Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations 9781138559950, 9780429467721

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POSTCOLONIAL WRITING IN THE ERA OF WORLD LITERATURE

This book explores the debates surrounding two dynamic fields – postcolonial studies and world literature. Contrary to many dominant narratives in critical theory, it asserts that as an analytical framework the idea of world literature is dead: the nineteenth-century ideal of world literature had always and already been embedded in colonial histories; and also because whatever promise that ideal held out has been exhausted by postcolonial Anglophone literature. Through fresh and incisive readings of the postcolonial canon and some of its most prominent authors like Rudyard Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the volume discusses how these Anglophone writings have used the banal and ordinary ideal of world literature to fashion out their own trajectories. Ambitious in scope, this book challenges many of the existing theoretical and literary frameworks and offers a radical reimagination of the fields. The volume, written in an accessible and lively prose, will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, critical theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature. Baidik Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. He was previously a Lecturer of English Literature at the University of Newcastle, UK (2006–10). He is the co-editor of The Postcolonial Gramsci (Routledge, 2012). His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Boundary 2, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Interventions, and Postcolonial Studies among other places. He also serves on the editorial board of the journal Postcolonial Studies.

“This deeply absorbing, brilliantly argued and theoretically complex study is a provocative contribution to the ‘world literature’ debate. Bhattacharya’s persuasive reading of the aesthetic legacies of empire suggests that world literature today is postcolonial Anglophone writing. This book should be required reading for scholars of modern global literatures.” – Supriya Chaudhuri, Professor Emerita, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India “In Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature, Baidik Bhattacharya challenges those who consider that World Literature has rendered the postcolonial outmoded: he resituates the debate to show that it is not a question of the one following the other or of simply being able to choose one over the other, showing that World Literature is itself an Orientalist construction. Its Western adherents remain blithely oblivious to its postcolonial condition, determined by the very problem that they imagine World Literature has allowed them to ignore. A powerful and persuasive intervention, a game-changer.” – Robert J.C. Young, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA

POSTCOLONIAL WRITING IN THE ERA OF WORLD LITERATURE Texts, Territories, Globalizations

Baidik Bhattacharya

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Baidik Bhattacharya The right of Baidik Bhattacharya to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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 permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-55995-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46772-1 (ebk) Typeset in Garamond by Apex CoVantage, LLC

F O R M Y PA R E N T S S WA P N A A N D B A N A B I R B H A T T AC H A RYA

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction: Poetics of Anglophone territories

1

1

Cunning of empire

35

2

Belated territories

67

3

Provincial aesthetics

97

4

Minority report

126

5

A short history of death

155

Index

183

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every book owes its existence to a group of interlocutors and wellwishers, and for a book that has been in gestation for long this list only increases in length. So is the case with this book. Over the years, I have been discussing parts of it with a broad range of friends, colleagues, and students, and, in hindsight, I can see how much I have benefitted from these conversations. My greatest intellectual debt is to my mentor Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. Her unassuming style, incisive scholarship, and personal generosity set the bar very high from the beginning; and this book, quite literally, would have been impossible without her continued support and inspiration. I have been extremely lucky to have some exceptional teachers and their mark, I hope, would be evident enough in the following pages – Rajeev Bhargava, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Bholanath Dasgupta, Ania Loomba, Franson D. Manjali, and Robert J.C. Young. I have also benefitted from my discussions over the years with a group of scholars who are not my teachers formally, but who have taught me a lot through their conversations and writings: Sibaji Bandyopadhay, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Supriya Chaudhuri, Tapati GuhaThakurta, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Udaya Kumar. I would like to thank the following for their careful reading and useful feedback on various parts of the book – G. Arunima, Sayandeb Chowdhury, Patricia Hayes, Aamir R. Mufti, Sambudha Sen, Bodhisattva Kar, Udaya Kumar, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Mallarika Sinha Roy, and Sanil V. I have benefitted immensely from their scholarship and generosity. All shortcomings, needless to say, are mine alone. The research for this book has been done at various libraries of the Universities of Oxford, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Delhi. My sincere thanks to all the brilliant library staff of these institutions.

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has been my good fortune to have wonderful colleagues all along my professional life, with whom I could share not only my ideas but also my excitement about the academic life. At the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, I was particularly fortunate to have Linda Anderson, Michael Pincombe, James Procter, Jennifer Richards, Neelam Srivastava, and Terry Wright as colleagues. At the University of Delhi, I am particularly indebted to Udaya Kumar and Sambudha Sen – they welcomed me in the intellectual life of Delhi and also provided the vital support system during difficult times. I also feel lucky to have the intellectual friendship of the following colleagues at Delhi: Tapan Basu, Rimli Bhattacharya, Shirshendu Chakrabarty, Nandini Chandra, Subarno Chattarji, Priya Kumar, Raj Kumar, Rochelle Pinto, and Ira Raja. It is almost impossible to sustain an academic life without friends, and I want to take this opportunity to thank them all – at Oxford: PrathimMaya Dora-Laskey, Stuti Khanna, Rayhan Rashid, Manav Ratti, Swagato Sarkar, Neelam Srivastava, Nowrin Tamanna, Joy Wang, and Manmay Zafar. And, in keeping with the international community of friends: P.K. Yasser Arafat, Prathama Banerjee, Anna Bernard, Sayandeb Chowdhury, Rajarshi Dasgupta, Veena Hariharan, Bodhisattva Kar, Aishwary Kumar, Premesh Lalu, Aditya Nigam, and Nivedita Sen. I was lucky enough to have Nitasha Devasar and Shoma Choudhury as my editors at Routledge. Their professional care and interest in the book has been exemplary. I would also like to thank all the support staff at Taylor and Francis for their help and support. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the two anonymous reviewers for Routledge, whose encouraging words and good-natured criticism of the manuscript have been extremely helpful in preparing the final version. The bedrock of my life has been my parents, Swapna and Banabir Bhattacharya. Their support has seen through not only this book but also much else in my life – this book is for them. The wider support network also includes my parents-in-law, Prabir Sinha Roy and the late Suhita Sinha Roy, and also my extended family in both Jalpaiguri and Kolkata. And finally, my partner in crime, Mallarika Sinha Roy, who is as much responsible for this book as I am. Sections from Chapter 2 were published in an earlier version in Novel: A Forum on Fiction (© Duke University Press).

ix

INTRODUCTION Poetics of Anglophone territories

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles, one a hack’s hired prose, I earn my exile. – Derek Walcott, “Codicil,” The Castaway and Other Poems (1965) I think that if all English literatures could be studied together, a shape would emerge which would truly reflect the new shape of the language in the world, [. . .] because the world language now also possesses a world literature, which is proliferating in every conceivable direction. – Salman Rushdie, “ ‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist” (1983)

This book is located at the crossroads of two dynamic fields – postcolonial studies and world literature studies. As the scholarship on world literature gets consolidated in recent years in explicit opposition to the postcolonial paradigm, I call for a very different reorientation of these two fields by suggesting that the idea of world literature – especially in its recent reincarnation through the works of the critics like David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova – has always and already been embedded in colonial/postcolonial histories. Postcoloniality is indeed the prehistory of this present celebration of world literature. This argument is fleshed out in this book through two different strands – first I show, through a close reading of the early career of the first major celebrity author of world literature, Rudyard Kipling, that the possibilities of Anglophone world literature were critically dependent on the structures and textures of the empire as a necessary ally; and second, I suggest that this energy of the world literature paradigm 1

INTRODUCTION

is best captured by postwar Anglophone authors like V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie. What this means is that the nineteenthcentury ideal of world literature has been exhausted through the global reach of Anglophone postcolonial literature, and, as a consequence, the world literature paradigm is dead. Contemporary postcolonial writing is indeed the last refuge of that ideal since authors like Naipaul, Coetzee, or Rushdie offer the most persuasive and empirical embodiment of the Goethean Weltliteratur. This book thus offers close readings of the postcolonial canon through the framework of world literature, and, at the same time, urges its readers to rethink both these paradigms in the light of different moments in history, through different and complex interlocking of texts, territories, and globalizations.1 In this Introduction, I offer two things – first an overview of the field within which this book seeks to make an intervention, and then I argue my case through a new conceptual model of Anglophone territories. Two maps In one of the iconic short fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” (1946), we meet a group of imperial cartographers obsessed with the exact correspondence between imperial geography and its map, and subsequently engaged in the arduous task of producing a map of the “Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” Earlier maps of provinces as large as cities or of the Empire that covered an entire province are deemed “unconscionable,” and not before long the Cartographers Guild finds the ideal mimetic match between the Empire and its map occupying the same space.2 Borges’s fabulous account of scientific “exactitude” provokes nervous laughter in his readers. Nervous, because it not only challenges one’s routine expectations from mapmaking – that maps should present diminutive versions of given territories through graphic and semiotic codes, or that maps are instruments of measurement, inquiry, and examination3 – but also forces one to confront the heart of imperial fantasy. Every modern empire uses maps to access governed territories and spreads color-coded blocks to stage, in the words of James Rennell, the Surveyor General of the British East India Company between 1764 and 1777, its “splendid territorial aggrandizement.”4 Such imperial fantasies to reach the “ends of the earth” through religious mission or secular occupation are by definition global and, like the last map in Borges, their “territorial aggrandizement” imagines mimetic exactitude not only to achieve a totalizing system of representation but also to 2

INTRODUCTION

overcome latent fears and anxieties, often expressed in gendered metaphors.5 Borges’s text recognizes this and the map that coincides with the empire is precisely such a cure as it tries, through its capaciousness, to know and represent every territorial detail of the empire and thus to assuage any fear of the unknown or the unfamiliar. The pseudoarchival framing of the fable – that it is indeed quoted from Suarez Miranda’s “Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658” and is not a ruse of imagination to which the proper name “Borges” may be appended – is thus an oblique homage to the long intertwined history of mapmaking and imperialism under the sign of modernity.6 But why should such a tale disturb its readers? Isn’t repetition meant to domesticate practices and habits, however outrageous, and make them available for everyday consumption? If this imperial fantasy indeed has been repeated so many times, and if it is such an integral part of the modern that we inhabit, it stands to reason, the fantasy should have been thoroughly naturalized in our collective retelling of imperial pasts. The fact that the tale still disturbs its readers is due to its foundational contradiction – it suggests, through deliberately exaggerated literalization of “exactitude,” that cartographic fidelity can be stretched endlessly until it matches the tangible space of the Empire. At the same time, it acknowledges that this imperial ambition is practically untenable. As the tale unfolds, one realizes that in its fancy to transform itself into a governmental apparatus and a perfect simulacrum, the map is transgressing the cardinal rule of mimesis – that is, mimesis as a relation works through difference and not identity. Nietzsche reminds us that between the two sides of a mimetic relationship “there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression” – hence no logical identity. What makes mimesis possible is “at most an aesthetic relation [ästhetisches Verhalten]” – or “a suggestive transference [andeutende Übertragung], a stammering translation [nachstammelnde Übersetzung] into a completely foreign tongue” – which requires difference as a necessary precondition.7 As long as the Empire and the map remain separate, both the imperial project and the text can hope to press this aesthetic relation in the service of the Empire. Even the gap between the two functions as active mediating force that does not stop at mere passive reproduction but pushes the boundaries of both realism and fantasy to vigorously occupy the space it aspires to represent. Thus “transference” and “translation” proliferate and the initial stammering gradually steadies itself into the tempting solidity of a foreign tongue. This seemingly endless expansion, however, faces its eventual crisis when the affective configuration of the map approaches its completion – as the foreign 3

INTRODUCTION

tongue gives way to familiar speech once again and as the map and the Empire turn out to be identical through isomorphic structure, mimesis falters. Borges/Miranda tells us that the “following Generations [. . .] saw that that vast Map was Useless [and] delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.”8 This rejection of the mimetic map marks a decisive break in the logic of mapmaking – a separation sets in between the two-dimensional space of the map as a portable artifact and the complex codification of spaces external to the map but recorded on its surface. Maps as artifacts have a limited sphere of signification and they work primarily as recording surface, while codes can, potentially at least, refer to the entire globe without violating the rules of mimetic representation. Since the Napoleonic La Description de l’Égypte of the early nineteenth century, imperial maps have relied upon this distinction to stage their “territorial aggrandizement.” Christian Jacob has described this new map as both “opaque” and “sovereign” – the latter because of the former – and has suggested that modern mapmaking ought to be seen as a “dynamic process whose effects, power, and meanings are to be found at the cross roads of production and reception, of encoding and decoding, of intentions and of expectations.”9 This seems to me a more accurate description of the logic that produces the sovereign opacity of imperial maps, making them independent of mimetic referentiality, but it says little about the relation between this logic and the material map or surface on which this logic is recorded. It says even less about the fate of the material space of the map or khartēs that has only shrunk since the days of the Cartographers Guild and their audacious experiment. It is possible to argue that the new opacity of its sign-system forces the imperial map to draw attention to its novelty of codification, to its astounding ability to abbreviate spatial extension within semiotic and graphic signs, at the expense of its material condition. Imperial cartography is thus forced to adopt a new set of representative relations, a whole new range of political assumptions, and of course a new map. Let me now turn to a second map to explore this newness – Joseph Conrad’s “shining map” of Africa under imperial occupation in Heart of Darkness (1899): [O]n one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the 4

INTRODUCTION

jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the center.10 Marlow the storyteller here reads a series of synchronic relations on the surface of the opaque and sovereign map and participates in the shared belief that such relations necessarily lead to territories that lie beyond the boundaries of the physical map. His reading strategy – structured around the nineteenth-century imperial ideology of mission civilisatrice that demanded this moral taxonomy and consequent hierarchization11 – does conform to his contemporary debates on imperialism, and he effortlessly invokes the opacity of the map to support his case. His immediate audience of sailors on the deck of Nellie and the eventual readership of the novella are supposed to share this preliminary condition of imperial mapmaking. However, the opacity of Conrad’s map is derived less from its ability to codify Africa, but from its intricate staging of European occupation. It is the insertion of Europe through the colors of red, orange, blue, purple, and yellow that makes Africa legible, and it is the comparative taxonomy of different colonial powers that ascribes meaning to African territories. Conrad’s map uses comparatism as a useful principle for territorial representation with the confidence that this comparative approach would reveal the truth of Africa in a way that would remain elusive to any study of its inert geological materiality or even of its lived realities. Superimposing Europe on Africa, and producing a “shining map” out of it, generates the narrative confidence of the new map. In fact, this imperial map is so confident of its narrative power and explanatory mechanisms that, unlike Borges’s fiction, it does not allow any playfulness to undermine its own authority or even its methods of organization. Instead, it boldly releases a new representational order based on certain protocols of visualization that is always and already dependent on one’s ability to decipher European codes strewn on the surface of a miniaturized map of Africa. I begin with these two maps because maps play a vital role in this book, in my search for a postcolonial literary history of world literature. But prior to that, these two maps effectively represent the two dominant trends in recent theories of world literature – a mimetic fantasy of mapping all literatures of the world within totalizing systems, and miniaturized scrutiny that makes sense of the world by replicating Europe across its face. In the first version, maps are mobilized as technologies of inquiry and documentation, with the target of maximum 5

INTRODUCTION

“territorial aggrandizement.” As complex and capacious modalities of record keeping, these maps produce “cognitive landscapes” which are redolent with, in Emily Apter’s words, “reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability.”12 Such notions of equivalence, coupled with a vulgarized idea of perfect translatability across genres, locations, and periods, create the typical raison d’être for such maps, turning literary histories into perfect reflections of the putative world. Within the cultural economy of such historical narratives, it is often proposed that the world and its literatures occupy the same space and employ the same principle of territorial contiguity to organize their respective material and symbolic integrity. If this indeed were the case, it follows that they will reinforce each other and represent each other within the same system of mimetic reliability. What is even more, because of this inherent homology between texts and territories, literature, like commodity or biological lifeform, will reveal its essential universality across space and time only when its whole being is integrated through a Borgesian style of totalizing mapmaking and when every individual component of it is made subservient to the same system of representation. In their spaciousness, such literary histories aim for what Fredric Jameson describes as the wrong ideal for the genre – that is, they try to “elaborate some achieved and lifelike simulacrum of [their] supposed object.”13 As a result, there is little scope for difference or resistance here, since the central simulacral paradigm overrides any possibility of disparity and instead relies heavily on complete transparency and translatability between archives. If the first narrative remains busy building totalizing models, the second one employs different versions of what Benedict Anderson calls “Eurocentric provincialism,” which relies on the central “conceit that everything important in the modern world originated in Europe.”14 Hence in this second frame cartographic representations of world literatures are organized around a set of theoretical assumptions and cultural borders that ultimately refer back to a monochromatic image of Europe. Even when the pressure of the archive is enormous, or when the corpus is unwieldy for a single explanatory narrative, such histories of world literature struggle tendentiously to assert the primacy of a European meridian, or a literary space, or at least a predominantly European form to organize everything else on the multiple axes of derivation, assimilation, negotiation, and translation. Similar to the Conradian “shining map,” literary histories in this mode of narration assume a shared culture of reading that can be manipulated through strategic invocation of European codes, and can be proposed as a generalized 6

INTRODUCTION

field representing existing realities of literature as world encompassing phenomenon. The principle of universal literature is first articulated as a European event which gradually annexes more and more territories and transforms literary history into a global narrative; it matters little within this framework that European events might have had more complex histories of influence and alterity, or that European imperialism might have played a coercive role in this process of universalization – all it can offer is a fundamental arrangement and calculation of literary landscapes where every discrete field will resemble the next one and will thus offer itself in neat tables of comparison. In our search for new literary history for contemporary times, we shall come across many more similarly oppressive visions – both old and new – and we shall need the singular experience of laughter in the true Borgesian style to wade through or even steer clear of their empty fecundity. Against such fantastic visions of literary history, this book offers another map – neither Borgesian nor Conradian, this map rather is a cartographic equivalent to the space and cultural trajectory of Anglophony, to the history of Anglophone territories in different phases and stages of globalization. This map is available in two parts – the first part surveys imperial standardization of cultural practices since the nineteenth century and records how cultural codes were translated into and made visible within the hegemonic space of English. This part is closely related to the expansion of global capitalism as part of imperial occupation and is particularly attentive to the knowledge paradigms which accompanied capital’s global ambition. On the other hand, the second part is geared towards the present moment of globalization and its configuration of cultural resources around the abstract axis of universal exchange and translatability, and it is particularly mindful of how the imperial legacies have been distributed across global cultural formations through progressive fragmentation and fragility. In this second part, Anglophony emerges as the receptacle of history’s debris but also as the beginning point for new and unpredictable connections between historical forces and current configurations of global capital, their axiomatic calculations and social organizations. These two parts, however, are joined through a hinge, as it were; and that hinge is the powerful idea of death. Death in this cartographic representation is not an absolute termination, or not the typical edge of the map, but a site that telescopes relations and interactions between the two parts of the map of Anglophony. It contains historical genealogies and contemporary configurations, territories and temporalities, and codes and characters. The logic of this book, likewise, is organized in two sections – the first section explores histories 7

INTRODUCTION

of colonial governance and imperial fictions to trace the emergence of the world-literature paradigm in the nineteenth century. But this history, for all its eloquence and vitality, I submit, is dead. The second section of the book suggests how this earlier moment has become ordinary and banal in contemporary globalization, making world literature a constitutive part of Anglophone postcolonial writing. This history is explored through different locations – South Asia, the Caribbean, South Africa, Britain, and so on – and through the oeuvres of V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, among others. Through these two maps and their mutual relationship, I suggest in the following chapters that world literature as a paradigm to account for the globalized realities of literature is dead; the only body of writing that can claim to reconfigure the legacies of this nineteenth-century dream, and can sustain such a claim historically, is Anglophone postcolonial writing. Maps are especially useful for anchoring my argument as they offer effective ways of plotting intellectual and political contexts for discursive paradigms. World literature in the nineteenth century is a case in point. When Goethe in his conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann in1827 and Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto in 1848 referred to “world literature” as an immanent phenomenon of their contemporary global history, they had a world in mind that could have been represented on a map.15 But it was a map with a history. As Mikhail Bakhtin suggests, the “world” became tangible for Goethe and his age because of its intense historicization during the eighteenth century. A new comprehension of the world took shape around this time through a host of “great discoveries, new journeys, and acquired knowledge” and, as a consequence, through greater “concretization and visual clarification of the new real world and its history.”16 Since the second half of the eighteenth century, through increased interaction with the colonies and through the daily business of governance, cultural practices on both sides of the colonial divide went through radical changes and a set of codes emerged to make sense of this newness. Literature as a recognizable category or even as an object of knowledge – whether as counter-discourse to modernity or as its extension – was such a code; it was not only fashioned within this global context of imperial cultures, it was indeed designed to reflect this globality in its very organization. The passage from “literature” to “world literature” in the nineteenth century was thus accomplished within this new condensed visibility of the world and was mediated by colonial histories. When I suggest that this vision of world literature, conceived as part of an ever-expanding imperial imaginary, is dead, I again invoke another cartographic image. 8

INTRODUCTION

What has died, I argue, is the emphasis on the singularity of world literature; or, rather, the insistence that like the imperial map world literature should also embrace territorial contiguity in order to be worldly and efficacious, across cultures. Contemporary efforts in resuscitating the earlier narrative miss this imperial core, and misrecognizes the nineteenth-century reliance on the empire for material as well as symbolic organization as an innocent roadmap to chart the worldly trajectories of literature in our times, albeit in updated versions. My suggestion in this book is that it is the temporal-territorial entanglement of Anglophone postcoloniality, of Anglophony itself, that offers a more nuanced cartographic foundation for the latest stage of globalization and its myriad circuits of organizing capital, labor, migration, information, images, and so on. Anglophone territories are schizophrenic with divided loyalties and multiple traditions, with ambivalent responses to national canons and strict aesthetic norms; and within this multiplicity, I argue, we need to anchor our search for a postcolonial literary history of world literature. Anglophone as world One of my central arguments in this book is that to track the trajectories of Anglophone postcolonial writing as world literature, or even to re-conceptualize postcoloniality, we need to move away from the “scriptural economy” of stable canons and enter the uneven zones of Anglophone territories produced through, and hence modeled on, imperial cartography.17 Anglophone, admittedly, is an imprecise historical designation as it refers to ethnicity and orality and not to techniques that secure stability for literary texts. Even at that, as the OED points out, it is both derivative (“modelled on a Frenchlexical item”) and of recent origin with its early usages dating back to the first half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, it has the merit of facilitating this shift from the canon to the territory since the very appellation of Anglophony conjures a map not of English or England but of imperial geography.18 This map is crucial for my argument since one can locate within it the typically postcolonial paradox Jacques Derrida calls the “monolingualism of the other” that distributes “disorder of identity” (trouble d’identite) and “abiding ‘alienation’” (alienation a demeure) within erstwhile colonies as inescapable conditions of belonging.19 Under the “threatening face and features of colonial hegemony,” the paradox unfolds through contradictory possibilities of inhabiting only one language and never inhabiting only one language – in either case the 9

INTRODUCTION

language in question being other’s or another language.20 This is of course a schizophrenic paradox at a formal level. As Derrida explains with reference to his own tenuous Franco-Maghrébin identity, this paradoxical and yet unavoidable monolingualism for colonized people was constituted through colonial state apparatuses like schools, army, citizenship, and censorship and our present depoliticized identitarianism – which thrives on “certain fragmentation of suffering” instead of addressing “general injustice or domination,” as Wendy Brown puts it21 – is partly a global inheritance of it. When related to territory, however, this cartographic underpinning of Anglophony leads us to different directions – not only to its monolingual canonicity but also to its fragmentation, mutation, and diminished codification. Of course one needs to distinguish between territory and territoriality at this point. As Stuart Elden points out, while the former is a germane ensemble of “politics-power-place-practices” maintained and defended through continuous human labor, the latter – i.e. territoriality – represents an abstract quality of land often subsumed, at least in the modern era, under national sovereignty. Territory does not remain an inert physical category for long, and under colonialism its properties are progressively appropriated by the colonial state in its push for global domination. During this colonial expansion, Elden argues, the concept of territory goes through a fundamental transformation as the older “political-economic notion of land” gives way to a more dynamic idea of territory as “political technology” across empires.22 This early modern mutation of territory into an essential part of power and domination remains valid even today, and Anglophone territories as political technologies allow similar codification of writing and territory – a simulation that functions by gradually dissociating itself from particular territorialities on the one hand and by instituting independent protocols of writing and form-giving on the other. Within the sovereign realm of postcolonial writing, one thus encounters new disciplinary rules and conventions that code and decode textual representations without reducing them to specific territoriality. Let me anticipate a possible objection to my argument at this stage – one could possibly say that the privileging of Anglophony in my argument is unwarranted, and that similar cases can be made for Francophony or Lusophony as well. While I am not opposed to the idea of somewhat similar fate of other territories, my emphasis on Anglophony is guided by two historical reasons. First, the British Empire was the largest territorial empire in modern history, and as a consequence Anglophony has the largest reach as its natural legacy. This is borne out by the sheer 10

INTRODUCTION

number of speakers of English and also by the volume of Anglophone publishing. If we are to think of world literature as an empirical reality, as many recent works do, Anglophony is our best bet. And second, more crucial, is the fact that some of the foundational mechanisms of world literature emerged through the British imperial encounter with its colonies. I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that the paradigm of comparatism and its firm anchoring in comparative literary studies was a result of colonial governance in South Asia.23 Similar arguments have been made by Aamir Mufti and Siraj Ahmed using the archives of British India.24 The point I want to make is that for my purpose in tracing overlapping histories of the empire and literary canons, or to think of something like postcolonial world literature, I have to anchor this argument through the dynamic space of Anglophony. What I have called Anglophone territories is a recognition of these histories, and as such, it is both an empirical category and a critical guide. If I privilege it here in my discussion, I do so in response to specific histories and not to belittle other literary traditions. To explore these myriad histories of Anglophony, I want to use the shift from territory as endogenous expansion to territory as regimes of codification as my entry point into this revisionist historiography. But how does one imagine newness in literary history? How does one, so to speak, stand outside of and survey literary territories and document their topographic codification? One answer has been provided by a good number of postcolonial texts, with their strategic implication of multiple locations and heterogeneous selves, or with the conscious invocation of the outsider through various tropes of migration, diaspora, exile, and so on.25 Situating themselves within the unenviable position of non-belonging, postcolonial authors have often surveyed multiple territories that shaped their texts under the long shadow of empire and have thus re-deployed a primarily modernist stratagem to represent the postcolonial condition. The other answer, again suggested by a host of postcolonial texts, is developed in what Fredric Jameson calls “national allegory.” Against the postmodern fragmentation of the West (or the First World), he argues, “[a]ll third-world texts are necessarily [. . .] national allegories” since “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”26 The sheer proliferation of this deliberately provocative position in postcolonial literary studies shows its inherent temptation as well as its efficacy to represent a certain codification of postcolonial political writing. And in yet another move, as Achilles Mbembe shows vis-à-vis African writings, a “collective imaginaire” has been posed as 11

INTRODUCTION

the postcolonial subject of reflection that willy-nilly appropriates the nation as an arbitrary yet given outline.27 Territory, in other words, has been one of the central conceptual tools through which the postcolony has been imagined for a long time, and, despite their mutual tensions, all three models collectively reinforce the will to anchor postcolonial politics in territorial practices. In recent years, however, these codes have looked doubtful, if not outright irrelevant, in the wake of the alleged “death” of the postcolonial paradigm and in the renewed attempts made by both “Comparative Literature” and “World Literature” to offer themselves as disciplines more in tune with the realities of contemporary globalization. In a millennial spirit, both these disciplines have been proposed as more adept in addressing the realities of globalization as an ensemble of events and flows defying any restrictive concept of national literary canon, and thus more appropriate candidates to account for the global phenomenon called literature. To be fair, this tension between the nation and the world as territorial framings for literature is not entirely new, either as disciplinary claims or as sociological descriptions. Indeed, since the nineteenth century both comparative literature and world literature have made identical claims and have put forward somewhat similar reasoning. Goethe, for instance, voiced the tension in his well-known claim about the advent of Weltliteratur when he told his disciple Eckermann that “[n] ational literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of World literature is at hand, and every one must strive to hasten its approach.”28 For Goethe, “world literature” comprised various national literatures and circulated through translation within an unbounded world market; the model was of a “mercantile world literature,” captured in his analogy of “circulating coins.”29 One needs to place this formulation against the aftermath of Napoleonic wars and growing national consciousness across German states and principalities in the early nineteenth century. The same national literature that he termed “unmeaning” (nicht viel sagen) here served as the foundation for national consciousness, at least since Herder and more forcefully in Fichte. Indeed, it would be important to place Goethe’s claims against Fichte’s declaration in Addresses to the German Nation (1808) just a couple of decades ago that “even if our political independence were lost [in the wake of Napoleonic invasion] we should still keep our language and our literature, and thereby always remain a nation.”30 This tension between a politically charged nation and a market-driven world, or between Fichte and Goethe, is a legacy of the nineteenth century that world literature had to negotiate at every step of its unfolding in the last few decades as well. 12

INTRODUCTION

My suggestion in this book is that Anglophony offers a way of circumventing this theoretical impasse through its strategic invocation of colonial histories. In its canonical monolinguality, Anglophony refers to imperial pasts and maps that necessarily stretch beyond national(ist) imaginations, and in its anthropological fragmentation it remains steadfastly attached to local histories smaller than a national canon. In either case, the map invoked is an aggregate of territorial codification emerging out of not only standardized English but also out of the worlds of patois, pidgin, creole, argot, and myriad other forms of disorder and vernacularization. Within this map – which is, simultaneously, greater and smaller than a nation – it matters little if the frame for literary history is the nation because of its genealogy through a much longer history of globalization and also because of its ability to turn this history into territorial coding. “Anglophone territories” in this book thus functions as shorthand for this long history of coding and political technology, with the proviso that this history can be accessed territorially. Furthermore, by joining imperial history and territory, Anglophone also releases literary history beyond the globe of globalization and the world of world literature. Anglophone as alternate world does conform to the Heideggerean notion of “worlding” as it is realized through and embodied in language;31 but, more crucially, it offers a historical corrective to the largely dehistoricized solicitation of the world in much of recent critical theory by suggesting that such a language has its roots in imperial cartography. Whereas the imagination of the world has mostly been carried through models borrowed from different disciplines, and while such schematic reproductions conceptualize the world with Europe at its center, Anglophone offers the possibility of different and divergent coordinates to map a world that comes into being primarily through literary language and within a clearly delimited territory. To further explore this central concept of the Anglophone as a world unto itself, we need to now turn to its complex architecture and its heterogeneous histories. Primary coordinates The world of Anglophony is formed through two broad types of relations: the canonical and the anthropological. The canonical partly functions in its traditional sense of course – as the “constitution and distribution of cultural capital” based on an “imagined totality” of texts32 – but, crucially enough, it is not restricted by bounded communities like the nation, nor reduced to stratified populations like class alone. Indeed, 13

INTRODUCTION

the cultural capital of the canonical, as I see it, is dispersed beyond national frontiers or even historical periods within a loosely held network of texts and institutions, and achieves its unity by referring back to a (real or imagined) land as authorizing its very being. As a body of writing, the canonical, over ages, achieves its density and capaciousness through a sovereign system of representation and develops its independent logic to manage palimpsestic sedimentations or repetitions without any marked internal difference. Thus the canonical, in its mimetic audacity, saturates Anglophone territories, pours itself over every crevice of its surface, and shapes itself as a replica of such territories. Within its rather ill-defined borders (which, again, is a typical characteristic of modern empires), the canonical arranges its own rules of hierarchy and distribution, values and cultural norms, and finally its own methods of regulation. Any number of authors from the Anglophone postcolonial world – Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Anita Desai, Derek Walcott, and many more – would testify to this paradigmatic presence of the canon, and would also acknowledge the rather ironic fact that the canon they often disparaged in their later life was indeed the force that goaded them into writing in the first place.33 It would be erroneous, however, to imagine a singular source for the canonical across Anglophone territories – as these authors testify, in certain cases the canon is maintained through tangible frames like personal libraries handed down as family heirloom, school curricula, institutional support of various kinds, the publishing industry, and literary awards, while in other cases the canon is held together by more diffused notions of taste, prestige, judgment, and so forth. All these apparatuses are mobilized and put in action when one writes in or about Anglophone territories – writing, in this sense, is a profoundly territorial act. However, the neatness of the canonical is punctuated by the second force I call the anthropological. It seeks to represent the local, often as the other of canonical forms and values, and resides in the fissures of monolinguality. With the anthropological, Anglophone texts invent ways of entering into and extending colonial histories, of engaging with the larger narrative of uneven history and unequal civilizations. Through its opacity, the anthropological grows in thickness by exploring relations between things and objects within synchronous time, without textual precedence or cultural attestation, and gradually fills up the gaps of Anglophone territories. My point is not that postcolonial writing repeats, consciously or otherwise, every convention of colonial 14

INTRODUCTION

anthropology tout court and thus provides a new lease of life to its often racist/Orientalist assumptions. Rather, my contention is that within the anthropological, Anglophone writing finds the most productive site to negotiate with the vestiges of colonial history. It is important to note for my purpose here that once these textual tools are removed from their specific colonial origins, they are rearranged and reattached to new organizations which take the anthropological into places where the colonial ethnographer never ventured. In this new avatar, the anthropological initiates new strategies of joining texts with territories, shaping not only the postcolonial subject but even the very concept of the postcolony in decisive ways. Anthropology thus appears in my argument under an essential duality – as a disciplinary site closely attached to colonial institutions and as a contemporary force resisting the sweeping drive of the canon. This is most prominently visible in the standardization of the concept of literature, which was fashioned through the powerful confluence of ethnology-race-philology in the nineteenth century, through the exigencies of colonial governance, and which thus bears traces of this original resolution. When this history is revived in Anglophone writing, however, this colonial moment becomes necessarily fragmented and diffused, making literature perform roles that are not part of its disciplinary history. Anthropologization of literature, in other words, remains one of the central paradigms for my postcolonial history of world literature. It would be counterproductive, however, to imagine the canonical and the anthropological as mutually exclusive, as inhabiting two different worlds that hardly meet or overlap. On the contrary, the steady traffic between the two fashions the characteristic topoi of Anglophone territories. In conceptualizing this relationship, and its histories, I find what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “Oedipal form” ( forme œdipienne) in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) particularly useful.34 They are of course referring primarily to Freud’s “Oedipus complex,” and thus in a contentious move posing Freudian psychoanalysis as an ally of modern capitalism, but they are also suggesting a much larger role for Oedipus within colonialism. In my reading, the central clue provided by Deleuze and Guattari is the very structure of Oedipus – it is a mechanism of repression based on a fiction; or, better still, it is a mechanism that joins a canonical narrative from Greek antiquity with the anthropological reality of the family (“holy familialism” or what they often disparagingly call “daddy-mommy-me”). Within this oedipal fiction of modernity, one discovers the typical narrative strategy of capitalism keen on breaking all the frontiers of time and space, indeed of any 15

INTRODUCTION

form of difference, to produce a global network through the canonical and the anthropological. Within Anglophone territories, similarly distinct canonical forms proliferate to code anthropological realities within recognizable “literary” conventions, and ensure that texts produced in this fashion circulate through available circuits. Oedipalization of anthropological heterogeneity is at the heart of this canonical narrative strategy and is also responsible for the emergence of Anglophone writing as a global phenomenon. Deleuze and Guattari’s model is particularly helpful because of the way they propose a relationship between ethnography and capitalism, and subsequently offer a history of what I call ethnocapitalism. In what I think is their most innovative historiographical move in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this history is accessible only through capitalism and in capitalism. They do so because this is how capitalism poses its anterior and accesses its own history, and also because this history is available in the capitalist move of “deterritorialization” or the “generalized decoding of flows,” which they claim “reveals a contrario the secret of all these [earlier historical] formations” (AO, 153). In its role as the relative limit to all other social formations prior to it (schizophrenia is the absolute limit), capitalism represents these historical stages as reliant on what Deleuze and Guattari think a deceptive ethnological logic of exchange and circulation. By exposing this ethnological core of capitalism’s deterritorialization, they first anchor the motor of history in capitalism, and then through this very act of anchoring propose a distinctly ethnographic model of history. They are not suggesting, as Claude Lévi-Strauss does most forcefully, that ethnology extends historical inquiries along a diachronic cut or that methodologically there is very little to distinguish between their respective subjects, goals, and techniques.35 Indeed, this would have been an improbable point in their argument since, as François Dosse points out, one of the central ambitions of Anti-Oedipus was to develop a political anthropology against contemporary trends of structuralism which Deleuze and Guattari found both weak and inadequate.36 As part of their political anthropology, Deleuze and Guattari rather propose that capitalism’s entry point into history is structured by ethnographic conventions; that is to say, capitalism not only relies on ethnography as the means to narrate its anteriority or its alterity but, in the process, recommends ethnography as the exclusive mode through which such narratives can be articulated. Whether for the European past or colonial present, capitalism establishes ethnographic conventions as precondition for historical legibility, with the additional rider that colonies can 16

INTRODUCTION

overcome this ethnographic pre-history and can enter the charmed realm of history proper once they also embrace the capitalist mode of social organization.37 Ethnocapitalism is able to investigate and propose historical models not because it chronologically follows those phases and hence can exploit the unwarranted benefit of hindsight. It is successful because of its very being or rather because of its constitution that requires it to deterritorialize available codes and then to reterritorialize them further, and thus to expose the architecture of earlier codes. But the presence of Oedipus within its very structure – as an “interior colony [colonie intérieure]” (AO, 170) – does not allow it to be completely independent of earlier codes and histories; indeed, Oedipus forces capitalism to be polyvocal and inherently comparative where neoterritories are formed with a mix of what capital produces (axioms) and what it encounters as external to it (codes). Anti-Oedipus mobilizes literature as part of this history, as one of its principal constitutive elements. It is important to note that literary texts form an intricate web in Deleuze and Guattari’s argument – the opening section cites two literary texts (Georg Büchner’s Lenz and Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies) as illustrations of schizophrenia; D.H. Lawrence makes regular appearance first as a counter-figure to Freudian psychoanalysis, and then in the second half of the book, along with Henry Miller, as allies in the constitution of schizoanalysis; and the figure of Antonin Artaud, at crucial junctures, embodies and performs the vitality of schizophrenia. But when they invoke the literary as a historical force, they make a curious case for Anglo-American literature from the last two centuries as performing something akin to capitalist deterritorialization, as opening up the possibility of schizophrenic radicalism only to mark its eventual failure: Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs [des hommes savent partir, brouiller les codes, faire passer des flux, traverser le désert du corps sans organs]. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so [ils ne cessent pas de la rater]. (AO, 132–33)38 17

INTRODUCTION

Codes and territories I want to claim two different yet related legacies of this model of ethnocapitalism for my purpose here. First, I want to claim this oedipal configuration of the canonical and the anthropological with its historical roots in capitalism as the ground for Anglophone territories. Instead of taking capitalism as a global phenomenon and then building literary models as analogous formations on it, as Franco Moretti does, the concept of ethnocapitalism allows us to investigate the narrative strategies that accompanied capitalist expansion. The difference between Moretti’s increasingly idiosyncratic models that obscure historical specificities of both capitalism and literature and this revisionist model needs to be emphasized because the historical force of capitalism functions quite differently here. Deleuze and Guattari point out that despite the planetary ambition of their history (which I want to use as a theoretical underpinning for Anglophone territories) they do not propose a universal history as commonly understood, and by insisting on the territorial nature of their model they indeed offer internal checks against any universalizing drive. This is partly the reason why they argue that their brand of l’histoire universelle is “contingent, singular, ironic, and critical [contingente, singulière, ironique et critique],” all at the same time (AO, 140). Take the third section, “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men,” as an example. Its foundational model is borrowed from Lewis H. Morgan and Friedrich Engels, and this debt is signposted in the very title of this section. When they rework the model, however, they employ capitalism as a template for retrospective narration of history, or use capitalism as the negation of all the earlier social formations. By proposing this retrospective account, they not only mark capitalism as the inescapable position within which all narrations of history in the present has to take shape, they also use the same capitalist condition as a necessary corrective to the stagist and evolutionary thrust of their original sources. Unlike Morgan and Engels, they do not suggest that the passage between different stages of history is both pre-determined and universal; rather, they classify the capitalist condition as responsible for universalizing its own pre-history. Thus when Deleuze and Guattari suggest three different stages of history, they do so to emphasize three different modes of territorial organization and not to recommend the grand narrative of linear development of history – they do so, in other words, within the condition of capitalism. Anthropology, especially in its colonial incarnation, is the disciplinary name for this narrative strategy. What really augmented the status 18

INTRODUCTION

of the discipline in the colonial world was its close collaboration with governance, and hence its illustrious role in what Ann Stoler calls “epistemic principles” or “ways of knowing” that created the reality of the colonies for effective governance.39 This relationship between early anthropology and colonialism is well recognized and does not need rehearsing here. What needs to be underscored, however, is the range of porous borders between anthropological knowledge of the colonies and other disciplinary formations like philology, cartography, philosophy, social psychology, history, and literature, and also how this porosity shaped their shared narrative strategies and discursive norms. In this book, I am particularly interested in exploring how “literature” came to be recognized both as an object and as a set of disciplinary practices – which were standardized in their modern forms through the colonial encounter – and how it became part of the ethnocapitalist narratives since the eighteenth century. My point in this book broadly is that the notion of “literature” regularly invoked as part of world literature was neither a universally understood description nor was it of purely European bequeath; rather, the modern notion of literature as literature was produced as part of this ethnocapitalist drive of codifying cultural practices across the colonial divide. This is partly why it is inimical to see literature as purely a counter-discourse to modernity (as Michel Foucault does in The Order of Things) or to imagine one single aesthetic regime for literature under the sign of modernity (as Jacques Rancière proposes in Mute Speech and elsewhere).40 Both these positions obfuscate the colonial genealogies of the modern concept of literature and also its deeply entrenched role in ethnocapitalism.41 The second legacy I want to claim from ethnocapitalism and its oedipal core is the emphasis on present configurations of capitalist history as revealing the secrets of past codes and regimes. Within contemporary Anglophone writing one can locate the full range of world literature because of its emphasis on the anthropologization of literature, the way literature has been brought under a regime of ethnographic codes to make its being stable yet porous. Anthropology here is not strictly an heir of colonial governance (though its origin and early history remain important), but is more like a site that enables comparison. Talal Asad has suggested that the most distinctive aspect of modern anthropology as a discipline is the comparison of embedded concepts (representations) between societies differently located in time or space. The important thing in this comparative analysis is not their origin 19

INTRODUCTION

(Western or non-Western), but the forms of life that articulate them, the powers they release or disable.42 Comparatism for Asad is a way of avoiding moralistic judgments on social phenomena; comparison rather is an opening into the discursive materiality of power and culture, into different regimes that articulate these concepts differently and often with very significant consequences. This comparativity is what makes Anglophone writing a site of similar investigations into different forms and vocations of the literary, as well as a site where the very difference and its implications can be articulated. Contemporary Anglophone writing stretches these earlier codes of literature beyond their territorial borders and reveal their inner structures and orientations in this very act of broadening their territorial reach. In this new territoriality, Anglophony articulates itself as an inherently comparative paradigm, with the power to gather together different literary traditions and codes and articulate them together within its very being. What I argue here is partly derived from Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that the presence of Oedipus at the heart of modern capitalist culture makes it inherently comparative. They also suggest that instead of submitting to the powers of Oedipus and instead of linking disparate historical instances through single explanatory systems like Oedipus (or world literature), anthropological comparatism allows one to segregate cultural phenomena across territories and also to pay attention to their respective domains of circulation (AO, 181–3). At the same time, however, what I propose is close to Gayatri Spivak’s call for a “new Comparative Literature” in Death of a Discipline (2003). What interests me most in this formulation is her reliance on “depoliticized” interdisciplinarity for the new discipline and the new territory, and her deliberate deployment of anthropological vocabulary to urge a mutual “thickening” of Comparative Literature and Area Studies.43 As she puts it, this has three interrelated steps: first, the “politics of the production of knowledge in area studies (and also anthropology and the other ‘human sciences’) can be touched by a new Comparative Literature, whose hallmark remains a care for language and idiom”; for her the way out of a “restricted disciplinary circuit” is “open-plan fieldwork”; and finally, the practitioners of Area Studies need to approach the “language of the other” as more than “field” language, which would, in turn, rejuvenate the “field of literature.”44 It seems to me that what she has in mind is analogous to the anthropological comparatism I have charted above, since her suggestions vis-à-vis Area Studies and its 20

