Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie [1 ed.] 0415965934, 2003000220, 9780415965934, 9780415803496, 9780203957417

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Sa t ir e

&

t h e

Po s t c o l o n ia l N o v el V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie

John Clement Ball

First Published 2003 by Routledge Published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ball, John Clement, 1960Satire & the postcolonial novel : V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie / John Clement Ball. p. cm. — (Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-415-96593-4 (alk. paper) 1. Satire, English—History and criticism. 2. Commonwealth fiction (English)—History and criticism. 3. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Achebe, Chinua—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Rushdie, Salman—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Postcolonialism— English-speaking countries. 8. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title: Satire and the postcolo­ nial novel. II. Title. III. Series. PR888.S3B35 2003 823’.91409358—dc21 2003000220 ISBN: 978-0-415-96593-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-80349-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-95741-7 (eISBN)

To the memory of my aunt, Catharine Greenwood Ball, and for Lisa

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter One Theories of Satire and Postcolonialism

9

Chapter Two “The Old Enemy. And Also the New”: V. S. Naipaul’s Multidirectional Satire

41

Chapter Three “In All Fairness”: Satire and Narrative in the Novels of Chinua Achebe

79

Chapter Four “Pessoptimism”: Satire and the Menippean Grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s Novels

115

Conclusion

165

Afterword (2002)

169

Notes

175

Works Cited

185

Index

203

vii

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Preface and Acknowledgements

Satire is a prevalent but largely untheorized mode of representation in postcolonial fiction. This book explores theoretical problems posed by satiric postcolonial novels written in English and then examines the generic, rhetorical, and political strategies of satire in texts by three of the most widely read authors from former British colonies: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie. The original version of this study was researched and written between 1992 and 1994 as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto. It was successfully defended in December 1994, and the degree was conferred in 1995. Following Routledge’s requirements, the dissertation has been “lightly revised” for publication in the Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory series. In addition to minor cuts and changes of wording throughout, there are two substantive revisions. The first is the addition of a brief afterword intended to update the theoretical framework (as outlined in the introduction and chapter one) by addressing the implications of some key developments in postcolonial studies and satire theory between 1995 and 2002. The other substantive revision is to chapter four. After completing my doctoral studies, I published two articles on Salman Rushdie’s work that grew out of the research for this chapter; the further thinking, writing, and editing that went into those publications is reflected here. The first article, “Pessoptimism: Satire and the Menippean Grotesque in Rushdie’s Midnight's Children,” was published in English Studies in Canada 24.1 (1998): 61-81. The second, “Acid in the Nation’s Bloodstream: Satire, Violence, and the Indian Body Politic in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor's Last Sigh,” applies the chapter’s conceptual framework to a novel published after the dissertation was completed; this article appeared in The International Fiction Review 27 .1 -2 (2000): 3 7 -4 7 . I am grateful to the editors of both journals for their permission to reprint material from those articles in this book.

ix

JC

Preface and Acknowledgem ents

Many other individuals and organizations have assisted this project at various stages. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded me a doctoral fellowship from 1991 to 1994, and the Department of English at the University of Toronto supported my doctoral studies in material and intangible ways from 1990 onwards. I am particularly grateful for the friendly encouragement and excellent advice of my supervisor, Jim Howard. My dissertation committee members, Ted Chamberlin and Chelva Kanaganayakam, were unfailingly generous with their time, providing thoughtful and inspiring comments on chapter drafts. As an external examiner, Diana Brydon was also extremely supportive and helpful. Informally, the dissertation benefited from the ideas and support of numerous graduate students and professors at the University of Toronto and elsewhere: they include Alan Bewell, Russell Brown, Dan Coleman, Brian Corman, Greig Henderson, Colman Hogan, Linda Hutcheon, Rosemary Jolly, Ross Leckie, Nancy Lindheim, Mark McDayter, Uppinder Mehan, Susie O ’Brien, Livinus Odozor, Katharine Patterson, Michel Pharand, Victor Ramraj, Richard Sanger, Michael Sidnell, Wanda Taylor, and Linda Warley. Since then, my understanding of postcolonial fiction has grown through exchanges with students and colleagues at the University of New Brunswick and elsewhere; though they are too numerous to list here, I am grateful to them all. As a research assistant at the thesis-into-book stage, Jennifer Bronson was conscientious and enthusiastic in helping me update theory and prepare an index. At Routledge, I thank Damian Treffs, who solicited this manuscript; William Cain, the Series Editor who accepted it; and Paul Foster Johnson, who as Damian’s successor shepherded it through the publication process. Finally, I owe the greatest of debts to Lisa Alward, who got me started on this project and who, together with our children Hilary, Jack, and Peter, has cheerfully tolerated (and refrained from satirizing) my research-induced states of compulsion and distraction.

Introduction

Satiric fictions occupy a prominent place among the texts from the former British Empire that have come to be called the postcolonial literatures in English. Many Commonwealth writers have written novels that are largely or partly satiric; a longish list might include Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Rajiva Wijesinha, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Austin Clarke, Chinua Achebe, T. M. Aluko, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Hope, Mudrooroo, Patrick White, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Janet Frame, Margaret Atwood, and Mordecai Richler. Back-cover blurbs regularly position postcolonial novels as “devastating political satire” or “wickedly satiric,” as if the presence of satire, like pornography, will help to sell more copies.1 Yet despite its prevalence and popularity as a mode, satire has not yet been studied and theorized in a comparative postcolonial context. Essays on particular authors or works have been published, but there has not yet been the kind of investigation undertaken here: one that employs the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to interrogate Western formulations of satire and the satiric with a view to outlining both their uses and limitations as models for postcolonial texts. In some ways, this absence of interaction between the discourses of satire and the postcolonial is surprising, for they appear to share certain foundational assumptions. Despite continuing debates and contradictions among theorists about what satire is or does, it is commonly agreed to target “an object of attack” (Frye, Anatomy 224) which has either a general or specific existence in the historical, material world of “social reality” (Guilhamet 166) outside the satiric text itself. For Edward Rosenheim, in a famous but controversial definition, satire is “an attack by means o f a manifest fiction upon discernible historic particulars” (323). Charles Knight adds,

1

2

Satire tir the Postcolonial Novel Satire’s distinction irom the genres it imitates lies in the unpleasant presence of such historical attack , and hence referentiality is central precisely because the identity of the satiric referent, its independence, and the tran sform ation th at occurs when satire may be said to textualize it are m ajor elements of the satiric message. (“ Satire” 35)

Critics who place notions of “attack” or “aggression” at the heart of satire (e.g., Kernan, “Aggression” 117; Test, Satire 15-19) construct it as a mode of oppositional writing whose referentiality is a function of its opposition. Beyond the pages of every satiric fiction, they claim, is a targeted victim— a person, institution, or practice—with at least some degree of historicality and, depending on the theoretical model, of individuality, specificity, or identifiability. Two of the chief distinguishing features of postcolonial texts, as theorized in the emergent discourse of postcolonialism, are oppositionality and referentiality. These general terms encompass a range of concepts. Oppositionality is variously articulated as resistance, subversion, counter-discourse, contestatory narrative, writing back, and critique. Referentiality, which Stephen Slemon calls “a crucial strategy for survival in marginalized social groups” (“Modernism’s” 5), is related to the concepts of agency, materiality, and historicality, through which specific local or national contexts and subjects for writing are privileged. In this context, as in satire theory, “referentiality” signifies not a mimetic or realist representation of the world, but rather a localized cultural grounding responsible for the claims of “difference” made by the postcolonial text (or the postcolonial critic examining the text).2 Postcolonial literary works, it is said, emerge out of a concrete social reality and history of colonization and domination. The postcolonial writer uses the colonizer’s language to oppose the hegemony of imperial and neocolonial power and to construct herself in that language as a subject where before she was an objectified and voiceless “other.” Abdul JanMohamed puts these attributes succinctly when he describes Third World literature, a major component of the postcolonial’s embrace, as “marked by two broad characteristics: its attempt to negate the prior European negation of colonized cultures and its adoption and creative modification of Western languages and artistic forms in conjunction with indigenous languages and forms” (103-04). According to theorists of postcolonialism, the postcolonial writer challenges the hierarchical binaries of Empire—center/margin, master/slave, self/other, civilized/savage—to establish new centers of discourse, new subject positions, and new loci of freedom and power. As a “space-clearing gesture” (Appiah 348), the “post” in postcolonial need not be just a temporal designation. In Slemon’s words, Definitions of the ‘p ost-colon ial,’ of course, vary widely, but for me the concept proves m ost useful not when it is used synonymously with a postindependence historical period in once-colonized nations but rather when

Introduction

3

it locates a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the m om ent th at colonial pow er inscribes itself onto the body and space of its O thers and which continues as an often o c culted tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations. (“M odernism ’s ” 3)

In general, postcolonialism can be seen as a discourse of opposition to and liberation from coercive European political structures, epistemologies, and ideologies. As such, “postcolonial” is not an unproblematic term— no more so than any broad category (like “satire,” for instance) that assembles, defines, and describes the common features of a large and diverse group of texts. Postcolonialism has been criticized on a number of fronts by Arun Mukherjee, Frank Schulze-Engler, Anne McClintock, and Ella Shohat, among others. It is attacked as prematurely celebratory, fixated on past rather than present power imbalances, inappropriately modeled on linear notions of time and progress, and wedded to outmoded binaries that reinforce the colonial domination they seek to undermine. “Postcolonial” is also said to be overly homogenizing and disrespectful of local differences and specificities. Moreover, according to some critiques, white settler cultures with their ambiguous double status—oppressive dominators of aboriginal peoples and dominated margin vis-à-vis the imperial center— should not be grouped with the more directly and brutally oppressed peoples of Africa, India, and the West Indies. These are all valid critiques of the terms “postcolonial” and “postcolonialism,” though somewhat unfair, I would argue, to the actual practice of postcolonial criticism in the hands of its finest practitioners. Scholars such as Slemon, Bill Ashcroft, Diana Brydon, and Helen Tiffin— leading advocates of postcolonial theory and practice— do articulate many of the subtleties and distinctions that foes of postcolonialism insist on. In their best work, they strike a balance sensitive to both the commonalities and the differences displayed by diverse texts. Nevertheless, it is important to articulate a couple of ways in which this relatively new critical rubric, with its potentially enormous embrace, is or should be restricted. The first restriction is proposed by Sylvia Soderlind, who recommends limiting the postcolonial to “the literature produced in former colonies that assumes a position of resistance to the metropolis” (6). To this idea we might add that the engagement with imperial power structures as present fact or past legacy may be direct or indirect, and whether it is “found” in a text or “constructed” by the postcolonial critic will be in some cases highly debatable. But implicit in Soderlind’s statement is the cautionary recognition (not always made elsewhere) that many texts from former colonies will have other primary concerns and may not resist the metropolis at all. The postcolonial category should be reserved for those that do. The second restriction on the field is one that Donna Bennett sees as innate in the political bearing of postcolonial criticism. She writes that “postcolonial approaches are more useful for identifying differences

4

Satire & the Postcolonial Novel

and tracing out the dynamics of power than for recognizing and valuing similarities and accommodations, whether they be those of groups or of individuals” (196). Like Soderlind’s, this statement serves as a useful caveat to the spirit of eager territorial expansion in which postcolonial models are sometimes advanced; it reminds us that the rubric—however compelling and broadly applicable it may seem—cannot serve by itself as an all-purpose interpretive tool. In general, postcolonialism should be used selectively, carefully, and non-hegemonically. It does not apply to all texts, and those to which it does seem to apply are not fully accounted for by it. For our purposes, however, Bennett’s remark helps clarify the apparent compatibility of postcolonial critical models (and the texts that fit the models) with satire. Like the postcolonial text, the paradigmatic satiric text is also obsessed with non-accommodating power dynamics and more interested in differences than similarities. If both satiric and postcolonial texts are innately oppositional and directed referentially towards material conditions and agents, w7hat kinds of specific connections between them can be made? Clearly the two theoretical constructs are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for each other. Postcolonial oppositionality and resistance take many forms besides satire, just as postcolonial literatures have no monopoly on satiric utterance, which has flourished throughout the world in contemporary and historical cultures. Both the complex but well-documented etymology of “satire,” and its existence as literary practice and as theoretical abstraction from practice, are predominantly Western.3 As practice, literary satire by most accounts began in the classical era and descended through medieval and Renaissance literatures, achieved prominence in the neoclassical era, tapered off in the nineteenth century and, depending on who you read, in the twentieth century either dwindled completely or came to dominate its literature.4 As a named and theorized entity (genre or mode), satire belongs etymologically to Latin and Greek; as a discourse of literary history, description, and classification it has in this century been the province of Anglo-American, German, and Russian critics. These roots in European cultural and critical traditions create potential problems for satire as a model for analyzing postcolonial literatures. European-based intellectual systems and literary theories are regularly attacked by postcolonial critics for running roughshod over the particularities and differences of colonial and postcolonial reality. As Flenry Louis Gates writes, N o critical theory— be it M arxist, feminist, poststructuralist, . . . or w h atever— escapes the specificity of value and ideology, no m atter how mediated these may be. To attem pt to appropriate our own discourses by using W estern critical theory uncritically is to substitute one mode of n eocolonialism for another. (“ E d ito r’s” 15)

Introduction

5

A loud chorus of postcolonial writers and critics has critiqued the imposition of Western concepts, from liberal humanism to New Criticism to postmodernism, onto postcolonial texts. Such practices are seen as assimilative, coercive, and universalizing, and as ignoring crucial specificities of race, tribe, class, culture, gender, ethnicity, religion, history, geographic locale, and the material conditions of existence. The discourse of satire might also therefore be vulnerable to dismissal as one more Euro-American will to power over literary texts whose intents and modes of meaning are sufficiently different from those of Western texts that they cannot benefit from its intervention and may, in fact, be polluted, distorted, or even colonized by analysis that follows principles derived from Western literatures. That satire has not been so dismissed may be because as a theoretical discourse it does not have the cohesiveness, the profile, or the perceived coercive power of more controversial intellectual systems. It is hard to imagine Bill Ashcroft’s description of poststructuralism as an “ominous intellectual orthodoxy” (“Intersecting” 24) being applied to satire criticism, a specialized and diffuse body of genre theory. I raise the specter of possible objections early, however, because the issues involved are central and serious, and to ignore them would be irresponsible. Indeed, a central goal of this project is to deny “satire” the status of transparent sign: to treat “satire”—a term in common use among postcolonial writers and critics—with a certain suspicion on the assumption that the unstated implication of such use—that both writer and reader know and agree what “satire” means, and that as a component of certain postcolonial texts it means more or less what it means in other literary-critical discourses— may occlude the special qualities of both satire and postcolonial literature. The oppositionality and referentiality that are so central to both satire and postcolonialism must not, therefore, be conflated. If satire is to earn its place in postcolonial discourse as a productive designation of modes of rhetoric and representation that appear to exist in postcolonial texts, the terms of its discourse must be tested against postcolonial models. The proliferation of theories and definitions must be investigated and reconfigured on terms compatible with the strategies and sensitive to the varieties of postcoloniality represented by a diverse group of texts produced in widely differing conditions. Moreover, formulations of the satiric and the postcolonial must be free to illuminate and critique each other. My first chapter will be devoted to such an inquiry. One claim made by most satire theories will be admitted from the start: the perception of satire as “a borrower of forms” (Guilhamet 165). As James Nichols says, “satire seems to have no distinctive forms of its own” (49). For Michael Seidel, satire is “a mode rather than . . . a generically fixed form,” and it can “alter potential in other systems of literary representation” (Satiric xii). Historically, literary satire occurs in poetic, dramatic, narrative, and rhetorical forms; the concept of generic satire began with the formal verse satires of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius, and contin-

6

Satire & the Posicolonial Novel

ued to be productively employed by writers and critics to categorize imitations and variations on such poetic attacks in the Renaissance and Augustan periods. But while genre status is claimed for satire by various critics on the basis of its dominance as a mode in particular works of dramatic, poetic, rhetorical, or fictional writing, arguments such as those made by Peter Petro for designating selected contemporary novels as generic satire are unproductive (9). The novel’s openness as a genre, alluded to by Henry James in his “fluid pudding” and “baggy monster” epithets, and theorized in this century by Mikhail Bakhtin and others, gives it plenty of room to accommodate varying types and intensities of satiric writing.5 So while I acknowledge the articulate and not unconvincing negotiations of generic status for satire in recent work by Leon Guilhamet, John Snyder, and Charles Knight, this study’s restriction to manifestations of the satiric in contemporary novels will avoid the turf battles of competing genre claims. It will remain content to let novels be novels and to analyze satire, however dominant and transforming its effects on individual examples of the novel, as a mode operating within the novel’s wide generic boundaries. Using Ronald Paulson’s simple but useful distinction between “satire” and “a satire” (Fictions 4), or tone and form, my topic will thus be satire rather than satires—the mode not the genre. More precisely, this study will be concerned with modes of satiric oppositionality in postcolonial novels. It will proceed by opening up critical assumptions about satire and the postcolonial to mutual inspection; it will then bring forward the questions, issues, parameters, and provisional theories that emerge from that inspection onto the testing-ground of postcolonial novels. The texts I have chosen for primary analysis are by three writers associated with different national literatures: V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad, Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, and Salman Rushdie of India. Besides being among the most prominent and widely read authors from their respective regions, they deserve detailed consideration on the basis of their substantial use of modal satire, the importance of the mode to their interests and strategies, their overt concern with Empire and its legacies, and the varieties they display—of referential and cultural contexts, of novel forms and writing styles, of political positions, and of satiric utterance itself. The aim of this project is not to construct an overarching theory of satire in the postcolonial novel that can then be widely and authoritatively applied. Satire, as critical commonplace has it, is protean. It is notoriously resistant to unitary theories (Test, Satire x; Griffin 3). In writers as different from each other as these three, satire is bound to operate in very diverse ways. Indeed, as a parasitic mode that adapts to and transforms its generic host— in these cases, the novel— satire may appear to be a completely different thing from one writer (or one text) to another. Satire thus needs to be separately theorized for each body of work, even after the first chapter has raised the general questions prompted by the idea of “postcolonial satire.” In each author’s work, I find satire to have a different appearance

Introduction

7

and a different function, and to be most profitably investigated in tandem with one or more different literary concepts. In the work of Naipaul, the focus is on satire’s multidirectional targeting and its relation to irony and allegory. In Achebe’s novels, satire is examined as a mode of critiquing colonial discourse and as a problematic adjunct to the narrative impulse. The final chapter considers the usefulness of Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulations of negative satire, Menippean satire, and the grotesque body as interpretive models for Rushdie’s texts. The result, I hope, is a study that maximizes diversity and interest while minimizing repetition and predictability. Despite the variables, however, some thematic and methodological continuity should be apparent. The politics of colonial and neocolonial, imperial and neoimperial power are favourite topics of each author, and will emerge as favorite objects of satiric representational strategies. As a result, this study is primarily about the satiric representation of politics and the politics of satiric representation. My general method will be to examine each author within the context of positions on colonialism, politics, culture, society, writing, and satire itself that emerge in his non-fiction and public statements—of which each author has a substantial body. Each major novel in which satire plays a significant role will then be examined for the contribution the satiric mode makes to its overall form, style, themes, and rhetorical agenda. The three authors come originally from colonies of invasion in the three regions of the world where the British Empire made its most violent and far-reaching interventions. In the West Indies, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, the imperial adventure disrupted and altered the greatest numbers of lives in the most profound and direct ways. It is arguably such places, which have historically felt power differentials the most acutely (and which continue to do so today), that are most likely to produce a vigorous culture of anger and opposition conducive to lively political satire. I support the use of postcolonial theories in the criticism of literatures in English from the white settler-invader populations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, as long as such theories are appropriately contextualized, qualified, and differentiated from their uses with the literatures of the postcolonial “Third World.” I cite examples from both settler and non-settler literatures in the theoretical arguments of chapter one. But while subsequent chapters on such satirists as Richler, White, Frame, and Hope could have extended the topic in fascinating directions, I have omitted them and their settler-colony literatures from primary analysis for practical reasons. In the detailed discussions of Naipaul, Achebe, and Rushdie, what I hope will become apparent is the variety, power, and complexity of satire as a tool of postcolonial critique serving cultures that were among those most profoundly affected by imperialism and its messy aftermath.

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C H A P T ER O N E

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 w ords, the conception of epic, tragedy, or the m ajor nonmimetic structures— history, philosophy, and oratory— can be idealized even beyond any imagined past. (1 6 6 )

This emphasis on generic rather than historical devolution provides an example of how a potentially useful point of intersection between satire

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Satire & the Postcolonial Novel

and postcolonial discourse can be theorized into mutual incompatibility. A satiric postcolonial novel like Mudrooroo’s Dr. W ooreddy’s Prescription fo r Enduring the Ending o f 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 postcolonial, 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. W ooreddy) 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 realworld 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

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as a distinctive feature of satiric rather than nonsatiric texts. The example of Dr. W ooreddy 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. W ooreddy. )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, Em pire 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 Sham e, Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, Achebe’s A Man o f the P eople, and Rajiva Wijesinha’s Days o f D espair sat-

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Satire & the Postcolonial Novel

irize 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 stillcontentious 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 in-

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stance, 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 am ong 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 postcolonial 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.

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Satire & the Postcolunial Novel *

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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 (Flodgart 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 o f 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 o f Elvira the target is comparatively benign: political immaturity and the absence of leadership demonstrated by electoral disorder. Murray Bail in Holden's Perform ance creates a blithely opportunistic politician in Hoadley, the Australian senator who spends his workdays 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 postcolonial 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,

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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 o f Midnight with the statement “India is a crowd,” or when Naipaul opens India: A Million Mutinies N ow by saying “Bombay is a crowd” (1), they are being descriptive, not judgmental. Rushdie says that in the West “being in a crowd is a special event which creates special feeling. In India this is not true. Nobody is afraid of crowds, because the crowd is the norm” (D. Brooks 69). So while Rushdie’s work, like that of many postcolonial satirists, does include crowds and scenes of disorder, their presence cannot automatically be linked to satiric modes. In some satiric fictions, a disorderly crowd may be positively evaluated: the carnivalesque crowd celebrating India’s independence in Midnight's Children, or the revolutionary crowds of workers in Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross. In elaborating his concept of plotless satire, Kernan admits that this pure form is “far rarer than the mixed kinds in which after a time the satiric stasis is broken and the characters . . . are swept forward into the miraculous transformations of comedy or the cruel dialectic of tragedy” (“Theory” 272). The satiric novel is by definition such an impure form. But since, according to Palmeri and Kernan (“Aggression” 118), satire as a genre “resists both comic and tragic forms of resolution and closure” (Palmeri 4), one of the measures of satire’s transforming generic influence over a given novel may be the degree to which conventional assumptions about plot progression, character development, and closure are subverted by satiric elements. George Lamming’s In the Castle o f My Skin employs a mixture of experimental and conventional prose styles, and in form and resolution follows principles of the Kunstlerroman as practiced by James Joyce and others. It also contains a satiric portrait, Mr. Slime, and satiric scenes involving him, but his dominant presence in the plot does not translate into a dominance of the novel by satire. The form of the work and its achievement of closure are unaffected by its satiric passages, which are

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Satire & the Postcolonial Novel

episodic and self-contained. Tragic and comic narrative structures and conventions of closure are found respectively in Mudrooroo’s Dr. W ooreddy and NaipauPs The Suffrage o f Elvira. Mudrooroo’s novel has a complex central character and an expansive, teleological plot tracing Wooreddy’s life as a metonym of his people’s oppression. The sense of tragic waste and loss that accompanies the closure of his death is uncorrupted by the book’s multidirectional satiric forays. Naipaul’s narrative, on the other hand, ends with only a parodie version of comic festivity and celebration; there is not the sense of social integration that comedy requires because there has been no purgation of the blocking conditions of corruption, opportunism, misplaced values, and so on. The novel’s appearance of resolution masks a lack of real closure; the satirized conditions that are Naipaul’s main subject have intensified, gaining a more entrenched legitimacy by the success of their perpetrators. The book ends with the “unresolved state of crisis” that Michael Seidel says is satire’s “modal mark” (“Crisis” 165-67). The more dominant presence of satire— its greater centrality to the text’s agenda— causes Naipaul’s book to close with greater irresolution and undermining of its host form’s conventions than Mudrooroo’s. This is not to say that the sense of crisis is any less at the end of Dr. W ooreddy, merely that for the characters in the narrative the crisis of story and history has played itself out to an inevitable end. Achebe’s No Longer at Ease has a similar ending but a different narrative emphasis: Obi’s story has ended tragically and conclusively, but the novel emphasizes the continuation in his society of the satirized conditions that led to his downfall. Some other novels achieve versions of closure less reliant on conventions of tragic or comic resolution. Rushdie’s Shame ends in no less than a local apocalypse, a prophesied destruction of the personified forces of shame and shamelessness on which his satire has turned. As purgation, this ending resolves satiric crisis by fantastic means consistent with the book’s ontological fluidity, and achieves closure via the satirist’s will and power to destroy his own creations. Ngugi does something similar in Devil on the Cross. After satirically representing Kenya’s neocolonial elite as beasts and grotesques in the central chapters, his final scene portrays his heroine, Wariinga, shooting her fiancé’s father, foregoing the wedding that was to be her personal salvation in favor of revolutionary action against a former personal oppressor who is also allied with the oppressors of her people. Ngugi thus rejects one available strategy of closure, in which the private resolution and celebration of a wedding would take place despite persistent satiric crisis in the public outside world. (Dickens employed that model in one of his most satiric novels, Little Dorrit.) Ngugi’s text, full of Marxist revolutionary fervor, transcends the symbolic violence of satiric representational techniques such as reduction, exaggeration, and dehumanizing imagery in favor of a more literal violence. That violence is still of course contained in textual representations. But it becomes symbolically destruc-

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tive, purgative action within representation and so breaks free of satiric stasis and despair. Do the endings of novels like Sham e, Devil on the Cross, and The Suffrage o f Elvira, in which satiric goals appear to dictate narrative structure and generic form, frustrate generic expectations? To take some other examples, how frustrating is the inconclusiveness of Offred’s unfinished manuscript in The Handmaid's Tale? Does the fact that the quests in Christopher Hope’s Kruger's Alp and Janet Frame’s The Carpathians achieve paltry or ambiguous results surprise us? Should we have expected better? The concept of generic expectations invoked by various critics is a slippery abstraction, particularly when applied to such a broadly variable genre as the novel. Twentieth-century novels of both the modern and postmodern variety experiment wildly with inherited notions of novelistic form and representational strategies. By doing so, they raise questions about the point at which the disruption of generic expectations can itself become, paradoxically, a norm. Helen Tiffin lists “the refusal of closure” as one of several features “characteristic of both the generally post-colonial and the European post-modern” (172). Heather Dubrow notes that generic prescriptions, like social codes, “differ from culture to culture” (3). The “generic contract” (32) that a work establishes with its reader through signals about its likely content, form, tone, and modes of meaning4 becomes historicized by cultural factors affecting its creation and reception. Postcolonial literatures would appear to require a flexible and provisional relation to generic rules, open to the multiplicity of intersecting determinants that emerge in an environment of cultural syncretism. In addition to examples of the western novel, past and present, local narrative modes and traditions for representing reality influence the forms of many postcolonial novels. Such cross-cultural sensitivity can be difficult to practice, but the concept of generic expectations and their frustration is an unconvincing one for other reasons. If the generic contract is established by signals from text to reader, the satiric novel as a sub-genre will develop its own contract, different from nonsatiric works, as signaled by its use of satiric devices such as ironic distortion and scatology. These signals will lead the reader to expect, from her knowledge of satiric fictions, the very qualities of stasis, irresolution, fragmentation, and so on that are supposed to frustrate her expectations. And if, as is usually the case in novels, satiric strategies are mingled with others such as realism, fantasy, self-referentiality, or destabilized ontologies, the informed and experienced reader posited by the theory of generic contract will presumably know enough to suspend all expectations of predictable closure or generic formulas. Since, as Knight (“Imagination’s” 132) and Snyder (1) have argued, generic rules must always give way to and subsequently incorporate the idiosyncrasies of the individual text, ultimately each novel must be permitted to establish its own ground rules based on its unique mixture of modes and structures. Having

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done so, it must expect that not all readers will be able or willing to read its generic coding. It is hard to share W. O. S. Sutherland’s confidence that readers of satire are not deceived because they make a tacit pact with the author that his misrepresentations are not factual (12-13). Satire can be particularly hard to identify, especially when its objects belong to an unfamiliar culture. How is a reader to know (jacket copy notwithstanding) that the novel she is reading is a satiric novel and should be comprehended as such? As with the problems of locating ideals and political targets, then, these issues of plot and genre show that the critic who uses models of satire that rely on generalizations drawn from European and American texts must do so with caution. There are a number of other debates in satire theory to which the emerging discourse of postcolonialism can contribute. The remainder of this chapter will use postcolonial principles to consider the role of norms or standards in satire, the meaning of satiric blendings of language and style, the historically of satire’s targets, and satire’s impact, both intended and achieved, on worldly affairs.

Many theories of satire assert the implicit presence of moral norms or standards against which the object of satire is seen to transgress. As Frye stated in his brief contribution to a symposium on the question of norms published in Satire N ewsletter in 1964, “Of course a moral norm is inherent in satire: satire presents something as grotesque: the grotesque is by definition a deviant from a norm: the norm makes the satire satiric” (Test, “Norms” 9). Among other contributors to the symposium, A. M. Tibbets agreed, saying that a judgment of something or someone as bad requires “a reasonably clear idea of what is not bad.” “It will not do,” he added, “to claim that these matters are relative, for they must be relative to something” (2). Several others dissented, such as Leonard Feinberg in a statement that he later incorporated into his Introduction to Satire: Before accepting the m orality theory, we might ask: W hose m oral norm s is satire based on? A universal norm ? It is hard to prove that one exists, except in such vague term s that even bitterly opposing satirists claim simultaneously that they adhere to it. . . . In the middle of the twentieth century no one has the right to set up his own preferences as absolute m oral norm s. ( 9 - 1 0 )

Feinberg suggests instead a criterion of “appropriateness” or social acceptability that maintains normative models but locates them in the realm of custom rather than morality and permits their acceptance by either “an entire society, or only one class in that society, or just a small coterie” (11). According to these principles, norms are still necessary for judging something, but a satire could be written in which only the satirist himself adhered to the norms employed. Such a work might be written as satire,

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but would probably not be read as satire. Connected with discussions of norms, as Feinberg’s remarks suggest, are theories asserting “shared comprehension and evaluation between satirist and audience” (Fletcher ix). In Knight’s view, “satire that is merely emotive—expressing the speaker’s emotion without gaining the listener’s agreement— is unsuccessful as satire.” To be successful, “Satire usually demands an audience which either agrees with the propriety of the attack or is willing to do so for purposes of entertainment” (“Satire” 32). For an audience to agree, its members must recognize and share the norms invoked either explicitly or implicitly by the satiric work. From this model it is understandable to conclude, as W. H. Auden did, that “satire flourishes in a homogeneous society with a common conception of the moral law . . . and in times of relative stability and contentment” (204). But that notion has been challenged by various critics, including Sutherland, who reminds us that Augustan England, typically seen as the pinnacle of British satire, was a very divided society (20). Postcolonial texts, satiric or otherwise, emerge from an environment that is at least as divided, fragmented, various, and destabilized as eighteenth-century England. Concepts such as shared norms and assumptions, cultural homogeneity, universal values, and social stability are impossible to apply with confidence either to contemporary postcolonial societies or to the international community of writers and readers of postcolonial novels. The anxiety and difficulty this creates for the author is passionately expressed by Achebe in an essay: “In the . . . wide-open, multicultural and highly volatile condition known as modern Nigeria . . . can a writer even begin to know who his community is let alone devise strategies for relating to it?” (H opes 40).5 Whether they are former colonies of invasion undergoing ethnic tensions and political transitions among various forms of postindependence rule, or settler societies facing demographic shifts and challenges from indigenous populations to their ideologies of white entitlement, postcolonial societies continue to experience intercultural struggle and political change. Assumptions of shared norms are additionally undercut by what Ashcroft describes as the particular “absence” of writers and readers from each other in the postcolonial discursive “event,” and the consequences of this gap on interpretation: H ow meaning is constructed in the writing by its absentee users becomes a central question in writing studies and is made much m ore salient by postcolonial writing systems in which writer and reader might have ranges of experience and presuppositions which may not be expected to overlap greatly, if at all. The additional perspective which the consideration of post-colonial literatures brings to this discussion is obviously their accen tuation of this phenom enon of distance: they present us with writers and readers far m ore ‘absent’ from each other than they would be if located in the same culture; they present a situation which in some cases . . . provides a totally ambivalent site for com m unication. ( “ C onstitutive” 60)

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Ashcroft’s remarks particularize for postcolonial literatures an observation that has often been made about the interpretive act: that, as Wayne Booth has said of ironic texts, “the more remote a work is from my home province (my century, my country, my family, my profession, my church, my club, my generation), the more [interpretive] mistakes I will make” (R hetoric 2 2 2-23). The word “mistakes” is a bit blunt, although in keeping with Booth’s intentionalist approach to ironic communication. Hutcheon— who locates that communication in acts of interpretation rather than inscription—posits the idea of multiple “discursive communities,” each with different perspectives on a given irony based on “the complex configuration of shared knowledge, beliefs, values, and communicative strategies” (Irony's 91). Authors may write with specific audiences in mind, but whoever the intended readers of a given work may be, the actual audiences for many postcolonial literary texts are international. They comprise a vast number of potentially incompatible discursive communities. The differing reception of Naipaul’s works by Caribbean and Anglo-American readers demonstrates the problems with claiming universal norms as the basis of satiric communication. And while Rushdie may have intended his portrayal of Mahound in The Satanic Verses as satiric fantasy, many Islamic fundamentalists read it (or dismissed it without reading it) as blasphemy. These may be extreme and unique examples. But they point to a general fact: a satiric work may assume an ideal reader who shares its standards of judgment, but it will not always get one. Slemon, addressing this issue in connection with allegory, suggests that “the colonial encounter and its aftermath . . . provides a shared matrix of reference and a shared set of problems for post-colonial cultures,” thus permitting allegorical communication between author and reader. This notion is encouraging, particularly when Slemon allows that shared typologies need not be universally held, but may be culturally specific, as in the case of the Akan carrier ritual he identifies as the allegorical foundation for Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are N ot Yet Born (“Post-Colonial” 165). However, the absence of universal codes in Slemon’s formulations would seem to require greater interpretive involvement from the critic in articulating such culturally specific typologies to those readers unfamiliar with them. And even the more broadly applicable “matrix of reference” shared within the postcolonial world presumably does not, if it exists at all, include readers from outside that community. For Slemon, such a pluralized basis for allegory becomes a challenge for criticism: to support the allegorical understanding that might not otherwise take place in a given reader’s reading experience (166). My proposition that postcolonial satire enables multidirectional resistance and opposition similarly implies that satiric critique requires mediation in order to be fully contextualized and located. As in the scene where Achebe’s Odili tells an English art critic that an old woman shaking her fist at a statue is not expressing “rage” but “honor and respect” (Man 55-56), the critic’s job is to further the under-

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standing of historical complexities and conditions that might be occluded by the vigor of satire’s primary attack.6 According to some theorists of satire (e.g. Levin 6), one strategy used by authors to address the possibility of misunderstanding is to incorporate into the text an embodiment of positive norms—a character or explicit set of ideas that contrasts with the transgressing satiric target. As Kernan puts it, “the most successful methods for showing that the world is askew” involve “build[ing] into the satiric world and parallel with the satiric plot suggestions, images, of more acceptable and time-tested approaches to life, which are validated once again by showing the disastrous consequences of failing to observe them” (Test, “Norms” 12-13). Norman Knox notes that “a satirist’s use of positive images and assertions is partially governed by whether he can count on his audience to have available the norms he wants to use.” When he cannot, Knox adds, “he must impose the very standards by which he works, and . . . this is a crippling difficulty” (Test, “Norms” 17). Postcolonial satire might be expected to incorporate such explicit normative elements, recognizing the difficulties in assuming a priori agreement or knowledge, but a sampling of texts does not bear this expectation out. Characters like Ngugi’s Wariinga and Gatuiria in Devil on the Cross, Wole Soyinka’s Iriyese in Season o f Anom y, or Patrick White’s Laura in Voss may be idealized and normative compared to the satiric butts, but Naipaul in The Suffrage o f Elvira and Mordecai Richler in The Incom parable Atuk spare no one satiric treatment and clarify no norms. Often a character with some normative functionality, like the protagonist in Armah’s The Beautyful O nes, Achebe’s Odili in A Man o f the P eople, or Frame’s Mattina in The Carpathians, will be compromised in some way. This more ambiguous kind of satire, which is compatible with a concept of satiric multidirectionality, works against the binary model of norm and deviation and offers one in which oppositions may be set up without either side being endorsed. Flodgart (36) and Palmeri (1-18) theorize satire along such “dialogical” lines (Palmeri 1), thus permitting satire to proceed without the burden of clear normative principles. Binary contrasts are also created by another set of assumptions in satire theories: the presence of gaps. Satiric gaps are variously described: as “the gap between what might be and what is” (J. Sutherland 4), as the “discrepancy between the material and the moral streams of life” (Cannan 22), and as “the contrast between reality and pretense” (Feinberg 3). These gaps relate closely to the contrasts already discussed between norm and deviation and between an idealized golden age and a contemporary falling off. But gaps are not only a function of satiric perspective; they are also structurally integrated into the prevalent stylistic devices and modes of indirection used by satiric texts. Irony, which Hutcheon calls a “double-talking, forkedtongued mode of address” (“‘Circling’” 170), is probably chief among these; one thing the various types and uses of irony have in common is a two-sided vision that spans a gap. Other techniques commonly identified

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as central to satire include reduction, exaggeration, grotesque distortion, reversal, burlesque, paradox, and violation of style or decorum. In each of these, a norm is transgressed— not a moral norm but a norm of fair representation— and a gap is constructed which the satirist presses into service as rhetorical support for his critique. Gaps are also present in postcolonial texts. The authors of The Em pire Writes B ack explain that, on a fundamental level, “all post-colonial literatures are cross-cultural because they negotiate a gap between ‘worlds,’ a gap in which the simultaneous processes of abrogation and appropriation continually strive to define and determine their practice” (Ashcroft, Em pire 39). Contributing to this general gap are several particular ones. There is a gap between ideologies and structures imposed by the imperial “center” (often claiming to embody universal, objective Truths), and the subjective experiences, traditions, and histories of the colonized “margin.” There is a power gap between ruler and ruled, master and slave, dominant and dominated. There is a geographical gap, separating different landscapes and climates, and the different cultural and social traditions that arise out of and adapt to those different experiences of place. And, centrally for literary works, there is a language gap: differences not only of languages but of the ways of speaking and writing a common language. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin explain, the postcolonial text’s “use of language incorporates the warning that the site of the shared discourse— the literary text— is not the site of a shared mental experience, and should not be seen as such” (59). Postcolonialism is thus not opposed to binary structures per se; in fact it relies on them to construct its simultaneous assertions of difference and syncretism. What its various recuperative, decolonizing, and recentering projects do oppose is lopsided binaries wielded as tools of hegemonic oppression. Us/them or white/black may be acceptable binaries when they are simply neutral and descriptive. But when us/them becomes master/slave, or when white/black becomes an evaluative measure of entitlement or evolutionary advancement, the result is what JanMohamed calls the “Manichean opposition” whose hierarchical binaries provide “the central feature of the colonialist cognitive framework and colonialist literary representation” (82).7 The gaps established by satire are also hier^ hical, insofar as satire measures deviation and deformity from an apparently superior position. In some controversial cases, such as Naipaul and Rushdie, satiric critiques have been read by some as réinscriptions of imperial hegemonic binaries privileging the “First World” over the “Third”; thus Rushdie is condemned by the Ayatollah, and Naipaul is described by Edward Said as a “witness for the Western prosecution” who reinforces postimperial Western ideas about Third-World debasement in the absence of First-World rule (“Intellectuals” 53). Other texts satirize imperial activities and appear to ascribe normative value to the local: in Achebe’s historical novels, satire’s resemblance to colonialist discourse makes it a potent

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weapon for critiquing that discourse through a countervailing imitation of its representational and epistemological restrictions. Still other texts evade easy identification of norms, moral or otherwise, and while full of aggressive, critical, and deviant representations, are not easily subjected to analysis of gaps.8 Criticism of satiric postcolonial texts demands careful investigation on a case-by-case basis of the gaps that structure their judgments. All texts, particularly those whose primary satiric directionality appears to be towards elements in colonial or postcolonial communities, must be interrogated for their use of binary contrasts. And since morality as an absolute and hierarchical criteria is tainted after the history of colonialism—Patrick Brantlinger reminds us that as justification for their incursions into Africa, “the Victorians increasingly saw themselves . . . as the highest moral power among nations” (197)—the relationship between satiric judgment and a potentially prescriptive m oral position based on binaries must be monitored. The critic must be alert to the fact that some satiric representations will look like réinscriptions of condescending colonialist discourse, as well as to the possibility that ambivalence and satiric multidirectionality may qualify a text’s apparent loyalties. One measure of the complexity of this project—the negotiation of critical frameworks for texts using theories of satire and postcolonial literature— is the interpretation of language gaps. Satire’s partial etymological origin in the Latin satura, meaning “medley” or “hotch-potch” (Highet 18), is often cited in support of satire’s multifarious nature and conjoining of disparates. When satire blends languages, styles, or discourses in its parodie mode or as a form of humorous incongruity, satire theories are inclined to set up linguistic gaps as hierarchical determinants of evaluation. For Kernan, the eighteenth-century satirists established a tradition in which “a debased style is both an effect of and an index to debased ways of thinking” (Plot 30). Joseph Bentley coins the term “semantic gravitation” to crystallize his proposition that “when extremes of high and low are merged, the high elements will descend toward the level of the low elements” (“Semantic” 7). This process is an aspect of the “radical dualism” that Bentley and other critics such as Jewel Spears Brooker (5-6) see as an “essential operational phenomenon” of satire (Bentley, “Semantic” 3). Satire merges elements from contrasting or antithetical realms: the intellectual and scatological, for instance, since so much satire works with mind/body dualities and conflations. When this happens, Bentley says, the “higher” realm is diminished by its association with the “lower”: the human is reduced to animal, desire become appetite. Similarly, when dictions are merged, or when content and style are drawn from hierarchically different realms, a leveling effect takes place that settles on the lower element. The gap con-

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structed by disjunctive language levels or relations of language to its subject helps define satiric critique. Hierarchies of language were invoked and imposed by the British imperial project. English obliterated some African and aboriginal languages in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand; throughout the Empire “standard English” was valued over local variants. Postcolonial models undo those hierarchies, viewing linguistic variation not evaluatively but as a metonym of cultural difference. For Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, “the syncretic and hybridized nature of postcolonial experience refutes the privileged position of a standard code in the language and any monocentric view of human experience” (41). Diana Brydon suggests that criticism that acknowledges “cross-cultural perspectives may benefit from a willingness to learn the Englishes of a variety of centers and to translate among them without privileging any single one as the norm establishing value” (“Myths” 9). As with other postcolonial gaps, linguistic ones simply exist as a historical legacy; to critique them with a view to narrowing or closing them is to misunderstand their role as indicators of valid cultural space. But establishing gaps and contrasts is exactly what the satirist does do as a strategy of critique, at least by most accounts. Flis “radical dualism” establishes its preferences—its norms and deviations— usually along the lines of the conventional values of the satirist and his projected audience. Knight’s work provides an interesting perspective on these apparent conflicts between postcolonial assumptions and satiric strategies. “Since satire characteristically imitates discourse,” he says, “its subject is likely to be the disruptions of language itself.” After analyzing George Orwell’s Newspeak as a metalinguistic device for illustrating social disorder, he writes, W hen the language that satire imitates serves or reflects the disturbances of culture, the metalinguistic function of satire not only preserves the disturbance for all to see but, further, explains how the social disorder p ro duces the linguistic distortion. Satire provides an ironic translation of texts whose language has been so perverted by the special intention of its users th at it could not otherwise be understood by readers outside of the exploited linguistic com m unity to which it is addressed. The metalinguistic function in satire articulates the equivalence of meaninglessness with social disorder. ( “ Satire” 35)

To apply these comments to postcolonial contexts is to read linguistic distortion— departure from some norm of discourse such as standard English—as indicative of the social disorder that produced it, a disorder for which Empire itself would have to answer. Knight’s idea is valuable, although it is equally applicable to non-satiric representations of linguistic variance: the bold celebratory variance of Jamaican dub poetry, for instance; Sam Selvon’s immigrant dialects in The Lonely L on don ers; Achebe’s Nigerian pidgin; or the mimetic Indian English spoken by Anita

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Desai’s characters. These are not attacks on Empire or signs of social disorder. What may appear to the critic of satire as satiric reduction through linguistic blending may therefore seem to the postcolonial critic simply an inscription of cultural difference and therefore not satiric at all. Alternatively, postcolonial linguistic variance may reverse the satire theorists’ locations of norms in the standard language, and valorize the deviation from “standard English” as a sign of authenticity and a site of resistance. As Ashcroft describes it, this perspective privileges the practice of language over the code—parole over langue in Saussure’s terms— allying the linguistic variance espoused by the theory of the “creole continuum” with “the discourse of the post-colonial as rooted in conflict and struggle, as ‘counter-discourse,’ since the perpetual confrontation with a ‘standard code’ is that which constructs the language” (“Constitutive” 62). Satiric mockery is sometimes, in fact, generated by uses of formal English in contexts where it looks stiff and pompous, as in the U.P.U. secretary’s speech in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (31-32). Language is one domain where the crucial distinction between satiric oppositionality and postcolonial resistance become clear, even though in some cases they may work in tandem. As an indicator of the presence of satire, language mixtures will therefore not suffice on their own, at least on the level of speech and dialogue. To be sensitive to postcolonial realities, the critic must consider instances of linguistic variance in the context of the represented society’s environment of monoglossia, diglossia, or polyglossia. One key to interpreting linguistic variance may be authenticity: if a variant can be viewed on the text’s own terms as authentic and normal, it is unlikely to be satiric. If it is a measure of inauthenticity it is more likely to indicate satiric evaluation. So far my remarks on linguistic variance have looked at it primarily as a function of dialogue and narrative voice. But satire’s use of parodic and burlesque modes of representation also constructs language gaps. When Palmeri talks about “the collision between languages in narrative satire” and the “formal strategy of parodic reversals” that serves as its “creative structural principle” (1-2), he is basing his argument on Mikhail Bakhtin’s principles of linguistic multivoicedness in the novel. For Bakhtin, “The language of the novel is a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other” (D ialogic 47). Opposed to the more unitary languages of epic and poetry, the novel as the only major genre “younger than writing and the book” (3) is antihierarchical, liberating, and indeterminate in its open-ended democratic heteroglossia. The novel’s dialogic nature dramatizes the encounter of official languages with unofficial “lower” languages, and the struggle of “authoritative discourse” with “internally persuasive discourse” in ideological consciousness (273, 342). One form such struggles can take is parodic stylization, a particular kind of linguistic collision in which “the intentions of the representing discourse are at odds with the intentions of the represented discourse” (364). In other words, a gap is

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constructed between discourses by the application of one to materials normally belonging to another. The purpose of parody may be, as Bakhtin states, to expose weaknesses in the represented language—the discourse appropriated by the parodie representing language. But as Hutcheon, Nichols, and others have observed, parody’s attack is not always directed towards the appropriated form. Hutcheon says, “The mock epic did not mock the epic: it satirized the pretensions of the contemporary as set against the ideal norms implied by the parodied text or set of conventions” (Theory 44). Nichols makes the useful distinction between “parody” and “pattern”; only in the former is the borrowed work or form the object of critique (53-54). Both types of parodie intertextuality would appear by the criteria we have been using to rely on normative assumptions by virtue of their status as attack or exposé. Theories of norms and semantic gravitation suggest that judgment implies hierarchy (good over bad) whether or not the basis of judgment can be clearly located. However, Bakhtin’s concept of fiction’s dialogicity provides an alternative model much friendlier to postcolonial concerns. The blendings and struggles of languages that Bakhtin posits as intrinsic to novelistic discourse are themselves antihegemonic, opposed to unitary, authoritative, official language. The polyglossic fusions of languages that are a real, natural legacy of history in postcolonial societies—even the supposedly “monoglossic” settler colonies (Ashcroft, Empire 39)— become under Bakhtin’s paradigms intrinsically antihierarchical, opposed to the official, authoritative “standard English” of Empire. Satire’s often jarring contrasts of language and discourse in the form of parodies, burlesques, and even invective constitute one specialized category of dialogicity whose implicit hierarchies of value are balanced by their antihierarchical contributions to the liberating heteroglossia of novelistic discourse. In fact, Bakhtin counts the older “serio-comical” genres of Socratic dialogue, Roman satire, and Menippean satire among the “authentic predecessors of the novel” because, like that later genre, “contemporary reality serves as their subject,” and also because of their roots in popular laughter and the carnivalesque: “It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic |and its unitary language], and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance” (D ialogic 22-23). If the novel as a quasi-oppositional, deconstructive genre grows out of satire’s dialogic transgressions of linguistic wholeness, what then is the place of satire in the contemporary novel? It is not just one more form of multi-voicedness; it has its own strategic specificity. Palmeri’s analysis takes up Bakhtin’s privileging of carnival laughter, claiming that even though such laughter “dislodges officialdom,” in doing so it still “replaces one absolute criterion of truth with another— more ambiguous and heterogeneous, but still unnecessarily constricting” (2). Palmeri sees satire as more multidirectional and self-critical than any model of norm and deviation and hierarchical gaps is likely to permit. He writes,

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the m ost com plex and subversive narrative satires incorporate more than a single instance of parodie energy: after parodying a prevailing perspective, these satires go on to parody their own parodie inversion, w ithout reverting to the original point of departure. Parodie satire in narrative then becomes not an isolated episode, but a continuing process of unsettling hierarchies of value and systems of thought. Through repeated parody and self-parody, such satire counterpoises multiple frames of understanding w ithout assenting to the authority of any single perspective. (2 -3 )

Palmeri’s theory claims space for satire as subversive and antihierarchical in general, including a self-reflexive undermining of the hierarchies of value it establishes and relies on for its critique. Satire is thus freed of absolute norm requirements, since any gaps it constructs will be provisional and open to challenge by other aspects or portions of the satiric critique. Comparative judgments can still of course be made, including the general contrast Palmeri claims between an idealized past and a fallen present. But within the fallen present, any systems of thought, belief, or action—even those given temporary normative functions vis-à-vis other, satirized systems— may succumb to satiric-parodic critique. Palmeri’s theory brings satire into greater theoretical compatibility with poststructural and postmodern concepts of indeterminacy, multiplicity, and the conditional nature of truth. It may therefore be more useful for analyzing the majority of postcolonial satiric fictions, which do not reveal clear and unequivocal normative bases, than those few (such as Ngugi’s Devil on the C ross) in which a commitment to particular political ideals and positions is an obvious point of departure for satiric representations. On the other hand, perhaps Palmeri’s views can be applied to all satire, as a way of accounting for the problems satire so often faces in being “misread” (Nichols 39) because its irony is not understood or appreciated. Postcolonial satiric fiction’s international audience ensures widely variant readings and responses, so a view of satire as multidirectional and self-contradictory can help accommodate “misreadings” as simply variant readings allowed and even encouraged by satire’s variable critique. Finally, what postcolonial models would seem to imply regarding the gaps constructed by linguistic mixtures such as parody and burlesque is that it is important to be sensitive to cultural specificity and difference when attributing meaning and evaluative direction to such mixtures. Just as the disorderly crowd may have varying metonymic significance in different societies, so may other signs of satiric reduction. The mind/body dualism on which the satiric grotesque relies— satire’s common technique of reducing humans to physiological phenomena, which in Bentley’s view connects satire to sadism (“Satire” 394)— may signify differently in cultures less beholden to Descartes, where bodies are inhabited, perceived, and valued differently, or where life is more intensely physical than it is in Western societies. In some poor countries, where to be fat is to be popularly admired as healthy and wealthy, a grotesque that in Western culture

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might signify satirized excess may or may not have satiric value. It may just be a convenient and realistic marker of a character’s class. Similarly, the attributions of naturalness and artifice, appropriateness and inappropriateness that attend the mingling of discursive realms in satire’s parodie and burlesque modes may not translate across cultural boundaries. Different societies generate different discourses, rankings of discourse, and ideas about proper representation of a given content. As Mukherjee notes, “the semiotic codes of cultures are often not interchangeable” (“Whose” 4). European models of “high” and “low” discourse should ideally be interrogated through local models before any conclusions about semantic gravitation or parodie diminishment are reached. Under this skeptical approach, even so apparently clear an instance of scatological reduction and discursive mingling as Sagoe’s Voidancy lecture in Soyinka’s The Interpreters (71-72) could not be assumed simply on the basis of its precedents in English satire to be satiric in intent until some confirmation from Yoruba traditions had been established for considering the yoking of philosophical treatise and defecation an unconventional transgression. The rigor involved in this kind of criticism is a version of what Christopher Miller calls “literary anthropology,” which he describes as an approach that is influenced by the “ facts” of ethnography and . . . a willingness to adopt modes of interpretation that might com e out of the culture in question. For the W estern reader, this means venturing beyond the codes of established interpretive technique . . . and it means facing a challenge to their universality. It also means taking the risk of being w rong. (2 9 7 )

Inevitably the critic will be wrong on occasion. As Brydon and Said have noted, not only can we never enter “another cultural system with the intimacy through which we experience our own” (Brydon, “Myths” 10), but, in literary criticism as in anthropology, the Western commentator must not forget that “there is no vantage outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, . . . a vantage that might allow one the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, and interpreting free of the encumbring interests, emotions, and engagements” of the real-world power relations that locate and contextualize the observer (Said, “Representing” 216). In a cross-cultural analysis such as this one, the practical difficulties for the critic who intends to back up claims of satiric reduction using local cultural contexts are obvious: no one person can be “inside” the various cultural traditions on which the texts draw. Flowever, the emphasis of postcolonial theorists on syncretism and hybridity suggests that while Western models for identifying and defining satire should not be imperialistically imposed on postcolonial texts, neither should authorizing “local” traditions always be required. In the rather extreme example of The Interpreters, for instance, it would be simplistic to

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insist on Yoruba models for verification given the text’s authorship by a Western-educated intellectual familiar with and influenced not only by his Yoruba cultural roots but also by English literature and its traditions of satiric representation. Similar arguments could be made regarding a number of postcolonial satirists, many of whom have lived in England or the United States: Naipaul, Rushdie, Achebe, Armah, Richler, and Frame, for instance. Clearly the critic on the lookout for satire, particularly as practiced by what Biodun Jeyifo calls “interstitial or liminal” writers (53), needs to strike a balance. Her critical activity needs to negotiate, one case at a time, some sort of compromise between utilizing Euro-American critical models and allowing their displacement or modification by findings derived from a project of “literary anthropology.” Such a project might, for instance, consider calypso’s association with “protest, complaint, satire and wisdom” (Rohlehr, Introduction 20), or the role of trickster figures such as the Caribbean Annancy or the Yoruba Esu-Elegbara (Euba 1-44) and Signifying Monkey (Gates, “Blackness”) for their alliance with the satiric spirit. The relevance of these investigations would be measured by their apparent applicability to particular satiric texts and authors. And while writing from settler cultures might appear to be exempt from such ethnographic research, the critic should not discount the impact of aboriginal cultures. Atwood (103) and Frye (Bush 233) have shown their influence on white Canadian writing, and any examination of the satiric mode in Robert Kroetsch’s novels, for instance, would do well to consider its debt to Native North American tricksters.9 The precise nature of satire’s historicality and referentiality has been contested by a number of critics, and their debates raise questions of vital importance to the study of postcolonial satiric fictions. The most extreme historical requirement is posited by Edward Rosenheim in his definition of satire as “an attack by means o f a manifest fiction upon discernible historic particulars” (323). For Rosenheim, The ‘dupes’ or victims of punitive satire are not mere fictions. They, or the objects which they represent, must be, or have been, plainly existent in the w orld of reality; they must, th at is, possess genuine historic identity. The reader must be capable of pointing to the world of reality, past or present, and identifying the individual or group, institution, custom , belief, or idea which is under attack by the s a tirist. . . And, indeed, when— as I have suggested sometimes happens— the historical identity of a satiric victim pales or disappears with time, the satiric quality of the w ork diminishes acco rd ingly and its continued survival com es to depend upon facts, whether accidental or artistic, which are extrinsic to its original satiric character. ( 318)

Several critics have challenged these rigorous standards for admission to the club of satire. Jae Num Lee finds the definition “too exclusive” because

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its requirement of fictionality bars polemics and diatribes, and because satires on general topics such as greed and lust will fail to meet the criterion of discernible historic particulars (5). Patricia Meyer Spacks and Gerard O ’Connor also find Rosenheim’s definition limiting (Spacks 363; O ’Connor 9); for O’Connor neither Rosenheim’s historical vision nor a contrary view of satire’s objects of attack as “annually replaceable” and therefore universal is sufficiently inclusive. Some satiric representations are extremely particular in their referentiality, he says, while others are much more general. Rosenheim’s mistake is not, according to O’Connor, in seeking a historical victim, but “in insisting on the absolute necessity of discovering that victim” (9-10). However, he adds, such discovery may be part of the responsible critic’s job “when an integral part of the meaning of that work of art is the historical identity of a particular satiric victim.” Because satire is the most topical and historically immediate of genres, it requires “a unique critical approach, one that combines an explication of rhetorical techniques with, very often, an exposition of historical information” (11). On this latter point, a more recent statement by Knight concurs, noting that interpreting satire is problematic “because of the tensions between the self-consciously formal character of its medium and particular reality of its attack. . . . The formal nature of satire abstracts its attack from mere particularity; its historical character undermines the enclosing walls of literary form” (“Satire” 22-23). Rosenheim’s insistence on historicality is attractive to the postcolonial critic. Its exclusion of universals is compatible with critiques by Achebe, Soyinka, and others of universalizing formulations like “human nature” as implicated in Eurocentric ideologies. For Soyinka, the European concept of universal values becomes coercive when applied to African literature, because it is “derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems” (Myth x). Rosenheim’s demands for specificity suit the attribution by critics such as Brydon (“Common” 9) and Mukherjee (“Exclusions” 6-7) of culturally and geographically localized referential contexts and agents to postcolonial literary texts. While postcolonial critics would not deny that greed, for example, is found universally in human societies, to read novels like A Man o f the People or The Suffrage o f Elvira as satires on greed would be to deny the specific historical, social, and cultural contexts and conditions invoked by the texts. Greed is certainly attacked, but not greed in general—rather the manifestations of greed as, respectively, neocolonial exploitation in a postindependence African state, and subversion of democratic order in the politically transitional society of Trinidad in 1950. But while Rosenheim’s definition may be productive for these reasons, O ’Connor is correct to fault his stringent demands of identifiability. An extension of Rosenheim’s remarks concerning the diminishment of satire over time into the realm of space wrould imply that the further removed a reader is from the geographic and cultural contexts of a work’s referents, the less access he will have to those referents

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and therefore the less likelihood of identifying them. The work’s status as a satiric fiction would become, under Rosenheim’s criteria, a function of an individual reader’s knowledge. And while readers are free to think what they like of any given text, the critic needs some parameters. If we follow Rosenheim’s lead, the diverse international audience of postcolonial texts would destabilize and atomize the critic’s project of definition into impossibility. Rosenheim’s position also provides little guidance on dealing with fictional composites: victims or targets whose historical referents are multiplicitous, or which combine particulars with generals. If the advocates of Nigerian nationalism are merged into the satiric fictional figure of Benjamin Benjamin in T. M. Aluko’s One Man, One M atchet, can this character be satisfactorily attached to a historical particular? If Frame’s targets in Faces in the Water are only slightly fictionalized individuals who mistreated the author in psychiatric institutions, is that autobiographical novel therefore more acceptable as satire than The Carpathians, whose targets cannot be described any more specifically than as contemporary smalltown New Zealanders? And what do we make of the invented Caribbean islands where Austin Clarke’s The Prime Minister and Naipaul’s “A Flag on the Island” take place? A flexible approach is required, one that follows Sheldon Sacks’s observation that a fictional creation cannot be satirized unless connected to an external referent (330-32) but that leaves reasonably generous boundaries around the field of historical particularity. A certain degree of such particularity is nonetheless achieved by the location of most postcolonial texts in specific geographical, historical, social, and cultural milieus constructed as local and therefore different from other places. Naipaul’s Trinidad is a particular historical location; Timothy Mo’s setting for Sour Sweet is not just London, but London in the 1960s as experienced by Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong. Real places and events transformed by fantasy, like Rushdie’s India during the State of Emergency, can still retain a strong sense of referential specificity, even if his “Sanjay Gandhi” and “Indira Gandhi” have only partial correspondences to the historical figures. These qualities of postcolonial texts, together with a postcolonial critical practice that foregrounds them, accommodate a reading for satire that insists on finding and explicating a measure of historical referentiality, but keeps a broad perspective on the various means and degrees of particularity by which targeted referents become represented as fictional satiric victims. As Dustin Griffin writes in a study wary of all previous certitudes about satire, “satires vary, in the degree and kind of referentiality, far more than the competing theories acknowledge” (120). Their topicality, he adds, is highly variable, and their targets vary from particular people to classes of people, from specific political issues such as “English colonial policy toward Ireland in the eighteenth century” to general problems such as “corruption” (121).

