World Literature Decentered: Beyond the West Through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal 2021001585, 9780367683375, 9781003136972, 9781032034553

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World Literature Decentered

What would world literature look like, if we stopped referring to the “West”? Starting with the provocative premise that the “‘West’ is ten percent of the planet”, World Literature Decentered is the first book to decenter Eurocentric discourses of global literature and global history – not just by deconstructing or historicizing them, but by actively providing an alternative. Looking at a series of themes across three literatures (Mexico, Turkey and Bengal), the book examines hotels, melancholy, orientalism, femicide and the ghost story in a series of literary traditions outside the “West”. The non-West, the book argues, is no fringe group or token minority in need of attention – on the contrary, it constitutes the overwhelming majority of this world. Ian Almond is Professor of World Literature at Georgetown University in Qatar. He is the author of six books, most recently Two Faiths, One Banner (2009) and The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri (2015), and over 50 articles in a variety of journals. He specializes in comparative world literature, with a tri-continental emphasis on Mexico, Bengal and Turkey. His work has been translated into 13 languages. He has lived and worked in the Middle East (Qatar and Turkey) for over 15 years.

Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Taking a comparative approach to literary studies, this series visits the relationship of literature and language alongside a variety of interdisciplinary and transnational topics. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Teaching in Times of Crisis Applying Comparative Literature in the Classroom Mich Yonah Nyawalo Family Fictions and World Making Irish and Indian Women’s Writing in the Contemporary Era Sreya Chatterjee Women in Transition Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders Edited by Maria José Blanco and Claire Williams Post-Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry Stefanie John World Literature Decentered Beyond the “West” through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal Ian Almond World Literature After Empire Rethinking Universality in the Long Cold War Pieter Vanhove To learn more about this series, please visit https​:/​/ww​​w​.rou​​tledg​​e​.com​​/ Rout​​ledge​​-Stud​​ies​-i​​n​-Com​​parat​​ive​-L​​itera​​ture/​​​book-​​serie​​s​/RSC​​OL

World Literature Decentered Beyond the “West” through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal Ian Almond

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Ian Almond 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Almond, Ian, 1969-author. Title: World literature decentered: beyond the “West” through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal/Ian Almond, Georgetown University in Qatar. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in comparative literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021001585 | ISBN 9780367683375 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003136972 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Comparative literature–Themes, motives. | Mexican literature–History and criticism. | Turkish literature–History and criticism. | Bengali literature–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN45 .A375 2021 | DDC 809–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001585 ISBN: 978-0-367-68337-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-03455-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13697-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India



In memory of Christopher Larkosh (1964–2020)

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Circumventing the West

viii 1

1 The Ghost Story: Hayalet, Fantasma, Bhut

27

2 The Hotel-Narrative: Anayurt, Shahjahan, Isabel

50

3 Femicide Narratives: Mujer, Mohila, Kadın

69

4 Retelling Myth: Mito, Katha, Efsane

96

5 Melancholy: Monmora, Melancolía, Hüzün

161

6 The Orient: Şark, Prachi, Oriente

195

Conclusion: The Ten Percenters

215

Bibliography Index

223 247

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to a number of people who have helped and offered advice in the preparation of this book: Abdullah al-Arian, Adile Aslan, Timothy Brennan, Uday Chandra, Amal Eqeiq, Ranjan Ghosh, Kaiser Haq, Tabish Khair, Christopher Larkosh, Suha Oğuzertem, Fırat Oruç, Victoria Rowe-Holbrook, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez and Karl Widerquist (for suggesting the title). Some small parts of this book have appeared in revised and edited versions in the following journals: Chapter 1 as “Decentering World Literature: The Ghost Story in Mexican, Turkish and Bengali fiction” The Comparatist no. 41 (2017) – courtesy of University of North Carolina Press; the first section of Chapter 4 in Sandhya Rao Mehta (ed), “Looking at Myth in Modern Mexican Literature” Language and Literature in a Glocal World (Springer, 2018) pp.139–160 – courtesy of Springer Publishing; a small part of Chapter 5 was adapted from three pages of an earlier book of mine, The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss (Cambridge University Press, 2015) – courtesy of Cambridge University Press. Many thanks to the poet Kaiser Haq for his help in correcting some of my clumsy transcriptions from the original Bengali. Any mistakes, of course, are entirely mine. Finally, this book is also dedicated to the underpaid cafeteria and service workers of our campus Georgetown University (Qatar), and indeed of Education City in general, who for over 15 years now have been working for a pittance at a multi-million dollar establishment.

 Introduction Circumventing the West

Still, in a sick, sad world, it’s hard not to be suspicious of anything as wholesome as World Literature. –“World Lite: What is Global Literature?”, editors of n+11

Cosmologists say that if space-time is infinite, then somehow, somewhere, all possible things exist. As someone who has taught that nebulous entity “world literature” for over ten years, I’d like to begin by sketching out one such alternate world. Think of this alternative world as a kind of World Literature Fantasy. In this parallel world, there is no dominant Western canon: only lots of good Western writers, struggling like everyone else to make their voices heard above the growing crescendo of the planet’s collective murmur. Moreover, the people who live in Western countries actually realize they only form 10% of the planet. They understand that the non-Western is not some misrepresented ethnic minority, but Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East – the overwhelming majority of the world. There are centers of influence, certainly, but they are multiple and constantly shifting. A decade of readers in Argentina might become obsessed with Middle Eastern fiction; a new generation in China might start to fixate on West African writers. The swirling network of influences – Swedes reading Turks reading Mexicans, Brazilians translating Urdu ghazals and Chinese tanka – forever shimmers, brightens and collapses, reconfiguring itself not in response to power and economy, but through a much more curious, seemingly chaotic algorithm. There are certainly books which are read more than others, but they do not subscribe to a common ideology – in the anthologies of this world, Buddhists, Islamists, Anarchists and the occasional Capitalist argue with one another endlessly on contentious editorial boards. Writers in this alternative world feel no compulsion to communicate some anthropological information about their community, although many choose to do so. Nor do they feel pressured to express themselves in some common, historically established second language such as English or French. Every 25 years, a new lingua franca is chosen by lottery – the four languages of the

2 Introduction twentieth century have been Quechan, modern Greek, Swahili and Thai. In many non-Western countries, British and American embassies try to raise consciousness about the little-known Anglo-Saxon people and their peculiar culture through music festivals and handcraft fairs, but with little success. One of the reasons all of the above remains a fantasy (in our universe, at least) is that it excludes two things: history and power. Power ripples outward, and books and music and culture tend to ride out on those ripples from powerful countries to less powerful ones. If those ripples bounce back, bringing something with them in return, it is generally a very selective counter-ripple, one calculated not to disturb the overall harmony of the pond. Similarly, history might be defined as the memory of power – that is, to specify my genitive, the memory belonging to power, the way the powerful remember. Perhaps one of the most insidious things about power is that it has the capacity to efface itself from its own effects. Leaders take control through the will of a deity, nations rise to power because of their intrinsic virtue, masterpieces become widely read due to their inherent greatness, culminating in tautologies which (for example) attribute “value to the British for no apparent reason except that they are British”.2 Over the past 30 years, discussions around the subject of “world literature” have been growing more and more intense. Debates about what we should call something are not usually that interesting – it’s hard to get that excited about terminology – but these ones are somewhat different. To some extent they resemble medieval arguments in Abrahamic monotheistic traditions about how to talk about God (if at all). This is perhaps not too surprising, given what Rebecca Walkowitz has called the “unimaginable largeness” of the idea of World Literature.3 Does something like World Literature exist today – and if it does, can we say anything about it, positively or negatively? The affirmative theologians insist it does, and we can. David Damrosch believes in a World Literature that can be named, at least canonically, and whose effects can be best discerned through the translation of those names (“World literature is writing that gains in translations”4); exotericists like Franco Moretti shy away from any kind of reflection on essences, instead concentrating on phenomena like the external metamorphosis and mutation of form.5 Set against them is a line of negative, apophatic voices who argue that all our current concepts of World Literature may well be versions of a delusional artifice – either an undeconstructed and misrecognized legacy of Orientalist philology (Aamir Mufti), a capitalist, market-driven realitydenying fantasy (Joseph Slaughter), or a fake “ethic of liberal inclusiveness” based on the systematic repression of the Untranslatable (Emily Apter).6 Two interesting points are emerging from these debates. The first is a radical historicization of how the planet has been culturally mapped – the increasing awareness that the world we were given to live in by our schoolteachers and television sets is a very particular product, with a very particular history. Mufti, following in the footsteps of Edward Said, sees Empire at the heart of such mapping. If Said had declared any modern

Introduction 

3

history of European culture to be inseparable from its imperialism, Mufti (amongst others) sees the “world” in World Literature to be very much a world drawn up in London, Paris, Washington and Berlin (tellingly, David Damrosch’s groundbreaking 2003 book What Is World Literature? had a group of Orientalists on its front cover, measuring the head of the Sphinx7). The second point is related: what is also becoming clearer is the extent to which a language of corporate capital, moving within a wider vocabulary of liberal humanism, is fetishizing certain keywords – ethnicity, development, diversity, human rights – in order to produce a project which (in Apter’s words) “either reinforces old national, regional and ethnic literary alignments or projects a denationalized planetary screen that ignores the deep structures of … economic interest contouring the international culture industry”.8 St Augustine said that whatever we say about God is not true, and whatever we do not say about Him is true.9 For these scholars – and in the spirit of negative theology – everything we understand by the term “World Literature” is untrue. If the term is to have any meaning at all, we have to move beyond those names. In making this point, I am not uncritically taking the side of Mufti and Apter. Mufti’s commitment to Said leads him to place Western imperialism – and its pedagogical face, Orientalism – at the heart of a cultural remapping of global reality, “a reorganization that is planetary in scope”.10 Even sympathetic readers will have to acknowledge that in Mufti’s emphasis on the Middle East and the Indo-Islamic world, examples of significant nonWestern literary influence upon the West (such as the Latin American Boom or the success of postwar Japanese popular culture) are left out of Mufti’s powerful argument, just as the Ottoman Empire inhabited only spectrally the pages of Said’s legendary book.11 Power may be systemic, but it can also be idiosyncratic, and explaining the blips and contrarian bubbles of history has been the task of politically focused histories since Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. Similarly, Emily Apter’s deployment of untranslatability as a “deflationary” critique of what she calls the “international culture industry”12 also runs into some issues – not necessarily its reliance on deconstruction or its meandering length, but perhaps a niggling concern about its radical epistemological position. In a book which mentions the words “capital”, “capitalism” and “modernity” over 150 times, the lurking framework of a (violently imposed) universalism sets up two kinds of tension with her desire for a “geopolitically case-sensitive and site-specific … comparative literature”.13 The first tension is the obvious one – the subject of the book, the homogenizing will-to-translate and the objects of incommensurability which try to resist this. The second, subtler tension, however, lies within Apter’s book – if we can agree that some historically coercive structure of capital-driven modernity has taken place, are Wallersteinian figures such as Franco Moretti really producing nothing more than “quantitative formalism”?14 In many ways it is the ghost of the translatable, not the Untranslatable, that stalks the pages of Apter’s book.

4 Introduction The skepticism of the negative theologians, however, remains valid: much of what is taugh​t/bro​adcas​t/ant​holog​ized/​discu​ssed/​sold as “World Literature” today is compromised to the point of semantic invalidity in two different yet related ways. The first is a question of simple proportionate representation – a tired point, but one which needs repeating since so many figures in Western academia, publishing and broadcasting seem to miss it. It stems from an unwillingness or inability to see what a small fragment of the planet the “West” actually is, a blindness to demographic dimensions that ultimately gives 90% of the world the status of a “minority”. Enormous bookshops in Berlin whose five-bay Weltliteratur sections contain not a single author who is not European or American; lists of Nobel prizewinners for Literature where the majority of the planet is given barely a quarter of the names; similar lists in respectable newspapers like The Guardian, which allow five – I repeat, five – non-Western names into its “Hundred-GreatestNovels-of-all-Time” roll call (at the end of the article it asked readers: “What have we missed? Have women been short-changed?”15); the appalling state of “World Literature” anthologies (Norton, Longman, Bedford) taught on so many courses in the United States, anthologies of modern European and American literature masquerade as anthologies of World Literature (in the 2013 edition of the Norton, Goethe gets as many pages as Africa16). Anthologies are an interesting and overlooked factor in this studied construction of a Western-centered planet, not simply because they sell in their hundreds of thousands each year, setting the terms of the literary planet for an entire generation of 19- and 20-year olds, but also because many of the figures responsible for editing them are World Literature scholars of some repute.17 The picture that emerges is of a planet where a small minority of countries, building on the legacy of 200 years of military and economic dominion, still try to present a “world literary space”18 (the term is Casanova’s) centered mainly around themselves and their achievements. The only real term for such Western-centered scholars, this book proposes, are “ten-percenters”: scholars who are convinced that the 10% of the planet they continually talk about is the planet. Against the idea that some semantic recognition of this situation constitutes an advance and a development in the debate, I would cite Žižek’s notion of “ironic disavowal” – the notion that through historicizing and deconstructing a particular hegemony, a soothing notion of awareness is created which allows the liberal to ironically distance themselves from the structure in the very act of supporting it.19 Anecdotally, this is a phenomenon witnessed in many conferences – at one symposium on the Messianic, I saw the keynote speaker interrupt himself briefly to acknowledge the irreducible complexity of Islamic civilization, before going on in the same breath to declare that the whole notion of the Messianic we had been discussing for the past week culminated in Hegel. At the most recent comparatist conference in Vienna this summer, David Damrosch was full of outrage for the perceived indifference of the West to non-Western authors – exactly why he

Introduction 

5

only allowed such voices 20% of his own anthology on nineteenth-century literature, unfortunately, was left unexplained.20 In the contents pages of one recent anthology (again the Norton), the last two pages are filled with Latin American, South Asian, African, Chinese names – a heartening sight, until one looks closer and sees barely a half-dozen pages allotted to each, clearly giving the impression of semantic diversity while actually reserving barely a wafer to it in a book the size of a telephone directory. On the back cover of another anthology, we are promised “a fresh and diverse range of the world’s great literature”, reflecting “an increasingly global culture”.21 The share of Western texts is over 80%. A pattern of academic lip-service to diversity and globality permeates some of the most elite institutions and publishers in the West, performatively generating identities and discussions which are often in dialogue with no one but themselves. Aside from the straightforward question of mathematical underrepresentation, however, there are subtler mechanisms at work within the rubric of that vast ocean of a term, “World Literature”. If we take a glance at one of the most prominent journal-magazines in the field, World Literature Today – a journal with an annual digital reach of over half a million, and one that organizes the prestigious Neustadt Prize every other year – we get a sense of what is at stake in the debate (I draw almost all my examples from the past five years). As far as representation goes, World Literature Today has impeccable credentials – each bimonthly issue moves through the planet’s continents, featuring and interviewing writers from a range of countries that would put any anthology or Nobel Prize list to shame. Nor would I deny that there is a qualitative diversity of voices within its pages (Dipika Mukherjee’s excellent piece on Malaysia, for example, or Mandavaille and Naghiyeva’s brief but nuanced article on Azerbaijan’s female poets).22 There is even something refreshing and sincere about the fervor with which World Literature Today hurls itself, article after article, issue after issue, into the centerless depths of the planet’s fiction. In implicit, often subtextual ways however, a certain worldview seems to gradually emerge in many of the magazine’s pieces. It is a worldview which expresses no explicit political position, and seldom makes any obvious show of national allegiance, even if this very absence of an open political identity forms part of its post-ideological politics. For the first-time reader, there are niggling issues – patronizing references to Latin American countries (Carlos Fuentes and his “mission to bring modernity to Mexican literature”23), a kind of tick-box introduction to each non-Western writer (prizes won, fellowships awarded, universities taught24), as though satisfying some invisible formula for inclusion in the magazine. For all the magazine’s surface cosmopolitanism, the eyeballs that wander through the world’s cultures still seem to wear some very Western spectacles – Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories are praised for their attention to Americanization and for embracing issues that are “redefining America”25, while the Mexican Jorge Volpi’s novel on the atomic intrigues of World War II is celebrated over his earlier, less “mature” novels

6 Introduction for being set exclusively in the United States and Europe.26 Interviewers also seem to follow this invisible Western anchoring – the first question put to Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou concerns his time at the College de France; when Aimee Phan asks two writers what other “VietnameseAmerican” writers everyone should be reading, they reply quite reasonably by discussing what Vietnamese writers we should all be reading. As I read through the pages of World Literature Today, I asked myself: would it be unfair to call this an inflight magazine? The emphasis on lifestyle, cultural authenticity, uniqueness and the consumer-freedom to realize one’s desires (in one issue the editor unequivocally equates World literature with freedom27) seems to share the same pain-free, politically anodyne world of the spa-studded magazines we find in the backs of airline seats. The articles on Soviet and post-Soviet literatures presented unproblematically a nuance-free progression from the evils of Communism to the freedom of capitalism28: the persistent questions which appear in every interview (what new writers should we be reading? what new patterns do we see forming?29), questions which tread a fine line between an intellectual curiosity and an eye for emerging markets; perhaps the most devastating similarity with inflight literature lies in the portrayal of cities – as “vibrant and innovative” hubs of creativity and growth (Detroit30), always with “rich” cultural histories and a “wealth” of diversity (Melbourne31), language which seems to borrow directly from gentrification projects and which makes urban literary identity almost synonymous with urban renewal. One article celebrates the ethnic diversity of Delhi, while omitting any mention of the rural poverty which drives so many Biharis, Bengalis, Tamils and Panjabis to the city in the first place.32 From this diversity, we move into a general paean to hybridity: If the twentieth century was about gaining freedom from empire, irrespective of whether the empire was British, French, or Russian, the twenty-first century has shown a penchant for delivering humanity from another kind of imprisonment – that of ethnicity. It is a century where a global pop star singing in English can have a name like Zayn Malik and Pakistani ancestry; … where a Bollywood actress called Priyanka Chopra can play an FBI agent with aplomb on American network television … where America can have a black president. … Crossover is the mantra of the day, and breathing simultaneously in different cultural milieus is commonplace.33 The passage, in its world-is-flat, Thomas Friedman-like version of cultural influence, exemplifies the aversion to any discussion of capitalism, violence and power in mainstream discussions of world literature today. The familiar strategy of neoliberalism to link in our minds the freedom of capital with the freedom of thought finds a subtle echo here in an idealized urban individualism in which nationalisms and rigid ethnic identities (such as Palestinian, African/American, tribal/Adivasi) are always “backward” and “regressive”,

Introduction 

7

set against the freedom of the young professional who can, following the flow of capital, “transcend” these narrow trappings. This is not to claim that huge, clumsy abstracts like “free-market capitalism” or “Eurocentric liberal humanism” can help us neatly explain every development in “World Literature” – each prize given, each record sale, each canonical admission. The mechanisms by which a Turkish or Mexican or Bengali novel finally reaches the eye-level point of sale in your airport bookshop, or gets recommended to you as you check your email, are multiple and beyond the algorithmic: the degree of domestic success behind the book, the ubiquity of the language it is written in, the gender of the author, the size and power of the agent or publisher behind it, the recognizability of the setting or semantic familiarity of the events it deals with.34 There are dominant patterns, however, and it is not simply magazines like World Literature Today which reflect them. If we take those three regions just mentioned – Turkey, Mexico and Bengal – and compare the kind of writers who succeed internationally with those who have not, overarching factors emerge. Orhan Pamuk’s position as Turkey’s most prominent writer was established well before his Nobel Prize, with My Name Is Red / Benim Adım Kırmızı winning the prestigious IMPAC prize in 2003. The two other fiction writers who might have competed for this place – the Seventies writer Oğuz Atay, and the much earlier novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar – are relatively unknown outside Turkey and have either been only recently translated (Tanpınar35) or left in their original Turkish. Whereas some of Pamuk’s books have actually been translated twice (The Black Book/Kara Kitab), Atay’s Tutunamayanlar (literally Those Who Cannot Hold On – considered one of the greatest Turkish novels of the twentieth century) has yet to meet an English-speaking public. The linguistic complexity of Tutunamayanlar, a book which is (among many other things) a response to Joyce’s Ulysses, could be cited as a feasible reason for its international unreadability; Tanpınar’s own vocation as a scholar of nineteenth-century poetry, and the extent to which his politically unwelcome work diminished his reputation in the modernizing Kemalist nation-state36, can also explain the low magnitude of his starlight in the global literary sky. Both of his major novels, Huzur/A Mind at Peace and The Time Regulation Institute/ Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitusu, demand some degree of familiarity with the history of the early Turkish state in order to grasp the tensions in the former novel and the satire in the latter. Pamuk’s most successful novels, on the other hand, either deal with intrigues against an Oriental backdrop of Ottoman Istanbul (Beyaz Kale/The White Castle and My Name Is Red), or interrogate the mystical underpinnings of political Islamism (Snow/Kar). The identity of the self is a constant theme (“Is there a way a man can only be himself?” asks one of his characters).37 While no one should deny Pamuk’s extraordinary novels deserve their international success, it is a success amplified – or perhaps even conditioned – by a series of recognizable

8 Introduction land- and time-scapes, together with Zeitgeist-sensitive themes, buttressed biographically by public political positions which have been courageous but also, at times, not wholly without design.38 Similarly, if we discern certain features in the work of Carlos Fuentes which might facilitate the international digestibility of his oeuvre, this is not to detract from a remarkable writer, but simply to point out how the same visibility eludes other equally remarkable writers (Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, José Emilio Pacheco). That Fuentes remains the most famous face of Mexican literature to the outside world (with perhaps Octavio Paz running a close second) stems only partly from biographical facts – his physical (though not political) closeness to the United States; a fluency in English and a formative part of his childhood spent in Washington; a series of highprofile connections to the world of film (his affair with Jean Seberg produced the novel Diana) and a Hollywood adaptation of his novel The Old Gringo/Gringo Viejo. As with Pamuk, there is a willingness in Fuentes’ most successful texts to interrogate Mexican identity and history in ways that do not exclude outside observers – the invocation of landscapes which will be familiar to the most minimally informed reader (Aztec struggles with the Spanish, Gothic houses with haunted pasts); a frequent use of mythology, often intelligent, sometimes exoticizing (one of Fuentes’ most anthologized stories concerns an Aztec sacrificial altar in the basement of a house39); perhaps most pertinently, a willingness to talk about Mexico and Mexicanness in Spanish for a non-Spanish readership – in vast, world-historical, often tragic terms (a trait he shares with Paz). This self-alienation and renegotiation with one’s national signifier in a work of fiction is not by any means uncritical – in Fuentes’ best work, this historical tone is parodied and mocked even as it is invoked40 – but one clear consequence is that it stages and performs the noun of the nation for the outside observer. The problematic clarity ensuing from this self-othering is not found in Mexico’s most famous novel among Mexicans – Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo – where the word “Mexico” does not occur once. Nor are such inquiries into the labyrinth of national identity ever really present in the alienated narratives of Rosario Castellanos or the intensely personal fiction of José Emilio Pacheco. In the absence of any template (colonialism, nationalism, migration) to present the contingent experience, the particular is barred from entry into the universal, and remains un-exportable, local, opaque. Yeats’ patronage, an anti-colonial struggle, and the propensity of a West forever inclined to choose a mystical India over a material one, all helped to lift Tagore’s genius into the wider currents of World Literature (even if his darker, less benign stories of village violence and marital murder continue to take second place to the transcendental poetry). Among more recent writers from Bengal, however, it is interesting to compare the textual fortunes of Amitav Ghosh and Mahasweta Devi: both fine novelists with a gift for narrative, the former internationally bestselling, the latter critically acclaimed but only really famous within India and Bangladesh. To argue that language

Introduction 

9

accounts for this disparity – Ghosh writes in English, Devi’s work is almost completely in Bengali – offers only a partial explanation (Tagore wrote not only in Bengali but in the purest sadhubashi, while domestically successful novels in English like Upamanayu Chatterjee’s English, August have had only relative success abroad). Neither is a congruency with Western historical narratives necessarily applicable here as a factor – if Ghosh’s work has a single, overarching merit, it is the way his novels either draw attention to little-known imperialist crimes (the British opium trade in India in A Sea of Poppies) or focus on “South-South” cultural relationships that completely exclude the West (an Indian’s experience in Egypt, for example, or Bengali connections to Southeast Asia).41 Finally, this disparity in fame between the two writers can hardly be said to lie in a paucity of Western academic attention when one of Mahasweta Devi’s principal translators and commentators has been Gayatri Spivak, perhaps the most renowned postcolonial scholar and critic today. What might privilege Ghosh’s fiction over Devi’s in an international arena is its attitude to the free movement of capital – whereas novels such as Ghosh’s In An Antique Land implicitly celebrate the old, wiser circulation of trade and commerce as a cosmopolitan model over the narrow-minded, restrictive nation-statism of the present, Devi’s stories of brutality and exploitation strike a much harsher anti-capitalist tone. In various texts (“Doulouti the Bountiful”, “The Arjun Tree”, “The Hunt”), violent collective resistance to the fake charms and patter of the free market is actively encouraged – and individuals who leave their communities almost always end up the victims of terrifying atrocities. If a novel like Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines or A Sea of Poppies extolls the empowering virtues of hybridity, so many of Devi’s stories seem to confirm the power of community – and denigrate the attempts of capital (entrepreneurs, landowners, crooked State actors) to fragment and atomize the collective. In short, an attempted “internationalization” of world literature is taking place, on certain terms, in certain ways. There is no specific center controlling these trends – not the British Council, or the office of Harper Collins, or the Harvard Institute of World Literature, or the New York Times. The effects of these and a multitude of other actors, however, overlap in powerful ways, and produce a situation in which each national book market is split schizophrenically between an international canon and a domestic one. This is a site of constant struggle, and to some degree this struggle is not new (Tagore was possibly one of the first non-Western writers to have to deal with the domestic effect of international fame). What is new, however, is the increasing influence the international readership in a digitally reduced world is starting to exert upon the domestic one– Afghans and Pakistanis reading The Kite Runner and The Reluctant Fundamentalist because they have been made into films; Turkish and Chinese readers turning to Orhan Pamuk and Mo Yan with fresh eyes because of their Nobel laureates. One might also argue – against the above – that the idea of a non-Western literature (or for that matter, non-Western history or even consciousness)

10 Introduction constitutes nothing more than a Rousseauistic pipe-dream. Arif Dirlik (to choose one of the most compelling proponents of this view) makes a powerful case for Eurocentrism as a kind of ineluctable condition, since “the very desire to rescue history from Eurocentrism is entangled in the history of Eurocentrism”.42 Dirlik paints a situation whereby, much like a collection of plants that have grown together inside a cylindrical tube, the world’s cultures have been forced to interact with European modernity as a “[persistent] frame of reference”.43 To ignore this reality – in Dirlik’s terms, to use “de-historicized” concepts of Eurocentrism without addressing the material circumstances through which such Euro-American hegemony came to be – is to be subject to a kind of culturalist naïveté, forever lamenting Shakespeare’s presence in every world language without ever really addressing why this is the case. The problems with this conviction of the impossibility of ever finding non-Western cultural autonomy are numerous. First of all, it underestimates – and sometimes completely overlooks – non-Western influence on the West, and indeed takes place very often in the absence of any empirical familiarity with non-Western traditions (Roberto Dainotto, a professor of Italian literature, asks: “Could one imagine … a Korean theory of the novel written … without Ian Watt?” – a question which, it has to be said, first requires an unfamiliarity with the history of the eighteenth-century East Asian novel in order to be asked).44 Even Dirlik comes close to this, when he suggests it is “probably not” possible for a non-Eurocentric “Chinese or Indian history of the world” to come into being (451)45 – one wonders where the influence of Ibn Khaldun upon figures as diverse as Arnold Toynbee, Borges and Nirad Chaudhuri counts in such an assertion. A series of tremendous assumptions underlie this conviction of the planet’s successful Westernization – assumptions which rely on a linguistic and philological unfamiliarity with many of the world’s non-Western literary traditions (the possibility, for example, that stream-of-consciousness writing may well have emerged before DuJardin in the nineteenth-century Ottoman novel).46 Although Orhan Pamuk, in The Black Book, mocks the more reckless, race-to-the-moon versions of these non-Western candidates for protomodernity (those who claim, for example, “that Ibn ‘Arabi had been the greatest existentialist of all time”47), a provisionary list of the more careful ways in which non-Western traditions have preceded some form or another of Western modernity is impressive. In addition to Turkish precursors to the stream-of-consciousness novel in late Ottoman nineteenth-century texts, we have, for example, elements of the modern nation-state in the Asante empire of precolonial West Africa (Basil Davidson); the fourteenth-century Ibn Khaldun proposed as the first secular historian48; South Asia, in particular, has been a rich source of such “protomodernities”, with Sheldon Pollock discerning early features of modernity in fifteenth/sixteenth-century Sanskrit treatises, while Amartya Sen (in a more popular fashion) has argued for the existence of a thoroughly empirical and skeptical intellectual tradition

Introduction 

11

in the Gupta period (from the fifth century onward) of Indian science and philosophy.49 In terms of literary history, perhaps the greatest lacuna of all concerns the extent to which so many European scholars appear unwilling or unable to acknowledge the non-European origins of the European novel – a series of ancient South Asian narratives, Arabized sometime around the eighth or ninth century, circulating northward into the Maghreb, translated into vernacular European tongues some three or four centuries later and finally making their influence felt on figures as central and constitutive to the European tradition as Chaucer, Cervantes, Boccaccio and Dante. The zeal with which Western influence is detected upon the non-West, it seems, appears to diminish when detecting influences going in the opposite direction. A related problem with this conviction of the ubiquity of the West is that it too easily assumes “engagement” to be “contamination” or even “imitation”. Non-Western poets such as Tagore or Dutt can appropriate Western motifs without becoming versions of them – in the same way it would be unfair to call the European novel “Arab” just because one strand of its genealogy can be traced back (through Cervantes, Chaucer and Boccaccio) to vernacular translations of the Arabian Nights. Tanpınar’s novel Huzur may well be, on some level, a conversation with Joyce’s Ulysses – but its meditations on Ottoman decline, moral rejuvenation and the receding of faith in Forties’ Istanbul make it much more than a Turkish relocation of Stephen and Bloom. More than anything else, assumptions about how irreversibly “Western” the world is today overlook the crucial question of “performativity” – a word in which, we shall see, there is just as much a solution as there is a problem. Many of the things called “Western” in our contemporary discourse (multiculturalism, secularism, democracy, relativism) are more an example of how power structures semantically capture and repackage already extant discourses as their own, rather than evidence of the actual historical expansion of a unique idea. As “Western-ness” performs itself inside and outside the West, it generates and exports a selective amnesia, one which sees everything non-Western as either leading up to it (if it is historically premodern) or a consequence of it (if it takes place after the arrival of the West). Even if an Arab Sufi can write in 1215 “The root of all things is difference”, such an idea will invariably be seen as “prescient” of Saussure50; even if we unpack the modern novel and find all manner of non-European (Arab, South Asian) composite elements, as a phenomenon the synonymy of “Europe” and “novel” is safely in place. Neither deconstruction nor historicism, those two theoretical arms of Western liberal academia, seem to offer a real solution to combatting this process. The Western centering and squaring of the time and space we live in, through Greenwich and Mercator, appears to be a configuration which remains intact even after the most concerted critical assaults upon it. A world literature scholar of some repute (Theo D’Haen) spends half of a wonderful essay unpacking and historicizing the idea of the world map,

12 Introduction but still remains tethered to parameters and concerns that are essentially European (asking, for example, what a historical atlas of Shakespeare’s dissemination around the globe would look like).51A study as powerfully titled as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, groundbreaking in so many ways for its rethinking of the colonial encounter with the modern, not only spends the first third of the book justifying itself to readers of Marx and Benjamin, but also arguably reprovincializes itself in its nearexclusive focus on Westernizing elites in nineteenth-century Bengal.52 Aamir Mufti’s formidable historicizing – and re-Orientalizing – of many of the philological streams which have fed into the river of World Literature leads him to call for a new critical task – that of “untangling and rearranging … the various elements congealed into seemingly distinct and autonomous … literary histories” (128). Like Chakrabarty before him, and in many ways like Apter’s own wish for a “comparatism that recognizes the importance of non-translation … incomparability and untranslatability” (15), the hope is that we can unthink the Eurocentric and colonially defined parameters of the present and extract “submerged ways of thinking” ignored by systemic forces of power. And yet these projects remain epistemological projects, and they fail – or at least, remain incomplete – for three reasons. The first lies in the inability of such approaches to deal with what one might term “congealed” histories – that is, successful mythologies of power so widely disseminated that they have taken on the opacity and solidity of stone (for example, the idea of Europe as the birthplace of not just scientific but also cultural and political modernity). Historicizing the process by which certain narratives acquire ubiquity, or even exposing the keystones of such narratives to be nothing more than a semantic void, may well be valuable first steps – but the question is whether they lead to anything more than a “tremor” (to use Derrida’s phrase53). The question is particularly pertinent in the critiques of origins, where (a skeptic might argue) a certain philosophical naïveté presents itself. In their conviction of the abiding power of the origin, they overlook, or badly miscalculate, the historical staying power of subsequent layers of meaning, even when the origin is revealed to be false or illusory. Once a signifier has been set into motion and has acquired, through time, a significant cluster of historical connotations around it, will the removal and replacement of the initial point of that signifying chain have any effect on the meanings which have subsequently crystallized in its wake? We have just considered the invisibility of the non-European components in the history of the formation of the European novel. Historically, Christian anti-Semites rarely seem to have been troubled by Jesus’ Jewishness, any more than today, in the United States, racist elements in the Republican Party worry over the antislavery origins of their movement. Or, to use a European example: if the name “Athens” really is derived from the Egyptian HtNt (“Temple of the Goddess Neit”),54 how much effect will this really have on the pervasive, Classical power this city-name continues to exert on Europeans today?

