Conclusion

Abstract

‘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.