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Modifying and adapting Rosenheim in this way provides one component of a working definition. Some further defining parameters for the separation of satiric from non-satiric novels are necessary as a supplement to the broad features of oppositionality and referentiality. Kernan says that the two “poles” of satire—the two principles around which most definitions revolve—are wit and morality (Plot 8). Spacks traces a primary shift in satire theories from the Restoration to the twentieth century along the wit-morality pairing. For Dryden and Pope, she notes, satire combines wit and a moral purpose; for Frye, the ingredients of satire are wit and an object of attack, but while a moral norm or standard is required as the basis from which an attack can be launched, a moral purpose in not necessary (Spacks 360-62). For Frye, “wit” is a general term allied with “fantasy,” as Kernan points out (Plot 13). Rosenheim’s definition substitutes “manifest fiction” for Frye’s “fantasy,” but what all three terms suggest in their broadest senses is an application of the transforming imagination to the materials of experience. Literary satire is not just reporting or direct denunciation. In a sense all three concepts, Dryden’s “wit,” Frye’s “fantasy” and Rosenheim’s “fiction,” suggest ways of playing with reality, of doing something distinctly and boldly other than direct representation. George Test’s parameters for identifying satire include “play” as a key ingredient. For Test, the four basic elements of satire are attack or aggression, play, judgment, and laughter or humor (Satire x). He resists a “unitary theory” (x) because of satire’s variousness, and within a general concept of satire as a “housebroken, cowed, or restrained aggression” (4), he outlines the essential contribution of each element. Satire’s “aggression” he sees as “symbolic,” diverted away from its motivating objects in the world of experience towards the fictional characters and actions that “come to stand for what the satirist is attacking” (16). In a public lecture in Toronto in 1992, Soyinka presumed a similar concept of satire. Claiming that the last thirty years of history show that Africa is “open for satire,” he said: “What can you do with someone like Nkrumah in Ghana? You can’t blow him up, so you have satire” (“Take”). “Play” is employed by Test as a general term subsuming such specific playful indirections as allegory, fantasy, imagery, wordplay, fictionality, and caricature. Play is what makes aggression palatable to others (1 9 -2 3 ).10 “Judgment,” Test says, allies the other elements with an evaluation whose “‘truth’ may be not only moral but also ethical, political, aesthetic, common sense, or shared prejudices” (29). However, “The trenchant manner in which satirists often advance their judgments . . . tends to impart to the judgments a moral quality even when the judgments are idiosyncratic” (29). These three components of satire— aggression, play, and judgment— together with a broadly constituted version of Rosenheim’s referentiality requirement, would seem to provide a set of provisional guidelines for identifying satiric novels. Test’s fourth element, “humor” or “laughter,” is more problematic, and may in fact lead to a critical dead-end.

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There are many useful theories of humor and laughter. Bakhtin’s “carnival laughter” is a quasi-sociological metaphor, and while it is associated with Menippean satire, it is at odds with what Bakhtin calls “negative” satire (R abelais 11-12). Ultimately it is more a function of folk-culture ritual and celebration whose spirit may be expressed in texts than a phenomenon generated or provoked by texts, satiric or otherwise.11 Henri Bergson’s influential theory proposes that laughter results from the perception of mechanical encrustation upon an organic entity: man as machine (Worcester 34). And for Baudelaire, as Bentley explains, laughter is “atavistic” and nasty, “a more genteel manifestation of the growl or snarl” which is “frequently a manifestation of the will to power” and associated with feelings of superiority (“Satire” 400-01). But despite the obvious associations with the satiric spirit that these and other definitions suggest, it is virtually impossible to identify a literary text, whether satiric or simply comic, as containing humor or stimulative of laughter. R. B. Gill points to a wealth of sociological and anthropological research that supports a nonuniversalizing conception of humor and laughter as contingent on social contexts and variable along cultural and gender lines (20). Test himself acknowledges this, asserting that “laughter is determined not only by society but is more narrowly defined by social class, influence of parents, siblings and peers, educational background, ethnic or racial roots, and by community and geographical region.” A “person’s sense of humor,” he adds, “is as unique as his or her fingerprints” (Satire 25). Test’s observation, combined with his acknowledgement that satire is often misunderstood because some members of its audience fail to “get” it (11), would seem to undermine his claim that “the presence of laughter-inducing devices and techniques is virtually a certainty in satire” (26). Most of the devices and techniques he has in mind—ridicule, anticlimax, parody, travesty—can be subsumed under the notion of “play” that his list of elements already contains. The subjectivity of laughter perhaps explains why many definitions such as Rosenheim’s and Feinberg’s (“a playfully critical distortion of the familiar” [19]) use criteria of fictionality and play but avoid humor and laughter. Postcolonial literature’s culturally diverse audience and tradition of contradictory readings—of what is funny to one discursive community being often insulting to another—would seem to require the omission of humor or laughter as identifiable or measurable components of satire. In addition, satire’s see-sawing between contempt towards its objects and a ridiculing amusement is too precarious to permit the inclusion of humor as a necessary ingredient. Using the insights of Test, Rosenheim, and others selectively, this study’s reading for satire will therefore assume its four constituent elements to be aggressive opposition, referentiality, play, and judgment. Satiric writing, let us say, harnesses aggression, targeting one or more victims with some degree of historical specificity by playful indirec-

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tion, implying judgment of the target(s) which a given reader may or may not be predisposed or convinced by the attack to share.

If satire’s motivation and subject matter dwell firmly but oppressively in the external world, what sort of impact does the satiric text aspire to in its material, worldly existence? In the discourse of satire theory, there is little agreement on satire’s purposes, although most critics have something to say on the subject. Robert Elliott’s groundbreaking study The Pow er o f Satire traces satire’s social origins back to ancient rituals, curses, and “primitive” beliefs in the power of the word: “The principal belief . . . is that satire kills (or at least causes death), that magical power inheres in the denunciatory and derisive words of a poet whose function is to blame as well as to praise” (47). Later on, as such beliefs die, satire becomes “free to develop in the ways appropriate to art” (98) but remains an object of hatred, fear, and censorship, as if more rational times were still unable to thoroughly purge it of its former status as a real, rather than surrogate, weapon. But its domestication into art had, by the nineteenth century, tamed satire’s once terrifying status as a tool of social control and moral reform. For Elliott, satire’s power is now largely gone (257-70). Satire’s textuality provokes many critics to see it as powerless, whatever its intentions may be. Feinberg says, “Satire offers the reader the pleasures of superiority and safe release of aggression” (5); he adds that if any social changes follow from a satire, this is because the satirist has expressed commonly held attitudes and is a symptom, not a cause, of something larger (257). Bentley concludes from satire’s procedural similarities to sadism that it has “questionable moral validity”; it may be “pure sadistic aggression” and “violence” as a “means to personal satisfaction” (“Satire” 388). Philip Pinkus asserts that, contrary to many critics’ assertions, satire does not even on the level of its own textual representations vanquish the evil it targets (31); indeed, even though the satirist’s act of “rebellion” is done self-consciously in the role of “fool” (since he knows his attack will not beat the enemy), he rebels anyway because his act “symbolizes the struggle that makes life possible[,] . . . the impulse of life determined to overcome its chains” (48-49). Richard Morton uses his opinion that satire does not change the world, since its age-old targets continue to exist, as reason to discount moral reform as its aim (1-2). However, his argument spuriously conflates achievement with intention; while measuring a satire’s actual impact on worldly affairs or human behavior is impossible, theorizing about the motives and goals of the satirist can be a separate, useful project. Some of the more pessimistic critical positions on satire s hope or achievement of betterment resonate with critiques of postcolonialism as an interpretive rubric. Theorists who emphasize satire’s “skeptical, despairing” ideology (Seidel, “Crisis” 167), its origins in disillusionment, ennui, and exhaustion (Clark 105-15), and its thematic wallowing in “the in-

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escapable burden of the present” (Griffin 64) see satire’s attack on the oppressive and the retrograde as always already an admission of defeat. As such, it acknowledges the continuing power of the targeted condition. Similarly, critics of postcolonialism often argue that its center/margin model “tends to reproduce the very same binary oppositions between ‘Europe’ and its ‘Others’ that it actually seeks to overcome” (Schulze-Engler 322)— that a fixation on resisting past and present oppressors reinscribes and reinforces (often from a Western critical location) the dominance and influence of imperial power structures even as it opposes them.12 Given these contiguous skepticisms about the oppositional potential of satire and postcolonialism, it is not surprising that the only major satire theorist to even mention postcolonial work does not see much achievement either. Snyder sees satire as “never breaking out even at its most raging into the political realm of definitive outcome. . . . All it can win . . . is its point” (19). Because the satiric stance is one of defeat and despair, not superiority (99), he says, this irony of satiric irony . . . is grotesquely evident in the satiric traditions, both literary and oral, of the oppressed. Irish satirists from Swift to Shaw and Joyce in the very process of getting even with the British both reveal and m aintain their humiliating situation of powerlessness. Similarly, A m erican blacks ‘puttin’ on ole m assa’ display and in displaying underwrite the m aster’s continuing pow er over them. ( 9 6 ) 13

Among critics who see satire as at least hopeful of influence, Hutcheon says satire is “ameliorative in its intention” (Theory 16), while for James Sutherland, satire as a department of rhetoric aims to influence the reader’s attitudes and actions (5). Frye sees satire’s goal as “breaking up the lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstitious terrors, crank theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fashions, and all other things that impede the free movement (not necessarily, of course, the progress) of society” (Anatomy 233). Beyond those relatively modest goals, Frye gives a special potential power to contemporary satire: “In an age such as ours, when the urgency of radical change is a main pre-occupation, the innate nihilism of satire, reactionary and wrong-headed as it often is, can be put to a revolutionary use” (“Nature” 88). A very optimistic reading of satire’s aspirations and impact is put forward by Edward and Lillian Bloom, who see it as “unabashedly didactic and seriously committed to a hope in its own power to effect change.” They admit that any “theory of satire as an efficient cause of sociomoral reparation is easier to assert than to prove” but suggest that “a gradual moral reawakening” can result, “a reaffirmation of positive social and individual values.” Satire aims not to reform targeted individuals, they write, but to warn others in the manner of “a sea gull impaled on a pier to warn off other gulls.” Its moral vision is therefore oriented to the future rather than the past (16-17).

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Among practitioners of satiric representation we can expect that there will be as many constructions of personal aims and worldly aspirations as there are individual writers—perhaps even more, since authors (like critics) do not always speak consistently on such topics. As we shall see in greater detail in the following chapters, the three authors chosen for primary analysis here exhibit a range of views. Naipaul varies between hinting that “irony and satire . . . might help” (Middle 68-69) with the much-needed reform of West Indian society and denying that he is a satirist because satire is optimistic and “one simply does not indulge in satire while one is awaiting death” (quoted in Ramraj, “All-Embracing” 126). Achebe, on the other hand, rarely discusses his work as satire, but as a novelist who sees himself as a “teacher” (H opes 27-31) he writes because “I have a deepseated need to alter things” (57). In one interview Achebe expresses his continued hope despite the depressing postindependence realities depicted at the end of A Man o f the P eople; in doing so he repeats NaipauPs figure from a different angle: “If you were convinced that it was absolutely hopeless, then you would just drink and wait for your death. But the fact that you are talking about it implies some optimism that somebody may listen, that there is still a possibility for change, so it is not entirely pessimistic” (Emenyonu 25). Rushdie, who has seen first-hand the kind of worldly impact satiric writing can have, argued before and after the fatw a that writing should refuse “quietism” and make “as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible” in order to multiply and contest the totalizing representations of the world provided by politicians and authoritarian powers (Imaginary 99; cf. 415-29). If none of these writers is so reckless as to claim an actual (rather than hoped-for) effect on the world, each is very conscious of his work as engaged with that world— drawing on it and offering something beneficial back. Homi Bhabha’s theories of colonial resistance can help extend the general debate about satire’s worldly goals into the realm of postcolonial relations. In an influential series of articles published in the mid-1980s—including “The Other Question . . . , ” “Of Mimicry and M an,” “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders”— Bhabha shows the ways in which colonialist authority and discourse become ambivalent. Focusing on colonies where dark-skinned populations were regarded as innately inferior and in need of what J. S. Mill called a civilizing “despotism” (quoted in Bhabha, “Sly” 75), Bhabha articulates paradigms of power that destabilize the absolutist binaries of self and other, authority and subservience. He locates disruptions of pure, self-nominated authority variously: in the mimicry and hybridity of colonized peoples (“Mimicry”; “Signs” ); in the emergence of stereotyping colonialist discourses and reinforcing behavior by natives (“Other”); and in colonial authority’s abandonment of a “civil” or democratic concept of governance in the face of its paranoid projection of hate and aggression onto the native, which forces authority into an ambivalent and contradictory role as, in Thomas Macaulay’s words, “the father and

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the oppressor of the people; . . . just and unjust, moderate and rapacious” (quoted in Bhabha, “Sly” 74). Bhabha’s “ambivalence” has two main locations: it is an inherent, self-undermining feature of colonial discourse itself, and it is a function of the agency of the colonized subject seen as a site of resistance (see Sharpe 144-45).14 Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry and hybridity as a disruptive challenge to authority is relevant to a discussion of satire. Mimicry introduces a tension between sameness and difference that Bhabha sees as an “ironic compromise”: the mimicking, hybrid native appears to the colonialist as “alm ost the same, hut not q u it e ” and becomes “at once resemblance and menace,” challenging the colonialist’s status as observer—he is now observed— as well as the authenticity and epistemological integrity of his identity and of the Western institutions he represents. With its ironic undercutting of similarity through visible difference, native mimicry represents a “comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimetic literary effects” (“Mimicry” 126-27). It is “at once a mode of appropriation and of resistance,” a form of “camouflage” that subverts colonialist authority by dismantling its self-privileging binaries (“Signs” 181). Bhabha’s theory disturbs and complicates Albert Memmi’s more intuitive model of colonial mimicry as a native endorsement of the colonizer’s superiority and power (Memmi 119-24). Bhabha shows how colonial power relations inevitably generate resistance and inhibiting ambivalence as by-products of their discursive and administrative structures of control. The concept of satiric multidirectionality that I have forwarded performs a parallel process. Many postcolonial satiric representations appear to direct their aggressively playful judgments primarily towards elements in contemporary postcolonial societies. Their negative evaluations and objectifying, detached gaze produce perspectives that often resemble colonialist discourse’s condescending characterizations of “primitive” or “backward” people, and many satiric texts are denounced on this basis. But because these satires usually focus on people, practices, and institutions allied with sites of political power and moral influence in postcolonial societies— electioneering candidates in Trinidad, senior politicians in Africa and Pakistan—their attacks demand contextualizing investigations beyond these primary or surface targets. Unlike the lowly constructs of colonialist contempt, the objects of satiric attack are rarely if ever perceived as fallings-off from their predecessors in the realm of authority— from a “golden age” of order and good governance in the colonial past. Moreover, although mimicry of European values and legacies is often in the bull’s-eye, so to speak, of the satirist’s aim— from Ganesh’s bookish anglophilia and individualism in The Mystic Masseur to Koomson’s exploitive materialism and betrayal of community in The Beautyful Ones—the satirist is denouncing or ridiculing not only the mimic man’s imperfect or too-zealous achievement of his colonialist models, but also the

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choice of models in the first place. The availability and apparent appeal of such political-ethical models—which include authoritarian structures of government, greed, corruption, “divide-and-conquer” sectarianism, abuse of natural resources, and disrespect for common people’s needs—are obviously not solely attributable to lessons learned or structures inherited from Empire. But there are important connections and resemblances— “almost the same, but not quite”— to the structures and examples of colonialist authority, as well as to contemporary patterns of neoimperial domination and alliance. These resemblances do implicate the imperial and neoimperial West. Multidirectional satiric resistance is a discursive maneuver that produces a postcolonial corollary to the destabilizing ambivalence Bhabha sees in colonial relations. It breaks down us/them binaries by implying, beyond the satirist’s frustrated judgment that “We’re screwing up,” an equally bitter “in a world you've given us.” Whatever its primary thrust seems to be, the satiric text is a multipronged tool of resistance, and as Stephen Slemon advocates, a theory of literary resistance m ust recognize the inescapable partiality, the incompleteness, the untranscendable am biguity of literary or indeed any con tra/d ictory or con testatory act which employs a First-W orld medium for the figuration of Third-W orld resistance, and which predicates a semiotics of refusal on a gestural mechanism whose first act must always be an acknow ledgem ent and a recognition of the reach of colonialist power. . . . Literary resistance is necessarily in a place of ambivalence: between systems, between discursive w orlds, implicit and com plicit in both of them. (“U nsettling” 3 7 )

For these reasons, Said’s view of Naipaul as a “witness for the Western prosecution” is too limited. Perhaps Naipaul’s work has encouraged particular readers to scoff at postcolonial debasement and satisfy their own sense of racial or cultural or moral superiority. But that is not all his satires can do or d o do. The responsible critical practice that I am advocating looks inside and outside the satiric text to forward a contextualized, historicized reading that balances the text’s primary satiric energy and directionality with other connections consistent with that bearing, which emerge as a function of the primary target’s hybridity and the text’s postcolonial axes of ambivalent resistance. To articulate the text’s multidirectional thrusts is to spread its accusations and humiliations, its blame and its shame, throughout an international community encompassing as many subgroups as the text’s satiric trajectory can legitimately support. And while this cross-cultural percolation of rhetorical energy may seem so broadly damning as to be divisive— and when perceived partially and with partiality it can be—when fully comprehended it can be constructive. In positing shared involvement, recognition, and responsibility across the divides of geography, history, culture, race, wealth, and power that structure our world, the multidirec-

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tional orientation of postcolonial satire looks for mutual, cooperative admissions that things could be better than they are and mutual commitments to work towards change. By emphasizing the negative fallout of hybridity, syncretism, and cross-cultural influence, it does not attack these realities per se in favor of an uncontaminated precolonial state. The colonial encounter cannot be reversed, and satire, for all its implicit idealism, is grounded in the possible. If particular instances of hybridity as a legacy of Empire have led to unjust or absurd conditions, then the relations of power and influence that helped produce them need to be addressed in order that new structures, institutions, and models can be developed to support more positive versions of the postcolonial world’s irreversible cultural syncretism. What Said objects to becomes less a condition of the text itself and more a matter of the partial or even biased reading—a reading which ignores or cannot see broader connections—that most readers can be presumed to draw from a satiric text as a function of their own cultural grounding, and of the gaps between their reading practice and the intentions of the text. It is also a function of what satiric texts by design encourage us to know and not know, to favor and to disparage. Issues of intentionality have hovered on the fringes of this discussion, and, as Booth notes, they are hard to avoid in interpreting irony and satire (Rhetoric 120-21). Often extratextual information such as an author’s essays or statements in interviews can help reveal sociopolitical beliefs or aesthetic aims that support the identification and interpretation of satiric writing. But such information must be used with caution; as Ashcroft has shown, the construction of meaning in the postcolonial text—a “social accomplishment” involving the interplay of writer, reader, and language functions in the textual “event” (“Constitutive” 58)— implies that the reader “responds to the ‘intentionality’ of the work itself, quite apart from any imputation of an author” (69). Because of the writer’s and reader’s potentially great “absence” or cultural distance from each other, “the writer and reader have access to each other only through the mutual construction of the text within certain linguistic and generic parameters. . . . Writing does not merely inscribe the spoken message or represent the message event, it becom es the new event” (60-61). For Ashcroft, therefore, “interpretation is never univocal, but the reader is subject to the situation, to the rules of discourse, and to the directing other, as the author is subject to them” (69). Shortly after Shame was published, Rushdie acknowledged that in his representations of Pakistan he wanted to “pretend that we did have power over our lives.” As a result, “the book does not make much of the fact that Pakistani politics are badly distorted by outside influence.” Nevertheless, he adds, one should rem ember th at the likes of General Zia rule by permission of the W estern alliance. . . . And it seems to me that readers in the West who

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read this book should think about the idea that the freedoms which are so prized in the W est are bought at the price of other peoples’ freedoms. . . . If a book like Sham e can do something to convince even eight or nine people that they should attem pt to protest against governm ents which do this in their name . . . then the book will have served some function. ( “M idn ig h t’s ” 16)

In the absence of representations in the text of the Western alliance, one cannot help but wonder if even this modest goal will be achieved. The rather optimistic view of multidirectional satire’s worldly potential that I (and Rushdie) have proposed relies on contextualizing knowledge that will not accompany most individual readings of satiric texts. These readings will be, in general, widely differentiated message “events” across gaps of cultural distance that the texts themselves may not attempt to bridge. Readings will often be partial, unidirectional, and positioned at a self-reinforcing safe distance free of guilt or implication. Jonathan Swift’s insight that satire is “a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” (358) does not support the self-recognition that satiric writing must prompt in order to achieve any constructive social influence. But if “the critic is responsible to a degree for articulating those voices dominated, displaced, or silenced by the textuality of texts” (Said, World 53), and if postcolonial texts cry out for a mode of reading “attentive to the shifting meaning and ideological effectivity of a text as it circulates between Western metropole and postcolonial periphery” (Mohan 29), then perhaps a critical practice that tries to compensate for satire’s willful blindnesses by bridging gaps and reading broader frames of reference can, in its limited sphere, encourage a wider attachment to the material objects of satire’s judgment.

C H A P T ER T W O

“The Old Enemy. And Also the New” V. S. NaipauPs Multidirectional Satire

With the possible exception of Wole Soyinka, V. S. Naipaul is the postcolonial writer whose work is most often discussed under the variable rubrics of “satire” and “the satiric.” And while he may also be the author most prone to employing these terms himself, his uses of them reveal a profound ambivalence towards the idea of “satire.” In his travel book on the Caribbean, The Middle Passage (1962), Naipaul criticizes other West Indian writers for reflecting and pandering to “the prejudices of their race or colour groups”; West Indian people need writers to tell them who they are, he says, yet they are failed by most of their authors: “The insecure wish to be heroically portrayed. Irony and satire, which might help more, are not acceptable; and no writer wants to let down his group” (68-69). Satire in this statement is given the stature of the noble undertaking, the honest product of a detached, clear-sighted vision that can assist with the important communal project of self-discovery. There is, perhaps, a little self-aggrandizement here: irony and satire had been dominant modes in Naipaul’s own fiction to this point. Similarly, a few years later, even as his own work is increasingly eschewing satiric modes, Naipaul says, “True satire grows out of the largest vision[,] . . . that ‘all-embracing Christlike’ vision which even a writer like Arnold Bennett thought worthy of achieving.” But as a caveat to such privileged positioning, Naipaul goes on in the same essay to lament satire’s decline: “Today sights are set lower; satire is compounded of anger and fear, which exalt what they seek to diminish” (“Documentary” 108). As such, the satiric impulse gets lumped in with base human emotions, and with the fad for documentary violence in art which Naipaul criticizes as “a counter of story-telling” and “a denial of art” (107). If this opinion sounds more like a criticism of satiric writing as practiced by others than a rejection of satire per se, it is nevertheless in keeping with comments scattered throughout Naipaul’s work in which he refuses to endorse “satire” as either an approved mode of writing or an appropriate

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label for his own work. Too self-contradictory and too minimal to amount to a fully articulated position, these statements nonetheless provide some interesting starting points for a discussion of NaipauPs satiric writing. In an interview with Derek Walcott in 1965, Naipaul flatly rejects the “satirist” label, saying, “I am not a satirist. Satire comes of out a tremendous optimism. One simply does not indulge in satire while one is awaiting death. Satire is a type of anger. Irony and comedy, I think, come out of a sense of acceptance” (quoted in Ramraj, “All-Embracing” 126). Elsewhere he says, “true satire is impossible when values have been rejected” (quoted in Nightingale 25). He criticizes Joseph Conrad’s “satirical vision,” which he says turns the fictional world of works like The Secret Agent into one of abstractions and caricatures, of easy simplifications and assimilations (Return 226, 218-19). Of his father’s story “The Adventures of Gurudeva,” Naipaul notes that the narrative deteriorates towards the end, where its irony “turns to broad satire, and the satire defeats itself” (“Foreword” 21). Naipaul’s own earliest fiction—which includes the farcical satire of The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage o f Elvira (1958) as well as the nostalgic but critical portraits of Miguel Street (1959)— he has pejoratively called “apprenticeship” works, “frivolous” books that later embarrassed him (quoted in Hassan 64; Ramraj, “All-Embracing” 134; Hamilton 42). In his autobiographical novel The Enigma o f Arrival (1987), Naipaul writes of the difficulties he faced writing The M iddle Passage; unable to resolve certain problems, he says, “I took refuge in humor—comedy, funniness, the satirical reflex, in writing as in life so often a covering up for confusion” (153). And The Mimic Men's Ralph Singh, whose persona and opinions seem to resemble those of Naipaul himself (L. White 158), says at one point, “The colonial politician is an easy object of satire. I wish to avoid satire” (Mimic 250). A cluster of associations around the idea of satire emerges from this dispersed commentary: satire becomes something simple, partial, lightweight, emotional—the product of an insufficient comprehension of experience and a lack of intellectual rigor. It ranks lower than irony, although, like many of his critics, Naipaul is reluctant to define or precisely distinguish between such interrelated terms as irony, satire, comedy, and “funniness.” Significantly, Ralph Singh’s rejection of satire comes in a novel that treats a similar subject to the earlier Mystic Masseur and Suffrage o f Elvira— the perceived deficiencies of colonial politics— but in a self-consciously intellectualized, expository narrative that does indeed avoid satire. Singh’s filtering, analytical consciousness tends to obscure rather than illuminate the characters and events of the story: the reader’s attention is divided between watching the story through Singh’s eyes and watching Singh himself in the process of narrating, dissecting, and assessing. Bruce King comments on the novel’s “baroque” and “fugal” structure, which makes meanings and “positions” hard to identify (V. S. 67). John Wain notes, with a memorable image, that the novel’s “tendency to summarize, to see

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everything unremittingly through the narrator’s memory . . . makes all the characters seem as if they had been put through some refrigerating process” (quoted in Hassan 259). This feature is most pronounced in the third section, where Singh’s account of his political rise and fall is vague and generalized—heavy on explanation and light on description, keeping specific characters and events out of focus. Satire is prevented in such a heavily mediated narrative. The Mimic Men lacks the descriptive and narratorial clarity, the preference for showing over telling, that in the earlier novels enables targets of satiric attack to be clearly seen and exposed. While some critics do find “satire” a useful label for aspects of the novel (e.g., Nightingale 108), most do not. There is a general critical agreement—which I share—that despite its tone of disparagement and themes of political failure and irresolution, The Mimic Men cannot be as satisfactorily accounted for by models of satire as Naipaul’s earlier fictions. The Mimic Men is a transitional work for Naipaul, looking ahead to his darker, more overtly intellectualized later fictions. The comic impulse dwindles away, replaced by what many critics see as a more trenchant political engagement with issues of political instability and personal identity in the Third World. Naipaul becomes more polemical and less playful in The Mimic Men and subsequent works; the absence of this element of play— manifest as comedy, farce, and caricature in the early works— makes the later novels less satiric.1 Apart from play, however, his later fiction retains and even augments the other defining components of satiric writing with which he began. Oppositionality, aggression, and judgment become the key features of a more despairing vision that never seems far from denunciation and dismissal. Referentiality becomes more specific; in The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage o f Elvira historical events and locations are populated by invented characters, whereas in Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979) events, places, and characters have real-world referents documented by Naipaul in earlier nonfiction. But when what looks like a satiric portrait creeps in— for instance the Big Man in A Bend in the River— it is held at arm’s length and kept from clear visibility by the narrator’s controlling and assessing consciousness. Naipaul’s increasing interest in nonfictional travel and historical writing, with a blend of narrative representation and analytical abstraction, heavily influences his fiction from the mid-1960s onwards. Naipaul has accounted for the change in his work in an interview: “In writing my first four or five books . . . I was simply recording my reactions to the world; I hadn’t come to any conclusion about it. . . . But since then, through my writing, through the effort honestly to respond, I . . . have begun to have ideas about the world. I have begun to analyze” (quoted in Hassan 250). In another interview he explains that his fiction has changed “because the world is so complex. As you get older and understand more, you no longer have the flat view of the world— flat and sometimes cruel. As you grow older you understand people a lot more; you have greater

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sympathy with people; you enter im liiem much more” (Shenker 53). Such statements, compatible with Naipaul’s direct comments about satire, dismiss his own early, satiric work as flat, simple, thin on ideas—as something the mature artist should grow out of in order to write from informed positions and attitudes rather than mere observation. Naipaul is perhaps being disingenuous here, denigrating as mere “recording” the high level of invention, craft, and intellect in his early work. And the binary he implies between the flat cruelty of satire and the sympathetic complexity of more analytical fiction is questionable to the point of being paradoxical. For all the two-dimensionality of their characterizations it is Naipaul’s earliest work that is most often described not only as “satiric” but also as “genial” and “sympathetic.” The later work’s nonsatiric oppositionality is much more likely to produce thoroughly unsympathetic characters such as Jane and Ahmed in Guerrillas, or Bobby and Linda in In a Free State, and to move beyond the symbolic violence o f satiric representation into the cruelty and horror of actual violence depicted in a narrative representation. In many ways, the multidirectional possibilities enabled by satiric fictions from and about a syncretistic society like Trinidad make Naipaul’s most satiric works at least as complex and rich as the later novels, which tend to reinforce and illustrate polemical positions that the author has previously articulated in his nonfiction. To stand up for Naipaul’s satiric fiction is to wade against the main currents of Naipaul criticism. His two most satiric works, The Suffrage o f Elvira and the later novella “A Flag on the Island” (1967), have received the least critical praise and attention. (“A Flag on the Island” is totally ignored by some book-length studies [e.g., Weiss], and given minimal treatment in others [e.g., Nightingale].) Naipaul’s critics, like the author himself, are inclined to relegate “satire” to second-rate status, as an inferior fictional mode. George Lamming, one of the first West Indians to take Naipaul to task, dismisses his early work as “castrated satire” that amounts to “nothing more than a refuge. And it is too small a refuge for a writer who wishes to be taken seriously” (225). John Thieme is anxious to insist that while The Mystic Masseur is a “satirical exposure of the society” (Web 140), it is “far more than just a satirical portrait” (46). Peggy Nightingale praises A H ouse fo r Mr Biswas (1961) for “moving out of the restrictions of satire” (55), and Robert Morris stresses the importance of not reading that novel as “little more than a sympathetic satire on the underdog” (27). On the other hand, Kenneth Ramchand exhibits the same hostility to satire in claiming that Biswas's major flaw is its “over-indulgence” in satiric “hostility” towards the Tulsis (202); when he compares the early novels of Wilson Harris to those of Naipaul, he writes in terms that make clear which approach to West Indian material he prefers: So the ground of loss or deprivation with which m ost West Indian writers and historians engage is not for H arris simply a ground for protest, re-

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crim ination and satire; it is visualized through the agents in his works as an am bivalent condition of helplessness and self-discovery, the starting point for new social structures. ( 12; emphasis added)

Like Naipaul, his critics are inclined to construct his career as an emergence out of the limitations of satire into more mature and complex artistry. The teleological narrative of authorial growth and maturity is one that many literary critics find irresistible,2 and in NaipauPs case it is reinforced by an increasing seriousness of tone and by his emergence in the West during the 1960s and 1970s as not only a highly regarded novelist but also a documenter of and privileged spokesperson for the Third World. The disrespect for satire shared by Naipaul and many of his critics can be seen, therefore, to have several sources. One is the aforementioned desire to see growth, development, and increasing complexity in an author’s work. A second factor would seem to be a residual generic status presumed for “satire.” The comments by Morris and Thieme quoted above imply that satire is a lesser species of writing; consequently, accounts of the satiric mode must be buttressed by critical articulation of “larger” themes and concerns to reassure readers that the work in question, however obviously a “novel,” is not at risk of degenerating into “just” a satire. This bias unnecessarily turns what should be matters of degree— the extent to which satire is present and influential in the form, style, and themes of a novel— into matters of kind— leading to critical fretting about the point at which a novel “becomes” a mere satire. Works like The Suffrage o f Elvira and “A Flag on the Island,” where satiric modes of representation are central, are given critical short shrift because they come closest to being satires— as if satire has so contaminated them that they are compromised as novels and therefore of diminished literary merit. Such attitudes are not, of course, unique to readings of Naipaul. George Test notes that satire is often critically sidelined because it makes people uncomfortable (Satire 5, 12). As Robert Elliott shows, satire’s historical associations with magic, taboo subjects, base emotions such as anger and revenge, and with revelations of human indignity leading to shame, tend to elicit an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory combination of attraction and repulsion among readers. For Elliott, the satirist as a descendent of the death-dealing curser-magician inspires “ambivalent emotional attitudes”: he “unquestioningly inspires emotions of adulation and respect and awe. But in other, and possibly more characteristic, roles, he becomes the object of hate and fear” (259). Rob Nixon and Dolly Zulakha Hassan have ably documented how the response to Naipaul’s work divides along a geopolitical axis between the disfavor of many critics from the developing world (especially the West Indies) and the adulation of the majority from the West (especially Britain and the United States). For critics in the first group, which includes Lamming, A. C. Derrick, Gordon Rohlehr, Selwyn Cudjoe, and many others, Naipaul’s work is variously labeled Eurocentric,

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racist, contemptuous, and a betrayal (Hassan 57-105). Western critics such as Paul Theroux, Landeg White, and Joseph Epstein are inclined to praise Naipaul for being ideologically neutral, truthful, genial, and courageous. The disagreements over whether to damn Naipaul as an unfair scourge or praise him as a penetrating oracle reproduce positions that have historically been taken towards satire. John Clark (155) and Leonard Feinberg (63) note that many satirists, such as Evelyn Waugh, deny that they write satire, preferring to pose as realists; Patricia Meyer Spacks remarks on the difficulty readers face in distinguishing satire from realism, especially if contextual information is lacking (360). Naipaul—who rejects the satirist label, and whose style is always closer to representational realism than to any of the possible clear departures from it (such as fantasy or magic realism)— is most likely to be commended for the truth of his vision by critics furthest removed from the Third-World contexts of his work. Third-World critics, closer to those contexts and thus presumably more able and inclined to see Naipaul’s representations of their reality as distorted, read him as a powerful and destructive force whose words are capable of great damage. Eric Roach says, “We dare not accept NaipauPs negation . . . We cannot accept satire and disdain and speak sneeringly as Naipaul does of our generations of failure and incompetence. We must talk of hope and seek ways and means of imposing order on the chaos” (quoted in Flassan 261). Such a perspective—exactly the opposite of what Naipaul said in The M iddle Passage “might help” West Indian society— is seen as necessary not only for the reasons of community self-esteem implied by Roach. It is also a corrective if, as Nixon claims, Naipaul’s “almost programmatically negative representation of formerly colonized societies” is a major cause of his high standing in the West; such representation reinforces historical Western imperialist opinions of the Third World’s inherent inferiority (6). The critiques of Naipaul—which have now come both from West Indian nationalists like Derrick and Roach and from US-based critics like Nixon and Edward Said who apply the methods of colonialist discourse criticism—can be seen as contemporary versions of the fear and loathing that historically greeted Elliott’s satirist-magician. Indeed it would be interesting, but beyond the scope of this study, to speculate about whether current critical concerns over issues of fair representation and ideological bias in all forms of writing are rooted in assumptions about the destructive power of the denunciatory word to which Elliott’s anthropology of satire could contribute. Certainly his insights can illuminate the specific subject of critical hostility towards Naipaul. By Elliott’s account, the ancient verbal productions from which satire descends were forms of denunciation, cursing, invective, raillery, and abuse presumed by superstitious peoples to have a mysterious efficacy and power to kill. The directness of this more “primitive” (167) form of satire seems crude compared to the sophisticated forms of indirection developed by

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later “literary” satirists in order to make their work both more pointed and more acceptable to polite society (264). But even as satire ceases to be a direct and dangerous assault and develops the numerous devices of indirection and attenuated textuality that we associate with it today, something of its ancient baggage remains. Elliott says that, although in modern society we do not believe in magic, “we often behave as though we lived in a world pulsating with magic power” (278). He cites Bronislaw Malinkowski’s examples of legal contracts, advertising and propaganda as evidence of a “very real basis to human belief in the mystic and binding power of words” (quoted in Elliott 279). Belief in the power of words combines with the satirist’s murderous ancestry to help account for the history of opposition to satire that Elliott and others have chronicled in Western discourses on literature. And satire’s ancient associations can be seen in the figurative language of violence often used to describe it: terms such as biting, deadly, and annihilating (281). Implicit in many hostile critical accounts of Naipaul’s work is an assumption that his books have destructive efficacy in a world still infused with the imbalances of national power and cultural prestige that obtained during the colonial era. In such a politicized critical climate, disagreements over whether, for instance, the satire in The Mystic Masseur is sympathetic or contemptuous become more than simply aesthetic debates. Previously denied cultural dignity is perceived to be at stake. Naipaul’s portrayals and criticisms of postcolonial societies are interrogated for their participation in the assumptions and rhetoric of imperial and neoimperial discourses; one thing imperial history and contemporary neoimperial politics demonstrate— in the injustices that resulted from the division of “superior” from “inferior” races, or in the current sensitivity to naming that prefers a “developing” to an “underdeveloped” world— is the power of words. Thus Derrick can complain not only of “Naipaul’s lack of sympathy” but also of “the unbalanced, wholly destructive nature of his satire” (195; emphasis added).3 In this context, Naipaul is treated by his more critical critics as a satirist (in Elliott’s anthropological sense) irrespective of whether those same critics would deem any given book by him to be satiric, ironic, comic, or otherwise. His work in general is seen as having a similar power to harm as that of Elliott’s satirist-magician and curser-satirist. In fact, it is paradoxically the very portions of Naipaul’s work which take it furthest away from the indirection of “literary” satire that are perceived to be the most incendiary. His essays and travelogues have always been more controversial than his novels and short stories. The Middle Passage was Naipaul’s first nonfiction book, and, although it contained an aggressive mixture of satiric portraits and direct denunciation, it was statements from the latter category, such as the now infamous “nothing was created in the British West Indies” (27), that became the primary lightning rods for critical protestations. Hassan notes, in her survey of West Indian responses to Naipaul’s books, that it is his “journalistic works on

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which NaipauPs notoriety in the region is primarily based” (177), and also that it was only after The M iddle Passage was published that West Indian critics (other than Lamming) began objecting on ideological grounds to NaipauPs earlier satiric fictions. Nixon’s study focuses exclusively on the nonfiction in its thorough and forceful reading of Naipaui as an intellectually dishonest participant in colonialist discourse. Nixon devotes two full chapters to what he calls “the terms of dismissal”—a grab bag of denigrating words such as “barbarous,” “primitive,” “simple,” and “mimic” that appear regularly in NaipauPs nonfiction, and which cavalierly “homogenize unfamiliar, dissimilar cultures under the rubric of their ‘common differentness’” (110). NaipauPs penchant for the pithy dismissal and the direct denunciation becomes more marked as his output after 1960 increasingly favors nonfiction and works of fiction that incorporate nonfictional narrative styles and content. As he becomes more analytical, his manner of opposition moves closer to Elliott’s “primitive” and more feared satirist, the purveyor of invective and raillery, and away from the indirect, playful mode of the more “literary” satirist. The result is a kind of Elliottin-reverse: as Naipaui writes in a manner less likely to be identified as “satire” and “satiric”— because less comic and less reliant on “literary” traditions of indirection— his writing is more likely to be perceived as destructive and of dangerous worldly influence. NaipauPs reliance in his nonfiction on uncompromising critical statements and unambiguously pejorative satiric digression means that what satire there is in those books becomes subservient. Satiric digressions may playfully illustrate points made by the controlling analytical voice, but because they are contextualized by that voice their multidirectional possibilities are restricted. The telling overshadows the showing. Comparison of two self-contained satiric portraits, one from An Area o f D arkness (1964), NaipauPs first travelogue of India, and the other from The Mystic M asseur, can help illuminate the difference. “Bunty,” formerly Chandrashekhar, is described in An Area o f Darkness as an Indian anachronism: a golf-playing, club-attending mimic of the long-departed British master. More abstracted composite than actual person, he is described as having achieved success and security a’ the expense of authenticity. He blends East and West into an artificial persona comfortable with neither side of his contradictory identity, and he is easily ridiculed but also envied by other Indians (62-63). Bunty is presented over the course of several pages that integrate an illustration of his habitual postures with an evaluative explanation for his existence heavy on dismissive terms: The Indian arm y officer is at a first meeting a com plete English arm y officer. H e even manages to look English; his gait and bearing are English; his mannerism s, his tastes in drink are English; his slang is English. In the Indian setting this Indian English mimicry is like fantasy. It is an undiminishing absurdity; and it is only slowly that one form ulates w hat was

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sensed from the first day: this is a mimicry not of England, a real country, but of the fairytale land of Anglo-India, of clubs and sahibs and syces and bearers. It is as if an entire society has fallen for a casual confidence trick ster. Casual because the trickster has gone away, losing interest in the joke, but leaving the Anglo-Indians flocking to the churches of C alcutta on a Sunday morning to assert the alien faith, more or less abandoned in its country of origin; leaving Freddy crying, ‘Just bung your co at down there, Andy’; leaving the officer exclaim ing, ‘I say, by Jove! I feel rather bushed.’ (61)

In addition to “fantasy,” “absurdity,” and “mimicry,” the description of Bunty is also framed by words like “violates” (64), “schizophrenia” (60), “failure” (65), and the trio of concepts that Naipaul invokes to sum him up: “Withdrawal, denial, confusion of values” (66). The themes that Bunty’s portrait helps raise are repeated, elaborated, and historicized later in the book in statements like these: “To be English in India [during the Raj] was to be larger than life” (211); “This concept of Englishness will survive because it was a product of fantasy, a work of national art; it will outlast England” (212); “the mimicry of the West [is] the Indian self-violation” (226); “to the Indians .. . who now sat in some of the air-conditioned offices, Independence had meant no more than this: the opportunity to withdraw, British-like, from India” (258). The notion of “withdrawal” becomes NaipauPs chief theme in An Area o f Darkness and in his second Indian travelogue, India: A W ounded Civilization (1977). “Withdrawal” stands for a passive denial of intellect and of Western-style progressive action; its roots can be linked to a political history of dependency and Indian philosophical traditions. Bunty as self-deceiving mimic, amusing but pathetic, functions primarily as a linchpin for NaipauPs vision of what is wrong with postindependence India. A comparable portrait is found near the end of The Mystic Masseur. Several newly elected M.L.C.s are invited to a British-style dinner at Government House, and do their best to look the part: The dinner was a treat for the photographers. Ganesh cam e in dhoti and koortah and turban; the member for one of the Port of Spain wards wore a khaki suit and a sun helmet; a third cam e in jodhpurs; a fourth, adhering for the m om ent to his pre-election principles, cam e in short trousers and an open shirt; the blackest M .L .C . w ore a three-piece blue suit, yellow woolen gloves, and a m onocle. Everybody else, am ong the men, looked like penguins, sometimes even down to the black faces. (2 0 1 )

Like Bunty, these men pursue misguided imitations based on superficial aspects of appearance and manner. The theme of inauthenticity is underlined by the following exchange: The G overn or’s lady moved with assurance and determ ination am ong the members and their wives. The m ore disconcerting the man or w om an, the m ore she was interested, the m ore she was charm ing.

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Satire & the Postcolonial Novel ‘Why, M rs Prim rose,’ she said brighdy to the wife of the blackest M .L .C . ‘You look so different tod ay.’ M rs Prim rose, all of her squeezed into a floriferous print frock, ad justed her hat with the floral design. ‘Ah, m a’am. It ain’t the sam e me. The other one, the one you did see at the M oth ers’ Union at Granadina, she at hom e. M aking baby.’ (2 0 2 )

But there are crucial differences between the M.L.C.s and Bunty. Although the dinner guests, apart from Ganesh, are only briefly sketched, they are still seen in action more clearly than Bunty. Pieces of dialogue and activity specific to a moment are used—the dropped monocle, the reactions to unfamiliar food and utensils, the nervous talk about reimbursement for travel expenses. Such details are missing from Bunty’s portrait, which is drawn from general or habitual traits. We see what Bunty tends to do or say or be, but we never actually witness him in action; as a satiric portrait he is less concrete, more distanced than the M.L.C.s. A more important difference, however, is the lack of contextualizing evaluative commentary in the Government House scene. No one is denounced or dismissed here; we are not told these people are ridiculous or absurd, or that dressing in jodhpurs denotes “confusion of values.” Indeed, these characters may be perfect satiric illustrations of Cudjoe’s sociohistorical observation that “intense mimicry occurs during the phase of transformation from colonialism to independence . . . , particularly for the society’s petit-bourgeois elements, who became government leaders” (137-38). But no one tells us this. Our assessment as readers is our own, facilitated by what we are led to observe in the scene and by an array of satiric and comic techniques such as the discordant scene, the empty ritual, labeling of characters (by clothes), animal imagery (“looked like penguins”), self-exposing action revealing a pretense-reality gap (the monocle incident), and self-exposing dialogue (the man in jodhpurs denigrating the waiters’ behavior). On the one hand, the M.L.C.s are revealed as ludicrous mimics of an imperfectly understood elite, but on the other hand their awkwardness encourages sympathy: Ganesh is said to feel “alien and uncomfortable” just “as if he were a boy again, going to the Queen’s Royal College for the first time” (204). This simile takes the narrator out of his mocking observer stance and contextualizes the satirized behavior within the realm of common human experience. It encourages other interpretations of the scene: how, we might ask, could the M.L.C.s behave otherwise if their relation to Government House is that of a child feeling disoriented at a new school? Is there only one target here? Why is Government House so unfamiliar? Who or what is responsible for the enormous gulf between the soon-to-be-outgoing political elite and the future leaders of Trinidad? Is such a gulf healthy? Has the removed, authoritarian, alien world of British colonial rule provided a suitable role model for the transition to democracy? Or is it likely to be detached, self-satisfied, and irrelevant— unwilling in politics as at mealtime to offer concessions or guidance to the habitually dependent

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society it has helped form? In this context, the scene points to the neglect and abandonment that Naipaul describes in The Loss o f El D orado (1969) as Trinidad’s historical fate in the hands of its British rulers (315-16). That might sound like awfully heavy freight for such a breezy scene to carry, but, as I will argue later, considerations of this sort are supported and augmented by other passages in The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage o f Elvira. The line of interpretation suggested by these questions illustrates the multidirectional possibilities enabled by an approach to satiric writing that maximizes narrative-dramatic showing and minimizes analytical-evaluative telling. The former is the mode favored by Naipaul in his early satiric novels and “A Flag on the Island,” but from which he departs in his nonfiction and later novels. He uses the Government House dinner as a comic symbol of a dysfunctional, hybridized society, negotiating a middle way through the sympathy-contempt spectrum that has so polarized the novel’s critics. R. H. Lee notes that the dinner scene contains “doubleedged satire,” which assigns “the right balance of irony to the ignorance of the members, and the absurdity of the colonial dining ritual” (69-70). Similarly, Timothy Weiss argues that the 1950s novels have an indeterminate “double-voicedness” that allows narrative perspectives to range between an insider’s sympathy for “a people caught up in unsettling political and economic changes” and an outsider’s detached satiric judgment of a “social malaise”— a richness Weiss says is missed by critics who “read Naipaul’s works from one side only, not hearing their double-voicedness or appreciating their hybridity” (22-23). The concept of satiric multidirectionality extends Weiss’s “double-voiced” reading of sympathy and critique to track down secondary satiric targets implicated by the fact that sympathy is warranted at all. It looks to those institutions and policies that created and sustained the colonial society and therefore share responsibility for any apparent deficiencies in it. One could argue that An Area o f D arkness also contains multidirectional accusations. Certainly British imperialism is criticized— for dominating India while expressing contempt for it, for leaving a legacy of administrative inefficiency resulting from the institutionalization of English as language of official business—and these critiques help explain the mimic postures of a Bunty. But any multidirectional opportunities are smothered by the book’s accusatory tone and derogatory language. It is clear that whatever historical disadvantages India may have suffered, Naipaul places blame for the failure of the independent nation on certain innate defects in Indian society and the Indian character. Why else would he state that “India will never cease to require the arbitration of a conqueror” (225-26), as if internally generated solutions were out of the question? The book’s polemic frames the satiric portrait of Bunty not as that of an absurd fantasist who may also be an unfortunate victim of a historical imposition, but as an absurd fantasist period.

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The difference between this harsher and narrower satire and the multidirectional accommodations of the early satiric fiction may be partly a function of historical placement. Perhaps Naipaul is simply more impatient with India after 15 years of independence than he is with Trinidad during its transition from colonial to postcolonial status. More likely, however, it is genre, style, and NaipauPs growing belief that he has something to say that are the primary determinants. In fact, playful satiric portraits like Bunty are rare in NaipauPs nonfiction, particularly after the mid-1960s. Increasingly his ideas harden into convictions, his tone becomes that of the serious analyst, and his portraits are drawn with a journalist’s dry neutrality.4 One searches in vain for The Suffrage o f Elvira's lampooning and farce in the later essay, “The Election in Ajmer” (O vercrow ded 98-138), despite the similarities of their subject matter. Michael X, whose self-promoting performance as Black Power leader prompts Naipaul to call him “a caricature” (Return 59), is a figure to be dissected, denounced, and lamented, but not to be sent up or actually portrayed as a caricature. Even NaipauPs ridiculing of intermediate technology in India: A W ounded Civilization, though reminiscent of Swift’s satire of pointless inventions in Gulliver's Travels, is conveyed through unadorned reporting framed by the familiar dismissive terms— “mimicry,” “failure,” “sentimentality,” “nullity,” and “intellectual confusion” (121-24)—which so readily tell the reader what to think that satiric irony and provocation are rendered superfluous. The satiric play of NaipauPs early novels encourages multidirectional readings because, unlike the nonfiction, it does not pre-empt the reader’s function of closing gaps between what is said and what is implied. The early writing is most interesting as satire because it invites multiple interpretations of its satiric trajectory. As a form of critique, satire is primarily concerned with the potentially harmful effects of the conditions it exposes. It is often deliberately less conscientious about elaborating the causes, since that might seem to excuse the targets and diminish the impact of satiric rhetoric. James Sutherland, however, maintains that it is important for the critic to consider causes of satirized behavior when interpreting satiric character portraits (124-25). This activity is particularly important for readers of postcolonial literatures since, as Cudjoe notes, the colonized subject “is essentially the product of his colonized past, . . . [and] of the colonizer’s culture” (138). The historical colonial experience has a major influence on contemporary conditions in colonial and postcolonial society; when these conditions are satirized, colonial rule is implicated and the satire becomes multidirectional. Most of NaipauPs satiric fictions efface that colonial history, denying it substantial representation in the texts as an explicitly shown influence on West Indian society. The Suffrage o f Elvira, for instance, does not contain a single white character except the two Witnesses, whose flirtation with political influ-

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ence is clearly not allied with colonial authority. Landeg White proposes that the Naipaul who wrote The Mystic Masseur “was not yet prepared to acknowledge— and perhaps at times forgot—that the absurdities could be caused by the attempt to rise above an absurd situation, a disastrous comination [sic] of place and time” (91). In the early books, the job of discovering a text’s multidirectional bearing thus becomes the reader’s and critic’s. But in the last predominantly satiric fiction he wrote, Naipaul incorporates elements of effect and cause. “A Flag on the Island,” Naipaul’s most critically marginalized work, is a paradigm of satiric multidirectionality. The direct causal element is American neoimperialism rather than British colonialism. Frank, an American GI stationed on an island modeled after Trinidad during the Second World War, prompts the transformation of the inhabitants of a run-down street through his interference in their lives. White, arguing that Naipaul is revisiting the world of his first book in this novella, sees Frank as the creator of opportunities so evidently missing in Miguel Street (142). But while the lack of opportunities contributes to the habit of failure that plagues Miguel Street's characters, Frank’s interference in a poor but functional society, intending to help, has the reverse effect. By helping Mano win a walking race, Frank brings about his suicide. By establishing a dubious commercial enterprise for the Lamberts to run, he destroys a family and provokes another death. By encouraging Blackwhite to “start writing about the island” (187) rather than about Jane Austen-esque lords and ladies, Frank sows the seeds of the writer’s later emergence as H. J. B. White, a ludicrous purveyor of interracial romances and faddy expressions of black anger for the American market. Naipaul’s mockery and critical thrust in “A Flag on the Island” are divided. On one hand, he is taking aim at what he describes in The Middle Passage as the Trinidadian “talent for self-caricature,” for “living up to the ideals of the tourist brochure” (70-71). By allowing themselves to be seduced by foreign attention— by the economic incentives and cultural models that, in Blackwhite’s words, seem to turn a place that “doesn’t exist” (187) into one that “is just about beginning to have an existence in its own right” (203)— the islanders embrace dependence and succumb to artificial postures. The cost of abandoning former ways is an inauthentic society doomed, as Henry is, to be miserable, and destined to be led astray and let down the way Blackwhite is by Leonard. On the other hand, by constructing Frank’s interference during the war as a microcosm of Western neoimperialism, Naipaul also targets the commercialized, consumer-driven American culture that increasingly dominates the island. It is the Americans who, in Frank’s words, “brought the tropics to the island,” although “to the islanders it must have seemed that we had brought America to them” (169). It is the Americans who help turn Blackwhite into White, Priest into Gary Priestland the TV evangelist, the reclusive Ma-Ho daughters into dancing public icons, and Selma into a consumer of American kitsch. The Americans also help turn Henry into a capitalist club-owner

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surrounded by plastic flowers, profiting from celebratory floor shows that trivialize and commodify the island’s brutal history of slavery for an audience of tourists. Naipaul shows a ridiculous state of affairs and how it is brought about— effect and cause. He does this through Frank, but also through other representative forces of cultural domination, from Leonard’s capricious manipulations to the territorializing penetration of the MooreMcCormack brand name. The cynical artist-for-hire posture of Blackwhite may be satirized, but so is the exploitive philanthropy of the Foundationland representatives, Bippy, Tippy, and Chippy. As economic and cultural partners, Blackwhite and Foundationland are diminished by their dependence on each other. “A Flag on the Island” is Naipaul’s only satiric fiction to portray people from both sides of a quasi-colonial encounter exposing themselves and deflating each other.5 Several theorists have catalogued the common techniques, motifs and stances of satiric writing. From their observations a quite lengthy checklist of features can be drawn up against which a purportedly satiric work might be measured. There is some value in such a venture—even if a systematic examination of every novel for such qualities would quickly become tedious— but its achievements have certain limitations. Theorists have widely varying views on the inclusiveness of the categories “satire” and “the satiric.” There seems to be a danger that the critic interested in satire will start seeing it everywhere. At its worst and most obvious, this expansionist tendency takes the form of a statement like the following by David Worcester in The Art o f Satire: “all irony is satirical, though not all satire is ironical” (81). But it can also be seen in recent books by George Test and John Clark. Test rejects criteria of fictionality proposed by Northrop Frye and others, and colonizes numerous nonfictional forms under the “spirit” of satire. Clark’s category of “the modern satiric grotesque” includes almost all of twentieth-century literature. So while there is undoubtedly some satisfaction to be obtained by noting the correspondences between a given work and the eclectic array of traits posited by different critics as typically satiric, the results can be expected to reveal the fluidity and imprecision of “satire” at least as much as they can be taken to prove the work in question is satiric by virtue of adhering to certain criteria. Still, of all Naipaul’s fictions, “A Flag on the Island” offers the most rewards to an analysis grounded in the observed traits and traditions of “satire” as eclectically produced by theorists. For instance, Naipaul’s novella exhibits Alvin Kernan’s “characteristic actions” of satire— “darkening, disordering, and preying” (Plot 23)— as well as satire’s fragmented, episodic plot (8, 151) and its crowded, disorderly scene (Kernan, “Theory” 253). Clark says satirists are “creators of devastation” (4) for whom a common figure is the “dangling man” awaiting catastrophe or nothingness (9)— like West Indians hoping for a hurricane that never comes. Frank can be seen as Clark’s satiric “persona who is frantic with ideas and activity” (58); he and other characters demonstrate

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“enormous bustle, stir, and pother accompanied by minuscule and sterile achievement” (92); thus the ending of a satiric fiction, Clark says, is inevitably discordant and anticlimactic. Blackwhite can be held up as an example of the satiric tradition of “debunking the author” that Clark documents in one chapter (36-50). Even the cannibalism motif, which he gives another chapter (131-38), is given a brief nod by Naipaul in a facetious remark by Frank (“Flag” 150). The technique of reductio ad absurdam noted by several theorists6 as a way of targeting intellectual rigidity is exploited at the end of the novella’s second chapter. Here Naipaul satirizes contemporary West Indian cultural ambitions to elevate local language variants over standard English—reversing the hierarchy sustained by Empire— by having Blackwhite “make up new words” for such a language and entertain offers to sponsor his philological research at Oxford or Cambridge (204-09). The satiric target, a valid real-world project of recuperation (not invention), is reduced to absurdity through a playful far-fetched game— Clark discusses the game motif too (67-76)—that ends with the would-be sponsor trying to coax Blackwhite out of a bluffing reticence with temptations like, “You will see the Tower of London. You will see snow and ice. You will wear an overcoat. You will look good in an overcoat” (208). Just as in the later negotiations between Blackwhite and Foundationland, both sides of this neoimperial relationship are ridiculed by the absurdities and contradictions of their involvement with each other. Major character types associated with satire can be successfully attached to the cast of “A Flag on the Island.” Blackwhite is a version of the protean trickster figure common to many cultural traditions, and who appears in Caribbean folklore as the African god Annancy. Test connects the spirit of the satirist himself to the self-contradictory trickster, who can mock and be mocked, deceive and succumb to deception (Satire 37-48). In The Middle Passage Naipaul discusses Trinidad as a “picaroon society” with “a picaroon delight in trickery” that substitutes the “sharp character” for the hero (72-77). As Thieme shows, the picaroon as “earthly trickster” living by wit and subterfuge dominates Naipaul’s satiric first two novels, and Thieme historicizes the contemporary tricksters by identifying Annancy as “fairly clearly an allegorical representation of the slave using his wits to ensure his survival” (Web 37). Blackwhite as trickster begins as deceiver— inventing and teaching patois for personal gain; passing off Pablo, Sandro, and Pedro as Caribbean art’s next great thing— but he winds up deceived. His nemesis, Leonard, is a kind of metropolitan trickster who starts out looking like the fool, pandering to local con-men; by the end, however, he has become a triumphant deceiver, thumbing his nose at the empty-handed Blackwhite. Blackwhite and other prominent islanders, especially Priestland, can be seen as alazons, versions of the comic-satiric figure defined by Frye as an “imposter, someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is” (Anatomy 39). In “low norm” satire (like Naipaul’s), which “takes for

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granted a world which is full of anom.iiies, injustices, follies, and crimes, and yet is permanent and undisplaceable,” the alazons are typically “in charge of society.” They are opposed by the eiron, the common-sense figure who allies himself with the author and reader in maintaining an ironic stance that penetrates through the postures of the alazons (226-28). Henry is the eiron of “A Flag on the Island,” although his proprietorship of The Coconut Grove in its 1960s version makes him part alazon as well. But like Hat, his precursor in Miguel Street, Henry sees through the masks of other characters. He articulates the negative impact of Frank’s involvements with Mano and Mr. Lambert, and after Blackwhite’s absurd discussion about Oxbridge patois studies, Henry says, “I never thought I would see this” (208). Ambiguously expressing either critical rejection or incredulous admiration (or even both), this comment captures Henry’s dual function as eiron and alazon and looks forward twenty years to his ardent desire for the purgative renewal of a hurricane. That self-destructive wish represents his eiron side becoming increasingly distanced from the inauthenticities perpetrated by himself as entrepreneurial alazon. Frank is a more difficult character to position. Critics have complained of his sketchiness, and of Naipaul’s insufficient differentiation of Frank from his own nonfictional persona (L. White 141-42). As a narrator, Frank remains a shadowy figure, perhaps Naipaul’s most prominent example of a character developed only as far as required to fulfill a rhetoricaldemonstrative function. He represents American interference in and “creation” of “the tropics,” but he also maintains a detached and critical perspective on those activities. The novella has clear affinities with the eighteenth-century convention of the satiric imaginary voyage, even replicating the narrative pattern of Gulliver's Travels: arrival during bad weather, encounters with bizarre locals, and hasty departure by sea. And while Frank is an uneasy fit with the wide-eyed ingénu travelers of Voltaire’s Candide and Johnson’s R asselas, he is perhaps more easily allied with Gulliver, whose variable function as eiron and butt of satiric irony is akin to Frank’s split role as ironic observer of absurdities and implicated participant in them. The multidirectional satire of NaipauPs novella is driven in part by the ability of both Frank and Henry to serve his satiric rhetoric in dual capacities. I have called “A Flag on the Island” a paradigmatic work because of its overt multidirectional satire. It also earns this designation by the connections it encourages between contemporary American domination and the earlier British colonization of the West Indies. Such connections are most clearly visible through the perspectives offered by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, towards which Naipaul makes oblique intertextual reference. The parallels between these books have been overlooked by NaipauPs critics: Thieme’s excellent study of allusion in NaipauPs fiction makes no mention of it, and although Anthony Boxill briefly acknowledges that, like Frankenstein, “Frank and other Americans like him have created a mon-

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ster which they can no longer control” (52), he does not pursue the implications of the comparison.7 West Indian writers looking to Old World literature for analogues of Caribbean society have most commonly chosen either the colonial masterslave archetypes of Prospero-Caliban and Crusoe-Friday, or the “new world” figure of Adam. NaipauPs may be the sole appropriation of Frankenstein. He only mentions Shelley’s character once, in an apparently throwaway line of dialogue where Leonard jokes that Frank’s name is “short for Frankenstein” (156). But Shelley’s novel offers a rich source of thematic parallels between the disastrous results of one man creating another and of one society creating another. In each case the created product is a deformed replica of the creator’s own image and desire, and the act of creation is a transgressive intervention into the territory of the divine.8 Frankenstein imagines himself worshipped like a god: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source. . . . No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (54). In Naipaul’s book, “Man had become god” is a refrain prompted by the mantra-like repetition of the names Moore-McCormack and Hilton, two American corporations present on the island (151, 160). Frankenstein’s monster causes numerous deaths for which the creator himself feels indirectly responsible; he regrets his act of creation almost as soon as it is done. Likewise, after two men die as an indirect effect of Frank’s intrusions, he is accused by Blackwhite of killing Mano, and he agrees with Selma’s advice that he should stop “interfering any more in other people’s lives” (197). Blackwhite’s relation to the white world veers between the adulation of his Jane Austen phase and the racially based rejection of his book, I Hate You. Similarly, Frankenstein’s monster initially reveres human beings and their literature; only later does he “swear inextinguishable hatred” (145) towards his maker and the human race. These comparisons point to differences as well as similarities; the hallucinatory frenzy of Frank is a far cry from the hallucinatory frenzy of Victor Frankenstein. Naipaul’s narrative is flippant and caustic where Shelley’s is ominous and laced with tragic irony. The grand vision of Shelley’s novel is regularly stopped down by Naipaul. Frank can walk away from his culture’s horrifying creations; Frankenstein must pursue his to the ends of the earth in an obsessive attempt to wreak revenge. While Shelley’s monster undertakes to destroy his creator and those closest to him before embracing his own self-annihilation, Naipaul’s monstrosities keep playing their sham roles until, on a desperate whim, they welcome a hurricane’s promise of destruction as “salvation” (225) and as a “clean break, a fresh start” (213). The terror of Frankenstein is profoundly real; Frank’s reunion with Henry and Blackwhite after twenty years is accompanied by a gesture of “mock terror” and the sarcastic statement, “Oh, I am frightened of you” (210). The different generic strategies of Naipaul and Shelley dictate very different treatments of related materials.