Introduction 

13

One might argue that it is unrealistic to expect theoretical critiques to deal with the transubstantiated material effects of successful, established ideology – and I agree that, in the end, it may well be the changing format of geopolitical capital (the emergence of BRIC/MIST countries, for example) that decenters the map of world literature far more effectively than any set of well-intentioned academics. A second problem, however, lies with the commitment of such decentering critiques to the Euro-American object of their criticism. This is a familiar charge, often leveled in the past at postcolonial theorists, and in particular at Edward Said, in whose Orientalism not a single Arab voice is to be found, and whose Culture and Imperialism talks significantly more about Camus, Kipling and Conrad than it does about Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Abdelrahman Munif. Emily Apter herself does an excellent job of detailing how literary critics, past and present, have been “unable to rework literary history” (20) due to what has been memorably called “the Eurochronology problem”,55 even if Apter’s attempt to “wean World Literature from its comfort zone” (450) still remains a comfortably European book, drawing fluently on an impressive canon of High Theory (Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze) and ending on a note of Nietzsche, ecology and Lars von Trier. My observation is not a dismissive one – the exposure of ideology’s trappings is a valuable moment, but to truly unthink the Westerncentered narratives of the present, certainly within World Literature, a more performative vocabulary is needed. I use the word “performative” with reference neither to Butler nor to Austin (the two thinkers most familiarly associated with the word56), but rather in the spirit of theorists like Naomi Klein, who suggests that the best way to overturn a system is not necessarily to fight it, but to construct a space where the claims of that system are made visibly invalid and irrelevant.57 The circumvention implicit in the title of this introduction does not mean to ignore, to overlook, to pretend never happened: to move past the West is more about a sober and accurate evaluation of the contribution of North America and Europe, but within a larger framework that sees them as two actors among many, many others. A reconfiguration, not a removal, of attention; a readjustment of recognition, one which does not necessarily replace Eurocentrisms with Afro- or Sino- or Latino-centricities, but which would be as sensitive to Lahore and Manila and Cairo as it is to Paris and New York. A number of academic gestures exist in this direction, but not nearly as many as there should be. One of the virtues of the half-century old field of Mediterranean Studies (beginning with Braudel and helped on by theorists like Bourdieu) is that it decentered Europe and reimagined it around a Middle Eastern and African shore.58 Although still configured within a North-South hemispheric divide, “South-South” approaches also involve some form of attention to the relationship between non-Western regions, with journals such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East among the most prominent.59 Robert J.C. Young’s “tricontinentalism”,

14 Introduction inspired by the 1966 conference in Havana and embodying the Marxist, anti-imperialist spirit of Che Guevara, Fanon and Ho Chi Minh, has also brought welcome critical focus to the non-Western world, even if – like Pankaj Mishra’s work on al-Afghani, Tagore and Liang Qichao60 – the central theme of anti-colonial struggle risks forever chaining countries like India and Egypt to essentially antagonistic identities, ontologically lockingin their histories to the very powers they have liberated themselves from. A version of this problem haunts (though by no means invalidates) two other recent attempts at “unworlding” the mundum World Literature offers us – Peter Hitchcock’s The Long Space (2010) and Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World? (2016), both of which draw on multi-continental approaches to defamiliarize and dismantle globalized normativities.61 Hitchcock’s invocation of writers from four disparate regions (Indonesia, Guyana, Algeria and Somalia) is intended to illustrate anomalous moments within “a postmodern global episteme” (2), and although more specifically couched within a framework of postcolonial theory, it is perhaps a more ambitious selection than the one Pheng Cheah offers in his fascinating reexamination of World Literature as a “world-making activity” (2). Perhaps one of the most salient effects of Cheah’s book is to warn us against fixating too much on cartography (“literary exchange generates a spiritual world that transcends spatial networks” (6)). Drawing on Heidegger, Arendt and Derrida, Cheah reminds us how all acts of worlding also require “unworlding” – a reference to both the destruction of premodern universes by the colonial juggernaut, but also to “disrupting and resisting the calculations of globalization” (9). The fact that Cheah draws on exclusively English-language writers as a resource for “reworlding the world” (12) – Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca and Timothy Mo – is mildly disappointing, even if this need is understandable within the wider context of showing how “global flows [of capital] destroy worlds” (13). The irony of using Englishlanguage, bestselling writers like Ghosh to foreground the “heterotemporality of precolonial oral traditions” (ibid) – apart from overlooking or ignoring the relationship between language and time – is not a devastating irony, but it does illustrate some of the dangers the use of a “postcolonial South” can entail in the search for an “alternative temporality”. A truly post-Western World Literature would need praxis as well as teoria, and would have to be willing to cross languages as well as continents, and canons as well as worlds. It needs to retain enough of a sense of the colonial to remap and reframe the inherited present, but not so much that it allows Bretton Woods and Bandung to reemerge spectrally in the form of a tacitly configured future. Cartography here (pace Cheah) can be a possibility as well as a limitation – the connecting together of unexpected cities, for example, in unanticipated ways. What did the literary year of 1923 produce in Jeddah, Buenos Aires and Seoul? What was written in 1950 in Mexico City, Istanbul and Calcutta? Common digits do not have to assume common timelines. An examination of genre, carefully delineating the Western

Introduction 

15

influence but within a space that would see effects coming from all sides – the ghost story, for example, in Turkish, Mexican and Bengali fiction, noting what is Victorian in Tagore or Gothic in Fuentes, but keeping equally present the cackle of a folkloric spirit, the echo of a Mayan myth, even the ghost of an Armenian past. No one pretends the difficulties involved in what might be termed “circumventing the West” are not considerable – what do we do, for example, with non-Western writers who fixate on England or France, such as Nirad Chaudhuri or Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar? How do we deal with the Francophilia of the Maghrib (or of Mexico for that matter, or Argentina)? A comparatism subtle enough to recognize the internalization of ideological influence without discounting the significance of an Empire-buttressed modernity has to see the colonial relationship while trying to look beyond it. Looking at a history of Islam in Latin America, or a parallel literary history of Turkey, Mexico and Bengal (or Egypt, Chile and Pakistan, or Jeddah, Buenos Aires and Seoul) might be one such step.

Methodology: Caveats, Reservations, Limitations Which brings us to the aim of this book – and its methodology. Why Mexico, Turkey and Bengal? To some observers, each region may well have characteristics which sharply distinguish it from the other two. Of the three, only Turkey has difficulties producing something equivalent to either adivasi/tribals or pre-Columbian indigenous peoples (to call Kurds, Greeks or Armenians “indigenous” overlooks Turkey’s different history of people settlement); of the three, only Mexico has had no demographically substantive experience of Islam. Moreover, in contrast to Turkey and Bengal, only Mexican writers will sometimes feel a definite ethnic/cultural commitment to Europe as a continent left behind – a sense of belonging and origin unavailable to most Turkish and Bengali writers. Perhaps the starkest distinction lies with Bengal itself – the only region of the three never to have been a modern nation-state, and certainly the only one to regularly employ English on its home soil as an acceptable literary language. The combination of Mexico, Turkey and Bengal should be understood, first and foremost, not as an attempt to define a “true” essence of World Literature, but rather as a usefully provocative alternative: a sequence of non-Western regions which might provide the basis for a fruitful rerouting of global literary conversations. The histories of the regions themselves, on closer examination, yield all kinds of tentative commonalities – and not simply those limited to a South-South-South approach, even if these seem to be the most visible on an initial glance. All three regions have had some form of encounter with Western imperialism – even if this manifested itself in a somewhat different manner in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, where the Turkish War for Independence (Istiklal Savaşı) pursued somewhat different parameters than the independence struggles in Bengal against the British and in Mexico against the Spanish Crown (and

16 Introduction later, of course, against both French and U.S. power). All three regions have a single, dominant metropolis (Istanbul, Calcutta, Mexico City), with nineteenth-century modernizing elites, generally an urban bourgeoisie who have taken it upon themselves to educate both an urban working-class and a rural proletariat; all three sets of elites have brought with them their own religious/secular tensions – whether it is a struggle between the laik and the ulema in Turkey, between an educated bhadralok and deeply Hindu consciousness in Bengal or the kind of conservador/liberal tensions which gave rise to a priest-led insurrection like the Cristero War in Mexico. All three regions have had language issues at the very heart of their identity struggles – whether it is the Romanization of the Turkish script in the 1920s and the long history of discussions leading up to it; the late nineteenthcentury debates in the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua over a central Spanish dictionary for Mexico and disagreements over whether such a dictionary should be monocentric/plurocentric62; or the various debates in Bengali not just between practitioners of the upper caste, more Sanskritbased Shadhubhasha and the colloquial, everyday, more Perso-Arabic Cholitobasha, but also the early twentieth-century arguments around what constitutes vulgar and poetic language.63 The fact that core issues such as these are not merely limited to non-Western countries – the early British nineteenth century, for example, underwent its own series of language debates in the search for a poetic vocabulary that communicated ordinary life – underlines how the methodology of this book is not merely that of a South-South-South approach. All three regions have had their own history of class struggles – either tensions between upper caste and lower caste/Dalit groups, between a ruling aristocratic/ European Mexican class and a campesino/indigenous proletariat, or between an urban, landed upper/middle class (often located in the centers of Istanbul and Ankara) and a Turkish working-class which became increasingly industrial as the twentieth century progressed. Such struggles have led in all three regions to the creation of communist parties – although the trajectory of Mustafa Suphi’s TKP and the Partido Communista Mexicano (founded ironically by a Bengali leftist, Manabendra Nath Roy, in 1917) would never achieve the same success as the much later CPI(M) did in West Bengal. Patriarchy has also been a dominant structure in Turkish, Mexican and Bengali society – with the turn of the twentieth century producing feminist voices such as Halide Edip Adıvar (born 1884), Begum Rokeya (b. 1880) and María Arias Bernal (b. 1884), all of whom had different arrangements of male authority (sometimes secular, sometimes religious, sometimes foreign, sometimes domestic) to confront and navigate. What is perhaps most interesting about these three regions, historically, is the way their own struggles against Western hegemony have produced internalizations of outside dynamics that sometimes reproduced colonizer mentalities. Whether it is the Bengali nostalgia for the lost imperial capital of Calcutta (moved to Delhi in 1911) and the belief that they “co-ruled”

Introduction 

17

India with the British, the pride in the Second Mexican Empire and the treatment of non-Spanish-speaking Mexicans, or the fond recollection in Turkish popular memory of the lost Ottoman territories of the Balkans and the Middle East, all three regions have seen themselves at some time or another as centers of hegemonic power. All these regions have witnessed violent separatist struggles (Naxalites, Zapatistas, Kurds), even if the tone and focus of these movements have been quite different. Finally, as we have said, all three literary traditions have produced – despite their struggles with European colonialism – a certain degree of Eurocentrism: the Anglomania of Nirad Chaudhuri and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the devotion to French literature of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Yahya Kemal, the classicism or general Francophilia of writers such as Alfonso Reyes and Octavio Paz. While these are not merely one-way absorptions of influence (Tanpınar’s Huzur – as we have said – constitutes much more than merely a Turkish version of Ulysses), they are testament to the way peripheral cultural systems can mythologize economically/militarily dominant centers. This final point is reflected in the somewhat canonical versions of Turkish/ Mexican/Bengali literary history I have had to use in this book – canons which are, respectively, Turkish Sunni Muslim/Ladino-hispanophone/upper caste Hindu in nature. If a single thing unites all three literary traditions, it is the way all three have systematically kept Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Mesoamerican-indigenous, Adivasi, Dalit and Bengali Muslim voices out of their modern literatures. The pressure to open up and expand the parameters of “Turkish literature” to include its minorities, past and present, is still part of an ongoing process.64 An estimated 15% of people living in Turkey are of Kurdish origin, and two of the main variants of Kurdish (Kurmanji and Zaza) are widely spoken in the southeast of the country, often on a bilingual basis with Turkish. Although the scholar Muhidine has called Kurmanji “the second language of Turkey’s literature”,65 the struggle to place writers such as the modern novelist Mehmet Uzun and even classical authors such as the seventeenth-century poet Ehmedê Xanî into the Turkish canon remains a difficult one. Even though the first literary translation from a Kurdish text into Turkish took place in 1869, and even though Kurdish was always considered a part of the Ottoman literary tradition ,66 a familiar political amnesia has patrolled the boundaries of what constitutes, even today, a Turkish milli edebiyat (national literature). Kurdish writers, in this respect, may be split up into four categories with regard to the Turkish literary canon: writers in Turkish of Kurdish origin (Cemal Süreyya, Yaşar Kemal, Yılmaz Güney) who do not necessarily consider themselves to be “Kurdish writers” (“I am Kurd too”, as Yaşar Kemal put it, “But I am not a Kurdish writer”67); self-consciously Kurdish writers who write in Turkish because it is the language they are most articulate in (Suzan Samancı, Şeyhmus Diken, Yılmaz Odabaşı – the latter who coined the expression “Türkcede bir Kürt Şair”/“Kurdish poet in Turkish language”68); Kurdish writers who write

18 Introduction in Kurmanji or Zaza, but who because of their Anatolian roots have some degree of traction in the Turkish literary sphere – Mehmet Uzun being the most famous of these figures, but also writers such as Hesenê Metê and the poet Cigerxwin; and then, finally, a category which does not really concern definitions of Turkish literature – Kurdish writers (such as the poet Sherko Bekas) belonging to regions outside Turkey, in Iran, Syria and Iraq, many of whom do not have Diyarbakir but Sulaymaniyah as their literary hub. The question of bilingual Turkish-Kurdish writers, in particular, suggests a porous dimension between the two literary spheres, in many ways reminiscent for Western readers of Irish debates about the status of Irish language and its relationship to the country’s literary output in English. There are novelists, for example Mehmet Uzun, who wrote their fiction in Kurdish but their essays and criticism in Turkish.69 There is also the familiar question of how “secondary” languages ebb and swell and the background of a writer’s unconscious as s/he tries to put their thoughts in a primary one. The scholar Scalbert-Yücel quotes a Turkish-Kurdish poet, Metin Kaygalak: “Even if I write in Turkish, the other languages I know … will enter my poetry. Therefore I cannot produce a clean [temiz] … poem”.70 The ineluctable presence of other languages (Kurdish, Armenian, Greek, Arabic) in a country as historically diverse as Turkey has inevitable implications for the definition of a “national literature”. Although prestigious Turkish literary presses such as Metis have begun to publish translations of Kurdish writers, political circumstances at the time of writing seem to reflect a resurgent nationalist tone in all matters cultural. Selahattin Demirtaş, the Kurdish leader of a Turkish opposition party HDP and also an accomplished writer of short stories, is currently in jail. In terms of Armenian writers, too, Turkish literature is currently undergoing a slow but steady reworking and revising of its conventional boundaries (a process accelerated by the assassination of Hrant Dink in 2007). The satire of Yervant Odian, the memoirs of Zabel Yessayan, the stories of Krikor Zohrab and the poems of Bedros Tourian are all in a process of translation and reevaluation within Turkish scholarship. Turkish-Armenian writers lived and wrote in the same cities as Turks, setting their novels and stories in the same locales. As Mehmet Fatih Uslu points out, the exclusion of Armenian writers from the Turkish literary canon conceals a number of ironies: in 1851, the Armenian Vartan Pasha wrote in Armenian script the very first novel in Turkish (Agapi Story), while Armenian priests authored the first plays in Turkish at the end of the eighteenth century (the latter point, it should be said, acknowledged by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar in his masterly history of nineteenth-century Turkish literature).71 Indeed, the years 1908–1915 – effectively the space between the Young Turks’ revolution and the mass extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire – is seen as a tragically short-lived period of literary promise for Turkish Armenian literature, in which a substantial anthology of famous Armenian short stories was translated into Turkish and circulated widely.72 Yervant

Introduction 

19

Odian even published his famous novel Abdulhamid and Sherlock Holmes simultaneously in Turkish and Armenian during this period.73 Alongside Uslu, Turkish scholars such as Fatih Altuğ, Hülya Adak and Murat Cankara are trying to address some of the ramifications of these lacunae. The presence of indigenous writers within Mexican literature and its canon involves a surprisingly similar set of issues as the Turkish case – particularly concerning the question of hybridity, the institutional (non)recognition of the past, the resistance of the mainstream to disruptive elements and the whole idea of what a minority literature means per se. An estimated 20% of Mexico identifies itself as “indigenous”, with a smaller number (around six million people) speaking one of the country’s 60 indigenous languages. Despite this considerable physical presence, indigenous writing is a peripheral presence on the mainstream literary scene – in bookstores, indigenous poets find themselves placed together not with Mexican poetry but rather under ethnographic sections,74 and poets such as Juan Gregorio Regino see themselves ignored by a “cosmopolitan elite”.75 Although the Roman alphabet began to be used by indigenous groups in the aftermath of the conquest (as early as the 1540s), the explosion in modern, indigenous literature, self-consciously written in languages such as Nahuatl, Maya and Zapotec, has only really begun in the last quarter of the twentieth century. There were certainly famous writers in the Mexican canon of indigenous origin – most notably Ignacio Altamirano (d. 1893), who wrote in Spanish but spoke Nahuatl; at the beginning of the twentieth century, the journal Neza was publishing the poems of the Zapotec poet Pancho Nácar.76 It was in 1994, however, that the first novel in Zapotec (Javier Castellanos Martínez’s The Songs of the Five Winds) was published, and in 2005 the first novel in Maya by a female writer came out (Sol Ceh Moo’s Teya).77 Over the past 20 years, indigenous literature – often through the use of “parallel texts” in Spanish – has acquired a growing presence in Mexican letters, and cultivated audiences inside and outside their own communities (and increasingly, it should be added, outside Mexico). Poets such as Briceida Coevas Cob (Maya), Manuel Espinosa Sainos (Totonac) and Irma Pineda (Isthmus Zapotec) have been translated and published by state bodies, and journals such as Blanco Móvil have dedicated entire issues to indigenous women writers.78 The relationship to Spanish language in all of this has been a controversial one. Some scholars point out how many of the pioneers in this explosion of indigenous literature have been trained as bilingual educators,79 suggesting Spanish has played a key, albeit hidden, role in the growth of contemporary indigenous literature. As with the Turkish-Kurdish poet Metin Kaygalak and his professed inability to write a poem in “clean” Kurdish, the Zapotec poet Victor Terán argues many indigenous poets are thinking in Spanish when they write,80 while at the other extreme of the argument, the Mazatec preacher and poet Prado Pereda avoids Spanish when at all possible.81 Given the fact that almost all the major figures in

20 Introduction contemporary Mexican indigenous literature are bilingual Spanish speakers, the question of the relationship of the colonizer’s language to the indigenous writer’s present is an abiding one. Finally, and unsurprisingly, the realm of what is termed Bengali literature (Bangla sahitya) has also been criticized for its oversights, particularly with regard to Dalit and Muslim writers. Dalit (so-called lower caste or “untouchable”) literature has its modern origins on the other side of India in Maharashtra, as the writer Manoranjan Biyapari points out.82 Although Dalit novelists such as Advaita Mallabarman have achieved some degree of fame (one of the most famous films in Bengali arthouse cinema is Ritwik Ghatak’s adaptation of Mallabarman’s novel, A River Called Titash83), there is a general sense that the cultivation of literary prestige in Bengali literature is very much an upper-caste affair.84 In this respect, the paucity of critical attention to Bangladeshi writers (or, before 1947, Muslim writers from Bengal) also reflects a very Hindu, even Brahminic bias. Z.H. Raju has called Muslims in Bengal “the forgotten majority”85 (half of pre-partition Bengal was Muslim), and this is certainly reflected in the relative absence of Muslim characters in, say, the short stories of Tagore.86 The Eastern half of Bengal, partitioned initially in 1947 into “East Pakistan” and then, after 1971, into Bangladesh, has produced an entire canon of writers that are only now beginning to find visibility across the subcontinent.87 Poets such as Shamsur Rahman and Kaiser Haq, deeply pessimistic prose stylists such as Hasan Azizul Huq, controversial female writers such as Rizia Rahman and the (banned) Taslima Nasrin, not to mention a whole plethora of rising young novelists in English (Adib Khan, Monica Ali, Tahmina Anam) are emerging as an unignorable literary tradition in their own right. I am stressing the internal diversity of the Mexican/Turkish/Bengali literary traditions because this comparative study of three regional literary systems has, to some extent, been forced to adopt the canonical, historically sedimented contours that come with them. In one sense, it leads us to the paradoxical situation whereby, in order to performatively decenter hegemonic centers globally, we have to collude with local hegemonies regionally (similar, perhaps, to the anti-colonial struggles whose movements often adopted an identity not always in harmony with the complex gender, ethnic and class composition of their peoples). Understanding how literary systems work – for example, how their ghost stories and hotel narratives and myth retelling devices function – means, to some extent, accepting the present configurations of such systems. Although absolutely sympathetic to the scholarship that has tried to work against this, this comparative study of three different regions has had to work with the current realities of an already inscribed set of traditions. Or to put it bluntly: one battle at a time. The task of helping to recover and reincorporate an Armenian Turcophone tradition, a Kurdish-Turkish literature, a contemporary fiction in Nahuatl/ Zapotec/Maya, or a Bengali literary tradition replete with Muslim and Dalit names, will have to be left to others.

Introduction 

21

A reader might also ask: why these six motifs – hotels, ghost stories, femicides, myth, melancholy and orientalism? To choose half a dozen “universal” motifs – love, God, death, motherhood, etc. – would have simply reinforced a humanism and overlooked the true subject of this book, which is the becoming-modern of this world. All of the motifs here involve, in some way or another, the project of modernity: whether it is the process of alienation, the demands of an imperial leisure class, the modern subject’s memory of violence, its incessant reconfiguration of the past, and its gradual coming-to-consciousness not just of the patriarchal structures it inhabits, but also the way it “others” everything around it, including its own self. Perhaps one closing point should be emphasized before we move on to the actual texts themselves. The task of this book is to find non-reductive commonalities in literary texts across three different regions. Sometimes these commonalities take place in texts written at approximately the same time; sometimes, they concern stories or novels separated by decades. This study does not always restrict itself to texts from the same historical period because it remains open to the possibility of ahistorical tensions and mechanisms within these texts – the idea of the spectral, for example, an expression of desire, might just as easily find itself in a nineteenth-century ghost story as a twenty-first century novella. This does not mean this approach is identical with that of Frederic Jameson, even though I have a great deal of sympathy with his work. The three chosen regions are not going to be studied because their literature somehow represents what Fredric Jameson infamously labeled “Third World literature”. My approach here, while sharing some initial premises of Jameson’s, is distinctly different. This book agrees with Jameson’s assertion that texts from developing countries all reflect “a life-and-death struggle with first world cultural imperialism … and modernization” (68); to a lesser extent, it also acknowledges the validity of seeing cultural and psychic structures as being “objectively determined by economic and political relationships” (76). This does not mean, however, that texts from Mexico, Bengal or Turkey are “necessarily allegorical” (69), or that literature from these regions are somehow more consciously allegorical than so-called First World literature (79). Many critics have rightly taken issue with the First Class/Third Class binary that follows on from this juxtaposition of a Western literature, unconscious, subtle, private and idiosyncratic, and a non-Western literature, crude and explicit, always public and allegorical. What this book will examine, through the lens of devices such as the ghost story and the theme of melancholy, is how parallel modernities may or may not develop in the literatures of three very different regions. Some of the points we raise will also be valid for the literary histories of England or the United States; other observations may have to rely on the specific colonial histories of the country concerned. At no point, however, will Bengalis, Mexicans and Turks be lumped together as “Third World writers”.

22 Introduction

Notes 1 “World Lite: What Is Global Literature?” editors of n+1, Issue 17 (Fall 2013). 2 A.N. Kaul, “A Reading of the Shadow Lines” taken from Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 308. 3 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature” Novel Summer 40:3 (2007) pp. 216–239. 4 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003) p. 281. 5 See, for example, Franco Moretti, “The Novel: History and Theory” New Left Review 52 (July/August 2008) pp. 111–126. 6 Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Joseph Slaughter, “World Literature as Property” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 34 (2014) p. 66; Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013) p. 49. 7 Although Damrosch argues that his use of the image on his cover shows how the Orient defies all attempts to measure it, his praise of Napoleon in Egypt (302) and the time and attention he devotes not so much to Gilgamesh but to its English translators reveal a book perhaps not quite as detached from Orientalism as his praise of Said would have us believe. 8 Apter, Against World Literature, p. 190. 9 Cited in J.M. Clark, Meister Eckhart (London: Nelson & Sons, 1957) p. 159. The original idea can be found in Chapter 8 of De Trinitate. 10 Mufti, Forget English!, p. 58. 11 See, for more, Derek Bryce, “The Absence of Ottoman, Islamic Europe in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism” Theory, Culture & Society 30:1 (2013) pp. 99–121. 12 Apter, Against World Literature, pp. 15, 189. 13 Ibid., p. 67. 14 Ibid., p. 86. Numerous critics have criticized Moretti and other world-systems theorists of literature for a reductive, quantifying approach – see most recently F. Orsini and L. Zecchini, “The Locations of (World) Literature: Perspectives from Africa and South Asia” Journal of World Literature 4 (2019) p. 2. 15 https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​003​/o​​ct​/12​​/feat​​​ures.​​ficti​​on. Accessed 16 November 2016. 16 Martin Puchner (ed.), The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume 2 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013) Shorter 3rd Edition. The anthology has approximately 523 pages out of a total of 1765 allotted to non-Western writers. Goethe receives 112. 17 Martin Puchner, David Damrosch, Vinay Dharwadker, Theo D’Haen. Gayatri Spivak has also critiqued the culture of U.S. literary anthologies in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) p. 39. 18 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) p. 82 ff. 19 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997) p26 20 David Damrosch and David L. Pike (eds), The Longman Anthology of World Literature Volume E: Nineteenth Century (New York: Pearson, 2009). 21 Ibid. 22 Dipika Mukherjee, “What to Read Now: Malaysia” World Literature Today (January–February 2016) p. 6; Alison Mandaville and Shahla Naghiyeva, “Five Younger Women Poets from Azerbaijan” World Literature Today (March– April 2016) pp. 22–24. 23 Thomas E. Case, “Carlos Fuentes, Mexico and Modernity” World Literature Today (Summer 1999) n. 73 p. 3.

Introduction 

23

24 Michelle Johnson, “Beyond ‘Whereverness’: A Conversation with Tabish Khair” World Literature Today (July/Aug 2009) pp. 17–19. 25 Rita D. Jacobs, “Review of The Lowland” World Literature Today (January– February 2014) pp. 58–59. 26 Ilan Stavans, “En busca de Klingsor” World Literature Today 74:3 (Summer 2000) p. 677. 27 Daniel Simon, “Editor’s Note” World Literature Today (May 2016). 28 Daneil Simon, “Editor’s Note” World Literature Today (November–-December 2011) p. 3; Anastasia Edel, “Three Quintessential Books to Add to Your ‘Russian Masters’ List” World Literature Today (March/April 2016) p. 6; Michaela Burilkovova, “Review of Slavenka Drakulić. A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism” World Literature Today (May/June 2011) pp. 60-–61. 29 See Johnson, “Beyond ‘Whereverness’ A Conversation” and also Daniel Simon, “Editor’s Note” World Literature Today (September 2016) no. 90, p. 3. 30 Mickey Lyons, “Literary Detroit: A Marriage of Poetry and Pragmatism” World Literature Today (September 2016) p. 5. 31 Jackie Lamoureux, “Melbourne, City of Literature” World Literature Today (March 2016) p. 5. 32 Vikram Kapur, “Delhi: 21st Century City” World Literature Today (May/August 2016) pp. 36–39. 33 Ibid., p. 38. 34 For an impressive overview of the material basis of the global publishing industry, see Ann Steiner, “World Literature and the Book Market” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds) (London: Routledge, 2011) pp. 316–324. 35 The English translation of Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitusu is by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, The Time Regulation Institute (London: Penguin, 2013). 36 See Jale Parla, “The Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel” PMLA 123:1 (2008) pp. 27–40. 37 Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book/Kara Kitab, trans. Güneli Gün (London: Faber, 1997) p. 156. 38 See Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013). 39 “Chac-Mool” can be found in Carlos Fuentes, Burnt Water, trans. Margaret Sayers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). Ryan Long considers it a story which “warns against fetishizing the past” – Ryan Long, “The Institution of Fiction: From Yáñez, Rulfo, and Fuentes to Pitol and Del Paso” in A History of Mexican Literature, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Anna M. Nogar, José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra (eds) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) p. 265. 40 For example, Carlos Fuentes, A Change of Skin, trans. Sam Hileman (London: Penguin Books, 1968). 41 Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London: Vintage, 1994) and Sea of Poppies (London: Picador, 2009). 42 Arif Dirlik, “History without a Center?” p. 432 in Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective, Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedict Stuchtey (eds) (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) pp. 429–492. 43 P. 433. 44 Roberto Dainotto, “World Literature and European Literature” p. 425 in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds) (London: Routledge, 2012) pp. 425–434. 45 One is reminded of Derrida making a similar assertion with regard to a world philosophy of the future – see Derrida on how any philosophy of the future will have to come either from Europe or from a European philosopher outside

24 Introduction Europe. In an interview with Giovanna Borradori, in Borradori, G., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Juürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 116–117. 46 The Turkish scholar Berna Moran claims this in referring to Recaizade Ekrem’s novel Araba Sevdasi – cited in H. Adak, “Exiles at Home: Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies” PMLA 123:1 (2008) p. 24. 47 Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, trans. Güneli Gun (Faber, 1995) p. 73. 48 Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden (New York: Times Books, 1992) p. 59; Berna Moran is referring to Recaizade Ekrem’s novel Araba Sevdasi – cit. in Hülya Adak, “Exiles at Home: Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies” PMLA 123:1 (2008) p. 24; for Ibn Khaldun as “the first propounder of a secular philosophy of history” see Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Clive of India: A Political and Psychological Essay (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975) p. 20. 49 Sheldon Pollock, “New Intellectuals in Seventeenth Century India” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 38:1 (2001); Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (Penguin, 2005) pp. 26 ff 50 William G. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love (SUNY, 1989) p. 67 – cit. in Ian Almond, Sufism and Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 2004) p. 104. 51 Theo D’Haen, “Mapping World Literature” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds) (London: Routledge, 2012) pp. 413–422. 52 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000). 53 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press, 1987) p. 91. 54 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) vol. 1 p. 51. 55 Apparently coined by Arjun Appadurai but found in Christopher Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters” in Debating World Literature, Christopher Prendergast (ed.) (New York: Verso, 2004) p. 6. 56 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” Theatre Journal 40:4 (December 1988) pp. 519–531; J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 57 Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (London: Picador, 2002) p. 220. 58 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London and New York: University of California Press, 1972–1973). 59 Even if CSSAAME is perhaps more interregional in its title and selection of articles than in the articles themselves. 60 Robert J.C. Young, “Postcolonialism: From Bandung to the Tricontinental” Historein 5 (May 2006) pp. 11–21; Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia (Picador, 2011). 61 Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010) and Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 62 For more on this, see Bárbara Cifuentes, “The Politics of Lexicography in the Mexican Academy in the Late Nineteenth Century” in A Political History of Spanish, José Del Valle (ed) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) pp. 167–181. 63 See Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal” in Literary Cultures in History, Sheldon Pollock (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) pp. 551 ff

Introduction 

25

64 For a comprehensive collection of essays trying to address the literary atmosphere of Ottoman Istanbul in its entirety (Kurds, Greeks, Persian speakers, Bulgars, Armenians), see Mehmet Fatih Uslu and Fatih Altuğ (eds), Tanzimat ve Edebiyat: Osmanlı İstanbulu'nda Modern Edebi Kültür (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Yayınları, 2014). 65 Timour Muhidine, La littérature turque á l’aube du millénaire: 1999–2000, Les dossiers de l’IFEA 2 (Istanbul: Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes Georges Dumezil, 2000), 11 – cit. in Clémence Scalbert Yücel, “Languages and the Definition of Literature: The Blurred Borders of Kurdish Literature in Contemporary Turkey” Middle Eastern Literatures 14:2 (2011) p. 183. 66 An Ottoman-Turkish translation of Xanî’s Mem û Zîn by Ahmed Faik – see Selim Temo Ergül, “An Overview of Kurdish Literature in Turkish” in Tradition, Tension and Translation in Turkey, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Saliha Paker and John Milton (eds) (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015) p. 260. 67 Cit. in Scalbert Yücel, “Languages and the Definition of Literature” p. 179. 68 Cit. in Clémence Scalbert-Yücel, “Emergence and Equivocal Autonomization of a Kurdish Literary Field in Turkey” Nationalities Papers 40:3 (2012) p. 366 – there is even an issue of the journal Yasakmeyve (number 6: 2004) devoted to “Kurdish Poets Writing in Turkish”. 69 Scalbert Yücel, “Languages and the Definition of Literature” p. 182. 70 Cit. in Scalbert-Yücel, “Emergence and Equivocal Autonomization” p. 366. 71 Mehmet Fatih Uslu, “Armenian Literary Studies in Turkey and New Prospects” New Perspectives on Turkey 53 (2015) p. 192. For more on Tanpınar‘s Armenians, see Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, On Dokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (İstanbul: Çağlayan Basimevi, 1988) pp. 278–282. 72 Uslu, “Armenian Literary Studies” p. 195 – the anthology was Sarkis Srents, Ermeni Edebiyatı Numuneleri (İstanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2013). 73 Uslu, “Armenian Literary Studies” p. 195. 74 Wendy Call, “To Be an Indigenous Woman Poet in Mexico: An Artistic Act of Protest, Resistance and Battle” Diálogo 17:4 (2014) p. 41. 75 Ángel Vargas, “México debe reconocer su carácter multilingüe: Escritores en riesgo de extinción, varias lenguas indígenas” La Jornada (8 December 2004). http:​/​/www​​.jorn​​ada​.u​​nam​.m​​x​/200​​4​/12/​​08​/0​7​​an1cu​​l​.php​ 76 Call, “To Be an Indigenous Woman Poet” p. 42. 77 Javier Castellanos Martínez, Wila che be ze lhao / Cantares de los vientos primerizos (Oaxaca: Instituto Estatal de Educación, 2007); Sol Ceh Moo, X-Teya, U puksi’k’al ko’olel / Teya, un corazón de mujer (Mexico City: Conaculta, 2008). Cit. in Gloria Elizabeth Chacón, Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab'awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) p. 132. 78 Call, “To Be an Indigenous Woman Poet”, p. 44. 79 Kelly McDonough and Gustavo Zapoteco Sideño, “Indigenous Literatures of México” in A History of Mexican Literature, Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, Anna M. Nogar, José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016) p. 403. 80 Paja Faudree, “What Is an Indigenous Author?: Minority Authorship and the Politics of Voice in Mexico” Anthropological Quarterly 87:4 (2015), p. 20. 81 Ibid., p. 22. 82 Manoranjan Byapari and Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Is There Dalit Writing in Bangla?” Economic and Political Weekly 42:41 (October 13–19, 2007) p. 4117. 83 Advaita Mallabarman, A River Called Titash, trans. Kalpana Bardhan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

26 Introduction 84 Byapari and Mukherjee, “Is There Dalit Writing in Bangla?” p. 4119. 85 Z.H. Raju, Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity: In Search of the Modern? (New York: Routledge, 2015). 86 William Radice comments on how Islam, the faith of most of Tagore’s tenants, is ‘almost completely absent’ from the stories; Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories, trans. William Radice (Penguin, 1991) p. 15. 87 Mainly, it should be said, thanks to the efforts of translators and anthologists like Arunava Sinha and Kalpana Bardhan.

