enter, or is foreclosed from entering reliable employment, has been rechristened the ‘outdistanced precariat’.70 This latter precariat even lacks the social agency of the organized proletarian class and in the Third World also lacks the ‘genealogically based’ identity of the subaltern.71 They thus combine an existential precariousness with an economic precarity that is condensed in the picaresque’s traditional propensity to ‘atopy’—a social placelessness in terms of genealogy and aspiration—that will serve as its main category of differentiation from the Bildungsroman. This book is concerned with those structures of global cosmological capitalism that create, rely on, and reproduce conditions of precarity and the precarious postcolonial narrative’s responses to—and projections of— these conditions. Given how poverty is distributed globally and within the West, it is clear that precarity is unequally distributed along the lines of race and ethnicity. At the same time, the turn towards economic and social categories effected by the focus on precarity aims to suggest that the trajectories of cultural and anti-racist emergence, the liberal turn towards diversity, and the temporalities of freedom associated with it are in themselves insufficient categories for promoting justice and have become problematically embroiled with (neo)liberalism after they became isolated from other forms of social struggle.72 This is not to suggest that racism has been overcome or that the problems associated with it have in any way become obsolete: quite the contrary, they are in the middle of an ugly and conspicuous comeback in both the United States and Western Europe. Nonetheless, I want to suggest that the social realities of racism cannot be meaningfully tackled without a sustained investment with questions of class, precarity, and (economic) individualism. Otherwise it will ultimately play out two categories of oppression against one another. Thus, race is not treated as a central isolated category of this book, even though I will argue in Chap. 4 that also in terms of equality of race and ethnicity cosmological capitalism has not delivered on its historical promise. Postcolonial precarity is usually not an issue of explicit legislative or popular racism, but is entangled with a structural indifference to distant and culturally different suffering, on which the governance of global capitalism can rely. Racist stereotyping, however, plays a huge role in the assessment of global capitalism and often makes it sound as if roguish Indian entrepreneurism and Chinese state corporations have

26  J. Elze

invented global capitalism and its problems, as if refugees and the subaltern precariat are morally responsible for descending flows of labour, or as if African-American hip-hop culture has single-handedly brought forth an obsession with cars and ostentation. The actual continuities between liberal capitalism and the alleged exotic excesses of excessive entrepreneurism and cultures of self are comically exposed in the postcolonial picaresque novels treated in this study. This dynamic of the postcolonial picaresque follows upon a strong African-American (and Black British) tradition of the form that dates back to Ralph Ellison’s existentialistically precarious Invisible Man (1957) and includes more recent and more playful texts such as Paul Beatty’s Slumberland (2008). Another recent spike in the use of ‘precarious’ came in the wake of discussions about modernity’s perpetual production of ‘bare-life’, sparked by Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and with Judith Butler’s explicit application of the term to discourses of humanization and dehumanization. In her Precarious Life she argues, via Levinas, that there is ‘an ethical demand of the other’ asserted by ‘what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself ’.73 ‘Precarious life’ for her connotes an awareness of the perpetual perishability of life. Despite her clearly political agenda in that book, her use of ‘precarious’ as perishability resonates strongly with the philosophical lack of ontological foundations implied in ‘contingency’,74 which claims that the rupture of being born is only precariously covered by those social constructions and ideologies of modernity that have agreed on the avoidance of suffering as the primary good, but ontologically cannot guarantee security and stability. In this view, modern structures of biopolitics, bureaucracy, and notions of the social are exposed as contingent, but also as productive of social relations, rather than expressive. Such approaches are fundamentally concerned with the contingency and precariousness of, not with the denied participation in the structures and promises of modernity. Butler’s use of ‘precarious’ fails to focus on the stability that derives from these social structures and identities for many and does not separate this relative—internalized or intertextual—stability from the precarity that affects the life of those excluded from and marginalized by it. Butler’s emphases on contingency, precariousness, and constructivism are, nonetheless, eventually relevant to the precarious picaresque because they create an awareness of the volatile ground on which our perceived stabilities rest, for their

1 INTRODUCTION 

27

principally fiduciary configurations. While these structures and internalized values may intertextually create relative social and epistemological stability, picaros intersubjectively suspend these values, not only because they realize their discursive status, but especially as they witness their constant states of exception, thereby pointing also perhaps to an ultimately paradoxical relation between the promises of modernity and the aspirations of liberal capitalism. Thus, the concept of precarity that defines the picaresque concerns the social and symbolic precariousness of individuals and their lives in early and postcolonial modernity—not as alternative or multiple modernities that would embrace difference or seek to escape modernity’s alleged homogeneity, but as marginal aspects of and precarious positions within a singular modernity. Precarity describes the uncertain, unresolved status that many individuals are assigned within and without these often otherwise stable systems of modernity. Socio-economically, the reach and security of this elusive stability, of course, seems generally to have diminished after its heyday in the post-World-War-II North Atlantic world. Nonetheless, it still makes sense, ethically, to speak of a distinctive, rather than an all-encompassing condition of precarity, especially in a postcolonial context, as colonial domination partly enabled the earlier social compromises in the West and neocolonial  exploitation still mitigates some effects of neoliberal accumulation through maintaining widespread consumption. Aside from the necessary absence of utter destitution, notions of developmental biography, of coherent identity, of transparent cause and effect, and of referential narrative are categories that help underpin assumptions of relative stability. This study will show how the picaresque novel always precariously unsettles all of these very notions. It is, therefore, this study’s premise that a picaresque novel is constituted as such by the central precarious categories of this book: ‘unsteady biographies’ (in this chapter), ‘incoherent style’ (Chap. 3), ‘volatile identities’ (Chap. 4), ‘unreliable narration’ (Chap. 5), and ‘destitution’ (Chap. 6). All of them—to return to the title of my introduction—mark instances of a novelistic picaresque response, in the aesthetic framework of postcolonial modernism, to the paradoxical pressures of cosmological capitalism.

28  J. Elze

Notes

1. See Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 2011), 333; Die Philosophie des Geldes. Gesamtausgabe VI, ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), 412. 2. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London: 1824), 146. 3. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (London: Atlantic Books, 2008): 64. 4.  See for instance Claudio Guillén, “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” in Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 71–106; Matthias Bauer, Der Schelmenroman (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994), 10–13; Giancarlo Maiorino, “Picaresque Economopoetics: At the Watershed of Living Standards,” in The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, ed. Giancarlo Mairoino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–39; Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 18. 5. Neil Lazarus, “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 423–438. Here: 431. 6. Ibid. 7. Ulrich Wicks,  “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” PMLA 89, no. 2 (1974): 240–249. Here: 240. 8. See Thomas G. Pavel, The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 51–71. 9.  See Joshua D. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (1999): 22–59. 10. See Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation (London: Routledge, 2009), p. ix; see also David Huddart, Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2008). 11. Lazarus, “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism,” 431. 12. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988). 13.  See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 14. See Marina S. Brownlee, “Discursive Parameters of the Picaresque,” in The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue’s Tale, ed. Carmen BenitoVessels and Michael Zappala (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 25–35. Here: 27. 15.  Ulrich Wicks, “Picaro, Picaresque: The Picaresque in Literary Scholarship,” in Upstarts, Wanderers or Swindlers: Anatomy of the Picaro:

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29

A Critical Anthology, ed. Gustavo Pellon and Julio Rodriguez-Luis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986), 23–52. Here: 47. 16. Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala, “Preface,” in The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue’s Tale, ed. Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 11–24. Here: 18. 17. Harry Sieber, The Picaresque (London: Methuen, 1977), 58. 18.  See Frederick Monteser, The Picaresque Element in Western Literature (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1975). 19. Daniel Eisenberg, “Does the Picaresque Novel Exist?” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 26 (1979): 203–219. 20. W.M. Frohock, “The Failing Center: Recent Fiction and the Picaresque Tradition,” in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 3, no. 1 (1969): 62–69. 21.  J.A.G. Ardila, “Introduction: Transnational Picaresque,” Philological Quarterly 89, no. 1 (2010): 1–12. Here: 4. 22.  Samia Altaf, “Pakistan Picaresque,” The Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 1  (2008): 14–21. Here: 14. 23. Klaus W. Hempfer, Gattungstheorie: Information und Synthese (Munich: Fink, 1973), 133. 24. Marcel Bataillon. Novedad y fecundidad del Lazarillo de Tormes (Salamanca: Anaya, 1968). 25. Antonio Gómez-Moriena, Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism: The Spanish Golden Age (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 32. 26. See Giancarlo Maiorino, “Picaresque Economopoetics: At the Watershed of Living Standards,” in The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, ed. Maiorino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–39. 27.  See James Casey, Early Modern Spain: A Social history (London: Routledge, 1999), 61–89. 28. See Pavel, The Lives of the Novel, 57. 29.  See Bernhard Malkmus, “The Picaresque Mode and Economies of Circulation,” in Das Paradigma des Pikaresken/The Paradigm of the Picaresque, ed. Christoph Ehland and Robert Fajen (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 179–200. Here: 180–181. 30. See José Antonio Maravall, La Literatura Picaresca desde la Historia Social (Siglos xvi y yvii) (Madrid: Taurus, 1986), 176–181. 31. Giancarlo Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance. “Lazarillo de Tormes” and the Picaresque Art of Survival (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003), 12. 32. Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 4.



30  J. Elze 33. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 24. 34.  Giancarlo Maiorino, “Renaissance Marginalities,” in The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, ed. Maiorino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xi–xxviii. Here: xviii. 35. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Cosmologial Time and the Impossibility of Closure. A Structural Element in Spanish Golden Age Narratives,” in Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, ed. Marina S. Brownlee and Gumbrecht (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 304–321. 36. Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48. 37. Joan Ramon Resina, “The Short, Happy Life of the Novel in Spain,” in The Novel. Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 301–312. Here: 306. 38. Ibid. 39. Resina, “The Short and Happy Life,” 306. 40. Bernhard Malkmus, The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shapeshifter (New York: Continuum, 2011), 31. 41. “Limpieza de sangre,” in The Oxford Companion to Spanish Literature, ed. Philip Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 329. 42. Gómez-Moriena, Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism, 33. 43.  See Susanne Zepp, Herkunft und Textkultur: Über jüdische Erfahrungswelten in romanischen Literaturen 1499–1627 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2010), 85–108. 44. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149548?redirectedFrom=precarious# eid, last accessed 08/22/2012. 45. Malkmus, The German Pícaro and Modernity, 16. 46. See Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 47.  See Anja Schwarz and Russell West-Pavlov, “Introduction,” in Polyculturalism and Discourse, ed. Anja Schwarz and Russell West-Pavlov (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), ix. 48.  See Ashwani Sharma, “Postcolonial Racism, White Paranoia, and the Terrors of Multiculturalism,” in Racism Postcolonialism Europe, ed. Graham Huggan and Ian Law (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2009), 119–130. Here: 127. 49. See Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London: Verso, 2012), 231–234. 50. Prashad, The Poorer Nations, 47. 51.  See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 87–98.

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52. See James Ferguson, “Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 166–181. 53. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 26–27. 54.  Scott Lash, “Capitalism and Metaphysics,” Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 5 (September 2007): 1–26. 55. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994), 8–9. 56. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 348. 57.  See Joseph Slaughter, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1405–1423. 58. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2. 59. See Prashad, The Poorer Nations, 47. 60. See Harvey, A Brief History, 39–63. 61. See Elizabeth Povinelli, “A Flight from Freedom,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 145–165. 62. Harvey, A Brief History, 66. 63. Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 100; Das Gespenst des Kapitals (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2011), 138. 64. Harvey, A Brief History, 65. 65. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1991), xxi. 66. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). 67.  See Brigitte Kasten, “Agrarische Innovationen durch Prekarien?” in Tätigkeitsfelder und Erfahrungshorizonte des ländlichen Menschen in der frühmittelalterlichen Grundherrschaft (bis ca. 1000), ed. Kasten (Munich: Franz Steiner, 2006), 139–154. 68. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/143325?redirectedFrom=picaresque #eid, last accessed 20 September 2012. 69.  See Robert Castel and Klaus Dörre (eds.), Prekarität, Abstieg, Ausgrenzung: Die soziale Frage am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2009). 70.  h ttp://www.fes.de/aktuell/documents/061017_Gesellschaft_im_ Reformprozess_komplett.pdf. 71. Simon During, “Precariousness, Literature and the Humanities Today,” Australian Humanities Review 58 (2015): 51–56. Here: 53.

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72. See Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Picador, 2006). 73. Butler, Precarious Life, 134. 74. Gerhard von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard, “Vorwort,” in Kontingenz (Poetik und Hermeneutik XVII), ed. Gerhard von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard (Munich: Fink, 1998), xi–xvi. Here:  xii.

CHAPTER 2

Biography

picaresque, adj. 2. Of a lifestyle, etc.: wandering, drifting; transitory, impermanent. precarious, adj. 2.c. Subject to or fraught with physical danger or insecurity; at risk of falling, collapse, or similar accident; unsound, unsafe

Introduction At a critical juncture in his adolescence, young Wilhelm Meister, hero of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s seminal novel of formation Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) receives the following advice on how to actively lead a life truly worth living. It is a piece of advice that is mainly concerned with the relation between human will and rationality to necessity and fortune: The web of life is woven of necessity and chance. Man’s reason stands between them and governs both, treating necessity as the foundation of its being and at the same time guiding the operation of chance to its own advantage, for man only deserves to be called a god of this earth, as long as in the exercise of reason he stands firm and immovable. Woe then to him who has been accustomed from youth to confound necessity with arbitrary will, and to ascribe to chance a sort of reason, which it seems a kind of religious duty to obey! What is this but to renounce our own judgment and to allow unopposed sway to our inclinations. We deceive ourselves with the © The Author(s) 2017 J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_2

33

34  J. Elze belief that this is an act of piety to pursue our course without reflection, to submit to the guidance of agreeable accidents, and finally to dignify the result of such a fluctuating life with the appellation of heavenly guidance.1

‘Guiding’, ‘exercising reason’, and firmness are the autonomous, metaphysical, and linear principles that should determine the protagonist’s comportment, especially in order to oppose the excessive vivacity of personal predispositions and inclinations, but also to counter external influences and pressures, such as chance, accident, or material need. When the first picaro related his life story more than 200 years earlier, his self-projection ran counter to this highly programmatic plea for reason, autonomy, consistency, and necessity. As a matured narrator, Lázaro de Tormes projects himself as a character that has clearly not been ‘firm and immovable’, furthering metaphysical ‘necessity’, but instead claims to have been fully determined by accident and material necessity. He clearly ‘obeys’ chance, though the results have been mostly highly ‘disagreeable’ and adverse rather than ‘agreeable’, as stated by the subtitle of the novel: ‘de sus fortunas y adversidades’, of his fortunes and adversities. The OED defines fortune as heteronomy—quite in opposition to the above advice on autonomy and rationality given to Wilhelm Meister—, describing it as ‘chance, hap, or luck, regarded as a cause of events and changes in men’s affairs’.2 Lázaro thus tries to make the vuestra merced—the high-ranking member of clergy who has requested a written statement of him—understand his present situation by projecting it as the result of a life shaped entirely by fortune and unlucky circumstance. He lets his interlocutor ‘know that there is a man alive who has seen so much disaster, danger and bad luck’ [‘vean que vive un hombre con tantas fortunas, peligros a adversidades’],3 that these have clearly made it difficult for him to stand firm. At the same time, however, he also insists that by ‘dint of hard work and ability’ (4) [‘fuerza y maña remando’ (11)] his fluctuating life has ultimately arrived at a safe haven [‘salieron a buen Puerto’ (11)]. Aravind Adiga’s postcolonial picaresque novel The White Tiger (2008) in many ways replicates Lazarillo’s heteronomous narrative of adversity in order to project the life story of a successful Bangalore businessman who has overcome the obstacle of low birth to also arrive at a safe haven and succeed as an entrepreneur. This entrepreneurial success story explores the postcolonial picaro’s tenuous relation to global capitalism and the discourses and values, such as freedom and human rights, which that capitalism purports to co-articulate. In order to express all the

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35

ambivalences of this relation, without simply offering allegorical fodder to indignant Western readers, the novel departs from the critical linear protocols and autonomous aspirations of Wilhelm Meister and the various, albeit much less idealistic, forms of novelistic self-actualization and critique that followed in its wake and resorts to the atopical and heteronomous structure of Lazarillo de Tormes. Before turning in more detail to this concrete cross-historical case to ask what it tells us about the possibilities of conceiving and narrating social emergence at the beginning and the end of modernity, the chapter will provide a discussion of the often-misrepresented narrative dynamics of the Bildungsroman and the picaresque, without which such a reading does not make much sense. It will contextualize these dynamics in the history of postcolonial literature and relate them to the political, economic, and cultural modes of emergence that they distinctively emplot. After discussing the atopical and material forms of critique of Lazarillo de Tormes and The White Tiger it will end by considering The White Tiger and the postcolonial picaresque in the context of human rights narratives and the reading positions that they tend to offer to metropolitan and cosmopolitan readers. One of the recurring problems of scholarship on the picaresque is that Lazarillo de Tormes has been read—mostly by Spanish scholars—as participating in or at least strongly foreshadowing the idea of modern subjectivity. The way of the picaresque protagonist is seen as isomorphic to the transformation of a medieval into an early modern age, a medieval into an early modern subjectivity, making him into ‘a made, educated, matured, and disillusioned man’ [‘hombre hecho, formado, maduro, desengañado’]4 provided with a detached and rationalist ‘point of view’ [‘punto de vista’].5 Therefore, Lazarillo has been misread as an embryonic Bildungsroman [‘un Bildungsroman en germen’],6 which ‘exemplifies […] a process of learning and development’.7 However, Lazarillo de Tormes, especially when opposed to the ideas of subjectivity, rationality, development, and agency assumed or aspired in a Bildungsroman, is in fact not a story that anthropo-genetically and biogenetically equates the formation of the modern subject; and neither should the pre-industrial mid-sixteenth-century Spain of the Counter-Reformation be prematurely mistaken for an era of modern subjectivity, despite some temporary influxes of Erasmist humanism.8 In the concrete Spanish context, the development of the modern subject was in fact long contained by a resilient aristocracy and powerful Catholic dogma until well into the nineteenth century, wherefore—at least for the Spanish context—the

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picaresque cannot even be assumed to be a direct early modern precursor for the emergence of modern individualism. The picaresque was certainly an important precursor for the rise of the novel elsewhere, but on the Iberian peninsula itself, its emergence was (merely) part of the ‘short and happy life of the novel in Spain’.9 The distinction between works such as Wilhelm Meister and the picaresque is not merely a question of historical progression between the early modern and the Enlightenment period, in which the Bildungsroman increasingly replaces the picaresque as the dominant form of fictional biography, and supposedly renders it fully superfluous once the Bildungsroman increases its purview towards more ostensibly material concerns. It is also not only a question of cultural difference between Germany and Spain. Rather, the difference between the forms pertains to competing modes of figuring the relation between the world and the subject in (early) modernity. This distinctness merits an ongoing differentiation between the two genres, as it relates explicitly to the interpretative and ethical stakes that they put forth in the present. To understand the proliferation of the picaresque in the postcolony and its emphasis on subversion and complicity, we need to first understand this relation between both the Bildungsroman and the picaresque, and the social climates they repeatedly emplot. Subversion is certainly not the better or more radical political strategy against which the conservative Bildungsroman somehow falls short. Quite the opposite: the Bildungsroman is, in its most radical form ‘as the full assimilations of historical time’,10 suited like no other genre for the articulation of struggle, transformation, and revolution. This potential remains, even when the form often projects the containment of these struggles and eventual resignation and disconsolation. Picaresque subversion, on the other hand, is merely what is left when the material and imaginary resources for struggle are unavailable and struggle is seen to lead nowhere, when a system is experienced as radically untransformable and any external position is rendered impossible not only by containment and annihilation, but also by absorption. At the same time the form also only appears in climates in which change, self-transformation, and autonomy are emerging as dominant ideologies of the self. Early in Lazarillo de Tormes the emerging logic of self-assertion that conflicted heavily with feudal and cosmological tendencies is paraphrased in Lazarillo’s initiation into the parvenu picaresque world. He leaves the old social order and ventures into one that is explicitly invested with self-responsibility:

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At that moment I felt as if I had woken up and my eyes were opened, I said to myself: “What he says is true; I must keep awake because I’m on my own and I’ve got to look after myself.” (8; emphasis added) Parescióme que en aquel instante desperté de la simpleza en que, como niño dormido estaba. Dije entre mí: “Verdad dice esté, que me cumple avivar el ojo y avisar, pues solo soy, y pensar cómo me sepa valer”. (21)

While the form of social emergence that is tied to this self-responsible logic remains perpetually contained by principles of feudalism and its underpinning cosmology, the demands associated with it are irreversible. This tension continues to this very day when the ideology of self-reliance—which itself is problematic enough—is counteracted by principles of accumulation based in ownership and capital, if not, as in the industrial recesses of the postcolony, by explicit coercion, exploitation, and precarity. It is this paradoxical pressure that the postcolonial picaresque emplots and to which the ambivalent protagonist of The White Tiger will ultimately respond with uncontained entrepreneurial energy.

Picaresque and Bildungsroman The suspicion that the Bildungsroman and the picaresque may have Moebius-strip-like inverted literary-historical trajectories and conditions of possibility is of course a much too general and schematic assumption. Both are potentially responses to the same historical conditions, though some conditions—and their dominant ideologies—may favour one form more than the other. Therefore, dominance of one form is not fully refutable for certain historical contexts, such as the ‘serious’ nineteenth century,11 when a discourse prevailed in which the developmental temporalities of the nation and the self were conflated and contained in a progressive ‘soul-nation allegory’12 leading to ‘the relative silence of other narrative forms, in particular the picaresque novel’.13 Similarly, the post-independence era in many former British colonies was marked by national projects and an idea of social, economic, and technological progress that likewise tended to become articulated in the semantics of a progressive ‘soul-nation allegory’ and, therefore, corresponded with a lack of attention for picaresque forms. The distinction between the picaresque and the Bildungsroman is also not necessarily one of economic status, even as Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel asserts that bourgeois novels in the Wilhelm Meister tradition

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rely on ‘a certain calm based on security’ [‘eine gewisse Ruhe des Gesichertseins’] and an ‘atmosphere of ultimate security’ [‘Atmosphäre des letzten Gefahrlosigkeit’].14 This ‘atmosphere’ clearly does not necessarily imply material security, a bourgeois lifestyle, or lack of social strife. It does however, as the appropriation of the form for the postcolonial and anti-colonial project implies, connote the privileging of a certain sense of agency and identitary security, if only as a heuristic projection or a perceived lack to be mitigated. This stability may stem from a clear political telos, from the closed temporality of the nation, or from the mere possibility of having any social place—including resistance—in the world from which to operate, aspire, and critique. Hence, the nineteenth-century predominance of the Bildungsroman form has not only been linked to ‘rationalism and Enlightenment’ but explicitly also to ‘revolutionary politics’, pointing towards the transformative potential of the Bildungsroman and its capacity to mobilize political action.15 Transformation, however, is only one of the dynamics of the Bildungsroman and of development. They may also follow repetitive and cyclical patterns and thus propose being governed by supposedly timeless social laws of being formed by the world. At the very least, personal emergence is narrowed by the array of social possibilities of a given period, similar to the sobering trajectory of ‘accommodation’ foregrounded in Jerome Buckley’s influential definition of the genre.16 The Bildungsroman is a form that always oscillates between transformation and classification.17 It cyclically and tautologically (re)affirms, reproduces, and narrows developmental patterns and social convention and also always has to do with (productive) resignation and compromise. Its emergence at the onset of European nationalism thus served to articulate and contain the transformative power of change and modernization. In this regard the Bildungsroman is, in fact, an ‘unfulfilled genre’ [‘unerfüllte Gattung’]18 or even a ‘phantom formation’ that has only ever existed as a genre ideal exerting a spectral creativity on novelistic temporality and writerly practice, by offering comparable developmentalist responses to isomorphic experiences, regardless of the investment in an ‘original impulse’.19 Due to its relation to such bounded forms of temporality the Bildungsroman is often also used as a denigrating foil—as the conservative other, as it were—for more experimental and, strangely enough, ‘progressive’ and radical literary forms, muting completely its revolutionary potential.

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Aside from its propensity to articulate historical change, the Bildungsroman is also more adaptable to the climates of insecurity than has often been admitted.20 In fact, it may even be said to have thrived in these climates. In this vein Jed Esty’s important study on the modernist Bildungsroman is not concerned with a replacement of the Bildungsroman by the picaresque but posits for the Anglophone literatures of the age of empire (1880–1920), that is for aestheticism, naturalism, and early modernism, the prominence of a Bildungsroman of arrested development. Rather than assuming the full-scale abolishment of notions of Bildung, self-formation, and understanding, usually associated with modernism and the historical avant-garde, Esty focusses on the transformation of the idea of Bildung in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglophone literatures that resulted in ‘Metabildungsromane’ of stunted growth or arrested development: he condenses these topoi into the eponymous notion of unseasonable youth, a term that explicitly draws on Buckley’s classic study Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (1974). Unseasonable Youth describes a Bildungsroman, in which a progressivist notion of development and the allegorical relation between the nation and the soul are problematized by an inside-out critique of, rather than frontal attack on, developmental historicism under the auspices of imperialism and modernization. Imperialism is seen to have continued development’s notion of progress but also to have disturbed it in an open temporality of global capitalism that had no internal checks and balances: ‘the modernist novel encodes the objective conditions of a world-system based on endless capitalist innovation yet still informed and legitimated by a nowfragile ideology of developmental historicism’.21 While the Bildungsroman is adaptable to modernist climates of insecurity, it differs from the picaresque in that it continues to depict, also in these climates, characters that—increasingly without any success— ‘firmly’ challenge the realities, conventions, and values of the dominant order are destroyed by it. The picaresque on the other hand would not oppose these realities, but would portray their vulgarity and paradoxicality by showing the ways of life that are only possible within them. The picaro neither acts in accordance with the official protocols nor strategically critiques them to gesture at a place outside, but always relies on his traditional role as a half-outsider ‘who can neither join nor actually reject his fellow men’.22 In, especially German, modernism the form, therefore, adapted to and highlighted modern capitalist demands by

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embracing and hypertrophying the official ideologies of constant change, adaptation, and complicity. Rather than dignifying the role of the struggling and suffering social ‘underdog’, the pícaro thrived by embracing the at-times roguish and illegal, though officially endorsed practice of ‘shapeshifting’.23 Joseph Slaughter has described the Bildungsroman’s twin tendency of classification and transformation with the helpful term ‘enabling fiction’.24 Accordingly, the picaresque will here be discussed in terms of disenabling or even disabling fictions that eventually lead to the abandonment of the ideals, codes, and values of humanism and modernity, but also an abandonment of their (postcolonial) critique. Instead the picaresque depicts what happens when one takes the last resort and actually embraces the vulgar realities that produce precarity. The postcolonial picaresque, specifically, is a form that exposes global relations of inequality, depicts them naturalistically, and seriously insists on their disenabling precarity. It also deconstructs and subverts the supposedly enabling notions of self-empowerment and freedom, by taking literally the official neoliberal—and implicit postmodern—agenda of abandoning social struggle in favour of individual subversion, social mobility, and progress. It, therefore, exposes the shortfalls and selective mechanisms of development but, perhaps more importantly, also the violent dissociation that results from completely abandoning the social goods of Bildung, struggle, and development in landscapes of precarity, at the expense of promoting self-interest and the fiction of an ensuing sociality engendered by an invisible hand.

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman Despite their complicity with imperialism, teleology, and evolutionary ideas, based in European nationalism, developmental temporalities have nevertheless had a strong appeal in anti-colonial contexts because they offered the image of a projected end of the ‘denial of coevalness’ between colony and metropolis.25 The understanding of a colonial situation, the forming of an anti-colonial perspective, the conceptualization of resistant action, and the ultimate achievement of postcolonial national independence required a stadial, evolutionary, and even teleological imaginary. These developmental notions also reanimated the soul-nation allegory, even if at times haunted by the colonial entanglements and the violence that were at the heart of European nation- and empire-building.

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Hence, colonial and early postcolonial novels especially before the late 1960s have often been considered as nationalist realist epics and fictions of development that were ‘intended to imagine national communities and to recover repressed historical experiences’26 and were able to capitalize on the Bildungsroman’s established relation to rationalism, nationalism, and revolutionary politics. These novels of the colonial period and the immediate decolonization era were not necessarily about childhood or youth, but they did betray a concern with nation. The closed temporalities of the nation, which came under threat with the globalized capitalism of the age of empire and resulted in Bildungsromane of arrested development in modernism, were reimagined, precisely to evoke the notion of a national community and achieve a realigning of individual, community, and nation. Sometimes ‘uneducated’ colonial characters explicitly went through the process of education ‘inextricably linked with the emergence of a new nation’.27 This novelistic prominence of the soul-nation allegory was backed by non-fiction, in the highly popular form of autobiography in which ‘many of the nationalist leaders offer their own life stories as emblematic of their nation’s birth’.28 Despite these examples, the dominance of national emergence plots in fictional literature feels slightly overstated, or at least needs to be qualified, as the novels of this period rarely have a closed plot that ‘comes to a halt … as soon as insurrectionists are victorious’, but are aware of the pitfalls of nationalism and the fragility of historical change.29 Nevertheless, even when this concern is less explicit or fails—as in Achebe’s African trilogy—the novels still clearly point towards the inadequacy of colonialism as a form of social organization and towards a standpoint external to it. While not always thematically probing nationhood, their ostensible realism meant at least a ‘search for diachrony’, which was (and is) historically naturalized as an emancipation towards sovereign nationalism.30 Similarly, ‘in India the narration of the nation gave the Anglophone novel […] its earliest and most persistent thematic preoccupation’.31 It is in this context in which we must also place Fredric Jameson’s heavily contested and almost strategically misunderstood assertion that ‘all third world texts are necessarily […] allegorical’,32 with which he certainly did not want to declare derivative the aesthetic capacities of postcolonial literature, but to render a certain postcolonial nationalism ‘unforgoable as a site of liberation struggle’.33 Despite the many pitfalls of nationalism when deployed as a discourse of exclusion and purity, it has perhaps

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not fully lost its potential as a heuristic site of struggle for souvereignty, especially in the face of transnational capital and neoliberal globalization. By their disposition to thus fuse historical transformation and personal realization, decolonization novels are among the rare instances of what Bakhtin has termed the ‘full height’ of the Bildungsroman, in which ‘emerging man […] enters into [a] completely new […] sphere of historical existence’.34 Therefore, despite the teleological trajectories of classification and the closed temporalities of nation-building that decolonization is also implicated in, the narrative of Bildung clearly has enormous potential for all forms of political struggle. Regardless of its problematic relation to imperialism, decolonization texts perform a similar ‘socio-cultural work’ as the Bildungsroman in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, by ‘conventionalising and naturalising the convoluted temporality of incorporation as the normal process by which historically marginalised subjects are to become national citizens’.35 Bildung in its relation to historical time and human self-actualization is thus fundamental to the project of colonialism, as well as to its end.36 After post-independence euphoria had ebbed away the form also increasingly lost its shaping power and was soon considered to have been exhausted.37 The reign of autocratic political leaders in many countries and the Indian state of emergency certainly weakened many authors’ optimistic perspectives regarding positive and stable postcolonial futures, and questioned the idea of progression inherent in the temporalities of the Bildungsroman. A focus on abjection—in authors such as Rushdie or Armah—that critiqued the excesses of the postcolonial state is emblematic of the fictions of this era, which, consequently, are also marked by a sustained shift in genre preference towards satire, the grotesque, and also the picaresque.38 It is this form of developmental critique that has prompted the development of postcolonial studies in its narrow sense, as a largely postmodern constellation, concerned with critiquing the temporalities of development, humanism, nationalism, and liberationism as inadequate and naively entrapped in Western epistemology. Instead, postcolonial literatures embraced a more radical epistemological critique that exalted in a celebration of hybridity, dysteleology, impurity, and difference.39 In many respects important and contextually legitimate, this anti-developmental tendency also marked a narrowing of the literary canon for postcolonial literatures and a depoliticization of the academic field in terms of a persistent anti-Marxism that occasionally helped to mystify the relation between Western capitalism and postcolonial disenfranchisement.40

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The Bildungsroman of course persisted in this critical climate, but in an allegorical form that emplots an increasing insight into the fictionality of the premises of nationalism or that foregrounds its propensity to articulate resignation and compromise and to emplot maturity as cosmopolitan detachment—as seen recently in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah for example; this form refrains from the illusions of development, the pitfalls of affiliating with emancipatory politics, and the allegedly homogenizing single storylines of social emergence. While the excesses of the postcolonial state were highly problematic and featured prominently in narratives of the end of postcolonial Bildung, probably even more detrimental to the living conditions in and social imaginaries of the postcolony have been the disastrous effects of postcolonial ‘readjustment’, which ended the Bandung era of national emergence and thwarted the, albeit hierarchical and underfinanced, welfare states of the postcolony.41 Countries were forced to deregulate their economies, by tying the granting of credit, interest rates, and developmental aid to the fulfilment of the required deregulation, and older apparatuses of allocation quickly disintegrated. Even where those developments did not result in existential scarcity it was obvious that the isolated closed temporality of the nation imagined at the onset of independence could no longer be maintained as the open temporalities of capitalism impacted ever more heavily and explicitly on the former colonies and now ‘had no organic checks and balances’.42 The World Bank and the IMF exerted more and more influence over national economies to facilitate the heightened influx of companies and capital to and from the postcolonial world, which ultimately manifested the sense that the (postcolonial) nation cannot detach itself from the endless temporalities of global capitalism. This structure may be critiqued through representations of continuous struggle, as a plot of arrested youth, or as resignation through critical versions of the Bildungsroman, displaying how these processes have hampered human progress. These versions may or may not demonstrate how human dignity persists within and outside these processes of global disenfranchisement. It may, however, also be performed in a structure of precarious growth as befits the postcolonial picaresque. Unlike the resigned Bildungsroman protagonists, picaresque subjects, even when they are successful, are pulled in by the social and economic logics of growth and self-interest and lose the possibility of retreating outside those systems. It is the argument of this book that picaresque postcolonial novel subjects

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reflect temporalities of emergence that no longer explicitly exclude postcolonial subjects from the world economy, as the narrator of The White Tiger reminds us: ‘it didn’t matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up’ (64). The picaresque, however, also delineates how in neoliberal capitalism this proposed ‘rising up’ was not governed by struggle or disillusionment, nor even by an advocated (neo)liberal logic of social mobility through education, but through more thoroughly protean forms of tactical adaptation and complicity, in which the temporalities of personal and national—or societal—development were fully out of synch: a phenomenon sometimes euphemized by the term alternative modernities.43 Rather than allegorically projecting societal emergence, or failure thereof, or timeless poverty, the precarious postcolonial picaresque performs the undignified and subversive—at times roguish—individualist options left within these disenabling global relations. While the picaro is said to have originally emerged from the scarce landscapes of early modern Spain, ‘the contemporary pícaro emerges […] from the neoliberal shantytown’.44

Picaresque Atopy The developmental precarity of the picaresque is founded not only upon poverty, but also, since its beginnings with Lazarillo de Tormes, upon a strong sense of placelessness (atopy). This registers geographically in the representation of multidirectional meandering and the form’s focus on the road,45 but also in a social placelessness through its featuring of narrator-protagonists that are not securely rooted in a class, family, or other structures that would imply a social place from which to articulate oneself and towards or against which to project one’s aspirations or critique—a security, which even the protagonists of the failed versions of the Bildungsroman achieve. Picaresque atopy thus resonates strongly— though less affirmatively—with the topological limitations of what Michel de Certeau termed short-term context-bound tacticality, which denotes a precarious inability to critically isolate and disentangle oneself from a social environment and project aspirations and critique at a stable ‘exterior distinct from it’.46 While more durable than elsewhere in Western Europe, the authority of the medieval system of estates in Spain did not remain completely unaffected by the transformative auspices of capitalism and historical time.47 This permeability, however, affected only very specific aspects of

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its charitable economy; for the most part the Spanish cosmological order was infamously resilient. When this system collided with early forms of capitalism, the most pervasive effect was that of a re-evaluation of poverty. Previously, poverty had been seen as an ontological fact, an expression of an assigned place in the cosmological order reproduced and represented in society. The poor were not deemed responsible for their material situation and were usually provided with alms.48 Poverty now became increasingly invested with responsibility, morality, and self-reliance, without the existence of the means and structures to self-reliantly make a living in a large-scale pre-industrial or agricultural economy.49 This clash is not only paradigmatic of what I have called cosmological capitalism but is also central to early modern picaresque poetics as a structure of ‘mutually excluding demands’50—demands that structurally resemble neoliberal imperatives of perpetual growth and self-responsible improvement within radically disenabling initial positions. A fixed position in a social hierarchy that included a degree of top-down social responsibility and often at least provided nutritional necessities as well as a stable, though economically meagre, social place in the world was replaced with the imperative to make it in life.51 Even though it is generally assumed that one principally ‘could achieve social ascent, however modest’ [‘puede lograr el ascenso social, por modesto que sea’],52 economic progress remained almost as implausible as it had been previously, at least for the lowest classes, the only difference being that now even basic survival had been additionally invested with self-reliability, insecurity, and effort. The proposed social mobility resulted in social atopy that displaced the guaranteed positions within the cosmological order, without making this order effectively permeable or transforming it as a whole. While this idea of independence from feudal forms of subservience was highly desirable, social mobility remained for many a chimera that now enlisted effort and energy but did not usually result in economic progress and equalled, at best, a zero-sum game, that turned all self-responsible aspirations to survive into the picaresque ‘Sisyphus-rhythm’.53 Lazarillo’s trajectory through the desolate landscapes of early modern Spain is indicative of this economic context, in which ultimately self-realization is replaced by a continued reliance on feudal forms of allocation that now come with a hefty price tag. Lazarillo de Tormes’ famous prologue opens the trajectory for the ‘tension and instability’54 that will remain emblematic for the picaresque sense of social placelessness. This atopy originally encodes the competing

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pressures between capitalism and cosmology, self-realization and feudalism, meritocracy and honour. The Spanish context is a special case, because here we cannot really speak of an emergence of capitalism, as the priority of Catholic dogma and aristocratic privilege were ultimately successful in rejecting humanism and also, though to a lesser extent, capitalism. Therefore, the text is not about a nascent capitalism and humanism that would point to a sustainable disruption of the cosmological order of the system of estates. Instead it shows how feudal principles are ultimately restituted, in a context in which capitalism denotes nothing but the re-evaluation of poverty and the responsibility to ‘make it’, while its underpinning humanist aspects of social mobility and self-realization are fully rejected. The novel opens with the grown-up Lázaro, who has to answer the request of a so-called vuestra merced [‘your honour’], a high-ranking noble asking him to explain a caso; presumably, the case is concerned with the fact that an archpriest has married off his mistress to Lazarillo in exchange for paid employment, in order to both uphold and conceal his affair. Lázaro is confronted with a double bind in which he has to incriminate an order that has failed him badly without offending the representative of this order. Lázaro replies to ‘your honour’ and provides an aetiology by telling his whole life story: ‘Your honour has written to me asking me to tell him the case in some detail […] so I think it is better to start at the beginning, so that you may know everything about me’ (7) [‘Y pues vuestra merced escribe se le escriba y relate el caso muy por extenso, parescióme no tomalle por el medio, sino del principio, porque se tenga entera noticia de mi persona’ (11)]. He continues with a critique of the static nature of what Bakhtin termed the ‘vulgar conventionality’ that is ‘manifest […] as a feudal structure’55 and doubts the merits of nobility and gentility assumed at birth, while seeming to propose selfreliance and social mobility as an alternative: ‘I’d also like people who are proud of being high born to realize how little this really means, as Fortune has smiled on them, and how much more worthy are those who have endured misfortune but have triumphed by dint of hard work and ability’ (4) [‘Consideren los que heredaron nobles estados cuán poco se les debe, pues Fortuna fue con ellos parcial, y cuánto más hicieron los que, siéndoles contraria, con fuerza y maña remando salieron a buen puerto.’ (11)]. Lazarillo critiques this social manifestation of cosmology, in which ‘status was inseparable from identity’56 and wants to assert how, in

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comparison, he has actively shaped his life by ‘dint of hard work and ability’. Thereby, he ultimately claims to present his reality in a modern sense as a ‘result of an actualisation’.57 By insisting on the difficulties of his own life and by proving unable to occupy a position that is not complicit with the order he criticizes, the text, however, also ultimately connotes ‘reality as that which cannot be mastered by the self, i.e., which resists it not merely as an experience of contact with an inert mass, but also—most radically—in the logical form of the paradox’.58 The ongoing need to express such paradoxical tension between humanity’s self-actualization and the containing brute facts of a naturalized social imaginary is what will later seem to pull the picaresque towards modernism and postmodernism, which are shaped by precisely such a concept of reality. The precarious picaresque’s specific brand of modernism, however, does not translate this paradox into a disenchantment of modernity’s imaginaries, but into an indignation with the precarity that results from the contained aspirations of modernity in the face of cosmological capitalism. In Lazarillo this tension includes not only a material reality that provides hardships for the individual and requires ‘hard work and ability’, as Lazarillo constantly emphasizes, but also the (onto)logical paradox that he is unable to occupy a position outside of those vulgar conventions that he aims to unmask. For example he basically revokes his initial propositions of a work ethic en grano by later in the novel giving up a fairly lucrative position as a wageearning water carrier, only to invest his modest savings in order to deceptively ‘dress myself very decently’ (57) [‘me vestir muy honradamente’ (127)], which clearly suggests an ongoing subscription to the codes and deceptive strategies of Spanish low nobility and the system of feudalism. While the interpellation of vuestra merced inevitably attaches action and agency to a human subject that is held responsible and has to defend himself as an individual, Lázaro, despite his insistence on ‘hard work and ability’ is no self-identical and detached reflexive subject performing a critique of his previous life from the end of a closed process of maturation. Hence, at the end of the story Lázaro, unlike his biblical precursor, is not reborn, but remains a paradoxical critic of a society of ‘vulgar conventions’, in which he nevertheless participates and which he ‘cannot actually reject’.59 Even though he violates their official morality by enabling adultery, Lázaro is still implicated in these structures socially and economically by receiving money from the archpriest. Lázaro’s atopy is not only one of conflicting concepts of reality and of a paradoxical implication with the structures he criticizes. His aetiology

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is already problematized in his motifs of writing, which suggest competing textual forms (novel and explanatory letter) and locutionary goals (informing the reader about oneself and being entertaining). His story, which is stylized as an explanation for vuestra merced is not only a letter but is also asserted to have been written as a publishable text, for the virtue of entertainment, education and, not the least gaining honour, or in sociological terms ‘cultural capital’. Authors, he claims, including himself ‘want to be rewarded, not financially, but with the knowledge that their work is praised if it deserves praise’ (3) [‘quieren […] ser recompensados, no con dineros, mas con que vean y lean sus obras y, si hay de qué, se las alaben’ (6)]. An important concept in his stylization as a writer is honour, which remained also the predominant—at least aesthetically felt—value for the Spanish nobility, even in the face of rising mercantilist culture all over Europe.60 Lázaro quotes Cicero’s ‘honour encourages the arts’ (3) [‘La honra cría las artes’ (3)] followed by increasingly dubious examples of honourable and praiseworthy behaviour: Who thinks that the soldier who reaches the top of the scaling-ladder first hates life the most? No, of course he doesn’t; it’s desire for praise that makes him expose himself to danger and it’s the same in the case of arts and in literature. The new doctor of theology preaches very well and he’s a man who only wants to help the immortal soul of his audience; but ask his Grace if it upsets if people say to him: “Oh how well Your Reverence spoke!” So-and-so jousted very badly but gave the banner bearing his arms to the jester because he praised the way he used his lance. What would he have done if the praise had been justified? (3) ¿Quién piensa que el soldado que es primero de la escala tiene más aborrescido el vivir? No, por cierto; mas el deseo de alabanza le hace ponerse al peligro; y, así, en las artes y letras es lo mesmo. Predica muy bien el presentando y es hombre que desea mucho el provecho de las ánimas; mas pregunten a su merced se le pesa cuando le dicen: “¡Oh qué maravillosamente lo ha hecho Vuestra Reverencia!” Justó muy ruinmente el señor don Fulano y dio el sayete de armas al truhán proque le loaba de haber llevado muy buenas lanzas: ¿que hiciera si fuera verdad? (6–8)

Obviously, these examples show how, from bravery via vanity to confidence trickery, honour, which is a concept that is intimately tied to the nobility and to feudalism, is increasingly exposed as (self-)deception and becomes increasingly atopical as a gesture that does not have to cohere

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with interior convictions or motifs. This passage not only exposes the concept of honour as performative and atopical, but places Lázaro’s own motivation for writing into a tradition of vanity and honra de bien that is heavily critiqued throughout the text. Thereby, Lázaro not only implicates himself but answers the ‘double bind by doubling his responses or rather multiplying his personality’.61 By attaching his very act of narrative so explicitly to honour he even manages to answer the double bind he is confronted with by himself creating a paradoxical double bind for his addressee: on the one hand, vuestra merced, who is a representative of a social system based entirely on honour, accepts honour as a mode of deceptive self-representation that values performativity over substance, in which case he must accept Lázaro’s text as a sincere—if not authentic—expression, without caring for his convictions, motifs or even truth. If, on the other hand, he does not accept the performance of honour as the dominant social and aesthetic principle he must inevitably incriminate himself as a representative of this mode of cultural identity, and question the social order which it is built on. By critiquing the medieval Spanish concept of honour, which still shapes subjects externally, the novel may have helped to create ‘a gap in the social texture which can later be filled out by the modern subject’: much later, I would add.62 It may thus offer an ‘experimental plot’ that tests forms of capitalist emergence, but the old order is—if precariously—restituted63: resources do flow again from the higher clergy to the lower classes, but the fact that now one has to sell one’s wife in order to be eligible for these alms not only signifies Lazarillo’s implication, but also discloses a divergence of lived reality from the doctrines of Christian morality and noble honour that officially stabilize Spanish society. Lazarillo’s life narrative does not—as Bakhtin would have wished of the Bildungsroman—perform the emergence of an individual that leaves the social totality, but instead Lazarillo precariously accommodates himself with the bad conventions of that precarious system; conventions that conflict with its officially advocated moral codes. His critique remains insurmountably paradoxical because it cannot avoid directing critique at himself and thereby ‘in every sense of the word lacks foundation’.64 Such a critique is radically atopical as it has no stable and detached place from which to be uttered, no foundations on which it rests.