INTRODUCTION

enriching effects on literary readings may as well be applied to anthropology. Not only that, her calculated emphasis on the depoliticization of disciplines in order to nullify their problematic genealogy through old imperial formations (anthropology in our case) or Cold War politics (Area Studies in her argument) is a conscious disaggregation of disciplinary practices from political incentive so that those practices can be put to very different or even unpredictable use. Admittedly, I am much more interested in the logic of comparison in Spivak’s text than in her proposal for a new Comparative Literature. It is a response to contemporary globalization and to the ever-expanding crisis in the humanities. But the real purpose of her comparatism is not to make it more market-worthy but to target what she describes as “literatures of the world through English translations organized by the United States” available for global consumption.45 Globalization, as she points out, is the imposition of the “same system of exchange everywhere” and the transformation of the “literatures of the global South” to “an undifferentiated space of English rather than a differentiated political space” is a related phenomenon.46 The virtual globe of globalization and the thin world of “World Literature in English” are in effect like two peas in a pod. Ethnological thickening of disciplines and territories, on the other hand, helps expand the domain of literature – in Spivak’s formulation, by introducing subaltern cultures of the world; and in my case, by acknowledging the “multivocal and polysemous” constitution of Anglophone territories. As I have been suggesting above – and this runs through the entire book as one of the guiding principles – that postcolonial Anglophone writing represents an open-ended future for English by introducing not only Anglophony (which is, unlike its written counterpart, necessarily multivocal) but also the notion of anthropological comparatism to signpost the polysemous nature of the corpus. The othering that Spivak seeks through intense language training, I suggest in the second section of the book (Chapters 2, 3, and 4), is already present in Anglophony, shaping these territories through intense struggle between given canonical English and other forms of linguistic subalternity (creoles, pidgins, vernaculars, argots, patois, and so on with all their idiomatic peculiarities). These struggles not only survive in the body of the corpus but also decisively characterize it. World literature today Recent discussions on world literature since the 1990s have been conducted, as I have suggested at the outset, using two broadly defined 21

INTRODUCTION

models or maps – mimetic systems to account for all literatures of the world and miniaturized replication of Europe to map whatever lies beyond its discursive limits. The real impetus behind the present currency of world literature is the trinity figure of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova.47 Though the field has expanded considerably over the last decade, these three have managed to gain a canonical status that, as Eric Hayot notes, remains unparalleled.48 My endeavor in this book is to draw attention to critical moments in their work and also to subsequent scholarship reliant on them, where their dismissal of key colonial events and histories have resulted in distorted histories and have inadvertently repeated many of the Orientalist/ colonial assumptions on culture and literature. Damrosch, for instance, defines world literature as encompassing “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” with the qualification that “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture.”49 Elsewhere Damrosch argues that the task of writing a history of such universal world literature is confronted by three major impediments – namely, definition (what is world literature?), design (what will be the concrete shape of such a history?), and purpose (what purpose will it serve?). Having established the core of world literature through circulation and active readership, he generalizes it even further to suggest that literary production had always been supra- or subnational before its nationalization in the nineteenth century and thus found circuits of circulation that had little respect for national boundaries. Once this universal mode of circulation is established, and once translation is put in place as the central motor, almost everything becomes part of the world literary canon and hence proper object for historical inquiry. Hence, questions of design and purpose are answered in the following words: A global history of world literature will allow us to situate our particular interests within the larger frame of the world’s literary production. Far from ceasing to be important subjects of study, national literatures will be seen in new ways, as will the individual authors who work within and across them.50 Damrosch’s assumption of universal literature is stated more programmatically in Moretti’s myriad model making using biological sciences, enlisting in the process not only classics like Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) but more recent works on genetic variations and 22

INTRODUCTION

gene migration.51 The resultant insight is that like genetic and biological universality, which recognizes identity within and across species, literature is a universal system. As he puts it, “the universe is the same, the literatures are the same,” and hence they can be studied using models of biological singularity.52 For Pascale Casanova, on the other hand, literature remains a European phenomenon with its unusual ability to annex more and more territories since the eighteenth century, eventually bringing the entire world under its sway. Even in more recent accounts, this exclusively European history of literature, or what Jacques Derrida calls its inherent “latinity,” persists somewhat undisturbed and unconcealed.53 Partly, this universalization of literature as a recognizable object beyond and despite local specificities is a theoretical requirement for comparatism to take place, because without this initial move the project of world literature in its current form would not have taken off. More crucially, however, this is an attempt, as Casanova admits most candidly, to undermine the overt political relationship between literature and history assumed by “post-colonialism.” In order to steer clear of this errant postcolonial “external criticism” (external to the text, as she puts it), she prefers to concentrate on the “internal” elements of literary texts like “actual aesthetic, formal or stylistic characteristics that actually ‘make’ literature.”54 Such an undertaking cannot but start with the necessary assumption of the universal Latinity of literature. Across the board there seems to emerge a consensus that the meaning of literature with its pure European origin has universal purchase and hence it must be seen as the first step towards its global journey or its eventual transformation into world literature. Only in recent years, and particularly in the works of Spivak, Apter, Aamir Mufti, and Pheng Cheah, among others, have appeared alternative models and concepts attentive to the long history of colonialism and responsive to contemporary postcoloniality.55 Mufti, for instance, has suggested that any history of world literature needs to situate its “variety of one-world talk” within interlinked phases of history: starting with “Enlightenment-era intellectual and literary practices,” he notes, such a history needs to link this eighteenth-century moment with the contemporary “academic humanities in the North Atlantic countries” and eventually with “practices and institutional frameworks, which make possible and compelling the experience of literature as a worldwide reality.”56 Central to this argument is Mufti’s point that the alleged singularity of world literature is not a given but is made at certain points in capitalist history in accordance with bourgeois cultural practices and demands. The alleged universality of the concept, 23

INTRODUCTION

thus, needs to be reoriented through such histories of bourgeois cultural habits over the last few centuries. Mufti, however, pushes the idea further, and suggests that this universality has been achieved through “English as global literary vernacular” as it progressively appropriates different linguistic worlds and practices, turning everything legible through its own transparency. This is not, of course, an isolated event in history, and has its roots in the global empire. What is even more interesting is Mufti’s insistence that the first two ideas – i.e. institutional history and global English – need to be contextualized within what he calls the “cultural logic” of world literature: that world literature is fundamentally dependent on imperial structures through Orientalism and eighteenth-century philological revolution.57 Referring to what Edward Said calls “modern Orientalism,” he argues that the cultural standardization and subsequent equivalence assumed by world literature theories are legacies of this particular Orientalist history. Though recent debates have often elided any direct reference to Said’s iconic study, he points out it would be quite counterproductive to ignore the centrality of Orientalism in a critical-historical approach to the question of world literature. Mufti extensively uses the archive of British India to support his claims, and indicates ways of postcolonial engagement with contemporary hegemony of world literature in academic humanities as well as in the world at large. Cheah, on the other hand, develops a theme that remains somewhat underdeveloped in Mufti’s argument – that is, the normative thrust of world literature. At the outset, Cheah declares that the “conceptualization of the world in temporal terms provides a normative basis for transforming the world made by capitalist globalization” in which literature remains an active force, both as “a site of processes of worlding and [as] an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes.”58 This initial gambit leads him to two different directions – the first one traces the concept of “worlding” through various philosophical traditions (Marxism, phenomenology, and deconstruction, among others), and the second one explores postcolonial literature as active sites where contemporary world-making practices are enacted most forcefully. By transferring the critical weight from a purely spatial understanding of the world to both “teleological time” and “worlding,” and by maintaining that literature plays a pivotal role in both, Cheah attempts to break free of some of the theoretical impasse in critical debates I have cited above. Both Cheah and Mufti, in other words, attempt a postcolonial reorientation of world literature debates. Their interventions introduce the much-needed historicization of both concepts at issue – i.e. world 24

INTRODUCTION

and literature – and open up the field for further investigation. This book builds on such critical-historical approaches and extends their insights to argue a very different case. In this book, I suggest that while these critical insights remain important, they neglect one vital aspect of contemporary world literature – what would world literature look like when seen not from the metropolitan center producing definitive theories but from the postcolonial global south, which gets attached to such theoretical narrative often without any conscious choice? What are the possible modes of world literary cultures available to the authors and readers who are located beyond the pale of the central narratives of world literature? How would one approach the pedagogic practices associated with world literature in a classroom located in the global south? Plan of the book As would be evident from my discussion above, this book is a postcolonial literary history anchored in the global south, supposedly the peripheries to what Casanova calls the “Greenwich meridian” of world literary culture;59 and because of this precise location, this book does not attempt any exhaustive chronological description and does not aspire to be an exact simulacrum of its presumed object in the fashion Borges describes. Rather, I am much more interested here in tracing particular genealogies of a host of concepts associated with world literature, revealing, in the process, their complex entanglement with colonial and postcolonial histories. I am interested in, to put it differently, how certain codes came to represent the worldwide realities of literature in our times and how such codes replicate themselves in literary history, academic institutions, and publishing industry. Hence, this book offers a new postcolonial literary history of world literature for our time. I want to emphasize all three vital components of this statement – i.e. postcolonial, literary history, and time – as critical tools whose meanings are by no means fixed or self-evident and are always in need of careful hermeneutic exposition. What does it mean, for instance, to label a literary history “postcolonial” in this era of globalization and world literature? Can literary history be truly postcolonial if it attempts to track postcoloniality as a global phenomenon across multiple locations and heterogeneous texts? Is history the proper name for a study that uses postcoloniality both as its condition of possibility and methodological tool? Can there be a single history of Anglophone postcolonial writing as world literature? These questions, asked in the context of 25

INTRODUCTION

current debates on world literature and postcolonial studies, will recur throughout this book and will take us to different locations, texts, and archives. To frame these questions, however, it is important to revisit the seemingly natural starting point of literary history and also to adopt a critical-historical approach to what Fredric Jameson describes in a different context as the “vacuousness of the narratives of manuals of literary history.”60 One of the central ambitions of this book is indeed to challenge such vacuousness in much of what has become the standard history of world literature in the last couple of decades or so, with its easy instrumentalization of genres/texts and constitutive failure to engage with the global history of colonialism. In recent years, and especially in academic discussions of globalization and world literature, such queries have become challenging because of the supposed death of the postcolonial paradigm. Hence, we need to define the idea of the postcolony as I use it in this book before describing its central concerns. What has been declared dead, I submit, is an idea of the postcolony as a singular monolith that bears witness to the aftermath of colonialism and remains a passive receptor of ideas and politics coming from erstwhile colonial centers. This history can neither address nor account for the multiple origins and trajectories of colonialism itself, and, as a consequence, cannot confront the typical construction of postcolonial histories beyond an instrumentalized understanding of causal chains. Indeed, the singularity of history remains its central template, and the monolithic postcoloniality the inevitable outcome. Any literary history that aspires to produce a postcolonial account of world literature, and, at the same time, wants to remain alive to the postcolony as a critical location, needs to go beyond such myopic narratives. As I suggest at different points of this book, we need to address the postcolony in its peculiar temporal-territorial entanglement, in its ability to sustain different worlds, so to speak, within its larger narrative. It is this absence of the plural imagination of the postcolony that has contributed to the curious fact that, despite shared grounds and concerns, there have been very few “direct exchanges” between postcolonial studies and world literature until recently.61 Indeed, Cheah has described this as one of the crucial “missed encounters” in recent critical theory.62 My insistence on Anglophony in this book is designed to function as a historical corrective – to open up questions of both world literature and postcoloniality and to insist on their historical implication into each other. That is partly why I suggest that Anglophony is internally divided and indeed schizophrenic, as it is destined to carry signs and traces of other languages under its own 26

INTRODUCTION

skin and to accommodate disparate histories, conflicting temporalities, and discreet territories within its being. As a perfect representation of postcolonial history, Anglophone writing is thus always monolingual and never quite so, always comparative but in the same language. This typically schizophrenic structure of Anglophony only increases if we follow it across geographical locations, as well as historical periods, and if we territorialize its history. What emerges from this act of territorialization is a pluralistic postcolony, of course, but, more crucially for my purpose in this book, a set of theoretical entry points within the shared spaces between postcoloniality and world literature. The specific notion of the postcolony I employ in this book is derived from this history that uses the empire as a unified field. Without this territorial view of the empire, it would be impossible to sustain a reorientation of world literature or its underlying premise of comparatism. What happens to this paradigm after the formal end of the empire is tracked in the bulk of this book, through Chapters 2, 3, and 4. These chapters deliberately extend the scope of this inquiry across geographical locations – the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and Britain – to suggest that the postcolony as a territorial unit is internally varied and dispersed; hence, the comparative paradigm of world literature looks very different from distinctive territorial locations. What unites these different views is the notion of Anglophony and its implication in postcolonial worlds; and I suggest that Anglophony defines the entry point for many of the authors I study into the contemporary phase of globalization. It is surely a sign of academic myopia that precisely in the era of widespread debates on migration, racism, religious faith, terrorism, and xenophobia, several critics felt the need to compose epitaphs for the postcolonial paradigm, without so much realizing that what has now been globalized has its roots in the messy histories of colonialism. But postcolonial literature, unmindful of such academic quandary, remains attentive to history and its global articulation. Take, for instance, the case of Rushdie’s fourth novel The Satanic Verses (1988).63 The novel is built around the experience of migration of the South Asian community to Britain after the Second World War and is a fabulous depiction of the underlying racism of the Thatcherite era. It also develops a second plotline dealing with the crucial question of religious faith and revelation, secular ideals and faithlessness, with an equally fabulous account of the early years of a religion closely resembling the history of early Islam. But what followed after its publication, known as the Rushdie affair, is quite unmatched in modern literary history. Prompted by a widespread ban on the novel across the world, especially 27

INTRODUCTION

in countries with Islam as state religion, and the “fatwa” issued by the Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini, the nature of religious faith and its role in modern secular nation-states (especially in Europe) became part of not only public debates but even diplomatic relation between nations. Many of the current tropes and narratives of Islamophobia or different versions of the “insurgent” Islam, including Samuel Huntington’s deeply racist theory of the “clash of civilizations,” can be traced back to this period. Rushdie’s novel and the controversy provided an unmistakably postcolonial foundation to globalized ideas of migration, displacement, and mobility. What I wish to submit is the following: much like Foucault’s diagnosis of the late eighteenth-century rearrangement of epistemological fields, which created the modern concept of literature and set its worldly trajectories, the second half of the twentieth century also performs a rearrangement and it is most evident in postcolonial Anglophone writing. Commentators have noted in recent years the rise of a new kind of novel in globalization, often with the precise date of 1989, and have argued that through a number of influences like information technologies and digital media, globalized but fragmentary wars, translations, new concepts of humanitarianism, escalated scales of migration, and so on, we are now witnessing the rise of a form which is constitutively global and not made so through circulation.64 We are witnessing, in other words, the augmentation of a form that is always and already world literature irrespective of reception and readership, or even the ability to travel across borders through translation. I argue in this book that this tectonic shift in literary production has happened not because globalization has finally forced Anglophone fiction to accept the global paradigm of literature, but because the world literature paradigm of the nineteenth century has died and its fragments have been scattered across Anglophone territories. This shift has taken place not because the universality of literature has been accepted by those who so far remained largely unaffected by its charm, but because this assumption of universal literature, often built on an analogy with biological universalism, is no more the guiding principle, allowing postcolonial fiction to critically engage with its aftermaths. In the concluding chapter of this book (Chapter 5), I map this epistemic field that stages this encounter between postcolonial and world literatures and suggest ways of using the concept of death as the inaugurator of this new phase in contemporary writing. I demonstrate how an unquestioned faith in the nineteenth-century model has led much of contemporary world literature theories astray, and how a postcolonial history of the present, 28

INTRODUCTION

organized under the sign of death, can reveal the workings of Anglophone writing at least since the days of decolonization after the Second World War. Anglophone postcolonial writing has become global, in other words, through its curious manipulation of death as an epistemic discontinuity. Let me conclude by going back to our stories and maps with which I began. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow describes another map, this time from his childhood, and explains his “passion” for cartographic representation: I would look for hours at South America, Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. By the time of this recollection, Marlow points out, those blank spaces have ceased to be blank any more and have been rendered legible with “rivers and lakes and names.” But this universal legibility has not diminished the map’s almost ensnaring attraction for him, especially Belgian Congo with its “mighty big river.” “And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window,” he tells his audience, “it fascinated me as a snake would a bird – a silly little bird.”65 This fascination with the map takes him to the depths of what he calls “darkness” and allows him to meet the “remarkable man” Kurtz. His experience of Congolese darkness, however, generates two different narratives: the one he tells his audience on the deck of Nellie (which is also the novella we read), and the other he relates to Kurtz’s Intended whose status remains somewhat unverified in the text. The first story he crafts out of African “darkness” is based on the principle of universal readability, and despite his acknowledged bafflement in the face of absolute otherness he is still able to produce a readable version for his audience that would more or less correspond with the map of Africa. It is in the second story, with its strong emphasis on the unrepresentable colonial “horror,” however, where this reading strategy comes undone and eventually puts the text and the map under suspicion. In this second story, we are allowed to see Marlow unable to represent the colonial darkness in the white civility of Europe; he is unable, so to speak, to make Europe face its own history. In the absence of history, what he offers is a fantasy designed to soothe and delude, but his other 29

INTRODUCTION

narrative introduces in the texts specific techniques of challenging the colonial consensus. In this book, I explore these other histories and small voices, these hidden codes and traces that repeatedly challenge the consensus around world literature. I suggest that these small and marginal voices would lead us to a better ground to re-theorize and rearticulate our contemporary literary landscapes and their complex histories. This book is a step in that direction. Notes 1 Before we go any further, a short note on the “postcolonial canon”: what I have in mind is the disciplinary (or sub-disciplinary) formation through university curricula, publishing industries, literary prizes, and more defused notions of taste and judgement. I do not engage with the revisionist canon(s) here, simply to signpost the way this body of writing has entered into popular circulation as well as consciousness. That is partly the reason why this canon has been represented here with many of its shortcomings, including its overwhelmingly male bias. 2 Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999), 325. On practical and semiotic difficulties of producing such a map, see Umberto Eco, “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1,” in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 95–106. 3 For these three roles of the map see Michel Foucault, “Questions of Geography,” in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 63–77. 4 Quoted in Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 12. 5 On the religious and secular uses of imperial cartography, see the essays collected in James R. Akerman (ed.), The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For a discussion on colonial anxieties, and their expressions in gendered language, see Anne McClintock’s brilliant reading of the map at the beginning of Ryder Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–15. 6 Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 325. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Daniel Breazeale (ed.) Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s (London: Humanities Press, 1979), 86; emphasis original. 8 Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 325. 9 Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, trans. Tom Conley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xv. 10 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 110. 11 For a history of such debates, see Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 15–69. 12 Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 1–2.

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13 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 12. 14 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), xiii. 15 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann: Being Appreciations and Criticisms on Many Subjects (New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), 175; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso, 2012), 39. 16 Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 44. 17 The concept of “scriptural economy” is borrowed from Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Chapter X. 18 See Nicholas Brown, “The Eidaesthetic Itinerary: Notes on the Geopolitical Movement of the Literary Absolute,” South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 100, No. 3 (2001), 829–32. 19 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 14, 25. 20 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 69, 7. 21 Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 39. 22 Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1–18. 23 See, Baidik Bhattacharya, “On Comparatism in the Colony: Archives, Methods, and the Project of Weltliteratur,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Spring, 2016). 24 Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 36 (Spring, 2010), 458–93; Siraj Ahmed, “Notes from Babel: Toward a Colonial History of Comparative Literature,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 39 (Winter, 2013), 306. 25 For a review of this trope, see Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 26 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), 69; emphasis original. 27 Achilles Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2002), 239–41. 28 Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 175. 29 Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 50–1. Also see David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3–4. For a discussion on the revival of this idea in contemporary debates, see Christopher Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters,” in Christopher Prendergast (ed.) Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004), 6–8. 30 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull (Chicago: Open Court, 1922), 213. 31 See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–56. For a discussion on “worlding” in the context of world literature, see Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 95–130.

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INTRODUCTION

32 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ix and passim. 33 For a discussion of various postcolonial authors and their relationship with the canon, see Ankhi Mukherjee, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 134. All subsequent references are abbreviated as AO and are cited parenthetically with pagination. Réda Bensmaïa has rightly cautioned against self-serving appropriation of Deleuze for postcolonial theory, and has argued that distinctions need to be made between different phases of Deleuze’s career and also between his own work and his collaborative projects with Guattari. As would be evident in this chapter, I primarily use Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative projects and refrain from referring to their individual works unless their joint projects explicitly refer to such texts. See Réda Bensmaïa, “Postcolonial Haecceities,” in Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (eds.) Deleuze and the Postcolonial (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 120–2. 35 This is how Lévi-Strauss argues his case: “The issue can thus be reduced to the relationship between history and ethnology in the strict sense. We propose to show that the fundamental difference between the two disciplines is not one of subject, of goal, or of method. They share the same subject, which is social life; the same goal, which is a better understanding of man; and, in fact, the same method, in which only the proportion of research techniques varies.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 18. 36 François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 238–9. 37 This formulation is by no means without its share of criticism. Christopher Miller, for instance, has complained that despite their critique of anthropology and ethnographic practices across the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari neither recommend any systematic condemnation of the discipline nor offer an internal critique, which was made available later by anthropologists like Talal Asad, James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, and many others. What is even more incriminating, Miller maintains, is the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s ostensible critique is severely compromised as they remain mired in older anthropological notions and thus end up replicating a debilitating form of “primitivism” that would not only undermine their ambitious project but would simply be detestable to most sophisticated anthropologists today. Miller is particularly interested in A Thousand Plateaus and its emphasis on “nomadology,” but he also indicates that Anti-Oedipus can be read using the same set of concerns. Christopher L. Miller, “The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority,” Diacritics, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), 6–35. For a critical review of Miller’s piece, see Eugene W. Holland, “Representation and Misrepresentation in Postcolonial Literature and Theory,” Research in African Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2003). 38 See also Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 39 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 205.

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40 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. pub (London: Routledge, 2002), 325–7; Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 41 For a critical reading of Foucault, see my “On Comparatism in the Colony”; for a similar reading of Rancière, see my article Baidik Bhattacharya, “Reading Rancière: Literature at the Limit of World Literature,” in New Literary History (2017). 42 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 17. 43 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 115. Spivak argues: “I am advocating a depoliticization of the politics of hostility toward a politics of friendship to come, and thinking of the role of Comparative Literature in such a responsible effort” (13). 44 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 4–5, 50, 9. 45 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 12. 46 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72. Extending Spivak’s insight, Jonathan Arac has suggested that the real radical promise of new Comparative Literature and the resultant “planetarity” resides in its emphasis on linguistic alterity against the “nationalist and monolingual enclosure” in which disciplines like American studies has been contained traditionally. Jonathan Arac, “Global and Babel: Language and the Planet in American Literature,” in Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (eds.) Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 20. 47 See Damrosch, What Is World Literature?; David Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature,” New Literary History, Vol. 39 (2008); David Damrosch, How to Read World Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009); Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, Vol. 1 (January–February, 2000); Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005); Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review, Vol. 31 (January–February, 2005). 48 Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 33, 38. 49 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4–5. 50 Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature,” 489, 494. 51 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 70. 52 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 68. 53 Jacques Derrida, “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony,” in Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, ‘Demeure: Fiction and Testimony’ and ‘The Instant of My Death’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 21. 54 Casanova, “Literature as a World,” 71–2. 55 See Spivak, Death of a Discipline; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 443–83; Emily Apter, “‘Je ne crois pas beaucoup à la littérature comparée’: Universal Poetics and Postcolonial Comparatism,” in Haun Saussy (ed.) Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 54–62; Apter, Against World Literature; Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 36 (Spring, 2010): 458–93; Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

2016); Pheng Cheah, “What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity,” Daedalus, Vol. 137, No. 3 (2008), 26–38; Cheah, What Is a World? My argument in this book, broadly speaking, is in conversation with many of the interpretive tools and critical assumptions from this new body of scholarship. Mufti, Forget English!, 10. Mufti, Forget English!, 19–20. Cheah, What Is a World?, 2. See Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 87–91. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 221. See Robert J.C. Young, “World Literature and Postcolonialism,” in Theo D’haen et al. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London: Routledge, 2012), 213–22. Cheah, What Is a World?, 11–13. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 2006). See, for instance, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Cheah, What Is a World? Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, 108.

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1 CUNNING OF EMPIRE

He first discovered India; then, he found Canada, South Africa, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand and the thousand and one pieces of land surrounded by water that make up the Greater British Isles. The Empire was a map; Rudyard Kipling made it a fact. The British Possessions were marked in red – plebian red; Rudyard Kipling painted them purple – imperial purple. – G.F. Monkshood, Rudyard Kipling: An Attempt at Appreciation (1899) Perhaps the first global writer in a modern sense, Kipling made a rapid transition from writing for purely local audience to addressing a readership that spanned the globe. – David Damrosch, How to Read World Literature (2011)

Hannah Arendt describes Rudyard Kipling as the “author of the imperialist legend” and suggests that in his stories like “The First Sailor” (1891) and “The Tomb of His Ancestor” (1898), he presents the “British as the only politically mature people, caring for law and burdened with the welfare of the world, in the midst of barbarian tribes who neither care nor know what keeps the world together.”1 Indeed, Kipling took both empire and fiction-making seriously. In a speech delivered in 1906 and entitled “Literature,” for instance, he narrates an “ancient legend” on the origins of storytelling. The legend describes the first man of notable achievements as “smitten with dumbness” as soon as he tried to relate his exploits to his fellow tribesmen. In his place, and as his interlocutor, emerged the first storyteller as a “masterless man” who “had taken no part in the action of his fellow tribesmen, who had no special virtues, but who was afflicted [. . .] with the magic of the necessary word” and was able to entertain with words which “became alive and walked up 35

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and down in the hearts of all his hearers.”2 To make his political point, Kipling repeats the legend six years later with the title “The Uses of Reading” (1912) and with an extension defining the art of storytelling as useful practice for the empire. He recalls an event narrated to him by the “greatest [British] General” in India – during his younger days as a subaltern the general was posted on the frontier under his father’s command and learned about a failed military operation led by his father. In his mature years, the general was entrusted with a similar operation, and taking his cue from his father’s failed campaign led the army to victory. The use of stories, Kipling argues, is somewhat analogous, since stories establish a “spiritual hereditary tie” between generations by making available the experiences of an earlier generation for the useful appropriation by later ones.3 Kipling the storyteller wanted to appropriate both versions of the legend – he might have refused to remain masterless forever, but his master narrative of the empire as “a community of men of allied race and identical aims, united in comradeship, comprehension, and sympathy” was critically poised on inter-generational and collective narration of the imperial legend.4 Kipling’s association with the empire more or less framed his reputation to his contemporaries. As one of his admiring critics put it in 1915: Mr. Kipling’s Imperialism is something that will be found inevitable from a study of the writer and the man. [. . .] No man echoes more loudly the cry: “My country, may she be always right! But – right or wrong – my country!”5 Indeed his status as the “prophet of British imperialism in its expansionist phase” and the “unofficial historian of the British Army,” to quote George Orwell, is so entrenched in literary history that it seems almost impossible to open his oeuvre or his life to any other reading.6 The problem is further compounded by the fact, as both Sandra Kemp and Anjali Arondekar note, that the Kipling archive is notoriously difficult to reconstruct. Through a maze of conflicting publishing histories, competing and “pirated” editions, multiple pennames, disputed copyrights, various unacknowledged appropriations, and its sheer volume, Kipling’s archive seems to replicate the breadth and aspiration of the empire he so fondly documented – it is the archive, in Kemp’s words, “on which the sun never sets.”7 However, this seeming continuity between the empire and the archive, I propose in this chapter, opens a different possibility of reading Kipling – his “legendary” mode of writing allowed him to turn the overpowering empire into a world in itself, 36

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a sort of literary territory with clear rules, and hence to release the aesthetic-anthropological coding of empire within a much larger space. He of course found a ready readership through the empire which was already global, and he mobilized several circuits of circulation within it, but his central achievement was his ability to imagine the empire as a limited world – as both anthropologically enclosed and aesthetically codable – and hence a material truth ready for circulation. Indeed, Kipling was so successful in his mission that he, along with other imperialists like Lord Cromer and Cecil Rhodes, in Arendt’s words, was able to offer a legend of the empire that “forced or deluded into its services the best sons of England.”8 Kipling, in other words, performed the vital task of situating an anthropological notion of the “world” within the territorial limits of the empire. He enacted the role usually reserved for anthropologists – i.e. translating cultural codes from the colony into accessible narratives and knowledge paradigms of the metropole – and united the empire as an anthropological site which needed to be decoded and explained. As the first epigraph for this chapter suggests, for his contemporaries he turned the map of empire into a tangible reality through this anthropological vision and transformed the “plebian red” stripes into “imperial purple.” In this chapter, I focus on the early years of his career and his meteoric rise as a world literary celebrity to explore his role in the consolidation of this imperial vision and its contribution in the making of Anglophone world literature.9 One of the central features of Kipling’s early writings was his ability to shape the underlying contradiction of the empire between its monolingual textuality and its multilingual history, and then to code it within intricate narratives of race, sexuality, and imperial responsibility. His strategies for this transformation show striking parallels with colonial policies and legislations, and his early recognition as a literary celebrity across the globe demonstrates the success of this intertextual collaboration between his writing and colonial governance. His body of work, his biography, his journeys crisscrossing the geography of the empire, and his literary fame, I argue in the following pages, all suggest a world literary phenomenon that demonstrated the narrative possibilities of the empire with unprecedented clarity, and his enduring presence shows how he shaped many of the central templates of contemporary Anglophone world literature. Her majesty’s scribe Many of Kipling’s early critics were baffled by his spectacular rise as a literary celebrity at a very young age. In 1889, just two years after the 37

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publication of Plain Tales from the Hills, the noted literary critic Andrew Lang introduced Kipling as “An Indian Story-teller” to London’s literary circuits and observed that though “Mr. Kipling’s tales really are of an extraordinary charm and fascination,” they might have limited appeal. Lang’s note ends with a patronizing pat on the back of the young author who is “fresh, facile, and spontaneous, working in field of such unusual experience,” but the tone is clearly guarded.10 J.M. Barrie, who greeted Kipling with the dubious title “the man from nowhere,” complained in 1890 of Kipling’s rawness and precocity, and mildly chastised the literary fad of London in finding a new darling every season without much thought or care.11 And yet, within a decade Frederic Lawrence Knowles, one of Kipling’s early American interlocutors, could barely hide his delight at Kipling’s transnational popularity in his A Kipling Primer (1899): “Fifteen years ago Rudyard Kipling’s name was unknown in India; ten years ago it was unknown in England. To-day Mr. Kipling’s fame is international.” In support of his assessment, he cites the authority of William Dean Howell, the revered editor of the Atlantic Monthly, as saying in a recent interview: “I am honestly of the opinion that Kipling is the most famous man in the world to-day [. . .]. In fact I think it fair to say that Kipling’s reputation is greater than that of any Englishspeaking poet who ever lived.”12 William M. Clemens, in his A Ken of Kipling (1899), gives a roadmap for this global fame, albeit with a touch of irony that could have come from Kipling himself: Mr. Kipling was compelled to go out into the world and find his audience. Once he found it, he was forced to educate his audience by brute force; and then the literary epicures placed him, well labeled, among the olives, and he became “an acquired taste.” To-day the supply does not equal the demand.13 William Cranston Lawton, a professor of Greek literature, describes Kipling’s genius in 1899 with “its world-wide ranging curiosity, its rollicking humor, its Titanic willfulness and extravagant expenditure of energy,” and argues that it is this sheer exuberance of his character that secured his global fame.14 This emphasis on a sparkling genius emerging from the margins of the empire was quite widespread, and was often established with favorable comparisons with other literary 38

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figures. Consider, for instance, this panegyric from another admiring critic Cecil Charles: His [Kipling’s] meteoric flight from obscurity to fame recalls Byron’s ascent in the literary firmament. [. . .] we owe him as a writer of classics, we are emphatically under an immense obligation to him for helping to arouse us to our responsibilities as Empire rulers.15 Cyril Falls continues the Byron analogy but also adds Chateaubriand to suggest that Kipling, like his illustrious predecessors, belongs to a group of writers who “are men of their hour, men who voice the thoughts and aspirations of their contemporaries [. . .]. They come at a time of crisis, and take their part in shaping the destiny of letters.”16 A flurry of admiring books and articles on Kipling appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in quick succession, and Knowles justifies the need for such critical works with reference to Kipling’s unmatched talent as evident in the fact that in Kipling the world has witnessed for the first time the “spectacle of a collected edition of an author’s works [being] issued within a dozen years of the date on his earliest title-page.”17 Another early commentator, John Palmer, even reminds his readers that “Mr. Kipling was a literary prodigy” who wrote some of his masterpieces when his contemporaries Henry James, Granville Barker, and Thomas Hardy had barely started. With the publication of Plain Tales from the Hills at the age of twenty-two, Palmer observes, one could see Kipling wielding “his implement as deftly and firmly as many a skilled writer who was learning his lesson before Mr. Kipling was born. Few authors have so surely scored their best in their earliest years.”18 Such early appreciations suggest two important patterns for our approach to Kipling as the first notable author of Anglophone world literature: his association with India and the necessarily fragmented nature of his colonial experience best captured in the formal brevity of the story. Kipling’s early reputation was built around poems, short stories, and periodicals – apart from the Civil and Military Gazette, the Pioneer, and several privately circulated journals in India, he was a regular contributor to various magazines from both sides of the Atlantic by 1897: Macmillan’s Magazine, St James’s Gazette, Cornhill, Longman’s Magazine, Scots Observer, Harper’s Weekly, Illustrated London News, Century Magazine, Bombay Gazette, The Idler, McClure’s Magazine, Pearson’s Magazine, Graphic, Pocket Magazine, Gentlewoman, Ladies’ Home Journal, Scribner’s Magazine, Pall Mall Gazette, and Cosmopolitan, among others.19 This mode of circulation consolidated 39

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his reputation across imperial geography and made his craft of storytelling a significant part of narrating the empire. Soon he was recognized as a master storyteller and even the last great practitioner of the genre by a range of critics – Walter Morris Hart, the author of Kipling: The Story-writer (1918), identified him as the “terminus ad quem” of English short story, while Walter Benjamin observed in “The Storyteller” (1936) that the core of storytelling found its “last refuge in the life of British seamen and colonial soldiers in Kipling.”20 Hart links Kipling’s literary output with his association with magazines and journals from his India days, and suggests a parallel with Maupassant. But more important, he implies a direct connection between Kipling’s chosen form and his Indian experience, which called for fragmented expression; as an extension of his journalistic works, Hart writes, Kipling dealt with his Own People, whose bread and salt he had eaten, whose wine he had drunk, whose vigils and toil and ease he had shared, with whose lives he passionately identified his own. And it was primarily for his own people that he wrote.21 This deliberate invocation of the biblical language to define Kipling’s “Own People,” which would have met Kipling’s nodding approval, is an attempt to restrict his genealogy within the small Anglo-Indian community, but it hardly takes the India part away. Indeed, Hart is soon forced to reformulate his case and suggest that Kipling’s stories are testimonies to the fact that he was essentially an outsider in India, and yet he knew India as well as, and occasionally better than, any native Indian. Indeed, despite his early “international” success and unannounced entry into world literature, Kipling in his initial years was closely tied to India for all practical purposes. The template is available in the unabashed panegyric of G.F. Monkshood’s Rudyard Kipling (1899): With these little booklings, issued firstly, with indifferent type and paper, from the Pioneer Press, Allahabad, Rudyard Kipling may be said to have laid in England the plinth of that fame to which he has added so fine a shaft and capital. [. . .] and as soon as issued they were bought up with an eagerness that must have recalled to the book-people the glorious days of the Dickens part.22 These “native tales” show, Monkshood argues further, how “it was left to Rudyard Kipling to take in hand our great Indian Empire [. . .] and 40

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bring it in books to our library table.”23 An anonymous reviewer for the Quarterly Review in 1892 went as far as to deduce a “Hindu” temperament in Kipling: For he has many a touch of the weird and even pagan spirit, testifying to what he has seen or what others have believed – Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, – all the marvels which by one gate or another pass into the ‘City of Dreadful Nights’ which we call the Hindu imagination. Things about which the European has no doubt (for he does not believe in them) have under the Himalayas a steadfast air of reality.24 The Indian Kipling was not a simple connoisseur of distant exotica for his readers; in important ways, he was responsible for shaping colonial imagination and discourses, responsible occasionally even for shaping popular opinions on colonial governance. This typical Indianness with its distinct markers constitutes what Ali Behdad identifies as a necessary split in Kipling’s early stories which are torn between the “manifest text” of “‘white’ authorial writing” and the “‘unconscious’ discourse as the site where the unspoken and the unspeakable surface” and challenge the manifest authority. Many of these Indian markers – pagan, occult, Orientalist, or subaltern – are textual devices that can be read by a “belated” postcolonial reader as sites contesting the authority and authorship of Kipling’s stories.25 For his contemporary readers, however, this split was rather the confirmation of the India every “European” aspired to write about but only few succeeded. The point is made in Monkshood once again when he suggests that compared to other authors of the “Anglo-Indian school of letters,” including H.W. Torrens, Sir Ali Baba or George Aberigh-Mackay, Meadows Taylor, Sir Alfred Lyall, Mrs. F.A. Steele, or the authors of countless “Mutiny fiction,” Kipling emerges not only as the most convincing but also the most compassionate.26 Behdad’s point, however, is worth exploring further since it is the split in Kipling’s text that secured his status within the canon of world literature and also made him the precursor of much of Anglophone postcolonial writing. Kipling is conscious of this constitutive duality of his early writing when he states in the “Preface” to Under the Deodars (1888) that his mission was to “assure the ill-informed that India is not entirely inhabited by men and women playing tennis with the Seventh Commandment,” or that a large part of his early work dealt with “things that are not pretty and uglinesses that hurt.”27 To achieve such 41

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effects, he had to supplement his description of white Anglo-Indian community with unmistakable elements of the colony. In a striking metaphor, he describes this role as “an Anglo-Indian Autour du Mariage” who chronicles “a specialized community, who did not interest any but themselves.”28 Though he has been dubbed a “reticent autobiographer” by critics, he still feels it necessary to put up an elaborate strategy in his posthumously published memoir Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (1937) to account for this special role, because he repeatedly comes across the possibility of this neatly held community or even its very white textuality being threatened by an extra-textual colonial reality.29 His chosen strategy is to establish his familiarity with Indian customs, rituals, landscape, and culture as a source of authority. He assures his readers, for instance, that he often went out of the narrow community of white Anglo-Indians and ventured into places where no other European would have gone; quite often during hot summer nights, he writes, he would “wander till dawn in all manner of odd places – liquor-shops, gambling and opium-dens, [. . .] wayside entertainment such as puppet-shows, native dances; or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan.”30 He had earlier described similar feats with descriptions of Lahore’s gullies and bazaars in The City of Dreadful Night (1889) and of Calcutta’s native quarters in From Sea to Sea (1899). Kipling the journalist and Kipling the storyteller are carefully superimposed on each other to suggest that these colonial tales, though primarily set within a small community, still represented a version of truth which is not available otherwise. Behdad’s suggestion of the split is reworked here as the ground for truth claims. Suffering white (male) bodies The most prominent feature of this colonial truth is a relentless account of hardship and suffering depicted through the tropes of tropical climate, disease, madness, boredom, and so on, in both his stories and his memoir. Kipling’s soldier stories capture it best; Charles Carrington, his authorized biographer, puts it in the following words: Kipling’s view of army life in India is gloomy on the whole, a life with few pleasures, no glamour, and no luxury for the rank and file. The heat and the fever, the recurrent epidemics of cholera, the boredom that leads to hysterical outbreaks of insubordination and violence, the jealous rages that flare

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into fighting madness among men who have loaded weapons always to hand.31 In his memoir, Kipling extends this notion of gloominess and despondency as a general template for his Indian experience and suggests that it can be used as a narrative technique to organize and make visible colonial reality. Thus, he describes his ordeal in Lahore during summer: In those months – mid-April to mid-October – one took up one’s bed and walked about with it from room to room, seeking for less heated air; or slept on the flat roof with the waterman to throw half-skinfuls of water on one’s parched carcass. This brought on fever but saved heat-stroke.32 To make it sound more authentic, he quickly adds a litany of tropical diseases to this pitiful story of hardship: Heaven knows the men died fast enough from typhoid, which seemed to have something to do with water, but we were not sure; or from cholera, which was manifestly a breath of the Devil [. . .]; from seasonal fever; or from what was described as ‘blood-poisoning.’33 To be fair, Kipling did not invent this trope of the dangerous colony. Since the publication of The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Specifically the Climate of India, on European Constitution (1813) by James Johnson, surgeon in the Royal Navy, a distinct branch of medical climatology identified Indian climate as a threatening force and offered various disciplinary “codes” to fortify the European body against its corrosive effects.34 In the second half of the nineteenth century, this view was widely shared by both everyday common sense and more specialized knowledge. In a contemporary medical guide for the Europeans in India, which might well have been part of Kipling’s library, a medical practitioner and member of Royal Asiatic Society, R.S. Mair, thought it prudent to advise his fellow Anglo-Indians on the inclement Indian climate and the resultant diseases encountered by the non-native population. He lists twenty-eight common diseases – from dyspepsia and diarrhea to intestinal worms and opium poisoning – caused by tropical Indian climate that, he observes, “does produce an unmistakable impression on all.” Effects of climate can be

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exaggerated in common conversations, he concedes, but it is beyond any reasonable doubt that [a]fter a time [the Englishman] begins to complain of lassitude and fatigue after the least exertion; the respiration is less deep and free, the circulation is enfeebled, he is more sensitive to heat than before, becomes sallow or pale, loses much of his mental vigour, passes restless nights, feels altogether unequal to the ordinary routine of duty, never ceases to abuse what he now calls the ‘abominable climate,’ and longs for the power, as he has the will, to quit the country at once.35 Or, consider the well-known painter Grant Colesworthy’s description of Indian climate: There are four months of excessive rain; five or six of distressing heat; [. . .] and a walk is opposed after about 6 o’clock in the morning by a blazing sun, from whose beams some people fly as though each ray were a poisoned shaft, and by that lassitude and disinclination to activity, which season – city life – and late hours are so calculated to create.36 And finally, a cautionary passage: The life of the Englishman in an Indian climate is an artificial one. [. . .] it is not in any case such life as the European care for or upon which the European thrives. [. . .] and he knows that, settled in India, his race must die out in the third generation, or be extended only by the infusion of native blood and the deterioration of his descendants to the level of the Eurasian.37 Many of these descriptions, often verbatim, found their way into Kipling’s early writing. The point I am trying to make is that Kipling did not work in a social or textual void. Similar points were being made not only in amateur descriptions of European bodies in tropical climate; they were being discussed even by medical experts and colonial officials. David Arnold argues that this concern with Indian climate, among other things, allowed the “creation of a state-centered system of scientific knowledge and power” that constituted the “corporeality of colonialism in India” and eventually led to what he calls the “colonization of 44

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the body.” Arnold proposes that colonial medicine is one prominent site to explore the ambiguities inherent in colonial government’s attitude towards climate and human body, but its full measure can only be “found across a whole range of interlocking colonial discourses, sites, and practices: from penology to anthropology, from the army to the plantation and the factory.”38 The medical historian Mark Harrison, on the other hand, suggests a larger role for “climate” in the evolution of colonial power in India. Way before Kipling could voice the commonly shared anxiety, Harrison shows, the British rule in India had made explicit connections between climate, disease, race, and colonial authority and at least from the 1830s used the argument regarding Indian climate to decide the details of colonial occupation.39 Mair gives a precise expression to this governmental sentiment when he says, apropos Indian climate, that ‘[i]t is for this reason, and for this reason only, that it is idle to talk or think of colonizing the plains of India with Europeans.”40 Unlike other colonies, the logic continued, India had to be governed by a handful of white colonial officials. Indeed, what Kipling made so prominent through his fiction – a white community threatened by tropical climate and diseases – formed the core of colonial governance which not only proposed a medico-scientific notion of race in the face of threatening tropics but also suggested techniques to curb its influence on European bodies. Official documents and medical manuals were replete with references to Indian climate as the all-encompassing condition of colonial reality, and such insistence on climate gradually led to a “hardening of racial boundaries” during the nineteenth century.41 Soon, however, many of these concerns about the threatening colony in both colonial documents and in Kipling’s fiction was gathered around the danger of what was described as “racial degeneration” or miscegenation. At one level this was a predictable consequence of hardened racial identities – strict demarcation of races made it necessary to regulate or even prohibit interbreeding between races and hence to impose the notion of racial purity as an object of colonial governance. The very notion of sexual propriety or choice was transferred from the domain of individual conduct to the highly normalized zones of colonial statecraft. As evident from the Reports of the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (1858–9), the white population in India, and especially the “poor whites,” became the focus of colonial administration. In order to achieve the desired degree of racial purity – which also was the marker of racial supremacy and hence the justificatory ground for colonial occupation – the colonial state introduced minute racial 45

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difference through a host of new nomenclature including “Domiciled Europeans” and “Eurasians” and used these legal categories to demarcate and control boundaries of whiteness.42 Kipling’s soldier stories, again, telescope this fear of miscegenation with striking clarity. And in accordance with official policy, he also emphasized the increasing concern about white soldiers having sexual relationship with native “prostitutes.” He recollects the fear in his memoir: It was counted impious that bazaar prostitutes should be inspected; or that the men should be taught elementary precautions in their dealings with them. This official virtue cost our Army in India nine thousand expensive white men a year always laid up from venereal disease. Visits to Lock Hospitals made me desire, as earnestly as I do to-day, that I might have six hundred priests – Bishops of the Establishment for choice – to handle for six months precisely as the soldiers of my youth were handled.43 Let us set against this Johnson’s codes for controlling “the passions” in tropical conditions: The removal of religious and moral restraint – the temptation to vice – the facility of the means, and the force of example, are the real causes of this “bias to pleasure”; [. . .] The monotony of life, and the apathy of mind, so conspicuous among Europeans in hot climates [. . .] too often lead to vicious and immoral connexions with Native females, which speedily sap the foundation of principles imbibed in early youth, and involve a train of consequences, not seldom embarrassing, if not embittering every subsequent period of life!44 And let us finally read three sections from a piece of legislation from British India, which in 1868 sought to regularize army cantonments and prostitutes: In any place to which this Act applies, no woman shall carry on the business of a common prostitute, and no person shall carry on the business of a brothel-keeper, without being registered under this Act at such place, and without having in her or his possession such evidence of registration as hereinafter provided. [. . .]