1

The Ghost Story Hayalet, Fantasma, Bhut

But now that he was a ghost, he realized that his primary problem was that he was the past, not the present. –Hasan Azizul Huq, “The Agony of the Ghost”1

A ghost story is usually about an interruption. One reality interrupts another, one musical performance disturbs another already in play. Two worlds, two times, bump into one another, sometimes antagonistically, sometimes collaboratively. In some texts, a struggle takes place as two different temporalities vie for control of the same building or person; in others, the two worlds merge and overlap harmoniously, content to mirror one another without intruding to the point of primacy. The idea of an interruption as the central premise of the modern ghost story or “episode” sits against a familiar critical background: that ghosts are a symptom of repression, that their presence – the way they leak into fiction, film, music and popular mythology – is somehow a consequence of massive psychic self-regulation, be it on a personal or societal level, an individual or collective memory. Lacan would say that we ourselves are the ghosts of our own body; our consciousness haunts the bag of fat, fluid and bone we are tenuously linked to.2 Hence the idea of the ghost as a symbol of the “unsettled accounts” of the symbolic order3 – the spectral, for both Lacanian theorists and deconstructionists, illustrates a certain, ever-elusive gap in the symbolic order, the ineluctable flaw inherent in every representational project. Over three decades of “spectral studies” have been concerned with identifying the ghostly with some form of repressed historiography, social tension or sexuality. The cultures we are talking about here do not have a common religious background. The Koranic notion of jinn – spirits in the Islamic tradition which can either be good or evil – has no immediate equivalent in the other two cultures; the colonial fissure which runs through Mexican history, producing a Catholic culture which is permeated to varying degrees with strains of a precolonial Aztec/Mayan mythology, cannot be found in its entirety in

28  The Ghost Story Bengali or Turkish contexts. The presence of the Adivasi/tribal in Bengali literature – and the extent to which the tribal is involved in the uncanny in Bengali fiction4 – is an indigeneity it shares with the Mexican experience but which, as we said in the introduction, for historical reasons distinguishes it from Turkey (while there are ethnic groups in Turkey which are no longer present, it would be difficult to think of an indigenous group in the South Asian/Mesoamerican sense of the word). Despite all of these cultural/historical differences, we are going to examine a very specific formula of ghost story, one which appears and reappears across all three literatures. Each of the six texts we are looking at involves a haunted structure or place, and a male protagonist who either has a relationship with the ghost or becomes a ghost himself. In almost all of these stories, the protagonist is eventually absorbed into his haunted environment. The texts, by writers as diverse as Tagore, Fuentes, Rulfo and Tanpınar, vary enormously in all sorts of ways: some are comic, others bleak and tragic; some of the fictional ghosts try to help, others are malevolent; in some texts a rational observer is visible and assertive, in others they are almost absent. Taken together, the texts span a period of over 60 years (the oldest story was published in 1895, the most recent in 1962). However, the theme of the ruin which connects with, and eventually appropriates and consumes whoever steps inside it, remains a constant. This chapter will argue that there is something about spectrality – and the relationship of both haunter and haunted to a variety of different themes (race, property, history, sex) – that can be discerned in stories with provenances as far apart as Calcutta, Mexico City and Istanbul, and that such an approach can tell us something valuable about what it means to read comparatively without reading Eurocentrically. Critical interest in the spectral has a fairly long historical background. Long before Derrida’s Specters of Marx (which for many constituted a “spectral turn”5), figures such as Adorno were already speculating on the relationship between occultism and commodification (“the Occultist draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish character of commodities”, wrote Adorno in 1951 – with the occultist forgetting that a world obsessed by products are produced by men, and “mis-remembering” such energies as a “being-in-itself”6). Alongside the spectral and the haunted, the idea of the ruin – what Benjamin called “petrified life”7 – has also been a subject of much critical discourse, even leading to talk of what Ann Laura Stoler calls “ruins theory”.8 As ruined/abandoned/forgotten houses feature in each of our six stories, Stoler’s wonderful definition of ruins as “sites that condense alternative senses of history”9 sets a powerful platform for our claim: that in the wake of empires (Ottoman, Second Mexican/Aztec, Moghul) the ghost story operates as a kind of leak. The discharge is not always threatening and subversive – sometimes it can even be protective and compensatory. Symbolic orders can creak

The Ghost Story  29 and groan under the weight of many different kinds of forces: a new, moneyed-class; a fresh religion; a gendered anxiety; or memory of a murdered race. If imperial cultures offer ways of configuring and coagulating certain ideas and values, then their breakup and decay can be witnessed under the guise of many different formats: a shift in social class, the loss of masculinity, the appeal to mythic memory, even the reordering of a certain kind of time. As I hope to show, ghosts appear in such moments as gas leaks. They escape through the cracks of symbolic edifices in moments of change, and the meaning of their disruptive presence cannot be limited to a single content or purpose.

Bhut The Bengali word for ghost, as Suchitra Samanta points out, has little to do with the Western image of the ghost – less a posthumous echo of the living, more a broad collection of varied, independent entities (headless ghosts, child-haunters, flying vampires, even harabhoot or ghosts that try to drown people10). One of the key differences between the modern and the premodern bhut is its location – if the traditional Bengali ghost-spirit resided in woods and ponds, the modern Bengali ghost is very much a creature of the house. Whether this is due to the influence of the Victorian Gothic – as one critic suggests11 – or a more general consequence of mid-nineteenth urbanization in Bengal, this linking of the spectral with some form of property possession is prevalent (in another of Tagore’s stories, a ghost actually comes back to its house to claim its jewelry).12 The idea of a subject becoming alienated from itself – becoming a ghost of itself – through the modern act of property accumulation is an idea that becomes especially relevant to the Banerji story we are going to examine. Both Rabindranath Tagore and Bibhutibhushan Banerji were known as writers of ghost stories, and the two stories we are showcasing – Tagore’s “Kshudita Pasan/The Hungry Stones” and Banerji’s “Maya/A Strange Attachment” – were written almost 30 years apart. We shall not examine the most obvious link between the two stories: the magnetic, consuming attachment which draws the protagonist into the haunted locale to consume him (reflected in the English re-titling of the Banerji story). Tagore calls this a “strange attraction” (apurbo nesha13), and it certainly suggests some enigmatic, elusive element which the desperate protagonists of both stories need to obtain in order to complete their identity. A subtler yet more pressing motif, however, one which extends throughout all of these ghost stories, is that of Empire. In “The Hungry Stones”, this idea is best understood as the memory of power. Tagore’s famous story of a tax-collector who visits a ruined Moghul palace near his place of work and becomes deranged by the ghostly visions he sees has empires past and present running through it. “The Hungry Stones” is a text which meditates on the death, and ghostly persistence, of Empire, blending the recollection

30  The Ghost Story of an imperial Moghul past with a Bengali Hindu Orientalist fantasy of Islam: About 250 years ago Shah Mahmud II built the palace as a private pleasure dome [bhogbilasher jonnno prashadti]. In those days there were rose-scented fountains in the bathrooms: young Persian concubines sat in seclusion on cool marble… Those fountains play no longer … there is no-one to inhabit the palatial emptiness of the place but a single, lonely tax-collector. … At first the desolation of the palace oppressed me like a weight on my chest. … The whole building seemed alive: it was sucking me in, its powerful stomach-juices were digesting me slowly.14 With its mention of “rose-scented fountains”, Persian concubines and palatial fountains, Tagore’s text deliberately creates a resurrected pocket of Perso-Arabic imagery in a politically post-Islamic time. The fact that such a description takes place within the domain of Tagore’s highly Sanskritized Bengali (shadhubhasha) accentuates the irruption of Perso-Arabic time into the language of the upper-caste narrator’s story. The British Romantic borrowing of some of the Orientalist landscape (particularly from Coleridge) is clear, and in many ways turns the piece into a symptomatic Bengali Hindu description of Islamic culture present elsewhere, not just in Tagore’s work but also in writers such as Michael Madhusudan Dutt.15 Moreover, the idea of a ruined palace which recovers in a ghostly fashion its historical splendor we will find almost perfectly replicated in the Mexican and Turkish stories (Fuentes and Tanpınar) that follow – and with this replication, perhaps a repressed awareness of the potency of history. Tagore’s text is, Arabian Nights-style, a tale within a tale, a tale told on the platform of a railway station. As the tax-collector becomes more and more obsessed with the Perso-Islamic visions he glimpses, he becomes a Moghul himself (“I took on a strange alter ego … I dressed very carefully in baggy pajamas, flowerpatterned kurta, red velvet fez, a long silk choga”16), until the tale is interrupted by another empire – this time in the form of an arriving train with an Englishman inside, who promptly takes the narrator away into his own compartment. It is important to note that in this intercourse between two empires, past and present, Bengali Hindu identity is almost completely effaced. The Bengali Babu who tells the story first makes his audience think “he was a Muslim from Northern India”;17 apart from the theosophist relative who never speaks throughout the story, the nearest reference we get to any kind of Hinduism is the brief mention of a nearby river’s Sanskrit etymology in the opening pages. In other words, the ghost story textually replicates its imperial subject matter by smothering the Hindu identity of its inhabitants. It is as though Tagore plays a kind of imperialism himself here, turning his Hindus into Muslims, bringing in Englishmen to interrupt the story at will.

The Ghost Story  31 Tagore’s ghost story spectralizes, feminizes and ultimately sexualizes this memory of power. The most obvious way to read this phantom tale, interrupted by the Englishman on his train, would be that of a recurring Romantic fantasy resurrected against a sterile Enlightenment modernity – the exoticism of past empires set against the banal contemporaneity of a present one. And yet, although no alternative is offered, neither of these imperialisms are really attractive – one deflates, the other consumes. A kind of nihilism emerges in these stories not just from this absence of alternatives, but also from the protagonist’s inability to abandon the influence of Empire – be it Moghul or, as we shall see later on, Ottoman or Second Mexican. Tagore’s hopeless protagonist hovers between Queen Victoria and Shah Mahmud Khan with no real identity of his own, other than a theosophist relative and a Sanskrit river-name. So easily does our Hindu friend don kurta, fez and baggy pajamas; one might be forgiven for thinking he is a phantom too. We are moving toward a somewhat bleak reading here: that ghosts represent a certain awareness, and a certain kind of despair. An awareness that all our identities ever really are, are the products of power structures and material environments – and a despair that all a quest for selfhood can ever involve is a choice between a finite number of such structures. No discovery of some deeper, abiding essence (the kind Tagore, in certain moments, certainly seemed to believe about Indian identity18), then, but rather the idea of the self as some ghostly aftereffect of power, an echo of ideology, a mere hiccup of hegemony. This nihilism can be found in another Bengali ghost story, Bibhutibhushan Banerji’s “Maya”/“A Strange Attachment”. Banerji’s tale shares some structural similarities with that of Tagore: the protagonist comes across a large, abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, a house he is warned against staying in. Like Tagore’s palace, he begins to see visions there, including a troop of phantom dancers and a ghostly female whose appearance is accompanied by the fragrance of Jasmin. Like Tagore’s magical ruin, the house begins to possess the (also nameless) narrator, consuming him until he becomes a ghost himself. Banerji’s story differs insofar as its theme of Empire is implicit, not explicit. No Englishman or Moghul appears in the story, no reference to British rule or the Independence movement, which was in full swing when the story was being written. And yet, although Banerji is widely (and inaccurately) romanticized as a rural, apolitical writer,19 there are good reasons for seeing a ghost story such as “Maya” as operating on one level at least as a colonial allegory. That the haunted house itself may possess some symbolic significance as a political project is suggested first of all by the name of its mysterious owner, Mr Chakrabarti, the absentee landlord whom we briefly see chat to the protagonist – and whom we never meet again. The Sanskrit term cakravartin (in Pali cakka vatti), often translated as “emperor” or “world-conqueror”, literally means “wheel-turner” (cakra vartayati) – a figure blessed with supernatural powers that turns the wheel of world events, and whose appearance signifies

32  The Ghost Story the passage from age (yuga) to age. The cakravartin, in other words, is the closest idea we have in Hinduism to the messianic.20 At the beginning of the ghost story, the protagonist promises Mr Chakrabarti to look after the house in his absence until his return, quite unaware of its haunted nature. We have spoken of the ghost story as revolving around an interruption, and “Maya” is a particularly apt example of this, as the text really concerns the coexistence of two times: the “real” time of the protagonist outside the house, and the “haunted” time of the poor man as he stays inside the building, waiting for Mr Chakrabarti to return. Banerji’s narrative genius lies in having an outsider from the village tell the protagonist all this at the end of the story: All the people who’ve stayed in that house before kept seeing some strange woman there [ekti baike dekhto okhane ]. In the end things reached the point where they simply refused to budge from the house. They just got thinner and thinner and wasted away until they finally died. … It goes like this. First the person becomes strangely attached to the place [tader kandojnana thakena] so he won’t move from it; then he loses interest in eating and he refuses to go anywhere else.21 The idea of being “strangely attached” recalls the “strange attraction” (apurbo nesha) of the Tagore story – the possibility that the narrator sees in the haunted structure the resolution of his lack, and locates in the ghost the completion of his own fissured subject. That “Maya” might not be just a simple ghost story, but a much deeper comment on the futility of the political project, is not merely to be surmised from the politically volatile time it was written in. The tale also has a non-supernatural sister story, “Uncle Bhandul’s House”/“Bhandul Mamar Bari”, about a man who tries and fails to build the house of his dreams in his thickly overgrown village; as the village dies away and the children move to Calcutta, the house remains an unfinished parody of itself, standing in the middle of the jungle much like Mr Chakrabarti’s. An explicit reference to the narrator’s youthful involvement in India’s Independence movement (p. 106) suggests that the occupying and abandonment of derelict buildings in Banerji’s stories expresses a deeper political cynicism about all ideological structures and projects, including those of the aspiring nation-state. Just because Empire is somehow involved in all of the stories we are examining does not mean it has the same function and meaning in each story. This is not simply because each of the regions deals with a different Empire – Tagore’s ghosts belong to the memory of Bengal’s Muslim past, while (as we shall see) Tanpınar’s hallucinatory visions evoke an Ottoman legacy, and Fuentes’ sinister ghost-aunt was a teenage beauty during the time of Maximillian I and Mexico’s Second Empire. For Tagore, the ghostly memory of Empire is a memory of pleasure; there is something at once opiate and exotic about it, a demarcator of the modern present as something

The Ghost Story  33 bureaucratic and banal; Tanpınar will also use the spectral visions of the Ottoman past to inflect the secular present, but this time as something rational and sober. In our Mexican example, Empire will signify work more than anything else – the archival labor necessary to reinscribe the past into the present. If one can speak at all of a ghostly direction, of the direction a ghostly sphere takes in a story, then in all of these stories the ghostly empires involved move in very different trajectories – some advance aggressively upon the “real” world, some lie perennially in wait as an option for the disenchanted, some occupy a middle ground, accompanying the “real” protagonist only in certain crucial moments. And yet the vein of Empire runs through all of these tales, providing a rich substratum of forgotten/ defunct power. Whether there is a logic concerning the relationship the ghosts have in these stories to the Empires which lie beneath them is unclear. In the majority of texts, some kind of lost primacy is yearned for – Tagore’s Muslim palace temporarily regains control over its Hindu protagonist, just as (we shall see) the pre-Kemalist world of Ottoman Istanbul is resurrected in the mind of Tanpınar’s madman; in Fuentes, the Aztec or Second Mexican Empire (depending on your interpretation) is eerily revived within the walls of the old woman’s house – and through the sacrifice of the historian who has come to work for her. In some of the ghost stories, at least, empires seem to compensate for their actual obsolescence through some kind of phantasmal resurrection – perhaps employing the same dialectic of being/non-being by which power structures have always sought to solidify themselves by speculating paranoically on the date of their future demise.22

Fantasma Ghost stories express the refusal of history to remain history, and one common characteristic of all the stories in our selection – and especially of the Mexican stories – is an explicit and conscious treatment not just of History per se, but also of the manner in which it is revealed and occluded.23 Carlos Fuentes’ 1962 novel Aura is the most striking example of this desire to examine, through the genre of the ghost story, the discipline of history itself. If another name for a historian is a ghost-hunter – someone who dedicates their lives to the pursuit and capture of the spectral – then Aura is a novel about a ghost-hunter who becomes a ghost. By the end of the book, the historian himself becomes a part of the history he has been called to study. However, many ironies may lie in this eventual archiving of the archivist,24 certainly one of them leads us to reflect on a relationship between history and the ghost story which is found in almost all our texts: Tagore’s mysterious narrator invokes the history of the pleasure-palace, and his interrupted tale ends with the promise of another history-lesson to unfold; Rulfo’s classic novel is all about the history of the town the narrator is visiting, and how much one can/should know about it; in our Turkish examples to come,

34  The Ghost Story Tanpınar’s obsession with tarih (history) puts histories and historians into the center of both his major novels, the dying scholar Ihsan in Huzur and the fictitious biography of the medieval Shaykh in The Time Regulation Institute. Aura surpasses all of these in its selection of a historian and a history as the central plot and protagonist of its text. An old woman and her niece invite a young historian into their home to compile and rewrite the memoirs of the widow’s dead husband – a famous general from the Second Franco-Mexican War, and a subject whose ghostly persona the young historian eventually adopts: The same evening you read those yellow papers written in mustardcolored ink, some of them with holes where a careless ash had fallen, others heavily fly-specked [manchados por moscas]. General Llorente’s French doesn’t have the merits his wife attributed to it. You tell yourself you can make considerable improvements in the style, can tighten up his rambling account of past events: his childhood on a hacienda in Oaxaca, his military studies in France, his friendship with the intimates of Napoleon III, his return to Mexico on the staff of Maximillian, the imperial ceremonies and gatherings, the battles, the defeat in 1867, his exile in France. … As you undress you think of the old lady’s distorted notions [el capricho deformado de la anciana], the value she attributes to these memoirs. You smile as you get into bed, thinking of the four thousand pesos.25 The unusual use of the second person incorporates the reader into a dialectical process with both the textual protagonist and the physical author of the book – in much the same way Felipe, the historian, is incorporated into History to re-emerge (now aufgehoben) as the reincarnated General. Interwoven with the memory of Empire, a novel such as Aura tells us several things about the formula of the ghost story we have chosen. First of all, the absorption of the protagonist into their environment is a comment on the potency of history – and the impotency of the historian. What exactly is being mocked here? The deific pretense of the historian to remain separate from and in control of the subject they examine. In Fuentes, the thought-trains and cynical, arrogant calculations of the historian (Felipe) acquire an increasingly foolish air as the trap closes around him. At least one critic has recognized the modern Mexican academic in the doomed figure of Felipe,26 and the pathos of becoming the memory you were trying to record appears to offer, from a certain angle, a conservative indictment of modernity within the pages of the novel (this possibility of the ghost story as the most conservative of genres we will return to later on). To doubt the strength of the historian – and to see History as a ghost which ultimately envelops all – is to see all recognition as a deluded form, sooner or later, of misrecognition. A novel in which a young scholar plans to use an old woman’s fading memories for material gain – and ends up,

The Ghost Story  35 on the contrary, being used by her as a supernatural vehicle for her dead husband’s ghost – barely conceals a deep contempt for the all-purveying, omni-perspectival arrogance of modernity and the past it feels so comfortably in control of. Among the many characteristics Aura shares with the other ghost stories here – female malevolence, a subtext of Empire, the entrapment of a male protagonist, loss of identity, even an element of Messianism – lies a possible fear of the memory of race. Susan Frenk has written of an unconscious fear of the indigenous and the female in Aura, contemplating an Aztec reading which sees the old aunt as Tezcatlipoca (the castrating witch), the niece Aura as Coatlicue (earth goddess), even seeing the staircase the historian climbs up to his final scene as the steps of a sacrificial pyramid leading to Mictlantecuhtli (the god of the underworld).27 In the Bengali stories, the animistic spirits of the pre-Aryan Adivasi seem to have some resonance in “Maya” (Mahasweta Devi actually has a ghost story about a tribal ghost), while the half-Christian ghost of Peyami Safa’s Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair evokes a premodern past of minorities and dhimmi culture effectively erased by the homogenizing march of the Kemalist nation-state. Precedents for Aura’s ethnic fears – the indigenous uncanny that lies submerged, disguised, waiting to take over our modern identity – can be found in a short story Fuentes wrote almost ten years earlier. “Chac-Mool” (1954) is one of Fuentes’ most famous texts, and in some ways operates as a prototype for Aura. The middle-class, modern-thinking protagonist (this time, Filibert, not Felipe), an aficionado of indigenous art, buys a “Chac-Mool” (an Aztec/Mayan sculpture associated with sacrifice) and stows it in the basement of his modern Mexico City apartment block. Like the protagonists in Aura, Filibert becomes a slave to the Chac-Mool he had presumed to “collect”. The spirit of the Chac-Mool takes over the building and eventually ejects Filibert – this time no historian, but a government bureaucrat – from the building. These supernatural tales of indigenous entities retaking the identities and structures of the urban, modern settler cultures which have displaced them betray, like Tagore’s fez-wearing, kurta-donning protagonist, an anxiety about the true provenance of their own identities. In Aura, a researcher loses his own identity while trying to research somebody else’s. In “The Hungry Stones”, the protagonist’s jacket and tie are usurped by the Moghul costume of a century earlier. How subversive are such ghostly memories? A positive reading would see, in the mechanisms of these stories, a kind of spectral Verarbeitung at work, as memories of earlier violence (upon tribals, upon Mayans, upon Armenians) break into the narrative, forcing open various historiographical lacunae and unsettling the perspectives of their comfortably modern subjects. The historian thinks he is stepping into an ordinary house, not the Aztec temple of (ultimately) his own sacrifice. Bibhutibhushan’s vagrant thinks he has found an ordinary bungalow, not a

36  The Ghost Story pool of malevolent spirits. Ghost stories are subversive, it could be argued, because they remind us how politically constructed the “ordinary” really is. By introducing the extraordinary, they render opaque the transparent ideological processes which normalize our “commonsense” and our “everyday”. The conservative aspect of such stories, however, lies in their possibly performative function: the defensive purpose of the ghost story is to permit a tolerable (because intangible) representation of the indigenous. It allows the problematic ethnic to be expressed, without ever bestowing anything but an ethereal validity upon the indigenous. In Aura, for example, it could be argued that history ultimately triumphs – patriarchal values are restored through the return of the General, with the doppelganger niece/aunt facilitating the whole dialectical process.28 The open-endedness of both Bengali stories suggests a development in which the ghostly anterior has played an ancillary part, facilitating the culmination of all the story’s elements in the narrative present. As we shall see, in the Turkish ghost stories (and particularly in Safa) the spectral seems to be there to complement and fulfill the present, rather than subvert it. The metaphysical representation of such anxieties provides their own relief – the ghost story, after all, is really about the haunted, not the ghost. This idea of racial memory in the ghost story disturbing (or complementing) settler/hegemonic memory finds a key text in the writer Juan Rulfo, and his classic work Pedro Páramo – possibly the most influential Mexican novel of the twentieth century. Rulfo’s own interest in Mexico’s indigenous past and present is attested by the 20 years he served as Director of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista.29 Pedro Páramo, a short novel written almost 15 years before Fuentes’ Aura, conforms to many of the patterns we have already discerned in our other texts. A son is commanded by his mother to travel to a town filled with ghosts to find his father, only to die shortly after arriving there and become a ghost himself. Pedro Páramo’s canonical weight is inferred by the volume of critical scholarship surrounding it. Debates trail in its wake: over the alleged nihilism of the novel,30 its precise relationship to the Mexican Revolution,31 not to mention formalistic discussions over whether the fragments of voices and narratives in the text form a unitary whole or not.32 For our own purposes of trying to understand something close to a memory of race in a ghost story such as Pedro Páramo, the scholarship on the book’s indigenous context is worth recounting. Several critics have tried to identify veins of “Mesoamerican thought” (el pensamiento mesoamericano) in the book; although Rulfo’s own knowledge of indigenous culture has been called into question by some,33 a number of critics (most famously Martin Lienhard) have compared the protagonist, Juan Preciado, with the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, and the novel’s setting (Comala) with the Mayan underworld Mictlan. Given the fact that a large part of the book concerns the protagonist’s interactions with various ghosts, the critic Valdes has identified

The Ghost Story  37 such conversations with the dead – and indeed the idea of a parliament of the dead – as key Mesoamerican motifs in the novel.34 Despite Rulfo’s claim to have never written about indigenous people or developed an indigenous character35 (in contrast with non-indigenous indigenista writers such as Rosario Castellanos), some critics read the relative absence of indigenous faces in Pedro Páramo as an ironic omission, given Rulfo’s own long career at an institute for indigenous research.36 At first sight, Pedro Páramo has little to do with any indigenous culture. Its characters all seem to be non-indigenous campesinos; the language of the work is completely in Spanish, with not a single line of dialogue in any other language. Moreover, there are only two explicit references to race in the whole book. The first is the scene in the middle of the novel, where the “Indians” (los indios) come down from Apango to sell their herbs in the market square.37 The scene is brief, and the indios are clearly seen as belonging to a world outside the novel. Their fleeting and singular appearance, it would seem, underlies the criollo, Spanish-Mexican provenance of the characters inside Comala. The book’s second reference, however, moves us somewhat in the opposite direction. The novel is named after the town’s gangster or caudillo, who is responsible for numerous rapes/seductions of the town’s women – and who, as a result, is the illegitimate father of many of the town’s inhabitants. “You should be thankful”, he tells his victims, “you’ll be having a fairskinned baby (un hijo güerito)”.38 The remark not only posits Pedro Páramo as a European mini-despot in a very colonial Comala; it also suggests that the pueblo of Comala is not as blanco as first appears. Two more aspects of the book point to the possibility that the many ghosts in the novel do not simply belong to a specific, recent, violent/sexual past, but also spectrally reenact a much longer stretch of cultural (and inevitably racial) memory. One of the early stories Rulfo considered to be a key text for Pedro Páramo, the 1953 tale “Luvina”, was directly inspired by the author’s visits to indigenous communities in Ixtlán de Juárez.39 Moreover, in Pedro Páramo itself, although there is no dialogue in Nahuatl, the number of Nahuatl-origin words is substantial: petate/petatl, papolotes/papalotl, zopilote/tzopilotl and mitote/mitotl, to name but a few.40 Underneath the linguistic topsoil of the book’s Spanish lies a rich, buried vein of indigenous language, a pre-Hispanic layer of foods, dances and place-names that occasionally poke out from below to lend the text an older strangeness. The most striking example of this – and of Rulfo’s unclear feelings toward the indigenous culture he sometimes expressed, sometimes excised – lies in the very first line of the novel. The opening words of the text – “I came to Comala” (vine a Comala) are justly famous for their dramatic, lyrical quality. Comala is introduced as the central space of the novel, the venue where all of the text’s action will take place. In an initial fragment of the novel, however, subsequently re-edited, the name Rulfo used for the town was not “Comala” but a former, pre-Hispanic name, Tuxcacuexco (“I was

38  The Ghost Story in Tuxcacuexco”/Fui a Tuxcacuexco was the opening line).41 From the very beginning of the book, in other words, a process of filtering, of mnemonic sifting, is underway; this does not mean Pedro Páramo is some form of repressed indigenous text in disguise – an assertion which would be as dramatic as it would be untrue. The replacing of Tuxcacuexco with Comala, however, does suggest that some form of elision was taking place – and that such processes not only formed a catalytic part of the project that became Pedro Páramo, but must also be taken into consideration when interpreting a text so full of ghosts. Before leaving our Mexican examples, one point deserves some brief consideration: the question of the relationship between modernity and time and space – exactly how the arrival of the modern affects the experience of space/time. On the one hand, the theorist Lefebvre famously declared one of the characteristics of modernity to be the “manifest expulsion of time”.42 The commodification of time – its effacing translation into money – was only one of the reasons Time is “murdered by society”. Modernity, argued Lefebvre, is a particular enemy of historical time, whose erasure is the condition for the normalization of all “social norms … and normative activity” (Badiou, in his Logic of Worlds, has recently made a very similar point about the era of late capital43). In the fiery heat of its arrival, the modern evaporates time and any sense of the historical with it, as space is redesignated and reconfigured within a dimension bereft of any sense of successor or precedent. Bakhtin, in his long essay “Forms of Time”, has something quite different to say about modernity – or at least, about the modernity of the novel. His concept of the “chronotope” sees the modern as a moment in the profound interrelatedness of time and space. The “chronotope” (as its name suggests) “expresses the inseparability of space and time”;44 far from being vanquished by modernity’s project, Time “thickens” and “takes on flesh” within the world of the chronotopic text. It becomes opaque, leaving behind the ahistorical realm of transparency to make events and the narratives which connect them visible.45 Almost all of the haunted houses/places in the ghost stories we are looking at illustrate this coexistence of two different times. They shift in appearance, change their shape or structure, depending on the time of day (or night) they are perceived. Tagore’s empty, ruined palace becomes an abode of sensual bliss after sunset; in Aura, the house physically changes in structure as he stays inside (the once-open garden darkening into a walled-patio); the Comala Juan visits, and the chronotope installed in his memory by his mother, drift into one another the longer he stays there. In Tanpınar’s novel, as we shall see, the crazy sheikh will live in a ruined medrese which, in his head, will still have all the opulence and glamour of a premodern Pasha’s palace. The systematic repetition of these tropes suggests the haunted places in our ghost stories are all chronotopes which refuse to be vanquished by history-dissolving modernity.

The Ghost Story  39

Hayalet The Turkish word for “ghost”, like the Spanish fantasma, is related to the word for imagination (hayal in Arabic, fantasia in Spanish). In contrast to the Bengali – and the English, for that matter – the seeds of a cynical disenchantment are already etymologically implicit in the word. A hayalet is no “spirit” or obsolete form of being (as the Sanskrit bhut would suggest), but a fragment of our fevered imagination. Although spiritual truth in Islam can sometimes be communicated to the believer through dreams and imagination, a believer’s word for ghost in Turkish would more likely be ruh (spirit). The rationalizing, demystifying energies alluded to in hayalet have ample representation in the mini-genre of Turkish novels featuring some form of trickery or hoax (such as Gurpinar’s Gulyabani46) usually to scare someone out of buying or selling property. Almost all of our texts involve the seduction of a male protagonist by a female ghost, usually with the aim of entrapment and identity theft. The threat which the female specter poses for the protagonist – of robbing his persona, of taking away his humanity – is also a theft of his moder​nity/​mobil​ ity/c​ontem​poran​eity/​laici​ty. Psychoanalytically put: a phallus is stolen, but not only a phallus. Tagore’s modern gentleman loses his English jacket and tight trousers; Fuentes’ ambitious scholar loses his youth; Bibhutibhushan’s drifter loses his freedom, his wandering vagrancy and quite possibly his mind. Depending on your reading of Peyami Safa’s 1951 novel, however, these female specters do not merely take, but also give. Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair (Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu) is the story of a halfItalian, half-Turkish old woman whose ghostly spirit continues to embody the attic armchair of a seaside boardinghouse where a young, modern, educated Turkish protagonist (Ferit) is staying. Safa’s conservative, nationalist politics (he described the Turkish language as “territory to be defended against foreign invasion”47) have led to a number of critics reassessing his ghost story as an essentially recuperative and restorative text in the most reactionary sense of the word.48 The ghost story in Mademoiselle Noralia really takes place in the final third of the book. Ferit, whose rational, scientific disposition has been underlined early on in the book with several references to psychology and neurology, loses his individual consciousness in the end of the book when he sits in the armchair of the dead woman and undergoes a supernatural transformation of self: He sat in the chair. The palm of his hand felt hot. He sensed something and closed his eyes. He sensed something and looked for his self. He sensed something and tried to break away from it. His memory blocked. Now in his consciousness there was no self [Artık şuurunda kendi ben’ini değil], there was an other, larger, infinite self united with everything else. There was a self which came out of him and hung on

40  The Ghost Story him, grasping and being one with everything. It was one with an absolute [Bu bir mutlak birdi]. (Own translation)49 It is a crucial moment in the text – when Ferit loses control of his individual (male, Muslim, Turkish) selfhood and merges briefly with the wider consciousness of the female, half-Italian, Christian owner of the house: a moment of connection with a wider, foreign Outside which, while not explicitly political, carries with it a political consequence in the momentary dissolution of Ferit’s culturally constituted subject. Unlike several of his less fortunate Mexican and Bengali counterparts, Ferit recovers his identity – but it is a changed one. The female spirit has enlarged Ferit’s narrow, rationalizing, deterministic outlook to a consciousness which partakes in and perceives all around it. The next day, when he gets on a ferry, the ghost of the dead Noralia has so changed him that he thinks the boat is going to Rome – not Istanbul – and that at any moment he is going to see Noralia and her son on the boat.50 This expansive transformation of Ferit has been read as a conservative gesture, basically an incorporation of Christian Otherness into a larger, nationalistic vision, and there are good reasons for reading the text this way. When we pan out to a wider picture, and view the novel in the framework of the other stories in our study, the political-historiographical struggle over what kind of “now” the characters should be living seems to be bound up with a series of very male anxieties. If we look at the small grid below, the usurping possibility of earlier histories seems to be inseparable from the threat of emasculation:

“Maya” “Hungry Stones” Pedro Páramo Aura Mademoiselle Noralia Time Regulation Institute

Ghost

Gender

Possible symbol

Successfully controls protagonist?