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Postcolonial Precarity and Picaresque Entrepreneurism Writing from his office in Bangalore, the epitome of neoliberal entrepreneurial India, the narrator of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger replicates the narrative situation of Lazarillo de Tormes, its paradoxical double bind, its atopy, and the precarious landscapes in which he needs to assert himself as a protagonist. Balram Halwai’s life narrative is told in a letter to the prime minister of China, who is due to visit and ‘wants to know the truth about Bangalore’ (4). What the prime minister is supposedly most interested in is Indian entrepreneurship. Despite having ‘no drinking water, electricity, sewage systems’, India, according to Balram, has an overabundance of entrepreneurs, among which he counts himself. Balram, who wants to impress the prime minister of booming China, proceeds to tell the truth about Bangalore, very much like Lázaro, by ‘telling you my life’s story’ (6), linking the story of the Indian economic miracle—China’s significant other in the Asian economic emergence of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—to his own biography, explicitly evoking the allegorical structure of nation and soul, fundamental to the Bildungsroman. In distinction to the contained linearity of this form, he does, however, project himself, the profession he represents, and the state of India in terms of a multiple personality: ‘My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time’ (11). Now that self-reliance and entrepreneurism have become the globally dominant social ideologies, unlike Lazarillo, he is not required to deny his affiliation to their moral flexibility and selfinterested pragmatics. Instead, the spirit of entrepreneurism often congratulates itself for pragmatically exhausting all the ethical possibilities that legal frameworks allow for and for being unaffected by ideology and ‘dogmatic moralizing’. Nonetheless, the narrator initially plays with the expectation of a developmental plot, when he claims that ‘India is two countries in one’, and posits a radical rupture between the ‘India of Light’ and the ‘India of Darkness’. Bangalore, the place that hosts thousands of international call centres and is also the primary hub of the subcontinent’s information and aviation technology industries, is posited as emblematic for the shining New India. The passage from the darkness to the light is, however, explicitly de-temporalized, as this darkness ‘is not a time of day’ but ‘a place in India, at least a third of the country’ (14, emphasis added).

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The distance between the rural parts of India and its urban centres like Bangalore is the distance one has to individually traverse in order to reach even the basic precondition to become a successful entrepreneur. Under these conditions the dominant logic of development in time, emblematic of the Bildungsroman is clearly replaced by the meandering through space emblematic of the picaresque. Social emergence is thus not governed by a collective developmental temporality, but is shifted towards the individual and his capacity at social and geographic mobility. This initial medievalization of the India of the darkness, the projection of historical and temporal difference onto, or as, spatial distance—or proximity—that has been prominent in European, including philanthropic, discourse on the ‘third world’ is obvious in the iconography of light and darkness.65 This transition from the (medieval) India of Darkness to the India of Light reverberates the supposed historical transition that has often been prematurely assumed for Lazarillo de Tormes at the threshold of early modernity. In The White Tiger, this radical difference, explicitly posed in topographical terms, also provides the social motivation for the topological personal-emergence plot of the protagonist, who aims to cross the border between two distinct social fields.66 Developmental discourse, which was to conversely ‘transform a spatialized global hierarchy into a temporalized (putative) historical sequence’,67 is no longer operative in Balram’s social topography, which poses not a sequential development but a radical rupture between light and darkness. This radical rupture is also transposed onto his attempt to deny the personal identity between the protagonist ‘I’ of the story and the narrator ‘I’ of the frame narrative, through which Balram is explicitly denying responsibility for previous action, as if the narrative situation, as in any autodiegetic narrative, were not the existential continuity of the life story, but a radical rupture; he repeatedly claims ‘Don’t blame me!’ (23, 267) and ‘I am in the light now!’ (14, 313). Such a complete rupture or discontinuity—often dubiously performed—between responsibility and the narrating self, and between experiencing and the projecting self, is central to any narrative of self-assertion, but is especially vital for the picaresque act of narrative, and will be the central concern of Chap. 4 of this book. This rupture also critically mirrors the pathetic unwillingness to take actual responsibility for the barbarity that has been the historical foundation of most civilizational progress, from which the Global North continues to benefit to this very day.

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Like Lázaro, Balram claims that his life narrative is not only about himself, but is also a panorama that is highly instructive of the social types and economic practices of India: When you have heard my story of how I got to Bangalore and became one of its most successful (though probably least known) businessmen, you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this the twenty-first century of man. (6–7)

At the same time, similar to the explanation of the caso, the narrative situation is also individually existential. Balram also applies the narrative form of an apologia, as he is concerned about explaining the ‘police poster with my face on it’ (11); about legitimating and contextualizing how he came to murder his employer, on whose stolen cash his business success has been directly built. Like Lazarillo, Balram justifies himself by portraying and incriminating the ‘vulgar conventionality’ of a society that, despite his hard labour, has denied him every means of social ascension and economic security, while enabling excessive wealth for amoral individuals on the other side of the social scale; who are often, as already stated in Lazarillo’s prologue, merely there by the luck of their birth. This motif is strengthened by the fact that his employer, the son of a rich landlord, is minutely portrayed as an entrepreneurial failure. As in Lazarillo de Tormes, the position Balram has assumed as a supposedly detached, mature, and economically successful narrator is claimed to be the result of an actualization, the result of a closed temporality of selfassertion. On the other hand, he also evokes his life as a process of resistance, where social and material obstacles cannot be overcome through constant compliance with the official doctrines. Economic possibilities that are offered by the protocols of an allegedly meritocratic and nongenealogical—‘it didn’t matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable’ (64)—order have proven insufficient to achieve any transposition or promotion from the lower to the higher realm of the binary structure of ‘light and dark’ or ‘big belly and small belly’. This rigid social topology can only be transformed by recourse to the means of that very vulgar conventionality that Balram criticizes. These conventions may diverge from the official tenets and values of the system of law of the Republic of India, but they nonetheless permeate its everyday practice, according to Balram. The abrupt change from darkness to light is only possible through his application and extension of those despicable

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and illegal practices for which he had previously scolded his former masters, and which he comes to consider the backbone of entrepreneurism. He stylizes his behaviour as a direct—causally connected and thereby fully heteronomous and indissociable—consequence of the behaviour of his masters, who stand as emblematic of the irresponsible sell-out comprador elites of the postcolony and who have directly informed his comportment. The rest of today’s narrative will deal mainly with the sorrowful tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity and wickedness. […] All these changes happened in me because they first happened in Mr. Ashok. (197)

The mono-causality that the narrator projects here is certainly to be read ironically and unreliably and serves as a reminder that the picaresque cannot propose to redeem all acts of violence simply by ascribing them thus simplistically to their context. At the same time it would be at least as absurd to assume individual pathology and moral deficiency as the sole cause of social transgression. Balram Halwai is a victim of, or at least a witness to, a series of mishandlings by his masters and other representatives of the upper class and ultimately he decides to reverse positions and take their place. The process whereby he has formed this—supposedly inevitable—resolution must resemble a legal expiation and has to be narrated somewhat more plausibly and coherently than in Lazarillo de Tormes. It must take into account the social transgressions he witnesses and the moral resolutions he forms from them. To convey this corrupted world that eventually forces him into violence, Balram also stays true to the picaresque indebtedness to satire as ‘a kind of negative jurisprudence’ that conveys violations ‘of the spirit of the law rather than its letter’.68 Falling short of the self-assured critical place of satire, the socially placeless picaresque not only legally equates that which is ethically equal, but renders the observed violations into the legitimate principles of its own actions. Balram, therefore, resorts to actions that are morally and legally unacceptable, but that, at the same time, are merely in accordance with those transgressions that he has continuously encountered. These witnessed conventions—like politically sanctioned violence, corruption, human-trafficking, bribery, or the valuing of money over human life— that The White Tiger constantly reminds us of, may not always have violated the letter of the law, or were at least not registered by it, but they

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have certainly violated its spirit. Consequently, Balram equates his crime with those that ‘society’s over-lords commit and from which they are structurally exonerated’.69 In The White Tiger, the crossing over into the light, thus, does not happen consistently, coherently and on pre-established educational paths, but only within the logic of the ‘vulgar conventionality’ of the existing order, whereby the light is always ‘polluted’ by the darkness. Balram’s transition is not emblematic of a larger historical emergence of the lower social classes from destitution and marginality, even though success stories such as his are certainly read allegorically as emblematic of the astonishing possibilities of social improvement. To what extent Balram Halwai’s penetration of the social boundary is thus an event that by definition transgresses norms, or whether it is a predictable part of a socially mobile and ethically schizophrenic system is one of the central questions that Balram poses to the interlocutor and the text poses to its readers. Balram’s violent emergence story is clearly part of the official mythology of social mobility and entrepreneurism in capitalism, which has always promoted self-interest and blind passions as the unwilling motors and origin of social order. Whether his modes of achieving success are merely in ethical continuity with these—already dubious—basic principles of entrepreneurism or whether they offer a further unethical violation, however, is a dilemma that his interlocutor is confronted with and that unsettles liberal readings of the novel. Concerning his master and eventual victim, Mr. Ashok, Balram’s motivation remains highly contradictory and his report oscillates between portraying his master as a fair and amiable fellow and portraying him as ‘no better than the others’, who mistreat Balram and bribe officials. Balram turns paranoid and suspects Mr. Ashok of looking for his replacement behind his back, an unfounded—and probably insincere— suspicion as it turns out, and which Balram claims has further sparked his plans. Also the motivation for killing—instead of just taking the money bag and leaving Mr. Ashok alive—is anything but morally sound: The first possible reply is that he could always recover, break out of his gag, and call the police. So I had to kill him. The second possible reply is that his family was going to do such terrible things to my family: I was just getting my revenge in advance. I like the second reply better. (285)

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Evoking his family’s possible death as a context for his action could indeed have mitigating effects for Balram and in many legal systems may, for example, have served to reduce his crime from murder to manslaughter. However, by making this merely anticipated consequence the principle of his action, he both exposes the ethical aporia of the contextual suspension of primary goods of modernity, but also replicates the even more paradoxical and potentially escalating neo-imperial logic of preemptive strikes. Balram Halwai’s long letter clearly invokes a testimonial tradition and may be thus scrutinized, as he tries to give an account of his actions to himself, to the addressee of his text, but also by extension to an implied cosmopolitan reader. He justifies his criminal act (to) himself beforehand: ‘And even if you were to steal it, Balram, it wouldn’t be stealing. […] See Mr Ashok is giving money to all these politicians in Delhi so that they will excuse him from the tax he has to pay. And who owns that tax, in the end? Who but the ordinary people of this country – you?’ (244; emphasis retained). Balram turns a complex economic, legal, and social relationality into a bilateral theft and takes this as the basis for his retaliation. This legitimating strategy points to a complex dilemma: while neoliberalism often depoliticizes the present behind a veil of complexity, populist sentiments of theft from the people, as appropriate as they may sometimes appear, are here likewise exposed as fostering problematic results, especially when they do not aim to instil social critique, but instead individual sentiments of disenfranchisement. Interestingly, neoliberal politics are now also increasingly articulated in tandem with such populist sentiments. The thieves and enemies of the people that these ideas project, however, are typically not the economic elites or the anonymous holders of capital, but degenerate political, intellectual, and cultural leaders that allegedly rob the citizens of the fruits of their hard work. Balram not only tries to invest his deeds with social justification, but also with a providential destiny that explicitly violates the principles of firmness set forth for Wilhelm Meister, who was not to render ‘agreeable accidents’ into ‘heavenly guidance’. Balram on the other hand places the grounds of success of his action outside his own plotting and into the favourable circumstances for that action: ‘you‘ve never seen the road this empty. You’d swear it’s been arranged just for you’ (281). Moments later this almost passivity-inducing providence is contradicted when he

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needs three attempts to actively persuade his master to come out of the car where he will kill him: ‘his body was moving as far from me as it could. I’m losing him, I thought, and this forced me to do something’ (282). Beforehand, he also links his murder to epiphany. When premeditating the crime, it is the city, its buildings and animals that supposedly talk to him, like apparitions of an epiphany and that eventually convince him to take the money (253–256). Various encounters throughout this passage make him realize the fear-based and submissive, but ultimately symbolic logic of the ‘rooster coop’ of Indian society and convince him to understand his inactivity and submission as complicity. While he plans his escape, the logic of the ‘rooster coop’ that resigns ‘99.9% […] to exist in perpetual servitude’ (175–176) becomes everywhere manifest for him, and he decides to be ‘the one in a generation’ to break out (276), making him into the exceptional hero that breaks the confines of a social space. Despite his previous attempts at renouncing the plotting aspects of his action, this ambition strongly connotes Yuri Lotman’s understanding of plot, which relies precisely on the exceptional and transgressive hero, who will not be contained by the social forces of a hierarchically and topologically structured world.70 Balram’s elaborate act of social self-exemption, however, starts much earlier in his narrative address, first by rooting his action in his lack of education and by attributing this lack to ongoing external forces and pressures. This also relates back to Lázaro’s demonstration to vuestra merced that ‘there is a man alive who has seen so much disaster, danger and bad luck’, and his eventual renunciation of nobility and their lack of merit and effort. Like Lazarillo, Balram starts his prologue by describing the misconceptions that he developed at home. Balram familiarizes his reader with his childhood, which he posits as emblematic of his caste and class: Me and thousands of others in this country like me, are half baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling … all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced. (10–11)

Beyond this explicit lack of comprehensive education (Bildung), he further constructs himself as personally atopic. While Lazarillo is born in an—inherently atopical—river, Balram has not even been named by

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his parents until school age and does not know his exact age, which is only—unrealistically—set at eighteen when it suits a potential employer; an instance of de-sequentialization that even severs the aging of the protagonist from chronometrically registered time and the temporalities of legal emergence tied to it, and places it in the realm of circumstance, opportunism, and exploitation. This, however, does not, he claims, condemn him to social atopy, but eventually roots himself within an economic class, the half-baked Indians; and they are, so we learn, prone to entrepreneurship (see 15). Like Lazarillo he mourns his lack of education and his unfortunate birth, but takes pride in how he autonomously managed to get along. His lack of institutional learning does not contradict his previous assertion of being an agent of change. Clearly, for him, change does not signify gradual development and transformative action is not dependent on reflection and learning. Hence, he imbues his half-bakedness positively, as the only system of education that truly breeds entrepreneurs. This is not only a farewell to humanist discourses of Bildung as enlightenment and development, but also a radical entrepreneurial side blow at the neoliberal reduction of social change to education (as training) that ultimately animated the socially mobile and entrepreneurial individual to isolate itself from communal struggle and that effectively replaced and demoralized ambitions to other forms of social welfare through its related—but unrealized—proclamation of equal opportunity. Thereby, Balram propagates half-bakedness as the source and prerequisite of entrepreneurship, which is precisely the subject the Chinese prime minister is interested in. A contradictory relation persists between stylizing himself a victim of social structures that produce half-bakedness, on which he blames his actions, and a certain sense of pride in the transformative powers with which this half-bakedness has ultimately equipped him. He even states to prefer this mode of formation to formal education, which almost makes it sound like a lifestyle choice, as he explicitly downgrades even white-collar wage labour: ‘But pay attention Mr. Premier! Fully formed fellows after 12 years of school and 3 years of university, wear nice suits, join companies, and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives. Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay’ (11). By his typically entrepreneurial denigration of traditional education and his leapfrogging success, he quite explicitly denounces the progressive temporalities of the nation, the Bildungsroman, and developmental discourse. The incompleteness that is literally inherent in the notion of

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half-bakedness further rebukes the isotropy of ‘package’ theories of modernization, as his alternative, half-baked path into modernity—from a rickshaw puller to a dispatcher of SUVs—clearly bypasses the ‘eurochronology’ of traditional modernization theory, but it also remains exceptional rather than exemplary.71 Unlike the hybrid dignity and creativity which postcolonial studies have found to reside in the symbolic and material practices of postcolonial cultural reappropriation, this process of half-baked emancipation from modernization is projected as one that enables economic success, but does not provide dignity or social value. Balram’s life trajectory is not only reminiscent of the (post-)developmental theory of leapfrogging, but is highly allegorical of a broad post-, or rather, anti-developmental and anti-educationalist sentiment in the postcolony, which claims ‘developmentalist patience has little to recommend […] on the contrary, today’s success stories are more likely to be seen as proving the power not of education and developmental uplift, but of luck, ruthlessness, or even criminality’.72 Clearly, this impatience is not at all confined to the postcolony, but is explicitly legitimated by the anti-idealism and alleged anti-ideology of entrepreneurism. Balram’s apologia, therefore, proceeds to explicitly imbue his murder—which is of course what he implicitly defends himself against legally and tries to justify to himself ethically— with the spirit of entrepreneurism itself, making it his rite of passage into entrepreneurship and his primal act of entrepreneurism: I confess. About three years ago, when I became briefly, a person of national importance owing to an act of entrepreneurship, a poster with my face on it found its way to every post office, railway station, and police station in this country. (11; emphasis added)

As a result of that, he not only links his life story and his foundational crime to a lack of education and to moral structures that are exotic to the prime minister, but also very directly to those aspects of Indian society and economy the prime minister so admires. Social ascension is shown as possible, but the transition from the darkness to the light requires a leapfrogging of social classes and implies a rupture that can hardly be achieved without moral flexibility and a principal willingness to commit violence and transgress or suspend morality and/or the law. This propensity of his entrepreneurism and social success likens it to the perpetual

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states of exception politically created for the agents of global capitalism and hyperbolizes the unleashing of ‘blind passions’, which allegedly are best suited to create social order, according to the long-standing liberal capitalist anthropology that is now radically endorsed by neoliberalism. The radical difference in standards of living asserted between the two Indias makes this entrepreneurial model of ascension, despite its illegality, immorality, and the risk attached to it, attractive enough. Unlike Lázaro’s, Balram’s defence does not even run the risk of incriminating the social order his addressee himself represents, but offers the chance of rooting his crime in a socio-economic logic his addressee finds interesting, but does not participate in. It might even be supposed that as the premier of a nominally communist country with a strongly controlled economy, the prime minister is even ideologically opposed to or at least still sceptical about this system, and so Balram creates a perlocutionary win-win situation: either the prime minister will condemn the social ideology of entrepreneurship and see Balram as one of its ill-educated victims and deem him—at least partly—blameless, or he has no moral quarrels with that system, in which case Balram is simply one of its successful and admirable representatives, if not his archetype.

Human Rights and the World-Literary Market Balram Halwai, like all picaros, clearly and explicitly resists ideas, political and otherwise, from the moment that he disavows traditional education and intellectual formation. This rejection of political ideas and his prioritizing of the practical over the ethical ventriloquizes the anti-metaphysical logic of entrepreneurism and capitalism: ‘If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy’ (96). While a functioning democracy must certainly be amended by an infrastructure that profits health and secures dignity, such a materialistic appeal also points ultimately towards a problematic suspension of social goods and basic rights in favour of materialist priorities. Considering his interlocutor, this at first glance seems to cater towards a Stalinist tradition of a priority of infrastructural modernization over liberal democracy. The assertion also, however, clearly gestures towards a neoliberal belief that ‘democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence’ and thus towards the perpetually increasing suspension of human rights and democracy under the priorities of capitalist accumulation and governance.73

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In distinction to this conditional picaresque administration of democracy and the entrepreneurial suspensions of human inviolacy that Balram Halwai pursues, Joseph Slaughter in his Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, takes up the relation of the Bildungsroman plot to the (national) time of development and the ultimate ‘security’ (‘Gesichertsein’) of its legalized protagonist, and extends this relation into the arena of human rights law: The Bildungsroman is the novelistic genre that most fully corresponds to— and indeed, is implicitly invoked by—the norms and narrative assumptions that underwrite the visions of full human personality development projected in international human rights law […] the dominant international legal construction of human rights and […] the predominant literary genre in which individual claims to those rights are novelized.74

An isotropic relation between human rights law and the Bildungsroman is here made explicit, confirming the Bildungsroman’s established role in terms of guaranteed personality development. With regard to their plotting they both make ‘common-sense commonsensical [and] what is already known effective’.75 This vision of the Bildungsroman obviously focusses less on its domestication of egotistic and idealist drives and more on the empowering and transformative potential of the form. This transformative potential, however, also assumes a movement that is simultaneously articulated along the lines of classification by an existing and guaranteed system and falls short of what Bakhtin saw as the Bildungsroman’s capacity to fully assimilate historical time: but it does so consciously. The system of rights and personality to which these narratives ought to progress is already in place and the desirable trajectory to actualize this position need ‘only’ be narratively secured. Therefore, development, in fact, ought to be somewhat cyclical, or in Slaughter’s terms ‘tautological’ and follow precisely the temporality of development. Its classificatory and its transformative dynamics equally contribute to the Bildungsroman’s continued status as a viable narrative form for marginalized groups, as the ‘predominant formal literary technology in which social outsiders narrate affirmative claims for inclusion in a regime of rights’.76 In this classificatory and empowering trajectory ‘the social work of literature and the cultural work of law are interrelated.’77 In fact, the two declarations of human rights in 1789 and in 1948 coincide with, or shortly precede, two very productive periods of the Bildungsroman in

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Europe and the postcolony respectively, which confirms at least a phenomenal correlation. This does not mean that the Bildungsroman is in any way reserved for situations of unproblematic inclusion and emancipation. Instead, Slaughter argues, it ‘corresponds to periods of social crises over the terms and mechanics of disenfranchisement’.78 The function of the contemporary global Bildungsroman, he argues, may lie not so much in narrativizing a successful incorporation of an individual into a system of human rights, but may also lie ex negativo in the narrative demand to fulfil these as yet unrealized promises of the contemporary world order. As long as these demands are aimed at an exterior, the ultimate security and teleology that human rights (plots) imply remain operative and transcend the placeless tacticality of the picaresque. Consequently, the novel of human rights is equally the novel of human rights abuse. Ultimately, even the postmodern postcolonial critiques of humanism and modernity follow this secure structure of critique, as they seek to abort principles of integration and development that undermine dignity and difference. Postmodern postcolonialism, thus, offers a critical perspective that aims outside of the epistemologies and ontologies that permeate the present towards new modes of thinking globality, connectivity, and hybridity. This relationship to human rights claims is clearly one of the reasons for the immense global success of ‘third-world literatures’, as Western readers were diagnosed as having an ‘insatiable appetite for the stories of third worlders coming of age’.79 Capitalizing on this appetite, which Graham Huggan has termed The Postcolonial Exotic, has become a successful marketing strategy that not only markets dedicated literature but also politicized humans.80 Interestingly, Slaughter mostly discusses as postcolonial Bildungsromane such texts that have emerged from and clearly thematize contexts of human rights violations by political regimes, such as apartheid South Africa, Sri Lanka, or Argentina during the rule of the military junta. These are contexts in which the demanding of those rights could be addressed to discernible political agents, and where the inoperativeness of certain rights could be attached to the presence of such oppressive regimes. These violations have been widely condemned in the West, and more importantly have been seen as isolatable problems, to be fully solved by political convergence to liberal democracy. This is where the ‘extroverted’ postcolonial Bildungsroman’s relation to human rights comes into play as a specific exoticist and developmental

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reading formation of the contemporary world-literary market. The contexts of explicit human rights abuses and political struggles—such as anti-apartheid or anti-authoritarian movements—have a great appeal to metropolitan readers, who can project from their own place and reality onto an exotic other a developmental logic according to which politicized lives ought to develop, usually in analogy to how a certain political situation should and could be changed or resisted by means of cultural and political struggle towards the freedoms that ‘we’ already possess. By teleologically projecting what is a self-evident tautology, ‘human-rights plots’ dynamically articulate the values of Western modernity; they perform their dignifying potential to their cosmopolitan readers and therefore allow for a secure reading position. This propensity certainly feeds into the global success of exotic literatures.81 Even where these teleological projections fail and their worlds are projected naturalistically as uninhabitable, they can still be read along the same lines, as Western modernity is partly defined by its propensity to look with self-confirming indignation at those social constellations which seem defective and obstructive with regard to the social goods of modernity.82 While many of these goods in themselves are of course desirable and certain practices are clearly deserving of this indignation, this gaze also has a dangerous tendency to depoliticize the neoliberal capitalist into a liberal and cosmopolitan present, thus offering what Timothy Brennan has—in a slightly different context—termed ‘an ideological image function of the periphery’.83 Such an ultimately diachronizing perspective risks severing the synchronic political and economic relation of the democratic and allegedly ‘post-industrial’ West to the landscapes of otherness and indignity narrated in those human rights narratives84, instead of prompting readers to conceive of an ethics in relation to the “dispersed suffering” that is left in the wake of the global neoliberal “economies of abandonment”.  On the surface, The White Tiger and other extroverted picaresque narratives also share the Bildungsroman’s ‘movement from pure subjection to self-regulation’.85 Balram’s atopical and explicitly anti-developmental life trajectory, however, does not emplot the ‘dominant transition narrative of modernisation, which both the Bildungsroman and human rights law take for granted’.86 They elude or even explicitly foreclose this secure positioning and affirmative narrativization of values by turning the tables on these exoticist projections. For example, in most of the texts discussed in this study, the projected postcolonial narrator/protagonists are very difficult to side with: an entrepreneur, who became successful

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through murder (The White Tiger), a corrupt politician and businessman who now wants to turn his experience into cultural capital as a postcolonial writer (The Mimic Men) and an alleged terrorist who has previously worked for an American consultancy agency (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). While these roles clearly point to the postcolonial picaresque’s unbroken implication in exoticism, these novels and their morally ambivalent protagonists clearly deflect the metropolitan readers’ desire ‘to cultivate themselves through absorption in their own pity at the spectacle of someone else’s suffering’.87 Instead, these protagonists all turn out to be corrupt and complicit agents of capitalism that exploit and expose its paradoxes, but they do not seek to overcome its systemic defects and the horrific human costs it exacts on a daily basis. This is not a critique of the Bildungsroman form per se, and not even of the concrete texts that are actually being written. In fact their liberationist and emancipatory direction is what has been conspicuously absent from a range of recent postcolonial novels and theory. The Bildungsroman clearly can also complicate agency and complicity by embedding it in economic incentives and in systemic pressures. Neither is the form simplistic about agency, nor is its focus on agency something to be frowned upon. Nonetheless, its strategically critical framing usually allows for a critical reading position that inadvertently posits a developmental or absolute alterity between the liberal present of the West and the oppressive spaces of the postcolony onto which humanitarian energy can be projected. The picaresque is not the superior form ethically or politically, but in its lack of critique and external isolatable standpoints, it tends to foreclose certain appropriative reading positions. In its satiric dimension it potentially risks being highly exoticist and speaking to a continued moral superiority of the West, but by making the worlds in which negative action takes place so unviable it also continuously raises the question of why someone acts a certain way and, thus, makes it difficult to resort to satiric judgement or humanitarian indignation. The picaresque’s landscapes of precarity certainly also ask for the reader’s indignation, but through its corrupted protagonists also makes absolutely clear that the object of indignation should definitely not be conceived to be mitigated by a conjunction with liberal capitalism. As Balram Halwai projects his own life narrative, it becomes clear, therefore, that in the case of The White Tiger learning from the social realities of postcolonial neoliberal India actually turns out to be a miseducation in terms of human rights. Only when Balram considers it consistent with current social practice to dismiss the most basic human right

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to physical inviolacy, a right which he has learned to suspend and deuniversalize by observing his masters, does he achieve the means to social ascension. From a Delhi bookseller he learns the phrase ‘I was looking for the key for years but the door was always open’, taken from an Urdu poem (253, emphasis retained). This phrase is repeated in free indirect discourse, and goes around in his head until it finally becomes his motto for seeking independence by the most radical means: murder and subsequent robbery (see 253–267). This phrase not only implies an assumed continuity or at least adjacency of his murder with all the social practices and exonerated violations of rights and morals he has previously witnessed. It is also a reminder of the principally precarious life and the ‘vulnerability of the Other’88 in the face of violence; that other is only protected by restraint, civility, and/or law, but is always ontologically open to violation. Human life is, therefore, performed as only precariously protected by a series of revocable intersubjective agreements. In this regard, Balram turns into an agent who recognizes the discursive and social imaginary nature of this agreement and exploits the immanent precariousness of his master’s physical existence. He dissociates from these agreements and the—for him obstructive—values they encode and acts simply for his own good, as instructed by the dominant discourse of self-interest. By explicitly terming his murder an act of entrepreneurism, he articulates a radical gap between the ethics and logics of entrepreneurism, where what counts is exclusively the ‘size of your belly’ (64), and the metaphysical ethics of human rights. While the protagonist exploits the contemporary priority the former takes over the latter, at least outside of official political discourse, the novel clearly criticizes the unviability of human rights within environments of radical inequality and points to a certain incommensurability between human rights and capitalism, or at least the cosmological version of the latter that permeates Balram Halwai’s India. The protagonists of recent postcolonial picaresque novels operate in juridico-political contexts in which human rights and the principles of equality attached to them have officially entered the letter of the law. However, they experience these systems of law as contradicted by global and local economic forces, and by ideologies that impede their full realization and (re)turn the actualization of these rights into a bilateral and annullable negotiation, rather than a guaranteed structure. The picaresque, then, is certainly neither the novel of human rights nor of human rights abuse, but of the (economic) precarity that constantly threatens

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human rights, which it may simply consider an inconvenient obstacle. Seen from this perspective, the suspension of the primary goods of modernity on which the postcolonial picaresque often hinges is also an appropriate ‘writing back’ towards a global political and economic system that will only be able to ‘afford’ to install the minimum propagated standards of humaneness, when the supposedly overwhelming facts of economic rationality allow for it. The economic disenfranchisement and precarity of the picaresque, therefore, imply a larger degree of complicity not only for its roguish and ambivalent protagonist, but also transpose some of the picaresque lack of an isolated exterior position onto a global reading formation. Read from the perspective of de Certeau’s conception of strategy and tactics, the picaro clearly is not a strategic ‘subject of will and power’ who can ‘isolate itself from an exterior’ and autonomously project visions of an ‘exterior distinct from it’.89 Such a stable critical viewpoint can usually not be assumed by the atopical picaresque protagonist, who has to resort to short-term context-bound tactics. This lack of an exterior standpoint also translates into the novels’ system of communication, that is, their relations to metropolitan audiences and their function in a world-literary system. It is still relatively easy to assume without residues of complicity—which is not to say always without involving suppression as to one’s own and one’s nation’s involvement—a safe critical position that is external to ostensibly political human rights abuses and the indignity that they foster, and to identify with movements and protagonists that seek to overcome this indignity. It is much more difficult to assume such an isolated position towards those economic and social realities that can be considered the downside—and are in any case part—of globalized capitalism, from which most Euro-Atlantic readers of novels profit, if often diffusely. The cosmopolitan/metropolitan reader, who should by definition be sensible to such long-distance effects, must engage from a much more atopical and unsecure location with those narratives that offer their violence as a direct effect of the precarity of neoliberal disenfranchisement. In a context of economic inequality, the liberal disengagement that is implied in humanitarian indignation stands on shakier ground, as the economic and ecological consequences that enable Western lifestyles become increasingly difficult to disconnect from the vulgar conventions and landscapes of destitution that persist in the postcolonial picaresque. Picaros, like Balram Halwai, do not even attempt to overcome the disenabling structures of exploitation and global inequality. They take

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literally and exploit for their own use the constant states of exception and the inhumane and exploitative logics of capitalism, thus also highlighting the vulgarity of the narrow options available in a system that thrives on endless growth through perpetuating inequality and that has successfully declared all social alternatives to be dubious. While the picaresque’s comic idiom may ostensibly clash with these serious issues it in no way contradicts them, but is emblematic of the restitutive tendencies of comedy that it emplots aesthetically and the satirical exposure of social practice that it seeks to emplot ethically. By relating the ‘vulgar conventions’ in which the picaresque protagonists have to assert themselves, at times violently, to the effects of economic exploitation, and by partly legitimating those character’s own responses by means of the neoliberal ideologies of entrepreneurism, the postcolonial picaresque radically distorts the allegorical potential of fictional autobiographical texts: it turns allegory into irresolvable enigma, as it reproduces the atopy of the form itself onto its metropolitan readers, who can neither identify with the progress of the protagonist nor disengage from the realities in which he operates without also incriminating the systems within which they live. Rather than securely decoding the text from the position of ‘distant suffering’ and humanitarian outrage that versions of the failed Bildungsroman would provoke in liberal readers, these enigmatic readings must be haunted by the ‘slow violence’ that translates from metropolitan daily material practice into the precarious landscapes of the postcolonial picaresque and the actions of the picaro.90 The postcolonial picaresque exposes the continuities, temporalities, and responsibilities that define (cosmological) capitalism without offering to disentangle itself from it in an act of emancipation or dignifying the system through performing a full-scale inclusion. While the extroverted postcolonial Bildungsroman may be the novel of global politics, the extroverted postcolonial picaresque may be the novel of the complexly and complicitly entangled global economy and the widespread precarity and complicity it produces.

Conclusion: Precarium The legal figure that seems to have most affinities with the picaresque is not modern human rights law, but the precarium, which derives from Roman law. It is nowadays still operative in some property laws and is also the etymological root of the current word stem precarious: the

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Latin precarium signified a right ‘obtained by entreaty’ or a ‘right, tenancy, etc.: held or enjoyed by the favour of and at the pleasure of another person’.91 Precarium signified the loan of a thing or a right, with the possibility of a haphazard revocation at a moment’s notice, and since its earliest formation in Roman property law, was explicitly not considered to be a contractual legal obligation or guarantee.92 This is, to be precise, not an order of law that only positivizes a right that is always already there, but is the legal foundation of a hierarchy in which rights may be granted and taken back at will. It signifies an order of law in which the human must not merely recognize her or his inalienable status as a human right’s person but in which she or he must appeal to superiors in order to have certain rights granted temporarily and bilaterally: an arrangement that is always likely to collapse, should the occasion require it, or simply at random. Later chapters will show that not only are the social positions and economic privileges granted to the picaro are of such a bilateral, revocable nature, but that even the narrative configuration of the picaresque usually aims—in the tradition of Lazarillo’s pleading to vuestra merced—at receiving an exemption. There is a strong affinity between the existentially motivated narrative situation of the picaresque, its unsteady ‘Sisyphus-rhythm’, the picaro’s means of attaining social success, and this order of law that is at the etymological root of precarity. While the Bildungsroman in its unfolding or obstructed humanrights plot usually narrates aspirations of escaping from despotic forms of law into the realm of tautological human rights, the picaresque projects demoralizing economies in which the precarium is still hauntingly operative.

Notes



1.  Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. R. Dillon Boylan (London: George Bell & Sons, 1875); 59/Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1980), 71. 2. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/73751?rskey=nEsObH&result=1# eid. 3. Lazarillo de author is anonymouses, in Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, trans. Michael Alpert (London: Penguin, 2003), 4; La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes: y de sus fortunas y adversidades, ed. Francisco Rico (Madrid: Catedra, 1990), 9. 4.  Claudio Guillén, “La disposición temporal del Lazarillo de Tormes,” Hispanic Review 25. no. 4  (1957): 246–279. Here: 271.

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5. Francisco Rico, La Novela Picaresca y el Punto de Vista (Barcelona: Ed. Seix Barral, 2000); The Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Point of View, trans. Charles Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 6. Guillén, “La disposición temporal,” 271. 7.  Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel 1554–1954 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 37. 8. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 199–210. 9. See Joan Ramon Resina, “The Short, Happy Life of the Novel in Spain,” in The Novel. Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 301–312. 10.  See Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Towards a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59. Here: 24. 11. See Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel. vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 12. See Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (2012) 6, 25. 13. Bernhard Malkmus, The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter (New York: Continuum, 2011). 14. Georg Lukács, Theorie des Romans. Eine geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die großen Formen der Epik (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1983), 120; The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Boston: MIT Press, 1971), 135. 15. Malkmus, The German Pícaro and Modernity, 34. 16. See Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 17–18. 17. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 8. 18. Jürgen Jacobs, Wilhelm Meister und seine Brüder. Untersuchungen zum deutschen Bildungsroman (Munich: Fink, 1972), 271. 19.  See Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). The continued relevance of the form outside of strictly German and Germanist academia and beyond German literary history has been repeatedly emphasized, especially since Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987) and Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García-Márquez (London: Verso, 1996). The form’s ongoing importance for Anglophone literatures

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specifically, including colonial and postcolonial literatures, is evinced by a range of recent monographs, especially Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Joseph Slaughter, Human Right’s Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). The question of how the “fiction of development” may have been transformed, but is still accommodated in contexts of problematic or foreclosed “development” and maturation, has recently been lucidly discussed in Jed Esty’s Unseasonable Youth. 20.  See for example Jürgen Jacobs and Markus Krause, Der deutsche Bildungsroman: Gattungsgeschichte vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989), 22. 21. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 37. 22. Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays towards the Theory of Literary History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 80. 23. See Malkmus’ title The German Pìcaro and Modernity. 24.  See Joseph Slaughter, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1405–1423. 25. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25. 26. Simon Gikandi, “Arrow of God Chinua Achebe, 1964,” in The Novel. Volume II: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 489-97. Here: 490; see also Joshua D. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (1999): 22–59. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2  (1991): 336–357. 27. Richard Lane, The Postcolonial Novel (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006), 47. 28. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 2005), 165. 29. See Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 1977), 241. 30. Simon Gikandi, “Realism, Romance, and the Problem of African Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3  (2012): 309–328. Here: 328. 31. Priyamvada Gopal, The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. 32.  Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Here: 69.

70  J. Elze 33.  Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 106. 34. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman,” 24. 35. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 26–27. 36. Redfield, Phantom Formations, 51. 37. See Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism”; see also Appiah, “Is the Post”; Stephanie Newell, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 182–191. 38. See Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” 25. 39. See Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 22–23. 40. See Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 17–20. 41.  See Achille Mbembe, “On Private Indirect Governement,” in On the Postcolony, trans. A.M. Berrett (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 66–101; see also Jean-Francois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Béatrice Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa (Bloomington, IN: India University Press, 1999). 42. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 6. 43.  See James Ferguson, “De-moralizing Economies: African Socialism, Scientific Capitalism, and the Moral Politics of Structural Adjustment,” in Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 69–88. 44.  Robert Nixon, “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque,”Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 3 (2009): 443–467. 45. See Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1999), 49–50. 46. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xviii. 47. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Cosmologial Time and the Impossibility of Closure. A Structural Element in Spanish Golden Age Narratives,” in Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, ed. Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 304–321; see Jochen Mecke, “Die Atopie des Pícaro: Paradoxale Kritik und dezentrierte Subjektivität im Lazarillo de Tormes,” in Welterfahrung-Selbsterfahrung. Konstitution und Verhandlung von Subjektivität in der spanischen Literatur der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Wolfgang Matzat and Bernd Teuber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 67–94. 48. See Giancarlo Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance: “Lazarillo de Tormes” and the Picaresque Art of Survival (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003), Chap. 1. 49. See José Antonio Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social: siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Taunus, 1986). 50. Mecke, “Atopie des Pikaro,” 93.

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51. See Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 5. 52. Robert Folger, “‘Tened … que no soy Ecce Homo’: El Buscón, el inconsciente político y la nuda vita” in Narrar la pluralidad cultural: Crisis de la modernidad y funciones de lo popular en la novela en lengua española, ed. Wolfgang Matzat and Max Grosse (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2012), 67–96. Here: 75. 53. Ulrich Wicks, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” PMLA 89, no. 2 (1974): 240–249. 54. Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro, 11. 55. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), 84–258. 56.  Peter N. Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 15. 57.  Blumenberg, “Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 29–48. Here: 33; “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in: Nachahmung und Illusion (Poetik und Hermeneutik I), ed. Hans Robert Jauß (München: Fink, 1964), 9–27. 58. Blumenberg, “Concept of Reality,” 34; “Wirklichkeitsbegriff”, 13–14. 59. Guillen, Literature as System, 80. 60. See Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 61. Mecke, “Atopie des Pikaro,” 88–89. 62. Ibid., 71. 63. See Andreas Mahler, “Weltmodell Theater: Sujetbildung und Sujetwandel im englischen Drama der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Poetica 30 (1998): 1–45. Here: 17–33. 64. Mecke, “Atopie des Pikaro,” 94. 65. See for example Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27–116. 66. See Lotman, Structure, 231–239. 67. James Ferguson, “Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 166–181.

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68. Walter Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 48. 69. Rob Nixon, “Neoliberalism,” 452. 70. See Lotman, Structure, 231–239. 71.  See Arjun Appadurai,  Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30. 72. James Ferguson, “Decomposing Modernity,” 177. 73. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 66. 74. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 40; emphasis added. 75. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 7. 76. Ibid., 27. 77. Ibid., 11. 78. Ibid., 27. 79. Ibid., 38. 80.  See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2000), 35, 102, 136. 81. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 43–45. 82. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 25–27. 83.  See Timothy Brennan, “The Ideological Image Function of the Periphery,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 101–122. 84.  Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 4. 85. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 9. 86. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 9. 87. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, Politics, trans. Graham D. Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiv. 88. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 135. 89. de Certeau,  The Practice, xviii. 90.  See Nixon, “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque”. 91. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149548?redirectedFrom=precarious# eid. 92.  See Carl Bulling, Das Precarium: Eine römischrechtliche Abhandlung (Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer, 1846), 5.

CHAPTER 3

Style

precarious, adj. 2.a. Of a line of argument, inference, opinion, etc.: insecurely founded or reasoned

Introduction This chapter will continue to triangulate the specific ethical stakes and formal characteristic of the postcolonial picaresque in conjunction and comparison with other related forms. Stylistically, the picaresque is marked by a strong episodicity—both syntagmatically and semantically (or epistemologically)—which in the context of precarity cannot be historically reduced to a phenomenon of pre-realist literature, nor aesthetically and ethically deployed as a postmodern device that critiques the rationalizing operations and representational protocols of realism, representation, and historicism. My rather theoretical take on the role of the episodic in the first section of this chapter will offer perspectives towards a functional analysis of picaresque episodicity and the ontological, epistemological, and economic relations that are potentially performed in the form’s ostensible deficit of emplotment. Picaresque episodicity has been casually remarked upon as proairetic and as part of a picaresque ‘Sisyphus-rhythm’,1 but this section is the first attempt of which i am aware to try and make sense of episodicity as a phenomenon of the picaresque in terms of a transhistorical mode of emplotting precarity. This take will also help to point to the similarities © The Author(s) 2017 J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_3

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in style between the picaresque and (post)modernist postcolonial literatures. In its second part, however, this chapter will elaborate in more detail on where their political, ethical, and aesthetic differences can be found. To make my point, I will discuss Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)—one of the most influential texts of the postcolonial (post)modernist canon—and will look at its points of convergence and divergence with the picaresque. The fact that I see Midnight’s Children as concerned with slightly different, in fact, at times contradictory, concerns than those of the picaresque, does not mean that the picaresque is not a productive lens with which to understand some of its aspects. Before turning to Rushdie, I will in the first section of this chapter refer to a variety of examples from the literary history of the picaresque to establish a sense of historical continuity in terms of their episodic emplotment. I will, however, also retain a degree of focus on The White Tiger (2008) because its concern with episodicity and contrast with Rushdie’s postcolonial (post)modernism clearly continue thematically some of the pivotal aspects from the last chapter, especially relating to the critical topology and allegorical structures of the Bildungsroman and how they translate into postcolonial (post)modernism. Tobias Smollett’s borderline picaresque Roderick Random (1748) offers a most telling early instance of picaresque learning and emplotment. In a pivotal scene after his arrival in London, the protagonist-narrator, after having been on the receiving end of a gambling trick, learns a caution that he aims to carry over into subsequent encounters in the metropolis. He even claims exultingly ‘I knew the world too well, to confide in such dependence [sic] myself’.2 Remembering a previous prank in which he lost all his money, he is very suspicious of a reverend priest who makes a very similar gambling proposal. Roderick even carefully checks the background of his opponent: ‘I was on my guard against his caresses, which I suspected much when I remembered the adventure of the money-dropper; but without any appearance of diffidence, observed, that as he was born in that part of the country, he must certainly know our families’ (236–237). Establishing some deviation from the previous situation is sufficient for him to trust the reverend priest, who ultimately, still manages to take most of Random’s money as part of a long(er) con. Roderick Random’s boasting assertion ‘I knew the world too well’ (235) is, therefore, nothing but a blatant misunderstanding of the world and himself. If anything, one may read this assertion against the grain and argue that he in fact knew the world too well: he transposes fully and unaltered his ‘knowledge’ of a previous situation onto the present context,

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expecting that it may help him understand the current situation by means of either complete difference or complete identity with that previous situation, but he is clearly unable to calibrate concrete cases to universal rules. This inability to configure events into knowledge clearly draws on a more general inability of the picaros to develop and learn, but it also condenses larger problems of the relation between experience, action, and emplotment in the picaresque that this chapter will address. This picaresque inability can be rendered into conservative satire by pathologizing the comportment and perception of parvenu subjects and thus rendering them ethically dubious or intellectually deficient. It may, however, especially in the postcolonial picaresque, also be read as a remnant of the deforming practices of capitalism and a reminder that precarious subjects need not be vessels of unspoiled dignity. The above scene suggests that action in a picaresque narrative is not structured by previous experience, pre-meditation based in self-reflexive learning, or even a Kantian sense of judgement a priori; rather, action is usually presented as unmediated, unmotivated, precariously heteronomous, and invasive/ eruptive. Consequently, the picaresque has been repeatedly dubbed a paradigmatically episodic and loosely articulated form.3 This episodicity of the picaresque denotes a ‘precedence to happening’ that moves the form towards the pole of what Roland Barthes has termed the proairetic code of narrative, which places prime importance on the sequence of events over its principle of cohesion and consistency.4 This incohesion has often been considered a defect of the form owing to its historical underdevelopment with respect to the realist novel, but has not been observed in its dimension as a formal expression of its persistent precarity. This is a dimension that is especially important in the postcolonial version of the genre. The chapter will address the narrative structure of the early modern and postcolonial picaresque from this very angle, considering episodicity as a feature of picaresque precarity, analogous to the obstruction of personal development and the incoherence of identity that define the form. Episodicity and lack of motivation must be considered from, and contextualized by both a stylistic/rhetorical and a literary historical perspective. The debate about episodic plots and their poetic and mimetic worth goes back to the beginning of Western poetics. Aristotle deemed that of all plots ‘the episodic ones are the worst’. They are insufficiently motivated and ‘neither necessary nor probable’, wherefore he equated them with ‘defective plots’, while in a well-formed plot, events necessarily happen ‘because of certain other events’ not simply ‘after certain other

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events’.5 This Aristotelian notion of plot and necessity was the poetological norm at least until the point at which it is said that character began to take precedence, in nineteenth-century realism. Within this long perspective of the debate, the seemingly random and ‘neither necessary nor probable’ narrative structure of events of the picaresque in novels like Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669), or Roderick Random (1748) cannot simply be explained by the fact that they precede what Ian Watt has famously labelled formal realism, wherefore they were supposedly unable to offer temporally progressive and motivated plots.6 Rather, the lack of progressive and psychological motivation in picaresque novels is also a marker of specific precarious realities and temporalities. This onto-epistemological consequence may then be routinized into or taken up as a particular generic mode of emplotment. Clemens Lugowski also counters the purely evolutionary models of motivation in literature by stating that the perceived lack of motivation in early modern novels does not mean that they are an ‘an underdeveloped stage of the later novel’.7 Rather, these texts emplot realities that are not based on a gradual unfolding of historical contexts, but on a concept of guaranteed reality for which the progressive quest narrative of modernity and the modern novel is not the appropriate form.8 I have shown in the last chapter how the early modern picaresque emerged as a genre when this concept of reality was experimented with: when the self and its continuity were beginning to be required as modes of selfexplanation and self-reliance and yet the largely cosmological system, intricately related to the novel of ordeal and its cyclical temporalities and modes of sudden action persisted.9 For the eighteenth-century English novel, recent studies have also sought to re-evaluate this perceived lack of consistency as a specific form of plotting and characterization and have problematized the value judgements and teleology implicit in the ‘Rise of the Novel’.10 When taken up after the ‘rise’ (and fall) of formal realism, such episodic structure can certainly not be read as a defect but must be observed as a stylistic and generic choice: not as a regression but rather as a similarly emplotted response to similarly experienced realities. While the early modern picaresque oscillated between historical and cosmological time, the postcolonial picaresque models the problematic relation between developmental temporalities and a complex—and supposedly ineluctable—system of global capitalism that restricts personal and social emergence and at the same time becomes increasingly coded as transcendent, animistic, and ahistorical.