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The Local Government shall have power to appoint persons to make periodical examinations of registered women in order to ascertain whether at the time of each such examination they are affected with contagious disease. [. . .] The Local Government shall make regulations for the inspection, management, and government of the Hospitals as far as regards women authorized by this Act to be detained therein for medical treatment or being therein under medical treatment for a contagious disease.45 The line of continuity, and its evolution, between Johnson and the legislation is not difficult to track – while the fear of miscegenation remains the key animating force behind both, there is a gradual shift from viewing morality in the colony as a matter of personal propriety to considering it a governmental concern. Kipling allows a combination of both in the way he remembers his experience of lock hospitals designed to monitor native prostitutes – moral persuasion and governmental prohibition come together to give shape to this threatening sexuality in the form of the body of the prostitute. Indeed, across the nineteenth century, and especially after the “Mutiny” of 1857, the British Raj in India calibrated a whole range of institutional, legal, and administrative resources to bring together morality and law and subsequently to give shape to its apparatuses of governance. Across an unpredictable terrain of race, imperialism, and sexuality, the heady mixture of legal provisions and moral sermons, like Kipling’s texts, tried not only to define degrees of whiteness but, as Philippa Levine suggests, also to identify the figure of the prostitute as the embodiment of the threat that might mar its purity.46 A degree of narrative realism often found its way across governmental documents and fictional texts to flesh out the white subject of such anxious discourses, and with the expansion of legal provisions during 1860s about venereal disease, this brand of realism played an important role in securing public consent. In his early fiction, Kipling explored this intertextual space between governance and fiction-making and deployed the anxiety of miscegenation as the logic of narrative organization. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to suggest that this combination of colonial anxiety and the white masculinity – always threatened, yet carrying the civilizing mission – largely secured his early success among what Monkshood calls the “Anglo-Indian school of letters.”

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In iconic tales of racial degeneration like “To Be Filed for Reference” (1888) or “Without Benefit of Clergy” (1891), Kipling portrays through the central characters of McIntosh Jellaludin (the Oxford scholar who converts to Islam and marries a native woman in India) and John Holden (the hapless civil servant in love with Ameera) the danger of what Satoshi Mizutani describes as “degeneration incarnate, who threatened to damage whiteness from within, thus dangerously undermining the legitimacy of British Raj.”47 As one of Kipling’s early critics Lawton puts it, a story like “Without Benefit of Clergy” bears a sermon that “A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed” and the “strange intermingling of the English and their dusky-faced subjects [. . .] under the hot Indian sun” is potentially ruinous.48 The threat in each case – as also in Lalun of “On the City Wall” (1888) and Bisesa of “Beyond the Pale” (1888) – is the native woman who ensnares the white man and thus weakens his virility. These stories rearrange the more generalized threat of the colony within the body of the native woman and suggest that the sexualized body, always unpredictable and excessive, must be put under surveillance and control. In his soldier stories, Kipling carefully infuses this general anxiety into more specific governmental strategies and builds on several legislations with the explicit aim of policing sexual encounters between white soldiers and native prostitutes through the intricately laid designs of laal bazaars and lock hospitals. Ashwini Tambe notes that this conscious promotion of regulated governmental heterosexuality served two purposes at once – it upheld the “powerful symbol of Indian moral degeneration” through the figure of the prostitute and it “provided sexual recreation for British soldiers and sailors.”49 However, every care was taken to address the deeper anxiety of miscegenation, and careful arrangements were put in place to ensure controlled sexual relationship across the racial boundary. These anxieties were pivoted on the question of “venereal diseases” – which Kipling also cites as the central health concern for his privates and subalterns – and legislations were made through a “complex mix of moralism, sanitary regulation, and military lobbying.”50 Along with the bodies of native women, this new set of legislations also sought to control white bodies, and the emphasis on disease allowed the colonial government to redefine the racial boundary with a pathological precision.51 The most important legislation in this regard was of course the three versions of the Contagious Diseases Acts or CD acts in Britain (1864–69) and their counterparts in various British colonies; in India 48

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this was accompanied by the Cantonments Act (1864) and the Indian Contagious Diseases Act (1868). As colonial archives show, however, preventive measures like lock hospitals were in use as early as 1805, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, such hospitals mushroomed across colonial India and eventually in 1861 they came under complete official control with their registration.52 Colonial institutions and legislation together made prostitution and the body of the native prostitute the site of regulation as, following these laws, they were forced to undergo regular medical examination and, if found diseased, were detained in lock hospitals. While protests against CD acts led to their eventual repeal in 1884, and while British feminist Josephine Butler’s “crusade” against these acts marked a new phase in Victorian engagement with the “Indian Woman,” Kipling remained steadfastly attached to the military emphasis on governmental heterosexuality and its latent threat.53 His depiction of the common white soldier made a distinct impression on his immediate readership; in R. Thurston Hopkins’s words, this figure, “under the Indian sun, is a high-spirited creature, usually arrogant and brassy. He has an educated taste for strong drink, an eye for ‘the girls,’ and is strong on loot and practical jokes.”54 But Kipling’s overt reliance on colonial narratives and policies also made them part of what could be called stories of “crumbling masculinity.”55 In almost all his soldier stories in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1888), Kipling gave expression to the fragility of the white male body under threat. Disease, debilitation, and death shape daily lives of these white soldiers, and we are told in no uncertain terms that this lot is thrust upon them by a hostile terrain that tears open not only their bodies but even their moral fabric. What makes it worthwhile and redeems these lives, Kipling’s fiction suggests, is the empire – in an exaggerated and somewhat theatrical version this imperial vision is presented in “The Drums of the Fore and Aft” (1888). Two drummer boys, Jakin and Lew, sacrifice their lives and inspire their regiment to win a difficult battle against a band of local Pathan men in Afghanistan, but this can be taken as a general template. Several stories from this early period pose a grandiose and panoramic vision of the empire as a cause worth dying for, as a cause that somehow overrides the suffering of individual bodies as they become part of collective narration of the grandeur of the imperial mission. Through alternate versions of homosociality and decaying male bodies, Kipling’s early stories were able to release this vision of the empire within world literature. 49

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“Pivot” experience and the beginning of Anglophone world literature Kipling’s early fame thus rested on a contradiction: the empire ensured his global circulation through its own structure and established him as a celebrated prodigy; at the same time, however, his fame was primarily due to an authentic version of the same empire as a threatening space both morally and physically, most prominently so in the metonymic figure of the fragile and decaying male bodies of British soldiers. Kipling soon realized that this identification between the body and the empire was tenacious at best and suggested a second and more confident configuration in Kim (1901). Before we discuss this final strategy in Kipling’s Indian tales, let us first look at its genealogy through what Kipling describes as his “pivot” experience in India. He insists that in order to gauge the significance of this event, one must place it against his life in India in general and “the affair of the Adjutant of Volunteers at the Club” in particular. In the pages preceding this episode, Kipling carefully details the intensity of summer and diseases in India: the taste of fever in one’s mouth, and the buzz of quinine in one’s ears; the temper frayed by heat to breaking-point but for sanity’s sake held back from the break; the descending darkness of intolerable dusks; and the less supportable dawns of fierce, stale heat through half of the year.56 More public signs of madness are seen in the club: “sudden causeless hates flared up between friends and died down like straw fires; old grievances were recalled and brooded over aloud; the complaint-book bristled with accusations and inventions.”57 He is spared from madness, he believes, because of his ability to read and the “pleasure” he takes in writing. At this point, he narrates the “pivot” experience: It happened one hot-weather evening, in ’86 or thereabouts, when I felt that I had come to the edge of all endurance. As I entered my empty house in the dusk there was no more in me except the horror of a great darkness, that I must have been fighting for some days. I came through the darkness alive, but how I do not know. Late at night I picked up a book by Walter Besant which was called All in a Garden Fair. It dealt with a young man who desired to write; who came to realize 50

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the possibilities of common things seen, and who eventually succeeded in his desire. What its merits may be from today’s ‘literary’ standpoint I do not know. But I do know that that book was my salvation in sore personal need, and with the reading and re-reading it became to me a revelation, a hope and strength.58 Kipling’s confession is important for a number of reasons. Besant’s novel – a bildungsroman in three parts – allows a break in Kipling’s life in India;59 as he recounts further: I was certainly, I argued, as well equipped as the hero and – and – after all, there was no need for me to stay here for ever. [. . .] For proof of my revelation I did, sporadically but sincerely, try to save money, and I built up in my head – always with the book to fall back upon – a dream of the future that sustained me.60 Kipling translates Besant’s rather provincial bildungsroman into imperial cosmopolitanism, which was facilitated by the structure and mobility of the empire. What he defines as his “salvation” is the moment this transition takes place – it is structurally determined by the empire but it happens when he is able to transfer the notion of organicity from its limited sphere of white bodies to the potentially unrestricted space of the empire.61 Once this organic structure of the empire is put in place and once the organic harmony of different parts of the empire becomes thinkable as a consequence, Kipling is able to imagine moving on its surface without friction. The careful planning of this passage, his deliberate detailing of sufferings induced by tropical climate, and his deployment of Christian vocabulary to describe his “pivot” experience – all these point towards his strategy to use the empire as the framing for his new fiction and to rearrange the anxiety surrounding endangered white bodies on the new organic body of the empire. Kipling’s account of the “pivot” experience, however, also points out that this new vision of the empire was not simply produced by Indian climate or crumbling masculinity, his earlier tropes, but was borrowed from the structure of modern novels. Of course he cites Besant’s novel as the source of his “salvation” and “revelation,” but the connection I propose here is much more fundamental than any single novel and is poised on the emergence of the novel as the most reliable form of documenting imperial experience or even of representing Anglophone 51

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territories. This point is made most persuasively in Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” when he says that the transition from the story to the novel under the sign of modernity is marked by notions of organicity and its limits. While stories remain structurally open-ended because of their repeatability, novels restrict such endless repetition by making its meaning part of its very own telling. As Benjamin puts it, the novelist “cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond the limit at which he writes ‘Finis,’ and in so doing invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life.”62 Both these notions of organicity and limit, he suggests further, is best captured by the way the novel internalizes death. Storytelling also cites death but does so by designating death as an external authority; the novel, by contrast, appropriates and celebrates death as part of its structure and unfolding. He proposes that the narrative closure imitating death was a reaction against the extreme privation to which modernity had consigned death; indeed the novel did not only make death visible by drawing it out of the closed walls of hospitals and sanatoria, it even gave death a symbolic function within its own tradition. In Benjamin’s account, the novel emulates private and forlorn death with unprecedented passion, so much so that the reading experience is structured from the beginning with the anticipation of “a definite death and at a very definite place” that would be shared by the reader, and it is only the details that retain the reader’s “consuming interest in the events of the novel.” As a result, the reader is drawn to the novel with the hope of encountering the private death in proxy, of “warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.”63 In this sense, the pleasure of the novel is a cannibalistic pleasure. But Benjamin is quick to add that death is also the inaugurator of a different representational order; with death the real “meaning of life” makes itself available, because with death every life “first assumes [its] transmittable form” or at least appeals to remembrance as such.64 By incorporating death, the novel releases this representational order and makes it coincide with its closure so overwhelmingly that the reader is able to slip into this “transmittable form” as part of his reading experience. The cannibalistic pleasure is superposed – but not erased – by the pleasure of living a surrogate life, and this conjoined pleasure, Benjamin argues, belongs exclusively to the solitary and uncounseled experience of reading the novel in modern times. Kipling’s “pivot” experience is a testimony to this – the salvation he so fondly remembers, and for which he cites Besant’s novel as the model, was realized through what Benjamin argues to be the historical role of the novel in providing explicit closure to bourgeois interiority 52

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and thus making the modern private individual possible. What Kipling adds to this history is the framing of the empire as an organic living whole that does not only limit the interiority of its citizens but makes their circulation on its own surface possible. Admittedly, this strategy is most effective in the bildungsroman format; but, as Benjamin points out, from the very beginning of modern novels, indeed from the days of Cervantes, this template mutated into various figures and types and stood novelistic representations in good stead. To explore Kipling’s use of this novelistic strategy, I turn to Kim as it infuses the bildungsroman and the empire as mutually supportive structures, and like the “pivot” experience in Kipling’s own life offers unambiguous identification with the structure of the empire as the only possible salvation. The novel responds to its central question “Who is Kim?” through this twin formation, through a deliberate spatialization of Kim’s identity across the geography of the empire, and hence invites us to read the overlapping white body and the empire as not only a novelistic tool but also as an imperial strategy. At the outset, as Edward Said points out, the smoothness of imperial space is imagined through willful negation of any conflict. Without this “basically uncontested empire,” as Said puts it, “whose economy, functioning, and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature,” it would have been impossible for Kipling to imagine his protagonist crisscrossing vast swathes of imperial geography to be a part of it quite literally.65 And without this allegedly “delusional” notion of the empire marked by “absence of conflict,” the central novelistic device of using the empire as a framing for the novel would have fallen flat.66 Within the text, however, the uncontested space of the empire is used to situate the picaresque quality of the story in which the adolescent Kim and the wise lama are engaged in an adventurous journey. Kim’s dual commitment to the Ethnological Survey and the Great Game in the company of Colonel Creighton, Mahbub Ali, and Hurree Chunder Mookerjee sustains this journey and offers Kipling an opportunity to explore and document large parts of the empire which remained somewhat peripheral to his stories – as Kipling observes in his memoir, Kim “was nakedly picaresque and plotless” just to imitate the landscape its protagonist inhabits.67 Like picaresque proper, the novel ends by revealing the true identity of Kim (though nothing of that sort happens to the lama), but the strategy of this revelation, like Kipling’s own life, requires both race and empire as enabling structures. What Kim realizes through the novel is his transition from mobile identities (when he is frequently confused with native Indian boys) to a fixed and exclusively 53

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white male body in the service of the empire. Even the opening pages of the novel make this ambiguous identity its central template: Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white – a poor white of the very poorest.68 As Kipling puts it later, this ambiguity was part of his imagination from the very beginning, from the moment he conceived the central character of the novel in 1892: Now even in the Bliss Cottage I had a vague notion of an Irish boy, born in India and mixed up with native life. I went as far as to make him the son of a private in an Irish Battalion, and christened him ‘Kim of the ’Rishti’ – short, that is for Irish.69 It is this status of being “mixed up with native life” that fuels the first part of the novel and makes his admission into the Great Game possible. This mobility ends with his recognition within the text as the white child of empire – he is able to connect with his surroundings (“clay of his clay” (K, 282)) after what Ian Baucom describes as his proper “sahibization.”70 Alongside this central transition in the novel there is a further layer where the threatened white male body is finally restored to its health and confidence under the shadow of the empire. From stories of uncertain whiteness, the novel finally emerges as a form that can restrict the boundaries of being white by running the biological and the formal structures together, by securing what Benjamin calls a “transmittable form” for Kim. Of course Kim does not die at the end of the novel, but he is contained within its structure in a way that is missing from Kipling’s soldier stories. Kim is the proper novelization of imperial experience, of the white male body that embodies this experience, and also the performative fiction par excellence of what Said calls the “pleasure of imperialism.”71 With Kim and with his abbreviation within the bounds of the empire, Kipling is able to incorporate death within the structure of empire – what remained as a threatening exterior and an essential part of a hostile colony in his stories is now internalized as a central principle of his novel. Death is figured through two novelistic devices – on the one hand, the reduction of Kim from a 54

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multiplicity to a resolutely imperial singularity conforms to the central novelistic tool Benjamin identifies in “The Storyteller.” His whiteness is instrumentalized in the novel not only to produce a closure to his life (and arrest him as the eternal boy hero of imperial espionage) but also to the novel itself. On the other, this initial closure is reinforced in the second figuration of death – by making the white body and the novel coterminal, Kipling also attempts to imagine the limits of the empire in its whiteness. Imperial space, quite literally, is mapped onto the body of young Kim in the novel, but, by the same token, whiteness now becomes a bounded entity and loses its endless expansion that was the key to his stories. Kim manages to avoid the nagging persistence of “crumbling masculinity,” but does so at the expense of making the empire a limited and hence stable category. As I have indicated above, the central apparatus of imperial imagination is supplied by the novel form, but within the text Kipling adopts an ingenious device to achieve its full effect – the Survey of India that doubles as a façade for the Great Game. Most critics have concentrated on the disciplinary thrust of the Survey and have linked it with colonial governance. Thomas Richards, for instance, sees it as part of what he calls the “imperial archive” of the nineteenth century – “the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire.”72 The Survey in Kim marks the transition from “colonization through ethnocide, deportation, and slavery” to “colonization through the mediated instrumentality of information” – indeed Richards draws striking parallels between colonial state’s mapping of the forbidden territory of Tibet under Lord Montgomerie and similar projects in the novel under the stewardship of Colonel Creighton to suggest that Kipling’s novel demonstrates most effectively the “colonial state’s investment in surveillance and control.”73 Baucom, on the other hand, argues that though this emphasis on surveillance and construction of imperial archive remains a valid reading of the novel, making it exclusive narrative strategy of the novel does not allow one to see certain hesitant moments in the text – moments which expose the gap between what the colonial state desires and what it manages to achieve.74 In either case, I think the point remains that the Survey in the novel is instrumentalized as an aide in visualizing the imperial space as both limited and knowable, and it functions as a parallel to the novelistic device I have charted above. The mutual reliance of the Survey and the novel, or even their intertextuality in Richards’s reading, leads to the 55

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conclusion that the novel actively seeks corroboration for its narrative devices from the world of the colonial state. It is possible to show parallels between the various stages of the Survey as recounted in R.H. Phillimore’s Historical Records of the Survey of India, 4 volumes (1945–1958) and the Survey in Kim, but it remains important to understand how the Survey functions as part of “that vast mass of ‘information received’ on which the Indian Government acts” (K, 21). It remained a central governmental apparatus for the colonial state to know and police the vast territory under its control, and it figures in the novel as a quietly assuring device suggesting that the apparently aimless journeys of its protagonists across parts of British India is not only a novelistic device but it has good governmental foundation as well. In other words, the novel as a form allowed Kipling to achieve both a narrative closure to the empire and its underlying masculine whiteness, and to achieve this closure he relies on a method of surveillance that employed chains, perambulators, sextants and quadrants, compasses, theodolites, chronometers, geodetic triangulation, tacheometry, and similar technologies to record imperial topography. Like Kipling’s own “pivot” experience, and like Benjamin’s formulation of the novel’s trajectory in modern world, the Survey functions in the novel as a device that makes available the “divinatory realization of the meaning of life” which is by now inextricably linked with the bounded space of the empire. While Kim repeats many of the devices available in Kipling’s stories – the homoerotic world, the trope of adventure, white soldiers etc. – in a significant aspect it differs from those stories: it transforms the ethical dilemma of the empire by translating its space into a governmental one which would henceforth be the ground on which any stake on the imperial imagination has to be made. In Kim we encounter a sort of resolution of the anthropological-canonical that I have charted in the Introduction, and this resolution is imagined within the bounded territory of the empire. Kipling is indeed, as Benjamin suggests, the last great storyteller, because in him we encounter the proper novelization of imperial experience, and hence of the Anglophone territories as well, which is governmental yet global, mundane yet legendary. Useful empire Our story of Kipling and the making of Anglophone world literature does not stop at his ability to integrate far-flung colonies within a

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narrative whole, and it is not even restricted to his status as the unofficial chronicler of the empire. As several attempts to revive Kipling’s legacy in the postwar period evince, he was not only seen as a prophet of the imperial past but also an important part of Britain’s post-imperial social imaginations. Such attempts show, in Benita Parry’s words, that [w]hen critics proffer a gloss which underwrites Kipling’s views on a patriotism enjoining obedience to an hierarchical status quo at home and bellicosity abroad, on the conservation of England’s ancestral culture, and on Europe’s title to global leadership, they are giving comfort to a domestic politics of social conformity and class deference, re-evoking an identity of race with nation, and sustaining the values of a white mythology.75 Here I want to focus on one such attempt at Kipling’s reparation, T.S. Eliot’s glowing tribute, which shows how the version of the empire made available by Kipling was seen as useful for his admirers and how this version served not only domestic politics in Britain after the Second World War, but even provided important narrative strategies to understand the legacy of British imperialism at a global scale. Eliot’s 1941 essay “Rudyard Kipling,” used as an introduction to his A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, was a major contribution in the postwar revival of Kipling. In this essay, Eliot argues that one needs to invent new protocols of reading to do justice to an author like Kipling, because the available conventions of reading do not apply to his oeuvre. The new reading is an attempt to “try and find the permanent in Kipling’s verse,” and is also an inquiry into the content of his verses in order to think beyond “[Max] Beerbohm’s caricature of the Bank Holiday cornet virtuoso on the spree.”76 This essay, however, is but one significant moment in Eliot’s long engagement with Kipling’s work – the other documents in this dossier are his 1909 essay “The Defects of Kipling” as a Harvard student, his critical review of Kipling entitled “Kipling Redivivus” for Athenaeum in 1919, and his 1958 address to the Kipling Society called “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling.” The stark contrast between the earliest and the last titles is readily visible, but the growing appreciation of Kipling was not caused by a sudden change in taste or custom but contained a peculiar autobiographical ring that helped Eliot revise his earlier position. As he elaborates in his 1958 address, it is the growing appreciation of Kipling

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as a resident foreigner in England, much like his own status in the same country, that forces him to re-theorize Kipling’s work: He [Kipling] had been a citizen of the British Empire, long before he naturalized himself, so to speak, in a particular part of a particular county of England. The topography of my own life history is very different from his, but our feelings about England spring from causes not wholly dissimilar. The word metic is perfectly good English, though to many people the French métèque may be more familiar. It does not apply perhaps in the strictest sense to either of us, since we come both from wholly British stock; but I think Kipling’s attitude to things English, like mine, was in some ways different from that of any native-born Briton.77 Eliot, of course, imagines Kipling as a modernist contemporary who, like other modernist stalwarts, is trapped within the inevitable conditions of exile and alienation. But the way he formulates the foreignness of Kipling – as a “citizen of the British Empire” and thus a métèque as opposed to a “native-born Briton” – alerts us to the further possibility that can only be captured in the trope of usefulness. Kipling for him is the most obvious occasion to put forward a new notion of culture that is a legacy of British imperialism and is in tune with contemporary historical realities. Through Kipling’s work, Eliot is able to formulate an account of the metropolitan center of the empire that has been irrevocably altered by territorial expansion; and by proposing new protocols of reading for Kipling’s work, he is able to recuperate the useful empire for the purpose of re-evaluating the core national culture. Eliot’s new appraisal of Kipling begins with the assumption that “his verse and his prose are inseparable” and that he was the “inventor of a mixed form.”78 Kipling’s re-evaluation, thus, is predicated on the fact that the full measure of his genius is to be sought in the generic plurality of his writing in relation to different phases of his career that have been marked by the geography of the empire. Along with this plea for plurality, Eliot also detects the “singleness of intention” – that of the “ballad writer” who wishes to be appreciated by a cross section of readership – that shapes his writing.79 The trades of the ballad writer, as Eliot describes it, are strikingly similar to that of the storyteller in Benjamin’s account: the intention of the ballad writer is “to tell a story in what [. . .] is the natural form for a story which is intended to arouse emotion”; “[r]epeated hearings [of ballad] may confirm the 58

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first impressions, may repeat the effect, but full understanding should be conveyed at one hearing”; “ballad verse is not simply a stage in historical development: the ballad persists and develops in its own way, and corresponds to a permanent level of enjoyment of literature.”80 In other words, ballad functions in the same way Benjamin claims the story does, and serves a similar purpose for its reader. Kipling the craftsman demands to be read as a ballad maker, as a writer whose work – whether verse or prose – is marked with its inherent repeatability or its ability to lend itself to repeated performances until it becomes part of shared national culture. This quality of his writing, however, also takes him beyond the mere status of storyteller or political versifier; and as he becomes part of a national consciousness through repetition, he performs the crucial duty of trying “to make certain things plain to his countrymen who would not see them.”81 It is important to point out here that the question of national culture is of vital importance to Eliot’s overall notion of poetry. In “The Social Function of Poetry,” he observes that “poetry differs from every other art in having a value for the people of the poet’s race and language”; that is to say, it has the peculiar ability to contain and express something of the local that other art forms lack. If this is the case, the expression of this local – via race and language – inevitably requires the larger frame of the nation, and, as a result, “no art is more stubbornly national than poetry.”82 Consequently, the social function of poetry in any “living and healthy” national culture is to express the emotions and feelings of its people, to influence nuances of the national language, and to facilitate “spiritual communication” between people.83 Kipling’s inclusion within this national fabric, with the admission that he is a métèque or a resident foreigner in England, sets the stage for the new reading strategy Eliot wants to pursue. Eliot maintains that it would be wrong to think of Kipling’s work as a whole in terms of its “development” since there is no development but mutation; for the “development we must look to changes in the environments and in the man himself.”84 Accordingly, there are three phases in Kipling’s life and work – the Indian phase, the travel and American phase, and the Sussex phase – and they mutually reflect the development of his views on the empire and its metropolitan/national core. Eliot makes no bones about the fact that Kipling was an ardent believer in the greatness of the British Empire, but argues that this belief is much more complex than it appears at the outset: while in his Indian phase he was exploring remote corners of the empire, in his Sussex phase he became concerned with the “core of empire” which to him 59

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was “something older, more natural and more permanent.”85 This dual vision of the empire – concerning its colonial periphery and its national core – is the useful counsel Kipling offers. It is not moral advice but a faithful account of the emerging reality in which the colony and the core are mutually constituted and the paradigm of being métèque applies to both. His participation in the national culture is important precisely because he was one of the first chroniclers of this split at the heart of the nation. Even when he glorified the empire and “helped to conceal its seamy side,” he remained concerned with the impact of the territorial expansion on the core of Englishness: “he did not aim to idealize either border warfare or the professional soldier; his reflections on the Boer War are more admonitory than laudatory.”86 The citizen of the empire made apparent the fundamentally schizophrenic character of British culture in the age of its imperial expansion. Hence the useful empire, available in the plurality of Kipling’s “mixed form,” is important for two reasons. First, as Eliot points out, it could show the métèque-like or schizophrenic national culture to be the core of the biggest empire of its time. This is not a description of the contemporary history, but a prognosis of the future of the empire. Eliot argues that during his India phase Kipling in reality belonged to India. The sense of belonging that we encounter in his work is truer than that of any Englishman who has written about India, and, in an important way, than even any Indian as well because Kipling could formulate an inclusive structure of inhabiting a place. For this mode of belonging – which Eliot describes as “religious attitude” – the inspiration was offered by an “attitude of comprehensive tolerance” that allowed him to transgress superficial boundaries and even to become the “first citizen of India.”87 By suggesting Kipling’s concern for India as that of someone who belongs, and by formulating this belonging in abstract religious terms, Eliot is able to effect an important shift within the available vocabulary of imperial culture – he proposes Kipling as the authentic scribe not of imperial grandeur but of imperial responsibility. Kipling, he argues, did not flatter “national, racial or imperial vanity” by writing on imperial matters, and he did not even “propagate a political programme,” but made his national audience aware of the existence of a responsibility that demanded serious attention. The plurality of belonging is the key to his argument, and he evidently uses it to suggest that the core of the empire (and not simply Kipling) is implicated in this imperial responsibility and this is going to be the governing principle even in the future. At this point, he struggles to repudiate charges of racism against Kipling and comes up with a canny rationalization of the empire that is precariously useful in rescuing the 60

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imperial mission from all charges of racism. He reformulates Kipling’s views as a belief that the “British have a greater aptitude for ruling than other people, and that they include a greater number of kindly, incorruptible and unselfseeking men capable of administration”; alongside this unwavering belief, he continues, Kipling also knew that “skepticism in this matter is less likely to lead to greater magnanimity than it is to lead to a relaxation of the sense of responsibility.” Such a view, he asserts with all seriousness, is anything but racist. The second feature of the useful empire is derived from the first. Dual belonging and responsibility – as Eliot constructs it – remained available as an integral part of imperial rhetoric during the first half of the twentieth century. What Eliot highlights here via Kipling is a significant articulation of imperial culture of his time, but by no means unique. Naturalization of the empire was so widespread during his time, and its denial of violence so familiar, that Eliot had little difficulty in expressing similar views elsewhere. In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, first published a year after India’s decolonization in 1947, he still maintains the rhetoric of moral responsibility to rationalize the imperial project. In his view, the current phase of “culture-consciousness” in Europe is a fatal one for any nation since it highlights cultural difference so vigorously that in effect it warrants cultural isolation. And the reason for this dangerous culture-consciousness is not far to seek. On the one hand, the Russian Revolution and its aftermath in the totalitarian form of life have made the rest of Europe skeptical about cultural contacts on a large scale. On the other, however, anthropological inquiries into various imperial projects have made the cultural content of the empire vulnerable. Predictably, Eliot is more concerned about the latter since it captures larger issues about culture and its relationship with politics. “Early British rulers in India were content to rule,” he observes, and for various reasons they “assimilated themselves to the mentality of the people they governed.”88 In contrast, later middle-class rulers of British India – and he squarely blames the middle class for the failure of the empire – were obsessed with the idea of importing Western civilization in India because of their innate belief in the superiority of Europe. The results they achieved were partial, and therefore catastrophic. Their “piecemeal imposition of a foreign culture,” with total disregard for the local one, has an inevitable element of arrogant superiority and has made the “Oriental” simultaneously resentful towards his own civilization and the one that has made insufficient inroads into it. Indeed, Eliot believes that partial westernization of India and the resultant schizophrenia is the reason behind the discontent against British rule, and the “failure 61

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of complete cultural assimilation” is a “religious failure.”89 Erosion of local culture through imperial culture, Eliot is quick to add, must not be taken as an indictment of the moral authority of the empire. For him, the empire was, and remains in theory, a moral obligation because of its manifold implications in the sustenance of the core cultural milieu. The useful empire, even when it is shrinking, is an indispensable element of the core. Vehement attacks mounted against the British Empire, he notes with a touch of acerbic irony, are covert attempts to advocate other forms of empire – e.g. American or Russian – which lack the moral underpinning that sustained the British variety in its prime. For Eliot the empire remains an uncontested territory – morally and politically – and functions as a useful category to understand contemporary history of the metropolitan center. Eliot’s growing appreciation of Kipling reaches its climax in his 1958 address, when he declares Kipling as the “greatest English man of letters of his generation.”90 This trajectory of appreciation chronicles Kipling’s rehabilitation in post-imperial Britain, but it also demonstrates the gradual acceptance of Kipling’s vision of the schizophrenic character of the empire – both at its periphery and also at home. What Eliot and other admirers of Kipling demonstrate, moreover, is that his version of the empire and its narrative strategies have now been universalized; even though the formal empire is no longer there, his narrative strategies have particular relevance for its vestiges in Anglophone territories. As we shall see in the following chapters, and through the works of Naipaul, Coetzee, and Rushdie, contemporary Anglophone writing engages with many tropes and themes introduced in Kipling’s oeuvre, marking their global circulation. Race, ethnology, colonial governance, cultural identity, and similar issues occur repeatedly in the Anglophone territories, and Kipling stands at the beginning of this long tradition of narrating the postcolony as embodying the aftermath of narrative codes and strategies using the empire as a master narrative. Let me now turn to Naipaul to explore how this notion of cultural schizophrenia marked the world-reality of Anglophone territories. Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1962 [1951]), 208–9. 2 Rudyard Kipling, “Literature,” in A Book of Words: Selections from Speeches and Addresses Delivered between 1906 and 1927 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1928), 3–4. 3 Rudyard Kipling, “The Uses of Reading,” in A Book of Words, 84–5. In the same speech he again alludes to another statesman who described the usefulness of his

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

reading of the Greek and Latin classics in the following words: “All I took away from school and college was the fact that there were once peoples who didn’t talk our tongue and who were very strong on sacrifice and ritual, particularly at meals, whose gods were different from ours and who had strict views on the disposal of the dead. Well, you know, all that is worth knowing if you ever have to govern India.” Kipling, A Book of Words, 91–2. Rudyard Kipling, “Imperial Relations,” in A Book of Words, 25. Cyril Falls, Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1915), 189. George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” in Andrew Rutherford (ed.) Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964 [1946]), 72. Sandra Kemp, “The Archive on Which the Sun Never Sets: Rudyard Kipling,” History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 4 (1998), 33–48; Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 131–3. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 209. Adam Barrows traces Kipling’s contribution to world literature through his ambiguous response to what he calls “imperial time.” Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 89–96. Andrew Lang, “An Indian Story-Teller,” in Roger Lancelyn Green (ed.) Rudyard Kipling: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 2000), 47, 50. James Matthew Barrie, “Mr. Kipling’s Stories,” in Green (ed.) Rudyard Kipling: The Critical Heritage, 78–87. Frederic Lawrence Knowles, A Kipling Primer (Boston: Brown, 1899), 32–3. William M. Clemens, A Ken of Kipling: Being a Biographical Sketch of Rudyard Kipling, with an Appreciation and Some Anecdotes (Toronto: G. N. Morang & Co., 1899), 46. William Cranston Lawton, Rudyard Kipling, the Artist: A Retrospect and a Prophecy (New York: Morse, 1899), 3. Cecil Charles, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works (London: J. Hewetson & Son, n.d.), 31–2. Falls, Rudyard Kipling, 11. Knowles, A Kipling Primer, 7. John Palmer, Rudyard Kipling (London: Nisbet & Co., 1918), 15–17. This is a partial list collated from Phillip Mallet, Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 45–52. Walter Morris Hart, “Preface,” in Kipling: The Story-Writer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1918), n.p.; Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds.) Selected Writings, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 157. Hart, Kipling: The Story-Writer, 6. G.F. Monkshood, Rudyard Kipling: An Attempt at Appreciation (London: Greening & Co., 1899), 104–5. Monkshood, Rudyard Kipling, 144. Quoted in Monkshood, Rudyard Kipling, 196. Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 76–7. Monkshood, Rudyard Kipling, 217–22. For a discussion on Kipling’s relationship with this Anglo-Indian school, see Bart J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ (New York: Routledge, 1986), 22–5.

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27 Rudyard Kipling, “Preface to Under the Deodars,” in Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis (eds.) Writings on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7–9. 28 Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1937), 77, 74. 29 Sylvère Monod, “Conrad and Kipling: Two Reticent Autobiographer,” The Conradian, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1987), 122–37. 30 Kipling, Something of Myself, 59. 31 Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 [1955]), 149–50. 32 Kipling, Something of Myself, 59. 33 Kipling, Something of Myself, 62. 34 James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Specifically the Climate of India, on European Constitution (London: J. Callow, 1813), 415–79. 35 R.S. Mair, Medical Guide for Anglo-Indians (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1874), 4–5. 36 Grant Colesworthy, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life: A Letter from an Artist in India to His Mother in England (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1862), 97. 37 Edward Braddon, Life in India: A Series of Sketches Showing Something of the Anglo-Indian – the Land He Lives in – and the People among Whom He Lives (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1872), 244–5. 38 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in NineteenthCentury India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 7–8, 35–7. 39 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15–20 and passim. 40 Mair, Medical Guide for Anglo-Indians, 5. 41 Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, 19. 42 Satoshi Mizutani, The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British India, 1858–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–46. 43 Kipling, Something of Myself, 62. 44 Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates, 478–9; emphasis added. 45 A Collection of the Acts Passed by the Governor General of India in Council, in the Year 1868 (Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1868), n.p. 46 Philippa Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1994), 579– 602. Also see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London: Routledge, 2003), 177–98. 47 Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 18. 48 Lawton, Rudyard Kipling, the Artist, 11. 49 Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxiii. 50 Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire,” 584. 51 See Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–1868 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 118 and passim. 52 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 130–1. 53 For Butler’s engagement with the Indian cause, see Burton, Burdens of History, 127–69. 54 R. Thurston Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Appreciation (London: Simpkin, Marshall Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1915), 287.

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55 Arondekar, For the Record, 159. Kipling’s disenchantment with war is equally evident from the following account of the Boer War: “I did see war in South Africa. [. . .] But what a disillusion! [. . .] Nobody galloped up on a lathered horse and fell unconscious after handing the general the long-waited dispatch. The general himself bestrode no charger, but sat in a comfortable camp-chair beside a neatly spread teatable. [. . .] And all this method and precision and application of modern efficiency ideas makes the carnage that follows all the more ghastly. [. . .] the dreadful dead men and the shrieking wounded men [. . .] seem to you like innocent bystanders who have got in the way of some great civil-engineering scheme and been torn and blown up.” Harold Orel (ed.), Kipling: Interviews and Recollections, Vol. 2 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983), 323–4. 56 Kipling, Something of Myself, 68. 57 Kipling, Something of Myself, 69–70. For an interesting history of Anglo-Indian clubs in India, see Mrinalini Sinha, “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India,” The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2001). 58 Kipling, Something of Myself, 71. 59 Besant was a constant source of wonder and enjoyment for Kipling in India; see, for instance, his approving comments on Besant of the “Golden Pen” in Out of India: Things I Saw, and Failed to See, in Certain Days and Nights at Jeypore and Elsewhere (New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1896), 188. The favor was returned in generous measure by Besant when he passionately defended Kipling in an article in Contemporary Review (1900); see Walter Besant, “Is It the Voice of the Hooligan?” in Roger Lancelyn Green (ed.) Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Appreciation, 250–8. Besant also introduced Kipling to London’s literary circuits. 60 Kipling, Something of Myself, 71. 61 On the organic underpinning of bildungsroman, see Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 240–3. 62 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 155. 63 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 156. 64 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 151. 65 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 162. 66 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 115. 67 Kipling, Something of Myself, 245. 68 Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Alan Sandison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1; further references are abbreviated as K and cited parenthetically with pagination. 69 Kipling, Something of Myself, 147–8. 70 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 86–7. 71 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 159 and passim. 72 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 11. 73 Richards, The Imperial Archive, 23 and passim. Richards even suggests that Montgomerie is the model for Creighton in the novel, giving further credence to my argument that the novel actively seeks support for its narrative devices from the colonial state. 74 Baucom, Out of Place, 87–9.

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75 Benita Parry, “The Content and Discontents of Kipling’s Imperialism,” New Formations, Vol. 6 (Winter, 1988), 50. 76 T.S. Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” in T.S. Eliot (ed.) A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 7. Eliot here refers to Beerbohm’s 1904 cartoon of Kipling as a petulant child blowing a trumpet and being dragged by Britannia. The caption of the cartoon reads: “Kipling on a Spree” with the additional line, parodying Kipling’s frequent use of Cockney, “Rudyard Kipling Takes a Bloomin’ Day Aht, on the Blasted ’Eath, along with Britannia, ’is Gurl.” See Philip Mallett, “Rudyard Kipling and the Invention of Englishness,” in C.C. Barfoot (ed.) Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 254–5. 77 T.S. Eliot, “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling,” in Elliot L. Gilbert (ed.) Kipling and the Critics (London: Peter Owen, 1965), 120. 78 Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” 5. 79 Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” 10. 80 Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” 9–10. In his 1919 review, Eliot describes Kipling’s poetry as the “poetry of oratory; it is music just as the words of orator or preacher are music; they persuade, not by reason, but by emphatic sound.” T.S. Eliot, “Kipling Redivivus,” in Green (ed.) Rudyard Kipling: The Critical Heritage, 323. 81 Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” 34. 82 T.S. Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), 18–9. 83 Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” 22–3; emphasis original. 84 Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” 27. 85 Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” 27; emphasis original. 86 Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” 29. 87 Eliot, “Rudyard Kipling,” 24. 88 T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 90. 89 Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 90–1. 90 Eliot, “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling,” 123.

