Extravagant Postcolonialism

Modernism and Modernity in Anglophone Fiction, 1958–1988

Brian T. May

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781611173802
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Brian T. May argues that, contrary to widely held assumptions of postcolonial literary criticism, a distinctive subset of postcolonial novels significantly values and scrupulously explores a healthy individuality. These "extravagant" postcolonial works focus less on collective social reality than on the intimate subjectivity of their characters. Their authors, most of whom received some portion of a canonical western education, do not subordinate the ambitions of their fiction to explicit political causes so much as create a cosmopolitan rhetorical focus suitable to their western-educated, western-trained, audiences.

May pursues this argument by scrutinizing novels composed during the thirty-year postindependence, postcolonial era of Anglophone fiction, a period that began with the Nigerian Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and that ended, many would say, with the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 publication of the Rushdie Fatwa. May contends that the postcolonial authors under consideration—Naipaul, Rushdie, Achebe, Rhys, Gordimer, and Coetzee—inherited modernism and refashioned it. His account of their work demonstrates how it reflects and transfigures modernists such as Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett. Tracing the influence of humanistic values and charting the ethical and aesthetic significance of individualism, May demonstrates that these works of "extravagant postcolonialism" represent less a departure from than a continuation and evolution of modernism.

1

Memorials to Modernity

POSTCOLONIAL PILGRIMAGE IN V. S. NAIPAUL AND SALMAN RUSHDIE

…

When invited to meet in close syntactic quarters, the terms “modernity” and “postcoloniality” have often suggested a vast but keen incommensurateness. If gesturing massively and pointing but vaguely, they have nonetheless signified philosophies, ideologies, and historical epochs that are sharply “discontinuous or in contention.”¹ Some years ago, however, this sense of hopeless opposition began to lose its grip.² In 1989 S. P. Mohanty wondered whether we sadder and wiser inheritors of a modern and postcolonial world, we jaded, globalized descendants of colonizing and colonized peoples, could not begin to explore “the imbrication of our various pasts and presents”: “How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality …?”³ Soon thereafter, Sara Suleri called for “studies … [in] the commonality of loss,” studies that would “generate a new idiom of cultural compassion.”⁴ Two years later, Homi Bhabha was encouraging us “to reinscribe our human, historic commonality.”⁵ And yet more recently, Michael Gorra eschewed the old idiom or “tired vocabulary” of cultural conflict in order to explore “a body of concerns held in common by writers from different countries.”⁶ Clearly, “common” has become a new key word in postcolonial studies; it is also clear that this is no accident.⁷ With this interest in historic commonality we may have begun to move beyond fascination with, for instance, imperial criminality—a fascination that used to be, unavoidably, as divisive as it was illuminating but that has become, some would argue, more divisive than illuminating. That is why polarizing revelations of what happened during empire have begun to give way to a new focus on “what comes after empire”—perhaps our future commonality.⁸ Yet our past commonality (largely of mutual loss, as Suleri indicates) has also become a topic of interest, especially as attention to this past itself discloses unknown avenues to the future.

Among the remarkable consequences of this recent interest in past commonality is the discovery, as I shall argue, that important, what I am calling “extravagant” postcolonial novelists have already anticipated it. Fairness bids us newly expansive postcolonial critics and theorists to admit that, adapting Freud, the novelists were there before us. But fairness to the novel is not the only reason that we should reread postcolonial fiction. Another is commitment to the postcolonial: these fictions may provide elements of the new idiom of commonality that we postcolonial critics and theorists now seek.⁹ These same fictions are not lacking in the old idiom. Harshly attentive to thoroughly modernized and Westernized selves, the socalled mimic men and women who have inherited the postcolonial earth, postcolonial novelists have not foregone all necessary indictments. But their attention has also been generous; faced with the spectacle of the mimic’s often cataclysmic loss, they have allowed themselves gestures of compassion, honoring that loss as their own. A new idiom of commonality emerges in these novels’ own language of mimicry. Here mimicry is not regarded simply as “our loss, their—the colonizers’—gain.” Rather, what may seem simple figures of inauthenticity turn out to possess piquant habits and values capable of casting their appeal across the cultural divide. These selves turn out to be occupying, amid so much conquered psychological space, pockets of a common enough affective ground.