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Episodic Lives From a narratological perspective, a lack of cohesion first of all suggests that the picaro as a character has difficulties with the symbolic experience and evaluation of events, as they occur in reality, that is, with the level of narrative prefiguration.11 Yuri Lotman has argued that ‘plot presents a powerful means of making sense of life’, but picaros tend to act as if they were not in possession of a consciousness trained in reading narratives or understanding social constellations and their symbolic expressions.12 A consciousness thus literate would never perceive events as radically singular since they could (almost) always be syntagmatically put into a chain of events or a system of semantic convention and comparability, and would thereby provide a horizon of expectation, or ‘a reality already ordered into prose’.13 As seen in the above case of Roderick Random picaresque characters, on the other hand, repeatedly expose themselves as inept at reading social situations. In David Hume’s terminology of human understanding, picaresque characters are not able to retain their immediate vivid impressions as ideas, let alone to develop complex ideas, with which they can, based on previous impressions, imagine and anticipate similar social situations, without having been concretely exposed to them.14 Not incidentally, therefore, The White Tiger also takes explicit recourse to the notion of ‘ideas’‚ with the novel’s centrality of ‘half-formed’ and ‘halfbaked ideas’ (11). These, according to Balram’s part-time philanthropic boss Mr. Ashok, are snippets, mere material sentences ‘that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling’ (11). Almost ironically evoking Hume’s production of complex ideas, these thoughts not only ‘mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head’, but are—as ideas should be— synthetically productive and even ‘make more half-formed ideas’. These modes of understanding form what ‘you act on and live with’ (11), but being based in half-bakedness, they offer a highly precarious mode of prefiguration and social orientation. According to Mr. Ashok, they divest the masses of the India of Darkness of the capacity to act as political agents in ‘our glorious parliamentary democracy’. On the level of action, this lack of prefiguration expresses itself especially with regard to Western objects and symbols. Balram Halwai is constantly thrown off by the shape and sound of Western words, most vividly in his encounter with ‘piJJA … Pizja … pizza … Peet. Zah’, the smell and materiality of which he derides as ‘stinking stuff that comes in cardboard boxes’ (154). He is also unsure of the codes of clothing

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(149–152) and repeatedly transposes concepts or phrases verbatim to inappropriate contexts, often to the amusement of others. This utter disorientation towards the metropolitan semiotic norms of clothing, food, love, and modes of transaction clearly de-mediate these symbolic practices into material phenomena. Are we, then, to read this as a simple register of the naivety and stupidity of picaros or even the subaltern precariat? Obviously, such a reading not only falls short of contextualizing and functionalizing the role of prefiguration and episodicity in the picaresque, but also, given the epistemological superiority with which the West legitimized colonization and continues to elevate itself above the postcolony, is fraught with ideological and ethical problems. Therefore, these responses must be framed epistemologically, aesthetically, and politically. Urban industrial and colonial modernity is generally marked by the experience of an increasing social distance from one’s material surroundings. This phenomenon relates to both the unfamiliarity of those productive activities that create the very objects that metropolitans are surrounded with, as well as to the necessary mental distance one (necessarily, according to Georg Simmel) takes from the masses of people and objects that one encounters daily in metropolitan centres.15 Early twentieth-century literary modernism offers aesthetic responses and techniques of naturalizing these alienating experiences in which—to use the famous Marx quote that is also the title of Marshall Berman’s book on modernism—‘everything that is solid melts into air’.16 In the postcolonial megacities of the picaresque this unfamiliarity is exacerbated by the distant and thereby invisible causes of poverty and ecological catastrophe, which Robert Nixon condensed into the term ‘slow violence’: an unspectacular, delayed, and displaced effect of metropolitan consumption and accumulation that registers in the working conditions, living standards, environments, and climates of the Global South. From the perspective of postcolonial industrial production this experiential unfamiliarity is further augmented by an immense social distance—also in terms of mere accessibility—between the objects that are produced in a place and the inhabitants of that place, and even their producers. Therefore, instead of positing the mere inability of the picaros to distinguish between redundancy and information, there may also be a spatial and emblematically modern and modernist side to the precarious lack of prefiguration. Especially if one registers the inability to locate one’s action and experiences within a larger framework of meaning not

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as deficient faculties of the individual, but as symptoms of the systemic distortions of social, economic, or ecological cause and effect. This shift in focus is especially pertinent to postcolonial picaresque novels since they circulate globally as material texts. As social texts they attend to the local while always also attending to the transnational pressures that shape the local ethically, economically, and ecologically. They aesthetically model the distant causalities that impact the subaltern precariat, which may be perceived in situ as being without discernible agents, motivation, meaning, or transparency. Global neoliberalism‚ occasionally by instrumentalizing postmodernism insists on the difficulty of locating the origin of certain felt effects across time and space, but also on the impossibility of estimating the potentially far-reaching consequences and effect of one’s own actions. Joseph Vogl has recently observed that in narrative worlds of financial capitalism, events are only loosely and episodically configured, because their complex modes of global connection creates a perceptive disorder that is not able to prefigure reality into narrative order but gravitates towards the fateful, the random, and the unfamiliar.17 For those who are not the baffled observers of financial flows, but who carry the burden of the downward tendency of labour and the disregard for environmental control sought by global investment capital, this unfamiliar episodicity tends not towards the epic, as Vogl has observed in Don DeLillo’s fiction, but towards the picaresque. To locate agency and to identify and (re)construct relations in these globalized ecosystems is a—perhaps overstated—difficulty that Fredric Jameson tried to address with his famous notion of spatial cognitive mapping.18 Cognitive mapping can ultimately be conceived of as a task of prefiguration, at which intradiegetically picaresque characters tend to fail. This failure is hyperbolically performed in their episodic and dissociated modes of experience and their perception of events, objects, and cultural conventions as radically other. Though these material contexts are not very often explicitly thematized, this distance–proximity relation is articulated in the postcolonial picaresque’s episodic structure and its defamiliarizing descriptions of objects and conventions (a feature also visible in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), in which the protagonist consistently refers to jeans—often actually produced in South Asia—as ‘blue legs’) and that also aesthetically permeates Salman Rushdie’s novels. The performed naivety of the picaresque protagonists is, therefore, not—or at least not only—an exoticism, but expresses the increasing disjunctions between world knowledge and personal knowledge in global

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modernity, a process that is especially pronounced among the precariat, where this general discrepancy is not heuristically mitigated by access to education and media. This is not to exoticize the postcolonial precariat to an uneducated timelessness but to highlight its systemic exclusion from and consequent unfamiliarity with those modes of knowledge and semiotic competence that still decide over cultural prestige and social mobility.

Episodic Plots It is certainly helpful if, on the first level of perception, events that impact on a person have already been experientially prefigured as part of a complex net of social interrelations and as dependent on cultural coding. Nonetheless, emplotment should usually serve to retrospectively order even seemingly singular life events into a meaningful coherent whole by constructing a configuration from a succession, a ‘because’ from an ‘after’.19 Contrary to the expectations of a well-shaped Aristotelian plot or those of formal realism, Paul Ricoeur confirms that action in reality occurs not always because of another action, but simply after it. As a consequence, a succession may not always be best expressed in terms of a configuration; a paradigmatic chain cannot or may not always be meaningfully brought into a syntagmatic order. If we want to read the picaresque as a performative and precarious critique of precarity and not as ‘defective plots’20 or pathologically insincere narratives, we must allow for the partial explanation that the picaresque life is so radically shaped by a lack of social meaning that it is perhaps best expressed episodically. Picaresque accounts of actions remain, therefore, true to precarious existence in their purely paradigmatic sequentiality. This precariousness may be the authentic and appropriate syntagmatic effect of picaresque prefiguration, but it is of course also a result of the narrative situations in which picaros project their narratives and selectively gear them towards specific demands. In the more recent versions of the genre, the narrators also do not shy away from metadiegetically relating their troubles of emplotment and motivation, perhaps speculating on the gain in prestige that dissociated forms of writing and critiques of linearity and memory have experienced with modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. One major difference between the early modern and the postcolonial picaresque is that the critique that may potentially be levelled at such incoherence is often metafictionally anticipated and exposed. By pleading

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a lack of—ultimately configurational—understanding and, thereby, offering a critical self-evaluation of the motivation and concatenation behind himself and his narrative, Balram Halwai, for example, hopes to create new credibility for both, as he ostensibly states the inconsistency of, and lack of plausible development in, his own text: ‘If you ask me to explain how one event connects to another, or how one motive strengthens or weakens the next, or how I went from thinking this about my master to thinking that—I will tell you that I myself don’t understand these things’ (112–113). By emphasizing the literary and rhetorical categories of ‘motives’ and the gradual forming of ideas, Balram clearly betrays an awareness that a degree of psychological consistency and coherence are part of a (explanatory) narrative and that a lack thereof may be problematic. He may or may not be trying to capitalize on a (post)modern acceptance of the ineluctability of memory and motivation, but what he is definitely doing in this passage—and which is typical of quite a few postcolonial picaresque texts—is to refute too strong a notion of ‘plotting’, which would render his crime more legally sanctionable, while simultaneously attempting to make the social reasons for his actions ‘followable’ (i.e. to order them into a plot). Clearly, the episodic structure of the picaresque has also somewhat evolved over time. Developments in prose fiction over the past 400 years, including the proliferation and debunking of formal and psychological realism, have undeniably left their mark upon contemporary picaresque novels, and at the same time have only created the expectations from which the picaresque stylistically deviates. After a very unsteady, volatile, and episodic beginning to his life narrative, Balram’s time with the Ashok family, for example, is depicted as rather continuous, and described with a degree of psychological and social detail. Despite these developments the form has retained its strong focus on paradigmatically encoding precarity. In The White Tiger for example, picaresque incohesion now resides mostly in the novel’s unreliability, its ethics, its flat paradigmatic characterization, and its de-automatizing modes of precarious experience. Accordingly, historian Sunjay Subrahmanyam has accused Adiga of constructing within The White Tiger ‘a central character [that] comes across as a cardboard cut-out’, and of the inconsistency of ‘having someone who can’t read English being able to recall entire conversations’.21 Besides being critical of the novel’s exoticizations and the lack of affirmative images of contemporary India—which is understandable, especially for a historian

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whose career has been devoted to emphasizing the trans-regional complexity of the connected histories of South Asia—Subrahmanyam’s critique aims at narrative incoherence and characterization. Indeed‚ in The White Tiger, as in other postcolonial manifestations of the picaresque, the connectedness of events and actions, as well as the development of ideas within the character, betray a lack of psychological ‘followability’,22 but it is a decidedly picaresque lack. Subrahmanyam expected a more plausibly consistent and developmental narrative, and one that highlighted the agency‚ complexity‚ and dignity of postcolonial actors. He probably would have preferred a narrative that presented a less clichéd and more realistic panorama of contemporary India. I dwell on Subrahmanyam’s critique also because his own historiographical mode of enquiry aims to render visible historical cause and effect, and meticulously assigns agency to all colonial actors. It is, therefore, diametrically opposed to the disjointed epistemological and syntagmatic episodicity of the postcolonial picaresque. From Subrahmanyam’s perspective, he reads the novel entirely as an attempt at social realism, while disregarding its satirical aspects that rely on strategies of exaggeration, de-familiarization, disconnection, and paradigmatic incohesion, which are modally opposed to realism and especially to ‘connected historiography’. Reading the novel as a picaresque performance of configurational and epistemological precarity, and considering the heavy irony that is contained in Balram’s above refutation of the—ultimately unreasonable—demand of opacity of cause and effect could clearly resolve this sense of deficiency. Ultimately, the lack of coherence, social meaning, and motivation in the picaresque gravitates towards a reversibility of live episodes. The order of the final four episodes in Lazarillo de Tormes, every episode in Vikas Swarup’s Q & A, the beginning of The White Tiger, and large parts of Roderick Random, as the eponymous hero of the latter’s name suggests, could be switched without altering the moral of the story or making the action and character development any less plausible.23 The episodic structure in Lazarillo de Tormes is pseudo-framed by the prologue and the last chapter, wherein the picaresque hero desperately tries to construct a life narrative that aims to make inevitable his conversion into a matured, reliable, self-reliant, and fully integrated member of society. This resembles a structure in early modern prose that Clemens Lugowski terms ‘motivation from behind’ because the actions within a text are less important than, or are fully determined by, the divine

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predestination guiding the text in the background.24 The early modern picaresque capitalizes on this long-lived prestigious structure, when calibrating its incoherent narrative to the demands of the situation of utterance in which it is given. It suspends the linear demands of testimonial narrative, all the while ironically distorting the motivation from behind into the parvenu ideology that ‘man would be measured by his end not his beginning’.25 This ideology is fully adopted in the entrepreneurial self-assertion of The White Tiger, which provides the text with a justification for its protagonist’s half-baked and non-linear trajectory. Balram also structures his life narrative according to the demands of its end(s). In particular, the novel’s long first chapter makes this overtly clear, as it stages a non-chronological account of Balram’s episodic early life before he entered into (the somewhat more stable) servitude with the Ashok family. This panoramic part of his life is structured along his reading out of the description of himself that is provided by the ‘police poster with his name on it’. The order of the information given on the wanted poster structures the order in which he offers the narrative of his early life: Balram Halwai alias MUNNA… See, my first day in school (13)

Or The suspect comes from the village of Laxmangarh, in the … Like all good Bangalore stories, mine begins far away from Bangalore. (14)

Every location, name, and profession sparks an interruption in the reading out of the text and triggers the insertion of an explanatory episode from Balram’s life narrative, which it thereby structures. He then relates these de-privileged and scatological experiences and the lack of education of his early childhood as emblematic of the subaltern classes of the ‘India of the Dark’ (13–42). Later in life, he does not traverse as many stations, but this section points towards an intimate and inseverable connection between motivation and life narrative that tends to privilege the episodic and proairetic, while muting linear and chronological progression. Vikas Swarup’s Q & A is perhaps most explicit with regard to the reversible structure of ‘motivation from behind’, as the number and

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order of the episodes in this novel hinge exclusively on the quiz-show format in which they are narrated and their temporal contingency and non-connectedness is the direct effect of this existential frame. Every life episode is selected, literally, according to its own specific motivation. The novel opens with a legal hearing in which the novel’s protagonist is made to give an account of how he was able to answer fifteen questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? To explain why he was, to the surprise and suspicion of the show’s hosts, capable of doing this, he, like Lazarillo, in his explanation of the caso, has to narrate his whole life. It is assumed that the cultural register of the answers to the questions lies fully outside his range of education and cultivation, wherefore he is assumed to have cheated and has to give an account of himself to a legal authority. The ‘motivation from behind’ is highly explicit in this instance and refutes all linearity because it is not his life but exclusively the demand to contextualize his responses to the questions that structure the narrative. Hence, the transitions between episodes are not determined by the necessities, continuities, or vagaries of his life narrative, but by the order of the questions posed to him, which do not follow the ontogenetic progression of his life. Consequently, his life narrative does not start, as Lazarillo’s does, at ‘year number one’ (or even at a point before he is born), but rather, ‘from question number one’ (30). Therefore, the picaresque motivation and its relation to episodicity is epitomized in this framing device. Outside of the motivation provided by the questions and answers, the ordering of Ram’s life narrative would seem utterly disordered. Although Q & A ends on a problematically positive and sentimental note, its structure exposes contingency as the sole means of changing economic place within landscapes of precarity, and episodicity as the sole means of representing this trajectory. The hierarchical make-up of society is shown as so radically timeless that even Ram’s precarious transposition through his winnings—which could, in fact, have yielded strong ideological benefits for the dominant system itself by providing an example of capitalist social mobility to point at—is contained in the novel by withholding his money from him. The paradoxical tension between two concepts of reality is, therefore, expressed in the episodicity of the picaresque’s (lack of) configuration: subaltern subjects are consistently interpellated as historical, developmental, self-responsible, and meritocratic by a quasi-cosmological system that at the same time strives to keep its basic premises, its transcendental principles, and its hierarchies relatively stable.

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Confronted with a paradoxical demand at self-explanation, picaro narrators perform the twin problem of narrative configuration and selfactualization. That is, they respond with an act of emplotment that highlights (and only pseudo-reifies) the ‘dialectic between contingency and order, episode and configuration, discordance and concordance’.26 Their episodic life narratives elude a central task of configuration, which ‘is not to accentuate the accidents but to reduce them’.27 As a character in the story, the picaro presents himself as someone who is unable to decode events symbolically and socially. In narrating these episodes he is not able to reduce their accidental character as events proper, but recounts, or rather repeats them as they have intruded upon him, not ‘one because of another’ but simply ‘one after another’. Similar problems of symbolically ordering vivid sensations, decontextualized events, or anachronistic objects emblematic of accelerated modernity have been naturalized by modernist innovations such as ‘stream of consciousness’ and are epitomized in postcolonial modernism’s concern with surrealism and magical realism. The postcolonial picaresque recalibrates these epistemological and ontological revolutions of modernism. It embeds them within a framework that does not primarily focus on the subjective perception that is challenged by the changed temporalities and spatialities of industrial modernisation or global modernity. Rather, it highlights the radical absence of progressive temporality and experiential cohesion at those (post)colonial sites that still largely bear the socio-economic consequences of the accelerations of modernity and that through their very precarity enable a relative equilibrium elsewhere.

Historiographic Metafiction The picaresque is not an inherently (post)modernist form, though its episodic style, its ambivalence, and its pragmatic tendency to metanarrative may point readers into this direction. As much as modernism, according to Neil Lazarus’ modal approach, does not have to occur in an experimental idiom, a life narrative that triggers a reading experience of experimentalism need not be modernist or postmodernist in outlook. Of course the postcolonial picaresque offers modernist responses to the experience of modernity, but unlike most modernist or postmodernist narratives it is not primarily about exposing and paradigmatically disenchanting ‘a social imaginary masquerading as “the world” itself’, but seeks to episodically relate the difficulties of not being included in and stabilized by the social imaginaries of modernity and their economic extensions.28

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In his critical re-evaluation of the politics of postcolonial modernism Lazarus has identified only one postcolonial author, at least according to the paradigms that have dominated the field in the 1990s and 2000s: Salman Rushdie.29 While this is clearly an exaggeration, this narrowing onto Rushdie is nonetheless a helpful shorthand for the narrowing of the options of postcolonialism and modernism that recent book-marketing fads and academic foci have effected, by centring almost exclusively on liminality, hybridity, and impurity and by privileging a playful (post)modernist or magical realist style as the only means of adequately encoding experiences of global modernity. It has often been propagated that ‘Rushdie’s work is not steeped in the European tradition of realism or the desire for metropolitan Western acceptance’.30 Despite, or rather because, of this alleged post-realist outsider status, postcolonial writing in this tradition was perhaps even more instrumental for diffusing postcolonial—especially South Asian—literatures globally than decolonization narratives and the human rights novel. Clearly, the picaresque has many more ostensible stylistic similarities and overlaps with this kind of writing ‘not steeped in … realism’, and its playfulness, irony, episodic incoherence, and anti-essentialism, than to the gravitating seriousness accorded to the Bildungsroman. The picaresque does, however, differ markedly from (post)modernist postcolonial writing in its concerns and critical strategies. The similarities between them derive from the picaresque’s investment in satire, its focus on abjection, from its unreliability, from its tacticality, and from its dissociated episodicity, but not necessarily from shared affirmative stances on programmatic notions of fragmentation, hybridity, and anti-essentialism. Vice versa, Salman Rushdie seems like an important author in the context of a postcolonial picaresque. Many of his, especially earlier, works resonate a comic picaresque mode in order to express the peregrinations of Indian characters and their unstable relations to Eastern tradition and to Western modernity alike. They negotiate questions of cultural difference and universal humanism that Rushdie also stands for as a public intellectual, and communicate the ineluctability and unreliability of perception, memory, narrative, and history. To communicate such tensions the picaresque is undeniably an interesting modal frame: not resorting to mere satire, thematizing the progression of an individual in society without explicit development or integration, focussing on the irresolvable conflict between the material and the ideal. Most notably, Midnight’s Children falls under this category and merits closer scrutiny

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here, especially as it has not been systematically assessed with regard to its picaresque dimension. Part of this negligence may lie with the fact that a picaresque reading of the text might not have seemed to add anything to the novel, but merely offered another shorthand for its episodic, playful postmodernist style, its scatological humour and its strange and unreliable anthropomorphized narrator. Thus it is all the more important, in the context of this book, to clarify the relation of this perhaps most widely read novel of the (post)modern postcolonial canon to the picaresque. Many aspects of Rushdie and his works have become mantras, both positive and negative around which different versions of postcolonial theory and scholarship have propagated their respective programmes and occasionally fought their conflicts with each other. In order not to rely too exclusively on the divided scholarship that has often unduly polarized Rushdie’s work, I will take some time to reconfirm—without any claim of entering ‘newness into the world’, as Rushdie would put it—what in my opinion are some of his near indisputable critical, political, and ethical concerns. This is necessary to discuss where exactly the often-referenced allegorical dimensions of the novel may lie, which in turn will help to establish Midnight’s Children’s position with regard to the precarious postcolonial picaresque and will help us to understand what is so specific about the picaresque within the field of postcolonial modernism. Episodicity, experiential prefiguration, and narrative configuration, which I discussed in the first sections of this chapter, are also important stylistic elements and problems in all of Rushdie’s prose, though they are more explicitly reflected in his ostentatiously metafictional novels than in most picaresque texts. The inability to form complex ideas and taking metaphors literally, for example, is quite central to Midnight’s Children, where it occurs not only on the level of perception, when the protagonist is unable to decode tropologically, but also more reflexively and metafictionally on the level of plot, where metaphors constantly become real and literal. The idea of poisoning minds and feelings, for example, is rendered literal in the poisonous chutneys into which negative feelings are poured, most notably by the protagonist’s Muslim aunt Alia and his Christian nanny Mary Pereira. Later Saleem’s nose provides him with the capacity to olfactorily determine the truth, literally ‘sniff out’ traitors and ‘smell fear’ and other feelings.31 Finally, the introduction of ostensibly transparent objects and well-known historical events as if they were unknown and inscrutable is another typical instance of the lack of

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prefiguration that the novel applies throughout, partly in order to remap the original perception of the self-centred child Saleem. Most importantly, however, the notion of precarious narrative configuration and emplotment that besets the picaresque is rendered into the very problem of the text and its narrator. Therefore, Saleem’s constantly professed problems with continuity, coherence, and wholeness stylistically liken, but also ultimately distinguish both forms from each other. He is interested in the problem of narrative configuration as a homogenizing, or in his words ‘swallowing’ operation and the problems and pitfalls of turning sequential action into narrative, history, and ideology (145). The dissociated episodic elements in the narrative stand in for the processes of disorientation that inform an evolving decolonized nation and offers the suggestion that the factuality of history always involves counter-histories, or causes and effects that elude traditional storytelling. Like the picaresque narrators, Saleem also has an interlocutor, but he does not have to fully fashion his life towards her demands; quite the opposite, ‘he casts himself as her protégé’32 and requires her presence to maintain the balance of his life narrative, in order for it to remain accessible and digestible for a lower-class audience. Midnight’s Children suggests that questions of authorship or of levels of semiosis and narrative may be especially pertinent in the transitory chronotopes of the postcolony, but that they also effectively pertain to all acts of narrative. Midnight’s Children, thus, turns the social, epistemological, and rhetorical precariousness of picaresque narrative into the basic principles and problems of all narrative, identity, and history. As such, these more general epistemological concerns become indistinguishable from the pragmatic narrative consequences of the picaresque and epistemologically nullify the precarious specificity of picaresque episodicity that results from the contradictory relations and precarious realties of cosmological capitalism. Prioritizing questions of representation and anxieties of meaning by no means consign Rushdie to some full-scale Westernism as many have argued,33 but, nonetheless, these postmodernist concerns are irrefutably part of his work. They may not even stem from an ostensibly postmodern orientation, but from the experience of nation and history as actually disintegrating discourses. As such they could be situated between the programmatic top-down playfulness of postmodernism and the bottom-up refracted style of the precarious picaresque. Rushdie’s text is strongly concerned with historical, political, and sectarian violence. It projects a mid-century India that is highly

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heterogeneous and laden with problems, obscurities, and also poverty: 420 of the original 1001 ‘midnight’s children’ die before their eighth birthday. This is remarked upon quite casually, pointing to the banality of this staggering ratio of child mortality. But despite its critique of India and the comic portrayal of its idiosyncrasies and contradictions, the text has a clear trajectory and a clear perspective from which it is articulated, which becomes clear when India’s chaotic impurity is contrasted with the purity of Pakistani nationalism and the submissiveness it requires. When Saleem is in Pakistan, he literally loses his memory and identity, refers to himself in the third person, and ‘achieves submission’ in the Pakistani army, which uses his exquisite nose to literally sniff out ‘undesirable and subversive elements’ in East Pakistan that impede Pakistan’s quest for unity and purity. This section is one of the most explicitly picaresque, as he seeks to legitimate his participation in atrocities of war through this deictic difference and the circumstance-induced lack of memory and feeling that led him into blind participation: ‘He, young Saleem then … I, now … he seems a stranger almost’ (230). More important than a picaresque self-defence, however, this section literalizes the lack of feelings and memory and the blind submissiveness necessary to participate in such an endeavour. The contrast between India and Pakistan helps us to understand that Midnight’s Children neither rejects progress, nor rationality, nor mysticism, or nation-statism, but makes clear how these values and imaginaries are dangerously perverted and obstructed through their very naturalization. Rushdie’s narratives are not about a randomness of facts and history but a critique of facts when those facts are uttered in order to uphold purity and hierarchy. This is where India, despite its obvious problems, becomes the preferable cosmopolitan counterweight to Pakistan: ‘this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence—that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.’ (453) While also numerous, these lies point towards one possible and submissive way of life only. With Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, under the direct impression of which the novel was written, Rushdie sees India drifting in a similar direction to that of Pakistan: ‘the truest deepest motive behind the declaration of the State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight’ (427). This destruction aims at the alternative forms of community and

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the epistemological multiplicities that the midnight’s children stand for and that seemed to embody the secular and multicultural promise of the Republic of India at its moment of independence. While everything Saleem Sinai says must be taken with a grain of salt, this points to a tendency that is emblematic of the novel: the privileging of the visible multiplicity of lives contained in a nation over the duplicities of blind nationalism. The pitting of India—which had strong communist affinities—against Pakistan, which was the model case for South Asian market capitalism, also suggests that Rushdie does not generally privilege or condemn one form of socio-economic organization. The novel strongly discredits the West’s support for Pakistan and celebration of the Pakistani economic miracle, which was bought at the expense of purification. This means that Rushdie is probably not being as avowedly anti-Marxist as has been suggested by, among others, Keith Booker, who forgets that the homogenizing tendencies that Rushdie rejects derive from a Westernsupported Pakistan as much as they later did from an allegedly quasi-Stalinist Emergency India.34 By countering the alternative realities of India with the ‘infinite number of falsenesses’ in Pakistan, Rushdie does not contradict two modes of multiplicity, but contradicts multiplicity with a disabling homogeneity steeped in ideology as literal falseness. One of the liberal blind spots of this duality is of course the implicit assumption that alternative realities are impermeable and immune to ideological appropriation. This trajectory towards multiplicity may not fully resemble the trajectories of the Bildungsroman towards metaphysical necessity and truth; however, the overcoming of the falsities of purity and of the detrimental effect they have on human communities is something that the novel clearly seeks to promote by juxtaposing it with the alternative realities of India. In that respect it maintains a transcendental dimension that gestures beyond the limitations of purity. It clearly aspires towards the multiple realities of India over against the homogenizations of nationalism. The novel may not have a clear political telos, but it definitely points away from the homogenizing tendencies in nationalism, religion, and progress. Contrary to what is often assumed, progress and modernization are, however, not problems in themselves for Rushdie, but only when they enlist or are enlisted by the purifying and poisoning tendencies ascribed to monotheistic religion or political despotism. The text also does not oppose Western rationality or modernization per se, a move which has become a well-beloved gesture of postcolonial theory, at times derived

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from Rushdie himself; but it critiques those aspects of rationality and those implementations of rationality that seek to purify it of everything else. A purifying tendency that is, of course, doubly absurd, as Western modernity has never even succeeded in ‘purifying’—also an important term for Bruno Latour in his analysis of the (not so) modern—itself of its remnants of myth and its indebtedness to nature and belief.35 The novel challenges purity with the alternative epistemologies that abound in India and that coexist on the surface of the novel, and with an ostensibly fragmented, multiply orphaned, homeless character, who is so un-Cartesian that he is literally unable to even seal off his mind from that of others, like Saleem in the famous All-India Radio and Midnight’s Children sections. While the picaresque protagonists may betray similar features, the precarious picaresque, rather than showing how ‘two epistemologies occupy the same national space’,36 usually shows how various and exploitative modes of production occupy the same space and thus juxtapose the living conditions, concerns, and ethics of the people that occupy this space. Rather than juxtaposition being a question of difference, the picaresque portrays it as a question of inequality. In its focus on destitution, marginality, and economic strife, the picaresque presents the local paradoxes of globalization not as those of differing values or epistemologies, but of ostensibly universal values—justice, emancipation, self-determination, living standards—that are suspended for some by some. Midnight’s Children certainly does not disregard or exclude poverty from its ‘alternative realities’, but its main problem lies with the destructive cultural repression that derives from purity and progress. The razing of the Old Delhi slums in the wake of the Emergency, for example, is largely a matter of cultural cleansing in the name of progress and unity. The slum itself with its magicians, while also portrayed in terms of scarcity and deprivation, is explicitly evoked as a place of cultural difference and political resistance. Unlike the picaresque novels discussed in the other chapters, Midnight’s Children does not centrally consider precarity and the economic implications of cosmological capitalism that underscore capitalism’s, neoliberalism’s, and democracy’s official liberatory claims. The poverty of India is a theme that appears in the novel, but it does not figure into the motivations of the main character, does not trigger any subversive or transgressive actions, for which Saleem Sinai would have to explain himself in his life narrative. Saleem may reflect on the poverty and the disenabling disinheritance of his twin Shiva and comment on the logic of ‘businessism’ to which his

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father subscribes, but the latter is not a logic that, like a picaro, he ultimately exploits and directs against his social betters. The businessism of his father, who was not even a parvenu, but middle-class born, is more important as a personal pathology and an idiosyncrasy of character and less so in its exploitative dimension. Midnight’s Children is, thus, politically focussed on how the official tenets of liberalism are undermined politically by anarchic and totalitarian tendencies, like Indira Ghandi’s Emergency in the context in which the novel was written. With his focus on multiplicity Rushdie, like the picaresque, was often seen to figure into a Bildungsroman critique, because he seemed to challenge the latter form’s main concerns‚ which have often been reduced to propagating seriousness, necessity, and homogenization. His playful refraction of the form, however, is much less absolute than these critiques: in its metaphysical ‘national longing for form’ that is at the same time also a critique of the limiting quality of (any) form it is closer to the existential concerns of the Bildungsroman than has often been registered, even as it refutes the concerns with necessity and essentialism that the German classicist version espouses. Therefore, while the allegory that the text proposes with this longing for form may not be as neat as the surface of the text suggests, this work—unlike the picaresque—nevertheless allows for allegorical readings by offering a rather nuanced position of critique; a position that may then be amenable to yet further allegorical appropriations.

Postcolonial Allegory and Liberal Allegoresis The novel’s well-documented and explicit relation to allegory, for our context, not only concerns the allegorical relation between Saleem Sinai and India, but, more importantly, must be related to how the critical elements and political values that dominate and structure the novel enable a critical reading position distinct from the precarious picaresque’s enigmaticity and atopy. Midnight’s Children famously offers a very explicit, self-conscious, and even obtrusive allegorical narrative of Indian nationhood from the beginning of the twentieth century to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, mirrored both in the family history of Saleem Sinai and his parents and grandparents, and in the shape and deformation of Saleem’s body.37 The text’s allegorical dimension is of course so obvious and spelled out as to be almost inoperative. Even when the protagonist’s relation to the nation is less explicit, he still points us to more subtle and at times pointless structural connections between his life and that of the

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nation, as in ‘the status quo was preserved in India; in my life, nothing changed either’ (407). One of the few British characters in the novel, and the man who is eventually revealed to be Saleem’s biological father, William Methwold, even explicitly admits to his own, but also ‘very Indian lust for allegory’ (127): the translation of the meaning of one story onto a different one. After literary criticism had shown great relish for this allegorical relation, Rushdie apparently felt the need to refute simplistic readings and deny the allegorical dimension of the text, though he admits that the text ‘clearly has allegorical elements’.38 Clearly, Midnight’s Children is not the ‘systematic allusion of one story onto another’, which is what one traditionally assumes, when confronted with allegory.39 First of all, it is anything but systematic and linear, but famously fragmentary, episodic, and disjointed. The allegorical dimension has nonetheless been reanimated in the context of Benjamin’s concept of allegory as the ‘accumulation of fragmentary objects’,40 especially when placed in the context of the mythologizing of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. This kind of fragmentary recursivity is central to the novel, which relies for its movement on the ‘ceaseless return of talismanic objects’.41 These objects—spittoons, the number 1001, perforated sheets, noses—like Benjamin’s ruins, allow us to ‘discover a common thread between seemingly disconnected historical moments’ and help counter the purifying and mythologizing narrative of the Indian Emergency, which was already on the verge of being forgotten by the time the novel was finished in 1980, when Indira Gandhi had been newly elected as prime minister after only a two-year interval out of office. Allegory is the continued extension of tropical relations beyond a single instance. It mostly happens in the context of metaphor, but may occur with all other tropes: metonymy, synecdoche, simile, and so on.42 Allegory can have a tendency towards secret meaning, as it may exclude uninitiated readers from its tropological operations. As such it has been esoterically applied in the service of power, but also exoterically as a defence against its scrutiny. Saleem does not resort to either form of secrecy, but quite the reverse, tries to display the connections that persist between himself and the nation in a pathological quest for meaning and an avoidance of obscurity. Therefore, in many instances the allegory of Saleem Sinai not only lacks systematicity, but also is no longer allusion, as Saleem even co-articulates and enforces this relation, rendering mute the necessity to tropologically decode. These often ridiculous connections also serve to expose allegory as a pathological compulsion and

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as a textual strategy in need of many implausible justifications and jugglings, and not as a process of transparent meaning that emanates from the lives of actual individuals. This tradition goes back to Quintilian, who termed such co-articulated allegory allegoria permixta, in which at least one element is spelled out, precisely in order to avoid ‘obscurity’,43 something that Saleem explicitly states that he fears above all else, and which he seeks to overcome with his constant co-articulation of self and nation. While he manages to escape tropological obscurity, his life narrative simultaneously enters the realm of implausibility and profanity. The constant and insistent co-articulation also serves to direct our attention elsewhere than towards allusion: to the process of narrative constructions, to the competing narrative forms, but also to the cultural multiplicity that can hardly be sanctioned by traditional allegory. On one hand, the tropological operation itself, i.e. the metaphorical translation of the elements and objects of his life onto the history of India, might have sent many readers on a hermeneutic goose chase to look for secret correspondences with historical reality that may have rendered that history much more factual and ineluctable. On the other hand, his spelling out of these relations also helps to ridicule the whole process of historical allegory and allegorizing. Saleem even explicitly reflects on the potential modes of tropicality that link his actions to those of the nation: ‘actively-metaphorically, passively-metaphorically, passively-literally, and actively-literally’ (330–1). The mode of agency that he aspires to and for which he condemns himself and the midnight’s children for not managing to attain is that of ‘actively-literally’, which denotes the active transformation of history and society by an emblematic group or individual, which would correspond to Bakhtin’s highest form of the Bildungsroman and the traditional trajectory of national allegory. The midnight’s children, however, do not allegorically emerge into the public arena to shape the fortunes of a multiplicitous nation of India. But even their horrific allegorical failure in the novel serves to hint at its much less linear allegorical and critical dimension, which resides not in a representative unfolding but in negativity, in satire, and in carving out places for cultural critique. The allegory of Midnight’s Children is thus clearly not one of coherent and dignified perpetual progress, like those that elevated colonizers and lowered the colonized in nineteenth-century colonialist literature,44 or those that persisted in the Indian-English novel of the early post-independence era and narrowed the possibilities of the novel at the expense

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of allegorically consolidating the ideology of the nation.45 Therefore, Rushdie’s allegory also seems somewhat at odds with the conception at stake in Jameson’s infamous assertion that ‘all third world texts are necessarily […] allegorical’.46 His playful refraction of allegory may have sparked some of the Marxist critiques that the novel and Rushdie’s work have generated. At the same time, however, at no point does Rushdie undermine the idea of the nation as a site of active anti-colonial and antiimperial struggle that was envisaged by Jameson, but merely cautions against an allegorical obsession, which purges the nation of its diversity, sanitizes it of its contested histories, and robs it of its future possibility. For Marxism as for Rushdie this possibility must eventually extend beyond the site of the nation, which can only be a heuristic step on the way to more international conceptions of justice and community. Like the nation, allegory is productively evoked, but also desecrated in its potentially purifying, linearizing, and swallowing forces. Allegory may thus not be the key to tropically unlocking all the hidden secrets and meanings of the novel. At the same time, through its status as an overt allegory that constantly co-articulates nation and protagonist, the novel exposes the gravitas and seriousness of  historical narratives as false and as being rooted in profane acts and encounters rather than in some metaphysical trajectory powered by dignified and mythological heroic agents. This happens especially on the level of recursive metonymy, which places the unfolding of Saleem’s life narrative in intimate proximity to major historical events: the revolution of the pepper pots, in which Saleem anticipates the Pakistani army’s move to take over the government (407); the beginning of Indo–Pakistani conflict, in conjunction with the account of his bed-wetting cousin Zafar (463–468); and the escalation of the language marches, shown through Saleem’s unwanted collision with them (331), which provides them with their rallying cry, are some examples of the profaning counter-allegories that the text develops. In these metonymic relations to Indian history, Rushdie desecrates the temporalities of allegory by highlighting the contingency and constructedness of official history through Saleem’s personal interference. The novel ironically ‘thematizes the metaphors commonly deployed by historians to figure a totality’ rather than naturalizing and essentializing its own temporalities as condensed in the life of an emblematic and dignified individual.47 As much as the Bildungsroman is not necessarily highly serious and not always successful at either classification or transformation, the tropological relation that persists in

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an allegory need not necessarily confirm the dignity and mythology of national emergence that places it within necessity and teleology, but may equally serve as the perspective with which to disenchant these narratives, as constructions, as lies, as accidents. With this the novel largely continues to explore the anti-essentialist concerns discussed above and provides the nation of India with a history that is indeed picaresque in structure and style, with a protagonist occasionally in dubious picaresque proximity to some of its most horrific events. But even if this relation to the nation were completely untenable, allegory (not as an active textual encoding, but allegoresis as a form of decoding a suspected (or imagined) double or hidden meaning, for a concrete context directed at edification, application, and self-confirmation rather than strict analysis) still does—somewhat problematically— apply to the text.48 With regard to Midnight’s Children this problem runs parallel to the problematic appropriations and continuities between post-structuralist and neoliberalist thought, between a project of antiessentialism and an endorsement of individualism and self-interest. Midnight’s Children can clearly be read as promoting the desirable emancipation from the purifying forces of history, religion, and nation, by endorsing migration, hybridity, impurity, or blasphemy. In that respect, the novel obviously allows for readings critical of the homogenizing tendencies of culture, state, and nation, Western or otherwise. It is amenable to be decoded as such, without a sense of complicity, implication, or ambivalence, by a liberal cosmopolitan reading public who—for good reasons—value the freedom of the individual and its dissociation from repressive forces and by extension from any restrictions, political or otherwise. This critical trajectory towards multiplicity and diversity allows for a secure reading position for those that identify with these values, even when their advocation in the text may be playful and is not directly tied to a narrative of emergence that emplots their realization. Such a critical position, I have shown, is irrefutable in the text and encouraged by it, regardless of what else may have been projected onto it. This relatively clear discursive rendering of narrative—which is usually foreclosed in the picaresque—gravitates towards the allegorical, but for Midnight’s Children that is not quite all that there has been to allegoresis and appropriation. In extension to this undeniable dimension of the text, commentators have increasingly tried to highlight Rushdie’s participation in an eminently Western and apolitical postmodern project, in which ‘India … is merely a

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colourful stage setting on which Saleem Sinai can act out his thoroughly Western postmodern angst’ or which imports the ‘crisis of meaning in the West to the non-West’.49 To level this critique of Westernism at the text and its author clearly comes at the expense of bracketing many other concerns of the novel and risks downplaying the detrimental social and political effects that have been produced by the forces of purification against which Saleem/Rushdie writes. Most problematically, this suggests that the unending search for meaning in life and the fear of a lack thereof is somehow an exclusively Western and postmodern concern. Especially in the wake of The Satanic Verses controversy, Rushdie’s fiction has become the object of polarized debate, with critics either embracing his humanism and cosmopolitanism or rejecting his arrogant liberal Westernism, with little ground in between.50 Some commentators have since accused Rushdie of an uncritical liberal and postmodernist stance, with some even explicitly condemning him as an advocate of neoliberalism.51 Timothy Brennan, who has defended Rushdie against most of the allegations he has had to endure, had to admit ‘that the unhappy trajectory of debate over The Satanic Verses has also greatly strengthened the uncritical belief in Western freedom, which although real and appreciable, comes always at the cost of a more global unfreedom to others’.52 This unhappy trajectory, which neither Brennan nor I believe to have been intended by Rushdie, now probably affects all novels by Rushdie and by extension many works of postcolonial modernism and has served to carve out a self-assured and ‘uncritical’ place of critique for liberal readings, and potentially for neoliberal allegoresis. In order to understand the potentially problematic allegorical trajectory for (post)modern postcolonial texts without rushing into judgement, Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of a ‘flight from freedom’ is a very useful frame to think in, as it links the risks and benefits of diversity, individualism, liberalism, and neoliberalism. Povinelli does not, of course, generally discount emancipation and the ‘aspiration to be rid of any specific form of social life’. This kind of aspiration certainly overlaps with Rushdie’s and postcolonialism’s important critique of purity and normativity. Povinelli makes clear that ‘homosexuals, colonial subjects, women, and indigenous worlds: all have seemed to benefit from a struggle for freedom’.53 The problem with freedom, however, is that freedom has been increasingly channelled into a ‘normative orientation to and aspiration for a state of social non-determination’.54 Povinelli grammatically sketches the negative trajectory of

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freedom as an open emancipation from the most abstract submissive cosmological forces via abstract institutions and concepts, local communities, and relations of kin towards the utter quest for independence of the ‘I’. When this trajectory of freedom can no longer settle in meaningful social relations, i.e. in a category larger than the ‘I’ and probably larger than units of kin—though this is difficult to pinpoint abstractly—it tends to become ethically and politically problematic. These open aspirations can be tapped by the forms of social de-solidarization that have enabled the neoliberalism, austerity politics, and identity-based modes of consumption, production, and (self-)exploitation that mark late capitalism. In this open trajectory of freedom, neoliberalism could easily be advocated ‘as the exclusive guarantor of freedom’.55 It is an undifferentiated continuity between these kinds of freedom that is assumed when Rushdie’s texts, which display a sustained ‘inability to believe in any community of actual practice’56 are alleged to help promote neoliberalism. Rushdie’s critique of totalitarianism and purity certainly comes from a liberal perspective and perhaps even with ‘an anti-communist subtext’, perceivable mainly in his harsh critique of Indira Gandhi and to a lesser extent in his satiric depiction of communist figures such as Quasin and Picture Singh, who makes too ‘many promises’: an accusation often also levelled by conservatives at socialists and social democrats. The latter critique at least is, however, not easily assignable as a position of the novel: Saleem could never enter ‘the-world-according-to-Picture-Singh’, purely as a result of his upper-class upbringing, which thus might refer to an imaginative failure on the unreliable narrator’s part to solidarize with social movements, not their indiscriminate dismissal. This satiric lashing out at Picture Singh’s brand of communism, furthermore, is no more severe than the attacks on Saleem’s father’s businessism, mentioned above. Rushdie is certainly sceptical of the historical failures and the human costs of communism, which still tend to be deployed as legitimation for a wholesale rejection of any alternatives to market capitalism, but he certainly does not uncritically advocate capitalism and neoliberalism. In fact, the Marxist charges that trajectories of bounded and convivial freedom, or cultural and identitary impurity, automatically conflict with the possibility of socialism, themselves do the utopian potential of socialism no favours, as they, like socialism’s harshest critics, conflate historical contingency with social possibility.

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Despite aspirational and conceptual overlaps that may result in an ‘unhappy’ neoliberal trajectory, the novel, therefore, does not actively participate in a wholesale demonization of modernization and does not sport any neoliberal agendas. In fact, quite the opposite; Rushdie has clearly positioned himself against Thatcherism in his essay writing and in the now-largely-ignored main plot of The Satanic Verses. Perhaps he simply has not actively conceived of individuality and social justice as unbridgeable concerns, even though, as David Harvey has pointed out, it is generally not too ‘hard to see how a wedge might be driven between them’.57 Under the auspices of global neoliberalism we should not condemn Rushdie’s brand of cultural criticism but should ‘rethink the target that this criticism was constructed to meet’ in order to avoid a disenabling orthodoxy and misapprehension.58 The appropriation of the novel for contexts of neoliberalism would require either adhering to a critical orthodoxy actually unable to distinguish between post-structuralist critique and neoliberalism, or strategic misreadings that produce interpretations in unbound neoliberal continuity with some of the libertarian tendencies of the text; misreadings that the novel may fail to actively reject and disallow and perhaps unintentionally invites with its occasional slandering of communism. Such appropriative readings are nonetheless an ‘allegorizing of a text whose author’s intention did not clearly call for such interpretation’.59 It would be wise to gradually distinguish between and contextualize the trajectories of freedom in the text in order not to continue to unwittingly play out class struggle against cultural and epistemological difference.