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London is my metropolitan centre; it is my commercial centre; and yet I know that it is a kind of limbo and that I am a refugee in the sense that I am always peripheral. – V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (1967) [A]n autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. – V.S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Perón, with The Killings in Trinidad (1980)

V.S. Naipaul’s novels present a characteristically postcolonial dilemma: how to read his novels and his politics together, in a frame of coproduction, and how to locate his bio-graphy within this framing. His novels, for example, set in the Caribbean islands and charged with the “passions and nerves” of his early life, are often informed by a regressive, even reactionary, vision of the New World. Satire in these novels frequently deteriorates into disturbing readings of history, reducing the socio-political complexity of the New World into what he sees as the derivative and perfunctory political modernity. And yet, these novels present a unique opportunity to explore one buried history of the British Empire which Gandhi described as the “new system of slavery” – it is the history of indentured labor, nineteenth-century mass migration of cheap laborers from the Indian subcontinent to different parts of the New World following the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and its implementation and amendments in subsequent decades.1 Without Naipaul’s fiction and his staging of the familial/autobiographical, without his brutal depiction of their desires and prejudices, the imaginative and emotional worlds of this other globalization of the nineteenth 67

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century, and especially of the resultant diaspora, would have been quite inaccessible.2 As historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues, despite disagreements with Naipaul’s views on postcolonial history, one cannot but acknowledge that “[w]ith his clarity of expression and utter lack of self-awareness, he provides a window into a [diasporic] world and its prejudices: he is thus larger than himself.”3 Consequently, the reader of Naipaul’s early novels is in a perpetual dilemma of finding effective reading strategies that would take into account Naipaul’s obstinate political agenda and yet would pay close attention to his narrative techniques to explain how such techniques are mobilized in his novels to engage with the history which is “larger than himself.” Naipaul’s prominence in the annals of world literature is closely related to this postcolonial dilemma – how to account for an author who remains fastidiously responsive to his divided self between “two worlds” and yet spends his entire life comparing one unfavorably with the other.4 In Pascale Casanova’s reading, this means Naipaul’s complete “assimilation” and “conformism” – “an outstanding example of a writer who wholly embraced the dominant literary values of his linguistic region; who, in the absence of any literary tradition in his native country, had no other choice but to try to become English” with the distraught realization that he is “neither completely English [. . .] nor completely Indian.”5 Many of these accounts of Naipaul’s peculiar status in world literature take literally what Naipaul’s authorized biographer Patrick French calls “a typically Naipauline performance: outrageous, funny, impossible” and fail to historicize the almost schizophrenic quality of his writing.6 In this chapter, I read Naipaul as providing copious testimonies to a form of postcolonial schizophrenia, which has its roots in the history of what Tejaswini Niranjana calls the “subaltern diaspora” of indentured migration and which proliferates through porous frontiers of texts and territories.7 Indeed, Naipaul makes schizophrenia a template to probe postcolonial societies quite early in his career, and only looks for repeated confirmations through novels and travelogues spread across continents. Take, for instance, his description of the Caribbean in The Middle Passage (1962) and his frustration over the “West Indian futility.” The central problematic confronted by any historian of these islands, he contends, is the schizophrenic gap between acceptable academic protocols and Caribbean realities. Though, in his characteristic fashion, Naipaul relentlessly condemns the lack of “achievement and creation” in the Caribbean, he nonetheless acknowledges that colonial plantation economy and canonical forms of history writing eventually remain incommensurable to each other, and the resultant schizophrenia 68

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is what emerges as the most defining cultural bequeath for the present moment of history.8 Two years later, he deals with this schizophrenia more frontally when he describes postcolonial India as deeply divided between two cultures in An Area of Darkness (1964). He makes postcolonial schizophrenia a direct descendant of the Anglo-India that Kipling portrayed and traces it across a vast range of ideas and institutional structures – “buildings, railways, a system of administration, the intellectual discipline of the civil servant and the economist” – suggesting a gap between the canonical presence of a distant culture and its imperfect mimicry within whatever is anthropologically local.9 Naipaul’s frequent recourse to a Conradian vision of darkness in both fiction and non-fiction is his acknowledgement of this schizophrenia – it is not necessarily a pathological disorder but rather a characteristic feature of postcolonial history. Attempts to read Naipaul as part of world literature by Casanova and others often miss this centrality of postcolonial schizophrenia in his work. To address his typical schizophrenic techniques, and also to engage with his politics, I propose in this chapter the concept of belated territories as an emplotting device as well as an ideological orientation in Naipaul’s fiction. My argument can be seen paralleling Henri Lefebvre’s “representational space”10 or Michel Foucault’s description of the “other” spaces of a culture,11 but what distinguishes belated territories is their chronotopic attempt to arrest postcolonial modernity as essentially schizophrenic in nature and hence always and already lagging behind a truer version. Unlike other spatial enclosures described by Lefebvre and Foucault, which secure stable representation over time, such territories are belated and contingent because they occupy a gap opened by both global capital and transnational literary canons. What interests me is the role played by schizophrenia in revealing the impossibility of a unified canon of world literature. In these belated territories, Naipaul’s own writing stages a sustained and troubled engagement with the English canon, in forcing it to work in unfamiliar locations like the Caribbean, and eventually acknowledges the canon’s inability to capture the belatedness of postcolonial territories. Within the abundance and immediacy of local reality, he suggests, the distant canon loses its usefulness or power and repeats itself as a dead weight with sufficient aura but little effect. Instead, what emerges in its place, and what challenges the authority of the canonical, is a mode of Anglophone writing that situates itself within the gap between received literary traditions and the realities produced through plantation economy. World literature as a totalizing system falters at this precise moment of globalized capital 69

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and plantation economy, in the face of labor migration through slavery and indenture, revealing its constitutive failure to appropriate such narratives. Belated territories and schizophrenic cultures thus function as an exposure of the hollowness of claims made about the inalienable and direct connection between world literature and global capital in recent theoretical debates. Belated territory as a chronotope Let us begin with the political unease so widespread in Naipaul criticism. Homi Bhabha has voiced his discomfort with Naipaul in the following words: His [Naipaul’s] political opinions on the history of the Third World can be provocative and offensive, even as his insights upon the lifeworld of postcolonial societies are subtle, sharp, surprising. It would have been easy to condemn the former and applaud the latter; and I could have argued, as critics often do, that artists and writers are most creative when they are most contradictory and that literary language works best when it embraces the arts of agonism and ambiguity. My task, however, was tougher than that because the imaginative value of Naipaul’s writing lies in its peculiar perversity.12 Bhabha is by no means alone, as this sentiment covers critics from different generations and schools. Ashis Nandy, for example, describes Naipaul (along with Nirad C. Chaudhuri) as one of the “inverted modern gurus” of our time, who peddle certain versions of “materialist” India and concurrently find it loathsome “for not being either a true copy of or a true counterplayer of the West.”13 Such disingenuous posturing vis-à-vis India, as Nandy’s argument implies, is a template that Naipaul uses for almost the entire postcolonial world as and when he chooses to write about it. Anthony Appiah has identified this phenomenon as the “Naipaul fallacy” that tries to make sense of the nonEurope by “embedding [it] in European culture.”14 Sara Suleri, on the other hand, takes up Naipaul as one of the last representatives of a “dying generation” who are, simultaneously, the product of a “given ‘third-world’ history” and display the inability of that history to repeat itself meaningfully in a postcolonial world.15 Much of Naipaul’s awkward postures, or what Bhabha describes as his “peculiar perversity,” Suleri maintains, is fueled by this inability to connect with the political 70

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realities of postcoloniality, and the litany of mimic men in Naipaul’s fiction testifies to this failure. It is, however, Edward Said’s sharp indictment of Naipaul as the immoral and uninformed native informant that has more or less framed critical responses to his work in the formative years of postcolonial studies: The most attractive and immoral move, however, has been Naipaul’s, who has allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution. There are others like him who specialize in the thesis of what one of them has called self-inflicted wounds, which is to say that we “non-Whites” are the cause of all our problems, not the overly maligned imperialists. Two things need to be said about the small band whose standard bearer Naipaul has become [. . .]. One is that in presenting themselves as members of courageous minorities in the Third World, they are in fact not interested at all in the Third World – which they never address – but in the metropolitan intellectuals whose twists and turns have gone on despite the Third World, and whose approval they seem quite desperate to have [. . .]. Second, and more important, what is seen as crucially informative and telling about their work – their accounts of the Indian darkness or the Arab predicament – is precisely what is weakest about it: with reference to the actualities it is ignorant, illiterate, and cliché-ridden.16 If Naipaul found only hostile critics among the first generation of postcolonial scholars, he did not fare any better with the next one either.17 The charge of being an uninformed/immoral native informant persists with exceptional resilience, and his increasing fame as an “objective” observer, or his canonization through literary prizes and university curricula, cut little ice. Indeed, Rob Nixon points out that his status in Britain and the US as a “consummately neutral observer” of the postcolonial world is an advantageous position for both parties. Naipaul’s self-styling as “a racial East Indian and a natal West Indian . . . [and] as one of the wretched of the South exiled in the North,” Nixon suggests, allows him to be “strategically invoked as a Third World counterweight to opinions that prove discomfiting to the Western hegemony.”18 Nixon’s point is in perfect accordance with a long series of Caribbean critics who complain that Naipaul’s calculated refusal of any specific class, race, or national identity in favor of a Romantic notion of unmarked authorial self19 or his rather blunt assertion that he is 71

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an apolitical visionary and “[t]here are no principles involved in one’s vision,”20 not only allowed him to make a virtue out of his rootlessness but also secured his rank among the leading figures of contemporary world literature.21 This charge of dubious objectivity has been extended in two significant strands of Naipaul criticism in recent years: Belinda Edmondson has shown how this apparent neutrality of the exile myth masquerades a Victorian sensibility which is exclusively masculinist and insensitive to cultural difference, and Lillian Feder has demonstrated how this loss of explicit contexts for his fiction forces Naipaul to consider writing as the sole guide to truth.22 I open this section with this brief account of the unsympathetic critical scene not to propose its opposite, nor even to join the cottage industry of rescuing the brilliant author of fiction from the embarrassing political commentator, but for two completely different reasons: first, I suggest that this political incorrectness or immorality on Naipaul’s part is not an occasional and individual problematic in our understanding of postcolonial modernity and its chroniclers, that it is not an idiosyncratic expression of Naipaul’s “peculiar perversity,” but a thematic paradigm that demands serious critical attention. Second, and more importantly, I propose this paradigm symptomatic of the Anglophone territory that his novels attempt to capture. Naipaul’s apathy for the indigenous political formations in the Caribbean, his oft-repeated disdain for what he calls the “half-made” societies, and his claim to be an authentic chronicler of the third-world derangement, I argue, suggest a narrative framing of the postcolonial modernity that we have yet to analyze on its own terms. Such gestures demonstrate, among other things, a particular mode of subject-formation that draws its provenance from colonialism as a schizophrenic politico-cultural project and transforms them through various postcolonial territorial practices. Naipaul’s writing offers an exceptionally rich archive if one wants to explore the afterlife of this typically colonial frame in the more sophisticated narratives of contemporary globalization. But let me first chart out the terrain Naipaul engages with and finds detestable. The decolonized nation-state and political modernity, as in much contemporaneous Caribbean writing, figure in Naipaul as interdependent historical phenomena. The interchangeability of “blackness,” “indigenousness,” and “nation-ness,” again much as in the work of many of his fellow authors, occasions political unease in Naipaul’s texts. But, unlike his contemporary authors, there is an obvious conflict between Naipaul’s overt submission to the idea of the self-contained nation-state as the cultural unit of political modernity and civility and the experience 72

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of his fiction that resists the territorial internment that such cultural units enforce. The nation-state in these texts is presented as utopian promise of political and cultural modernity, as an enclosed territory that would contain every spatial practice and would provide an effective framing for the realization of such practices. Naipaul’s narrative voice assumes direct and causal relationship between such territorial enclosures and modernity, between nationality as a stable identity and certain ways of being modern, and the “writers” in Naipaul’s fictional world have the additional burden of narrating beyond “their race or color groups” to forge a national identity in the Caribbean.23 This innocent belief in the nation and narration as crossing more immediate allegiances of race and class, and heralding unprecedented vigor to the “borrowed” island culture, is a recurring feature in Naipaul’s early writing. The literary in his early novels plays a surrogate role for the nation that is yet to come, a textual presence that is set to culminate in historical inevitability.24 However, the fiction he chooses to narrate is conspicuous for its refusal to attest such a conviction. Instead of confirming the “modular” territorial orientation and framing of the nation-state,25 his fictional half-made societies represent a historical juncture where the passage from the colony to the nation-state is structurally fluid. And, while his contemporaries have often utilized this spatial uncertainty to construct a counterculture of European modernity that Paul Gilroy describes as the discursive “double consciousness,”26 Naipaul has progressively aligned himself with a tradition of witnessing and narrating the territorial frustration of the New World that fractures modern expectations of historical experience, nationality, and identity. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Naipaul, in texts like The Middle Passage, only finds confirmation of his belief that the Caribbean essentially is a politically barren terrain. Though he often argues that for him travel is an unmediated practice or what he sees during his visits to different parts of the world has certain directness about it, his text is only a wary confirmation of the third-world political deracination that he found quite early in his life. He does not only find enough proof to say confidently that “[n]ationalism was impossible in Trinidad” because in the colonial society people “owed no loyalty to the island,” even to unearth the real culprit in what he describes as the “picaroon society” which is by definition the other half of enlightened European civility: To bring political organization to the picaroon society, with its taste for corruption and violence and its lack of respect for the person, has its dangers. Such a society cannot immediately 73

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become responsible; but it can be re-educated only through responsibility.27 Plantation colonies for Naipaul lack recognizable political conventions, but this lack is not an invitation to rethink the very notion of the political itself; unlike his fellow Caribbean authors, he can only interpret it as a failure of the political modernity which was conceived in distant Europe and which somehow lost its bearings in the wilderness of the New World.28 Naipaul’s political incorrectness, I propose, needs to be situated in this context of postcolonial nation-state in his texts – the promises of organic culture made through European nations and the failure of that dream in somewhat mechanical and territorial elaborations of decolonized nation-states in the New World. In this chapter, I attempt to capture one such postcolonial narrative trope against and within which Naipaul’s novels unfold – the history of territorial doubling that produces different understandings of political modernity in the Caribbean islands. This is an important paradigm for our reading of belonging, affiliation, and cultural kinship in Naipaul’s novels, and to this end I submit the paradoxical chronotope of belated territory as it maps the temporality of modernity across irreducible spatial doubling. Territory as political space is decisively central here as the temporal frame of modernity – a stage in the universal unfolding of History – is also cast into a spatial metaphor within the postcolony. Modernity is not simply a stage in history but an enactment of History that always happens elsewhere, in some other location, and outside the pale of colonial and postcolonial bildung. Naipaul expresses this sentiment in the following note on his childhood in Chaguanas: The local history I studied at school was not interesting. It offered so little. It was like the maps in the geography books that stressed the islands and virtually did away with the continent. We were a small part of somebody else’s ‘overview’: we were part first of the Spanish story, then of the British story. Perhaps the school histories could be written in no other way. We were, after all, a small agricultural colony; and we couldn’t say we had done much. [. . .] I grew up with two ideas of history, almost two ideas of time. There was history with dates. That kind of history affected people and places abroad [. . .]. But Chaguanas, where I was born, in an Indian-style house my grandfather had built, had no dates.29 74

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In this passage and elsewhere, the postcolonial territory remains a marginal imitator or even an imposter: it is not vigorous enough to unmask the workings of the central narrative, and it is not original enough to build its own counter-narrative. Novels which unfold within this postcolonial location, then, can only embody this belatedness through territorial images – what I call belated territory – that lag behind the real theatre of modernity and hence occupy a hesitant zone of anonymity and interpolation.30 Naipaul himself provides a remarkable metaphor for this territorial belatedness in The Mimic Men (1967), that of “parenthesis.”31 As the narrator Ralph Singh elaborates: he is the latecomer, a sort of “picturesque Asiatic” (MM, 287); that “[t]o be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder” (MM, 141); and their politics consists of “borrowed phrases” from politics elsewhere (MM, 237) – in short, he occupies the parenthetical space as a postcolonial subject. It is this sense of being disingenuous that culminates in his uninhibited self-loathing: There, in Liège in a traffic jam, on the snow slopes of the Laurentians, was the true, pure world. We, here on our island, handling books printed in this world, and using its goods, had been abandoned and forgotten. We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new. (MM, 175; emphasis original) Singh’s rhetoric places the parenthetical territory of the New World as spatial supplement to the cultural syntax of European modernity. Parenthesis signifies temporal delay – as being afterthought – but, more importantly, denotes spatial transition or interval. It is unspecified and anonymous, not part of the core discourse itself but a spatial appendix. My suggestion of “belated territory” or Naipaul’s notion of “parenthesis” function in this chapter as territorial shorthands within which different and diverse spatial practices, representations, and discourses unfold, contest each other, and yet coalesce. Such contradictions define the Anglophone postcolony within the legacies of imperialism and place the schizophrenic duality at its heart. Though belated territories are connected to the passion, action, and lived situations of the island, as Singh’s story in The Mimic Men shows, they are neither celebrated nor considered independent territorial realities by Naipaul. Rather, such 75

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territories are relational, existing with reference to some other spatial order – metropolitan center – and as such are the perennial other to that central rhetoric of space. They are not simply subsidiary spatial categories (though that sense is very strong in Naipaul); they are also devoid of any originality and creativity. Within this derelict territorial container, Naipaul locates his novels with their countless mimic men and releases them within the larger oeuvre of Anglophone world literature. Enigma of belatedness Naipaul’s Caribbean fictions – e.g. The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), and The Mimic Men – are marked with somewhat claustrophobic settings: they seldom lead us outside the community of expatriate East Indians, primarily Hindus, who came here as part of indentured immigration. “Hanuman House,” the family mansion of the Tulsis in A House for Mr. Biswas, with its Hindu rituals and restricted entry to non-Indians only as maids and servants, is a representative case in point. When read against Naipaul’s contemporaries like George Lamming or Wilson Harris, for example, these novels might appear potently xenophobic; and yet they repeatedly gesture towards the history of indenture as providing this imperfect cohesiveness and invite us to read them within this framework. Insularity is an important troping of history, and as such attempts to capture the creolized and somewhat contaminated cultural signs of East Indian communities at the heart of the New World. Privileging this history facilitates the New World’s inclusion in an ideological terrain that grows within and fills up the vacuum left by imperialism, and yet helps the indenture community to retain its distinctly Indian civilizational markers. For Naipaul, this conjoined history of insularity and belated territory begins with indenture migration. Indeed, it is the history of the arrival of approximately 430,000 Indian immigrants or “coolies” in the British West Indian sugar colonies – mostly in Guyana and Trinidad – throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries until the formal abolition of indenture immigration in 1917. Transformation of sugar from a precious rarity to mass-consumed commodity during the eighteenth century, increasing demand of sugar in Europe following rapid and vast industrialization and urbanization, and the steady flow of metropolitan capital in the sugar plantations forced the planters to look for newer sources of cheap laborers outside traditional slave 76

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trades after the formal abolition of slavery.32 India and China, for various reasons, emerged as the most lucrative source locations. As Sidney Mintz puts it, these plantation colonies were “inventions” and “overseas experiments” of Europe, and with slavery and indenture they involved more and more parts of the globe within this sordid narrative of European inventiveness.33 Indian immigrants – who were deported following active campaign by people like John Gladstone and whom the securing agents Messrs. Gellanders, Arbuthnot and Company of Calcutta described as “well limbed and active, docile, easily managed, intelligent but without religious or caste prejudices”34 – arrived in these sugar plantations initially under five-year indentured contract. Between 1875 and 1917, during the “mature” phase of indenture immigration, this flow of immigrants rapidly changed demographic patterns and societal composition of these islands. Though voices of concern were frequently raised against the practice of indenture migration, often drawing astute parallels with slavery, plantation owners considered the scheme as by and large successful and profitable.35 One-third of these immigrant laborers returned to India once their contract had expired, and the remaining population settled in and around these plantations. This had decisive impacts in terms of both labor control and plantation economy and vastly affected the communities who depended on that economic structure. Different communal practices and exchanges largely transformed the island life, both in terms of labor productivity and ethnicity, but the Indian community, unlike the Chinese, remained somewhat secluded and like “a tribe apart up to 1920 and beyond.”36 In an important passage, Naipaul describes his private struggle as a writer against this history: James Joyce was an experimenter in pure form – form divorced from content. And the James Joyce point about language is not the one I am making. I never felt that problem with the English language – language as language. The point that worried me was one of vocabulary, of the differing meanings or associations of words. Garden, house, plantation, gardener, estate: these words mean one thing in England and mean something quite different to the man from Trinidad, an agricultural colony, a colony settled for the purpose of plantation agriculture. How, then, could I write honestly or fairly if the very words I used, with private meanings for me, were yet for the reader outside shot through with the associations of the older literature? I felt that truly to render what I saw, I had to define myself as writer 77

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or narrator; I had to reinterpret things. I have tried to do this in different ways throughout my career.37 To gauge the full import of this passage, we need to turn to Naipaul’s fiction. “Differing meanings or associations of words,” we may recall here, is also a problem that plagues almost all the authors in Naipaul’s fictional world. B. Wordsworth (or “Black Wordsworth”), the poet and calypsonian in The Miguel Street, for instance, is a caricature at best. Though he relies on composing calypsos during the season for his livelihood, he tells the young narrator that he is writing a great pastoral poem that would belong to the land because he, like his “White” counterpart, shares Romantic sensibility and can “watch a small flower like the morning glory and cry.” The narrator reports that B. Wordsworth calibrates all his resources to compose one line a month, distilling all his experience into his poem, and patiently waits for the Caribbean pastoral to materialize. To the narrator’s disappointment, the poet dies without finishing the promised poem, confirming that the Wordsworthian pastoral, however great it might have been in its original moment, is unable to capture the anthropological immediacy of Trinidad produced by plantation capital and slave/indenture labor. Its charm cannot transform the mundane realities of an Alberto Street or a St. Clair Avenue in the way it did with English locations.38 His problem, like Naipaul’s in the passage above, is not so much with the language itself, but with the differential chains of signification that clearly mark a caesura between metropolitan meaning and its colonial derivation. Characters like Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur, on the other hand, use this differential structure to advance their own personal and political goals. Ganesh’s deliberate manipulation of Sanskrit texts, his self-promotional pamphlets, and his newspaper columns like “A Little Bird Tells Us” endorse the derelict intellectual and political culture of the island where a trickster like him can become a local hero by flaunting his dubious “learning” and “knowledge” of books. Ganesh’s wife Leela brings the point home by attesting his predilection for “big, big books. Six to seven inches altogether.”39 It is, however, left to Mohun Biswas to echo most intimately Naipaul’s frustration with literary tradition, not least because Biswas is modeled on his father’s failed attempt to become a writer. Biswas’s profession as a journalist for Sentinel and his secret ambition to succeed as a writer are the sources of his relative independence from his in-laws, the mighty Tulsis. His status as an autodidact and his strange reading habits are staged with an unusual mix of satire and emotional generosity. The reader, for instance, is made privy to such knowledge that “[h]e read all 78

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the books he could get on journalism, and in his enthusiasm bought an expensive American volume called Newspaper Management, which turned out to be an exhortation to newspaper proprietors to invest in modern machinery,” or that “[h]e bought Short Stories: How to Write Them by Cecil Hunt and How to Write a Book, by the same author.”40 This sense of restrained satire, however, does not culminate in subsequent sections, but matures into emotional exacerbation as we see Biswas spending his meager salary increase to take correspondence lessons in writing from a spurious “Ideal School of Journalism, Edgware Road, London.” Let me reproduce two episodes from this phase of Biswas’s life to underscore the point Naipaul makes about language. As part of his writing exercises, Biswas is provided with copious hints on different seasons that he may wish to incorporate: ‘Summer. The crowded trains to the seaside, the chink of ice in a glass, the slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab . . .’ ‘Slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘The only fish I see is the fish that does come around every morning in a basket on the old fishwoman head.’ (HMB, 343) After his submission, he receives a letter with further promises and instructions: He received a letter of congratulation from the Ideal School and was told that the articles were being submitted without delay to the English Press. In the meantime he was asked to apply himself to the second lesson and write pieces on Guy Fawkes Night, Some Village Superstition, The Romance of Place-Names (‘Your vicar is likely to prove a mine of colourful information’). Characters at the Local. He was stumped. No hints were given for these exercises and he wrote nothing. (HMB, 343) Guy Fawkes Night and the village vicar are, of course, alien to the Trinidadian village life. But what exhausts Biswas’s enthusiasm and industry is the asymmetry between his peripheral experience and the metropolitan order of things. His derivative life has been shaped by the history of indenture and plantation; such history crystallizes in diasporic lifeworld around little artifacts, memory of India suspended in time and space, or 79

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the caste system. But such a history, as he discovers through writing, cannot be accommodated within the purity of language or within its realm of “meanings or associations of words.” Naipaul’s own examples – “Garden, house, plantation, gardener, estate” – are even more telling as they directly refer to the differential structure of meaning caused by the history of plantation. He gives voice to the split that imperialism creates within its very language, at the moment of enunciation, and distributes territorially. The meaning he is trying to capture through “garden” or “plantation,” for example, is the supplementary signification that is created overseas and that remains in the domain of peripheral compliance to the language because of its irrevocable colonial genealogy. His difficulty, unlike Joyce’s, is not with the sign but with this supplementary tradition that assumes life overseas. Three different models of narrating this colonial meaning, as I have delineated above, are presented with varying degrees of success: caricature (B. Wordsworth), manipulation with clear hints of fraudulence (Ganesh), and utter frustration (Biswas). Naipaul’s own answer, however, rejects all of them and proposes a very different narrative strategy – he increasingly realizes that this supplementary meaning can only be articulated territorially, i.e. with reference to the colony, and also as a lack of autonomy where the territorial fluidity of the plantation colony fails to provide semantic certainty of any sort. In a passage from “Prologue to an Autobiography,” he explains further: The English or French writer of my age had grown up in a world that was more or less explained. He wrote against a background of knowledge. I couldn’t be a writer in the same way, because to be a colonial, as I was, was to be spared knowledge. It was to live in an intellectually restricted world; it was to accept those restrictions. [. . .] So step by step, book by book [. . .] I eased myself into knowledge. To write was to learn.41 When read against his earlier acknowledgement of alienation within a language, where he could claim the language but had no control over its range of signification, this passage allows us to see Naipaul as both Biswas’s foil and progeny. Biswas’s self-realization, attempted through a short story titled “ESCAPE,” is caught between two opposite depictions of himself: a protagonist with a Hindu name, “short and unattractive and poor, and surrounded by ugliness”; or a central character with Western name, “faceless, but tall and broad-shouldered; he was a reporter and moved in a world derived from the novels Mr. Biswas has read and the films he had seen” (HMB, 344). He never gets beyond 80

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this essential dichotomy, and in spite of having a romantic plot in mind never manages to write beyond the enigmatic and incomplete first sentence: “At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children . . .” (HMB, 344). Difference or belatedness of being, in his case, never manages to express itself beyond the shadow of history and civility, and remains forever caught within a lack that can neither generate anything nor repeat itself meaningfully. In Biswas’s life and writing, the Western and the Hindu protagonists are ultimately alien to each other and will never meet. Naipaul’s own answer is to unite these two worlds in terms of the canonical and the anthropological, difference and repetition, and eventually as a schizophrenic narrative. That is also the reason why territorial difference and belatedness force Naipaul to define narration as epistemology (or a means to self-knowledge and self-fashioning), and simultaneously to claim it as a struggle for honesty. His fiction follows the customary colonial logic of modernization which highlights the role of colonial regimes in transforming a primitive society into a modern one, but he also territorializes this argument to suggest inherent duality between the canonical presence of the metropolis and its anthropological repetition in colony/postcolony. Admittedly, this is perilously close to Hegelian world history, but what distinguishes Naipaul’s case is his insistence on territorializing difference and delay or proposing the trope of belated territory as the framing of postcolonial lifeworlds. Biswas’s protagonists are reformulated in Naipaul’s fiction through their rigorous territorialization, and they are made to interact over a delay which is not only temporal but also territorial – their essential difference collapses within structures of repetition and mimicry. Naipaul seems to transform dark and inert gaps of Hegelian history by suggesting that they may not belong to the core European narrative of political modernity, but by embodying a delayed staging of European history they are at least eligible to be sites of anthropological knowledge. Territorial derangement My account of belated territories in Naipaul’s fiction shows irreducible doubling of canonical/anthropological that is produced, sustained, and eventually offered as a scheme of the world. It is, however, important to distinguish belated territories from what Anne McClintock calls the “anachronistic space” that represents spatial aporia in imperial imaginary.42 What I have in mind is more functional in nature – while the “anachronistic space” marks those static dots of racial or gendered 81

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alterity that resist the universal narrative of history, my suggestion of belated territories is the stage on which a deferred performance of this universal history takes place. Indeed, the history of slave/indenture labor and colonial capital, and the global reticulation of both, did not leave these belated territories untutored or unstructured – far from it. Rather, one witnesses here the moment of ethnocapitalism when capitalism’s logic admits the colony within its global history but codes its mode of circulation within available tropes of ethnography. Plantation colonies in Naipaul’s fiction are not anachronistic in the sense McClintock suggests; rather, they embody time as essentially deferred and in need of recuperation, as lagging behind in the very temporality of signification and hence in need for new representational tools. Colonial topography thus is not left out of the seemingly linear imperial time, but is violently included in it as anthropological antecedence. In this context, let us listen to a passage from The Mimic Men, as the narrator Ralph Singh recounts his childhood in the island of Isabella: My first memory of school is of taking an apple to the teacher. This puzzles me. We had no apples on Isabella. It must have been an orange; yet my memory insists on the apple. The editing is clearly at fault, but the edited version is all I have. (MM, 109–10) Singh struggles here, as Vivek Dhareshwar has suggested, against derivative signification, a defining metaphor for the colonial subject-position.43 Within this space of derivation, his memory cannot register the immediacy of oranges because they are always and already coded as apples in the belated territories of plantation colony. The narrative is of course playing on the familiar trope of comparing apples and oranges, but the passage is much more interested in connecting this trope to the schizophrenic structure of the canon and the colony, of what is derived from “old literature” and what is encountered as part of everyday life in the colony. Singh’s memory struggles with this schizophrenia, and his ability to record the “editing” and his sense of puzzlement at the displacement tells us that his narrative is anything but passive. This recognition may not be enough to resolve the disparity between apples and oranges, but it is an indication that the novel consciously interrogates schizophrenic postcoloniality. Singh’s decision to probe schizophrenia is again evident when he narrates an incident involving one of his friends in Isabella, the halfChinese Hok. In this episode, Hok refuses to acknowledge his mother, 82

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“a Negro woman of the people, short and rather fat” (MM, 116), when in the company of his friends and the teacher. Though he finally has to run after his mother, and to “talk” to her, because the teacher asks him to, the experience shatters him: It was for this betrayal into ordinariness that I knew he [Hok] was crying. It was at this betrayal that the brave among us were tittering. It wasn’t only that the mother was black and of the people, though that was a point; it was that he had been expelled from that private hemisphere of fantasy where lay his true life. The last book he had been reading was The Heroes. What a difference between the mother of Perseus and that mother! What a difference between the white, blue and dark green landscapes he had so recently known and that street! (MM, 117) Hok’s embarrassment, and Singh’s empathy with him, is part of the schizophrenic colonial reality that refuses the racial other a place into its idealized and canonical citadel of civility, thus reducing the postcolony to an anthropological territory of belatedness. In his “private hemisphere of fantasy,” Hok repeats this model and shares it with Perseus and his white mother; but this privacy is intact as long as the autonomy of the discourse is uninterrupted. It is only through self-denial, or by putting one’s immediate racial affiliations under willing suspension, that one maintains this autonomy and becomes part of the “white, blue and dark green landscapes” of this canonical civility. Hok’s mother, or any person of color, disturbs this compact and self-sustained discourse of whiteness. Singh’s comments on the incident reveal that the threat is of racial difference, or the acknowledgement that two different histories of territory can come together through the volatile notion of race. Like Singh and Hok, Naipaul suggests, postcolonial writers are saddled between these two different presences of territories – on the one hand, the sign of the metropolitan territory from which the colony is proscribed; and, on the other, the supplementary territory of the colony where the metropolis achieves sovereignty through a sort of textual proxy. Hok and Perseus, just like oranges and apples, haunt postcolonial narrative with uncanny schizophrenic precision. Singh’s own life is a virtual documentation of and struggle against this postcolonial schizophrenia. His negotiation with the metropolis progressively alienates him from the island life and almost forces him to take refuge within a pure fictional zone. A case in point is the change of 83

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his name – from Ranjit Kripalsingh to Ralph Singh – which finds in the text the following fanciful explanation during a conversation between Singh and his teacher: ‘Singh, Does this certificate belong to you?’ ‘I don’t know. I can’t see it from here.’ ‘Funny man. It says here Ranjit Kripalsingh. Are you he? Or have you entered the school incognito?’ So I had to explain. ‘Ranjit is my secret name,’ I said. ‘It is a custom among Hindus of certain castes. This secret name is my real name but it ought not to be used in public.’ ‘But this leaves you anonymous.’ ‘Exactly. That’s where the calling name of Ralph is useful. The calling name is unimportant and can be taken in vain by anyone.’ (MM, 113) This paradoxical situation is replayed in the days of his campaign as a political figure – a London dandy who, in spite of his newfound and fashionably socialist interest in the masses, is an isolated figure, somewhat foreign and almost always unassailable in metropolitan glamour and charm. Schizophrenia can be seen as the predominant mode of Singh’s self-fashioning. He continues in the mode of somebody special, repeating his childhood fantasy of being a shipwrecked Aryan in the remote island whose call of life lies somewhere else, in some Orientalist landscape of “endless plain, tall bare mountains, white with snow at their peaks” (MM, 118). Concurrently, however, his experience of London, and his access to the metropolitan life, has transformed his position so much that he now perforce records the landscape of Isabella as an exotic but insignificant location of which he is no longer a part. This peculiar mode of self-fashioning arrests the political domain for him within an irreversible duality of the elite and the subaltern. Naipaul seems to suggest that the new elite of the decolonized era is folded within this double register of schizophrenia that restricts their politics within borrowed and fashionable political language and makes them essentially counterfeit to local realities. Repeated reference to the ironic centrality of the Roman house in local politics or to Singh’s exalted situation as the “rich man with a certain name who had put himself on the side of the poor” (MM, 231) are particularly enlightening in this respect. 84

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The novel, however, offers two curious doubles of Singh – his friend Browne, who remains somewhat shadowy and haunts Singh, and the masses of Isabella as irreducible but necessary foils. Browne is certainly not the subaltern in the novel, not even a vocal one, but is Naipaul’s approximation of the ethical limit of the native elite that rewrites the history of decolonization within the given register of canonicity. Singh’s admission is quite categorical here: I couldn’t be sure where Browne stood in this. He was as dedicated as the rest. But he was more frivolous than any of us dared to be. We met regularly, but we were never as close again as on that first evening in the Roman house. It was as though each had declared himself irrevocably then, and further probings were unnecessary. So that, absurdly, we became close again on the public platform, when we each became our character. (MM, 234) Browne is the other side of the canonical culture, the impossibility of a perfect repetition, its uncontrollable excess, and as such is the unexpected ally of what Singh thought as the silent, menacing subaltern population of the island. Singh frequently poses a natural continuity between Browne’s “Negro” background (MM, 177–80), the failure of his London experience, and the “dusty country roads,” “shining black faces,” and “the smell of Negro sweat” (MM, 231). Browne is their leader, Singh a posed benevolent; Browne a part of the new political order, Singh a continuity of the old in a new garb. This dichotomy, and the suggestion of an acrid and anonymous population behind Browne’s leadership, further determine the course of Singh’s position vis-à-vis the politics of the land. Singh perceives Browne and his supporters, who become prominent during decolonization, as consequences of the feigned and derivative colony. They lack any original or organic culture and thus, like the land, can mature only into some sort of faceless and redundant political community. His reaction to this political upheaval, characteristically, is a mix of fear, dishonesty, and confusion: And with this wonder there went, I can confess it now, a great awakening fear of those shining faces; a fear just buried under the delight I felt at being protected by this foolish strength, as virtuous as the smell of its sweat; a fear just under my delight as speaker and manipulator. (MM, 236) 85

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What he registers in this passage is the political consequence of schizophrenia, and his inability to confront its ramification in his own life. Singh realizes that this silent upheaval of “shining faces” will not conform to his received ideals of politics and will rather press for actions within which he will find himself inadequate. His gradual distancing from Isabella is thus for him the failure of decolonization – or at least the failure of the colony to adhere to already available scripts of European modernity. His own socialist overtures or Browne’s “nationalist” cause, he perceives, have not grown out of the history of Isabella and cannot capture its political reality. And the masses, he feels, do not qualify as natural candidates for the haloed political domain of the nation – primarily because that order belongs to some other location – and would gradually degenerate into an unreasoned disorder. Singh’s political deracination, in other words, is a measure of the inability of the island to repeat – or find a place in – what in a different context V.Y. Mudimbe designates the “Western epistemological territory.”44 Singh never questions the “universal” appeal of this episteme, or how such universalism is achieved through the disavowal of its imperial sources. Selwyn Cudjoe suggests that Naipaul’s belief in this episteme was shaped under the influence of a tradition established by Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, and James Anthony Froude, and it is so resolutely entrenched in his early writing that he is able only to depict the Caribbean as “a philistine society, bereft of history and standards” with inhabitants incapable of having any “spiritual and mythological tradition.”45 In The Mimic Men, Singh’s similarly unquestioned submission implies that this episteme can only be articulated in its singularity and sameness; the belated colony with its anonymous subaltern population is and will remain a perennial foreigner to its scope. Given such a situation, Singh’s exasperation can only grow as he narrates the inability of the island to develop into a politically charged nation-space. The imperial schizophrenia, as he recounts, cannot be turned into a political imaginary like the nation; it can only serve as the mark and measure of belatedness, thereby thwarting modern territorial structures. Canonicity and its universalization through registers of civility – whereby histories of slavery, indenture, plantation, and racial segregation are sublated – becomes a place of refuge in Singh’s narrative; he can only approximate this uninhabitable space and can never fully master it. Ralph Singh’s failure as a political leader and his subsequent exile in London, however, need not be interpreted as absolute; at different points in his narrative he tries to resolve this schizophrenic self. Early in his life, he stumbles upon one such possibility where territorial/racial 86

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hierarchies could be inverted – sexuality and the body. Eden, one of Singh’s fellow students, said he wished to join the Japanese army: the reports of their rapes were so exciting. He elaborated the idea crudely and often; it ceased to be a joke. He recognized this; in his conversation he sublimated the wish to rape foreign women into a wish to travel. Little Eden’s fantasy is particularly concentrated on Asia as a result of his admiration for Lord Jim, and his secret wish likewise is to be the sole “Negro” of the world and a “sexual king” of a remote island (MM, 180). His sexual fantasy is accompanied by a strong emotion of selfloathing, with a wish “for the Negro race to be abolished,” and an impossible urge to find a continuity of sort between “Lord Jim” and “Lord Eden” (MM, 180). Singh’s own escapades in London are equally instructive: his sexual encounters with neighbors and prostitutes and his relationship with his English wife Sandra are highly fetishistic and laden with the anxiety to perform. Through Sandra he could access the cosmopolitanism of London, the pure core of the real world; the vast and anonymous city had earlier reduced Singh to “futility,” and it is Sandra who “showed [him] how much could be extracted so easily from the city; she showed how easy occasions were” (MM, 54). The smoothness of this passage into purposefulness for Singh is a sharp contrast to the unreal existence in Isabella and a respite from his feigned self. Though this “dark romance of a mixed marriage” (MM, 59) is intermeshed into colonial history, the pivotal point being the exotic romance of “mixed” marriage, it also provides Singh with an opportunity to revisit the larger colonial imaginary without necessarily being a latecomer. It is an opportunity to enter the real space of history. His belatedness, so to speak, has been compensated for by his resourcefulness, with his ability to cross the Rubicon of color line.46 The body of the white woman is the fetishized object in this relationship. It is a fetish since the body stands for something lost or something denied to him altogether – it provides a presence, an access, and solace. Indeed the body, as Singh’s memory testifies, is the possible source of a new representational order and a new beginning for Singh’s colonial text. It disturbs the settled nature of colonial discourses and territorial striations, and inaugurates a different narrative strategy for Singh where he could represent something which was unrepresentable earlier – his own subjectivity. His sexual encounters with Sandra exemplify this 87

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newfound representational mode, as evident, for example, in the elaborate and intimate description of the “fullness of her breasts” (MM, 52). More interesting is the passage where, through graphic details of their sexual encounters, he intends to find a “normal” and “natural” self for himself vis-à-vis Sandra’s sexual attention (MM, 57–8). But for our purpose, let me quote a different passage of reflective prose that immediately follows the description of this sexual ritual: It has since occurred to me that the art of physical love is in the keeping of women, and depends to a considerable extent on the position of women in society. As this position improves, so the art of love declines. Woman becomes neither server nor served; and with this emancipation prudery the fear of the erotic, the fear of fear, has to be restated. The absurd view is promoted that sex is neither vice nor mystery. So we arrive at slot-machine or peasant sex; and the praise of profane love gives way to the farmyard lyricism about pregnancies and lyings-in. (MM, 58) Singh’s theorization encompasses two vital points of difference in the story of his romance – class and sexuality – but avoids the third and the most crucial one, race. The marriage registrar’s concern for Sandra marrying a non-white man and the “controlled reproof ” (MM, 58) with which he greets Singh bring the point immediately home; but Singh’s mini dissertation on the class-bound nature of sexual performance hardly notices it. Instead, his somewhat misogynist abstraction immediately plunges into various textual traditions for support: the vigorous juxtaposition of “profane love” and “farmyard lyricism” involves a version of the self that is radically different from the falsity of Isabella, one which claims cultural traditions as part of self-fashioning. Sexual fit, not racial difference, becomes the point of reference; the profanity of sexual desire effects a reversal that is otherwise impossible. Schizophrenia, its profanity, finds an apt match in this sexual possession of a white female body – the reverse mastery is demonstrated in its wretched abstractness, and is repeated through successive relationship with Wendy and Stella. Impossibility of the canon In A House for Mr. Biswas and in The Enigma of Arrival (1987), however, Naipaul returns to his familiar search for a canonical model to explain 88

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his belatedness. Rob Nixon suggests that in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul develops a form of “postcolonial pastoral” with “writing that refracts an idealized nature through memories of environmental and cultural degradation in the colonies.” Naipaul “self-consciously appends himself,” Nixon notes, to a long tradition of English pastoral writing by William Constable, John Ruskin, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, William Cobbett, Richard Jeffries, and Thomas Hardy. But because he is an “uprooted immigrant,” and because of his memories of trans-Atlantic slave plantations in the Caribbean, Naipaul is only able to see the hortus conclusus through the “double consciousness” of a colonial – “behind the wealth and tranquility of an English idyll he remembers the painful, dystopian shadow garden of the transAtlantic plantation that helped make that idyll possible.”47 Sarah Casteel suggests that this postcolonial pastoral is not simply an extension of colonial histories of plantation and slavery/indenture or the ruined landscapes produced by such histories, but is closely tied to an aesthetic regime during the nineteenth century which produced rural England as an idealized “home” and made it available across the empire. Reading Naipaul’s Enigma and Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound together, Casteel argues that it is within this conjoined world of imperial imagination that such postcolonial pastoral makes sense.48 Similar arguments about the pastoral as a form and its complex repetition in The Enigma of Arrival have often been made in Naipaul criticism; and because of its unmistakable autobiographical ring, the novel has inspired many of Naipaul’s readers to deduce larger points on his personal relationship with canonical English forms. A House for Mr. Biswas, on the other hand, has received little attention in this context despite the fact that the first section of its “Part One” set in rural Trinidad is also called “Pastoral.” In this section, Naipaul does not refer to any literary tradition of idyllic beauty and calm, but narrates early mishaps in Biswas’s childhood including the accidental drowning of his father Raghu, almost destitution of the Biswas family after the death, and their eventual dispersal across the land with Biswas and his mother Bipti ending up in Pagotes. Indeed, at the end of the section we encounter Biswas as “really quite alone” (HMB, 40), a fate he would struggle to change during the rest of his life. Behind the section heading “Pastoral,” Naipaul records discordant narratives of poverty, death, and displacement that plagued Trinidadian rural economy in the early decades of the twentieth century, and he invites us to read the discrepancy as key to understanding the novel and its politics more broadly. In a “Foreword” to the novel in 1983, he explains that his attempt to write a 89

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“story of a man like my father” took him to a part of Trinidadian history to which he had little access. During the early decades of the twentieth century the “transplanted Hindu-Muslim rural culture of Trinidad [. . .] was still a whole culture, close to India,” but during his adulthood and particularly when he began writing the novel in 1957, that wholeness “had begun to weaken.” He thus embarked on writing the most important story of his life with meager resources – “memories of my father’s conversations” and “his short stories [. . .] about old rituals” – and to turn this into material for his novel he had to invent a new temporality: “events twice removed, in antique, ‘pastoral’ time, and almost in a land of the imagination.”49 Naipaul’s pastoral is thus a means to code both history and imagination, or rather a form of imagined history, but its primary function is to conceal and not to reveal. As he recounts in the same “Foreword,” a reading of the novel many years later brought tears to his eyes, making the sense of lacrimae rerum obvious perhaps for the first time, because he could recognize retrospectively how much he had concealed behind the conventions of the form, and how much he was ashamed of being exposed to the world.50 In his “Prologue” to Literary Occasions, Naipaul offers a final version of this gap between the canon and what was anthropologically local to him, and describes its implications for his own writing. He describes the following “English literary anthology” that he as a schoolboy in Trinidad designed for himself: [S]ome of the speeches in Julius Caesar; scattered pages from the early chapters of Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield; the Perseus story from The Heroes by Charles Kingsley; some pages from the Mill on the Floss; a romantic Malay tale of love and running away and death by Joseph Conrad; one or two of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare; stories by O. Henry and Maupassant; a cynical page or two, about the Ganges and a religious festival, from Jesting Pilate by Aldous Huxley; something in the same vein from Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley; some pages by Somerset Maugham.51 Selected with the aid of his “self-educated” journalist father, this rather idiosyncratic and truncated canon presented to Naipaul, for the first time, the enchanting world of “literature,” with the additional promise that he could belong to it, like his father dreamt all his life, as an author. This “private idea” of becoming an author, he recollects, was “a curiously ennobling one, separate from school and separate from 90

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the disordered and disintegrating life of our Hindu extended family” in the Caribbean (P, 5). It produced a core to his life which was otherwise missing. However, as it happens so often in Naipaul’s fiction, this promising episode is soon followed by an overwhelming sentiment of failure, despair, and even shame; he goes on to narrate that later in secondary school when he tried to read books whose select pages created a charmed circle around his childhood, he found them “very far away” with difficult language and with “social or historical detail” which he could barely follow. Neither in his “disintegrating world of a remembered India” nor in the “more colonial, more racially mixed life” of Port of Spain, could he find comparable experiences or even keys to decipher metropolitan literary texts (P, 8–9). He was indeed assaulted by the realization that his wish to become an author was in jeopardy since “the literature that had given me the wish came from another land, far away from our own” (P, 6). Like his father’s private failure or Ralph Singh’s political failure, which animated A House for Mr. Biswas and The Mimic Men, Naipaul felt assailed by the purity of the distant canon that cannot be repeated in his own life. In Naipaul’s estimation here and elsewhere the canon does not only represent an “imaginary totality” of texts but suggests a text-territory continuum that always and already escapes the colony.52 Naipaul acknowledges, in other words, the peculiar trajectory of canonization in modernity and its relationship with unexpected circuits of circulation – management of native population, colonial jurisprudence, cultural identities, anti-colonial political movements, censorship, nationalist consolidation, and so forth.53 The very status of the canon as the receptacle of refined taste and aesthetic judgment seems to presume in the postcolonial world that it is territorial exclusivity above everything else which authorizes its cultural arbitration. Hence the metropolitan territory-text, despite its rather embattled history, appears with a semblance of empirical density and coherence (with “dates,” in Naipaul’s words) which the colony can hardly match. Ergo, he realized by the end of his “island education” that his wish to be a writer was “now less a true ambition than a form of self-esteem, a dream of release, an idea of nobility” (P, 12). Naipaul’s response to this crisis is not only very different from many of the characters in his novels, but it also opens a new window onto world literature debates I have been tracking in this book. As if to counter this alienating effect of the canon, he produces a second list of industrial commodities which came from the same “outer world” (“principally England, but also the US and Canada”) but created a 91

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dense physicality of everyday life in the colony: “smoked herrings, salted cod, condensed milk, New Brunswick sardines in oil”; “Dodd’s Kidney Pills, Dr. Sloan’s Liniment, the tonic called Six Sixty Six”; “coins of England, from the halfpenny to the half-crown” which were freely traded with dollars and cents; textbooks like “Rivington’s Shilling Arithmetic, Nesfield’s Grammar”; “batches of The Illustrated London News”; Hollywood films and American magazines like Life and Time; the “Everyman Library and Penguin Books and the Collins Classics” (P, 9). Commodities, it seems from this list, carried within them no historical data, no date, or no promise for refinement; as objects, they were selfexplanatory and self-sufficient, and hence their consumption required no training. Naipaul’s account suggests that the tactile density created by metropolitan commodities was the result precisely of this absence of history. But he still lacked a historical framework within which he could situate this density of local lifeworld, and could still connect with the world of literary representation. In an innovative move, working through intricate pieces on insignificant characters and mundane lives, with obsessively detailed portrayals of Caribbean lifeworlds, Naipaul gradually came to locate history within the chasm that separates these two worlds for him. He could connect with the world of literature, or world literature, not by concealing this early disconnect but by narrating it. “As a child trying to read,” he writes, I had felt two worlds separated me from the books that were offered to me at school and in the libraries: the childhood world of our remembered India, and the more colonial world of our city. [. . .] What I didn’t know, even after I had written my early books of fiction [. . .] was that those two spheres of darkness had become my subject. Fiction, working its mysteries, by indirections finding directions out, had led me to my subject. (P, 21) As I have suggested above, this strategy on Naipaul’s part is located in the chronotopic belatedness and also in the schizophrenic postcoloniality. It does not imply a straightforward submission to a distant land and its canonical representation, as Casanova suggests vis-à-vis Naipaul, but advocates, on the contrary, that the canon is ineffective beyond its territory-text continuum, beyond the cultural sphere that bestows power and legitimacy to it. Indeed, I would argue that Naipaul’s oeuvre poses serious challenge to various versions of world 92

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literature that depend on steady annexation of peripheral geographies into the central European narrative through gradual diffusion of form, genre, or literary taste. What he does most successfully in his fiction is that through the belated territories and their anthropological realities he puts the complete actualization of the universal world literature perpetually on hold, as an attractive horizon but little beyond its promise. Instead, the belated territories of his fiction as well as the schizophrenic postcoloniality are allowed to proliferate and occupy the space opened up by the deferred promise of canonicity. What emerges from this gap, and rivals the “imagined totality” of the canon, is layers of darkness marking the belated arrival of the postcolony. This history is necessarily larger than Naipaul the individual, but he remains its most astute chronicler. This resolution in Naipaul’s fiction often leads to disturbing political conclusions; nonetheless, it is an outcome of Caribbean history with plantation, slavery, and indenture – in short, global journey of capitalism with mobile capital and displaced labor. The fact that this globality of an earlier period did not guarantee the global ascendancy of a central literary canon, as evident in Naipaul, should inform our contemporary enthusiasm to posit a causal and direct relationship between world literature and globalization. Notes 1 For a discussion on Gandhi’s involvement with the history of indentured labor, especially in South Africa, see Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), Chapter 2. 2 See Bruce King, V.S. Naipaul (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983) for a discussion on how Naipaul’s family and acquaintances in Trinidad provided him with the characters for his early novels. The case of A House for Mr. Biswas, whose protagonist Mohun Biswas is based on his father Seepersad Naipaul, is widely documented. 3 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Where Does He Come From?,” London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 21 (November, 2007), 9. 4 V.S. Naipaul, “Nobel Lecture: Two Worlds,” www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html (accessed May 2, 2016). 5 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 205–12. For a critical reading of Casanova’s position, see Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 75–99. 6 Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (London: Picador, 2008), xv. 7 Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), Chapter 1. See also Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2007).