This common ground lies outside India’s many old colonial attics, those havens of Raj nostalgia whose curious cultural refuse often fascinates the postcolonial novelist. Nor is this ground Bhabha’s utopian “Third Space of enunciation” lying, far from the attic, somewhere beyond the two cultures’ trenchlines—an everyman’s land where, as Rushdie might say, a hybrid newness may come into the world. Neither “mimicry” nor “hybridity” designates this kind of commonality. The word “sympathy” is closer. The claim is that some postcolonial novelists finally look past both nostalgic reveries and utopian dreams, reaching across recognized cultural differences. In some postcolonial novels one is startled to note an eleventhhour, impulsive embrace of a few of the more attractive among the many modern Western habits and values long ago exported by the colonizers and too readily adopted by the mimes and mimics. Following on the heels of these novels’ unmistakable attacks on modernity are episodes in which the postcolonial, far from laboring to obliterate modernity’s every vestige, instead memorializes it—episodes of commemoration, sublimation, even exaltation.

Of course, this claim arises from a certain definition of “modernity,” a particular demarcation of a complex cultural phenomenon. But no literary historian can grasp modernity in its totality and essence; each must choose between its various synecdoches. The synecdoche to be discussed here, nevertheless, is one that many would regard as a central issue of modern life in the West: namely individuality.¹⁰ The novels in question are Naipaul’s Area of Darkness (1968) and Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1992), both of which depict contemporary pilgrimages that bring the issue of individuality into sharp relief.¹¹ Both Naipaul and Rushdie depict traditional religious pilgrimages in which the pilgrim of concern is a doubting exile who refuses the “sight of the god” to which traditional pilgrimage is consecrated.¹² Reluctant, rationalist, individualist, he finds himself at the climax staring not at miracle but at mud. This is curious mud, being postcolonial matter in its most atomized, irreducible form, and it provokes good questions about the extravagantly postcolonial (for instance, what is it, once reduced to its basics? fertilizer or sheer dead formlessness?). Yet, rather than explore the extravagantly postcolonial conception of the material, I explore the fate of what its heat and dust so often claim: the Westernized, modernized self. As we will see, in both Naipaul and Rushdie the death of matter signifies that self’s own death; it cannot even halfcreate what it halfperceives. But the extinction of the modernized self in both cases is succeeded, quite unexpectedly, by closing episodes of distinction. The same modern notion of personal honor whose exhaustion Naipaul has just explored he chooses to celebrate in the end. Just as surprisingly Rushdie ends by exalting a notion of personal responsibility that he has already defined and disdained as modern. These novelists, rather than efface the modern, reinscribe it in cultural memory.

The more surprising claims at hand should be delineated. To regard Naipaul’s text as anything other than reflexively proWest is to go against a tough grain in recent postcolonial criticism; many see Naipaul as essentially a sheepish modernist who failed to “cut … out” a suit of postcolonial wolf’s clothes (A, 266).¹³ Rushdie, on the other hand, who created the sharpesttoothed wolf in postcolonial literature, has often satisfied even the most ideologically committed postcolonial critics (SV, 171). The surprise in Rushdie’s case is not that he indicts modernity but that he memorializes it. Of course, in theoretical moments most would agree that surprise should not surprise, since postcolonial texts, like other texts, do not always foreground their most unusual ideological investments. Yet when these novels answer so keenly to the affective, to what Suleri calls “cultural compassion,” something truly unexpected has taken place. The most surprising claim, accordingly, is the assertion that Naipaul and Rushdie write of postcolonial hearts too capacious to celebrate the spectacle of modernity’s negation. Rather than “one more theoretical celebration of the other,” they offer an atheoretical, impulsive commemoration of the West.¹⁴ One can be uninterested in the West itself, untroubled by its putative decline, for example, and still find this commemoration crucial, for it signifies a kind of postcolonial openness that is itself rarely commemorated or even recognized. Nor is it often felt, as if in our own affective registers. The Satanic Verses has been characterized as a novel that “gestures hopefully toward the future”; yet it, like Naipaul’s novel, offers a touching invitation to regret.¹⁵ Both end by asking us to cherish the very entity to whose demise they have signaled their commitment. And recognizing the affective and elegiac dimension of these novels may help us to refine our larger conception of the postcolonial, whose future shape depends on the shape modernity now assumes within it.