Conclusion: The Enigma of the Picaresque The picaresque certainly lacks the critical dimension of Midnight’s Children, but on the other hand also enigmatically obscures postcolonial allegory‚ deflects (neo)liberal allegoresis, and repeals any affirmative identification with its corrupted protagonists and their ethical protocols. The White Tiger‚ for example‚ renders the tendency to social dissociation that looms as an allegorical problem over Rushdie’s novel into its own problematic temporality of dissociation and fragmentation. The dynamic of freeing oneself from the illegitimate claims of a society that constantly violates its own official values are here portrayed as legitimate conclusions drawn from the social worlds projected in this text, but they end in self-interested lethal violence. In the worlds of the precarious picaresque

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the positive and negative aspirations of freedom become indistinguishable: positive aspirations of freedom from exploitation do not eventually point to an—even if unattainable—life outside of a repressive system, to sediment into new social meaning, embeddedness, and livability, but instead lead seamlessly into the negative self-interested aspirations that ‘align [… themselves] to the worst excesses of capitalism’60 in order to seek a better position within the existing system of hierarchy, exploitation, and oppression. Trajectories of individual emancipation are unequivocally rendered violent and socially destructive in the picaresque, even though they may be personally liberating in economic terms. With this tendency, the postcolonial picaresque points to a persistent precarity that cannot be sustainably solved by the individual and the forms of emergence, fragmentation, and subversion that are available to it. In analogy to the critical operations of post-structuralism, the constructedness and precariousness of the social values and social practices that sustain a social imaginary are eventually encountered by the picaro and abused—a revalation that is condensed in Balram’s liberating assertion ‘I was looking for the key for years, but the door was always open’ (253). This kind of discovery, however, becomes disastrous in the novel‚ as it is only used to enable the individual to act outside of the confines previously placed upon himself, in order to become individually successful. Such a picaresque suspension of power merely highlights the more pervasive ideological forces of capitalism as the endless temporality of self-assertion and self-interest encapsulates all; even, and perhaps especially, as they shortly (seem to) step out of the official legal and moral confines of a system’s constraints. While the recognition of the contingency of social imaginaries and the suspension of their social efficacy are indispensable critical operations, the way that this critique remains within or is absorbed by the temporalities of individualism and entrepreneurial self-realization renders it highly problematic and cyclical. Unlike the critique of purity offered in Midnight’s Children, picaresque subversion does not point critically at the present. It does not even propose to offer an escape from the cyclicality and ‘Sisyphusrhythm’ of the landscapes of precarity that it projects, but displays how temporalities of individual self-assertion may in fact be helping to sustain—though not in the socially meaningfully way that Adam Smith hallucinated—an exploitative capitalist system, rather than questioning or overcoming it. Midnight’s Children offers a place of cultural critique, but it risks being instrumentalized, because it does not actively point its critique beyond the confines of the allegedly indivisible nexus of democracy

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and capitalism, thus‚ remaining within a mode of critical disruption that allowed for a lever to be driven between the concerns of freedom and equality. The picaresque on the other hand falls short of the operation of critique, but emplots how the destruction of social imaginaries can ultimately be an important aspect of the reproduction and intensification of capitalism. Through its complicit modes of disruption the form displays the misapprehension of the trajectories of liberation when they are extended into contexts of economic self-interest. The picaresque’s lack of critical stances and of identification may render it allegorically enigmatic and irresolvable; however, it also quite clearly suggests that the problems of inequality are certainly not solved by a temporality of fragmentation and detachment but are actually reproduced by it.

Notes







1.  See Ulrich Wicks‚ “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach‚” PMLA 89‚ no. 2 (1974): 240–249; Peter Brooks‚ Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 18. 2. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 235. 3. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 18. 4.  See Roland Barthes, S/Z., trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 18. 5. Aristotle. Poetics, 1452a. 6. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Pimlico Press, 2001), 22. 7. Clemens Lugowski, Die Form der Individualität im Roman (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994), 68. 8. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 17ff. 9.  See Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Towards a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 10–60. Here: 23. 10. See Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character. Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Ch. 1. 11.  See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Volume I, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellhauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 53.

102  J. Elze 12. Jurij M. Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 161–184. Here: 182. 13.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III. in Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (eds.) Gesammelte Werke 15 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), 392. Translation JFE. 14. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13–26. 15. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader‚ ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 103–110. 16. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983). 17.  See Joseph Vogl‚ The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford‚ CA: Stanford University Press‚ 2014)‚ 15; Das Gespenst des Kapitals (Zürich: Diaphanes‚ 2011)‚ 6. 18. Fredric Jameson‚ Postmodernism‚ or‚ The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham‚ NC: Duke University Press‚ 1991)‚ 50. 19. Aristotle, Poetics, 1452b; emphasis retained. 20. Aristotle, Poetics, 1452a. 21.  Sunjay Subrahmanyam‚ “Diary‚” London Review of Books 30‚ no. 21 (2008): 42–43. Here: 43. 22. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 67. 23. See Christian Wehr‚ “Lazarillo de Tormes und die Form der Individualität im Roman‚” in Maskerade und Entlarvung. Das Paradigma der Pikareske‚ ed. Christoph Ehland & Robert Fajen (Heidelberg: Winter‚ 2007), 25–43. 24. Lugowski, Form der Individualität, 79. 25. Elizabeth A. Povinelli‚ “A Flight from Freedom‚” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond‚ ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham‚ NC: Duke University Press, 2005)‚ 145–165. 26. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 158. 27. Ibid., 157. 28. Andreas Mahler, “Joyce’s Bovarysm. Paradigmatic Disenchantment into Syntagmatic Progression,” Comparatio. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 5‚ no. 2 (2013): 249–296. Here: 251. 29. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22–25. 30.  Jaina C. Saga‚ Salman Rushdie’s Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, and Globalization (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2001), 5. 31. See Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 2006), 427, 430, 553. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text.

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32. Timothy Brennan‚ “The Cultural Politics of Rushdie: All or Nothing‚” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999), 107–129. Here: 123. 33.  Dubravka Jaruga‚ “‘The Mirror of Us All’: Midnight’s Children and the Twentieth Century Bildungsroman‚” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999), 169–187. 34.  M. Keith Booker‚ “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War‚” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999), 283–314. 35. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern‚ trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge‚ MA: Harvard University Press‚ 1993)‚ 46–48. 36.  M. Keith Booker‚ “Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie‚” ELH 57‚ no. 4 (1990): 977–997. Here: 990. 37.  See Jean Kane‚ “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children‚” Contemporary Literature 37 no. 1 (1996): 94–118. Here: 95. 38.  See Todd Kuchta‚ “Allegorizing the Emergency: Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory‚” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999), 205–224. Here: 206. 39. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher‚ Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg: Winter, 1974), 84. Translation mine. 40. Kuchta, “Allegorizing the Emergency‚” 215. 41. Vilashini Coopan‚ World’s Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford‚ CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 53. 42.  See Heinrich Plett, “Konzepte des Allegorischen in der englischen Renaissance‚” in Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie, ed. W. Haug (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), 310–335. Here: 314. 43. Quintilian‚ The Orator’s Education, III. Books 6–8, trans. and ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 331 [VIII. 6.52.]. 44.  Michael Reder‚ “Rewriting History and Identity: The Reinvention of Myth, Epic, and Allegory in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children‚” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999), 225–249. Here: 234. 45. Josna E. Rege‚ “Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s Children and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties‚” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999), 250–282. Here: 256.

104  J. Elze 46.  Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Here: 47. Neil Ten Kortenaar‚ Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2004), 33. 48. Ernst Robert Curtius‚ Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter. Munich: Francke, 210ff.; European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages‚ Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 203ff. 49. Rege, “Victim into Protagonist?” 258. 50. Brennan, “The Cultural Politics of Rushdie‚” 107. 51.  E.g., Neil Lazarus‚ “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism‚” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond‚ ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham NC: Duke University Press‚ 2005)‚ 423–438. Lazarus  2011‚ Booker‚ “Midnight’s Children‚ History‚ and Complexity”. 52. Brennan, “The Cultural Politics of Rushdie‚” 126. 53. Povinelli, “A Flight from Freedom‚” 146. 54. Ibid., 147. 55. David Harvey‚ A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press‚ 2005)‚ 40. 56. Aijaz Ahmad‚ In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994), 158. 57. Harvey, Neoliberalism‚ 41. 58.  See David Scott‚ Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 14. 59. Peter Berek‚ “Interpretation, Allegory, and Allegoresis‚” College English 40‚ no. 2 (1978): 117–132. Here: 123. 60. Povinelli‚ “A Flight from Freedom”‚ 148.

CHAPTER 4

Identity

precarious, adj. 2.b. Dependent on chance or circumstances; uncertain; liable to fail; exposed to risk, hazardous; insecure, unstable

Introduction Wherever there is a social relation between two living beings there we have imitation[.]1 I thought the gesture was attractive, I copied it[.]2 The desire of colonial mimicry […] I shall call metonymy of presence[.]3 Many studies on the Spanish picaresque share a central concern with the picaresque hero and its role in the emergence of modern subjectivity,4 while comparative historical approaches have focussed instead on the picaro and his delinquent or roguish character. If one considers the picaro’s identity as precarious—which in the context of identity means first and foremost ‘retractable’—and seeks to understand the picaresque beyond the early modern Spanish form, then such a sociologically inflexible understanding of the picaro is (far) too restrictive. Even more severely, this pathologization of the picaresque as literature of delinquency has hampered the form’s ethical potential in contexts, such as contemporary global migration, in which marginalization, exoticization, and premature criminalization often enough tend to be conflated. Though the form undeniably © The Author(s) 2017 J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_4

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often relates tactics that roguishly cross and stretch the constraints of the letter of the law, the picaresque is at its most basic a portrait and performance of precarious biographies at the margins of social modernity. Clearly the early modern picaro’s survival tactics were not only marked by such ‘classic’ misdeeds as thievery, violence or murder but also strongly relied on masquerade.5 In Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón (1622) the narrator-protagonist, Pablos (much more explicitly and actively than Lazarillo de Tormes, who merely adapts to different professions and means of accessing food) pretends to be of higher social rank. Often his masquerades are so elaborate that he incorporates others into them, rents horses and attire, and pretends to employ servants to pass as a nobleman as described in this paradigmatic passage: I found a place where they hired out horses and began to cut a fine figure on one straightaway. […] Up rode two gentlemen […] I engaged them for some time in flattering conversation. In the end they said they were thinking of having a little bit of fun in the Prado Gardens and I said I’d go with them, that is of course, if they didn’t mind. I left a message with the shopkeeper that if my pages and lackey appeared, would he please send them to the Prado? I described their uniforms; then I rode off between the two gentlemen. It occurred to me as I rode along that nobody who saw us could tell whose were the pages or footmen with us, nor which of us didn’t have any.6 Supe dónde se alquilaban caballos, y espetéme en uno al primer día […] Llegáronse dos caballeros […] Y con mil cortesías los detuve un rato. En fin, dijeron que se querían ir al Prado a bureo, y yo – que si no lo tenían a anfado – que los acompañaría. Dejé dicho al mercader que si venían mis pajes y in lacayo, que los encaminase al Prado; di señas de librea, y metíme entre los dos caminamos. Yo iba considerando que a nadia que los veía era possible el determiner y juzgar cúyos eran los pajes y lacayos, ni cual era el que no le llevaba.

‘Cutting a fine figure’ and ‘engaging in flattering conversation’ while riding between two noblemen, so that he may be easily mistaken for one: such are the roles that the picaro Pablos plays variously throughout the text. He thrives on representing the social positions of others, and appropriates their cultural capital by accumulating debt, imaginatively evoking certain items (‘described their uniforms’), or by metonymically capitalizing on the expressions of others around him. He is a protean character whose central characteristic is his inconsistency of life roles and selfidentity—his personal flux in the face of an inconsistent social world that forces him to vary his roles radically in form and social register:

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There is no part the pícaro will not play […] he assumes whatever appearance the world forces on him, and this a-personality is typical of the picaresque world, in which appearance and reality constantly mingle, making definition and order disappear. […] The pícaro is every man he has to be, and therefore no man.7

Appearance and reality are indeed mingled in the passage above, in which Pablos counts precisely on the non-distinctiveness of appearing to employ a lackey and actually employing one. The proximity to one is sufficient as ‘nobody who saw us could tell whose were the pages or footmen with us, nor which of us didn’t have any’ [‘a nadia que los veía era possible el determiner y juzgar cúyos eran los pajes y lacayos’]. While the picaro has been discussed in relation to the parasite regarding his forms of subsistence,8 the parasitic aspect of his ambitious identity performances and cultural expressions that capitalize by proximity and metonymy has not yet been sufficiently noted and offers another interesting link to the contexts of postcolonial literatures, which often tend towards subversion, appropriation, and mimicry in contact with the ideologies, material practices, and identity formations of colonial modernity. The quotations opening this chapter root imitation, copying, and mimicry on very different levels. The first as an inescapable social, potentially anthropological—or perhaps even biological—constant, the second as a deliberate intersubjective effort, and the third conceives of it ultimately as a haunting approximation, hardly distinguishable from its original. These various ways of conceiving imitation will be of central importance for an understanding of picaresque mimicry in relation to other forms of imitation. This chapter will approach the precarious aspects of postcolonial protean identity expressions through the lens of the early modern Spanish picaresque and through these various theories of repetition, imitation, performance, and mimicry. Such an approach will help to disentangle the complex and precarious identity structures in the early modern picaresque from the assumption of a ubiquitous ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’ and help fine-tune the understanding of postcolonial mimicry, as opposed to other forms of colonial imitation. In the context of the current intellectual proliferation of performativity, the imitative complexities of the picaresque need to be carefully re-examined, as it is no longer sufficient to bypass the notion of precarious picaresque identity simply by referring to it reductively as role-playing and masquerade, from which other social practices are implied to be distinguishable

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as non-imitative and authentic. Vice versa, the precarious picaresque also points us towards persistent exclusionary mechanisms and modes of unbelonging that are not simply resolved by spreading the assumption that ‘identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’.9 A careful examination of the precarious dynamics of picaresque identity performance can help to point to the blind spots left by theories of the social, even those concerned with imitation and performativity. Sociological theories of imitation such as Gabriel Tarde’s notion of universal imitation can help to triangulate picaresque precarious identities, but significantly they do not account for them as part of the mechanisms of the production of the social in modernity that they project. Clearly therefore, they must lie outside of the social: a conclusion that both helps to hammer home a crucial point about precarious picaresque identities, but that also points to a limited model of the social in these otherwise highly inspiring theories.

The Mimic Man V.S. Naipaul’s sixth novel The Mimic Men (1967) is the fictional autobiography of Ralph K. Singh. Like Naipaul himself, Singh was educated in England, born and brought up in the Caribbean (in Singh’s case the fictional island of Isabella, in Naipaul’s case Trinidad) and descends from parents who came from India in the nineteenth century to work on colonial Antillean sugar plantations. Mimicry is already apparent on the opening page of the novel. In what is chronologically the second part of his life story, which starts by describing his first days as a student in London, Singh portrays the manners of his landlord Mr. Shylock and recounts how he actively decides to mimic them. Shylock, as his name suggests, is certainly not at the ethnic and religious centre of British post-war society. On the contrary, it is likely that he has also experienced marginalization and adaptation-pressure throughout his life. Nevertheless, in his aspirations to appear English, he serves as the young Indian-Caribbean’s mimetic role model: Mr Shylock looked distinguished, like a lawyer or businessman or politician. He had the habit of stroking the lobe of his ear and inclining his head to listen. I thought the gesture was attractive, I copied it. (3; emphasis added)

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Chronologically, however, Singh’s desire to slip into different social roles emerges even earlier in his life and triggers a series of mimicries, adaptations, simulations, and role plays. During his childhood, narrated in the second part of the book, Singh states that he felt deeply embarrassed by his heritage: ‘To be descended from generations of idlers and failures, an unbroken line of unimaginative, unenterprising and oppressed had always seemed to me to be the cause for deep silent shame’ (89). Therefore, at about the same time in his life, he almost programmatically decides to dissociate—and de-exoticize—himself from this genealogy by changing his name: For instance, I gave myself a new name […] I broke Kripalsingh into two, correctly reviving an ancient fracture, as I felt; gave myself the further name of Ralph; signed myself R.R.K. Singh. At school I was known as Ralph Singh. The name Ralph I chose for the sake of the initial, which was also that of my real name. In this way, I felt I mitigated a fantasy or deception […] Ranjit Kripalsingh had been transformed to Ralph Singh. (100–101)

He turns his exotic and Indian-sounding name into a much milder form of alterity that still bears sufficient witness to his visible Indian heritage. This ‘transformation’ relates to an actual onomastic phenomenon: Singh is a popular name among Sikhs, who generally have to carry Singh as one of their various last names. Upon immigration to England, Canada, or the United States, many Sikhs, very much like Ralph, tend to reduce their surnames to Singh, partly of course to harmonize with local pronunciation. Ralph is very concerned with the consistency of his performance and is afraid that the deception may be too radical. He therefore mitigates the change by combining his ethnic desire with plausibility, both semantically and graph(em)ically: he opts for a name that still sounds mildly Indian and that resembles his actual name at least in its initials. Tellingly, he starts with this public performance when he enters school, at that very point in life at which one temporarily starts a life outside of one’s private home. In Richard Sennett’s theory of social role play, such a split of a public persona itself does not necessarily impede a healthy social role, which in his understanding in fact relies on a discrepancy between public performance and private identity. Both realms

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are obviously constructions, but both those constructions mutually structure the life of a social individual.10 This is only appropriate to the creative ‘self-actualization’ that ought to structure human identity in modernity.11 Despite the modern acceptance of self-actualization and of a split between public and private roles dating back to the eighteenth century, which according to Sennett was partly rolled back in the nineteenth century with a proliferation of intimacy and authenticity, social expression, especially in intercultural contexts, is often still structured by an expectation of a representative continuity between physical appearance, social performance, and cultural substance. In this cultural climate, performances that are thought to be recognizable as such—usually because they conflict with an essentialized physical appearance—are easily deemed inappropriate and often become sanctioned. In such instances physical appearance and cultural substance become conflated to bypass modernity’s official primacy of social performance. This is a pervasive dilemma, especially for picaresque characters. Anthropologist James Ferguson attests to this priority of authentic expression in the West— even where it might not be consciously geared towards racist exclusion— and states that Westerners confronted with mimicry tend to be puzzled as to how ‘to deal with an object of alterity who refuses to be other, and who deliberately aims to spoil his or her own “authenticity”?’12 This bewilderment is also very pronounced in liberal cosmopolitan contexts, in which, paradoxically enough, exotic alterity is deemed the last bedrock of cultural authenticity. The role-playing of the protagonist in Naipaul’s novel no longer solely serves the early modern picaresque purpose of securing his physical and material survival, as he clearly states that ‘I have no material hardships to record’ (101), but—at least during his childhood—results from the protagonist’s urge to construct a coherent, wholesome, and non-stigmatized social identity that will be recognized and acknowledged. When he realizes that role-playing and mimicry gets him there, he exclaims: ‘The discovery that many were willing to take me for what I said I was was pure joy. It was a revelation of wholeness’ (122; emphasis added). ‘Wholeness’, thus, for him is not a felt unity between performance and inner substance, but produced through the social acceptance of his performance by others. Quite emblematically, Homi K. Bhabha has called Singh ‘Naipaul’s colonial politician as play-actor’ who is an ‘authorized version of

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otherness’.13 The repeated meta-generic references to film and theatre throughout the novel further underline this deliberately performative aspect of Singh’s personality: ‘Create the scenes then’; ‘I was not unmarked. The Camera was in the sky. It followed the boy’; ‘we each became our character’ (210, 120, 213). Such a decidedly outside and highly self-conscious perspective on one’s own performances distinguishes mimicry from more viscerally rehearsed and involuntary forms of role-playing, which are ‘akin to an unconscious script that we unwittingly perform all our lives’.14 In these more internalized and less retractable, and thereby less precarious identity formations, despite being equally shaped by imitation, ‘there is […] no external standpoint from which we can observe our performance’.15 While this lack of an external standpoint may seem to topologically evoke picaresque atopy at first, in terms of social pragmatics, it actually signifies its opposite. The ‘unobserved’ role governed by this ‘unconscious script’ is precisely what would provide for a (perceived) stable identity or centre. In that sense (imitative and seemingly homogenous) modern mass societies, whose social scripts of course constantly evolve and change through influx, fashions, etc., can be seen to offer a relatively high degree of social security through resemblance and belonging. For this reason, many of their expressions have, in the wake of modernity’s inner and outer expansions, been mimicked in order to participate, or at least to seem to participate, in these stable systems and the security they can provide. In contrast, those imitations—epitomized in picaresque identity performance—that are considered less customary, less established, less traditional, less coherent, or actively intersubjective are often referred to and disregarded as mimicry and expelled as dishonest.16 As a result of the pointing-out of these more culturally visible imitations the imitative efforts of all other social practices have tended to be forgotten; in fact pointing at those modes of mimicry—especially in contexts of imperialism, colonialism, and migration—may have actively helped this metropolitan process of forgetting and essentializing one’s own identity as normal, transparent, and unproblematic. It is one of postmodernism’s prime achievements to have decentred these assumptions. This, however, does not mean that the efforts and insecurities that enter into precarious picaresque and postcolonial identity performance should be fully conflated with the insecurities and anxieties that structure the often more metaphysical metropolitan quests for personal identity.

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In the third part of the novel the grown-up Ralph, who has had massive success as a businessman in the late colonial and early postcolonial period, becomes an active political agent in a postcolonial society that is undergoing a socialist transformation. Again he quite explicitly considers this political function as a role to be played. After having written his first political article for a leftist nationalist newspaper, an essay about the hardships of his father, whose poverty he had previously despised and condemned, he states: ‘the irony does not escape me: that article was deeply dishonest. It was the work of a convert, a man just created, just presented with a picture of himself’ (205). He remarks further upon his personal detachment from the movement that he seeks to participate in for his own progress: ‘I will not linger on the details of our movement. I cannot speak of the movement as a phenomenon generated by my personality. I can scarcely speak of it in personal terms’ (209). He cannot link this part of his biography with any substantial political goal or desire or a governing personality because it was only one of the various roles he had played, one of the personalities he had temporarily and tactically appropriated. Unlike the early modern picaros, however, the narrator reflects on the ambiguity of his role-playing, which also takes the reverse direction from that of the early modern picaros’, who usually pretend upwards. Singh, on the other hand, is in this third part of the novel made to play ‘the rich man with a certain name who had put himself on the side of the poor, who appeared to have been suddenly given a glimpse of the truth.’ (210) This evokes a philanthropist trope of self-recognition that usually results in tax-deductible humanitarianism, but not in the joining of communist movements; therefore one can safely assume this turn to be fully opportunistic. When he claims, ‘I was now aware of his attractiveness’ (210), the third-person self-reference ‘his’ further accentuates his distancing from the role played, and displays a strong awareness and an exposure of that role-playing, as well as a marked discrepancy between role and genuine personality, or more precisely, one role and another. This ostensible distancing is also that of the narrator, who is now a postcolonial author and wants to deny his deeper affiliations with what has at the moment of writing come to be considered a problematic political regime. Jacques Lacan claims that in studying mimicry ‘we should not be too hasty in introducing some kind of intersubjectivity’ and ‘very careful not to think too quickly of the other who is being imitated’.17 In this context, it is, however, quite important to observe how Ralph evaluates the identity performances of other Caribbean subjects and understand how

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these evaluations actively affect his own desire to escape his role. It is this activeness and effort in observation and imitation that defines his specifically picaresque form of mimicry. It goes beyond the ubiquitous roleplaying and derivation that pervades the performativity and imitation of social life, or the initiation into the Symbolic. Like Lacan, Tarde downplays the difference between conscious and unconscious imitation and even actively denounces its importance, at least as a social phenomenon.18 Nevertheless, he does have a few things to say on the issue: He maintains that what may start as a conscious imitation, both for an individual or a social group, over the course of time always becomes unconscious and ‘involuntary’ and usually develops from a strategic adaptation to a full-scale adoption of behavioural codes and patterns.19 Ultimately: Society may therefore be defined as a group of beings who are apt to imitate one another, or who, without actual imitation, are alike in their possession of common traits, which are ancient copies of the same model.20 Une collection d’être en tant qu’ils sont en train de d’imiter entre eux ou en tant que, sans s’imiter actuellement, ils se ressemnblent et que leurs traits communs sont des copies anciennes d’un même modéle.

The implied conflation of advanced societies with non- or post-intersubjective imitation is made clear, when he rhetorically asks: ‘Is it true that as a people becomes civilised its manner of imitating becomes more and more voluntary, conscious, and deliberate?’ [‘Est-il vrai qu’à mesure qu’un people se civilise, sa manière d’imiter devienne de plus en plus volontaire, consciente, réfléchie?’]. This is followed by the negative answer ‘I think the opposite is true’ [‘Je croirais plutôt l’inverse’].21 This rising ‘involuntariness’ signifies something done not necessarily against one’s will, but certainly without one’s will, and is at stake in long-rehearsed and internalized identity performances. Long before Lacan, Tarde had, therefore, clearly also defined a social group as a sublation of explicit intersubjectivity and thus also prefigured many of the other poststructuralist notions of subjectivity: most notably Derrida’s notion of textuality and Kristeva’s idea of a pervasive socializing intertextuality, which for her explicitly ‘replaces that of inter-subjectivity’.22 These intertextual modes of imitation are especially operative in modern nations, wherein ‘our increasing density of population and our advance in civilisation prodigiously accelerate their diffusion’ [‘la densité

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croissante de la population et les progrès accomplis accélèrent prodigieusement cette extension’],23 and provide a high degree of stability. The downsides of this social stability can be an undue homogenization and purification of the social body, the fear of which became a major driving force in the proliferation of modernism and postmodernism. As problematic as such stable and fully internalized identity-projections are with respect to the quantification of humans and the exclusions and normalizations they can foster, the social structures they affirmatively construct are also perceived as much less volatile and precarious by those for whom they operate. While dissociated from intersubjectivity and active free will, this intertextual imitation and subjection is, however, not exercised through active submission and forceful coercion. Such modes of subjection are certainly not less powerful or effective—in fact, quite the opposite—but they make subjects forget their subjection. This act of forgetting is what enables, regardless of how phantasmagoric, semiotic, or deceptive, a sense of belonging and inclusion. If this forgetting does not take place, belonging is unavoidably felt to be precarious. This can occur to anybody at any time, when the semiotic, discursive, and potentially alienating qualities of routine social behaviour become momentarily evident to us and our bodies, but it is persistently the case with someone like Ralph Singh who has to constantly calibrate his behaviour and identity towards role models in contexts of hierarchically organized and racist cultural difference. In the case of Ralph Singh, then, imitation is precarious, precisely because it remains inter-subjective and voluntary. He envies his classmates, the French Creole boy Deschampsneuf and the Afro-Caribbean boy Browne, who have apparently forgotten their activity of imitation and subjection. Even though their standpoints have also been unavoidably created in imitation and mimicry, from Ralph Singh’s Indian-Caribbean perspective, being English, French-Creole, or even Afro-Caribbean still signifies wholeness and a supposedly coherent self. Ralph feels that such coherence of self-identity eludes him. Consequently, he relates these boys to a series of stable natural expressions, systems of knowledge, and characteristic objects: Grapevine and Meccano sets were accordingly things which I at once put beyond ambition, just as until that moment, they had been outside my knowledge; They were things that befell a boy like Deschampsneuf. It was also part of his developed ability to manage the world that he had views

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on the king […] judgement that coloured my view of both kings for years. […] Browne too knew about the world; his speech to me was the very distillation of the wisdom of a hundred Negro backyards […] Browne was also famous. […] I deeply envied Browne his fame and regard. For him the world was already charted. (98–99)

It is this chartedness of life that Ralph envies and naturalizes, a chartedness that is biologically transferred, so he believes, through blood and upbringing and which he perceives as a coherent, stable, and full cultural identity. Both Browne’s and Deschampsneuf’s appearance and behaviour are perceived by Ralph as expressive of an authentic and specific way of life, a personal truth, and a seemingly effortless self-identity that lies in their speech, habits, gestures, and in their surrounding objects: ‘the very distillation of the wisdom of a hundred Negro backyards’; ‘things that befell a boy like Deschampsneuf’. Ralph essentializes their identities also because of their ethnicities, which in his estimation provide unrehearsed social places and correspond to the more clearly polarized Caribbean binaries of black and white, both of which he cannot inhabit. He envies both for their supposedly clear roles and laid out life-itineraries, and for the fact that for them ‘the world was already charted’. This assertion, at least metaphorically, links them to Michel de Certeau’s elites, who possess a map, that is, a charted representation of the (social) world and their own place in it,24 whereas the picaro organizes not only his mobility, but also his identities tentatively, in the tactical and tactile logics of the tour. In a hilarious scene the 9-year-old kids are later asked to write fictive application letters in class based on prefabricated sentences provided by the teacher. Ralph is not able to perform, adopt or fake a coherent style to complete these model sentences. He relates the highly formal and stylized, and to him alien, model sentences to his everyday experience and writes the letter from his current perspective and in his naïve everyday language. He fails to realise that he was expected to write them from the imaginative future moment at which he might apply for a job and was expected to use a specific, formalized register, thereby literally confirming that ‘the picaro lives for the present’.25 Deschampsneuf and Browne, on the other hand, succeed fully: ‘Then the letters of other boys like Browne and Deschampsneuf are read out and I see. Absolute models. But how do they know?’ (98; emphasis added) Application letters are certainly a format in which an—unreasonable—demand for expressing authenticity and an utter symbolicity come together performatively. As

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such they can render visible the imitative character of public self-projections. Ralph, however, has not internalized the meaning and combinatory requirements of the highly formal register of application letters. Therefore, he perceives that for Browne and Deschampsneuf these signs came effortlessly, while he has no such thoroughly internalized code-system. He is aware that they are also producing ‘models’ and, thus, does not believe in the authenticity of their metropolitan performance, which for him is always undermined by their ethnicity, but he envies their effortless competence, which he feels eludes him. Browne’s and Deschampsneuf’s seemingly effortless adherence to these discursive rules, however, have of course been well rehearsed and transmitted as a desire through ideological apparatuses, of which school, in which all of this takes place, is often considered one of the most effective. Browne’s and Deschampsneuf’s identities and semiotic skills can therefore also be read as the result of a specifically ‘colonial indoctrination process through which Caribbean men and women denied an autonomous cultural identity, have been coerced into seeking legitimacy through the imitation of Western models’.26 Their highly formalized expertise in one of the most important and explicitly symbolic practices of capitalist, individualist self-fashioning merely marks the epitome of an entire apparatus of colonial knowledge. The effectiveness of this colonial knowledge lies precisely in its capacity to no longer become constantly identified as subjection and effortful mimicry. It is no longer intersubjectively negotiated but involuntarily imitated and perhaps sincerely desired, and thus automatically reproduced. Therefore, in the case of Deschampsneuf and Browne, this process—though specifically colonial— is closer to the ‘intertexual’ and involuntary rules of universal repetition, without a degree of which colonial discourse could not have been so effective. However, we will also see that for the Afro-Caribbean boy Browne even this relative sociological regularity cannot contain specifically racist and colonialist assumptions. The plural in the title, The Mimic Men, thus hints at the fact that in this novel, imitation cannot simply be confined to Ralph Singh, the mimic man. As Graham Huggan has noted, ‘The colonial “mimic man” may set off […] in search of “genuine culture” only to find there other […] “mimic men”’.27 The we-form in the narrator’s name-giving diagnosis therefore has to include these two: ‘We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption

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that came so quickly to the new’ (157; emphasis added). While they differ from Ralph’s picaresque mimicry, their identities are also ‘conducted before a projection […] which in its smallest gestures is based on metropolitan references’.28 Only in their case the role-playing is not easily identified as such, because it lacks the failures, gaps, and distortions that the more surface-oriented Ralph performs. He both considers the two boys to be essentially determined by their timeless ethnicity and culture, and at the same time wonders at their convincing adaptive abilities and absolute discursive competence.

Expressions and Impressions Ralph’s more precarious modes of imitating are a question of depth and surface, though not only in terms of his imitations’ less firmly internalized results, but also already regarding the goal of their imitative aspirations. More important in this context than the distinction between conscious and unconscious, or voluntary and involuntary imitation—and more central to his own work— is Tarde’s distinction between the will to imitate a certain action or expression on the one hand, and the desire to take over an idea and only perform the actions expressive of that idea, on the other.29 He maintains that imitation always proceeds from inner to outer, ‘ab interioribus ad exteriora’,30 from desire to expression, wherefore he exultingly proposes that not fear but love is always at the heart of (the imitation of) great cultures. Mimetic desires always touch the ‘heart’ first and then proceed from the inside to the outside, from depth to surface: First the literature and the soul of a nation are admired, then its cultural practices are copied.31 Quite similarly, Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has argued that the Continental reception of British literature, most importantly the highly interiorized epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson, and the adoption of British salon culture and bourgeois lifestyle, preceded the bourgeois revolutions of the political system.32 These categories of inner and outer help to further disentangle the picaresque mimicry of Ralph Singh from those of his postcolonial peers and from social imitation in general. Of course, this is not a distinction between imitation and non-imitation, but a psycho-topological question of layers of imitation: one concerned with the imitation of the exterior and the other with the imitation of the interior, from which the outer expression will only result. Even the active will, for example, of the historical middle class to perform expressions of an upper class, or of Creoles like Deschampsneuf to perform metropolitan elites, is first transferred through such inner imitation. Such

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imitative action goes beyond the dimension of explicit coercion as it includes the active desire to imitate, or rather become someone else, not by coercion, and not even by necessity. If those regular and forgetful imitations that we call internalization, ideology, or identity are supposed to work fully, then the desire for the interior, the desire to take over an idea, has to precede the act of merely imitating the exterior expression: ‘Before imitating the act of another we begin by feeling the need from which this act proceeds, and we feel it as precisely as we do only because it has been suggested to us’ [‘avant d’imiter l’acte d’autrui, on commence par éprouver le besoin d’oú naît cet acte, et on ne l’éprouve avec sa modalité precise que par ce qu’il a été suggéré’].33 Such imitation of expressions that is firmly grounded in a desired interior is ‘first believed in and then practised’ [‘ne commence pas par être pratiquée, mais par être crue’].34 Therefore, this mode of imitation produces social practices and cultural identities that are largely perceived and portrayed as stable and have turned into custom, at ‘that obscure crossroads where the constructed and the habitual coalesce’.35 Clearly Tarde’s theory is inappropriate to describe many of the multiform postcolonial material practices and cultural identities that are generated by the encounter with accelerated globalization of products and media. Its mechanisms are even directly opposed to these practices and identities when they are projected through the more explicitly precarious imitation that Ralph Singh and other picaros are implicated in. This incommensurability is intricately related to the problem of precarious picaresque prefiguration, discussed in the last chapter, which denotes a mode of experience that is deflected from a semiotic surface, which is thus rendered material, as its cultural meanings are never quite accessible. Ralph Singh becomes increasingly apt in the course of the text at understanding the complexities of these semiotic systems and the potentially empowering role that mitigated exotic deviation from them might foster. Nonetheless, this focus on the exterior is usually an exclusionary mechanism for picaros and even the liberating potential associated with it eventually turns existentially and materially precarious for Ralph. In those less precarious modes of imitation envisioned by social theory, then, before a social group mimics the dress and behaviour of others, it must have previously taken over their feelings and desires, which are expressed in their way of life. Interpersonally, Tarde argues, every social bond begins with the desire to imitate a strong personality. To imitate this personality is not perceived as an obligation but is felt to be a wish, even ‘loving admiration’ [‘une admiration […] amoureuse’]36 as he calls it. From this internal desire, also activated in effective colonial discourse, follows the imitation

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of external expressions, which in the novel results in the successful aspirational performances of Deschampsneuf and even Browne. Contrarily, Ralph Singh is introduced to the reader while copying a mannerism from his landlord Shylock merely because he states that he ‘found the gesture attractive’ (3; emphasis added). Hence, he copies a gesture and comportment that he does not primarily consider the expression of something, but values because it creates the impression of something. He copies Shylock because he ‘looks distinguished like a businessmen or a lawyer’ (3; emphasis added) though it has been clearly established that he is neither. This conveys a practice of imitation that is fully aimed at the exterior and is deemed to be precarious—even if it will prove temporarily successful in economic terms. It is not rooted in a previous desire for Shylock’s way of life or any inner substance this gesture may be an expression of. Consequently, it will not affect Ralph beyond the copying of this single gesture. Shylock’s name suggests that in his case this substance may be especially elusive, as the landlord himself may have experienced a process of assimilation and perhaps simulation in which he may still be caught up. Singh reverses the vectors of internal desire and external imitation and copies the gesture first, hoping to accumulate the cultural capital he associates with the appropriation of that gesture. Significantly, this practice is made explicit at the very beginning of the text, when he does not even copy the expression of someone’s actual social role, but rather, an expression that explicitly signifies something the person is not. The previously discussed scene involving the application letters further attests to Ralph’s inability to even imaginatively relate to a desire behind an expression. Ralph takes his homework literally and actively imitates the prefabricated model sentences, attaching these expressions almost unaltered to himself hic et nunc and, unsurprisingly, fails. He is not able to imaginatively take over the idea, desire (however artificial in this context), or goal intended in an application letter. This would have included imaginatively taking on the role of someone actually in need of writing an application letter, of copying the desire and wish to attain a certain job, which the application letter would then be an—of course highly stylized—expression of. Ralph, again, only manages to stay on the very surface of these provided expressions.

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Such an imitation of the exterior is what Bhabha alludes to in his typically elusive statement ‘the desire of colonial mimicry […] I shall call metonymy of presence’.37 Let us unpack that: A performance in mimicry is solely directed towards the outer expression, is only the sign, only the attribute or adjunct of the substance it should be expressive of. In mimicry these expressions can be endlessly accumulated, while the original and interior principle or substance need not be substituted. Therefore, the accumulation remains on the surface and can accumulate expressions to an extent that it becomes an uncanny and haunting over-performance. An imitation in the sense of Tarde and those performed by Deschampsneuf and (less successfully and more ambivalently as we will see) by Browne, on the other hand, may in analogy be called a metaphor of presence. Here a cultural element, an inner desire or presence is translated into an appropriate and similar expression in a different field: A felt desire moves or transfers (Greek: metapherein) into the realm of gestures or language. I contend that mimesis or seemingly authentic identity expressions are metaphoric because they represent an idea, represent a—if deceptively—felt presence in a different realm or context. A metonymy of presence, on the other hand, is the relation to a presence by means of proximity to its symbolic forms of expression. Bhabha writes likewise that ‘mimicry repeats rather than represents’.38 It takes a contiguous element from the realm of expression and repeats it in that very same realm: a copied gesture, a code of apparel, a political statement. Interestingly, ‘metonymy’ derives from the Ancient Greek metonumia, which literally means ‘change of name’: ‘I gave myself a new name […] Ranjit Kripalsingh had been transformed into Ralph Singh’ (101). Despite a range of colonial characters in The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh is the only representative of this metonymic aspect of colonial mimicry. While mimicry temporarily helps him to succeed economically, in his utter disorientation he, and other picaros who follow this model of precarious prefiguration and simulation, must, however, be somewhat distinguished from the enabling and affirmative dimension of postcolonial cultural agency that Bhabha identifies in colonial mimicry. In distinction from his Caribbean peers, Ralph’s picaresque mimicry, like the biological process of a plant or an animal likening itself to its environment— from where the term has been transposed into psychoanalysis and then cultural theory—is more about the adaptation to a hostile environment or concrete demand, and less about the adoption of a desire, lifestyle, or

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identity. Deschampsneuf and Browne, on the other hand, seem to aim to be part of the colonial project; they eagerly take over the ideas and assumptions that have been passed on and perform the required actions appropriately because of an internalized desire for, or, in Browne’s case, at least a very nuanced understanding of colonial discourse. Their expressions resemble a metaphor of presence, because they transfer an inner state or sincere aspiration, regardless of how self-deceptive and oppressive, into an expression. Therefore, it seemed to the more disoriented, or rather surface-oriented Ralph that to them things came easily. While their expressions are also only acquired imitatively, they seem nevertheless more routine and less precarious as they proceed from inner to outer, from root to surface. In the colonial relations of domination and subjection on Isabella, the offspring of the former slaves and former Creole slave-owners have perhaps occupied a more clearly rehearsed, symmetrical, less atopical, and precarious place than the offspring of Indian indentured labourers, who seem to experience a stronger sense of social and identitarian atopy and are not as straightforwardly and routinely affected and effected by the vectors of Caribbean colonial discourse and counter-discourse. Tellingly, while they are reliably entrenched in colonial knowledge, Browne and Deschampsneuf also embody the two forms of ethnicity that have eventually been deployed in nationalist anti-colonial discourses throughout the Caribbean. Therefore, these more deep-seated structures of identity performance or representation do not conflict with the fact that Browne will later become a devoted anti-colonial politician. Ralph Singh, on the other hand, both as a colonial subject and later as postcolonial politician and author starts at the surface and fails to create a non-precarious identity and sustainable performance. His mimicry remains metonymical: He also uses the vocabulary of anti-colonial struggle and political revolution, but without being in the least infected by the desire for the anti-colonial or revolutionary project: ‘that article was deeply dishonest’ (205). He repeats its expressions but they do not represent or convey an adopted inner state. The cohesion between expression and inner conviction, however, does not necessarily secure the reception of a cultural performance as honest and appropriate, especially in contexts of racist bias. Consequently, with regard to Browne, the effort he has to invest to unmark himself become obvious in the text. He is clearly perceived as successfully embodying the desire of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’,

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of producing a class of colonial subjects ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.39 Browne is presented as having fully taken over the ‘desire to emerge as “authentic” through mimicry’, as having fully adopted to colonial discourse. Only those gazing at him with racist assumptions and notions of identitarian authenticity can find a residue of ambivalence and consider him ‘caught inappropriately, between’.40 He is a well-educated scholarship-holder who aims at ‘studies abroad, a profession, independence, the past wiped out’ (160) and clearly performs a sincere public identity in terms of the consistency of his role over time; a role for which he invests everything in school, and which he hopes will be acknowledged if he wipes out his past. In this he is similar to Ralph, who breaks his genealogical connections by changing his name. Therefore, he is deeply embarrassed when Ralph visits him at his parent’s house and witnesses the material reality in which he lives and is made aware of his background, as suggested by his poor AfroCaribbean family. Upon entering, Ralph proclaims ‘in that interior all the attributes of his race and class were like secrets no friend ought to have gazed upon’ (162; emphasis added). This gaze supposedly unmasks and exposes the assumed true self that is behind Browne’s public performance in school. What has already been suggested in Ralph’s insecure evaluation of his own identity performances is now made clear in the way he evaluates Browne: In his evaluations, Ralph is not adhering to an idea of performance, in which a public role is merely coherently played so that the performance is accepted as truthful and sincere; instead, he adheres to an idea of intimacy and authenticity, in which a public performance is expected to correspond to and reveal a true self that lies behind it. If these two realms conflict, the performance is considered inauthentic. The symbolism of entering the house, the intimate sphere of the home, as well as the explicit reference to the ‘interior’, but also to ‘secrets’ and ‘attributes’, evokes the intimacy of these private realms—beneath the public performance—that are for him the markings of authentic identity and truth. Such an ostensibly revelatory onto-epistemology that gestures towards an authentic and transcendent personal truth behind it is, here, only consistent with the pseudo-revisionary protocols of the autobiographical narrator Ralph Singh, who likewise claims to seek to ‘rediscover a lost truth’ (205). The privileging of authenticity and essence is even more severe in such racist contexts, as the assumed background or interior does not even need to be gazed upon in order to be operative. In fact, the very surface

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or foreground suffices to construe a certain background, to project an interior. Browne is the most apt pupil in the colonial school of Isabella. Regardless, he is still suspected of having a personality—an interiority—that is not synchronized with his otherwise highly consistent public performance. This can only happen in a colonial context, where the ‘visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction. It is a form of discourse uttered inter dicta’.41 In a highly racialized colonial context of imitation, between (inter) his absolute words (dicta) and gestures, Browne’s skin, and in fact even his name, expose him as ‘almost the same but not white’.42 Paradoxically, Browne may no longer feel that he is actively copying, but may have fully identified with and adopted the ‘metropolitan mimetic imperative—the desire to reproduce its culture as so many faithful copies’.43 Ralph, himself, may fail at creating such consistent, metaphorical, and sincere identities, but he has perhaps also understood that strict adhesion to metropolitan protocols is futile insofar as it does not secure complete integration in contexts marked by the nexus of authenticity and racism. Frantz Fanon considers this Western mimetic imperative to be highly successful in generating the Antillean Negro’s racial desire: ‘the goal of his behaviour will be The Other (in the guise of the white man), for The Other alone can give him worth’.44 Fear and coercion have certainly had their impact on this colonial identity performance; however, admiration and desire, maybe even love, as Tarde claims, have also played their part, if only as the upside of the institutionalized self-hatred that Fanon maintains.45 A convincing performance like Browne’s is largely perceived as coherent, precisely because it is not only derived from a surface observation, but is metaphorically expressive of an internalized desire. But regardless of how smooth and consistent it may be, it is declared a metonymic performance by assumptions of authenticity inherent in racist discourse and by semioticizing pigmentation. It is what Fanon calls ‘the fact of blackness’46 that marks the site of interdiction here. As much as Browne tries to ‘wipe out his past’, he cannot wipe out his skin colour and the assumptions it triggers. In colonial mimicry this culturally biologized visibility, which cannot be erased via inculcation of discourse, is the site of interdiction in which mimesis is always already construed as mimicry. Because he fully identifies with the metropolitan mimetic imperative and in Fanon’s words, may at first ‘not altogether apprehend the fact of his being a Negro’,47 Browne is ashamed of

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his economic and cultural blackness, trying to make others forget it by avoiding their contact with his family and restricting access to his home. He is embarrassed because he thinks that he has been exposed by Ralph’s glimpse at his home. However, because of the biologized fact of his blackness his identity and knowledge have in fact always already been perversely reduced to and projected as ‘the wisdom of a hundred negro backyards’ (99). While ambivalence in Bhabha’s colonial mimicry is perceived as a strategy of subversion, in The Mimic Men it only serves as a means of racist marginalization. This incommensurability may be due to Naipaul’s conservative cultural politics, which seek to expose the affiliation and aspiration of New World subjects to a Western lifestyle as universally disabling and ridiculously derivative, instead of depicting the more complex cross-cultural operations of creolization or hybridization that Caribbean cultural theory and writers such as Edouard Glissant have developed. Naipaul’s Caribbean mimic men may, however, also be read more productively as counterweight to an over-affirmative understanding of the subversive potential of mimicry in Bhabha’s theory and in other anthropological theories of mimicry that tend to ‘force-fit practices of apparent imitation or assimilation within a […] scheme of cultural difference and appropriation’.48

The Mimic Men Naipaul is often criticized for presenting himself as ‘the ultimate literary apatride, the most comprehensively uprooted of twentieth-century writers and most bereft of national traditions’49 who ‘does so in order to lay claim to Arnoldian objectivity, to a secure, reputable, tradition of extratraditionalism’.50 Thus far we have seen that his protagonist Ralph K. Singh is projected as someone who is rather anxious about his own uprooted, extra-traditional position as an Anglo-Indian-Caribbean subject. Only when he starts to actively invent traditions, identities, names, and family genealogies (or mythologies) for himself, does it ‘feel like a revelation of wholeness’ (122). It is in moments when his flexible performances are acknowledged as mildly exotic and attractively intercultural that they can offer a very high degree of social possibility and success through the freedom from genealogical constraints and social ideas. This is especially nuanced in the first, chronologically the second part of the novel, in which Ralph lives in London. Here, he uses quite explicit,

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almost classically picaresque confidence tricks in order to pick up British girls: In London I had no guide. There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note the consistencies or inconsistencies. It was up to me to choose my character, and I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial […] I let it be known that on my island my family were the bottlers of Coca-Cola. […] In the halls the British Council there were always women to be picked up. (19–21; emphasis added)

He now knows exactly how to insert himself into the exotic colonial fantasies of those women that frequent the British Council. This is a typically Naipaulian scene insofar as he ridicules and eroticizes the intercultural ambitions of Europeans and their desire for mitigated otherness while he simultaneously exposes the inauthenticity of (post)colonial subjects. In this elaborate simulation, Ralph creates a fake family background, or at least highly exaggerates his own, and inscribes it into the exotic cosmopolitan elites of global corporate capitalism. Furthermore, his role-playing includes the consideration and anticipation of the cultural likes and dislikes of his love interests, which he has studied most carefully. He uses this knowledge to create a form of self-expression that secures interest and provides a basis for communication about supposedly shared preferences, and surrounds himself with such cultural objects as will create a favourable impression of his cultural interests: I have taken care to provide myself with magazines, notably Punch […] I might offer; It would always be accepted. The way was then open for that type of conversation at which I was becoming adept. […] when dedication and commitment are total, mistake is rare. Will it be believed if I say that on four successive Wednesdays I made lucky strikes on the Oxford train? (22)

Mimicry, as previewed at the beginning of this chapter, is also the central strategy of Pablos in Quevedo’s El Buscón who is described as someone whose ‘life project is to become a gentleman and deny his blood’.51 The similarities between Pablos’ and Ralph’s role-playing are quite striking when juxtaposing the previous scenes with the most elaborate mimicry of El Buscón, where Pablos poses as a nobleman. By anticipating and inscribing himself into the cultural and ideological likes and dislikes of

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the aristocracy, he tries to win the affection of a girl and the assent of her family, as he is interested in marrying her for her—not even very significant—dowry and status. The sexual ambition and strong desire for cultural self-affirmation of The Mimic Men is here supplanted by an exclusively material and prestigious orientation: I told them I was running away from my mother and father who wanted to marry me off against my will to an ugly, stupid, common woman, just because she had a large dowry. “And I, ladies, prefer a clean woman without a rag to her back to a rich heiress [”] […] Up jumped the aunt […] and said: “Oh, young man, I do think you’re right! […] I’ve refused my niece to lots of rich men because they didn’t have any class. She’s poor— she’s only got a dowry worth of six thousand ducats—but as far as blood is concerned, she can look anybody in the eye [”] (167–168) Yo les dije que en huir de un padre y madre que me querían casar contra mi voluntad con mujer fea y necia mal nacido, por el mucho dote. “Y yo, señoras, quiero más una mujer limpia en cueros que una judía poderosa; [”] […] Saltó tan presto la tía: “!Ay señor, y cómo le quiero bien! […] no he querido casar mi sobrina, con salirles ricos casamientos, por no ser de calidad. Ella pobre es, que no tiene sino seis mil ducados de dote; pero no debe nada a nadie en sangre.[”] (237–238)

Pablos knows exactly what role he needs to perform in order to gain the nobles’ attention. He anticipates and mocks the typical siglo de oro pretensions of the impoverished Spanish low nobility, who have compensated for their loss of political influence and economic affluence through a hypertrophied understanding and advocation of honour and an incestuous insistence on the purity of blood (pureza or limpieza de sangre). Not only does Pablos dress, speak, and behave accordingly, he even anticipates the expectations of the decadent nobility, who value descent and purity of blood over money and dowry. He anticipates that they prefer—in fact have to prefer for lack of actual material resources— someone who values ‘una mujer limpia’ (a clean woman) over ‘una judía ponderosa’ (a rich Jew). The official English translation does not retain the explicit anti-Jewish, and thereby anti-converso and anti-parvenu sentiments in that assertion. Pablos is confirmed in his anticipation when they have to admit that ‘she is poor’ [‘ella pobre es’] but proudly assert that ‘as far as blood is concerned, she can look anybody in the eye’ (168) [‘debe nada a nadie en sangre’ (337)].