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8 V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies: British, French and Dutch – in the West Indies and South America (London: Andre Deutsch, 1962), 29. 9 V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 57. 10 The representational space, Lefebvre suggests, is inconsistent and “[r]edolent with imaginary and symbolic elements”; it has its origin in history, both collective and individual, and through history it develops a structure that can be perceived and studied as an operational tool. The symbolic and imaginary elements, the sources of inconsistency and incoherence, are, however, historical constructs in a very concrete and perhaps immediate way: they embrace, in other words, “the loci of passion, of action and of lived situation.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 41–2. 11 Foucault defines the “other” space of a culture as “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, Vol. 16 (1986), 24. 12 Homi Bhabha, “Adagio,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31 (Winter, 2005), 373. 13 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 83. For an extension of this insight see Naheem Jabbar, “Naipaul’s ‘India’: History and the Myth of Antiquity,” Textual Practice, Vol. 20, No. 1 (March, 2006). Naipaul also acknowledges his intellectual affinity with Chaudhuri’s work, especially his largely positive appraisal of the British Empire, and pays him glowing tribute in Literary Occasions: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2003), 145–56. See also, V.S. Naipaul, A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (London: Picador, 2007), 168–85. 14 Anthony Appiah, “Strictures on Structures: The Prospects for a Structuralist Poetics of African Fiction,” in Henry Louis Gates Jr. (ed.) Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984), 146. 15 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992), 150. For a related and updated argument see Brian May, “Memorials to Modernity: Postcolonial Pilgrimage in Naipaul and Rushdie,” ELH, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Spring, 2001). 16 Edward Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World,” Salmagundi, Vol. 70–71 (1986), 53. Naipaul tries to return the compliment. In an interview with Farrukh Dhondy, with obvious reference to Said’s work on Jane Austen, he accuses him of being ignorant of the history of slavery in British Empire. “V.S. Naipaul Talks to Farrukh Dhondy,” Literary Review, www.literaryreview.co.uk/Naipaul_04_06.html (accessed November 7, 2016). 17 For more recent accounts of Naipaul’s work and its reception in the postcolonial world, see the special issues of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2002) and South Asian Review, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2005); see also Fawzia Mustafa, V.S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Feroza Jussawalla (ed.), Conversations with V. S. Naipaul (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997). 18 Rob Nixon, London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28. 19 See, for instance, V.S. Naipaul, “I Don’t Consider Myself a West Indian,” Guyana Graphic, November 30, 1968. 20 Ronald Bryden, “The Novelist V.S. Naipaul Talks about His Work to Ronald Bryden,” The Listener, March 22, 1973, 367.

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21 Selwyn R. Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). See also Vivek Dhareshwar, “Self-Fashioning, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion: V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1989); Timothy F. Weiss, On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). 22 Belinda Edmondson, Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Lillian Feder, Naipaul’s Truth: The Making of a Writer (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). 23 Naipaul, The Middle Passage, 68. 24 It has been noted that such a belief is heavily influenced by Victorian understandings of Englishness and its unmistakable manifestation in culture and literature. Though The Enigma of Arrival (1988) perhaps best thematizes this constant replacement of the historical by the literary, his early novels reveal the genealogy of such a colonial view. 25 On “modular” or standardized and repeatable nation-states, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 4, 87 and passim. 26 Gilroy reworks W.E.B. Du Bois’s foundational concept to put forward his own theory that black experience constitutes the subtext of Enlightenment modernity. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 111–45. 27 Naipaul, The Middle Passage, 72–4. After the book was published, he made the following remarks which bring home the comparison with James more prominently: The Middle Passage is “too romantic about Negro racial politics, about the idea of racial redemption. I should have expressed what I really felt deep down: that racial politics were going to destroy those islands. All those places are going to be Haiti in the end.” Quoted in Scott Winokur, “The Unsparing Vision of V.S. Naipaul,” in Feroza Jussawalla (ed.) Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 119. 28 To get a sense of Naipaul’s “peculiar perversity,” it would be interesting to compare his account of the Caribbean with C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, which roughly addresses similar political questions. See C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989). 29 V.S. Naipaul, “Prologue to an Autobiography,” in Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), 58–9. 30 The temporal belatedness of the New World is a classic case of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as the “waiting room of history.” But my emphasis here is somewhat different and is concerned with the effects of this belatedness on the territorial imagination and the way this belated space envelops the subjectivity of its inhabitants; see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8 and passim. Amit Chaudhuri has used The Mimic Men to illustrate Chakrabarty’s idea; see Amit Chaudhuri, “In the Waiting-Room of History,” London Review of Books, Vol. 26, No. 12 (2004). 31 V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: Andre Deutsch, 1967), 38; henceforth abbreviated as MM and cited parenthetically with pagination. 32 Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); K.O. Laurence, A Question of Labor: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British

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33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Guiana, 1875–1917 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Lomarsh Roopnarine, Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance and Accommodation, 1838–1920 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2007); Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Penguin, 1985), xxiv. Edgar L. Erickson, “The Introduction of East Indian Coolies into the British West Indies,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 6 (1934), 128–9. One such representative statement can be retrieved from the pages of the Times (July 29, 1839): “[T]he whole scheme [of indenture labor] would degenerate to jew-jobbing and crimping, thus reviving most of the horrors of slavery.” Quoted in Erickson, “The Introduction of East Indian Coolies into the British West Indies,” 133. Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 270. V.S. Naipaul, “On Being a Writer,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 34, April 23, 1987. V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street (London: Andre Deutsch, 1959), 44–6. V.S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur (London: Andre Deutsch, 1957), 15. V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (London: Penguin, 1992 [1961]), 341–2; subsequent references are abbreviated as HMB and cited parenthetically with pagination. V.S. Naipaul, “Prologue to an Autobiography,” in Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), 32–3. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 40–2 and passim. Dhareshwar, “Self-Fashioning, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion,” 75. Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 186. Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul, 77–80. It is interesting to note that the subtext of this encounter – that Sandra also finds in Singh’s elite position in Isabella a possible compensation for her class background – does not become very prominent. There are a couple of passing references, but by and large the white woman’s body is an unmarked entity. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 245–6. Sarah Phillips Casteel, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 25–6. V.S. Naipaul, “Foreword to A House for Mr. Biswas,” in Literary Occasions, 131–2. Naipaul, “Foreword to A House for Mr. Biswas,” 129. V.S. Naipaul, “Prologue,” in Literary Occasions, 5–6; subsequent references are cited in the text as P with pagination. The description of the canon as an “imaginary totality” of texts is from Guillory, Cultural Capital, 30 and passim. See, among others, Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (ed.), The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Franklin E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Robert Crawford, The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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3 PROVINCIAL AESTHETICS

As an episode in historical time, apartheid was causally overdetermined. It did indeed flower out of self-interest and greed, but also out of desire, and the denial of desire. In its greed, it demanded black bodies in all their physicality in order to burn up their energy as labor. In its anxiety about black bodies, it also made laws to banish them from sight. – J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996) More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. – J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)

J.M. Coetzee is an astute reader of philosophical texts. In his academic writing and rare interviews he has often indicated his intellectual kinship with a diverse set of philosophers, mostly from the continental school, and this admission has led a number of his readers to interrogate the complex relationship between his novels and philosophical discourses.1 But this has, at times, obfuscated another significant part of Coetzee’s intellectual make-up – that he is equally capable of bringing philosophical nuances to bear on his readings of historical events, especially when related to his work and location in South Africa. His observations on the centrality of race in South African history – more specifically during the decades of apartheid – are noteworthy here, given the frequent charge against him that he had been so oblique on this issue that in effect he became practically indifferent. In his fiction, as he points out in an interview with David Attwell, one can identify “a simple standard erected” 97

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over the years and that standard is the “body” – the “body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt.” He even suggests that in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons [. . .], but for political reasons, for reasons of power.2 Within his fictional world, within the endless play of textuality he painstakingly construes, the body is a political marker of his time that confronts neat reading strategies and easy allegorization. Coetzee’s account is thus premised on a certain reality of South African history – that the suffering body is marked racially and that this racialized body has a phenomenological truth which defies every textualization through its visual immediacy. This visual immediacy of race, and also its refusal to enter any form of lexicalization, is a political force in history, and in his work, novel after novel, Coetzee responds to this political question as bordering on the very limits of the art of writing. Race or histories of racial discrimination, however, are hardly new in Anglophone territories. What distinguishes Coetzee’s engagement with racial history in South Africa is his anchoring of this history in a group of suffering bodies who are essentially “mute.” Whether it is Magda in In the Heart of the Country (1977), the unnamed barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Michael K in Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Friday in Foe (1986), or Lucy in Disgrace (1999), Coetzee’s fiction presents a group of characters who are either silent or in possession of unreliable narration, thus making it impossible for these novels to fully explain or interpret them. This failure of “reading,” however, does not go unnoticed in these texts, and through copious commentaries Coetzee’s novels develop a peculiar aesthetic dimension of race-thinking and race-politics. Race in these texts, I argue in the following pages, is part of a fundamental partition of visibility in South African history – Coetzee cites a long tradition of “white writing” as creating a culture of letters constitutionally incapable of representing black Africans and suggests, as a corollary, that this other part of the South African population has been visible for a long time only through governmental practices of race management during the colonial and apartheid eras. Literature as a democratic field of visibility since the nineteenth century, as Jacques Rancière has argued most powerfully in recent times, thus finds an unusual zone of exception in South African history.3 My suggestion in this chapter is indeed to read Coetzee’s 98

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novels as challenging the aesthetic regime of world literature, as creating another course of events that stubbornly refuses to be coopted by the regime as Rancière describes it. Indeed, racially marked bodies, despite their visual imminence, remain resolutely silent and punctuate the universal aesthetic principles that underline much of contemporary world literature. What I call Coetzee’s provincial aesthetics in this chapter emerges through this partitioning of the aesthetic field – it is provincial because of its genealogy through apartheid and hence its indelible links with the provincial consensus on race-thinking and race-management. In Coetzee, however, the provincial is overlaid with the promise of new beginnings, and of new aesthetic idioms. As evident in his fictions and fictionalized memoirs, provincial as a location – as opposed to the metropolitan – is not a designation of shame, but the enabling site where these new aesthetic practices are located in material history. But this is not an independent argument in his novels and essays, and certainly not a cultural derivation from the canonical texts he often cites as his predecessors; rather, the point emerges most prominently through the institution of censorship, or what Peter McDonald calls the “censorious anxieties” in South African history since the colonial era, where Coetzee locates the legal and institutionalized collaboration between aesthetic norms and racialized political practices.4 In his piece on censorship in South Africa, “The Work of the Censor” (1990), Coetzee seeks to unite these two aspects within the structure of paranoia and its functioning through successive displacements. Indeed, referring to Freud’s classic study of paranoia, he identifies metonymic chains of displacement that define the “offensive” or the “undesirable” – through a further displacement onto an undefined “offended” subject – and argues that these metonymized codes of what can be seen or read (quite literally), and what can then circulate in public domain, gave a uniquely aesthetic edge to apartheid. It is this regulation of visuality and reading, of which the censor is itself a metonymic but representative part, that produced the typically racialized apartheid aesthetics. As a response, he suggests that this history can be fully understood only through a counter aesthetic elaboration, through a similarly complex form like the novel. His novelistic aesthetics is an attempt to rival apartheid aesthetics in history since, in his scheme of things, history and the novel represent two different discursive formations and the relationship between the two is primarily antagonistic. In his essay “The Novel Today” (1988), he declared quite early in his career that since the days of Don Quixote the crucial aim of the novel is to reveal that the “authority of history lies simply in the consensus it commands [and] I see absolutely no reason 99

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why, even in the South Africa of the 1980s, we should agree to agree that things are otherwise.”5 Whiteness and writing Coetzee’s provincial aesthetics as a zone of exception within world literature operates on two different but related planes – literary history and formal unity. He envisages these two as mutually constitutive, of course, but he also makes the additional point that literary history must not use texts as mere instances of a particular mode of writing or a genre but ought to locate them within certain material specificities of institutions and discursive formations. This is precisely the point of White Writing (1988), Coetzee’s most sustained inquiry into what he calls in the subheading the “culture of letters in South Africa.”6 Attwell argues that “white writing” is Coetzee’s name for a crisis of the white self in Africa which manifests itself in the “search of a language in which the self and Africa can enter into a fulfilled, reciprocal relationship.”7 This crisis is so intrinsically associated with the white self-imagining that it finds little support outside the history of white settlements. In black South African literature, Attwell points out, there is no comparable crisis and hence “Coetzee’s terms [. . .] are not easily transferable to black writing.”8 Attwell’s comments delineate the precise historical genealogy of “white writing” – while it is part of South African history, it cannot be generalized beyond racial borders and cannot be made part of postcolonial modernity in Africa broadly conceived. This historical precision, however, is not to be taken as a sign of insularity, or even marginality, because white writing made significant inroads in South African literary culture during colonial and apartheid regimes, and its foundational tropes widely circulated beyond its precise historical trajectory. To illustrate this larger circulation, Rita Barnard has drawn attention to Coetzee’s strategy of accessing “white writing” generically – almost all his examples of white writing are drawn from the pastoral tradition which he sees both as generic convention and ideological bearing and which ensures greater circulation of white anxiety about belonging and landscape in texts written in both English and Afrikaans.9 What was restricted to racial difference in its origin thus found a larger space of circulation through generic conventions; Coetzee’s “white writing” is, in short, a historically specific act of writing that spreads its whiteness across Africa through narrative conventions encompassing texts and territories.

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While Naipaul remains steadfastly trapped within the gap of the canonical and the anthropological in the Caribbean and thus can only narrate the pastoral as caricature in articulating local realities, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, Coetzee in Barnard’s reading makes the pastoral a moral site to engage with South African literary history. This is an important suggestion for my readings, and though my conclusions in this chapter differ from those offered by Barnard, as would be evident below, I want to use it as a point of departure. My reading starts rather with Coetzee’s engagement (or “re-engagement,” as David James puts it10) with canonical texts and genres in the colony. The first part of this story is available in Raymond Williams’s magisterial The Country and the City (1975). Williams argues that the stabilization of the pastoral form in English, especially in the construction of the golden age of English pastoral between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, involved, both in creative writing and scholarly glosses, several layers of erasure. Permanent and idyllic country life, often portrayed with a tinge of longing, erased a whole range of changes in English history and effectively mystified the consolidation of the forces of capitalist agriculture. If one searches beneath these texts, as one must, suggests Williams, it becomes clear how a “moral order” of the pastoral form was “extracted from the feudal inheritance and break-up, and [how it] seeks to impose itself ideally on conditions which are inherently unstable.” He even argues that the form conjured a sense of order through the “sanctity of property” in a world of changing “property relations” and proposed an “ideal of charity” amidst the “harshness of labor relations in both the new and the old modes [of agricultural production].”11 While this domestic history led to canonical texts and the pastoral emerged as one of the central means of narrating English rural life by the eighteenth century, the relationship between this genre and imperialism is somewhat imprecise in Williams. In a tantalizing example of converting the “conventional pastoral into a localized dream,” he cites Michael Drayton’s ode “To the Virginian Voyage” (1606), which located both the “Golden Age” and the “Paradise” explicitly in a colony and initiated a new phase in the history of the form. This lead, however, is dropped almost as soon as it is invoked, as Williams remains doggedly engaged with the internal history of England.12 What happened to the displaced form remains a matter of speculation in Williams, but it receives extended treatment at Coetzee’s hand as the very ground for new literary history. He recasts the displaced genre as “white writing” (with an obvious nod to Jacques Derrida’s account

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of metaphysics as “white mythology”13) or as “European ideas writing themselves out in Africa.”14 In the South African context, however, this whiteness makes itself visible through the double bind of the canonical and the anthropological; the canonical is the belief in a literary language that would, in the truest sense possible, belong to the land: “a natural or Adamic language, one in which Africa will naturally express itself, that is to say, a language in which there is no split between signifier and signified, and things are their names” (WW, 9). And the anthropological is the realization that English is inadequate to the task. As Coetzee puts it: Many English-colonial doubts about cultural identity are projected and blamed upon the English language itself, partly because, as a literary medium, English carries echoes of a very different natural world – a world of downs and fells, oaks and daffodils, robins and badgers – partly because English makes no claim (as Afrikaans does) to being native to Africa, partly because of the mystique, promoted by émigré teachers with a stake in maintaining a special status, that English is spoken correctly only in southeast England, and then only by a certain social class, partly because the writer’s audience is split between colonials with whom he has some community of experience and metropolitans to whom so much has to be explained that he inevitably lapses into exasperated simplifications. (WW, 8) The pastoral in South Africa, both as farm novel or plaasroman and landscape poetry, Coetzee suggests, is a failure because of this asymmetry between the canonical and the anthropological; but this failure exposes a version of South African history that does not always manifest itself on the surface of these texts. Unlike the New World, the Cape colony or even Africa never enticed its white colonizers as the modern Eden – i.e. a place untouched by corruption and thus continuing with innocent ways of life. On the contrary, the Cape indeed presented the threatening prospect that “Africa might turn out to be not a Garden but an anti-Garden, a garden ruled over by the serpent, where the wilderness takes root once again in men’s hearts.” One of the manifest signs of this dystopic vision was the alleged sloth (which was seen as a precursor to degeneration), and to resist it “cheerful toil” was prescribed. South African pastoral thus placed enormous premium on labor since only labor could deliver the colony from degeneration and, as Coetzee argues, this emphasis led to a double duty – “[t]o satisfy the critics of 102

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rural retreat, it must portray labor; to satisfy the critics of colonialism, it must portray white labor.” In its attempt to represent the colony as belonging to a white community reliant on honest labor, the pastoral adopted a twofold strategy: on the one hand it proposed white right over land by repeatedly showing white farmers and their “cheerful toil” which pushed black bodies to shadowy existence; on the other, by proposing the agricultural question as solely a battle between a “(Dutch) peasant rural order” and “(British) capitalism,” it converted South African history into the history of conflicts between Boers and Britons and thus pushed even further the “black-white conflict out of sight into a forgotten past or an obscure future” (WW, 3–6). This insistence on whiteness effectively erased every trace of black bodies and the labor they invested; if English pastoral removed material conditions of agriculture to standardize its generic conventions, as Williams points out, the South African version chose to expunge the racial other to sustain itself. Given this historical provenance, the failure of the form assumes new meanings for us. Coetzee argues that from this invisibility of black bodies and their labor two dominant forms of the pastoral eventually emerged. The first one portrayed rural South Africa as divided between countless farms, each ruled by a benevolent white patriarch with contented and honest children. In the works of Pauline Smith and others, this “conservative” version of plaasroman looks back, usually in a spirit of nostalgia, to the calm and stability of the farm, a still point mediate between the wilderness of lawless nature and the wilderness of the new cities; it holds up the time of the forefathers as an exemplary age when the garden of myth became actualized in history. (WW, 4) In the second version, Africa emerged as a primal landscape of “rock and sun, not of soil and water,” and thus resisted any of the generic conventions dependent on agricultural practices like plowing or attending the field. Instead, the “dream topography” of this other tradition depicted “South Africa as a vast, empty, silent space, older than man, older than the dinosaurs whose bones lie bedded in its rocks, and destined to be vast, empty, and unchanged long after man has passed from its face” (WW, 7). Until the 1960s, that is until the dream of white nationalism began to look doubtful, this tradition produced significant landscape poetry in English, and continued the effort to find an 103

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adequate language for the continent; the oft-repeated image of the poet pitted against vast and desolate landscape is a testimony to this unrelenting effort. Thus the new pastoral evident in Drayton’s ode reinvented itself as “white writing” across continents, as a form of writing that hung between Europe and Africa.15 Barnard finds conspicuous parallels between White Writing and Coetzee’s early anti-pastoralist novels like In the Heart of the Country and Life and Times of Michael K, and suggests that these early works extend Coetzee’s view that “it is not permissible to love a colonized land with an unreflective sincerity: a poetics of love for mountains, stones, trees, and flowers is ethically foreclosed for the settler.”16 While this critical stand on white settlement’s exclusion of black bodies is shared by both his discursive and fictional texts, his novels perform the additional task of disrupting the spatial economy of pastoral traditions by reformulating the relationship between the country and the city or by dislocating their loaded histories to reveal how the “moral order” of the genre becomes untenable when extended to racially marked landscapes. In Life and Times of Michael K, for instance, proliferation of camps into spatial networks across the country and Michael K’s journey through these enclosed spaces of brutal violence and exploitation reveal that not only a “pastoral fantasy” but even a “simple rural life” is impossible for a person like him who is formally recognized as “coloured” or “CM-40-NFA-Unemployed.”17 In his later novels, and especially in Disgrace, Barnard contends, a fundamental change takes place – though Coetzee continues with some of his earlier critiques of South African history and the role of the pastoral, he no longer employs the strategy of “demystification” and he surely abandons the utopian vision of reclaiming a “rural life without patriarchal or colonial domination.”18 The “new” South Africa of the novel, Coetzee seems to imply, is passing through an interregnum with the unsettling possibility that it is the “site of a painful othering, whose conditions and terms will no longer [. . .] be articulated adequately in relation to matters of land and rural life.” Barnard even hazards the “risky” prediction that Disgrace marks Coetzee’s “farewell to the genre that absorbed so much of his critical attention and creative energy in the first half of his career.”19 While I agree with Barnard’s diagnosis of a crisis in Coetzee’s narrative strategies in Disgrace, I believe it needs to be read as part of a literary history that stretches beyond Africa and indeed repositions the very status of literary history for us. It is here, I feel, that he becomes an important figure for Anglophone world literature and also a counterpoint to the modern regime of literature a la Rancière. The most 104

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significant aspect of “white writing” in Coetzee’s account is its whiteness, of course, but what he implies is not simple racial prejudice. His point is not that such writing did not represent black bodies or black Africa because of racial bias; rather, he suggests that whiteness of this tradition forced it to become distinctly anti-literary within modernity, to directly contrast itself to the notion of literature elsewhere. This other history of literature is tracked by Rancière through the notion of “mute speech” or “mute letter” – the emergence of modern literature (which he describes as “literature as literature”) as part of a democratic life since the nineteenth century. This democratic impulse took literature away from its classical or representational function which worked according to a strict hierarchy of writing and doing. Rancière argues that such representational function determined meaning through the imposition of the will – much in the fashion of orators or priests – and literature was primarily conceived as a dynamic speech-act designed to have specific effects on “specific moves in the souls and motions of bodies.”20 Against this classical mode, in the “age of archeology, paleontology and philology,” literature became progressively anchored in literariness as a democratic principle; as Flaubert and Balzac demonstrate most conspicuously, literary language became “petrified” in the same way that everyday objects of little consequence were or as fossils and archaeological sites were. What is important to note here is the democratization of meaning that is not restricted to literary conventions but is available in the abundance of objects and in “the power of a writing engraved in the very flesh of things.”21 With this new democratic writing, literary forms like the novel embraced the vital principle that everything speaks, “converting any scrap of everyday life into a sign of history and any sign of history into a poetical element.”22 Clearly, what becomes “white writing” in Coetzee’s account is notable for its failure to participate in this tradition, and hence for its inability to capture mute speech “engraved in the very flesh of things.” Since the nineteenth century, when literature assumed its democratic petrification and extended beyond its traditional role of imposing “will,” as Rancière suggests, “white writing” charted a different course altogether through its steady refusal to widen the aesthetic space beyond a racially defined whiteness. What is more important for my purpose is Coetzee’s insistence that this anti-literary tradition (which formed its own canon in South Africa) was forged through anthropological discourses or even that colonial anthropology provided the fundamental template for the white canon. He distinguishes a fastidious trend in early travel writings and proto-anthropological texts from the seventeenth and the eighteenth 105

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centuries that repeatedly berated the Khoi people or the “Hottentots” for their alleged “[i]dleness, indolence, sloth, laziness, torpor.” In these accounts, the authors recorded their frustration at what they saw as the besetting sin of idleness (which was absence of both work and leisure) that engulfed the Hottentot life and as such, as one of these authors noted in 1680, the Hottentot “could be counted more among the dumb beasts than among the company of reasoning men.” The real problematic, however, was elsewhere; as Coetzee observes: the Hottentot’s idleness has the status of an anthropological scandal: despite the fact that nothing more remote and more different from European Man can be imagined than the Hottentot, the Hottentot generates an extremely impoverished set of differences for inscription in the tables. [. . .] Though far more different from the European than the Turk or Chinese is, the Hottentot paradoxically presents far fewer differences for the record. (WW, 23; emphasis original) Idleness, to put it differently, becomes a trope in these texts, marking the discursive limit where the protocols of anthropology break down in search of difference in the mute world of the other despite the fact that it was devised in the first place to document such differences. No wonder then that Coetzee suggests that this breakdown has larger consequences: “The moment the travel-writer condemns the Hottentot for doing nothing marks the moment when the Hottentot brings him face to face (if he will only recognize it) with the limits of his own conceptual framework” (WW, 32). Coetzee is quick to note two distinct implications of this anthropological moment – first, the inability of literature in South Africa to rethink itself in the face of such crisis; and second, as a consequence, a clear division of representational labor when the colonial and apartheid governance took up the task of reading this other life in South Africa given its resolutely speechless status in literature. Democratic muteness in the South African context thus faced a fundamental division – while disciplines like paleontology or philology forced literature to democratize its scope in Europe (as Rancière shows), anthropology drove “white writing” (which, paradoxically, remained beholden to Europe) away from this democratic petrification and thus left the space of black Africa to be occupied by governmental interventions. In the subsequent periods, as Coetzee shows in White Writing, this division was taken as a natural foundation, and a range of authors from W.C. Scully and Roy 106

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Campbell to Pauline Smith and Alan Paton consolidated its unquestioned veracity. At the same time, however, Coetzee also employs a generic and tropological inquiry to survey the migration of the anthropological principle into various forms of fiction, and asserts that many of these generic conventions were forged through the replication of the anthropological refusal to read “mute speech” of everyday African lives. Pastoral, as we have seen above, became especially advantageous in this regard as it created a sense of the land, and thus answered to a widespread colonial anxiety, but did so within the boundaries of whiteness reinforced by its generic refusal to be drawn within the everyday signs of history. It was exceptionally suitable since it could carry forward its foundational legacy in English, as Williams reminds us, which involved several layers of erasure; in its inception, the English pastoral was designed to gloss over immediate signs of agrarian change and class inequality, and in South Africa it was reactivated to elide racially marked black bodies. In novels like Dusklands and Life and Times of Michael K, Coetzee offers anti-pastoralist accounts of the land, and thus carries forward the antagonistic task to this literary history he imagines to be the true vocation of a novel. But in Disgrace, which Barnard considers to be his farewell to anti-pastoralist tradition, he performs something more and something different; he indeed offers a roadmap for Anglophone postcolonial writing in South Africa. There are moments in the text when David Lurie reflects on the inadequacy of English or of his academic learning to the “truth” of Africa; but, through rigorous and unrelenting focalization through David, the novel indeed wishes to perform the same task – it aspires to be adequate to the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. Derek Attridge has noted that the narrative places a special premium on contemporary times – or “the times” of its own narration – in a marked contrast to some of Coetzee’s early novels;23 as if, simply through its inhabitation of the contemporary times, it wants to become a reliable chronicle of it. But, because of the same focalization, all the novel is able to capture is a series of David’s failure to “read” his contemporaneity. The novel records, in other words, only his personal failures to forge a relationship with all the other major characters across racial lines – Soraya, Melanie, Petrus, Bev Shaw, and Lucy – and his inability to “read” each of these situations in which he is supposed to interact with his contemporary history. It is here that Disgrace performs its central act of irony through a curious doubling of readability. It makes David a direct heir to “white 107

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writing” and its Weltanschauung and records his repeated failures to “read,” but it also makes him a professional reader of texts as a professor of literature. I want to draw attention here to the timeline of Rancière’s argument – his modern aesthetic regime starts with the Romantics and gradually consolidates itself in the course of the nineteenth century. It is significant for my purpose that David in Disgrace specializes in the Romantic era and has authored three books out of which two deal with materials roughly from the period Rancière charts: “the first on opera (Boito and the Faust Legend: The Genesis of Mefistofele), the second on vision as eros (The Vision of Richard of St Victor), the third on Wordsworth and history (Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past).”24 (D, 4). To reinforce this connection, the very first chapter of the novel also notes that he is working on Byron, not a work of criticism but a chamber opera dealing with “love between the sexes” and entitled Byron in Italy. In his flatulent literariness, David even compares his life and sexual escapades with Soraya, one of his mistresses he meets through “Discreet Escorts,” with Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary and nineteenth-century Parisian life (D, 5–6). His simultaneous commitment to two different traditions of literariness – one democratically petrified and the other resolutely white – makes his incompetence as a reader even more ironic. The novel plays on this doubling of readability and spreads out an intricate web of reading and non-reading as part of its exploration of “the times.” Take, for instance, the leitmotif of Byron in the novel. The chamber opera is more of an ambitious project in the early chapters of the novel, and one gets to know of its broad outlines through David’s conversations with Lucy or through his solitary musings. Whether he imagines himself as a Byronic character is deliberately left open in these pages, and we are made privy only to his sundry plans of borrowing music for the opera or of his fanciful ideas of composition – another effect of focalization. His work on the piece really begins – and this is significant for the novel – in the aftermath of the horrific rape episode in which Lucy is sexually assaulted by three black men and during the time he progresses from one failed attempt to communicate with (or “read”) his own daughter to another. By this time, however, the opera, or at least David’s imagination of it, has changed dramatically. While in its initial conceptualization the piece was supposed to concentrate on Byron’s final years in Italy in the company of his young mistress Teresa Guiccioli, now the new version imagines a middle-aged Teresa as its protagonist who is “a dumpy little widow installed in the Villa Gamba with her aged father, running the household, holding the purse-strings 108

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tight, keeping an eye out that the servants do not steal the sugar.” In this version Byron is dead and Teresa’s sole remaining claim to immortality, and the solace of her lonely nights, is the chestful of letters and memorabilia she keeps under her bed, what she calls her reliquie, which her grand-nieces are meant to open after her death and peruse with awe. (D, 181) The exit of Byron is doubly important for my argument once we realize, as Rancière claims citing Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin, it is Byron who represented the false promise of spiritual poetry and the opposite end of democratic petrification in the nineteenth century. Balzac indeed posed a contrast between Byron the poet of “spiritual turmoil” and the geologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier, the “true poet” of the time who “rebuilt cities out of some teeth, repopulated forests out of some petrified traces, and rediscovered races of giants in a mammoth’s foot.”25 In Disgrace, this exit of Byron is reconfigured as David’s more earnest attempts at reading his times. His failures still haunt the final pages of the novel, as evident from his interactions with Lucy and Bev Shaw, but he seems to have found a new language to read through the ailing animals he puts to death. Aesthetics of madness Let me now turn to the other half of this narrative – i.e. the apartheid regime. In Rancière’s formulation, the political effect of literature is restricted within its putative structure, or within its ability to become democratically petrified. “Literature,” he maintains, “‘does’ politics as literature – that there is a specific link between politics as a definite way of doing and literature as a definite practice of writing.”26 Coetzee’s account of “white writing” certainly embodies a “definite practice,” but it is not an independent writing practice. It assumes, for its effect, to be supplemented by the definite governmental practice of race-management during both the colonial and the apartheid periods. In his anti-pastoralist novels, Coetzee attempts to break this supplementarity through the violent insertion of suffering bodies and sets up an aesthetic contest for visibility between the novel and the racist state as his central concern. It is important for my purpose, however, to underscore the precise location of provinciality that uniquely shaped 109

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this aesthetic competition. In his CNA Award acceptance speech in 1981, he gestures towards this provincial grounding when he points out the absurdity of imagining the “South African literature in English, both that which currently exists and that which is likely to come into being in the foreseeable future, [as] a national literature.” Implicit in this statement is his critique of literary prizes like the CNA Award which project a national canon of white liberal dream, but more central is his diagnosis of the “daily problem of wedding subject matter, or content, to form” in English-language writing in South Africa. Of course Coetzee here anticipates the more elaborate treatment of this disjuncture in White Writing, but he also makes an attempt to encompass the problem within a scheme of opposition between the “metropolis” and the “province” with the claim that English-language writing in South Africa is “not building a new national literature, but instead building on to an established provincial literature.” The “provincial,” which territorializes race, is not a place of “ignominy” but a strategic location to avoid both metropolitan expectations and nationalist aspirations.27 Provinciality over the nation, I suggest in the following pages, is not an accidental choice for Coetzee but an attempt to anchor apartheid within its local history. This is clear from his choice of reading the history of apartheid as a history of “madness” that gestured towards a metropolitan model of Herderian ethnonationalism but remained acutely aware of local histories to work out its finer details. In his reading of the “heart-speech of autobiography and confession” as a way of entering into this mad world in “Apartheid Thinking” (1991), which offers a detailed reading of the sociologist and apartheid ideologue Geoffrey Cronjé’s texts, Coetzee suggests that neither the explicitly stated economic self-interest nor any simple notion of racial difference can fully grasp the madness of apartheid.28 To understand apartheid in its proper and provincial context and to explain how it appealed to a large number of people, he insists, one needs to address “apartheid thinking” at its core and to pose the essential question of “how madness spreads itself or is made to spread through a social body” (AT, 165). “[I]f madness has a place in life,” he observes, it has a place in history too. The indifference of South African historiography to the question of madness [. . .] should arouse nothing but mistrust, and make us redouble rather than abate our efforts to call up and interrogate the demons of the past. (AT, 164)29 110

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To this end he submits two powerful concepts – desire and contagion – which were shaped within the provincial history of South Africa. Through careful readings of Cronjé’s texts between 1945 and 1948, Coetzee argues that apartheid was primarily concerned with the central question of desire across racial lines and resultant “blood-mixing,” and hence was critically dependent on regulations of desire. Cronjé indeed mobilized a whole range of registers including religious, sociological, and quasi-scientific to emphasize the importance of blood purity for the successful continuation of the white nation in South Africa and repeatedly warned his readers against the danger of interracial desire leading to “bloedvermenging” or blood-mixing/miscegenation (AT, 171). In Coetzee’s account, desire is not individually defined in Cronjé’s texts but rendered as a social flow that assigns various actors their subject positions across the social field and on different sides of the color line. Coetzee concedes that in its attempt to regulate desire and to produce a pure white nation, apartheid was little different from nationalisms elsewhere. The Herderian vision of the nation, which underpinned much of nationalist movements since the eighteenth century (especially in the colonial world), had always been preoccupied with the purity of the volk. What distinguished apartheid was its exclusive premium on race and its elaborate legal-bureaucratic networks to spatially segregate different races in order to secure “racist exclusivism.” In its bid to manage blood purity, as Cronjé’s texts demonstrate, apartheid deployed the concept of contagion as both medico-legal as well as governmental principles. This preoccupation with contagion, Coetzee argues following Maynard Swanson, led to what could be termed “sanitation syndrome” which first located the root of contagious diseases in urban slums populated with black South Africans and then suggested spatial segregation. Not only such slums were quarantined and evacuated to prevent diseases from spreading further, even slum-dwellers were also regularly deported to locations beyond the limits of the city. Coetzee notes a chain of metonymy at play here – first, in a “metonymic displacement” the disease is projected on black bodies; “from being a carrier who is black, the suspect becomes the black who is a carrier; from being vehicle of infection, blackness itself becomes the infection” (AT, 181). In the second set of displacement, [T]he germ of infection is rapidly displaced, in a kind of fluid motion whose model is the circulation of the blood, throughout the black body. The black body becomes a generator of black essence [. . .]. Though black blood is the name conventionally 111

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applied to this essence, it is understood in the first place that black blood stands for black semen (a kind of semen possessed by both sexes, however, as Cronjé’s story of the black woman giving venereal disease to the white baby reveals), but in the second place that this “standing-for” is not stable – is not an equivalence, a metaphor. The circulation of “black blood” through the black body is nothing more or less than the circulating power of metonymy itself, one site unendingly displaced on to another. Thus the black body is the place of metonymy; and if this seems a slippery concept, a concept hard to grasp, hard to get a hold on, hard to pin down, that is because the place of metonymy is a nonplace, because its essential “place” is the place where it has just been or is just about to be. (AT, 181–2; emphasis original) To call the history of this form of social striation along the racial line madness, however, is not to exonerate its perpetrators or their macabre social engineering. What apartheid successfully did in its madness, Coetzee argues, was that it legalized a series of practices which were part of the general South African way of life since the beginning of colonial occupation and especially during the period of segregation immediately preceding apartheid. Hence the metonymic nonplace of the black body was, at least for advocates of apartheid like Cronjé, a natural culmination of a long history of “racist exclusivism” and hence perfectly understandable. However, Coetzee’s emphasis on madness reveals a conflict at its heart between economic self-interest and the complex economy of desire. Torn between the need to use cheap black labor on the one hand and the dangerous desire for black bodies on the other, Coetzee seems to suggest, apartheid calibrated the metonymic chain of contagion to erect an intricate network of regulated visibility of black bodies. Apartheid or apart-hood was interpreted quite literally to restrict circulation of black bodies and “black blood” within the social body and a range of measures from banning interracial marriages to physical segregation were introduced. In my discussion of Kipling and British India in the first chapter, we have seen how the colonial state employed the threat of contagion (especially of venereal diseases) to structure the social space of the colony; in apartheid this colonial principle found its most regressive sophistication and enforcement. Coetzee notes: As an episode in historical time, apartheid was causally overdetermined. It did indeed flower out of self-interest and greed, 112

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but also out of desire, and the denial of desire. In its greed, it demanded black bodies in all their physicality in order to burn up their energy as labor. In its anxiety about black bodies, it also made laws to banish them from sight. (AT, 164) The most striking aspect of “Apartheid Thinking,” however, is its inclusion in a collection of essays on censorship. Coetzee of course incorporates some justificatory remarks on how Cronjé invokes a principle of self-censoring to achieve his goal, but, strictly speaking, the essay is not on censorship and it does sit uneasily with the other pieces in the volume with more direct connections with state censorship of literary or visual texts. If anything, as Coetzee’s own account demonstrates, Cronjé’s texts were instrumental in the establishment of one of the most authoritarian states in the twentieth century, which heavily invested in censorship as part of its everyday functioning. Yet its inclusion gives us the central template of the provincial aesthetics I track through Coetzee’s oeuvre – though he states in his introductory note to Giving Offense that he does not present a “strong theory” of censorship in his writing, in “Apartheid Thinking” and in the supplementary piece “The Work of the Censor: Censorship in South Africa” he does suggest “paranoia” as a possible model for understanding state censorship, and I want to read it as the key to Coetzee’s new aesthetics that avoids both metropolitan anticipation and nationalist desire. Through the incorporation of the censor – both a person and an institution, and this essential duality is important – as part of this provincial aesthetics, Coetzee proposes aesthetic regimes as a contested territory for literature and the state, and maintains that both are governed by paranoia as an organizing principle. Drawing on Freud’s note on paranoia and Schreber’s autobiography, he argues that if paranoia is the manifestation of “a general detachment of libido from the world,” then in the South African case its manifestation was most prominent in the state’s fantasy of the “total onslaught” in which the South African state or even “Western Christian civilization in Africa” was put under continuous and veritable threat. Coetzee is ready to accept that the institution of censorship historically preceded this paranoiac fantasy of “total onslaught”; but he insists that once this paranoiac worldview came into existence, it almost naturally selected the “bureaucracy of censorship” to articulate its anxious concerns.30 Coetzee is quick to point out that Freud’s account of paranoia is fraught with the inherent suspicion that the account itself becomes 113