Nameless Persian/Arab concubine Various Aunt/niece

Female Female

Tribal Moghul

Yes Yes

Noralia Aselban

Female/male Indigenous/rural Female Indigenous/Second Empire Female Christian/Greek/ Ottoman Female Ottoman

Unclear Yes Unclear Yes

Historical identity and sexual identity are interwoven – and yet the degree to which their threat is allowed to emerge, and even succeed, is variable. Some writers, such as Tagore and Rulfo, textually interrupt the threat and bring it under control before it is allowed to get out of hand; others, such as Safa and Fuentes, try to incorporate the anxiety and manage it, staging

The Ghost Story  41 the spectacle as a way of controlling it. Others still, such as Tanpınar and Bibhutibhushan, play perversely with the fantasy of completely succumbing to the world of their Other, choosing the semi-jouissance of identity abandonment as their protagonists elect to live in the spectral world of their obsessions. Safa’s novel is interesting insofar as it is the only one which features no element of sexual attraction between the protagonist and the ghost. Ferit’s consciousness may momentarily merge with Noralia’s into an “absolute” (mutlak), but the union is a spiritual, not a physical one. Any sexuality in the protagonist/ghost relationship is rechanneled vicariously through a third party. Mademoiselle Noralia ends with the happy reconciliation (and imminent marriage) of Ferit with his fiancée Selma, who (like Noralia) is also a child of converted, formerly non-Muslim parents.51 As the critic Ertürk points out, Selma acts as a younger counterpart to Noralia – just as, in Fuentes’ novel, the niece, the young historian, is so attracted to act as a dryad for the old aunt.52 The sexual reappropriation of Noralia’s spiritual vision has to take place through her younger parallel. The irony of a conservative text which employs the female possession of a male body as a device to propagate its nationalistic vision should not be overlooked. Up to now, we have seen how the ghost story can be the unplanned emergence of a fantasy, the studied cultivation of a fetish or a conscious strategy of risk management. Our next Turkish novel – and our final example – highlights the relationship of the ghost story to the Messianic, and also suggests an underlying unease with property which might culminate in the alienation (the separation of body from spirit) of the protagonist. Unlike all our other texts, the ghost story of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s 1954 novel is basically a 20-page subplot. The Time Regulation Institute is a novel often read (too often, one critic has said53) as a brilliant satirizing of Atatürk’s modernizing project. The narrator relates how he assisted Hayri Irdal, the time regulator of the title, in the establishment of an institute which would set the Turkish nation on a modern timeline through the vast installation and regulation of time-pieces. One character we encounter early on in the novel is Seyit Lutfullah, a wild-looking, half-blind, Afghan traveling preacher. In many ways, a living ghost from the Ottoman past abides in a ruined old medrese next to an equally ruined mosque: The paving stones in the courtyard had been either broken or dislodged by an enormous plane tree surging out in all directions. Most of the rooms on the three wings … were partly or completely in ruins [büsbütün yıkılmıştı]. As for the little mosque on the left side of the courtyard, all that remained were four front steps leading up to the minaret. (46, 47)

42  The Ghost Story And yet, in the fantasy of Seyit Lutfullah’s deranged mind, he lives not in the broken masonry of an abandoned mosque, but rather in a Persian pleasurepalace similar to Tagore’s “Hungry Stones”: the man walked in a world we could not see [görmediğimiz o alemde ]: among turquoise palaces [firuza saraylarda ] filled with gold, jewels, and silver-laced tapestries, a world that promised a thousand and one delights. While wandering about that pleasure-filled world, he enjoyed a lover named Aselban, a beautiful creature with whom he frolicked among ever-blooming roses [hiç solmaya güller arasında], at the edge of a crystal pool … taking delight in the fragrances of jasmine and rose. (42, 43) The similarity of both passages with the description of the “pleasure palace” in Tagore is striking: the Orientalist references, the concubines, even the same fountains and rose fragrances. In both cases, a repressed pocket of the hedonistic Orient is allowed to break into the pleasure-deferring structures of British/Kemalist modernity. In the beginning of a satire of modernity’s wedding with Time, we are presented with this pocket of unreality from another world. The deluded, vision-immersed figure of Seyit Lutfullah is no doubt how Tagore’s protagonist would have appeared by the end of the story had we been able to reach it. Tagore’s Persian concubine Cesmingar, not to mention the woman Bibhutibhushan’s protagonist glimpses, seems to find an eerie counterpart in Aselban (a figure the critic Oğuzertem interprets as a Lacanian petite a, the Turkish Asıl-Ben meaning “true self”).54 Given Tanpınar’s own position as a professor of Ottoman literature, it is tempting to see the author himself (or see the author parodying himself) in this figure of a crazed Sheikh, a vagrant among the ruins, trying to persist in the present within a bubble of differently colored Time. At the outset of a satire on the chronophilia of the modern, Tanpınar allows an enclave of a past he cherished to briefly manifest itself amidst the crumbling streets and yalilar (mansions) of Fifties’ Istanbul. Tanpınar’s novel is about the clash of different times, and the potential megalomanias and solipsisms involved in getting one world to spin at the speed of another. The brief, ghostly tale of Seyit Lutfullah at the start of the book (Lutfullah himself is introduced as a “strange shade” acayip gölgesi55) has practically little to do with the rest of the text, and yet thematically preempts it. Like all of the ghostly pockets of time we have seen up to now, Lutfullah’s phantom palace represents a kind of release – a haven of pre-Kemalist time, a bubble of phantom resistance to the engulfing modernity around it. To some extent, however, Lutfullah’s solitude is also Hayri Irdal’s; his straddling of two times is the subsequent fate of both main characters in the book; his madness, too (if we are to believe one possible, rejected ending of the book, with the narrator writing from an insane asylum – rejected by the publishers in the final edition56) is ultimately the

The Ghost Story  43 narrator’s. The “strange shade” of Seyit Lutfullah, with his phantom palace and demon lover, allows a release of the essence of the vanishing past into the present – a release which is not simply a spectral fire escape from the modern (something we have been saying about each of our stories), but also a pocket, parodied anticipation of it. This idea of the ghost story as a form of doubling-backward of Time upon itself leads us to our two final points: property and the Messianic. Messianism lies as a subtext beneath many of the stories: Bibhutibhushan’s vagrant waits for the master to return; Fuentes’ young historian is the one the old aunt has been waiting for; in the Time Regulation Institute, the crazy Seyit Lutfullah is explicitly given messianic status – the magical restoration of the ruined medrese to a sumptuous saray is dependent upon the re-discovery of a certain “treasure of Andronikos” Then everything would fall into place. Aselban would agree to appear in human form, her lover would be reunited with his true face, and at last they would be joined in eternal bliss. “Thereafter I will reign over the entire world”, he would say, “and everything I desire will come true”. He’d banish misery and injustice from the world and govern with absolute justice [tam bir adaletle].57 It is probably out of place to wonder whether the Messianic is not, in itself, a kind of ghost story – not a return of the dead to haunt the living, but rather the return of the resurrected living to haunt the spiritually dead. Both structures share this sense of a disrupted temporality, of a rupture which is somehow a consequence of the return of something else. In Tanpınar’s novel, one of the characters jokes that Seyit Lutfullah is a true Marxist, “one of the founders of socialism” (48), and although Tanpınar’s subtlety should not be underestimated – the author was adept at anticipating and parodying possible reader responses to his work within the texts themselves – the idea that the ghost story may be a depoliticized form of the Messianic is worth fielding here. So many of our texts deal with some kind of political project that it is tempting to see figures such as Seyit Lutfullah as spectral echoes of projects somehow wrong or incomplete. Ghost stories reenact the incompleteness of political programs by illustrating a certain gap in the fabric of their fictive reality58: whether it is a revolution which never quite reached the people it promised, an independence struggle which never seemed to get off the ground or a nation-state that alienated the people it wanted to help, the messianic elements in these texts act out the phantasms of such movements by highlighting what is missing: a father, a treasure, a landlord, a husband. The mention of Seyit Lutfullah’s imaginary “treasure” – a treasure whose discovery would initiate the messianic process and give him dominion “over the entire world” – brings us to our concluding point: capital. To find certain recurring mechanisms within these texts is not to impose a cultural homogeneity upon them, any more than locating a certain pattern or thread

44  The Ghost Story in six different carpets means they are all essentially the same carpet. A final constant thread through all of our ghost stories has been a protagonist transitioning – or attempting to transition – from one economic status to another through the accumulation of property/capital. Tanpınar’s crazy sheikh is only the last example of this – if we recall the joy of Bibhutibhushan’s homeless narrator upon finally acquiring a house: Why, two rooms of this huge house were open just for my use! … The whole thing was like some miraculous gift from heaven that God had sent down into my hands! … I hadn’t had it so good in a long time … And I never had such a golden opportunity to earn my living without a stitch of work. … I was lord [maliki] over this big house.59 Although “Maya” might well be a moral fable of the dangers of property possession – if you own something, sooner or later it ends up owning you – a slightly more materialist reading would see a protagonist alienated from his own humanity through the acquisition of property. A man who, through the appropriation of capital, literally becomes a ghost to himself. The other texts reveal similar mechanisms: Tagore’s protagonist is a tax-collector, a gatherer of capital, one who berates himself throughout the story for “being such a slave to tax collection”.60 In Mademoiselle Noralia, Ferit receives an inheritance from the death of his aunt, one which permits him to move into the summer house where he is possessed by Noraliya’s ghost. The young, penniless historian in Aura greedily anticipates the 4000 pesos he will get out of the aunt – and ends up becoming master of the house (although not in any way he had imagined). In fact, the Mexican stories illustrate particularly well this relationship between social mobility and the ghost story. In Alfonso Reyes’ “The Dinner” (“La Cena”),61 the 1912 ghost story Fuentes rewrites and expands into the longer novella Aura, the male protagonist visits the two women – Dona Magdalena and her daughter – in a house which promises to be an old colonial villa on the outside, but inside is usurped by the garish and vulgar excesses of the nouveau riche: And I entered, astonished at hearing myself summoned as if into my own home. The vestibule disappointed me. Upon the romantic words of the invitation (at least, they seemed romantic to me), I had founded hopes of an encounter with an ancient house, full of tapestries, old portraits and huge armchairs; an ancient house, lacking in style, but full of respectability [sin estilo, pero llena de respetabilidad]. But instead of this, I was confronted with a diminutive vestibule and with a flimsy, inelegant staircase; which foretold the cramped, modern dimensions [dimensiones modernas y estrechas] I could expect in the rest of the house. The flooring was of polished wood; the few bits of furniture had the chill luxury of things from New York, and on the wall, covered in

The Ghost Story  45 bright green paper, there grimaced, with unpardonable indications of impertinence, two or three Japanese masks.62 In the very heart of the aristocratic structure, bourgeois vulgarity and modernity are in a struggle to take over the house. It is this tension between classes – and the attempt of one individual to shift across the lines of society into another – that produces the eerie effect of disembodied alienation. To be clear: this is not simply Adorno’s diagnosis of occultism as a misrecognition of alienation’s efforts and a subsequent (false) relocation of these material processes in a series of supernatural devices (“a second mythology” as Adorno calls it).63 Nor is it the equally familiar idea of the spectral as exhibiting some form of anxiety within capital – most famously expressed in 1848, of course, by Marx himself in the opening words of the Communist Manifesto, where communism is openly declared to be a specter for capitalism, walking in its midst, reminding it of manifold injustices and looming retribution. There is something about the way a subject is psychically configured by their material circumstances that leads to the production of ghostly phenomena whenever a change takes place in those circumstances – in the case of our stories, whenever protagonists acquire property, or acquire the desire to become property-owners. The lifeworld which structures the contours of a subject is reconfigured – even in the cases of failed protagonists such as Juan Preciado, who sets out to get what is “owed” to him but never succeeds; and in the disruption caused by this reconfiguration, the spectral emerges as an extraneous self, haunting the present of the text with its possibility. In our ghost stories, capital alienates – or threatens to alienate – all those who try to acquire it (the irony that this may be a spiritual as well as a Marxist point, I shall pass over for now). “Alienate” here means the sundering of spirit from self, the separation of the human body from their Geist or spirit. Perhaps what ghost stories illustrate best of all is the way material mechanisms within a society can produce spectral effects – and how these spectral effects always seem to involve some degree of self-estrangement. To see a ghost is to estrange oneself from the community of the rational; to try and improve one’s economic standing is to estrange oneself from the income group of one’s peers, and enter the higher group of one’s superiors. If ghosts have any meaning at all within literature, it may be as a spectral after-effect of the shifts and mutations every modern subject who tries to change their situation has to undergo.

Notes 1 Hasan Azizul Huq, Twelve Stories, trans. Bhaskar Chattopadhyay (Dhaka: Bengal Lights Books, 2015) p. 145. 2 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) p. 60. 3 Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994) p. 193.

46  The Ghost Story 4 Mahasweta Devi even has a short story about a tribal ghost – see her story “In the Forests of Jharowa” in Suchitra Samanta (ed.), Hauntings (New Delhi: Katha, 2000) pp. 197–208. 5 Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen (eds.), The Spectralities Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) p. 2. 6 Theodor Adorno, “Theses against Occultism” in Minima Moralia , trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso: London, 2005) p. 288. 7 Cited in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013) p. 9. 8 Ibid., p. x. 9 Ibid., p. 9. 10 Samanta, introduction to Hauntings, pp. 10–11. 11 Tithi Bhattacharya, “Deadly Spaces: Ghosts, Histories and Colonial Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Bengal” in Mélanie Joseph-Vilain and Judith Misrahi-Barak (eds.), Postcolonial Ghosts/Fantômes Post-Coloniaux (Montpellier: PULM, 2009) p. 147. 12 Rabindranath Tagore, “Manihara” in Samanta, Hauntings, 47–68. 13 Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones” in Selected Stories, trans. William Radice (New Delhi: Penguin, 1994) p. 234; the Bengali text comes from Galpaguccha (Calcutta: Bisba-Bharati, 1947) p. 272. 14 Ibid., p. 234, Galpaguccha p. 271. 15 In an 1894 letter from his house in Sajadpur, Tagore wrote: “I feel, somehow, that in this golden noon sunshine an Arab tale could be made: a Persian or Arab landscape – Damascus, Samarkand, or Bokhara; bunches of grapes, rose-gardens, nightingales singing, wine from Shiraz, desert paths, lines of camels, horsemen and travelers, clear fountains shaded by date palms” (Selected Stories, 283–284). Stories such as “The Postmaster” also have these occasional Orientalist/Arabian Nights references (Selected Stories, 42). In a sonnet complaining of his poverty, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (born 1824) could lament he has “No cushions, carpets that by riches are/ Brought from the Persian land, or Turkish shore” – The Bengali Book of English Verse, (ed.) T. D. Dunn (Longmans, Green and Co.: Bombay, 1918) p. 20. 16 Tagore, “The Hungry Stones”, p. 238. 17 Ibid., p. 233. 18 In Tagore’s essay “Indian History”, for example, he laments how the true historical essence of India has been pasted over by an “Arabian Nights tale” – see Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal” in Pollock, Sheldon (ed.), Literary Cultures in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) p. 541. 19 The picture of Bibhutibhushan as an essentially Romantic writer incapable of any degree of political comment is widespread. The great critic Buddhadeva Bose sees in Bibhutibhushan “a lover of Nature … at once innocent and intelligent”, while Sukumar Sen describes a writer “romantic and lyrical by temperament … with a rare sincerity and fullness of heart”. The writer Amit Chaudhuri, more perceptively, has noted a “subtly exploratory speaking voice” which shuns neither “the facts of rural poverty” nor “the matter of colonial subjugation”. Buddahdeva Bose, An Acre of Green Grass (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, 1948) p. 89; Sukumar Sen, History of Bengali Literature (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1971) p. 329; Amit Chaudhuri (ed.), The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (London: Picador, 2002) p. 67. 20 See the opening pages of Ian Almond, “Messianic Themes in South Asian Literature: Reading Bibhutibhushan Banerji in the Light of Agamben” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 12:3 (2013) pp. 111–124

The Ghost Story  47 21 Bibhutibhushan Bandyhopadhyay, A Strange Attachment and Other Stories, trans. Phyllis Granoff (Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1984) p. 29. All references in English will be to this edition. All references to the Bengali text will be to Bibhutibhushan Galpasamagra (Calcutta: Mitra and Ghosh, 1975) 2 vols. Galpasamagra 2:686. 22 For examples of how the British constantly looked at a declining Ottoman empire as presaging their own fate, see Filiz Turhan, The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire (London: Routledge, 2003). 23 For an explicit consideration of the relationship between the massacre, history and the spectral in Latin American literature, see Alberto Ribas-Casasayas and Amanda L. Peterson, Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2016) pp. 5–6. 24 One reading even takes Aura to be a deconstructive parable, reflecting upon the act of writing itself – Alira Ashvo-Muñoz, “Aura: Ontological Materiality of Existence and Fabulation” INTI, no. 75/76 (2012) pp. 77–85. 25 Carlos Fuentes, Aura, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2012) p. 3. 26 Susan F. Frenk, “Rewriting History: Carlos Fuentes’ Aura”, Forum for Modem Language Studies 30:3 (1994) p. 262. It is interesting to see, over Aura, an ongoing debate among Fuentes scholars about the novelist’s relationship to the Baroque and the Gothic – see the opening pages of Stephen Buttes, “The Failure of Consuelo’s Designs: Carlos Fuentes and “Trompe l’Oeil” Modernity” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 41: 2 (Winter 2017) pp. 297–324. 27 Frenk, “Rewriting History, pp. 257, 264; For a contrary interpretation, one which sees in Aura a “paradigm for women’s possible resistance” (39), see Christopher Rollason, “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Carlos Fuentes’ Aura” the Fantastic and the Feminine in Inter-American Dialogue” Journal of the Odisha Association for English Studies 9:1 (2019) pp. 39–50. 28 For a similar reading of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, see Riso, Elisa, “Rulfo y la representación literaria del mestizaje” Escritos, revista del Centro de Ciencia del Lenguaje 28 (2003) pp. 125–148. 29 Sergio Lopez Mena, “Juan Rulfo y el Mundo Indigena” Fragmentos 23 (June/ December, 2002) p. 103. 30 See L.A. Gyurko, “Rulfo’s Aesthetic Nihilism: Narrative Antecedents of Pedro Páramo” Hispanic Review 40:4 (1972) p. 451; Laura Garcia-Moreno has also described the book as a work of “melancholy paralysis” – “Melancolia y desencanto en Pedro Páramo” in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos 30:3 (Spring 2006) p. 498. 31 Some critics (such as Silvia Lorente-Murphy and Patrick Dove) have argued that the book dismantles the myth of the Mexican Revolution – see Silvia LorenteMurphy, Juan Rulfo: Realidad y mito de la Revolucion Mexicana (Madrid: Pliegos, 1988) and Patrick Dove, “Reflections on the Origin: Transculturation and Tragedy in Pedro Páramo” Angelaki 6:1 (2001) p. 92. See also Gustavo C. Fares, “Juan Rulfo: Critica Reciente” Revista Iberoamericana 55:148–149 (1989) p. 989. Others argue that the novel transcends the actual historical event of the Revolution – Mario J. Valdes, “Juan Rulfo en el amoxcalli: una lectura hermeneutica de Pedro Páramo”, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos 22:2 (Winter 1998) p. 226. See Ariel Wind on the “spectral melancholy” in the novel which forces a critical rethinking of the Revolution and of Mexican historiography in general – Ariel Wind, “Spiritual/Spectral “Structures of Feeling” in Andrey Platonov’s Soul and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo” Comparative Literature 71:1 (2019) pp. 41–63.

48  The Ghost Story 32 For more on the unifying interpretations of Pedro Páramo (Carlos Fuentes, Julio Ortega, Ricardo Estrada), see Carol Clark D’Lugo, “Pedro Páramo: The Reader’s Journey through the Text” Hispania 70:3 (September 1987) p. 473. 33 Mena, “Juan Rulfo y el Mundo Indigena”, p. 107. 34 Valdes, “Juan Rulfo en el amoxcalli”, p. 228. 35 Cited in B. Christine Arce, “El alma en llamas: visiones mesoamericanas de Pedro Páramo” Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana 42:2 (2013) p. 150. 36 A claim made by Elisa Riso, op. cit. 37 Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, trans. M.S. Peden (New York: Grove Press, 1994) p. 86; Spanish edition Pedro Páramo, ed. J.C.G. Boixo (Madrid: Ediciones Catedra, 1985) p. 155. References to Spanish original will be in bold. 38 Pedro Páramo, p. 104, 174. 39 Mena, “Juan Rulfo y el Mundo Indigena”, p. 106. 40 Pedro Páramo, 69, 83, 100. 41 See the introductory footnotes to the Spanish edition of Pedro Páramo, p. 63. 42 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) p. 96. 43 Ibid., p. 96; Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds (London: Continuum, 2009) p. 104. 44 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) p. 85. 45 Ibid., p. 250. 46 For more on the secular/rational depiction of allegedly “paranormal” events in Turkish literature, see Özgür Çiçek and Irmak Ertuna-Howison, “Literature for the People: The Paranormal Mysteries of Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar” Clues: A Journal of Detection 30:2 (Fall 2012) pp. 19–28. 47 “Dost ve Duşman Kelimeler” 13 August 1941 – cit. in Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) p. 156. 48 Berna Moran saw with suspicion a novel whose “mystical philosophy” acted as a kind of propaganda against various forms of materialism, positivism and determinism – Berna Moran, Türk romanında eleştirel bir bakış (Istanbul: Iletişim, 2008) pp. 249, 251. Nergis Ertürk has impressively fashioned the picture of a “polyvocal text” which succeeds in becoming “a national act of literature” through a violent denial of both “internalized Muslim Kurdish difference” and “externalised Christian Armenian difference” (Ertürk, Grammatology, p. 155). 49 Peyami Safa, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (Istanbul: Alkım, 2008) p. 227. 50 Ibid., p. 278. 51 Sema’s parents, we are told, are actually donme – seventeenth-century Ottoman Jews who converted to Islam. 52 Ertürk, p. 141. 53 See Süha Oğuzertem’s extraordinary essay “Hasta Saatler, Bozuk Sihhatler” Defter 23 (1995) pp. 65–83. 54 Ibid., p. 78. 55 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsu (Istanbul: Dergah, 2010) p. 40. 56 The ommitted end can be found in Turan Alptekin, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (Istanbul: Iletişim, 2001) pp. 66–70. 57 The English translation is by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, The Time Regulation Institute (London: Penguin, 2013) p. 47, Saatleri p. 48. 58 This idea of the ghost as a symbol of the “unsettled accounts” of the symbolic order can be found in Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994) p. 193.

The Ghost Story  49 59 “A strange attachment” in Bandyhopadhyay, A Strange Attachment, pp. 24, 25; Bengali text Bibhutibhushan Galpasamagra (Calcutta: Mitra and Ghosh, 1975) 2: 681. 60 Tagore, “Hungry Stones”, p. 236. 61 As a purely speculative aside, the influence of Tagore’s story “The Hungry Stones” upon Reyes (and indirectly upon Fuentes) remains a distant possibility – Reyes had read the story in Spanish, and makes a substantial reference to it (Las Piedritas Hambrientes) in a 1918 article, “La Poesia del archivo” in Alfonso Reyes (ed.), Obras Completas vol. IV (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1995) pp. 74–76. 62 Y pasé, asombrado de oírme llamar como en mi casa. Fue una decepción el vestíbulo. Sobre las palabras románticas de la esquela (a mí, al menos, me parecían románticas), había yo fundado la esperanza de encontrarme con una antigua casa, llena de tapices, de viejos retratos y de grandes sillones; una antigua casa sin estilo, pero llena de respetabilidad. A cambio de esto, me encontré con un vestíbulo diminuto y con una escalerilla frágil, sin elegancia; lo cual más bien prometía dimensiones modernas y estrechas en el resto de la casa. El piso era de madera encerada; los raros muebles tenían aquel lujo frío de las cosas de Nueva York, y en el muro, tapizado de verde claro, gesticulaban, como imperdonable signo de trivialidad, dos o tres máscaras japonesas.  63 Adorno, “Theses against Occultism” in Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2005) p. 239.

2

The Hotel-Narrative Anayurt, Shahjahan, Isabel

The longer you stay in this world, the bigger the bill you have to pay [je joto beshi shomoy ei duniyay thakbe shonghsharer, bil shay toto beshi debe]. – Sankar, Chowringhee, p34, 301

If a hotel is a box of stories, then the hotel-narrative is a text which attempts to contain those stories. In doing this, it more or less performs the function of a hotel itself – accommodating various voices, giving them varying degrees of attention, allowing some characters to check in, others to check out. Hotel-narratives are interesting because of the way they attempt to address the demands of the micro- and the macro-, try and describe the particularity of the individual while addressing the context of the collective and always seem to flirt with allegory and symbolism while never allowing themselves to be reduced to such parameters. Like the hotel-narrative, a hotel both belongs to society and endlessly accommodates exceptions to it. One of the tasks of this chapter will be to examine what happens when a writer attempts to rearticulate this phenomenon within a creative literary space. What fantasies are involved in the literary depiction of a hotel? What political subtexts – not to mention explicit positions – occur in their reenactment? What philosophical questions emerge when one writes about a luxury hotel in Calcutta, a more modest three-star in Mexico City, or a local stayover in a Turkish provincial town? And in these various depictions of hotels, what kind of relationship can be found to the project of modernity? In following on from the ghost story in the last chapter, it is clear that in concentrating upon the hotel, we are dealing with a very different form of commonality. If ghosts are universals (with all the reservations already expressed about the very different words for them – bhut, hayalet, fantasma), then hotels might be termed “historically finite universals”: that is, universals that are a consequence of historically embedded, finite processes. If the persistence of life and consciousness beyond the demise of the physical is widely strewn across centuries and cultures, the ubiquity of the modern hotel is – generally speaking – a historical symptom of nineteenth-century industrial modernity and its imperialist exportations.

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The Hotel Isabel stands on the street Isabel la Catolica, in the centro historico of Mexico City; the Shahjahan Hotel lies on Chowringhee, in the heart of Calcutta; the Anayurt Oteli (Motherland Hotel) sits on a road just off the railway station of a small town in the West of Turkey (very probably present-day Manissa). These three hotels (one of them wholly fictitious, the other two based on real-life counterparts) are the subject of the three hotel-narratives to be examined in this chapter. Hotel-narratives here mean literary texts which take the hotel – and the idea of the hotel – as a central theme and topos. Each of the three novels in this chapter places the hotel not as an incidental theme or background but as a constitutive element in the text. Ideas such as the hotel as a microcosm of the world or the nation, or the hotel as a metaphor for the novel, run through all three of our chosen texts. Each of the three regions offers numerous examples of literary texts which feature hotels, sometimes in quite central ways – in Mexican fiction, for example, hotels form a significant aspect of the first segment of Bolaño’s 2666, and the Hotel Jardin in Elena Garro’s Recollections of Things to Come operates with its name as an Eden-like device in the novel.2 There are also texts where the hotel operates as a tacit but central backdrop – Tomris Uyar’s “Guests of the Dying Hotel”, for example, or the Giacomo Hotel in Krikor Zohrab’s (Turkish-Armenian) story “Armenisa”.3 In this chapter, however, we are concentrating on the hotel-narrative where the text serves, grows out of and revolves around the hotel. Hotels are modern spaces. In many ways, they constitute a space where alienation is purchased by its guests, where some degree of temporary separation from a community or society is obtained as part of a commercial transaction. Their premodern versions – the traveler’s inn, the caravanserai – bear only a limited, historicizable relation to the emergence of the modern hotel in the nineteenth century. In Chapter 1, we looked at the ghost story as a phenomenon indicative of modernity, albeit with a premodern history (in folklore, mythology, classical literature, etc.) that stretched undeniably before it. The idea of the modern hotel – sitting as it does at the confluence of urban development, emerging spaces of leisure and recreation, logistically transformed patterns of travel and a growing, multiply-motivated bourgeois traveling class – carries less of this premodern history with it. This does not mean that hotels are not culturally embedded within the time and place of their construction and use. Our sensitivity to this factor should be further heightened by the very different style and language of the three novels to be studied – Sankar’s Chowringhee (1962), Yusuf Atılgan’s Anayurt Oteli (1973) and Guillermo Fadanelli’s Hotel DF (2010)4 – novels set decades apart, and which differ on the perspectives of the narrator (worker/manager/guest), an upbeat/factual/melancholy tone and differing degrees of international context (from the exclusively domestic traffic of a Turkish railway hotel to the stream of tourists coursing through a Mexican city center establishment). This said, a small cluster of themes will be discerned in the workings of each of these novels – themes which hint at mechanisms that

52  The Hotel-Narrative lie beneath the oscillating difference of the three texts. One overriding idea, in particular, will be seen as a central component in the hotel-narrative, regardless of its provenance. Before we start, one quick question: how does the idea of the hotel feature in the Theory canon? Perhaps the only point which stretches across theorists as diverse as Lefebvre, Foucault, Adorno and Žižek is the profoundly ideological function of a hotel – in his classic study of space, Lefebvre sees the hotel as “an extension of dominated space”, one which “reproduces … the relations of production”.5 Foucault’s oft-cited notion of “heterotopia” (in which hotels are invoked among only one of many examples) also retains this notion of the hotel as a space somehow produced and regulated by power, even if the relationship with power is (contra Lefebvre) nowhere near so clear. The hotel, following Foucault’s term, would be a topos where incongruous “spaces and locations” lie next to one another, a counterplace where different arrangements “within society are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned”.6 This distinction between Lefebvre and Foucault (a distinction, essentially, between a Marxist and quasi-post-structuralist concept of space) is interesting because it presents two versions of a hotel – a place where power happens, and a place where power commands. Either the hotel is a vehicle of ideology where power is able to formulate and manifest its will in desired patterns; or, alternatively, the hotel is a multiply-centered space where power definitely exists and exerts influences, but not exclusively in any one direction and not without different, opposing forces of resistance rising up against it. This question of who or what effectively runs a hotel – what, in essence, a hotel means – we will return to in our analyses of each of the three texts.7

Chowringhee (1962) The sun does set occasionally on the British Empire, sir, but the lights never go out in a hotel. – Chowringhee, p32

Perhaps the most carnivalesque of the three novels we are going to examine, Sankar’s funny, upbeat portrait of a high-class hotel in Fifties Calcutta offers its own commentary on a confident, newly emerging India which, at the same time, still has the shadow of Empire hanging over it. Sankar’s book (interestingly enough, the Spanish translation carries the title “Hotel Calcutta”) narrates, through the eyes of its young protagonist and via a tumbling series of episodes, the fortunes of a range of characters – apparently omniscient receptionists, devout Hindu laundry workers, emotionally vulnerable dancers, high-society wives. Chowringhee has been called “India’s corporate story”, 8 and yet the description does a disservice to the book, as the novel’s relationship to capitalism is a good deal more ambivalent. Although some degree of corporate mythologizing undeniably takes place

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– the function of the hotel to entertain and accommodate wealthy, powerful people retains a legitimacy which is never fundamentally questioned – negative descriptions of the Shahjahan hotel are not repressed: not just what one character refers to as the hotel’s “soul-destroying opium [afyim] of illusion” (35, 31), but also the immunity one worker develops at the hotel after “years of ingesting and digesting the poison [bisha] of Shahjahan” (306, 267). If the mythologization of the Shahjahan and, subtextually, a celebration of Indian commerce constitute one of the aims of the book (the novel’s sentimental ending seems to suggest this), it is a mythologization often interrupted by short, painful blasts of reality: overworked employees, rich people’s whims, the hedonism of the powerful, even the suicide of those who unsuccessfully aspire to join them. The point leads us to one of the first features to cross all three novels in our chapter: misogyny. All three of our novels seem to have the abuse, rape and even murder of women at the heart of their plot-lines – as though the hotel were a space antithetical to women, a place intended only for the degradation and destruction of women.9 As we shall see, such elements are central to the mechanisms of both Turkish and Mexican novels – the routine rape and ultimate murder of the chambermaid in Yusuf Atılgan’s text; the prostitution, murder of Sofia and philandering obsessions of the protagonist in Hotel DF. The trafficking of women as dancers and “hostesses” is one of the darker subtexts of Chowringhee, and the text goes into some detail about the various processes in which foreign dancers and barmaids are procured, their youth ascertained and their singleness protected (“kept under lock and key”, 117). Frederic Jameson has spoken of how “a hotel is still private property … [and whoever enters is] still within the authority of private property”.10 Women in Chowringhee appear to be an extension of hotel property – and implicitly a chattel to the male hotel owners. The fact that virtually all of the characters that die in the novel are women (Jane, Karabi, Sujata) would suggest a deeply conservative tone in Shankar’s work, an almost reactionary punishment of freedom with death, since all three single female characters die after committing themselves to another partner. Empire – or perhaps more accurately, the legacy of defunct empires – is another thread which seems to run through all three novels. This recognition of the imperialist aspects of the hotel-narrative is not too surprising: all three of the hotels concerned (Isabel, Shahjahan and Anayurt/Motherland) have names associated with power structures, and particularly in the case of the British/Spanish colonizers, the idea of the hotel as a viaduct for foreign influence in the wake of colonialism’s arrival is historically clear. What is subtler is the way, in each novel, the hotel persists as a pocket of the past, a concrete structure which preserves some kind of relationship, however tenuous, with a now redundant imperial past.11 In the Turkish text, we will see, the hotel is a former Ottoman mansion from the Tanzimat period, and the hotel owner’s family, several generations removed, have served as Janissaries in the court of Avcı Sultan Mehmet12; in Hotel DF,

54  The Hotel-Narrative the portrait of Queen Isabel, the Spanish monarch who sent Christopher Columbus out to discover the “New World”, dominates the lobby of the hotel. Chowringhee offers by far the most striking example of the hotel as a tomb of Empire, a testament to the afterlife of the colonizers, to the tenacity of the Raj. The fact that the protagonist himself is “the last babu of the last English barrister of Calcutta High Court” (3) imbues the narrative with an end-of-Empire tone from the very opening pages. Whether it is the name of the hotel manager, Marco Polo, and his resemblance to Churchill (29), its description as “an ancient inn to the east of Suez” (76), the old Englishmen who linger like archives in the story offering anecdotes and glimpses into the hotel’s past, or even simply the Persian name of the hotel itself, deepening the imperialist grandeur of the building with a Moghul hue, a variety of elements in Chowringhee cultivate the idea that the hotel is a place where Empire is not yet dead. In fact, when we put a number of the references to the Shahjahan next to one another, an impression almost of the “undead” emerges: The centuries-old spirit [shotabdi pracheen atma] of Shahjahan Hotel kept asking, ever louder, “Who are you? Why are you here?” (85, 73) Life, youth and everything else in this city are transitory [ei shohorer jibon, joubon ebong anyo shobii jeno khonoshthayi] – nothing can defy eternity and keep standing in Calcutta. But Shahjahan Hotel stands upright with unbelievable arrogance. … It survives [tike thakbe] – and not even Simpson [the hotel founder] could have imagined that it would have withstood the ravages of time and lasted so long. (87, 75) we went to the Lower Circular Road cemetery. … Flowers in hand, we entered that silent city of the dead. [mritamanushader shey nistobda shohore]. … None of the [boys of William Lane] … was probably alive any more, but Shahjahan Hotel lived on, eternally young, beckoning the hungry, the thirsty and the lustful with its bewitching charm. (137, 119) Through the voice of the English founder of the hotel, Simpson, we learn: “I will live on (ami beche thakbo) in every breakfast, lunch and dinner at Shahjahan Hotel” (87, 78). Empire stalks on, obscenely, as the memory of both the Moghuls and the Raj refuses to fade, but abides in the “independent” nation-state, perversely continuing to signify something that should have been superseded. Reminiscent of Tagore’s ghostly mansion in the previous chapter – abandoned, ruin by day, magical pleasure-palace by night – there seems to be a relationship between desire and the hotel as a place where Empire refuses to die. The narrator’s various references to how he has

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been “re-born” through the Shahjahan Hotel (19, 402) reinforce this idea of an imperial past lewdly abiding in the present through the shells of hotels such as Shahjahan, Isabel and Anayurt. More on this theme of death in a moment. It is also worth noting, finally, that in Chowringhee, the hotel is not merely a tomb of Empire, but also a fluid gateway and point of continuity between past and present. One of the most interesting passages in the book offers, in the comment of one of the hotel’s workers, a cynical summary of this idea: “Everyone in this country’s become an Englishman” he grumbled. “Those who claim that the English won India in an orchard in Plassey in 1757 know little about history. Actually, victory came many years later, right before our eyes, on 15 August, 1947, our Independence Day. The country went English overnight. …. When Gandhi was leading the freedom struggle, we used to be scared that our hotel jobs wouldn’t last long”. (195-6) The Shahjahan’s English menus, drinks, music and names of its employees (Jimmy, Rosie, Byron) all provide the basis for Nityahari’s cynicism (Nityahari himself, as a devout Hindu and high-caste Brahman despite his lowly job, acts as one of the discordant voices in the otherwise Anglicized space of the hotel). Perhaps some of the Shahjahan Hotel’s undead uncanniness can be attributed to the way it straddles the world of the living and the dead, the colonial and the national, the Raj and the Indian nation-state, belonging to neither yet somehow existing in both. The fact that, in the closing pages of the novel, the narrator feels relief and hope when he finally leaves the hotel behind him and walks out onto the street in what can be termed a post-paradisal moment, “jobless and shelterless” (403), does suggest that the ambiguities inherent in the Shahjahan Hotel – for all their jazzy modernity – are ambiguities that need to be left behind.