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Pablos’ theatricality is only undermined when someone enters the scene later who is indeed able to ‘link his present with his past’ (Mimic Men 19), which he has not managed to ‘wipe out’ fully. It is his former master Don Diego Coronel, who after initially falling for Pablos’ explanations and excuses soon exposes him, as he believes he has noted inconsistencies in his performance. After a ‘background check’, he has him beaten up and Pablos is left injured in the streets with the warning ‘Así pagan los picaros embustidores mal nacidos’ (249) which translates in the English as ‘that’s for being a lying bastard’ (177). The English translation foregrounds the general fact of lying, whereas the Spanish clarifies a more general disgust for ‘mal nacido’ (low-born) parvenu characters, who aim to improve their lot by transgressing their low birth; a transgression that, regardless of any actually achieved economic status, is always indiscriminately perceived as lying, as it violates the social roles assigned at birth. The early modern Spanish nobility on the other hand is portrayed as having a consistent performance, one supported by a guaranteed place in a cosmological order that is ineradicably assumed at birth. Thus, there is no materially significant ‘behind’, in the sense of a current impoverished reality that could, in Don Diego’s eyes, devalue one’s status, but only a transcendentally significant ‘before’, a low birth. ‘Background’ in this sense is projected not as an incompatibility of expression and disposable resources, but as a denial, or ignorance of the socially prescriptive function of blood and birth, and of the social impermeability prescribed by the feudal system and the cosmology that it represents socially. Pablos and Ralph both lack permanent mimetic goals or an internalized cultural identity against which their putative performances would consciously contrast for them: In opposition to a conscious self-fashioning, which is controlled by an interior instance “behind the roles” picaresque characters merge with their constantly shifting roles; they have no instance that is behind or beneath their respective expressions of themselves.52

This echoes Homi Bhabha’s estimation that ‘mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask’.53 Ralph’s and Pablos’ performances are precarious, because someone might indeed—as Ralph almost programmatically claims, though in negation—‘link present […] with […] past, and note consistencies and inconsistencies’ (19), which is precisely

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what happens in the case of Pablos’ recognition by Don Diego. This is a strange conflation of authenticity and sincerity, as the exposures they are threatened by focus on inconsistencies of roles over time, while they are, at least in the case of Pablos, also directed at an authentic and ineradicable genetic fact rather than at doubting a meritocratic social achievement. The ‘before’, thereby, is essentialized and becomes untransformable through merit. Evoking the pressures of cosmological capitalism in the realm of identity, this essentialism clearly refers to the stable social cosmology of the system of estates and the racist discourses of colonialism while strongly conflicting with the officially advocated emerging meritocracies of early modernity and neoliberal globalization. As in the postcolonial Caribbean, simulation in sixteenth-century Spain is not only relevant for an understanding of picaresque mimicry but also in a broader context of Renaissance self-fashioning. The Spanish term dissimulación describes how nobles tried to hide their intentions from their peers while trying to decipher others’ agendas. The broad social dissemination of such a strong ad hoc conception of action is especially discernible from the success of Baltasar Gracián’s Oraculo manual y arte de prudencia (The Oracle, a Manual of the Art of Discretion) published in 1647, which was a small manual to be carried in the sleeves of the nobility’s garments. Such books were clearly not only a Spanish phenomenon and Gracián’s text was not the only instance. Via the influence of Italian texts, most prominently Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) of 1528, Books of Manners became increasingly popular throughout Europe and especially Spain.54 Interestingly, even the censored version of Lazarillo de Tormes itself was in 1603 (possibly even in 1599) marketed under this rubric and published in a single volume with two other texts in a vastly expanding market of ‘courtesy books’ and instructional volumes, explicitly linking the picaresque to the tradition of conscious adaptability and simulation.55 These manuals provided guidance, instructions, commentary, and aphorisms on how to live and perform in courtly (semi-)public. The most paradigmatic and revealing comment from the Oraculo Manual may be: ‘vivir a la occasion’ (live according to occasion)56 which necessarily and very explicitly proposes to replace a substantial a priori with an ad hoc conception of action. Reminiscent of bad, or badly prepared actors playing an insufficiently rehearsed role, many a nobleman carried the ‘hand oracle’ in his sleeve, and one could always consult lines and stage directions whenever it was not intuitively clear how to behave. Contrary to

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the sleepwalking and forgetful imitations of modern mass society, what has been forgotten when these lines need to be consulted is not the (f) act of imitation but its content. The siglo de oro was thus an epoch in which deception and an excessive discrepancy between material existence and the outward portrayal of nobility were the rule, more so than in other contexts. Therefore, the picaro’s protean mimicry, along with the abundance of roles he assumes, merely epitomizes the paradoxes of early modern identity performance. The central mimetic imperative of the Castilian noble that increasingly affected the wider population, who were now able to buy titles, is for the picaro, however, usually overwritten by the pressures of changing affiliations, landscapes, and material realities. Coping with these contingencies of the disintegrating estate system—and especially its charitable aspects— became the original determining factor that generated picaresque mimicries in Lazarillo de Tormes. Therefore, Pablos’ picaresque mimicries are protean and tactical: no one role is rehearsed and internalized, but he remains adaptable and ever-changing. What distinguishes these protean mimicries is that that they follow the logic of the series: They are not centripetally ordered by one internalized, essentialized, or aspired role that is expressive of an idea or way of life. Rather their mimicries centrifugally depart from one role that is not central but simply initial. Pablos’ unmasking can only happen because his former master links his current role with a previous, initial role, which he then construes as his overruling, essential personal identity and fixed social role, with which his current performance does not harmonize. In fact he never possessed such an interior, never adopted a governing desire, but like Ralph Singh and all picaros, always only adapted to exteriors. This adaptability highlights not only a picaresque pathology as emblematic of the fluid identities of (post)modernity, capitalism, and globalization, but also denotes the limited possibilities of subject-formation under the pressures of cosmological capitalism. In its flexible adaptation of roles, Ralph’s mimicry strongly resembles the adaptability required of the early modern Spanish picaros. In the first chapters he tries performing the ‘extravagant colonial’, in the second invents the Europeanized Ralph K. Singh, in the third plays the postcolonial politician, ‘the rich man with a certain name who had put himself on the side of the poor’ (210) and in the frame narrative becomes the postcolonial autobiographical author, who is struggling to shape his life and find ‘a truth that got lost’. His mimicry is highly protean, and,

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especially in his authorial attempts to differentiate himself from his past actions and beliefs, explicates some of the consequences of the open syntagm implied in this perpetual proteanism. While Ralph may not be as strongly subjected to the vagaries of a precarious and destitute environment as most later—post-adjustment—picaros, his transitional autobiography best highlights the inability and/or unwillingness of the picaro to permanently adopt and take over the substance and idea behind practices and expressions. This inability also gestures towards a potentially resistant aspect of picaresque mimicry within the framework of universal repetition. Resistance, however, should in this context perhaps be understood more in terms of a fortification than an active struggle, more as an immunity and perhaps even a perpetual exclusion than a potentially trans-individual or intersubjective subversion. Despite his strong insistence on the precedence of the interior, Tarde acknowledges that humans may often think they merely take over (exterior) means and expressions that seem appropriate tools to respond to some of their specific needs. But by assuming these expressions, Tarde claims, the ends and ideas that they originally expressed always take hold of the copiers.57 Hence, even when the outer is what is being imitated and desired, there can be no taking over of an expression without that expression also leaving a deep impression. There is no adaptation, or rather adaptor that is not always subsequently adopted. Here Tarde’s theory and Judith Butler’s popular assertion that ‘identity is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results’58 converge. What is imitated and rehearsed always subsequently pollutes and defines what is supposedly (and) distinctly behind. From this perspective the immune picaro clearly seems to be outside of the regular operations of the social aspect of human life. While the picaro may be inapt or unwilling to, or impeded from taking over ideas, he also seems to resist the contamination that usually follows the adaptation of a role or practice. How one decides to evaluate such identificatory precarity especially in the context of postcolonial literatures, ultimately, also decides on the politics of postcolonialism, which could mourn this as a form of perpetual exclusion and an emblem of inequality or could celebrate it as an example of resistance, hybridity, liminality, and difference. The picaro is either exempted from the rigid social identities of modernity or excluded from modernity’s stabilizing operations.

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Mimicking Conversion This immunity also affects the highly contradictory relation of the picaro and the picaresque novel to any (fixed) form, especially to the psychological and moral notion of novelistic conversion and the aesthetic notions of novelistic completeness and closure. This tension is only dubiously resolved in the picaro’s attempts to close the open syntagm of picaresque meandering and shape-shifting through the containing ‘irritation of form’ that the novel as a mode of potentially endless ‘actualization’ by definition seeks to escape, but whose material necessity and attending rhetorical conventions the picaresque often precariously exploits, as the next chapter will show in some detail.59 The inability to be seriously and lastingly affected or infected with causes, desires, or identities especially contradicts the motif of conversion and confession that is a formal and thematic problem of most picaresque texts.60 The closure that is performed by these acts is always highly suspect of remaining as precarious as previous adaptations, due to the immunity that is attested to in the series of volatile intra-diegetic role plays and trickeries that are supposedly concluded with it. Such a suspicion of inconstant and precarious conversion is also very much present towards the end of The Mimic Men. At the opening of the last chapter Ralph Singh states: As I write, my own view of my actions alters. […] I used to feel they were aberrations, whimsical, arbitrary acts out of control. But now with a feeling of waste and regret for opportunities missed, I begin to question this. I doubt whether any action, above a certain level, is ever wholly arbitrary or whimsical […] I question now whether the personality is manufactured by the vision of others. The personality hangs together. It is one and indivisible. (199)

He explicitly states that he has overcome his previous picaresque opportunism and claims to have now come to an understanding of identity and biography as teleological, non-arbitrary, consistent, and self-willed. As a specifically colonial subject, Ralph here explicitly disregards Fanon’s claim that the colonial subject is manufactured and symbolically produced by the internalized desires and visions of others. He insists that it is possible to detach oneself from circumstance and from ‘arbitrary acts out of control’, thereby creating the possibility for conversion and self-determination. His reality is affirmed as the result of an actualization

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and he considers his former self to have continuously and non-arbitrarily developed and resulted in his present persona, whereby he tries to deflate any suspicion that he may only retrospectively manufacture this self or performatively construct it in the moment of writing. Despite this proposed unity and coherence of personality, he admits to have previously held questionable ethics that differ from his current beliefs. He assumes a detached commentator position on his old, flawed self as an exterior and exotic entity. This detachment is performed by a shift in personal deixis from proximal to distal, from pronominal self-reference in the first, to pronominal self-reference in the third person: ‘I have established his isolation, his complex hurt, and particular frenzy, his lack of judgement and balance, the deep feeling of irrelevance and intrusion’ (200; emphasis added). Singh is now more reminiscent of a didactic author, who speaks about his fictional protagonist and tries to guide the text’s interpretation and meaning. He judges the character’s actions by a more distanced and (self-)critical mode of narration and commentary that evokes the confessional narrative in the Augustinian tradition. This includes the portrayal of his life as a process of development and the stylization of his current role as reflexive maturity. Everything is readily admitted into this confession, including some unflattering ethics and actions that are now made an integral part of his developmental process, in the hope that his conversion will thereby be secured through the prestigious protocols of traditional confessional literature, as even St. Augustine also famously included accounts of his theft of pears and his long-held misconceptions about a life worthy of God in his biography. Most problematically, those previous acts include an earlier piece of pseudo-confessional writing geared entirely towards personal profit and advancement. After decolonization Ralph manufactures a series of articles, whose success is explained with the fact that they are written, ‘without error because I was making a confession, proclaiming the name, making an act of expiation’ (205; emphasis added). Now, after the socialist postcolonial project in which he aimed to participate through these supposedly confessional articles has been discredited, he re-evaluates these ‘confessional’ essays and acknowledges: ‘The irony doesn’t escape me: that article was, deeply, dishonest. It was the work of a convert, a man just created, just presented with a picture of himself’ (205; emphasis added). Hence, the writer of a confessional narrative admits to have previously been a false convert and to have written a confession and expiation which he now admits to have been dishonest. Regardless of this

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previous volatility of conversion and confession, and, more stunningly, of his strange conflation of conversion with dishonesty, he now claims to have finally learned his lessons. He distances himself from his former wrongs and proposes to have gone beyond considerations of prestige towards purely metaphysical considerations: ‘The writing of this book has been more than a release from these articles; it has been an attempt to rediscover […] truth’ (205). The growing disbelief in the narrator’s proposed teleological and tautological Bildungsroman-like conversion into an indivisible and settled subject of narration is further nourished when towards the end of the novel he also admits to his initially opportunistic motivation for writing, which clearly places the act in a continuity with all his previous roles: When I settled down to write this book, the labour of three or four weeks, as I thought, I was looking beyond to other things. The financial uplift at the end would be small; I knew. But I thought there was a good chance that publication might lead to some form of irregular, agreeable, employment: reviews and articles on colonial or “third world” matters […] and perhaps after a year or two of this light underground labour, some little niche in television: the colonial expert. (266)

Within the framework of the contemporary world literary market this passage replicates many of the crude allegations directed towards postcolonial authors, which accuse them of self-exoticization and ‘cashingin’ on ethnicity to satisfy a general purported demand for—especially postcolonial—autobiography.61 Naipaul anticipates such critique and the ‘colonial expert’ is clearly an opportunistic job description in an environment that increasingly needs regional expertise and values international experience and in which, as Ajiz Ahmad has scathingly remarked of postcolonial theorists and writers, Western and otherwise, the Third World ‘seems to have become, yet again, a career’.62 From a narratological and hermeneutic perspective these material considerations create a highly unreliable frame that renders it wellnigh impossible to fully believe the metaphysical deflation of this initial motivation that follows on the next page: ‘It never occurred to me that the writing of this book might have become an end in itself, that the recording of a life might have become an extension of that life’ (267). To remain with the vocabulary of immunity and infection: He clearly claims to have eventually become infected, or at least affected, with the

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self-searching and self-reflexive aspects of writing a sincere life narrative, of discovering and exposing the truth about himself. He wants to accumulate further credibility by claiming to have only subsequently been infected by a role that he at first only opportunistically mimicked, and which now has firmly grasped him. This proposed conversion, or infection, is highly doubtful, as the picaresque protagonist, especially in this novel, often demonstrates his immunity towards being adopted by a cause, desire, or identity-formation: his ‘constant inconstancy’.63 Precisely the onto-epistemological fact that writing a life is ‘an extension of that life’ creates an existential situation, wherefore the question of reliability inevitably poses itself with regard to fictional, and especially conversional, autobiographies. In Ralph Singh’s case, his previously volatile roles and his own conflation of conversion and dishonesty in the evaluation of his first political confession, make it seem unlikely that his current stylization as a writer is anything but another phase in a series of opportunistic adaptations to the social roles and economic possibilities readily available to him. It seems contradictory to assume that out of ‘the character that was easiest and most attractive […] the extravagant colonial’ (19) develops ‘the colonial expert’ with a ‘little niche in television’ (266), who now seeks to ‘rediscover […] truth’ (205). Therefore, it must be suspected that role-playing and deception pervade in the frame narrative of the novel, in an attempt to mimic the conversional character of confessionals and the Bildungsroman. In fact, the generic distinction between picaresque and Bildungsroman for this novel, I argue, hinges on this very performance. The postcolonial writer is then merely the last of the roles he assumes in the diegesis of the novel. It must be doubted whether this role is in fact the endpoint of a chronological development, and must, therefore, like the conversion of picaresque protagonists into picaresque narrators in El Buscón, Lazarillo de Tormes, Moll Flanders, The White Tiger, or Simplicissimus also be read against the grain in a complementary reading. The reversibility of perspectives is a central transhistorical generic feature of the picaresque and its projections of causality and conversion must be treated with utmost caution.64 This echoes the widespread early modern paranoia—an important aspect also of Bhabha’s essay on colonial mimicry65—towards the religious conversos, whose conversions were always feared to be an outward conversion covering an ongoing inner adherence to old ‘erroneous’ beliefs. Even though the picaresque may have originally been developed in critical analogy to the inquisition protocols that surveyed the

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plausibility of conversions,66 the supposedly ‘educated’ picaro-narrator must, nevertheless, be suspected to be himself an insincere converso from rogue to writer. While he always pretends to have settled down, he may still take pleasure in former misdeeds and must always be suspected of being capable of shape-shifting into yet another role should opportunity or necessity present itself. From the perspective of precarity, the picaro narrator faces a fatal alternative that forces him into this mimicry of conversion. On the one hand he is being expelled from the well-regarded part of society and participation in its common goods, practices, and institutions. At the same time he needs to have access to some of society’s resources in order to survive. Therefore, he has to pretend his integration and affiliation with his society and his willingness to mature in his narrative. The picaronarrator however, as in his previous roles, carefully selects the information he passes on, conceals unfavourable information or may even lie and partly ‘shed[…] his personality in order to feign another’.67 He has adopted this strategy of adaptability ever since his initiation into the picaresque world turned developmental temporality and cultural integration upside down; we should not expect him to be able to abandon it when sitting down to narrate his life, an activity which is often geared towards specific requests and pressures. This is not only due to the principal existential continuity of all homodiegetic fiction,68 but rather signals a specifically picaresque ‘Sisyphus-rhythm’. The tacit (self-)contradictions that the form seeks to address within the context of cosmological capitalism cannot be reintegrated into a plausible and unambiguous mimetic, conversional, and moral framework.

Conclusion: Disabling Flexibility In Naipaul’s case, unreliability and insincerity are of course not solely generic aspects of a picaresque postcolonial novel but also form part of the highly conservative cultural politics of a public intellectual. In his Nobel speech, over thirty years after the publication of The Mimic Men, Naipaul, however, somewhat seems to defend his protagonist, by stating that the novel was ‘about colonial men mimicking the conditions of manhood, men who had grown to distrust everything about themselves’.69 Despite this belated attempt to suddenly make his Caribbean characters into postcolonial critics of identity, the novel actually betrays such a stark dramatic irony especially towards the narrator

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Ralph Singh and his perpetual opportunism, particularly as a postcolonial writer, that it must clearly be read as a picaresque parody of postcolonial autobiography rather than a picaresque autobiography under the precarious conditions of postcoloniality. For Naipaul, the picaresque is not the literature of precarious identity but of insincere opportunism. This opportunism, however, is not due to the adaptability enforced by economic or cultural precarity, but is adopted by a lack of (cultural) integrity. While Naipaul unduly pathologizes a lack of (post)colonial integrity, the fact that Ralph could not access and that Browne would not become identified with the ideas behind the cultural expressions they assume with varying degrees of expertise, nonetheless, makes visible the social and semiotic exclusionary mechanisms of cosmological capitalism that more implicitly define all postcolonial picaros and differentiate them from other narratives and agents of cultural difference, emancipation, or integration. Bhabha claims that one may easily read Naipaul’s conservative melancholia against the grain, by turning his characters into vernacular cosmopolitans.70 Bhabha overlooks, however, that Ralph Singh may not only be read as the model case for either an assertion of productive cosmopolitan difference or a pathological failure to achieve cultural autonomy, but—somewhat combining Naipaul’s pessimism with Bhabha’s critique of Eurocentrism—is also emblematic of the precarious adaptation pressures that persist in global cosmological capitalism and that perpetually foreclose precarious subjects from participating in its more prestigious and stable forms of identity and belonging. All layers of postcolonial culture and politics, from leftist political activism to entrepreneurism, from political writing to postcolonial autobiography, are more or less explicitly condemned as opportunistic in the practices of Ralph Singh. In this use and ideological mutation of the picaresque as form of swindling parvenu autobiography, Naipaul is quite close to Francisco de Quevedo, who is (in)famous for a similar cultural traditionalism and essentialism.71 Quevedo was highly sceptical of the nobility’s loss of power in early modern Spain and modelled his picaro Pablos as the epitome of a lamentable development in which privilege and social ascension are increasingly detached from blood and descent.72 Therefore, in spite of the fact that ‘in El Buscón, every character is a clown living on Hypocrisy Street’ his critique seems especially pronounced when it concerns low-born parvenu characters and he ‘exaggerated Pablos’ dominant characteristics and reduced him to a one-dimensional, static figure whose ridiculous behaviour stands for the

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psychological reality of a particular type of moral blindness’.73 Despite Quevedo’s and Naipaul’s conservative cultural politics, their (parodies of) picaresque novels highlight and even make more explicit the metonymic and protean structures of identity and mimicry that are central to an understanding of picaresque identities from the perspective of precarity. They would merely need to be framed within the context of cosmological capitalism, a context that these two novels noticeably elude as the frame of picaresque self-assertion, even though its pressures are operative in and isotropic to the novels’ dynamics of imitation and authenticity. In this context, picaresque adaptability would not be based on insincerity but on the perpetual precarity of social mobility and cultural belonging; not rooted solely in the lack of integrity of the protagonist, but also in a lack of dignity on the part of the world. Adaptability and flexibility are nowadays celebrated as key qualities by global neoliberalism and considered necessary to succeed in the context of today’s economic ‘realities’. Similarly, they are  occasionally implied as the appropriate identity formation in the perpetual cosmopolitanism, complexity, and transcendental homelessness of our age by postmodernist cultural theory. Protean mimicry as a social practice should, however, not be uncritically celebrated, not only because it structurally resembles a more general sociopathology conducive to and induced by neoliberalism, but also, because, in rapidly transforming postcolonial contexts especially—where it tends to be more readily realized—it might be expressive of a sense of homelessness, disorientation, and disenfranchisement. On the other hand mimicry should not be condemned as inauthentic, as it often is the only conceivable and sincere strategy of underprivileged groups and individuals with which they can momentarily participate in the securities of social and economic modernity that remain otherwise foreclosed.74 In this regard mimicry can be about membership in certain social and symbolic structures that provide security and prestige via participation in modernity. It is geared towards membership that needs to be constantly renegotiated through adaptive practices by those that ‘want to be full and equal citizens of a modern […] society’.75 By also making the act of narration such an, if not the most explicit, attempt at membership, the picaresque novel’s narrative situation also becomes an instance of the precarious identities that it thematizes. The context-dependent adaptability of the postcolonial picaresque takes seriously a cultural, if not anthropological, demand of modern capitalism that privileges renewal, adaptability,

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and self-reinvention, while at the same time—in its cosmological tendency—it still mostly censures what are considered discontinuous biographies, especially when they conflict with the expectations of racism and authenticity. The conflation of mimicry with dishonesty that is advocated in Naipaul’s evaluation of New-World cultures may be one of the many reasons why the picaresque has not had more of an impact as an interpretative paradigm in postcolonial theory and literary studies despite the strong focus the fields have had on (symbolic) resistance. With their immunity towards causes, picaresque identities seem incompatible with affirmative political claims and projects and with most forms of minoritarian or anti-colonial identity politics, even those steeped in deconstruction. In my reading, the postcolonial picaresque is not emblematic of a cultural difference that declines to participate in the structures of Western modernity, but is an active performance of the impertinences (of flexibility) required on the part of marginalized individuals to enter these structures. Even though modern social roles and identities have been disenchanted as being imitative, they nevertheless can provide security and meaningful belonging, just as conventionality and agreement, at least heuristically, can secure the operation of signification. Reading picaresque mimicry primarily as a precarious exclusion from such stable social roles is, however, not to simply promote a blind perpetuation of these roles and of the values, social mechanisms, and cultural identities of the present. Clearly, for far-reaching social aspirations towards more dignity, justice, and human self-determination to be possible the stability of involuntary imitation needs to be intersubjectively overcome on key issues, in order not to be ruled by endlessly rehearsed and transcendentalized brute facts. The modes of social cohesion and identity that such social transformation would seek to eventually create still require imitation and inner subscription, but would need to be much more inclusive than those admitted by the exclusionary and exploitative nexus of cosmological capitalism and modernity. The picaresque’s prime objective, therefore, is not a postmodern critique or disenchantment of modern social identity as imitative, against which the picaro celebrates his wor her own proteanness, but to communicate the precarity of being perpetually excluded from the operations of meaningful social identity and to expose the picaresque continuity with self-interested dissociation that this exclusion may foster.

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Early modern and postcolonial picaresque mimicries are not merely representative of specific historical or cultural configurations of selffashioning or mimicry, but reveal a transhistorical precarity that produces these much less stable and metonymic performances as the identity effect of a cosmological capitalism whose official ideology is one of historical self-formation and assimilation. Behind this official ideology, however, cosmological capitalism seems to fetishize timeless authenticity and cultural difference, including in those instances, in which difference serves as a mode of cosmopolitan empowerment or liberal systemic self-legitimation. Neoliberalism was partly so successful because along with freedom and meritocracy it officially advocated tolerance and colour-blindness; in its uncloaked neoconservative form, however, racist assumptions of ethnic and cultural authenticity now increasingly and officially return all over the world. The picaro highlights this perpetual exclusion by resisting the contamination by ideologies whose expressions he copies. Such immunity, or ambivalence as Bhabha calls it, of mimicry may historically have been a factor in harbouring anti-colonial sentiments beneath a mask of devotion. However, when it results in not being able to take on or conjure-up any social identity it leaves the picaresque performer nowhere: He remains atopical and precarious. He may avoid being adopted into the somnambulism that defines social man, but he is likewise precariously on the outside of the social, on the outside of modernity, trying to shape-shift his way in. The picaro is, therefore, simultaneously the fully individualized human that is not affiliated to anything and the fully dehumanized person that is fully identical with the vagaries of his environment: ‘he is every man he has to be and therefore no man’.76

Notes

1. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans E.C. Parsons (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), xiv; Les lois de l’imitation (Paris: Alcan, 1895), viii. 2. V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (1967; London: Picador, 2002), 3. Subsequent references in parantheses. 3. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 121– 131. Here: 128.

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4. See for example Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays towards the theory of literary history. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971),; Francisco Rico, La Novela Picaresca y el Punto de Vista (Barcelona: Ed. Seix Barral, 2000); Punto de Vista; Jochen Mecke, “Die Atopie des Pícaro: Paradoxale Kritik und dezentrierte Subjektivität im Lazarillo de Tormes,” in Wolfgang Matzat & Bernd Teuber (ed.), WelterfahrungSelbsterfahrung. Konstitution und Verhandlung von Subjektivität in der spanischen Literatur der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 67-94; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Eine Geschichte der spanischen Literatur (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), 294–373; Sieglinde Chwastek, Pikareske Persönlichkeitsnetwicklung im spanischen Schelmenroman: Kindheit und Umwelt als Determinanten (Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner, 1987). 5. See Johannes Roskothen, Hermetische Pikareske: Beiträge zu einer Poetik des Schelmenromans (Frankfurt a.M./New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 32. 6. Francisco de Quevedo, The Swindler, in Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, trans. Michael Alpert (London: Penguin, 2001),  61–198. Here: 166; La vida del Buscón llamado Don Pablos, ed. Domingo Ynduráin (Madrid: Catedra, 1980), 236. 7. Stuart Miller, The Picaresque Novel (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967), 25. 8.  See Bernhard Malkmus, ‘The Picaresque Mode and Economies of Circulation’ in Das Paradigma des Pikaresken / The Paradigm of the Picaresque. Ed. Christoph Ehland & Robert Fajen (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 179–200. 181. 9. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2001), 34. 10. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1976), 3–27 and 313–336. 11.  Blumenberg, Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 29–48. Here: 32; “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in Nachahmung und Illusion (Poetik und Hermeneutik I), ed. Hans Robert Jauß (München: Fink, 1964), 9–27. Here 12. 12. James Ferguson, “Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the ‘New World Society’,” Cultural Anthropology 17, no. 4 (2002): 551–569. Here: 553. 13. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 126. 14. Matthew Potolsky Mimesis (London: Routledge, 2006), 122. 15. Potolsky, Mimesis, 120.

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16. See Ferguson, “Of Mimicry and Membership,” 553. 17. Jacques Lacan, “The Line and Light,” in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 91–105. Here:100. 18. See Tarde, Laws of Imitation, xiv; Lois de l’imitation, viii. 19. See Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 192–194; Lois de l’imitation, 210–211. 20. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 68; Lois de l’imitation, 73. 21. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 192; Lois de l’imitation, 209. 22. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. and trans. Leon Roudiez et al., (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 64–92. Here:  66. 23. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 17; Lois de l’imitation, 19. 24.  See Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 118–122. 25. Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 9. 26. Graham Huggan, “A Tale of Two Parrots: Walcott, Rhys, and the Uses of Colonial Mimicry,” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 4 (1994): 643–669. Here: 643. 27. Huggan, “A Tale of Two Parrots,” 644. 28.  Derek Walcott, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16, no. 1 (1974): 3–13. Here: 6. 29. See Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 194–213; Lois de l’imitation, 211–233. 30. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 204; Lois de l’imitation, 222; emphasis retained. 31. See Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 199–200; Lois de l’imitation, 217. 32. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 67–73; Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1981), 87–94. 33. Tarde Laws of Imitation, 193; Lois de l’imitation, 210. 34. Tarde Laws of Imitation, 200; Lois de l’imitation, 217. 35. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993), xv. 36. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 202; Lois de l’imitation, 219. 37. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 128. 38. Ibid., 125; emphasis retained. 39. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education,” in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, ed. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 729.

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40. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 127. 41. Ibid., 128. 42. Ibid.; emphasis retained. 43. Graham Huggan, “(Post)Colonialism, Anthropology and the Magic of Mimesis,” Cultural Critique 38 (1997/8): 91–106. Here: 95. 44. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 154. 45. See Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 155–160. 46. Ibid., 109ff. 47. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 162. 48. James Ferguson, “Of Mimicry and Membership,” 557. 49. Rob Nixon, “London Calling: V.S. Naipaul and the License of Exile,” South Atlantic Quarterly 87.1 (1988): 1–37. Here: 3. 50.  Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1998), 246– 264. Here: 248. 51.  Peter N. Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 79. 52. Katja Strobel, Wandern Mäandern, Erzählen. Die Pikara als Grenzgängerin des Subjekts (München: Fink, 1998), 50. Translation JFE. 53. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 126, 125. 54. See Peter Burke, The Fortune of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortigiano (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995). 55. Harry Sieber, “Literary Continuity, Social Order, and the Invention of the Picaresque,” in Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, ed. Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 143–164. Here: 149. 56. Baltasar Gracian y Morales, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia (Madrid: Ed. Jura, 1954), 561; The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle, trans. Christopher Maurer (London: Heinemann, 1993), 261. 57. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 207; Lois de l’imitation, 225. 58. Butler, Gender Trouble, 42. 59. Blumenberg, “Realitätsbegriff,” 22; “Concept of Reality,” 42. 60.  See Hans Robert Jauss, “Ursprung und Bedeutung der Ich-Form im Lazarillo de Tormes,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 8 (1957): 290–311. 61.  See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2000), 153. 62. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994), 94.

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63.  See Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen,  Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 2009), 545. 64. See Matthias Bauer, Der Schelmenroman (Stuttgart: J.B: Metzler, 1994), 11. 65. See Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 131. 66. See Susanne Zepp, “Ironie, Inquisition und Konversion: Parodien von Inklusionsdispositiven im Lazarillo de Tormes,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 56 (2005): 368–392. 67. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans Meyer Barash (Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 19. 68. See Franz. K. Stanzel, Theory of Narrative, trans. Charlotte Goedsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 150;  Theorie des Erzählens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 200. 69. V.S. Naipaul, “Nobel Lecture: Two Worlds,” Nobelprize.org., 21 August 2012. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html, accessed 21 August 2012. 70. Homi K. Bhabha, “Looking Back, Moving Forward: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2007), ix–xxv. Here: x–xi. 71. See Jürgen Jacobs, Der Weg des Pícaro: Untersuchungen zum europäischen Schelmenroman (Trier: WVT, 1998), 68. 72. See Harry Sieber, The Picaresque (London: Methuen, 1977), 28; see also Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction,79–80. 73. Richard Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 109–110. 74. See Ferguson, “Of Mimicry and Membership”. 75. Ferguson, “Of Mimicry and Membership,” 555. 76. Miller, The Picaresque Novel, 25.

CHAPTER 5

Narration

precarious, adj. 2.a. doubtful, dubious 3. suppliant, supplicant; importunate, Obs.

Introduction The previous chapters of this book have focussed on the social placelessness, the allegorical enigmaticity, the protean identity, and the dissociated modes of experience and narration of the picaresque novel. In addition to these precarious aspects, the roguish ambivalence of the unreliable narrator and his uneasy relation to closed form renders the picaresque narrative itself rhetorically precarious: It becomes ‘a line of argument, inference, opinion’ that is ‘insecurely founded or reasoned, doubtful, dubious’1 and cannot be existentially separated from the world in which it is uttered. In order to come to terms with the unreliability of the picaresque, which often still ethically baffles readers and critics and which might trigger problematic assumptions about the political and ethical potential of the form, we need to think of the picaresque act of narrative as closely entangled with the worlds which it depicts and the situations in which it is uttered. Particularly in the context of the postcolonial picaresque, traditional concepts of unreliability that are based on the concept of an implied readership and which operate with the assumption of a stable and un-implicated ethical universe around and within literary © The Author(s) 2017 J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_5

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texts, need to be questioned accordingly. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which together with his later novel How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) will be the central reference point in this chapter, takes up the implicating and self-exempting tendencies of Lazarillo de Tormes and frames within it the complex relations, responses, and continuities between capitalism, imperialism, and terrorism that beset our present like no other. The novel, thus, calibrates imperial violence, corporate exploitation, and the indigence they produce towards the acts of violence and radicalization that may result from them, when Western modernity’s primary goods can no longer be taken seriously or considered binding. Embedding this postcolonial response within the larger history of the picaresque helps us understand the ongoing problematicity of these relations in modernity, even as the postcolonial picaresque somewhat raises the stakes by making life and death the explicit background before which the picaresque self-assertion is conducted and to which it has to calibrate its ostensibly plotless narrative of mitigation and denial. The narrator of Petronius’ early picaresque novel fragment Satyricon (estimated to have been written around 65 AD) provides the reader with the plan of a narrative project that is emblematic of the aspirations of the picaresque and the epistemological problems of the novel well into the present: ‘my honest tongue recounts how men behave’.2 This points to the two aspects that a reflection on unreliability must seek to address: Firstly, the ostentatious—and dubious—self-designation of the primary articulatory organ as true to fact and secondly, the relation of that tongue’s narration and the narrated events to the larger structures of societies’ actual conventions and behaviours rather than their official protocols. The basic narrative situation of the picaresque novel usually features a (more or less) aged narrator/protagonist, who typically narrates his own life while at the same time offering a social panorama of the societies that he traverses, providing a ‘paraencyclopedical portrait of the world and a pseudoautobiographical portrait of the self’.3 From the perspective of reliability, already the combination of those two agendas is more paradoxical than it may seem at first glance. A panorama usually requires a privileged, detached, and elevated viewpoint from which to survey a situation or landscape. An individual life story focalized through a single character/protagonist, however, can by definition not properly provide such a detached viewpoint on the narrative world that this narrator observes and is simultaneously implicated in. Epistemologically, in fact panorama and autobiography can be seen to occupy opposite ends of

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a scalar spectrum of points of views.4 The only privileged posture—which is the requirement for producing a panorama—that the autodiegetic picaro narrator can assume is his posterity to the events that have occurred, without being able to shed his bias or his human epistemological restrictions. While the panoramic aspect is highly important for understanding the intricacies of picaresque unreliability, we should not, however, overemphasize this aspect, as Mikhail Bakhtin did when he placed the picaresque in the category of adventure narratives, fully reduced it to the panoramic aspect, and made it exclusively about the geography and the character types of the traversed places, while the picaresque protagonist was said to have no internal problematicity.5 This emphasis ignores the aspect of pseudo-autobiography, which points to the archetypal role that the picaresque novel has had for the development of the modern novel and the prototypical role it continues to have for articulating the aporias of individual and world. From a perspective of precarity, autobiographical form is indispensable to the picaresque novel and its precarious narratives, and is not a literary-historical archetype, to be overcome by more sophisticated modes of picaresque narration that no longer require this primitive mode of connecting events, as some observers have argued.6 Both aspects of Petronius’ asserted relation between the recounting tongue and the behaviour of men are, therefore, integral to the picaresque from its very beginnings to the postcolonial present. Lazarillo de Tormes may only claim to give an account of the case, by telling ‘my story in some detail’ (4) and not ‘by telling you my life story and showing you how bad of a society I had to live in’. However, his narrative, in which he encounters a wide spectrum of early modern Castilian character types and professions, implies that his story is also about ‘acknowledging the collective guilt of society’.7 Balram Halwai, in The White Tiger (2008) on the other hand, states that he ‘wants to tell the truth about Bangalore’ (4), while being less explicit about wanting to explain himself. In all these cases, the respective other aspect of social panorama or individual life story, while being muted in the address to the narratee, is strongly present in the narrative and they usually condition one another: The badness of a society derives from the negative experiences one has made in traversing it, while individual misdeeds are suggested to be the results of ‘vulgar conventionalities’.8 Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist already condenses this problem in its very title. The personal designation ‘fundamentalist’ is modified and mitigated by its epithetical relation to ‘reluctance’, which denotes a general personal aversion to fundamentalism

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that is, however, outgrown by the requirements of the contemporary world, which render fundamentalism a viable and near unavoidable response to the conditions of that world and its power structures. Picaresque narrators aspire towards a combination of panorama and autobiography that is epistemologically and ethically problematic, because all of the information that pertains to the panoramic aspects is always unavoidably subjective and filtered through the pragmatics and aspirations of personal autobiography. Even if dishonesty and roguishness are popular trademarks of the picaresque, the form’s specific mode of unreliability, however, especially in the context of the postcolonial picaresque, also needs to be related to the precarious experiences of the picaros and to the culturally asymmetrical and paradoxical situations of utterance in which picaresque life stories and confessions are typically given. If it includes distortions or gaps, the transgressions they conceal— and the fact that they need to be concealed—perhaps also ought to tell us something about the structures that condition these delinquent complicities rather than only about the epistemological restrictions and characterological dispositions of the subaltern precariat.

Aetiology Without a Cause Beyond the epistemological tensions between autobiography and panorama, unreliability in the picaresque also originates from a specific communicational situation whose basic conflict is eminent to the structure of the narrative. While existential motivation pertains to any autobiographical act and may be quite subtle, as in an attempt to leave a better impression or more flattering self-image in a memoir, it is especially pertinent in those paradigmatic cases in which a narrator explicitly addresses an authority to state a case or a criminal offence. In such cases the current motivation of the frame becomes the central factor and sole vantage point for the construction of the life narrative. Quite prototypically for this motivation, The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s narrative situation takes place in a Lahore teahouse, where the protagonist Changez recounts his life narrative to an interlocutor who soon turns out to be a CIA operative. Clearly, there is a confessional bond between them, typical of the relation ‘between suspect and interrogator’ that ‘urges towards speech’,9 even though the initial power structures will eventually tip later in the novel. This novel, therefore, probably embodies the picaresque narrative situation and its existential motivation in the crassest possible manner

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and points towards a productivity of the form’s enduring narratological propensities in the context of cosmological capitalism by embedding it explicitly in its most troublesome political frame: neo-imperialism and the modes of military violence and terrorist counter-violence that it sparks. It also hyperbolizes the originally confessional framing of the picaresque by embedding the projection of the life narrative into an actual interrogation that is isomorphic to the geopolitical power relations of the twentieth and early twenty-first century.10 In this situation The Reluctant Fundamentalist recontextualizes and amplifies but also strongly resembles Lazarillo De Tormes, in a strange aetiological paradox. Four hundred and fifty years before Changez and the CIA agent sit down in the Lahore teahouse, Lázaro famously writes: ‘Your Honour has written to me asking me to tell him the case in some detail’ (4) [‘vuestra merced escribe se le escriba y relate el caso muy por extenso’ (10)]. Lázaro was asked to explain the case of his marriage, which is suspected of being a front for an affair between his wife and the local archpriest, who secured his modest but secure position as a town crier. Lázaro explains the case—since he cannot fully refute your honour’s claim—by relating his life story in order to highlight how he has been shaped by hapless circumstance, bad luck, and adversity. Thereby, he expects that ‘your honour’ may better understand his situation and, in a secularized version of the Confessions, witness his transformation. Regardless of the situations he describes, his misdeeds are always supposedly triggered by other misdeeds that may represent the baseness of the external world but not of his character. His narrative is intended to show the insurmountable antagonism of the world, which can prompt no positive responses and can only result in a delinquent career and in the questionable setup for which he is now being interrogated. Nevertheless, he simultaneously claims to have overcome his past and succeeded in converting himself into a valuable member of society ‘con fuerza y maña remando’ (11) [‘by dint of hard work and ability’ (4)]. He not only denies responsibility for previous actions, but also insists upon an ethical difference between—but still apologizes for both— mature Lázaro and young Lazarillo. The extreme antagonism he claims to have confronted not only serves to excuse himself as determined by a hostile world, but is also supposed to heighten the quality of his conversion. Lázaro tries to both make plausible his actions and, thereby, legitimize the aetiology of the ominous caso, while at the same time denying that the arrangement signified by the caso exists: He provides an aetiology, i.e. the social causes for a situation, the existence of which he denies.