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paranoid in its act of exposition – Freud becomes apprehensive that “his brand-new theory of the etiology of paranoia” is already available in Schreber’s autobiography, and Coetzee feels “this asseveration betrays a certain paranoia in Freud himself; alternatively, seeing paranoia everywhere, even in Freud, belongs to a perception that has been touched by paranoia” (WC, 198). In a similar move, he suggests that his own reading of state censorship being guided by paranoia is not untouched by the same nervous condition, or even that “[p]olemics around censorship tend all too soon to fall into a paranoid mode in which every argument presented by the other is seen as a mask for a hostile intention” (WC, 200). Once this peculiar doubling of paranoia is recognized, it is easier to see how it functions as a generative power within both state bureaucracy and aesthetic production, setting up an irreducible contest between the censor and the writer for visibility. The central claim made in this regard is that judgments made by the censor are similar to “primary instinctual impulses” described by Freud in his note on the ego and its management of desire in “Negation” (1925) – that is to say, these judgments replicate a “primitive Yes/No response” of the unconscious to “admit or refuse entry.” Hence Coetzee extends this Freudian insight to suggest further that laws and judgment are on the same level: under suspicion, on the defensive. The (paranoid) wisdom of the law is that society must guard itself on all sides, against its own defenses too. The defense of the ego [. . .] is assigned by Freud to a function that – like a border official charged with preventing the entry of subversive materials – he calls censorship. (WC, 201–2) At this point we may go back to our earlier discussion of Rancière and modern literature, and also to how South African culture of letters followed a different, and anti-literary, course within world literature. In The Aesthetic Unconscious, Rancière reformulates his theory with reference to Freudian psychoanalysis and proposes a direct link between literature and Freud’s project: if it was possible for Freud to formulate the psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious, it was because an unconscious mode of thought had already been identified outside of the clinical domain as such, and the domain of works of art and

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literature can be defined as the privileged ground where this “unconscious” is at work.31 This argument clearly sidesteps any engagement with paranoia or other forms of regulating the unconscious that Coetzee explores (there is no reference to Freud’s study of paranoia in Rancière’s text), and, instead, proceeds to align the Freudian unconscious with Cuvier and his new science of reading natural objects. Rancière indeed suggests that the Freudian unconscious was analogous to this principle of “Everything speaks” (pace Cuvier) that ushered in a new aesthetic regime by destroying representational hierarchies of the classical era.32 Once this link is established, however, the logic of universal democracy takes over the fields of both aesthetics and psychoanalysis, and it becomes difficult to address local histories of regulation like censorship. What Coetzee outlines through his joint exploration of “white writing” and censorship in South Africa is not a project of universal readability; rather, as I have demonstrated above, he points out a fundamental division in the very notion of aesthetics where literature and the state are competitors, and they rely on their respective networks of visibility to counter each other. This is why Rancière’s thesis of the democratic impulse so widespread in European aesthetics finds little support in South Africa, and this is also why the post-apartheid Anglophone writing has the additional task of reading what has largely been left unread in the dominant literary culture. To put it differently, Coetzee proposes a counterpoint to European literary history through his insistence on censorship as the ground where the distinctions between two practices of reading – literary and governmental – are enacted most characteristically. The figure of the censor embodies the latter and as such is the strict reversal of Rancière’s democratic promise of modern aesthetic regime because it is designed to disallow certain forms of reading and hence also to effect a very specific arrangement of the distribution of the sensible. Schreber’s delirious account and Freud’s formulation of the etiology of paranoia are mobilized in Coetzee’s text as grounds to elaborate on this governmental practice, and also to indicate its inherent pathological possibilities, which the Anglophone novel must contend. What Coetzee does in the process is nothing short of outlining a peculiar aesthetics attached to state-organized apartheid with a longer history through colonialism, and it is here that his emphasis on censorship becomes decisive. In considering censorship across cultures in Giving Offence, he is willing to grant it a larger history; but in insisting on its typically xenophobic

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nature in South Africa, he appears more interested in its provincial articulation. As he argues with reference to the works of J.C.W. Van Rooyen, the chairman of the Publications Appeal Board during the final years of the apartheid era, censorship in South Africa was reliant on a chain of metonymic “displacements” similar to the machinations of apartheid. The elaborate edicts on public morality in the South African Publications Act, for instance, was nothing but a ploy to hide the highly partisan views taken by successive censors. In several cases, in order to deal with this paranoid anxiety about an impending doomsday for the white minority, the Publications Appeal Board acted as both champion of the public (whose feelings it embodied in a fiction called “the average man” and assessed according to its own methods) and arbiter between the public and the intellectuals in a cause célèbre that it did as much as any other party to set up and stage-manage. (WC, 196) Both the fictions of national security and public morality were thus perpetuated as elaborate displacements for the racial anxiety the apartheid regime was so keen to reroute in the public discourses. Coetzee’s reaction to this history of partitioning the sensible between the legacies of “white writing” and the apartheid censorship was to set up a necessary rivalry between the censor and the writer. If censorship functioned as an organ of the paranoid governmental readings of black lives in Africa, and if it explicitly forbade others from entering the field, the role of the writer was indeed to disturb the neatness of this partition. As he says in an interview: I have no doubt that the concentration on imprisonment, on regimentation, on torture in books of my own like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K was a response – I emphasise, a pathological response – to the ban on representing what went on in police cells in this country.33 Though his own novels were never banned under the apartheid censorship, despite at least three of them being thoroughly scrutinized, Coetzee nevertheless maintains this antagonistic role and his anti-pastoralist novels need to be read as part of this defiance.34 It is only in Disgrace, which is his first and so far only novel explicitly set in post-apartheid South Africa, that he has the additional burden of negotiating with 116

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the political democracy that pushed the limits of this early stance of rivalry. Once the paranoid racist state and its oppressive machineries like censorship are removed from the scene, and once the boundaries set around governmental readings are dismantled, Coetzee feels somewhat forced to rethink the very concept of democracy. This point is made with striking insight in Disgrace and its obsession with dogs. Coetzee’s interest in animals in his fiction and elsewhere has been primarily read as a sign of his sustained struggle to find an ethical entry point within history. Attridge, for instance, argues that the animals in the novel mark the irreducible “singularity” of any living or dead being, and hence are “others whom [David] knows he cannot begin to know.”35 In their respective singularities, these dogs disrupt any formal equation between the novelistic and the historic, resisting any easy solution for the troubling times in South African history. For my purpose, however, it is equally important to trace the genealogy of these dogs in South African history – not a biological investigation but how the figure of the animal has been part of anthropological accounts of black Africans, as Coetzee notes in White Writing. In Disgrace he deliberately sets up a provocative encounter between current democratic practices and this colonial legacy, and invokes the animal imagery at strategic points in the narrative.36 What this provocation means can be gauged from the oral submission made by Jeff Radebe, the Minister of Public Enterprises in the ANC government, in front of the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) in which he accused Disgrace of reproducing the pervasive colonial stereotype of the black as a “faithless, immoral, uneducated, incapacitated primitive child.” Radebe went on to suggest that the novel did not only repeat this colonial and deeply racist stereotype, it even added the additional anxiety, again widely held by the racist minority in South Africa, that in the post-apartheid era the so-called “primitive child [appears] without the restraining leash around the neck that the European had been obliged to place in the interest of both the native and society.”37 The event of rape of a white woman by three black men, the submission maintained, would be a pertinent instance of such racist worldview. This primitive child or animal-like black African certainly refers back to the racist metaphors from the colonial/apartheid era, and more specifically to the works of some of the ideologues of the pure Afrikaner nationalism like Cronjé and J.B.M. Hertzog, but the point is not to discard the ANC submission as an inept reading of the novel that mindlessly reduces an exquisitely crafted novel to the chaotic atrocities of colonial history. Coetzee is deliberately invoking this history, and 117

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Radebe is right in recognizing this; but what the oral submission before SAHRC misses is that the novel is also making this anthropological point part of its own structure and unfolding. Contrary to Radebe’s complaint, the dogs in the text do not only refer to Lucy’s dogs in her kennels, but to a larger colonial discourse that the novel consciously confronts. It is no coincidence that almost all the major characters in the novel (irrespective of their racial identities) have been likened to dogs at some point or the other in the text. Bodies that matter The crucial question that confronts us at this stage is the following: does Coetzee’s emphasis on two different practices of reading lead to any specific notion of aesthetics? Does it develop into, to borrow from Rancière, “a mode of thought that develops with respect to things of art and that is concerned to show them to be things of thought?”38 Coetzee’s answer seems to circulate around a void at the heart of his narratives that can only be gestured at but cannot be fully cited within the text. Take, for instance, the dog imagery once again. In an intertextual reference, he invokes Kafka’s The Trial when David describes Lucy’s decision of accepting Petrus as her husband after the rape incident as living “Like a dog” and when Lucy reiterates the same phrase by saying “Yes, like a dog” (D, 205). Within the narrative, this is meant to gloss Lucy’s seemingly irrational decision of not reporting the rape incident to law enforcement authorities or even of accepting her place in the farmland under the protection of Petrus with a sham marriage. At the same time, the text makes it clear that these two iterations of intertextuality belong to two different discursive orders. As Gayatri Spivak points out, David understands Lucy’s decision as symptomatic of a breakdown of the civil society reminiscent of Kafka’s tale, while Lucy refers to a history laden with racist imagery as the beginning point for her counter-intuitive idea that in relinquishing one’s privileges (or through disgrace) one can truly enter into a democratic space with a population that has been denied similar rights over centuries.39 In the text, the canonical aesthetics, or Coetzee’s much-discussed allegiance to European modernism, thus finds limited validation as it remains largely with David and his innumerable failures to “read.” Within this aesthetic field, Lucy can only be thought of as a body that resists rationalization, like those speechless animals, and the novel is unable to explain her. But the fact that Lucy is essentially mute in the novel and that a fuller account of her decision is only available in speculative counter-focalization also 118

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alerts us to the novel’s unwillingness to flesh out this other domain of thought developed with response to literary forms. Instead, the novel is much more interested in projecting Lucy as a necessary but mute body which escapees any aestheticization or which remains beyond the pale of rationality. If Coetzee develops a provincial notion of aesthetics, as I claim in this chapter, it grows out of this intense bonding with local histories and bodies, with reference to the anthropological remnants of history. Coetzee’s provincial aesthetics receives a fuller elucidation not in Disgrace but in Foe and its insistence on the muteness of Friday. It is of course a deliberate literalization of the largely silent Friday in Daniel Defoe’s novel The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), but his muteness is used in Coetzee’s novel as a standing challenge to the “sphere of myth” surrounding the iconic figure of Robinson Crusoe in the “collective consciousness of the West.”40 According to Coetzee, Friday is instrumental in exposing the foundational figure of English novels – i.e. Defoe – as an impersonator, a ventriloquist, even a forger (his Journal of the Plague Year is as close to a forgery of historical document as one can get without beginning to play with ink and old paper). The kind of “novel” he is writing [. . .] is fake autobiography heavily influenced by the genres of the deathbed confession and the spiritual autobiography.41 No doubt these reference to deception and fabrication have been integral parts of novelistic mechanism set in motion since the eighteenth century, not least by Defoe himself, but to tease out their full sense we need to listen to Susan Burton’s account of Friday in Foe: Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You will respond: he is neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is he anything to himself ? – how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what I make of him. Therefore the silence of Friday is a helpless silence.42 119

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Friday, as this and several other passages in the novel attest, is a challenge not only to the internal mechanisms of the novels of both Defoe and Coetzee, he even resists any universal aesthetic discourses that might develop through these texts. His muteness indeed is an invitation to rethink the very category of aesthetics itself. As is well known, Foe is a retelling of both Robinson Crusoe and Roxana. The real motor of the story, however, is not so much its intertextuality but the gap between its narration and the published versions of Defoe’s novels. Susan Burton, the central narrator of the novel (there are others including unnamed ones), writes a longish memoir on her experience of a year as a castaway on a remote island where she meets another castaway Robinson Cruso and his manservant Friday. Through this memoir and a series of letters which intermingle her story of shipwreck with other details of her personal life including the mysterious appearance of a girl who claims to be her daughter, Susan exhorts Mr. Foe the “author who had heard many confessions and [was] reputed a very secret man” to write her a story that would give not only the truth of her life but the “substance of the truth” (F, 47, 51). A singular relationship develops between Susan and Foe, as the former becomes more and more dependent on the latter not only through her story (which she cannot publish under her own name owing to the gender bias of the eighteenth-century literary market) but also through the material support Foe offers. This phase of the story is primarily narrated by Susan, and the text drops copious hints to suggest that Foe is heavily fabricating the narrative of her shipwrecked life: Once you proposed to supply a middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These I would not accept because they were not the truth. Now you propose to reduce the island to an episode in the history of a woman in search of a lost daughter. This too I reject. (F, 121) In effect, then, Susan’s life provides material for not one but two narratives – one with Cruso and Friday on the deserted island which edits Susan out, and the other based on her life before the shipwreck and after her return to England which would become Roxana. The distance between what she writes (Coetzee’s novel) and what supposedly becomes the canonized versions (Defoe’s novels) is precisely the ground of early novels in English that produced a formal unity through

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selective narratives and techniques. What baffles Susan and Foe alike, and what remains unchanged across narrations (though given somewhat theatrical overtone in Foe) is the silent Friday with his untold story. At different points of her memoir Susan records her perplexity with the mute Friday, wondering about a range of things including his past or his strange ritual of scattering petals on seawater. Friday in Foe is a mute body without a past or even without an explanation that can be retold within the text or that can be verified with other potential sources. Cruso gives different versions of their meeting and Susan tries various unsuccessful methods to obtain a reliable narrative for him. Coetzee’s revisiting of the early moments in the history of English novels with Friday, however, is part of a larger project within Anglophone territories that exposes some of the foundational assumptions of modern aesthetic regime – in this case, its inherent inability to read or represent the racial other. Coetzee correctly identifies the principal technique of Defoe’s novels to be “empiricism” and describes his central achievement in the following words: For page after page – for the first time in the history of fiction – we see a minute, ordered description of how things are done. It is a matter of pure writerly attentiveness, pure submission to the exigencies of a world which, through being submitted to in a state so close to spiritual absorption, becomes transfigured, real.43 Friday disturbs this plan, since for all its attention to minutiae Defoe’s narrative stops at the rather obstinate and literally mute body that cannot be restored to any form of linguistic intelligibility. He stands, as it were, as a tenacious sign around which the narrative with all its power to unveil circles and falls apart; he resists every effort to be drawn into its heady vortex. All the sciences of Western Enlightenment that provided the justificatory framework for the new aesthetic regime – from geology to philology, from paleontology to psychoanalysis – are clueless before this absolute other. In a way, Friday stands in for a series of mute bodies across Coetzee’s oeuvre, including Lucy and the bunch of dying dogs or even the unnamed barbarian girl and Michael K, who defy the protocols of the new aesthetics that has been universalized in the wake of European imperialism and that Rancière identifies as the clear marker of modernity. The fact that Friday is explicitly identified as a black African in Coetzee’s novel, and not in Defoe’s, also tells us how the provinciality of this aesthetic strategy is so central to Coetzee.

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The final passages of Foe bring out the fuller implication of Coetzee’s provincial aesthetics: But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday. He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face. The skin is tight across his bones, his lips are drawn back. I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in. His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (F, 157) Friday’s muteness here crosses his individual body and finds a larger canvas. As the unidentified narrator tells us, this phantasmagoric setting of a drowned ship under an unknown sea is the precise location where Friday’s mystery can be unlocked. It is “not a place of words” as it does not lend itself to linguistic representation. These passages rather suggest that Friday’s body marks a break between the order of literature and the order of life, and as such this racialized body releases a different form of opacity. The flow that comes out of his mutilated mouth, the “slow stream,” is not intelligible to the narrator. Though it pervades the space, it cannot be given any recognizable form. Friday, or similar bodies representing racial difference, is a stumbling block for the aesthetic regime Rancière describes, since its muteness comes from the outside of the literariness that this regime is designed to read. Hence, when faced with this cordon, the modern democratic regime withdraws from the scene, as it were, allowing the earlier regime to take over – i.e. imposition of will or form. That is the reason that Defoe/Foe, Crusoe/Cruso, and Susan all fail to give Friday any linguistic substance or formal legibility, and instead impose cannibalism and other forms of primitivity to make sense of him. It is interesting to note that Coetzee consciously invokes Defoe in this case, as if to mark the very beginning of this regime from the eighteenth century as embroiled in the opacity of race that it can neither understand nor translate. World literature, which is also based on this 122

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democratic appeal, faces a somewhat similar barrier in Coetzee’s provincial aesthetics. Notes 1 For a set of representative essays, see Anton Leist and Peter Singer (eds.), J.M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); also see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” Diacritics, Vol. 32, Nos. 3/4 (2002); Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J.M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), among many others. 2 J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 248. 3 See Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). For a somewhat programmatic presentation of its central argument, see Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance, Vol. 103, No. 1 (2004), 10–24. 4 Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10. 5 J.M. Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” Upstream, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1988), 4. 6 J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); henceforth cited parenthetically as WW with pagination. 7 David Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 14–15. 8 Attwell, Rewriting Modernity, 15. 9 Rita Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 28–9. 10 David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 96–134. 11 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 44–5. 12 Williams, The Country and the City, 23. On the omission of imperial history in Williams, see Gauri Viswanathan, “Raymond Williams and British Colonialism,” in Christopher Prendergast (ed.) Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 188–210. 13 Derrida’s description of metaphysics as “white mythology” is the following: “A white mythology which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own mythology (that is, Indo-European mythology), his logos – that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason.” Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” trans. F.C.T. Moore, New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn, 1974), 11. 14 J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 338–9. 15 For an extension of Coetzee’s idea of the “white pastoral” into visual and architectural archives, see Gavin Lucas, An Archaeology of Colonial Identity: Power and Material Culture in the Dwars Valley, South Africa (New York: Springer, 2006), 8–16 and passim.

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39

Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 32. Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 30. Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 34. Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 40. Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2004), 16. Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 21. Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 23. For a larger critique of Rancière’s position, see my article Baidik Bhattacharya, “Reading Rancière: Literature at the Limit of World Literature,” New Literary History, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Summer, 2017). Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 165–72. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), 4; henceforth abbreviated as D with pagination in parenthesis. Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 19. Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 1. J.M. Coetzee, “SA Authors Must Learn Modesty,” Die Vaderland, May 1, 1981, 16–17. J.M. Coetzee, “Apartheid Thinking,” in Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 164; hereafter cited parenthetically as AT with pagination. On this particular point on madness, see also John Kane-Berman, South Africa: The Method in the Madness (London: Pluto Press, 1978); Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Derek Hook, A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid (New York: Routledge, 2012). J.M. Coetzee, “The Work of the Censor: Censorship in South Africa,” in Giving Offence, 198–9; hereafter cited parenthetically as WC with pagination. On the connection between Coetzee’s conception of paranoia as driving apartheid and his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, see David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time (London: Penguin, 2015), Chapter 6. See also Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 74; and John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2009), 162–6. Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 4. Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, 34–6. On this point see also Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Quoted in McDonald, The Literature Police, 308. See McDonald, The Literature Police, 303–20. Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 184. As Shameem Black has pointed out, “[t]he use of animal imagery for black Africans exceeds its demeaning legacy of racist metaphor, although such connotations comprise parts of the history that the novel provocatively commands us to confront.” Shameem Black, Fiction across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late TwentiethCentury Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 236. Quoted in Peter D. McDonald, “Disgrace Effects,” Interventions, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2001), 323–4. Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, 4–5. Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” 17–31.

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40 J.M. Coetzee, “Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe,” in Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 17. 41 Coetzee, “Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe,” 19. 42 J.M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Penguin, 2010), 121–2; hereafter cited parenthetically as F with pagination. 43 Coetzee, “Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe,” 20.

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4 MINORITY REPORT

[T]o be rejected and reviled by, so to speak, one’s own characters is a shocking and painful experience for any writer. – Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith” (1990)

David Damrosch has noted that in the postcolonial “hypercanon,” as attested by MLA Bibliography Articles entries between 1984 and 2003, Salman Rushdie not only eclipses any other author, he even seems set to become the “Shakespeare” of postcolonial literary studies.1 No doubt this is partly because of his success in producing a new kind of diasporic novel since the early 1980s that seems to strike a chord with what he believes to be our increasingly “post-modern” and postimperial times. The achievement is evident in his repeated success with the Booker Prize for his second novel Midnight’s Children (1981), as also in its genre-defining influence on contemporary Anglophone writing. More crucially, however, Rushdie achieved global fame (and notoriety) when his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was declared an affront on Muslims and when it became embroiled in a geopolitical crisis of unprecedented magnitude. Suddenly, a novel and its author, coupled with a religious edict and large-scale protest across continents, came to dominate international headlines; as one of the early commentators, Jean-Claude Lamy, noted: At the center, a single man (sacrilegious apostate for some, innocent novelist for others) chased by a multitude of killers, a clash of civilizations, geo-strategic rivalries, and the wrath of God! And there is even blood, which has already flowed in Islamabad, Kashmir, and Bombay, and is more than likely to flow elsewhere.2 126

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In subsequent decades, the Rushdie affair has come to mark a watershed in the history of Anglophone writing as world literature that received its final attestation in a series of macabre incidents involving several deaths, upheavals in international diplomatic relations, disruption in trade relations between countries, and widespread anger and violence surrounding the issues of religious faith and secularism.3 Rushdie’s novel received the attention it did because of its Anglophony, and because of the way Anglophony is now situated across the virtual globe of globalization; the way Rushdie and his novel overshadowed a contemporary and somewhat similar controversy surrounding the Egyptian Nobel-laureate Naguib Mahfouz (including a near-fatal attack on him) was proof of how Anglophone writing was set to dominate the period of “high globalization” starting in the 1980s with global networks of power, labor, information, and religious faith.4 In Britain, Rushdie’s adopted home then and also the setting for The Satanic Verses, however, things took a very different turn after the novel was banned in India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sudan, Qatar, and South Africa and especially after Iran’s Shia leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed a “fatwa” and placed a £1,500,000 price on Rushdie’s life on February 14, 1989. In an ironic turn, the minority South Asian community (predominantly Muslim), whom Rushdie claimed to have represented in his novel, started demanding a similar ban on The Satanic Verses on the ground that the novel was blasphemous to Islam. To garner support for their demand, they organized rallies and conventions in London, Birmingham, and other places, and circulated a large amount of material against the novel and its author to enforce minority religious rights in a postwar British society, which was ostensibly secular but legally Christian, as its blasphemy laws protected only the established Church of England. In the wake of the controversy, the minority community repeatedly cited South Asian precedence and asserted that the most urgent minority right was indeed, in the words of Tariq Modood, “the right to be culturally different.”5 This sudden assertion in turn reignited the darker crevices of racism across the nation with predictable backlash. Within weeks, graffiti like “KILL A MUSLIM FOR CHRISTMAS” or “GAS THE MUSLIMS” appeared on the walls of underpasses or tube stations with alarming regularity. Areas with a dense Muslim population across Britain started receiving unwanted attention and vandalism, and the civil-social domain of secular Britain was suddenly under the cloud of acute Islamophobia.6 127

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After the notorious “Bradford book burning” on January 14, The Independent came up with this chilling parallel: Their campaign to have the book banned, on the grounds that it blasphemes Islam, led to a demonstration over the weekend in Bradford in which, following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler’s National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book.7 Within the popular domain, as represented by print and audiovisual media, the incommensurability between a secular literary form and the religious demands of a minority community (articulated through extreme measures like book burning) was seen as a clash between the enlightened Europe and its progressive values on the one hand and the medieval Islam and its insistence on intolerant theocracies on the other. The novel became a flashpoint and a contested site to give voice to these different values, sensibilities, and demands. Perhaps Rushdie himself captured this horror in its most poetic form: “How fragile civilization is; how easily, how merrily a book burns!”8 The overlap between the novel and these disparate events has been so extensive that it is almost impossible to read The Satanic Verses or its author outside the so-called Rushdie affair or his subsequent canonization in Anglophone world literature. My contention in this chapter is to use this historical event to suggest that it is the Rushdie affair that catapulted into popular vocabulary, rather violently, the notional existence of an international civil society and its cultural expression in a standardized world literature which needed to be defended against the somewhat fanatic attack against the very object called literature. Rushdie’s novel demonstrated for both his critics and supporters the global reality called literature that enforced universal norms across geographical boundaries and cultural traditions and demanded standardized responses to its singularity. In the following pages, I use different registers of the Rushdie affair to argue that the present domination of Anglophone world literature was forged through this contest between a secular literary history and its putative adversary, in what I shall call the minor-subaltern community of postwar as well as post-imperial Britain. To understand this urgency of defending “a work of fiction, one that aspires to the condition of literature,” as Rushdie puts it,9 against a threatening minor-subaltern community (or what Arjun Appadurai captures in the evocative phrase, the “fear of small numbers”10) who have scant regard for such cultural objects, however, one needs 128

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to explore the very nature of the fraught identity of this group as indicated by the two parts conjoined with a hyphen. Minor is a numerical and governmental category developed through the establishment of modern liberal statehood, and in due course has been globalized along with the nation-state and its techniques of enumeration. Subalternity, on the other hand, implies the depressed position in any structure of domination and remains under the radar of any generalized system of representation, whether political, aesthetic, or otherwise. In itself, subalternity does not necessarily suggest minority, and there are several instances in history where the subaltern was actually numerically greater than the dominant. However, in globalized nation-states, and especially in metropolitan centers, the minor and the subaltern come together in different registers of governmentality and culture, as occupying the same space and responding to similar claims of identity, legal rights, or cultural difference. During the Rushdie affair, this minor-subaltern community became visible through the complex notion of blasphemy and its supposed expression in violence. In recent times, and especially after 9/11 and several terrorist attacks in London, Paris, Brussels, and elsewhere in Europe, this implied relationship between this community and the blasphemy-violence complex has been universalized more thoroughly, attesting Talal Asad’s observation that blasphemy in modern times, especially when related to Islam in a non-Islamic country, becomes the charged site to represent “some moral and political problems in liberal Europe.”11 In this chapter, I am much more interested in exploring how this blasphemy-violence complex of the minority community came to represent the inevitable opposition not only to free speech but even to literature. Secularism, freedom of expression, and several other related ideas, in hindsight, were loaded pointers towards a new consensus on secular world literature and I suggest that we need to situate the contemporary dominance of Anglophone writing in the volatile space opened up by these debates in the wake of the Rushdie affair. Archives of affect Let us begin with two fragments of what Hayden White calls the “unprocessed historical record,” as we embark on our search for the minorsubaltern subject of postcolonial Anglophone writing.12 The first one is a political pamphlet of unusual interest on several counts.13 The text is composed in different languages with clear South Asian association; apart from English, it repeats the call for the “greatest international march” on 129

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May 27, 1989, in Bengali and Urdu. Clearly the publisher – British Muslims Action Front – or its convener Abdul Hussain Choudhury envisaged the target audience (and people who would eventually join the march) as primarily South Asian but multilingual. In the wake of the Rushdie affair and after the “Bradford book burning,” the leaflet calls for unprecedented unity amongst the 850,000 strong Muslim minorities in Britain. Several such pamphlets were in circulation, and Choudhury confirmed that “imams throughout the country were telling their congregations to go on the march, because the novel was ‘an attack against the Koran,’ and that all mosques have been supplied with leaflets.”14 These pamphlets formed an important part of communication within the minority community; they were mostly published using cheap paper and as the end product shows – typeface, odd spelling of Bengali, and irregular syntax of Urdu – they appear to be produced under somewhat hurried and financially constrained circumstances. However, what arrests our attention most is a strange elision: while the Urdu and the English sections roughly corroborate each other, the Bengali section lacks one significant bit of information – it fails to mention either Rushdie or his novel, presumably the all-important piece of news, and simply urges the true Muslims in the name of the prophet to raise their demand for extending the current British blasphemy law to Islam. From a passionate rage against the novel and its author, the text displaces the movement onto a purely civil-social domain and proposes to enter into a dialogue with the state. Rushdie or his supposed blasphemous novel, it seemed, very soon gave way to a more pressing concern of minority rights. This displacement is more dramatically staged in the next fragment, another pamphlet that squarely asks its readers, “Can you stomach the best of Rushdie?”15 As it transpires, however, the “you” in question here is not (or not only) the British Muslim community who may not be able to savor Rushdie’s brand of fiction-making but an interpellation of the whole nation beyond any distinction of race, class, ethnicity, or religion. With an air of sensational disclosure, the pamphlet argues that the “best of Rushdie” is equally offensive to non-Muslim British citizens, and cites several passages from his texts to suggest that British citizens in general have serious reasons to be aggrieved. The notion of “hurt” or “grievance” is mobilized to call for a strategic alliance between Muslims and non-Muslims, the minority and the majority, and hence to extend the scope of affect to imagine a nation which has been insulted by this irresponsible author and his deliberately offensive fictions. Within the visual economy of the pamphlet, this strategic message is articulated through a veritable maze of symbols and images culled from different 130

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traditions and historical moments, from the high-Victorian imperial imaginaire to contemporary popular culture. The space of the pamphlet has been cut horizontally to produce two rectangles of uneven length. Within the bigger one on top appears the conically arranged text in bold typeface – presumably inspired by the Star Trek series – bearing the central message that Rushdie offends “the British” at large and not only minority British Muslims. While one would have expected from a pamphlet like this a litany of allegations stating how he offends Islam and its followers, the text rather democratizes hurt sentiments and invites all to share it. This canny displacement is immediately replicated in the smaller box below where one can see a forlorn and rather dejected Britannia embodying the British nation alluded to in the text immediately above her. Britannia, true to her nineteenth-century image, appears here in her full imperial regalia – flowing robes, trident, Corinthian helmet, and Greek hoplon shield embossed with the Union Jack. In a somewhat comical gesture, hurt is literalized in the image through a pen, ostensibly of Rushdie, which stabs Britannia and causes her to shed enough blood to form a pool at her feet. And finally, this bloodsoaked image of hurt British pride is superimposed with a volume with two clear inscriptions – “The Satanic Verses” and “Salman Rushdie.” Both these archival fragments are united by the central notion of hurt sentiments and consequent calls for censorship, and are organized around a displacement – minority displaced onto the whole body politic of the nation-state and thus both empirical and ontological being of the former made critically dependent on the latter. Both pamphlets assume that the long history of the empire is the ground on which a claim such as this one can be made, and it is the same history that can be mobilized to define the need for banning the controversial novel. At one level, this can be seen as an unlikely endorsement of Etienne Balibar’s argument that “in a sense, every modern nation is a product of colonization.”16 What makes this political gesture even more interesting is the official response from the state, which also stressed this shared history and affect argument if only to ask the minority to behave and to be British. Talal Asad cites two documents authored by John Patten, deputy to the home secretary Douglas Hurd, which addressed the issue of multiculturalism and identity in postwar Britain. At the heart of this address to the minority population resides a faith in common and shared cultural norms, which is summarized by the title of the second document, “On Being British.” Patten’s blatant sermonizing is interesting for various reasons, but I want to concentrate on the exceptional importance he attaches to a shared history of affects and emotions 131

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and “loyalty” to shared cultural practices that, while spelling out norms of being British, extends the common affect argument expressed in the pamphlets cited above. He states that the core of Britishness is dependent on three “common” features which everyone shares: “Our democracy and our laws, the English language, and the history that has shaped modern Britain.”17 In both these documents, Patten offers various versions of this sharing community argument and invites the Muslim minority to join the mainstream of British culture by accepting its norms and rules. And, as a corollary, he suggests that once these shared values of culture are established, and once they are understood in their proper historical context, the demand for banning The Satanic Verses would inevitably go away since the minority would automatically understand that such a demand is incommensurate with the proper ways of “being British.” This was made amply clear later by the prime minister Margaret Thatcher in her reply to a petition from the Union of Muslim Organizations, saying “there are no grounds” on which such a ban could be implemented with the addition that “it is an essential part of our democratic system that people who act within the law should be able to express their opinions freely.”18 This variable emphasis on the common history of affect – its assertion in “being British” and its negation in cultural rights – is precisely what constitutes the minor-subaltern. It needs to be situated against the typical British version of liberal-constitutional multiculturalism which, as Stuart Hall points out, was historically sustained through a doubling of racism (biological and cultural) as well as a rather normative idea of legal justice. Within postwar Britain this contradiction made sense since, Hall argues, this dual minority found itself embedded within a larger political transition, from a formal liberalism that could only conceptualize equality as sameness to a social democratic version of equality that was attentive to difference but nonetheless ineffective in fully embracing the consequences of “cultural pluralism defined in relation to communities.”19 The minor as a numerical-governmental group operated within the first as it was legally acknowledged on the plain of being British and formal equality. But the subalternity of the group, resulting from entrenched racism, remained unacknowledged and unaddressed. In the second model, this other half of the community found its articulation but remained short of full legal rights based on religious/cultural difference. A good place to track this duality is the works of the sociologist Tariq Modood, whom Rushdie describes as the “sidekick” of the hardliner Shabbir Akhtar and a hypocrite disguised as moderate, and his engagement with the duality of the minor-subaltern before and after 132

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the Rushdie affair.20 In his former avatar, Modood was a great champion of the “ethnic pride” of South Asian Muslim minority as defined by “the civilisations of old Hindustan prior to British conquest” and also of claims like the “Taj Mahal is an object of their history.”21 After Rushdie’s novel and Khomeini’s fatwa, he discovered a second source of community identity – i.e. religion – and his new formulation effortlessly replaced Taj Mahal with a universal Islamic brotherhood. In his newfound belief without the physical boundaries of any nation-state or region, Modood was particularly opposed to secularism because he saw it as an imposition of the majority cultural norms on the minority and also a source of state discrimination against all religions. As a corrective, he proposed autonomous cultural minorities that could be fashioned with the resources selectively culled from Islamic history: What is urged now is some variation of the millat system, a form of religious-based communal pluralism which reached its most developed form in the Ottoman Empire whereby ethnic minorities ran their own communal affairs with a minimum of state interference. The British in India [similarly] allowed the development of a Muslim family law with its own separate courts.”22 It is easy to see how Modood changed his track in the wake of the Rushdie affair and, based on this evidence, it is equally possible to call out his insincerity. But it is still necessary to explain the larger shift, to think about the compulsion that forced him and several others to defend the minority exclusively on the grounds of culture with Islam as a possible source for cultural codes and cohesion. The unease of the British elite with voices like Modood was partly due to the fact that they confronted for the first time, in Asad’s words, the possibility of the “politicization of a religious tradition that has no place within the cultural hegemony that has defined British identity over the last century – especially as that tradition has come from a recent colonial society.”23 As a result, this was further seen as threatening the notions of “culture” or “common life” which became available for wide-ranging British consumption in the twentieth century through imperialism and “a language of total colonial reconstruction.”24 Indeed, in Asad’s view, the decisive point in this crisis came when the liberal and white British elite feared that people who do not accept the secular liberal values of the governing classes are nevertheless able to use the liberal language 133

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of equal rights in rational argument against the secular British elite, and to avail themselves of liberal law for instituting their own strongly held religious traditions.25 The general if conservative consensus surrounding British multiculturalism, which Hall painstakingly documents, seemed to have broken forever in the face of this unprecedented assertion of the minor-subaltern. It was an assertion of both parts of their hyphenated identity, often at the same time, to break away not only from the existing model but even from alternative narratives of multiculturalism, whether Paul Gilroy’s model of “syncretic” British culture or Homi Bhabha’s muchdiscussed version of postcolonial “hybridity.”26 Instead, what was being asserted was a demand that the British state reenact the history of its overseas colonial enterprise, particularly in British India, to recognize differential minority rights policy. In an act of supreme irony, the members of the minor-subaltern community seemed ready to repeat the drunken lamentation of Whisky Sisodia from the book they wanted to be banned, that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means,” and even ready to renew Gibreel Farishta’s satanic plan to “tropicalize” London27(SV, 343, 354). It seems indeed ironic that Rushdie is perhaps the most reliable chronicler of this dual register of being minor-subaltern in contemporary Britain, even though he became their public enemy after The Satanic Verses. In his fiction the minor-subaltern responds, often at the same time, to the legal register of rights and justice (the status of being minority) and the political-cultural language of dispossession and subordination (being subaltern). This duality is not its weakness; rather the tension between the two allows it to be unusually supple, answering different political calls supplementing each other. Indeed, my point in this chapter is that this strategic invocation of an internally fraught identity for the immigrant in postwar Britain is precisely what the Rushdie affair brought into the fore. One of the central templates of this tension is available in Rushdie’s Shame (1983) when the immigrant narrator explains the genesis of the text. His central character Sufiya Zinobia “grew out of the corpse” of a murdered British Asian girl of Pakistani origin and a victim of what among the South Asian communities is known as honor-killing.28 As the narrator elaborates, she was murdered by her “Pakistani father [. . .] because by making love to a white boy she had brought such dishonour upon her family that only her blood could wash away the stain” (S, 115). The narrator gives her a name, Anahita 134

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Muhammad or Anna, and imagines her “dead body, its throat slit like a halal chicken, lying in a London night across a zebra crossing, slumped across black and white, black and white, while above her a Belisha beacon blinked, orange, not-orange, orange” (S, 116). Anna haunts the pages of Shame, and through a fabulous cross-border metamorphosis becomes Sufiya, providing in the process the central conceptual tool for the novel – the powerful dyad of shame/shamelessness that is also the reason for her death. When he decided to write about Anna and shame, the narrator tells us, he “recalled the last sentence of The Trial by Franz Kafka, the sentence in which Joseph K. is stabbed to death. [. . .] that sentence, the ghost of an epigraph, hangs over her story still” (S, 118). This same text, and indeed the same sentence, opens up an ethical domain in Coetzee’s Disgrace, as I have discussed in the last chapter, and here its intertextuality haunts the political trajectory of the minor-subaltern. Anna Muhammad’s story, appalling as it is, may not have meant much to the narrator except his shocking realization that “like the interviewed friends [of the Pakistani man] etc., I, too, found myself understanding the killer. The news did not seem alien to me” (S, 115). The text is quite categorical in its admission of communal practices that may not make sense to “peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy” but have definite appeal to a community brought up on a steady “diet of honour and shame” (S, 115). This is an unusual moment in the text, and one of its most unguarded, when the narrator risks betraying the codes of affect that bring together not only the community but even the novelistic organization of the text. It restricts the entry point into the novel through this ghastly event of gendered violence, and despite the narrator’s later insistence that this shame is somewhat sublimated in the novel through the enabling rage of Sufiya, the unease of this initial moment remains active. As though to compensate for this awkwardness of the origin, the narrator offers a second gloss, this time apropos the shamelessness of his other character Omar Khayyam Shakil: This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners’ unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write, and so for ever alter what is written . . . Sharam, that’s the word. For which this paltry ‘shame’ is a wholly inadequate translation. Three letters, shìn rè mìm (written, 135

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naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance. It was not only shame that his mothers forbade Omar Khayyam to feel, but also 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. (S, 38–9) In a spirit reminiscent of Walter Benjamin, and more recently of Emily Apter, the narrator uses untranslatability as a marker of cultural identity, one that cannot be democratized beyond given cultural borders. These “other dialects of emotion” are operative within the text, albeit through imperfect translation, as stark reminders to the reader that the novel is unable to fully lexicalize what it describes and the minor-subaltern subject in the novel, like the nuanced understanding of sharam, remains fundamentally untranslated within a universal novelistic discourse. I want to suggest that the purported blasphemy of The Satanic Verses belongs to the same order of things – of communal cultural codes and untranslatability. Blasphemy in this narrative cannot be fully explained by Asad’s “cunning of reason” argument alone – that is to say, it cannot be rationalized solely as an extension of secular laws to protect non-secular rights. Rather one needs to understand blasphemy in the context of cultural untranslatability. Gauri Viswanathan makes a useful distinction between blasphemy and heresy, and suggests that though the two were not always sufficiently distinguished in history, a working definition is required here – If blasphemers are defined as those who commit verbal offense in shocking, vile, and crude language or imagery but without necessarily attacking points of doctrine, heretics on the other hand are those whose alternative interpretations of fundamental religious truths substantially undermine the stable foundation on which those truths stand, regardless of whether the language they use is tasteless or not.29 Blasphemy, she notes, is directed more towards a community and its codes of belonging, and not so much towards the question of doctrinal truth. If it offends, in other words, the offending content is to be interpreted according to the community’s accepted notions of truth and not necessarily according to the hermeneutic traditions of any given 136

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religion. Like the idea of sharam in Shame, blasphemy in the Rushdie affair thus represents another untranslatable that cannot be universalized beyond a community and cannot even be effectively articulated “in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners’ unrepented past.” Modood’s passionate defense of religious rights and his skepticism of secularism have their roots in this belief in untranslatability and its political effect, in the conviction that the minor-subaltern cannot fully be assimilated within the legal narratives of secular states. Within the anachronistic language of sharam and blasphemy, and the “encyclopaedias of nuance” surrounding such affective gestalt, the minor-subaltern seemed to have found its speech within the liberal-constitutional framework of the British state. Secularism and untranslatability Thus, Rushdie’s account of the minor-subaltern rests on a contradiction – while he insists on the anthropological nature of the community and narrates their anchoring in communal collectivities like family or religion, he chooses to frame his endeavor with the secular form of the novel. During the controversy this contradiction surfaced prominently, and Rushdie struggled to emphasize the secular credentials of literature and the novel in representing the minor-subaltern. He argued that the “novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel, and about the shifting relations between them,” without trying to establish, unlike religions, “a privileged language” (IH, 420; emphasis original). The novel is rather a secular arena, one that does not demand sacrality as part of its existence or unfolding, and one on which different claims and power relations are enacted. When the community whose predicaments he claimed to represent within this arena became wary of this secular space, and subsequently demanded a ban on the novel itself, however, this strategy faced a crisis. Asad again is helpful in understanding the historical complexity involved in this. As part of his provocative thesis that the genealogies of the modern political doctrine of “secularism” comes after the emergence of “the secular” as a mode of being in the world, often through complex negotiations between the primarily Christian “inside” and the predominantly Islamic “outside” of Europe, he suggests a foundational disjuncture at the heart of secular modernity. Within Europe, there has been a gap between “Europe’s historical narrative of itself ” on the one hand and the “historical narratives produced by so-called ‘minorities’ ” on the other.30 Secularism as a political doctrine, and increasingly a state policy since the nineteenth 137

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century, demands the flattening of heterogeneous times and spaces and thus full transparency of subjecthood as a precondition for belonging within modern notions of numerical citizenry. What is often forgotten in this historical process, which demands that every other tradition must be fully and unequivocally translatable into a single narrative, is the violence that reduces “multiple ways of life” into mere “identities.”31 As Partha Chatterjee states in his commentary on Asad’s thesis, [i]n all countries and in every historical period, secularization has been a coercive process in which the legal powers of the state, the disciplinary powers of family and school, and the persuasive powers of government and media have been used to produce the secular citizen who agrees to keep religion in the private domain.32 To a certain extent, the minor-subaltern’s response in the Rushdie affair can be read as posing different and untranslatable cultural rights as a way to redress this historical violence. What makes our story more complicated is the presence of a novel at the heart of the controversy and its status as a literary text. We need to ask the following questions: Is the novel as a work of literature necessarily secular and, if so, is this secularity universally understood? Is the secular of a literary tradition or history the same as “the secular” as a mode of being in the world or is it derived from “secularism” as a political doctrine of modernity? On his part, Rushdie assumes that the novel (or even literature) is a secular view of the world, one that comes into being in the aftermath of the breakdown of religion as an allencompassing narrative. It is certainly derived from the Enlightenment, and once it comes into being in its present version, it also becomes part of the political doctrine. As far as the secular vocation of the novel goes, he is well within a long tradition of theorizing the novel, starting with Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1916) which famously describes the form as inhabiting “a world that has been abandoned by God.”33 For obvious reasons, however, Rushdie cannot stop at this mere declaration of secularity and often strategically essentializes both sides of the debate to set up a contest between modern secularism as represented by The Satanic Verses and atavistic religious fundamentalism as propagated by the hardliners and mullahs. Take, for instance, his defense of the novel: Joyce’s wanderers, Gogol’s tricksters, Bulgakov’s devils, Bellow’s high-energy meditations on the stifling of the soul by the 138