Anayurt Oteli (1973) At the head of the street leading from the station square hangs a dark green tin arrow with HOTEL lettered in white, nailed to a pine tree. But one of the nails – eroded through the years – has sheared off, so the sign points downwards giving the impression that the hotel lies underground [otelin yeraltında olduğu sanısını veriyor insana]. (18, 12) Not just for its subterranean status, Motherland Hotel stands apart from our other two novels in a number of ways. If Chowringhee and Hotel DF are full of international bustle and tourist chatter, Yusuf Atılgan’s short novel presents a dark, melancholy picture of a small domestic hotel. If a

56  The Hotel-Narrative rich tapestry of guests presents itself at the reception desks of the Isabel and the Shahjahan, Motherland Hotel narrates a succession of largely nameless individuals and couples, ironically closer to the subject-dissolving anonymity of the postmodern hotel than the much more recent Hotel DF. The novel has acquired a great deal of prestige in the Turkish canon, and (like Chowringhee) was made into a successful film in the 1980s. Nurdan Gürbilek has called the protagonist Zebercet “the first underground man of the Turkish Republic”,13 while Jale Parla has both read the novel as “an exposure of the latent psychopathology underlying the rhetoric of nationalism”14 and (in another essay) inserted the text into a Turkish tradition of “twilight” novels that cultivate gloom and shadowy spaces in a formfocused rejection of Republican, Enlightenment values. The obsessive-compulsive tics of the hotel manager provide a source of disturbing comedy for the first half of the novel: routines, punctuality, placing things in certain jacket-pockets (acceptable things in the right-hand pocket, unacceptable things in the left one). Halfway through the novel, however, after the hotel manager’s rape and murder of the chambermaid, the potential comedy fades away from idiosyncrasy into psychosis as we witness the rapid deterioration and subject-dissolution of the protagonist, culminating in the closing scene of his suicide. What Motherland Hotel highlights, with respect to all of the novels in this chapter, is the relative paucity of religion in these narratives – effectively, the degree to which the hotel is a secular space, even a godless space.15 In Chowringhee, the upper-caste laundry worker Nityahari who chants “Kali ma Kali” around the hotel is really the only reminder of any religious voice at all in the novel16; in Hotel DF, the closest thing we encounter to a religious phenomenon amidst the gallery of drug dealers, failed TV actors, bored bourgeoisie and corrupt policemen is the chapter entitled “Apparition of the Virgin” (175), where the narrator encounters the beautiful Sofia for the very first time. What does it mean to call the hotel a secular space? And how does a novel like Motherland Hotel communicate this? To suggest the modern hotel as an Ersatz for religion would be to see the hotel as addressing needs – community, shelter, recreation, privacy, a meaning for motion – which hitherto only religious narratives had addressed. It would see the hotel as evolving handin-hand with structures – transport, industrialization, bourgeois recreation, a certain liberal cosmopolitanism – that were antagonistic to or at least competitive with structures of religion. The immediate irony here is that replication cannot be avoided: whether it is the material reproduction of sublimity, the manufacture of “atmosphere”, the generation of secular mythologies around people/names/buildings, even the production of communities, the modern hotel incorporates and recreates some degree of religiosity. In a famous essay on the hotel lobby, “Die Hotelhalle”, Siegfried Kracauer described the space as “the inverted image of the house of God”, a “negative church” which did not reflect any place beyond itself, which provided no overarching meaning

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to the “community” who gathered there, but only an “aimless lounging” that nihilistically leveled any distinction between the serious and the trivial.17 Although this is true of all three novels in our chapter, modern Turkish history – and the Kemalist secularizing project that runs through it – accentuates the feature in Motherland Hotel, whose hotel is founded in the same year as the Turkish Republic (1922), converted from an old Ottoman mansion. From the opening pages we encounter “a full-length portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the right-hand wall” (18), a sign which initiates a space – and a narrative – where religion will be referenced as minimally as possible, and even in the few places it is mentioned, always in ways in which the semantics are undermined by the actual content. Sherif the Hadji (Pilgrim), for example, who is not really a pilgrim, but a drunk and a gambler (110); or Chief Maid Kadriye, an old woman so conservative she never takes her veil off – until she is thrown out of the house for engaging in lesbian sex with one of the servant girls in her bedroom (78). If religion emerges at all in the text, it is usually physically or chronologically located outside the hotel – Zebercet’s recollections of his devout mother (106), the stories of the hotel owner’s brother who joins a Sufi order (138) or even the way Zebercet gets rid of an erection in a cinema by performing a mental sunnet (circumcision) on himself. Outside in the society, religion and religious mores abide – inside the actual space of the hotel, however (in a manner quite comparable with the Isabel and the Shahjahan) unmarried couples, homosexuals and prostitutes seek out the God-proof, Law-resistant seclusion of its walls. What makes Motherland Hotel a modernist novel, however, is the way the absence of religion in the text does not appear to be replaced by anything – not even an existential courage. In both Hotel DF and Chowringhee, the hustle and bustle of quotidian capitalism doesn’t appear to give any of the characters time to pray or, for that matter, reflect on the redundancy of prayer. In the Turkish text, however, the sepulchral emptiness and gloom pervading the hotel performs, more than anything else, Atılgan’s critique of the Kemalist project – in effect, a secular attack upon the secular. We shall return to this idea of the hotel as concealing a kind of textual void shortly. Before we move on to the Mexican text, there is one final thing that Motherland Hotel reveals about the hotel-narrative: the inclusion of some reference to the concrete practice and exercise of history. In Chowringhee, this will be the endless stories about the hotel’s past and its founder, and the archival anxiety that all these memories will one day disappear (112); in Hotel DF, the presence of an actual historian (Laura Gibellini) as one of the guests. In Motherland Hotel, a great deal of meaning is condensed into the history books briefly mentioned at the beginning: Registers from the previous years were stored in a chest under the stairs together with some thick history books of his father’s, printed in the old Arabic script (eski yazı birkaç tarih kitabıyla birlikte). Once Zeberjet was out of grade school his father had taught him this script.18

58  The Hotel-Narrative The historical reference is to the Romanization of the Perso-Arabic alphabet that Turkish used until 1928, when the entire alphabet was changed in a single stroke. We are not told what these old history books are, only that they lie forgotten alongside the hotel registers Zebercet reports to the police each week (though nobody reads them). These lingering, buried references to the practice of history lie like depth charges in the novel. The unnamed girl who comes to the hotel with her father to visit the archaeological ruins (24); the undescribed painting of an Oriental harem hanging in Zebercet’s office, a small square of premodern Ottomania which leaks out sexually into the hotel, and stands in contrast to the hotel’s only other picture – the full-length portrait of Atatürk. Such allusions to history produce a strange tension in the novel, as the quasi-pathological routines of the hotel manager and his duties become overwhelmed, as the novel progresses, by an increasing number of stories and anecdotes from the past, until in the last 20 pages of the novel, they burst through the fabric of the text – a profusion of mini-histories from the Kecheji family and their descendants. Thus, we have the idea of the hotel as a modern space whose purpose is legitimate and purchased alienation – it is a building which houses people outside their contexts and communities – but which struggles to contain its own origins in the process. In the closing 20 pages of the novel, Motherland Hotel becomes the story of a hotel that cannot efface its own history anymore.

Hotel DF (2010) …and afterwards I go out onto the street, where I discover I have absolutely nothing to do. – Frank Henestrosa in Hotel DF, p. 150 (own translation)

There is something about the blend of homelessness, detective fiction, melancholy and hotel rooms that might make Turkish readers of Hotel DF – if there are any of this yet-to-be-translated novel – think of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book (especially given the background role hotels like the Pera Palas play in the text). Hotel DF takes on the acronymic name for Mexico City in its title – Distrito Federal – and offers a compendium of characters/guests which, of all three novels, is probably the widest in socio-economic terms: drug dealers, flawed detectives, corrupt police commanders, Spanish historians, chambermaids, the children of the rich and Bohemian German tourists on Humboldt-like journeys of (self)discovery. Guillermo Fadanelli is a prolific writer – Hotel DF is the 8th of 11 novels – and he has acquired, over the past decade, the reputation of a writer of literatura basura or “garbage literature”: literature associated with the most abject, downtrodden, unpalatable aspects of the urban.19 Reaction to the novel has been mixed. The writer Valeria Luiselli has called it “a moral portrait of the epoch”, and describes Fadanelli

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as one of the “central voices of the marginal”.20 Other critics have been less impressed, with Diana Palaversich in particular pointing out the “machismo and misogyny” of an author who “endlessly bombards us with typical masculine fantasies”.21 The objection has been raised that Fadanelli cultivates a façade of being “counter-culture” but actually is unable to “escape the aesthetic and erotic molds of mainstream society”.22 Critics sympathetic to the novel have acknowledged an aestheticization of “narcocultura”, but with the aim of portraying a city caught in perennial crisis.23 Hotels are melancholy spaces – or perhaps, more accurately, they are spaces of commercial exchange which possess an underlying melancholy. If Motherland Hotel exudes an implicit sadness in its gloom, silence and sudden closure, Hotel DF joins Chowringhee in the representation of a subtextual sadness: a busy, hectic enterprise whose frenetic activity actually masks a series of deeply melancholic themes (old age, loneliness, human indifference, purposelessness, the absence or elusiveness of permanent historical context).24 The protagonists in these novels – be they managers, workers or guests – all have an air of inadequacy, and also of what Heidegger calls Geworfenheit, the sense of being thrown into the world. In the Turkish text, the Messianic promise – and subsequent collapse – of the beautiful woman from the Ankara train provides the rupture which sets Zebercet free of his bearings, sending him spinning ultimately into self-destruction. The protagonist of Chowringhee begins as a kind of flaneur on the streets of Calcutta, wandering in existentially from the pages of the previous novel, and ironically returns to the very same sense of shelterlessness at the end of the novel. Beneath the jokes, caricatures and excess of Chowringhee lie a series of broken characters – lives wasted or cut short, subjects living disappointed existences, cursed (like Gomez, Sata, even the protagonist himself) with transcendental visions that are forever restricted by the finite trappings of income, hierarchy and history. What makes a hotel-narrative like Hotel DF a melancholic text, more than anything else, is the saturnine disposition of the protagonist, Frank Henestrosa. A strange composite of second-rate detective, would-be philanderer, aspiring artist and melancholic outsider, he fills the novel with expressions of self-doubt, self-contempt, recollections of childhood, confessions of apathy and frequent declarations of near-complete aporia: If I wasn’t a hypocrite I would help [the chambermaid] do the cleaning. But if I did I would lose her respect. (130) What am I looking for? I don’t know, perhaps my own face. (80) In front of an old mirror on the wall that suddenly reflects the reception of the Hotel Isabel, I observe my own sad image [observo mi triste

60  The Hotel-Narrative imagen]. … If I didn’t have money on me it would probably depress me just seeing this orderly, modest gentleman. And who doesn’t get depressed at my age. (41-2) Although other existentially homeless guests wander through the novel (Gabriel Sandler, Stefan the German tourist), it is the protagonist Frank who skews an otherwise busy, event-filled text with a slightly more fatalistic, even philosophical tone. Particularly in the final example above, with the protagonist noticing himself in the reception mirror, we see exemplified the narrator’s anxieties about finitude, identity and direction. Hotels interrupt life: and it is the space afforded by the interruption, the gap enabled by this estrangement, that makes the hotel such a vehicle of reflection, and such a source of alienation and all the melancholy that alienation inspires. Frank himself insists he has moved to the Hotel Isabel “for a change, to put a bit of emotion into my life” (as he tells his ex-girlfriend).25 In this way the hotel plays a backstage to the process of alienation, but also catalytically drives it, opening up and reconfiguring the characters as they progress through the novel. What distinguishes Hotel DF from the other two texts is that it is a crime story set in a hotel – even if, as one scholar has pointed out, the classic detective fiction formula of “crime-clues-deduction-solution” is far from played out in the novel,26 where a web of parallel and overlapping crimes form several of the novel’s subplots. In his unforgettable short story “Tenga para que se entretenga”, José Emilio Pacheco points out how whenever you start to investigate a crime in Mexico, you come across two or three others whose existence you had not anticipated.27 Hotel DF operates in a similarly centerless way – although Frank’s aim is to find out exactly what is happening on the closed-off second floor of the building, what emerges in the novel is a whole world of different crimes and unrelated injustices, a whole layer of iniquity wriggling beneath the bland surface of the everyday: corruption, domestic violence, incest, exploitation. One of the many sadnesses to be found in Hotel DF is surely this persistent sense of guilt and complicity – even the detective-narrator admits to constantly suspecting himself (34), so entrenched and pervasive is this notion of a fallen world wholly complicit in its own culpa. When one of the characters in the novel jokingly refers to a rival establishment as a “hotel calvinista” (285), it is the Hotel Isabel – and no other – that springs to mind. Before moving on to the final section, we should also ask: from the author’s point of view, what purpose does the introduction of melancholy into a hotel-narrative actually serve? Consciously or not, what is the consequence of imbuing a hotel-novel with a melancholic hue? Perhaps the expression, performance, and even repetition of a melancholy protagonist/ atmosphere serve as a kind of mimetic compensation; by describing a hotel full of loneliness, isolation and incomprehension (the cluster of misunderstood existences within its walls, the suicidal thought-trains behind each

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door, the unwitting lives that lie next to each other in appalling adjacency), some recognition of the problem takes place. Deleuze famously described the Baroque as one last (doomed) attempt to recover and hold together the fractured and cracked ruins of the classical before they finally collapsed into the modern.28 This may be a version of what the hotel-novelist tries to do. Read this way, hotel-narratives – for all of their melancholia – would be profoundly positive texts, literary attempts to retain and represent communities even in the very moment of their alienation and dissolution. By the end of Hotel DF, the portrait of Queen Isabel which has been hanging in the reception lobby since the beginning is gone – but the Hotel Isabel still remains open for business, with or without its monarch. Death and the Hotel-Narrative A hotel without killers isn’t a hotel [Un hotel sin asesinos no es un hotel]. – Samuel in Hotel DF, p118

All of the features we have discerned here – misogyny, Empire, history, melancholy and a paucity of religious reference – seem to be leading us toward one general thesis: a profound relationship between death and the modern hotel in literature. Even the most casual glance across the Western literary canon would give us numerous examples for this: the Hotel des Bains in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the final room of the suicide scene in Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”, the Gresham in James Joyce’s “The Dead” and – if we redefine a sanatorium as a hotel for the seriously ill – then Mann’s Der Zauberberg also invokes some sense of a polyphonic conference of the dead.29 Moreover, some of the most famous hotel-stories in Turkish literature are soaked in death: Tomris Uyar’s “Guests of the Dying Hotel” (“Ölen Otel ki Muşteriler”) gently narrates a set of aging life-stories against the background of a modest hotel whose fortunes are in similar decline, while Adalet Ağaoğlu’s 1973 novel Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die) narrates a planned suicide against the background of a hotel.30 One of the most recent plays to address the horrifying murders in Ciudad Juarez is Rascon Banda’s Hotel Juarez (2008), which explores the torture and murder of women in the Mexican border town against the backdrop of a city hotel.31 Death permeates all three of the hotel-novels in our chapter. In all three, the hotels are either situated near cemeteries or actually physically referred to as cemeteries – in Hotel DF, for example, the receptionist tells a guest “after nine o’clock, the hotel turns into a graveyard” (126); in Chowringhee, the book begins at the grave of Sir Hariram, “one of the most illustrious among the dead citizens of this dead city” (1, 34).32All three hotels are linked to tombs – whether it is the faintly infernal position of the Motherland Hotel underground, the sepulchral “stale corrupt air of Shahjahan” (272) or the telephonic graveyard for cellphone-signals that is the Isabel (260). More than anything else, premature and violent death takes place in both the hotel

62  The Hotel-Narrative space and background of all three narratives – suicides and murders pile up in Atılgan’s work as we follow Zeberjet to his self-destructive conclusion; Guillermo Fadanelli’s novel is filled with homicides, mostly from the druggangs linked with the hotel, as the plot of the novel culminates in the murder and funeral of Gabriel’s cousin, Sofia; and in Chowringhee, perhaps most disturbingly, a satirical and comic narrative is repeatedly interrupted by a string of deaths past and present – Karabi’s suicide, Sujata’s car accident, the deaths due to small pox of Jane and Robbie. In fact, even though all the novels employ some degree of comedy and ironic observation in their narration (even the darkest text, Motherland Hotel, exploits the comic possibilities in Zebercet’s obsessive idiosyncrasies), death emerges as a quietly permanent guest, the lugubrious theme which seems to underlie all the others. What connects the hotel with death in modern literature? What explains the relationship, evident across both Western and non-Western fiction, between the theme of death and the representation of the modern literary hotel? Before considering theoretical approaches, some very specific explanations could be furnished to give a meaning to the funeral tone of each of our Mexican, Turkish and Bengali examples: as a comment on the selfdestructive pathology inherent in the Turkish nation-state in Yusuf Atılgan’s novel; as an observation on the posthumous survival of the British Raj in a newly independent India in Sankar’s text; and, in Guillermo Fadanelli’s novel, as just one more example in a long tradition of thanatophilia in Mexican literature (what Claudio Lomnitz has called Mexico’s “nationalization of death”,33 and which lies beneath what the poet Xavier Villarutia meant when he famously defined life as “a nostalgia for death”), using the topos of a city center hotel to illustrate the specifically Mexican ways in which life and death intersect in a twenty-first century metropolis. All of these explanations, situating the novels in their post-Kemal/post-colonial/ post-PRI contexts, would see the prevalence of Death as a motif suffused with a local and immediate meaning. Rising above the local to consider more theoretical, overarching approaches, the path forks. In one direction beckons the path of psychoanalysis, seeing the deaths of characters in the novel as a textual form of punishment for various violations of the Law. Within such an approach, the hotel would be a space of briefly tolerated subversion, and the hotelnarrative a conservative genre which temporarily allows, but ultimately terminates, any commitment to repeated and sustained violation. Anticipating our chapter on myth in this book, the author of Chowringhee puts this in interesting terms with a reference to the Ramayana, commenting on the fate of the hotel hostess, Karabi, who has fallen in love with the son of a business empire: “The gurus of the hotel business have a maxim” [Bose-da] said softly. “Never forget that there’s a counter between you and your guests. Sita fell prey to Ravana because she crossed the line”.34

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Sita is the goddess-wife in the Hindu epic poem who is abducted (or, in Bose-da’s patriarchal retelling, seduced) by the “demon-prince” Ravana; the hotel counter metaphorically runs along lines of caste, class, race and marital convention. If Karabi’s suicide is a consequence of her crossing this line, then within such an approach the hotel-narrative and its author operate a regulatory apparatus, one set up in a futile yet earnest struggle to rein in desire and punish those who violate its dicta to an unacceptable degree. Is the hotel-narrative such a text? In Hotel DF, the beautiful Sofia could well be considered murdered for being inappropriately in love with her cousin, Gabriel; similarly, the criminal youths who abduct a rich kid they come across in the wealthy district of Condesa (137) are murdered by the police not for abducting him, but (textually) for developing affection and fellowfeeling toward him, ultimately letting him go. In Motherland Hotel, the analysis of an essentially conservative genre remains plausible, but a little more stretched: the murder of a chambermaid (who regularly sexually services the needs of Zebercet), the bloodied nose of the female prostitute, not to mention the suicide of Zebercet himself, might well be seen as ultimately punitive acts.35 The sepulchral gloom of the novel, however, seems to require something more than the textual framework of a punishing, Godlike Author to explain its relationship with death. Staying with psychoanalysis for a moment, one might also bear in mind that all three male protagonists in these novels (Zeberjet, Frank and the seldom-named narrator Sankar) are sexually inactive, frustrated or impotent, recalling the proximity between death-drive and sex-drive in both Freud and Lacan.36 If we follow Lacan’s definition of the death-drive as a repetitive movement made out of frustration in response to a fundamental lack in language, then all three novels’ male protagonists gyrate toward female objects of desire, but ultimately end up in disappointment, regressing to a primary narcissism, lost (as Elisabeth Roudinesco puts it) in a “maternal and deathly imago”.37 Both Zebercet and Frank Henestrosa suffer sexual disappointment, seeking solace respectively in suicide and the arms of a previous ex-; in the case of Chowringhee’s narrator, Sankar does nothing but observe acts of sex and death from beginning to end of the novel, ultimately choosing to leave the hotel and melt back into the city night. Under this optic, the hotel – as the modern warehouse of alienation – offers narratives replete with alienated subjects, whose death instincts drive them repetitively toward impossible objects/states of desire. In Hotel DF, the most explicit example of this is the abusive and sexually unconventional relationship between Gloria and her failed TV-actor husband Roberto Davison (already described as “a little bit dead”/“un pez muerto” by his agent 142), a repetitive and joyless relationship which seems to be driven by the actor’s own death instinct: the man who now bites her neck like a badger, her man, seems to return to life in bed [vuelve a encontrar la vida]. … “You’re not going to strike me, right? I was only talking. Is that forbidden too? Your jealousy

64  The Hotel-Narrative embitters the air”, she repeats, her words are expressed without any hint of passion. Roberto has no desire to recite arguments and lets himself be carried away by the tangible heat of his blood, he wants to force his wife to feel, kiss, eat, extinguish the fiery core that has started to burn when he saw her in the dining room chatting with a stranger. And that’s what he’ll do until he dies [hasta quedarse en huesos]. p153 (own translation) hasta quedarse en huesos – literally, “until he/they become bones”. The image presented here of an old man obstinately playing out his perversions upon a passive wife – a description of dogged, repetitive sexuality which ends in a heap of bones – suggests the link between sex and death in the literary hotel is not merely a punitive one, but also indicative of a far deeper, more constitutive relationship. If the death-drive was characterized by Freud as an empty, repetitive, quasi-undead movement to “re-establish a state of things”,38 then the alienating structure of the modern hotel – not just as a locus of illicit sexual activity, but also as a space in which the subject is temporarily stripped of their lifeworld – offers the perfect circumstances for the ontological derailment of the death-drive.39 The deathliness of hotel-fiction – its murders, suicides, fatal accidents, funeral images, even the undead spirits of its buildings – might well emerge from the context-annihilating subject-dissolution the modern hotel seems to enable. In other words, hotels accommodate life – but they are the opposite of life. If psychoanalysis promises one way of understanding this phenomenon, then historicism offers another. Here sexuality would be removed from the equation, and emphasis would be realigned not upon the sexual frustration/impotence/inactivity of the protagonists but upon the three hotel owners whom we hardly ever meet in the novels (in the cases of both Anayurt and Isabel hotels, the owners are absent from the physical narratives of the novels, and send emissaries only at intervals to collect the months’ takings40; while the English owner of the Shahjahan, Simpson remains a largely mythological figure whom we hardly ever encounter in the text). To historicize all three novels would mean to see the hotel’s relationship with death against the background of a wider sense of secularizing modernity, the hotel-narrative as being enabled by what Homi Bhabha calls “the interruption …[of] the death of the Father”41 – the clearing of a space left vacant by the evacuation of transcendental authority, but not yet filled with any new content. Within such a reading, the hotel would be a space in which a secular tradition (be it Kemalism, the Mexican PRI or the secular Indian nationstate) culminates in a kind of nihilism, a moral void where, now the Father is dead, nothing and everything is possible. From this optic, the prevalence of death in the modern hotel-novel is a consequence of this culminating breakdown of moral conventions and philosophical raisons d’etre – the murders and suicides which take place within a hotel’s walls are not the

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effect of some conservative punishment mechanism, nor the throes of a death-drive which gravitates obscenely, impotently toward the sexual, but rather the consequences of a series of societal/ideological implosions which have already taken place. Toward the end of each novel, a certain nihilism is generated and contained within the closing narrative: in Chowringhee, Spengler (author of Decline of the West and Nirad Chaudhuri’s favorite author) is openly invoked as the drunken orgy of the striptease event sounds “the death-knell of civilization” (18, 204); the breakdown of Zebercet in Motherland Hotel results in murder, intoxication, psychosis and suicide; in Hotel DF, we have multiple events – the disappearance of the Spanish historian which drives Frank back to his ex-girlfriend, the murder of Sofia and the effect it has on her cousin (“if Sofia is dead, everything is permitted”, 273) and the disappearance of the portrait of Queen Isabel in the reception which gives the hotel its name. Even though the nihilism latent in a novel as contemporary as Hotel DF draws on a different set of historical processes (neoliberalism and globalization, rather than nation-statism or postcolonial nationalism42), the dissolution of the Master Signifier and the effects of authority’s evaporation remain similar in terms of their textual playing out. To read death in the hotel-narrative this way – as a secular petri dish of experimental nihilism, visible yet contained – means reading all three novels in our chapter, to some degree, allegorically. The novels already pander quite openly toward symbolism, if not outright allegory, in the idea of the hotel as representing a society, country or government: Hotel DF, in its title alone, explicitly proffers the hotel as a model of Mexico City; “running a hotel was no different from … governing a country”, Zebercet tells himself at the end of Motherland Hotel (146); and the all-knowing receptionist Bose quotes Omar Khayam in Chowringhee: “It’s difficult for a country to get a good prime minister, but it’s even more difficult to get a good hotel manager” (28). Without following Jameson too far down the road of all “Third World Literature” being “necessarily allegorical”,43 it does seem reasonable to see fictional hotels as being used creatively (and not only by non-Western writers) to generate structures with politically relevant possibilities.44 If hotels really are modern spaces – if they constitute, like Kracauer’s Godless but congregational hotel lobbies, attempts to found post-religious, nontranscendental communities – then the abundance of death and deathliness associated with them is a consequence of the extreme secular space they attempt to create: a space without gods, owners or proprietors, just an endless army of lonely subjects, alienated from each other and from themselves.

Notes 1 Sankar, Chowringhee, trans. Arunava Sinha (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2007); Bengali text Chowringhee (Calcutta: Upl Books, 2010). 2 See the first part of Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004) and Elena Garro, Los Recuerdos del porvenir (Mexico City: Mortiz, 1963).

66  The Hotel-Narrative 3 Krikor Zohrab, “Armenisa” in A.J. Hacikyan, G. Basmajian, E.S. Franchuk, and N. Ouzonian (eds), The Heritage of Armenian Literature vol. 3 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005) pp. 520–530. 4 Guillermo Fadanelli, Hotel DF (Barcelona: Literatura Mondadori, 2010); Yusuf Atılgan, Anayurt Oteli (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 2012) – English translation by Fred Stark, Motherland Hotel (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2017). Many thanks to Ignacio Sánchez M. Prado for drawing my attention to Fadanelli’s novel. 5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) p. 384. 6 See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces; Utopias and Heterotopias” in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 350–358. 7 This difference is exemplified in Frederic Jameson’s oft-cited reaction to the Bonaventura Hotel, and Homi Bhabha’s somewhat Foucauldian response to it. For Jameson, the escalators, elevators and dizzying lobby of the Los Angeles hotel plunge the observer into a “milling confusion”, one which robs them of the ability to “map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught” (Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991] pp. 83–84). Bhabha, perhaps a tad predictably, deconstructs this by pointing out the “mimetics” of a “class-subject” epistemology beneath Jameson’s quasi-phenomenological response, one which still relies on an inside/outside binary distinction (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994] p. 219.). 8 Reported by Ananya Dutta, “A Full 50 Years Down the Lane, Chowringhee’s Charm Remains” The Hindu 13 June 2012. 9 This goes against a number of hotel-fiction studies that see the modern hotel as a space of protection, empowerment and liberation for women – though admittedly concentrating on mainly women writers. Randi Salomon, in an essay on the hotel-narratives of Arnold Bennett, sees hotels as places not of isolation, but positive and productive spaces (“Arnold Bennett’s Hotels” Twentieth-Century Literature 58:1 [Spring 2012] p. 6). Emma Short sees hotels in some women’s fiction as “offer[ing] a space in which women are free to explore otherwise forbidden desires” (Emma Short, “No Place Like Home: The Hotel in Modernist Women’s Writing” PhD thesis, Newcastle University, 2011 p. 65). Bettina Matthias, in the only monograph on the subject, is more reserved, concluding how women are especially vulnerable to the ambivalent nature of hotels as both liberating and alienating (The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature [Camden House, 2006] p. 201). 10 See Frederic Jameson and Michael Speaks, “Envelopes and Enclaves: The Space of Post-Civil Society (An Architectural Conversation)” Assemblage 17 (April 1992) p. 34. 11 Tonisha Guin sees the book as a series of ruptures in time as various “precapitalist” times emerge and undermine the contemporary capitalist one – “Heterogeneous Time in Indian Modernity: Reading Chowringhee” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities VIII: 1 (2016) p. 283ff. 12 For this first point, I am indebted to Adile Aslan, “Anayurt Oteli and Turkish Literary Modernity from the Periphery” (unpublished). 13 Nurdan Gürbilek, Magdurun Dili (Istanbul: Metis, 2008) p. 172. 14 Jale Parla, “From Allegory to Parable: Inscriptions of Anatolia in the Turkish Novel” New Perspectives on Turkey 36 (2007) p. 20, and also “Dark Knowledge Befits Dark Color: Turkish Novelists Interrogate the Ideology of Light” New Perspectives on Turkey 41 (2009) pp. 9–42.

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15 Erdağ Göknar is among those who have noted “a godless world, reduced to material relations” in the novel – see his Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy (London: Routledge, 2013) p. 181. 16 Chowringhee p. 356. Striking, given the fact that the writer Mani Shankar Mukherjee is also the author of a 264-page monograph on the religious sage, Swami Vivekananda. 17 Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Hotelhalle” in Inka Muelder-Bach (ed.), Werke vol. 5:2 Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011) pp. 175–188. 18 In Atılgan, Anayurt Oteli, p. 29, Motherland Hotel, p. 41. 19 Glen S. Close, Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction: A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence (Palgrave, 2008) p. 53. 20 Valeria Luiselli, “Hotel DF” Letras Libres no. 149, 1 May 2011. 21 Diana Palaversich, De Macondo a McOndo: senderos de la postmodernidad latinoamericana (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdes, 2005) p. 75. 22 Close, Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction, p. 55. For a negative but reasonable profile of Fadanelli, his masculine bias and a gendered perspective on his status in Mexican literary society, see Emily Hind, Dude Lit: Mexican Men Writing and Performing Competence 1955–2012 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019) p. 31 ff. 23 Thelma Jiménez-Anglada, “Death and Sovereignty in Urban Borderlands: Guillermo Fadanelli’s Hotel DF” Chasqui 47:1 (2018) p. 178. 24 See the critic Fudacz for a reading of Fadanelli as a novelist of the “non-place”, whose “characters … wander through the city spaces, spaces of consumption, transit, and travel, without any identifying connections to them” (132) – Jamie Fudacz, “Between Place and Non-place: The Fictions of Guillermo Fadanelli” Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties 13 (2014) pp. 117–132. 25 Fadanelli, Hotel DF, p. 157. 26 Karen Marie Frazier, “Neoliberal Noir: Bearing Witness to Systemic and Subjective Violence in Mexico” PhD University of Michigan (2016) p. 82. 27 José Emilio Pacheco, De Algun tiempo a esta parte: Relatos Reunidos (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2006) pp. 403–417. 28 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London: Continuum, 1993). 29 Not wanting to flirt too much with popular culture, I might also have mentioned, from The Shining and Psycho respectively, the Overlook and the Bates motel. 30 Adalet Ağaoğlu, Ölmeye Yatmak (Istanbul: Remzi, 1973). For the allegorical aspects of the novel, see Sibel Irzık, “Allegorical Lives: The Public and the Private in the Modern Turkish Novel” South Atlantic Quarterly 102:2/3 (2003) pp. 551–566. For a focus on Ağaoğlu as a female intellectual, see Adile Aslan, “The Role of the Intellectual in Contemporary Turkish Women’s Narratives” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14:1 (2012). Pp. 1–8. 31 Banda’s play can be found in Enrique Mijares (ed.), Hotel Juarez: Drammaturgia de Feminicidios (Durango: Teatro de frontera, 2008). 32 For more references to graveyards and cemeteries, see also Chowringhee, p. 137 and Hotel DF, pp. 107, 111, 119. 33 Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico, p. 35. 34 Chowringhee, p. 294. 35 This idea of punishing the protagonist who refuses to subordinate their desires to the (in this instance patriarchal) Law is found in Slavoj Žižek’s review of the “reactionary” 2011 film Black Swan – see his Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012) p. 421. 36 A disputed proximity, of course – Lacan himself considered the term “deathinstinct” an “enigmatic signification” (Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan [London:

68  The Hotel-Narrative Routledge, 1989] p. 7). Freud saw a greater degree of opposition in the two drives, whereas Lacan saw “an internal antinomy, a knot of satisfaction and suffering” (H. Glowinski, Zita M. Marks and S. Murphy (eds), A Compendium of Lacanian Terms [London: Free Association Books, 2001] p. 102). 37 Elisabeth Roudinesco, “The Mirror Stage: An Obliterated Archive” in Jean Michel Rabate (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 30. 38 Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id” in Albert Dickson (eds), On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the Ego and the Id, and Other Works (London: Penguin, 1991) p. 381. 39 For more on this point, see Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner, Žižek: Beyond Foucault (London: Palgrave, 2007) p. 175. 40 Hotel DF, p. 118. 41 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 69. 42 For Fadanelli’s hotel as a paradigmatic chronotopos of globalization, see Estefanía Bournot, “Rutas y encrucijadas: cronotopos de la narrativa contemporánea latinoamericana” Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 44 (2015) p. 143ff. 43 Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986) p. 69. 44 Sibel Irzık, in an interesting reformulation of Frederic Jameson, has suggested a tendency in many modern Turkish novels not to allegory but the parody of allegory, where “characters are portrayed as having been condemned to lead allegorical lives” – Irzık, “Allegorical Lives” p. 556.

3

Femicide Narratives Mujer, Mohila, Kadın

Among the six stories analyzed in this chapter, a village girl is promised a dream marriage in the next town to a rich benefactor – and then literally prostituted to death in a brothel servicing low-paid workers; the society belle of a small town marries the attractive, most sought-after bachelor – and then is publicly shamed and humiliated the very next day as a nonvirgin in front of the entire community; a mother of three enjoys a final few hours of contentment with her family before an angry mob breaks into the house, murders her husband, burns her children to death and gang rapes her multiple times. All of the stories examined in this chapter deal with the murder and destruction of women – all of them showcase the variety of ways in which a system can paralyze and dismantle a female subject. Our attempt to find non-reductive ways of talking about the commonalities of three literary regions has led us to the genres of the ghost story and the hotel-novel. If the term “femicide narrative” is suggested as another example here, it should be stressed that the word “femicide” is connected to but not limited by the horrifying trafficking and mass murder of women witnessed in recent years (and analyzed in books such as Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez’s The Femicide Machine).1 One of the things this chapter will attempt to propose is the genre of a “femicide narrative” – a story, novel or film which narrates the literal or metaphorical destruction of a female subject in terms which are largely systemic. The obliteration of women examined in these stories – apart from that of the physical – might be spiritual (i.e., demoralization), psychological (madness), political (complete disenfranchisement), ideological (absolute incorporation) or even semantic (dishonor/disgrace). In all these texts, however, the case study of a doomed female subject is offered up – a participant in a system which, from the very beginning, has set and configured the parameters of the woman’s imminent destruction. There are no happy endings in the femicide narrative. There is no moment of expanded consciousness, no thrilling finale where the protagonist actualizes the potential she has been nurturing all along; no inspiring sense of culmination as the main character overcomes the trappings of patriarchy and exercises her agency to realize the self she deserves. The

70  Femicide Narratives word “agency” will feature as a central theme in our analysis of these stories. In fact, all six stories in this chapter (and especially those by Devi and Aral) express in fiction many of the reservations about the word “agency” that Marxist and feminist critics have been articulating over the past 30 years – reservations which, in some cases, see a neoliberal or even cynically conservative element in the exaltation of female “agency”.2 Whether it is (as Abu-Lughod famously insisted) a “tendency to romanticize resistance” and overestimate the “ineffectiveness of systems of power”3 or more simply an obsession with “the micro-positional scale of postcolonial agency”, an “emphasis on cultural and representational issues” that overlooks important material concerns,4 the term “agency” has come under increasing attack. Instead of cultivating fantasies of empowerment, the femicide narrative is a text which sees its true political value in the sober delineation of the limits of a female subject’s agency, and (as Abu-Lughod would have it) accurately evaluating the “effectiveness” of the oppressing system. The femicide narratives in this chapter – and the authors who produce them – do not invoke the subject as a ground of agency, since (as Judith Butler puts it) “the subject itself is produced through operations of power that delimit in advance what the aims and expanse of agency will be”5; which is why the femicide narrative adopts a systemic approach to the destruction of the subject it depicts. Femicide narratives are by female authors. This should not suggest no male writer can produce such a text – examples abound from all three regions: Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil’s “Ferhunde the Maid” encompasses the entire lifespan of a female servant in a rich family who grows up, and grows old, waiting to marry while looking after generation after generation of the family’s offspring; Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 examines the femicides of Ciudad Juarez in minute, relentless, excruciating detail; Tagore’s short story “Elder Sister”/“Didi” tells the story of a woman who disobeys her husband by taking care of a resented baby cousin, and ultimately pays for her compassion with her life; the Bangladeshi novelist Syed Manzoorul Islam’s 2010 novel Absurd Night (Ajgubi Raat) is a magical realist retelling of a murdered woman,6 while, finally, the 1973 film Meghne Dekhe Tara/Cloud Capped Star (directed by Mahasweta Devi’s uncle, Ritwik Ghatak) offers the most convincing cinematic example of the genre, where a family in 1950s Calcutta effectively drives a self-sacrificing daughter into the depths of madness with their selfish, individual ambitions. Female authors are highlighted because this chapter is taking an authorbased approach to the question of the femicide narrative. Castellanos, Devi and Aral are all female, left-wing or left-leaning fiction writers and near contemporaries who wrote their featured texts in the 1960s/1970s/1980s, respectively. All three come from privileged backgrounds, took undergraduate degrees in literature, worked in teacher training colleges and cultivated an interest in the conditions of both the provincial (Chiapas/Bihar, rural West Bengal/small town Anatolia) and the persecution of indigenous or

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minority groups (Tzotzils/tribals/Alevis). The subtext to this chapter will be a reflection on the mechanisms within a society by which female, middleclass intellectuals can attempt to speak on behalf of, or even adopt and articulate the viewpoint of, a gendered subaltern class they have some limited empirical knowledge of but do not necessarily belong to. It goes without saying that the act of narrating the destruction of a female subject already has the ontological impossibility of the gesture woven into the act – it is difficult to imagine a femicidal narrative written in the first person. What lies behind this exercising of imagination as an act of speculative empathy – and how transnational is this gesture? The differences between these authors – and their texts – should not be downplayed. Quite apart from the enormous question of how the patriarchies in each of these stories differ – a nineteenth-century Catholic conservatism, a twentieth-century Sunni morality and an urban Hindu orthodoxy – there are two immediate differences to be considered. The first one is time: Castellanos’ two stories, written in 1961 and 1964, predate the Bengali and Turkish texts by a good 15–20 years. The military counter-insurgency operations in both Turkey and West Bengal which formed a backdrop to these later texts have no real equivalent in Sixties’ Mexico. Even though neither Devi nor Aral’s two stories explicitly invoke these events, the violence of masculinity implicit in all militarism remains an important context for both writers. Second, the question of indigeneity – which strongly binds both Devi and Castellanos as writers who have represented the struggles of indigenous people (albeit with different degrees of critical success7) – cannot really be extended to Inci Aral. Partly because the term “indigenous” itself is so difficult to translate into a Turkish context – the closest group in modern Turkey to Adivasis or Mayans – we might consider in terms of state oppression by a central government would be Kurds, and yet among the many oppressed groups Inci Aral has chosen to write about (Alevis, divorced women, the urban poor), Kurds have been relatively absent. The consequence is that race/ethnicity, such an important factor in the fiction of both Devi and Castellanos,8 cannot be seen as a connecting link to Aral’s work, the gender of whose female subjects appear to transcend cultural/ ethnic specifications.