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Like Lázaro, Changez, the narrator-protagonist of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both denies his case and renders it plausible in the double gestures of mitigation and pleading innocence that modern legal systems have largely separated into discrete and conflicting pleas. The Reluctant Fundamentalist thus also resorts to the paradoxical ‘aetiology without a cause’ of Lazarillo de Tormes, of denying a case, and simultaneously contextualizing it and explaining it through the deforming negativity of his social environment. This environment and the development one reluctantly and unavoidably makes within it are minutely represented to the interlocutor towards whom the protagonist has to explain himself. From vuestra merced in Spain in 1554 to the Chinese premier in India in 2008, and the CIA interrogation in 2007, most picaresque situations have an explicit internal reader, listener, or interlocutor to whom such testimony is given. The narrator’s testimonial relation to the internal narratee manifests the potential problem of credibility in the narrative, but is also emblematic of the paradoxical standards and ethics of the worlds in which the picaros must assert themselves and their narratives. The explicitly investigative and inquisitive structure of The Reluctant Fundamentalist also evokes the asymmetrical confessional situations on which the picaresque had been originally founded: Recent archival philology has linked the genre prototype Lazarillo de Tormes to an explicit tradition of testimony and confession that goes beyond the previously assumed parody of St Augustine’s Confessions.11 Minutely comparing the structure of Lazarillo de Tormes with CounterReformation Inquisition protocols, which next to an ‘expert report’ also contained a genealogy and self-explanation by the accused, Susanne Zepp makes highly plausible not only the already assumed structural relation,12 but even a referential relation between the two modes of enunciation: ‘it is conceivable that the beginning—by now turned topos—of all picaresque novels—the detailed description of the protagonist’s origin—refers explicitly on the discursive model of the proofs of origins in the inquisition’.13 Such a discursive origin also concerns the question of authorship of Lazarillo, which uninterruptedly looms large and supports the widely held assumption that its author, like Mateo Aleman—the author of the second picaresque novel Guzman de Alfarache (1599)—was himself a converso. More importantly, this mode of coerced self-explanation sheds light on the revolutionary and elusive centrality of the ‘I’-form of the novel and its specific historical context of emergence, which still baffles scholars to this day and that

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ontologically and temporally conflicts with the cosmological system in which this historical self-narrative is embedded. Hamid’s contemporary novel closely resembles these contexts of Lazarillo de Tormes, as his scrutiny by the CIA also hints at the potential suspensions of due process, indifference, and the assumptions of innocence that mark regular legal inquiries and tend towards the inquisitory. Similar to the genealogical information required in Inquisition protocols, the novel’s narrator/protagonist Changez likewise opens his aetiology with a genealogical description of his respectable background: He is from a middle-class Pakistani family, whose poverty is only constituted comparatively on a global scale. At the beginning of his life narrative he states that ‘I am not poor; far from it […] our family home sits on an acre of land in the middle of Gulberg, one of the most expensive districts of this city. We employ several servants, including a driver and a gardener— which would, in America, imply that we were a family of great wealth’ but that ‘At Princeton [I] as quietly as I could, held down three on-campus jobs.’14 Nevertheless, he gets a Princeton education and is chosen for a traineeship at a multinational consulting company, which eventually turns into a permanent job. His early life ought to provide testament to the fact that he had no inborn anti-Western tendency and is from a background that is not innately associated with delinquency. The fact of his alleged financial struggles at university already initially attests to the fact of the wide chasm between the West and the Non-West, but it does not yet serve as an explicit delegitimation of the United States or of neoliberal capitalism. Originating in such an explicitly confessional narrative situation, the aetiological narrative situation of the picaresque has always maintained a strong affinity to those (pseudo)confessional instances of precarious sincerity, like psychiatric sessions, witnesses before the law, or actual juridical or religious confessions, that ‘permeate our culture including our educational practices and our law’.15 In fact many of the postcolonial versions replicate in their narrative situations these—traditionally Western—institutional enunciative frames, and convey the distortions that are involved in these very practices themselves. Therefore, the picaresque also models the problematic nature of a testimonial narrative whose binary logic of true and false, or guilty and not guilty, healthy or not healthy, may be inadequate to contextualize an action, both socially and psychologically. In the picaresque this relation shifts to the tension between the truth of the facts—which picaresque narratives may aim

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to conceal—and the truth of social pressures and conventions, which it often tries to expose. This oscillation does not of course necessitate that every picaresque act of concealment is redeemable or that every action may be sufficiently contexualized and explained by the vulgarity of a system. Certainly, the picaresque plays with that precarious undecidability between cultural construction and roguish disposition or personal pathology, even though it has in traditional scholarship been unduly over-identified with the latter. Unreliability, therefore, despite its problematic status for global testimonial narratives, is an important aspect of that precarious status of the picaresque narrative. Precarious not only because it may collapse in its referential veracity, but also, because picaresque autobiography may project the picaro’s morally despicable action as a legitimate consequence of the vulgar conventions of reality. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is clearly a prime example of this tendency, as its narrator/protagonist, suspected of terrorist activity, is trying to demonstrate how a conversion to terrorism—if it would have taken place, which, of course, it did not—is only the, as it were, normal and natural result of American imperialism. As such, his transformation would not be emblematic of personal pathology, but would be an inevitable continuity with a negative reality that even overcomes a general personal reluctance towards fundamentalism. Thus, while Changez first and foremost tries to refute the allegations of terrorism through familiarization with himself he, at the same time, is also increasingly trying to provide personal, social, and political contexts that would mitigate the severity of his alleged actions or that would even render them legitimate and normal responses to the order of the world in which he operates. Indeed, he is making some valid and irrefutable ethical and political assumptions about the living conditions, the varying values of human life, and the hierarchies under neoliberal and neo-imperial globalization, while at the same time, both the basic veracity of the statements about his life and the calibration of his responses to these conditions remain unresolvably dubious. The ambivalence and uneasiness with which we have to encounter this picaresque protagonist and his supposedly ‘justified sins’ and reluctant actions highlights the genre’s propensity to articulate the tightly knit web of precarity, exploitation, imperialism, and violence that renders most situated responses towards global questions indissolubly ambivalent. This ambivalence, however, while it helps to contextualize accountability and complicate agency, cannot rid us of an ethical imperative to judge and act.16 As readers of novels, in order to assess a narrator’s reliability in

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such quasi-testimonial situations we may ‘use the same abilities to judge and understand as in the case of real testimony. We only use these abilities off line, so to speak’.17 It is from this viewpoint that many of the picaresque justifications collapse, without however, reaffirming the conditions in which they have become possible.

Adjusting (to) Fundamentalism The narrative situations of the postcolonial picaresque are usually intercultural, often bridging and articulating the former colony–metropolis divide, in which—strangely enough given the atrocities committed in the wake of colonialism and imperialism from the metropolitan side—the postcolonial narrator explains himself, as is particularly evident, perhaps, in the Lahore-teahouse interrogation in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Given the circulation of the postcolonial picaresque novels on a global literary marketplace and the intercultural communicative situation in them, a transcultural reading perspective is, therefore, also inscribed into them: either explicitly as in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), which directly and metaleptically addresses its cosmopolitan Western(ized) readership and in The Mimic Men (1967), which reflects the distinction potentials of postcolonial writing, or more allusive and metaphorical as in The White Tiger or The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Throughout the earlier part of his life narrative, Changez at first only subtly and carefully criticizes American attitudes and Western decadence, from an insider’s perspective, in order to build up the psychological and social cohesion of his later suspected conversion to fundamentalism. He extensively recounts negative experiences he has had with Americans, especially with regard to their self-righteous attitudes towards Pakistani and other non-Western cultures: ‘But his tone—with, if you will forgive me, its typically American undercurrent of condescension—struck a negative chord with me’ (63). Of course working at a consulting agency, which is where the first half of the novel is largely set, certainly does not bring out the best in the West. The principles of corporate adjustment for which business consultancy stands are often in stark opposition to the humanist values that have shaped the official ethical protocols of modernity, as set down in many democratic constitutions and revolutionary declarations, and is instead typical of a pragmatic and self-congratulatory subordination to or conflation of the ethical with the legally possible and the economically rational. As an agent of

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neoliberal adjustment that operates globally, the transnational consulting agency is the ideal plot device and trope for experiencing intersubjectively the kind of processes and attitudes that also operate in the larger political realm of neo-imperialism and that spark Changez’s later alleged transformation. A complicit and mutually productive relation between neo-liberalism and terrorism is clearly encoded in this career of a consultant-turned-alleged-terrorist.18 Changez’s initially subtle hostility only becomes manifest—and supposedly also only apparent to himself—when he has to struggle, and eventually fails, to feel any empathy for the victims of the attacks of 9/11. To blend in he resorts to—typically picaresque—metonymic surface simulation: ‘I feigned the same shock and anguish I saw on the faces around me’ (84). Rather than feeling pity, however, he is actually fascinated, perhaps even pleased by the symbolism of these events: But at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack—death on television moves me most when it is fictitious and happens to characters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodes—no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees. (83)

Within the same passage in which he admits to his inability to suffer and his wish to see America reduced from a position of power and dignity, associated with erectness and incompatible with kneeling, he ironically deems as the pre-eminent format for installing empathy the very form and strategy of his own life narrative: the protagonist-based episodic narrative. His explicit reference to episodes suggests a conviction that empathy need not necessarily be installed by a coherent developmental unfolding in time, but also by a paradigmatic episodic recurrence over time and the iterative familiarity emblematic of TV procedurals. First and foremost, Changez’s narrative is designed to both make him familiar and to make his reluctant conversion to fundamentalism understandable. At the same time, the narrative is also designed to deny his direct implication in any acts of terror allegedly carried out by him or his pupils. Psychologically, his aspired acquittal through paradigmatic familiarity is in accordance with his above-posited theory of empathy. Legally, therefore, his proposed strategy of iterative episodicity pertains not to the linear and detailed reconstruction of events and motifs, but resembles the more cyclical defence of calling a character witness to the stand.

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Likewise, when he does resort to circumstantial events for his narrative expiation, they also remain highly paradigmatic and operate as a shorthand for the negative character of the world, rather than being detailed, coherent, and plausible. He even explicitly dismisses the importance of facts and details in the evaluation of character and insists instead on ‘more or less’ (135), rather than an absolute fidelity, which privileges the general message of his narrative. The illocutionary force of his life narrative is supported by direct commentaries and the narrator’s pleas to his sceptical interlocutor. When he becomes doubtful as to the perlocutionary force of his life narrative, he spells out the suspicion of its unreliability and contradictorily refutes it: [T]o be honest, I cannot now recall many of the details of the events I have been relating to you. But surely it is the gist that matters; I am after all telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you—an American— will agree, it is the thrust of one’s narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one’s details. Still, I can assure you that everything I have told you thus far happened, for all intents and purposes, more or less as I have described. (135)

The notion of American, and by extension Western, history as reduced to ‘the thrust of one’s narrative’ sarcastically resembles the critique of postcolonial historiography and its project to render visible the racist atrocities and general human costs that are muted in triumphant nationalist narratives of progress and modernization. This narrative structure is still deployed in legitimating military interventions that are geared at abstract categories of a nation’s people, but disregard the actual lives that are rendered into collateral damage. More concretely, this accusation of American history may well refer to the near-ridiculous dismissal of facts in the legitimation of the 2003 war in Iraq as a response to the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction. Diegetically, this relativization of the importance of the truth of details is particularly relevant to the supposedly most cathartic and pivotal moment of his life narrative, which indeed simply seems too neat to be true: During a business trip to Chile on a mission to downsize yet another factory, an elderly man, called Juan-Bautista, heavily scorns Changez for working as a management consultant: ‘“does it trouble you”, he inquired “to make your living by disrupting the lives of others?”’ (171). This elderly man confronts him with his disloyalty to the concerns of the Global South by

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telling him about the janissaries, ‘Christian Boys […] Captured by the Ottomans and trained to be soldiers in the Muslim army’ (171). He not only equals Changez’s Americanization to their destiny, but implies that his conduct is, in fact, much ‘worse’, as his implication in American corporate imperialism is a self-chosen profession and happened at a much more mature age: “I went for college” I said. “I was eighteen.” “Ah, much older”, he said. “The janissaries were always taken in childhood. It would have been far more difficult to devote themselves to their adopted empire, you see, if they had memories they could not forget”. (172)

Changez claims to have been deeply affected by this accusation and soon after it his latent resentments become more and more explicit. Rather than continuing to act as a corporate agent for American neo-imperialism, he is soon convinced that ‘such an America had to be stopped’ (180) and claims that ‘I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world’ (177). Such overt recognitions are clearly portrayed to legitimate and signal an unavoidable reversal and change in his attitude—though at the same time he still denies any active radicalization. Chile seems an apt setting for his retributive conversion, considering that it has been the location of one of the most well-known and invasive hemispheric imperial interventions of the United States, which significantly occurred on the ‘other September 11’ of 1973. This clearly offers a further layer to his alleged radicalization and refers us to the United States’ own market-capitalist fundamentalism: Chile was a relatively stable country and Salvador Allende, a socialist in coalition with social and Christian democrats, was anything but a proven dictator, but at best a threat to the United States’ wholesale hemispheric political and corporate sphere of influence. The United States countered this alleged threat by supporting a military overthrow in the wake of which Chile’s economy was readjusted—in something of a model for other neoliberal adjustments in the Global South—to become the first nationwide test case for an orthodox neoliberal state; one that interestingly combined the political repression (of General Augusto Pinochet) and a deregulated economy that neoliberalism usually likes to portray  as mutually exclusive. In leftist public memory, the US intervention that followed Allende’s election and fell into the early days of neoliberal emergence in the United States certainly marked a highpoint of the intricate relation

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between corporate interest and CIA involvement that directly pertains to Changez’s current interlocutor. This relation is important for Changez’s attempted exemption, because this kind of neo-imperial interventionism it is often mentioned as one of the main arguments by those who argue that America has brought the pervasive anti-Americanism and terrorist hostility it has encountered, and that culminated in 9/11, upon itself. By embedding his life narrative in this gradual disillusion with corporate America, which is catalysed by this moment of recognition, the narrator projects his conversion to Islam and believes that it could influence his interlocutor to feel sympathy for his psychological and sociological motivation. Dissent to dominating systems of belief and state-authored homogenization has, after all, always been a major incentive for religious conversion and radicalization, even in the history of Euro-American modernity and its conceptions of freedom.19 Regardless of the fact that a CIA agent would certainly not be influenced by the justification of a radicalization through any story, his story, especially its cathartic moment, however, seems too neat and generic to be true. His interlocutor appears to be very suspicious, an attitude that is related indirectly through the narrator commenting on the eluded questions, expression, and gestures of the CIA agent. This perceived suspiciousness is impudently countered by Changez with further paradoxical assertions about the generally precarious relation of truth to fiction in (his) narrative, and which that emphasize, now officially, the importance of the effect of his narrative over the veracity of the events that it depicts: But your expression, sir, tells me that you think something is amiss. Did this conversation really happen, you ask? For that matter, did this so-called Juan-Bautista even exist? I assure you, sir: you can trust me. I am not in the habit of inventing untruths! And moreover, even if I were, there is no reason why this incident would be more likely to be false than any of the others I have related to you. Come, come, I believe we have passed through too much together to begin to raise questions of this nature at so late a stage. (173)

The fact that they ‘have passed … together’ suggests the complicity of narratives, for which certain questions—an unwillingness to suspend disbelief as it were—seem inappropriate and counterproductive. Especially if a life narrative is aiming to root itself in the heteronomy of the social world, the veracity of the external events that have created a change in

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comportment is of course an indispensable criterion. This kind of inquisitive back-and-forth epitomizes the anthropomorphized and existential narrative situation that is so typical of the precarious status of the always ultimately contested picaresque. It makes clear that the context and the narrative are not only two existing narratives, subsequently projected, but are constantly recalibrated through their competing utterances, demands, and assumptions. This existential situation and its entanglements highlight that, here as elsewhere, unreliability in the picaresque is a complex and complicit communicational phenomenon that refers to paradoxical situations of inquiry and testimony that proliferate everywhere in modernity and especially in contexts of cultural difference. This unreliability, then, cannot be resolved by relying solely either on the epistemological unreliability of an ethically or intellectually inept protagonist, or on the rhetorical unreliability of an immoral perpetrator or notorious liar. Rather, we have to consider the competing ethics of these modes of unreliability, which variously place the blame on the excesses of an inscrutable world, a deficient mind, or the insufficient mimetic precision of symbolic signs on the one hand, and the dishonesty and moral inferiority of a protagonist on the other.

Implied and Implicated Readers Up until now, studies on unreliability in the picaresque have focussed mainly on the problem of moral aberration and suggested the concept of implied author- or readership as the privileged constellation, which through signals of irony can expose the picaro’s deviation and dishonesty. This conception of unreliability is still very much indebted to Wayne C. Booth’s classic formulation: ‘I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not’.20 This focus may work for texts like Naipaul’s The Mimic Men or Quevedo’s El Buscón (1626), which as we have seen are parodies of the picaresque novel and the social phenomenon of the picaro, written to critique an emerging post-feudal social order in the one instance and the supposedly imitative cultures and identities of New World subjects in the other, rather than utilizing the picaresque as a mode of expressing precarious biographies. A general irony between ‘author and reader’ is however not the primary signal towards narrative unreliability in all picaresque novels, and

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certainly not in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, despite the near-unprecedented problematicity of its protagonist.21 The unfathomability of the narrator and the ethical lack betrayed in his actions certainly baffle and affect the reader of picaresque novels, but they cannot usually be naturalized fully by means of unreliability in terms of an aberration of otherwise stable and unproblematic norms. Such a position simply sets the inherent immorality or even the ‘pathological evil’ of the individual as the central reference point and makes it impossible to also ask panoramistic questions as to ‘what kind of world gives rise’ to his actions.22 It would seem highly negligible to simply map a detached ironical union between implied author and implied reader onto the complex relations sketched in the postcolonial picaresque and entirely dismiss and ridicule the reasons that narrators provide for their reluctant transgressions. The attachment of unreliability to the concept of the implied author is, thus, clearly one of the main weaknesses in Booth’s definition and its obstructiveness becomes fully apparent, not only in the complex relations mapped in the postcolonial picaresque narrative situation but also in the global circulation and specific readership of these texts that further problematize these already questionable categories;23 categories which assume that an external reader and an external author, sure of their values and those of the work, safely frame and expose the dishonesty of a (picaresque) narrator. The postcolonial writer and the cosmopolitan Western reader, may first of all, not share all of these values in the same way. Such a frame or disposition would, furthermore, flatten out all of the ambiguities and ethical problems that the form so successfully addresses and would unproblematically restitute the world and its norms from which the picaresque protagonist so ostensibly deviates. For the precarious postcolonial picaresque and especially so for The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s narrative of violence and counter-violence, Booth’s concept is particularly troublesome, because the norms of the work are anything but stable and are intimately related to the norms of the world, whose ethical aporias it models in its complicit and compromising situation of utterance. While there is always also some ironic distance towards the morally flexible picaro and his modes of evaluating the world and his actions, from the perspective of precarity this distant ironizing is not the dominant, and surely not the sole mode of evaluating picaresque reliability and responsibility. Instead in the picaresque, we are neither invited to safely refute, nor to simply embrace the ethics of the narrator/protagonist. Of course this is

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especially the case, in a narrative situation in which an alleged Pakistani fundamentalist supporting terrorism is speaking to an interrogating CIA operative, in a world after Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib. Even if we reject the ethics, actions, and reasoning of the protagonist, as suggested by Booth’s concept, such a rejection does not in consequence have to amount to an unproblematic and normative affirmation and restitution of the worlds and norms which have led to the picaro’s responses: we may very well condemn the actions of an individual and take seriously the negativity of the world that has given rise to him or her. Booth’s concept simply does not apply for the precarious picaresque, let alone the postcolonial picaresque, because the norms and values from which the picaros deviate do not offer a stable uncorrupted universe that spans author, reader, and text. Rather they occur in and produce vulgar realities in which they are consistently suspended and challenged. Their actions thus, despicable as they may at times be, also highlight the very paradoxes of these realities and the constant suspension of their own official values, be it in the disastrous effects of neoliberal adjustment and business consultancy or through the official states of exception produced by neo-imperial military violence and neoconservative politics. This points to the aforementioned picaresque indebtedness to satire and its tendency to display violations ‘of the spirit of the law rather than its letter’.24 In distinction to satire the picaresque not only legally equates ethical violation, but it makes the constant violation of mores the legitimate principle of its own actions. Changez and most other picaros, therefore, resort to actions that are morally and legally unacceptable, but that, at the same time, they merely consider to be in accordance with those transgressions that they have encountered continuously. These witnessed conventions, like politically sanctioned wars or the valuing of money over human lives, may not always have violated the letter of the law—which is anyway often designed to suit them by neoliberal governance—but they have certainly violated its spirit. Changez’s initial occupational context is certainly no coincidence in this context, as consultancy can probably be seen as the kind of business that helps corporations to maximize their gains from these very discrepancies between the legal and the ethical, the letter and the spirit of the law. The postcolonial picaresque as an extroverted novel may very well imply and implicate in its internal communicative situation a potential metropolitan reader to whom it performs the aporias of personal responsibility and humanist ethics under local conditions that are shaped by the

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pressures of global capitalism. But it is not between this implied reader and an implied author that the unreliability of the narrator is produced, as a deviance from their secure ethical norms. If anything the implied decoding by a metropolitan reader is designed to problematize, contextualize, and relativize the unreliability of the precarious narrator/protagonist as an effect of the aporetic ethics and economies in which he has to operate and in which any metropolitan reader directly or indirectly partakes. The implied reader of the postcolonial picaresque, rather than being in a detached union with the implied author as in Booth’s theory, is pulled into and ethically implicated in the dialogic process that occurs in the communicational situation of the novel. At the very least he is disturbed in his allegorical decoding of the text by having to grapple with the function of the picaro’s unreliability, his elusive ethics and, in some cases, his acts of violence. Hence, there may well be an implied reader and, less importantly, an implied author, but they are clearly not instances that can ironically register the unreliability of the postcolonial picaro as a simple deviation from the stable communicational and societal norms that they concurrently project. Therefore, the etymologically related term ‘implicated reader’ perhaps better denotes this position and helps recalibrate the picaresque narrator’s ambivalent and existentially motivated relation towards the officially advocated ethics and primary goods of cosmological capitalism. This kind of implication is central to The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In Changez’s ever more explicit critique of American imperialism, which is clearly posited as the cause of his (unacknowledged) reluctant conversion, his ‘confession’—like Lazarillo’s, who confronts vuestra merced with a range of double binds—‘implicates its audience’ which, as he admits, is a ‘devilishly difficult ball to play’ (80). In this instance the notion of the implicated metropolitan reader, which I want to suggest as the pragmatic replacement of the category of the implied reader for the postcolonial picaresque, is quite explicit, not only due to the direct reference to ‘implicate’ and ‘audience’, but also in the fact that an American CIA agent hyperbolically expresses the ambivalent nature of Western human rights claims and their legitimating implication with and perpetual suspension by political power, corporate interest, and biopolitical states of exception. The category of the implicated audience thus clearly relates to both the narratee and to a potential reading audience, especially a liberal cosmopolitan one. The implication works in various ways: Any cosmopolitan reader trained in ambivalent cosmopolitan

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ethics will reflect about his own, and his national culture’s (the latter of which, being a cosmopolitan, he is usually officially sceptical about) implication in the negative world that the protagonist projects and will thus not be able to disengage his life fully from the neo-imperial conditions that helped spark the precarious grounds on which violence and terrorism become possible. The reader is, however also implicated in union with the picaresque protagonist himself as many of the reasons that are given for his refutation of corporatism are quite followable, and resonate strongly with the ethics and concerns of liberal cosmopolitanism and with an anti-imperial stance that is painfully aware of the atrocities committed in the name of progress. This implication certainly does not allow for every act of violence to become redeemable, but it suspends any kind of value judgement and requires a considerate ethical response to violence and a genealogical inquiry into its conditions of possibility. While it requires a reconstruction of a fundamentalist’s motivation and thus a degree of ‘becoming fundamentalist’, the position does not risk identifying uncritically with the picaro’s position and its acts of violence. This is for two reasons: Firstly, because an ambivalent cosmopolitan ethics is rather more likely to be too hesitant than too quick in embracing responses to conditions of negativity, let alone violent ones. Secondly, because the picaresque is a highly enigmatic genre—especially so its postcolonial avatar—and one that always ultimately refutes any kind of wholesale identification. Nonetheless, it offers effective and affective avenues of reflection for the ways in which we are implicated both in picaresque reasoning and in the processes that create the neoliberal shantytowns from which the modern-day picaros’ and their modes of coping with global modernity have emerged.

Framing Unreliability After his supposed catharsis—which consequently aims to place the subsequent events into the tragic dynamic of fatal inevitability—Changez relates that after his conversion he goes back to Pakistan, where he teaches politically minded students and is, so it seems, suspected of having recruited them to a terrorist cell, and a few of them are now suspects in an attempted terrorist attack. He pledges his innocence in this case and starts losing his temper when his interlocutor still seems to remain doubtful and tries to resort to the registers of interrogation:

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But I was certain that the boy in question had been implicated by mistake. How could I be certain, you ask, if I had no inside knowledge? I must say, sir, you have adopted a decidedly unfriendly and accusatory tone. What precisely is it you are trying to imply? I can assure you that I am a believer in non-violence; the spilling of blood is abhorrent to me, save in self-defense. And how broadly do I define self-defense, you ask? (206)

The explicit question of self-defence, obviously, hinges on the same question of legitimacy as his potential conversion to fundamentalism and as Balram Halwai’s legitimation of his murder. Legally and ethically, it is ultimately the same question that Balram faces and that is part of the plot structure of many picaresque apologias: When does a retaliation become plotless and systemic, rather than fully transgressive and autonomous? Allegorically it extends to the question: At what stage can an imperial system that globally produces precarious lives be considered an active agent that may be countered, if necessary with violence? What is the moral status of these redeeming acts and who are its appropriate victims? This negative process of recognition and the legitimation of actions taken—though never fully admitted—is a central concern of the postcolonial picaresque as a contemporary genre of global capitalism. Picaresque unreliability thus poses the demand of ethically framing the violent responses within the worlds in which they have occurred. Picaresque unreliability, however, is also intricately related to other formal and ethical dimensions of ‘framing’. It is also a comportment that tends to frame its interlocutors, at times with dangerous consequences, especially as it stretches and liquidates the ontological frames that separate narrative and world. The latter become especially important towards the end of the novel, when the question of self-defence is extended from an evaluation of past conduct into a threat in the present. When all of Changez’s protestations, explanations, and denials seem to have been in vain, he ostensibly guides his interlocutor into a trap, which he may have planned regardless of how his narrative was received. The novel suggests that the CIA Agent is killed by a group of fundamentalist henchmen, all while Changez—in a hypertrophy of a picaresque narrator—claims his innocence and attests to the harmlessness of the situation until the very moment of the attack, when his innocence can no longer be upheld but at the same time becomes a moot point.

164  J. Elze It seems to me that you have ceased to listen to my chatter; perhaps you are convinced that I am an inveterate liar, or perhaps you are under the impression that we are being pursued. Really, sir, you would do well to relax. Yes, those men are now rather close, and yes, the expression on the face of that one—what a coincidence; it is our waiter; he has offered me a nod of recognition—is rather grim. But they mean you no harm, I assure you. (208)

The explicitly existential, near metaleptic, framing of this postcolonial picaresque exploits and exceeds a tendency that has been with the form since the first hint at the genre continuity of the picaresque, in the wake of Lazarillo de Tormes, was made in a parodic episode of Don Quixote. This scene makes explicit what can only be suspected in Lázaro’s narrative (and other picaresque novels), namely the ongoing subscription by the narrator to the old beliefs and practices of the protagonist. In this episode, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet a convoy of delinquents who have been sentenced to service on the galleys. Among them is Gines de Pasamonte, who claims to have written an autobiography that is ‘so good […] that it’s too bad for Lazarillo de Tormes and all the other books of that genre that have been or will be written’ [‘tan bueno […] que mal año para Lazarillo de Tormes, y para todos cuantos de aquel género se han escrito o escribieren’].25 The criminal on trial is able to make Don Quixote believe his claim to innocence simply by relating his highly subjective and necessarily one-sided life narrative, in which he puts the blame for his imprisonment solely on unfortunate circumstance and on other characters. He is immediately freed from his chains without further investigation as to the truth of his assertions, by Don Quixote, who knows—and lives by—chivalric romances and later pastoral novels, but who is obviously unaccustomed with the idea of an existentially motivated first-person narrator, let alone an unreliable picaro; and obviously has not read Lazarillo de Tormes or drawn any conclusions from it. A few pages later the freed—and supposedly both innocent and converted rogue—proves his ongoing subscription to delinquency by stealing Sancho Panza’s donkey.26 This replicates the aporetic and precarious framing paradox of picaresque novels of giving testimony of one’s life upon concrete request and with a clear agenda. With regard to the picaresque genre which is prototypically represented by Gines this can only be read as parodic advice that the claims and the reliability of such a selfdeclaredly conversed picaro narrator should always be considered with the utmost suspicion and scrutiny. Interestingly, this episode also exposes

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the syntagmatic picaresque aporia of the formal conclusion of one’s life story. While picaro narrators always insist that their conversion is irreversible, Gines hints at the open syntagm of his life by openly conceding ‘How can it be finished […] when my life is not yet finished?’27 The Reluctant Fundamentalist hyperbolizes this ongoing implication of a narrator-protagonist uncontained by the frame of the narrative, as the narrator does not just steal from his interlocutor, but threatens his very life and potentially even murders him, thus pushing the question of self-defence beyond the frame of internal narrative scrutiny of the novel. The novel thereby evokes and tests the reader’s willingness to frame violence as self-defence, while also rendering the violence effective and dangerous in its almost metaleptically posed threat: ‘you are under the impression we are being followed’. The ‘irritation of form’ that prematurely arrests any potentially unending narrative of human self-actualization here serves as the means to suspend absolute certainty as to the actual execution of lethal violence, and we may still pragmatically complete the scene by considering the interlocutor and ourselves paranoid, though that seems progressively less likely towards its end.28 Despite its ending, which untypically, but somehow consistently with this historical generic frame, seems to turn the tables in terms of power structures, The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a nuanced picaresque investigation into the problem of contextualizing, framing, and explaining violence. Its basic narrative configuration invokes quite explicitly the investigative structures of the Counter-Reformation Inquisition. The contemporary globalized world abounds with such asymmetrical and paradoxically urged confessional situations, though usually without the possibility of the interrogee gaining the upper hand. They range from, most drastically, the investigation—perhaps even torture—of alleged terrorists, replicated in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, via the personal accounts increasingly requested at metropolitan airports, to the more abstract but increasingly common call ‘upon “foreigners” to display their (ostensibly inadequate) allegiance […] to abandon their putative “parallel societies”’.29 Those are popular (and often populist) demands that imply the almost paranoid assumption that these allegiances are somehow insincere and precarious.30 The picaresque narrative conveys in various ways the ambivalences of cultural difference and economic inequality in global neoliberalism, and the subaltern cultural practices it produces. The narrators do not portray some exotic innocence but present the neoliberal spaces of destitution as ‘offenses against customs and mores

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as if they were violations of a legal covenant’,31 with which their alleged crimes are merely consistent. Regardless of whether they ultimately acknowledge their acts, picaresque aetiologies, therefore, consistently point us towards an ambivalent structure of agency and accountability that should frame our evaluations of their conduct. Judith Butler has explicitly elaborated on this line of thought in Precarious Life: Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology of “evil.” Both the discourse of individualism and of moralism (understood as the moment in which morality exhausts itself in public acts of denunciation) assume that the individual is the first link in a causal chain that forms the meaning of accountability. But to take the self-generated acts of the individual as our point of departure in moral reasoning is precisely to foreclose the possibility of questioning what kind of world gives rise to such individuals. And what is this process of “giving rise”?32

Changez’s whole narrative—but also that of Balram Halwai in The White Tiger—revolves around this question of ‘giving rise’, even if the narrators themselves often aim to unduly attempt to stylize their actions into fully fledged ‘mechanisms’. The texts do this in a way that probably makes most readers share the critique uttered by the narrators, but without offering a narrative in which we sympathize too strongly with the protagonist or in which they are projected as exemplars of dignity and morality. Emphasizing and critiquing the state of the world in which certain actions are conducted and individuals are shaped, without at the same time unambiguously redeeming all of these actions and their agents as mechanistic, is the ethical effect and function of unreliability in the (postcolonial) picaresque. Picaresque novels, however, also affectively help delay and redirect liberal critique by not only pointing to a neoliberal context for terrorism and violence as legitimated antinomy, but also to a systemic continuity between picaresque violence and cosmological capitalism. Unreliability, in this context, not only attests to a limited ethical range of contextual explanations for violent actions, but perhaps more importantly also points to the troublesome escalating continuities of picaresque actions

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with the systems against which they direct their violence. This pertains to violently self-interested postcolonial entrepreneurs, but is probably most drastically emplotted in the autobiography of a neoliberal business consultant (reluctantly) turned terrorist fundamentalist. While terrorism is an attack on the very lifestyles and freedoms that neoliberalism self-declaredly espouses and enables, it also in many respects functions as a systemic continuity that helps to fine-tune—adjust, if you will—the social structures that neoliberalism seeks to reproduce. In its more recent neoconservative cloak, neoliberalism has quite actively ‘highlighted’ and welcomed internal and external threats in order to achieve new forms of social and national cohesion to affectively replace the ones that it had previously destroyed.33 These threats also managed to legitimate military investments and the reduction of civil liberties, which lead to forms of state and corporate control that help to push capitalism into an even more cosmological direction. In tandem with these modes of governance and accumulation, terrorism leads to self-congratulatory, uncritical, and often paradoxical celebrations of freedom in the wake of mourning that may even further stabilize the ideological base of neoliberalism. By both contextualizing terrorism and clearly delegitimating terrorists, picaresque unreliability not only points to limitations for exclusively constructivist explanations of terrorism but also exposes terrorism for its reproductive continuities and implication with neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The novel emplots these entanglements by making the fundamentalist a former employee of an American business consultancy: a continuity between business consultancy and terrorism that is mutually revealing.

How to Get Filthy Rich The strategy of implication that I have proposed as a central element of picaresque narrative unreliability and ambiguity ultimately denotes the active framing of a reader into the reasons and circumstances that allegedly shape and narrow the picaro’s actions so as to eventually render them legitimate, automatic, or even laudable. What a picaro is essentially doing when he asks an interlocutor in the tradition of Lazarillo de Tormes to ‘imagine how a man could live’, is to ask him to take over his point of view. That does not entail a full suspension of the law, but the acknowledgment that under certain circumstances the conditions are so hostile towards legal and moral comportment that one compromises certain ethical and legal stances.

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The existential motivation of the picaresque, its self-explanatory aetiological structure, and its anthropomorphized communicative situation often tend towards the metaleptic. This metaleptic tendency, however, is not only one of mere playfulness or metafiction that wants to point us towards the representational dilemmas in which fiction, testimony, and historiography are caught up, but also actively contributes towards the implication of the reader, urging him to transpose to the picaro’s perspective. This imaginary empathetic transposition finds its ideal case in a narrative situation in which the internal narrative situation is bypassed and the reading ‘you’ is directly asked to imaginarily transpose himself into the experience, options, and landscapes in which picaros conduct themselves, without the presence of an anthropomorphized narrative situation blocking the full affective access of the second-person pronoun. Mohsin Hamid’s third novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) makes that leap and attempts to fuse the picaresque narrative situation with other genres.34 Rather than terrorism, he uses the context of third-world entrepreneurism that Balram Halwai has been so emblematic of, but he aims to draw the reader more explicitly into a chronological, typical, and predictable narrative, rather than to the exceptional aspects of an entrepreneurial life trajectory. He does this by camouflaging the novel as a self-help book, a genre that in its very form already offers a counter-perspective to the protocols of official education, development, and formation. Instead, a self-help book typically focusses on situational wits, on a priority of praxis, on pragmatism and individualism. How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia occasionally extends these self-help values into the semi-legal, and at times criminal predispositions that it projects as necessary to success in ‘Rising Asia’. In this respect it strongly resembles Balram Halwai’s concerns with entrepreneurialism and his celebration of half-bakedness, in which the formation of ideas through education and entrepreneurial success are mutually obstructive: ‘Many skills, as every successfull entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing’ (78). The novel’s projection of the main character as ‘you’ fosters identification and an ineluctable grammatical complicity with the actions of that protagonist and simultaneously renders ‘us’ the protagonist of the novel. It retains the episodic format of the picaresque, but has more of a developmental progression to it in terms of economic improvement, which makes sense, given that this is the sole objective of the self-help book. The text is developed in twelve clearly separated chapters, which

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span the protagonist’s entire life, from a life-threatening case of hepatitis shortly after ‘our’ birth to a moment near ‘our’ death around the age of eighty. These chapters contain indispensable steps on one’s way to getting ‘filthy rich’: While the first two ‘Moving to the City’ and ‘Getting an Education’ still somewhat resemble the protocols of sanctioned developmentalism, historical emergence, and postcolonial improvement, the following chapters ‘Don’t Fall in Love’, ‘Learn from a Master’, and ‘Avoid Idealists’ already strongly resound with the picaresque avenues of self-interest and their un-officialdom and anti-idealism. None of the traditional picaros has a fulfilling relationship—and they usually don’t reproduce—but they follow masters at a certain, often unofficial, trade. They always avoid any idealism—which is inaccessible to them in their metonymic surface mimicry—in favour of retaining applicability and adaptability. Within the chapters, the picaresque tendencies are sometimes less explicit than could be expected from the structure and narrative situation of the book. Of course ‘we’ fall in love and get disappointed, of course ‘we’ fall in with idealists and eventually abandon their movements and causes, which themselves always turn out to be problematic. ‘We’ initially work for a trader who sells expired goods to stores, and then start to work for ourselves—Chap. 6 is entitled ‘Work for Yourself’—as a bottler of potable water that is purified and sold. Interestingly, this initial occupation strongly resembles the very first occupation ever to have appeared in the history of the picaresque novel, as Lazarillo de Tormes’ only successful waged occupation was with a water carrier. This is not to suggest an active intertextuality, but points to the fact that in landscapes of precarity occupational proximity to very basic goods and resources that are not universally provided and exempted from profit-making can signify economic success. Once the narrator is established as an entrepreneur, the seventh chapter turns towards the pivotal moment that typically structures the aetiological narratives of self-exemption, for example in The White Tiger or The Reluctant Fundamentalist: ‘Be Prepared to Use Violence’. Unlike in Balram Halwai’s case, murder is not the initiatory entrepreneurial moment that provides the resources to become a successful entrepreneur in the first place, but happens at a later stage in the context of increasing business and territory and the forms of violence such expansion provokes from other actors. It is here projected as self-defence and the murder—of an alleged assassin—is carried out not by the protagonist (‘us’), but by

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‘our’ bodyguard. The attempted assassination occurs in the context of a turf war and renders violence an unavoidable side effect of the economies of entrepreneurial un-officialdom. It is here consistently framed as the response to a concrete and serious threat, but it is also nonetheless projected as an unavoidable part of entrepreneurial emergence in those landscapes of precarity, by meriting its own chapter in the book. The self-help book continues where many other picaresque novels might have left off. Already successful, we continue and expand our commercial enterprise by ‘Befriending a Bureaucrat’. With this step we come full circle by participating in the hierarchical make-up of society depicted in The White Tiger, in which the values of official democracy are undermined by corruption and favouritism. Entrepreneurial success has now completed its journey from illegality to become officially legitimized and even supported by the political system, which points to cosmological capitalism’s and neoliberalism’s paradoxical perfection in close proximity to the state and its protection and ‘protection industries’. This subsequently extends into a lucrative military contract by ‘patronizing the artists of war’ who connect enterprise to various levels of the state, thereby rendering the state a neoliberal extension of corporate interest rather than a construct to protect its citizens and regulate the relation between legality and ethics through politics. These sections not only exoticize the postcolonial corruption of governments, but are also emblematic of the often undemocratic favouritism implied in neoliberal governance and the role it assigns to the state.35 This continuing of entrepreneurial progress well beyond the moment of initial entrepreneurial success also shows how delinquent picaresque self-interest is eventually absorbed by the protocols of cosmological capitalist accumulation. The last three chapters of the self-help book somewhat depart from the picaresque way of life as it depicts ‘our’ eventual decline—which is however not a complete relapse into precarity. ‘Dance with Debt’ still thematizes the capitalist demand to keep growing and depicts our attempts to absorb other companies to increase market share and revenue, which are then undercut by our heart attack and the stealing of funds by our manager, which points towards a generational cyclicality of picaresque entrepreneurism. The two final chapters ‘Focus on the Fundamentals’ and ‘Have an Exit Strategy’ are then quite uncharacteristic for a picaresque. They focus on our resignation with modest funds (leftovers from our more successful days) and the final reunification with the love of our life that has always eluded us before. The chapter focusses

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on a few years of mature bliss, without the personal aspirations and the erotic priorities that compromise young and untested love. After a few happy years, our love dies quickly of cancer that has been diagnosed at a very late stage. The novel ends in a hospital seconds before our own death. While the idealistic and platonic, and decidedly non-material happiness contradicts with the materiality and the focus on carnality that usually permeates the picaresque, it is also never quite clear whether the last two chapters have not been a hallucination following the heart attack that we experienced during the debt crisis. The last few chapters, especially the last two, seem to contradict the picaresque structure, because they focus on resignation and the cyclicality that may lead an entrepreneur back to the realities on the ground. The text reflects its failure explicitly as not having ‘been the very best of guides to getting filthy rich in rising Asia’ (219). This sense of failure, however, only derives from extending the picaresque narrative frame much beyond its usual confines, that is, beyond the moment of parvenu success, from where a picaresque life narrative is usually provided, to encompass the whole life, including the character’s eventual decline and old age. Such a story has to eventually include the linear deformation of the temporalities of success. The goal of ‘Getting Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’ has certainly been achieved and the sections spanning the relative wealth of the protagonists have in fact lasted a couple of decades. The final chapters shift their concern from material to idealistic and metaphysical concerns that seem at first glance more amenable to the Bildungsroman. At the same time the placing of this metaphysical concern shows a tendency to postpone these issues until well after economic success and thus temporally sequentializes the priorities of idealism and materialism. The metaphysical concern also further dignifies the character’s entrepreneurial life, by making it the pretext for the eventual discovery of the right values. This retirement into modesty and idealism, however, is only possible due to the funds that have previously been acquired. Tying the end of the text to a supposedly healthy relationship and true happiness does not, therefore, undermine this picaresque self-help strategy, but also gives it further credibility and legitimacy. This legitimacy, however, is usually only acknowledged, valued, and accessible after the picaresque parvenu’s success has been achieved. These later chapters do not conflict with the nature and ideology of self-help, which also typically highlights focussing on essentials and on individual happiness;

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a focus which it sometimes conflates with economic success and strong notions of self-interest, but sometimes also projects sanctimoniously and hypocritically in spiritual opposition to it: ‘focus on the fundamentals!’ It thus provides the text with credibility as both a spiritual and a material self-help book, though its sequencing makes clear that privileging metaphysics over materiality is for those that can afford it. Even if the end of the novel were not explicable in a picaresque logic it would still serve as an interesting case for the concern of this chapter: The ‘you’-narrative form of the novel highlights in many ways the picaresque aetiological structure and the form’s complicated relation to values, laws, and the vulgar realities that threaten them. While it is a highly comical experiment, it literally leaves one pondering where the point of conflict would have been for ‘us’. The pragmatics of the self-help book with its focus on applicability, informality, and the focus on the borders that persist in daily practice rather than those erected by official law or metaphysical morality, highlights the pragmatic choices that the picaro has to go through. The second-person structure of the novel implicates the reader directly in these choices—or rather shows how ‘we’ had little choice—as one has to negotiate the ineluctable direct second-person address with the morally questionable acts that are syntagmatically linked to it. The empathetic takeover of perspective ultimately requested in aetiology is here deictically forced upon the reader. We, thus, have a much harder time fully rejecting the actions projected therein, as they are not committed by an easily isolatable character. Regardless of whether the real reader is actually ‘swallowed up in the hypothetical situation and consents to the text’s implications’ or ultimately aligns ‘reference … with a fictional protagonist’,36 the ‘you’ at least momentarily enhances the identificational potential of the text and will make us more hesitant to dismiss the offered perspectives and actions without any reflection as to our own behaviour in similar situations. At the very least this deictic trick is an effective comment on literary and transcultural judgement and exoticization. The episodic structure of the self-help book and its distinct sections also highlight like no other form the episodic format of the picaresque insofar as they focus on key events, lack transition, and feature long intervals between them that we fill iteratively. At the same time, the episodes are not reversible and clearly stadial, as the protagonist of a selfhelp book ought to achieve his goals for it to be relevant as one. The

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narrative also somewhat undercuts the precarious episodicity of the picaresque in its programmatic premeditation, rationality, and prefiguration of reality. As such it raises awareness of the fact that entrepreneurism is also a discursive programme that is being activated, ideologically tied to the alleged possibility of self-interested emergence. It is thus coherent and operative as a global ideological superstructure and is not only a— potentially roguish and exotic—postcolonial response at the precarious base. The work, which is a mock self-help book in terms of its structure, ethics, and address is, therefore, in many ways a novel about the narrative form and narrative structure of the picaresque and about the deforming capacity of neoliberal ideology, which it unfolds most drastically in tandem with precarity.

Conclusion: Deplotting Violation The simultaneously transformative and classificatory temporality of the Bildungsroman has been prominently termed the ‘enabling fiction’ of global politics.37 In the context of cosmological capitalism, then, the unreliable narration of the picaresque can alternatively be understood as the fundamentally ‘disabling fiction’ of global neoliberalism. Disabling fiction in the sense that these novels try to recruit our attention and affection, and implicate us in a process of disenablement that projects compelling fictional answers to the question posed by Butler: ‘How is it that radical violence becomes an option, comes to appear as the only viable option for some under some global conditions?’ At the same time they also clearly expose (their own) violence and its legitimation as a likewise problematic, precarious, and eventually disabling and escalating mode of contextuality that is also perhaps more reproductive than it is transformative. Yuri Lotman understands the structure of the artistic text as a tension between the force of plot that aims to transgress or violate existing social semantic spaces and their boundaries through revolutionary events, and the function of myth that not only seeks to contain the dynamics of plots, but may ultimately be understood to signify all the redundant and heteronomous elements that enter into human action and make plot—in the sense of radically autonomous and unprecedented action—so difficult to realize within the symbolic economies of modernity.38 Plot is the principal dynamic of the Bildungsroman, in its broadest sense, where, significantly, the giving-up of plot (i.e. ambition/idealism)

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for the pressures and accommodations offered by myth (i.e. convention) are always carefully negotiated or experienced as failure. The picaresque, on the other hand, is consistently reluctant to admit, in fact, seeks to consistently deny its status as plot: its having a caso. Instead, even though they project personal narratives of formation, or rather of being formed, the narrators insist on the normative power of the bad conventions of reality that turns all possible action into systemic consequence and, therefore, renders them uneventful. Regardless of whether they deny their actions or whether they embed them as a consequence of imperial capitalism, picaresque narrators like Balram Halwai and Changez project their actions outside of the autonomous realm of plot into the heteronomous realm of myth and convention. While myth assigns to almost all human action a degree of heteronomy, within cosmological capitalism the vulgarity of conventionalities increases the purview of myth to such a degree, that it may even normalize the violation of the inviolacy of human life. While the picaresque novel’s episodicity performs the difficulty of cognitively mapping cause and effect in global capitalism, its unreliability ironically points to the problem of answerability and accountability in these relations. By positing their actions as plotless, picaresque narrators extend the disabling effects of the slow violence of neoliberal capitalism into the spectacular violation of the avoidance of suffering signified by violence and terrorism. Regardless of how we eventually evaluate these practiced continuities ethically, by causally relating these two modes of violence, the picaresque aesthetically links the production of postcolonial precarity to the exploitation of the precariousness of perishable human life.

