On 18 November, I spoke at the symposium "Ontworteling: De schrijver als Nomade" (Uprooting: The Writer as Nomad") at the University of Utrecht's beautiful academy building. The programme included an interesting mix of writers and academic speakers, including Dutch authors Abdelkader Benali and Mustafa Stitou, Dr Henriette Louwerse, Prof dr Yra van Dijk and the symposium's organiser, Prof Dr Johan Goud.The programme contained an interesting mix of speakers, both academics and authors, including Dutch authors In my own lecture, I analysed novels by Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Abdelkader Benali (The Tin Drum, Midnight’s Children and The Long Awaited) as on the one hand part of the tradition of the picaresque novel and on the other hand attempts to modify this tradition in order to tell a narrative of transition. There is a strong intertextuality between these texts, with each novel building on its predecessor to come up with a narrative form that can solve the trauma of border crossing (from the life of the German minority in Poland to post war West Germany, from colonial rule to independence and from village life in Morocco to city life in the Netherlands, respectively).
Oscillating between the nonchalance of the picaroon and the need for belonging that drives the plot of the Bildungsroman and between the ethics and values that each of these genres imply, these novels establish a tradition of ‘tragic picaroons’ who show both the necessity and futility of resisting nationalism and history through narrative. Narrative works towards an end point and the end point is always oppressive as it subordinates all events prior to it, so any resistance of oppression through narrative ends up being oppressive itself. The unnatural narrative deployed in these novels (i.e. a narrative that constructs a reality that blatantly reveals itself to be fictional and constructed) foregrounds this and facilitates a continuing resistance, not only to the narratives of nationalism and history but, ultimately, to all narrative.