Mujer But it was you he mistreated, not your relatives, who aren’t going to lift a finger to wipe out the affront. Don’t you realize, you fool [grandísima bruta], what that man did to you? Not only did he dump you in the hospital to manage on your own with only to help you, but he declared you dead so others would not worry about you. And there you are, happy as you please, with no ill feelings towards him.9 – Rosario Castellanos, “El Viudo Roman”

72  Femicide Narratives The novella “El Viudo Roman”/“The Widower Roman”, written in 1964, is one of the most overlooked and underanalyzed of Rosario Castellanos’ texts. If the semantics of power and the centrality of language to ideology is one of the most prevalent themes in Castellanos’ work (she even has a story on the real, socio-economic, institutional consequences of a clerk’s rubber stamp10), then “The Widower Roman” counts as her most successful study of the symbolic relationship between language and power.11 The tale of a wealthy, conniving widower (Don Carlos) who obtains a cold, calculated revenge on his deceased wife’s dead lover by marrying – and then shaming – his beautiful, younger sister, “The Widower Roman” displays the sign-system of a power structure in all its range of complexities. It is a story almost completely indebted to the epistemological: acts of validation, interpretation, deduction, dissemination abound as the characters – and the reader – are drawn into a web of inquiry which, a third of the way toward the end, suddenly encounters a volte-face which shocks both characters and reader alike. Second-time readers are rewarded with a subtle foreshadowing in the guise of Dona Castula (the kind of abducted indigenous child-cum-servant we see in other stories such as “Modesta Gomez”), a figure who initially appears to be a central character in the story, only to cede ground to the twin, overwhelmingly symbolic figures of Doctor and Priest (Don Carlos and Don Evaristo) and become nothing more than a peripheral reminder of the past. Don Carlos’ inability to understand his servant’s stoical acceptance of her lover’s deceit lights the way to the story’s ultimate revelation – the doctor’s repressed, bitter thirst for revenge, and the contrast this offers to the unprepared reader with the calm, respectable, husband-inperpetual-mourning presented in the first half of the story. “The Widower Roman” counts as a femicide narrative because it not only narrates the annihilation of a woman, but does so through the two faces of the system that destroys her – Faith and Enlightenment, Belief and Knowledge, Science and God. If the priest Don Evaristo unwittingly provides, through a reliance on the all-determining concept of purity, a series of candidates for his wealthy, eligible parishioner, then Don Carlos employs all the liberal Enlightenment rationality at his disposal (empirical inquiry, rational speculation, logistical planning) to exact his wholly feudal, non-rational, un-modern revenge. In a manner reminiscent of Lacan’s reflections on the Janus-faced nature of the Law – not simply its officious, punitive outer form, but also its obscene, lurid underside12 – Don Carlos represents the raw, visceral, libidinal desire for vengeance which uses the priest as its superficial, legitimizing façade. Both parties work in a perverse kind of tag-team to select, serve up and ultimately consume Romelia – a falseconsciousness who, in another layer of complexity to the story, yearns for nothing other than her own Master signifier, someone who will dictate to her horizons, her codes, who will supply the crucial supplement to fill her existential lack:

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Yes, there in the closest pews were her friends, who tomorrow and perhaps always would still be called senoritas; who were not to be initiated, as she was to be this evening, into the mysteries of life [ a ser iniciadas, como ella esta noche, en los misterios de la vida]. … From today on Romelia would join the company of women who never say “I want” or “I don’t want” but who always dodge issues by deferring to the man of the house to achieve their aims. This sidestepping may be condensed in a single phrase: “the master wishes … the master prefers … the master orders … one mustn’t contradict the master … above all one must please the master … first I must consult the master” – the master who would exalt her above all to the rank of wife and intimately give her a true image of her body that would finally reach the fullness of knowing, feeling and performing the functions for which it had been created.13 What makes Castellanos such an accurate representer of patriarchal sign-systems is the degree to which she depicts the complicity of its victims. Romelia’s “weakness” here, if we can call it that, is her need to be needed, an existential lack which drives her guest to snag Don Carlos: “[she sought] a love which would fill all her emptinesses and not demand any reciprocity” (Un amor que colmara todos sus vacíos y que no exigiera reciprocidad).14 Her desire for a Master is as religious as it is romantic here. The irony of her fate – the man she tries so hard to “catch”, the Master she yearns to have, will turn out to be her absolute and utter undoing – forms Castellanos’ own dark comment on the semantic blindness of such consciousness. I will say something about the deeper question of the Mystery and the secret in a moment. The mention of Romelia’s weakness, however, brings up the whole question of Castellanos’ status within feminist scholarship. Although Maureen Ahern has celebrated Castellanos as the first Mexican writer to draw the essential connections between sex, race and class,15 and although a number of critics have praised both her stories and the novels for depicting the contexts of their female protagonists with ruthless realism (María Rosa Fiscal, for example16), many scholars have taken issue with the negativity of Castellanos’ female subjects. One scholar, for example, has seen a short story collection such as Ciudad Real as offering “grotesquely distorted images of disease and decay” which, although they reflect an attempt to “foreground real accounts of gender oppression”, ultimately constitute a “misogynistic view of womanhood”.17 Just as there is a thin line between an empowering literary text which depicts an active, assertive female subject and one which partakes in a liberal fantasy of political fulfillment, an equally thin demarcation lies between texts that pitilessly expose the entrenchment of a failed subject (in the spirit of Ideologiekritik) and those that stoically resign themselves to the insuperability of a hegemonic system.

74  Femicide Narratives Critical approaches which level charges of negativity at Castellanos do not take into account the way narratives like “The Widower Roman” have as their main aim to delineate the ideological capture of a female subject. All femicide narratives share this exposé in common: not simply the staging of patriarchy as a sign-system, but specifically the way a removed signifier – a secret, a promise, a mystery – is used to exploit the ineluctable incompleteness of a subject in order to seduce and control it. In Devi’s story, as we shall see, the young tribal girl is tricked (like Romelia) into her destruction through the promise of initiation into the mystery of matrimony; in the Aral story, the secret lies on the other side of the door the divorced mother has been locked out of; in “The Widower Roman”, the secret promise of marriage as a responsibility-dissolving liberation, a portal to a dimension of freedom and self-realization, plays a central role in Romelia’s downfall. Ideological sign-systems cannot function without such secrets – the enigmatic promise of something that will complete a subject’s identity is used to direct and focus the behavior of the subject, so that it becomes the performative horizon for all of her actions. A second feature of many of the stories we have chosen is disease. In the two Bengali stories to come, both protagonists die of contracted illnesses – either tuberculosis, syphilis/gonorrhea or, in the case of the “breast-giver”, the breast cancer that ultimately (and symbolically) consumes the wetnurse. Disease also abounds in many of the stories of Rosario Castellanos (Finnegan points out the unusual number of diseased and disfigured characters in the stories of Ciudad Real18), and certainly in one of her stories in particular – the 1961 text “Tres nudos en la red”/ “Three Knots in the Net” – the cancer that the mother Juliana succumbs to illuminates the text on a number of levels. As one scholar points out, “Three Knots in the Net” can be seen as a bridging story between the earlier Chiapas stories and the later texts set in metropolitan Mexican cities.19 The story of a tense relationship between an unruly and eccentric daughter and a set of middle-class parents economically fallen on hard times reflects Castellanos’ own biography quite closely20 – even to the point of the mother in the story dying of cancer.21 The development of the story, as with most of Castellanos’ texts, is quirky and odd – a child (Agueda) that skins lizards alive, dreams of a completely different set of parents and, in an effort to destroy the system by overperforming it, rigorously interrogates the priest sent to “save” her on biblical points he can’t possibly answer. The story’s tension lies in the fact that it is simultaneously a tale of resistance and incorporation – as the young Agueda acquires a consciousness which enables her to escape the ideological “net” in the title the mother (Juliana) gradually emerges as the real object of interest: a selfeffacing and self-denying woman who, by the end of the story, is only able to leave the world of patriarchy that has subdued her through the terminal ward of the local Cancer institute. As with “The Widower Roman”, where the initial presence of Dona Castula briefly misleads us into thinking she,

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not Romelia, will be the central object of our attention – Agueda emerges at the beginning of the story only to recede before the real subject of the narrative – the incremental, subtle, ineluctable death of the mother. How is “Three Knots in the Net” a femicide narrative – and how is disease involved in this? Like “The Widower Roman”, it is a story which culminates in the destruction of a woman – and like “Roman”, a number of social/cultural actors (religion, community, male values of inherited power and entitlement, fatalism) are factored into the narrative to give a systemic account of the subject’s demise. In writing on disease and the body in Victorian novels, Pamela K. Gilbert points out how the “material body is a polyvalent signifier”22; disease, and the demise of diseased characters, can have a variety of meanings in a literary text – a conservative punishment of transgression, an affirmation of ideological boundaries, even (in popular literature) a dark pleasure afforded by the observation of spectacle. In the case of femicide narratives, I would like to argue, disease emerges more than anything else as an authorial punishment of false consciousness. How is Juliana a false consciousness? However problematic the term, Castellanos’ text offers numerous glimpses into the behavior of a subject which repeatedly fails to disentangle itself from the “net” of society. Starting with the very first line of the story – Juliana’s disappointment that she had a baby girl, not a boy, the mother internalizes the ideological settings of the environment around her: the willingness to describe her daughter’s anomalous behavior as satanic (133), her literal sickness at appearing in clothes above her station (133), her belief in destiny (129) and the virtues of “resignation” (141). All of this culminates in a key paragraph where Juliana “explains” to herself the reason her daughter enjoys torturing lizards: Águeda is a Sanromán, she told herself. How could Juliana fight an immutable hierarchy? [¿Cómo iba Juliana a rebelarse contra una jerarquía inmutable? ] She’s a Sanromán, she repeated, walking away. Therefore, whatever evil and compulsion she had within her was inherited from the former torturers of slaves and floggers of Indians. From herself, humble embroiderer of San Sebastian parish, Águeda had inherited nothing. Juliana breathed a sigh of strange relief, that of her own innocence.23 Elsewhere, the critic Finnegan has suggested that Castellanos endorses the essentializing mythologies of Octavio Paz and his notion of “lo Mexicano” through representations of motherhood and pregnancy.24 Juliana’s political fatalism in the above passage – Cómo … rebelarse contra una jerarquía inmutable? – seems to be a direct consequence of the kind of essentialisms Paz would espouse in Labyrinth of Solitude. Agueda’s cruelty, thinks Juliana, runs all the way back to Cortés. All ideological structures mythologize in order to avoid the discomfort of non-mythical explanations – Juliana’s error is to accept this myth unquestioningly. When critics lament the “negativity”

76  Femicide Narratives of female protagonists in Castellanos’ stories, they appear to overlook the studied and calculated depiction of a captured subject. The only “model” intended here is a deliberately negative one: since Juliana, unlike her daughter, believes in an immutable and irresistible hierarchy, she dies of an immutable, untreatable disease. One might see a certain political sadism in making the punishment of the character fit their delusion – the mechanism here, by which a writer punishes a character for insufficient political intelligence/existential courage, is a mechanism which comes dangerously close to imitating the very power structures the writer is critiquing.25 And yet, in the next section, we will see the same mechanism at work in Mahasweta Devi – both Doulouti the sex-worker and Jashoda the wet-nurse will express their belief in some form of destiny or cosmic order, and will suffer painful, disease-ridden deaths as a result. Physical survival and even health, in this sense, is to be acquainted with an active political consciousness – or at least, a consciousness which fits what the writer perceives to constitute “awareness”. Castellanos once said in an interview that the most alienating experience she ever had was that of isolation itself – it was, she claimed, something that (paradoxically) connected all women.26 Death and disease are lonely experiences – they distance and ultimately remove the individual from the communities around them. If this sense of isolation permeates all of Castellanos’ fiction, it not only accounts for the eerie melancholy of the stories, but also provides an insight into how power keeps its hegemonic hold on her protagonists. Castellanos’ female characters – her trapped mothers, her unruly daughters, her unfree maids – are often lonely, even if the isolation they feel is not so much romantic but existential. It is a truism that power divides and conquers – less observed, but equally valid, is the way power can prey on the essential solitude of a subject, prey on its endless quest for something which will remove its constant sense of ontological incompleteness. Both Juliana and Romelia, in their different ways, exhibit this need – this lack which is a consequence of their own isolation. That Castellanos provides no community as a solution, but only fleeting examples of existentialist courage, is perhaps the “negativity” some critics misrecognize as pessimism.

Mohila It is most unnatural to count human beings [manush gona khub adharmo]. – Mohan, “Douloti” p31, 25

The idea of community, which we found to be so negative in Castellanos, provides perhaps the most significant difference between two writers who otherwise enjoy so much in common; two writers who were born barely a year apart (Devi in 1926, Castellanos in 1925) and whose first books also appeared within a year of each other (Devi wrote her first work, Jhansi Rani/The Queen of Jhansi in 1956, Castellanos’ Balun-Canan appeared in

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1957). Both writers enjoyed comfortable, middle-class backgrounds they subsequently abandoned – even if Devi’s bhadralok relatives were politically more sympathetic to their daughter’s behavior than Castellanos’ conservative, land-owning parents. Both writers would dedicate themselves to the welfare of their country’s indigenous population – with the important difference that Castellanos’ subjects were not just a group that she went out to live with and learn from (as Devi did), but a group she also grew up with as a child on her Chiapas estate. Notwithstanding this personal childhood experience on Castellanos’ part, it is probably fair to say that the relative success of Devi’s representations of the tribal subaltern is one more difference that separates her from the Mexican writer, whose portrayal of indigenous people in stories such as “The Eagle”/“El Adveniemento del aguila” and “The Refused Gift”/“El Don Rechazado” can seem idealistic and one-sided (with many reviewers going much further than this in their criticism).27 It is perhaps the most poststructuralist of ironies that a writer so closely associated (in the West) with both Spivak and the Subaltern Studies group prides herself on and openly validates the empirical accuracy of her descriptions of the Adivasi, the harijan, the working poor: “Every day I would walk to a different village … this is the only way [to write about these people], to go and see with your own eyes”.28 Reading both Devi’s interviews and her journalism gives fascinating glimpses into the origins (however mimetically problematic the term) of her fiction. “The Breast Giver”/“Stanyadini”, Devi tells us, actually sprang from a chance encounter in a Calcutta hospital with a woman who had been a wet-nurse, and had subsequently developed breast cancer.29 In Devi’s journalism, her stories could have been inspired by any one of the many factual cases she has written about for 20 years. There is the very real account of Mangaru, a bonded laborer who had been given a field full of rocks to till (like the protagonist in “Paddy Seeds”), and when he refused to work in bondage, he had every tooth in his mouth broken.30 To take another example: the real-life father and son duo “J.P.” of Palamau, Bihar, who in the 1970s held a reign of terror over tribals and bonded laborers (dharumaru) alike, murdering men, raping women, while at the same time fulfilling their posts as government officials and elected members of the legislative council of the state – anyone reading the newspaper articles Devi wrote throughout the 1980s would not fail to recognize the “fictional” counterparts in stories such as “Douloti the Bountiful” and “Arjun”.31 Critics writing on Devi’s substantial oeuvre have produced a field of commentary that, in itself, contains several recurring questions of continuing relevance: most obviously, the exact target of Devi’s critiques (tradition? colonial legacy? the modern nation-state?)32; the extent to which her fiction is “feminist” (a label, like “communist”, Devi has repeatedly rejected33); how easily Devi’s representations of the tribal sits with the various approaches of Subaltern studies and their treatment (arguably, their de-politicization) of the Adivasi34; and even more tangential themes, such as the treatment

78  Femicide Narratives of the environment within her fiction or what lessons the wider realm of translation studies can draw from a case study of Spivak’s role as translator (she has been called the gate-keeper/dwarapalika of Devi’s work35) all point to a South Asian author whose fictional output has excited and embraced a remarkable range of different themes. In this respect, she is comparable to the Bangladeshi contemporary novelist Rizia Rahman, whose detailed description of life in a multi-story Dhaka brothel (Letters of Blood) is reminiscent of a text like “Doulouti the Bountiful”.36 Within this body of secondary criticism, a number of scholars have highlighted a systemic aspect to Devi’s work – she has been called a “political anthropologist”, a writer whose work shows how “capitalist forces have penetrated female reproductive spaces” and turned them into “sexualized and commodified sites”.37 It is with this aspect of “commodification” in mind that we turn to the story “Douloti the Bountiful”. All of the femicidal narratives we are looking at involve some degree of commodification – turning the woman into an object of numerical worth before reducing that number to zero. In both Castellanos stories, it was the woman’s commodifiable value as a vehicle of property transferal (in Romelia’s case, a value which was never to be realized); in the Turkish texts to come, the divorced woman of “The Door” loses her value as the worker’s family caretaker, and is moved from the legitimate, recognized, valued space of the family home to the outside, illegitimate, non-recognized space of female singledom. If commodification acts as a subtext in these examples, the process is foregrounded to its painful extreme in “Douloti”, a text which narrates the effective sale of a young tribal girl into a brothel, first as the “kamiya-whore” of a single boss and then (as the brothel changes hands) as a multiply-worked prostitute, pushed to the limit with 30 clients a day until the diseased, desiccated body of the protagonist finally collapses onto a school map of India at the end of the story. At 90 pages, “Douloti” is a long story – practically a novella – and although it stays with the eponymous protagonist, the text ranges out and beyond her to encompass a number of characters, themes and backstories. It is in the middle of the story – when the brothel owner dies, and the business is taken over by his revenue-thirsty, accounts-obsessed son, Baijnath – that the theme of commodification emerges as one of the central ideas of the text: The feeding money will go down more, the number of clients will go up more. Body! Kamiya woman’s body! [sharir! kamiya arter sharir!] If the body dries up she’ll depart. Famine’s on the way, is there any shortage of harijan kamiya women? And I’ll keep the accounts. [Ar hisab rakhab ami]. … Within a month Baijnath brought in new girls. Many plans all around, the tribal-harijan areas are crowded with contractor, broker, overseer, officer, clerk. Very cheap labor, you can make poor girls disappear by very cheap tricks.

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The women at Rampiyari’s whorehouse were put in a system of twenty to thirty clients by the clock. Pick up your cash fast. And when the body is empty?38 The symbolical shift here – from feudal, patron-tied prostitution to industrial, multiple-client sex-work – forms an ironic comment on the multiple modernities in the text (one upper caste villain early on in the story has already warned against “the West Wind” that is blowing through the village, 42). The modernity which can produce liberal reform, but also the modernity which can quantify the process of bonded labor. This is one of the familiar ways in which Devi often enacts a clash of modernities in her fiction: between the quantifying, reifying industrial modernity found in both the brothel and the coal-mine (and of course, the brothel that services the coal-mine) and the political modernity of civic liberal values that the reforming priest, socialist and nationalist in the story represent. In other stories, too – “Arjun”, “The Hunt” – the Janus-faced nature of modernity is a frequent object of interrogation. Devi’s strength as a writer – and it is a strength she shares with both Mexican and Turkish writers in this chapter – is her ability to depict a situation replete with multiple possibilities and positions, but without compromising the powerful ethical and political drives that have produced the piece. There are multiple actors in the story of “Douloti”, and some of them are clearly to be designated as monolithically evil – the contractor Latia, the brothel-owner Paramananda, his sociopathic business-manager son Baijnath; but where precisely to locate the chain of ancillary causes that facilitates the destruction of Douloti? Various candidates emerge: in the parents who love their child, but allow her to be given away to be “married” to a visiting Brahman; in the brothel-matron Rampiyari, who keeps a motherly eye on the girl, protecting her yet making sure she satisfies her clients; the priest Father Bomfuller and the socialist Prasad, both of whom – through their naive trust in the law and the validity of political action, respectively – fail practically to save Douloti from her fate; the Indian nation-state, embodied in the schoolteacher Mohan, which represents perhaps the most visible institutional failing in the text. And then there is Douloti herself – in the beginning, her terrifying, heart-breaking naiveté, later her reluctance to see any political solution to her travails. “Douloti” may well be a parable on the evils of commodification – a text which illustrates the ultimate consequences of any commodification of the female body – but the moral at the end is less than clear, as the complexity of the scenario Devi delineates appears to transcend any single explanation. Two aspects of the story, however, are worth highlighting for what they say about commodification in general. The first is the presence of the noncommodifiable – fun, memory, disease, myth,39 love – that which cannot be inserted into the commodifying structure, which resists incorporation into the dehumanizing market of values and prices that Douloti has found herself

80  Femicide Narratives abducted into. These irreducible elements emerge in many parts of the story, and whenever they manifest themselves, they threaten the money-making activity of the sex-worker Douloti, just as they threaten the economy represented in the text. When the fair comes to town, the girls in the brothel want to go so much (“Douloti’s spirits danced at the thought of seeing the fair” 68) that they all but go on strike until Rampiyari agrees to let them out for a couple of hours (69). At the town fair, Douloti – now a “kamiya-whore” bond slave – encounters a fragment of her past life, Uncle Bono Nagesia from her village. The scene is an uncomfortable one, as we see Douloti being forced to recognize what has happened to her, within a temporality she has up to now tried to repress. A wiry elderly man with a headband was drinking tea in a tea-shop. Seeing him the bottom of Douloti’s chest gave a great shudder. Bono! Bono Nagesia! – Uncle Bono! – Douloti? – Yes, Uncle Bono. Douloti’s tears flowed, she sobbed out loud. Not like a whore, but like a country girl [konya randiye motu nay thik ye kona deholi mayor motu]. If they come to the fair from their husband’s house and see someone from their father’s house the country girl gets her weeping done first. This is the rule. If you don’t weep everyone will fault you – you’re so happy in your husband’s house that you don’t think about your father’s house? They cry by rote, but they also cry with emotion, and Douloti cried for emotion.40 Although she is now far away from the community that would still see her as “the country girl”, the abducted sex-slave that is now Douloti still performs the gesture. Douloti breaks down because her previous self still haunts the present one. The obvious technical point to make here is that Devi uses these moments of irreducibility (memory, community, pleasure) to intensify the unbearability of Douloti’s predicament. This is true for the reader – “Douloti the Bountiful” is a painful story to read, and the scenes where Douloti almost recovers happiness, or remembers a moment from the past, are among the most upsetting; but it is also true for Douloti herself, whose subject is fissured by the initial commodification/rape of her body (58), and whose subsequent encounters with the non-commodified world do not comfort but torture her. Douloti’s alienated, disenchanted subject cannot move forward, even when it encounters the possibility of a (political) solution at the fair. When we add to this the fact that one of the meanings of the name Douloti comes from the word for wealth (daulata/ দৌলত, literally money or wealth), then it seems even more pressing to ask: what is a text like “Douloti the Bountiful” trying to say about commodification?

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Elsewhere, Devi has written with greater ambivalence about the effects of a commodifying modernity upon a rural subject. There is another, much shorter story, “The Hunt”, which could almost be read as a positive, alternative telling of Douloti’s tale. In this text, an (adopted) tribal girl, Mary, is sexually harassed and pursued by an outside timber contractor – the protagonist pretends to accept his advances, meets with him secretly outside the village and murders him with a machete, stealing his money to run off to the city with her long-standing fiancé. The two texts, one femicidal, one homicidal, stand next to one another almost like pathways that diverge from a common point. Both figures, Mary and Douloti, are alienated by capital; both figures have their identities robbed by commodification; both characters lose their present lifeworlds to the world of the market. And yet one story is the tale of the liberation of a subject, the other of its complete destruction. This is a reading which argues in one sense against critics such as Spivak, who has in deconstructive fashion seen Douloti as neither wholly victimized nor possessing agency.41 Perhaps one of the reasons why blame is so multiply-located in “Douloti” is that the new reality Douloti finds herself submerged in is still buttressed by the old one. Douloti’s tribal identity cannot resist the commodification of her body – the use of her body as property – because it is a commodification which takes place on the basis of that millennium-old identity. Every upper caste man she comes across, whether it is Latia or Singhji or Paramananda, she calls “God” or “my Lord” (debota). If debt is the ultimate commodification of a relationship between two identities, then the “compound interest” that keeps Douloti ensnared is only the most recent, numerical surface of a much older relationship. Douloti accepts her debt, and by accepting her debt she accepts her fate (“The day bond slavery is over”, says Douloti, “the sun will rise in the West”, 72). The most insidious kind of commodification is the one that does not sweep away tradition, but introduces a market logic in the language of that tradition.42 If debt is the commodification of human relationships, then the debt that the lower caste/outcaste/tribal owes to the upper caste benefactor is precisely what ensnares Douloti so successfully. Religion features in all of the stories in our chapter. All three of our writers see religion and religious vocabulary as a lubricant in the mechanisms that crush women like Romelia, Douloti and Selver. Despite this common perception of religion and religious vocabulary as being a central component in the ideological structure involved, we also encounter perhaps a substantive difference in Bengali fiction’s approach to this issue. In the stories of Castellanos and Aral, religion is directly implicated in the femicidal process itself – but primarily as the endorser and enforcer of a purity/impurity dichotomy. The priest sifts and sorts the “suitable” candidates for “The Widower Roman” from the unsuitable ones; Juliana fears for the “proper” upbringing of her daughter and, with societal expectations of what a “good” wife is in mind, sends her to catechism to be “corrected” by a priest. Although we have not

82  Femicide Narratives yet come to the Turkish texts, in both stories Sunni Islam will be a coding machine that both differentiates the good mother from the bad and designates the unclean element in a society that has to be removed. In the Hindu caste structures of Devi’s stories, a critique of patriarchal religion and its misogynistic venom toward women is also present, but it is a critique which takes on some subtly different characteristics. Devi’s text “Breast-Giver”/“Stanyadini” is perhaps the best place to examine these characteristics, not least of all because it is such a well-known story (in the West, primarily, due to Spivak’s translation and widely discussed essay on it43). In contrast to the tribal Douloti, the protagonist of “Breast-Giver” is of the highest priestly caste (Brahman), even though Jashoda is also economically poor. Named after the mother of Krishna, she is the wife of the local Shiva temple’s priest who, through a series of accidents, begins to breastfeed the children of a rich, numerous household, before eventually succumbing to breast cancer and dying alone, impoverished and in agony, in a city hospital. The particular urban version of Durga worshipping, Shakti Hinduism, “Breast-Giver” is set against is implicated in the destruction of Jashoda at every stage. The sacredness of Jashoda’s bovine function – milked like a cow by a whole generation of rich people’s children – is constantly underlined with references to Jashoda’s quasi-divine status, as Jashoda in certain moments is transformed into that most Hindu of oxymorons, the servant-goddess: “The good lord sent you down as the legendary Cow of Fulfillment”, they tell her (313), and elsewhere: “You are a portion of the Mother” (321). This is not to reduce the story to (as Spivak puts it) a “minimalizing reading” that sees nothing more than “a ‘realistic’ picture of Indian gendering” (369) – the story has many hermeneutical layers to peel away – but an abiding insistence on the complicity of spirituality in the exploitation of Jashoda emerges as a central theme, one which culminates in the closing lines of the story: Jashoda was God manifest, others do and did whatever she thought. Jashoda’s death was also the death of God [Jashodar mrittuu ishwarer mrittu]. When a mortal masquerades as God here below, she is forsaken by all and she must always die alone.44 To begin with, Devi does play with a couple of Bengali literary precedents – most obviously Prabhatkumar Mukherjee’s “The Goddess”/“Devi” (1899), the story of a girl who is mistaken for an incarnation of the goddess Devi, and ultimately kills herself, imprisoned and held captive as she is by her “devotees”.45 Throughout “Breast-Giver”, the reader has to deal with the disconcerting sensation of seeing a woman who is simultaneously worshipped and abused, extolled but also exploited, entrapped (and ultimately destroyed) by the very “privilege” of her status (there is almost something Dostoyevskyan about this theme of religion returning to be murdered by the religious).46 What is interesting in both Bengali stories, however, in contrast

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to their Mexican/Turkish counterparts, is how the discourse of purity/impurity (practically a default setting for so many fictional critiques of Christian/ Muslim structures) plays a very minor role in the object of polemic. The dichotomy of un/cleanliness is not by any means absent: Jashoda cleans her nipples scrupulously before they are suckled by the Haldar’s rich children, and Devi even spends one delightful page satirizing how “such is the power of Indian soil that all women turn into mothers here” (311). But the critiques of conservative sexual coding we see so frequently in Turkish and Mexican stories – the ways in which religious social structures enshrine female innocence, and punish female “experience” – are largely absent. In neither of Devi’s stories do we see “innocence” – and the kinds of behavior such a word permits and prohibits – explicitly patrolled by religion in the ways Aral and Castellanos depict (and, for that matter, Elena Garro and Ines Arredondo, and Halide Edip and Tomris Uyar). In fact, the only one of Devi’s stories which seems to foreground this pure/impure dichotomy in an explicit way is, unsurprisingly, a story about a Muslim couple (“The Divorce”). What religion primarily seems to endorse in “The Breast-Giver” – and what Devi is criticizing it for – is the woman’s self-effacement and absorption into the Divine. The woman’s body is seen as a vehicle, not an obstacle, to this deification. As with all the other stories, there is the conventional, material critique of religiosity as a revenue-generating enterprise (when the temple needs money, it turns the shrine’s image around, so devotees witness the god/dess turning its back upon them and give more); we see this also in the household calculations of the family that exploits Jashoda’s breasts, both economically and to keep the figures of their wives slim and attractive. And, as in the other stories, there is also the more general criticism of religion as something which reifies and eternalizes structures of social hierarchy. But the wish to find God in the object you are exploiting – to divinely affirm your treatment of someone not through their dehumanization (whore, slut, unclean) but through their superhumanization – is not a characteristic of Religionskritik shared by Mexican or Turkish writers. We shall touch on this subject again in the next chapter, when another substantial difference between Bengali myth and Mexican/Turkish myth-retelling will be examined – but for now, suffice to say that a certain tendency toward concepts of the sacred as being immanent in Hinduism (residing in people, in things, in the here and now – or the idea, as one authority puts it, that “sacred power is embodied in particular, concrete forms”47) might perhaps be one factor in understanding why so little Bengali feminist fiction sees sexual innocence (always a consequence of a deferred, transcendentally located purity) as a central element in its critique of religion.

Kadın Is all this really happening behind this door? (Bu kapının ardında gerçekte bunlar mı var?) – Inci Aral, “The Door”/ “Kapı”48

84  Femicide Narratives Inci Aral forms part of a generation of Turkish women writers from the 1970s/1980s – Adalet Ağaoğlu, Tomris Uyar, Latife Tekin, Nazlı Eray among others49 – who produced their work against a backdrop of political instability (violence between armed political groups), military coups (most notably in 1980) and widespread religious conservatism. Her work distinguishes itself by a use of textual fragmentation, both of voice and time, often splitting the narrative into multiple temporalities and voices which then collide into and ironically comment on one another. In many of her stories, two timelines spring up as the protagonist recalls thoughts and feelings from an earlier self – a technique which formalistically expresses the ideological splitting of a subject which all alienation entails (and which is reminiscent of both Devi’s “Douloti” and Elena Garro’s “La Culpa es de las Tlaxcaltecas”). In terms of both biography and text, two differences should be mentioned. Aral, like Devi and Castellanos, certainly comes from a middle-class background, though not as privileged as the first two writers in this chapter. Her father was a forestry official (orman muhendis) who died while she was still young, causing her to be brought up by her aunt and uncle, who was the principal of a middle school in Bursa.50 A modestly middle-class upbringing ensured she was surrounded by literature as she grew up. Although this level of social background is enough to keep the continuity present throughout all of this chapter – that of educated, middle-class women representing poorer, uneducated female subjects – Aral was not born into a local family estate, nor was she (like Devi) surrounded by family members who were also recognized writers and artists. A second brief point should also be added: Aral cannot really be said to have the stature in Turkish literature that her Mexican and Bengali counterparts have in their national literatures. Despite having won two of the most famous Turkish literary prizes, and despite her own work being widely translated and even performed,51 critical writing on her 11 novels and 8 books of stories remains undeservedly sparse. No published critical monograph exists on her in Turkish at the time of writing. No critical attention of any kind, article or book, exists in English.52 Aral’s 1979 story “The Door”/ “Kapı”, despite its length (barely 1500 words), encompasses the various features of the femicide narrative considered up to now – religion, commodification, a linguistic sign-system whose binaries sift out and apportion value, innocence and worth. Within a brief short story composed essentially of one single scene – a divorced mother of two on the doorstep of her ex-husband’s apartment, denied the sight of her children by an unfeeling, gate-keeping mother-in-law – Aral communicates a series of nuanced reflections on the status of women in male society, and the nature of the law that regulates that status. “The Door” is, in one sense, almost a theatrical text: set in a single location, and reliant on the female subject’s mental/mnemonic depth as both engine and interrupter of the tale’s plot development, it does not end in the physical destruction of the woman (unlike almost all of the other tales examined up to now). And yet in

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its compact format, it offers a freeze-frame picture of how a patriarchal system works – how power keeps identities in place, produces guilt and fear to ensure “proper” behavior is respected and cultivates relationships between women that ensure male interests are always served. This last point is particularly relevant, since “The Door” is a text full of absent males, and essentially the story of a quarrel between two women in the absence of a male. The first, most obvious absentee is the husband himself – out buying bread, he appears only at the end to confirm and reinforce the position of the mother-in-law. His physical force – he closes the door against the nameless protagonist, and threatens to call the police – represents the actual, physical, personal face of the system that legitimately locks a mother out on the other side of a door from her children. Aral’s decision to play out nearly all of the story in the absence of the ex-husband highlights the importance of the mother-in-law as a compliant actor, as the story pivots on a perceived “mistake” the divorced mother has made in the date: –You are not to take them this week, I have been told that your term is next week … said my mother-in-law. –Why’s that, it’s been fifteen days and today is Saturday, isn’t it? –That may be so, but on the divorce papers it says the first and third Saturday of the month. This is a longer month and this is the fifth week. I am astounded. This had never crossed my mind. It’s impossible … a month is four weeks… –This is absurd, don’t I take them every fifteen days? What’s with the first, the fifth? My voice is getting louder, an irrepressible fury is knotted up inside me. I feel dizzy, my ears are buzzing… –You’re to take them next week, my dear, that’s what my son said [Haftaya alacakmışsın kızım, oğlum öyle dedi]. –No, I’m not, I’m going to take them now… –Don’t yell at me, it’s not up to me. I’m telling you nice and quietly [usul usul], what’s there to get worked up about?53 What “The Door” does so well is foreground the extent to which all patriarchy requires female complicity – women who are willing to see other women not as women, but as threats/untrustworthy/“whores”, etc. In all of the stories examined so far, the destruction of the female subject has been facilitated by another woman either strategically serving her own interests (like Douloti’s Rampiyari) or misguidedly serving another man’s interests (like Romelia’s Dona Castula, or the Sunni Muslim women who will assist their menfolk’s violence in the last story to come). The face of the “Door” is the mother-inlaw: a woman who vicariously represents the power of her son, and whose presence in the story even sets up an Oedipally sexual tension as the woman who has moved into the ex-husband’s house to replace the protagonist.