Notes

1. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149548?redirectedFrom=precarious# eid, last accessed 22 August 2012. 2. Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 134. 3. Matthias Bauer, Der Schelmenroman (Stuttgart: J.B: Metzler, 1994), 2. 4. Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 39. 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Towards a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson

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and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59. Here: 15ff. 6. Robert Alter, Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 83. 7. Giancarlo Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance: “Lazarillo de Tormes” and the Picaresque Art of Survival (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003), 5. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), 84–258. Here: 162. 9. Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2. 10.  See Susanne Zepp, Herkunft und Textkultur: Über jüdische Erfahrungswelten in romanischen Literaturen 1499–1627 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 85–108. 11.  See Hans Robert Jauss, “Ursprung und Bedeutung der Ich-Form in Lazarillo de Tormes,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 8 (1957): 290–311., “Ursprung und Bedeutung”. 12.  See Antonio Gómez-Moriena, Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism: The Spanish Golden Age (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 33.  13. Zepp, Herkunft und Textkultur, 100. Translation JFE. 14. Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Penguin, 2007), 10, 12. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text. 15. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 2. 16.  See Homi Bhabha, “Notes on Globalisation and Ambivalence,” in Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity and Innovation,  ed.  David Held, Henrietta L. Moore and Kevin Young (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 36–47: Here. 44–47. 17.  Tobias Klauk, “Can Unreliable Narration Be Analyzed in Terms of Testimony?” Journal of Literary Theory 5, no. 1 (2011): 37–56. Here: 45. 18.  See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 82. 19. See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 1–73. 20. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 159; emphasis retained. 21. Paul Riggan, Picaros, Madmen, Naifs and Clowns: The Unreliable First Person Narrator (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 157.

176  J. Elze 22. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 15. 23.  See Andreas Kablitz, “Literatur, Fiktion und Erzählung—nebst einem Nachruf auf den Erzähler,” in Zeichen der Fiktion. Aspekte fiktionaler Rede aus historischer und systematischer Sicht, ed. Irina O. Rajewsky and Ulrike Schneider (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008), 13–44. Here: 30–34. 24. Walter Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 48. 25. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote. trans. Charles Jarvis, ed. E.C. Riley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 169; Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2004), 206. 26. See Don Quixote, 175; Don Quijote, 211. 27.  Don Quixote, 169; Don Quijote, 206. 28. Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 29–48. Here: 42;  “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in Nachahmung und Illusion (Poetik und Hermeneutik I), ed. Hans Robert Jauß (München: Fink, 1964), 9–27. Here: 22. 29. Anja Schwarz & Russell West-Pavlov, “Introduction,” in Polyculturalism and Discourse, ed. Anja Schwarz & Russell West-Pavlov (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), ix. 30.  See Ashwani Sharma, “Postcolonial Racism, White Paranoia, and the Terrors of  Multiculturalism,” in Racism Postcolonialism Europe, ed. Graham Huggan and Ian Law (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2009), 119–130. Here: 127. 31. Reed, An Exemplary History, 48. 32. Butler, Precarious Life, 15. 33. Harvey, Neoliberalism, 82. 34. Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013). 35. Harvey, Neoliberalism, 70–81. 36. Monika Fludernik, Towards A “Natural” Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 230. 37.  See Joseph Slaugher, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1405–1423. 38. See Jurij M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman (London: Tauris, 1990), 151–53; see Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 1977), 236–237.

CHAPTER 6

Abjection

Precarious, adj. 2.c. Subject to or fraught with physical danger

Introduction ‘I used to be human once’. Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007) opens with this negation of the narrator’s humanity and an inversion of the developmental trajectory of the human-rights plot. This assertion by its narrator/protagonist not only initially deflects “humanitarian” readings,1 but also literalizes and hyperbolizes picaresque marginality, marginalization, and abjection, by rendering its picaresque protagonist narrator a self-designated animal, who explicitly does not consider himself part of the dignified realm of humanity. From the outset the novel is concerned with framing the disastrous and—literally—disabling effects of global neoliberalism on the Global South in the mode of abjection. The relation between ecological and economic deprivation in the South and industrial modes of accumulation on the part of the allegedly post-industrial North is rendered blatantly visible throughout the novel, which is set in the aftermath of a toxic disaster caused by a U.S. corporation. Nonetheless, the novel’s agenda is not always easy to pinpoint, as it exhausts itself neither in an assertion of resilience in the face of deprivation, nor in a mourning of timeless suffering. Its explicit © The Author(s) 2017 J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_6

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reflection of North–South reading relations further underscores this ambivalence, as it constantly oscillates between the urge to communicate an unbearable and dehumanizing plight and the wish to project the maintenance of human dignity and subjectivity outside the narrow exotic frame of victimhood. These competing urges combined with the demands of a Western readership that craves to consume both authentic dignity and humanitarian suffering result in a paradoxical narrative, whose overtly multilayered and paratextual frame performs the difficulty of accessing testimonial truth in such an asymmetrical, complicated, and fraught relation. The picaresque frame of the novel leaves an uncertainty not only as to whether the reclusive dignity with which it ostensibly closes is an ethically appropriate choice. It also leaves us pondering whether the rather positive ending it offers is even accurate to the diegetic events, which Animal’s life narrative ought to truthfully relate, or whether this pseudo-romantic closing is an explicit manipulation in order to render the narrative more salvageable on a global literary market.

Abjection and the (Postcolonial) Picaresque Grotesquely deformed by toxicity into a four-footed animal, by which name he also goes, Sinha’s narrator-protagonist roams the streets of the fictional Indian city of Khaufpur (which means Terror City in Urdu) around 15 years after an ecological—or rather industrial—catastrophe that Sinha explicitly modelled after the Bhopal chemical plant incident. On the night of 2–3 December 1984, a pesticide plant run by the Indian branch of the American multinational Union Carbide exploded, causing the immediate deaths of at least 2259 people, the ensuing deaths of at least 3787, and sicknesses and injuries to hundreds of thousands in the years and decades to come; not only were some toxic effects temporarily delayed, but they were passed on to following generations. Bhopal was clearly one of the worst ecological disasters in recent history, but also one that, in close temporal proximity to the Chernobyl catastrophe, did not receive the latter’s international recognition and media coverage; this was perhaps due to the fact that unlike the case of Chernobyl, the plant’s toxicity did not threaten to affect Western Europe. Bhopal’s relative absence from public memory surely also attests to our limited capacities and our cultural—if not racist—selectiveness when it comes to mourning the victims of disaster.

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In this City of Terror, the trajectory of the Bildungsroman is inverted, as humanity is not something to be attained but to be relinquished. The text makes that explicit by reverting not only the inclusionary principles of human dignity and modernity, but by evolutionarily reversing the trajectory of humanity towards erectness and the cultural possibilities anthropologically connected to it, as well as the dignity with which erectness is culturally associated. The protagonist’s self-designation as ‘animal’ can, however, also be read as an attempt at overcoming victimhood through the embracing of difference. By turning that difference into a taxonomic one, the narrative also, however, points to the problems of cultural difference that have in the past also served to conserve underdevelopment in the name of authenticity.2 The novel’s narrator-protagonist shares a lot of biographical similarities with the tradition of the Spanish picaresque and the novel is one of the few in postcolonial literature that has been consistently read in the context of that tradition. Animal is an orphan, who spent his early youth and childhood in the slums of Khaufpur, before he befriends a group of activists who associate with his childhood friend and secretly beloved Nisha. To an extent that exceeds even that of other postcolonial picaresque novels, which are often roguish economic success stories where results are achieved by playing the competing demands of legality and justice off against one another, Sinha uses the picaresque idiom to consistently present precarious landscapes of destitution, deformation, poverty, and global injustice through the eyes of his protagonist. In the specific context of ecological catastrophe and toxic poisoning the effects of precarity impinge upon and deform the actual body and mind of his protagonist more explicitly than the ideologies and practices of capitalism do to the other protagonists, without even offering any subversive leverage for roguish economic success stories. While most other picaresque novels aim to manipulate the paradoxical modes of inclusion into cosmological capitalism, Sinha’s protagonist emphasizes an ongoing and ineradicable difference that is not only cultural, but decidedly taxonomic, and explicitly evocative of the racist colonial language of dehumanization. The dehumanizing forces of capitalism are thus taken literally in this self-declared exclusion from humanity. The protagonist’s deformation mostly points beyond the potential liberation achieved through cultural difference towards its limitations in the context of global asymmetry, exploitation, and uneven flows of toxicity.

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The text’s concern with the bodily abjection caused by pollution and extreme poverty is its most explicit topical link to the early modern picaresque novel and its ‘picaresque art of survival … at the margins of the renaissance’.3 At the same time the novel seeks to balance an abject ‘aesthetics of despair’ with the lived realities of ‘integrity in human conduct, or any sort of human community … or love’.4 The protagonist’s selfabjection, the novel’s focus on friendship and communal integration, and its explicit problematization of a cosmopolitan readership turn abjection into a textual phenomena that requires representation, but that is also  counteracted to restore agency and dignity and in order to historicize and politicize rather than culturalize abjection. This restoration of postcolonial dignity and agency is both a desideratum of Animal’s testimony that genuinely seeks to elude static representations of eternal suffering, but also, I would argue, a demand of a world literary market that requires a certain degree of (authentic) dignity to be upheld in the face of catastrophe in order for postcolonial lives to remain salvageable and marketable. The end of this novel, I argue, ironically caters to this impossible demand, by performing an unlikely process of sobering Bildung and of reunification, resurrection, and persistence in the face of the ongoing toxicity that surrounds them. The early modern picaro has repeatedly been considered a figure of abjection, as the Spanish picaresque has often been read in the context of the postmedieval carnivalesque fictions of Rabelais.5 Abjection denotes realms of the improper, the unclean, the bodily: criminality, faeces, violence; and as such it has clear affinities with the precarious landscapes of the picaresque. The strong focus on scatological elements, such as pregnant wombs, excrement, semen, or disgusting food in Rabelais or in Till Eulenspiegel and the carnivalesque is often understood to affirm the regenerative nature of bodily fluids and of an otherwise marginalized corporeality.6 Excess and abjection served the social function of integrating and reversing the lower and higher realms of society and thus fostering moments of equilibrium.7 Emphasizing those materials and processes that are indispensable to human physical existence, yet which are often excluded from the official symbolic economies of society, is a vital strategy with which to maintain social order, by creating heterotopias of temporary ventilation and reversal. Carnivalesque spectacles thus also serve to contain the physical and numerical possibility of revolution that is otherwise contained symbolically.

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In the precarious picaresque, however, abjection and scatology are rather negative forces, pointing towards lack, inaccessibility, and exclusion. Abjection usually signifies the ongoing expulsion of the picaros from society. Julia Kristeva has seen the abject to be neither subject nor object: ‘Not me. Not that.’ It denotes what is unacknowledged by the symbolic practices that render objects accessible to subjects, but nonetheless impinges upon the subject and exists in reality: ‘Not nothing either’.8 Similarly, the marginal early modern Spanish picaro is neither subject nor object. He thrives or strives at the borders of social acceptance, with his humanity often violently suspended, his physical survival unclear, his representation in cosmology suspended by emerging capitalism, his modern subjectivity contained by residual cosmology. A concern with scatology and abjection has, therefore, been a classical concern of the picaresque tradition, albeit within a generally prevalent idiom of excess and grotesquery in early modern literature. Lazarillo de Tormes, who pukes out the sausage that he was able to steal from his first master, or Quevedo’s Pablos, wallowing in mud, and his unsightly meal of eggs are explicit early instances of that tradition. The scene of Lazarillo’s vomiting of the sausage, with which this book opened, is emblematic in the context of abjection not only because it is spectacular and disgusting, but also because it reflects on the questions of objectification and subjection. It attests to the picaro’s inability to fully objectify vital aspects of his daily life if they exceed the most basic nutrition. His vomiting is typical of the picaresque, insofar as it exemplifies abjection not as excess or a result of overfeeding, but as a lack, as an impossibility not only of retaining objects for later use or trade, but an inability even to transform edible objects into nutrition. Lazarillo, thus, remains stuck in what Georg Simmel has termed ‘momentane Nutznießung’ (immediate usufruct), as he is not able to detach himself from bodily concerns and from the most basic objects that would still them.9 The sausage was a choice of meal and was not retainable for Lazarillo, who usually only feeds on crumbs of bread, onions, and dried turnips. Only the possibility of choice and the emancipation from physical needs enables the feeling of value and the subsequent creation of subjectivity, beyond mere survival.10 For those stuck in a fight for survival, it is impossible to safely enter the symbolic realms of ownership, choice, and subjectivity. Relying on the classics of European sociology like Simmel, always bears the risk of exoticistically overlooking the subjectivity and creativity that is inherent in postcolonial practices of

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appropriation, even under conditions of deprivation. The explicit context of abjection and hunger that the early modern and postcolonial picaresque project, however, make a questioning of the material possibilities of subjectivity a rather urgent horizon that is perpetually delayed by the Sisyphus-rhythm of the picaresque. Sinha’s novel is not only concerned with immediate deformation but also unequivocally picks up on the problem of the lack of objectification and subjectification of human existence in perpetual precarity and the lack of value creation, symbolization, and temporalized subjectivity that this implies. Animal even phrases poverty as an absence of time that consigns every slum-dweller to a perpetual presentism—like Lazarillo, who has to ‘wolf down’ the sausage instantaneously—and a never-ending Sisyphus-rhythm of subsistence that is typical of the picaresque: ‘In the kingdom of the poor, time does not exist’. He explains to the American doctor that he leads through the slums: Elli, if you had no watch, your stomach will churn and growl and say, hey Elli, it’s food time, hey it’s still food time, hey don’t you hear me, it’s food time. What happens if you can’t afford food? When you can’t remember the last time you ate something? I’ll tell you. When it’s light there’s binding a cloth tight around your belly to squeeze out the pain, when it turns dark you’ve to drink plenty of water to fill your miserable gut. Hope dies in places like this, because hope lives in the future and there’s no future here, how can you think about tomorrow when all your strength is used up trying to get through today. Zafar says this is why people don’t rise and rebel. (185)

The text constantly focusses on abjection in terms of disgusting food, filth, litter, or deformed foetuses in glasses. Aside from offering a panorama of the abject suffering in the slums of Khaufpur, Animal also describes in detail his own deformed body, dwells on the chiropractical difference of his bone structure, which is upside down in comparison to that of other humans. He eats his own skin slowly (13) and he describes the disadvantages for defecation that his posture presents. On all fours he is close to the ground, smelling and seeing a world that is turned from its head onto its feet, as it were (2). By partly celebrating this low position he invokes Michel de Certeau’s—in my opinion ultimately exoticist—theory of the everyday, which privileges epistemology and subversion on the ground over the abstract power and knowledge of those panoramistically in social control.11 Animal eludes a regime of visibility and has knowledge

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about the actual physicality of the world. He thus focusses on the corporeality that underpins, yet is usually excluded from erect and visual face-to-face social interaction. Animal stylizes this as a privileged access, as envisioned by de Certeau, but his animality also makes clear that the permanent adoption of such a posture may imply deformation and dehumanization. In an essay entitled ‘Excremental Postcolonialism’, Jed Esty has talked about the aesthetic and ethical importance of abjection and scatology to postcolonial literatures. Excrement and other related issues are for Esty not just an element of the naturalistic depiction of postcolonial poverty, but a ‘governing trope of postcolonial literatures’.12 Esty considers scatology as a strategy with which to come to terms with the postcolonial excesses of the state, but also with the imaginative failures of a decolonization that followed the developmental path laid out by the erstwhile colonial powers. He analyses the postcolonial literatures of Ireland and West Africa, which respectively followed a phase of nationalist euphoria and accompanying literary optimism with a perception that all has ‘literally turned into shit’: Samuel Beckett’s work in the wake of Irish revival and Wole Soyinka’s and Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels of the 1960 s, which follow upon the heels of what has often been denoted as the ‘nationalist realisms’ of decolonization.13 Given the genre’s traditional affiliation to abjection, the picaresque is unsurprisingly mentioned by Esty among the genres that have risen to prominence in postcolonial literatures’ turn towards excrement.14 The focus on dirt, faeces, and other abject material has been seen as a counter-imaginary to colonialism’s obsession with clean bodies and sanitation: a desire that it nonetheless failed to instal widely. As such, the presence of excrement in postcolonial literatures also topically points to ‘the failures of development and the contradictions of colonial discourse’.15 The focus on persistent abjection also makes clear that narratives of cultural emancipation often bypass the bodily and material concerns on the ground, by being concerned with largely ideal, numerical, and symbolic realms such as national independence, GDP growth, or written documents. Excrement, however, not only concerns the presence of unsightly waste, but also the presentation of spectacular wealth and wastefulness. It concerns the ethics and aesthetics of surplus and extravagance as much as those of shortage and refuse. In Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) money is thus re-odorized, ‘converting it into shit and forcing readers to see wealth as polished waste.

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He reduces the comprador’s foreign cars, fancy hotels, and luxury goods to excremental status—denouncing them as cruellest forms of excess’.16 Waste equals luxury as a form of abjection and expenditure, as both are materials and energies that exceed economic and ecological equilibrium that can be meaningfully absorbed by a physical or social body without loss.17 By highlighting the functional similarity of these two poles of socio-economic status the omnipresence of waste—which semantically denotes both profligacy and refuse—in these texts, ‘neo-colonial capitalism appears in its uncloaked, cloacal form’.18 Rather than working towards productive equilibrium and equality, neoliberal capitalism in particular produces excess and waste on both ends of the economic spectrum: landscapes of waste and hunger so extreme that it disallows any reliable objectification of basic goods, but at best instantaneous consumption, as in Sinha’s timeless slum-dwellers. On this deprivation, neoliberal capitalism builds accumulation and luxury so extreme and disgusting that it cannot be meaningfully integrated into any social system, ultimately perhaps not even one of aestheticism or ostentation through status symbols. As such, the presence of waste—in whatever form—also highlights an absence of social and material equilibrium. When waste (fulness) grows on one side, when it even risks becoming the cultural norm, waste must inevitably be squandered elsewhere. At a time at which consumption in the West has created ever smaller cycles of product durability and fashion, in which energy consumption remains at high levels, and in which overweight has become a social illness, this relation becomes ever more urgent on a global level. It is inscrutable how a global economic system that constantly officially contains social change and public investment in the name of a quasi-mercantilist notion of an equilibrium of finite value, does not accept—or at least ignores the ethical consequences of—the fact that excess in one space must mean, and is meaningfully related to, deprivation elsewhere. Practices of industrial profit-making and the consumption-based lifestyles that had to be implemented to maintain economic growth in the North have rendered vast spaces uninhabitable, primarily in the Global South, through climate change, extraction of raw materials, and neo-imperial political destabilization. Those are the global relations that the postcolonial picaresque, and most notably Animal’s People, address through their focus on abjection and complicity.

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In the context of a global reading formation, such suffering and excessive corporeality also serves the function of articulating an absence for Western readers, whose everyday lives are largely marked by the absence of physicality and dirt and for whom defecation and sexuality have become exclusively private acts, which supposedly do not impinge upon public social life. Even sweating has largely become a phenomenon relegated to gyms ever since the eradication and outsourcing of many forms of physical labour created a demand for physical exertion and exhaustion outside of work. The Global South thus represents the corporeal aspect of life that is clearly not absent—but has been muted—in the everyday routines of most Westerners. It is certainly from this conspicuous absence that the bodily turn in the academy was derived a decade or so ago. Often, however, the material effects of deprivation, the public nature of supposedly private acts and the continuous responsiveness of the demands of the body in (clichés of) the Global South are misrecognized as authentic. Paradoxically, therefore, shit and dirt, for the Western journalists that come to Khaufpur and that pay Animal for tours through the slums, are emblems of authenticity in their search for ‘the really savage things, the worst cases’ (4). They want to see the abjected of global capitalism—though they usually do not make that contextualization—and want them to narrate their stories of dehumanization and indignity, offering them the promise of dignity through narrativization. They crave the visibility of slum-dwelling abjection, which undermines the potential normalcy and routineness of depravation, precarity, and lack of perspective.19 What this exoticist fascination suppresses is the fact that this corporeality is intricately and routinely related to the economies and ecologies of the Global South as the location where the physical actions that uphold our ostensibly post-industrial information societies take place, and from where many of the natural resources that are vital to our living are extracted: where clothes and technology are produced, where food is harvested, where raw materials are gathered under the harshest conditions, where chemical products are produced; the exhausting nature and toxicity of all of which do not allow any forgetfulness as to the physical dimension of human existence and the industrial state of the economy. While this may serve as a reminder of the physical aspects of reality that we crave to experience in literature, the representation of crass Third World poverty, according to Timothy Brennan, has also served an

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economic image function, which has helped to mute worker’s struggles in the West with the fear of outsourcing and by reference to those who are much worse off. Clearly, the majority of citizens, especially workers of the North, are also exploited by capitalism. While my argument is that there is a connection between the way we live now and the plight of the postcolony, I agree with Brennan that the consequence cannot be to hamper the ambitions of class struggle in the West or to exclusively render responsible the individual and his modes of consumption as the source of change, but to structurally and politically rethink our relations to nature, our hierarchies, and the alleged structural necessity of inequality to our current model of economic growth. Interestingly, one of the few scenes in the novel in which the Indian characters relate unambiguously to the American doctor who works in the slums, is when she narrates her father’s plight as a worker in a steel mill, a tale that points to a shared global struggle of the working classes that is even highlighted by a shared isotopy of fire (201, 218). The disillusioned postcolonial novels of the 1960s, according to Esty were, however, not interested in installing any urge to struggle through abjection. In his reading he sees these novels as emblematic of the forms of postcoloniality in theory and literature that have increasingly seen liberationist struggle as a dangerous epistemological naivety.20 Esty proposes: excremental language is invoked here precisely in order to diffuse guilt and shame. At the level both of national politics and of individual ethics, excremental writing tends toward complex models of systemic guilt, rather than toward the sharp absolutions and resolutions that attend moral or political binaries.21

This logic of diffusion might make sense in the context of a period in which the sure-fire rhetoric of decolonization has proven to be insufficient to instal a better future by a mere change of regime, and where the binary options of actually existing communism and capitalism have proven frustrating. Forty years later in Sinha’s novel, however, the abject serves a different function in a climate in which it has increasingly become common sense to render agency and responsibility systemic and impossible to pinpoint, and in which all modes of thinking other than, and outside of the transcendental status of global capitalism, were relinquished by capitalism’s endism. ‘There is no alternative’ and other assertions

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pointed towards systemic pressures that humanity was supposedly unable to overcome. Animal’s People thus retains the scatological imagery and ambivalence of the novels that Esty discusses, but offers something of a counter-strategy to that postmodernizing diffusing mechanism of the 1960s that Esty diagnosed. Rather than diffusing guilt and the possibility of resolution, Sinha is emblematic for a range of recent picaresque texts that through their visible abjectness display what Robert Nixon has termed the ‘slow violence’ of global capitalism and the ‘dissociating mechanism of neoliberal economics’ that are applied to deflect agency into complexity, nature, and providence.22 Especially by linking deprivation and suffering to the consequence of a concrete—even if airborne—corporate practice, the novel advocates for the possibility of establishing relatively linear relations of agency and responsibility and the struggle against them. While it is immensely important to be aware of the systemic aspects of power and how they narrow, complicate, and predetermine human agency, questions of responsibility have to be asked and may be answered. Fortunately, such questions are increasingly being posed in postcolonial literature and theory, in an attempt to rethink some of the ways in which dominant theoretical predicaments have led to a depoliticization of the field and have even been misapplied in the service of a mystification of global inequality.23 This is an urgent matter, given that decisions about life and death are still being made in corporate boardrooms, by politicians, and, less directly and freely, by consumers and voters.

Abjection and Visibility Explicitly set within this concrete and irrefutable toxic relationship, the novel also points to the generally uneven relations that persist between the Euro-Atlantic accumulation of capital and the social and ecological destruction of the sites in which the material and human aspects of our ostensibly post-industrial societies are realized. Robert Nixon’s fascinating study on the slow violence of global capitalism has also tackled the regimes of (in)visibility that regulate our epistemological relationality to these sites: He emphasizes that the effects of ecological catastrophe often elude our notions of violence because they are not as spectacular and visible as other forms of violence, and tend to have spatially dislocated and temporally delayed effects that can easily lead to the misperception of a severed causality. These dissociative mechanisms not only pertain to a blurred reality of causality, but also

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to a challenge when it comes to garnering visibility and legitimacy for some forms of victimhood. In this context of victimhood and visibility, Animal’s People straddles the difficult problem of how the visibility of deprivation relates to abjection and to an authenticity of suffering. This problematic relation is explicitly exposed in the novel’s critique of the sensationalist journalists that come to Khaufpur to seek only the most extreme cases of deformation and suffering. The importance of this epistemological bias that the novel addresses is now also highly apparent in the forms of representation that perversely structure the reception of the current European ‘migration crisis’ and the regimes of inclusion and entitlement that become ethically related to the visibility of depravation. In many centreright contexts, the precarity and deprivation of the refugees and thus their right to flee is consistently contested. At the core of this lies the problematic distinction between economic refugees and refugees of war. This distinction goes right to the heart of Nixon’s distinction between slow and spectacular violence, and reverberates some of the concerns that Sinha raises in his novel on the spectacle of postcolonial suffering. Only the direct victims of the spectacular violence of war and its representational archetypes of bloody violence and consuming fires, it seems, are entitled to the status of refugees, not those fleeing poverty or wars whose atrocities are less visible to distant observers. Debates have even tended towards the distinction that only the traditionally victimizable groups— women, children, disabled, and the elderly—should be entitled to refuge, while the group of healthy men should remain in their country and fight. The question of the visibility of legitimate refugee status also clearly feeds into discourses of abjection. Even where the distinction between refugees of war and economic refugees is not at stake, a general concern is the lack of visible suffering of recent, often Syrian, refugees in Europe: They do not all wear completely insufficient or tribal clothing; they may look a bit worn, but not completely starved, and most importantly they have and are able to afford smartphones, which completely disentitles them as sufferers in the eyes of many observers. The most perfidious meme that has circulated the internet was an image of half-naked African bodies, most notably those of children and women. They were taken from the well-known gallery of terrifying images from non-Mediterranean Africa, featuring bloated stomachs, visible ribs, and thin arms and legs that literally look as if they consist only of skin and bones. The text that accompanies these images read: ‘This is what people look like who really

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need our help’.24 In a context in which every reference to the plight of Africa is otherwise usually placed, alongside environmental issues, as the entirely esoteric and thus negligible concern of a degenerate liberal elite, the strategy of privileging this mode of suffering is not only highly cynical but also hypocritical. It clearly points towards the necessity that those that need support be visibly deprived and fully abject, that is, half-dead and grotesquely deformed: and preferably under-aged and/or female. Animal also thematizes and despises the global appeal of abjection that risks overshadowing the banality and normalcy of depravation and slow violence. His accounts are thus not only spectacular but also specular. They attain a predominantly visual quality that enables their consumption and circulation: ‘What I say becomes a picture and the eyes settle on it like flies’ (13). Aside from the context for which they have been unduly recruited, the spectacularity of the visible deprivations of African women and children, like the representations that Animal reluctantly provides, often draws attention away from the relation of these deprivations to global capitalism and roots them in a timeless poverty of Africa exacerbated by the incompetence and corruptibility of their leaders: but at least they are worthy of our limited resources of mercy, pity, and aid. Sinha’s novel thematizes the global appeal of similarly exoticizing and culturalizing images that circulate when it comes to India’s ‘natural’ relation to dirt and sickness. A supposedly natural relation that is both of interest to the foreign ‘jarnalis’ eager to market visible suffering, and is enlisted by the ‘Kampani’ (the graphemic rendition of Animal’s pronounciation of the company responsible for the disaster) in order to culturalize the diseases and visible deprivations that have occurred in the wake of its pollution. Robert Nixon discusses the actual Bhopal disaster and Sinha’s novel in the context of slow violence, because the disaster has administered the most severe of its effects slowly and invisibly over time, such as the toxins that have been emitted which were largely invisible. The notion of slow violence usually pertains to even more systemic forms of violence that cannot be retrograded to single events and are easily dissociated from causes and diffused into complexity. On an ecological level these are the systematic robbing of raw materials from many places in the developing world: wood, water, precious metals, oil, or gas, but also the effects of global warming that have affected the Global South more severely than elsewhere, in the form of aridity and rising sea levels. These are ecological aspects that carry their own violence and destruction, but that also create ensuing human-on-human violence in the increasing tension over

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scarce resources and inhabitable land. Economically and politically this slow violence has become more severe in the wake of the neo-imperial destabilization of states and the vacuums that these have left behind after neoliberal adjustment. Certainly not unspectacular or invisible, many of these conflicts are ‘at least’ usually kept from the eye of the European mainstream media consumer and thus retain a low degree of visibility. In the case of Animal’s People violence, despite the slowly manifesting physiological aspects, also has an important spectacular dimension, not only in Animal’s body. It is clearly retrogradable to an event that has the dimension of a historical caesura, by being only referred to as ‘that night’. The accident clearly involved explosions and fire and as such does not lack spectacularity. Sinha’s ecological corporate disaster retains quite a degree of visibility in comparison to those other forms of slow violence. The effects of toxic corporate waste that it projects are also somewhat more visible, in physical deformations for example, and, even more importantly, culpability for the disaster is far more easily determined than is usual in cases of more systemic global inequality and ecological destruction and their depriving effects. This does not mean that responsibility is uncontested in this case. Quite the opposite, the novel shows that a narrative of toxicity is based on an intricate narrative of acknowledgement that carefully selects those that are entitled to be acknowledged as victims. Therefore, the novel clearly addresses the problems of global state and corporate dissociation, but it does so precisely by localizing and visualizing slow violence in a discernible event and by displaying the ridiculous and pathetic strategies with which responsibility is denied. The epistemological bias towards events that can be related to corporate and political actors also has an affinity to and is taken up by literary plots of activism. The main plotline of Animal’s People offers such a narrative of emancipation, which aims at a clear goal: to reach a court decision that acknowledges the company’s guilt and demands of them structural reparations and an official apology for ‘that night’. This clarity of purpose persists, even when the Kampani is explicitly depersonalized as ‘faceless’. The novel accompanies a group of activists that are concerned with pursuing the legal persecution of the Kampani, as seen through the eyes of the deformed picaro. The Kampani that was responsible for the disaster has abandoned the factory and through its dislocated transnational setup eludes the jurisdiction and, therefore, the legal responsibility for the catastrophe it has created. The novel begins at a point in time at which for the nth time a hearing

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is taking place in the trial against the Kampani. Only this time, a newly appointed judge, surprisingly, considers actually scrutinizing a motion put forth by the activists who seek to order the Kampani to appear in court or else have its Indian assets frozen. The novel is largely set in this short interlude of hope for justice, even featuring a short ‘Golden Age’ after the judge has ultimately considered the bid midway through the novel and actually ordered the Kampani and its lawyers to show up in court for trial. The novel thus sets up a Bildungsroman-like potential binary between an existing ‘before’ and a projected ‘after’ disenfranchisement. This anticipated temporality of emancipation would be realized by the event of the administration of legal justice and the receipt of reparations.25 The Kampani, of course tries to dissociate itself from the responsibility for the debilitations that abound in Khaufpur. It tries to portray the effects of the poison as not of their making, but as the results of poverty, lack of hygiene, and lack of basic medical care: ‘Whatever illnesses there are, most are caused by hunger and lack of hygiene, none can be traced back to that night or to our factory’ (184). The conditions and their causes are of course not put into a context of pollution and poisoning, let alone exploitation, but are instead culturalized as timeless and authentic components of Indian urban life and politics, rendering the assumption of cultural difference one of the Kampani’s rhetorical strategies of neoliberal dissociation. From a perspective of slow violence, even if the Kampani had not spilled its waste, all of the aspects it mentions would still fall under its purview and that of other transnational agents who profit immensely from the markets and modes of production in the postcolony, without taking responsibility—or paying adequately—for the labour and resources that they exploit. In neoliberal discourse these relations are thus easy to diffuse, often with the help of notions of systemic complexity and cultural difference offering an example of how poststructuralism and postcolonialism can be misapplied in order to depoliticize poverty. Sinha’s text tries to be as explicit as possible by focussing on the more visibly bilateral relation between pollutant and polluted, emitter and contaminated, perpetrator and victim. It also spells out the implications of this negligence by literally dehumanizing his protagonist, and thus excluding him taxonomically from the realm of those worthy of human rights law, but not of humanitarian pity. This dehumanization that Animal occasionally embraces in order to deflect humanitarian pity is also evoked in one of the court sessions that take place later in the novel: An elderly lady recalls that

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the toxins that were being produced in the factory and ended up killing people were actually designed to exterminate insects. She aims to turn the slow violence of corporate negligence into the spectacular violence of active extermination, by provocatively asking the lawyers in Hindi: ‘was there ever much difference, to you?’ To this equation the Kampani’s translator can only reply: ‘I don’t know how to translate it’ (306). Obviously, the equation between insects to be eradicated and negligible humans is so unthinkable to the official liberal protocols of a Western company and by extension to the rhetoric of the Kampani, that it cannot be translated. Outside of the symbolic realm that regulates the rhetorics of dignity, where that equation is unfathomable, however, it is an equation that simply has occurred in physical reality: The toxins designed for insects have been indiscriminately evaporated onto humans, without much regret it seems. The abject corporeality that is at stake in the activists’ claims clearly lies outside of the symbolic constraints that officially govern the circulation of toxicity.

Politics of Humanitarianism Despite its unequivocal investment in rendering visible the realities of abjection and suffering in the wake of corporate catastrophe and economic underdevelopment, the novel has also repeatedly been read to actively deflect humanitarian readings and their belief that ‘victims of an otherwise debilitating trauma’ may best be relieved through testimony.26 As such, the novel not only seeks to overcome the invisibility of nonrepresentation, but also that other form of invisibility, which is effected through humanitarian misrepresentation and misapprehension and a tendency to respond with self-dignifying aid and pity: ‘What really disgusts me is that we people seem so wretched to you outsiders that you look at us with that so-soft expression’ (184). The dimensions through which the novel transcends such humanitarian misrepresentation are the importance and dignity of friendship, political consciousness, and community that the novel, unlike many picaresque novels, emphasizes. The importance of friendship in the novel not only dignifies the reality of Khaufpur, but also shows the potential of ties consciously forged over against genealogical ties that have become toxic in the world of Khaufpur anyway. This partial deflection of the humanitarian craving for suffering does not mean that the representation of abjection and plight serves a

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lesser purpose that is fully outweighed by the equally necessary narrative of dignity that the text also undeniably offers. It is an incredibly difficult balance to strike and the text is actively concerned with this difficulty, as it constantly addresses and oscillates between these demands. While the humanitarian craving to read for suffering is clearly activated by the abject imagery of the novel, Animal’s People also explicitly addresses questions of transnational corporate agency, political responsibility, and social struggle.27 It is at this crossroads between mitigation and transformation, between legal principle and individual help, which are central for the way that Western readers relate themselves to the novel and its landscapes of suffering, where the picaresque tendencies of the main character are most clearly exposed and most consistently employed. The picaresque frame with its immunity to causes is the idiom with which to reflect on the pitfalls of these competing ideologies, and to perform its various effects, both as political projects and as narrative frames. Next to its parasitic relation to the spectacle of suffering, which Animal condemns, humanitarianism is also explicitly problematized in its uneasy relation to the tautological guaranteed status of rights and in its problematic relation to individualist choice, as it usually operates outside the realm of politics and inside the realm of aid and charity. I will address this political critique of humanitarianism in the novel first, before turning to its aesthetic and market dimension and finally to how it is framed by the politics of genre. The tension between humanitarianism’s aid measures and the political demand for rights and reparations becomes explicit in the novel when the American doctor Elli Barber enters the scene in order to open a local health clinic. This clinic and its charitable dimension clearly conflicts with the local movement, which aspires towards reparations and an acknowledgement of the human and legal rights to receive them. The movement in which Animal participates—originally to be close to his friend and secretly beloved Nisha—and which is led by the intellectual middle-class activist Zafar suspects the doctor to be in cahoots with the company, which literalizes a felt collaboration between humanitarianism and the absence of state and corporate legal and ethical responsibility. Beyond this potential collaboration, the group also generally opposes the selectivism of humanitarianism. Based on that they advocate a boycott of the clinic, which most slum-dwellers join. The complex relation of aid and politics is, however, not an entirely uncontested issue in the movement.

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When a woman is confronted with the offer of being healed by the doctor, the leaders of the movement urge her to uphold the boycott, even at the expense of her potential death. This sparks a heated debate within the movement over the epistemology and ethics of proximity and individuality: While one faction advocates that help should be provided where it is possible, the other emphasizes the importance of upholding the principles that would eventually lead to a change of politics that might equally affect all those afflicted, not only those lucky enough to have personal relationships with and live in close proximity to the source of the cure (see 165). The people of Khaufpur, and its slum-dwellers in particular, are clearly victims of a global network that deals in the transplantation of toxic industries, the exploitation of cheap labour and lack of regulations, and the denial of responsibility and relation: as such they demand recognition. Therefore, I do not agree with readings that propose victimhood as a generally problematic category in league with the dehumanizing and misrepresenting tendencies of humanitarianism.28 Only when it is emotionally tied to humanitarian discourses of aid, rather than to structural political and ethical demands, does it become problematic and tend to cater more to the dignity and liberal indignation of the aiders—who according to Animal ‘speak to us with that sopious tone in your voice’ (184)—than the structural support of those requiring rights and reparations. The movement clearly does not strive for help, but towards receiving the rights that should be guaranteed to them by virtue of their participation as human actors in the processes and practices of global modernity.29 The novel is clearly concerned with exposing suffering and victimhood, but not necessarily in order to create humanitarian pity, but also to spark political outrage: Emotions can certainly be a tool to exert political, juridical, and legislative pressure, therefore the tension between writing suffering and political demands is neither absolute nor easily resolvable. That these dynamics are often translated into humanitarianism rather than global politics only attests to the utter depoliticization that has occurred in the relation between the North and the South (formerly known as the West and the Third World). This is a structural depoliticization that not only refers to the absence of any significant political institution that codifies that relation outside of developmental aid, but that has also severely affected our imaginative capacity to think outside of the palliative measures of humanitarianism. The ambitions of postcolonial justice to

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extend legal jurisdiction towards those who have been hampered by the effects of colonialism and imperialism and its ‘neo’-versions is a far cry from the actual legal, political, and even imaginary state of those relations.30 While Animal supports the movement’s political goals, he is unsure whether he personally should not try to benefit from the humanitarian medical aid that could be administered through the clinic and through Elli Barber’s personal support and engagement. He simultaneously meanders between these affiliations, displaying a certain picaresque dishonesty and opportunism. These unsteady picaresque affiliations across parts of the novel help portray the discourses of humanitarianism and of political activism from a meandering picaresque perspective, that pokes fun at their hypocrisies and ambivalences, without the text’s resigning itself to a perspective of relativity, difference, or exoticism as responses to the failed politics and ethics of emancipation and development. By offering us the narrator’s semi-outside perspective, these discourses do not lose their affective and political edge, but are contextualized in characters that embody their ambiguities, but also perform their potential sincerity. Like a typical picaro, Animal gets not as easily affected by these discourses, but aspires to participate in them where it serves him. He is thus not quite an ‘anti-voice to the new, ornate, chilvalric discourse’ of development and humanitarianism,31 but is certainly an ambivalent picaresque filter that explores the pitfalls, the appeals, and the limitations of these ‘chivalric’ discourses. Consequently, within the political movement Animal is in charge of its more unconventional and roguish methods: He is tasked with spying, or in his jargon ‘Jamisponding’, on the American doctor to determine a potential hidden agenda. Animal’s picaresque opportunism comes fully into play when he turns his assignment to spy on Elli into an opportunity to secretly have his back treated, even though the clinic is being boycotted by all other inhabitants. This picaresque tendency displays the incontestable individual appeal of the practical help of humanitarianism, especially when taking the isolated individual as the only source of social meaning and affect. Animal plays a double-agent game; neither telling his friends that he seeks actual medical care, nor telling the doctor that he is spying on her. His picaresque roguery also includes the sexual objectification of the doctor, the spying on Zafar and Nisha, and the slow poisoning of his love rival Zafar to mute the latter’s sexual appetite for Nisha. This picaresque roguery has been read to serve as a reminder

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that ‘justice should not depend on Animal exhibiting an attention-grabbing level of suffering and ethical correctness to prove that he is worthy of rights’, thus also underscoring some of the authenticating dynamics and pious demands of humanitarian reading.32 During Animal’s double-agent game the initial assumption that Elli Barber is collecting data for the Kampani is proven in his eyes when he sees her meeting her former husband, who is a lawyer for the Kampani (270–271). Without hearing their conversation he assumes that she is indeed in league with the Kampani. His picaresque ethical meandering is rendered into an inner conflict in this scene, as he neither confronts Elli with the suspicion, nor informs the others about his supposed discovery, which would have potentially provided them with valuable information. He remains quiet because he does not want to lose his opportunity of having his back fixed, an ambition which only the friendship with and proximity to Elli installed in him. In these scenes it seems as if he will take the typically picaresque road to individual relief by using for his own ends the only narrow means available: the proximity and visibility bias of humanitarianism. It turns out, eventually, that Elli has had no business with her former partner but was actually trying to dissuade him from his plans to strike a dirty deal between the Kampani and the state government. She is subsequently projected largely as a positive character with genuine concerns for the Khaufpuris. Eventually, she becomes more active in the political cause and quite probably even actively helps to undermine the deal between the Kampani and the state government. In many instances, however, it becomes clear, that her initial humanitarianism does not succeed in overcoming the dissociative arguments that are—in a much more radical way—used by the Kampani: ‘What the hell has this got to do with me?’ (159), her response when asked about the court case against the Kampani, or the statement that ‘this is a matter which concerns people’s health, it is not a question of politics’ are some examples of the mild form of dissociativism which she subscribes to (108). It is as if the ongoing deterioration and non-acknowledgement of Khaufpuri’s health conditions are separable from the politics that enabled them and that now undermine the acknowledgment of their suffering and disease. Instead ‘humanitarian aid is offered as a way to defuse legitimate anger and distract attention from the much costlier and often irreparable damage that victims of corporate violence sustain’.33

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The humanitarian prioritizing of direct practical help also links to a neoliberal bias towards conditional and concrete social support and contained private investment, and its ethical marginalization of indifferent and ineffective big government, union struggle, and large-scale public infrastructural projects, whose social aspirations are often cynically derided as inappropriate to the diversity of economic reality and the plurality of human needs. Humanitarian, practical material support in situations of crisis is of course helpful and the personal motives for providing this help usually unquestionable. In order to be sustainable, however, these responses ultimately also need to address the ongoing ecological and economic relations between the North and the South; they need to register the relation between consumption, production, and abjection; and they need to include a deep and unprejudiced reflection of some of the material practices of our lifestyles and our political and economic organization. Elli Barber, like most of us, does not feel that this is a realm in which she should or can operate. She does not think that global asymmetry is related to her way of life, but sees her intervention as her personal ethical project and her individual desire to abandon what she considers the narrow, materialist, and non-fulfilling lifestyles of American doctors and lawyers, although she significantly forbids any wide-ranging critique of America (see 159). Such personal engagement is important: it is, however, also emblematic of the form of individualism and personalized politics that has enabled the worldwide downsizing of welfare apparatuses and just taxation systems, and served to demonize organized social struggle. This focus on the capacities and ‘moral sentiments’ of the individual and on enabling bilateral rather than governing structural relations suggests an entrenched connection between humanitarianism and liberal economics. Pointing to a critique of humanitarianism does not imply that more governed forms of intervention have proven to be much more beneficial. In fact, they have often been beset by an irreconcilability between global expert knowledge and local practice. Animal’s frame narrative, however, also critically addresses the choking and potentially misunderstood assumption that the testimony provided by postcolonial literature can serve to promote better forms of vernacular expertise that provides alternatives to the top-down expert culture of ‘the London School of Economics researcher and the UN policy wonk’.34 Certainly, the novel does not urge us to go back to these traditional forms of expert culture, but it gestures towards forms of a global institutional responsibility that

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cannot exhaust itself in a fascination with local cultural difference or in palliative humanitarianism.