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If the Frankenstein intertext most obviously connects to “A Flag on the Island”’s topic of American neoimperialism, it also indirectly evokes the earlier British colonial history of the West Indies. Naipaul has often acknowledged that the West Indian colonies are “a unique imperial creation, where people of many lands [were] thrown together” (O vercrow ded 19-20). As such, they are very different from the colonies of intervention in Asia and Africa: “They are manufactured societies, labour camps, creations of empire” (254). Even more than the American “creation” of the postindependence tropical paradise for tourists—which is really a collaborative enterprise—the original development of the West Indian colonies was, like Frankenstein’s manufacturing of life, a unilateral act of creation of a new society that had not existed before. (Jean-Paul Sartre once denigrated colonialism with the statement that “the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters” [26].)9 And even though Frankenstein comes to call himself “the slave of my creature” (153), various aspects of the monster’s development have parallels in the history of Caribbean slaves. Just as slaves, severed from their ancestral languages and societies, were forced to learn and mimic the master’s language, thought, customs, and culture, the monster’s lack of language or ancestry forces him to learn these things by observing and imitating humans. The monster looks on the cottagers as superior beings, and, by corollary, regards himself with the same self-contempt that slavery taught blacks, according to Naipaul in The M iddle Passage (66). While the monster seeks the love and acceptance of the cottagers and of Frankenstein, he only earns their abhorrence. The exclusion and prejudice of the cottagers result from differences not in the monster’s essence—the blind man welcomes him— but his appearance. He is rejected as a sub-human “other,” much the way blacks were historically treated by w7hites as inferior beings. The rejection of the monster by Frankenstein suggests a different analogy. The monster’s accusation that “you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature” (99) is not unlike Naipaul’s complaint that the British, after creating their West Indian colonies, “neglected” them (Finding 128). The monster’s response to rejection— “Shall I not then hate them who abhor me?” (100)—has various parallels in West Indian history, from slave revolts to the Black Power movement that was just getting underway when Naipaul wrote his novella. These secondary correspondences between the Frankenstein narrative and West Indian history may be more the product of critical extension than authorial intention. But the two historical “creations” of the West Indies— by the British as agricultural slave colony, and by the Americans as site of touristic frivolity and fetishized black culture—are thematically yoked together through their common associations with the immensely suggestive Frankenstein intertext. That connection extends the directionality of the novella’s critique beyond its explicit two-pronged thrusts against West Indian and American targets. The ease with which islanders submit to dependent relationships and inauthentic postures vis-à-vis Americans can be

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traced to the habits of dependency and mimicry fostered by a colonial history that, in NaipauPs view, demanded little more of them. The new confusions and exploitations are outgrowths of the old. Moreover, Frankenstein engages in a form of non-satiric judgment congruent with the multidirectionality of “A Flag on the Island.” Frankenstein becomes monstrous himself in his blind self-absorption, his bumbling failure to protect Elizabeth, and in the ease with which he exchanges roles with his creation— Frankenstein becoming the vengeful, murderous pursuer scarcely hindered by landscape or bodily limitations, while the monster becomes the pursued. The reader’s sympathy and repulsion are carefully split between creator and creation. Each is seen as a victim of the other, and each brings out the worst in the other. Similarly, when the final farcical section of “A Flag on the Island” reveals the indignities of mutual exploitation, each side of the neoimperial partnership victimizes the other, and each side is diminished by the relationship. Blackwhite milks Foundationland for money but must prostitute himself to do it; Bippy, Chippy, and Tippy can dictate his artistic focus, but they are dependent on him for their cushy jobs and are helpless to evaluate Pablo, Sandro, and Pedro as Tenderers of the “tribal subconscious” (217). (The portrayal of both artists and grant-givers as faceless, interchangeable triplets is another indication of NaipauPs divided satiric attack. Both sides are equally mocked and trivialized by the same satiric device.) Perhaps because of its inclusive multidirectional orientation, or because of its status as most-often-ignored work in Naipaul criticism, “A Flag on the Island” has not been interrogated the way the earlier satiric novels have been for adherence to Western, imperialist norms of judgment. It is The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage o f Elvira, novels whose less obvious multidirectional critique must be more actively read into them than read out o f them, that are most often attacked for using unfair and inappropriate Western standards in their satiric evaluation. They provide a valuable contrast to the novella. As different kinds of multidirectional satire they offer a site from which to investigate some problematic questions regarding norms, irony, and postcoloniality in NaipauPs fiction. -r 5|* 5j- }J-

NaipauPs notion of mimicry has a natural structural compatibility with satire. Satiric writing often turns on the revelation of hierarchically evaluated gaps— between ideal and actual, reality and pretense, order and disorder. The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage o f Elvira, which are set during Trinidad’s lengthy transition from colonial to postcolonial status, expose the naked chaos and disorder that lie beneath the thin veil of order claimed by such ideals as leadership and democracy. For Naipaul, this disjunction is an intrinsic component of an imitative society that will always look shabby compared to the objects of its mimicry. But Naipaul realizes that such easy contrasts are insufficient; the gap created by mimicry is more

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than a single hierarchical divide separating “deficient” colonial peoples, institutions, and practices from normative metropolitan counterparts. Mimicry actually creates a two-tiered gap across which the satirist can maneuver. The first tier spans the gap between the colonial’s perception of foreign realities and his or her ability or willingness to live up to that idea. The second-tier gap is between the original reality (as it exists elsewhere) and the colonial’s perception or understanding of it. Thus Bunty’s mimicry in An Area o f D arkness “is a mimicry not of England, a real country, but of the fairytale land of Anglo-India” (61). In Elvira, Dhaniram chastises Harbans for lack of generosity, saying, “You must try and feel that you giving to the people. After all, is the meaning of this democracy” (55). Here the two tiers are clearly delineated. First, Harbans fails by the standards of West Indian democracy; second, that concept of democracy fails by the standards of the ideal from which it is derived. The debate over whether Naipaul is condemning West Indians based on imported norms or showing sympathetic amusement towards the problems of a transitional society can be addressed by attending to both tiers of the gap that mimicry opens up, and by asking how satiric and ironic gaps are connected to them and distributed between them. The setting of The Suffrage o f Elvira is Trinidad’s 1950 election, the second to be conducted under universal adult suffrage. The picture of disorder, corruption, and free-wheeling individualism that Naipaul draws is compatible with an island historian’s account of the events: In 1 9 5 0 , a modified form of Crow n Colony governm ent still existed, but universal adult suffrage had been granted in 1 9 4 6 , and a proliferation of groups and politicians com peted for the new electorate in the elections of 1 9 4 6 and 1 9 5 0 . It was the heyday of the individualist in politics, the independent, the ‘broker politician’ wheeling and dealing between various interest groups, manipulating the voters and the divisions am ong them in his own interests, seizing every chance in the confused transition from one system of political authority to another. (Brereton 2 2 7 )

The novel abounds in gaps, ridiculing the way Trinidadians experiment with this “brand-new thing” (27) called democracy. The narrator says that when democracy first came to Elvira in 1946, “it had taken nearly everybody by surprise and it wasn’t until 1950 . . . that people began to see the possibilities” (12). That apparently innocuous last word turns out to imply not the possibilities of empowerment that democratic elections might give people, but the possibilities of profit for those in a position to benefit directly from the exigencies of electioneering. The candidate Harbans, rather than providing leadership, is a defeatist cipher, victimized and exploited by various power brokers and, increasingly as the campaign continues, by the public at large. Instead of being a process of communal debate proceeding to an informed expression of collecti ve will, this democratic election is conducted through empty propaganda, perpetuation of superstition, and ma-

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nipulation of the candidate’s insecurity to such an extent that he is trapped into perpetual largesse in order to buy votes and placate constituencies. When, after a succession of travesties, Harbans wins and the narrator blandly remarks, “And so democracy took root in Elvira” (223), the ironic gap is clear because of what “democracy” has come to signify. In the final paragraphs, the election’s outcome is elaborately summed up not as an admirable achievement or reflection of progress, but as a simple balance sheet of gains and losses. In this version of democracy, campaign workers hope for the death of a Negro constituent so their candidate can pay for the burial and challenge his Negro rival’s hold on the black constituency. Motivations and loyalties are determined by boyhood loyalties, match-making aspirations, arguments over a breadfruit tree, and opinions on the relative prettiness of Hindu and Muslim girls. Votes swing over dead dogs and chickens. The gap between ideal and actual is implicit; nowhere does Naipaul use the denunciatory mode of his nonfiction, nor does he point to a preferable model or set of standards for comparison. But a perception of gaps as gaps is encouraged in statements by characters; things in Elvira are regularly said to be not measuring up. Baksh’s remark that “only poorer people does like dressing up, to try and pretend that they ain’t so poor” (14) exposes the artifice of mimicry and the appearance-reality gap so often invoked in satire. The notion of local standards of excellence is undermined by Chittaranjan: when Harbans tries to flatter him by saying, “Is a big big house you have here, Goldsmith,” he replies, “Biggest house in Elvira, that’s all” (31). When Nelly Chittaranjan laughs at Foam’s pretenses, calling him a “boy trying to be mannish” (95), her view can be connected to Naipaul’s perception of an imitative, immature Trinidadian society. Foam’s perspective on Chittaranjan reveals the archetypal satiric theme that the emperor has no clothes, that public façade is a large gap away from private reality: “Outside, canvassing in his visiting outfit, he was the powerful goldsmith, the great controller of votes. But at home, in his torn khaki trousers, patched shirt and sabots, Foam knew him as a sad humiliated man” (157). The linguistic gaps endemic to colonial and postcolonial societies occasionally transcend their usual “metonymic” function of indicating “cultural difference” (Ashcroft, “Constitutive” 71). In certain passages of the novel they are seconded to Naipaul’s satiric attack in some quite specific and subtle ways. For instance, Baksh on election night instructs the crowd to “corporate with the police” and “Beware of the Highway Code” (220). When “cooperate” becomes “corporate” and “beware” is substituted for “be aware,” Naipaul identifies satiric targets through the stable linguistic gaps he invites his readers to construct. The targets are the corruption of democracy (cooperate) by financial interests (corporate), and the erosion of aspiration (be aware) by the suspicion and mistrust (beware) that are engendered by a society in which community fails because everyone is out for personal gain.

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The tone of the narrative voice varies between neutral objectivity and an apparent complicity with the values and judgments of the satirized community. “Baksh made money. It was hard not to feel that for all his conviviality Baksh was a deep man” (13), the narrator says, beginning with an objective fact and proceeding to a questionable judgment. Baksh’s actions throughout the novel undermine this perception of depth, revealing an ironic distance here between the narrative voice and the controlling authorial perspective. The narrative tone is compatible with NaipauPs satiric aims, dramatizing the pervasiveness and inescapability of certain limiting attitudes by showing evidence of them even in the voice of widest perspective, the omniscient narrator. But even if Baksh’s opportunism and greed during the campaign do not amount to “depth” in one sense, he does demonstrate an ability to succeed in a society that, according to Naipaul, knows “only the values of money and race” (Middle 22). His success, measured by local standards and values, is a form of depth compared to the shallowness and futility of characters like Harbans and Mahadeo. In a “picaroon” society that admires the trickster or “sharp character,” Baksh, who repositions himself three times during the campaign and gains from each change in allegiance, is a hero. As with words like “depth,” “democracy,” and “opportunities,” two different meanings of the word “hero” emerge. One is a local meaning based on local standards and values, according to which Baksh the con-man can be “treated . . . like a hero” in Ramlogan’s rum shop (174); the other is the more general, idealized meaning implied by Naipaul’s statement in The M iddle Passage that Trinidad was “a society which denied itself heroes” (41). NaipauPs irony hinges on such gaps between ideal meanings or models and local versions, but as ironic gaps aware of double perspectives, they do not necessarily mark satiric attack. Like Chittaranjan stressing the relative rather than absolute largeness of his house, Naipaul is sensitive to the difference between local and imported standards and values. Many of the most damning remarks in The M iddle Passage assert West Indians’ relative lack of the standards Naipaul sees in more complex Western societies: “nothing was created in the West Indies” (29); “Colonialism distorts the identity of the subject people” (165); “In the West Indian islands slavery and the latifundia created . . . a society without standards, without noble aspirations, nourished by greed and cruelty” (28); “Again and again one comes back to the main, degrading fact of the colonial society; it never required efficiency, it never required quality, and these things, because unrequired, became undesirable” (58). These comments provide some of the context missing from the novel itself and engage in a multidirectional critique that implicates the British. If nothing was created, whose fault was that? If colonial society under British rule had low standards of achievement, is it any wonder that what West Indians understand “democracy” to mean is far from the democratic ideal? But the novel represents its world fully formed, as is, without editorializing

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and without narrative representation of causal elements. Irony is employed instead; in Wayne Booth’s view “stable irony” invites the reader to close the gaps created by its dual perspective based on assumptions about where the unstated half of the duality is most appropriately located (Rhetoric 1-31). Thus a West Indian critic like Derrick reads the deliberate imbalance of Naipaul’s early ironic satire as based on inappropriate external norms (195). This response is an understandable reflection of the fact that Naipaul’s work does seem to expect comparison to such norms, and many readers, especially from outside the West Indies, will not have the basis in contextualizing knowledge to allow them to do anything more than perceive Naipaul’s characters as deficient “others.” But what readings like Derrick’s overlook—as do readings that contradict them by claiming that Naipaul is “far from taken in by metropolitan values” (L. White 19)— is the possibility that ironic gaps and satiric gaps may be quite distinct. Satire as “militant irony”— in Northrop Frye’s often-quoted definition (Anatomy 223)— is rightly said to harness irony as one of its most powerful modes of indirection. However, the related assumption that, when they are working in tandem, irony’s gaps, targets, and referents will be the same as those of satire becomes problematic in the postcolonial context. This assumption leads many critics indiscriminately to pair “irony” and “satire” in their readings, as if whatever differences there may be between them are less important than their mutual cooperation. Yet for a word like “democracy”— in which both the ironic and satiric gestures of The Suffrage o f Elvira are thematically crystallized— it is not only possible but necessary to posit a distinct rhetorical gap for each of the ironic and satiric aspects. What I am calling the “ironic gap” exists in the domain of the ideal or hypothetical; it considers irony in its semantic function. Naipaul’s repeated use of “democracy” encourages the reader to make an evaluative judgment based on a differential relation: “democracy” as practiced in Elvira is a travesty of democracy in its abstract or idealized aspect. Despite any comparable degradations that might be seen in the practice of democracy elsewhere (everywhere?)— the Times Literary Supplement said Naipaul’s joke wears thin because democracy “is becoming rather an old joke anyway” (quoted in Hassan 133)—a cluster of idealized associations to do with equality and empowerment continues to adhere to the idea of democracy. It is to this hypothetical, abstract concept that Naipaul’s verbal irony points, and in this sense it has a relatively pure sphere of influence. When satire tugs at irony, however, irony is contaminated, forced to slum in a realm of real-world referentiality in which the heavy baggage of history, social contexts, and power relations is unpacked and inspected. At this point the “ironic gap” of ideal versus actual must be subdivided into the two-tiered gap allied with mimicry. The satire is targeting a colonial imitation of a metropolitan institution that has no history on the island, no tradition of practice from which an abstracted ideal might have entered local consciousnesses. Eric Williams, a former prime minister of Trinidad,

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once commented on ius [ ; u. r uiciice’' on other countries as models of democracy— and thus on “borrowed” rather than “created” political forms (quoted in Mann 477). In King’s view, “English words and ideals do not apply to what actually happens. Particularly in politics, there is a misfit between liberal notions of representation and decolonization and the realities of society in a late colonial or newly independent state” (V. S. 28). And for Boxill, “the environment and history of the West Indies have created standards so far from the norm of Western standards that it is ridiculous to expect democracy to work there as it does in Europe” (34). Landeg White makes a similar point even more forcefully: “Judging Elvira by its reactions to a farcically irrelevant ‘democracy’ is tantamount to setting the characters an English-style examination and then calling them ignorant because no one knows the date of the battle of Waterloo” (83). Albert Memmi sees this as a general problem of colonial rule: “the colonized does not govern. Being kept away from power, he ends up losing both interest and feeling for control. . . . How could such a long absence from autonomous government give rise to skill?” (95). Naipaul implies all of this when he says that democracy in Elvira is a “brand new thing.” Elvirans have not had the experience with the democratic franchise even to pay lip service to its ideals. Therefore its practice is most appropriately assessed in the context of a society doomed by its colonial past to have different standards and a different understanding of “democracy” than the metropole. The satiric application of irony to targets with identifiable “real-world” counterparts makes a demand on the interpreter who, in Linda Hutcheon’s view, has the primary responsibility for making irony “happen” (Irony's 5-6). The interpreter must read through or beyond the ironic gap to construct the multiple and complex satiric gaps the referential contexts establish. This distinction I am making between irony and satire, ironic gaps and satiric gaps, offers one way to separate the inseparable, and to advocate processes that nonetheless may or may not happen in any particular instance of interpretive reading. It is a useful distinction, if somewhat artificial— after all, satiric gaps are as reliant on irony as ironic ones—and it certainly will not prove applicable to all instances of satiric postcolonial irony. But it does help account for the particular conflation of stable and unstable ironies in Naipaul’s work. Hutcheon in Irony s Edge argues that, because irony only “happens” when it is interpreted as such, its multiplicity of possible interpreters, interpretations, and interpretive contexts means that no irony is “stable” (89, 97). Dustin Griffin says much the same thing in his recent book on satire (65). It is hard to read the early Naipaul, however, without sensing his assumption of an implied reader prompted to construct ironic gaps between ideal and actual that the author as intending ironist also presumes—gaps that are “stable” in Booth’s intentionalist sense. In the repetition of “democracy”—and the semiotic disjunction to which the repetition continually draws our attention— Naipaul seems clearly to expect the reader to read as if democracy’s “usual” (ideal-

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ized, abstracted) meaning were stable, known, and preferable to Elvira’s version. This invocation of a stable ironic gap is made problematic, however, by postcolonial contexts that press irony into the service of satiric gaps. These gaps paradoxically challenge the stability of the ironic gap even as the latter is recognized for its enabling function in Naipaul’s rhetoric and comic humour. The satiric gaps denaturalize and de-essentialize the meanings presumed by irony’s semantic and semiotic gestures. “Democracy” ceases to be just an abstraction; its meanings (and the satiric gaps hinged on its meanings) become localized and shot through with history. “Democracy” becomes an unstable, variable signifier. The ideal meaning implied by irony (in the semantic domain of “pure” double-talk) loses its normative authority; the ideal meaning is relativized— shown to be contingent— by the referential specificity of satire. In The M iddle Passage, Naipaul traces the origins of political immaturity in British Guiana to conditions that obtained during British tenure: T h at the governm ent is elected does not m atter; the people require it to be as paternalistic as before, if a little m ore benevolently; and a popular governm ent must respond. ‘The people’ have learned their power, and the sensation is still so new that every new voter regards himself as a pressure group. In this way the people— not the politician’s abstraction, but the people who wish to beg, bribe and bully because this is the way they got things in the past— in this way the people are a threat to responsible government and a threat, finally, to their own leaders. It is p art of the colonial legacy. (121 )

Here Naipaul states his belief that colonial history and political structures are in large measure responsible for the dysfunctional aspects of West Indian society. This historical view implies that even if irony turns on the abstract ideals that the metropole claims to support, the satiric judgment of actual local phenomena must accommodate the reduced possibilities allowed by local conditions and standards. Again, irony and satire and their respective gaps must be read as having different rhetorical aims even when, as in The Suffrage o f Elvira's “democracy,” the same textual item—word, sentence, scene, characterization—participates in both. It is in the interplay of satiric and ironic appeals that a text’s satiric multidirectionality emerges. The satiric energy generated by the novel’s inscription of referentially specific aggression and judgment in the form of satiric conventions—caricatures, grotesques, futile actions, disorderly scenes, gaps of various kinds—is separated therefore into two channels. With one channel, it takes the institution of British colonialism to task for its failure to create a society in which a more respectable form of democracy could exist, and for its belated dumping of democracy, with no training in its use, like so much excess inventory for Trinidadians to ransack. In other words, the colonial masters are implicated for the fact that there is a disparity between ironic and satiric gaps—that the ideals implied by verbal irony cannot be used as

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satiric touchstones in Trinidad. This first channel is oriented to the past. Its chief function is to assign an appropriate measure of responsibility—perhaps even blame and guilt—to the metropole. The second channel, which targets West Indian society, is oriented to the future. Its function is to goad: to use the embarrassment and shame enabled by unflattering representations as a spur to West Indians in the direction of reform. An awareness of historical accountability does not, therefore, entirely reorient satiric aggression towards the British. Even if, as Ramraj says, “the fault [for Elvira’s election travesties] lies with those who too hastily introduced adult suffrage in a community not quite ready for it” (“Diminishing” 271), the Elvirans are not let off the hook by Naipaul the way Ramraj suggests. The sympathy and understanding that many critics read into the novel as a counterbalance to satire are there, even if the historical context that enables such sympathy is absent from the novel itself and must be imported from Naipaul’s other writing. But sympathy and recognition of the absence of standards do not in themselves excuse West Indians from satiric critique. Baksh may be an understandable product of a picaroon society, his self-advancement through trickery part of a historical tradition that colonial structures generated. But that does not mean his kind is approved by Naipaul, nor do his attitudes provide a solid foundation for future, postcolonial development beyond the limitations of colonial society. Therefore he must be satirized. A perceived lack of standards today does not for Naipaul mean a continued lack of standards will be acceptable tomorrow. And while metropolitan standards are not appropriate for satire in these historical circumstances, West Indians do, in Naipaul’s view, need some standards to aspire to in the future if they are to have any hope of undergoing the “regeneration” that the author says he hopes to provoke with his writing (quoted in Hassan 236). Rohlehr concisely describes Naipaul’s challenge: Satire is the sensitive measure of a society’s departure from a norm inherent in itself. Since Naipaul starts with the conviction that such a norm is absent from his society, his task as satirist becomes doubly difficult. N o t only must he recreate experience, but also simultaneously create the standards against which this experience is to be judged. This explains the m ixture of farce and social consciousness which occurs in the tw o early novels. (“ Iron ic” 179)

Satire is too rooted in the contemporary to allow for a complete channeling of satiric energy towards a critique of a bygone colonial era. And it is too rooted in historical reality to ignore the societal and political contexts that extend satiric critique beyond the West Indians who are the text’s explicit objects of (mis)representation. Multidirectionality allows for a kind of literary law of the conservation of energy: by being channeled towards two targets, the rhetorical force generated by satiric indirection is conserved, rather than being critically dissipated into perceptions of either

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a too-forgiving sympathy or an unproductive unidirectional exposé. A multidirectional reading accommodates both ends of the ultimately misleading binary of sympathy versus contempt that has dominated critical disagreements over Naipaul’s early novels (e.g., see Hassan 107-76). The novels can thus be seen as gaining a thematic and rhetorical richness through the interplay of irony’s idealism and satire’s groundedness. * * * * * * * * * * The Mystic Masseur departs from The Suffrage o f Elvira's group focus and construction of gaps around “democracy”; here Naipaul’s satiric and ironic aims cluster around a single character, Ganesh, and his embodiment of a different political idea—leadership. Again, mimicry is central, and offers a useful starting point for an examination of how the ironic and satiric gaps encouraged by this mock-biography support a multidirectional reading of satire. Dressed up by his father to look like “a little sahib” (15), Ganesh with his bookish aspirations is treated with both skepticism and awe by a community that associates books and intellect with Britain. “You ever hear of Trinidad people writing books?” asks a dubious Basdeo when Ganesh announces his ambition (44). For others, such as Leela and Ramlogan, the idea of a local author causes “amazement and wonder” (40). Later, Ganesh’s mimicry takes as its model the “Hollywood Hindus” (114); the fact that he is, in effect, imitating an imitation clearly sets up the two-tiered gap implicit in the structure of all Naipaul’s mimicries. The inferiority of local standards is suggested by the islanders’ belief in Ganesh’s authenticity— as mystic, masseur, author, and politician—when early on even he seems aware of his own inauthenticity: People said, ‘He doing a lot of thinking, that boy Ganesh. He full with w orries, but still he thinking thinking all the tim e.’ Ganesh would have liked his thoughts to be deep and it disturbed him that they were simple things, concerned with passing trifles. He began to feel a little strange and feared he was going mad. (28)

Pathologically lazy, he loafs and procrastinates for several years before attaining success. Even that success begins as a diminished version of his expectations: his “big big book” (81) turns out to be a “pamphlet” (90). And the gap between the leadership role he gradually assumes and the weakness of character beneath is devastatingly emphasized by his essential hollowness and lack of belief in what he is doing: “I wish Hitler would come over and start bombing up Trinidad. . . . Bomb everything to hell. Then it going to have no more worries about massaging people and writing books and all that sort of nonsense” (107). This wish underscores a feeling of futility that Naipaul identifies with Caribbean society, a marginality that undermines ambition. Like the islanders in “A Flag on the Island,” Ganesh demonstrates that such a society can aspire to little more than its own annihila-

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tion. This wish is not fulfilled for Tnnidad as a whole, but Ganesh as an individual appears effectively to have achieved it with his new name and willing absorption by the metropole at the novel’s end. Like The Suffrage o f Elvira, The Mystic Masseur shows money to be a corrupting influence; hypocrisy and greed destroy familial relations between Ganesh and Ramlogan just as they destroy democracy in Elvira. Each novel shows corrupt campaigning practices taken to such an extreme that campaign teams discuss ways to cause an expedient death— of a constituent or rival candidate. Harbans’s emptiness and malleability are enough not to recommend him for a leadership role, even in the absence of a clear picture of his rival. Ganesh, for all his populism and charisma and skill at living by his wits, is certainly of less intellectual substance than his rival, Indarsingh, who at least can address political issues. In fact, the absence of issues in either the Harbans or Ganesh campaigns points to a pivotal gap in both books—the separation of form from content. The Elvirans adopt the form of democracy—an election with campaign managers, slogans, signs, polling booths, and so on—without the content of issues, debates, or platforms. When Ganesh prepares books and newspapers he is obsessed more by the textures and smells of paper and the impressiveness of typography than by the content of his writing. For years he talks about the big book he plans to write, but only upon publication does either the reader or Ganesh’s community find out what its subject is. Ganesh adopts the form of “author” long before writing a book, simply by framing a publisher’s letter of interest, sent in reply to his query (devoid of potential titles or subjects) as to whether the publisher would be “interested” in the fact that “he was thinking of writing books” (70). Similarly, Ganesh adopts the form of community leader even though, as with Baksh, any leadership traits he may possess are unidealized ones that only qualify as such in the straitened environment of colonial Trinidad. As a questionable leader, Ganesh is a magnet for satiric energy. But a lot of that energy rebounds off him. His success reflects unfavorably upon the society that produces him as folk-hero, wealthy entrepreneur, and political leader. As Harveen Sachdeva Mann writes, Ganesh is both victim and master of the confusion around him, exploiting a transitional society’s openness to an eclectic blend of influences from “East and West, spiritual and secular, orthodox and modern, conservative and revolutionary to his advantage” (473-74). William Walsh notes that Ganesh as a phenomenon is made possible only because of a historical “gap” between outgoing and incoming power groups (6). Walsh and some other critics use recognition of historical contingency to excuse Ganesh—and, by extension, the novel as a whole— from contamination by the barbs of satire. Thieme argues that even though Ganesh is confirmed as a “charlatan” at the end of the novel, Even here N aipaul does not totally alienate sympathy from him. The deadpan neutrality of the com ic presentation is preserved, so th at to the

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very end Naipaul stops short of satire and retains the ironic largeness of vision which he sees as making for ‘accep tan ce.’ N ow here is there any suggestion th at Ganesh could be other than he is. ( Web 4 3 )

A similar point is made by Landeg White, who says that any indignation at Ganesh’s activities “is tempered by recognition that he too is a victim of displacement” who embodies his society’s contradictions (72). Therefore, White says, Naipaul’s irony encourages “a tolerance, an affection for wit and style which, while it does not rule out assessment, definitely rejects contempt or indignation” (73). According to these lines of argument, irony breeds tolerant acceptance and sympathetic identification, whereas satire’s domain is alienated assessment and indignant contempt. Irony thus constituted is not the “stable” irony of idealist critical judgment. It is irony enlisted for one of two purposes. The first is the compassionate Chekhovian portrayal of individuals caught in transitional circumstances beyond their control; here irony serves a balanced vision that values characters and events as ends in themselves, rather than as functional stand-ins for a referential som ething beyond themselves—which the satiric mode does. The second use of non-judgmental irony is in service of a more existential vision, driven by what Booth calls “unstable” or “cosmic” irony (Rhetoric 253); here the informing vision, like Samuel Beckett’s, is of absurdity so pronounced and an abyss so profound that satiric critique becomes pointless, giving way instead to resigned acceptance and a sympathetic engagement with inevitable human despair. This is the irony of Naipaul’s previously quoted statement in which he associates satire with optimism and anger and irony (his preferred term) with the acceptance of one awaiting death. Neither of these two possible versions of Thieme’s “ironic largeness of vision” applies to The Mystic M asseur. But Naipaul’s two most admired novels can be seen to be based on irony of these kinds, and to make satire either negligible or non-existent. A H ouse fo r Mr Biswas qualifies its incidental satire of institutions, practices, and character types prevalent in colonial Trinidad with a generous and ultimately ambivalent vision. The novel sets up internal oppositions— between vision and circumstance, goals and achievements, and between Mr. Biswas the rebel and his suffocating in-laws— but the ironic observations built around such gaps and incompatibilities are only sometimes harnessed to satiric aggression. As I will argue below, Mr. Biswas’s life story supports both satiric resistance and cultural affirmation; sometimes these work in tandem and sometimes they seem to cancel each other out, but neither agenda has unequivocal authority. The Mimic Men's irony, on the other hand, is of the existential, cosmic variety that, in Ramraj’s reading, “apportions blame to no one” because “the personages are all seen as victims of forces beyond their control” (“All-Embracing” 133). Ramraj does not suggest “cosmic irony” as an alternative to satire in The Mimic Men, but when he quotes Philip Toynbee in his arti-

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cie, he seems to have something like it in mind: “there are periods when satire falls into abeyance, not through lack of follies and wickedness, but because things have gone too far for satiric treatment: disaster seems to be out of all proportion to any degree of human responsibility” (133). The Mystic Masseur keeps disaster on a human scale. In its portrayal of a transitional era whose potential for renewal went unfulfilled, the novel knows who its targets are and where responsibility lies. Here what hampers West Indian society can be much more clearly seen and identified than in The Mimic M en. The novel’s narrative hinges on a series of ever-widening gaps between power and its foundations. Ganesh’s growing stature looks increasingly suspect in light of the combination of serendipity, chicanery, exploitation, and finally betrayal and abandonment by which he succeeds. Publicly he rises, but privately he undergoes a moral degeneration whose effects are increasingly dangerous as he gains power and influence. The gaps between form and content evident in his performance of various roles— thinker, teacher, author, masseur, mystic, and political leader— come together as a series of related ironic gaps similar to those created by The Suffrage o f Elvira's repetition of “democracy.” In none of his roles does Ganesh live up to the abstract ideals or standards associated with them. Such failings are not, of course, unique to Ganesh; the novel ironically observes the unidealized performance of roles and functions by other characters and institutions. Ganesh’s teacher training is considered complete once he “learned to write on a blackboard and overcame his dislike of the sound of scraping chalk” (19). The declared purpose of the school he teaches at is “Form not inform” (20). Ganesh’s decision to take up massaging based on one lucky (and probably rigged) success with Leela’s foot makes him no more fraudulent—and probably less dangerous— in that capacity than the dentist described by Beharry: L ast Christm as Suruj M oom a take up the children by their grandm oom a and this boy just com e up to she cool cool and say he taking up dentistry. You could imagine how Suruj M oom a was surprise. And the next thing we hear is that he borrow money to buy one of them dentist machine thing and he start pulling out people teeth, just like that. The boy killing people left and right, and still people going. Trinidad people is like that.

(66-67)

This anecdote establishes the social context for Ganesh’s own successes. He triumphs in part because a society without the standards even to license and police dentists is one in which to announce yourself as performing a function and to adopt the appropriate costumes and props is sufficient attainment to be taken seriously in that function. Such a society, Naipaul implies, gets the quack doctors, banal authors, and sham politicians it deserves. Satiric energies that seem to be directed towards Ganesh are ultimately extended to the society that engenders and supports him.

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But as with The Suffrage o f Elvira, the future-oriented satire aimed at West Indian society— a collection of unflattering representations that seem designed to embarrass and warn rather than blame— is balanced and qualified by the historically oriented satire of colonial management implied by the ironic gaps between ideal and actual. The failure of Elvirans to live up to the ideals of the democratic franchise implies the failure of colonialism to beget anything better; likewise, The Mystic Masseur's broader rendering of West Indian shortcomings indicts the colonial era that was just beginning to wane at the time the novel is set. In both novels, satiric multidirectionality takes the form of two distinct rhetorical gestures—the ironic-idealistic and the satiric-referential—that invoke different gaps and expose different targets. The thematic functions of irony and satire in NaipauPs early novels are nowhere more apparent than in the use of silence as a symbol for the legacy of colonialism. At several points in The Suffrage o f Elvira and The Mystic M asseur, silence or absence prevails where the content of ideas and speech are required. Without policies to debate, the Harbans team broods, ponders, sips tea, and thinks in silence until someone proposes a strategy which, inevitably, “go take some money” (51). Ganesh’s electioneering cohorts have trouble finding enough content for their first four-page issue of The D harm a; in the middle of planning, discussion grinds to a halt and “there was a long silence, broken only by the boy turning over the pages of Time with unnecessary rustle” (170). When the newspaper comes out, space is taken up by ads for fictional stores and an irrelevant article with the enormous headline, “FLYING IN ANCIENT INDIA” (178). The committee later wants to capitalize on the damage done to Narayan by The Dharma's revelations, “but no one could think of a plan” (179). These variations on the theme of silence that emerge as Ganesh rises to political office demonstrate that he has not grown substantially beyond the emptyheaded thinker who impressed people when he was a young man. In light of Kernan’s notion that the satiric plot tends towards stasis or intensification of unpleasant conditions, the triumph of silence in these early satiric comedies is one indication that while their plots may proceed on a surface level towards victories, successes, and festive celebrations, they do so with neither the sense of concluding social integration that comedy requires— The Suffrage o f Elvira ends with the very opposite— nor the sense that the satirized conditions—corruption, chicanery, vacuousness, and so on— have been removed. In fact, these conditions have intensified, gaining an entrenched legitimacy by the success of their perpetrators. This narrative inscription of stasis and worsening conditions supports NaipauPs satiric critique of West Indian society. He shows Trinidadians complacently allowing the worst aspects of their colonial past to become the building blocks of the emerging postcolonial nation; opportunities for newness and transcendence of historical degradations are being missed. This future-oriented vision aims at self-recognition and reform through un-

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flattering representations. It offers the “help” that Naipaul says West Indians need, and which he sees as best furnished by irony and satire (Middle 68-69). But Naipaul also says, at an equally early stage in his career, that “I write for England” (O vercrow ded 11). The Mystic Masseur makes this clear in its prefatory note, which introduces Trinidad as “a small island, no bigger than Lancashire, with a population somewhat smaller than Nottingham’s” (5). But writing for England is not equivalent to being pro-England. The triumph of silence over creativity, of emptiness over fruitful thought, indirectly censures the British for their neglect and abandonment by showing the embarrassing results of their experiment in society building. Colonial history has given West Indians little or no experience in leadership or creative thinking; hence the silence. Naipaul can count on British readers acknowledging the gap between the ideal content of political debates, election strategies, and newspapers, and the flimsy West Indian examples. And whatever directionality metropolitan readers may actually glean from NaipauPs ironies, the social contexts underlying his work make clear that such ideals are inappropriate for measuring Trinidadian society because the present-day absences stem from historical absences for which colonial rule is largely responsible. In his essay “The Overcrowded Barracoon,” Naipaul describes Mauritius as “colonized, like those West Indian islands on the other side of the world, only for sugar, part of the great human engineering of recent empires, the shifting about of leaderless groups of conquered peoples” (O vercrow ded 257). He quotes the Mauritian prime minister decrying colonialism as “a destructive institution” that rewards “parasites and hangers-on.” These people, the prime minister suggests, provide a weak foundation for an emerging independent nation. The author agrees with him; colonialism is, in NaipauPs words, “The old enemy. And also the new” (285). NaipauPs multidirectional satiric jabs are aimed at the old enemy as well as the new—the not-quite-postcolonial colonials who will not or cannot send the old enemy packing. A H ouse fo r Mr Biswas is not nearly as saturated in satire as the shorter and more narrowly focused novels that preceded it. In fact, it seems to show the beginnings of NaipauPs ambivalence towards the use of satire. Still, his most critically favored novel is energized by the referential aggression, judgment, and play of satire in several distinct ways. Most obvious is the incidental satire of Trinidadian people and institutions more or less familiar from the earlier novels. A typical example is F. Z. Ghany, the village solicitor who concocts Mr. Biswas’s birth certificate. He represents a similar sham authority and dubious suitability for his role as the death-dealing dentist in The Mystic Masseur or the trustees of democracy in The Suffrage o f Elvira. Naipaul sums up the Ghany episode by saying, after some scraps

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of paper have been signed and stamped (with a broken stamp in a dusty shed), “In this way official notice was taken of Mr Biswas’s existence, and he entered the new world” (41). An ironic gap is established between this announcement of weighty import and the ad h o c, seemingly unofficial informality of the scene. Words like “official,” “solicitor,” and “affidavit” become in this scene one half of an ironic gap turning on a semiotic discrepancy. Abstract meanings seem far removed from actual incarnations. Again, however, a different satiric gap emerges in the context that the novel itself provides of “a society that had no rules and patterns, and [where] classifications were a chaotic business” (459). The satiric gap implicates the colonists who created and perpetuated a disordered world—a world in which reduced versions of officialdom are accepted as legitimate because the ideal or abstract meanings to which the irony seems to refer do not pertain locally. F. Z. Ghany is all Mr. Biswas’s mother and aunt know of official authority. They have no better models; he is what they expect. Naipaul opposes this sad legacy of colonialism as much as the opportunism and incompetence of Ghany himself.10 The novel burgeons with incidental satire: of colonial schooling modeled irrelevantly on English systems (41-44); of religious evangelism incapacitated by absurd debates over violent versus non-violent conversion strategies (108-10); of sensational journalism mimicking England’s worst (291-97); of a returned Londoner’s self-aggrandizing scorn, illusion of worldliness, and local stature as a role-model (485-91). Each of these passages prompts a multidirectional interplay of ironic and satiric gaps, and has thematic and rhetorical parallels to passages in earlier novels. But in addition to these incidental ironic sallies, A H ouse fo r Mr Biswas signals its interest in satiric representation in three main ways: by its fixation on disorder and decrepitude; by the allegorical interpretations it invites; and by its portrayal of Mr. Biswas himself as a lively but ineffectual satirist. Ramchand is one of several critics to comment on Naipaul’s intense, obsessive “vision of a world that is dingy, overcrowded and smelly, with inconsequential objects and derelict human beings stranded in gloom and grease.” The Tulsis in particular, Ramchand says, make “Mr. Biswas’s world even more coarse-grained, chaotic, overcrowded and suffocating” (193-94). Mr. Biswas experiences these attributes not as natural features of daily life but as constraints and frustrations. They inhibit his desire for independence and order, which is projected into the goal of his own house. The Trinidadian social world that the novel describes in such detail resembles “the crowded scene” and the “characteristic actions” of “darkening, disordering, preying” that some critics see as satiric conventions (Paulson, Fictions 72; Kernan, Plot 23). Words like “decrepit,” “mudcaked,” “commotion,” “terror,” “panic,” “threatening,” “noise,” “chaos,” or “darkness” are sprinkled liberally throughout the book. And while Mr. Biswas might be said to have triumphed at the end, his “rise” to home ownership and the independence that it symbolizes is an uneven, lurching passage full

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of setbacks. The goal once reached is disappointing (the house is derelict and mortgaged beyond its worth) and short-lived (Mr. Biswas dies soon after moving in). In many ways, little seems to have changed for the beleaguered Mr. Biswas. The descriptions of the Sikkim Street house make the shop at the Chase, with its sooty, makeshift kitchen and crooked, peeling walls, seem luxurious by comparison. He is as vulnerable to the chicanery of the solicitor’s clerk who sells him the house as he was to the predatory Seebaran and Mungroo years before—and at much greater cost. These unrelenting physical and social details suggest that on at least one level A H ouse fo r Mr Biswas exhibits traditional satiric conventions of plot and form: the intensification of unpleasant conditions rather than their removal or resolution; “minuscule and sterile achievement” (Clark 92); circular and repetitive rather than linear and developmental movement; even, one might argue, the deepening sense of entrapment and futility that Clark argues satire achieves through “the multiplication of cases of a single disease”—a “downhill” rather than circular movement (99). To give the novel this sort of critical emphasis is to propose that Mr. Biswas’s accomplishments (independence, home ownership, a supportive family) are overshadowed and even undermined by his environment’s continued restrictions of possibility. It is to see the novelist’s stance as pessimistic—even fatalistic— and the novel’s driving generic impulse as more satiric or tragic than comic. Not all critics see the novel this way. They disagree about whether Mr. Biswas’s life story is ultimately one of futility and failure or of courageous achievement and creation.11 Not surprisingly, some critics read it as an ambivalent or paradoxical mixture of both. For Landeg White, the Sikkim Street house as the central metaphor embodies a “paradox” by which “achievement and failure are aspects of a single experience” typical of “a world which is shot through with contradictions” (98). Morris curiously turns his tipping of the balance in favor of Mr. Biswas’s success into an act of critical cheerleading, enthusing about the importance of “trying to work out the paradox so that Mr. Biswas at least seem s, in the end, to rise above the disconnected but potent forces always pulling him down” (27). Certainly most critics who recognize satire in the novel locate its targets elsewhere than in Mr. Biswas himself— in his “environment.” But to make the common and reasonable claim that the Tulsis bear the primary brunt of satiric aggression and judgment is to beg the question of who or what they represent. What is the “real world” referent that inspires the satiric fictional representation? The answer to this question is not straightforward; it is complicated by the variety of quite plausible allegorical interpretations that the novel permits. With the exception of Cudjoe, who reads Mr. Biswas’s life as a tragic, quasi-Hindu allegory of alienation in four stages (72-73), allegorical critics usually make a sociohistorical connection between Mr. Biswas’s struggle for freedom and the political history of colonial Trinidad. These readings vary in specificity and focus. Most vaguely and least politically, Mr.

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Biswas’s life is seen as “a pilgrimage from one mud hut or crumbling tenement to another,” just as “West Indian society is an affair of nomads and migrants; after three hundred years there is still no resting place for its denizens, no secure cultural norm or geographical spot to which they can anchor themselves” (Ormerod 590). Here the Tulsis are given no particular allegorical signification. In some other readings, Mr. Biswas’s refusal to submit to the Tulsis is seen as “an allegory of the attempt to emancipate oneself from colonial/determinist dependence” (Thieme, “V. S.” 13), or as “a nationalist parable, arguing in 1961 the case for that self-governing democracy which came to Trinidad in 1962” (L. White 128). Here Mr. Biswas allegorically represents Trinidad as a polity, a collective, and the Tulsis the tyrannical colonizing force that paternalistically looks after him in return for his labor. Some readings posit more racially specific versions of this relationship. Hanuman House has been interpreted as a “slave society” in which husbands are recruited, put to work, and convinced that they freely chose this life of dependency and exploitation—that they have no other needs or alternatives. Mrs. Tulsi demands love and worship, and suggests that rebellion against the divinely ordained family structure is futile and morally wrong. Mr. Biswas in this reading is the rebellious slave (Rohlehr, “Character” 87-92). Alternatively, the novel can be read as “an allegory of the painful progress of the major group among the Trinidadian Indians, Hindu northern Indians” (King, V. S. 40). Each of Mr. Biswas’s domestic situations thus represents a specific historical stage: his life journey allegorizes a community’s movement from the dependence of indentured labor, through the greater independence of small-scale farming and shop-owning, to an urbanized and creolized state that places growing emphasis on the education required to take advantage of new opportunities. If in this version Mr. Biswas stands for a specific racial community, the Tulsis must represent the threatening but seductive larger creole society in which the Hindu Indians find themselves. Through the multiple substitutions of available allegories, then, Naipaul’s portrayal of the Tulsis lets a number of targets be identified and satirically judged. Allegorically the novel can be seen to satirize such things as the self-serving manipulations of hierarchical colonial power (“the old queen” Mrs. Tulsi encouraging worship and obedience), colonial expansionism (the recruiting of husbands), the colonizer’s abuse of natural resources (the ruining of the Shorthills estate), the disorder of the colony’s creole society (the noisy chaos of the Tulsi household), and that society’s enforced conformity and mediocrity (the destruction of Savi’s doll house). The Tulsis are thus translated into various historically specific versions of oppression, coercion, exploitation, and incompetence. The danger in giving interpretive authority to this seemingly happy union of allegory’s indirections and satire’s indirections, however, is that it might occlude more direct significations. If Mr. Biswas is taken to stand for Trinidad’s Hindu society and the Tulsis for either colonial power or creole

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society, and if the novel is read as satirizing the latter from a position sympathetic to the former, can this interpretation be reconciled with the fact that the Tulsis also unallegorically represent that threatened Hindu world? Can they, in other words, be victims as well as tyrants— hobbled in the direct plot by the very forces that, through the indirect correspondences of allegory, they represent in relation to Mr. Biswas? If the answer is “yes”—and I will argue that it is—the novel’s satiric force is necessarily affected. Primarily, the Tulsis are a fictional version of a traditional, wealthy, high-caste family. They begin the novel as a family fortress— unified, stratified, and highly ritualized. Increasingly anachronistic, what Rohlehr calls “Tulsidom” (“Character” 90) falls into disarray over the course of the novel. The Tulsis succumb to the concurrent pressures of creolization, decolonization, capitalism, and modernity. On one level this entropy simply extends the allegorical correspondences: as Tulsidom disintegrates so does Empire, and as Mr. Biswas becomes free (in a limited way) so does Trinidad. But on another level the end of Tulsidom is a genuine loss for which colonial history is largely responsible. The Tulsi isolationism and command structure are in part an attempt to preserve some cultural integrity and stature—which a well-to-do Brahmin family would have had in India— in a new environment where cultural syncretism has decimated the caste system. Tulsidom is an attempt, increasingly unsuccessful, to shore up a certain order and coherence in the face of colonial society’s disorder. And for the fastidious, patrician, Brahmin Naipaul such an effort is not without merit— at least in theory, however flawed this particular incarnation may be. The fragmentation of the Tulsi fortress may be a good thing on the level of indirect satiric allegory (because it helps liberate Mr. Biswas), but on the level of direct signification it represents one more casualty of Empire and its manufactured disorder. These two levels of signification (which are really levels of interpretation) make Tulsidom a much less clear-cut satiric target than, say, neoimperial America in “A Flag on the Island.” The assured judgment of satire is qualified by ambivalence—a consciousness that the oppressors are also oppressed. Naipaul inscribes this ambivalence directly into the character of his protagonist. Mr. Biswas’s rebellion against the Tulsis is advanced primarily through his satiric wit. He caricatures family members with mock-heroic and reductive names: the gods, the old queen, the Big Boss, the readers and learners, “This blasted fowlrun you calling family” (94). He translates Hanuman House into “the monkey house. . . . The place is a blasted zoo, man” (108). He teases Suniti about her “worthless husband” and his “goats”— making up the goats simply to irritate her (511). The therapeutic value to Mr. Biswas of his satiric stance is undeniable. It helps him to cope— to maintain some dignity and individuality in a situation designed to subjugate him. Satirizing the overwhelming, absorptive Tulsis compensates to some extent for his otherwise unassertive, easily manipulated personality. Its efficacy, however, is questionable. Early on, he realizes that

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satire alone will not improve his situation: “The campaign against the Tulsis, which he had been conducting with such pleasure, now seemed pointless and degrading” (118). Later, the creative exuberance of generating his own satiric resistance seems obsolete when someone else’s satire can be read for therapy instead: “Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary” (337-38). Satire as pure comfort has an ambiguous status: psychologically it may help, but its worldly achievement is hard to measure. If Mr. Biswas is seen as a failure, his satiric rebellion looks futile and absurd. If he is seen as achieving some form of liberation (however qualified), then satire as a form of resistance looks more worthy. And even if his satire’s determining influence on power structures and domestic arrangements is minimal, it may have the more intangible benefit of showing Mr. Biswas’s liveliness and dignity—an attractive feistiness. As Landeg White puts it, The wit of T h e M ystic M asseur is put into the mouth of M r Biswas himself, with N aipaul standing back pointing fout] the sad irony that it is all a response to events which cannot be altered. . . . His cam paign of caricature may at times seem little more than the verbal equivalent of his spitting into the rum at Bhandat’s, but it does at least save him from becoming as drab as H ari or from collaborating in his own degradation like Govind. ( 1 1 2 , 115)

There is a strong tradition in the history of satire of oppressed groups reserving the right to satirize their oppressors, regardless of any hope that doing so will improve their circumstances. In the case of American slaves “putting on ole massa,” for instance, the satiric discourse was private; it had power within the group in part because it was not intended to be understood or acted upon by its targets (W. Cook 113). Another tradition of satire theory, not unrelated, insists that satire is an expression and an acknowledgement of defeat, despair, and lack of power. In John Snyder’s view, the satiric irony of the oppressed simply reveals and maintains a “humiliating situation of powerlessness” (96). This is not to say that satire is worthless, but that its value is more aesthetic than causal, and more a function of pleasure than power. But if, as Philip Pinkus argues, the satirist is a rebellious “fool” who knowingly “fights what he can never beat,” but who nonetheless “symbolizes the struggle that makes life possible[,] . . . the will to live, the impulse of life determined to overcome its chains” (48-49), then satire becomes at least a demand to be heard, a form of personal or collective assertion. Cultural assertion in the face of political and cultural oppression is commonly taken to be the central aim and achievement of postcolonial literatures. Naipaul tends not to be critically identified (or self-identified) with a

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project of cultural assertion on behalf of a community the way other postcolonial writers of his generation are—the West Indians Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, for instance, or the Africans Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. And even if A H ouse fo r Mr Biswas can be read as a satiric allegory of cultural or national assertion and resistance, it also reflects Naipaul’s ambivalence about both satiric resistance and cultural assertion in its couplings of failure and success, achievement and nothingness, the lone voice and the deafening din, the expansive epic narrative and the constricted half-made world. Satire may on one hand be prompted by fear and a futile desire for revenge and rebellion; it may get attention but not results. On the other hand it may be a form of “strength,” as Naipaul suggests in his fictional self-portrait of Anand, whose “satirical sense kept him aloof.” Yet while the self-protective assertion of satire may make Anand “unassailable,” it also “led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness” (372). This autobiographical snippet is just one of many ways in A H ouse for Mr Biswas that Naipaul explicitly shows resistance not only through satire, but also to satire—as an attitude, and as a way of knowing and representing the world.