86  Femicide Narratives The rigid adherence of the mother-in-law to the letter of the Law, and her inability to go beyond it, not only shows the finitude of the older woman’s imagination, but also suggests that she herself (rather like Romelia and, in a certain way, the Mistress-Mother in “The Breast Giver”) has located the essence of her being in the fulfillment of the Law. Her ontological completion lies in its observation. Hence, the second absent male of the story: the judge (yargıç). Mentioned only once in the story, as the nameless female protagonist recollects the day of her divorce, the memory of the judge – and the precise wording of the judge’s instructions – shape and haunt the entire story. It lends a systemic edge to Aral’s prose, turning the text not merely into an angry episode between divorcee and hostile mother-in-law, but with the mention of “judge” and “police”, a deeper, more radical critique of the subject’s treatment is offered, one which involves (as with “Douloti the Bountiful” and “The Widower Roman”) a whole panorama of different actors – police, family, community and the Law. The gateway to legitimacy and acceptance which the “Door” represents hinges on the correct interpretation of the absent Father’s wish. Aral puts hermeneutics at the center of this brief story (the protagonist understands she can pick up her children every other week, but the actual wording is “the first and third Saturday of the month”) to highlight not just how the husband and mother-in-law’s absurd literality interprets the decree to frustrate the protagonist, but also to show how irreversible, even in the most arbitrary moments, power’s declarations can be. The third absent male in this story is somewhat more speculative. It cannot be understood from the English translation of the story, which simply describes, in the opening pages of the text, the flowers in front of the apartment next door – where the protagonist used to live with her young husband: They’ve put the poinsettia beside the door. When my husband brought it, it was thumb high. First months of our marriage. We had dipped our finger into the dirt in the pot to make place of it. (His finger or mine? It made no difference, in those days we were not two separate beings). We had planted it together. It lived and it grew. Now it has become a small tree. I used to keep it on the balcony. A much better place for it. But I don’t have a say on where to put it anymore. (p20) The translation of “poinsettia” here is botanically correct, but in Turkish the name used in the original text is Atatürk Çiçeğini – Atatürk’s flower. As “poinsettia”, the red flower in the story merely serves as a casual metaphor for the character’s own ill-fated marriage – initially tended and cared for together, later taken out of the woman’s control. In the Turkish text, however, a slightly deeper political symbolism is at work – as though the woman’s own struggles to obtain the justice of both her children’s custody and her own fulfillment offer some kind of comment, however implicit, on the

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modern Kemalist state – its promises, its results, and of course its failures. This is not to green-light a full-on reading of “The Door” as an allegory of Kemalism (which would be ridiculous), but simply to point out how a critique of patriarchy here extends itself to the father-figured state that forms the backdrop to the woman’s travails. In “Selver” (written in 1981), one of nine interconnected stories found in the collection Kıran Resimleri (literally “massacre scenes”), Aral presents a case of femicide which goes beyond any social/legalistic punishment found in the previous story. In December 1978, in the southeastern town of Kahramanmaraş, a large-scale massacre (with multiple cases of rape and mutilation) took place in the local Alevi community, a minority noted across Turkey for its secular, left-wing disposition. The abuses were enacted by religious-nationalist members of the Sunni Muslim majority in the town – in some cases, by neighbors and locals who had lived for decades alongside the victims. The official death toll was 109 – although many claim the true number was significantly higher.54 Aral visited the city in the aftermath of the massacre and, allegedly, read through the substantial, 1400-side court testimonies of the massacre, as (critics claim) names and impressions from these official documents find themselves reworked into some of the stories.55 “Selver” is, therefore, a semifictitious reworking of an actual, experienced event. What makes “Selver” a femicide narrative? As readers we not only witness the murder of her children and husband (and, of course, witness her witness), one by one, by a murderous mob outside – effectively annihilating any sense of identity she obtained from these relationships. The text then describes how the men who murdered her kin go on to rape and mutilate her continually, finally leaving her in darkness, her hands burned and her ear bleeding profusely: The night was silent and dark. Was this person lying wounded and exhausted on the floor really Selver? Could she ever be herself again? [Bir daha kendisi olabilir miydi?] She found she could neither perceive nor understand anything anymore. What kind of mother am I, she thought; I’m still alive. … She couldn’t describe to anyone how the unbounded beauty of motherhood could turn in one day into such bitter pain [acılı bir kahra]. In a garden she had planted four trees [her children], in one minute they had cut them all down. Three sons – twenty one, nineteen, seventeen; a fifteen year old daughter; her husband, and her pregnant daughter-in-law. She had lost everything she could lose. … The pit she found herself in grew deeper [Bulunduğu çukur derinleşiyor]. She seemed to go deeper and deeper into it. … What kind of hate was it that had grown, who had nurtured it and when? What kind of unbelievable enmity had been sown – when, where, by whom? … She couldn’t complete the thought. Everything was broken. [Kopuk kopuk her şey.] In the middle of a sweeping tide she lost herself again.

88  Femicide Narratives Her memory faltered in the inseparable confusion of dream and reality [düşle gerçeğin ayrılmaz karmaşasında bocalıyor belleği]. (Own translation)56 “Selver” is a terrifying story for a number of reasons. As a narrator, Aral is effective in communicating the position of the female protagonist – to be in a burning house, huddled together with one’s family, as a large, deafening mob of people outside hurl curses, bricks and firebombs into your home. The text moves quickly, and much of the horror lies in the brevity of the descriptions. But as a story, “Selver” is also disturbing because it narrates the metaphorical disemboweling of a woman – and the victory of a mob. Questions of agency, responsibility and choice fade away as the reader realizes that Selver is a woman in the wrong town at the wrong time – overwhelmed by the brute force of numbers, there were never going to be any options for her. There are no dilemmas, uncertainties, no moments of existentialist indecision. “Selver” narrates the power of religious-nationalist force crushing a human cell. There is a bareness to the text, a spartan tone which makes the events it depicts all the more unbearable. Within the space of six hours – and as many pages – the story moves from the scene of a mother, serving food to her family around a table, to the image of a raped, widowed, childless, bleeding woman, sitting in the corner of a darkened room. Although a reading intent on finding “agency” in the text could focus on the final page, where Selver manages to limp out of the room where she has been abducted and disappear into the night (47), it is difficult to find much positivity even in this last resolution to survive. The “abyss” (çukur, literally “pit”) she slides into during the second half of the story is given almost a mystical hue – not in any comforting, transcendental sense, but merely insofar as she is truly separated from the world, emptied of all bonds and sensations, so that death is now something she yearns for (45). What happens to Selver is a dark, political version of kenosis or fana’ – the annihilation of the self, but with no comforting, cosmic background to absorb the annihilation. The horror of “Selver” lies in this motif – the emptying or hollowing-out of a human being: “Inside a black void she melted away and disappeared” [Kapkara bir boşluğun içinde eriyip yok olmuştu]. As with so many of Aral’s stories, it intersects with a second, happier timeline from an earlier moment – the narrative of the destroyed subject weaves in and out of the earlier narrative of the complete one, thereby generating in the tension between them the unspeakability of the subject. The devastation is not just physical, nor even emotional but also existential – once all her children have been killed, Selver wonders what point there is in living any more; the murderers have rendered her existence absurd. The dark emptiness of the story formalistically expresses what Selver’s persecutors have done to her being. The question of how far religion – in this case, Sunni Islam – is involved in this narrative does raise the larger question of how culturally specific

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these Turkish texts are. To some degree, Aral’s narrative – not just the story “Selver”, but also the collection Kıran Resimleri as a whole – has already had some sense of the local and the particular removed from it. The first edition, we are told, did not even have any reference to the site of the massacre, Kahramanmaraş, on its inside covers or back page (an omission rectified in subsequent editions).57 Names and labels referring to the victims of the massacres – names such as “leftist” (solcu), “godless” (dinsiz) or Alevi – do not feature at all in the story, and appear only half a dozen times in the entire collection. Apart from the binary of heaven/hell (cennet/cehennem), used vividly as a way of spatiotemporally organizing the protagonist’s memories of her life before the attack and her existence after it, there is little religion in “Selver”. This paucity of cultural references – in particular to the Alevi identity which appears to be the central component in the “othering” of Selver and her community – may have a number of reasons behind it: the desire to write a domestic text for an “insider” audience, free of alienating “explanations” and clarifying designations; the wish to produce a narrative which expresses something about such acts of violence that transcends local contexts, with their local tensions and local names; perhaps even the familiar reluctance of Alevis themselves to openly designate themselves as Alevis – all these possible reasons account in some part for the near-complete absence of the term in the fictionalized account of an Alevi massacre (the word appears once in a book of 112 pages). If there is one thing that perhaps distinguishes Turkish femicide narratives from their Mexican and Bengali counterparts, it may be a certain textual echo which the depiction of misogyny and female injustice has for a Turkish readership. This echo has a particular history – a specific time in Turkey’s early Republican period (from the early 1920s onward until the 1940s) where a variety of writers, figures and institutions (state as well as non-state) attempted to bring about the modern emancipation of Turkish women through the idea of the cumhuriyet kadın, the Republican woman. Names such as Selma Rıza (the first woman journalist in Turkey), Sabiha Gökçe (the first female pilot) and Afife Jale (the first Muslim actress) emerge during this period, as does the groundbreaking leftist-feminist voice of Sabiha Sertel’s newspaper Resimli Ay. 58 Most famous, perhaps, are the novels of Halide Edip Adıvar, whose titles – Vurun Kahpeye/Thrash the Whore (1926) – clearly highlighted the abuse and oppression of women in a systematic fashion. 59 The point has to be made carefully; enough Turkish scholars have pointed out the limitations of the reform movement of the early Turkish Republic, desiring in effect “emancipated but unliberated” women whose primary roles would still be as “better” wives and mothers.60 Nor is this to deny the presence of Bengali proto-feminism along the lines of a Rokey Sakhawat Hossein, or a Mexican women’s movement around the time of the soldaderas.61 Neither region, however, has anything quite like the consistency and the coherence that the movement for women’s rights had in Turkey during this period. When, years

90  Femicide Narratives later, writers such as Inci Aral (or Latife Tekin, or for that matter even male writers like Vedat Türkali and his multiply-filmed Fatmagül ´ün Suçu Ne?/What Is Fatmagul’s Fault?) highlight the beating or rape of women, a line of genealogy, consciously or not, goes back to this period. Atatürk’s flower – the Atatürk Çiçeğini that lies on the doorstep of Inci Aral’s protagonist’s flat – blooms as a wistful reminder of this receding tradition. The travails of Aral’s protagonist – and the creative mechanisms that produce such representations – do not take place in a historical vacuum, but spring from and allude to a clear set of textual and semantic precedents, a set of precedents (due to Turkey’s unusual historical circumstances) that cannot quite be found in their entirety in Mexico or Bengal. Some might argue that there is something profoundly disempowering about the repeated representation of such femicides – that, in depicting in relentless detail the defeats of these women, authors such as Devi, Castellanos and Aral are in effect colluding with patriarchy in an unwitting demoralization of the oppressed female subject (for example, the criticism made of Castellanos by Nuala Finnegan). If this argument loses credibility, it is for two reasons: partly because it continues to address the problem of femicide in semiotic, representational terms – reflecting, as Kapoor and others have already suggested, a certain “bias toward cultural, as opposed to economic arguments” and “ignoring” material frameworks62; and partly because, as Bonnie J. Dow points out, “feminism is also a collective politics”63 – individual actions and stances have a value, but when represented at the expense of solidarity with a larger community/network/movement of people, they can be at best politically innocuous, at worst actively counterproductive to any emancipatory project. What femicide narratives (and particularly texts such as “Selver”, “Douloti” and “The Widower Roman”) demonstrate is the extent to which any concept of agency is delimited and constrained by its physical, material, economic circumstances. The explicit, unignorable manner in which the physical contours of the oppressive structure are emphasized – the physical power of the mob that rapes Selver, the economic dependency of Douloti, the legislative, propertied power structure that overwhelms Romelia – does not allow space for an individual response to the subject’s persecution. Within the worlds of such stories, there is no space for the “fetishizing … of autonomous choices” (Gill).64 Within such fictions, there are no possibilities for these subjects to “fashion themselves anew with each passing day”(Ahmad).65 In all three examples, events unfold in such a way that only a systemic diagnosis and response can emerge as a solution.

Notes 1 See also L.B. Reinares, Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature: Transnational Narratives from Joyce to Bolaño (London: Routledge, 2014). For a sustained attempt to proffer the term “feminicide” over “femicide” as a term which more

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effectively “interrupts essentialist notions of female identity” and addresses the shift in meanings from an English-speaking North to a Spanish-speaking South, see Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano (eds), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas Paperback (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) pp. 3–4. 2 For example, Bonnie J. Dow, “Feminism, Miss America and Media Mythology” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6:1 (2003) pp. 127–160. 3 Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women” American Ethnologist 17:1 (1990) p. 42. 4 Ilan Kapoor, “Capitalism, Culture, Agency: Dependency versus Postcolonial Theory” Third World Quarterly 23:4 (2002) p. 15. 5 Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left London: Verso, 2000) p. 151. 6 Syed Manzoorul, Absurd Night, trans. Pushpita Alam (Dhaka: Bengal Lights, 2010). 7 Estelle Tarica, for example, is highly critical of Castellanos’ relationship to the indigenous both inside and outside her fiction: “[Castellanos] proposes her friendship with the Indians as a debt that she intends to pay by civilizing them” in Estelle Tarica, “Escuchando pequeñas voces: Rosario Castellanos y el nacionalismo indigenista” Arbor: Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura CLXXXIII 724 (March–April 2007) p. 302. 8 Particularly in the case of Mahasweta Devi. 9 “Pero fue a ti a quien ofendió, no a tus parientes, que no van a mover un dedo para borrar la afrenta. ¿No te has fijado, grandísima bruta, en lo que ese hombre te hizo? No sólo te dejó tirada en el hospital para que te las averiguaras como Dios te diera a entender, sino que te declaró muerta para que los demás no volvieran a preocuparse por ti. Y tú te quedas tan fresca y no le guardas rencor” in Rosario Castellanos, Obras reunidas, II. Cuentos (Spanish Edition) (Kindle Locations 3115–3118). Fondo de Cultura Economica. Kindle Edition. English “The Widower Roman” translated by Ruth Peacock in Maureen Ahern (ed.), A Rosario Castellanos Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988) p. 158. 10 “El Adveniemento del aguila” in Ciudad Real. Carol Clark D’Lugo also sees a crucial role of language in enforcing hierarchy – see “Fictions of Apprenticeship: Following the Growth of Narrative Strategies and Cultural Ideologies in Rosario Castellanos” Hispanófila 156 (May 2009) pp. 109ff. 11 Gordon calls it a “classic novella” belonging almost to the slightly sensationalist genre of “drama de honor” – George Gordon, “El Viudo Roman y La Nina Romelia” Revista Iberoamericana 56:150 (1990) p. 84. 12 For more on the obscene superego implicit in this idea, see Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008) pp. 86–90. 13 “Sí, en las bancas más próximas estaban sus amigas a las que mañana (y quizá siempre) les seguirían diciendo señoritas. Las que no iban a ser iniciadas, como ella esta noche, en los misterios de la vida. …. De hoy en adelante Romelia ingresaría en el gremio de las mujeres que nunca dicen “yo quiero” o “yo no quiero” sino que siempre dan un rodeo, alrededor de un hombre, para llegar al fin de sus propósitos. Y ese rodeo se ciñe a una frase: el señor dispone… el señor prefiere… el señor ordena… no hay que contrariar al señor… ante todo es preciso complacer al señor… necesito consultar antes con el señor… El señor que la exaltaría al rango de señora ante los ojos de todos y que, en la intimidad, le daría una imagen exacta del cuerpo que, al fin, habría alcanzado la plenitud de saber, de sentir, de realizar las funciones para las que había sido creado.” in Castellanos, Obras reunidas, II.(Kindle Locations 3753–3758); English in A Rosario Castellanos Reader, p. 188. 14 Castellanos, Obras reunidas, II. (Kindle Locations 3633–3634). English own translation.

92  Femicide Narratives 15 Cit. in Beth E. Joergensen, “Nonfiction: Essay, Criticism and Chronicle” in Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Anna M. Nogar, José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra (eds), A History of Mexican Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) p. 311. 16 María Rosa Fiscal writes how, although Castellanos’ female characters are incapable of surviving, this is nevertheless a realistic description – “Identidad y Lenguaje en los Personajes Femeninos de Rosario Castellanos” Chasqui 14:2/3 (February–March 1985) p. 35. 17 Nuala Finnegan, “Feminine Dis-ease in Ciudad Real by Rosario Castellanos” Hispanic Research Journal 2:1(2001) p. 58. 18 Finnegan, ibid., p. 48. 19 Hanna Geldrich-Leffman, “Marriage in the Short Stories of Rosario Castellanos” Chasqui 21:1 (May, 1992) p. 32. 20 Castellanos had grown up as an alienated and disaffected child in a wealthy landed-family in San Cristobal, whose economic assets had been downsized after Cardenas’ famous land reforms of 1948. 21 Geldrich-Leffman, “Marriage”, p. 32. 22 Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) p. 16. 23 “Águeda es una Sanromán, se dijo. ¿Cómo iba Juliana a rebelarse contra una jerarquía inmutable? Es una Sanromán, repitió, alejándose. Por tanto, lo que hubiera de maldad y tiranía en ella era la herencia de los antiguos atormentadores de esclavos, de los viejos azotadores de indios. De ella, de la bordadora humilde del barrio de San Sebastián, no había nada. Juliana respiró, con un extraño alivio, su propia inocencia.” in Castellanos, Obras reunidas, II. (Kindle Locations 6296–6299); English in A Rosario Castellanos Reader, p. 132. 24 N. Finnegan, “Reproducing the Monstrous Nation: A Note on Pregnancy and Motherhood in the Fiction of Rosario Castellanos, Brianda Domecq, and Ángeles Mastretta” The Modern Language Review 96:4 (October 2001) p. 1012. 25 Kipling, perhaps, is most famous for killing the characters (Indian and English) in his stories who most visibly transgress the laws of his racist, imperialist universe. 26 Cit. in Rocío Carretero, “El carácter social de la mujer mexicana en la narrativa de Rosario Castellanos” La Palabra y el Hombre (Spring 1987) no. 61 p. 53. 27 See Tarica, “Escuchando pequeñas voces”, op. cit., especially pp. 300–302. 28 Alessandra Marino, “‘Where is the Time to Sleep?’ Orientalism and Citizenship in Mahasweta Devi’s Writing” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50:6 (2014) p. 697. 29 Madhurima Chakraborty, ““The Only Thing I Know How to Do”: An Interview with Mahasweta Devi” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50:3 (2014) p. 286. 30 Mahasweta Devi, “Back to Bondage” in Business Standard, 27 May 1981 – in Maitreya Ghatak (ed.), Dust on the Road: The Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000) p. 4. 31 Ibid., p. 5. 32 McCall uses “Douloti the Bountiful” basically as an argument against Gynanenda Pandey’s claim that bonded labor was largely a result of colonial influence – Sophie McCall, “Mahasweta Devi’s Documentary/Fiction as Critical Antidote: Rethinking Bonded Labour, ‘Women and Development’ and the Sex Trade in India” Resources for Feminist Research 29:3/4 (Fall 2002) pp. 39–58. Spivak herself has disagreed with Devi’s oft-repeated belief that the mother in “BreastGiver” is an allegorical portrait of the nation – although Devi’s own position (on her own work) has been partially defended by Sandhya Shetty, who sees Devi as ironically repeating the trope of Mother India – G.C. Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text from the Third World” in G.C.

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Spivak , In Other Worlds (London: Routledge, 2006) pp. 337–339; Sandhya Shetty, “(Dis)figuring the Nation: Mother, Metaphor, Metonymy” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7:3 (Fall 1995) pp. 50–64. 33 For Devi’s reservations on being called a feminist, see Gabrielle Collu, “Speaking with Mahasweta Devi: Mahasweta Devi Interviewed by Gabrielle Collu” in Nivedita Sen and Nikhil Yadav (eds), Mahasweta Devi: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2008) pp. 224 ff; on her distancing herself from Communism, see Mahasweta Devi, Amar Mitra and Sabyasachi Deb, “Mahasweta Devi: In Conversation with Amar Mitra and Sabyasachi Deb” Indian Literature 40:3/179 (1997) p. 169. 34 Apart from McCall (op. cit.), see also Krishnamurthy on how Devi’s work reaffirms a dialogic process between politics and literature contra the depoliticizing tendencies of the Subaltern Studies group – Aruna Krishnamurthy, “The Revolutionary Man in Naxalite Literature” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 11:1 (Spring 2017) pp. 140, 142. 35 Minoli Salgado, “Tribal Stories, Scribal Worlds: Mahasweta Devi and the Unreliable Translator” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35:1 (2000) p. 142. 36 Rizia Rahman, Letters of Blood, trans. Arunava Sinha (Dhaka: Bengal Lights Books, 2016). Selina Hossain’s “Izzat” might even be termed a femicide ghost story, as it deals with the spectral aftermath of a wife’s murder, from the point of view of the murdered wife – Kalpana Bardhan, (ed) Oxford India Anthology of Bengali Literature 1941–91 (Delhi: Oxford UP, 2010) pp. 295–300. 37 Mary Cappelli, “Tortured Bodies, Rape, and Disposability in Mahasweta Devi’s “Giribala”, “Dhowli” and “Douloti the Bountiful”” Cogent Social Sciences 1 (2016) pp. 1–2. 38 Mahasweta Devi, “Douloti the Bountiful” in Imaginary Map: Three Stories, translated and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 79–80, Mahasweta Dever Sheshto Golpo p. 64. 39 I use the term “myth” here cautiously. David Farrier has written on the way myth and analysis contrast but coexist in Devi’s fiction, while Jennifer Wenzel, in her own careful but fascinating mythic reading of “Douloti the Bountiful” as a retelling of the Ramayana (Douloti as the Sita abducted by the raksha Latia), warns against the kind of mythic fantasies about the indigenous which figures such as Vandana Shiva indulge – David Farrier, “Disaster’s Gift” Interventions 18:3 (2016) p. 463; Jennifer Wenzel, “Epic Struggles over India’s Forests in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Fiction” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 18 (1998) p. 129, 131. For more on other representations of adhivasis with Devi in mind, see Elen Turner, “An Unfinished Story: The Representation of Adivasis in Indian Feminist Literature” Contemporary South Asia 20:3 (September 2012) pp. 327– 339. 40 “Douloti the Bountiful” p. 71, Mahasweta Dever Sheshto Golpo p.84. 41 Devi, Spivak argues, does not represent Douloti “as an intending object of resistance” but is not “the intending subject of victimization either” – G.C. Spivak, “Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful” Cultural Critique 14 (Winter 1989–1990) p. 125. 42 A point, as the Warwick Research Collective points out, originally belonging to Trotsky (10). See Kalpana Bardhan on the “adaptive dexterity of capitalist exploitation processes” in “Women, Work, Welfare and Status: Forces of Tradition and Change in India” South Asia Bulletin 6:1 (Spring 1986) p. 5. Moretti sums this up succinctly: “Hegemony doesn’t need purity – it needs … collusion between the old and the new” – “The Novel: History and Theory” New Left Review 52 (July/August 2008) p. 124. 43 Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern”, op cit.

94  Femicide Narratives 44 “Douloti the Bountiful” p. 331, Mahasweta Dever Sheshto Golpo 100. 45 The story was made into a successful film by Satiyajit Ray – Devi/The Goddess (1960). 46 I am thinking, in particular, of the section “The Grand Inquisitor” concerning Christ’s return in The Brothers Karamazov. 47 Gavin Flood (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) p. 42. 48 Inci Aral, “The Door”, translated into English by Işılar Kür (Epsilon, 2004). Original text is “Kapı” in Ağda Zamanı (Istanbul: Epsilon, 2004). 49 For more on Inci Aral’s contemporaries, see Güneli Gün, “The Woman in the Darkroom: Contemporary Women Writers in Turkey” World Literature Today 60:2 (Spring, 1986) pp. 275–279. In interview with Süveyda Tanriver, Aral has placed some distance between herself and the idea of a “woman writer”, while acknowledging the concerns, challenges and specificities of being a woman in Turkey today – see Süveyda Tanriver, “İnci̇ Aral’ın romanlarında kadın ve kadın sorunu” M. A. Thesis, Selçuk Üni̇ versi̇ tesi̇ 2010 p. 240 ff. 50 See Alev Önder, “Inci Aral” in Burcu Alkan and Çimen Günay-Erkol (eds), Turkish Novelists Since 1960 (Detroit: Gale, 2013) Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 373. Literature Resource Center. See also Inci Aral’s interview online “Bibliyofil Cine5 – İnci Aral ve Münir Üstün”. Available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​v​=s​_​p​​adt70​​S3c from 3:04 onward, accessed 8 February 2018. 51 Bakırköy Belediye Tiyatrosu (a theater company in Istanbul) performed a dramatic adaptation of Kıran Resimleri in October 2016. 52 A dictionary entry by Alev Önder, already cited above, is the only English language piece at time of writing. 53 Inci Aral, Kıran Resimleri (Istanbul: Kırmızı Kedi, 2004) pp. 21–22. 54 David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007) p. 415. 55 Karin Schweissgut argues this in Fremdheitserfahrungen: Untersuchungen Zur Prosa Turkischer Schriftstellerinnen Von 1980 Bis 2000 (Wiesbaden: Mizan/ Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006) p. 61, referring to the frequently imprisoned historian Yalçın Küçük as her source (Türkiye Üzerine Tezler vol. 1 [1986]) and mentioning the court records Kahramanmaraşta 19–25 Aralık 1978 Tarihleri Arasında Meydana Gelen Olayların Sanıkları Hakkındaki Gerekçeli Hüküm, Adana 1980. 56 Kıran Resimleri pp. 43–44 57 Schweissgut, Fremdheitserfahrungen, p. 61. 58 Ada Holland Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 3:2 (Spring 2007) pp. 1–30. 59 See Hülya Adak, “National Myths and Self-Na(rra)tions: Mustafa Kemal’s Nutuk and Halide Edib’s Memoirs and The Turkish Ordeal” South Atlantic Quarterly 102:2/3 (Spring/Summer 2003), especially pp. 511ff. 60 Shissler, “If You Ask Me”, p. 4. 61 See John Mraz, “A Photo Essay” p. 299 ff in The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, eds. G. M. Joseph and T. J. Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 62 Kapoor, “Capitalism”, pp. 12, 13. 63 Dow, “Feminism”, p. 145; see also Melissa Wright’s criticism of Gloria Anzaldua, whose affirmation of female agency (she argues) dispenses with both feminism and any idea of solidarity with labor – Melissa W. Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2006) p. 18.

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64 Rosalind C. Gill, “Critical Respect: The Difficulties and Dilemmas of Agency and ‘Choice’ for Feminism. A Reply to Duits and van Zoonen” European Journal of Women’s Studies 14:1 (2007) p. 73 Cit. in Linda Duits and Liesbet van Zoonen, “Who’s Afraid of Female Agency?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 14:2 (2007) p. 163. 65 Aijaz Ahmad, “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Post’ Condition” Socialist Register 33 (1997) p. 373.

4

Retelling Myth Mito, Katha, Efsane

The moment we start to retell myths is a peculiarly modern moment. The desire to retell a myth belongs to a movement which begins to see the past as a store, not a source. The mythic past is suddenly alienated from present, lived time. As soon as Perseus becomes a 40-something has-been, or Job gets reformulated as a bureaucrat who has his typists taken away from him, the mythic undergoes a certain desacralization. The complexity of the relationship between myth and literature lies in the fact that this desacralization is also a rejuvenation, that in the seeds of this alienation lies a certain reconnection. In Mexican literature, this desire to retell myth most visibly begins to show itself in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Sometimes a voice is given to a pig, or a bull; sometimes, a hero is turned into a monster, or a monster into a hero; sometimes, a prophet is made to look like a poet, or a verse from sacred scriptures is given the agenda of a writer’s manifesto. But in all these cases, “retelling myth” indicates the moment when the relationship between mythic time and present time is reconfigured. This reconfiguration can be subtle and refracting, or radical and explosive, but it remains a central feature of the modern. Does this mean that, since there are a proliferation of theories about the origin of myth – myth as derived from ritual,1 myth as an attempt to formulate the social contradictions of societies (Levi-Strauss2) or even the logical contradictions of the psyche (Lacan3), myth as reflecting certain underlying universal qualities in the human condition (Campbell) and so on – this chapter will attempt to proffer an overarching theory for the retelling of myth? A number of obstacles immediately arise to this. The first lies in the absence of any clear original texts for many myths – an absence which complicates the attempt to distinguish between a myth and its retelling. Mircea Eliade stresses repeatability to be one of the main features of the mythic4 – the mythic allows the reiteration of a sacred, originary essence, so that the reteller of the myth may briefly resurrect (or return to) that constitutive moment of sacred time. For some myths – such as Quetzalcoatl or the Minotaur – the closest thing to an Urtext we have are fragments of Ovid or the Dresden codex. Myths that have a clearer textual provenance – such as the Mahabharata or the Ramayana – are nevertheless

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partially clouded by subsequent well-known retellings of them (in Bengal, Kasiramdas and Krttibas, respectively). T.S. Eliot’s famous pronunciation on the organic nature of a canon – how the inclusion of the latest element to it forces the original base to modify itself accordingly to accommodate it – seems to apply here, as the distinction between a myth and its retelling becomes harder, in some cases impossible, to achieve. Even in cases which seem philologically more clear-cut – such as the figure of Job or Odysseus – writers may not necessarily be responding to the original biblical or Homeric trope. Twentieth-century versions of Odysseus have as much to do with Joyce as they have with Homer, while for many Turkish writers, Islamic/Quranic versions of Judeo-Christian stories may well be the more immediate ones. A second problem lies in what we might call constituencies of myth, and is summed up by Vico’s observation that a history of myth is the history of a people. To try and formulate any theoretical thought on the retelling of myth in Mexican literature, we have to deal with the fact that there are three pools of different myth (Judeo-Christian, Greek and pre-Hispanic). Each of these three types contains subdivisions: for the sake of simplicity, we shall limit our consideration of precontact mythology to Aztec/Mayan tropes, but this does leave out a considerable number of mythic narratives and legends from other indigenous Mesoamerican cultures (Otomi, Huichol, Seri, Mixtec, etc.5). Moreover, writers can sometimes retell two mythic narratives at the same time – as we saw in the first chapter, where Rulfo’s classic novel could be the descent of Orpheus into the underworld, but also the journey of Quetzalcoatl through the land of the dead. Even the emphasis on the non-historical definition of myth (and here we follow Northrop Frye’s opposition of the historical to the mythical6) brings with it problems. Apart from removing a number of interesting texts in Mexican literature from our analysis – the historical figure of La Malinche, Cortés’ interpreter/lover, has given rise to a plethora of brilliant reworkings7 – there also arises the question of events which lie interstitially between the historical and the mythical, such as the Trojan War, or the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Excluding the historical from our treatment of myth does risk overlooking the crucial gray area which exists in the process of becoming mythical. Although the process of mythologization is not the subject of our inquiry – it is the quotidianization of the mythical, not the mythologization of the quotidian that will guide our thoughts – the existence of what we might loosely term semi-myth might offer some insights into how and why myths are retold at all.

