Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities After Empire by Praseeda Gopinath

Author:Praseeda Gopinath [Gopinath, Praseeda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh
ISBN: 9780813933832
Google: rfwIcWrqSL0C
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2013-04-10T21:35:31+00:00

The Neo-picaresque

The cultural turn to comprehensively map the nation led to a revival of the picaresque. A new breed of writers focused on the picaresque to meditate upon the intimate relationship between the changeable rogue (usually male) protagonist and the changing nation. The quintessential picaresque trait, the journey, foregrounds the male protagonist’s endeavor to remake his gender identity to fit the changing nation. The form explores the reshaping of English masculinity and the reorientation of English manly ideals necessitated by the post-imperial state and welfare structure of Britain. In addition to Hurry on Down, many other novels owed much to the genre, including Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954), Thomas Hinde’s Happy as Larry (1958), John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), and even Amis’s Lucky Jim, which is usually read as a “campus novel.”20

V. S. Pritchett, in keeping with the auto-ethnographic impulse, not only addressed the new hero in his review of contemporary fiction but also made explicit the connection between the new crop of postwar English novelists and the nation. He noted the sudden reemergence of the picaresque form with its quintessential elements: the novelistic description of the “low view of life”; the isolated, ambivalently decent, selfish protagonists; and the meandering through different “conceptions” of society. He also pointed out that an appropriation of the picaresque and the novelists’ self-conscious affiliation with Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding was indicative of “class revolution” or the welfare state paradigms of these writers and their protagonists: “They discerned that the picaresque novelists were products of revolution; [that] they were engaged in adventure; and that the modern adventure was a rambling journey from one conception of society to another. … I am not saying that the limitless world of Defoe is available to the modern English novelists, for it is not; but there is no doubt that the young novelists of today have a similar ‘low’ view of life, and a sense of being alone and out for themselves” (38). Pritchett’s description of the realist neo-picaresque carries an implicit allusion to the imperial beyond, though his categorization is framed strictly within domestic socioeconomic changes wrought by welfare state consensus. In other words, he alludes to the “limitless[ness]” of Defoe’s world where protagonists can migrate to the colonies, if England cannot accommodate their aspirations and rogueries, as opposed to the more circumscribed spaces of postwar England available to the postwar picaro.

The picaresque, as a mixed form, is a notoriously tricky one to pin down. In each of its manifestations it mutates to accommodate a different set of national-literary conventions and socioeconomic structures.21 Richard Bjornson defines the picaresque as a form that employs a loose “episodic, open-ended narrative” to show a clever and adaptable lower-class protagonist as he/she journeys “through space, time, and various predominantly corrupt social milieux” (4). The postwar neo-picaresque contains each of these quintessential elements, while adhering to documentary-style realism in its attempt to classify and capture the insular welfare state. The postwar picaresque invokes the expansive horizons of imperial romance,

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