C H A P T ER T H R E E

“In All Fairness” Satire and Narrative in the Novels of Chinua Achebe

When critics discuss the work and sensibility of Chinua Achebe, their assessments tend to cluster around a notion not usually associated with satiric writing: “balance.” Emmanuel Ngara, for instance, praises the “truthful and balanced picture of Igbo society” in Achebe’s novels, one which “does not gloss over its weaknesses” (116). David Cook argues similarly that in Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe’s “lordly, objective, incontrovertible manner” of presenting the encounter between European and Igbo peoples is not “concerned to pass judgment on social systems, nor to assert dogmatically that one is better or worse than another” (67). “And so the total effect,” says Cook, “is one of balance” (74). These constructions of ideological neutrality, echoed by Gareth Griffiths (83), Oladele Taiwo (112-16), James Booth (81) and many others, have correspondences in the thematic realm. According to J. Z. Kronenfeld, readings of Things Fall Apart as “simply a celebrative account of ‘traditional,’ totally homogeneous and ‘communal’ African society” do an injustice to its portrait of a society achieving a “balance” between opposing forces such as communal cooperation and individual achievement, aspiration and fate, “masculine” and “feminine” virtues, matrilineal and patrilineal kin (218-19). G. D. Killam praises the “balance and proportion” (93) between absurdity and seriousness in A Man o f the People (1966), and Elleke Boehmer notes the “uneasy co-existence” in Anthills o f the Savannah (1987) of “political cynicism” and “pessimism” with “an apparent commitment to gender reform and to the redemptive power of myth” (105). My aim in this chapter is not to contest such critical positions but rather to ask how Achebe the writer who “attribut[es] proper value where it is due” (D. Cook 69) might be reconciled with equally persistent critical constructions of Achebe the satirist. Moreover, how might works of narrative realism renowned for their ethnological and sociopolitical accuracy— so much so that Robert Wren can devote a book-length study to the demon79

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stration of their referential veracity— be accommodated to concepts of satiric play, misrepresentation, and judgment? The many critics who find “balance” in Achebe’s writing are supported not only by each other but by the author himself. His essays and interviews state clearly his commitment to maintaining equitable perspectives on Igbo society and the colonial encounter. His famous early assertion of his mandate—to “teach my readers that their past— with all its imperfections— was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them” (H opes 30)—demonstrates by its candid yet emphatic admission of “imperfections” that even a recuperative, anticolonial project must make room for self-criticism. He recognizes the destructive effects of hierarchical moral binaries in colonialist epistemes and rejects the idea that simply reversing them is an effective strategy of resistance. In other words, if colonial power justified itself by aligning the white/black duality with such ethnocentric simplifications as good/evil, civilized/primitive, Achebe refuses to fight back in like manner. He says, From the African standpoint, there may be something in w hat these fo reigners are saying, or there may be some faults in our own system. . . . There is no reason, for instance, for twins to be throw n away [as they were in pre-colonial Igboland]. But if you take a position for or against, then you find yourself defending the throw ing aw ay of twins, or else you say th at everything in Africa is barbarism . . . . N ow I don’t w ant to take either position. Fo r every proverb you produce I can give you one that says the opposite. (Emenyonu 23 )

For Achebe, artistic representations of colonialism must contain truth: “I think it’s not my business to present villains without any redeeming features. That would be untrue” (Lindfors, Palaver 8). More recently, Achebe has stated similar beliefs through Ikem Osodi, the character in Anthills o f the Savannah whom many critics (e.g., Maughan Brown 8; Ngara 124) read as a spokesperson for the author’s own political and aesthetic ideas. In an important speech, Ikem says, Those w ho would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of hum anity to the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in com fort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion. But it will not be in the com plex and p arad oxical cavern of M other Idoto. (1 0 0 - 0 1 )

Achebe’s “balance” can therefore be seen as a function of the paradoxes and complexities of the world and of an open-minded pursuit of truthfulness that opposes rigidly narrow perspectives. It is an approach to human existence grounded in the traditional Igbo notion of duality as summed up in one of Achebe’s favorite proverbs: “Wherever Something stands, Something Else will stand beside it” (Morning 161). Derived from the recognition of the human world’s spiritual counterpart, this Igbo dualism implies

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balance in the horizontal axis of its metaphor, and contrasts with the vertical hierarchy that structures the colonialist binary. It participates in the Igbo qualities of flexibility, openness to outside influence, dynamism, and resistance to centralized authority, which have been well documented by Achebe and his critics (e.g., Achebe, H opes 42; Carroll 26-29). The art of Igbo society reflects this “mobile” and dualistic worldview favoring harmonizing accommodation and inclusiveness rather than negation or exclusion. In Achebe’s words, “the Igbo formulate their view of the world as: ‘No condition is permanent’ . . . and new forces are liable to appear without warning in the temporal and metaphysical firmament” (H opes 43). As an example of how such new or alien elements are incorporated, he mentions the frequent representation of the alien district officer am ong traditional m bari figures. . . . A rt must interpret all human experience. . . . Even if harm ony is not achievable in the heterogeneity of human experience, the dangers of an open rupture are greatly lessened by giving to everyone his due in the same forum of social and cultural surveillance. (44)

What basis does a worldview stressing harmony and balance, complex truths and “giving to everyone his due” provide for satire? Does not the ambivalent Igbo sense of justice, encapsulated in Akuebue’s remark in Arrow o f G od (1964) that “the pride of Umuaro” is “that we never see one party as right and the other wrong” (100), militate against the righteous assurance of the satirist that he or she does know right from wrong, and that wrong must be punished? Would not a stronger foundation for satire be found in Frantz Fanon’s assertion that “on the logical plane, the Manicheism of the settler produces a Manicheism of the native. To the theory of the ‘absolute evil of the native’ the theory of the ‘absolute evil of the settler’ replies” (93)? These rhetorical questions are intuitive ones based on inherited concepts of satire as binary comparison, as confidently moralistic judgment and will to power. Achebe’s work overall is no such thing, yet while he is far from wholly or consistently satiric— few contemporary authors are—he does give satire an important place in his repertoire of rhetorical and representational strategies. That he is a satirist is asserted by numerous critics, and Achebe himself calls A Man o f the People “a social satire” (H opes 104) and “a rather serious indictment . . . of post-independence Africa” (Duerden 13). But in the absence of any theoretical elaboration of “satire” by Achebe, a critical examination of the nature and function of satire within an ideological and aesthetic climate that stresses “balance” must proceed by investigating more precisely how such balance is expressed by the author and achieved in his work Biodun Jeyifo, in perhaps the definitive critical articulation of balance in Achebe, identifies in his work two opposed poles of “cultural affirmation” and “cultural critique” (the latter Jeyifo also calls “cultural demystifica-

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tion” and “deflation”) (61). The paradigmatic figure who unites these opposed intentions is Obierika, Okonkwo’s friend in Things Fall Apart. Jeyifo describes Obierika as an ambivalent thinker with “a balanced sense of the friend’s strengths, weaknesses and even neurotic susceptibilities” (58). As Obierika is to Okonkwo, the argument goes, so Achebe is to Umuofia and to Igbo society in general: “Obierika’s skepticism toward his culture achieves its tremendous force precisely because he bears deep, positive currents of values, predispositions, identity from the very same culture” (60). This is as much as to say, by implication, that Achebe’s critical stances on Igbo and Nigerian society are legitimated and authorized by his status as a cultural insider whose self-identification is with his ethnic and national community. His license to criticize comes from his countervailing willingness to celebrate, to embrace, to exemplify. In Jeyifo’s reading, Things Fall Apart and Arrow o f G od become unique postcolonial texts by their ability to achieve a “balanced textual inscription” between affirmation and critique, or between doxa (defined by Jeyifo as “belief, opinion, or custom perceived in terms of elementary structures of ordered meanings”) and “para-dox(a), or irony and dialectic” (61). It is significant that Jeyifo focuses his construction of balance in Achebe on Obierika, and on the ambivalent detachment from Igbo culture that separates him from Okonkwo. Obierika comes to represent the flexibility and willingness to change under external pressures that the Umuofians as a whole demonstrate in rejecting Okonkwo’s rigid militancy, and which the people of Umuaro likewise exhibit in Arrow o f G od when they defect from Ezeulu’s to the missionaries’ authority over the harvest. Obierika’s questioning adaptation is the way of survival; he represents the practical side of the Igbo and of Achebe. Achebe has been called a “moderate” because his political views are reformist rather than revolutionary, and because his attitude towards English as a literary and national language in Nigeria is one of pragmatic acceptance and not the politically charged rejection of Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o. But to be a moderate does not entail being an apologist for both the traditional Igbo way of life and the colonial imposition that forced it to change. Obierika’s and Achebe’s balance of “affirmation” and “critique” in Things Fall Apart pertains to Igbo culture only; nowhere in Obierika’s ruminations or Achebe’s own comments is there a suggestion that Africa has seen a net benefit from its colonial experience. Achebe may be willing to say, in his balanced way, that “to oppose colonialism does not mean that one does not appreciate the values of Western technological civilization” (Duerden 8), but the emphasis is still on op p o sing colonialism. And the following statement by Achebe, while advocating “fairness,” makes clear that the affirmation-critique balance that measures Igbo society has been profoundly recalibrated towards critique when measuring colonialism:

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W ithout subscribing to the view that Africa gained nothing at all in her long encounter with Europe, one could still say, in all fairness, that she suffered many terrible and lasting misfortunes. In terms of human dignity and human relations the encounter was alm ost a com plete disaster for the black races. It has warped the mental attitudes of both black and white, (quoted in Killam 5)

That Achebe is first and foremost a critical opponent of colonialism is most evident in the essays collected in Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) and H opes and Im pedim ents (1988). These can be sorted into three broad categories. Essays from the first group—of which the most important are “Onitsha, Gift of the Niger,” “Chi in Igbo Cosmology” and “The Igbo World and Its Art”—examine the Igbo worldview and its cultural products, performing sympathetic ethnography from the inside. Achebe writes o f the Igbo and as an Igbo. The Igbo values he forwards with approval are among those I have grouped under the rather overdetermined concept of balance: opposition to absolute truths and concentrations of power; dualism and openness to contradictory realities. In another essay, Achebe admires Amos Tutuola’s balanced “moral universe . . . in which work and play in their numerous variations complement each other. . . . We give work and struggle; and in the end we take rest and fulfillment” (H opes 70). A second group of essays, including “The Truth of Fiction,” “Africa and Her Writers,” “The Writer and His Community,” and “The Novelist as Teacher,” carefully negotiates an African aesthetic for literature. Achebe rejects European traditions of “art for art’s sake” and the alienated artist in favor of a vision of writing as socially rooted, created “for the good of . . . society” (Morning 29); nevertheless the writer “must remain free to disagree with his society and go into rebellion against it if need be” (H opes 28). Significantly, when he criticizes Nigerian society in these and other essays, Achebe typically takes aim at Europe as well. For instance, after contrasting traditional Igbo society’s “unbridled republicanism” with the “aristocratic culture” of Europe, he derides the cultural neocolonialism he sees in certain African writers as “the near-pathological eagerness to contract the sickness of Europe in the horribly mistaken belief that our claim to sophistication is improved thereby” (Morning 36-38). This vigorous tirade is one of several constructions by Achebe of Europe as a source of pollution, a bad influence on African values and ideologies. The “sickness” Achebe describes is a mental sickness— a disease that infects African attitudes and is broadly reflected in the realms of politics and culture. He takes the European origins of the disease as his primary subject in the third group of essays, which finds Achebe at his most angry and denunciatory. Prominent among these are “Colonialist Criticism” and “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart o f D arkness,” but others that share their spirit and sphere of interest include “Thoughts on the African Novel” and “Impediments to Dialogue between North and South.” It is

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important to note that these essays attack the limitations of colonialist ideologies rather than the material activities of colonial agents that influenced and were influenced by those ideologies; this distinction will have particular relevance to Achebe’s satire. “Colonialist Criticism” sees white peoples’ denigrating, self-privileging assessments of black culture in the colonial era and of black literature more recently as blinded by the same arrogant assumptions of black inferiority and epistemological accessibility. In the past, Achebe argues, black peoples were subject to the purported benefits of European administration, religion, and education; today the black writer is seen as a “somewhat unfinished European” whose cultural work will earn approval when it achieves a “universality” that really means resemblance to European texts and participation in their aesthetic, epistemic, and moral universe (H opes 46, 54). In this and the essay on Conrad, Achebe prefigures the main arguments of colonialist discourse theory, arguing that the abuses of colonialist activity— military, literary, critical— are driven by “the desire— one might indeed say the need— in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil for Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (H opes 2). He reads Conrad’s erasure of African subjectivity as an inscription of comfortable racist myths that provided ideological support for imperial activities; as a critic of imperialism, Conrad failed to recognize “the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth” (13). One thing becomes clear from this gathering of Achebe’s essays into three groups (a manifestly provisional gathering which accommodates many but not all of Achebe’s collected essays). When Achebe speaks in his own voice, whatever balance he may achieve in terms of subject matter (by writing about European and African ideas) does not entail an ambivalent or balanced evaluation. Achebe writes with sympathy of Igbo intellectual and ideological systems, and with hostility of those that were introduced by Europe. When Africans disappoint Achebe, it is most often because they have too willingly put to use a European set of mental tools that perniciously undoes what was admirable in their African identity. If there are not strict allocations of absolute good and absolute evil in these essays, there is certainly a general division between preferable African/Igbo worldviews and the disapproved systems of European imperialism. And what is most objectionable in European ideology is precisely its lack of Igbo “balance.” Dominating and hierarchical, excluding and so convinced of its superiority that it does not even consider what contribution African perspectives might offer it, the colonialist and missionary assertion that “I am the truth, the way; and the life” is, as Achebe notes, antithetical to the Igbo proverb “Wherever Something stands, Something Else will stand beside it” (Morning 161). As a body, then, Achebe’s nonfiction juxtaposes the Igbo’s egalitarian openness and suspicion of absolutist truths or power structures with the self-aggrandizing, moralistic reductiveness of European colonialist views of

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Africa. Two important parallel juxtapositions may be attached to these very different ways of mediating self and other, the known and the unknown. The first is the juxtaposition between “balance” and “satire.” If the Igbo worldview earns the designation “balance” by what Derek Wright calls its “sophisticated relativismf, ]. . . its enlightened and tolerant sense of alternative possibilities” (79), there is something of the satirist’s habits of diminishment about the colonialist. Satire as a form of othering traditionally asserts the satirist’s superior moral position over a simplified, selective portrayal that deliberately limits its recognition of human complexity. In their most typical incarnations, the satirist and the colonialist share specific representational techniques: simplification, reduction, selective exaggeration. What Dustin Griffin identifies as the satirist’s typically “aristocratic” attitude— “disdainful and imperious, intolerant, sharply aware of social differences, sensitive to style, suspicious of the mob” (137)— is also the attitude of the paradigmatic colonialist. Both types, as a strategy of domination, tend to “freeze” or “fix” their objects into static forms resistant to change. Like the colonialist, the satirist comes to “know” his object of study as a degraded, undignified entity that can benefit from attendance to his discourse. The second juxtaposition that the Igbo-colonialist contrast suggests is between what Achebe calls a “worldview” and what Michel Foucault and Edward Said call a “discourse.” Said and other colonialist discourse analysts follow Foucault in theorizing “discourse” as a “system of thought” (Said, Orientalism 96) whose consensual possibilities for knowledge are intimately bound to questions of institutional power, ideological climate, and political relations of domination. Discourse as “what is written and spoken” reflects and reinforces “the unequal relation between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed” (Said, World 47, 48). Said’s groundbreaking study Orientalism describes how “the Orient” became a Western academic and institutional construct that served the needs of Western hegemony; similarly, Africa was discursively constituted as “other” through what Patrick Brantlinger calls “the myth of the Dark Continent” (185) in the period prior to the imperial-missionary “scramble for Africa” that the myth helped justify. The Igbo “worldview” as articulated by Achebe is not a “discourse” in this particular sense because it matured in pre-contact times without experience of racial “others.” When white others arrived and were incorporated into its system of knowledge, they were not subjected by the Igbo to discourse’s strategies of containment; in Brantlinger’s words, “discourse . . . treats its subject as universally accepted, scientifically established, and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or theoretical opposition” (187).1 These parallel juxtapositions suggest an alignment between, on one hand, colonialist “discourse” and “satiric” modes of representation, and, on the other, the Igbo “worldview” and “balance.” The gap between these alignments is the aporia in which occurred the non-meeting-of-minds be-

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tween whites and blacks that helped facilitate the colonialist’s occupation of Igboland. This gap also provides a starting point for a discussion of satire’s place in Achebe’s novels. * *

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Taiwo writes that while Achebe’s work offers less “consistently sustained satire” than that of his compatriot T. M. Aluko, “One must remember, however, such things as the closing page of Things Fall Apart, the dinner part [sic\ in Arrow o f G o d , and almost any chapter of N o Longer at Ease, not to mention the overall effect of A Man o f the P eople.” He also notes that “the focus of satire in Achebe tends, as the examples cited illustrate, to be that which militates against traditional culture rather than traditional culture in itself” (149). Taiwo’s apportioning of satire among the first four novels (he was writing before Anthills o f the Savannah) concords with the general emphasis of most critics. Those who discuss satire2 are most likely to identify it in A Man o f the People or N o Longer at Ease (1960); the historical novels are usually seen as only minimally satiric, if at all. However, just as those novels evoke the social context of a coherent society against which the more satire-worthy fallings-off of modernity may be implicitly measured, their selective satiric gambits establish the foundation and orientation for the more pervasive satire of the contemporary novels. Specifically, they establish a moral and ideological foundation in “traditional culture,” and an orientation towards discourse rather than human subjects— and ideologies rather than activities— as the targets of satiric attack. Take the famous final paragraph of Things Fall Apart, for example: The Com m issioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learnt a number of things. One of them was th at a D istrict Com m issioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress th at point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new m aterial. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could alm ost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought:

Pacification o f the Primitive Tribes o f the Lower Niger. (187)

The

This passage generates complex satiric ironies whose referent is a complacent and reductive discourse of which the District Commissioner is a representative exponent. As Wren notes of the D.C.’s planned study, “No such book exists, but books like it do exist” (5). Discourse’s pervasiveness and power transcend its manifestations in any single individual, institution, or text. Achebe’s satiric target is therefore not the D.C. but the ideology that

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makes him possible, not the fictitious book but the discourse in which “pacification” can describe English activities in Igboland and in which Okonkwo’s story is worth a “reasonable paragraph.” Most commentators on the ending note the irony conveyed by the gulf between the proposed paragraph and the full-length novel that the reader has just finished—a narrative whose subjectivity and new possibilities for knowledge the paragraph would negate. David Carroll notes that “the final ironic shift [in perspective] is to challenge the reader to apply the [colonialist, ethnocentric] stereotype once more if he dare” (64). As such, it clarifies the novel’s “primary purpose,” which Simon Gikandi identifies as “to contest, and wrestle with, the silent shadows and forms of colonialist discourse” (26). But what also needs highlighting is the satiric symmetry by which Achebe shrinks the D.C.’s discourse to his own “reasonable” paragraph. The reductiveness of colonialist discourse is matched and undermined by the reductiveness of satire in a potent tit-for-tat that simultaneously critiques and exemplifies its target. David Cook’s rather different reading of that final paragraph suggests a multidirectional satiric irony: “It is not just that the D.C. plans to reduce the heroic death pangs of a way of life to a patronising paragraph: it is that the clansmen have allowed themselves to be diminished in this way without resistance. The only figure who escapes this final irony is the dead Okonkwo” (80). Cook presumes that the Umuofians could somehow have resisted the D.C.’s discursive containment. But even if the Commissioner is a sincere “student of primitive customs,” his possibilities for knowledge are limited by an inherited set of presuppositions regarding race (blacks are “primitive”), subjectivity, and entitlement (the white subject’s burden is to pacify, civilize, and represent— i.e., speak for— black objects). There is nothing the Umuofians could have done to escape representation within a colonialist discursive paradigm that preceded their “discovery” by whites. Achebe’s first novel is actually quite unidirectional in its specifically satiric opposition. Its satiric target is colonialist discourse; what critique it forwards of Igbo society emerges through the balanced elaboration of narrative rather than the loaded diminishment of satire. Achebe’s counterdiscursive portrait of an Igbo clan’s integrity, complexity and highly evolved social systems—the aspect of the novel intended “to help my society regain belief in itself” (H opes 30)— is offset (i.e., balanced) by a demonstration through narrative of certain limitations and structural problems that rendered the clan vulnerable. An event such as Okonkwo’s killing of Ikemefuna, which causes a rift between him and Nwoye, elaborates unresolved contradictions between variant masculinities, and between rigid and adaptive approaches to tradition; Obierika’s commentary helps draw out these themes. Similarly, the narrative depicts the osw’s defection from a clan that ostracizes them towards the Christian church’s embrace, showing a weakness in the social fabric that missionaries and colonial administrators could exploit to the further detriment of the clan.

Satire & the Postcolonial Novel 1 he distinction I am drawing here is between two different forms of critique: satiric and narrative. Achebe’s satire targets a powerful but deficient colonialist discourse whose general procedure is to fix and diminish the other— to render the other as incomplete, silent, inert. Satiric representation shares these general properties: satire too proceeds by fixing an object, locking it into partial but characteristic states in order to observe its deformity and pre-empt its self-defense. Satire as a mode for representing and opposing colonialist discourse is peculiarly apt and even, as a negative combating a negative, a form of balancing. But satire thus constituted is antithetical to narrative. Gikandi, in his excellent study of Achebe, borrows from Said’s Orientalism in asserting the power of narrative as a counterdiscursive tool: As a strategy of representation narrative counters the ‘official’ view of the colonized as ahistorical and hence fixed in time and space. . . . In an a ttem pt to represent the colonized as a transparent entity which is, at the same tim e, immune to historical change and transform ation, the colonizer fixes the colonized as a people w ithout an objective history and hence subject to only those forms of change that com e from outside, that is, from the colonial structures. In con trast, anti-colonial writers, seeking to assert the capacity of their people for change and transform ation, return history to their people; narrative becomes the indispensible agent of history. (10)

The balance that Jeyifo sees in Things Fall Apart between cultural affirmation and cultural critique exists within a mobile narrative whose very existence as narrative reclaims subjectivity and history from colonialist or “official” erasure. Although it includes a critique of historical Igbo society, narrative as counterdiscourse in Gikandi’s sense vastly outweighs the minimal (paragraph-long) satiric diminishment and fixing of that same diminishing and immobilizing colonialist discourse. In that quantitative im balance satire gains rhetorical force; its procedures match those of its target, and both look small beside narrative. A number of critics appear to deny the specifically narrative accomplishment of Things Fall Apart. Fawzia Afzal-Khan proposes that Achebe’s “mythification creates a society that is historically static, or petrified, because it is forever fixed in a mythical past” (15). Wren (75) and Neil ten Kortenaar (“How” 323-28) view Umuofia as a static world plunged into historicality and narrativity only with the arrival of white colonizers and missionaries. Indeed, ten Kortenaar argues that the D.C. is a primary agent of narrative in the novel who fits Okonkwo into “a comprehensible narrative” in order to establish the Igbo’s “essential otherness and his own heroic character” (320). To say this is to identify correctly a process that did happen; concomitant with the European exploration and colonization of Africa was the writing by Europeans of narratives that represented European experiences in and observations of African realities. The “knowl-

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edge” such narratives provided had a functionality and authority (to Europeans, at least) in their time. But Achebe’s depiction of the D.C. musing about a chapter that might just be a paragraph suggests through irony that any narrative this man produces out of his brief encounter and cursory research will seem inadequate and incomprehensible when judged by the standards set by Achebe’s preceding narrative. His discourse will resemble satire’s subjective restrictions of meaning and explanatory power more than it will the seemingly objective “moral meaning” that, as Hayden White argues, Western cultures have come to associate with narrative representation (21). However static and ahistorical Umuofia may seem—and the presence of such things as guns and snuff suggests that even before the missionaries arrived Okonkwo’s world was hardly identical to that of his ancestors— Achebe’s novel allies itself with a narrativizing historicality simply by emplotting the changing circumstances, developments, and interactions of Okonkwo’s life. It is this detailed, elaborate micronarrative of an individual Igbo life that the D.C.’s discourse would corrupt, and against which his “reasonable paragraph” would look narratively inept. White’s work on the role of narrative in historical representation offers a number of interesting perspectives from which to view the satire-narrative partnership that operates in all of Achebe’s novels, and which is most starkly delineated in Things Fall Apart. In The Content o f the Form , White surveys and negotiates various recent theories addressing the problematic relation of history’s content (facts and events) and the narrative form in which history is presented and said to achieve meaning and generate knowledge. Despite an array of contending theoretical positions on the degree to which narrativity is either indistinguishable from or an obstruction to historical knowledge and understanding, a consensus of practice emerges in the West that, as Benedetto Croce bluntly puts it, “Where there is no narrative, there is no history” (quoted in H. White 28). But are the coherence, order, and causal-sequential logic usually associated with “story” objectively discovered in historical events, or subjectively im posed on them? What is the nature of the meaning conveyed by a full-fledged historical narrative as opposed to the less shaped and integrated chronicle? In the course of wrestling with such questions (and with others’ prior wrestlings with them) White makes some pertinent claims: that the narrativizing impulse is always a moralizing impulse (14); that the “historical narrative, as against the chronicle, reveals to us a world that is putatively ‘finished,’ done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not falling apart” (21; emphasis added); and, following Lévi-Strauss, that the distinction often made in the West between historical and nonhistorical (or civilized and primitive) societies is an invalid “myth of Western and especially modern, bourgeois, industrial, and imperialistic societies” that mistakes “a method of representation, narrative, for a content, namely, the notion of a humanity uniquely identified with those societies capable of believing that they

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[alone] had lived the kinds of stories that Western historians had told about them” (34). Through his fictional narrative history of Okonkwo and Umuofia, Achebe offers a highly moralized inscription of a world immediately before and during the period when it begins to dissolve, to fall apart. In doing so he contests the Western (and specifically colonialist) assumption that narrative and humanity are the exclusive preserve of “civilized” Europe. Demonstrating the possibility of a written narrativity for Igbo society asserts that the Igbo belong in history and in what the West recognizes as historical discourse; this assertion is a function of narrative’s translatability across cultures (H. White 1) and of “the success of narrative in revealing the meaning, coherence, or significance of events” (54). The satiric ending of the novel juxtaposes a kernel of deficient representation against the reader’s prior experience of narrative coherence; as Northrop Frye observes, satire is often based in “the feeling that experience is bigger than any set of beliefs about it” (Anatomy 229). The closure enacted by the novel’s final paragraph (and the “reasonable” colonialist set of beliefs to which it points) is paradoxically an end and a beginning, an act of closure and a refusal of closure. The end of Okonkwo’s story is also the end of reliable knowledge of that story, since new “knowledges” (which are really forms of ignorance) will take over. The movement from Igbo narrative elaboration to colonialist satiric reduction marks the end of a historical era, before contact with and diminishing representation by imperial agents. It is also, however, the beginning of a new, more uncertain era, and the introduction of a satiric mode (perpetrated by both Achebe and the D.C.) that threatens narrative coherence and completion. Griffin remarks that when narrative incorporates satire it becomes difficult to conclude (95-97). The emphatic placement of satire as a self-conscious exclamation mark at the end of Achebe’s narrative serves as a grim announcement. It augurs the open-ended and inconclusive aspects of the new colonial era, the partiality and reductiveness of the knowledges and representations that will circulate in that era, and the greater presence of reciprocal and combative satiric modes of representation in Achebe’s forthcoming fiction as he attempts to deal with various stages of postcontact history.

Arrow o f G od furthers the contrasts inaugurated in Things Fall Apart between a balanced narrative grounded in Igbo culture and a satiric critique of a relatively static and inflexible colonialist discourse. Europeans, introduced only towards the end of the first book, have a generation later become well established. As the bearers of a satirized discourse, white characters also play a much larger and more integrated role within the Igbo-focused narrative. There is not the same neat division between narrative and satiric sections in Arrow o f G od as in Things Fall Apart. In fact, it is the active participation in narrative of Winterbottom, Clarke, and other

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colonial agents that guarantees them a measure of the representational complexity that Achebe grants to his Igbo characters—a complexity without which they would be only conduits for satire. The novel’s contrapuntal narrative alternates between “white” chapters and “black” chapters, and shows enough of the white characters’ motivations, thought processes, and responses to events to render them fully human, if not always sympathetic. For instance, through the unfolding of narrative the reader is encouraged to see Winterbottom’s judgment as apt on some occasions (his objection to the policy of imposing paramount chiefs) and errant on others (his uncomprehending response to Ezeulu’s refusal of the chieftainship). The Europeans are only butts of satire insofar as they are the exponents of colonialist views; it is not the men themselves but their attitudes—and the discourse the attitudes reflect—that are the target. Achebe says in an interview, I do not paint white characters that are complete blackguards, because I don’t think th at is necessary for them to do the harm they did. They were decent people with families, and that is the w orst kind of danger: when it com es from a decent man. It does not really excite me that a monster causes trouble. W hen an ordinary man causes havoc, that is m ore om inous. (Em enyonu 23 )

What makes the ordinary man wreak havoc is the mental straitjacket that a pervasive colonialist discourse imposes on him, prescribing the parameters of knowledge and reducing the broad flexibility of mind needed to engage sensitively with an alien world. Colonialist discourse appears in various forms in the novel. The most obvious examples are textual, as in a parodic passage that purports to be an excerpt from the now-published Pacification book whose dubious genesis we have already seen: Fo r those in search of a strenuous life, for those who can deal with men as others deal with m aterial, who can grasp great situations, co a x events, shape destinies and ride on the crest of the wave of time Nigeria is holding out her hands. For the men who in India have made the Briton the law maker, the organizer, the engineer of the world this new, old land has great rew ards and honorable w ork. I know we can find the men. O ur m others . . . send us fearless and erect, to lead the backw ard races into line. . . . Son after son will leave the Mersey, strong in the will of his p arents today, stronger in the deed of his fathers in the past, braving the clim ate, taking the risks, playing his best in the game of life. (33)

This inspirational, Kiplingesque mix of racial bravado and destiny-seeking by the D.C., George Allen, displays many characteristic features of imperialist rhetoric: the sense of Britain’s entitlement to act as “law-maker” over “backward races” by virtue of its superior advancement; the macho challenge of a “strenuous” manhood, “fearless and erect” in its grappling for control over a risky, inhospitable environment; the association of the impe-

Satire & the Poòtcolonial Novel rial vocation with the pleasures of sport and games; the promise of “great rewards” given (or taken) for “honorable work.” Wren calls this passage “satire, of course, but has no one ever writ thus?”; he then quotes from a real book whose tone is similar (5). Wren’s remark implies recognition of an important trait of satire: it may achieve its referential critique simply by reproducing a discourse that in context satirizes itself. One might debate the point with respect to this particular passage. Is Achebe simply imitating a typical imperialist text, or is he playfully concentrating as many codewords and representative ideological outrages as possible in order to maximize the fun and the recognizability of the parodied object as a satiric target? The answer to this question is not crucial; what is important to acknowledge is that the passage functions satirically regardless of whether it is an accurate imitation or a playful distortion. Either way, it appears grotesque in its idealization of an endeavor that emerges in the juxtaposed narrative as banal reality—the sterility of Winterbottom’s life—and as negative achievement and misperceptions: Achebe shows how imperialism confounds rather than “raises” a sophisticated rather than “backward” Igbo society. This conception of “satire” as a function of narrative context and therefore not beholden to notions of distortion or exaggeration is important for reconciling Achebe the satirist to Achebe the truth-teller and man of balance so many critics admire. A satiric gesture may also be referentially accurate;3 its satiric nature is tied not to a recognized misrepresentation but to gaps it opens up, through irony and juxtaposition, between itself and narrative referents elsewhere in the text. In Arrow o f G od specifically the gap is between the diminishing perceptions of a colonialist discourse— in which natives are frozen into the likeness of “material” (33), “children” (38), and “dogs” (76)—and what Achebe’s narrative shows as the dynamic, human, adult, historical world of that discourse’s unwelcome embrace. It is the gap between what Said calls “vision”—a panoptic freezing of racially categorized people through a discourse of “synchronic essentialism”— and “narrative,” which he defines as “a specific form taken by written history to counter the permanence of vision” by asserting “diachrony,” or “the potential of reality for change” (Orientalism 239-40). Achebe describes an aspect of the colonialist mentality that is his satiric master-target in “Colonialist Criticism”: To the colonialist mind it was always of the utm ost im portance to be able to say: ‘I know my natives,’ a claim which implied tw o things at once: (a) that the native was really quite simple and (b) that understanding him and controlling him went hand in hand— understanding being a pre-condition for control and control constituting adequate proof of understanding. (H opes 48)

In Arrow o f G od, Achebe incorporates a skeptical questioning of colonialist discourse’s validity into his narrative. The English character Clarke, a

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new arrival in the region, criticizes Allen’s Pacification book for its smug tone and disregard of native institutions. Clarke’s opinion is summarily dismissed as unrealistically “progressive” by Winterbottom, who counters with the superior knowledge of his many years’ experience: “When you’ve been here as long as Allen was and understood the native a little more you might begin to see things in a slightly different light. If you saw, as I did, a man buried alive up to his neck with a piece of roast yam on his head to attract vultures you know. . .” (36; original ellipsis). The contrast between the newcomer’s tentative liberalism and the old hand’s self-assured contempt dramatizes the infiltrating power of colonialist attitudes. The person with the greater experience in Africa, and therefore the better opportunity to acquire valid, independent knowledge, is paradoxically the one who forwards as an example of his insight an exotic cliché that he could have “learned” from a sensational travel book back in England. The poverty of this knowledge is satirically reinforced in a subsequent scene, when Winterbottom dusts off the same hoary image as proof that he, “the man on the spot who knew his African and knew what he was talking about,” has a sounder head for policy than “the starry-eyed fellows at headquarters” (56). His repetition of the image of vulture, man, and yam suggests that not only is what Winterbottom “knows” a particularly gruesome and unrepresentative image of the society portrayed in the novel, but it also seems to be the only thing he knows.4 Winterbottom’s comments suggest the interpretive sway the more racist and melodramatically romanticized elements of colonialist thinking have over first-hand colonial experience. They also suggest the static, inflexible, repetitive nature of that discourse. Winterbottom, whom Clarke later describes as “inflexible” (103), is the novel’s prime exponent of this colonialist certitude, which opposes the more inductive road to knowledge involving the give and take of process, of engagement over time, of narrative. Charles Knight proposes that the most useful binary comparison for satire is not bad/good or falsity/truth but certainty/doubt; satire attacks the blindnesses of certainty in favor of the receptiveness of doubt (“Imagination’s” 149). Winterbottom confidently rejects the more tentative, adaptive British methods of establishing a colonial infrastructure in favour of France’s more forceful and unilateral policies. What he calls British “dithering” (36) is, however flawed its achievements, a well-meaning compromise between an imposed occupation and a responsive attempt to structure authority according to pre-existing native institutions. Clarke’s idealistic critique of Allen’s self-assured discourse also can be read as a critique of Winterbottom and, less directly, of the French policies he valorizes. But any provisional binary involving Winterbottom’s certitude versus Clarke’s doubt is undermined once Clarke himself is set into narrative motion. When he too gains some field experience and becomes implicated in the exercise of power, his ideas shift to reflect a growing ambivalence. He speculates that too much knowledge of others may be a disadvantage in

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colonial administrators, by making them “feel sorry and even responsible” (105). In the exercise of power, Clarke begins to realize, stating is easier than inquiring, imposing more convenient than adapting. Perhaps, he concludes, the French system is better, because “The French made up their minds about what they wanted to do and did it. The British, on the other hand, never did anything without first sending out a Commission of Inquiry to discover all the facts, which then hamstrung them. He sat down again, glowing with satisfaction” (105). Clarke seems untroubled that the conclusion he has so triumphantly reached is identical to the corrective wisdom offered him previously by Winterbottom. And perhaps this movement of his views closer to what he has heard from the captain is an attempt to ingratiate himself. Yet when he lies to cover up his incompetent failure to find out the “facts” about Wright’s purported beating of natives, he annoys Winterbottom; when he then sycophantically weds his new distaste for facts with his boss’s theory about British and French policies, Winterbottom firmly overrides him: “‘Facts are important,’ cut in Winterbottom, ‘and Commissions of Inquiry could be useful. The fault of our Administration is that they invariably appoint the wrong people and set aside the advice of those of us who have been here for years’” (109). Achebe achieves a number of things with this encounter. He shows the attractions of colonial high-handedness through the formerly idealistic Clarke’s hasty adoption of an imperious and arrogant attitude to natives. Clarke presumes Wright’s innocence because, even though Clarke has made no effort to open up lines of communication with the natives, he is confident that he would have heard if Wright were doing anything “unorthodox” to them (106). Winterbottom’s humiliating reproof of Clarke is not a reversal; it is not a sign that the captain’s possibilities for knowledge have expanded. The “facts” Winterbottom promotes are not those gathered through independent research by Commissions of Inquiry, but rather his own facts and knowledge. He does not want Commissions talking to Africans but to him, and when they do not use his expert advice, he calls them “wrong.” Despite the interpersonal tensions, then, Clarke and Winterbottom are starting to resemble each other; Clarke reproduces Winterbottom’s knowledge just as the latter continuously reproduces his own. In fact, Winterbottom’s anger at Clarke’s “cheek” in appropriating his own expression “on the spot” suggests that his quarrel with Clarke is an emotional, personal one (107, 106). Clarke is both a threat and an embarrassment, and must be taken down a peg. In these scenes, Achebe dramatizes the ossification of structures of knowledge and power in colonial agents through a narrative process emphasizing personal change and interaction. Relationships among characters may stress the human complexity and dynamism of narrative interaction, but fundamental attitudes stiffen. Clarke’s stated impatience with the “facts” he might learn from his new environment ironizes his later repetition of his self-image as an idealist who would, in Winterbottom’s

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shoes, “defend his natives” from mistreatment by other British officials (161-62). This is hollow puffery: with what knowledge of the natives would he protect Africans from British abuse? His subsequent mishandling of Ezeulu shows that his ignorance and inability to engage sensitively with African difference are as profound as those of his colleagues. Rather than try to understand the cultural contexts of Ezeulu’s refusal to be a warrant chief, Clarke gives him a lecture “about the benefits of the British Administration . . . which he would have called complacent if somebody else had spoken it. But he could not help himself.. . . Clarke did not know what else to say” (174). His response to cultural stalemate is to fall back reflexively on the platitudes of a George Allen. In a situation where knowledge of “anything of value in native institutions” (36) might have enabled fruitful negotiation, Clarke abrogates his relativist ideals and forwards knee-jerk imperialist rhetoric. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, Clarke abandons “internally persuasive discourse” for “authoritative discourse” (Dialogic 342). He shows further intellectual and ethical lameness when Winterbottom gives him a conscience-easing rationale for locking up the priest— “Refusing to co-operate with the Administration” (177). Clarke deludes himself that this rank-pulling imposition satisfies his desire to treat Ezeulu justly; his concept of justice is a blunt appeal to power that only hears, or wants to hear, one side of the story. Clarke is a textbook example of what Albert Memmi calls the “colonizer who accepts”—the initially “timid and modest” immigrant who soon internalizes the glory and power of Empire and then defends the imperial project with frightening conviction (45, 47). His rapid fall from statements of flexible liberalism to acts of rigid authoritarian bullying reinforce Achebe’s initial construction through Allen and Winterbottom of colonialist discourse as limited, destructive, and worth satirizing. But Clarke himself is not the object of satire. As a full participant in the narrative process, he shows qualities of insecurity and malleability that offset the totalizing self-assurance of the satirized discourse he comes to embrace. Perhaps it is this balancing of qualities and the depiction of psychological complexities that prompts Ibe Nwoga to note that Achebe writes of Europeans in Arrow o f G od “in a mainly ironic, not satiric vein. He does not attribute any viciousness to them. They are well intentioned but misguided” (37). Nwoga overrates “viciousness” as a requisite feature of satiric targets, but otherwise his point is sound. Indeed, it echoes Achebe’s previously quoted comments on his white characters as ordinary men wreaking havoc. What is satirized is the discourse that transcends any individual characters, black or white, even as it infiltrates their minds and corrupts their value systems. In Achebe’s historical novels, the chief proponents of colonialist paradigms of knowledge and power are white: Smith and Allen in Things Fall Apart, Winterbottom and Clarke in Arrow o f G od. The satire is almost entirely unidirectional. But something of the detrimental effect of those paradigms can also be seen in black characters acting as mediators. A notable

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example occurs in Arrow o f G od when a Court Messenger (or Kotma) brings a dispatch for Ezeulu. Upon arrival, he insists that the priest identify himself, even though he can recognize Ezeulu by his appearance. The messenger’s rigid, inappropriate formality is ridiculed by the villagers: “Look round and count your teeth with your tongue,” says Akuebue: “are you the white man yourself?” (137, 140). The Kotm a defends his use of the white man’s protocol in his role as representative: what Winterbottom would do, he must do. But his acculturation into white methods of knowing seems to require an enormous forgetting equivalent to deracination. The messenger has become seduced by the power associated with the white man’s absence of knowledge of the Igbo; he feigns the same ignorance to participate in the power. In this scene Achebe embryonically foreshadows the negating effects of colonialist thinking on black consciousnesses that will preoccupy him in contemporary settings. And in Akuebue’s satiric attack on the Kotm a's self-denial, the author prefigures his own response. *

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No Longer at Ease brings Achebe’s focus to the contemporary moment. Published in 1960 (before Arrow o f G od), it is set in a thoroughly hybrid, transitional Nigeria on the threshold of independence. The novel’s premise is that many decades of colonial rule and of mutual involvement between Europeans and Africans have not demystified each side’s knowledge of the other, nor resolved the questions of value and structure in African communities opened up by colonial and missionary contact. On the contrary, new social divisions have developed between urban and village worlds, and between a foreign-educated elite capable of accumulating great wealth and a village society increasingly envious of what white rulers and the blacks they hire can possess. Villagers are more and more willing to abandon time-honored systems of value and status measured by titles, barns, yams, and large families in favour of a belief that “greatness is now in the things of the white man” (54). And if social ruptures are proliferating, so are the habits of misunderstanding and non-comprehension fostered by colonialism. Achebe’s chief object of satire—a restricting discourse— is now attached not only to white agents of Empire, but also to the expanding class of Europeanized Nigerians to which the novel’s protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, belongs. The novel foregrounds issues of knowledge and thereby establishes its continuity with the satiric trajectory of the historical novels. No Longer at Ease begins and ends at the same moment of paralyzed noncomprehension. Two colonial officials candidly express their bafflement at Obi’s fall from grace without offering speculative explanations. “I cannot comprehend how a young man of your education and brilliant promise could have done this,” says the judge (2); “I cannot understand why he did it,” says the British Council man (3). Mr. Green, Obi’s employer, does have a theory, which he elevates to the status of “facts”: that “the African is corrupt

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through and through” as a result of being “sapped mentally and physically” by disease and “the worst climate in the world” (3). Despite its air of sympathetic liberalism—Mr. Green supports “equality and all that,” and concludes that under such debilitating conditions the African’s corruptibility is “hardly his fault” (3)—this theory is clearly as ethnocentric as anything Allen or Winterbottom promotes. As Gikandi observes, Mr. Green’s explanation consists of “well-established clichés which exist on the surface of colonialist discourse: . . . Mr. Green’s assertions are so subjective and prejudiced that he ends up deconstructing his own notion of ‘facts’” (83). By assimilating Obi to an ahistorical, “natural” condition of all Africans, Mr. Green elides the whole experience of colonialism, as though it had had no impact on African value systems or behaviors. He dehistoricizes and essentializes “the African” in a manner similar to what Johannes Fabian has called “allochronism”: the tendency of anthropologists to “distance” their object of study (“the Other”) by denying its coevalness and thus keeping it “outside the Time of anthropology”—either prior to the present (at an earlier evolutionary stage) or outside time and history altogether (as part of nature) (xi, 32-35). We have seen how, in the historical novels, Achebe juxtaposes the static restrictiveness of a discursive knowledge produced by colonial power with the narrative elaboration of dynamic complexity in the African objects of that knowledge. In N o Longer at Ease he similarly contrasts Mr. Green’s glib racism with a diagnostic exploration through narrative of the multiple factors influencing Obi’s decision to take a bribe. The limitations of Mr. Green’s discourse— and the disgrace of the judge’s and the British Council man’s failure to understand Obi’s act despite their education and African experience—emerge as satiric targets through that juxtaposition. When he ends the novel with a direct assault on Mr. Green’s assurance, Achebe reinforces the ironic gap that has emerged between Mr. Green’s “knowledge” and the superior insight the reader has gained by witnessing Obi in action. In the final sentence Achebe reminds us that not only did the judge, the British Council man, and the Umuofians not know why Obi succumbed, but “we must presume that, in spite of his certitude, Mr Green did not know either” (170). The story framed by the white men’s epistemic flounderings can in this way be read as the sympathetic revelation of Obi as a victim of forces beyond his control. The knowledge this narrative produces as a contextualizing counterweight to the satirized discourse of Mr. Green stresses the conflicting demands of modernity and tradition on Obi. The reader comes to understand the “paradox” of Obi’s situation, in which “the causal base for an undoubted wrong [taking a bribe] is an undoubted right [meeting kinship obligations]” (Wren 48). It is not necessary to construct Obi as an allegorical representation of his nation living beyond its means (J. Booth 95) to see Obi as trapped among irreconcilable goals and values promoted in his cultural environment. Conflicting pressures erode his finances, as

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Booth and Wren suggest, and also affect his freedom of choice. Obi’s Umuofian sponsors give him a British education so he can achieve the position and earn the income of a quasi-English modern gentleman, yet they invoke traditional strictures in objecting to his desire to marry an osu—a desire founded on values he embraced in England. Many other examples could be cited to show how Achebe’s narrative of Obi reveals causes and complexities that contest Mr. Green’s discourse. And if Achebe’s sole satiric target were, as in the historical novels, white colonialist discourse, a similar reading counterpoising fluid narrative with static discourse, “balanced” elaboration with satiric irony, would suffice. But Obi is not just a victim of contending social forces. He is also a victim or target of satire; as such he represents African appropriation and internalization of faulty colonialist “knowledge.”5 As Lloyd Brown notes, in Achebe’s portrayals of contemporary Nigeria, “the perceptual problems created by the foreigner’s cultural norms have been compounded by those Africans who accept or pander to the European’s irrelevant judgements” (33). The unidirectional thrust of the satire in Things Fall Apart and Arrow o f G od is augmented; while the historical novels let their critique of black characters emerge through narrative, in N o Longer at Ease a multidirectional satire is introduced that highlights similar mental restrictions in blacks and whites. Colonialist ways of thinking can be identified in several Nigerian characters. Joseph, for instance, tells Obi, “In future, when we are all civilized, anybody may marry anybody” (75), revealing his acceptance of European categories of “civilized” and “primitive.” For Joseph, to be civilized is to possess a level of absolute individual freedom; to be primitive, he implies, is to be bound to the regulatory authority of tribal custom. Joseph’s privileging of Europe over Nigeria is also seen in such small things as his belief that “no decent restaurant served Nigerian food” (34). The Hon. Sam Okoli, who serves sherry, drinks whisky, and shows off his costly recording machine with pride, prefers his white assistant secretary from Oxford to the previous one, a black “idiot” from Ibadan University. “Our people have a long way to go,” he says, making clear what models they should follow in order to progress (69). And while he pays lip service to anticolonial nationalism, his ambivalence is obvious— “White man don go far,” he says, “We just de shout for nothing” (68)—and also understandable: he is doing very well under British political and economic domination. But it is Obi himself who most typifies a blinkered Europeanized “knowledge.” Newly returned from England, he rails against corruption in the civil service as the habit of “old men who have no intellectual foundations to support their experience” (20). Rooted in a village tradition in which “if you pay homage to the man on top, others will pay homage to you when it is your turn to be on top,” these men view the bribe as “natural” (21). If Obi’s theory sounds not unlike Mr. Green’s belief that the African is corrupt by nature and because of nature, Obi departs from his

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boss’s position in raising himself above the deficient group. His British “intellectual foundations” and moral rectitude make him confident that he and other members of the educated elite will be different. They will succeed without bribery; they will be immune to its temptations because they can afford to be. But Obi’s theory presumes a sanctified, simplified world in which the elite intellectual lives detached from his tribal community— from its corrupting influence, and from its demands. The narrative of his failure to accommodate those very demands debunks his discourse as thoroughly as it does Mr. Green’s. Achebe’s satiric target is not simply the content of Obi’s discourse. Some of what Obi says is even valid; as Wren documents, the tradition of “kola” giving— “money paid as tribute to greatness”—provided a social basis and social sanction for the legal crime of taking bribes (47, 97). The more important target is the rigidity and arrogant assurance of Obi’s views, and their tone of smug superiority. These qualities are reinforced in a subsequent paragraph: O bi’s theory that the public service of Nigeria would remain corrup t until the old Africans at the top were replaced by young men from the universities was first form ulated in a paper read to the Nigerian Students’ Union in London. But unlike m ost theories formed by students in London, this one survived the first im pact of hom ecom ing. In fact, within a month of his return Obi cam e across tw o classic examples of his old African. (38)

The echo of Winterbottom’s possessive epistemic embrace (“the man on the spot who knew his African”) is unmistakable, as is the sense of a sociopolitical theory concocted in absentia whose maker looks to fit his observations into the theory rather than overhauling the theory in light of on-site evidence. Even as Obi’s experience increasingly belies the simplicity of his theory, he persists in similar formulations. He becomes “firmly decided . . . that Mr Omo was one of his old Africans” (66) and, in a tone of paternalistic, even touristic detachment, he says to Joseph, “Your Nigerian police are very cheeky, you know” (74). Several critics have commented on Obi’s limited vision. For Carroll, Obi’s view that, since the masses cannot be educated into a democratic body politic, reform must be imposed “sounds like a colonial describing the natives” (71). Philip Rogers sees Obi as a “man of words” who “goes native” in England and becomes empty as a result: “European education and values constitute the germ of his later alienation and betrayal of his parents’ world” (166, 177). Gikandi calls Obi a “quixotic idealist” who imposes ideas and ideals gleaned from books onto reality and “refuses to recognize the validity of those experiences that exist outside his moral— and no doubt imaginary— scheme of things” (97, 99). Obi’s chief blindness, according to Gikandi, is that he misunderstands Nigeria at a point of enormous political and social transition as “a stable and knowable community” (86).

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These are all useful perspectives on the satirized deficiencies of Obi’s discourse. They are compatible with theoretical models of satiric rhetoric such as Knight’s certitude/doubt binary and Frye’s view of satire’s general target as “the imposing of over-simplified ideals on experience” (Anatomy 231). But neither Carroll, Rogers, nor Gikandi discusses the novel’s critique and dramatization of social problems as satire. It may be that they do not consider the novel satiric, or perhaps they find “satire” too imprecise a term and deliberately leave it outside their critical vocabulary and sphere of interest. Commentators who do attribute “satire” to the novel—Taiwo (130-31) and Eustace Palmer (79-82), for example—are sometimes inclined to make too much of the term’s explanatory power, as though labeling a novel or character portrait “satire” marked the end rather than the beginning of their critical responsibilities. What neither group of critics explores— neither those who recognize satire in the novel nor those who do not— is the precise role of satire with respect to other modes of rhetoric, representation, and critique. Does satire dominate the novel, or is it restricted, as in the historical novels, to selective exposures of reductive discourses whose inadequacy is shown by their failure to account for a complex, narrativized reality? Certainly many features of the novel are congruent with satiric representational strategies. Griffiths mentions the novel’s “reduction in the scale of the moral universe” (71); the inevitable comparison with Things Fall Apart, and of Obi with his grandfather, suggests that if Obi is a tragic figure, he is of greatly reduced stature. Okonkwo’s fall is the product of a noble if misguided insistence on defending what he knows and believes in; Obi’s, by contrast, results from a failure to stand up for his stated beliefs. As Carroll notes, the same cultural forces are at work in the 1950s as in the 1890s, “but in a confused, diluted, and blurred form” (65). In the multidirectional manner of V. S. Naipaul’s “A Flag on the Island,” Achebe’s novel shows both sides of a colonial relationship bringing out the worst in each other: reducing each other’s dignity, corrupting each other’s aspirations, limiting each other’s vision. Obi assesses the diminished possibilities for achievement of Mr. Green, a man whose romantic, idealistic, and thoroughly colonialist conception of Africa has been negated by contemporary reality: “In 1900 Mr Green might have ranked among the great missionaries; in 1935 he would have made do with slapping headmasters in the presence of their pupils; but in 1957 he could only curse and swear” (106). Structurally the novel resists closure, circling back to end with the same expressions of bafflement with which it began. Nothing has been learned, and while Obi is punished, his society is not; Nigeria does not appear ready or able to bridge the cultural, political, and economic gaps into which Obi has tumbled. The novel’s narrative movement, therefore, is towards the “sustained, unresolved state of crisis” that Michael Seidel sees as typical of satiric representation (“Crisis” 165). Building on Frye and Kernan, Seidel notes that

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“satire subverts the resolving or ameliorating impulses of plot”: “The bias toward sustained crisis is the modal mark that distinguishes satiric action from that of comedy or tragedy. These latter are also bred in crisis, but comedy and tragedy demand crisis resolution (one can almost read plot resolution) as part of their aesthetic being, their literary design” (167). What Seidel says of satire is what Obi says of tragedy. Obi tells his interviewers, “Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever.” The conclusive “purging of the emotions” of a conventional tragedy, he says, is “too easy”; in a true tragedy, “There is no release,” and he cites as an example Evelyn Waugh’s satiric novel A Handful o f Dust (39). Achebe playfully has Obi agree with one interviewer that “suicide ruins a tragedy” (39), a view which, as Rogers notes (170), would negate the “tragic stature” of Okonkwo’s death in Things Fall Apart. By this as well as by Obi’s further remark that “real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot” (39), Achebe seems to suggest that in modernity’s reduced universe there is no equivalent to the symbolic weight by which Okonkwo’s death stands for the end of a society; no way of life, ideology, or social structure is stable and complete enough to be capable of having a defined end. The more fragmented and destabilized world of Obi and of N o Longer at Ease—whose condition is change, indeterminacy, irresolution, crisis— is a place where satire and tragedy, Waugh and Achebe, Seidel and Obi meet. The nature of this reduced and fluid universe is to make the novel paradoxically both less and more accommodating to satiric rhetoric than the historical novels. The certitude with which Achebe satirically depicts and judges colonialist discourse in Things Fall Apart and Arrow o f G od is based on and contextualized by his self-identification with a set of Igbo referents elaborated in the counterpoised narrative. The sophisticated coherence of the Igbo worldview is the firm ground for the satiric stance. In the modern Nigeria of N o Longer at E ase, the colonial period has wreaked such havoc that the satirist has no contemporary footholds. The narrative of personal and societal crisis discourages satiric judgment because the diagnostic elaboration of causal factors—jostling value systems, misunderstandings— helps explain and account for the very things that emerge as deficient. Obi’s fall, Isaac’s refusal to change his views on osu despite his Christian beliefs, Joseph’s snobbery about food, the institutionalization of bribery, even Mr. Green’s wrong-headed certitude—the cultural conditions that provide reasons for these things are revealed in the narrative (and further accounted for by the background that the historical novels contribute). Causation and explanation can thus be seen to qualify satiric aggression and to enable sympathetic understanding. One might therefore see all the characters in N o Longer at Ease as victims of colonialism, and of the contemporary confusion it helped create, and as therefore undeserving of satiric attack. The novel’s satire would be restricted to another few pot shots at colonialist ways of thinking—now exemplified equally if vari-

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ously in whites and blacks—whose limitations are once again shown up by a counterpoised narrative. But Seidel’s theory of satiric crisis enables a different and preferable perspective, according to which N o Longer at Ease participates in satiric representation in the totality of its narrative—rather than in juxtaposition to nonsatiric narrative. Obi’s crisis, which is partially resolved since he is convicted but not sentenced, becomes a narrativized symptom of the larger societal crisis of modern Nigeria whose ongoing, unresolved nature is exemplified by the wonderings why that conclude the novel. By Seidel’s criteria No Longer at Ease is as satiric as Gulliveťs Travels: “The conviction that a work such as Gulliveťs Travels is so deeply satiric derives largely from the modal realization that Swift projects the crisis of mind represented by the action beyond the expected resolution represented in the action” (“Crisis” 166). Other qualities Seidel attributes to satire also describe the novel’s tone and Obi’s defining actions and attitudes: Insofar as satire can be said to have an ideology at all, its tenets are located in absurd, skeptical, despairing, or even subversive assessments of hum an capacity where the powers necessary to resolve life’s crises are ab sent or concealed. Satire’s representing strategies are m ost subtly and innovatively called to the fore by mimicking irresolute conditions: belligerence that stymies accom m odation, usurpation th at prevents restoration, bravado that masks doubt. (1 6 7 )

As the colonialist discourse that provided Achebe’s first satiric target penetrates Nigerian society, its effects are increasingly seen in regrettable actions, demeaning attitudes, unfair practices, and self-undermining ideologies throughout all sectors; satire likewise expands its embrace beyond discourse into action and narrative. The referents that once prompted a vision of tragic diminishment have now become so reduced that they cannot accommodate the scale of loss that tragedy demands.6 Too much has already slipped away: dignity, coherence, values, knowledge. With the potential for Aristotelian tragedy and resolution lost to narrative, the irresolution of what Seidel calls “satire” and what Obi calls “real tragedy”— in all important ways the same thing— becomes what narrative is forced to wallow in. The coherence and closure that in Hayden White’s view gives historical narrative its illusion of completeness, and its legitimacy as a conveyor of “moral meaning” (21), prove unavailable in a transitional, unfinished Nigeria. Narrative is overwhelmed by satire with its penchant for the incoherent, the partial, and the incomplete. Satire thus construed becomes a discursive feature of Nigerian modernity itself. * *

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The ending of Achebe’s most satiric novel, A Man o f the P eople, contains a similar combination of resolution to the individual narrative and unresolved crisis on the societal level. Odili, the novel’s protagonist and narra-

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tor, sees his major goals accomplished: Nanga and his party are ousted from government, and in winning over Edna, Odili achieves his desired revenge and romantic fulfillment. But this resolution of the novel’s plot does not extend beyond the personal realm. There is no sense that the purgation of the “fat-dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat regime just ended” (167) rids the nation of the sociohistorical conditions and contradictions of values that allowed such a regime to exist. Odili concludes his narrative with an ironic, resigned acknowledgement that since his experiences have shown the quixotic inefficacy of individual reformist activity, goals of societal transformation must be abrogated for smaller satisfactions: “in such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest—without asking to be paid” (167). For the author of Odili’s narrative, this position offers no satisfaction at all; quite apart from its valorizing of murder, its focus on individual agency and morality as a substitute for social transformation is an expression of satiric pessimism and irresolution. For this reason, critics who disagree about whether Achebe’s final vision is hopeful or despairing, optimistic or pessimistic based on readings of either moral growth or abandoning of ideals in Odili miss an important aspect of the novel’s specifically satiric nature. At its worst, such a reading can also efface the novel’s African nature. James Olney, for instance, says, “While the satire of A Man o f the People rejects, there is a parallel movement, focussing on Odili and his moral growth, that makes discoveries and accepts, that integrates experience around a new personal center and asserts this individual personality as a replacement for the village code that has been violated and destroyed” (202-03). In showing how the hero discovers meaning to exist only in the private domain, Achebe’s novel reaches the same conclusion as “the contemporary Western novel,” Olney says (203); Achebe thus shows “how far he has come, in theme and technique, from Things Fall A part” (203). The implication that these thematics exemplify a kind of artistic progress ignores Achebe’s position, clearly forwarded in his essay “The Writer and His Community,” that the African novel does not share the European novel’s emphasis on “individual rather than social predicaments.” For the “non-Westerner,” Achebe says, “the human hero does not loom so large”; for the Igbo specifically, the individual is “subordinate to his community” (H opes 37-39). On the other side of this interpretive debate about Odili’s rise or fall, Rosemary Colmer shows Odili succumbing to ever-greater “moral laxity”: “Odili’s trials and his many errors have not brought him to any firm moral ground. . . . He ends the novel guilty of most of the same moral errors and even the same crimes as Nanga; he is guilty too of the same errors as the villagers, ignorance and cynicism” (100-01). Colmer’s multidirectional critique is preferable to the assertions of Odili as moral center by Olney, Killam (88), Bernth Lindfors (“Palm-Oil” 62), and others, but she too supports Odili’s valorization of “the stand of an individual for an ideal, in

