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The Pícaro at War: Vernacular Language and Violent Conflict in Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Philip Joseph
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Abstract

This essay compares Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669) and Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), approaching them as picaresque war novels that tell the story of a vernacular language becoming literary through brutal war. Despite differences of language, nation, and time, the novels of Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa share a structural similarity traceable to their respective postwar contexts. These novels rewrite the expected relation between war and language. Instead of privileging the damage done to speech, they authorize a spoken language through the medium of a highly mobile rogue protagonist. Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa contend with the question of whether a language, lacking the official status guaranteed by a sovereign state, is strong enough to constitute and represent a territory divided by civil war. In their works, war tears apart a territory and lays the foundation for its autonomous postwar culture all at once.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Literature in the World , October 2016 , pp. 1284 - 1298
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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