The picaresque abject hero exposes what privileged societies repress and disown

Evidence

Animal joins a long line of picaros: canny, scheming social outliers governed by unruly appetites, potty-mouthed and scatalogically obsessed, often orphaned outcasts who, drawn from polite society’s vast impoverished margins, survive by parasitism and by their wits. The picaro is the abject from which the body and the body politic cannot part. Stigmatized as aberrant and filthy, the picaro embodies everything the socially remote privileged classes, with their ornate rhetoric and social etiquette, seek to contain, repress, and eject. But the picaro keeps resurfacing as a discomfiting reminder of the limits to the social barriers and the studied amnesia that elite society strives to uphold. Julia Kristeva’s formulation of the abject thus offers a productive analytic frame for Animal’s People, a picaresque novel about the dissociative rituals of a neoliberal transnationalism determined to disown, across time and space, the toxic repercussions innate to its practices, repercussions that will return to haunt it. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 146

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pairs the picaro tradition with Kristeva’s abject to explain how a filthy, stigmatized narrator body holds society’s repressed toxic truth.
• XREF: connects to: The picaresque genre inherently works to make suppressed suffering visible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 957; The picaresque tradition interrogates who counts as human when the poor are animalized — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 181

Broader Connections

• The picaresque genre inherently works to make suppressed suffering visible #corroborates (0.93) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 957
• The picaresque tradition interrogates who counts as human when the poor are animalized #expands (0.88) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 181