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the face of public apathy” on the grounds that “a nation does not have the unanimity of a smaller community, and cannot act as a whole on moral issues” (Colmer 92). Despite their differences, both Olney’s and Colmer’s readings occlude the satiric irony by which Achebe’s final sentence laments the loss of community cohesion—a loss for which no individual act or achievement can possibly compensate. The question of whether or not Odili and Eunice are redemptive individual beacons of hope is something of a red herring; Achebe is more concerned with the ongoing social crisis within which their acts take place than with the acts themselves. This view is supported by Achebe’s many comments about the social grounding of his art and the preeminence of community over the individual, and also by the ambiguous dualism through which satirized characters are both self-contained fictional constructs and stand-ins for a historical som ething with referential specificity beyond the boundaries of the fiction— a person, type, class, social condition, power center, discourse, or other entity. In and of themselves, Nanga, Odili, Max, Odili’s father, the villagers, and other characters participate in a narrative that variously concludes their fates. But as referents in a multidirectional satiric critique they come together into a national collectivity, a failed community whose condition is ongoing crisis. Written contemporaneously with its represented historical moment, A Man o f the P eople like N o Longer at Ease departs from the satire-narrative counterpoint of the historical novels by integrating satire into narrative. The indeterminacy and mutability of postindependence reality expands satire’s project beyond the unidirectional exposure of inadequate, inflexible discourses. Satire in the contemporary moment becomes a flirtatious companion to all narrative representations. In a national community in which, Achebe says, “some of the worst elements of the old are retained and some of the worst of the new are added on to them” (Duerden 13), diminishment and crisis invite satire’s harsh scrutiny as a seemingly necessary and even realistic way to inscribe the contemporary scene. The most prominent magnets attracting multidirectional satiric energy to Achebe’s narrative are Nanga and Odili. As a satiric referent, Nanga stands for a debased postindependence politics through his activities and attitudes. He is openly corrupt in his involvement with “British Amalgamated,” the novel’s stand-in for the multinational economic imperialism that sustains African dependency after the withdrawal of colonial political power. He distorts the meaning of the democratic franchise when he denounces his election rival Odili for aiming to “overthrow a duly constituted government” (133). (Nanga’s authoritarian view of political opposition as sedition has origins in colonial rule as much as does British Amalgamated’s economic clout.) A cluster of unidealized activities, conditions, contradictions, and personal qualities are attached to Nanga as a satirized narrative agent: as minister of culture he shows cultural ignorance and philistinism; he exploits his power to give and withhold favors in order

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to increase his wealth and bully the electorate for support; he sends his children for regular visits to his home village to counteract urban deracination and acculturation, yet prefers the “parlour-wife” Edna to the “bush” Mrs. Nanga. Odili is the novel’s main internal voice of critique. An idealistic malcontent, he comments directly and ironically on the deficiencies of his society, and on Nanga as an exemplar of its degradation. Achebe’s first first-person narrator, Odili is also his first sustained satirist figure. Robert Elliott notes the prominence of railers, fools, malcontents, and licensed jesters in satiric literature of many cultures: “Perhaps in his many manifestations from Thersites on, the railer is privileged to abuse whom he will because he affords author and audience vicarious satisfaction as he attacks figures of authority. Momentarily, perhaps unconsciously, we identify with him and so gain release of frustrated aggressive feelings” (140). The railer or “primitive satirist” figure is a narrative representation of the satiric spirit itself. These characters’ critiques of specific aspects of their environment often seem truthful; their views are validated to a degree by the narrative itself. It is thus tempting to see such figures as moral centers whose satiric perspectives equal the author’s. Lindfors, in an extreme (and much-challenged) reading of this kind, says of Odili, “Whatever he says can be trusted to be accurate and honest. Somehow Odili has managed to remain untainted amidst all the surrounding corruption and his clear vision provides an undistorted view of a warped society” (“Palm-Oil” 62). What such a reading misses, however, is the way the moral authority of Odili the detached commentator is undermined as soon as he is forced into involved action. Once he enters narrative, he becomes a version of what Elliott calls “the satirist satirized” (130). The opening chapter provides a microcosm of this process. From a safe distance, Odili mocks Nanga and the “silly, ignorant villagers” (2) who support him; he anecdotally describes outrages involving this “villain” that are replete with images of grotesque physicality and animality and scenes of chaos and indignity (5-7). Fie wants nothing to do with Nanga—to remain securely outside narrative interaction— but when contact is forced upon him, Nanga’s remembrance of their former acquaintance flatters Odili into immediately questioning “whether—perhaps— I had been applying to politics stringent standards that didn’t belong to it” (10), and into taking up the minister’s offer of hospitality and help obtaining a scholarship. Once he has succumbed to Nanga’s warm domestic embrace, Odili admits, if I were at th at m om ent made a minister I would be m ost anxious to remain one forever. . . . We ignore m an ’s basic nature if we say, as some critics do, that because a man like N anga had risen overnight from poverty and insignificance to his present opulence he could be persuaded w ithout much trouble to give it up again and return to his original state. ( 4 1 -4 2 )

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This view thoroughly refutes his earlier satiric dismissal of “the poo” contemptible people” who accepted the self-enrichment of politicians on the grounds that “a sensible man would [not) spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune placed in his mouth” (2). The novel contains many other examples of Odili’s self-satirizing betrayal of the image he projects of himself as ethically pure and above the fray. His confused motives for challenging Nanga blur political idealism with a wounded ego, sexual humiliation, romantic desire, and revenge fantasies. He neglects to investigate the sources of C.P.C. funds before accepting the party’s money and car, and he makes personal use of party funds before and after the election. The same narrative that reveals Nanga as the satirized representative of what Gikandi calls “the great ironic moment” of independence— so deemed because it promised a break from the colonial past but produced instead “the continuity and consolidation of colonial institutions” (110, 114)—also satirically contextualizes Odili by showing how his detached satiric moralizing is compromised by his narrative complicity with his objects of critique. Odili is also attacked by Nanga himself, who satirically diminishes his rival as a “boy” who has no business “thrusting his finger into my eye” (156). Nanga expresses moral outrage that Odili “came to my house in Bori, ate my food, drank my water and my wine and instead of saying thank you to me he set about plotting how to drive me out and take over my house“ (157). But this critique is itself undermined by Nanga’s telling conflation of “house” as domicile and “house” as government; Odili may not have the right to take over Nanga’s residence (nor does he try to), but he and his party are certainly entitled in a democratic election campaign to try to drive out the current rulers and take over the government house. Achebe’s satiric methods in this novel reinforce the qualities of “moderation” and “balance” attributed to him. Odili and Nanga satirize each other, and these satiric perspectives are in turn satirically undermined by narrative revelations that are at odds with them. According to Elliott’s analysis of the “satirist satirized” motif as exemplified in Timon o f Athens and Book Four of Gulliver's Travels, the “primitive satirist” type associated with cursing, raillery, and invective is “satirized, in the sophisticated sense of the term, by his creator.” The authorial “sophisticated” satire argues “against excess” and “argues implicitly for moderation, for rational discrimination in judging the ways of men” (167). Achebe similarly positions himself—and by extension, the reader— between the extremes of bookish idealism and unintellectualized pragmatism represented by his antagonists. His narrative neither completely denounces nor fully endorses either character, but participates in the “dialogical” critique that Frank Palmeri identifies in narrative satire. For Palmeri, the meaning of narrative satire emerges through repeated “internal reversals of value and implication”; “such satire counterpoises multiple frames of understanding without assenting to the authority of any single perspective” (3). Through its con-

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trapuntal doubleness, Palmeri says, satire opposes dogmatic authority and resists tragic and comic closure: “Narrative satires do not end with an achieved harmony; the struggle they embody between opposed views of the world reaches no satisfactory resolution or synthesis” (4). Satire’s “meaning” in such a rhetorical environment must become interstitial— outside of because not assimilable to any positions of either affirmation or satiric critique found within the text itself. The text opposes the certitude of a certain kind of satiric rhetoric: Elliott’s “primitive” raillery and cursing, which appear in the novel as Odili’s self-righteous scorn and Nanga’s aggression towards challengers and towards democracy itself. Of course, Achebe’s multidirectional satire has other targets than Nanga and Odili. M ax’s doublespeak— simultaneously opposing government corruption and accepting tainted funds into his party’s coffers—is an example of the dissimulation that Leonard Feinberg identifies as “the richest source of satire.” Feinberg notes that because of a “double standard” in society, ideals and conventional morals do not usually coincide with the qualities required to succeed (23-24). When Max dismisses principles in politics as located in “Britain or something” (93), when he postpones bringing common people into the Common People’s Convention until after “the planning stage” (88), and when he justifies both taking a bribe and reneging on its conditions (141-42), he undermines the C.P.C.’s promise of a radically new politics. Once in power, Achebe implies, the C.P.C. would be as unable to break from established structures and practices as were the rulers who first filled British shoes after independence. We have seen how even Odili, once he is drawn into what Nanga calls “the dirty game of politics” (133), also like Max compromises his ideals in order to survive. And just as Achebe can from his interstitial position satirize both Odili’s imposition of a simplistic critique on a complex reality and his abandoning of the ideals behind that critique, he forwards a similarly balanced, twopronged attack against both rulers and ruled. The novel’s title implies this ambiguous duality. “A man of the people” goes beyond its immediate connoting of Nanga’s populism to suggest other meanings through the multiple signification of “of” as a marker of origin or derivation (Nanga came from the people), and of causality and creation (they made him what he is and allow him to exist). In a kind of postcolonial codependency, Nanga and the people reinforce and exploit each other’s misadventures and weaknesses; if he is a monster, they are his keepers. As Fanon says of postindependence Africa, “A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves” (198). Odili’s grumblings in chapter one introduce this interdependence; it is furthered by his use of grotesque imagery for both Nanga as body (5-6) and the people as body politic (113). A dependent economy and history of authoritarian rule have encouraged a “national cake” ethic of self-interest and a belief among villagers such as Odili’s father that exploiting one’s position for personal gain is “sense” (135).7 Nanga’s construction of his election

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rival as a traitor is supported by popular response; similarly, the ethics of withholding government services from Odili’s village during the campaign go unquestioned, and as a form of bullying this strategy succeeds in swinging voters to the governing party. In various ways, then, the man and the people are satirized together through their narrative interaction. An important effect of this multidirectional dispersal of satiric energy is that no one element of society is singled out for blame. If abuses of democracy are perpetrated by Nanga and the people together, whose fault is the dysfunctional politics of the postcolonial nation? If would-be idealists like Max and Odili succumb to unethical behavior, is it inappropriate ideals or a degenerated environment that should be taken to task? If a “national cake” ethic has emerged and been encouraged, are attitudes and activities prompted by it appropriate targets of satiric critique, or should the factors that produced such an ethic bear the burden of blame? The answer to such questions would seem to be “both and neither.”8 The attitudes, actions, and agents critiqued in the novel are so interconnected that they not only satirize each other but also contextualize and in some sense therefore excuse each other. If everything looks bad, but everything is shown to have reason to look bad, the novel’s satiric energy is more easily constructed as a sign of overall crisis on the level of national collectivity than as specifically applicable to individual components of that collectivity. The satirist’s position is in what Palmeri calls “the ironic spaces” between entities that contrapuntally critique each other. Like No Longer at E ase, A Man o f the P eople is satiric without being a satire o f anything that can be captured in a word or phrase. A satiric perspective in Achebe’s African modernity is generated by a sense of loss perhaps most vividly captured in Odili’s bleak response to Koko’s death. He denies that Koko died because he “had taken enough for the owner to see”; this moral principle may function in the village community (and does in the case of Josiah), but “in the affairs of the nation there was no owner, the laws of the village became powerless. Max was avenged not by the people’s collective will but by one solitary woman who loved him. Had his spirit waited for the people to demand redress it would have been waiting still” (166-67). What has been lost is the functional if unidealized community life of Achebe’s historical novels. As the polity expanded from village to colony to nation, community coherence was dissipated and traditional systems of value undermined. Achebe may not look to the past as the golden age “image of pristine integrity” that Palmeri attributes to satirists ( 1 ) 9 But he is the “conservative” African satirist theorized by Femi Euba: a figure in whose work “it is possible to describe the intensity of satire by the extent to which the contemporary society has wandered away from the traditional” (76). In Achebe’s recuperative fictional project the past has always been a preferred environment containing much of worth since lost or abandoned to the competing pressures and distractions of the contemporary. British colonial intervention, although not of course di-

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rectly represented in this postindependence fiction, is necessarily implicated in the losses and distortions that have prompted the satiric perspective. And colonialism’s continuity as postindependence economic domination, which is represented as “British Amalgamated,” directly participates in the satirized state of affairs. As Achebe says in an interview, Well, the colonial departure from the scene was not really a departure. I mean independence was unreal, and people like N anga were actually used as front men, as puppets, by the form er colonial power. As long as they could go ab ou t saying they were ministers, as long as they enriched them selves, they were happy, and they would leave the real exploiter at his w ork. So I think in a very basic sense, characters like N anga flourished because the colonial situation leading to the independence period in Africa made it possible. (Lindfors, Palaver 1 0 -1 1 )

The awareness of British responsibility and implication built into the novel—especially to the reader who comes to it after reading its predecessors— adds a further layer of multidirectionality to a balanced satiric critique that eschews singular attributions of blame. In another interview, Achebe says of A Man o f the P eople, If things were perfect, there would be no need for writers to write their novels. But it is because they see a vision of the world which is better than wrhat exists th at they write. So, w hatever they write, if they are true p ractitioners of their art, would be in essence a protest against w hat exists, against w hat is. . . . I don’t think it’s a question of protest against Europe or simply protest against local conditions. It is protest against the way we are handling human society in view of the possibilities for greatness and the better alternatives which the artist sees. (O gbaa 4 , 10)

This comment articulates a vision of fiction-writing in general as participating in the social referentiality and oppositional stance that is a particular feature of satire. For Achebe, a negative evaluation of present conditions (“what is”) serves a vision of future transformation and improvement. In the two novels that offer satiric critiques of the present, however, any countervailing and contextualizing sense of the “possibilities for greatness” communicates itself to the reader only indirectly. The liminal satire of multiply deflated and mutually diminishing discourses, engagements, and actions that Achebe writes in No Longer at Ease and A Man o f the P eople is not in the business of explicitly affirming anything in the present or potential future, and only implies its approval of the past. It is in his latest novel, Anthills o f the Savannah, that Achebe most fully integrates representation of past and present ills with an overt, if tentative articulation of the course to a better future. î«-

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Achebe’s own, says, “Writers don’t give prescriptions. . . . They give headaches!” (161). But while this mandate may apply to the Achebe of the earlier novels, in the 21 years between his fourth and fifth novels Achebe published a good deal of quite prescriptive nonfiction. The culmination of this work was The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), which diagnosed sociopolitical ills and proffered reformist remedies. Anthills o f the Savannah extends this future orientation into fictional narrative and offers tentative prescriptions to any headaches it may induce. In doing so it appears to resist, even to reject, the procedures of the satirist. Notably, however, The Trouble with Nigeria's polemic contains strong elements of the curse and the satire. Nigeria, Achebe says, unleashing a dense string of invective, is “disorderly,. . . corrupt, insensitive, inefficient, . . . expensive, . . . dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar” (9). Its electorate, failing to learn from experience that its politicians will let it down, is “like a bunch of stage clowns who bump their heads into the same heavy obstacles again and again” (54). A satiric perspective is also offered on the politicians: after the examples of selfless leadership provided by Mahatma Gandhi and Aminu Kano, “no one who reduces the high purpose of politics which they exemplified down to a swinish scramble can hope to do so without bringing a terrible judgement on himself” (63). The apparent move away from satire that we shall see thematized in Anthills o f the Savannah is perhaps not, therefore, a rejection of satire per se, but the result of a new sense that satire belongs in its place—as rhetorical support to the direct critique of nonfiction—and that fictional writing should take advantage of the different kinds of meaning-making enabled by narrative. The final chapter of the novel answers the central problem identified in the preceding narrative— elite male rule closed off from the populace at large— and offers a vision of a more inclusive, community-based regrouping led by women. The novel’s politics have been challenged as insufficiently progressive regarding women’s roles (e.g., Alden, Boehmer), and as advocating a contradictory, poorly theorized mix of revolutionary populism and reformed elite rule (e.g., Maughan Brown). According to ten Kortenaar, the novel “does not offer a solution to Nigeria’s woes, but says, ‘Here’s what a solution would look like if one could be imagined’” (“‘Only’” 70). Whatever one may think of its content, however, Achebe’s final vision in Anthills o f the Savannah is clearly not presented with the authorial irony that in No Longer at Ease and A Man o f the People resisted closure in favour of unresolved satiric crisis. Unlike Odili’s rejection of communal regeneration for vigilante individualism, the affirmations at the end of this novel are endorsed by the author. Whether one finds the final scene’s portrait of expansive restructuring uplifting or not, one cannot help but feel the author is sincerely offering it as an inspiring, life-affirming, dialogic integration of once-separate elements. He seems to be eschewing satiric closure for something closer to the redemptive hopefulness of comedy. The external conditions with which the novel closes may resemble

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those portrayed at the end of A Man o f the P eople— senseless deaths of leaders, the unstable aftermath and dubious promise of a coup. But Achebe in this novel pulls strongly against any sense of unresolved crisis in the public domain by attributing real value and potential to the reorientations that take place in narrative to his microcosmic community of fictional characters. The forward-looking values embodied in the final chapter supplant the stasis of the satiric perspectives with which the novel opens. The first “witness,” Chris Oriko, narrates chapter one with the satirist’s “detached clinical interest” (2). Cloistered in the Council Chamber, he sits “at this silly observation post making farcical entries in the crazy log-book of this our ship of state” (2). He ridicules the Chief Secretary (6) and calls Okong a “buffoon,“ a “freak baby” that he himself fostered (10, 11). Chris satirizes himself and his fellow ministers as animals cowering near holes, and singles out one colleague so fearful of crossing His Excellency that “as soon as he had sniffed peril in the air he had begun to disappear into his hole, as some animals and insects do, backwards” (3). Chris’s target here is the timidity that Achebe identifies in Nigerians when he says, “I think we still need to nurture and develop the spirit of dissent, of disagreement and to be convinced that disagreement doesn’t mean treason, that because somebody says ‘No’ doesn’t mean he is less patriotic than the yes-people” (quoted in Wren 108). Chris himself is one such yes-person; he too crawls in and out of holes, and his satiric journal-writing is in lieu of real agitation. His Excellency, Sam, is also satirized by Chris as a “baby monster” whose commanding, fear-instilling presence is undermined by the frantic paranoia with which he responds to the Abazonian demonstration (10). When Chris describes Sam as a “fiery sun” (3), he ironically associates the Presidentfor-life with the French sun-king, only to undercut such an equation by calling Sam “His present Excellency” (6). Sam in turn uses satiric anger and scorn to dominate his cabinet, and childishly mocks them by talking “in mimicry of some half-witted idiot with a speech impediment” (15). But he displays the insecurity of his power in a postcolonial world where, as Ikem says later, the English may have “ceased to menace the world,” but “that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America” (52) is a dominant threat; Sam’s satiric authority over his cabinet followers is tempered by his fear of being satirized as “General Big Mouth” in Time magazine (15), since this would compromise his stature in the eyes of “the world”—especially the Americans who, the novel implies, in some way authorize that authority. Satire in these opening pages thus becomes for Sam a transparent means of domination and for Chris a marker of paralysis and despair. Chris’s satiric discourse is a way of standing pat; a poor substitute for the challenge that might prompt reform, it is complicit in the very status quo against which it impotently rails. In neither Sam’s nor Chris’s hands is satire seen as admirable or productive.

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In particular, Chris’s captious disengagement and self-confessed “inertia” (2) can be seen as antithetical to narrative, which the novel valorizes through its thematic and stylistic choices. At the same time as Chris satirically introduces us to his colleagues, he confesses his inability to construct a narrative of the recent past to account for the dysfunctional present: I have thought of all this as a game that began innocently enough and then went suddenly strange and poisonous. But I may prove to be too sanguine even in that. For, if I am right, then looking back on the last tw o years it should be possible to point to a specific and decisive event and say: it was at such and such a point th at everything w ent w rong and the rules were suspended. But I have not found such a m om ent or such a cause although I have sought hard and long for it. (1 -2 )

Chris’s narrative incompetence is subtly underscored by his arbitrary shifting back and forth between past and present tenses in the first chapter. If the past resists narrative, Chris is similarly unable at this point to break out of his funk in order to inaugurate a narrative of transformation and change in the near future. And while his satire may be multidirectional, his critique of both leader (Sam) and led (the cabinet) lacks the scope of Achebe’s multidirectional satire of leaders (Nanga) and led (“the people”) in his previous novel. Chris’s led are really, or at least nominally, the leaders of Kangan. Chris’s elite view from the hermetic Council Chamber does not include the masses. His top-down view of power acknowledges no role, either beneficial or disabling, for common people in the construction of past or present narratives of Kangan. Beatrice chides Chris that “the story of this country, as far as you are concerned, is the story of the three of you [i.e., Chris, Sam, and IkemJ” (66). Chris, chastened, agrees, admitting that “we tend sometimes to forget that our story is only one of twenty million stories— one tiny synoptic account” (66-67). Chris makes more such realizations as events plunge him from satiric stasis into a state of crisis rendered as narrative flux and forced engagement with people outside the elite: Braimoh and Emmanuel, soldiers and police. Through the ordeal of losing his title and hiding from government forces he becomes increasingly sensitized to the lives of poorer people. At one point, he refuses to let Braimoh’s children be turfed out of their beds on his and Beatrice’s behalf, showing a concern for the dignity and comfort of working people that impresses Beatrice; she chastises herself that she had failed, in her desire to sleep with Chris, “to consider such things as beds and floors and at what and whose cost” (197). And Chris dies trying to take responsibility for the welfare of an anonymous woman about to be raped. It is the shift from satiric safety to narrative danger that redeems Chris by enabling his blinkered worldview to expand and interact with a larger national community. Besides his fugitive adventures, Chris’s education and widening of horizons are promoted by his friendships with Beatrice and Ikem. Beatrice, as

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we have seen, encourages Chris to widen his view of Kangan history beyond the activities of its leaders. And although her advocacy of enhanced recognition of women’s roles is directed towards Ikem in the text, her lover Chris has also presumably been influenced by her feminism. Ikem also champions the cause of the people, and is the novel’s conduit to the voice of the Abazonians that Sam and Chris know only as a threatening, inchoate crowd of “hoodlums” (9) beyond the Council Chamber window. But Ikem is a contradictory figure. As C. L. Innes points out, his “crusading zeal” on behalf of the dispossessed is compromised by his “lack of identification with them,” signified by his refusal to let Elewa stay the night, his patronizing comment that he is “amazed” at the people’s “perceptiveness,” and his self-proclaimed pleasure at “sealing himself off from the people in the market by the car and the book, symbols of wealth and education unavailable to them” (Chinua 152-55). Later in the novel, Ikem does acknowledge a certain unbridgeable difference between himself and the people. He begins by making a statement that effectively summarizes the problem raised by the novel as a whole: “It is the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being” (141). But Ikem recognizes also that his position among the educated and empowered elite excludes him from the “stubborn sense of community” exhibited by the proletariat: “There seems no way I can become like the poor except by faking. What I know, I know for good or ill” (142). Chris, as we have seen, moves from voluntary satiric detachment to enforced narrative engagement, a process that thrusts him into physical motion that also begins to dislodge his restrictive knowledge and self-identification. Ikem similarly represents a combination of separateness from and somewhat awkward embrace of “the people.” And these qualities, which coexist simultaneously in him (as opposed to Chris’s movement from one to the other) are aligned in Ikem too with notions of satire and narrative. Ikem as an elite editor cut off from the poor is a passionate crusader who writes oppositional editorials and satirically describes Sam as a “fool” and his cabinet as “mesmerized toadies,” “court jesters,” and “a circus show” (46, 118). His response to a wife-beating neighbor (“Mr So Therefore”) is satiric detachment rather than the confrontation that might produce a narrative of change and betterment (34-35). But when Ikem voluntarily and at considerable risk visits the Abazonian delegation, he hears about the importance of story— its primacy even over the struggle that story makes “everlasting” (124). Ikem’s own “Hymn to the Sun” echoes the Abazonian elder, providing the source of the novel’s controlling metaphor, “anthills surviving to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year’s brush fires” (31); this poetic valorizing of narrative comes after a brief piece of mild satire on the same topic, the power of the sun. Beatrice contrasts with Chris and Ikem not only by her gender, but by her nonparticipation in satiric representation and her emergent association

Satire & the Postcolonial Novel with narrative. As the survivor who presides over the final chapter’s communal rehabilitation, Beatrice becomes the third witness taking over the storytelling/writing role from Chris and Ikem. She is, as Gikandi observes, “the proverbial anthill that survives to tell the tale of the drought” (147). The novel thus sets up a series of parallel alignments and preferences in which a tentative renewal is achieved by the purgation of a static elite detachment from the body politic associated with men and with satire in favour of a regenerative national community associated with women and with narrative. The novel’s satirist figures— not just Chris and Ikem but also Sam and Mad Medico— are sacrificed; they have no role in the final grouping. Satire gives way to “narrative” in two senses of the word: first, narrative as change and struggle, the engagement with society and combating of inertia that Chris is beginning to exemplify; and second, narrative as storytelling and the preservation of memory into the future that Beatrice comes to represent. In these different senses of narrative the novel’s two main proverbs come together: the tortoise who dies but leaves behind signs of struggle, and the anthills of the savannah. After two contemporary works in which satire and narrative become interfused, Achebe in Anthills o f the Savannah returns to the split he established in his historical novels between satiric stasis and narrative elaboration. Once again satire’s affiliations are with detached rulers epistemologically limited by their separation from the people. Once again narrative offers an alternative, and reveals the limitations of a gaze that is partial in both senses of the word. One might even argue that Achebe’s earliest novel and his latest are inverted images of each other. Things Fall Apart moves from a dominant narrative intended to recuperate and ennoble memory and history to a short concluding passage satirizing the colonialist “knowledge” that would erase the preceding narrative. Reversing that structure, Anthills o f the Savannah moves from an opening chapter of inert satiric crankiness to a counterdiscursive, ameliorating narrative whose primary achievement is to envision and symbolically achieve a restoration of dialogic balance to a previously lopsided community. In shifting his focus over five novels from past to present to future, Achebe plays satire off against narratives structured respectively according to tragic, satiric, and comic conventions of closure and resolution.

C H A P T E R FO U R

“Pessoptimism” Satire and the Menippean Grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s Novels

In October 1988, Salman Rushdie cracked a joke during a panel discussion at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors. With Indira Gandhi’s assassination and Zia ul-Haq’s recent airplane crash presumably on his mind, Rushdie remarked that his novels had featured a select group of politicians and that most of them had subsequently died. “Many met violent ends,” he said: “I’ve come to believe maybe this is a service I could perform” (Remarks). This quip by a popular and influential author—whose construction by himself and his admirers as a secular, postmodern, postcolonial, Third World cosmopolitan migrant has made him the virtual embodiment of a valorized contemporary subject— ironically has the writer in opposition sounding like a very ancient figure: the fearsome curser-satirist of Robert Elliott’s The Pow er o f Satire, whose words were seen by “primitive” peoples to have the power to kill (47).1 Versions of such a figure populate Rushdie’s novels. In Shame (1983), Old Mr. Shakil and Iskander Harappa, spewing multidirectional oaths, call death upon enemies local and foreign; Gibreel as angel of destruction does the same to London in The Satanic Verses (1988), and Baal, the satirist of Jahilia in that novel, composes “assassination songs” against murdered men’s killers (98). But however noisy and fearsome they may be, and however morally correct their objections to an offensive status quo, such characters are inevitably compromised in Rushdie’s narratives. They are variously shown to be delirious or desperate, and out of synch with their times. The most concrete achievement of their ravings and curses is usually to hasten their own deaths. Perhaps the jesting tone in which Rushdie allied himself with Elliott’s primitive satirist was an expression of uneasy ambivalence about the role. In awe (or mock-awe) at the success of his previous satiric representations, Rushdie might nonetheless have had reason to wonder about the consequences of his latest satiric attack: would he decimate another target, or

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would iie bring on his own death? The Satanic Verses had just been published, a novel whose biggest target was not a politician, or even a national political culture, but an international faith. It was already controversial for being deemed officially unwelcome in India. (Rushdie had a joke for this too, that day. When asked why Rajiv Gandhi had banned the book, he said that perhaps it was because, in a previous novel, “I was rude to his mother” [Remarks].) While The Satanic Verses was seen by many Muslims as a violent assault on the sacred words of a revered tradition, the real death-blow came not from Rushdie’s text but from the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini. As Srinivas Aravamudan describes the logic of what became “the Rushdie affair,” The satirist’s arrow , once it is defined as literal, as well as perform ative— through the workings of defam ation or blasphemy— is often m atched with a countershaft designed to accordingly damage the originator of the verbal attack . But the respondent in this w ar game can choose to raise the stakes, adopting m ore violently persuasive means. (17)

It was not Rushdie’s text but the words pronouncing the fatw a against him that held the real power, as Aravamudan notes: “[the question] ‘what can Khomeini do?’ is entirely inseparable from ‘what does Khomeini say?’” (18). The ironies only multiplied when Margaret Thatcher—herself a target of Rushdie’s satire who did not oblige him by dying—was forced to defend the author and his book from the more potent violence unleashed by the Ayatollah’s words. The fatw a provides a virtually unavoidable context for criticism of Rushdie’s work, particularly The Satanic Verses. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states, after 14 February 1989, a “mere reading” of the novel uninformed by the peculiar circumstances of its reception became “impossible” (217). For a scholar of postcolonial satire, issues raised by the affair are compelling— questions of cultural norms and authorial location, intentionally and audience, the social place and functional power of satiric literary critique, and many others. To address them adequately might well require a book-length study. But in order to address several of Rushdie’s major novels, and to treat his work in a manner consistent with my previous readings of Naipaul and Achebe, this chapter will keep issues raised by the fatw a mostly in the background. Like Spivak, I will acknowledge the impossibility of this endeavor, but like Spivak I will try to do it anyway. Rather than steering “satire” through the treacherous waters of competing ideological constructions of Rushdie, this chapter will propose a poetics of satire unique to his work. It will argue that the thematics of Rushdie’s fiction are driven by a tension within it between two countervailing forms of satiric energy: the Menippean and the “negative.” If my anecdotal opening was not intended to introduce a lengthy analysis of satire and the fatw a, it did point to an ambivalence in Rushdie regarding his own status as a satirist. This ambivalence is characteristic and

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significant: before and after the fatw a Rushdie has alternately embraced and resisted association with satire. In two famous essays he allies the art of which he approves—and his own work directly or by implication—with satire. “Outside the Whale” argues for recognition of the sociopolitical, referential contexts of all “works of art” and challenges George Orwell’s “quietist option” for the writer (Imaginary 92, 97). Rushdie insists that writers take sides in debates and make “as big a fuss” as possible about injustices and oppressions; using “comedy, satire, deflation,” the artist must not be “the servant of some beetle-browed ideology,” but rather “its critic, its antagonist, its scourge” (98, 99). In The Satanic Verses, the satirist Baal describes his work, “a poet’s work,” in similar terms: “To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep” (97). Satire, in such statements, becomes the very essence of responsible art. “In Good Faith,” Rushdie’s post-fatwa response to attacks on his novel, defends the artist’s “freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, including religious orthodoxies” (Imaginary 396). He denies that satire is an alien, unfamiliar mode to Islamic culture that can therefore be read only literally as blasphemy, yet feels he must contextualize the “forceful, satirical” language of the character Salman the Persian as the product of Gibreel’s destabilized dreaming mind (399). His own purpose in writing the book was not to offend against Islam, he says; rather, “dispute was intended, and dissent, and even, at times, satire, and criticism of intolerance, and the like” (414). Here Rushdie appears comfortable with the idea of his writing as intentional satire (if not with its reception as such). His comments elsewhere implicitly acknowledge that “satire” has a broad rhetorical spectrum, that it may not always be aggressive dissent but may also be playful spoof: the portrayal of Marxists in Midnight's Children (1980) as conjurers and cardsharpers, he says, was meant to be “affectionate satire” (though some on the Left took offence) (“M idnight’s ” 18). But if oppositional referentiality makes him a satirist, elsewhere Rushdie asserts that his work’s social and political grounding makes him a realist, even a naturalist. While Shame may be “as black a comedy as it’s possible to write,” it is so “not for easy satirical reasons, but for naturalistic reasons. Because that seemed to be the only way that one could come somewhere close to describing the world that was there” (“Midnight's” 15). Here Rushdie asserts the rigor and fidelity of his representations against a literary snobbism that might discredit “easy satirical” techniques of caricature, fanciful exaggeration, and symbolic violence. He says that only in the West are his novels seen as fantasies, and only Westerners are likely to forget that Shame is about a real place and real dictators. In India, he proudly observes, nobody talks about Midnight's Children “as a fantasy novel; they talk about it as a novel of history and politics” (“Midnight's” 15). He advances such notions even further in an interview, stating that he does not write fantasies but “understatements, pale shadows of the world.” He uses

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a Brechtian notion of the realistic as inclusive of the fantastic to argue that “realism . . . is whatever you have to do in order to describe what you see. . . . To be metaphorical does not mean that you cease to be realistic” (D. Brooks 60). From a theoretical standpoint, none of this is very rigorous. Rushdie uses “realistic” and “naturalistic” loosely, as synonyms for “referential.” And referentiality has always been a component of satire, easy or otherwise. It is also a popular option for fantasy, if only as the recognizable context against which the fantastic appears as fantastic (Todorov, Fantastic 25). Rushdie’s ambivalence about satire transcends the kill-or-be-killed fate that faces the ancient curser-satirist. It can be read as an expression of a time-honored ambiguity inherent in the protean manifestations and shadowy generic status of satire. If satire is principled dissent against specific instances of terror, injustice, authoritarian coercion, and shameful behavior, then yes, Rushdie writes it. If satire is cheap-shot caricatures and a will to power over easily conjured phantasms, then no, it is not a term Rushdie would have us use. To some extent, his ambivalence may also signal a resistance to being reduced to and fixed by any label—complete with its attendant baggage—particularly after Shame was published and widely categorized as “a satire.” Leonard Feinberg remarks that satirists from Bernard Shaw to Evelyn Waugh to Sinclair Lewis eschew the label and claim instead to be realists presenting an accurate picture of the world (63). Would it be unfair to suggest that by disavowing “satire” in favour of “naturalism” Rushdie guarantees his place in the company of satirists? Rushdie’s critics often link his novels with satire and the satiric.2 Typically, they presume a conventional definition of satire as a playfully didactic mode of referential attack using various deforming techniques of representation and rhetoric. Target-specific satiric jabs are certainly prevalent in all of Rushdie’s work, yet it is hard not to agree with James Harrison when he argues that overemphasizing Rushdie’s activity as satirist may limit other interpretive possibilities. Although Harrison favors a reading of Shame as “a satire” with “close to a single satiric purpose— almost a single target” (5), he argues that the other novels cannot be adequately accounted for under that rubric. Grimus (1975), he says, lacks the specificity of cultural grounding required for satire’s referential critique; things, ideas, people, and places are too slippery (36-40). Midnight's Children, despite a Book Three that is “so angrily written as to be more like a curtain up on Shame than a curtain down on Midnight's C hildren” (46), and despite many incidental “rapier thrusts . . . en passant” (48) targeting specific Indian phenomena in Books One and Two, is not, Harrison says, predominantly satiric in tone: “The targets for such satire are too scattered, and there is too much else going on” (48). Harrison’s reading is certainly preferable to Tariq Ali’s early description of Midnight's Children as “centrally an attack on clearly identifiable targets: the indigenous ruling classes in South Asia”— “a devastating political

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indictment” characterized by “pessimism and nihilism” (87, 93). To Ali’s reading one is compelled to respond, “Is that all? Is the novel only pessimistic, only an attack, and only on the ruling classes?” Ali dismisses Rushdie’s own view that the book’s apparent despair and pessimism are countered by its “optimistic” inscription of “the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration” through its teeming density of stories (Imaginary 16). Harrison is right to resist giving primary authority to the satiric energies of Midnight's Children. There is much more than sociopolitical critique and referential attack “going on” in its narrative. But could the same not also be said of Sham e, despite its greater saturation in satire? Where does one locate the boundary separating works for which “satire” is not a suitable term from those for which it is? Rather than address that thorny generic problem I would like to ask another question. Is satire always and only a referential attack, a “didactic” and simplifying reduction of meaning to negative evaluation (Harrison 67)? Mikhail Bakhtin offers an alternative in the theories of Menippean satire and the grotesque body elaborated in his books Problem s o f D ostoevsky's Poetics, The D ialogic Im agination, and Rabelais and His World.3 The two concepts are not explicitly linked in Bakhtin’s writings, but he clearly finds both Menippean satire and “grotesque realism” preferable to what he see as the deriding, oppositional, negative type of satire. “The satirist whose laughter is negative,” Bakhtin says, “places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it” (Rabelais 12). Menippean satire and the grotesque are associated with a participatory, ambivalent laughter that enables both affirmation and critique (Rabelais 11; D ialogic 26). Both ideas are theorized in conjunction with the concepts of carnival, dialogism, and ambivalence, and both involve top-to-bottom reversals of hierarchy, crude naturalism, and bodily imagery suggestive of incompleteness and becoming, and a spirit of renewal and liberation from the status quo. Bakhtin’s Menippean satire and his grotesque body have enough in common to warrant yoking together in what we might call the “Menippean grotesque”—a formulation with tremendous applicability to Rushdie’s work. Unlike his “negative” satire, Bakhtin’s Menippean grotesque does not find its meaning exhausted by its antagonistic, critical representations; these may in fact be subordinate to more positive themes of regeneration and democratization (Rabelais 311-13). Rushdie’s novels can be seen to invite a Bakhtinian reading and to be better served overall by Menippean models of satire than by the concept of satire as historically specific critique that most critics employ. If, as Harrison says, the latter can be seen to enable only a partial reading—a cataloguing of satiric passages, portraits, and devices together with an identification of “real-world” referents that can account for only some of what is “going on” in the text as a whole— Bakhtin’s cluster of concepts allows for a more flexible notion of satire that

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does justice to the variety and complexity of Rushdie’s work and that obviates my earlier question about boundaries. Certainly, Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque needs to be negotiated constantly with the opposing views of Wolfgang Kayser and others, as well as with various South Asian conceptions of the body that Rushdie’s novels incorporate. Nonetheless, through its dialogism and grotesque imagery, Rushdie’s work is energized by a tension between negative, pessimistic satire as verbal aggression ridiculing “some aspect of historical reality” (Fletcher ix) and Menippean, grotesque satire as an optimistic expression of becoming, renewal, and freedom. That tension is created by an evershifting balance of forces whose interaction has a determining effect on the varying tone, structure, generic status, and thematic import of individual novels and portions of novels. The result is an ambivalent, at times conflicted vision best captured in the term “pessoptimist,” a neologism Rushdie once borrowed from Edward Said (who in turn borrowed it from the Palestinian novelist Emile Habiby) (Rushdie, Imaginary 168; Said, After 26).

Bakhtin’s complex and compelling theory of Menippean satire locates the origins of the modern Menippean spirit in a “carnival sense of the world” (Problem s 134) associated with medieval folk culture: As opposed to the official feast, one might say th at carnival celebrated tem porary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it m arked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norm s, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becom ing, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all th at was imm ortalized and com pleted. (Rabelais 10)

Ambivalent carnival laughter can be “gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding” (11-12). Through its transgression of hierarchical fixities and boundaries, carnivalesque energy opposes “all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization” (255). In the work of Rabelais, through which Bakhtin’s theory of carnival is largely developed, the primary symbol that makes concrete the transformative potential of the carnival spirit is the grotesque body: the ingesting, defecating, urinating, fornicating body of the open apertures, where the physiological self proclaims its incompleteness by flowing into and out of the world. This conception of the unfinished body “blended with the world, with animals, with objects” challenges the bourgeois ego’s self-image of containment and completion. Instead it stresses change, renewal, and fertility; it turns the human body into a version of the “cosmic” realm, “the entire material bodily world in all its elements” (Rabelais 27). Bakhtin’s ethical view of the grotesque body as a valorized semiotic medium challenges traditional alignments of bodily images with satiric at-

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tack. Joseph Bentley encapsulates the usual view in his dualistic concept of “semantic gravitation.” Satiric effects— intentional or not—are always created, Bentley says, when “elements with widely contrasting connotations” are juxtaposed or merged: “When a cluster of images juxtaposes high and low elements— Bach and hairy endings, for example, or genius and fetus— the result is a movement of the high toward the low, a semantic gravitation” (“Semantic” 6-7). Bentley’s theory relies on the Cartesian mind-body split, which must be conceived as a hierarchy in order for combinations of the intellectual/spiritual with the physiological/material to automatically communicate as satiric reduction—as a tainting of the higher by association with the lower. Other accounts of the grotesque by satire theorists such as David Worcester (63-68), M. D. Fletcher (4), and Frank Palmeri (1) also presume a Cartesian hierarchy in positing a necessary link between grotesque imagery and satiric reduction. And when Northrop Frye defines satire as “militant irony” that “assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured” (Anatomy 223), he establishes a clearly dualistic structure of judgment that deprecates the grotesque. However, as Jewel Spears Brooker argues, even though the dualism that dominated Western thought from the seventeenth century on has been destabilized in the aftermath of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Freud, satire continues, with a kind of “epistemological schizophrenia,” to rely on that discredited subject-object dualism to facilitate its attack (5-6). In order to construct its victim as an exaggeratedly different “other,” Brooker says, satire requires a “strong sense of attack, of self and enemy, at its centre; and attack, by definition, presupposes a delineated subject and object” (8). In this context, then, critical disagreements over the rhetorical effect of grotesque imagery are premised on different views of the stability of subject-object and mind-body splits. These disagreements can be formulated as a question: do representations of the grotesque body offer a subversive challenge to the bourgeois individual’s self-image of rationality and containment by demanding its identification with that body and the world, or do they shore up the individual’s sense of separateness and privileged subjectivity by offering images of radical “otherness”? This is a version of the long-standing question of whether satire is ameliorative or punitive—offering a humbling critique or the pleasures of superiority. Such uncertainty over satire’s achievement complicates the work of even the most starkly polarized and influential theorists of satire and the grotesque: Kayser and Bakhtin. Kayser acknowledges that the grotesque has origins in “a satiric world view” (186-87) although he takes pains to distinguish the two concepts (37). Theorizing the grotesque as “experienced only in the act of reception” (181), Kayser identifies the feelings it evokes variously as estrangement, alienation, confusion, disparagement, and helplessness in the face of a disintegrating order. For him, the grotesque offers a glimpse of “a chaos that is both horrible and ridiculous” (53), and it reinforces “the discrepancy between world and Self” (146-47).

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Bakhtin, for whom a disintegrating order is cause for joy, explicitly challenges Kayser (along with the earlier German theorist G. Schneegans) for stressing the negative, the alien, the terrifying at the expense of what Bakhtin sees as a positive counterpart: “The existing world suddenly becomes alien (to use Kayser’s terminology) precisely because there is the potentiality of a friendly world, of the golden age, of carnival truth. Man returns unto himself. The world is destroyed so that it may be regenerated and renewed. While dying it gives birth” (Rabelais 48). This rhapsodic view of the grotesque’s liberating, revolutionary, and democratizing potential is at the heart of Bakhtin’s theory. That power and potential are a function of the carnivalesque and of the grotesque body’s unfinished nature and unbounded interaction with the world. Even something as mundane as the consumption of food is cause for celebration: “The victorious body receives the defeated world and is renewed” (283). Grotesque images of what Bakhtin calls “the material bodily lower stratum”—with its open orifices producing urine, excrement, and reproductive fluids—may in one sense be associated with debasement: for Bakhtin, “debasement is the fundamental artistic principle of grotesque realism; all that is sacred and exalted is rethought on the level of the material bodily lower stratum or else combined and mixed with its images” (370-71). But these images are also ambivalent, associated in various ways with fertility, renewal, and regeneration. The grotesque can therefore serve traditional satiric purposes of attacking established pieties or stratifications of power. Bakhtin, however, emphasizes the constructive changes and “progress” (406) that such an attack can inaugurate, rather than the purely deconstructive, leveling effect of the attack itself. This orientation towards the optimistic over the pessimistic, the transformative over the critical, marks Bakhtin’s greatest departure from other theorists. For Bentley (as we have seen) the juxtaposition of “genius” and “fetus” sets in motion a process of semantic gravitation that satirically debases and reduces the status of genius. Bakhtin would read this same combination as a reinvigorating of genius by its metaphoric identification with fetus— a bodily image of birth and newness. Still, these contradictory theories do not easily, unequivocally ally themselves with contrasting views of satire as either ameliorative or punitive, either subversive or reinforcing of the status quo. For one thing, the theories of Bakhtin, Kayser, and others regarding the psychological and social forces inherent in the grotesque are theories of potential, presumed effect only. They carry no claims to empirical authority regarding actual reception or impact. But beyond this rather obvious qualification, there are intrinsic features of both theories that resist the very correspondences they seem to invite between Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, grotesque, Menippean satire and subversive, transformative energies on the one hand, and, on the other, between Kayser’s negative, alienating, satiric grotesque and a static, detached attack on “others.” Geoffrey Galt Flarpham notes the dangers of

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delusion in Bakhtin’s idealistic, nostalgic view of human community (72-73). And as Palmeri warns, carnivalesque transgressions of boundaries and entrenched hierarchies may ultimately serve the interests of the very official forces Bakhtin wants them to destabilize: “Allowing a community to vent accumulated social pressures in a licensed transgression, a contained subversion, carnival generally helps preserve the status quo” (8).4 In Kayser’s more negative reading, the grotesque nonetheless does not automatically generate or serve satiric contempt and detachment. When a moral or satiric intention is too dominant, he argues, the grotesque cannot “come into its own” (125). And implicit in his description of the grotesque’s alienating, terrifying properties is a choice: the recipient of a grotesque representation may position herself within its realm—threatened by it, implicated in it—or may perceive its exaggerations and distortions of the “normal” as so alien, other, debased, or impossible that she confidently locates herself securely outside and satirically above its represented world. Moreover, Kayser’s very premises would seem to be challenged by Harpham’s suggestion that as a “species of confusion” (xv) the grotesque may no longer have its former power and distinctiveness in a contemporary world where its everyday familiarity in culture has made it virtually inseparable from “the real” (xix). It is important to stress the multiple ambivalences and overlappings among these broadly opposed formulations of satire and the grotesque because in Rushdie’s novels their main trajectories of affirmation and critique both work together and tug against each other. I will argue in my readings of his novels that Rushdie’s “pessoptimistic” vision is a profoundly Menippean one compatible with key Bakhtinian concepts of the grotesque body, carnival, the crowd, dialogism, heteroglossia, and, of course, satire. But I will also demonstrate the presence and necessity in his texts of some of the very elements Bakhtin wishes to set his systems against—closure and monologism, negative or target-oriented satire, Kayser’s pessimistic and nonregenerative grotesque. For all his valorizing of egalitarian inclusiveness, wholeness, and the boundary-destroying fluidity of realms, Bakhtin regularly sets excluding borders around his own privileged subjects. Bakhtin’s grotesque is separate from Kayser’s and Schneegans’s, Menippean from negative satire, the dialogic novel from monologic poetry and epic, Renaissance laughter from the laughter of later periods. Rushdie’s novels, though immensely illuminated by Bakhtin’s work, also challenge some of that work’s certainties and distinctions. In part, the challenges come from Rushdie’s cultural contexts. Kayser warns us to be careful when identifying the grotesque in images from unfamiliar cultures; what we see as “nightmarish” and “incomprehensible” may be “a familiar form that belongs to a perfectly intelligible frame of reference” (181). In the Indian culture that frames much of Rushdie’s work, elephant-headed and six-armed gods are popular everyday images. Western proprieties of privacy surrounding the activities of the “bodily lower

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stratum” are disregarded every morning on India’s rural fields, yet sexuality is more private than in the West. Eastern cultures provide special contexts not always accounted for in the largely Western orientation to the grotesque of Bakhtin, Kayser, Harpham, and others. There are personal and political contexts evoked by Rushdie’s work as well: his “translated” state of multiple national and cultural affiliations (Shame 29), and his engagement with the topics of Empire, colonialism, and postindependence politics in India and Pakistan. Bakhtin is careful always to historicize his theories; the critic of Rushdie’s novels (which Bakhtin of course never read) must be equally careful. It is remarkable how well Rushdie’s first major novel, M idnight’s Children, corresponds to Bakhtin’s description of the Menippean satire or “menippea.” When Saleem Sinai narrates his familial and personal histories, he aspires to “encapsulate the whole of reality” (75)—the multiplicitous reality of the Indian subcontinent that he claims to contain within him and to reflect metaphorically through his life. He fears absurdity and seeks the meaning and purpose of his life history and, by extension, his nation’s. Likewise, Bakhtin’s Menippean satire, also called “encyclopedic satire” (Payne 5), is characterized by “an extraordinary philosophical universalism and a capacity to contemplate the world on the broadest scale. The menippea is the genre of ‘ultimate questions’” (Problem s 115). It deals with topical issues, addresses the ideologies of the day, and arises in periods of social change “when national legend was already in decay, . . . in an epoch of intense struggle among numerous and heterogeneous religious and philosophical schools and movements” (119). Rushdie’s sixty-threeyear narrative begins in 1915, in the year of Mohandas Gandhi’s return from South Africa to begin nationalist agitation, and ends in 1978, shortly after the end of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Its chronological centerpoint and thematic focus is the moment of independence in 1947, when an imposed and hierarchical imperial order gave way to a postcolonial democratic self-rule. Menippean satire is a “utopian” genre (Proble7ns 118), and Rushdie captures the utopian spirit of freedom, optimism, and newness of the transitional period through images of celebratory crowds, and of Saleem’s birth, growth, and adoration by his family. It is also evident in an exuberant and transgressive narrative style reflective of the multiplicitous energies of carnival. Menippean satire in Bakhtin’s account is a positive, future-oriented genre in which pluralism and festive carnival laughter represent signs of renewal, hope, and incipient democracy. Rushdie establishes such principles as working norms in portraying newly independent India’s proliferating possibilities. Bakhtin’s privileging of discovery over certitude, participation over detachment, unstable becoming and transformation over official authority’s stasis and negation is echoed by Rushdie’s own preferences. The

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colourful “carnivalization of speech” (Rabelais 426) that Saleem’s polyphonic medley of discourses and languages achieves makes his monologue a “microdialogue,” which Bakhtin sees as possible when a voice incorporates a multiplicity of mutually conflicting and interrupting voices (Problems 75). Indeed, embedded genres and a mixed style are key features of Menippean satire. The novel’s emphasis on Saleem’s physical, spiritual, and mental mutability establishes identity and character as process—perpetually renewed. Like the heroes of the Dostoevsky novels that are Bakhtin’s privileged specimens of post-Rabelaisian Menippean satire, Saleem’s richness as a character is a direct function of the fact that he “never coincides with himself” (Problems 59). For if, as Saleem constructs his identity, “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me . . . everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine” (370), then that identity will be not only multiple but changing constantly. In essays and public statements, Rushdie regularly voices his approval of such Bakhtinfriendly concepts as multiplicity, hybridity, pluralism, impurity, transformation, and newness. He often connects these notions with the specifically Indian contexts in which they become necessary and unavoidable. Fie prefers questions to answers and opposes absolutism in favour of provisional, indeterminate truths. He insists on a social grounding and social mandate for art and believes, like Bakhtin, that “the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth” (Imaginary 14). Menippean satire for Bakhtin involves “an extraordinary freedom o f p lot and philosophical invention” which boldly uses the fantastic and extraordinary for “the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea, a discourse, a truth” (Problems 114). Saleem’s life parodically reproduces and undermines the Hindu concept of the four stages (asramas) of life;5 towards the end, prematurely old, he enacts a combined version of the third stage (meditative retreat) and the fourth (wandering sage) in attempting to articulate public and personal truths. He proposes that fantastic events such as the telepathic Midnight Children’s Conference have allegorical or symbolic value intimately bound to the truths that he wants to confirm. In comments that seem custom-made for M idnighťs Children, Bakhtin notes the combination of the free fantastic, the symbolic, at times even a mystical-religious element with an extrem e and (from our point of view) crude slum naturalism. . . . The idea here fears no slum, is not afraid of any of life’s filth. . . . The menippea loves to play with abrupt transitions and shifts, ups and downs, rises and falls, [snakes and ladders?] unexpected comings together of distant and disunited things, mésalliances of all sorts. (Problem s 1 1 5 , 118)

Bakhtin also identifies abnormal psychological states— including split personality, unusual dreams, and strange passions— as characteristic of Menippean satire (116). Saleem’s dream of the Widow, his telepathy, his

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amnesiac “man-dog” phase, and his obsession with Jamila Singer are just a few of Rushdie’s many uses of “abnormal states.” The novel also features the “scandal scenes,” “eccentric behavior” and violations of norms and customs noted by Bakhtin (117), and displays the “passion for spatial and temporal expanses” characteristic of the genre (Stam 134).6 But if Menippean principles attain a certain normative value by their congruence with central features of Midnight's Children's style, plot, characterization, and thematic concerns, as well as with statements of authorial philosophy, Rushdie also shows those valorized principles under siege by tyrannical forces of monologic authority. The darkening of tone that so many readers experience in Book Three marks a defeat— in India’s political realm as well as Saleem’s personal realm—of Menippean optimism and joy by the very retrograde powers that the Menippean satirist would wish to subvert and relegate to the past. Overcome by a reality that no longer coheres with its principles, Menippean satire gives way to a more negative, attack-oriented satire. The Menippean vision remains implicit, however, as the normative basis from which the negative satiric attack is launched. Book Three’s general shift in tone from optimism to pessimism, from hope to its absence, is perhaps not as great or as sudden as some critics suggest. As Harrison says, there is a lot of incidental target-oriented satire in the earlier parts. His catalogue of “rapier thrusts” in the novel includes mentions of segregated swimming clubs as symbols of white racism; telepathic snobbery among the participants in the Midnight Children’s Conference as examples of India’s class- and caste-based prejudices; and incidental stabs at Nehru’s astrological consultations, selfish rich landlords, and other individual targets (Harrison 48). To these examples one could add the novel’s satiric exposés of war propaganda, election-day thuggery, political corruption and inefficiency, European self-centeredness (which enables it to have “discovered” India [13]), and Indian mimicry (displayed by the inhabitants of Methwold’s Estate, and metaphorically conveyed in the description of businessmen turning w7hite). '1 he absence of bitterness or anger from these satiric jabs subordinates them to the predominant themes of Saleem’s and India’s early years, which cluster around Menippean concepts of hope, newness, becoming, and possibility. But they do help to show that such optimism is a construct made from a deliberately selective vision. Indeed, it comes at a great cost: in order to stress the positive excitement of “the infant state’s attempts at rushing towards full-sized adulthood” (232), Rushdie must occlude the horrors of violence and displacement experienced by millions during the Partition riots. Books One and Two do contain many episodic portrayals of anti-Menippean energies— denial, oppression, monologism. But from the standoffs between Reverend Mother and Aadam Aziz to the careerist misrepresentations of Jamila Singer, these episodes do not inspire Saleem’s anger because, like the Partition riots, they do not directly harm him. They can be sent up with playful detachment, domesticated to the exuberant manipulations of

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Menippean satire. Until the loss of his hair tonsure and fingertip, the most significant act of direct, unasked-for imposition upon Saleem is Mary Pereira’s baby-switch; this, of course, has the positive effect of giving him a family and moving him out of the slum. Those later bodily mutilations, however, mark the formal introduction, long before Book Three, of the darker, more negative satiric energies that will increasingly dominate the narrative. Saleem’s body functions as an extreme example of what Peter Brooks calls the discursive, textualized body. In Body W orks, Brooks defines the body in modern literature as “a site of signification—the place for the inscription of stories—and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot and meaning” (5-6). Saleem engages in what Brooks calls the semiotic retrieval of the body in order to make it signify, or represent, or mean (8, 22). But for Saleem as actor-protagonist in narrative, that body has already been written upon in the sense that it has been marked and scarred. To inscribe the body is to recognize the artistic dilemma inherent in the contradiction between generating meaning and discovering meaning— between writing (or speaking) the body oneself and reading (or listening to) a body already written-upon by others. Subsumed in that structural tension of writing/reading and speaking/listening are the dualities of subject/object, self/other, controller/controlled, creation/destruction, active/passive, affirming-Menippean-satire/negative-debunking-satire. The novel encourages us to evaluate all such pairings hierarchically: the first element is valorized, the second the endangering threat to it. Thus the objectifying inscription of negative historical events on Saleem’s body (border disputes, wars, the Emergency) determines and largely limits his freedom to positively inscribe his body as a subject in history. His “buffetted” body affects the stories that can be told, as well as the manner of their telling, which is “faster than Scheherazade” (11). Saleem, after all, is much more convincing as “the sort of person to w hom things have been d o n e” (232) than as the central, determining influence on Indian history that he sometimes claims to be, no matter how scandalously appealing the transgressive Menippean empowerments of the latter may seem. Saleem’s body in its grotesque aspect— an irregular body whose open apertures exist in a dynamic give-and-take with the world that increasingly favors take over give— becomes the primary site on which a normative Menippean ethos is overwhelmed by a bitter, angry satire of negation and despair. The first step in tracing this process in detail— in explicating the complex and varying connections of grotesque body images and satiric ethos— requires the recognition of a central device in Rushdie’s novel: the literalized metaphor. When the freezing of Muslim assets causes Ahmed Sinai’s testicles to freeze and Sinai babies to cease issuing forth, or when Saleem as “mirror” of India literally comes to contain its multiplicity in his head, connections that in a realistic novel would remain metaphorical—enacted in language only—are turned into literal events by the freedom of

