Satire and the Postcolonial Novel

V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie

John Clement Ball

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135451554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire" and the "satiric."

CHAPERT ONE
Theories of Satire and Postcolonialism

A remarkably enduring commonplace of satire theories is the notion that satire, even at its most revolutionary, gazes nostalgically and conservatively back upon a privileged golden age. Ronald Paulson (Fictions 18) put forward this idea among the first wave of twentieth-century theorists working to rescue satire from theoretical marginality, and it has been advanced more recently by Frank Palmeri and Leon Guilhamet. Palmeri begins Satire in Narrative with the following assertion: “Satirists discover in the past an image of pristine integrity, in relation to which their contemporary situation signifies a falling off into ambiguity and doubleness” (1). For Guilhamet, satire “implies the existence in the past of an order prior to the dislocation characteristic of the modern world” (16). He draws this implication from satire’s use of conventional genres (in however fragmentary a manner), which allows satire, in its role of “mediator between the real and the ideal,” to “find connections with the idealized traditions of antiquity” (16). The golden age is actually for Guilhamet a “golden age of genre” (164); genre represents institutional order, and the satirist prefers the orderly, known past to the chaotic present and the unknown future. The past “has the sanctity of myth,” and “the object of satire is a present danger or perversion of a hallowed norm” (165). If Guilhamet appears from these quotations to be equivocating between attaching satire to sociohistorical reality and using genre as a metaphorical substitute for that reality, he clarifies his allegiance with the following:

It is not so much the historical past, perhaps, as the ideal perception of pastness revealed in forms [i.e., genres] which attracts the great satirists. In other words, the conception of epic, tragedy, or the major nonmimetic structures—history, philosophy, and oratory—can be idealized even beyond any imagined past. (166)

This emphasis on generic rather than historical devolution provides an example of how a potentially useful point of intersection between satire and postcolonial discourse can be theorized into mutual incompatibility. A satiric postcolonial novel like Mudrooroo’s Dr. Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, for instance, might be read as privileging an ideal past of harmony and peace in Tasmania’s aboriginal society, one that was shattered by the violent interventions of white missionaries and colonizers. In this reading, Mudrooroo’s satire primarily targets the missionary Robinson as a metonym of the misguided do-goodism that proved so destructive; Robinson may be ridiculous, but his power makes him dangerous, and hence he is a satiric rather than simply comic figure.¹ Any residual satire directed at Wooreddy and other quasi-collaborative figures would then be read as a “falling off” from authenticity and wholeness into confusion and distorting behavior that would not exist but for Empire; Wooreddy would therefore be a satirized victim, but of forces outside his control. In this way, the novel could be read as paradigmatically post-colonial, taking aim at the institutions, agents, and policies of imperialism that form a kind of composite master-target behind all postcolonial satiric gestures. In such an interpretation, a golden age like that portrayed in Mudrooroo’s historical novel would be, at least for works from invaded societies, the lost period of integration and order to which all satiric representations explicitly or implicitly look back. Satiric opposition would thus become closely allied with models of postcolonial resistance. The nostalgia for a golden age and what Northrop Frye calls satire’s “struggle of two societies, one normal and the other absurd” (Anatomy 224) would become related to the concrete history of colonization and what Bill Ashcroft calls “the desire within post-colonial discourse to return to an original pre-colonial relationship with the sense of a community which gave you birth” (“Intersecting” 30). Such a model of postcolonial satire might be quite productively tested.

But in Guilhamet’s formulation, real history disappears as the source of satiric contrast and idealization. As a normative reality from which the satirized present (or historical present in Dr. Wooreddy) marks an offensive deviation, the material past is subsumed into genre—apparently a more compelling source of ideals. Satire’s referentiality—what Linda Hutcheon calls its “extramural” focus (Theory 43)—takes a back seat to a vision of generic lineage. Postcolonial recuperative projects, to which the golden-age model of satire could contribute, are diverted under Guilhamet’s model from the realm of national-ethnic culture and collective history into a purely textual process of genre shoring up fragments of its own grander past. Not only is this obliteration of the satirist’s political urgency and real-world groundedness at odds with postcolonial assumptions, but the location of pastness in Western generic categories would also elide the oral and scribal genres dominant in the varying pasts of invaded cultures.

