Abstract
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’, 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 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.
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Elze, J. (2017). Style. In: Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51938-8_3
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51938-8
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