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magic realism, or what we might call the Menippean fantastic. Several critics have remarked on Rushdie’s use of the literalized metaphor, including Neil ten Kortenaar (Midnight's), Jean-Paul Durix, Anuradha Dingwaney (“Salman”), and Kumkum Sangari. Their accounts of its function and effect range from the self-evident to the counterintuitively obscure: for Durix the literalized metaphor means that “signifiers can trigger off the appearance of what they refer to” (61), while for Sangari, “Metaphor is turned into event precisely so that it will not be read as event, but folded back into metaphor as disturbing, resonant image” (164). Harpham in On the G rotesque offers a more useful insight: he views the merging of the metaphoric with the literal as a property of mythic narrative, which traverses normally separate categories such as animal and human, or animate and inanimate. “At the margin of figurative metaphor and literal myth,” he writes, “lies the grotesque, both and neither, a mingling and a unity” (53). This blending of realms has a leveling effect on modern Western hierarchies of meaning and Aristotelian logic (54). It offers instead an infinitely inclusive field of significance that embraces contradiction— one in which “no realm of being, visible or invisible, past or present, is absolutely discontinuous with any other, but all equally accessible and mutually interdependent” (51). Under Harpham’s rubric, the trope of the literalized metaphor can be contextualized within Rushdie’s project in several ways. First, it expresses Rushdie’s preference for contradiction and multiplicity instead of a totalizing, unitary truth. Second, it captures the mythic sensibility of a novel steeped in Hindu mythology, a novel that can be read as a creation myth of independent India. Third, it evokes a traditional Hindu cast of mind that makes no distinction between the divine and the human, or man and nature; all are interconnected, and all are equally real (Younger 15). As Wendy Doniger O ’Flaherty notes, Hindus accept contradiction and pluralism and reject attempts to eliminate alternative views (5-7). Fourth, if the literalized metaphor is compatible with Rushdie’s worldview and with Hindu thought, it also agrees with the carnival spirit of Menippean satire, which favors contradictory conjoinings, juxtapositions, and the revolutionary interpenetration of “officially” bounded and stratified realms of human life and of literary representation. Fifth and finally, this trope translates abstract ideas into physiological conditions. Virtually all of Rushdie’s literalized metaphors manifest themselves as bodily abnormalities and thus participate in the multiplicitous indeterminacy of the grotesque. In the literalized metaphor, then, the valorized transgressive openness of the grotesque joins forces with the valorized transgressive openness of Bakhtin’s related but separately theorized Menippean satire. Inscriptions of idea on the body in Midnight's Children—whether literalized or simply metaphoric— are normatively constructed as positive, enabling events. Saleem’s first self-description is as a “swallower of lives” who has “consumed multitudes” (11); he says, “To understand just one

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life, you have to swallow the world” (108). The individual gives way to the crowd, and for Rushdie this can be a good thing with enormous potential, just as Bakhtin’s grotesque, unfinished body fulfills itself when it “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world” (Rabelais 317). For Bakhtin, the important parts of the grotesque body are the open cavities, orifices, and apertures where “the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome; there is an interchange and an interorientation” (317). In Midnight's Children, the most important apertures are the nose and the genitals. Aadam Aziz’s nose, described in the novel as “the place where the outside world meets the world inside you” (19), is said to have “dynasties waiting in it” (29), thus affiliating itself with the motifs of intermingling, fertility, and regeneration that Bakhtin associates with the bodily orifices and protuberances. Saleem’s “mighty cucumber of a nose” (152) leaks into the world in the early years when he seems to have the greatest power over and stature in his world; these are also the years when India as a new nation inspires the greatest optimism. But after the accident in the washing-chest Saleem’s nose becomes the conduit for a greater form of access to and interaction with the world through his telepathic mind. It becomes a channel of communication (Stam 163). In this mode, the nose offers great hope and potential, but for the idealistic Saleem the results of his telepathic activities are as disappointing as the political events with which they overlap. When the nose is later surgically drained, the effect is a disconnection from the multiple voices of community. The drainage is described through images of absence, isolation, and infertility: “A connection broken (for ever). Can’t hear anything (nothing there to hear). Silence, like a desert” (295). The most important subsequent use to which his nose’s interactive capacities are put is the aiding and abetting of death in the 1971 war.7 Increasingly over the length of the novel the interaction between body and world through the nose is associated less with possibility and achievement and more with futility and ignoble deeds. The nose is only one location for the novel’s important imagery of leaking or dripping. In other instances, the images are also normatively positive. When Saleem says, “Things—even people— have a way of leaking into each other . . . like flavors when you cook” (39), he sees this as not merely inevitable but good. Leaking leads to transformation, creation, and newness—to a productive impurity. And the fact that “the past has dripped into me” (39) allows Saleem to perform the creative act of narration. But if the idea of intermingling and impurity is valued by both Saleem and Rushdie in principle, the reality is that leaking and dripping can become draining, and in this novel the image is usually negative in practice. The young Saleem’s enormous dripping nose may be a metaphor of growth, potency, and potential (especially if, as Bakhtin asserts, “the grotesque image of the nose . . . always symbolizes the phallus” [Rabelais 316]), but “Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth” is an image of isolated imbecility (129). And any positive associations attendant on baby Saleem’s

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“heroic programme of self-enlargement” by draining successive women’s breasts is qualified by corollary associations with greed, excess, unnaturalness, and the sterility of life-giving bodily organs rendered “dried-out as a desert after only a fortnight” (124). Examples abound. When the Rani of Cooch Naheen turns white, her disease leaks into history and infects businessmen after independence. Saleem’s later speculation that his lust for meaning and centrality leaked into Indira Gandhi has clearly negative connotations: the leakage has produced the demagogic, multiplicity-denying slogan “India is Indira and Indira is India” for the post-Emergency election campaign (406). In a particularly negative use of the leak image, Saleem tells us that “children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us” (249). The Midnight Children’s Conference fails because the children begin replicating the poison of their parents’ prejudices and can no longer collaborate. Saleem’s cousin Zafar receives a heavy dose of adult poison after leaking urine into his bedclothes: his father hurls abuses (“Pimp! Woman! . . . Coward! Homosexual! Hindu!” [281]). Later, Zafar’s fiancée discovers his leakage and responds by willfully obstructing her own— the menstrual flow— so that she can put off becoming an adult and avoid marrying him. When Aunt Alia impregnates her cooking with negative emotions as a means of bitter revenge, the emotions leak into the members of Saleem’s family who consume “the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord” (320). The effect is to drain the family of strength, sense, competence, coherence, love, and hope. Saleem himself goes through a series of drainings, beginning with the loss of his finger. As noted above, this event marks the first step in the darkening, more pessimistic tone that finds its most intense expression in Book Three. Saleem describes the finger-mutilation in apocalyptic terms that clearly challenge the Bakhtinian vision of the unbounded grotesque body as emblem of positive, regenerating flow between realms. In fact, he takes pains to separate the non-material intermingling of identities from any material affront to the bounded body: O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but hom ogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next. The body, on the other hand, is hom ogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, a sacred temple, if you will. It is im portant to preserve this wholeness. But the loss of my finger . . . has undone all that. Thus we enter into a state of affairs which is nothing short of revolutionary; and its effect on history is bound to be pretty dam n startling. U ncork the body, and God knows w hat you permit to com e tumbling out. (2 3 0 - 3 1 )

A finger, of course, is not one of Bakhtin’s orifices of interaction between the body’s internal and external spheres. The unnatural, externally im-

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posed flowing of blood from a finger is a different order of event from a dripping nose or feeding breast—hence Saleem’s dire tone. And the novel’s instances of leaking and draining are in general increasingly imposed, increasingly the outcome of external assault on the body, distinct from the normal flow of orifices. At the end of his life Saleem’s body, “buffeted by too much history,” begins unnaturally to crack and crumble as a result of being “subjected to drainage above and drainage below” (38). The drainages above (of Saleem’s nose) and below (of his testicles) are both violent, inflicted processes that prevent further natural drainings (of snot and sperm). In some instances, then, drainage means the natural transgressions of the body’s limits through the emissions of apertures associated in Bakhtin’s system with abundant excess, new life, hope, and Menippean satire. In others, drainage means imposed transgressions of the bounded body and is associated with monologic tyranny and negative satire: the sterilization of the midnight children as “the draining-out of hope” during Emergency rule (421) is the novel’s central satiric moment. Depending on context, then, images of the grotesque body draining into the world may have either positive or negative thematic value. In the first case they serve a Menippean vision of renewal and progress referentially directed towards the qualities of Indian society that Rushdie valorizes: pluralism, democracy, hybridity, and change. In the second case they serve as an angry satiric attack on forces in modern India and Pakistan that deny those principles: fundamentalism, despotism, “purity,” stasis. In both cases the satiric method and philosophy match the perceived primary qualities of the referents. The imagery is ambivalent, but not in Bakhtin’s sense, which posits the positive associations (birth, community, and renewal) as accompanying and ultimately triumphing over the negative associations (death, degeneration, and alienation) embedded in the grotesque. Some of these negative, target-oriented satiric images of death by draining do, in fact, come with corollary suggestions of fertility, but they take on an attenuated, parodic form. Saleem’s surreal vision of a field of “crops” on a field near Dacca after the 1971 war turns out to be a pyramid of dead and dying soldiers— including three childhood friends— “leaking nourishing bone-marrow into the soil” (360). This image of wasted youth supports Rushdie’s satiric indictment of the agents behind a gruesome and unnecessary war far more powerfully and relevantly than it offers mitigating optimism through images of human crops and fertilizer; if anything, these images mock the very notion of fertility. Similarly, Saleem’s alter ego Shiva is said to fulfill both aspects of his divine namesake (425): he represents destruction by helping sterilize his fellow midnight children and procreation by “strewing bastards across the map of India” (395). But if Saleem is unequivocal in aligning the removal of the midnight children’s reproductive powers with a satiric denunciation of Emergency as “the draining-out of hope” for India’s future, he seems hesitant to celebrate the next generation, Shiva’s offspring, as a countervailing cause for optimism.

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Young Aadam Sinai and his peers will be a “tougher” generation, “not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills” (431). If this description suggests an agency and effectiveness never achieved by Saleem and his peers, it sounds closer to the selfish, bloody-minded, totalitarian agency of Shiva than the democratic idealism of Saleem. If these children of a darker era can challenge the current tyrannical powers of negation, it will be to replace them with something equally monologic and just as scary. A sense of apprehensive awe inheres in Saleem’s description of this group as “fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything” (431). This image of regeneration proves no more encouraging than the Emergency’s other horrific contribution to reproduction imagery, the multiply cloned versions of Sanjay Gandhi that parody and discredit the very idea of regeneration. A number of Western literary and sociological traditions are evoked by Rushdie’s satiric imagery of tyrannic bodily abuse. English satirists from Swift to Huxley have championed the rights of the individual body against state interference. In Michel Foucault’s pessimistic vision, the body is always institutionally coerced and ideologically conditioned to meet the utilitarian demands of “discipline” and “power,” which see a docile and subjected body as socially, politically, and economically productive (“Body”; “Docile”). For Foucault, moreover, the body “manifests the stigmata of past experience”; as “the inscribed surface of events” it is necessarily “a volume in perpetual disintegration” because a body imprinted by history is a body destroyed by history (“Nietzsche” 148). The chief targets of Rushdie’s negative satiric anger in Midnight's Children are institutionalized policies and procedures of a postindependence Indian state whose short history, written upon Saleem’s body, ultimately destroys it. But for Rushdie the body is not always necessarily the controlled, actedupon body of Foucault. His novel is equally interpretable through a more traditional view espoused by the Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith and David Hume, who in Catherine Gallagher’s words “maintained a two-millennia-old tradition of seeing the individual body as sign— both as metaphor and as source—of the health or infirmity of the larger social body” (83). The healthy baby Saleem reflects a generally healthy young Indian state, while the bodily deterioration of the older Saleem is both a metaphor and a literal effect of ill health in the realms of the state and the body politic. Again, as a process these changing connections accommodate both Menippean-optimistic and critical-pessimistic forms of satiric energy. Interestingly, Rushdie’s novel is also compatible with the major eighteenthcentury challenger to Smith’s and Hume’s traditional alignments of bodily and social health. Thomas Malthus argued that healthy individual bodies may reflect a healthy social body in the present but could cause its enfeeblement in the future by proliferating and causing overpopulation. The healthy “body is a profoundly ambivalent phenomenon” for Malthus be-

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cause of its capacity to “destroy the very prosperity that made it fecund, replacing health and innocence with misery and vice” (Gallagher 84). Malthus’s pessimism resonates strongly in the context of India’s burgeoning population and the various state campaigns of suasion aimed at curbing the social body’s growth through birth control. It resonates too with the uncertain promise attributed to the second generation of midnight children sired by Shiva. Indian concepts of the body are equally ambivalent, equally multiple and contradictory, and resonate in equally complex ways with Rushdie’s satiric intents. As Gavin Flood shows in a survey of views among different Indian philosophical-religious groups, the body is thought of variously as the only criterion of personal identity, as an inseparable part of unitary reality, as a place of bondage and suffering, or as a locus of liberation (47). Saleem’s body is all of these at different points. And if both Saleem and Rushdie value certain kinds of impurity and intermingling, the novel also invokes and gains satiric power from a significant strain in Indian thought that privileges bodily “perfection” and purity. In orthodox Brahminism the body is seen as polluted by effluents; passion and spontaneity must be suppressed to keep it safe from possession by malevolent forces (Flood 49). Indian art typically takes the perfect yogic body as a standard of perfection; discipline and penance make the body “etherealized so that it may become a fit vehicle for the realization of moksa [release from earthly bondage)” (Mukerjee 129). A fascinating example of bodily discipline and perfection is documented in Joseph Alter’s study of Indian wrestling, The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in N orth India. Alter describes the wrestler as embodying an ideology of social duty and nationalist reform through somatic disciplines of diet, exercise, and abstinence. Wrestling bouts disregard caste strictures of touchability; by positing the body as the sole criteria of identity, such bouts critique the hierarchical construction of “the Hindu body [as] the docile subject of a pervasive political anatomy” (24; cf. 167-97). Because Hindu philosophy sees mind and body as “intrinsically linked,” not separable into a “simple duality,” the wrestler’s physical exercise and mental meditation are seen as one indivisible activity (92). Wrestlers take from the world a customized diet with special emphasis on milk, almonds, and ghee, and they voluntarily block what their bodies might leak into the world by abstaining from sex and masturbation. Semen is seen to contain the essence of the body and of life (129). It is the quintessential fluid that distills all other fluids, including blood and marrow, and becomes for wrestlers “the locus of a person’s moral character and physical prowess” (137). Wrestlers extend their somatic enterprise into a self-congratulatory nationalist ideology in which the wrestler represents “the perfect citizen” standing against the hedonistic bodily indulgences of the modern body politic. Reforming the body is valorized by wrestlers as civic duty and patriotic act through which individuals, one by one, can counteract social degeneration. Alter

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undercuts the utopian idealism of the wrestlers’ ideology with gentle irony: “Eventually, it is thought, the whole country will exercise and eat its way toward a civic utopia of propriety and public service” (247); celibacy will curb population growth and “poverty will fall before an inspired work ethic fueled by the natural energy of the wrestler’s good health” (248). Saleem’s individualization of national destiny is no less preposterous, and if his experience is ultimately of the mutual failure of the body and of history, a primary sign of the bodily and societal collapse that he narrates— for him as for the wrestlers— is the draining out of semen. Enormous symbolic and satiric value is attributed to this event; “the draining-out of hope” is also the beginning of Saleem’s death. In her discussion of ancient (Vedic and post-Vedic) beliefs about bodily fluids, O ’Flaherty notes that while women’s loss of blood (menstruation) and milk (nursing) were symbols of creation and fertility, the male’s loss of blood and semen (his equivalent of female milk) were associated with death (40-44). The flow of male fluids was to be strictly controlled; a belief that semen was stored in the head made castration a form of symbolic beheading that resulted in a loss of more general powers, including the powers of the imagination (59, 81-87). As they are for Alter’s modern-day wrestlers, women were seen as potential polluters of men’s precious fluids (O’Flaherty 57); a particularly dominant woman could drain a man of his life (77). When Saleem is drained of semen by a dominant Widow, he begins to die, and India irrevocably enters a period of darkness. Saleem musters his remaining powers to narrate his story, although even the powers of imagination that serve him so well throughout begin to fail him as his disintegration becomes acute. The draining of fluids from his body is the final literalization of the intermingling of realms and transgression of boundaries that as metaphor— as idea— proves enabling, but that as material bodily fact manifests itself increasingly as failure or destruction. A recurring debate over Midnight's Children concerns whether it is best seen as celebration or critique, as ultimately optimistic or pessimistic about the overarching referent behind its fictions: postindependence India. The temptation here, as with all polarities, is to seek a middle ground. Neil ten Kortenaar, acknowledging the novel’s “paradoxical” reception “as both a celebration of India and a withering satire on the very possibility of the nation-state” (Midnight's 41, 57), performs a subtle and compelling reading of its historical allegory that challenges Timothy Brennan’s view of Rushdie as one of the Third World’s “satirists of nationalism and dependency” (Brennan 81). Showing in detail how Rushdie’s allegory literalizes conventional metaphors of national history, ten Kortenaar argues that such metaphors, once exposed as the fictions they are, can nevertheless offer a form of “truth.” In his view, “Rushdie’s novel explodes the notion of the nation having a stable identity and a single history, then invites a sceptical, provisional faith in the nation that it has exploded” (Midnight's 41-42). It is a critique that ultimately affirms.

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Examined through a different generic lens, Rushdie’s view of the nation proves equally paradoxical. We have seen how his novel navigates a complicated course between the metaphoric and the literal, between inclusive Menippean optimism and exclusive negative satiric pessimism, and between an orthodox Indian valorizing of purity and a secular migrant preference for impurity. If we let genre be our guide—and for Bakhtin, genre always has sociopolitical implications— we can see Rushdie’s vision of India residing in the pessoptimistic divide between these countervailing forces. As his controlling image of the leak proves life-enhancingly dialogic in principle but damagingly hostile to dialogue in practice, and as Menippean energies are overwhelmed by satiric, so Rushdie celebrates the Nehruvian vision with which independent India was “born”—as a secular, pluralistic democracy— but scourges the historical assaults on that vision that culminate in virtual “death” during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. But if the novel seems to end with the gloom and despair of the satirist in his conventional role as defeated victim, there is a sense in which the defeat is not total. Graham Pechey writes of Bakhtin that his theory of social hegemony is w ritten alm ost exclusively from the standpoint of a perennial counter-hegem ony always in the making— always having the last laugh as it were on the m onoglot pow ers-that-be but never w inning in any properly political sense. In other w ords, the true priority of heteroglossia is never realised as decisive victory: the forms of its militant self-assertion constantly imply that priority which the m onoglot and centralising forces have constantly to posit themselves against. (52)

At the end of Midnight's Children, if we are to locate such a counter-hegemonic challenge anywhere it must be in the novel itself. Rushdie’s most Bakhtinian essay, “Is Nothing Sacred?”, is a paean to the novel as a “‘privileged arena’ of conflicting discourses” where “we can hear voices talking abou t everything in every possible w ay” (Imaginary 426, 429). The novel is a privileged genre for Rushdie for the same reasons it is for Bakhtin: insofar as literary genres have the power to “transform our awareness and conceptualization of external reality” (Gardiner 22), the dialogic world of the novel involves a “decentering of the ideological world” (Dialogic 367). Rushdie’s novel, so often seen as “teeming” with India’s diversity, bursting forth “the fecundity of the repressed” (Sangari 166), exemplifies not only these aspects of Bakhtinian “novelness” but especially of its hyperinclusive subspecies, the Menippean satire. The cracking-up of Saleem’s body, which in one sense figures the destructive assaults of ignoble history, in another sense, as Mujeebuddin Syed has shown (103), draws on a Vedic tradition to figure creation—the pouring-out in narrative of the multitudes that Saleem has swallowed over his life. Saleem’s pouring-out is Rushdie’s pouring-in: together they create a polyphonic novel that can claim to include a wide spectrum of the nation’s diversity. By contrast with the narrower scope of the nation’s rulers, and as the normative ideal on which satire is

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based, the Menippean novel provides a subversive alternative to official state ideology. It asks its readers to return from the final moment of imminent death to the initial moment of exuberant birth, of first principles. It is in this India, the visionary secular democracy that has always fallen short in practice, that Rushdie wants to put his faith. *

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Pakistan is a place that inspires few compliments and little optimism from Rushdie. In Midnight's Children it is called “the Land of the Pure” (319), where purity is associated with the denial of “Bombayness” (301)—a preferred multiplicity and cosmopolitan inclusiveness characteristic of India— and with the elimination of Saleem’s family and memory. When India does inspire a denunciatory, “negative” satire in that novel, it is when the nation’s rulers embrace the kind of authoritarian, antidemocratic, monologic politics more commonly associated with Pakistan. Rushdie has publicly denounced the Pakistani state of Zia ul-Haq as “a nightmarish, surreal land” cruelly repressed under a “medieval, misogynistic, stultifying ideology” of Islamization that institutionalized “the ugliest possible face of the faith” (Imaginary 53-54). Zia’s predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, does not fare much better in Rushdie’s account (57). In the case of Sham e, a novel set entirely in Pakistan— “or not quite” (Shame 29), but close enough to include the cities of Quetta, Karachi, and Islamabad and fictional-allegorical versions of Zia and Bhutto— it is not surprising that the result should be the author’s blackest, most pessimistic, and most relentlessly satiric work. Pakistan was the world’s first Islamic republic. The inseparability of the country’s political and religious laws and institutions encourages Rushdie to equate Pakistan with Islam. If Islam is based on a top-down authority derived from a single text spoken through a single prophet by a single God, Pakistan, Saleem tells us, is also “a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be” (Midnight's 315). In James Harrison’s view, the basic difference between Midnight's Children and Shame is the difference between Hinduism’s diversity, inclusiveness, and embrace of contradiction and Islam’s monism, exclusiveness, and fundamentalist assertions of truth (18-24). For Harrison, Indian/Hindu multiplicity— Saleem’s “Bombayness”—are reflected in the style and tone of the earlier novel, while the more focused “coherence and anger” (70) of Shame make it a more Muslim text— its elements monologically subordinated to “a single satiric purpose” (5) of denunciation. There is much to commend Harrison’s view as an enabling comparison, and in the context of this discussion it would imply that the normative Menippean valences of Midnight's Children find no articulation in a “negatively” satiric Shame whose procedures of singleminded negation, denial, exclusion, and top-down moralistic judgment would seem to match the predominant traits of its target. Indeed, such a reading would accord with views expressed by other critics. For Timothy Brennan, the novel’s “political pessimism” is a function of

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the fact that its qualities of “apparent invention and open-endedness are really just a kind of patterning, and provide the elements for a repetitious plot of tyranny, demagogy, and death— the same old story” (Salman 132). In other words, what appear to be Menippean principles embedded in the novel’s creative exuberance and playful style are subordinated to the narrower project of condemnation. The Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad sees Shame's narrow and exclusive field of representation as its chief weakness. The restriction of focus to a courtly, empowered class occludes “the dailiness of lives lived under [that class’s] oppression” and the possibility of local, grass-roots resistance to it (139). “Satirizing the masters is one thing,” Ahmad says, but the novel offers no hope, no portrayal of an affiliative politics (151-52). Rushdie, who admits to not knowing Pakistan as well as India (having learnt it “in slices” after emigrating to England) finds it not to teem with stories the way India does (Shame 69); in Ahmad’s view this offers an easy excuse for the author to improperly present the activities of a narrow social stratum as the experience of a country (137-39). If the novel affords no space for popular resistance to authoritarian power, nor for what Ahmad calls “the human bonding . . . [that] makes life, even under oppression, endurable and frequently joyous” (139), then it also affords no space for the popular resistance and joy of a Bakhtinian “carnival.” Do Shame's vehement referential attacks, undercurrent of rage, and confinement to a field of representation that excludes “the people” and their carnivalesque challenges completely bar from the novel the salutary Menippean principles of multiplicity, regeneration, and optimism? On the evidence of the transgressions of boundaries and bodily abnormalities portrayed in the novel, the answer would seem to be “yes.” The India-Pakistan borders established by Partition are described as “moth-eaten” (61), but this does not signify a disruption of borders that Rushdie—who loathes Partition—can find heartening. Rather, the borders are only moth-eaten as a result of wasteful border wars aimed at strengthening those borders and shoring up territory within them. The body in Sham e, as in its predecessor, becomes a primary site on which human morality and political-historical approbation and disapprobation are inscribed. But Shame contains no reveries about the virtues of intermingling realms leaking into each other, no hopeful Bakhtinian images of birth, growth, or renewal. Here the grotesque is Schneegans’s satiric grotesque; it is Kayser’s alienating, horrifying grotesque. In various ways, grotesque imagery serves as the satiric marker of violence, shame, denial, and oppression— a moral abyss. The grotesque body in Shame can serve a very explicit satiric reduction: Raza Hyder is denounced by Bilquis as having become “pygmified,” “shrunk” until “he is smaller than a bug” (271). The observation that Iskander Harappa “possessed the power of accelerating the ageing processes of the women in his life” thematizes unnaturalness, death, and cannibalistic oppression: “You feed on us,” Arjumand Harappa tells her father (181-82). When Arjumand defeminizes her body she signals her support

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for and complicity with a corrupt, repressive patriarchy. Likewise, Good News’s yearly pregnancies and arithmetical progression of children are a far cry from the “pregnant and begetting body” that in Bakhtin’s system symbolizes new life and progress (Rabelais 26); this image of grotesque excess rather enables a vivid satiric admonishment of patriarchal ambition fearsomely imposed on the functional female body. Omar Khayyam Shakil’s pot-bellied body, “fatter than fifty melons” (53), is not, after Bakhtin, a positive symbol of the body transgressing its limits and renewing itself by feasting on the conquered world. It is an external manifestation of negative attributes: the “something ugly” that Farah Zoroaster attributes to his personality (51), the “shameless” quality than Rani Humayan sees in him (80). If Omar’s shamelessness is bodily inscribed, so too is its supposed opposite, the emotion of shame that his mothers forbid him to feel. Shame penetrates the body’s boundaries like a disease, making the face get hot and the heart start shivering, according to Bunny (39). When indeed Omar is briefly “possessed by a demon” that clutches and strangles his inner organs and causes him to endure shaking spells and hot and cold flashes, his response is to “vomit . . . out the thin yellow fluid of his shame” and henceforth vow “to escape this” unwanted intrusion (53). Shame and shamelessness, though said by the narrator to be opposites (39), in fact are dual aspects of the same moral principle; both are linked to the targets of Rushdie’s most vigorous satire, and both denaturalize the body. Nowhere is this satiric grotesque more evident than in the body of Sufiya Zinobia, the mentally and physically stunted girl-woman who acts as a repository for the diverted shame her shameless family refuses to acknowledge. Shame invades her body, materializing first as blushes, then as disfiguring boils and lumps. She is disturbed by “the bad things” “that get inside her” but can neither understand them nor block their entry (214). And since the shame inside is produced by corrupt and violent behavior, once it can no longer be contained within her body it spills out into the world as violence. “Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence,” the narrator says: “Humiliate people for long enough and a wildness bursts out of them” (116-17). Sufiya’s violent acts are drastic and gratuitously destructive transgressions of the body’s boundaries. And they result in some grotesque inversions: turkeys are decapitated and their insides pulled out of their necks. Needless to say, here is none of the encouraging anti-hierarchical energy that Bakhtin sees in top-to-bottom, “inside out” reversals performed on the grotesque body (Rabelais 403). Like the shame that Omar comes to refuse (and which Sufiya collects in his stead), this manifestation of shame as violence is demonic. As violent revenge of the symbolic oppressed, it is itself a kind of satiric indictment. Satire is a form of symbolic violence: an aggressive verbal attack, a disfiguring representation or system of representations. As an excess of shame transforms Sufiya into a grotesque hybrid of beast and woman increasingly

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dominated by beast, the literal violence she enacts in narrative is inseparable from the satiric verbal violence Rushdie performs in writing. She becomes Rushdie’s agent (he m akes her his agent); as she spirals in for the kill on Omar and Raza, the men whose deferred shame made her what she is, she traces out the “demonic spiral or circle” that Stephen Greenblatt identifies as a central image of satire (114). The victims at the center and the end of Sufiya’s literal violence are prominent among the victims of Rushdie’s symbolic (satiric) violence, and for the same reasons. The idea of “shame” becomes the moral touchstone for Rushdie’s indictment of the Pakistani ruling class. As a norm, it is nevertheless presented as an unstable, flexible concept, so imprecisely defined and variously sourced that it disables binary notions of satiric judgment based on clear, shared norms between author and reader. The novel’s narrator defines “shame” as a “wholly inadequate translation” of sharam , a word “containing encyclopaedias of nuance.” These variations include, in addition to shame itself, “embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts” (39). Although the opposite of shame is said to be shamelessness, another very different opposite is implied in the tragic story of the Muslim girl killed by her father. The girl brings “such dishonour upon her family that only her blood could wash away the stain” (115). Removing the source of “dishonour” (which is yet another meaning of sharam) retrieves “honour” and “pride”: “We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride” (115). Here the linguistic gap has been explicitly connected to a gap of cultural understanding. Shame is therefore a flexible enough concept to have two very different opposites: the “shamelessness” that denotes an absence of shame or of a capacity for shame, and the “honour” that shame negates. Both shame and shamelessness can lead to violence: the Muslim father’s shame causes him to kill his daughter, whereas Raza and Isky, the novel’s preeminent shameless villains, conduct various violent campaigns. And we have seen the violence that results when they shamelessly deflect the shame they should rightly feel onto Sufiya, who absorbs “like a sponge” (122) their refused shame and also the shame the country at large feels—for the abuse it has suffered, and for its association with such shamelessness. Like “hope” in Midnight's Children, “shame” is described as a “liquid” (122). But whereas hope drained out of bodies necessitates an oppositional satiric stance in the earlier novel’s final chapters, “shame” in Shame is a life-sustaining fluid that never enters shameless bodies. Instead, “the fluid of shame spills, spreading in a frothy lake across the floor,” where Sufiya soaks it up (122). It is significant that Sufiya’s final destructiveness is targeted not at Raza, the last surviving shameless and violent villain. Raza is killed by the three

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Shakil sisters, who say, “There is no shame in killing you now, because you are a dead man anyway” (281). (He is dead, presumably, because for too long he refused to imbibe the moral sustenance of shame.) Sufiya’s final victim is her husband; Omar as shamelessness and his wife as shame are complementary metaphors for aspects of Pakistan. Despite his peripheral, essentially powerless position, Omar has been complicitous with shameless villains to such an extent that he is forced to flee from destructive vengeful shame with one of them. He had originally moved from the geographical and political margin of Pakistan (Q.) to its center (Karachi and later Islamabad) with his shamelessness intact, but he becomes married to a person who obligingly accumulates his and others’ repressed or ignored or deflected shame. In effect, that shame itself is marginalized until, like the beaten Muslim girl whom Rushdie imagines “thrashing the white kids within an inch of their lives” (117), it takes revenge on the shameless center. This must eventually happen, Rushdie prophesies, because, like Sufiya and Omar, shame and shamelessness are indissolubly wed, linked together in the complex relations of Pakistan’s citizens and politicians. His forecast is an apocalypse in which shame consumes shamelessness and then consumes itself. In effect, then, shameful behavior and shameless behavior can be the same thing, differentiated only by the willingness of the observer or agent to perceive or feel shame. In Rushdie’s hands, the concepts of shame and shamelessness are fluid (literally and metaphorically). They are multiplicitous, open-ended, unstable, dialogic. “Shame,” as an inadequate translation of a cluster of divergent meanings attributed to sharam , and as signifier of either positively or negatively evaluated qualities according to context, becomes what Bakhtin might call a heteroglot word with a carnivalized meaning. What would appear to be the moral platform for Rushdie’s “negative” satiric attack turns out to be far from secure. But in its very flexibility and diverse significations, and in the resistances the word offers to dualistic, hierarchical judgment, “shame” evokes on a semantic level the Menippean spirit so absent from the destructive and selfdestructive world to which it refers. If a Menippean spirit is manifest in the signifier “shame,” it also abounds in aspects of the novel’s narrative voice, tone, and style. M idnight's Children, although narrated entirely by one person, conveys through stylistic and tonal shifts the effect of a heteroglossic, dialogic crowd conversing; the voice reflects and legitimates Saleem’s claim to contain multitudes. Shame carries over a number of stylistic features from the earlier novel, including “the long sentence” which Sangari describes in Bakhtinian terms as “an index of the fecundity of the repressed,” a marker of dialogism, multiplicity, and the hybridity of stories. For Sangari, “The long sentence shows that heteroglossia— the genuine plurality of unmerged and independent voices— is not an achievement, but a continuing struggle between contending social forces that, like the sentence, has no ‘natural’

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culmination” (166-67). Shame is narrated largely in the third person, with occasional interruptions by an I-narrator, a representation of Rushdie who does not participate in the plot. The mixture of narrative voices allows Shame to exhibit at least some of the dialogism and heteroglossia of its predecessor despite the fact—and precisely because of the fact—that these principles are in short supply in the society portrayed. The autobiographical I-narrator’s usual discourse is direct address, offering framing information for the main story (told in a third-person voice). “I” tells the story of his visits to Pakistan, and of the father-daughter tragedy that inspired his creation of Sufiya (115-17). “I” empowers himself to moralize, to make direct thematic remarks about his fictional creations: I repeat: there is no place for monsters in civilized society. . . . This was the danger of Sufiya Zinobia: that she cam e to pass, not in any wilderness of basilisks and fiends, but in the heart of the respectable world. And as a result th at world made a huge effort of the will to ignore the reality of her, to avoid bringing m atters to the point at which she, disorder’s avatar, would have to be dealt with, expelled. ( 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 )

This voice of the earnest essayist contrasts markedly with other, more playful voices that Rushdie puts on like changes of clothes. Most common is an ironic voice that mocks satiric targets by feigning complicity with their less admirable attitudes. Unlike the essayist, this playful voice seems to wink at the reader, damning with praise that does more harm than good to its object: “Did any man ever sacrifice more for his people? He [Iskander] gave up cock-fights, bear-fights, snake-and-mongoose duels; plus disco dancing, and his monthly evenings at the home of the chief film censor, where he had watched special compilations of the juiciest bits excised from incoming foreign films” (125). The narrative voice is flexible enough simultaneously to acknowledge the real reason for an identified problem and to mock the language of those who would deflect their own guilt or otherwise normalize the problem: O confusion of people who have lived too long under military rule, who have forgotten the simplest things about dem ocracy! Large numbers of men and wom en were swept aw ay by the oceans of bewilderment, unable to locate ballot-boxes or even ballots, and failed to cast their votes. O th ers, stronger swimmers in those seas, succeeded in expressing their preferences twelve or thirteen times. (1 7 8 )

In this passage, words such as “confusion,” “heroic,” and “clarified” do not offer direct and sincere signification. They are examples of what Bakhtin, writing in The D ialogic Im agination, calls the dialogized word, saturated with the ideologies and discourses of other voices besides the author-narrator voice using it in this instance. Enabled by the heteroglossic reality of language as a social entity, such parodie quoting of alien discourses can function in “the novel” to oppose a more unitary, authoritative

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“literary language,” as well as being “aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time” (Dialogic 273). Wayne Booth remarks that for Bakhtin “the novel” means not “the actual works that we ordinarily call novels but rather a tendency or possibility in literature, one that is best realized only in certain novels and entirely lacking in others” (Introduction xxii). Indeed, one can see in the idealized, dialogized “novel” of The D ialogic Im agination many of the principles theorized and valorized separately by Bakhtin under the labels “Menippean satire” and “grotesque”: a politicized affinity with the anti-hierarchical carnivalesque; a challenge to completeness, closure, the unitary, and the bourgeois status quo. Bakhtin’s “novel” does in fact evolve from earlier “serio-comical” genres such as fables, dialogues, Roman satire, and Menippean satire: these are the “authentic predecessors of the novel” (Dialogic 22). And Bakhtin’s favourite “novelists,” Rabelais and Dostoevsky, are also Menippean satirists. Rushdie’s dialogized, heteroglossic language in Shame is not just the product of a “novelist” whose works and philosophies are remarkable compatible with Bakhtin’s (indeed, one can easily imagine Bakhtin taking great pleasure in Rushdie’s fiction). Shame's language and style are strongly satiric as well as novelistic. Take, for example, a passage like the following: The clairvoyancy of Talvar Ulhaq enabled him to compile exhaustive dossiers on w ho-w as-bribing-w hom , on conspiracies, ta x evasion, dangerous talk at dinner parties, student sects, hom osexuality, the roots of treason. Clairvoyancy made it possible for him to arrest a future traitor before he com m itted his act of treason, and thus save the fellow’s life. (1 8 4 )

Here “clairvoyancy” reads the way “confusion,” “heroic,” and “clarified” do in the previously quoted passage: as indirect speech quoted by the author, originating with another. A benign-sounding substitute for “spying,” “clairvoyancy” belongs in the invisible “intonational quotation marks” that Bakhtin identifies in the dialogized language of “the novel” (68). However, not only the word itself but also Rushdie’s “quoting” of it are ideologically loaded; Rushdie uses the word not as a neutral embodiment of heteroglossia but as an exposé of hypocrisy and the capricious harassment of civilians at the government’s convenience. As in the previous passage, such “quotings” are what Bakhtin calls “parodie stylization”— in which the representing (authorial) language is so distanced in intentions from those of the represented (quoted) language that the latter is discredited and satirized (Dialogic 364). By directly imitating the kind of propagandistic double-speak that can mask expedient institutional bullying, Rushdie indirectly denounces it. Parodie stylization and mock-complicity are sometimes very subtle, sometimes less so. In a previously quoted segment the narrator mimics the kind of rhetoric used to justify electoral corruption. The end of that para-

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graph reads “Rough justice, Arjumand remembers, hut justice all the sam e.” The similarity of the narrator’s assumed (mock-complicitous) stance to Arjumand’s italicized attitude is already established. And as the segment continues, describing the “trouble” in the East Wing that resulted, the narrator talks about the “riff-raff of the People’s League . . . led by the well-known incompetent Sheikh Bismillah.” Two more italicized interjections occur, presumably also denoting Arjumand’s view. The first occupies its own sentence and highlights an ironic linguistic gap over “democracy” not unlike the one implied by Naipaul in The Suffrage o f Elvira: “Give p eop le dem ocracy and look what they do with it.” What they have done is expressed their will, but because that will disrupts the status quo, “democracy” must be reinterpreted. The second set of italics is parenthetically introduced into a sentence whose overall unity of tone almost makes the typographical switch unnecessary, given the complicity of narrator (Roman) and character (italic) voices: “The final defeat of the Western forces, which led to the reconstitution of the East Wing as an autonomous (that’s a laugh) nation and international basket case, was obviously engineered by outsiders: stone-washers and damn-yankees, yes” (179). Pseudo-complicity is also suggested by the narrator through a kind of self-censorship. This is both theoretically unavoidable, he says— “every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales” (71)— and necessary in Pakistan, as he explains in the story of the kick from his friend under the dinner table, which warns him not to discuss Bhutto’s execution in the presence of an “informer” (27). The prime example of self-censorship in the novel is in chapter five, where Bilquis becomes a true member of the Hyder family by her participation in communal storytelling. The family audience acts as a censoring agent, for although Bilquis’s “story altered, at first, in the retellings, . . . finally it settled down, and after that nobody, neither teller nor listener, would tolerate any deviation from the hallowed, sacred text” (76). Later, the narrator says, the forthcoming “juicygory saga . . . would always begin with the following sentence . . . : ‘It was the day on which the only son of the future President Raza Hyder was going to be reincarnated’” (77). When, eleven pages later, the narrator begins his own version of that saga with the same sentence, he seems to be complying with the dictum that the story can only be told in one way—accepting the authority of this familial version of literary censorship. The playfully ironic and parodic voice that Rushdie so often assumes in Shame exists in a state of dialogic tension with the I-narrator’s more direct, “straight” modes of address. When the narrator solemnly states that “human beings have a remarkable talent for persuading themselves of the authenticity and nobility of aspects of themselves which are in fact expedient, spurious, base” (198), he glosses his characters and reinforces the satiric touchstone of “shame.” But he also offers a perspective on the very wrcsolemn playful voice, whose most common strategy is to parodically

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feign complicity with expedient, spurious, hypocritical, or self-servingly limited descriptions of reality. Each produces a form of unitary discourse: both the judgmental, serious “I” and the parodied “they.” Each serves the goal of a denunciatory satire—what Bakhtin calls negative satire. The predominance of those inscriptions of unitary, authority-seeking pronouncement, whether offered sincerely or mockingly, can be seen to give the novel a tone of exclusivity, and undoubtedly help motivate the attacks launched on the book from Marxist, feminist, and other standpoints by critics such as Ahmad ( 123—58) and Inderpal Grewal. Their criticisms are of the novel’s narrowly upper-class field of representation, of its portrayals of women as functions of male power, and of the too-authoritative dominance of Rushdie’s male narrator-persona. But if the novel is a negative satire, an indictment of Pakistan’s ruling class, can it be exempted from such criticisms? If Rushdie wants to indict the nation’s rulers for being out of touch with the people, is it acceptable (and even rhetorically potent) for the novel to be out of touch with them too? If women are inscribed in the novel as passive victims or mediators of male power, or as demonic agents of retribution, but are clearly shown to be part of a diseased society vehemently censured for, among other things, restricting its women in exactly these ways, is Rushdie nonetheless failing in his duty? Does he become part of the problem? Such questions get at the heart of satire’s uncomfortable status in the current critical climate. Satire’s penchant for misrepresentations and replications of bias, degradation, and narrowness regularly incites the hostility of critics advocating fairer and more inclusive representations, and in particular the representation not just of oppression but of subjects and agencies with the potential to achieve some measure of liberation from that which oppresses them. Not all critics, of course, share this perspective. From one critical point of view, satire’s oppositionality gives it a place of honor at the table of texts. From another, its iconoclasm earns it at least a special license, a blind eye, a place outside the rules of engagement in the current crisis of representation. But from yet a third point of view, satiric texts, with their various stances of despair and misanthropy, their strategies of objectification and hierarchical evaluation, are the first to be contested; they are the clearest examples of a deficient politics. I do not want to single out for approval or critique any one position on this spectrum of critical responses. I do, however, wish to summarize and conclude my discussion of Shame by relating these ideas to the question of whether the novel is best described as Menippean satire or negative satire. In Bakhtin’s view Menippean satire, carnival, dialogism, and the grotesque all embody a liberatory spirit that counters entrenched dogmas and hierarchies. Negative satire does not: it alienates and diminishes. Sham e, like its predecessor, exhibits a number of features associated with Bakhtin’s Menippean satire: the “bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic” and the “extraordinary” towards intellectual aims; the openness to

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vulgarity, barbarism, and depravity; the incorporation of abnormal moral and psychological states, and of scandals and eccentricities; the pleasure in unexpected conjoinings and abrupt transitions; the journalistic topicality (Problem s 114-19). As I suggested above, the multiplicity and contradictoriness of “shame” as a moral touchstone, as well as the novel’s enormous stylistic and tonal diversity, suggest that the position from which Rushdie’s satire is launched—the moral norm, so to speak—is a worldview compatible with Menippean principles of egalitarian multiplicity. These normative principles contrast with the satirized world’s propensity for hierarchy and monologism. But if a case can thus be made that Shame is a Menippean satire that uses narrative and stylistic means to suggest the liberating alternative to its condemned referents, the novel reads much more appropriately, I think, as a fundamentally negative—and negating— satire. Even if the juxtaposition of an earnest-direct voice and a parodic-ironic voice does create a dialogic tension suggestive of Menippean satire, the elements in dialogue are both, as we have seen, unitary and judgmental. As Dingwaney points out, Rushdie’s work relies on his voice’s authority, even if it astutely and strategically deconstructs its own self-empowerment by incorporating fragments, contingencies, and ambivalences (“Author(iz)ing” 164). In Sara Suleri’s reading, Shame's narrative displays an intense anxiety about its own claims of representational authority: it is “horrified at its own powers of replication [of authoritarianism and violence], its knowledge that it also can oppress” (177-78). Whether calculating or conflicted, Rushdie’s procedures of imposition and condemnation can seem just as hierarchical and selective as the attitudes he targets; hence the politicized attacks by various critics. Moreover, the novel’s imagery of grotesque bodies and porous borders is consistently yoked to a critical, alienated vision that cannot accommodate— and often flatly denies—the spirit of renewal and hope evoked by the Bakhtinian grotesque. The apocalyptic ending also inspires little sense of a regenerative future about to begin. Rushdie once said that the end of Shame is not necessarily “the end of the world” but maybe “a cleansing of the stables,” a need “to wipe things out in order that you can write other things” (D. Brooks 65). Rushdie did go on in The Satanic Verses to reassert much more clearly and convincingly the Menippean-Bakhtinian ideas and procedures he had introduced in Midnight's Children. But in Shame the emphasis is more definitively on “wiping things out.” There is no force or principle or entity waiting in the wings of Shame's world to renew it after the dust clears— neither Good News’s twenty-seven children nor Rani’s inert satiric shawl. Shame is closer to what Michael Seidel calls “satiric invective,” in which “the urge to re form is literally overwhelmed by the urge to annihilate” (Satiric 3-4). The Menippean pessoptimism of Midnight's Children has been distilled in “the land of the pure” into a virtually unalloyed pessimism.

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Catherine Cundy, one of the few critics to offer a lengthy treatment of Grimus, proposes that Rushdie’s first novel exhibits traits of the Bakhtinian Menippean satire more fully and artfully developed in his fourth, The Satanic Verses (134). Ib Johansen, writing before the latter was published, also sees Menippean characteristics in Grimus. Like Cundy, he offers a brief catalogue of the features that fit Bakhtin’s definition (21, 30); Jo hansen also finds support for the idea in Northrop Frye’s less elaborated definition of Menippean satire as dealing “less with people as such than with [narrow, limiting] mental attitudes” (Frye, Anatomy 309). Grimus is a puzzling text, and critics tend to agree with Rushdie himself in granting it the secondary status of a flawed apprenticeship work. Certain preoccupations evident in the subsequent novels do make their first appearance in it: issues of migration and exile, order and disorder, racial and sexual identity, the confluence of Eastern and Western cultures. And the aesthetic promoted by the character Elfrida Gribb, who prefers “loose ends” and frayed edges over “tales in which every single element is meaningful” (141), is noteworthy because Rushdie’s novels, including Grimus, tend paradoxically to fuse both of these apparent polarities.8 But the text’s very abundance of interpretive possibilities, and the abstracted fictionality of its setting and characters, give it a referential slipperiness not seen in the other novels, which, however reliant they may be on fantasy, magic, and selfconscious fictionality, still sink deep roots into actualities of place, history, and people. Critics generally see this slipperiness as a problem. For Brennan, Grimus is an “uninterpretable allegory” that makes real-world conflicts and subjectivities “so metaphorical as to be unrecognizable.” “It would be hard,” Brennan says, “to find a novel that demonstrated better the truth of Fanon’s claim that a culture that is not national is meaningless” (Salman 70-71). If the novel’s lack of referential specificity frustrates allegory, it also prevents effective satire, according to Harrison (36-40). To these critiques I add my own: in the absence of referential clarity and historical groundedness, Menippean satire is also hobbled and disempowered in Grimus, especially given the dynamic mutual dependency of negative and Menippean satire that we have seen in Midnight's Children and Sham e. Bakhtin’s “menippea,” a “journalistic” genre, is defined in part by its “concern with current and topical issues” (Problems 118). The Menippean generic features that Cundy and Johansen observe are indeed present, but in Grimus\ “too clever” inventions (Rushdie quoted in Johansen, 21), they are too easily read as signifying nothing—or too many unspecific things. The children’s fantasy Haroun and the Sea o f Stories (1990) presents a different problem. It easily meets the minimum standards of referentiality required for satire; it does not take much knowledge of Rushdie’s postfatw a predicament to connect the anti-story forces of darkness in the novel

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with the threatening censors lined up against the author. Villains and heroes are easy to identify and match up allegorically with general or specific referents in Rushdie’s beleaguered present at the time of writing. However, the novel is too tightly and tidily plotted to contain a significant Menippean component. Its fantastic world is all of a piece and has none of the wild contrasts or “slum naturalism” of Bakhtin’s Menippean satire. Its encounter between good and evil is too unambiguous, the sympathies it inspires too unfailingly sided with the ultimately victorious good. The completeness and apparent permanence of that victory— in which all obstructions have been either erased or brought on side, and the world itself reoriented to prevent future recurrences—mitigates against negative satire. Satirists are never so wholly successful at “finishing off” what they oppose; even if specific targets are symbolically eliminated, disabling conditions and agents invariably remain as present and future disturbances. Although some incidental satiric jabs are made in the novel, satire has no transforming effect on the level of genre. Haroun and the Sea o f Stories is more appropriately regarded as a novel infiltrated by such generic types as the fantasy-adventure and the moral fable than as a satiric or Menippean novel. As for Cundy’s unsupported claim that The Satanic Verses is “the exemplification of Bakhtin’s idea [of Menippean satire] within the context of post-colonial writing” (134), it does reward further examination— not only because by and large it proves true, but because this novel’s Menippean intentions have been so potently interpreted and censured as negative satiric attack. As text and event, The Satanic Verses shows the energies of the Menippean and the negative satire, which Bakhtin wants to keep separate, locked together in a deadly embrace, wrestling as vigorously as Mahound and Gibreel, multiplicity and oneness ever did. The novel states its Menippean theme of change and renewal from the opening sentence: “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die’” (3). This notion becomes a refrain, along with a related question: “How does newness come into the world? How is it born?” (8). Bakhtin says that “the content of the menippea is the adventures of an idea or a truth in the world” (Problem s 115); Rushdie’s “newness” appears to come into the world in various ways and through a multitude of adventures. The answer to his recurring question is therefore not simple. Newness may be imposed singularly from above: the angel Gibreel’s revelations to Mahound; the angel Azraeel’s tropicalization and purging-by-fire of London; Ayesha’s pied-piper pilgrimage; or Mrs. Torture’s reconstruction of the British middle class, which in Hal Valance’s words amounts to “a bloody revolution. Newness coming into this world that’s full of fucking old corpses” (270). Newness may alternatively be engendered by the challenges of the multiple to the entrenched status quo: Rushdie’s recuperation of carnival energies surrounding Islam’s founding moments; the transformation of a London given a new face by its postwar

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influx of immigrants; or Hanif Johnson’s rallying call that “newness will enter this society by collective, not individual, action s” (415). The standoff between imposed, unitary newness and the regenerating energies of crowds, carnival, and resistance to authority prompts the novel’s third major refrain: “ What kind o f idea are you?/is he?/am i? ” (95, 111, 500). The novel, in its tightrope walk between Menippean and negative satiric themes and procedures, asks itself this question too in the form of the narrator’s refrain, “Who am I?” (4). The intersecting stories of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha represent this standoff as dynamic, unstable process— as narrative. The idea of rebirth and renewal is first forwarded, as we have seen, by Gibreel. Having experienced a very public near-death and apparent rebirth in India, Gibreel loses his faith and desires to escape—to cut short his movie-star life and reincarnate himself in England with Allie Cone. His days of enforced captivity on the Air-India jet reinforce the idea and communalize it: he tells his fellow hostages “that they were all dead to the world and in the process of being regenerated, made anew” (84). The idea is echoed by the narrator, for whom the exploding aircraft, “a seed-pod giving up its spores” (4), represents “not death” but “birth” (87). (Similarly, a younger Saladin debates whether the aircraft that first carried him to London was a “mother ship” bearing “seed” or a “father ship,” “a metal phallus” whose “passengers were spermatozoa waiting to be spilt” [40-41].) Yet Gibreel, despite his halo, despite his enthusiasm for the death-rebirth conjunction valorized by Bakhtin, proves not to be a reliable proponent of this process. His self-renewal is too tainted by his schizophrenic flirtation with megalomania, violence, denial, and totalizing power. The character whose narrative most thoroughly exemplifies the death and renewal of a former self is Saladin— the one who initially resists the process, who does not recognize how necessary it is. The narrator foreshadows Saladin’s preferred status in the opening scene, where of the two Indians plummeting “like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork” it is Saladin, not the reincarnation-obsessed Gibreel, who falls “head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal” (4). Saladin, skeptical of Gibreel’s fixation, has no grand plans to remake his life; he is returning from a professional engagement in Bombay to resume his old, buttoned-up, deracinated, anglophilic life. But it is precisely such qualities— his “contempt for his own kind” (45), his nostalgia for Empire and an “olde dream-England” evoked by Pamela’s voice (180), his anachronistic construction of London’s “poise and moderation” as better than Bombay’s “vulgarity,” “confusion,” and “superabundance” (37)—that need to be challenged. Although professionally, as the man of a thousand voices, Saladin embodies the multiplicity and newness of a changing London, personally he tends towards the reactionary, the mimic, the exclusive, the monologic, and increasingly the irrelevant and out-of-touch. He is ignoring or denying London’s essential

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instability—what Gibreel recognizes in “that most protean and chameleon of cities” (201), the “city visible but unseen” of its new immigrants (241). Saladin’s detachment and negation align him with the singular, the sterile, the satiric. Under the value system of the novel (and of Rushdie’s previous novels), Saladin needs to be purged and remade. According to Zeeny Vakil, the only character to be fully endorsed by that value system, Saladin needs to be reclaimed. As the exponent of the “Bombayness” he abrogates, Zeeny makes the “reclamation” of Saladin “her project.” And while the novel tells us that “at times he thought she intended to achieve this by eating him alive” because she “made love like a cannibal” (52), this seemingly throwaway alignment of renewal with the grotesque foreshadows the site where Saladin’s rebirth will indeed take place: his own newly grotesque body. Saladin’s mutation into a goatish, devilish beast is much more dramatic and affecting than Gibreel’s assumption of a halo: another indicator of who will undergo the true regeneration. An early reference to “migrant. . . wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia” (4) establishes a link between the procreating body and immigrant identity that Saladin-as-goat will further. The previously infertile Saladin becomes a grotesque fusion of man and beast with a “greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect . . . organ” (157). This metamorphosis makes a number of thematic and satiric points. As a magic-realist literalized metaphor, it inscribes on the body the fears and prejudices of those who see Third-World immigrants as sub-human aliens, inherently evil (hence the horns), and reproducing at an alarming rate. The immigrant’s subordinate position means that the established whites “have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (168). The white (but significantly not Anglo-Saxon) police officers treat Saladin as an alien; they express revulsion at his physicality, giving him a derogatory quasi-national label and mocking his claims to be a British resident: “You’re a fucking Packy billy. Sally-who?—What kind of name is that for an Englishman?” (163). The white response to this encounter with the grotesque is the alienated horror and satiric othering of Schneegans’s and Kayser’s theories. But Rushdie satirizes the policeman’s response from a position aligned with the Bakhtinian grotesque of regeneration, Menippean satire, and the carnivalesque. Those who see darker-skinned immigrants as beasts, and who propose an ethnically unitary conception of “Englishman,” earn Rushdie’s satiric critique for resisting the newness of demographic multiplicity. The satiric grotesque that they “construct” Saladin as rebounds satirically back on them. And in the same way that, the novel tells us, derogatory terms like “Black” and “Mahound” can be reclaimed— their intended satiric put-down subverted, appropriated as a rejuvenating badge of “pride” (93)— Saladin’s grotesque body transforms an image of scorn into a site of reclamation.