I

Why should the pilgrimages depicted by Naipaul and Rushdie be termed postcolonial pilgrimages? Generally speaking, the most definitive feature of “the postcolonial condition” (as Linda Hutcheon recently phrased it), particularly the condition of the extravagantly postcolonial artist, writer, or intellectual, is that of a religious and broadly cultural alienation or dislocation brought about by Westernization (colonization of some sort, including cultural imperialism).¹⁶ The actual pilgrimages depicted in Rushdie and Naipaul, by contrast, are not chiefly pilgrimages of the alienated (if such a thing is possible) but traditional exercises in Haj and Himalayan ascent, respectively; as we will see, the impulse toward the traditional manifest in both is so strong that it creates phenomena that border on the caricatural, the absurd, and even the magically real. Nevertheless, both accounts pay most of their narrative attention not to one or more of the devout but to a particular, individualized participant who is indeed alienated, who chooses not to participate in the nativist devotions he witnesses. One should note, further, that these antipilgrims are alienated not by skepticism native bred but by Western and modern influences. Indeed, both are “modern men” (SV, 476).¹⁷

In the best modern way, these antipilgrims attempt to stand outside experience and make sense of it linguistically and narratively. Like all moderns, they “assume[] … some commented exterior whose existence as a knowable reality is taken as prior to that of discourse (the discourse of analysis and reference, of historicism, of experimentalism).” Even that mere assumption signifies that these antipilgrims have survived “the epistemic change” from the premodern to the modern.¹⁸ Yet that same simple assumption also signifies that they have not undergone the epistemic change from the modern to the postmodern. Such “discursive” practices as theirs, “in the strict sense unthinkable” in premodern times, are losing sway in the postmodern.¹⁹ According to such historians of knowledge as JeanFrancois Lyotard, for example, the “hermeneutics of meaning,” what Timothy Reiss would call the “analyticoreferential” enterprise, whether religious or secular, is now decaying (“its great hero, its great voyages, its goal”); the quests and questors of modernity are growing obsolete.²⁰ But in both Naipaul and Rushdie epic modernity persists. Neither author depicts the postmodern condition in which the modern intellectual’s “metanarrative apparatus[es] of legitimation” have grown rusty, the various ambitions of modernity having withered away.²¹ Withered they have: both Naipaul’s “I” and Rushdie’s Mirza Saeed are too skeptical to be described as voyagers, whether religious or merely “hermeneutical.” Equally “without belief or interest in belief” (A, 41)—until the beliefs of others turn shockingly substantial—they are avowedly secular men, and “a secular man lives in the world of things” (SV, 478), not ghosts, ideals, abstractions. Nevertheless, these materialists are not themselves mere thingsintheworld, soulless, dumb as posts; they are men of ideas, “Hamlet[s]” haunted by bad dreams and selfdoubts, melancholiacs thoughtfully liable to “bouts of selfreproach” (SV, 228). As squeamish and standoffish as they have grown on the outside, they do not turn out to be “sentimentalists and softheads”; indeed, both end up “toughminded.”²² Seeking hard facts and solid grounds, they do not wish to dwell amid images, gesturing toward essences and abstractions, but to pursue ideas to their referents, master them, and then move on to fresh facts, new truths.