Guilhamet’s perspective on the golden-age concept is certainly problematic, but even in the more straightforward versions of Paulson and Palmeri the idea will have trouble standing as a model for all postcolonial satire or as a distinctive feature of satiric rather than nonsatiric texts. The example of Dr. Wooreddy suggests that if there is a golden age implied by postcolonial satire it will be located before colonial intervention. Congruent with the recuperative strategies claimed for some postcolonial texts by many critics and authors, this seems a reasonable application of outside theory to postcolonial contexts. But as a widely applicable model it cannot stand. Texts from settler societies would be excluded; their history of cultural rupture is of a very different kind than that of Caribbean, African, Indian, or aboriginal communities. Settler societies’ relations to the imperial center—and their experiences of marginalization, cultural dislocation, and consequent striving for voice and collective self-understanding—were entirely different than the oppression meted out by Empire in colonies of invasion. The settler cultures of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and white South Africa do not have collective precolonial social structures, languages, or cultural traditions to recuperate.

But even for cultures that Empire invaded, a model of satire that locates the ideals on which satiric contrasts are founded in a pre-colonial past is problematic in several other respects. Certain non-satiric works such as Ngugi’s The River Between and V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men also idealize some version of that past as a time of order; others, like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, though clearly preferring that past to the subsequent disruption caused by Empire, nevertheless document the internal divisions and structural weaknesses of the society that contributed to the invaders’ early success. (Such a qualified idealism can also arguably be read into the satiric Dr. Wooreddy.)² The idealization of a precolonial golden age would also ally satiric representations from invaded cultures with a now largely discredited nativism. Moreover, the inhabitants of such a golden age would also risk adhering to the European myth of the paradisiacal noble savage, which, as Selwyn Cudjoe points out, defined people by a binary negation, “as having failed to attain or replicate the European mode of life.” Savagism, he argues, “did not acknowledge the integrity of the native’s culture” (121). As an alternative to the purist impulses of nativism and savagism, notions of hybridity, cultural syncretism, liminality, and contamination have been asserted by numerous postcolonial writers and intellectuals as good bases for constructing new identities, cultures, and literary forms. The nativist goal of retrieving a “pre-colonial purity” is widely recognized as impractical because “post-colonial culture is inevitably a hybridized phenomenon involving a dialectical relationship between the ‘grafted’ European cultural systems and an indigenous ontology” (Ashcroft, Empire 195). Or, as Kwame Anthony Appiah more bluntly says, “we are all already contaminated by each other” (354).³

The binary axis of the golden-age model also renders it inadequate to deal with satire whose focus is contemporary, postindependence neocolonialism. Novels like Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, Achebe’s A Man of the People, and Rajiva Wijesinha’s Days of Despair satirize contemporary power elites for betraying the promise of independence—for shoring up privilege and wealth through corrupt politics and collaboration with First-World capitalism while ordinary people remain poor and downtrodden. These satiric representations, in which politicians become caricatures and grotesques, often imply that the horrors of neocolonialism can be attributed in part to lessons learned and examples followed during colonial rule, particularly by collaborators. Timothy Brennan calls such novels “a pointed exposure of the ‘empire’s old clothes’ worn by a comprador elite who … take on the nationalist mantle only to cloak their people more fully with the old dependency” (“National” 57). An implicit critique of British colonialism can therefore be read into them, especially in the case of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, where still-contentious national borders and the omnivorous military budgets needed to contest them are a legacy of imperial power-brokering. Trying to isolate a particular satiric target through binary comparisons proves difficult with such novels. Does the knowledge of “imperial legacies” urged by Brennan (57) and often implied by satiric representations support the idea I acknowledged earlier that imperial intervention may be the master-target of all postcolonial satiric writing? In other words, does the experience of colonialism provide for satiric texts what Slemon claims for postcolonial allegories: “a shared matrix of reference” between texts and readers (“Post-Colonial” 165), through which all satire is at least in part an attack on imperialism? Or would such an interpretative slant unduly blame the British and excuse the primary targets, the current people in power, thereby defusing the satire’s critique of those present-tense targets?