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If Saladin’s horns symbolize a purported evil, they also identify him as a cuckold. Jumpy Joshi has replaced him in Pamela’s bed, and gotten her pregnant— something the old Saladin could not do. However, as a phallically enhanced beast he is object of the Sufyan girls’ precociously sexualized teenage attraction. But the physical changes and attendant imagery of procreation and fertility only tell part of Saladin’s story. He realizes that his previous striving for newness by appropriating “Englishness”—as a mode of behavior and “moral code”— has backfired, resulting in his “rejection by the very world he had so determinedly courted” (256-57). To take refuge with the Sufyans is to be cast “back into the bosom of his p eop le, from whom he’d felt so distant for so long!” (257). His former pursuit of a deracinated, elite “fineness” has been derailed; instead he is “embroiled” with “the grotesque,” “the quotidian,” “the world and its messes” (260). Brought face to face with a family that does not seem British “in any way he could recognize,” Saladin begins to lose “his old certainties” (259). His world is carnivalized. Its orders and hierarchies are suspended, and the distance between spectator and actors, Saladin and his “kind” (253) breaks down. Saladin is severed from the haughty security of his former views, and begins reconstituting himself to the point where at the end of the novel he can embrace India, his father, and his old Indian name. He can reestablish roots in his culture of origin, and fall in love with Zeeny Vakil, complete with her leftist communal politics, belief in hybridity, and her ways of being “immersed in life up to her neck.” In a finale to the death-rebirth duality that dominates the book, Zeeny’s reentry into his life is seen by Saladin as having “completed the process of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the most surprising and paradoxical product of his father’s terminal illness” (534). Keith Booker notes that the novel closes with an image of rebirth in the form of “urban renewal” (“Finnegans” 195): “Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born” (Satanic 547). This is fitting, given that Saladin’s rebirth corresponds to and relies on recognition of a London transformed by newness— indeed, by a kind of “Bombayness.” But the novel’s very last line suggests a double entendre that relocates the idea in the realm of the personal and the bodily lower stratum. “I’m coming” (547), says Saladin to Zeeny, a woman he loves and will probably marry; with so much affirmation and renewal in the air, there is every reason to expect that this time, when he “comes,” he will do what his old self never could with Pamela: engender new life. To read The Satanic Verses with this focus on Saladin’s story is to read it as Rushdie’s most straightforward inscription of the optimistic Menippean grotesque. Some fine critical accounts of the novel extend such a reading in interesting directions. Beert Verstraete, for instance, proposes that the theme of metamorphosis may have implications for “social commentary and satire” (329), but “to view [The Satanic Verses] simply as a novel of social commentary and satire on the problems of racism and the integra-

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tion of Third-World minorities into British society is an oversimplification” (333). Rather, Verstraete argues, by stressing syncretism and multiplicity, as well as “such powerful religious and metaphysical notions as incarnation, reincarnation, and transmigration of souls,” the novel is more congenial to Hinduism than to monotheistic Islam, Christianity, or Judaism (329). As in Midnight's Children, then, the novel’s regenerative valences can be connected with what Verstraete calls “the radical Hindu conception of metamorphosis intermingling all levels of reality, from the subhuman to the divine” (330). A Menippean-Hindu worldview becomes the basis for the novel’s attack on fundamentalist or monologic thinking— whether exhibited by police officers bullying a racial minority or a dogmatic religion prescribing the truth to its members. Booker reads The Satanic Verses as participating in Bakhtin’s Menippean tradition, using motifs of metamorphic transformation to contest ideas of the self-contained, stable subject and the solidity of boundaries between self and other (“Beauty” 980). The novel challenges Islam, a regular “symbol of monological thought” in Rushdie’s fiction, as well as the dualism underlying Western thought which, as many contemporary thinkers argue, “has tended inevitably toward the establishment of hierarchies” (991-92). In another essay, however, Booker sources the novel’s thematic pattern of death and rebirth in the narrative of mankind’s fall and resurrection so central to monotheistic Christianity (Finnegans 192-94). Indeed, one might extend Booker’s point through Frye, who in The Great C ode argues that the Bible’s central narrative shape of fall and rise (a “U”) is the same as that of comedy (169-71). There is something in Saladin of the “humour” character so prevalent in Renaissance and Restoration English comedies—the eccentric who must be jolted or tricked out of certain overdeveloped and disabling traits so that his regenerating integration into a purged and renewed society may take place. Comic closure typically suggests an overall improvement in conditions and optimism for the future; Booker proposes that Rushdie, like James Joyce in Finnegans W ake, uses the archetypal fall myth as a trope for the “effort to bury the past in order to clear the way for the future” (205). Any interpretation of Saladin as exemplar of a valorized process must contrast him with Gibreel, whom Verstraete equates with the absolutism and purist impulses of monologic and dualistic worldviews (330-31). Julia Kristeva, in an essay that sympathetically explicates Bakhtin’s theories, notes that carnival, as the principle behind both “Menippean discourse” and the “polyphonic novel” (77), opposes the dogmatic logic of epic. Epic discourse, associated with “prohibition” and “m onologism , ” presumes “a subordination of the code to 1, to God. Hence, the epic is religious and theological,” whereas carnival discourse achieves a “poetic logic” and “dream logic” by which it “transgresses rules of linguistic code and social morality as well” (70). Carnival for Kristeva is “antitheological. . . and deeply popular,” a relativizing, dialogic, contradictory, and inherently “rebellious”

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discourse which “challenges God, authority, and social law” (78-79).9 In broad terms, the narratives of Saladin and Gibreel diverge along such lines. Saladin lurches from a monologic, exclusive relation to the world as he would wish it to be to a more inclusive and humble acceptance of the world as it is. Gibreel, increasingly deluded by angelic alter egos and epic dreams, wants to impose purgation and renewal from above; his manner is high-handed and destructive. He comes to represent a violent lunacy and quasi-theological megalomania that brook no opposition. His vision and approach become so antithetical to the carnivalizing principles Rushdie wants to promote that he cannot be part of the conclusion’s regenerative spirit. What he represents must itself be purged; recognizing his own “sickness,” Gibreel commits suicide (546). In banishing Gibreel and his monomaniacal violence, does the novel also expel negative, attack-oriented satire w^ith its hierarchical judgment and symbolic violence? In other words, if the end is a triumph of Saladin over Gibreel, the communal over the unilateral, renewal by-beast over renewal-by-angel, is it also the triumph of Menippean over negative satire? One might be tempted to say so, yet as usual Rushdie complicates and undermines any such unequivocal distinctions. Saladin’s regeneration is not simply a function of his enforced immersion in community—of the carnivalization of his secure former life. It has its monologic aspects too. The force that humanizes him, causing his beastly form to recede, is “the fearsome concentration of his hate” for Gibreel (294), motivated by his “violent” assertion of the “true” facts about their mutual airplane crash experience (273). And although Saladin later decides that affirming love is “more durable” and easier to sustain than negating hate (407), his assault on Gibreel with lecherous voices is, for all its polyphony, a target-oriented act of hateful revenge that resembles satiric undermining and violence, not Menippean affirmation. And if Saladin’s renewal is due in part to his acknowledgement of a previously denied racial and national identity, does it not therefore smack of an essentialism at odds with the novel’s promotion of impurity, hybridity, and multiplicity? For his part, Gibreel is not purely absolutist and destructive. At the height of his rampage as the angel Azraeel, and immediately after realizing that Saladin is the source of his telephonic torment, Gibreel rescues his friend and adversary from death by fire in the Shandaar Café. And ultimately he turns a gun on himself rather than on Saladin, apparently recognizing that his way has been the wrong way. It is no surprise that Rushdie should undercut the binary contrasts his characters seem to embody. This is, after all, the author who in Shame proposed that “Robeston and Danpierre” offered a truer model of contradictory, inconsistent human nature than the more clearly opposed and hierarchically evaluated Danton and Robespierre (241). Rushdie’s work always frustrates simple schematic readings, and just as the basic SaladinGibreel opposition gets blurred in numerous ways, the primacy of the

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Menippean vision in The Satanic Verses does not entail a ban on negative satire. In fact, the novel abounds in satiric portraits: pointed attacks on specific elements in British society, from the entertainment mogul’s exploitive opportunism to black activism to the racism of police and media voices. For Rushdie, satiric judgment remains a vital function of art, even when that art embraces the relativizing ethos of carnival. Just as multiplicity and absolutism can coexist in a character, the apparent monologism of negative, dualistically objectifying satiric critique can be subsumed within a polyphonic novel exemplifying Menippean thematics and procedures. The Satanic Verses may exhibit the familiar features of a Bakhtinian Menippean satire that we identified in Rushdie’s earlier novels: an all-inclusive breadth of scale and concern with ultimate questions; the use of fantasy, of extreme contrasts and conjoinings, and of abrupt transitions; a fascination with baseness and depravity; sociopolitical topicality and referentiality; and especially what Kristeva calls “pathological states of the soul, such as madness, split personalities, daydreams, dreams, and death” (83). But its Menippean strategies and carnivalesque perspectives are regularly seconded to something resembling satiric attack. As in his previous novels, Rushdie destabilizes the distinction Bakhtin’s work implies between “Menippean” and “negative” satire. It is the “Mahound” sections of the novel that, more than anything else he has written, best illustrate this generic instability. From one perspective, this revisionist-historical fantasy is the very essence of the Menippean carnivalesque. Through Gibreel’s schizophrenic dreams Rushdie carnivalizes the canonized, sacred history of Islam’s origins. Just as Bilquis’s story in Shame is at first varied in the retelling but soon settles down to an unalterable text, the now-enshrined text of the Qu’ran is shown in The Satanic Verses’ “Mahound” and “Return to Jahilia” chapters to be a metamorphic product not only of angelic revelation but of such human factors as doubt, weakness, ambition, deception, and negotiation. The holy text becomes as humanized and hybridized as the polytheistic world in which it first appeared. Because Mahound’s monotheistic message of “one one one” sounds “dangerous” “amid such multiplicity” (103), the prophet briefly succumbs to local pressures to recognize three popular goddesses; the result is an outbreak of carnival spirit (114-17). Indeed, one might argue that Rushdie is not so much carnivalizing Islam as inscribing attributes of a polyphonic Islamic culture that already exist, but that are increasingly threatened by the faith’s more fundamentalist adherents. Defending his novel in “In Good Faith,” Rushdie argues that “Muslim society questions its own rules daily” (Imaginary 400). And the “satanic verses” episode does have a historical basis (S. A. Ali 34-35). From this perspective, Rushdie is representing and recuperating a spirit of metamorphosis, instability, and antiorthodoxy inherent in Islam that may be in danger.

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We have seen in Rushdie’s previous fiction how even the rejuvenating optimism of the Menippean grotesque can slide into a negative satiric attack. Menippean satire is not only in favour o f certain principles— multiplicity, renewal, carnival, etc.— it is also op p osed to forces of monologism, fixity, and absolutism that obstruct or oppress those principles. To oppose such forces can be to satirize them; Menippean satire provides methods and moral foundations from which various satiric attacks are launched at specific targets. Thus even if Rushdie’s “Mahound” narrative aims at renewal from within, it knows that its carnival energies will come at a cost to the orthodoxies and hierarchies that determine the status quo in some powerful versions of Islam. From a devout Islamic perspective committed to that status quo, Rushdie’s work offers not rejuvenating potentialities but negativity, destructiveness, satire, and blasphemy. A Menippean perspective, of course, challenges the very concept of blasphemy as presuming an authoritative truth that must not be transgressed. But for the novel’s Islamic opponents, The Satanic Verses is an act of satiric othering, a unitary, hierarchical judgment by a single author resident in a Western world traditionally hostile to Islam. Can anything written by a single author, especially one as opinionated and polemical as Rushdie, ever really be multiplicitous? Or is an authored text always a will to power that can only represent multiplicity from a position of authority? A version of this question troubles Gibreel. In his dream he is variously Gibreel and Mahound and a perspective outside both: he is authority (speaker), authorized (listener/agent), and author (omniscient spectator/dreamer). In true carnival fashion, he is actor and audience; the boundary breaks down. When Mahound rationalizes his repudiation of the three Jahilian goddesses by saying “it was Shaitan” who originally made him recognize them, Gibreel dissents, noting “one tiny thing that’s a bit of a problem here, namely that it was me both times, baba, m e first and second also me. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing” (123). When he says “me,” does he mean Gibreel the angel in the dream, or Gibreel Farishta having the dream? This boundary is never firm. Is he the multiple beings in the dream or the single being (schizophrenia notwithstanding) who dreams the many? There is no answer to this conundrum; it is a matter of perspective, of emphasis. When Rushdie states in Sham e that “I myself manage to hold large numbers of wholly irreconcilable views simultaneously, without the least difficulty” (241-42), does he remain an “I” or by definition become a “we” ? Bakhtinian dialogism would offer one perspective; Islamic fundamentalism quite another. A discourse where it is possible for words to have multiple, ideologically determined meanings, and for man to cease to coincide with himself, is incompatible with a discourse of the sacred word, in which believers and infidels can be confidently told apart.

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Like much of Sham e, then, the “Mahound” portions of The Satanic Verses make it difficult to distinguish the multiple from the unitary, the carnivalesque from the patronizing, the Menippean from the negative. Perhaps Bakhtin’s theories rely on too stable— and too Western—a standpoint. The “Rushdie affair” certainly dramatizes the stunning effect different cultural contexts for the reception of a text can have on what that text is deemed to be: thematically, generically, socially, morally. And as Aravamudan explains Islamic hostility to Rushdie’s novel, these contexts extend beyond its perceived insult to Islamic culture to encompass an expectation by Muslims of how it might be received and used as a weapon in the West: Defending satire of a longstanding historical and cultural ‘o th er’ of the W est, such as Islam, can very easily, if the satire is appropriated by the West as a decontextualized ‘critique,’ serve the ap otropaic function of insulting and frightening the adversary, ultimately doing the ideological w ork of cultural imperialism. Such a defense illegitimately asserts the superiority of a Western viewing position over that which is attacked. (5)

The novel’s preference for the multiplicitous over the monological demands that a discordant plurality of variant readings be acknowledged as valid. As K. M. Newton argued after the fatw a, to withdraw into an autonomy-of-art defense against Muslim anger is no longer feasible given the recognition by literary theorists that reading is a nonunitary, nonuniversal activity of socially constructed beings; Muslim responses to the novel, like all responses, have a right to be taken seriously. Rushdie’s character Baal, the precocious satirist of Jahilia, is said to be able to wound with his words. “And,” Rushdie writes, “if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him” (97). Here in a single sentence are the two modes of satire that drive Rushdie’s fiction: the negative, target-oriented satiric attack and the rejuvenating Menippean satire. Here too is the association of satire with the places where the grotesque body leaks into and imbibes the world: unnaturally, painfully, and fatally in the case of the negative satiric wound; naturally and life-sustainingly in the case of the Menippean nourishment. But in the context of the fatw a controversy this image gains added significance. It reminds us that the nourishment is provided only if blood is drawn in the first place. Furthermore, it reminds us that, however interdependent these two acts may be, the person from whom blood is drawn is a different person with a very different experience of the event—a different “reading” of it— than the person who is nourished. Rushdie once said, in a pre-fatwa interview, I w rote M idnight's C hildren and Sham e as if I had never left: as if I was an Indian who had never left India or a Pakistani who was still living in Pakistan. And it would have been very disappointing to me if those books had

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Satire & Postcolonial Novel been received as outsider books. . . . So it was very reassuring to me that the books were received as insider books in India and Pakistan. (Ball 30)

So when J. M. Coetzee wrote in a review of The M oors Last Sigh (1995) that, given Rushdie’s British citizenship and “indeterminate residence” (after the fatw a), “it has become less and less easy for him to claim that he writes about India as an insider” (15), he touched what must have been a sensitive nerve. When that novel was published, Rushdie had not been to the subcontinent since the 1980s—perhaps not since making the documentary film, The Riddle o f Midnight (1987), in which he first critiqued the religious factionalism that the novel satirizes. He also found himself increasingly on the “outs” with an Indian intelligentsia more inclined to dismiss than to celebrate his writings. Still, his geographical and temporal distance from India did not lessen Rushdie’s commitment to tackling its history and political culture in his fiction. Thematically, stylistically, and structurally similar to Midnight's Children.( The Moor's Last Sigh brings the earlier novel’s politics up to date. While reaffirming the author’s Nehruvian vision of India as a heterogeneous secular democracy, it moves past the crisis of governance of 1975-77 Emergency and into the ideological crises of the 1980s and 1990s. For Rushdie, the rise of the religious right is like “corrosive acid . . . poured into the nation’s bloodstream” (351); it violates “the old, founding myth of the nation” (351) just as the Ram cult reduces polytheistic Hinduism to a religion in which “only one chap matters” (338). In his satire of an exclusive Hindu nationalism, Rushdie again makes the human body the main site where literal and metaphoric versions of the national health (or disease) are enacted. And again the body’s fluid dynamics (blood, food, poisons, breath) serve as markers of both an esteemed intermingling and the invasive, “purifying” violence that denies it. It is mainly through the narrator, Moraes (“M oor”), and his mother, Aurora, that these ideas are inscribed and negotiated. Where Saleem Sinai’s crumbling and buffeted body symbolized assaults on India’s body politic by wars and Emergency, Moraes ages at double-speed, his rapid growth a metaphor for postindependence India (both in terms of population and development), and specifically Bombay: “Like the city itself,” he says, “I expanded without time for proper planning” (161-62). His deformed right hand, like Saleem’s hair-tonsure, may represent political deformations at the nation’s geographic extremities or it may, like Lambajan’s lost leg, reinforce the ambiguous image of Indians after 1947 unsticking themselves from the British flag like flies from flypaper, “leav[ing] legs or wings behind, preferring freedom to wholeness” (129). By birth, Moraes is racially and religiously mixed; a hybrid blend of Christian, Jewish, and possibly Arabic Muslim ancestry, he belongs to a demographically small minority. But if he can be seen as “a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and horribly unraveling) plait” (87), Moraes uses his marginality to make an

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ideological point. He firmly resists essentialist group identities defined by majority and minority status, rhetorically asking, “Are not my personages Indian, every one?” (87). Bakhtin’s notion of the unfinished body blending into the world is contained in the novel’s title image: for the wheezy, asthmatic Moraes, “A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning” (54). The inclusive interchange between realms is often translated from somatic to topographical space. “Bombayness” is conveyed here by the Haroun-Yike image of “an ocean of stories”: In Bombay, Moraes says, “all India met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. . . . Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea” (350). The novel is full of enabling images of opening up and interpenetration: teenage Aurora opening windows to “let in” Cochin’s multifarious world, however “dirtyfilthy” it may be (9); the Alhambra Palace as a “testament . . . to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers” (433). Aurora embodies many traits valorized in the novel. Having invited “the torrential reality of India to awaken her soul” (45) in Cochin, she responds to Bombay with a similar openness: “she sucked up the city’s hot stenches, lapped up its burning sauces, she gobbled its dishes up whole” (128). Moor begins to see her as the human incarnation of the metropolis; in her carnivalesque annual performance on Chowpatty Beach she dances satirically against fundamentalist elements in Hindu culture from a position clearly aligned with inclusive, cosmopolitan “Bombayness.” Still, Aurora is not unequivocally idealized: as a mother she shows insufficient love, and in this novel the idea of love is overtly identified with Rushdie’s value system. Moor promotes an “image of love as the blending of spirits, as mélange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the austere, the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy” (289). The actuality of Aurora’s love eventually fails to meet those standards: she makes her most profound personal impact on Moraes through a loveless act of exclusion, irrevocably banishing him from her love and from the family when she and Moraes fall victim to Uma’s devastating trick. Nonetheless, it is in the detailed descriptions of Aurora’s paintings that Rushdie’s pluralist values find their most elaborate and original expression. Through ekphrasis, Rushdie puts into (or pulls out of) her images the aesthetic and moral perspectives from which he would have us read his novel and interpret his satire. Just as Saleem Sinai’s speculations about “an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality” reflected metafictionally on Midnight's Children (75), so Vasco Miranda, persuading Aurora to eschew the mimetic-naturalist spirit of her age, justifies Rushdie’s narrative method here. “‘Forget those damnfool realists!” he enthuses: “Life is fantastic!”’ (174). Full of grotesque figures fusing human and animal parts, with breasts for buttocks or whole bodies made from

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urban rubbish, Aurora’s teeming canvases signify a grand, all-encompassing vision. Her blending of realities is geographic as well as social. A key stage of her work’s development involves the Bombay landscape blending into an Arabian seascape, the “frontier” populated by “strange composite creatures” (226). As chief moral touchstone, Aurora’s canvases not only seem to be the visual equivalent of Rushdie’s encyclopedic, grotesque, magic-realist novels,10 but they also help explain a unique feature of this particular novel. Her blurring of “the dividing line between two worlds” (226) is part of a grand merging and palimpsesting of worlds that both she and Rushdie perform to advance their more-or-less mutual idea of contemporary India as a type of Moorish Spain. Before the tumultuous events of the late fifteenth century—the Inquisition, the expulsion of Jews, and the end of Moorish rule in Granada— the Iberian peninsula had for some time harbored a heterodox, accommodating society. Indeed, in its day medieval Spain comprised Western Europe’s most multiracial and religiously pluralist society. Under tolerant Christian kings, three monotheistic groups (Christians, Muslims, and Jews) had coexisted, convinced that by believing in the same God they could live in peace. But from the thirteenth century on, they became increasingly segregated and hostile. An idea of limpienza de sangre, or blood purity, took hold; although its origins have been traced to orthodox Jewry’s prohibition against mixed marriages, the idea was appropriated by Christians as a weapon against Jewish and Mudjehar (Moor) minorities (Read 202-07). The purist idea of Christian Spain promoted so fiercely by Ferdinand and Isabella identified the interests of the nation-state with those of a single religious group. Such an identification is anathema to Rushdie in the Indian context. But when he, like Aurora, starts “using Arab Spain to re-imagine India” (Moors 227), the parallels enable a prophetic critique. As Coetzee notes, they suggest that the A rab penetration of Iberia, like the later Iberian penetration of India, led to a creative mingling of peoples and cultures; that the victory of Christian intolerance in Spain was a tragic turn in history; and that Hindu intolerance in India bodes as ill for the world as did the sixteenthcentury Inquisition in Spain. (14)

Overlaying the context of 1492 on 1992 invokes a historical process of national “purification” through which Rushdie can mirror and satirize an event still in process in India. Medieval Spain offers the positive parallel to the older, pluralist nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru, while the ascendant Christian Spain of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance—a fractious, coercive society— forecasts the course India could take under the sway of Hindu nationalism. As in Midnight's Children, Rushdie conveys through imagery the historical shift from a normative, inspiring national condition to a satirized, dangerous one. And again the Menippean

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grotesque gives way to a more negative satire aimed at the very social forces that threaten its carnival inclusiveness. As before, the difference between the earlier and later national conditions is based on a discrepancy between benign interminglings (of realms, fluids, bodies, and peoples) and invasive penetrations and poisonings— in other words, between a voluntary opening up to and an unwanted assault or infection by. It is introduced as a historical process: “What started with perfume ended with a very big stink indeed . . . there is a thing that bursts out of us at times, a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon each other” (36; original ellipsis). In this passage the nose is invoked to suggest a movement from pleasant to unpleasant bodily intake, leading immediately to a frightening image of parasitic contagion. Forces allied with purity are identified with the most damaging and monstrous of impurities. Even in this early foreshadowing the satiric reversal is established. The associations are made more explicit later on with references to acid in the nation’s bloodstream, to “the plague-spores of communal fanaticism” (208), and to Uma, whose appearance of affirming pluralism masks a reality of self-seeking devastation; she sows “pestilential seeds” to produce a “menu” of “misery, catastrophe, grief,” and division for Moraes’s family to consume (320). After the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in 1992, with fundamentalist ideologies on the rise and Bombay blowing apart, Moraes describes the national condition in a brilliant, multilayered image: “the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, each one of us full of our doom. . . . The explosions burst out of our very own bodies. We were both the bombers and the bombs” (372). This description is interesting not only for its transhistorical fusions of military and body imagery, but for its insistence on the collective “we” in assigning responsibility. Even as he laments the violence of divisive forces, Moraes adheres to his vision of himself as part of the crowd. This is appropriate, since he has indeed been part of the problem. Rushdie does not exclude his protagonist from the condition he critiques. Like his forebear Boabdil the Unlucky, whose secret alliance with the Christians helped end Moorish sovereignty in Grenada (Harvey 301), Moraes spends time as an agent of the intolerant enemy. He may embody and advocate multiplicity through his hybrid ancestry, his professed beliefs, and his role in Aurora’s paintings as “a standard-bearer of pluralism, . . . a symbol . . . of the new nation” (303), but when employed as a thug by Raman Fielding, or Mainduck, he is co-opted by the novel’s main exemplar of the new fundamentalism. Admittedly, this occurs after the shock of Uma’s duplicity, Moraes’s ostracism from family, his imprisonment in Bombay Central lock-up (“the intestine of the city,” 287), and his rescue by Mainduck. But he does not feel torn about the betrayal that his job as bully represents; indeed, he relishes the new life and works hard to model

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his new identity after Mainduck’s. Thereafter Moraes features in his mother’s paintings only as “a semi-allegorical figure of decay”; he has demonstrated to her that the valorized principles of “impurity, cultural admixture and mélange” are not unequivocally good: that they “were in fact capable of distortion, and contained a potential for darkness as well as light” (303). The inclusive, in other words, can include and then be overcome by powerful forces of exclusiveness. What is the significance of Moraes’s complicity and Aurora’s disillusionment to the novel’s satiric strategies? Do these developments blur or undermine the idealized moral vision of the nation from which Rushdie’s critique is launched? There are two perspectives from which one might answer these questions, which get at the heart of the novel’s ideological and generic conundrums. From the first perspective, Moraes’s years with Mainduck serve Rushdie’s satiric agenda in a conventional way. Like Saleem’s stint in the Pakistani army, they give Moraes access to the primary target so that he (and Rushdie) can really show its deformities. Up close, Mainduck (a version of Shiv Sena leader Bai Thackeray) can be described in all his repulsive physicality, “with his great belly slung across his knees like a burglar’s sack, with his frog’s croak of a voice bursting through his fat frog’s lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth” (232). This is conventionally negative grotesque imagery; it is Kayser’s alienating grotesque, not Bakhtin’s optimistic one. Up close, too, we encounter Mainduck’s reactionary public policies— anti-union, anti-immigrant (broadly defined), anti-working women, pro-sati, pro-caste. And we observe the private man, who resembles a coercive and decadent Mafia Don. Besides the grotesque, Rushdie uses many of satire’s traditional strategies of representational violence to critique fundamentalists: reductive metonymy (the BJP, RSS and VHP as “alphabet-soupists,” 363); analogy (Mainduck as a “little Hitler,” 297); mechanization (Tin-man Hazaré’s robotic appearance); understatement (Moraes’s eerie descriptions of beatings); and the dialogic appropriation of a satirized discourse as the narrator’s own: “Muslims and Flindus had, for a time, shared [Ayodhya] without fuss . . . but to the devil with such old news! Who cared about those unhealthy, split hairs?” (363; original ellipsis). Satiric horror is registered through the image of the violated body that becomes the lowest common denominator of Mainduck’s political agitation; assaulting people is the main thing Moraes and the other goondas do. As in previous novels, imposed transgressions of bodily boundaries signal negative satire, not the positive interminglings of the Menippean grotesque. Here bloodletting takes on additional ironic meaning when identified with Hindu nationalists: though they advocate the integrity and purity of blood as metaphor, they violate the integrity and cause impurity of blood in its literal form.

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From this first perspective, Moraes’s time with Mainduck is a device to facilitate satire of fundamentalist thinking through Moraes. The fact that Moraes himself administers beatings, breaks unions, and enforces sati and caste discipline is just a convenient (and powerful) way of displaying a satirized condition in all its nauseating detail; Moraes is only a target insofar as he becomes a temporary synecdoche for activities and ideologies attributed to others. In this reading his primary function is as window on, not exemplar of the religious right; he is exempt from the novel’s critique. But is he really? I would like to suggest a second, more allegorical reading that interprets Moraes’s involvement as a sign of a growing satiric despair in Rushdie and of a more all-embracing pessimism about India. The gloom with which Midnight's Children ended was based on a feeling, in the aftermath of the Emergency, that democracy and human rights had been betrayed by the prime minister and her loyalists. There was treachery at the highest level, and citizens (like Saleem and the midnight children) had been victimized. The Emergency’s challenge to the secular democracy of India was to its legitimacy as a democracy. Although Rushdie has written that “it was during the Emergency that the lid flew off the Pandora’s box of communal discord” (Imaginary 3; c.f. 41-52), and while Indira Gandhi’s politics had always been divisive and factionalizing by comparison with Nehru’s, as long as the Congress party was dominant, some version of the secular principle remained officially in place. She may have fostered Flindu nationalist sentiments, especially from 1980 on, but Indira Gandhi continued to advocate secularism until the day she died (Malhotra 18, 229-31). In the 1980s and 1990s, however, Rushdie sees Hindu nationalist parties (along with other ethnically and religiously based movements) gaining an increased profile and legitimacy among India’s people. It is the secular-pluralist ideal underlying the nation’s democracy that is the one that is now taking a beating, so to speak, and even dying a painful death. Unlike the brutally top-down nature of social upheaval during the Emergency, the rise of the religious right is a function not just of charismatic leadership but of mass participation. It is both a top-down and a grass-roots movement. To Rushdie it therefore represents a greater national crisis than the Emergency. From this second perspective, then, Moraes’s complicity is very significant to the novel’s satiric orientation. He starts out, both in the novel and in Aurora’s “M oor” paintings, as an allegorical embodiment of India as pluralistic, hybrid, gentle giant. He may grow too fast and get too big, he may be deformed, but he is not a monster. In Mainduck’s service, however, he betrays his roots and his ideals. Disillusioned from the fallout of his relationship with the divisive Uma, he lets himself become the willing agent of the very forces that would deny him—as individual and as national principle. Moreover, Moraes takes pleasure in his new role, administering beatings with cool efficiency, relieved that he can give up his old confusing complexity for the “simplicity” and “straightforwardness” of Mainduck’s

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brutal program (305). His unapologetic embrace of an alien cause suggests that Moraes, the “semi-allegorical figure of decay” (303), represents a nation increasingly detached from its origins and willing to violate its founding principle of pluralistic secularism. The satiric critique is not just of extremist leaders, but of the body politic who respond to their message— hence the insistence, in even the most conventional of satiric diminishments, on the inclusive “we”: in this “national tragedy,” he says, “those of us who played our parts were— let me put it bluntly—clowns. Clowns! Burlesque buffoons, drafted into history’s theatre on account of the lack of greater men” (352). This sense of “collective guilt” (297) is echoed numerous times by Moraes. He says, “The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they fought in the land at large” (376); “We have chopped away our own legs, we engineered our own fall” (372). Rushdie’s satire is at its most multidirectional in this novel. The informing principle of its critique is Aurora’s pessimistic idea that admixture and mélange can breed darkness and distortion, that inclusiveness can breed exclusiveness. Even “Bombayness” is not powerful enough to overwhelm negating energies: “the great city’s powers of dilution,” Moraes says (351), cannot weaken the “rivers of blood” (350) that run through it after Ayodhya. In this key merging of the somatic with the topographical, the whole body-river-street network of arteries and exchanges is infected and polluted. Ideologies of purity and exclusion overrun the systems that used to guarantee impurity and inclusion; such a “disease” (208) could not spread without enormous popular support. Civic nationalism of the land—India as territory with all its diverse occupants— is undermined by an insurgent nationalism of the majority peoples—those whose “Hindu blood” causes them to claim special entitlement over the land. The result is that Rushdie challenges more strongly than ever the moral and generic dualities he has always invoked—of enabling Menippean multiplicity as the normative position from which violent exclusivity is satirized. If one can lead to the other— not just at the level of genre or textuality as in Midnight's Children, but on the societal level too—the distinction becomes virtually impossible to maintain. As Uma betrayed her own apparent pluralism, and as the mongrel Moraes, excluded from love, is coopted by those who would reverse the principles of secular-democratic tolerance, so India as a whole is hijacked by forces that would deny it. A powerful version of complicitous critique, or satirist satirized, emerges. The novel’s all-embracing pessimism is felt at the level of genre and tone. Despite valorizing intermingling and impurity, The Moor's Last Sigh is rather anemic in the spirit of the joy, carnival, regeneration, and optimism that marks the Menippean grotesque. Although it covers much of the same historical period as Midnight's Children, it lacks the sense of celebratory hope associated with India’s and Saleem’s early years. At independence, instead of Nehru’s inspirational “tryst with destiny” speech, we

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hear Vasco Miranda drunkenly prophesying the triumph of Hindu gods over Nehru’s secular-socialist ideals: “Minority group members. Squarepeg freaks. You don't belong here” (166). Where Saleem as allegorical baby is pampered and loved and celebrated, Moraes’s babyhood is erased from the narrative, which leaps immediately to a childhood characterized by a divided family, insufficient love, and by his isolation as a perceived misfit. In this novel division and negativity seem to be pervasive; the seeds of ruin, however dormant, are often shown to have been planted all along. As with the needle buried in Vasco Miranda’s circulatory system— the time-bomb that will eventually and without warning kill him—we are encouraged to see, within every enabling system and process, an alien but intrinsic “thing” (36) that will violently destroy it. This gloomy fatalism is reflected structurally; the ending is contained in the beginning. Where Midnight's Children begins with an announcement of birth and ends with a prophecy of death, The Moor's Last Sigh is framed by the same moment of exile, despair, and premature death. The shadow of loss and exclusion— from normality, from national community, from life itself—hangs over the whole book. Perhaps that is not surprising. While writing the novel Rushdie was alienated from his national communities by the fatw a, which itself imposed a state of paradoxical inclusion and exclusion: “yes, you are one of us,” it said, and then: “but we reject you.” While The Moor's Last Sigh may display the fertile storytelling and polyphonic voice that have become Rushdie’s signature, it nonetheless seems dominated by a weary satiric detachment and resignation. Though he still waves the flag of the secular, heterogeneous India circa 1995, Rushdie knows before he starts that it is faded and tattered. That vision, like the Congress party that once advocated it, is wasting away. In the new India, principles of exclusion are gaining more inclusive acceptance; the heterogeneous crowd is embracing those who would divide it. As the nation is infected, so is Rushdie’s novel. However predictably it may espouse a Menippean grotesque, the negative satirist’s dismay wins out.

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Conclusion

Harry Levin once observed that the satirist’s final and most characteristic word is “But— ” (14). Satire’s problems with closure are well established— from the deliberate and announced (Rasselas's “Conclusion, in Which Nothing is Concluded”) to the apparently accidental and unannounced (the texts of Rabelais, Sterne, Byron, and others that ended only when their authors’ lives did). Some of the traditional difficulties and ambivalences satirists have in “finishing off” the ongoing problems and debates their works address have been apparent in the postcolonial novels discussed here. If satire’s seed is a present annoyance, what that seed grows into can often take on a life of its own and, like Frankenstein’s monster, make a mockery of any ideas its creator might have about containing it in a nice tidy package. To do so might be not only difficult but also arbitrary and presumptuous. It is said that biographers begin to resemble their subjects. Similarly, I am aware that certain elements of satiric form have infiltrated this study. Satire’s protean nature has inspired a variable mode of analysis in which what is defined as “satire” undergoes something of a costume change for each of its major appearances (although the general shape underneath, lumpy and irregular as it is, should be recognizable). Moreover, while the topic of satire and the postcolonial novel has now been extensively explored in theory and in a dozen novels and one novella by three major writers, the project feels as though it could go on and on in Rabelaisian fashion without greatly diminishing returns. Further chapters on satirists of the postcolonial world—Ngugi, Soyinka, Richler, Frame, Hope, White, Carey—would add further nuances, parameters, and speculative insights to the topic. But scholarship is not just an additive, accumulative undertaking (although increasingly these days it may seem in its aggregate to be exactly that— dauntingly additive and rapaciously accumulative). Scholarship is supposed to involve synthesis. And while the healthy resistance of both

165

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Satire & the Postcolonial Novel

satire and postcolonial fiction to unitary theories ensures that any synthesis this conclusion manages will be modest, and while it will undoubtedly contain some Ubuts,” I hope I am not fated to resemble my subject to the point of writing a conclusion in which nothing is concluded. Dustin Griffin, in one of many disputes with his critical forebears, objects to theories of satire as rhetoric in the service of a moral point because “we should resist reducing the satirist to the kind of single-mindedness and tunnel vision that we expect to find in no other writer” (39). Through the different concepts that have been substantially associated with satire in this study— multidirectionality, irony, allegory, narrative, colonialist discourse, Menippean satire, and the grotesque— I have tried to avoid single-mindedness by regularly shifting the terms of discussion and examining satire in conjunction with a range of powerful formulations that may accompany it, enhance it, interact with it, qualify it, or oppose it. I may have avoided repeating and cross-referencing critical approaches between chapters, but there is no reason why, for instance, Bakhtin’s ideas could not be judiciously applied to the novels of Naipaul and Achebe, nor why multidirectionality, irony, and allegory could not be emphasized as attributes and adjuncts of Rushdie’s satire. The approaches I employed for each author were those I found to be most relevant and productive, but they are not the only possible ones. The overall thrust of the study has been political, in the broad sense of the word. A political thematic focus was inevitable given the interests of the authors; a political critical focus was also inevitable given the use of postcolonial critical models in tandem with those of satire. The thematic and the critical naturally intersect insofar as the politics addressed by each author’s satiric energies is a politics of colonization and decolonization, of colonialism, neocolonialism, and tainted independence. If my readings have focused more on satire’s serious, judgmental side than its funny, playful side, that too is perhaps inevitable. Although Griffin may have a point when he argues that critics of satire do not sufficiently account for play (71, 84), it is hard not to feel that the ways in which satire plays—with reality, rhetoric, and representation—give pleasure in the experiencing that would be demolished by critical dissection. Perhaps a new critical discourse of satiric play is worth pursuing. But when I finish reading a satire, my questions and confusions rarely concern its modes of play, and usually do concern its targets, agendas, assumptions, and meanings. The humor and transgressive creativity are evident; the serious aspects demand inquiry. If the critical situation of satire as a mode of resistance and critique engaging the political was predictable, another recurring feature of the three authors’ work and of my critical emphasis arguably was not: satire as not just a method but a topic of fiction. The equivocal attitude towards satire that emerges in each author’s essays and public statements is thematically foregrounded in his fiction through portrayals of satirist figures. These au-

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thors do not mock and ridicule and curse unilaterally, but enlist the services of one or more characters to assist them. The result can be a kind of ambivalent metasatire. NaipauPs Mr. Biswas may benefit psychologically from the therapeutic value of his satiric rebellion, and the reader may find him more engaging and sympathetic for his wit, but its value and achievement in his world are made uncertain by his life’s ambiguous status as a narrative of either successful liberation, entrapped failure, or something in between. Achebe begins his career by associating satire with a colonialist discourse that shares some of its properties; when he subsequently creates Odili as both satiric observer and satirized participant, he conveys an ambivalence about satire as an attitude and discursive mode that in the portrayal of Chris, twenty-one years later, solidifies into disapproval. Rushdie’s portraits of various compromised curser-satirists and hurlers of invective invariably connect satire’s representational violence with acts of physical violence; the most important of these characters, Gibreel, is dramatically sacrificed in favour of the more ambivalent and hopeful positions associated with Saladin and Menippean satire. Even at it most cocky and confident, satire has always been ambivalent. As a defense of dignity and freedom that often works by attacking dignity and denying freedom, and as a moral or intellectual victory that may substitute for an unreachable material victory, satire can seem both highminded and dirty, essential and pointless. Satire makes people laugh and nod their heads and admire its creator; satire also makes people uncomfortable and suspicious and inclined to attack its creator. In an intellectual climate like ours today, when issues concerning fair representation of people of color, women, and other historically disadvantaged groups have gained a new profile, satire may seem more dangerous and retrograde than ever. As the literatures of former colonies win new popularity and academic legitimacy as a function, in part, of that intellectual climate, those of us involved in the dissemination and canonizing of such texts and the “novel” knowledges and experiences they embody should pause to consider why the most prominent and acclaimed authors from those literatures are so often satirists. Are dubious or unhealthy pleasures and interests being served by the attractiveness of postcolonial writers who act as high-profile scourges not only of their colonial oppressors but also of their own societies? Or does satire constitute the developing postcolonial world’s most vigorous mode of inquiry and best literary hope for the promotion of knowledge and betterment at home and abroad? I hope this study suggests, somewhat ambivalently, that both questions may have the same answer: yes, but— .

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Afterword (2002)

Brian Connery and Kirk Combe, editors of the only theoretical book on satire to be published since this dissertation was finished, wrote in 1995 that “recent reinvestigations and refinement of our concept of ideology should be pertinent to studies of the potential for satire as a site of resistance to cultural and political hegemony—as well as for satire’s implication within hegemonic discourse.” In particular, they anticipated “that satire theory will be instrumental in the continuing investigation of colonial and post-colonial literatures” (“Theorizing” 11). So far, this confident prediction has not come true. Postcolonial critics, not unlike those practicing other politically inflected forms of literary and cultural criticism, continue to be largely uninterested in exploring what Connery, Combe, and I perceive as a natural confluence of interests (and opportunity for fruitful debate and cross-pollination) between satire theory and postcolonialism. It is my hope that the publication of this study can begin to demonstrate the possibilities and thereby stimulate further theorizing of postcolonial satire as well as practical criticism of satiric postcolonial texts. The absence of wide interest is not entirely surprising. Satire’s formal experimentation and penchant for contesting “real-world” power, together with the innate interdisciplinarity of satire criticism, may make it well suited to contemporary critical interests. But satire per se seems to have been deemed a passé topic some time ago; since the late 1960s it has gradually lost its luster as an object of adventurous theoretical inquiry. Two fine monographs published in the early 1990s and cited herein, George Test’s Satire: Spirit and Art and Dustin Griffin’s Satire: A Critical Réintroduction, go some distance towards updating and reinvigorating theoretical models of satire. Griffin, whose book came out just before this dissertation was completed and could only be selectively integrated into its theoretical framework, is particularly effective at interrogating what he sees as an ossified critical consensus on what satire is and how it works. He brings intelli-

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\ n0

gent new perspectives to old debates about moral norms, historical particulars, and political intents while stressing more avidly than his predecessors satire’s performative nature— its penchant for play and display—and its seductive appeal to “high-minded and low-minded” pleasures (184). But however conversant it may be with poststructuralist indeterminacy and concepts of ideology and hegemony, Griffin’s book, like Connery’s and Combe’s, is more likely to influence the thinking of scholars already interested in satire than those for whom satire warrants mention, if at all, as a self-explanatory label with little to offer the forward-looking critic.1 This is unfortunate, for the most innovative thinking about satire in the 1990s has much in common with key developments during the same period in the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies. Griffin’s signal contribution is to reorient our understanding of satire from calculated ends to experimental means: he convincingly argues that satire is a form of open-ended, exploratory inquiry into problematic conditions rather than a forthright attack on targets prejudged to be immoral, hypocritical, absurd, or dangerous (39). Fredric Bogel’s important essay in Connery and Combe’s collection similarly emphasizes relational process over the old dualistic model of author-subject castigating victim-object. While many time-honored ways of thinking about satire construct an implied reader who is on-side with the satirist’s harsh judgment, Bogel rightly points to the discomfort this presumption of authority and superiority can create in actual readers, and he invites us to question this alignment. In his view, satirists establish complex dynamics of identification and disidentification between readers and satirized objects: they assert difference and construct distance even where (and especially where) they may anxiously perceive similarity and proximity. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s writings on rhetoric, Bogel sees satire as “that literary form that works to convert an ambiguous relation of identification and division into one of pure division” (46). Satirists do not ask readers for an unambiguous alignment against the satiric object, he says: They ask us, instead, to meditate on the problem atic intricacies of identification and difference by which we define our own identities and our relations to others of whom we cann ot fully approve or disapprove. Reading satire is not so much about finding a position we can plug ourselves into as about exploring the com plexity of w hat it means to take a position.

(52)

Postcolonialism has also been moving increasingly away from binary models of imposed power and authority—of oppressors and victims—towards more dynamic and broadly relational ways of understanding identities and affiliations in the aftermath of colonialism. The articles by Homi Bhabha discussed in chapter one have been immensely influential in their articulation of the ambiguous relations of identification and disidentification— the blurry boundary between similarity and otherness— in colonizer-

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colonized relations. Work published both before and since the collection of these articles in The Location o f Culture (1994)— by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Simon Gikandi, and Ian Baucom, among others—has increasingly stressed the ways identities are constructed mutually and reciprocally across divisions of power, geography, race, nationality, and culture. Many postcolonial scholars have advocated or at least observed (some with enthusiasm, others with dismay) the field’s move away from the recuperation of subordinated cultures and silenced voices— an approach grounded in nationalist projects of resistance— towards postnational or transnational models that more adequately account for the increasingly diasporic subjectivities of the best-known postcolonial authors as well as the syncretic and transcultural thematics of their texts.2 Recent primers on postcolonial theory by Leela Gandhi (122-40), Ania Loomba (173-83), and John McLeod (205-38) all reflect this shift, which Jane Jacobs described succinctly in 1996: As the w ork on the nexus of pow er and identity within the imperial p rocess has been elaborated, so many of the conceptual binaries th at were seen as fundamental to its architecture of pow er have been problematised. Binary

couplets

like

core/periphery,

inside/outside,

Self/Other,

First

W orld/Third W orld, N orth/South have given w ay to tropes such as hybridity, diaspora, creolisation, transculturation, border. (13)

In Gandhi’s account, “Postnationalism pursues such indeterminacies in the colonial encounter in order to bridge the old divide between Westerner and native through a considerably less embattled— if more politically amorphous—account of colonialism as a cooperative venture” (124). This approach “seeks to show how the colonial encounter contributed to the mutual transformation of colonizer and colonized. In other words, the old story of clash and confrontation is retold with an eye to the transactive/transcultural aspect of colonialism” (125). In light of such paradigm shifts, Bruce King in the same year prophesied an end to postcolonialism’s scholarly allure: “It is probable that the age of post-colonialism is already over. . . . The clever are abandoning the ship, for globalization theory, transculturalization, positionality, and detailed social history” (“New” 25). Six years later, King’s predictions of the field’s demise can be judged premature; postcolonialism’s absorptive, transformative energies and academic institutionalization have enabled it to accommodate such conceptual reorientations within its capacious boundaries. The world that a history of imperialist and neoimperialist relations has wrought, however lopsided its distribution of power, wealth, or influence may be, is therefore increasingly theorized as a dynamic, complex network of interconnections. Influenced by relational models of identity and place in disciplines such as psychology and geography, and attentive to an increasingly wired, mobile, border-hopping, interdependent set of world systems, theory and scholarship from postcolonial scholars is increasingly

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drawn to investigate transnational phenomena such as migration and exile, cosmopolitanism and globalization, hybridity and diaspora, human rights and the environment. As it negotiates global with local spatial scales and past with present temporal scales, postcolonial scholarship examines the ways in which literary and cultural texts represent the intersection of diverse cultural “worlds” and histories on local places, communities, bodies, and identities. Often this work is strongly moral or ethical in its orientation and interdisciplinary in its approach; these qualities, together with an antipathy to concentrations of power— neoimperialist hegemony, the follies and evils of global corporatism— make it well matched with satire and satire theory. Indeed, a tension Ato Quayson observes in postcolonialism has direct parallels in the writing and criticism of satire: “At every turn in the field of postcolonial studies,” he writes, “there seems to be an undecidability between an activist engagement with contradictions in the real world and a more distanced participation via analyses of texts, images and discourses” (7). The quintessential satirist appears to be similarly ambivalent about translating worldly inquiry and protest into the realm of textual representation. There continues, therefore, to be much to commend the yoking of these two scholarly solitudes, particularly if satire as a category of representation can be rehabilitated and reframed following the approaches explored here and the more general theoretical updatings of Griffin, Bogel, and others. But old definitions die hard, and it is not surprising to see the most recent general discussion of satire, Sean Regan’s article “The Decline and Future of Satire,” restating familiar truisms about satiric representations such as its dependence “on the audience and author sharing a belief in . . . certain intellectual and moral values, in relation to which the target of the satire is found lacking or repugnant” (17). Satire is still more likely to be thought of as a top-down attack than an open-ended inquiry, as predetermined rather than indeterminate in its views, unidirectional rather than multidirectional in its rhetoric, and as a product of the satirist’s response to the world rather than the process of responding. The satirist’s presumed role as self-appointed judge, punitive scourge, and practitioner of the representational violence of othering makes postcolonial theorists understandably wary. Furthermore, satire’s residual generic status may make it seem irrelevant (or at least of only passing interest) to the criticism of postcolonialism’s dominant genre, the novel. Indeed, as Griffin remarked in 1994, a revised general theory of modal satire’s role in the novel is needed, but it remains to be written (4). Further work by postcolonial theorists on reception—the ways the decoding of textual meaning varies across geographically and culturally disparate reading communities—might enable fruitful application of Bogel’s insights regarding the ways a satiric text’s ambiguous meanings rely on the complex triangulation of satirist, satiric object, and reader. There are also tremendous opportunities for scholarship on traditions of satiric represen-

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tation in African, Indian, West Indian, and aboriginal oral, visual, performative, and textual cultures to be applied to the study of literary and cultural texts. Finally, as noted in my conclusion, the critical questions and problems I have raised regarding postcolonial satire, and the interpretive approaches I have modeled through the work of Naipaul, Achebe, and Rushdie, can be fruitfully applied to a host of additional literary texts. I very much hope they will be. The extent to which postcolonial novelists will continue to write satiric novels remains to be seen. Of the three authors considered in this book, only Rushdie was writing satiric novels after the 1960s. Many of the others mentioned in my introduction and conclusion are less drawn to satire in later than earlier work. The last decade of the twentieth century saw the emergence of novelists such as ITanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith who, though mainly comic, have a flair for mildly satiric characterizations and scenes, but we do not currently seem to be in a great age of postcolonial satire. Nonetheless, satire remains an important ingredient in the international literature of the past half-century of decolonization, neocolonialism, and neoimperialism. And nothing about our current times suggests an absence of conditions or actors worthy of satiric response unless, as Regan suggests, the proliferation of outsized and self-parodying representations in our image-saturated world has rendered the satirist redundant (15).^ Even so, if the “archetypal theme” of historical satiric narrative is, as Flayden White suggests, “the apprehension that man is a captive of the world rather than its master” (quoted in Griffin 197), then satire should continue to appeal to writers interrogating the history and legacies of imperial mastery and colonial captivity. And as our globalizing, multicultural societies become increasingly mixed in their identities (and mixed up about those identities), the often baffling medley of representational strategies that ancient satura and menippea have engendered will undoubtedly continue to be pressed into the service of provocative inquiry and playful critique.

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Notes

In

1.

t r o d u c t io n

N

o t es

The analogy between satire and pornography is not as flippant or gratuitous as it might seem. Satire is often quite like pornography: it objectifies and distorts, demeans and exaggerates. Both pornography and satire com m only engage in a kind of representational violence aimed at producing pleasure and feelings of superiority in an audience. As Dustin Griffin notes in his discussion of satire’s possibly erotic effect, satire “exposes w hat lies hidden, m etaphorically stripping aw ay clothes and veils.” But unlike the pornographer, Griffin argues, the satirist is more inclined to prom ote disgust than desire as a response to his representations (1 7 3 ).

2.

The referentiality of postcolonial texts is also not a head-in-the-sand denial of poststructuralist and postm odernist challenges to the notion of language’s referential capacity. Postcolonialism has an uneasy relationship with poststructuralist and postm odern theories. It uses some of their vocabularies and concepts, but hangs on to concepts of agency challenged in much poststructuralist thought, and to notions of centeredness, construction, and referentiality contested by postm odernism ’s emphasis on decentering, deconstru ction, and the an ti-referential. (For an extended discussion of these issues, see essays by Helen Tiffin, R ajesw ari M oh an , and those collected in Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin’s Past the Last Post.) Stephen Slemon deftly negotiates the postcolonial’s parad oxical attitude to the referent in a statem ent th at also indirectly delineates tw o related branches of postcolonial criticism : the deconstructive approach of colonial discourse analysis, and the reading of Com m onw ealth literary texts as docum ents of cultural assertion: “This referential assumption would appear to make what I am calling a post-colonial criticism radically fractured and contradictory, for such a criticism would draw on p ost-structuralism ’s suspension of the referent in order to read the social ‘te x t’ of colonialist pow er and at the same time would reinstall the referent in the service of colonized and post-colonial societies” (“M odernism ’s” 5).

175

176 3.

Notes

Satire is an im portant and tim e-honored mode of representation in many t raditional cultures of the postcolonial “Third W orld .” But there it has tended, until recently, to be perform ative, oral, and social— manifest, for instance, in poetry, dram a, calypso, com m unal ritual, folktale, and myth— rather than formally literary and textual.

4.

Perhaps one reason for the disagreement between those who see satire in the twentieth century as dom inating (e.g., Clark; Test, Satire) and those w ho see it as dwindling or disappearing (e.g., H odgart; Griffin) is the variable referent of “satire.” As a genre m ost often associated with verse, it has dwindled; as a mode infiltrating various discursive forms from high to popular culture, art to entertainm ent, it seems healthier than ever.

5.

C

1.

Griffin makes a similar claim : “W h at satire wants to do can generally be done within the generous confines of the novel w ithout disturbing its econ om y” (4).

h a pt e r

O

n e

N

o t es

Leon Guilhamet proposes th at the satiric butt is more dangerous and timebound than the “ timeless and harm less” com ic fool (8). Jam es Nichols makes a similar distinction between satire and com edy (1 3 1 ).

2.

As Biodun Jeyifo notes, literary and critical emphases on cultural recuperation often contain qualifications or warnings against overly valorizing the past: If norm ativity in this conception of the post-colonial usually entails w hat C ab ral has called “ return to the so u rce,” a reassertion or reinvention of tra ditions which colonialism , not w ithout considerable success, had sought to destroy o r devalue, there are also varying degrees of critical vigilance against the inscription of cultural norm s and traditions as com forting but enervating m yths of pure origins, and as uncontam inated m atrices of the self. (53)

3.

Fo r a powerful attack on postcolonialism ’s “ emphasis on hybrid identities” and a corresponding defense of “ the retrieval and réinscription of a fragmented p a st,” see Ella Shohat ( 1 0 9 - 1 0 ) .

4.

Jo n ath an Culler offers a reader-based theory of genre as “ a set of expectations, a set of instructions about the type of coherence one is to look for and the ways in which sequences are to be read ” (2 5 5 ).

5.

As one of A chebe’s finest critics describes it, not only does the postcolonial subject exist “in a co n text in which there is no shared and certain body of ‘belief and norm s of behavior’ [Achebe, H op es 1 0 0 ] ,” but that con text is one in which social and political upheaval have made the te x t’s most fundamental referents (nation, culture, society) inaccessible— with a corresponding im pact on w hat narrative can achieve (Gikandi 1 2 0 , 8 0 - 8 1 ) .

6.

An exam ple of this kind of criticism occurs in Neil M cE w an ’s A frica an d the N o v el, in which the author explains the specific African m oral norm s that Oguazor, a satirized ch aracter in Soyinka’s T h e In terp reters, is transgressing (6 3 ).

7.

The M anichean element of colonialist knowledge is not surprising, since the age of European imperialism coincided with w hat Geoffrey Galt H arpham

Notes

177

calls “ the great nineteenth-century dualism s” (6 7 ). These include Blake’s R eason and Energy, Schopenhauer’s Will and Idea, M a rx ’s bourgeoisie and proletariat, N ietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus, and Freud’s ego and id. H arpham writes, On one side in all these constructs there is clarity, abstract logical order, stability, and linear time; on the other, formlessness, contradiction, ambivalence, instability, and cyclic or tenseless time. Once this elementary grammar is fixed in the mind we see it everywhere, projecting it onto the MasonDixon line, the Mexican border, cellars and attics, city and country, and such Manichean categories as ‘white’ and ‘colored.’ (68) 8.

Linda H utcheon says that C an ad a’s multiplicitous dualities (English/French, East/W est, federal/provincial, etc.) may provide rich con texts for irony, but also make ironies difficult to interpret (“ ‘Circling’ ” 1 7 8 ).

9.

For a good general discussion about the relation of trickster figures to satire, see George Test (Satire 3 7 - 6 6 ) .

10. Dustin Griffin also discusses play as an integral element of satire, although his focus is quite different from Test’s. Fo r Griffin, recognizing satire’s playfulness counters the critical emphases on m orality and persuasion that make satire seem too calculating and too earnest. Yes, he says, play and gaming may be ways of testing ideas or of com peting with others, but it is im portant to remember that “play, like display, takes place in an arena th at is in some sense marked off from business or serious purpose, reserved for self-delighting activity that has no concern for m orality or for any real-w orld consequences save the applause of the sp ectators” (8 4 ). (I take up the issue of the worldly effects of satire in the last section of this chapter.) 11. For a m ore extended discussion of M ikhail Bakhtin’s “carn ival” and its relation to satire, see chapter four of this study. 12. For related critiques of “W est/R est” binaries in postm odernist and “Third W orld ” paradigm s, see Kumkum Sangari ( 1 8 3 - 8 4 ) and Aijaz Ahmad

( 101- 02 ).

13. Fiutcheon, writing of the dangers of a postcolonial ironic critique, says, “The problem of embodying that which one is trying to analyze and the difference between endorsing and exam ining are pragm atic issues of crucial im portance in postcolonial theory to d ay ” (Iro n y ’s 1 9 7 ). In light of the negative assessments of satiric and postcolonial opposition cited in this paragraph, one is prom pted to ask, “ H ow can one oppose something w ithout first naming it? ” 14. The prioritizing of these tw o locations by Hom i Bhabha and others has been vigorously contested by participants in debates over the inclusions and exclu sions of colonial discourse theory, particularly concerning its purported effacement of the resisting native voice. F o r some representative contributions to the debate, see essays by Diana Brydon (“ C o m m o n ” ), Jenny Sharpe, and Anne M axw ell.

178 C

1.

Notes

h a pt e r

T

w o

N

o t es

M y argum ent in this paragraph relies on the definitional criteria outlined in chapter one, as adapted from George Test and Edw ard Rosenheim. Satire’s com ponent features of aggression, judgment, referentiality, and play must all be present in some degree; the disappearance or significant diminishment of one feature can remove a given w ork or passage from the category of “ satire.”

2.

The Canadian author M ordecai Richler, w ho has been fruitfully com pared with N aipaul (R am raj, “D iminishing” ; Goldie), is similarly seen by A rthur Davidson as progressing from the “ sometimes sophom oric satire” of T h e In com parable A tu k , through the transitional (but still satiric) C o ck su re, tow ards the “ m ature social com ed y” of St. U rb ains H o rsem en and Jo sh ua T h en and N ow (1 1 9 ). Interestingly, postcolonialism as a critical paradigm has been critiqued for a reliance on a progressivist “ imperial idea of linear tim e.” In Anne M cClinto ck ’s view, the term ‘post-colonial’ . . . is haunted by the very figure of linear ‘development’ that it sets out to dismantle. Metaphorically, the term ‘post-colonialism’ marks history [and, by extension, literary history] as a series of stages along an epochal road from ‘the pre-colonial,’ to ‘the colonial,’ to ‘the postcolonial’— an unbidden, if disavowed, commitment to linear time and the idea of ‘development.’ (85)

3.

In her survey of W est Indian responses to N aip aul’s w ork, Dolly Zulakha H assan sums up the “ typical” reading of T h e M ystic M asseur by W est Indian critics as “ focused on w hat they see as the lack of compassion and sympathy with which the characters are presented and consequently the destructiveness of the satire” (1 2 3 ; emphasis added).

4.

As Test argues, “ D irect attack that lacks some of the elements of play and laughter would seem least likely to qualify as satire” (Satire 16). While with Naipaul these questions of direct versus indirect, expository versus fictionalplayful, are m atters of degree rather than either-or distinctions, it is interesting to note that N aipaul’s earliest travel books, T h e M iddle Passage and A n Area o f D ark ness, are also the tw o m ost prone to employing playful satiric portraits as supplemental support to their disparaging analyses. As he becomes m ore confident (and repetitious) in his opinions, the satiric dimension of N aip aul’s travel books declines, as it does in his fiction.

5.

Rob N ixon correctly points out th at in T h e M iddle Passage N aipaul’s “co n dem nation of the tourist society is harsher than his judgment of either the tourists or the inequities in N orth-South econom ic relations that have p rovoked tou rism ” (6 4 ). This imbalance would seem to be corrected by the multidirectional satire of “ A Flag on the Island.” Anthony Boxill, in fact, says that it is possible to see N aipaul as showing “great sympathy and understanding for the predicam ent of the modern West Indies. H ow can a small country lacking in resources be expected to withstand the onslaught of the Am erican plastic w o rld ?” (5 3 ). As I argue in my discussions of T h e M ystic M asseur and T h e Suffrage o f Elvira, the sympathy versus satire binary can be a misleading one; it blurs and blunts the edges of a multidirectional satire that takes both sides of colonial and quasi-colonial encounters to task and excuses neither.

179

Notes 6.

Fo r exam ple, see Frye, Anatom y (2 3 3 ), Feinberg (1 1 2 ), Snyder (1 4 2 ), Nichols

7.

I have recently published a fuller treatm ent of the intertextual connections between “ A Flag on the Island” and Frankenstein summarized in the following paragraphs, including a reading of Shelley’s novel through contem poraneous debates about W est Indian slavery. See Ball, “Imperial M on strosities.”

8.

In Chinua A chebe’s novel N o L o n ger at E ase, a soldier who has been to Lagos,

(85).

Nigeria, only just holds back from attributing a kind of om nipotence to his colonial-era m asters, telling the young Obi O konkw o, “ If you see a white m an, take off your hat for him. The only thing he cann ot do is mould a human being” (1 4 ). 9.

Sartre is writing here in a polemical introductory essay to Frantz Fan on ’s T h e W retched o f the E arth. And while his statem ent can be read as suggesting one direction— a one-w ay movem ent— to the act of creation, it also implies an other directionality in proposing that by “creating” the “slaves and m onsters” of the colonies the European was Fanon extends and reinforces the “ Europe is literally the creation of ers her is that which was stolen

able to become [i.e. m ake himself] a man. m etaphor with a neat and ironic reversal: the Third W orld. The wealth which sm othfrom the underdeveloped peoples” (1 0 2 ).

M etaphors of creation would seem, at least from these perspectives, to be inherently multidirectional. 10. Bruce King writes of A H ou se fo r M r Biswas, “The novel shows an im poverished, disorganized Trinidad and implicitly criticizes imperialism for having created such a mess in which those of African and Indian descent have been brought together w ithout the resources to live or make better lives” (V. S. 4 5 ). 11. For exam ples of critics who stress futility and failure, see Garebian (4 9 5 - 9 6 ) and Derrick ( 2 0 2 - 0 4 ) . For interpretations stressing achievement and creation, see Boxill (3 7 - 3 8 ) and O rm erod (6 0 2 ).

C

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A nother reason why the Igbo “w orldview ” is not a “ discourse” in the Foulcauldian sense employed by Edw ard Said and other colonialist discourse th eorists is suggested by Aijaz Ahm ad, who observes that Fou cau lt’s concept of “ ‘discourse’ presumes, as coextensive corollary, a rationalism of the postmedieval kind, alongside the increasing elaborations of modern state form s, m odern institutional grids, objectified econom ic productions, m odem forms of rationalized planning” (1 6 6 ).

2.