Pseudo-Romances, Picaresque Novels, and the Plots of Humanitarianism The mediated narrative situation of Animal’s People serves as another strong link to the picaresque tradition. In distinction to the The White Tiger (2008), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), or Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) the interlocutor is not a discrete individual envisioned in the text or a character in the frame narrative, but an explicitly cosmopolitan readership envisioned as ‘eyes’. This may create an occasional circumvention of internal address, if a reader directly identifies with the social reference of these ‘eyes’. The ‘you’ that we are then confronted with addresses us not as potential actors, as in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), but as consumers of narrative, thus activating our implication not in the picaro’s actions but in the shape of his life narrative. Among picaresque classics, this narrative address resembles most strongly the ‘you’ address in Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). In addition to the narrator’s addressing himself explicitly to this cosmopolitan and humanitarian readership, Animal’s People has a short editor’s prologue that also strongly resembles that of Moll Flanders and that further dissociates the narrative encoding of experience from the shape of the text. These paratextual/metadiegetic aspects of the frame sever any ideas about testimonial transparency by embedding the signs on the page into a multilayered process of construction, amending, and situated decoding. This process is not only emblematic of the complexities inherent in any communicative act, but especially points towards the asymmetries and multiform social, formal, and generic influences that transform the precarious experience of neoliberal globalization on the ground into a novel on a global literary market. Unlike the editor of Moll Flanders, who has supposedly purged all immoral reflections from the text to make it more salvageable as a narrative of confession, the editor here claims to have only made orthographical and grammatical, rather than socio-moral amendments, which is unlikely given that he has obviously transcribed the whole text and translated it from Hindi into English. Originally, the narrator Animal speaks his life narrative onto a tape machine that he has been given by an Australian journalist (‘jarnalis’), wherefore the text is

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separated into tapes not chapters. The whole narrative is, therefore, from the outset explicitly embedded in the context of postcolonial autobiography and its transformation, exploitation, and consumption in the global literary marketplace. Reflecting on this constellation, Animal from the beginning doubts the Euro-Atlantic belief in the power and social efficacy of authentic stories: ‘You told me that sometimes the stories of small people in this world can achieve big things, this is the way you buggers always talk’ (3). The literary and non-fiction discourses that created a demand for stories of Third World suffering and ‘third worlders coming of age’ are explicitly referenced by Animal35: ‘You had turned us Kaufpuris into storytellers, but always of the same story. … You were like all the others, come to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far off countries can marvel there’s so much pain in the world’ (5). The act of reading is clearly referenced as an act of exploitation and extraction (‘suck … from’) that caters to a humanitarian desire for spectacle (‘marvel’). Thus abjection also serves a very symbolic importance as a product and image to be exported and consumed. Animal argues that rather than liberating those that suffered by providing them with a voice, the exoticization of their suffering has actually served as a prolongation rather than a solution to their disenfranchisement: ‘On that night it was poison, now it’s words that are choking us’. While their invisibility through absence may be overcome by representation, this creates a new ‘spectacular invisibility’ that focusses only on their timeless suffering and dehumanization.36 The editor’s note makes clear that despite this stated hostility the tapes have indeed been turned into a written account for publication. Animal addresses his interlocutors as ‘eyes’, because he is already anticipating the fact of his account as a text ultimately written and read. ‘Eyes’ clearly denotes Westerners or privileged Indians unfamiliar with the landscapes of poor India, let alone Khaufpur. He thus reflects on the incommunicability of experience that arises from an extreme gap in living conditions: ‘What am I to tell these eyes? What can I know that they will understand? Have these thousands of eyes slept even one night in a place like this? Do these eyes shit on railway tracks? When was the last time these eyes had nothing to eat? These cuntish eyes, what do they know of our lives?’ (7–8). By focussing on the facts of immense material and medical deprivation and their translatability into the social contexts of Western middle-class readership, Animal gestures towards an unmitigable

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difficulty in grasping postcolonial narratives of precarity, which thus risk being read exoticistically and culturalistically. Therefore, the text, especially in its opening pages, clearly inscribes itself into and problematizes the whole field of global literary production and circulation and the ethics, demands, and modes of representation associated with it. Most explicitly, Animal is concerned with the wish to strike a balance between communicating the hardships of economically and physically precarious existence and avoiding the designation as timeless sufferers that chokes the Khaufpuris and has even served as a culturalist argument for the Kampani to elude responsibility. The focus on the potential implication of a readership and its way of life and the pitfalls of writing and reading about deprivation and abjection is thus central to Animal’s People. While he opens with a strong metafictional attack on the ‘eyes’ and their desire for spectacular suffering, it is interesting to see that through the course of the novel Animal is increasingly trying to emotionally and attentionally absorb ‘us’ (the ‘eyes’) into his narrative. Animal’s ‘invitation to his ideal readers to share in his peculiar vision’ has been read as an attempt at cultural exchange.37 In this last section of the chapter, I will suggest that this increased attempt to engage the novel’s readers through the protocols of genre, rather than being an attempt at cultural exchange, may instead be the narrator’s most picaresque strategy, his most opportunistic compromise to the vulgar realities of global asymmetry, which might eventually lead us to even doubt the veracity and possibility of the ending that he projects for the novel. The last third of the novel, after a short ‘Golden Age’ (255) when the Kampani is compelled to show up in court, marks an escalation of the political conflict and consequently an increase in reader engagement. When a deal between the Kampani and the government seems pending, the practices of resistance are radicalized to include the selfabjection of the bodies of the resistance, as Zafar and Farouq—another member of the group of activists—go on a hunger strike and resist hydration during the hottest season of the year. Their health deteriorates, and at the height of the hunger strike demonstrations simultaneously take place in front of the court building. When it seems likely that a deal has been made the demonstration escalates into a riot that attacks the heavily protected lawyers and the secured grounds of the former factory. The protesters finally manage to tear down the walls and fences surrounding the factory in an attention-grabbing narrative, thus

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reproducing an imaginary that has become topologically emblematic of successful political action: the actual overcoming of physical boundaries and demarcations like walls or fences (311). The directed temporality of revolutionary nationalism, thus, still seems to be an ‘unforegoable … site’ to be deployed by the subaltern precariat38: ‘the power of nothingness has to directed or else it will achieve nothing’ (315). While these scenes are very absorbing, this popular imaginary of resistance is also quickly rendered futile: When the crowd has stormed the factory, they simply do not know what to do next, reminiscent of the aspirations of revolution that do not point towards meaningful action beyond the moment of liberation. The Kampani clearly cannot be tackled by the binary temporalities of revolution as it exceeds their traditional spatial and institutional frame: the nation. While responsibility can of course be mapped transnationally, the Kampani eludes the kind of localization required by proletarian revolt through the simple merit of being dislocated. The revolutionary taking-over of factories and the means of production that has been a core imagery of Marxist revolution is clearly not meaningfully achieved in this storming of an abandoned and toxic factory. Instead, this may serve as a more appropriate allegory for the disadvantageous colonial legacies of many postcolonial nations, legacies that did not offer fruitful grounds for alternative modes of sociality. Appropriately, the protestors’ moment of disorientation is used by the police forces to re-evict them from the grounds. Simultaneous to this eruption of resistance, we are told that Zafar and Farouq have died as a result of the hunger strike. Animal feels responsible for Zafar’s death, thinking that he has narrowed the latter’s chances for survival with the pills that he had in previous weeks sneaked into his food and drink to lower his libido. Animal, from a feeling of guilt, takes the remaining pills all at once to commit suicide. The pills, however, do not kill him, but lead to hallucinations and a lengthy psychedelic and surrealist episode in which he returns to the factory and wanders through apocalyptic landscapes of fire. He has visions of angels and of loved ones that are lost and imagines that this fire is a second toxic disaster and that he has died in it. When he awakes in the final chapter he thinks that he has died and is now meeting the friends he had presumed dead in an the afterlife. His friends Zafar and Farouq, however, apparently did not die as a result of their hunger strike after all. Instead, all of his friends searched for him in the wake of the fire and the riots for various days and finally found him in the forests outside of Khaufpur, where he had

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meandered under the influence of the pills. Animal learns that there has indeed been a fire—one that he probably started under the influence of the drugs. However, it was not followed by a second toxic event and ‘only’ three people died in it. While it is acknowledged that ‘three is three too many’ and his stepmother Ma Franci was among the victims of a fire that he presumably started, the reconciliatory and melodramatic aspects of the ending strangely outweigh the narrative’s tragic elements, not only by weighing against one another the scale of potential events, but also through the edifying and conciliatory communal atmosphere that dominates the last chapter. Friends recognize, declare, and perform their affection, catastrophes are averted, and couples find each other or manifest their relationships through marriage. This is very reminiscent of the function of both comedy and romance—as modes of historiographic emplotment and as plot structures of drama. Typical of the genre of romance, trials are overcome, conflicts are intersubjectively resolved, characters are brought back from the dead, and values are discovered and genealogically secured. At the same time, the novel’s end features comic reunification, reintegration, the coupling of appropriate partners, and the retransformation of animals into humans, all of which, not incidentally, takes place in the woods outside the city limits, as in many Shakespearean comedies. The ending also gestures towards romance as a category of historical realism39 and as an ‘anticolonial … story-potential’ by trying to sell domestic conservation and integration as a form of the triumph of the good.40 I will refer to this as pseudo-romance, because Hayden White’s historiographic categories of emplotment of comedy and romance—and similarly the plot trajectories of the dramatic genres that they denote—are here intricately entangled, because conservation and integration are presented as processes of meaningful and contained transformation and recognition.41 The whole scenerio is finally comically secured and projected as sustainable in an iterative mood: ‘I danced at their weddings. All live together now in Pandit-ji’s house, I still have my lunch there every day’ (365). Animal at first cannot believe this unexpected turn of events, but is ultimately convinced of their reality in a touching, almost kitschy scene full of amicable humour and teasing that displays the cohesion and affection of a tightly knit group of friends who is clearly not devastated by the disillusions of injustice, poverty, and toxicity. This scene of reunification also eventually prompts Animal to desire his own inclusion into humanity: ‘I don’t think I can bear to go on being an animal in a world of

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human beings’ (364). Zafar responds to his wish by stating ‘Animal, my brother, you are a human being. A full and true human being’. Animal does not respond with his usual rejections, but snivels at Zafar’s assertion and they embrace in tears, clearly implying an acceptance of this invitation to rejoin humanity. Thus, despite its largely picaresque idiom, the novel on this level literally embodies the scripts of the human rights plot of the Bildungsroman that narrativizes the becoming of—or return to— what one already is by the virtue of birth. It makes clear that a denial of humanity and an insistence on difference is not a continuously viable position, even though Animal will also accept his own deformity, and thereby enlarge his previous conception of humanity so that it goes beyond the narrow category of ‘upright humans’ (366). The structure and the end of the novel have been read as emblematic of the assumption that ‘representations of the marginalized poor must be dysteleological’.42 It is certainly important to differentiate postcolonial experience from the temporalities of Euro-Atlantic development that have often proven detrimental in the past when transplanted onto other contexts. Nonetheless, this perspective resounds too explicitly with those postcolonial theories of difference and dysteleology, whose uncritical proliferation has helped undermine liberationism and struggle.43 Dysteleology in the case of this novel is especially hard to imagine as the proposed mode of empowerment, because the novel’s plot was so clearly invested in a temporality of emancipation and inclusion, which did not prove culturally inadequate or unduly homogenizing, but was perpetually denied by the hierarchies of global capitalism. While the ending’s comparatively reconciliatory note seems to cautiously affirm the self-actualizing scripts of the transformative Bildungsroman and romance, there is also a strong element of ‘compromise’ and ‘enriching  resignation’ that pertains to the personal trajectories of the group of protagonists and links them to the classificatory dimensions of the Bildungsroman and to comedy as it disengages them from the larger political dynamics to instal a rather static or circular picture of the world: ‘Eyes, what else can I tell? Life goes on. It will take time, so we’re told, to appoint a new judge in the case, the hearing’s again been postponed, the Kampani still trying to find ways to avoid appearing’ (365). The perpetual delay of the process, the reappointment of a judge, and thereby the seemingly endless temporalities of justice with which the novel ends, signify a delay that is emblematic of the ‘Sisyphus-rhythm’ of the picaresque only that it goes further than the

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picaro, to affect an entire community waiting for recognition and reconciliation. This delay is posited in a very matter-of-fact tone that gestures more towards a continuation, than a change that is still actually expected to take place; and even Zafar’s supposed conviction that ‘we’ll get them in the end’ (363) rings rather hollow at this stage, lacking all the urgency, anger, and hope that the movement had previously embodied, while trying to maintain a passive expectation of the triumph of justice. Thus the Sisyphus-rhythm structure of the picaresque is used here to extend the explicit non-developmental stance of the picaresque genre onto the postcolony–metropolis relation and the postcolony’s perpetual resignation to the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’.44 Furthermore, the novel’s ostensibly comic-romantic ending frames and tries to mitigate this waiting-room perspective in the context of familial and communal happiness, which seems to offer a dignified retreat from these endless temporalities of acknowledgement. This certainly dignifies the protagonists’ lives and achieves Animal’s stated task of rendering Khaufur into something more than some exoticistic place that consists only of the pitiable remains of disaster and depravation. While Animal towards the end of the novel accepts his humanity anthropologically and ethically, he also decides to embrace his animality and thereby his difference, when he is offered an operation that may allow him to walk upright again, and which he eventually declines: ‘I can run and hop … I can climb hard trees, I’ve gone up mountains … If I’m an upright human, I would be one of millions’ (366). His bodily abjection becomes mitigated into a productive hybridity in which he simultaneously celebrates his humanity and embraces his animality. This proliferation of difference and human-animal hybridity is of course a valuable counterweight to colonialism’s distorted and essentialist enlistment of humanism—that has since operated as postmodernism’s straw puppet of humanism—and its development of racist taxonomy, which often severely narrowed the concept of humanity. At the same time this celebration of difference, both on the level of Animal’s body and on the level of the private consensuses reached by the other characters, is highly suceptible to Western cosmopolitan views on the postcolony, which also privilege the authenticity of exotic difference and the private dignity of—mitigated and non-life-threatening—poverty exhibited in the South. While the acknowledgement of dignity helps to deprivilege a hampering discourse of the eternal suffering and lack of agency in the postcolony, it also hints towards a depoliticization of poverty that tends to culturalize

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economic disenfranchisment as life-artistry amidst hostile circumstance. The pseudo-romantic form of closure, resignation, and self-recognition offers highly domestic and domesticated moments at the end of such an otherwise activist plot. On top of this strange domestication and Animal’s re-humanization, it is striking that this enriching resignation happens to a group that is much better off relatively than the masses of the poor: Zafar was previously a member of the middle class, Pandit was a successful singer, Elli is a doctor, and Farouq’s family got wealthy through organized crime. Considering their social possibilities, the ending feels like a sobering end to the undue investments of its middle-class protagonists who have now grown to prioritize their happiness over their self-abandonment to resistance and politics. While being, thus, principally explicable by the scripts of the Bildungsroman and possible in the social constellations that the text had developed, the novel’s final emphasis on personal happiness thus feels somewhat odd and overtly constructed. A constructedness that is, however, certainly not a slip on the part of the author Indra Sinha. The end may succeed in projecting ‘multifaceted individuals whose existence transcends the disaster’; it does so, however, only for a few individuals, and it excludes the poor and turns politics from an active struggle into a passive expectation.45 It also seems to resolve the previously fiercely debated questions of proximity and generality unduly towards the social and emotional priority of familial proximity. Therein, it seems like a form of closure that is designed to appeal to the narrative scripts of liberalism and of the humanitarian reader, where the trials and tribulations of disenfranchisement are not structurally overcome, but personal content and dignity is found and some hope—though clearly in the form of a rather cruel or hollow optimism—is maintained. The picaro could thus be read as responding to the demands of the market, by fulfilling the minimum requirement: remaining alive, finding private happiness, and becoming human. While focussing only on the abjection of the pitiable remains of global capitalism is inadequate to the subjectivity of the people entrapped in poverty and suffering, a strong focus on the dignity that thrives in the clefts of global capitalism is at least equally problematic, and highlights a propensity to disengage that seems impossible in the previously conceptualized absence of time that impacts on the Khaufpuri slum-dwellers. The irony created by this paradigmatic comedy-romance ending becomes obvious, when the narrator’s very last words are reserved for the rather

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tragic and syntagmatic assertion ‘the poor remain … Tomorrow there will be more of us’ (366). While a lot of good scholarship has been published on Animal’s People for a text of such recent date it is surprising that none of the research, despite its shared and related interest in the representation of poverty and catastrophe, in the question of global reading relations, and even in the genre of the picaresque (though without any sustained typological interest) has tackled the strangeness of this ending.46 There is a set of possibilities for reading this ending: We can indeed take it literally and embrace the message that personal hope arises in the midst of all the suffering. This would in fact undermine the desire to marvel at pain and point—for better or worse—towards the normalcy of/in disenfranchisement. Secondly, we can criticize this ending, by tying it to the distinct social possibilities of those for whom it happens and read it as emblematic of the typical form of resignation that asymmetrical political struggle against transnational corporations eventually creates, which leads to compromises by the middle-class activists. Or, thirdly, we can even doubt whether this end is actually true to the events as they have taken place, which would add another strong picaresque dimension to the narrative. The paratextual—the fictional city of Khaufpur even has its own elaborate website—and pervasively metadiegetic dimensions of the text as well as the perceivably generic character of its ending direct our attention to the construction and constructedness of the narrative and its imbrication with various layers of global capitalism. In the context of these constructive layers it does not seem at all inappropriate to question the reconciliation with which the narrative ends, and instead assume a manipulation of the diegetic events by the narrator, who might have the goal of creating a story that is more readily digestible for the readership to which his narrative is eventually marketed. The presence of the Western journalists at the beginning of the novel, the address to the eyes of privileged cosmopolitan readers, and the explicit reflections on spectacular, yet digestible, difference and suffering add further credence to the suspicion of tinkering: Animal—or the editors that have found the tapes—may have changed the content of the story to after all cater to the tastes of the journalist that wants to publish his story and the presumed audience of that publication. From the beginning of the novel Animal has been addressing his oral story to a readership and clearly has developed a ‘grudging acceptance of their role as legitimate co-producers of his story’.47 If the ‘eyes’ are indeed

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the co-producers of his story, it seems very likely that the text has been produced to cater to the visual capacities and narrative scripts of theses eyes, a capacity that Animal has given serious thought to (‘What am I to tell these eyes … that they will understand?’). They may be interested in glimpsing destitution, but not as an all-consuming whole, especially if that destitution is so clearly tied to the relationality and effects of global corporate capitalism. While abjection thus is an important element in the panoramistic part of the life narrative, the suffering that is experienced should not be total, but in order to be salvageable needs to be mitigated by moments of dignity on the biographical and personal level. This includes picaresque humour and a picaresque character, albeit one that is able to leave the confines of his negativity, to join meaningful personal relations, only so as to end active resistance and struggle. The appeal of resistance and political action are of course also important pieces in postcolonial literature’s success story. Novels that unambiguouly support political projects have however often been seen critically, due to their alleged epistemological naivety and their isotropy with the developmental and homogenizing scripts of modernization and nationalism. Instead, the end of Animal’s People suggests that the people of the ‘Apokalis’ have simply accepted their fate and managed to find ways to live socially alongside but also outside of the toxicity of the catastrophe and the deprivations of injustice. The interpretation that can easily be drawn from how the end is presented cannot possibly have been Sinha’s intention: An acceptance of the unalterable outside forces and a reclusion into and a prioritization of private happiness. While Animal’s narrative, manipulated or not, evokes ‘poetic justice’ for its envisioned global readers, the novel communicates an awareness that, as Zafar notes, ‘poetic justice, rhyming or not, is not the same as real justice’ (361).

Conclusion: Digesting Precarity The novel, as this chapter has shown, takes up a range of almost irresolvable pressures: Its mode of representation certainly highlights the dehumanizing abjection of global capitalism, while its metadiegetic and paratextual address to its readers also attacks our exotic desire for consuming spectacular Third World suffering. The end, however, seems to mark an ironic compromise towards the market demands of salvageable disaster and the maintenance of dignity outside of the political discourse of reparations and justice and within a discourse of humanitarianism. It

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also renders Animal’s difference into one of personality rather than species. He accepts his humanity, while turning his bodily difference into a tool of empowerment. While he ostensibly denies humanitarian medical aid as inappropriate to his daily needs and singular personality, he seeks a market for his life narrative, which now ticks all the boxes, and integrates himself into the reading desires of Western audiences: He offers landscapes of destitution from which the culturally different protagonist can eventually detach himself to make for a different, but dignified personal life. Like most picaros Animal thus eventually takes literally what has been asked of him by the authorities of the regime of inequality that governs the ecologically unviable landscapes in which he lives: He turns his narrative into a salvageable piece of world literature that it probably would not have been if it had emphasized themes of perpetual death and guilt. The fact that it resorts to constellations of pseudo-romance—in what should have been a tragedy—makes that clear. This pseudo-romance is a centrifugal form that confirms existing orders, but in the hands of the picaro its stiltedness perhaps also allows us a glance at the ridiculousness of the assumption of human dignity in the midst of catastrophe, which can only seem unrealistic. The escapism of romance and comedy potentially points towards an absence of such solutions in reality, but also to the fact that the changing of the world is sacrificed for the restoration of personal relations, and the representation of bleak reality is sacrificed to maintain digestible literary form (for ‘us’). Whether or not we assume a manipulation of the events by the narrator or not, Animal’s People performs how the asymmetries that structure the global relations eventually turn revolution into pseudo-romance. With this pseudo-romantic resolution to the struggle Animal’s narrative clearly also gestures towards market demands as it ostensibly conforms to rather than ‘replaces the happily-ever-after resolution that the humanitarian reader seeks’.48 The artificiality of this ending and the concluding fact that the ‘the poor remain’, however, leaves enough doubt to highlight the precarious position of postcolonial live narratives, which are precariously trapped between the urge to communicate plight and maintain dignity, between the invisibility and the marvellous spectacle of suffering. Postcolonial literatures have to balance these ethical and representational requirements with an effective demand for politics, a deflection of mere humanitarianism, and the necessary global visibility of a story that is regulated by market demands and readerly desires.

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While ‘narrative itself is too often complicit in making invisibility spectacular’49 and often does not foster new modes of truly seeing those it seeks to represent, Animal carefully balances his narrative between projecting abjection and maintaining the dignity of those that he wishes to speak for. Strategically, he may pit them as living ‘outside of time’ and he is probably sincere as to these dehumanizing facts, but he is also careful not to render them impersonal dupes of disenfranchisement. The text however, also makes clear that this visibility may be easily hampered by narrative forms and modes of reading that always either suppress or expose suffering. The picaresque reflection on this process and the picaresque construction of the end of the novel render visible the global readership’s disabling participation in these processes. Taken literally, the end surely refers to the important task of eluding entrapping notions of victimhood and ironically supplements discourses about the typical modes of living in the postcolony. By overtly relating this representation to the narrative scripts of pseudo-romance and the sobering trajectory of the Bildungsroman it also, however, invites us to reflect that this normalcy may not be communicable to us outside of the narrative scripts, social dynamics, and affective economies we are familiar with. While these are the very scripts that only enable its visibility on a global market, they also render permanently invisible and un-envisageable the political needs of those the narrative seeks to represent. Read from a picaresque perspective, the generic embedding of the end makes clear that the currently imaginable modes of social empowerment are tied to specific frames of narration, which both govern the marketability of literary texts and severely restrain our political imaginaries.

Notes

1. See Jennifer Rickel, “‘The poor remain’: A Posthumanist Rethinking of Literary Humanitarianism in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Ariel 43, no. 1 (2012): 87–110. 2. See James Ferguson, “Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the ‘New World Society’,” Cultural Anthropology 17 (2002): 551–569., “Of Mimicry and Membership”. 3. See Giancarlo Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance: “Lazarillo de Tormes” and the Picaresque Art of Survival (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003).

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4. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994), 155, 151. 5. See Matthias Bauer, Der Schelmenroman (Stuttgart: J.B: Metzler, 1994). 6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 217ff., 357. 7. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 9, 226. 8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Damien Roudez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. 9. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 2011), 333; Die Philosophie des Geldes. Gesamtausgabe VI, ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), 413. 10. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 68, 72; Philosophie des Geldes, 33, 39. 11.  See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xix. 12. Joshua D. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (1999): 22–59. 13. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post-in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1991): 336–57. Here: 359. 14. See Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” 25, 37. 15. Ibid., 26. 16. Ibid., 33. 17. See George Bataille, The Accursed Share. An Essay on the General Economy. Volume I: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 20–24. 18. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism,” 31. 19. See John Marx, “Failed-State Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 49, no. 4 (2008): 597–633. Here: 599ff. 20.  See David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999),  4. 21. Esty “Excremental Postcolonialism,” 34. 22. Rob Nixon, Slow Vilolence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 59. 23.  See Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), 19.  24. https://twitter.com/victorericeira/status/711515208792014850. 25. See Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 1977), 231–239. 26. Rickel, “The poor remain,” 90. 27. See Patrick D. Murphy, “Community Resilience and the Cosmopolitan Role in the Environmental-Challenge-Response Novels of Gosh, Grace, and Sinha,” Comparative Literature Studies 50, no. 1 (2013): 148–168.

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28. See Rickel, “‘The poor remain’,”. 29. See Gurminder Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity. Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007): 83–144. 30.  See Gurminder Bhambra, “Citizens and Others: The Constitution of Citizenship through Exclusion”. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 40, no. 2 (2015): 102–114. 31. Nixon, “Neoliberalism,” 462. 32. Rickel, “The poor remain,” 106. 33. See Rickel, “The poor remain,” 99. 34. Marx, “Failed-State Fiction,” 628. 35. Joseph Slaughter,  Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 38. 36. Andrew Mahlstedt, “Animal’s Eyes: Spectacular Invisibility and the Terms of Recognition in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46, no. 3 (2013): 59–74. Here: 61. 37. Heather Snell, “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Postcolonial Text 4, no. 4 (2008): 1–15. Here: 8. 38. Lazarus, Postcolonial Unconscious, 106. 39.  See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 150. 40. David Scott,  Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 7. 41. See White, Metahistory, 177. 42. Mahlstedt, “Animal’s Eyes,” 72. 43. See Lazarus, Postcolonial Unconscious, 9–10. 44. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. 45. Rickel, “The poor remain,” 92. 46.  See Mahlstedt, “Animal’s Eyes”; Murphy “Community Resilience and the Cosmopolitan Role”; Rickel “‘The poor remain’”; Snell “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter”; Nixon, “Neoliberalism”; Jesse O. Taylor, “Powers of Zero: Aggregation, Negation, and the Dimensions of Scale in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Literature and Medicine 31, no. 1 (2013): 177–198. 47. Snell, “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter,” 3. 48. Rickel, “The poor remain,” 106. 49. Mahlstedt, “Animal’s Eyes,” 61.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion Economic Liberalism, Cosmological Capitalism, and the Project of Modernity

‘Válete por ti’—help yourself—is the first suggestion that Lazarillo de Tormes receives from his blind master after having left his poor home in order to survive in the scarce landscapes of precarity of early modern Spain. Young Lazarillo follows this imperative—literally hammered into his head with the help of a stone—and seeks his luck, a quest that proves ultimately incompatible with the official protocols and social structures of the very society that has ordained him to this self-interest. Postcolonial picaros have extended this paradoxical quest for self-assertion in the face of precarity and turned from docile servants into violent entrepreneurs, from business consultants into terrorists, from abject dehumanized animals into salvageable hybrid humans, from insecure half-castes to postcolonial authors. These modes of self-assertion all, in various degrees, unsettle our understandings of ethics, of a good life, and of cultural difference and have inscribed postcoloniality with a picaresque trajectory that displays an utter absence of human dignity in the postcolonial margins of global modernity. At the same time the picaresque, it seems, does not ask us to altogether reject the aspirations and promises of modernity and humanism vis-à-vis the material and existential precarity that it exposes. Typically set in the post-developmental world of global neoliberal adjustment and foreign direct investment, the postcolonial picaresque usually offers a scathing—at times naturalistic—account of the social realities of precarity in the postcolonial peripheries and the industrial recesses of global modernity. Precarity in the picaresque disenables strategic critical operations and leads to context-bound responses to deprivation that © The Author(s) 2017 J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_7

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often turn out to be violent or at the least violate cosmopolitan expectations of ethical conduct. Through their ethically questionable tactics the precarious picaros, however, also disenable any liberal allegorical appropriation of their life narratives and with their actions point towards the aporias within liberal discourses of capitalism themselves. The idea of self-interest at the core of liberalism and neoliberalism—that also capitalized ideologically on their contextual similarity to postcolonial ideas of difference and shared with them a suspicion and desecration of great society-type nation-statism and modernization—are performatively exposed through picaresque plots as extremely troublesome schemes of socio-economic rationality. Unlike the hallucinations of Adam Smith and his less iconic neoclassical and neoliberal followers, self-interest has hardly ever served to create sociality as a by-product, and it certainly does not do so in the picaresque, where its irreducibly agonistic logic of emergence does not foster sociality collaterally and certainly does not offer modes of emergence that are directly tied to merit and industriousness. Even if that logic wasn’t inherently exposed as flawed, the picaresque at least demonstrates how the postcolonial realities in which it ought to provide social emergence and sociality are fraught by hierarchy and inequality to such a degree that it renders productive aspirations of self-interest inoperable. In a world in which 45 million people—the majority of which are in former colonies in Asia—live in conditions of slavery, the potential of self-interest is clearly often contained and may at best secure physical survival but not social emergence.1 These 45 million are only the most severe cases: refugees, unprotected labourers, and prostitutes certainly vastly exceed this number and the liberal capitalist narrative of self-emergence through blind merit is certainly not available to them. It is to such precious subjects and their, at best, paradoxical forms of emergence that the postcolonial picaresque novel directs our attention. For precarious picaros, the modes of emergence that liberal capitalism affords can, therefore, only occur when the demand not to interfere with the property and well-being of others is violently suspended, as The White Tiger (2008) and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) demonstrate. The picaresque landscapes of precarity and the picaros’ modes of response to it have made clear that the long-distance effects that capitalism manifests locally are a problem that cannot be equilibrated by the idea of invisible hands. Picaresque plots, instead, display how the allegedly natural capitalist right to accumulate property through labour is constantly suspended in actual (cosmological) capitalism and

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can only occur once the ‘shackles’ of sociality are violently thrown off by the picaro. Oikodicy, the belief that society is best founded as the effect of liberal economic transactions, is clearly not a viable source of inhabitable societies in any picaresque novel.2 The precarious exclusion from social meaning and security that affects picaros is deeply inscribed into their paradigmatic narrative style and their identities that resemble, but at the same time also offer alternative, or at least additional, perspectives on, some of the concerns of postcolonial studies. The picaro often gets precariously stuck on the material surface of things and expressions, which defines both his volatile identities and his problems with prefiguring perception into meaning and configuring experience into plot. This opens a clear trajectory to other postcolonial discourses, especially those interested in hybrid material practices of sampling, media piracy, cultural identity, networks of distribution and trading, or the usage of infrastructure.3 To emphasize the immense amount of human creativity and cultural specificity that has entered into these ‘vernacular cosmopolitan’ processes is an invaluable task of postcolonial studies and has certainly enlarged our understanding of global modernity.4 Nonetheless, working with scraps, waste, and inappropriate infrastructure is at the same time perhaps not a condition that should be perpetually dignified. The picaro, therefore, also exoticizes his otherness into lacks of knowledge and meaning and inserts them into a structural denial of participation and coevalness, as he always individually seeks to overcome the social conditions through which these differences express themselves. This may unduly exoticize these practices or frame them as deficient in a teleological trajectory, but cultural studies’ fascination with these material practices also bears a certain alternative risk of rendering them adequate enough and appropriate to cultural plurality. The fact that creativity also exerts itself in conditions of deprivation should not mean that these condition are desirable or should be maintained, which, to be clear, is certainly not what scholars investigating such cultural transformations are trying to say. Nonetheless, such an emphasis has perhaps at times mystified our political and ethical relation to these landscapes of precarious creativity and tied them inadvertently to liberal economic discourses that suggest that cultural and economic processes are best negotiated on the ground, unregulated, rather than through perpetually ineffective ideas, discourses, or political programmes. This is a process that also has affinities to the bottom-up agency suggested in Homi Bhabha’s ideas on the workings and negotiations of colonial discourse.5

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Bernhard Malkmus, in an impressive analysis of the picaresque in Germanophone literary modernism argued that the ‘picaresque is about the conditions of individuality in modernity’.6 Malkmus is right in this assertion and the question of how the individual can assert itself in the economic and material realities of modernity must certainly take centre stage, as it does in this book in Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel. This, however, does not amount to mourning the irreconcilability of the singular individual with the collective project of modernity. Read from the perspective of precarity, the picaresque is less about the role of the individual in modernity than about the possibility of the project of modernity in capitalism. The picaresque shows how both the major modern good of non-suffering and the promise of subjectivity are under threat as a consequence of the conditions of precarity created by global capitalism and by the modes of self that liberal capitalism has aggressively deployed.7 Furthermore, the capitalist ideology of transcendent markets being regulated invisibly—without human regulation and social ideals—and the cosmological impermeability of capitalist hierarchy that this enables have undermined the modern project of productive and transparent human intersubjectivity and self-actualization from its very inception.8 The picaresque, therefore, also performs an incompatibility between modernity as a conscious process of human self-actualization and self-authorization, and capitalism as an inherently cosmological system of authority that always offers a transcendent and containing counterweight against the potentially unlimited human freedom and creativity that Bruno Latour has termed the full ‘immanence of society’.9 In his various manifestations, such as entrepreneur, terrorist, or dehumanized animal, the picaro gestures at the responses that cosmological capitalism opens up in the postcolony and ties his actions directly to the vulgar conditions that heteronomously determine him. While most readers would not redeem all of these actions, picaresque narrators usually do offer a socially convincing origin of violence, deprivation, and complicity and clearly implicate global conditions and actors in their unethical conduct. Picaresque novels may traditionally lack an affirmative place or isolatable position of critique from which they respond to the world. This, however, does not mean that the picaresque is not part of a critical project. Quite the opposite, these novels urge us to question the conditions in which such precarious lives have become possible and through these situated lives project a comprehensive critical perspective on the present including the modes of critique and

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emergence currently possible within it. Therefore, the liberal capitalist, and especially neoliberal, tendency to hijack all positive trajectories of self-assertion, difference, or freedom is countered by the atopy of the picaresque that has structured the genre since Lazarillo de Tormes. The picaresque may not offer a safe place of critique to which we can aspire and with which we can identify, but it shows more comprehensively than other forms that within the ideological frame of liberal capitalism and the economic reality of cosmological capitalism better modes of conviviality are difficult to envision. Picaresque novels clearly urge the reader to critique, but by strongly disrupting our identification with the protagonist’s emergence or failure they also make sure that these avenues of critique cannot follow the trajectory of individual emergence. Their roguish emergence unsettles us, while occasional picaresque compromises, as in Sinha’s Animal’s People, ironically point to the narrow and unconvincing visions of political emergence framed by humanitarianism and capitalism. Like most postcolonial fiction of its time, contemporary picaresque narratives are anti-idealist, episodic, and often times metafictional. Their perceived experimentalism does not, however, fully share the agendas of modernism and postmodernism, but derives from the paradigmatic and satiric form that, ever since Lazarillo de Tormes, the genre has always taken as a response to conditions of precarity in modernity. The postcolonial picaresque, thus, combines the projects of satire and of (post)modernism, which in isolation are not fully adequate to the present. Satire, in its inherently conservative standpoint that comically elevates itself above the present to point out problems from an ethically secure authorial location, is in itself an unattainable and undesirable position of critique as it seeks restitution of the allegedly stable and self-evident social norms that are being violated in social practice. These stable norms are not available to the postcolonial picaresque, at least not in the mode of an unproblematic return to common sense. At the same time, the satiric frame of a social indignation with the present—which turns around the ethnographic indignation that according to Latour has hampered the modern perspective—is one that the picaresque as literature of precarity cannot relinquish. Postmodernism, as epistemological critique, on the other hand, is also a somewhat inadequate perspective, because its own project of critique has largely renounced comprehensive narratives of sociality, progress, and struggle without which postcolonial justice cannot be attained. As paradoxical as it may seem given its carnivalesque surface,

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the picaresque satirically reactivates some of the social goods and narratives of modernity that postmodernism has declared suspicious. Satire is here not directed against ‘certain’ deviant elements that pervert an otherwise noble system, but more comprehensively at the wholesale corruption of modernity through a set of fundamental and pervasive capitalist practices and assumptions, which may camouflage themselves as integral aspects of modernity, but that actually undermine modernity’s humanist unfolding. By fusing the assessment and indignation of satire and the far-ranging epistemological critique of postmodernism, the picaresque directs our attention to aspects of modernity to which we should not yield and whose lack we should not accept, while also epistemologically exposing some of its currently predominant assumptions and ‘facile normalizations of the present’ as destructive imaginaries.10 This critique does not pertain to the humanist universality of the project of modernity and progress itself—which was intricately linked to the avoidance of suffering11 and, thus, must include an aspiration to eradicate precarity—but lies in a fundamental critique of the assumption that liberal capitalism can be the only sustainable socio-economic and anthropological base of modernity. To recuperate the social goods of modernity it must be disentangled from this allegedly anthropological relation with capitalism and from the essentialism and racism that have spoiled it in the past and have led to its understandable critical desecration in postcolonial discourse and the attendant ‘decomposition’ of its temporalities in cultural theory and political ideology.12 The postcolonial critique of modernity’s historical relation to racism and essentialism was an indispensable critical step that must now be amended not with a simple recuperation but with a ‘recomposition’ of modernity’s ethical and transformative aspirations. In order to ‘engender new and unexpected horizons of transformative possibility’13 this recomposition must eventually seek to sever modernity from the constraining and destructive brute facts often cynically deployed by cosmological capitalism.14 Tackling the landscapes of precarity that cosmological capitalism has perpetually produced in the Global South is a first step, and perhaps the most pressing concern in such a process of rectifying the economic, ecologic, and racist injustices with which capitalist modernity has troubled the planet. The picaresque’s specific postcolonial modernism is, thus, not a wholesale anti-modern desecration of an ‘unfinished project of modernity’,15 but a disconsoling display of landscapes in which the social goods of modernity have never been provided.

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By aesthetically projecting devastating postcolonial landscapes of precarity and the delinquent and destructive individualist responses to it the picaresque, ultimately, does not ask us to unthink the humanist project of modernity, but to undo cosmological capitalism and the precarity it persistently produces.

Notes

1. http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/. Last accessed: 17 June 2016. 2.  See Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 17–34; Das Gespenst des Kapitals (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2011), 31–52. 3.  See Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986); Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz, Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 4.  See Homi K. Bhabha, “Looking Back, Moving Forward: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2007), ix–xxv. 5. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 17–19.  6. Bernhard Malkmus, The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shapeshifter (New York: Continuum, 2011), 184. 7. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 12ff. 8. See Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 29–48. Here: 32;  Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in: Nachahmung und Illusion (Poetik und Hermeneutik I), ed. Hans Robert Jauß (München: Fink, 1964), 9–27. Here: 12. , “Concept of Reality”, 32; “Realitätsbegriff”, 12. 9. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 36–37. 10. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2. 11. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 12ff.

220  J. Elze 12. See James Ferguson, “Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 166–181. 13. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 2. 14. See Blumenberg, “Concept of Reality”, 34; “Realitätsbegriff”, 14. 15. See Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philsophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

Index

A Abjection/Abject, 1, 8, 11, 17, 42, 86, 177, 180–184, 186, 188, 189, 192, 199, 200, 204, 205, 212, 207, 209 Achebe, Chinua, 41 Adichie, Chimamanda, 43 Adiga, Aravind The White Tiger, 3, 5, 10, 22, 50 Aetiology, 46, 47, 149, 150, 172 Ahmad, Ajiz, 133 Aleman, Mateo Guzman de Alfarache, 16, 150 Allegoresis, 96, 97, 99 Allegory, 37, 66, 92–95. See also Allegoresis, Enigma National allegory, 94 postcolonial allegory, 92 Allende, Salvador, 156 Alternative modernities, 44 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 69 Aristotle/Aristotelian, 75, 80 Arrighi, Giovanni, 19 Atopy, 25, 44, 45, 47, 50, 57, 92, 111, 217

Autodiegetic narrator, 51. See also First-person-narrative B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 42, 46, 49, 60, 147 Barthes, Roland, 75 Berman, Marshall, 78 Bhabha, Homi K., 110, 120, 124, 127, 136, 139, 215 Bhopal, 178, 189 Bildungsroman and decolonization, 42, 86 and human rights, 19, 60 and modernization, 38, 39 failed Bildungsroman, 44 Blumenberg, Hans, 71, 140 Boltanski, LucSee Distant suffering Booker, Keith, 5, 90 Booth, Wayne C., 158–161. See also Implied reader Boyle, Danny Slumdog Millionaire, 5 Brennan, Timothy, 97, 185 Brooks, Peter, 28, 175

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 J. Elze, Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8

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222  Index Buckley, Jerome, 38, 39 Butler, Judith, 23, 26, 130, 166, 173 C Castiglione, Baldassare, 128 Certeau, Michel de, 44, 65, 115, 182, 183 Cervantes, Miguel de Cervantes Saveedra Don Quijote, 164 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 71 Colonialism, 17, 41, 130, 183, 204. See also Neocolonialism Comedy, 66, 202, 203, 208 Communism, 98, 99, 186 Configuration, 23, 24, 27, 67, 80, 84, 85, 87, 88, 139, 165 Cosmological Capitalism, 4, 12, 14, 18–20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 45, 88, 91, 128, 129, 135–139, 149, 161, 166, 170, 173, 174, 179, 216–219 Cosmology, 14, 18, 41, 128, 181. See also Cosmological Capitalism and history, 12 Cosmopolitanism/Cosmopolitan, 97, 137, 162, 180, 198, 204, 206, 214, 215 Creole, 114, 117, 121 Cultural Difference, 36, 86, 91, 95, 114, 136, 139, 191. See also Diversity and inequality, 213 D Defoe, Daniel Moll Flanders, 198 DeLillo, Don, 79 Derrida, Jacques, 113

Development Fiction ofSee Bildungsroman and modernization, 5 Developmentalism/Developmental discourse, 51 temporality, 51, 135 theory, 58 Distant suffering, 66 Diversity and neoliberalism, 103 Dysteleology, 203 E Economic Liberalism, 225. See also Neoliberalism Emplotment, 11, 202. See also Comedy, Romance and historiography, 82, 168, 202 precarious emplotment, 23, 80, 88 Endism, 198 End of HistorySee Endism Enigma/enigmatic, 10, 66, 162 Entrepreneurism, 5, 10, 22, 25, 50, 53, 58, 64, 136 Environmentalism, 79, 189 Episodicity, 81, 83, 92. See also Sisyphus Rhythm Equality, 14, 20, 23, 64, 101, 184. See also Inequality Esty, Jed, 39, 183 Exoticism/exoticist, 63, 79, 195 F Fabian, Johannes, 69 Fanon, Frantz, 131, 132, 139, 150 Ferguson, James, 110 First-person narratorSee Autodiegetic narrator

Index

Fundamentalism/Fundamentalist, 63, 150, 152, 159, 161, 163, 165, 169 G Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 33 Gracían, Baltasar, 128 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 14 H Habermas, Jürgen, 117 Hamid, Mohsin How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 168 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The , 11, 17, 146, 147, 159, 165 Harvey, David, 99 Huggan, Graham, 61, 116 Humanism, 14, 35, 40, 42, 46, 61, 86, 97, 204, 213 Humanitarianism, 11, 112, 193– 197, 207, 208, 217. See also Humanitarian reading Human rights, 24, 34, 59–64, 67, 161 Hume, David, 77 Hybridity/hybrid, 42, 58, 61, 86, 96, 130, 204, 215 I Identity identity Politics, 138 IMF, 18, 20, 43. See also Structural Adjustment Imperialism, 39, 40, 42, 111, 146, 152, 153, 156, 195. See also Neoimperalism Implicated reader, 158, 161

  223

Implied reader, 159, 161. See also Implicated reader Individualism/individualist and neoliberalism, 97 Inequality mystification of, 187 J Jameson, Fredric, 41, 79 K Kristeva, Julia, 181 L Lacan, Jacques, 112 Latour, Bruno, 91, 216 Lazarillo de Tormes, 1, 5, 8, 10, 14–16, 35, 36, 44, 51–53, 76, 82, 106, 128, 129, 134, 146, 147, 149–151, 164, 167, 181, 198, 213, 217 Lazarus, Neil, 5, 7, 85 LiberalismSee Economic liberalism, 8, 92, 97, 205, 214. See also Neoliberalism Linearity, 50, 80 Linebaugh, Peter, 22 Locke, John, 2 Lotman, Yuri, 56, 77, 173 Lugowski, Clemens, 76, 82 Lukács, Georg, 37 M Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 121 Malkmus, Bernhard, 216 Marxism/Marxist, 95 Meritocracy and cosmological capitalism, 17

224  Index Metafiction Historiographic Metafiction, 85 Mimesis, 120, 123 Mimicry colonial mimicry, 105, 107, 120, 123, 134 as metonymy of presence, 105, 120 Modernism and precarity, 7 postcolonial modernism, 6, 10, 11, 27, 85, 87, 97, 218 Modernity, 6, 7, 12, 26, 27, 35, 62, 85, 110, 138, 194, 213, 218. See also Alternative modernities, Multiple modernities Modernization, 23, 38, 58, 59, 90, 99, 155, 207, 214 Moretti, Franco, 30, 68, 70 Multiple Modernities, 27 N Naipaul, V.S. The Mimic Men, 11, 108, 116, 120 Neoimperialism, 8, 149, 154, 156 Neoliberalism as cosmological capitalism, 18 and diversity, 97 History of, 14 Nixon, Rob, 78, 187, 189. See also Sow violence P Parvenu, 15, 36, 75, 83, 92, 126, 127, 136, 171 Performativity, 11, 49, 107, 113 Petronius, 146, 147 Picaresque early modern spanish picaresque novela picaresca, 10, 12, 17, 107 Pinochet, Augusto, 156

Postdevelopmentalism/postdevelopmental, 169 Postmodernism, 4, 6–8, 10, 47, 79, 80, 88, 114, 204, 217, 218 and precarity, 11 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 97 Prashad, Vijay, 18 Precariat, 24–26, 78–80, 148, 201 Precariousness epistemological, 7, 11, 27, 42, 134 Precarity, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, 16–18, 22–25, 27, 40, 47, 63, 65, 66, 73, 75, 80, 82, 85, 100, 130, 136–138, 147, 159, 170, 173, 179, 185, 188, 200, 213, 216–219 Prefiguration, 77, 78, 80, 87, 118, 120, 173 Proairetic, 73, 75, 83 Purity of blood, 13, 126 Q Quevedo, Francisco de El Buscón, 11, 106, 125, 136, 137, 181 R Reader/reading/readership, 161. See also Implied reader, Implicated reader allegorical, 50 cosmopolitan, 35, 55, 62, 96, 161, 206 critical, 51 desires, 208 developmental, 62 exoticist, 61 humanitarian, 192, 196, 198, 205, 208 liberal, 54, 66, 97

Index

metropolitan/western, 35, 62, 63, 160, 161 Realism and nationalism, 207 Resina, Juan Ramon, 15 Revolution/revolutionary, 36, 38, 41, 95, 117, 121, 150, 173, 180, 201, 208 Riceour, Paul, 80. See also Configuration, Prefiguration Richardson, Samuel, 117 Romance Pseudo-romance, 202, 208, 209 Rushdie, Salman midnight’s children, 11 Satanic verses, The , 97, 99 S Satire, 42, 53, 86, 160, 217 Second-Person NarratorSee YouNarrator Sennett, Richard, 109 Simmel, Georg, 78, 181 SimplicissimusSee Simplicius Simplicissiumus Simplicius Simplicissiumus, 134 Sinha, Indra Animal’s People, 11, 79, 153, 177 Slaughter, Joseph, 40, 60 Slow violence, 66, 78, 174, 187, 189–192 Smith, Adam, 100, 214 Smollet, Tobias Roderick random, 74 Socialism, 4, 21, 98 St Augustine confessions, 150 Structural Adjustment, 45 Subalternity, 17, 25, 26, 79, 84, 165, 201 Subrahmahyam, Sunjay, 81 Swarup, Vikas

  225

Q&A, 5, 82, 83 T Tarde, Gabriel The Laws of Imitation, 139 Teleology, 61, 203. See also Dysteleology Telos, 38, 90, 96. See also Teleology, Dysteleology Terrorism/Terrorist, 17, 63, 149, 152, 154, 157, 162, 165, 167, 213, 216 Tragedy, 208 U Unreliability unreliable narrator, 98, 145 V Vogl, Joseph, 79 W Watt, Ian, 76 White, Hayden, 202. See also Comedy, Romance Wicks, Ulrich, 9 World Bank, 18, 20, 43 World Literature, 208 Y You-Narrator, 50, 51, 62, 80, 85, 88, 112, 116, 133, 135, 146 Z Zepp, Susanne, 15, 150