To argue the latter would be to agree with Neil Bissoondath’s view that blaming Empire for everything is evasion (Meyer 20). It would be to assert that if the satirist takes aim at corruption and exploitation in postindependence political institutions, these institutions and their agents dictate the primary directionality of satiric critique. But this would not do justice to the complexities of postcoloniality. If hybridity and syncretism are to be productive postcolonial concepts, their logical extension into the discourse of satire demands a concept of satiric multidirectionality. Ngugi advises that “when discussing any satirist… we must see him in his social and political setting” (“Satire” 56). Each postcolonial text, however unflattering its representations of postindependence societies may appear to be, deserves to be read in the context of imperial domination, and with attention to the multiplicity of targets that it may invoke in that context. These targets may be the legacies of British imperialism or the contemporary hegemony of neoimperial powers such as the United States, the United Nations, the World Bank, or multinational capital. Attending to such targets, which a text may not directly implicate, is essential to a responsibly postcolonial criticism of satiric texts.

Absence of attention to this element of historicizing and contextualizing multidirectionality can lead to unnecessarily polarized responses. For instance, the disagreements over whether Naipaul should be commended or reproved for seeming to ally himself with prevailing First-World condescension towards postcolonial nations often ignore the dark shadow that imperial history casts over all of his writings about colonial and postcolonial cultures. Satiric multidirectionality is not only present as variations among postcolonial texts—some satiric novels “write back” primarily against Empire and others against elements in the writer’s own society—but within a given text, as a supplement to the overt direction of its critique.

Satire, with its deliberate misrepresentations and detached, objectifying gaze, is the quintessential form of “othering.” It is not usually in the interests of satiric rhetoric to play fair by articulating the causes or conditions that might contextualize a particular (mis)representation; explaining too much weakens the satire’s bite. But responsible critical practice demands precisely this kind of work. Refusing to see satire’s targets as simply there—as corrupt, foolish, or unjust by nature—the critic must, as Edward Said has often advocated, “see Others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted” (“Representing” 225). To approach a satiric text with this mandate may be to “ask more of a text than it asks of itself,” which Diana Brydon considers a valid goal of postcolonial criticism (“White” 197). And by attending to a multidirectional thrust, this interpretive perspective is one way to construct a model of satiric resistance beyond a unidirectional oppositionality and a simplistic politics of blame.

The critic should not, however, misrepresent the satiric spirit itself by defusing its aggressive energy—by seeking too zealously the conditions that satire may point to beyond its surface targets to the extent of saying, in effect, that when any postcolonial author satirizes elements in his or her own society, he or she is really targeting the British or the Americans or the multinationals. Nor should the critic be a spoilsport, denying the validity of what Dustin Griffin calls “the pleasures of satire” (161), however dubious such pleasures—of righteous condescension, self-flattery, sadism, and even masochism—might be. The critic’s job is a text-by-text negotiation of emphasis: how exactly does a particular work prioritize and connect its multiplicitous targets (in terms of causality or association, for instance)? To what extent can the satirized conditions be attached to imperial or neoimperial experiences? As a form of postcolonial resistance, the satiric spirit may downplay the primacy of resistance to imperial power that “postcolonialism” forwards as the chief theme and agenda of Commonwealth texts; multidirectional satire might accommodate the heterogeneity and divisions within postcolonial societies that Arun Mukherjee has insisted upon in objecting to what she sees as an overly homogenizing post-colonial theory obsessed with Europe (“Exclusions” 27-33). Satiric modes can articulate internal disagreements within a culture, and also offer variously constituted connections between the satirized conditions located there and the colonial experience.