These characters’ capacity to think tough is brilliantly evident in their own narrative exploits. Neither character allows narrative to have its way with meaning; neither allows the story to consume the idea, the fabular fox to get out of hand and gobble up those morally edifying, if sour, grapes. Which is to say, both characters accept the traditional opposition between narrative and meaning: “Just as fiction can be opposed to fact and truth, narrative is opposed to atemporal laws that depict what is, whether past or future.”²³ One need not be Socrates (or Alasdair MacIntyre, for that matter) to think that narrative and reason (ideas, general principles, rules, and so on) are always at odds.²⁴ The meaning we attach to a narrative “we extract or create”; it does not rise naturally, effortlessly to the surface of the narrative and present itself as the narrative’s true face.²⁵ Thus, to move from a narrative proper, whether conceived as plot or story or their amalgam, to an abstract truth that the narrative occasions is always to leave narrative behind or to put narrative in its place. Whether one should want to put it in its place is another question. To do so requires not just the power of abstract reasoning but also a certain orientation to “the course of human affairs,” what Richard Rorty casually terms “the philosopher’s essentialistic approach” and what Lyotard would decry as a legacy of modernity.²⁶

This approach is the one typically taken by both “Naipaul” (the pilgrim) and Mirza, both of whom try to put narrative in its place. The story of “Naipaul”’s pilgrimage is Naipaul’s own story; it is narrated, confidently enough, by Naipaul himself, who is no slave to narrative but who demonstrates again and again a willingness to interrupt “Naipaul”’s ongoing story, draw back from it, and turn essayist (sometimes for an entire chapter, as in “The Colonial” [A, 68–82]). Rushdie’s Mirza, on the other hand, tries to win “converts” to his secular cause (SV, 481)—stopping the Titlipurian pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea—by telling stories (“about lemmings, and how the enchantress Circe turned men into pigs [and] the story of the pipeplayer who lured a town’s children” [SV, 484]). Yet Mirza, like “Naipaul,” recognizes “mumbojumbo” when he hears it (SV, 476). Both are full of fables and old stories (SV, 484), but the fables are edifying, the stories instructive, the local legends no more than charming (A, 155); they can hear and communicate “the music of the poetry” even in foreign tales (SV, 484), but they are also capable of submitting narrative to interpretation that (putatively) does not supplement it with a new narrative but takes us beyond narrative altogether, closer to naked truth, essence, pith.

Rather than allegories of the postmodern, then, Naipaul and Rushdie write allegories of modernity. That they write allegories of modernism, more specifically, remains to be seen. To be sure, there is nothing in the passages in Nietzsche that preoccupy Mirza that distinguishes Mirza’s intellectual concerns as definitively modernist ones. Mirza’s “choice of bedside reading matter” contains some of Nietzsche’s most Zarathustrian utterances, apocalyptic evocations of “the pitiless end of that small, overextended species called Man” (SV, 216). The Nietzsche of these passages is the one who seems to belong to the large company of “modernist apocalyptists” (starting with Matthew Arnold, James Longenbach argues) who believe that God is dead, culture is defunct, apocalypse is now.²⁷ But this is also the Nietzsche who has so often preoccupied the many philosophers—modernist and other—who have addressed the socalled end-of-man question. These philosophers include not only such relatively modernist participants as Heidegger and Sartre, whose relation to Nietzsche is relatively serious, anxious, even agonistic and contestatory, but also definitively postmodernist writers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, whose innovations upon the famous oracular voice and prophetic sentiment reveal a relation to Nietzsche that is, if not less contestatory, less anxious.²⁸ Foucault, for instance, is urbane, collected, and remote, even as he contemplates “the perilous imminence whose promise we fear ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Memorials to Modernity: Postcolonial Pilgrimage in V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie
• 2 Chinua Achebe: Tradition and the Talent for Individuality
• 3 Modernism Re(d-)dressed: Interrogativity and Individuality in Jean Rhys
• 4 Nadine Gordimer: The Conservationist as Conversationist
• 5 J. M. Coetzee: A Question of the Body, and an Answer
• Conclusion: Postcolonial Modernism, Postcolonial Humanism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index