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triumphs of materialism; these, and many more, are what we have instead of prophets and suffering saints. [. . .] If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer, then literature is an inquiry, great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our mind. (IH, 423) He even suggests that literature is, of all the arts, the one best suited to challenging absolutes of all kinds; and, because it is in its origin the schismatic Other of the sacred (and authorless) text, so it is also the art most likely to fill our god-shaped holes. (IH, 424) Against this enlightened and secular inquiry, and not always by implication, the religious groups based on sacred and authorless texts (here the Qu’rān) demanding his novel to be banned can only emerge as forces of “darkness.”34 At this point, and unlike his narrator in Shame, Rushdie does not feel that he can understand their demand and the news does seem “alien” to him. Secularism as represented by the novel form overrides such moments of ethical quandary, something he took great care to document in his fiction. The contradiction between Rushdie the embattled author and his novels in fact offers a complex gloss on Asad’s thesis. At its core, Asad’s point is a reworking of Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” (1843) with its meditation on what was then known as “Jewish emancipation.” In one of its key passages, Marx notes: Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the field of public law and making it a private right. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state where man behaves, as a species-being in community with other men albeit in a limited manner and in a particular form and a particular sphere: religion has become the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism, the bellum omnium contra omnes. Its essence is no longer in community but in difference.35 Marx points out the inherent contradiction of state secularism in Europe with reference to the Jewish question, and argues that the privatization of religion under state patronage affirms that the state can acknowledge 139

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religion only as a marker of difference. The minority figure of the Jew is caught between this state demand of privatization and the civil-social call for communal practice – the Jew indeed ceases to be a Jew once she enters the secular(ized) domain of citizenship. It is a chastised container of sort that reduces every other form of affiliation as secondary, if not contradictory, to the political ideals of a secular and rational subject. Indeed, Marx even suggests that the perfectly Christian state is not the one that “recognizes Christianity as its basis,” but the “atheist state [. . .] that downgrades religion to the other elements of civil society.”36 What Asad argues is somewhat analogous, and makes the additional point that not only the individual nation-states but the whole of Europe is unable to produce a narrative of itself that could represent minorities as themselves. The largely unstated but implicit point in both Marx and Asad – i.e. the point about representation – becomes indeed the cardinal issue for Rushdie. Can his novel adequately represent the Muslim minorities in postwar Britain as themselves? Does his novel participate in the overall secularization that “downgrade” religious minorities or does it expose the mechanism through which such marginality is achieved under the aegis of secular nation-states? Rushdie offers two different answers to this point on representation and sets the stage for contemporary celebration of world literature as a borderless phenomenon in globalization. The first response is developed in The Satanic Verses through a series of immigrant characters who go through transmutations of various kinds and expose the violent absorption of the minor-subaltern in a “secular” Britain. As one of the characters in the novel reveals: “They describe us [. . .]. That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (SV, 168).37 In the novel, this metamorphosis is further mediated by the Argentine immigrant Rosa Diamond’s delirious fantasy of Norman Conquest which, as Simon Gikandi notes, along with its parodied reference to “Willie-the-Conk,” is also a strong inversion of Enoch Powell’s infamous defense of Englishness against the threat of migration in the 1960s.38 But this strand of narration is not an independent one, as the text develops a second narrative through the depiction of the birth of a new religion and its prophet Mahound, which became the most controversial section of the novel, and suggests overlaps between this quasi-religious story (revealed in Gibreel Farishta’s dream) and the one on migration. Novelistic representation, the text seems to suggest through these two stories, attains its secular credentials because of its ability to accommodate very different provenances of religious faith and its loss, as evident in the case of Anglophile Chamcha, who 140

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cannot believe his misery in his adopted country, and also in the case of Gibreel, who experiences strange deracination when faced with the crucial question of religious belief. Within the text, and through its fabulous satire in both cases, the point is made that both forms of derangement find their adequate representation because of the novel’s primary commitment to its own secularity. In their respective grandnarratives – i.e. nationalism and religion – such stories of faithlessness would have been unthinkable. In short, it is the secularity of the novel that allows such acts of blasphemy. When this suggestion was violently rejected in the public domain through repeated calls for banning the novel, Rushdie developed a second response. In this new formulation the untranslatable is located not inside but outside the novel. While in the first answer the novel’s secular credentials are made conditional almost solely on its ability to find adequate representational strategies for the untranslatable minor-subaltern, in this new version its secularity becomes visible only through its opposition to what it perceives as anachronistically untranslatable, and hence an affront on it. Rushdie sets the tone by suggesting in the aftermath of the event at Bradford that the historical origin of Islam and the human characteristics of its prophet are not alien to Islamic scholarship; it is only the clerics, the contemporary “Thought Police,” who have made any secular engagement with Islam a “taboo.”39 Though his response is not always very consistent, he sticks to this one point on the orthodox core of Islamic practices as well as wily clerics as the primary adversaries of The Satanic Verses. His hints were picked up soon across the board, and commentators posed irreducible contradictions between the novel and theological belief. Thus Anthony Burgess drew parallels between Muslims and Nazis since both rely on the “vindictive agency of bonfire,” and advised British Muslims that they should “fly to the arms of the Ayatollah or some self-righteous guardian of strict morality.”40 Fay Weldon, on the other hand, argued: “The Bible, in its entirety, is at least food for thought. Koran is food for no-thought. It is not a poem on which a society can be safely and sensibly based.”41 And Roy Jenkins, the man behind the Race Relations Act 1976, went as far as reconsidering Britain’s immigration policy by suggesting that “we might have been more cautious about allowing the creation in the 1950s of a substantial Muslim community here.”42 My point in detailing these two responses is to suggest certain patterns that defended the ideal of a secular literary form on multiple registers. In retrospect, the most prominent defense of the novel seems to have emerged in opposition to the untranslatable minor-subaltern and, 141

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given the global reach of the controversy, this opposition soon crossed the borders of Britain and achieved global endorsement. A clear line was drawn connecting the Muslims in Britain and global Islam with strong implications that opposition to the novel in every case needs to be read as an act of anachronism, as a clash between the enlightened “West” and the medieval “East.” Thus when the British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd suggested at a meeting at Birmingham that the resolution to the crisis was a seamless assimilation of the minority in the proper British ways of life, he did not only address the Muslims but “swept up blacks, Sikhs, Asians.” His generalizations emphasized that to be part of the “mainstream of British life” it is obligatory for the minorities to enter the state institutions – like state-sponsored co-ed schools – and any failure to abide by the rules of this mainstream would “incur a handicap which no amount of anti-discrimination legislation can remedy.”43 A somewhat similar call can be heard for the novel as well, where its detractors are repeatedly told that they must leave their cultural specificities behind in order to enter this domain of secular literature. In a spectacular assortment of registers from different cultural sources, Rushdie gives voice to this call: The elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the acceptance that all that is solid melts into air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins. This is what J.-F. Lyotard called, in 1979, La Condition Postmoderne. The challenge of literature is to start from this point and still find a way of fulfilling our unaltered spiritual requirements. (IH, 422) One can easily read Rushdie’s description as a proleptic call, indeed a call ahead of its time, for the current predilections for world literature as a secular and universal object. Is world literature secular? In a crucial way, with Rushdie’s emphasis on secular literary texts against the dark forces of religion and his appeal to history as a means of fleshing out this dichotomy, we are back to the moment of the modern constitution of literature. Of course the context is different, as the battle is staged within Britain this time and not in any of its colonies, but this inversion also proves my point that it is the globalization of 142

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the colonial experience that shaped much of what has since then been recognized as world literature. To argue his case thus, Rushdie summons several authorities in his support during his Herbert Read Memorial Lecture for 1990, “Is nothing sacred?” including Carlos Fuentes, Richard Rorty, and Michel Foucault; he also invokes a rigorous sense of historicity. History is the general ground on which a vital distinction between literature and religion can be made, and a secular being for the former can be established. Referring to Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (as also Don Cupitt’s commentary on it), he argues that the importance of historicity for any concept is that it saves one from leaning on the seductive but ultimately false hopes offered by “foundationalism.” By exposing the unreliability of taking “some unchanging cosmic realms” or nature as the foundation for human knowledge or value, as an echo of certain preexisting natural permanence, historicity throws one within the realm of uncertainty and contingency in the spirit of “an adaptable pragmatist, a nomad” (IH, 423). This nomadic condition, according to him, is much closer to one’s lived reality in our contemporary times. Foucault, another “confirmed historicist” for Rushdie, on the other hand, suggests in “What Is an Author?” that the primary role of the author lies in “challenging sacralized absolutes.” Indeed, Rushdie reads Foucault’s provocative suggestion that “texts, books and discourses really began to have authors . . . to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive” as exceptionally applicable to his own case as he becomes the target of an unfair edict for his transgression (IH, 423). What Foucault traces through European history, and what he finds especially noteworthy in the breaking-up of the classical age, Rushdie suggests, can be repeated usefully to illuminate the pragmatic context of his own predicament. Rushdie’s central aim in invoking this notion of historicity is to defend the novel in general and The Satanic Verses as an exemplary case. That is why he highlights Foucault’s point that discourses in history were not commodities but acts “placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous” (quoted in IH, 424), and the novelistic discourse is no exception. He interprets this as a call to explore the origins of any practice, religious or otherwise, because “[i]n our beginnings we find our essences” (IH, 424). Accordingly, in their beginnings both religion and literature show their true colors, and the early days of the novel reveals that it is best suited to challenge totalizing ideas and absolute values, and hence the exact opposite of religious dogmas. Rushdie seems to deliberately erase 143

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Foucault’s emphasis on cultural specificity (“our culture”) and overlook the complex politico-legal histories of what eventually becomes the “author function.” Instead, he takes Foucault’s text as a blanket attestation of his own claims about the novel’s general history or of its role in contemporary times. He indeed takes a step further and joins this history to his own circumstances and argues that because the novel is the least susceptible to external controls, it is best suited to chronicle the travails of postmodern times. Though Rushdie insists that he is not interested in extoling the “writer as secular prophet” (IH, 427) and quite prepared to admit literature’s unfinished nature, he nonetheless defends literature as a privileged site, an “unimportant-looking room,” where “we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.” It is this faith in literature’s ability against monolithic religious narratives to represent almost everything without being perturbed about its own authority that allows Rushdie to declare: “[w]herever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or letter the walls have come tumbling down” (IH, 429). To extend Rushdie’s emphasis on historicity further, let us at this point step back from the Rushdie affair for a while, and look at two moments from the nineteenth century where somewhat similar debates on literature and religion, albeit within the broader field of colonialism, were carried out. The first one is from the 1860s onwards with Matthew Arnold as its central protagonist with his reformulation of “culture” as a “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know [. . .] the best which has been thought and said in the world.”44 At the heart of this reworking, not unlike Rushdie, Arnold locates literature as replacing religion and whatever it represents: Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. [. . .] The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them [religion and philosophy], for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize ‘the breath and finer spirit of knowledge’ offered to us by poetry.45 Arnold’s well-known diagnosis is taken generally as coming from the internal critiques of and the disenchantment with Christianity, or the established Church at least, and what is less appreciated is his attempt 144

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to elevate literature and culture as a regulatory field that would train the working-class who, in his estimation, had no culture whatsoever. With the declining status of religion in the age of science and reason, Arnold felt the only guide to proper “conduct” for the working-class would soon be lost, and the hapless poor would need something to replace that void. Culture was his answer, and he increasingly placed more and more emphasis on education promoting culture among the masses as an antidote to anarchy and revolution. The logic of this newfound interest in culture, however, was derived not from British history or class conflict, ostensibly the subject of Culture and Anarchy, but from his contemporary Orientalism and imperialism; and this is why, as Robert Young demonstrates, the “highly influential, virtual founding document of English culture locates that culture’s energy and history as the product of racial difference.”46 Working with a binary model of Hebraism and Hellenism, Arnold could only conceptualize culture on racial characteristics and could use the nation-state as its final framing. In Arnold’s scheme of things, the “State becomes a work of art, the nation its culture.”47 Arnold’s preoccupation with culture, however, was not an isolated event in nineteenth-century British history, nor was it restricted to Britain. Indeed, the central point of Culture and Anarchy was that Britain lacked what Arnold considered desired cultural values, and hence one must look for possible models and resources elsewhere. This broader context, and its justification, as Edward Said notes, came from myriad sources related to racialized theories of physiology and comparative philology, which had profound impact on Arnold. Said particularly mentions the French ethnologist and Semitist Ernest Renan and suggests that “[w]hat gave writers like Renan and Arnold the right to generalities about race” was a vast network of racialized scholarship reinforced “not only by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course, by the Darwinian theses on survival and natural selection, and – no less decisive – by the rhetoric of high cultural humanism.”48 This connection is important for my purpose here primarily because I want to suggest that the struggle he posed between literature and religion came from elsewhere, from other histories, with clear colonial origins. His characterization of the three component classes of his contemporary Britain – Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace – were thus quickly subsumed under the supposedly Hellenic and Hebraic elements. What he did in effect, albeit via Renan, was a reformulation of the central thesis of comparative philology which by the mid-century was structured around the cardinal difference between the Aryan and the Semitic; through the Hellenism and 145

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Hebraism of English characters, he reintroduced this predominantly racialized vocabulary with colonial connections into domestic debates on culture and literature. The colonial origins of this comparative philology I have discussed elsewhere;49 I want to add here that this coordinate of ethnology-race-philology was used by Arnold to frame the literaturereligion debates in the nineteenth century. Of course I want to expand the terms of the Rushdie affair historically, but the point of this exercise is to disturb the settled terms of British cultural discourses and to suggest that at least since the nineteenth century the question of British culture has been discussed and agreed upon through a vocabulary made available by colonialism. Even when Arnold eulogized the secular virtues of literature against religion, which in important ways anticipated Rushdie’s defense of literature, he had to do it within a discursive matrix produced through colonial history. However, Arnold’s reliance on the colonial history and comparative philology also takes us to my second moment in history, this time in British India, where the consolidation of English literary canon and its teaching as part of colonial educational policies were also accompanied by a raging debate on the secular values of literature as opposed to the religious texts of the Orient. Within a larger framing of the Orientalists and the Anglicists as two warring groups, these debates concentrated on the ostensibly secular values of literature and suggested ways of both taking the native population away from the incapacitating grasp of religion and also of placing them within networks of governmentality. It was quite remarkable, as Viswanathan argues, that English literature was chosen as the repository of such secular values given that the educational curricula adopted by the colonial government was designed to “confer power as well as to fortify British rule against real or imagined threats from a potentially rebellious subject population.”50 The colonial state thus saw secular credentials of literature as an ally of power, as “an embattled response to historical and political pressures” and as part of “defensive mechanisms of control.”51 This intertwined history of secular literature and colonial power provides a longer historical framework for both Arnold’s and Rushdie’s defenses. The question that confronts us at this stage is this: given this longer and colonial genealogy of the literature-religion debate, and given the close complicity between secularism and different configurations of power and disciplinary knowledge in history, how does one assess Rushdie’s claims on behalf of secular literariness? It becomes more pressing once we realize that Rushdie’s vocabulary has been broadly repeated in recent endorsements of world literature. At the outset, 146

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Rushdie’s argument and different claims made on behalf of the secular world literature are political acts – they seek to defend a political ideal against possible adversaries. As political statements, however, they belong to two different discursive orders – while Rushdie attempts to appropriate specific European histories of literature (and especially of the novel) as a safeguard against what he considers a violent threat from the stubborn minor-subaltern, the votaries of world literature erase any form of cultural difference in favor of monolithic secularism. What distinguishes the two is their respective configurations of literary history, their different re-institution of a normative structure as universal truth, and of course their different deployment of the belief in literature’s global validity. Rushdie’s arguments thus connect the secular form to diverse circuits of literariness which are derived from European history but which are also, at least for him, devoid of any explicit legacy of this historical origin in contemporary times. Any invocation of literature’s secular vocation thus should be understood as a defense which is historically valid, and yet uniquely equipped to function in the modern world. When he cites Rorty, Foucault, and others, he appeals to this belief in the peculiar construction of the literary within modernity – to its simultaneous assertion and withdrawal of “historicity.” World literature, on the other hand, especially in recent debates, assumes secularism as the ontological being of literature. Such debates unmoor literature from the Christian foundations of modern European culture and deliberately erase its colonial career, so that when it is configured on the world (whatever may be the model for it), there is very little friction between literature’s being and its territorial reach. Normative understanding of literature thus becomes cardinal to the circulation of world literature, but its secular structure remains generally unstated. My insistence on the longer history of secular literature suggests that such a conceptualization always and already is an embattled one, posed against its putative other (whose individual identity may vary depending on the context), and in need of continuous protection. Historically, this other has been located in the colonial and postcolonial worlds – either as stubbornly religious natives of distant colonies in need of European intervention, or, more recently, the dangerous minor-subaltern in the midst of Europe, as redundant remnants from its colonial past, with its unreasoned refusal to be part of the mainstream life. Pascale Casanova is perhaps the most influential author to articulate this thesis within the world-literature debates. As part of her description of the emergence of the “world literary space,” which was structurally dependent on the 147

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ascendancy of French as a denationalized language during its classical age, she identifies a “secular international order” as augmenting the new idea of literature: Indeed, the secularization of European political and literary space stands out as one of the fundamental traits of the French imperium. To the extent that it was the ultimate consequence of the enterprise inaugurated by du Bellay and the humanists against the supremacy of Latin, it can be understood as a first step in the direction of autonomy for European literary space as a whole. Having succeeded in escaping the influence and domination of the church, it remained for writers – this would be the work of the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth century – to free themselves first from dependency on the king, and then from subjection to the national cause.52 In her theoretical schema, entry into the world literary space (since Europe and the world, more often than not, are interchangeable in her account) is also an entry into the charmed circle of the secular international order, to accept the normative structure set in place through the gradual denationalization and secularization of the literary language by great French humanists like Voltaire. Universality of the secularization process and the perfection of French classicism, thus, are identified with each other, and their mutual effect is held directly responsible for the emergence of, for the first time in history and exclusively through French culture, of a literary space which was potentially boundless. Now, Casanova’s curiously Eurocentric (or, more precisely, Gallocentric) bias is no secret, and a detailed account of her myopic worldview is beyond the scope of this chapter.53 Rather, I want to draw attention to the overall theoretical structure of her text which places this secularization thesis at the heart of what she describes as the virtual “world republic of letters.” Her theoretical schema, as she points out, is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and is made of three distinct phases crucial to the “genesis of world literary space.” During the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, the period Anderson describes as the age of “revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism,” one can observe the gradual weakening of Latin’s grip on the educated elite of Europe and the concomitant rise of vulgar tongues which soon aspired to rival the grandeur of classical languages. This first phase initiates Casanova’s secularization process, since the diminished status of Latin also signaled the waning influence of the 148

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church. In the second phase of “philological-lexicographic revolution” (again, Anderson’s term) from the late eighteenth century, Casanova locates the emergence of nationalist consciousness across Europe and the strengthening of popular literatures “summoned to serve the national idea and to give it the symbolic foundation that it lacked.” In the first two stages, thus, non-Europe was virtually absent, and the steady ascendency of the secular literary space could only imagine its exteriority through this void. It is only with the third phase, the period of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, that this space was opened for the “entry into international competition of contestants who until then had been prevented from taking part.”54 What becomes clear, somewhat inadvertently perhaps, is that Casanova’s version of the secularization thesis, despite its universal pretentions, reiterates Asad’s argument that secularism (and not “the secular”) is a development internal to European Christianity. Any access to this secular literary space is strictly regulated through the minute details of European history; since such access to literature also meant subscription to European ideals, she seems to suggest, the rest of the world found its entry only when European imperialism was over and when its cultural values were unevenly scattered across the globe. In her eagerness to build this Europe versus the rest of the world framework, Casanova argues that the “period of decolonization, which began roughly after the Second World War” allowed the “newly independent nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America” within the world literary space for the first time,55 overlooking the fact that way before the Second World War and indeed during the nineteenth century almost all of South America was decolonized. In fact, her neat historical plan of ever-expanding European secularity across the globe would be severely compromised if one were to introduce in this history what Doris Sommer calls the “foundational fictions” or national novels from South America between 1850 and 1880, which forged a new national literature by bringing together heterosexual love and patriotism. Away from the models Europe made available, most notably as historical novels, argues Sommer, these nineteenth-century texts invested “nation-building projects” across the continent with exceptional literary energy and transformed the genre of romantic novel as the principal site where nationalist imagination took shape.56 This was possible because of the unique character of decolonization in South America which made available, way before Europe did, the project of national consolidation for the modern world. That Casanova should miss this chronology is doubly astounding because the text she borrows 149

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her historical framework from – i.e. Anderson’s Imagined Communities – is indeed the text that states unambiguously, against dominant trends in historical scholarship on nationalism, that the “creole communities” of the Americas “developed [. . .] early conceptions of their nationness – well before most of Europe.”57 Her narrative of secularization as the foundational premise for world literary space, in its enthusiasm, not only misreads Anderson, but even uncritically repeats the fallacious secularism argument I have charted above. Casanova’s “European provincialism” is not restricted to the final phase of her secular history and can be seen at work across the text. As Aamir Mufti has shown, even the second stage – the “philological lexicographical revolution” – curiously avoids any engagement with nonWestern interventions through Orientalism in the eighteenth century, which went a long way to shape the ground rules of her world literary space. Instead, she maintains the exclusively European history of this period by using Herder (and his early texts from 1770s) as the paradigmatic figure who championed popular and national traditions as true repository of national greatness, and who thus proposed a new connection between the nation and its language. In contrast, Mufti argues, following Said’s lead in Orientalism, that the “gestalt shift” came about because of the Orientalist encounter with non-Western languages – the “‘discovery’ of the classical languages of the East, the invention of the linguistic family tree whose basic form is still with us today, the translation and absorption into the Western languages of more and more works from Persian, Arabic, and the Indian languages” – and that Casanova’s deliberate choice of early Herder coupled with her dismissal of this vital moment produces a skewed picture of the philological revolution.58 As Said points out, the philological moment in European history between Jones’s Anniversary Discourses (1785–1792) and Franz Bopp’s Vergleichende Grammatik (1832) had a deeply secularizing effect, since it disrupted the notion of divine language for good and hence also announced the need for a secular version of history. Between Jones and Bopp, and not so much with Herder, first emerged the possibility that the study of language could lead to a secular history (and in effect could encompass the entire breadth of human history), and the legacy of this first-generation philologists led to the secular but nationalized conception of space that Casanova appropriates in her account; but the fact that these philologists were also Orientalists or that this “new” philology was created by Orientalism crucially challenges her little Europe theory.59 Even if one agrees with Casanova that the pioneering

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moment of this philological revolution rests with Herder and not with Orientalists like Jones or Bopp, one would find it difficult to agree with her claim that Herder’s theory of language or its special relationship with the nation was achieved only through his opposition to dominant French culture exemplified by Voltaire’s writings and had nothing to do with the fledgling interest in non-Western languages widespread in his contemporary Europe.60 Even in Herder’s early works, like Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur [Fragments on Recent German Literature] (1767–8) or Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache [Treatise on the Origin of Language] (1772), it is virtually impossible to miss either his participation in what Said describes as the preparatory stage for modern Orientalism, or the rich and detailed comparison he offered between German and Oriental/Eastern languages.61 Casanova’s secularization thesis thus re-deploys many of Rushdie’s arguments – especially his insistence on European culture, his characterization of the non-Europe as the threatening other, and finally his appeal to history as the valid ground on which such claims can be made. What seems more likely is that both of them are drawing from similar sources and comparable understanding of literary history, and thus arriving at almost identical conclusions. This general consensus is what I have tried to problematize through different registers of the Rushdie affair and also by placing the affair against other narratives from history. My contention in recuperating these lost histories is not simply to point out the Eurocentric core of world literature (though it remains crucial), but also to indicate how the history of Anglophone territories expose the consensus on literary history as secured through the irreducible duality of the secular and the blasphemous, the latter representing anachronistic prehistory of the former. To put it bluntly, the modern conceptualization of secular literature has been established not so much through the internal history of Europe and Christianity but through its opposition to a minority, mostly Islamic, either as colonized natives or as minor-subalterns. The Rushdie affair, through bitter antagonism in the public domain, bared this history of visceral intimacy. At the same time, the controversy, and not least Rushdie’s desire to author the readings of his own novel, also suggested possible ways of globalizing the essentially European history of literature as an object. Anglophone territories combined the canonical and the anthropological, the secularization thesis and the menacing minority, I suggest, to give a new lease of life to world literature in this era of globalization.

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Notes 1 David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in Haun Saussy (ed.) Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 48–50. 2 Quoted in Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003), 15. 3 For details on this controversy or “Rushdie affair,” see Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie File (London: Fourth Estate, 1989); Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (London: Atlantic, 2010). 4 See the contributions by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter van der Veer, Feroza Jussawala and Charles Taylor in the dossier “The Rushdie Debate,” Public Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1989), 79–122; see also Aamir Mufti, “Reading the Rushdie Affair: An Essay on Islam and Politics,” Social Text, No. 29 (1991), 95–8. 5 Tariq Modood, Not Easy Being British: Colour Culture and Citizenship (London: Runnymede Trust and Trentham Books, 1992), 22. 6 See, Appignanesi and Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie File; Pipes, The Rushdie Affair; Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad. 7 “Dangers of a Muslim Campaign,” The Independent, January 16, 1989. 8 Salman Rushdie, “Choice between Light and Dark,” The Observer, January 22, 1989. 9 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 393; hereafter abbreviated as IH and cited parenthetically with pagination. 10 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 77 and passim. 11 Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 21. 12 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5. 13 Appignanesi and Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie File, 47. 14 David Rose, “Rushdie Protest ‘to Pull 500,000’,” The Guardian, May 2, 1989. 15 See the back cover of Ahmed Deedat, Can You Stomach the Best of Rushdie? (Birmingham: Islamic Propagation Centre, 1990). 16 Etienne Balibar, Race, Nation and Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1992), 89. 17 Quoted in Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 244. 18 Quoted in Leonard Williams Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 562. 19 Stuart Hall, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question,” in Barnor Hesse (ed.) Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions (London: Zed, 2000), 231. 20 Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), 227, 282. 21 Tariq Modood, “‘Black’, Racial Equality, and Asian Identity,” New Community, Vol. 14 (Spring, 1988), 402, 397. 22 Tariq Modood, “British Asian Muslims and the Rushdie Affair,” in James Donald and Ali Rattansi (eds.) ‘Race’, Culture, and Difference (London: Sage, 1992), 274. 23 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 248. 24 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 252. 25 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 267.

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26 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Homi K. Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 212–35. 27 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 2006), 343, 354; henceforth abbreviated as SV with pagination in parenthesis. 28 Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Vintage, 1995), 116; hereafter abbreviated as S followed by page number. 29 Gauri Viswanathan, “Blasphemy and Heresy: The Modernist Challenge: A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1995), 401. 30 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 177. 31 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 180. 32 Partha Chatterjee, “Fasting for Bin Laden: The Politics of Secularization in Contemporary India,” in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds.) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 60. 33 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 88. 34 Rushdie, “Choice between Light and Dark.” 35 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in David McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 54. 36 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 55. 37 A somewhat similar sentiment is expressed by another character in the novel, the owner of Shaandar Café in London, the Bangladeshi woman Hind, who feels that “[e]verything she valued had been upset by the change [through migration]; had, in this process of translation, been lost” (SV, 249). 38 Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 208. 39 Salman Rushdie, “The Book Burning,” The New York Review of Books, March 2, 1989, 26. 40 The Independent, February 16, 1989. 41 Fay Weldon, Holy Cows: A Portrait of Britain, Post-Rushdie, Pre-Utopia (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), 6. 42 The Independent, March 4, 1989. 43 “Beyond the Threat,” Guardian, February 25, 1989. 44 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1869), viii. 45 Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in R.H. Super (ed.) English Literature and Irish Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 161–2. 46 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 60. 47 Young, Colonial Desire, 60. 48 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 227; also see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 130–1. 49 See Baidik Bhattacharya, “On Comparatism in the Colony: Archives, Methods, and the Project of Weltliteratur,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Spring, 2016). 50 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 167.

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51 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 10. 52 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 69. 53 On Casanova’s Eurocentrism, see Christopher Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters,” in Christopher Prendergast (ed.) Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004), 9; Suman Gupta, Globalization and Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 142; Djelal Kadir, Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 179; Françoise Lionnet, “Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison,” in Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (eds.) A Companion to Comparative Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 397–8; June Howard, “Sand in Your Mouth: Naturalism and Other Genres,” in Keith Newlin (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 98. 54 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 47–8. 55 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 79. 56 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Also see the essays in the following collections for a sense of the distance between the universal “European” model of secularity and particular realities of South America: Amaryll Chandy (ed.), Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Doris Sommer (ed.), The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 57 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 50; emphasis original. Indeed, what Anderson says about “European provincialism” in his preface to the second edition of Imagined Communities is worth recalling here, if only to highlight the entrenched Eurocentrism of Casanova’s account: “It had been part of my original plan to stress the New World origins of nationalism. My feeling had been that an unselfconscious provincialism had long skewed and distorted theorizing on the subject. European scholars, accustomed to the conceit that everything important in the modern world originated in Europe, too easily took ‘second generation’ ethnolinguistic nationalisms (Hungarian, Czech, Greek, Polish etc.) as the starting point in their modeling, no matter whether they were ‘for’ or ‘against’ nationalism.” Anderson, Imagined Communities, xiii. Casanova, writing almost after a decade and building her thesis on the testimony of this very text, repeats the “conceit” all over again. 58 Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 36 (Spring, 2010), 459. 59 Said, Orientalism, 135–6. 60 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 76. 61 Said, Orientalism, 118. On Herder’s Orientalism see Nicholas A. Germana, “Herder’s India: The ‘Morgenland’ in Mythology and Anthropology,” in Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (eds.) The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). On the connection between Herder and philologists like Schlegel and Humboldt, see Michael N. Forster, German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 109–40.

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5 A SHORT HISTORY OF DEATH

Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. – Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936)

I have proposed two sets of arguments in this book so far. In the first one, and in the spirit of ethnocapitalism, I have shown how the canon of Anglophone world literature used the empire to spell out its own specificities. With overlapping concerns between colonial governance and Kipling’s fiction, I have shown how the “world” of this world literary canon was identified with the territorial and cultural reach of the empire. In the second set, I have suggested that it is the globalization of the colonial moment that produces the realities of contemporary Anglophone territories as embodying the world literary space. Through Naipaul’s portrayal of the schizophrenic “belated territories,” Coetzee’s account of “provincial aesthetics,” and Rushdie’s representation of the “minor-subaltern,” I have outlined how certain colonial codes have been globalized in our contemporary times, and how such codes represent the contemporary world literature for us. Let me now spell out the inevitable conclusion – as a conceptual category world literature is dead, and like every other death this end of an idea reveals its true meaning; and that meaning for world literature is best captured through the abstract richness of banality and ordinariness. Banality in this case does not imply insignificance or marginality but suggests, following Hannah Arendt, that any millennial event or concept, when stripped of its moral or ethical agency, is reduced to its everyday mundaneness.1 The suggestion of world literature, as I have submitted in this book, has been a similarly banal category if we realize that its potential has been exhausted by postcolonial Anglophone writing and that it 155

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represents an updated configuration of race, philology, and ethnology that I have tracked in this book. Instead of ushering in some unprecedented democratization of the literary field and institutions, as many had hoped in the early 2000s, world literature has turned out to be a dead end without any fixed meaning, methodology, or value. But why insist on the death of world literature? Primarily because, as Walter Benjamin argues, death reveals the “real meaning of life” since with death every life “first assumes [its] transmittable form” or at least appeals to “remembrance” as such.2 My hope is that with this insistence on death we shall be in a better position to appreciate the real meaning of world literature – i.e. its banal career. However, there is a second death in our story – the death of “postcolonialism.” As I have suggested at various points in this book, the present celebration of world literature is premised on this supposed death of the postcolonial paradigm, of its inadequacy to describe the present realities of literature as a global phenomenon. These two deaths in my account belong to two different registers and two opposing discursive traditions. While the death of world literature and its underlying premise of biological universalism is a specific outcome first of imperial and then of neoliberal histories, as I show in this book, the death of the postcolonial paradigm is hardly borne out by recent history. If anything – with recent debates on migration, civil wars, occupation, terrorism, and political Islam – we are continuously being reminded how the rosy picture of the post-postcolonial globalization is being haunted by the messy businesses of colonial history. In the midst of an extended phase of what Achilles Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” we are being reminded how the academic hubris in writing premature epitaphs of postcoloniality is coming back to haunt us.3 In this chapter I want to juxtapose these two death narratives, and I want to look at the specific discursive mechanisms mobilized to generate such narratives. The point of this exercise, of course, is to suggest that the death of world literature has made it banal and ordinarily available to Anglophone territories; but I also want to spend some time on this invocation of death as a political gesture, as a ground to anchor postcolonial writing. In other words, this chapter brings together some of the central ideas I have proposed in this book under the sign of death. My submission is that by turning this narrative of death of postcoloniality and hence the rise of world literature argument upside down, and by posing death as the exclusive mode of appreciating world literature in the present, we can introduce new ways of engaging with postcolonial Anglophone writing and its worldly trajectories. We can suggest how and why this mode of writing is premised on the ordinary elements of literary culture produced in 156

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the last couple of centuries, and what the modalities are through which these components have been globalized in history. This is an important step to underscore the typical political import of Anglophone writing, since it is in their globality and comparatism that contemporary postcolonial texts indicate new political possibilities. My suggestion should not be read as yet another plea for literary cosmopolitanism stretching across ex-colonial spaces and linking a group of privileged individuals. Rather, what I have in mind is a postcolonial territorial logic that finds early impetus in what both Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Paul Gilroy, in different contexts, have called “planetarity” characterized by “alterity” and “conviviality”4 and that remains open as an alternative sequencing of the globe of globalization. The intention here is of course to mark the historical evolution of these territories as different from the genealogy of present globalization and hence to suggest that such territories do not cover the entire globe physically; but this disparity between the planet and the globe is even more important to think of the material conditions of Anglophone writing in its quest for standardization and politics. Postcoloniality and the end of critique Any discussion on the status of postcoloniality as a critical paradigm confronts an inevitable temporal conundrum – in order to justify one’s endeavor one is forced to find ways of accounting for colonial pasts (including anti-colonial imaginaries) for the contemporary postcolonial moment. There is nothing inherently wrong in such quests, and the practice is entirely justifiable in a historicist framework with the assumption that past events illuminate the darker crevices of the present one inhabits. What has remained somewhat unaddressed in such queries is the relation between past histories and present ones, between what one wishes to understand and what one, in turn, wants to make an intervention in. Postcoloniality as a conceptual space is itself marked by this dual iteration of time, with its reference to past histories and its location firmly within the present. As a result, this relationship between two different sets of events has been more assumed than interrogated, more a matter of an unspoken agreement than active discussion, and this has led to a number of confusions. It is difficult to know, as a result, what is being described as dead with the death of “postcolonialism” – past events from colonial history, their role in the formation of the present postcolonial questions, or the specific set of relations between the past and the present in the assertion of postcoloniality? In the 157

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absence of any clarity, the field has only spawned polemical statements and rhetorical gestures, often in the shape of sharp attacks between different groups, making it almost impossible to distinguish between genuine political questions and hollow personal assaults. What makes the story even more complicated is the rather simplistic biological assumption behind the central narrative of death. It assumes, for its effect, that every idea, concept, or ideology (history, socialism, postcoloniality etc.) is essentially structured like organic beings, with internal history and meaning, and always moving towards an unavoidable and absolute death. Organisms and ideas may share a range of other things too, but what brings them together in such arguments is the internally programmed temporality, and the possibility of this time being narrated, like a well-crafted story, with clear beginning-middleend. For whatever its effect, this is a shared narrative across different versions of death, and can be traced back to the early nineteenth century. As part of a biological revolution, as Foucault explains, a fundamental shift occurred in the conceptualization of organisms and life itself – a shift from classical taxonomy of life forms to a modern anatomical recognition of biological universalism, or from “linguistic patterning” to “anatomic disarticulation.” With the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, a reversal of the classical taxonomic model took shape, and the earlier reference to difference as the organizing principle for elaborate classificatory tables was displaced with the discovery of an underlying and deeper sameness only visible to the anatomic gaze. Taxonomic paradigm classified organisms, Foucault suggests, by noting exterior differences; whereas this new insight foregrounded an inner core of life that was autonomous but invisible. As Foucault notes, from Cuvier onward, living beings escape, in the first instance at least, the general laws of extensive being; biological being becomes regional and autonomous; life, on the confines of being, is what is exterior to it and also, at the same time, what manifests itself within it. And though the question of its relations with the non-living, or that of its physico-chemical determinations, does arise, it does so not along the lines of a ‘mechanism’ stubbornly clinging to its Classical modalities, but in an entirely new way, in order to articulate two natures one upon the other.5 In this new framework, thus, living beings are characterized from within, from their invisible organicity, and also from their ability of being 158

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comparable to other equally “regional and autonomous” life forms. What is equally important for my purpose is Foucault’s suggestion that this new paradigm, which was the condition of possibility for biology, also pervaded other realms of thought almost immediately and replicated itself in discrete objects and ideas. The most telling example is comparative philology, where similar vocabularies were developed around the same time to describe individual languages as well as their clustering into language families. At a deeper and inaccessible core, languages harbored similar likeness, and yet, just like life forms, retained their autonomy and localization within comparative tables. In Foucault’s narrative, the figure that resembles Cuvier most distinctly is not any naturalist but the philologist Franz Bopp. We are back yet again to the powerful confluence of race-ethnologyphilology which has appeared frequently in this book across different chapters and at crucial junctures of my argument. This time, however, we are back to this context not to track yet another fragment of imperial history that sought to humanize its insidious power, but to elaborate on a certain conceptualization of death that has shaped most of the radical death narratives in the last couple of centuries or so, including that of postcoloniality. With the biological revolution, it was only natural that the idea of death would also have to be rethought and be given new meaning. Departure from the taxonomic paradigm also meant that death could no longer have been imagined as an external fate that the organism was destined to confront eventually. If the source and meaning of life was located inside the living organism, this new paradigm suggested, its negation had to be imagined within the same space, within its very being. Death would have to be conceived as emerging from the very depths of life if only to “overtake living beings”: the animal appears as the bearer of that death to which it is, at the same time, subjected; it contains a perpetual devouring of life by life. It belongs to nature only at the price of containing within itself a nucleus of anti-nature.6 This simultaneous possibility of life and death, nature and anti-nature, within the same organism, Foucault argues, gives the experience of life the aura of being “an untamed ontology.”7 When this ontology is reassigned to other modes of thought with the suggestion that an idea or a concept is dead, it does reveal this inner “devouring” of life by life; but it also shows how the nineteenth-century biologism has definite attraction across the board irrespective of one’s political affiliations. I shall 159

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return to this moment of biological universalism later in this chapter, but let us note at this point that it is the shared notion of biological life as being an ontology unto itself, albeit untamed and capricious, that shapes the political appeal of such death narratives to their supporters and detractors in similar ways. It is certainly a measure of the popularity of this paradigm that several internal critiques of postcoloniality have also appropriated it as valid starting point. It is most poignantly stated in David Scott’s work over almost a decade, in the context of revolutionary politics in the Caribbean (especially Haiti and Granada), and in the aftermath of the death of what he describes as the “post-Bandung” political vision. His concern is less with the death as an event and more with finding adequate resources to narrate its outcome, or what he describes as the “temporality of the aftermaths of political catastrophe, the temporal disjunctures involved in living on in the wake of past political time, amid the ruins, specifically, of postsocialist and postcolonial futures past.” For him this is not so much a problem of disenchantment with an idea, but the unsettling possibility of narrating death as part of the untamed ontology for which there is no available temporal framework and hence no narrative means. “It is an experience,” Scott notes, of time standing away, so to speak, from its conventional grounding and embeddedness in history, its modern handmaiden, so that time and history, once barely distinguishable, seem no longer synchronized, much less synonymous.8 Faced with such a possibility of experiencing time outside of history, against history as its own counterfeit, Scott suggests that partly the problem for this conundrum is our desire for plotting “a teleological historicity of transition from the evils of colonialism to the promised virtue of the sovereign nation” within the narrative structure of romance (in the sense made available by Hayden White) which neither disturbs nor problematizes sufficiently the vagaries and inequalities of contemporary neoliberalism.9 Moreover, this narrative strategy erases the central problem of time and history being incommensurable, of inhabiting a time in the midst of history’s ruins and shattered promises, and hence remains unable to record the implications of a death that so overwhelmingly characterizes our present postcolonial moment. What repeatedly escapes the framing of the romance is a “certain experience of temporal afterness [. . .] in which the trace of futures past hangs like the remnant of a voile curtain over what feels uncannily like an endlessly extending present.”10 160

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In Scott’s formulation the ontology of death is not only revealed in the failure of the “futures past” to fulfill its promises but is visible in equal measures in our own failed attempts to adequately emplot the stalled present and its endless occurrence as aftermaths of failures and ruins.11 He offers “tragedy” or “tragic sensibility” as a more appropriate narrative mode, but it is the implications of death and its narration that concerns me more here.12 Death narratives function in two distinct ways – first, as ground-clearing exercise, making room for something new, something as yet unthought; and second, as closure to make sense of an idea in retrospect. Both these exercises insufficiently imagine death and fail to recognize its doubling in Foucault’s description as both a possibility and a promise, much less to engage with its being and future becoming. Scott’s unending present, I suggest, can be re-imagined as the territory where this doubling is staged and its consequences fleshed out. It is a territory alive, simultaneously, to different meanings of death and to its different configurations for the “afterness.” What this means can be seen in Achilles Mbembe’s extended reflection on the figure of the “Nègre.” It is a figure around which one can witness the sedimented remains of racism, of colonialism, slavery, and apartheid.13 While such historical conditions have been delegalized for long – that is to say, they have been dead in a formal sense – the realities of racism are anything but over. Like Scott, Mbembe also suggests that this reality of race cannot be captured in the teleological narrative of emancipation, but must be located in the aftermath of death itself. In what he calls the “dead weight of history,” the temporal experience separated from the calcified iteration of historicity, that one can outline the different circuits through which racism circulates in our contemporary times even after its legal death.14 Death is thus not an escape from history, much less its absolute termination and compartmentalization, but an invitation to rethink it. This rethinking takes death as inherent in life and not as its final and arbitrarily external destination. It is in this spirit that I declare world literature dead because I want to use its death as inaugurating different forms of inquiry, informing different desires and actions, addressing the momentousness of the present. Mbembe outlines the typical temporality through the figure of the “Nègre.” Being and becoming “Nègre,” the two manifestations of the material as well as symbolic realities of the “Nègre” figure, in his argument lead to two very different trajectories of history – its origin in early capitalism, and its continuity as a limit concept in contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism. This multiplicity also leads us to a very different configuration of the postcolony as the location for critical 161

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investigation with manifold temporalities, which Mbembe elsewhere defines under the rubric of age. “As an age,” he notes, “the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement.”15 Once we accept this temporal entanglement not only around the figure of the “Nègre” but as part of the stalled present, it becomes easier to sidestep any linear and singular narrative of death and to engage more productively with multiple versions of death and its aftermaths, in a spirit of unveiling the architecture of Foucault’s ontology. World literature, thus, is dead in this second sense I have outlined – as a putting together of the diverse histories of its being, as also charting its becoming and aftermath. The being and becoming of world literature, in other words, need not be two separate histories, and yet they may be re-deployed to perform two very different tasks. In this book I have addressed this duality through the extended location of the postcolony, as a territory constituted through temporal entanglements. This territorial entanglement and its emplotment is suggested, for instance, by the recurring emergence of colonial governance in different chapters, across different locations and historical periods, that shaped the contours of what has come to be recognized as world literature. By the end of the nineteenth century, as I demonstrate through Kipling’s texts in Chapter 1, colonial governance became an active component in the fiction of colonialism, marking its portability across specific geographical borders. By the time it reemerged in twentieth-century South Africa, as Coetzee’s oeuvre attests (Chapter 3), it laid the foundation for “white writing.” Similarly, anthropology as a disciplinary formation (or more specifically the convergence of race-ethnology-philology) appears at different junctures through colonialism, British multiculturalism in the twentieth century (Chapter 4), and so on. In short, across the chapters of the book, I have suggested a range of narrative strategies to emplot the temporal entanglements involving world literature’s colonial origins and its postcolonial fragmentation. My suggestion at the outset to focus on two narrative orientations in the canonical and the anthropological is precisely an attempt to frame this temporal multiplicity across Anglophone territories. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to extend these points to interrogate the way biological universalism has saturated the debates on world literature today by looking at David Damrosch and Franco Moretti’s texts. My contention is that this biological