* * * * * * * * * *

We have seen that assumptions about satire’s nostalgia for an idealized golden age, despite gaining an attractive historical specificity in postcolonial contexts, are of very limited use. A number of other common claims about satire will prove inadequate for postcolonial texts, in part because of the special contexts and agendas of those texts, and in part because of the enormous variety of postcolonial satire, which is likely to frustrate claims of universality by any paradigm of satiric writing.

For instance, observations that satire is politically opposed to tyranny and despotism (Hodgart 33; Kernan, “Plot” 117) can certainly be supported by numerous postcolonial examples. As Harry Levin notes, “Since totalitarian regimes have trouble in living up to their own propaganda, they offer a standing incitement to satire, which of course they can ill afford” (12). Versions of totalitarian rule are represented satirically in novels as diverse as Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But the particular tyrannies involved are envisioned within radically different political structures: respectively, military government, democracy subverted by a historically true State of Emergency whose effects are fantastically fictionalized, and institutionalized gender oppression in a dystopian future. These differences are important, but we must also note that what is politically objectionable to the postcolonial satirist is not always tyrannical. The leader as tyrant may be frightening in his or her concentration of power, but in Naipaul’s The Suffrage of Elvira the target is comparatively benign: political immaturity and the absence of leadership demonstrated by electoral disorder. Murray Bail in Holden’s Performance creates a blithely opportunistic politician in Hoadley, the Australian senator who spends his work-days sexually satisfying lonely women; he may not be doing his job, but he is hardly a tyrant. Presumably societies with a greater experience of tyranny are more likely to generate satiric opposition to despotic abuses of power. Perhaps a more broadly useful term than “tyranny” as a chief target of satire is Daniel Eilon’s concept of ideological closure, which he defines as “the closed environment cultivated within cliques, political parties, aristocracies, professions, and religions—that is to say, all groups that accord themselves privileged status” (15).

Alvin Kernan’s influential depiction of the satiric scene as “disorderly and crowded,” “choked with things,” and dominated by “idiocy, foolishness, depravity, and dirt” (“Theory” 253-54), although developed from classical, English, and American examples, seems to describe some post-colonial fictions as well. For Kernan, satire sacrifices plot and progression for stasis; when change does occur, it is not “the true sense of change but … mere intensification of the unpleasant condition with which satire opens” (271). The plot is fragmented and lacking resolution; the satiric action “moves always toward the creation of messes, discordancies, mobs, on all levels and in all areas of life” (Kernan, Plot 68). Frye’s views are congruent with these concepts, as are statements from other critics that satire lacks closure. John Clark, James Nichols, Charles Knight, and M. D. Fletcher all assert that the discordant, unresolved endings of satiric texts can disrupt generic expectations (and of course the resultant tensions provide a site of potential competition between “satire” and “novel” for genre status over particular texts).

There are certainly plenty of crowded, disorderly scenes in postcolonial satire; Naipaul for one makes disorder an explicit theme in The Mimic Men, and his early fictions portray a Trinidad that is “crazily mixed up” (Suffrage 74). But while for Naipaul the crowd and the appearance of chaos in a society have immediate satiric value, for others this may not always be the case. In most Western “First-World” societies, including Europe, America, and the settler colonies of the Commonwealth, population densities, living patterns, and concepts of individualism and personal space make crowds or mobs vulnerable to negative evaluation. Other places are simply more crowded. When Rushdie begins his documentary film The Riddle of Midnight with the statement “India is a crowd,” or when Naipaul opens India: A Million Mutinies Now by saying “Bombay is a crowd” (1), they are being descriptive, not judgmental. Rushdie says t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One Theories of Satire and Postcolonialism
• Chapter Two “The Old Enemy. And Also the New”: V. S. Naipaul’s Multidirectional Satire
• Chapter Three “In All Fairness”: Satire and Narrative in the Novels of Chinua Achebe
• Chapter Four “Pessoptimism”: Satire and the Menippean Grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s Novels
• Conclusion
• Afterword (2002)
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index