Some exam ples are: Killam (8 5 ); N joku ( 6 0 - 8 4 ) ; Lindfors ( “ P alm -O il” 4 8 ); Ngugi (“ C h in ua” 2 8 0 ); Innes (C hinua 8 5 ); R avenscroft ( 1 9 - 2 0 , 3 1 - 3 6 ) ; Olney (2 2 ); Palm er ( 7 9 - 8 2 ) ; W anjala (1 6 5 ); Okpaku (7 6 ); M cC artney (1 3 1 ).

3.

As Patricia M eyer Spacks observes, satire may be difficult to distinguish from realism (3 6 0 ). M atters of discursive con text and of background knowledge affect the generic designation in problem atic ways in postcolonial con texts; w hat may seem satiric to one reading com m unity may not to another. Some of A chebe’s interpreters w ant to praise him on both counts; thus for Joseph Ok-

180

Notes paku A M an o f the People is both “ accu ra te ” and “ satirical” (7 6 ), and for Bernth Lindfors the same novel “ should be recognized as a devastating satire in which Achebe heaped scorn on independent Africa by picturing one p art of it just as it w as” (“ A chebe’s ” 2 4 9 ).

4.

Achebe writes with coy irony in his essay “ W here Angels Fear to T read ” of the possibilities for European knowledge of Africans: “ I am not saying that the picture of Nigeria and Nigerians painted by a conscientious European must be invalid. I think it could be terribly valid, just as a picture of the visible tenth of an iceberg is valid” (M orn ing 7 8 ). A similar sense of unbalanced proportion can be seen in the size of the D .C .’s paragraph at the end of Things Fall A part (com pared to the size of the preceding narrative), and also in A rrow o f G o d w here, as G. D. Killam observes, it takes W interbottom a page to sum up the causes of U m u aro’s w ar with Okperi, and Achebe’s n arrator the better p art of an eighteen-page chapter earlier to do the same (7 1 ).

5.

Albert M emm i describes the psychology of this process in his accoun t of “the mythical p ortrait of the colonized” created by the colonizer: Constantly confronted with this image of himself, set forth and imposed on all institutions and in every hum an co n tact, how could the colonized help reacting to his portrait? It can n ot leave him indifferent and remain a veneer w hich, like an insult, blows with the wind. H e ends up recognizing it as one w ould a detested nicknam e which has becom e a fam iliar description. The a c cusation disturbs him and w orries him even m ore because he admires and fears his powerful accuser. ‘Is he not partially right?’ he m utters. ‘Are we not all a little guilty after all? Lazy, because we have so m any idlers? Timid, because we let ourselves be oppressed.’ Willfully created and spread by the co lonizer, this m ythical and degrading p ortrait ends up by being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized. It thus acquires a certain am ou nt of reality and contributes to the true p ortrait of the colonized.

(8 7 -8 8 ) 6.

On the basis of the historical novels, A rthur R avenscroft takes a tragic mode to be A chebe’s norm , one he is regrettably unable to achieve in the novels with con tem p orary settings. The result is an interesting version of the anti-satire bias we have seen in various critics of N aipaul and Achebe: “N o L o n g e r at E ase seems to be to o socially satirical to be able to carry off convincingly the tragic effect Achebe gives us reason to think he is striving for. W hat one misses is the artistically cohesive tension between chief ch aracter and setting that o c curs in T hings Fall A p a rt” (2 0 ). The presum ption here seems to be that the them atized falling-off that satire reflects as incoherence and lack of closure is also a form al or artistic falling-off. But if satire is a record of failure, can its form not also legitimately (and with no loss of artistic cohesiveness) underscore that failure?

7.

A chebe’s m ost satiric short story, “The V oter” (Girls 1 1 - 1 9 ) , portrays a similarly self-seeking polity; Chief the H onourable M arcus Ibe is expected not only to spread governm ent m oney lavishly on his village, but to kick back some of his new personal wealth to villagers in return for votes.

8.

The reasons for the dysfunctional politics th at emerged in Nigeria and other African nations in the era of decolonization are too com plex to go into in detail here. Fo r a good sum m ary view, see accounts of the social and political

181

Notes

background to A M an o f the People by Robert W ren ( 9 6 - 1 1 4 ) and Jam es Booth ( 2 1 - 4 0 ; 9 9 - 1 1 1 ) . Fan on ’s chapter in T h e W retched o f the Earth entitled “The Pitfalls of N ational Consciousness” (1 4 8 - 2 0 5 ) describes and prophesies many of the social and econom ic structures that led to hierarchical, n eocolonial political arrangem ents in ex-colonies. 9.

In his essay “ Kofi Awoonor as N ovelist,” Achebe praises A w oonor’s treatm ent of the theme of postindependence betrayal in This Earth, M y Brother. . . [original ellipsis] and then asks, “W h at then? W h at does Africa do? A return journey w om b-w ards to a rendezvous with golden-age innocence is clearly inadequate” (H opes 86 ). Achebe’s use of “ inadequate” instead of “ impossible” would seem to convey his doubt that such a golden age ever, in fact, existed. Dustin Griffin argues that m ost satirists are suspicious of golden age myths. In Ju ven al’s satires, he says, “To remember the past is not to be guided by it or to hope to bring it back but to rub R om an noses in a dirty imperial present from which they cann ot escape” (6 0 ). This com m ent seems pertinent to Achebe, although he is perhaps a bit to o generous to be com fortable “ rubbing noses” and too hopeful to foreclose the possibility of escape or im provement. But then, Achebe’s novels are by definition not as thoroughly steeped in satiric energy as Juvenal’s satires. Griffin’s m ore m oderate general form ulation that “ by robbing us of an image of pristine order [in the past], satirists leave us with the inescapable burden of the present” (64) affords a m ore apt description of w hat Achebe’s first four novels as a whole seem to do.

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1.

E lliott’s accoun t of death-dealing magical curses in various cultures does not draw on specifically Indian exam ples, although he asserts the universality of the belief “ am ong people of every stage of civilization” (2 8 5 ). The prevalence of magic and superstition in ancient India is well docum ented, and belief in the pow er of the words contained in curses and black-m agic spells is discussed in books by Sures C handra Banerji and Chhanda C hakraborty (1 6 3 ) and Beni Gupta (1 7 7 - 2 0 2 ) .

2.

Fo r exam ple, M . M adhusudhana R ao proposes th at “ irony and bitter satire become the mainstay of Rushdie’s w orldview ” (1 6 3 ), and m ost of the Indian critics collected in T h e N ovels o f Salman R ushdie (Taneja 1 9 9 2 ) invoke satire in discussing m atters of tone, vision, or literary style. The trajectories and ta rgets of Rushdie’s satire are discussed incidentally or at length by numerous critics, including Tim othy Brennan (1 0 9 , 1 6 4 ), Keith Booker ( “ Beauty” 9 9 0 ), Chelva K anaganayakam (9 5 ), Rikmini Bhaya N air (1 0 0 0 ), and M . D. Fletcher (9 9 -1 1 1 ).

3.

For discussion of the grotesque body, see Rabelais (esp. 3 0 3 - 4 3 6 ) . Fo r discussion of Menippean satire, see chapter four of P roblem s (esp. 1 1 2 - 2 2 ) , and the essay “ Epic and N ovel” (esp. 2 1 - 2 8 ) in D ialogic. Tzvetan Todorov rem arks on the difficulty of making links am ong Bakhtin’s theoretical texts, including R abelais and P ro blem s; it is hard to reconstruct a coherent “ general system ,” since the texts are not cross-referenced (M ikhail xii).

181

Notes M ikhail Bakhtin is not, of course, the only tw entieth-century critic to theorize M enippean satire. N orth rop Frye devotes several pages of A natom y o f Criticism ( 3 0 8 - 1 2 ) to the genre, and while his ideas have been influential, it is hard not to agree with Dustin Griffin when he describes Frye’s theory as “ sketchy,” “cry p tic,” and of limited use. M oreover, Griffin says, when Frye’s theory is set beside the m ore elaborate and very different form ulation of Bakhtin, “ it alm ost seems as if Frye and Bakhtin are describing different form s” ( 3 2 - 3 3 ) .

4.

A similar argum ent has been forw arded in response to N ew H istoricism and postm odernism under the name “ G reenblatt’s curse: ‘how authority leaves ro om for subversion only to absorb it’ ” (Brydon, “Jo in t” 4 5 ).

5.

H ere is how Heinrich Zim m er explains the Hindu “ four-stages” concept: According to the Hindu dharma, a man’s lifetime is to be divided into four strictly differentiated stages (asrama). The first is that of the student, ‘he who is to be taught’ (sisya), ‘he who attends, waits upon, and serves his guru’ (antevasin). The second is that of the householder (grhastka), which is the great period of a man’s maturity and enactment of his due role in the world. The third is that of retirement to the forest for meditation (vanaprastba). And the fourth is that of the mendicant wandering sage (bhiksu). (44) The strict differentiation and order in time of these stages is transgressed right aw ay in the novel when Baby Saleem begins making householder-like assertions of himself on the world, “working changes on the people around him ” (1 3 0 ). His willfulness and “ singleness of purpose” (1 4 0 ) are responsible, we are told, for his m other’s streak of luck at the racetrack. W hen he does become old enough to take up his role as a student, he is still making decisive intrusions into the adult w orld: writing the letter to Com m ander Sabarm ati, p roviding the rallying-cry for the language-m archers, and assisting with Ayub’s coup. Also at this stage he is presiding over a parody version of the Indian p arliament. On both literal and m etaphorical levels, then, Saleem blurs the distinction between student and householder stages, enacting both simultaneously. According to the traditional model, the student stage “ is ruled exclusively by obedience and submission (Zim m er 1 5 5 ). Under the tutelage of a guru-m aster, the respectful and eager pupil acquires knowledge and skill that will allow him to fulfill his destined role in the householder stage. Saleem has no master, and the role he is fated to act out is the undefined one of m irroring India’s grow th as a country, a role for which there are no models to study nor teachers to transfer knowledge or experience. The traditional model continues: “Then, abruptly, when the stage of pupilship is finished, and w ithout any transitional period, the youth, now a m an, is transferred— one might say, hurled— into married life, the stage of householdership” (1 5 6 ). The householder takes up “the paternal craft, business, or profession” (1 5 6 ), receives a wife th at has been chosen by his family, and begets sons. Rushdie subverts this model by having Saleem m arry and settle into a random ly chosen job at a pickle factory only at the end of his life. He begets a son w ho is “ n ot-m y-son ” (4 3 1 ), also late in life; all of this occurs after he has enacted a parodic version of the third stage, retirem ent to the forest, in the Sundarbans. The third stage is a shrugging off of the “ social personality,”

Notes

183

the “ social a c to r’s mask, or p erso n a ” (Zim m er 1 5 7 ), in search of complete identification with the Self. O ne’s “essence transcends this manifested nature and everything that belongs to it”; in the forest one seeks “to reach that unnamed essence . . . [and] to enter upon the path of the quest for the Self” (1 5 7 ). Saleem does not so much shrug off or put aside his social personality as have it blasted out of him during the 1 9 6 5 war. He loses all memories of his past, as well as the family that tangibly connects him to it, and enacts the new role of “ buddha,” a parody version of the fourth stage of “wandering holy beggar” (1 5 7 ). But far from the idealized retreat into meditation and pure identification with Self, the third and fourth stages are depicted in Book Three of the novel as “ an adulthood whose every aspect grew daily m ore grotesque” (3 3 5 ). The third and fourth stages are jumbled together throughout Book Three, not strictly separated. The Sundarbans, the site of the m ost extensive parody of the third stage, is a nightmarish “ forest of illusions” (3 5 6 ) that gives Saleem back his memories and haunts his com panions with theirs to such an extent that they nearly go mad. The ideal of a peaceful realization of heightened selfawareness is achieved by Saleem, but rather than discovering a transcendent essence he simply recovers his connection to the first tw o stages— to his history. The wandering holy beggar role, the fourth stage, is elaborated before and after emergence from the Sundarbans. This stage sees the individual as a non-entity, “no longer linked to any p lace,” “a homeless w an derer” “taking no thought of the future and looking with indifference upon the present” (Zim m er 1 5 7 - 5 8 ) . The goal is spiritual release, or m oksa. Saleem wanders or travels throughout Book Three with a certain arbitrariness. M uch of his m ovement— from W est Pakistan to East Pakistan to Delhi to Benares to Delhi and finally “ B ack -to -B om ” (4 3 5 )— is decided upon by other people or by circu m stance. The draining of hope that is accomplished with his sterilization causes Saleem to feel indifferent to his present and future and disconnected from his own life. Any homes he has are tem porary until the end, when he settles down with Padm a to play a kind of non-w andering sage in writing down his life story and articulating its meaning. His presumed death at the end both is and is not spiritual release: Saleem appears to transcend the material world psychologically, by rejecting its continued relevance for him, while being physically trampled into the very specks of dust from which the world is made. 6.

E Anne Payne, in a book on C h au cer’s debt to classical M enippean satire, uses Bakhtin’s definition and adds seven of her ow n, all of which apply to M idn igh t’s C hildren. These include paired and opposed characters in dialogue (Saleem and Shiva, up to a point); a virtually endless quest assisted by a “helping” and com m enting ch aracter (Saleem’s search for meaning aided by Padm a); nonpornographic obscenity; a sense of “ unquenchable hope and a titanic energy” ; the absence of unquestioned theological authority or abstract certainty ( 9 - 1 1 ) . Indeed, when Payne says M enippean satire “ requires that we accept as necessary the presentation of simultaneous unresolved points of view ,” and that it questions “the possibility of ideal stand ard s” by showing that “ the world is largely w hat we make it” ( 4 - 6 ) , the genre can be seen not only to be com patible with Rushdie’s views (in his essay “ Is N othing S acred,” for instance) but also to predate certain “con tem p orary” theories com m only

184

Notes used to explain his w ork; Linda H utcheon describes the postm odern world view in virtually identical term s (Poetics x , 4 3 ).

7.

As Keith W ilson observes, the “ epic centrality” of Saleem’s nose is one of the novel’s many intertextual parallels to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (3 4 ).

8.

Fo r a good discussion of this aspect of Rushdie’s novels, especially M idnigh t’s C h ild ren , see Peter Brigg.

9.

Julia K risteva’s sum mary of Bakhtin is fairly true to the original, although the idea of carnival as an “ antitheological” challenge to God would appear to be her own addition. Bakhtin does not say th at carnival is antitheological; in fact he argues at one point th at M enippean satire and “carnivalization” were importan t elements of ancient Christian narrative literature, including m ost of the N ew Testam ent (Problem s 13 5 ).

10. Fo r a good reading of Rushdie as a magic realist, and of T h e M o o r’s Last Sigh as a pessimistic parody of M id n igh t’s C hild ren , see Laura M oss.

Aft

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1.

I have published a fuller discussion of Griffin’s book in University o f Toronto

2.

Fo r instance, see articles by M oraru , Krishnaswamy, and M ishra.

3.

A ccording to Regan, the satirist is in “ decline, at least in the English-speaking

Q uarterly (Ball, Rev.).

w o rld ,” in p art because of the unintended self-parody of his usual targets. M inisters of state and their fleeting shadow s, m anagem ent and unions, academ ics and artists, singleissue fanatics, the quasi-religious in their therapy and counselling groups, religion itself: the all inclusive type has becom e so com m onplace, dispossessing ordinary talk and behaviour, that the satirist’s techniques— of irony, ridicule, dim inution, and invective . . . — seem now only to reinforce the very absurdities and m onstrosities they were once intended to reprove. W hen there ap pears to be no lam poon that has not already been taken for the real thing— as a glance through the personal, meetings or lifestyle sections of any of the broadsheets readily confirm s— the satiric venture has nothing much left but to dine out on its own increasingly sour tail. (15)

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Index

on his literary goals, 8 0 , 83

aboriginal peoples/cultures, 3, 10, 11,

on literature, 103

2 4 , 2 9 , 173

on Nigeria, 19, 8 2 , 8 3 , 9 8 , 1 1 0 ,

Achebe, Chinua, 1, 6 , 7, 19, 2 2 - 2 3 , 24,

25 , 2 9 , 30, 78, 79, 116,

16 6 , 1 6 7 , 1 7 3 , 1 7 9 , 1 8 0 Anthills o f the Savannah, 14, 7 9 ,

Things Fall Apart, 11, 7 9 , 8 2 , 8 6 - 9 0 , 9 5 , 9 8 , 1 0 0 , 101,

80, 86, 1 0 9 -1 4 , 167

1 1 4 , 1 80

A rrow o f G od, 8 1 , 8 2 , 8 6 , 9 0 - 9 6 , 98,

180 political views of, 8 2 , 110

T h e T rouble with N igeria, 1 10

1 0 1 , 180

“The Voter,” 1 80

as satirist, 7 9 , 8 1 , 8 6 , 9 2 , 1 0 0 ,

110

Adam , Ian, 175

“ b alance” in, 7 9 - 8 5 , 8 8 , 9 2 , 1 0 6 ,

Africa, 3, 7, 12, 2 3 , 3 2 , 3 7 , 8 2 - 8 3 ,

1 0 9 , 180

84,

critics on, 7 9 - 8 0 , 8 8 , 9 9 , 1 0 3 - 0 4 ,

8 5 , 8 8 , 173

Afzal-Khan, Faw zia, 88

1 7 9 -8 0

Ahm ad, Aijaz, 1 3 7 , 1 4 4 , 1 7 7 , 179 alazon, 5 5 - 5 6

H opes and Im pedim ents, 3 6 , 8 0 , 8 1 , 8 3 - 8 4 , 8 7 , 9 2 , 176

Alden, Patricia, 1 10

A M an o f the People, 11, 2 0 , 2 1 ,

Ali, Syed Ameer, 153

30, 36, 79, 81, 86, 1 0 2 -0 9 ,

Ali, Tariq, 1 1 8 - 1 9

11 0 , 1 1 1 , 1 6 7 , 1 8 0 , 181

allegory, 12, 2 0 , 1 2 5 , 1 3 4 , 146,

M orn ing Yet on Creation Day, 80,

1 6 1 - 6 2 , 163

8 3 -8 4

see also satire— relation to allegory

N o L o n g er at Ease, 16, 8 6 ,

Aluko, T. M ., 1, 86

9 6 -1 0 2 , 104, 108, 109, 110,

O ne M an, O n e M atchet, 31

1 7 9 , 180

Alter, Joseph, 1 3 3 - 3 4

nonfiction of, 8 3 , 1 1 0 , 180

ambivalence, 2 3 , 3 6 - 3 7 , 3 8 , 82

on the English language, 82

Annancy, 2 9 , 55

on the Igbo worldview, 8 0 - 8 1 ,

anthropology, 2 8 , 9 7

8 2 -8 6

apocalypse, 16, 1 4 0 , 145

203

Index

204 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 11

see also colonialist discourse;

A ravam udan, Srinivas, 1 1 6 , 15 5

postcolonial literatures— gaps

A rm ah, Ayi Kwei, 1, 2 9

in; satire— gaps in; satire—

T h e B eautyful O nes A re N o t Yet B o rn , 2 0 , 2 1 , 3 7 A shcroft, Bill, 3, 5 , 10, 11, 1 9 , 2 2 , 2 4 , 2 5 , 2 6 , 3 9 , 61

norms in Bissoondath, Neil, 12 Black Power, 5 2 , 58 Blake, William, 1 7 7

A tw ood, M argaret, 1, 2 9 T h e H a n d m a id ’s Tale, 14, 17

blasphemy, 2 0 , 1 54 Bloom , Edw ard A. and Lillian D ., 35

Auden, W. H ., 19

Boabdil the Unlucky, 159

Australia, 7, 11, 2 4

body, the

Awoonor, Kofi

South Asian view of, 1 20,

This E arth, M y Brother. . ., 181

1 2 3 - 2 4 , 1 3 3 -3 4

Ayodhya, 1 5 9 , 1 62

as signifier, 1 2 7 , 1 2 8 , 1 3 2 - 3 3 ,

Bail, M urray, 1

see also grotesque

1 3 7 , 1 5 6 , 1 5 9 , 16 0 H o ld e n ’s P erform an ce, 14 Bakhtin, M ikhail, 6, 7, 2 5 - 2 6 , 3 3 , 9 5 ,

Boehmer, Elleke, 7 9 , 1 10 Bombay, 1 4 8 , 159

1 1 9 -2 0 , 1 2 2 -2 3 , 1 2 4 -2 6 ,

Booker, M . Keith, 1 5 0 , 1 5 1 , 181

128, 129, 130, 131, 135,

Booth, Jam es, 7 9 , 9 7 - 9 8

1 3 7 -3 8 , 140, 1 4 1 -4 2 ,

Booth, Wayne M ., 2 0 , 3 9 , 6 3 , 6 4 ,

1 4 4 -4 5 , 146, 147, 148, 151, 155,

1 4 2 , 181

1 5 7 , 1 6 0 , 1 6 6 , 1 7 7 , Boxill, Anthony, 5 6 - 5 7 , 6 4 , 1 7 8 , 1 79

1 8 1 - 8 2 , 1 84

Brantlinger, Patrick, 2 3 , 85

Banerji, Sures Chandra, 181

Brathw aite, Edward Kam au, 78

Baucom , Ian, 171

Brennan, Timothy, 12, 1 3 4 , 1 3 6 - 3 7 ,

Baudelaire, Charles, 33

1 4 6 , 181

Beckett, Samuel, 6 9

Brereton, Bridget, 6 0

Bennett, Arnold, 41

Brigg, Peter, 18 4

Bennett, D onna, 3 - 4

British Guiana, 65

Bentley, Joseph, 2 3 , 2 7 , 3 3 , 3 4 , 1 2 1 ,

Brooker, Jewel Spears, 2 3 , 121

122 Bergson, H enri, 33 Bhabha, Hom i K, 3 6 - 3 7 , 3 8 , 1 7 0 - 7 1 , 177 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 1 3 6 , 143

Brooks, David, 15, 1 1 8 , 145 Brooks, Peter, 1 2 7 Brown, Lloyd W., 98 Brydon, D iana, 3, 13, 2 4 , 2 8 , 3 0 , 177, 182

Bible, the, 1 5 1 , 1 84

Burke, Kenneth, 170

binaries/dualities

Byron, Lord, 165

in European thought, 2 , 3, 11, 2 2 , 2 7 , 3 5 , 3 8 , 8 0 , 1 2 1 , 1 28,

calypso, 2 9

151, 177

C anada, 7, 11, 1 7 7

in the grotesque, 1 2 1 , 1 2 7 , 128

C annan, Gilbert, 21

in postcolonialism , 2 2 , 171

Carey, Peter, 1, 165

in satire, 12, 9 3 , 1 0 0 , 1 2 1 , 1 27

Caribbean, the, see West Indies

Index

205

caricatu re, 12, 4 2 , 4 8 - 5 0 , 5 2 , 7 6 , 7 7 ,

C roce, Benedetto, 89 Cudjoe, Selwyn, 11, 4 5 , 5 0 , 5 2 , 74

117 carnival/carnivalesque, 2 6 , 1 1 9 , 1 2 0 ,

Culler, Jonath an , 176

1 2 2 -2 3 , 124, 137, 142, 144,

Cundy, Catherine, 1 4 6 , 1 4 7

147, 149, 1 5 1 -5 2 , 153, 154,

curse, see raillery

157,

162, 177, 184

C arroll, David, 8 1 , 8 7 , 9 9 , 1 0 0

Danton, Georges Jacques, 152

caste system, 7 6 , 1 6 0 , 161

Dark Continent, myth of, 85

censorship, 34

decolonization, 2 2 , 7 6 , 1 6 6 , 1 7 3 , 180

Chakraborty, Chhanda, 181

dem ocracy, 5 9 - 6 1 , 6 2 , 6 3 , 6 4 - 6 5 , 6 7 , 1 2 4 , 1 4 3 , 1 5 6 , 161

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 183 Christianity, 1 5 1 , 158

Derrick, A. C ., 4 5 , 4 6 , 4 7 , 6 3 , 179

Clark, John R ., 15, 3 4 , 4 6 , 5 4 - 5 5 , 7 4 ,

Desai, Anita, 2 4 - 2 5 Descartes, René, 2 7 , 121

176

dialogism, 2 1 , 5 1 , 1 0 6 - 0 7 , 1 1 4 , 1 1 9 ,

Clarke, Austin, 1

120,

T h e Prim e M inister, 31 Coetzee, J. M ., 1 5 6 , 158 Colmer, Rosem ary, 1 0 2 - 0 3 colonialism /colonization, 2, 7, 10, 12, 22, 23, 37, 5 0 -5 1 , 5 8 -5 9 , 6 2, 64, 6 5 -6 6 , 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 8 2 -8 3 , 85, 87,

1 3 5 , 1 4 0 - 4 2 , 144, 1 4 5 ,

1 5 4 ,1 6 0 diaspora, 1 7 1 , 172 “ discursive com m unities,” 2 0 , 33 Dickens, Charles Little D orrit, 16 Dingwaney, A nuradha, 1 2 8 , 145

8 8 , 9 5 , 9 6 , 9 7 , 104, 1 0 8 - 0 9 ,

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 1 2 5 , 142

124, 166, 1 7 0 -7 1 , 173, 179,

Dryden, John, 32

180

dualism/dualities, see binaries

see also Em pire, British; imperialism

Dubrow, Heather, 17 Duerden, Dennis, 8 2 , 1 04

colonialist discourse, 2 , 7, 2 2 - 2 3 , 3 6 ,

D urix, Jean-Pierre, 128

37, 4 7 ,4 8 , 80, 81, 8 4 -9 3 , 9 5 -9 6 , 9 8 -9 9 , 101, 102, 114, 166, 167, 175, 176, 177

Eilon, Daniel, 14 eiron , 5 6

colonies of invasion, 11, 19, 58

Einstein, Albert, 121

colonies, settler, 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 2 6

ekphrasis, 1 5 7

Com be, Kirk, 1 6 9 , 170

Elliott, Robert C ., 3 4 , 4 5 , 4 6 - 4 7 , 4 8 ,

comedy, 1 5 - 1 6 , 4 2 , 7 4 , 1 0 1 , 1 1 0 , 114, 151,

176

Connery, Brian W ., 1 6 9 , 1 70 C onrad, Joseph H eart o f D arkness, 8 3 - 8 4 T h e Secret A gen t, 4 2 Cook, David, 7 9 , 8 7

1 0 5 , 1 0 6 , 1 0 7 , 1 1 5 , 181 Em enyonu, Ernest, 3 6 , 8 0 , 91 Empire, British, 1, 6 , 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 2 4 , 3 8 , 3 9 , 5 0 - 5 1 , 5 6 , 58, 62, 6 5 -6 6 , 72, 76, 96, 124 see also colonialism ; imperialism

Cook, William W ., 7 7

England, 19, 2 9 , 7 2 , 9 1 , 1 37

cosm opolitanism , 172

Englishness, 4 9

creole continuum , 2 5

epic, 2 5 , 2 6 , 151

creolization, 7 5 - 7 6

Epstein, Joseph, 4 6

206

Index

Euba, Femi, 108

golden age, 9 - 1 1 , 1 4 , 2 1 , 2 7 , 3 7 , 1 0 8 ,

Europe, 1 3 , 15, 7 9 , 8 3 - 8 4 , 8 8 - 8 9 , 174

1 2 1 , 181 Goldie, Terry, 178 G ranada, 158

Fabian, Johannes, 9 7

Greenblatt, Stephen, 1 3 9 , 18 2

fall, myth of the, 151

Grew al, Inderpal, 14 4

Fanon, Frantz, 8 1 , 1 0 7 , 1 7 9 , 181

Griffin, Dustin, 6, 13, 3 1 , 3 4 - 3 5 , 6 4 ,

fantasy, 17, 2 0 , 3 2 , 4 6 , 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 1 2 5 , 146, 147

85, 90, 166, 1 6 9 -7 0 , 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 181,

fatw a, see Satanic Verses affair Feinberg, Leonard, 1 8 - 1 9 , 2 1 , 3 3 , 3 4 , 4 6 , 1 0 7 , 1 1 8 , 179 Ferdinand V, King of Castile, 158

182, 184 Griffiths, G areth, 2 2 , 2 4 , 7 9 , 1 0 0 grotesque, the, 7, 18, 2 7 - 2 8 , 1 0 7 - 0 8 , 1 1 9 -2 4 , 127, 1 2 9 -3 1 ,

Fletcher, M . D ., 15, 19, 1 2 0 , 1 2 1 , 181

1 3 7 -3 8 , 142, 144, 145, 149,

Flood, Gavin D ., 133

155,

1 5 7 - 6 0 , 1 6 6 , 181

see also body

folklore, 55 Foucault, M ichel, 8 5 , 1 3 2 , 1 79

Guilhamet, Leon, 1, 5 , 6, 9 - 1 0 , 1 76

Fram e, Jan et, 1, 7, 2 9 , 165

Gupta, Beni, 181

T h e Carpathians, 17, 2 1 , 31 Faces in the Water, 31 Freud, Sigmund, 1 2 1 , 1 7 7 Frye, N orthrop , 1, 10, 15, 18, 2 9 , 3 2 , 35, 54, 5 5 -5 6 , 63, 90, 100, 1 2 1 , 1 4 6 , 1 5 1 , 1 7 9 , 182

Habiby, Emile, 120 Hall, Stuart, 171 H am ilton, Ian, 4 2 H arpham , Geoffrey Galt, 1 2 2 - 2 3 , 124, 128, 1 7 6 -7 7 H arris, W ilson, 4 4

Gallagher, Catherine, 1 3 2 , 13 3 Gandhi, Indira, 1 1 5 , 1 1 6 , 1 2 4 , 1 3 0 ,

146 Harvey, L. P., 159

1 3 5 , 161

Hassan, Dolly Zulakha, 4 2 , 4 3 , 4 5 ,

Gandhi, Leela, 171 Gandhi, M ahatm a [M ohandas K .], 110,

H arrison, Jam es, 1 1 8 , 1 1 9 , 1 2 6 , 1 3 6 ,

1 2 4 , 158

4 6 , 4 7 - 4 8 , 6 3 , 6 6 , 178 Heisenberg, W erner Karl, 121

Gandhi, Rajiv, 1 16

Highet, Gilbert, 23

Gandhi, Sanjay, 1 32

Hinduism, 1 3 6 , 1 56, 157

Gardiner, M ichael, 135

four stages of life in, 1 2 5 , 1 8 2 -8 3

G arebian, Keith, 179

mythology of, 128

Gates, H enry Louis, Jr., 4 , 2 9

philosophy of, 1 2 8 , 1 3 3 , 151

genre, expectations of, 1 7 - 1 8 , 176

see also nationalism— Hindu

see also satire— as genre; novel—

1 0 2 , 178

G hana, 32 Gikandi, Simon, 8 7 , 8 8 , 9 7 , 9 9 , 1 0 6 , 114, Gill, R. B., 33 Gilroy, Paul, 171 globalization, 1 7 2 , 173

history/historicality, 9 - 1 1 , 13, 18, 2 6 , 2 9 -3 1 , 33, 52, 74, 8 9 -9 0 ,

as genre

1 7 1 , 176

H od gart, M atthew, 14, 2 1 , 176 H ong Kong, 31 H ope, Christopher, 1, 7, 165 K ru g e r’s A lp , 17 H orace, 5

Index

207

Hum e, David, 1 3 2

Johnson, Colin, see M udrooroo

humor, theories of, 3 2 - 3 3

Johnson, Samuel

H utcheon, Linda, 10, 2 0 , 2 1 , 2 6 , 3 5 , 64, 177, 184

Rasselasy 5 6 , 165 Joyce, Jam es, 15

Huxley, Aldous, 1 32

Finnegans W ake, 151

hybridity, 11, 12, 2 8 , 3 6 - 3 7 , 3 9 , 1 5 2 , 1 5 6 , 1 5 9 , 1 7 2 , 1 7 3 , 176 Igbo people/culture, 7 9 - 8 6 , 8 7 , 9 0 , 1 0 1 , 179

Judaism , 1 5 1 , 158 Juvenal, 5 , 181 K anaganayakam , Chelva, 181 K ano, Aminu, 1 1 0

imaginary voyage, 56

Karachi, 136

imperialism, 7 , 10, 12, 13, 2 2 , 3 5 , 3 8 ,

Kayser, W olfgang, 1 2 0 , 1 2 1 - 2 4 , 1 3 7 ,

51,

5 8 - 5 9 , 8 4 , 176

see also colonialism ; Empire, British indenture, 75 India, 3 , 6, 7, 3 1 , 7 6 , 1 1 6 , 1 3 1 , 1 36, 1 3 7 , 1 5 8 , 1 7 3 , 181 history and politics, 7, 1 2 4 , 1 2 6 , 1 29, 1 3 2 , 1 3 4 , 1 3 5 , 1 5 6 , 161, 1 6 2 -6 3 see also Naipaul, V. S.— on India; Rushdie, Salman— on India

1 4 9 , 1 60 Kenya, 16 Kernan, Alvin B., 2 , 1 4 - 1 5 , 2 1 , 2 3 , 3 2 , 5 4 , 7 1 , 7 3 , 1 00 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 2 2 , 1 16 Killam, G. D ., 7 9 , 8 3 , 1 0 3 , 1 79, 180 King, Bruce, 4 2 , 6 4 , 7 5 , 1 7 1 , 179 Knight, Charles A ., 1, 6, 15, 17, 19, 2 4 , 3 0 , 9 3 , 1 00 K nox, N orm an, 21 Krishnaswamy, Revathi, 184

Innes, C. L ., 113

Kristeva, Julia, 1 5 1 - 5 2 , 184

intentionality, 2 0 , 2 8 , 3 4 , 3 9 , 1 1 6 , 1 1 7

K roetsch, R obert, 2 9

interpretation, 1 9 - 2 1 , 2 7 , 2 8 , 3 3 , 3 9 ,

Kronenfeld, J. Z ., 79

5 0 , 5 2 , 6 4 , 76 interstitiality, see liminality

Kiinstlerrom an, 15 Kureishi, Hanif, 173

intertextuality, 2 6 , 5 6 - 5 9 invective, see raillery irony, 2 0 , 2 1 , 3 9 , 4 1 , 4 2 , 5 6 , 5 7 , 73, 92, 177 see also satire— relation to irony Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 158 Islam, 1 1 6 , 1 1 7 , 1 3 6 , 1 4 7 , 1 5 1 , 1 5 5 , 158 see also Rushdie, Salman— on Islam Islamabad, 136 Jacob s, Jan e M ., 171 Jam es, Henry, 6 Jan M oh am ed , Abdul R ., 2 , 22 Jeyifo, Biodun, 2 9 , 8 1 - 8 2 , 8 8 , 176 Johansen, lb, 1 46

Lamming, George, 1, 4 4 , 4 5 , 48 In the Castle o f my Skin, 15 laughter, theories of, 3 2 - 3 3 , 1 1 9 , 1 2 4 , 178 Lee, Jae N um , 2 9 - 3 0 Lee, R. H ., 51 Levin, Harry, 14, 2 1 , 165 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 89 Lewis, Sinclair, 118 liberal humanism, 5 liminality, 1 1 , 2 9 , 1 0 7 , 1 0 8 , 109 Lindfors, Bernth, 8 0 , 1 0 3 , 1 0 5 , 1 0 9 , 1 7 9 , 1 80 literalized metaphor, 1 2 7 -2 8 , 1 3 2 , 1 3 4 -3 5 , 1 4 9 , 156

208

Index

literary theory, European postcolonial critiques of, 4 -5 London, 3 1 , 1 4 7 -4 8 , 1 50 Loom ba, Ania, 171

N aipaul, Seepersad T h e A dventures o f G uru deva, 4 2 N aipaul, V. S., 1, 6 , 7, 13, 2 0 , 2 2 , 2 9 , 3 8 , 1 1 6 , 166, 1 6 7 , 1 7 3 , 1 7 8 , 180

M acaulay, Thom as, 3 6 -3 7 magic realism, 4 6 , 1 2 8 , 1 4 9 , 1 5 8 , 1 8 4

A n Area o f D arkness, 4 8 - 4 9 , 5 1 - 5 2 , 6 0 , 178

M alh otra, Inder, 161

A B en d in the R iver, 43

M alinkowski, Bronislaw, 4 7

critics on, 4 4 - 4 6 , 5 1 , 5 9 , 6 3 , 7 3 ,

M althus, Thom as, 1 3 2 -3 3

7 4 , 178

M ann, H arveen Sachdeva, 6 4 , 68

T h e E nigm a o f Arrival, 4 2

M arx, K arl, 1 7 7

Finding the C entre: Two

masculinity, 8 7 , 91 M aughan Brow n, David A., 8 0 , 1 10 M auritius, 72 M axw ell, Anne, 1 7 7

Narratives, 58 “ A Flag on the Island,” 3 1 , 4 4 , 4 5 , 5 1 , 5 3 - 5 9 , 6 7 , 7 6 , 1 78, 179

M cCartney, Barney Charles, 1 79

G uerrillas, 4 3 , 4 4

M cC lintock, Anne, 3 , 178

A H ou se fo r M r Biswas, 4 4 , 6 9 ,

M cEw an , Neil, 176

7 2 - 7 8 , 1 6 7 , 179

M cLeod, John , 171

In a Free State, 4 4

M em m i, Albert, 3 7 , 6 4 , 9 5 , 180

India: A M illion M utinies N o w ,

Menippean satire, see satire— Menippean Meyer, Bruce, 12 M ill, John Stuart, 36

15 India: A W ounded Civilization, 49, 52

Miller, Christopher, 28

T h e Loss o f El D o ra d o , 51

mimicry, 3 6 -3 8 , 4 8 -5 0 , 5 9 -6 0 , 6 1 , 6 3 ,

T h e M iddle Passage, 3 6 , 4 1 , 4 2 ,

67 M ishra, Vijay, 1 8 4 missionaries, 10, 8 5 , 8 7 , 88 M o, Tim othy So ur Sw eet, 31 M ohan, Rajesw ari, 4 0 , 175 M oraru , Christian, 1 84 M orris, R obert K ., 4 4 , 4 5 , 7 4 M orton , R ichard, 3 4 M oss, L aura, 1 8 4 M u drooroo [Colin Johnson], 1 Dr. W ooreddy’s Prescription fo r E n d u rin g the E n d in g o f the W orld, 10, 11, 16 M ukerjee, Radhakam al, 1 33 M ukherjee, Arun E , 3, 1 3 , 2 8 , 3 0 myth, 9, 128

46, 47, 53, 55, 58, 62, 65, 7 2 , '178 M iguel Street, 4 2 , 5 3 , 5 6 T h e M im ic M en , 11, 15, 4 2 , 4 3 , 6 9 , 70 T h e Mystic M asseur, 3 7 , 4 2 , 4 3 , 44, 4 7 -4 8 , 4 9 - 5 1 ,5 3 , 5 9 - 6 0 , 6 7 - 7 2 , 7 7 , 178 nonfiction of, 4 3 , 4 4 , 4 7 - 4 8 , 5 1 , 52,

5 6 , 6 1 , 178

on colonial/postcolonial societies, 4 7 , 73 on his own writing, 4 2 , 4 3 - 4 4 on India, 4 8 - 4 9 , 5 1 - 5 2 on satire, 4 1 - 4 2 , 4 4 , 4 6 , 78 on the Third W orld, 4 3 , 4 5 on the West Indies, 6 0 , 6 2 , 6 7 , 7 1 -7 2

Index

209

T h e O vercro w ded B arra co on, 5 2 , 58, 72

N krum ah, Kw am e, 3 2 N w oga, D. Ibe, 95

T h e R eturn o f Eva Perón with T h e Killings in Trinidad, 4 2 T h e Suffrage o f Elvira, 14, 15,

O ’Connor, Gerard W ., 3 0 O ’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, 1 2 8 , 13 4

16, 1 7 , 2 1 , 3 0 , 4 2 , 4 3 , 4 4 ,

Olney, Jam es, 103

45, 5 1 ,5 2 -5 3 , 5 9 -6 2 ,

Opaku, Joseph, 1 7 9 - 8 0

6 3 -6 6 , 67, 68, 70, 71, 143,

oppositionality, 2 , 4 , 5, 6, 10, 13, 2 0 ,

178

25, 33, 35, 43, 44, 82, 109, 115,

Nair, Rukmini Bhaya, 181 nationalism

1 1 7 , 144, 1 5 4 , 1 7 7

Orientalism, 85

civic, 162

O rm erod, David, 7 5 , 179

colonial, 171

Orwell, George, 2 4 , 117

Hindu, 1 5 6 , 1 5 8 , 1 6 0 , 162

“o th er’’/ “othering,” 2 , 13, 5 8 , 85

nativism, 11 naturalism, 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 1 1 9 , 125 Nehru, Jaw ah arlal, 1 5 8 , 1 6 1 , 1 6 2 - 6 3

Pakistan, 3 7 , 1 3 1 , 1 3 7 , 1 40 see also Rushdie, Salman— on

neocolonialism , 2 , 7, 1 1 - 1 2 , 16, 3 0 , 1 6 6 , 1 7 2 , 1 7 3 , 181 neoimperialism, 7, 13, 3 8 , 4 7 , 5 3 , 5 5 ,

Pakistan Palmer, Eustace, 1 0 0 , 179 Palmeri, Frank, 9, 10, 15, 2 1 , 2 5 ,

5 6 , 1 0 4 , 173

2 6 -2 7 , 1 0 6 -0 7 , 108, 121,

New Criticism, 5

123

New Historicism , 182

parody, 2 5 - 2 6 , 2 7 , 2 8 , 1 4 1 , 1 4 2 - 4 4 ,

New Zealand, 7, 11, 2 4

1 7 3 , 1 84

N ew ton, K. M ., 155

Paulson, Ronald, 6, 9, 10, 73

N gara, Emm anuel, 7 9 , 80

Payne, F. Anne, 1 2 4 , 183

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1, 12, 7 8 , 8 2 , 165,

179

D evil on the C ross, 11, 15, 16, 17, 2 1 , 2 7 T h e River B etw een, 11 Nichols, Jam es W ., 5 , 15, 2 6 , 2 7 , 1 7 6 , 179

Pechey, G raham , 135 Persius, 5 Petro, Peter, 6 Pinkus, Philip, 3 4 , 7 7 Pope, Alexander, 3 2 pornography, 1, 175 postcolonial literatures

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1 7 7

gaps in, 2 2 - 2 4 , 4 0 , 73

Nigeria, 6, 102

reader(s) of, 1 9 - 2 0 , 2 7 , 3 1 , 3 3 ,

see also Achebe, Chinua— on Nigeria Nightingale, Peggy, 4 2 , 4 3 , 4 4

39, 52 , 172 reception of, 1 6 7 , 172 theories of, 1, 2 - 5 , 1 0 - 4 0 , 7 7 ,

noble savage, myth of, 11

16 9 , 1 7 0 - 7 3 , 1 7 5 , 1 72, 177,

novel, the

178

as genre, 6 , 15, 17, 2 5 - 2 6 , 1 0 3 , 1 3 5 , 176 satire in, 6, 142

writers of, 1 9 - 2 0 , 1 65 postcolonialism, see postcolonial literature— theories of

N ixon , Rob, 4 5 , 4 6 , 4 8 , 178

postm odernism , 5, 2 7 , 175, 1 8 2 , 184

Njoku, Benedict Chiaku, 17 9

postnationalism , 1 7 1 - 7 2

2.1.0

Index

posistructuralism , 5 , 2 7 , 175 purity/impurity, 11, 1 3 0 , 1 3 6 , 1 5 1 , 1 5 2 , 1 5 8 , 1 5 9 , 160

Rushdie, »alınan, 1. 6, 7, 2 2 , 2 9 , 3 1 , 1 6 6 , 1 6 7 , 1 73, 181 as satirist, 1 1 5 - 2 0 , 1 2 3 , 1 5 6 , 181 as “pessoptim ist,” 1 2 0 , 1 2 3 , 1 3 5 ,

Quayson, A to, 172

145

Q uetta, 1 3 6

critics on, 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 1 3 4 , 1 3 7 , 1 4 4 ,

Q u ’ran, the, 153

1 4 6 ,1 8 1 G rim us, 1 1 8 , 1 4 6

Rabelais, François, 1 2 0 , 1 4 2 , 165 raillery, 4 8 , 1 0 5 , 1 0 6 , 1 0 7 , 1 6 7 R am chand, Kenneth, 4 4 - 4 5 , 73 R am raj, V ictor J ., 3 6 , 4 2 , 6 6 , 6 9 - 7 0 , 178

H aro un and the Sea o f Stories, 1 4 6 -4 7 , 157 Im aginary H om elands, 3 6 , 1 1 7 , 1 1 9 , 1 2 0 , 1 2 5 , 1 3 5 , 1 5 3 , 161 M idnight’s C hildren, 14, 15, 4 0 ,

R ao, M . M adhasudhana, 181

117, 1 1 8 -1 9 , 1 2 4 -3 6 , 139,

R avenscroft, Arthur, 1 80

1 4 5 , 1 4 6 , 1 5 1 , 1 5 5 , 1 57,

Read, Jan , 158

1 5 8 , 1 6 1 , 1 6 2 , 1 8 2 - 8 3 , 184

Regan, Sean, 1 7 2 , 1 7 3 , 1 84 realism, 17, 4 6 , 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 179 see also magic realism recuperation, 1 0 , 11, 2 2 , 1 0 8 , 176 referentiality, 2 , 4 , 5 , 10, 2 9 - 3 3 , 4 3 , 63,

92, 104, 109, 1 1 7 -1 8 ,

1 4 6 - 4 7 , 1 7 5 , 178 see also satire— as referential attack

T h e M o o r’s Last Sigh, 1 5 6 - 6 3 , 184 multiple affiliations of, 1 1 5 , 1 2 4 , 156 on his own writing, 1 1 5 , 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 156 on India, 15, 1 1 7 , 1 3 4 - 3 5 , 1 5 5 -5 6 , 160, 161, 1 6 2 -6 3 on Islam, 1 5 3 - 5 4

representation/m isrepresentation, 7,

on Pakistan, 3 9 - 4 0 , 1 3 6 , 1 5 5 - 5 6

13, 16, 1 8 , 2 2 - 2 3 , 2 5 - 2 6 ,

on satire, 1 1 6 —17, 118

27, 28 , 29 , 44, 72, 80, 85,

political and aesthetic views of,

87, 88, 90, 92, 138, 144, 145,

1 6 7 , 173

resistance, 2 , 3, 10, 13, 2 0 , 2 5 , 3 6 - 3 7 , 38, 78, 80, 137, 169, 171, 177 Richler, M ordecai, 1, 7, 2 9 , 16 5 C o ck su re, 178

1 1 7 - 1 8 , 1 2 5 , 1 3 5 , 157 T h e Riddle o f M idnight, 15, 156 T h e Satanic Verses, 2 0 , 1 1 5 , 1 1 6 , 117, 145, 146, 1 4 7 -5 5 , 167 Sham e, 1 1 , 16, 17, 3 9 - 4 0 , 1 1 5 , 117, 118, 119, 124, 1 3 6 -4 5 , 1 4 6 , 1 5 2 , 1 5 4 , 155

T h e Incom parable A tu k, 2 1 , 1 78 Jo sh ua T hen and N o w , 178

Sacks, Sheldon, 31

St. Ur b a in ’s H o rsem a n , 178

sadism, 2 7 , 34

R oach , Eric, 4 6 Robespierre, M aximilien François M arie Isidore de 1 5 2 Rogers, Philip, 9 9 , 1 0 0 Rohlehr, G ordon, 2 9 , 4 5 , 6 6 , 7 5 , 76 Rosenheim, Edw ard W., Jr., 1, 2 9 - 3 3 , 178

Said, Edw ard W., 13, 2 8 , 3 8 , 3 9 , 4 0 , 85,

8 8 , 9 2 , 1 2 0 , 179

Sangari, Kumkum, 1 2 8 , 1 3 5 , 1 4 0 - 4 1 , 1 77 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5 8 , 179

Index

211

Satanic Verses affair, the, 2 0 , 3 6 , 1 1 6 -1 7 , 1 4 6 -4 7 , 155, 156,

76, 80, 101, 121, 152, 153, 1 6 6 , 1 70, 1 7 2 , 178 language and, 18, 2 3 - 2 9 , 6 1 ,

163

1 4 0 -4 4 , 160

sati, 1 60, 161

magical pow er of, to kill, 3 4 , 4 5 ,

satire

4 6 - 4 7 , 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 181

African, 108 aggression in, 13, 3 2 , 3 3 , 3 4 , 4 3 , 6 5 , 1 2 0 , 178

M enippean, 7, 2 6 , 3 3 , 1 1 6 , 1 1 9 -2 0 , 122, 123, 1 2 4 -2 8 ,

ambivalence of, 1 2 0 , 1 67

131, 132, 135, 137, 140,

as admission of defeat/despair,

142, 1 4 4 -4 5 , 1 4 6 -5 5 , 159,

3 4 -3 5 , 36, 77, 103, 111,

1 6 0 , 1 6 2 - 6 3 , 1 6 6 , 1 67,

1 3 5 , 1 6 3 , 1 80

1 8 1 - 8 2 , 1 8 3 , 184

as genre, 5 - 6 , 9, 10, 15, 17, 2 6 , 4 5 , 7 4 , 1 1 8 , 1 1 9 , 1 4 7 , 172, 176

morality and, 18, 19, 2 3 , 3 2 , 3 4 , 35 multidirectional, 7, 1 2 - 1 3 , 2 0 ,

as inquiry, 1 7 0 , 1 7 2 , 173

21, 23, 2 6 -2 7 , 3 7 -4 0 , 48,

as m ode, 5 - 6 , 1 72

5 1 -5 2 , 54, 56, 5 8 -5 9 ,

as referential attack , 1 - 2 , 1 2 - 1 3 ,

5 9 -6 7 , 71, 72, 73, 87, 98,

1 8 ,2 1 ,3 0 , 32, 3 3 -3 4 , 46,

1 0 0 , 1 0 4 , 1 0 7 , 1 08, 1 09,

52, 55, 61, 6 3 -6 6 , 69, 70,

1 1 2 , 1 6 2 , 1 6 6 , 1 7 2 , 178

72, 74, 76, 86, 92, 97, 98,

“ negative” (Bakhtin), 7, 3 3 , 1 1 6 ,

99, 1 0 1 -0 2 , 109, 111,

119, 123, 126, 127, 131,

1 1 5 -1 6 , 1 1 7 -1 8 , 1 1 9 -2 1 ,

1 32, 1 3 5 , 1 3 6 , 1 4 0 , 1 4 4 - 4 5 ,

122, 126, 131, 137, 138,

1 4 7 -4 8 , 1 5 2 -5 5 , 159, 160,

146, 153, 154, 156, 162, 1 6 6 , 1 7 2 , 173 as violence, 1 6 - 1 7 , 3 4 , 4 4 , 1 1 7 , 1 3 8 - 3 9 , 1 5 2 , 1 60 closure in, 1 5 - 1 7 , 5 5 , 7 1 , 9 0 , 100, 1 0 2 -0 4 , 107, 1 1 0 -1 1 , 114, 142, 165, 180 com pared to colonialist discourse, 8 5 -8 6 , 87, 166, 167 crisis and, 16, 1 0 0 - 0 3 , 1 1 0 - 1 1 critical deprecation of, 4 4 - 4 5 , 4 7 , 1 4 4 ,1 8 0

32, 59, 63, 64, 66, 116, 121, 1 3 9 , 1 4 5 , 1 7 0 , 176 perform ative nature of, 1 7 0 , 176 pleasures of, 3 4 , 1 6 7 plot in, 1 4 - 1 8 , 2 1 , 7 1 , 7 4 , 101 play/playfulness in, 3 2 , 5 2 , 8 0 , 166,

definitions of, 1 - 2 , 4 , 5 , 2 9 - 3 4 , 1 18, 1 1 9 , 1 2 0 , 1 6 5 , 176

1 7 0 , 1 7 7 , 178

reader(s) of, 1 7 - 1 8 , 19, 2 1 , 2 4 , 3 0 - 3 1 ,3 9 , 40 , 45 , 52, 64, 116,

crow ds in, 1 4 - 1 5 , 2 7 , 5 4 , 73 81,

163 norm s in, 10, 1 8 - 2 3 , 2 4 , 2 6 - 2 7 ,

1 3 9 , 1 6 7 , 1 7 0 , 1 7 2 , 179

relation to allegory, 7, 7 3 , 7 4 - 7 6 , 7 8 , 1 66 relation to the grotesque, 1 1 9 - 2 3

etym ology of, 4 , 2 3

relation to ideology, 169

gaps in, 2 1 - 2 7 , 4 0 , 5 9 - 6 7 , 7 0 - 7 2 ,

relation to irony, 7, 2 7 , 3 5 ,

92 judgment in, 18, 2 0 , 2 3 , 2 6 , 3 2 -3 4 , 37, 40, 59, 65, 74,

5 9 -6 7 , 6 9 -7 1 , 77, 8 6 -8 7 , 9 8 , 1 2 1 , 16 6 relation to narrative, 7, 8 7 - 9 0 , 9 4 , 9 7 , 1 0 0 , 1 0 1 - 0 2 , 1 04,

Index

212 106, 1 0 7 -0 8 , 110, 112, 1 1 3 - 1 4 , 1 66

Season o f A nom y, 21 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 3 0 , 3 2 , 4 6 ,

relation to wit, 32

1 79

R om an, 5, 2 6 , 1 4 2 , 181

Spain, 1 5 8 - 1 5 9

satirist as character in, 1 0 6 , 1 6 2 ,

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 116

1 6 6 -6 7 techniques of, 2 1 - 2 2 , 3 2 , 3 3 , 4 3 ,

“ standard English,” 2 5 , 2 6 Sterne, Laurence, 165 Tristam Shandy, 1 8 4

50, 5 4 -5 5 , 85, 88, 117, 173, 184 theories of, 1, 4 - 7 , 9 - 4 0 , 4 5 - 4 7 , 54, 119, 121, 166, 1 6 9 -7 0 ,

Suleri, Sara, 145 Sutherland, Jam es, 5 2 Sutherland, W. O. S., Jr., 18, 19, 2 1 ,

1 7 2 - 7 3 , 179 w orldly im pact of, 18, 3 4 - 4 0 , 6 6 ,

35 Swift, Jonath an , 4 0 , 1 32

76, 78, 116, 121, 122, 172,

G ulliver’s Travels, 5 2 , 5 6 , 1 0 2 ,

177

106

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 2 5

Syed, Mujeebuddin, 135

Schneegans, G ., 1 2 2 , 1 2 3 , 1 3 7 , 149

syncretism, 11, 12, 17, 2 2 , 2 8 , 3 9 , 4 4 ,

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1 77

7 6 , 1 5 1 , 171

Schulze-Engler, Frank, 3, 35 “ scramble for A frica, th e ,” 85 Seidel, M ichael, 5, 16, 3 4 , 1 0 0 , 1 0 2 , 145 Selvon, Samuel, 1 T he L onely L o n d o n ers, 2 4

Taiw o, Oladele, 8 6 , 100 Taneja, G. R ., 181 Tasm ania, 10 ten K ortenaar, Neil, 8 8 , 1 1 0 , 1 2 8 , 134 Test, George A ., 2, 6 , 18, 3 2 - 3 3 , 4 5 ,

sexuality, Indian views of, 1 2 4 , 1 3 3 ,

54, 55, 56, 169, 176, 177,

134 Shakespeare, William Tim on o f A thens, 1 0 6 Sharpe, Jenny, 3 7 , 1 77

178 Thackerary, Bai, 160 Tharoor, Shashi, 1 Thatcher, M argaret, 116

Shaw, Bernard, 118

T h erou x, Paul, 4 6

Shelley, M ary

Thieme, Joh n , 4 4 , 4 5 , 5 5 , 5 6 , 6 8 - 6 9 , 75

Frankenstein, 5 6 - 5 9 , 179 Shenker, Israel, 4 4

Third W orld, the, 2, 7, 2 2 , 4 5 , 4 6 , 1 3 4 , 1 7 6 , 1 79

Shohat, Ella, 3, 176 “ Signifying M onkey,” 2 9

Tibbets, A. M ., 18

slavery, 5 5 , 5 8 , 6 2 , 7 5 , 179

Tiffin, Helen, 3, 17, 2 2 , 2 4 , 175

Slemon, Stephen, 2 - 3 , 12, 2 0 , 3 8 , 17 5

time

Smith, A dam , 1 32

in anthropology, 9 7

Smith, Zadie, 1 73

in colonial/postcolonial discourse,

Snyder, Jo h n , 6 , 17, 3 5 , 7 7 , 1 7 9

3

Socratic dialogue, 2 6

in satire, 9 - 1 1 , 2 7

Soderlind, Sylvia, 3, 4

Todorov, Tzvetan, 1 1 8 , 181

South A frica, 7, 11, 1 2 4

Toronto, 3 2

Soyinka, W ole, 1, 3 0 , 3 2 , 4 1 , 1 65 T h e Interpreters, 2 8 - 2 9

tourism , 5 3 , 5 8 , 178 Toynbee, Philip, 6 9 - 7 0

Index

213

tragedy, 1 5 - 1 6 , 7 4 , 1 0 1 , 1 0 2 , 1 1 4 ,

Younger, Paul, 128

180 transnationalism , 1 7 1 - 7 2

Zia ul-Haq, M uham m ed, 3 9 , 1 1 5 , 136

trickster, 2 9 5 5 , 6 2 , 6 6 , 1 7 7

Zimmer, Heinrich, 1 8 2 - 8 3

Trinidad, 6, 3 7 , 4 4 , 5 0 - 5 1 , 5 2 , 5 3 , 5 5 , 6 0 , 6 3 , 7 1 - 7 2 , 7 4 , 7 5 , 76 Tutuola, Amos, 83 United N ations, 12 United States of A m erica, 12, 15, 2 9 , 53,

5 6 , 5 8 , 76

universality, 14, 1 9, 2 0 , 2 2 , 2 8 , 3 0 , 33 Verstraete, Beert C ., 1 5 0 -5 1 violence, 1 6 , 4 4 , 1 2 6 , 1 3 8 - 4 0 , 1 5 2 , 156,160, 162, 167 Voltaire C andide, 56 W ain, Joh n , 4 2 W alcott, Derek, 4 2 , 78 Walsh, W illiam, 68 W anjala, Chris L ., 1 74 W augh, Evelyn, 4 6 A H an dful o f D ust, 1 0 1 , 118 Weiss, Tim othy F., 51 West Indies, the, 3, 7, 4 1 , 5 2 , 5 6 , 5 8 , 6 0 , 6 2 , 6 5 , 7 0 , 7 2 , 1 7 3 , 178 writers of, 5 7 W hite, H ayden, 8 9 - 9 0 , 1 0 2 , 1 6 5 , 173 W hite, Landeg, 4 2 , 4 6 , 5 6 , 6 3 , 6 4 , 74, 75,

77

W hite, Patrick, 1, 7 Voss, 21 Wijesinha, Rajiva, 1 Days o f D espair, 11 W illiams, Eric, 6 3 - 6 4 W ilson, Keith, 1 8 4 W orcester, David, 3 3 , 5 4 , 121 W orld Bank, 12 W orld War Two, 5 3 W ren, R obert M ., 7 9 , 8 6 , 8 8 , 9 2 , 9 8 , 181 wrestling, Indian, 1 3 3 - 3 4 W right, Derek, 85