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framework has been central to the emergence of world literature debates in recent years, and it is the linearity and universality of this paradigm that has led to the dead end we are facing today. If we need to reorient our discussion, and if we want to propose a more nuanced narrative, it becomes absolutely imperative to critically interrogate its claims. I also want to rethink subsequently the political import of such thinking for our present landscape of critical thinking, especially with reference to globalization, the nation-state, and literary studies. Biological universalism Damrosch and Moretti theorize their respective versions of “world literature” on the grounds of biological universalism. Damrosch’s plea to resuscitate the nineteenth-century project of “world literature” is accompanied by the following formulation: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.” He immediately qualifies this rather capacious canon by inserting the condition of active readership and restates his case thus: “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture.” World literature for Damrosch is a “mode of circulation” and not an unmanageable canon, and he takes special care not to reduce the space of circulation to either different subsets of local canons or a sublime “global babble” devoid of any difference. For such a middle ground of circulation, it becomes vital for him to assume that just as one can deduce the existence of a species called “insect” without being individually bitten by the billions of insects around the world, so can one pose the “blanket term ‘literature’ ” for the “sum total of the world’s literatures” without presumably being familiar with all of them.16 Damrosch is cautious enough to dissociate his formulation from suggestions of cultural homogeneity enforced by globalization and from the recent phenomenon of writing with an aim to be translated and read abroad. He suggests that a distinction needs to be made between world and global literatures – while the first remains faithful to local inflections and organic cultural traditions, the latter by definition falsifies its immediate context in order to travel across borders. His point, following Goethe, about world literature is thus built around two central axes – national literature and translation – with the proviso that “works of world literature take on a new life as they move into the world at large, and to understand this new

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life we need to look closely at the ways the work becomes reframed in its translations and in its new cultural contexts.”17 As the metaphor of life suggests, apart from the “insect” analogy, he sees biological life and literature as analogous structures. The parallel between being bitten by bugs and books is surely tempting, and I shall return to it in a moment, but let us first look at the other model offered by Moretti. Damrosch’s belief in the universality of literature is stated more audaciously in Franco Moretti’s proposal for “distant reading” as the only way of solving the “problem” of world literature. Borrowing his model from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, he proposes that the history of world literature or of world literary forms like the novel needs to be based on synthesizing a vast range of research on individual traditions, and then on producing a meta-model which would place them all into one history: Literary history will become ‘second hand’: a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading. Still ambitious, and actually even more so than before (world literature!); but the ambition is now directly proportional to the distance from the text. Again, Moretti tells us, the project of “distant reading” is possible only if we agree on the critical assumption that “the universe is the same, the literatures are the same” and if we agree further to devise more sophisticated models of comparison to cover more and more territories of this shared universe.18 His multi volume project on the history of the novel Il Romanzo (2001–3) with seventy contributors working under his general editorship is a case in point. The delicate balance between a centralized editorial control and reports from diffused geographical locations with distinct traditions of novel writing is sustained through Moretti’s fundamental and unwavering faith in the organismic qualities of the novel – i.e. despite differences in time, space, and cultural tradition, the novel, like Damrosch’s “insect,” is ultimately the same everywhere. All one needs is a set of better and more effective models to account for this universality. Damrosch’s largely unspoken assumption in the “insect” analogy – i.e. the universality of biological form as a model for theorizing universal literature – receives extended attention in such strategies of distant readings, and then becomes the central template of Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. In the chapter entitled “Trees,” for instance, he proposes 164

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the following study of “comparative morphology” for literary history: “Take a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reasons for its transformations: the ‘opportunistic, hence unpredictable’ reasons of evolution,” which can be represented through trees with “diachronic succession, or synchronic drifting apart.”19 His aim is as much to attend to the “micro-level of stylistic mutations” as to the “explanation of general structures over the interpretation of individual texts,” all in the name of opening up “new conceptual possibilities.”20 He provides literary examples from different contexts – temporally and spatially – and argues that a rigorous tree marking divergences would allow one to account for the evolution of literary forms across space, and hence would be able to solve many of the well-known riddles of literary history. The real motor here is the concept of divergence, which Moretti initially cites from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and elaborates in the following words: From a single common origin, to an immense variety of solutions: it is this incessant growing-apart of life forms that the branches of a morphological tree capture with such intuitive force. [. . .] a tree is a way of sketching how far a certain language has moved from another one, or from their common point of origin. And if language evolves by diverging, why not literature too?21 In other words, there is little difference between “life forms” and “literature” and hence the explanatory model for one should work for the other too. The devil, however, is in the details. It is of course a minor quibble that contrary to Moretti’s contention, Darwin himself clarifies that the tree metaphor migrated from ethnology and philology to biology and not the other way around, but its implications are anything but minor.22 First, a methodological problem – as it turns out, Moretti chooses a wrong model to explain branching-off, since the tree in the nineteenth century emerged as the organizing principle for classification and not as a metaphor for divergence.23 Thomas Trautmann calls it the patrilineal “segmentary tree” which is a certain kind of genealogical figure in which [. . .] relations among the living are understood and calibrated for nearness by reference to common ancestry, with the result that everyone within the structure [. . .] is related to everyone else.24 165

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In both philology and ethnology, the segmentary tree attempted a graphic equivalence to the powerful idea of kinship (which asserts sameness over difference/divergence), and this was most notably articulated in the philological “discovery” of the Indo-European language family in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Orientalists like William Jones and Franz Bopp used similar trees to demonstrate, in the words of Maurice Olender, “affinities among different language groups [. . .] either by historical and geographical connections between peoples [. . .] or by the idea of descent from a common ancestor for the existence of common word roots and grammatical structures.”25 Here lies the second problematic gap in Moretti’s account. In his enthusiasm to enlist “hard” sciences as theoretical allies, he introduces a second source for the tree metaphor – this time from the ambitious project of History and Geography of Human Genes (1994) by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, which offers parallels between genetic and linguistic data to map the genetic diversity of world population.26 Interestingly enough, and this goes completely unnoticed in Moretti’s text, it transpires that even this project is dependent on the same IndoEuropean language family which the authors claim has stood the test of time for 200 years and thus is a valid starting point. In fact, in their note on the project and its connection with philology, Cavalli-Sforza et al. argue that the central insight they have taken is the “monogenesis of language” or a “common phylogenetic origin” of languages within a family, which, once again, prioritizes sameness over divergence.27 Ostensibly, Damrosch and Moretti rely on the organismic metaphor to break away from the shackles of the national canon. They want to open up a global field of literature where literary texts would effortlessly cross boundaries and where, as a consequence, national borders would appear not only rigid but artificially so. This is of course a move to bolster the premises of comparative literature. What they do not realize, however, is that it has two very different consequences. First, they run the risk of perpetuating what Eric Auerbach calls “imposed uniformity” which leads to “a standardized world, to a single literary culture, only a few literary languages, and perhaps even a single literary language.” In this nightmarish world of uniformity and universality, Auerbach suggests ironically, the “notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed.”28 And second, more crucially, they hardly appreciate the internal contradiction of their theory – i.e. the organismic metaphor refers less to the projected non-national field of world literature and more towards the bulwark of their critique, i.e. the nation and national literature. As Pheng Cheah has argued, the transformation 166

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from “mechanistic models of state and society” to the “organism as an extended metaphor for the political body” occurred at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in close collaboration with emerging German nationalism, especially after the Napoleonic invasion.29 Associated with Jena romantics – principally Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Schleiermacher – this organism metaphor articulated a foundational moment in the history of nationalism by bringing together culture and human freedom within one conceptual frame, and then by offering it as a rational expression of political freedom against the entropy of modernity. Its close association with the nation-form is apparent since the late eighteenth century. But more important for my purpose is the line of argument in Cheah that traces the evolution of the concept of culture (Kultur, but also related and cognate terms like Bildung, Aufklärung, Erziehung, and Geist) as the principal site where the encounter between the organismic metaphor and nation-thinking is staged. Organismic paradigm and national literature Cheah identifies Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) as the text that first articulated the modern version of the “organismic metaphor of the political body.” The coherence of Kant’s argument, however, depended on changes in political philosophy in the preceding decades. By the end of the eighteenth century, a host of authors apart from Kant proposed Bildung as the source for political freedom – not so much as its passive condition but as its very “ontological paradigm.” Individual freedom, in this view, was seen as nested within collectivity and for this collective body (which was also modeled on individual organic units) to realize itself culture was a necessary “auto-causality.” But for this elemental shift to take place, it was also necessary to see culture as “self-impelling, self-producing, and self-generating.” Cheah shows how culture was given both autonomous and autochthonous status during the late eighteenth century through its explicit identification with a higher form of nature. Like natural organisms, culture also internalized its own causality as an immanent principle, but unlike nature its purposive being was not entirely explainable with reference to mechanical causality.30 As he explains, the organism is quite literally the basis of culture and of a teleological view of history, for the analogy was elaborated into an organismic conception of nature as a self-organizing whole, a 167

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system of purpose that historically culminates in the world of culture.31 This intrinsic duality of culture – that it was part of yet superior to the natural world – allowed it to infuse different political registers and in this process the extended organismic metaphor also found hospitable reception across different ideals of freedom. In Kant, the organismic metaphor of culture became the unambiguous site for the realization of freedom. What was implicit in Kant, i.e. the anthropological underpinning of culture, came into sharp focus with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s attempt to territorialize both culture and freedom (hence the organismic metaphor) within language and then eventually within the nation. Indeed, Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation [Addresses to the German Nation] (1808) is the key text for our purpose here since it relates two of the central concerns of this book: the standardization of culture as the site to enact the will to nationhood and the progressively biological/anthropological conceptualization of national cultures in post-revolution Europe. The context of these lectures was provided by Napoleonic invasion and owing to this rather exceptional condition, as Friedrich Meinecke suggests, Fichte packed his Addresses with both the “strongest metaphysical as well as the most urgent practical concerns of his age.” For him, the practical steps included first and foremost the task of rejuvenating the German nation currently threatened by foreign occupation through a rigorous education system which would concentrate on the characteristics of Germans as Urvolk (original people) or even das Volk (the people) and hence pose them as unique. For this he was ready to indulge in “speculative reason” and personal sentiment, and thus to bring philosophy to more volatile terrains of political action.32 But such steps were never adequate for the emergence of a nationalized people, and Fichte’s text introduced rather metaphysical strategies to think what Etienne Balibar calls the “nation-form”: the ‘external frontiers’ of the state have to become ‘internal frontiers’ or [. . .] external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been – and always will be – ‘at home.’33

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Frontiers of both kinds and even their underlying ideas of inside and outside in Fichte assumed a decidedly cultural import, and through a complex mix of race and nation he was able to produce some of the fundamental tenets of nation-thinking that extended the cultural foundation within the political realm. His Addresses also used this cultural foundation of the nation to outline the role of national literature which, I argue in this chapter, remains intact in much of recent discussions on world literature. The historical condition of Napoleonic invasion that shaped Addresses required Fichte to account for the essence of the German nation against foreign aggression. He was also forced to outline a historical model to support this essential core and to allay any fear that political domination could irretrievably destroy the German spirit. To fulfill both these conditions, Fichte argues that the Germans were “an original people” and as such they formed “a people that has the right to call itself simply the people.”34 His proof for this originary status is the language – the German speaks a language which has been alive ever since it first issued from the force of nature, whereas the other Teutonic races speak a language which has movement on the surface only but is dead at the root. To this circumstance alone, to life on the one hand and death on the other, we assign the difference [between the German and the other peoples of Teutonic descent]. (AGN, 68) This fundamental difference between living and dead languages and their consequences for respective cultures is suggested in the text by a framework of comparative philology between German and neo-Latin languages. In fact, Fichte even declares that comparisons with neo-Latin languages would be necessarily limited since only primitive languages like Greek could qualify as ideal comparative counterparts to German (AGN, 69). The crucial distinction between the insider and the outsider is based on this notion of living language, since in Fichte’s schema a community could be defined not by physical borders of mountains and rivers but by inner or spiritual ones springing from the ability to share this language. As Cheah suggests, the distinction between Germans and non-Germans is thus conceived as the contrast between life and death;35 and it is possible for Fichte to propose this linguistic nation “as a self-permeating organic whole” which was “persistently brought into

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being by rational-purposive activity” on the one hand and “spiritual law of the nation” on the other.36 Against distressing political circumstances, Fichte attempts a new interpretation of the original people as nation-people who represent “the totality of men continuing to live in society with each other and continually creating themselves naturally and spiritually out of themselves, a totality that arises together out of the divine under a certain special law of divine development” (AGN, 134–5). Here Fichte is clearly building on a tradition of philosophical mediation on the origins of language and how one could conceive its relation with communities or political structures. This list includes, among others, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Rousseau, Herder, and many other minor authors.37 Within the German philosophical tradition, it was Herder’s thesis that, in Martin Heidegger’s words, was able to bring the “according weight, the impulse and flood, the overflowing and the wild, the dark and the weaving to free reign in the German essence” and thus was also able to influence the “age of the ‘classic’ and of ‘German idealism’” in significant ways.38 Indeed, Herder could be seen as establishing a “tradition” in German philosophy of language – which would eventually include figures as diverse as Hamann, Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Humboldt, and Hegel – as also participating in a philological turn in the final decades of the eighteenth century. However, Heidegger’s suggestion of Herder’s influence, especially on the philosophy of language, can best be understood as two distinct arguments in the two parts of his prize-winning essay Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache [Treatise on the Origin of Language] (1772). In the first part, Herder offers his reasons for preferring the theory of human origin of languages to the divine one, and identifies the Kantian notion of Besonnenheit or “awareness” as the chief reason for his preference. Awareness as a distinctively human faculty mediates between the world and the human body, giving rise to early languages, and it also embeds individual experience of language within its natural locale. This is not yet a secularization thesis one would see in later philologists like Bopp and Rask,39 but it makes a strong plea in favor of language as part of the natural world or indeed as a living organism which goes through a cycle from life to death.40 This point about organicity is elaborated further in the second part as Herder presents histories of different languages and makes a distinction between perfect European languages and imperfect languages of the savages (from the Americas, for instance) or of the Eastern nations (Chinese, Arabic, Siamese etc.); their coexistence is taken as a proof of organism-like evolution of languages, and their 170

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comparison a methodological tool to explain the relationship between language and the community of speakers.41 Thus Cheah’s chronology for the transition from Kant’s cosmopolitanism to Fichte’s nationalism misses the vital part played by these contemporary developments in the philosophy of language. The idea of German as an original language in Fichte’s text was inspired by figures like Herder and more directly by recent contributions in comparative philology, hence in turn by Orientalist scholarship of colonial officials like Jones. It was not entirely fortuitous that 1808 saw the publication of both Fichte’s Addresses and Friedrich Schlegel’s magisterial work of comparative philology, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier [On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians]. Without this philological intervention, the territorialization of freedom within the living organism of the nation would have been difficult to imagine. I shall return to this point below, but let us for the moment turn to Fichte’s rather intriguing points on national literature. In his twelfth lecture, the question of national literature is introduced through a detour – how would Germans, Fichte asks, preserve their unique cultural heritage under foreign occupation? He reasons that since his proposal for new education to produce new individuals will need at least a generation to materialize, it is important to ask the inevitable question: How are we to manage to get through this interval? Since we can do nothing better, how are we to maintain ourselves at any rate as the soil on which the improvement may take place, and as the point of departure at which this improvement may begin its work? (AGN, 205–6) The question is not merely rhetorical but is imbued with widespread despondency resulting from the “state of subjection” which erodes originality with repeated and precise coercion. His answer to this misery introduces the classic nationalist stance of distinguishing the political world from the spiritual one: If our external activity is restricted and fettered, let us elevate our spirit all the more boldly to the thought of freedom; [. . .] Let us give it [freedom] a place of refuge in our innermost thoughts, until there shall grow up round about us the new world which has the power of manifesting our thoughts outwardly. (AGN, 207) 171

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Freedom can only flourish in such adversarial historical situation within the inner spiritual recesses of the German character, within its essential culture which is neither as base as animal life nor as rarefied as to be full of empty words. Fichte indeed offers culture as the spiritual abode for freedom until it is realized politically. And it is at this point that he raises the crucial question of national literature. National literature from its inception was thus a political concept for Fichte, and the institutionalization of a German national canon in the following decades repeatedly asserted its political character.42 In this address, he mentions a truism of German culture that holds that “even if our political independence were lost we should still keep our language and our literature, and thereby always remain a nation” (AGN, 213). He concedes that fragmented German states were held together over centuries by this sense of belonging to a common cultural root, and now that the last vestiges of the Holy Roman Empire have been destroyed by Napoleon, one is forced even more to fall back on this wellspring of Germanic nationhood. At the same time, he also holds that this unexamined faith in the continuity of the primitive cultural tradition is under severe duress, and the future of national literature has to be thought anew. For Fichte, national literature has a special function in this; as he says, the “noblest privilege and the most sacred function of the man of letters is this: to assemble his nation and to take counsel with it about its most important affairs” (AGN, 217). For German men of letters this is more acute, since they have the historic duty to compensate for the absent political unity through their speech and writing and thus to bring into being the contours of a national character. But under alien rule this is set to change – either the new national literature will be written in the language of the new rulers or it will be written in German but with considerable concession for the ruling race and will cease to be national. Thus the question of national literature is inextricably tied to the core issue of national sovereignty, because without political freedom there will be no national literature worth its name. Fichte purposely places language at the heart of his deliberations since only through language he can invoke the organismic metaphor of the political body. And within this organismic metaphor, national literature and political freedom merge into each other. Fichte’s argument about German literature and culture set the basic template for all subsequent discussions on national literature. When Damrosch and Moretti assume the universality of literature across national borders, they build on this early moment in nationalist thinking. Indeed one of the chief characteristics of national(ist) imagination, 172

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as Benedict Anderson has shown, is that it is inherently “limited”; that is to say, no nation imagines itself to be covering the entire face of the earth.43 Rather, the usual stratagem is to imagine one’s nation in the midst of a host of other nations through comparison, or to replicate one’s own experience of a nation to imagine similarly formed national communities. It is this typical national(ist) thinking that is at work when one posits comparable national literatures across nations. In each case, Fichte’s formulation of distinct nation-people marked by unique language and literature – and hence by distinct organismic bodies – reappears to constitute the very ground of comparison. And in each case, it is the organismic nature of language that underwrites the nation-people and its culture; as Fichte puts it: What an immeasurable influence on the whole human development of a people the character of its language may have – its language, which accompanies the individual into the most secret depths of his mind in thought and will and either hinders him or gives him wings, which unites within its domain the whole mass of men who speak it into one single and common understanding, which is the true point of meeting and mingling for the world of the senses and the world of spirits, and fuses the ends of both in each other in such a fashion that it is impossible to tell to which of the two it belongs itself. (AGN, 69) Damrosch and Moretti do not take into account this vital moment in the history of the nationalization of literature; instead, they rather tactlessly repeat some of its central premises in the hope of challenging national canons. Death in globalization It is this notion of organismic literature that has died. In its absence, we are faced with the challenge of devising more nuanced and historicized understanding of the worlding of literature, or how and why a text comes to be recognized as literary in a given world. Since I have also suggested that this transition in itself unveils something like an ontology of death, I want to take this opportunity to speculate on its possible implications. Let me reiterate once more that death in this case does not mean complete termination of an idea or a phenomenon, and certainly not its triviality. Death rather is a way of articulating the 173

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relationship between past events and present ones, from the vantage point of the extended present, which is integral to the kind of Anglophone world literature I have charted in this book. World literature’s being as such and its becoming postcolonial are important resources to imagine its putative death in this sense. The central implication, as I have suggested above, is the banality or ordinariness of world literature. Banal or ordinary marks the status of an idea when it is drained of any millennial spirit or ritual expectations, and signals its somewhat routinized and predictable iteration. What becomes available as banal or ordinary after the death of an idea is a proliferation of fragments, ruins, traces, and their multiple ways of circulation which, in the field of literature, is recorded through expressive resources with shared meaning, thought, and experience. These fragments may take on features which are grotesque or moderate, incendiary or timid, but in every case, through their modes of circulation and reception, they remain ordinary. World literature as a “disciplinary rallying point of literary criticism and the academic humanities” – and also of its normative institutions like universities, publishing, and literary prizes – made its entry in the mid-1990s and announced, as Emily Apter puts it, the “deprovincialization of the canon” as also the rearranging of the “cognitive landscapes” as its primary goal. In quick succession, this millennial aim was replicated across disciplines, and a host of scholars extended its scope across texts, periods, and methods. It soon transpired, however, that within a decade this paradigm gave rise to the disturbing trends of, to borrow from Apter once again, “reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or [of] the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’ ”44 What started as a call for paradigmatic shift in literary studies, in other words, soon preoccupied itself with either reductionist assumptions about cultural hierarchy or a global market of perfect exchangeability. In a certain sense, world literature as a paradigm died in the middle of its being anointed as the master narrative of globalized literary studies; in a dramatic gesture, it exhausted its promise precisely when it was being summoned to match the challenges of contemporary globalization. One of the principal reasons behind this premature exhaustion, as I have argued in this book, is the flawed conceptualization of the genealogy of world literature itself. In different versions of this genealogy, and across the board, efforts were made to restrict world literature within a set of historical events and disciplinary methods which were derived from a singular source and, as a result, the world of world literature 174

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disconcertingly resembled an imaginary notion of Europe. Most of the scholars engaged in the exercise came to denationalize the canon with their extremely parochial disciplinary background, and in effect sought to universalize their discipline’s inherent provincialism in the name of charting the worldly careers of literary texts. What was almost entirely lost in this period was the global genealogy of the very idea of world literature, its temporal “entanglement” and territorial heterogeneity. As I have suggested in this book, world literature and its underlying premise of comparatism were fashioned through the colonial encounters in which Europe participated along with other protagonists. Without this history, it is difficult to explain the gradual anthropologization of literature or even the rise of the comparative method. This latter shift is most notably visible in Kant’s anthropology, which decisively replaced his critical paradigm with a comparative one and reformulated some of the claims made in the third critique in manifestly anthropological vocabulary. Indeed, Kantian anthropology, while responding to the larger crisis of European philosophy in the wake of rapidly expanding empires, charted the world of world literature. Without this global context of the fundamental methods of identifying something as world literature, any inquiry must remain restricted and weak. The final triumph of this strategy was announced by Kipling who turned the experience of imperialism into a world unto itself, and thus occasioned its portability. His status as the first major author of Anglophone world literature is a testimony to the entrenched globalized values of imperialism. When recent theories fail to account for such histories and occasion the death of world literature, this failure needs to be seen as an inability to find adequate coordinates between a set of events in the past and a description of the present. The failure in this case is particularly telling because contemporary Anglophone fiction, unlike their theoretical counterparts, does respond to this history in innovative ways and with exceptional resourcefulness. I have selected three defining moments in the book (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) to explore the ways contemporary postcolonial writing engages with, expands, and reformulates some of the narrative strategies created in that earlier moment – and coded as the canonical and the anthropological – defining, in the process, world literature for us. This organization of my argument is based on the evidence that postcolonial literature uses components which have become both banal and ordinary after the earlier moment of world literature was exhausted. There are of course structural continuities between colonial and postcolonial modernities, between global empires and neoliberal globalization, but this continuity must not be taken as a 175

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programmed guarantor of the uninterrupted progress of either world literature or its foundation in biological universalism. Rather, what postcolonial fiction reveals is the distance between biological universalism and contemporary writing, as also the peculiar modalities responsible for the transformation of universal ideas into fragmented discourses of postcoloniality. One striking case, for instance, is Coetzee’s fiction that stretches the modern conceptions of aesthetics beyond its European boundaries and stages its decentering in the colonial context. What became a global template for modern literature since the early nineteenth century, he suggests, could only replicate itself as a parochial and paranoid tradition in Africa. Its universality faltered against the powerful figure of the racial other. Racialized bodies and suffering, and their refusal to lend themselves to universal strategies of reading, force one to rethink the very conceptualization of modern aesthetic as structured around universal and unhindered readability. In other words, what I suggest here is the reversal of Pheng Cheah’s diagnosis of the “missed encounter” between world literature and postcoloniality. Cheah perceptively notes that [l]iterature of the postcolonial South is an important modality of world literature defined as literature that worlds and makes a world because the sharp inequalities created by capitalist globalization and their devastating consequences for the masses of postcolonial societies make the opening of other worlds a matter of the greatest imperativity.45 He argues that the world is primarily a temporal being, and in the aftermath of imperialism and global capitalism, that time has been exclusively identified with “Western capitalist modernity’s linear time.” Contemporary globalization is thus predominantly characterized by its violent destruction of marginal postcolonial societies in order to enlist them as part of the universal world-system as well as its linear temporality. Cheah is critical of the unqualified emphasis on “non-Western heterotemporalities” in recent scholarship marked by a certain nostalgic yearning for pre-capitalist temporalities, and hence unable to move beyond the project of recovering the vestiges of an essentialized past.46 What is needed rather urgently, in his view, is an ethical reworlding of the world responding to the “greatest imperativity” of postcolonial societies. Literature is one of the most significant resources for this reimagination of the world because, as novels like Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide or Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts demonstrate, it can draw on 176

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“alternative temporalities” to reworld the postcolony. Postcolonial novels are therefore not sites of recovery of some lost temporal frame, he contends, but of the enactment of “world literature as the interplay of different processes of worlding.”47 It is here that the missed encounter between world literature and postcoloniality becomes prominent, since the normative structure of temporalizing the world evident in these texts is largely missing from contemporary scholarship. It is not clear from Cheah’s account, however, what the resources for “different processes of worlding” could be apart from “revolutionary time” and “worldly ethics” drawn from a strong sense of “belonging” and certain “forms of cultural and linguistic translation, relations of generous giving that respect the self-determination of the recipient, practices of care and concern for others, and above all the telling and receiving of stories.”48 The champions of postcolonial heterotemporalities, whom Cheah criticizes for being naively nostalgic, would have happily cited the same catalogue as informing their enterprise as well. It is important to note that the flows and calculations of global capital do not only disturb the nativist dream of pure recovery, but also underwrite other local aesthetic norms and ethical sensibilities. After the death of the world literature paradigm and its steady if gradual dispersal of canonical and anthropological codes across different cultures of writing, the resources for reworlding need to be sought in the ontology of that death and not in some ethical domains harboring alternative temporal possibilities. As my readings of Naipaul, Coetzee, and Rushdie suggest, this mission of reimagining or reworlding the postcolony does not anchor itself in some exterior and hence recoverable time inimical to global modernity or capitalist time. They instead respond to the earlier moment of ethnocapitalism with its oedipal structure from within and by disrupting its standardized narrative practices and codes on a global scale and also by reworking its fragments into postcolonial lifeworlds. In their novels they acknowledge the historical force of capitalism and its global trajectories; but they also uncover the tendentiousness of this history, its parochial rigidity and monocultural shallowness, because they imagine postcoloniality as temporal entanglement, located in but not reducible to capitalist globalization, that extends the present without any warranty of either pure innocence or unblemished ethics. They imagine, in other words, the death of world literature as inaugurating a new regime of postcolonial writing. The other implication of this death is that Anglophone territories have emerged as focal points and repositories of new global cultures produced through continuous shifting of borders between communities 177

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and their lived worlds. Instead of seeking out a national framework as the final refuge, Anglophone territories have traditionally been involved in both global flows of capital and labor, images and ideas on the one hand and the transnational literary cultures on the other. Of course this was made possible by the global culture of imperialism, but what happens in the present moment of globalization is not simply a story of continuity or renovation, but a different configuration altogether. Anglophone territories in the present, in truly Nietzschean fashion, expose the mechanism of earlier literary codes by deterritorializing them, this time quite literally, but do so within an essentially comparative structure. Indeed, the very organization of the postcolonial texts I have studied in this book is predicated on a comparative framework between received canonical texts and their anthropological reworking, launching a new regime of aesthetic codes and values. If one approaches postcoloniality in globalization, in Scott’s words, as an essentially “after-Bandung” world that only leads to tragic visions of loss, I suggest, such tragedy can be counterposed with the promise of literary territories that still continue the older postcolonial mission of accruing its supranational politics through this project of comparatism. Indeed, the vision of supranational postcoloniality enshrined in Bandung is embodied by Anglophone comparatism in a way that other political ensembles have failed to emulate, and it is the distinct style of literary coding and its distribution over large cartographic units that has sustained its distinctive political edge. It is possible to argue that what Scott describes as the failure of the political vision underpinning decolonization can also be rethought as the inability of political institutions to successfully engage with this literary narrative or even with its political technologies that take postcoloniality beyond restrictive enclosures. Of course, one has to be really naïve to resurrect a romance-like narrative for the “postcolonial present” in globalization; but that does not suggest automatically that Scott’s diagnosis of tragedy is the only option left or even that the binary structure of romance-tragedy is the only available model to critically think of postcoloniality in our times. On the contrary, my wager in this book has been that postcolonial writing through its productively schizophrenic engagement with canonical “literature” continues the rhetoric of postcolonial utopias even when, or particularly when, such utopian visions seem to carry less political clout today. This intimate suturing of writing and political vision is secured though the continuous engagement with “literature” as a contingent category and by extending its reach to a point where its internal cohesion not only 178

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breaks but also exposes the historical architecture that gave rise to it in the first place. Within these broken remnants of literature, and within temporal-territorial frame made available by the death of world literature, new ideas of the postcolony and literature – postcolonial literature as such – are taking shape. We need to pay serious attention to these new histories and their new worldliness, to their paradoxical canonicity and their politically charged commitment to anthropology. Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1965). 2 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds.) Selected Writings, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 151. 3 See, Achilles Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2003), 11–40. 4 For Spivak’s definition of “planetarity,” see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 72–3. Gilroy also insists that planetarity should not be equated with globalization since the “planetary suggests both contingency and movement. It specifies a smaller scale than the global, which transmits all the triumphalism and complacency of ever-expanding imperial universals.” Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xv. 5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. pub (London: Routledge, 2002), 297–8. 6 Foucault, The Order of Things, 302. 7 Foucault, The Order of Things, 303. 8 David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 2. 9 David Scott, “The Tragic Vision in Postcolonial Time,” PMLA, Vol. 129, No. 4 (2014), 806. 10 Scott, Omens of Adversity, 6; emphasis original. 11 He also describes this failure as “generational”; see David Scott, “The Temporality of Generations: Dialogue, Tradition, Criticism,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (2014). 12 For this “tragic” emplotment of the postcolonial present, see David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 13 Achilles Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre (Paris: La Découverte, 2013). 14 Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre, 101, 254. 15 Achilles Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 14. 16 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4–5; emphasis original. 17 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 24; emphasis added. 18 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, Vol. 1 (January– February, 2000), 57, 68; emphasis original. 19 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 90–1.

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20 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 91–2. 21 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 70; emphasis original. 22 The original passage runs like this: “It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be the only possible one. [. . .] The various degrees of difference in the languages from the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and modern, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.” Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), 422–3; emphasis added. 23 It is also important to note that despite Moretti’s high hopes, the evolutionary model has limited explanatory power even within his chosen field of detective fiction. This is a point made in Christopher Prendergast, “Evolution and Literary History: A Response to Franco Moretti,” New Left Review, Vol. 34 (July–August, 2005). And Moretti largely concedes it in Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 137–58. 24 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 10. The term, as Trautmann explains, is borrowed from E.E. EvansPritchard and in turn from Emile Durkheim, and from their work on kinship structures. 25 Maurice Olender, The Language of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 17. 26 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 70. Indeed, Moretti even appends an endorsement of his project by one of the authors (Alberto Piazza) as the afterword to his book, 95–113. 27 Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 23–4. 28 Eric Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Said Maire and Edward Said, Centennial Review, Vol. 13 (Winter, 1969), 3. Jonathan Arac suspects a similar trajectory of stifling monolinguality in Moretti’s critical project; see Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review, Vol. 16 (2002). 29 Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 27. 30 Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 45–8. 31 Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 57. 32 Friedrich Meinecke, The Age of German Liberation, 1795–1815, trans. Peter Paret and Helmuth Fischer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 44–5. 33 Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 95. 34 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull (Chicago: Open Court, 1922), 108. Further references are cited as AGN. 35 Aamir Mufti has shown that this reliance on language to distinguish foreign elements from the authentic ones in Fichte’s text is equally at work vis-à-vis the Jewish

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36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

question. See Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 69–75. Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 126–7. For an overview of such texts, see Gordon W. Hewes, Language Origins: A Bibliography, 2 Vols. (The Hague: Moutan, 1975); James H. Stam, Inquiries into the Origin of Language: The Fate of a Question (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Language: The Metaphysics of Language and the Essencing of the Word: Concerning Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language, trans. Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna (New York: SUNY Press, 2004), 36. As Michael N. Forster points out: “Herder had written the work in the spirit of a principle which his teacher Kant had championed in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) to the effect that explanations of natural phenomena in terms of natural laws are no less compatible with God’s fundamental role in nature than explanations of them in terms of violations of natural laws (i.e. in terms of miracles), and are indeed better proofs of God’s fundamental role in nature than the latter.” Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 310. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 118 ff. Herder, Philosophical Writings, 130 and passim. Also see, Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 65–7. See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830– 1870, trans. Renate Baron Franciscono (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 1–2. Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 11. Cheah, What Is a World?, 12. Cheah, What Is a World?, 14. Cheah, What Is a World?, 13–14.

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INDEX

Addresses to the German Nation (1808) 12 Aesthetic Unconscious, The 114 Ahmed, Siraj 11 Akhtar, Shabbir 132 All in a Garden Fair (Besant) 50 anatomic disarticulation 158 Anderson, Benedict 6, 148, 173 Anglophone: codes and territories 18–21; ethnicity and orality 9; postcolonial writing 8, 9; primary coordinates 13–17; as world 9–21; world literature 50–6; writing 15, 20, 62, 69, 126, 157 Anglophone territories 7, 9, 13, 14, 18, 51–2, 62, 178; poetics of 1–34 Anniversary Discourses (1785–1792) 150 anthropology 15, 45, 179 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) 15–17 “Apartheid Thinking” (1991) 110, 113 Appiah, Anthony 70 Apter, Emily 6 Area of Darkness, An (1964) 69 Arendt, Hannah 35, 155 Arnold, David 44, 45 Arondekar, Anjali 36 Artaud, Antonin 17 Asad, Talal 131, 138 Atlantic Monthly 38 Attridge, Derek 107 Attwell, David 97 Bakhtin, Mikhail 8 Barker, Granville 39 Barnard, Rita 100

Barrie, J.M. 38 Baucom, Ian 54 Behdad, Ali 41 belated territories 67–96; canon, impossibility 88–93; as chronotope 70–6; enigma of belatedness 76–81; territorial derangement 81–8 Benjamin, Walter 52, 53, 55, 59, 136, 156 Besant, Walter 50, 51 “Beyond the Pale” (1888) 48 Bhabha, Homi 70 biological universalism 163–7 Bopp, Franz 159, 166 Borges, Jorge Luis 2, 4 British imperialism 36, 58 Brown, Wendy 10 Burton, Susan 119, 120 Butler, Josephine 49 Cantonments Act (1864) 49 capitalist deterritorialization 17 capitalist globalization 24 Carrington, Charles 42 Cartographers Guild 4 Casanova, Pascale 1, 22, 23, 92, 147, 149, 151 Casteel, Sarah 89 Charles, Cecil 39 Chatterjee, Partha 138 Cheah, Pheng 24, 166, 169, 176 Choice of Kipling’s Verse, A 57 Choudhury, Abdul Hussain 130 City of Dreadful Night, The (1889) 42 Clemens, William M. 38

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INDEX

CNA Award acceptance speech 110 Cobbett, William 89 Coetzee, J.M. 2, 8, 97, 102, 104, 106, 109–15, 117, 119–21 cognitive landscapes 6 Colesworthy, Grant 44 collective imaginaire 11 colonial hegemony 9 colonial incarnation 18 Communist Manifesto, The (1848) 8 Conrad, Joseph 4 Constable, William 89 contemporary postcolonial writing 2 Country and the City, The (1975) 101 Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) 167 Cromer, Lord 37 Cronjé, Geoffrey 110–13 Cudjoe, Selwyn 86 cultural assimilation 62 cultural capital 14 culture-consciousness 61 Cuvier, Georges 109, 158 Damrosch, David 1, 22, 126 Darwin, Charles 22, 165 death, short history of 155–81 death narratives 161 Death of a Discipline (2003) 20 Defoe, Daniel 119 Deleuze, Gilles 15–18, 20 depoliticized identitarianism 10 Derrida, Jacques 9, 10, 23 deterritorialization 16 Dhareshwar, Vivek 82 diaspora, subaltern 68 Dosse, François 16 double consciousness 73, 89 dream topography 103 “Drums of the Fore and Aft, The” (1888) 49 Dusklands 107 Eckermann, Johann Peter 8 Elden, Stuart 10 Eliot, T.S. 57–62 Engels, Friedrich 18 English-language writing 110 Enigma of Arrival, The (1987) 88 ethnocapitalism 16–19, 155

ethnology-race-philology 15 Eurasians 46 European imperialism 7 Feder, Lillian 72 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 12, 168, 169, 171 “First Sailor, The” (1891) 35 Foucault, Michel 69 Franco-Maghrébin identity 10 French, Patrick 68 Freudian psychoanalysis 15, 114 From Sea to Sea (1899) 42 Froude, James Anthony 86 Ghosh, Amitav 176 Gikandi, Simon 140 Gilroy, Paul 73, 134, 157 Gladstone, John 77 globalization 12, 21, 127, 176; death in 173–9 Goethean Weltliteratur 2 Goldsmith, Oliver 89 Gray, Thomas 89 Guattari, Félix 15–18, 20 Hall, Stuart 132 Hardy, Thomas 39, 89 Harris, Wilson 76 Harrison, Mark 45 Hart, Walter Morris 40 Hayot, Eric 22 Heart of Darkness (1899) 4, 29 Heidegger, Martin 170 Herderian ethnonationalism 110 Historical Records of the Survey of India 56 History and Geography of Human Genes (1994) 166 holy familialism 15 Hopkins, R. Thurston 49 House for Mr. Biswas, A 88, 89, 91 Howell, William Dean 38 How to Write a Book 79 Hunt, Cecil 79 Hurd, Douglas 131, 142 Imagined Communities (1983) 148 imperial cartography 4 imperial mapmaking 5 imperial maps, sovereign opacity 4

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INDEX

Indian climate 44 Indian Contagious Diseases Act (1868) 49 Influence of Tropical Climates, More Specifically the Climate of India, on European Constitution (1813) 43 In the Heart of the Country (1977) 98 Jacob, Christian 4 James, Henry 39 Jameson, Fredric 6, 11 Jeffries, Richard 89 Jellaludin, McIntosh 48 Jenkins, Roy 141 Johnson, James 43 Joyce, James 77 Kafka, Franz 135 Kant, Immanuel 167 Kemp, Sandra 36 Ken of Kipling, A (1899) 38 Khoi people 106 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 28, 127 Kim (1901) 50, 53, 56 Kingsley, Charles 86 Kipling, Rudyard 1, 35–8, 40, 47, 51, 54–7, 59–62, 69 Kipling Primer, A (1899) 38 “Kipling Redivivus” 57 Kipling: The Story-writer (1918) 40 Lamming, George 76 Lamy, Jean-Claude 126 Lawrence, D.H. 17 Lawton, William Cranston 38 Levine, Philippa 47 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 16 liberal-constitutional multiculturalism 132 Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (1719) 119 Life and Times of Michael K 107 Lukács, Georg 138 Lurie, David 107 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 108 Mahfouz, Naguib 127 Mair, R.S. 43 maps 4, 22 Marx, Karl 139 Mbembe, Achilles 11, 161

McClintock, Anne 81 McDonald, Peter 99 Meinecke, Friedrich 168 mercantile world literature 12 Middle Passage, The (1962) 68 Midnight’s Children (1981) 126 Miller, Henry 17 mimesis 4 mimetic reliability 6 Mimic Men, The (1967) 75, 86, 91 minority report 126–54 Mintz, Sidney 77 Miranda, Suarez 3, 4 mission civilisatrice 5 modern Orientalism 24 Modood, Tariq 132 Monkshood, G.F. 40, 41, 47 Moretti, Franco 1, 18, 22, 164 Morgan, Lewis H. 18 Mudimbe, V.Y. 86 Mufti, Aamir 11, 24, 150 Muhammad, Anna 135 Mystic Masseur, The 78 Naipaul, V.S. 2, 8, 67–74, 77, 78, 80–4, 89–93, 101 Naipaul fallacy 70 Nandy, Ashis 70 national allegory 11 national literature 167–73 Newspaper Management 79 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3 Niranjana, Tejaswini 68 Nixon, Rob 71 Notes towards the Definition of Culture (Eliot) 61 “Novel Today, The” (1988) 99 “Oedipal form” ( forme œdipienne ) 15 Oedipus forces capitalism 17 “On Exactitude in Science” (1946) 2 “On the City Wall” (1888) 48 On the Origin of Species (1859) 22, 165 organismic paradigm 167–73 Orwell, George 36 Palmer, John 39 Parry, Benita 57 Paton, Alan 107

185

INDEX

Patten, John 131, 132 Phillimore, R.H. 56 philological-lexicographic revolution 149, 150 “pivot” experience 50–2, 56 Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) 38, 39, 49 pleasure of imperialism 54 political deracination 86 political incorrectness 74 politics-power-place-practices 10 postcoloniality 1, 157–63 provincial aesthetics 97–109; aesthetics of madness 109–18; archives of affect 129–37; secularism and untranslatability 137–42; whiteness and writing 100–9 Publications Appeal Board 116 Race Relations Act 1976 141 racial degeneration 45, 48 racist exclusivism 112 Rancière, Jacques 98, 99, 105, 108, 114, 115, 118 Renan, Ernest 145 Rennell, James 2 Reports of the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (1858–9) 45 restricted disciplinary circuit 20 Rhodes, Cecil 37 Richards, Thomas 55 Rudyard Kipling (1899) 40 Rushdie, Salman 2, 8, 144 Rushdie affair 128, 129 Ruskin, John 89 sahibization 54 Said, Edward 24, 53, 54, 71, 145 Satanic Verses, The (1988) 27, 126, 143 schizophrenia 82, 86 Schlegel, Friedrich 171 scientific “exactitude” 2 Scott, David 160, 178 secular international order 148 secularism 137–42 Shakil, Omar Khayyam 135 shining map, of Africa 5 Short Stories: How to Write Them 79 Singh, Ralph 75, 86, 91 Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 67

Smith, Pauline 103, 107 Soldiers Three (1888) 49 Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (1937) 42 Sommer, Doris 149 South Africa 98, 102, 103, 106, 107, 115, 116 South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) 117, 118 South Asia 11 spiritual communication 59 spiritual hereditary tie 36 spiritual turmoil 109 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 20, 21, 118, 157 splendid territorial aggrandizement 2 Stoler, Ann 19 “Storyteller, The” (1936) 40 storytelling 52 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 68 Swanson, Maynard 111 Taj Mahal 133 territorial aggrandizement 2, 4, 6 territorial derangement 81–8 territorial heterogeneity 175 Thatcher, Margaret 132 Theory of the Novel, The (1916) 138 “Tomb of His Ancestor, The” (1898) 35 “To the Virginian Voyage” (1606) 101 Trautmann, Thomas 165 Trinidad 78, 89, 90 Trollope, Anthony 86 Under the Deodars (1888) 41 “Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling, The” 57 universalization process 7 untranslatability 137–42 “The Uses of Reading” (1912) 36 Van Rooyen, J.C.W. 116 Vergleichende Grammatik (1832) 150 “Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658” 3 Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) 98 Wallerstein, Immanuel 164 White Writing (1988) 100, 117

186

INDEX

Wild Ass’s Skin, The 109 Williams, Raymond 101, 103 Wordsworth, B. 78 Wordsworth, William 89

“Work of the Censor, The” (1990) 99 world literature 8, 12, 142–51 Young, Robert 145

187