Mito I doubt that we could call him a good Mexican who could read the Aeneid unmoved. – Alfonso Reyes, “Virgil in Mexico” (1930)8

98  Retelling Myth Modern Mexican literature abounds with the retelling of myth. And as LeviStrauss discovered when he tried to categorize the myths of the Amazon, the more one tries to group and clarify examples, the more those examples spill out of control and reconfigure themselves in unexpected ways.9 Certain mythical figures cut across the bay of Mexican literature like a boat, drawing all kinds of currents in their wake. Eve evokes a chaste, virginal, nineteenth-century lily, a defamiliarized observer in awe at the raw freshness of the world and a surreal, fragmentary vision of the feminine by Gabriel Zaid10; Perseus calls forth a spoiled brat, a middle-aged, disillusioned exhero, and at least two lovers of Medusa11; three versions of Circe, seductress of Odysseus, can be found where the pigs are in love with their enchantress and never want to be transformed back into humans again12; Job’s torment as he seeks to discern the reason behind his divinely inflicted malaise has been transformed into a struggle for language in the desert, a figure of disillusionment in darkness, a plea for rejuvenation and a satirized case of state unemployment.13 Even an indigenous myth like that of the flayed god Xipe Totec materializes in a Juan Villoro story as a Mexican urbanite losing his identity in the desert, or as a Chicano comment on having two skins in a U.S./Mexican poem.14 Although some writers visibly lend themselves to the adaptation of myth more than others – Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco and Emilio Carballido all spring to mind – one central figure that should not be overlooked is Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959). Why is Reyes important? Primarily because he reflects, in one figure, three possible relationships between myth and Mexican literature at a pivotal point in the history of the nation’s letters. First of all, a lackadaisical, satirical, at times openly mocking attitude toward the most revered figures of Greek myth – his Homero en Cuernavaca, for example, where he gives Nestor a Mexican’s wisdom, and speculates on whether Achilles should have taken a wife in a provincial town in Morelos.15 This satire performs the desacralizing function of mythretelling we have already mentioned – even if it is the intimate, affectionate desacralization of the non-fervent believer, not the external slander of an outsider’s scorn. At the same time, we also have in Reyes the figure of a serious Hellenist (or aspiring Hellenist16), an essentially philological approach influenced by a mixture of French and Weimar classicism.17 Ifigenia Cruel, Reyes’ famous retelling of Euripides’ play, exemplifies this detailed devotion to the Hellenic in Reyes – a space where parody is dispelled, and an unconditional reverence for the Greek is recruited in the nation-building project as an Enlightenment antidote to Catholicism. The careful, accomplished lyricism of Ifigenia Cruel supplies the Apollonian aspect of Reyes’ complex Hellenism, a love of form and a rationalist’s containment of tensions. A third face of Reyes, however, reflects a much more Nietzschean belief in myth. “Only a horizon surrounded by myths can unify an entire cultural movement” we read in the closing chapters of The Birth of Tragedy,18 and a text such as Reyes’ meditation on the conquest of the “New World” (“La

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Visión de Anahuac”) expresses, in its mixed evocation of both Hellenic and pre-Columbian myth, a belief in the power of mythic landscapes to provide platforms for national identities: In that landscape, not deprived of a certain aristocratic sterility … the mind deciphers every line and caresses every undulation; under this shining sky and in its general freshness and calm, those unknown men [aquellos hombres ignotos – the Aztecs] looked out with a broad, solemn, spiritual gaze. Ecstatic before the cactus of the eagle and the serpent – the happy essence of our region – they heard the voice of the auspicious bird who promised them a haven above those welcoming lakes. (Own translation)19 The criollo intellectual, son of a general fallen in the revolutionary struggle, imagines a landscape he could not have possibly seen. Reyes exemplifies a European use of indigenous myth as foundational narrative – a landscape which can demarcate both an ending and a beginning, a termination and a promise. A use of myth and mythic trope emphasizes continuity, but a modified continuity – one in which the mythic has to supplement, in an utterly ancillary way, the formation and development of the new, without being able to determine its trajectory. This idea of the indigenous as ingredient we will return to in a moment. Reyes is not the only Mexican writer to use myth in this Nietzschean fashion as a tool of world-building (Octavio Paz, in a different manner, also constructs his brooding, solitary Mexican with Nietzsche in mind), but he is one of the first. We have mentioned three faces of Reyes’ interest in myth – but there is an additional reason why Alfonso Reyes is an indispensable figure to any study of myth in Mexican literature. As the critic Sánchez Prado points out, Reyes explored – and could be said himself to embody – a Hegelian moment in the literary study of myth.20 The process by which a subject acquires consciousness of itself, and through a moment of self-alienation, interstitially obtains a recognition and subsequent return to its own changed self – the retelling of myth exemplifies this process, and no example is more central than Reyes. If the representation of mythic figures – be it an Eve, a Perseus or a Quetzalcoatl – allows Mexican identity to distance itself, reconfigure and then reincorporate the represented onto itself like a layer of coral on a reef, then Reyes’ work illustrates this process in its blend of studied Hellenism and classical parody. This is not simply through the way Achilles and Briseis are relocated in a provincial Mexican town, in a series of poems which do not let the reader forget the topos of the speaker. It also takes place in the way Reyes interrogates the exegetes and translators of the Iliad, taking them to task or celebrating their presence. This attention to the framework of the myth builds the exo-skeleton of something which, in time, will acquire the opacity and solidity of a natural shell.

100  Retelling Myth There is even a short story by Reyes which illustrates this process of becoming-through-self-othering. His classic “The Dinner” (“La Cena”, 1912), written barely two years after the beginning of the Revolution, is possibly one of his most famous stories – it inspired the Carlos Fuentes novella we visited in Chapter 1, not to mention a considerable amount of Gothic artwork. Reyes’ text is a surreal account, half-dream, half-narrative, of a man invited to a mysterious dinner, who is forced to look upon the historical portrait of a military officer – whom he quickly realizes to be himself. In many ways, the tale is a parable for the dialectical process of identity, as the man flees his own mirror image, dressed in theatrical garb. He leaves the house utterly changed, having encountered – and negotiated and rejected – his own self before making his escape. To some extent, Reyes’ use of myth could be seen as a kind of distorting, colored mirror, returning back to its user an image of themselves, similar but not quite the same. Scholars have written a considerable amount on myth in Mexican literature. The most numerous are individual studies of single authors – for example, looking at myth and archetype in Elena Garro or indigenous myth in Carlos Fuentes.21 One comprehensive survey of specifically Greek myth in Latin American drama – dedicating itself to an entire continent, amazingly within the space of a single (lengthy) article – is Pilar Hualde Pascual’s work on the various Antigones, Electras and Medeas that have arisen over the past century. Mexican dramatists such as Hugo Argüelles and Maria Sten are featured among the Argentinians, Venezuelans, Colombians and Cubans who have borrowed a Prometheus or a Creon to express a particular hope or attack a particular junta. Pascual’s conclusions are several: that Antigone is by far the most adapted Greek myth in drama, particularly in denouncing the desaparecidos of various regimes; that the function of “psychological introspection” rivals political/social satire as a purpose in the retelling of myth; and that the “tendency to transgress” the solemnity of the classical myth is a common occurrence whenever it is retold.22 Some mention should also be made of the only major theoretical work on Latin American myth and narrative – R.G. Echevarría’s Myth and Archive (1990). Although more interested in Borges, Carpentier, Asturias and Márquez than Mexican writers per se, its central thesis – how “the modern Latin American novel transforms Latin American history into an originary myth in order to see itself as other” (14) – is an important one.23 Understanding the process of mythologization in all of its aspects – how do historical personages and events become myths and heroes? what kind of spaces do they move from/to? how is time involved? – might help us better understand our question, which is very nearly the opposite: how does demythologization take place? What happens in literature when myths and heroes become finite, historical personages and situations? In our approach to myth, taking into account and digesting what has already been written in the secondary literature is only part of the task. The

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wealth of examples – of represented and remodified Jobs, Agamemnons and Quetzalcoatls – that sprawl across the body of the modern Mexican canon bring up, as we have said, a very Levi-Straussian question of categorization. The ways in which we can sift and sort these retellings are endless. One way might simply be to discern between retellings which stay in the time and place of the myth (like Carballido’s Theseus) and reinterpretations which are set in a different context (such as Aridjis’ reworking of the Persephone story as a prostitute in a Mexico City nightclub).24 Stories like Pacheco’s twin-plotted retelling of Perseus, however, which hops back and forth between Ancient Greece and Fifties’ Mexico City, problematize this approach somewhat. Equally practically, one might divide retellings between sympathetic and hostile reinterpretations, or faithful and transgressive versions – even though the enormous number of texts which ambivalently contain both sets of elements (such as Castellanos’ autobiographical poem on the virgin birth, or indeed Alfonso Reyes’ entire attitude toward the Iliad25) quickly make this Manichaean category flawed as an exclusive approach. Subtler options also exist. Hans Robert Jauss’ distinction between cyclical and typological returns of history offers an interesting way of distinguishing retellings of myths which reiterate the mythical without any sense of fulfillment (such as the use of Charon to indicate, in the form of a disgruntled waiter, the perennial failure of all message-ferrying26) and the invocation of myth in a more culminative sense (Fuentes’ Aura, which sees myth returning to itself to resurrect the past, being an obvious example).27 More straightforwardly, a simple sorting of all these texts into three mythic groups (pre-​Colum​bian/​Judeo​-Chri​stian​/Grec​o-Rom​an) might give us a keener historical sense of why certain writers draw on certain groups of images at certain times. The invocation of indigenous mythic tropes such as La Llorona (the weeping woman) or the flayed skin can express an openly political use of myth as a vehicle to challenge historical narratives or rearticulate silenced/stalled/stonewalled debates.28 Certain uses of biblical or classical figures have also lent themselves to conservative/modernizing agendas (Reyes and his post-Porfirian Ateneo de la Juventud being the most vivid but hardly unique example).

Five Ways of Retelling Myth Let’s begin with a simple set of formalistic categories. The first category of myth repetition might be called “myth aggrandizement”. In this category, both the form and the content of the myth are retained and expanded – with some attempt to preserve the spirit of the myth also visible. Myth aggrandizement affirms the continuity of time, and the permanence of the essence of the myth. Because of this belief in permanence and essence, myth aggrandizement usually has the affirmation of ideology as its primary use.

102  Retelling Myth A nice example is one late nineteenth-century retelling of Eve’s appearance in paradise – from the Mexican Romantic poet Manuel M. Flores: Soft, undecided, astral, floating, like the soft vapour of foam whose white, moon-like gleam, wandering in a spiral of dark mist, the purest and most serene emanation of the virginal chalice of the lily, the living pearl of the beautiful dawn, prayer of light for the forthcoming day, distilled in the voluptuous form of a new being that has received life, a white luminous figure rose next to a sleeping Adam. (Own translation)29 Most of the elements already extant in the original are reiterated here: Adam’s virility, Eden’s primordiality, Eve’s purity, the insubstantiality of her origins, her dependency on Adam and her uncertainty and insecurity in paradise. Flores was no conservative, and what we see in “Eva” is no mere rehashing of the story from Genesis. The very titling of the poem around Eve suggests some slight decentering and adjustment of the original mythic viewpoint. And yet, even if all myth aggrandizement involves some nominal and ineluctable modification – the impossibility of “pure” repetition – texts like “Eva” keep the form, content and spirit of the original, but bless it with a sympathetic expansion. The figure of Eve is portrayed as an emanation of the highest purity, present at the very dawn of the world, and if the 31 verses of Hebrew given to her in Genesis are expanded to nearly 300 lines of verse in Spanish, it belongs to a movement which seeks the repetition of the original biblical moment on a magnified scale. In myth aggrandizement, the profusion of details does not distract or dilute but augment the source. As the different primordial elements balloon outward, spaces emerge between (what kind of silences existed in paradise? What exactly was Adam and Eve’s physical appearance? What conversations, what attitudes took place between them?) which are filled in with harmonizing content by the new author. The embellishment, almost always congruous and respectful, reflects a belief in the essential truth and relevance of the myth. Even if, in this case, Flores is dedicating this retelling of Eve to the memory of his own love (Rosario de la Peña30), the myth remains the potent arche. Flores and his lover are the consequential aftereffects of the myth – the myth is not some ingredient or vehicle to express the situation of Flores and his lover. Myth aggrandizement invariably follows this geometric expansion of the original model, and in doing so – regardless of how liberal its narrators may be – reflects an essentially conservative belief in the abiding,

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atemporal essence of certain structures and values. Indigenous poets such as Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec) are also drawn to this mode – a poem such as “Xingá chi’un”/“Lord of Thunder” solemnly reiterates the sense of looming anger and impatience of the thunder god belonging to the ancient ceremonial center of El Tajín.31 The second category of myth-retelling might be termed “myth inhabitation”. In this approach, the incomplete form of the myth is kept, but filled with a different (not necessarily subversive) content. Often this involves giving voices and viewpoints to people and things whose perspectives were left unarticulated in the original myth. Perhaps the most important aspect of inhabiting myth is that while the form is kept, the content is not radically disrupted, but rather only modified by an individual personality or agency. New information is introduced which neither wholly harmonizes nor subverts the established narrative. In Gabriel Zaid’s brief retelling of Circe, for example, we are given the viewpoint of the newly transformed pig: My country is in your eyes, my obligation on your lips. Ask of me what you want, save that I abandon you. If I shipwreck on your shores, if I’m stretched on your sand, I’m a happy pig, I’m yours, nothing else matters. You are the sun I belong to, my orbit is around you. My laurels are in your words, my estate is amongst your assets. (Own translation)32 If there is a reveling and a delight in the corporeality of the human here – in the pig-like animality that we all share – it is not a celebration of the body which goes against anything in the spirit of the Odyssey (in the original, after they are turned back into humans, Odysseus and his sailors remain on the island with Circe for a year, eating and drinking). This is not like Kierkegaard’s famous fourfold retelling of Abraham and Isaac, where each time a radically different version of Abraham’s thoughts are presented (culminating in a man whose faith is broken).33 Myth-inhabitation slides into the skin of the myth it retells, only slightly altering it to better adapt the structure to its own particular contours. In order for the myth to be inhabited, there has to be an opening somewhere: an animal or an object or a character that has no voice, a silence where nothing is insinuated. Mythinhabitation rides myth. It shares the first category’s belief in the contextspanning continuity of form, but sees that form (however personal, however overarching) as slightly more open-ended. Myth-inhabitation involves what might almost be termed a certain perspectival curiosity – a commitment to understanding the same mythic events, even in the same sequence, but from a different viewpoint. How did Ariadne feel when Theseus left her behind to disappear into the labyrinth to slay the Minotaur? How does the rain god Tlaloc feel when it rains? What happened between Helen and Paris as the fall of Troy loomed closer and closer? What are the thoughts

104  Retelling Myth of the old god Huehueteotl as he himself grows old?34 The inhabitation of an alternative viewpoint, even with all its potentiality for subversion, still involves something of a commemoration for the myth. Even in the most mischievous examples – giving a pig a voice, or painting Helen as weary of her Trojan adventure – it remains an ultimately conformist curiosity, one which is reluctant to step outside the parameters of the received narrative. If myths can be expanded and inhabited, they can also be reversed. The commitment to form is still approximately the same in this third category – the god is still technically a god, the hero is still the protagonist of the story, the monster remains physically a monster – but the content is inverted. Brave warriors become spiritual/moral weaklings; one-dimensional fiends acquire depth and vulnerability. Two Mexican versions of the Perseus myth, each belonging to a different genre, illustrate this idea of myth-reversal. Both the playwright Carballido and the poet Gilberto Owen reverse the hero-monster formula by injecting romantic love into the relationship,35 turning an object of fear into an object of desire. Medusa’s death moves from being the culmination of courage and commitment to a moment of tragedy and even pathos. In this brief scene from the 1959 play, where Medusa tells Perseus how she first discovered her powers, both characters begin to cry: MEDUSA: So they took on a life of their own, and I saw them gradually grow, one by one. … When I got to these shores, its horror was already fully grown. I uncovered myself for a moment and birds fell to the ground like deformed hailstones, like rocks. And that’s what they were. A sailor who was swimming, was turned into a statue and sank with a resounding splash. This was me: Medusa. I was a young woman, a Hesperides, no longer. I met the Gorgons, my equals. So they called me: the other Gorgon. But they were born that way, I wasn’t! I wasn’t. She covers her face, she is crying. Perseus cries too. Then she dries her eyes, taken aback. She shouts crassly to the black servants. MEDUSA: Can you leave ? (They obey). …. You know something? You are the first man in the world to cry for Medusa. (Own translation).36 Carballido’s play empties the Argos and Thebes of Perseus’ day of any moral value – a dark and dismal universe forms the background to the plot, with both Danae and Acreus portrayed as full of hate.37 The implicit denigration of the classical universe we see in the play – and also in the 1948 poem which inspired it – clings to this commitment to form, while still employing a notion of the human to undo this humanism. What lies behind this desire to retain form if the content of this myth is so palpably in need of reversal?

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In one sense, myth-reversal acknowledges a need for “worlding” structures of ritual and trope, but refuses to tether them essentially to permanently abiding values. Myth-reversal is not a refusal of history, but of the previous uses of history; it acknowledges the power and unity of mythic structure as the right place to enact a counter-critique (or even Nietzschean Umwertung) to topple a particular narrative peddled by a particular hegemony. It remains reformist, however, not revolutionary: it does not call for the removal of the semantic framework of myth, nor even its reconfiguration. Rather, it fills the same structure with what it perceives to be its opposite content. Pacheco’s 1958 retelling of Perseus (also inspired by Owen’s poem) in some limited sense can also be considered an example of myth-reversal – its portrayal of an aging, coughing, disillusioned Perseus, whose love for Andromeda has long grown cold, inverts the classical triumphalism of youth, glory, power and love in the original slaying of Medusa, while retaining the Gorgon as an unexplored monstrosity. The break in the technique of the narrative though – Pacheco’s story is repeatedly interrupted by a modern-day parallel narrative of a government clerk who ultimately murders his older, quarreling wife – suggests a departure from the structure of the myth, a formalistic set of innovations which pushes the text out of the category of “myth-reversal”.38 Up to now, these three categories can all be said to employ a commitment to the arche of mythic time. Jameson is right to collapse the two Jaussian categories of the modern (the cyclical and the typological) into one another as two subject/object perspectives within the same parallax view.39 If the aggrandizement of myth believes in the cyclical return of history to itself (where the past is a source), the reversal of myth believes in an inverted fulfillment of the same tropes by the present (where the past is – crucial distinction – a store, not an origin). And yet the difference between embellishing a narrative like Genesis, inhabiting a myth like Circe and inverting a story like Perseus’, is ultimately only a question of perspective – of where the reteller feels the weight and import of history lies, in the origin or in the moment. The next two categories break away from this symbolic commitment to myth entirely. “Myth-manipulation” is a phrase we could use to describe an approach which substantially changes both form and content. It contrasts with reversals or inhabitations of myth in that it embodies a deeply anarchic attitude toward time. The structure and the inherent meaning of the myth are played with without negating them entirely – but the idea that some kind of archaic, primordial truth, spanning centuries, persists in the form of a myth is greatly diminished in the act of manipulation. In this approach, it is finally possible to talk of a desacralization, since nothing in the original myth is held so holy by the reteller that it cannot be changed. The poet Jaime Sabines, in his famous retelling of Adam and Eve (1952), takes the biblical narrative as a platform to inquire into the relationship between language and the discovery of the world. There is no mention of a serpent, no booming voice in the garden, just a couple wandering through

106  Retelling Myth a landscape, repeatedly stunned at the freshness and astonishing complexity of the world: Have you seen how the plants grow? Where the seed falls it absorbs water: it is the water that makes it grow, that submits to the sunlight. Through the trunk, through the branches, the water goes up into the air, like when you rise up towards the sky at midday and your eyes start to evaporate. … Have you seen them? Plants walk in time, not from one place to another: from one hour to another. You can feel this when you stretch yourself out on the earth, with your mouth above, and your skin penetrates like a bunch of roots, and all of you becomes a fallen trunk. (Own translation)40 Reminiscent more of an experiment in Russian Formalism than the opening chapters of Genesis, Sabines tweaks and plays with the myth, giving Adam a cold for the first time so that the reader lives through the experience with him; making Eve die so that we feel his solitude in the garden. Myth moves from a perennial source of abiding truth to a store of saturated tropes, historically ubiquitous, paradoxically fresh precisely because they have been used and reused in so many different ways, so many times. If there is a sacredness at all to these tropes, it lies not in the object of devotion, but in the long history of their worship. Here perhaps, we encounter one of those moments where our interest in the quotidianizing of myth leads us to reflect on the process of mythologization – like Delillo’s endlessly photographed barn door, the sacred is bestowed on the myth from the outside, not unveiled by the narrator in a revisitation. The sacredness of the retold myth is an aura generated and regenerated by use, not fed by some long, unbroken line of continuity to a distant, archaic source. As a result, myth-manipulation is a much more terrestrial activity than any of those which have gone before it. There is still some manner of recognition of the original element of the myth. In Sabines, the idea in Genesis of encountering and naming a reality for the very first time is still present in the poem – but this recognition is a token, nominal one, a point of departure for somewhere very different. This idea of the germ of the myth persisting in the retelling can be seen in the various Mexican versions of Job. Salvador Novo’s poem, where he simply puns on the meaning of the name in English – riffing on a line from the New York Times, “Thousands Without Job” – paints the story of a wandering, unemployed bureaucrat. Pacheco’s short text on Job, where verse 18:2 (“When will you have done with words?”41) is originally an uncharitable reference to the perceived interminability of poor Job’s complaint – turns the moment into a much more aesthetic quest to produce life (water) out of the exhausted banality of everyday speech. Our position is still loosely akin to Job’s – we speak and speak, without

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producing anything – but the sterility is very much a semantic desert, not a spiritual one. Modern Mexican literature (and, as we shall see, not just modern Mexican literature) abounds with these secular reworkings of Old Testament stories, turning figures like the Shunammite in I Kings 1:3-4 into tales of abused Mexican womanhood and forced marriage.42 The motivations for these secular manipulations of biblical themes are often, though not always, political – unlike myth-reversal, there is no open confrontation, but rather a studied and deliberate decontextualization. The distinctiveness of myth-manipulation lies in this refusal to respect the original context of the myth, and to find instead alternative lines of reference for a contemporary audience (the Book of Job is not about judgment, but about language; Genesis 3:1-22 is not about spiritual but rather linguistic innocence, and so on). Desacralization is the necessary condition for myth-manipulation; a selective disrespect toward the original is the enabling factor in this modification of myth. In the final stage of myth-retelling, that of appropriation, both form and structure are almost completely discarded. Only the sign remains. Myth appropriation – which could almost be termed myth transformation – takes nothing but the sign from the myth, but remains almost wholly indifferent to whatever meaning or context the myth originally posed. At the very most, a splinter, a fragment is carried over into the retelling – as we see in Gabriel Zaid’s surreal poem on the birth of Eve. If Flores tried to reiterate the spirit of Eve’s obedience and purity, and if Sabines kept the loose form of the narrative but inflected it with a wholly different set of aesthetic and poetic agendas, Zaid simply retains the name – Eva – as a semantic platform to embark upon an idiosyncratic and (almost) non-sequential set of observations: I don’t have any time to lose, she said to me in the morning, and threw up a multitude of women. Sea of women; archipelago of chairs. With these splinters you have left me in fragments, my ribs splashed with ice. Frozen, sombre launches. Fine. But what times are these? You didn’t stay long at the last few parties. (Own translation)43 A kind of nihilism underlies this final mode of retelling, a semantic emptying or deflation of myth, one which merely plunders the imagery of myth for its own delight, with no concern for depth or history. If, as Augustine claimed, Paradise was the last time human language was spoken perfectly without misunderstanding – when every signifier led unproblematically to every

108  Retelling Myth signified44 – Zaid’s poem fills in the space left by the modern name “Eve” with the incongruous clutter of the everyday. In this respect, appropriation utterly quotidianizes the mythic – it refuses the curve of history, and forces the myth to live, denuded, in the present, alongside its own reiteration. Myth appropriation, in its most extreme cases, does not even ask the ghost of the original to lend it power. A violence is at work in this act of desacralization, as the appropriator rips the mythic sign out of the fabric of its setting and stitches it into a wholly different cloth. Arreola’s “Telemachus” appears to begin with the promise of Odysseus’ son, but quickly develops into a series of reflections on Assyrian kings, interstitiality and the ovens at Dachau; the myth of Orpheus, for Gilberto Owen, inspires the thoughts of a poet at his typewriter, watching cyclists from his window pass by in the rain.45 This indifference to context sits easily with an ignorance of context – which is why indigenous myths, in particular, are the myths so often subject to this category of retelling, especially when retold by non-indigenous Mexican writers. The Aztec/Mayan god Xipe Totec is one such example. A deity whose original function – in the flaying of his own skin – is to symbolize the vegetative regeneration of the earth reappears in a number of modern texts with little or no sense of this original, rejuvenating symbolism. In “A Chicano Poem”, the U.S./Mexican writer Lorna Dee Cervantes invokes the imagery negatively to describe how the process of North Americanization peeled off the skin of her “indigenous consciousness”. In one story by Juan Villoro, the metaphor is rendered even more remote from its original meaning, as a computer screen covered with sticky notes is the subject of a comparison with the Aztec deity: My eyes wandered to the computer, covered with Post-its where I jot down “ideas”. At this point, the machine looks like a domesticated Xipe Totec, the Aztec flayed god. Each “idea” is a layer of skin from Our Flayed Father. Instead of writing the script about syncretism I’d already cashed an advance on, I was constructing a monument to the topic.46 The skin of the myth, so to speak, is physically retained, but reused to convey a whole panoply of ideas – the loss of identity to a nation-state, the accretion of ideas in historical time – which pursue an ever wider orbit around the original point of the myth. In another story (also by Villoro), a group of young Mexican urbanites go off to camp in the desert on a Bohemian adventure. The protagonist loses himself from the others and wanders alone, wearing the skinned fur of a dead coyote, until he returns to the camp from his mythic ordeal, his bourgeois, city-dwelling identity annihilated in the process.47 Myth appropriation takes the skin of the myth, without worrying about the insides. In the case of indigeneity, this mode of retelling can correspond to a certain late-twentieth century postmodern

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cynicism to (or disbelief in) history – characters in Juan Villoro’s stories can be found sitting in the backs of cars, reading Baudrillard. Miguel Leon Portilla’s 2001 play Quetzalcoatl’s Escape (La Huida de Quetzalcoatl) paints the god as a Heideggerian protagonist, thrown into the world, trying to come to terms with himself and with his existence.48 It also colludes, somewhat more disturbingly, with a neoliberal, late capitalist annihilation of context – one which, in the case of non-indigenous uses of indigenous myth, brings with it a subtly neo-imperialist resonance as the original content of the myth is jettisoned, to be replaced with whatever set of signifiers (multicultural, liberal humanist, anti-/pro-nationalist, feminist, cynical postmodern) the writer feels drawn to. At some point the question arises: can a myth ever be appropriated purely semantically, without any of the contextual residue ever lingering spectrally in its wake? In discussing the retelling of myth, we have already spoken of the impossibility of pure repetition – do we not face here also the impossibility of pure annihilation? Possibly the most famous use of Xipe Totec has been Carlos Fuentes’ highly influential novel A Change of Skin (1967), the story of two couples whose road journey from Mexico City to Veracruz, passing through the ancient Aztec city of Cholula, results in a text so engaged with various myths (Mayan, Greek, Nordic, even Hindu) that one could legitimately consider myth to be its central theme. In terms of our five categories, the novel seems to occupy a place somewhere between manipulation and appropriation. It joins Octavio Paz in a belief in the centrality of sacrifice, labyrinth and pyramids to the modern Mexican soul (sometimes explicitly referencing Paz’s text), even if some of the allusions seem to be interested exclusively in the act itself of appropriating myth’s shapes and colors, however absurd the appropriated image may be. When the protagonist wanders through a fruit market near the beginning of the novel, we see a watermelon seller mysteriously transubstantiated into the role of a sacrificial high priest: “He watched the fruit vendor cut into the heart of a watermelon with a single machete stroke”.49 Extending the profound spiritual metaphor of sacrifice to a watermelon may seem whimsical, but to Fuentes’ credit his manipulation of the Xipe Totec myth attempts to inflect and preserve some sense of the regenerative original. While some of the uses of the novel’s title directly address the emotional fragility of twentieth-century identities and the relationships they plunge into – particularly in the explicit association of Xipe Topec with Freddie Lambert – Fuentes’ novel is also a meditation on history, and the way myth is involved in history as a process of death and rebirth.50 More substantial than watermelons and post-it notes, some degree of meaningful reinterpretation of Mesoamerican myth is at work here, even if in the end A Change of Skin is a novel which is more interested in the definition of myth rather than myth itself. It leans toward the pole of appropriation because, for all its allusions to and invocations of the trappings of the Aztec/Mayan world (Cholula, the references to skin and pyramids, the endless mirrors throughout the book), its pessimism

110  Retelling Myth suggests something darkly and subtly ineluctable about the myths it appropriates. Any originarily positive or contrarian elements in the myth of Xipe Totec (or for that matter Tezcatlipoca, or Tonantzin) can only ever aspire to the status of positive ingredient in Fuentes’ project. The fact that mainstream Mexican writers such as Fuentes or Villoro happily appropriate indigenous myth for their own uses leads us to a number of points regarding indigenous writers’ approach to myth. First of all, that myth appropriation is a two-way process – Zapotec poets such as Irma Pineda and Totonac writers such as Jun Tiburcio also appropriate Greek and Christian myth to augment their poetry. Tiburcio’s poem “Chumatec children” imagines the Christ child reborn in the sierras of central Mexico, a “Totonac child God”, raised in poverty among chickens and dogs, Messianically destined to one-day fight for and awaken his people.51 In a similar fashion, the Tzotzil poet Enriqueta Lunez indigenizes Mother Mary (“Maruchal” in Tzotzil), reinscribing her sacrifice and pain into a common ancestry with the poet.52 In Midnight Song for the Minstrel (2018), a slew of mythical images (hydra, unicorn, nymph, trolls, fairies) emerge in Pineda’s song of spurned love, drawing on a mythology which has little to do with the Zapotec myth Pineda has used elsewhere (see, for example, “Doo Yoo”/ “The house of the navel”53), with perhaps the most delightful image used being that of the centaur – employed to describe the eyes of an indifferent and scornful male lover, but also brilliantly alluding to the first sight of conquistadores on horseback.54 If Midnight Song for the Minstrel illustrates anything, it shows how indigenous writers cannot simply be pigeon-holed into endlessly repeating motifs of sun, moon and corn. If, as the Zoque poet Mikeas Sánchez has claimed, all indigenous writing is activism,55 then this may explain an invariably respectful attitude toward indigenous myth among indigenous writers. Where mainstream Mexican writers often embark upon savage and sometimes satirical retellings of their society’s most sacred narratives, poets such as Briceida Cuevas Cob (Maya) or Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec) employ gentler retellings or more affectionate allusions to myth, possibly with a larger project of cultural repetition/resurrection/ celebration in mind. In Regino’s poem “Guardians of the Earth”/“Chikon nangui”, for example, the presence of the Chikon or Mazatec deities who watch over the earth is solemnly related.56 It would be easy to caricature this tone of care and respect as “anthropological” or “ethnographic”, but to do so would be to overlook the very real power imbalances that demographic minorities have to overcome in relaying and representing their own cultures to a mainstream “outside”. The five categories of myth-retelling we have outlined here – aggrandizement, inhabitation, reversal, manipulation and appropriation – should be thought of less as rigid boxes and more as different points on a line stretching from replication through dissolution to near-complete evaporation. Most of the 80 or so poems, stories, novels and plays I have looked at fall somewhere in the middle categories – that is, they either adopt the

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voices of mythical personae, attempt to reverse mythical narratives or play with the “stuff” of the original myth to produce something visibly altered and different. If some degree of chronological or even teleological sequence is discernible in the progression of these categories, it shouldn’t be overstated. Many of the texts we might attribute to “myth-manipulation” would fall loosely within the period of Mexico’s literary modernism (1920s to 1940s57), and many of the poets we associate with the Contemporáneos (Novo, Owen, Jaime Torres Bodet) would naturally be interested in the reworking of myth. The more post-structuralist proclivities lying behind the semantic appropriation of myth would also seem to connect to Mexican writers more stereotypically associated with the themes of the postmodern (Juan Villoro, Alvaró Enrigue). Nevertheless, Owen’s wholesale uprooting and appropriation of the Orpheus myth dates from 1930, while Elsa Cross’ careful inhabitation of Ariadne’s character was written in 1964 – the simple idea that writers become more adventurous with myth as time goes on should be cautioned against. Perhaps the most striking provisionary conclusion to draw from this panoply of twentieth-century retellings is the paucity of any benign treatment of myth in modern Mexican literature. Melancholy, anger and cynicism seem to permeate almost every prophet, classical hero and indigenous god offered up. A glance at other cultures, where overall positive reworkings of myth are more visible (R.K. Narayan’s prose rewriting of the Ramayana, the largely positive attitude to Persian legend and myth in Orhan Pamuk’s novels, not to mention life-affirming reworkings of myth such as both Tennyson’s and Joyce’s Odysseus) seems to accentuate in the Mexican context a landscape of suddenly finite gods, helpless, murdered monsters, all-too-human heroes and abandoned prophets with no message to speak but their own. A century which saw ten bloody years of a revolution fail to deliver a society it promised, and which witnessed the postwar growth of a state that increasingly smothered and oppressed the very people it had been constructed to empower, combined with a rapid postwar industrialization and all the sociocultural effects such disenchanting processes produce – such a century might be forgiven for seeing myth as nothing more than an eternally recurring negativity. The fact that so many retellings of myth took place in the 1960s also suggests that the more norteamericano aspects of Mexico’s cultural history – the limited but arguable resemblance of its Sixties to the rebellious decade enjoyed by its northern neighbor – are a factor in this antagonistic attitude toward mythic narratives, particularly insofar as they participate in current hegemonies. The year 1967 alone saw the appearance of Fuentes’ A Change of Skin, Homero Aridjis’ Persefone, José Lopez Portillo’s Quetzalcoatl, and the performance of José Fuentes Morel’s La Joven Antigone se va a la guerra and Carballido’s Medusa. The Judeo-Christian and classical humanist values seen (correctly) to be underpinning many of the myths retold during this period explains in part the paucity of sympathetic representations. The

112  Retelling Myth hopes Alfonso Reyes nurtured for Mexico’s Virgil – “I want Latin for those of the Left!” he cried in 193058 – were perhaps not quite realized in the reworkings of classical myth that emerged 30 years later, as the classics came to represent not merely the failed “civilizing” project of the PRI, but also a longer, nineteenth-century background of bourgeois, classical education – Latin as the language of doctors, lawyers and priests. Even later on in Palinuro de Mexico (1976), the retelling of a minor hero from the Aeneid, Fernando del Paso offers a narrative closer to a Rabelaisian tale of excess than a Virgilian model of obedience and self-restraint.59 The absence of any real collusion between Mesoamerican mythology and the PRI/Mexican state (or indeed, the Porfiriato which governed before it) explains the paucity of satirical retellings of indigenous myth. Even given the various attempts, throughout the century, to invoke mythology to assist a nationalist project (from the 1927 production of Ruben M. Campo’s play Quetzalcoatl, set in the ruins of Teotihuacan, to the painted murals of national palaces and football stadiums60), the proximity of names such as Quetzalcoatl and Aztlan to the indigenous subaltern seems to have deterred the frequent kind of acerbic representations of biblical and classical figures we have seen from writers like Pacheco, Novo, Fuentes and Castellanos. If the condition of satire is to mock the empowered, then the proximity of myth to power will always be a factor in its desecration. In a postwar scenario, the Judeo-Christian/Classical education of the nation’s elites and the symbolic investment of such mythologies in the sociocultural fabric of the society would go some way to explain how the portrayal of Theseus as a spoiled brat, or the Hebrew God as a spoiler of ant-hills, could be subversive.61 In this attempt to periodize the retelling of myth, it is useful to recall Claudio Lomnitz’s valuable commentary on the relationship between neoliberalism, the production of myth and the withdrawal of the state. At the end of Death and the Idea of Mexico, the relatively recent surge in popularity of the Santa Muerte – a black, skeletal, Madonna-figure, personifying Death and frequently holding a Grim-Reaper-scythe – is seen as the symptom of “Mexico’s second secular revolution”.62 The deicidal murder of the Transcendent State has produced a vacuum in which myths such as the Santa Muerte emerge to replace an obsolete/disavowed/discredited authority with a new kind of sovereignty. If, as we have seen, desacralization is the condition for the appropriation of myth (and the Santa Muerte is a hybrid-mix of several), then recent appropriations of Mesoamerican underworld narratives such as Yuri Herrera’s tale of a sister who crosses the U.S./Mexican border to find her brother make sense63 – set against a background in which the Mexican state is at best impotent, at worst corrupt and complicit, the relationship between neoliberalism and a return to myth may well see the mythic as an attempt to replace the lost master signifier of the State with a radically different content (in Lomnitz’s case, it is the Santa Muerte as a truly democratic Death).

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And so we return to the question we asked at the beginning: how does demythologization take place? And what is the meaning of the quotidianizing and repetition of myth in modern Mexican literature? A broad, literary landscape presents itself, bristling with parodies, satires, invocations and allusions and interfacing with not one but a multiple number of mythic vocabularies. The varying strength and tone of parody, the oscillating closeness/vagueness of repetition, the distortion and readjustment of viewpoint, all fissure and inflect this landscape even further, so what emerges is something similar to a Cubist painting, where different pockets of sacred time and space explode around the canvas, cracking and fragmenting the century seemingly beyond any hope of schematization. We have already mentioned one option – the possibility of a cautious periodization, lending some sense to the quality and quantity of mythretelling in each epoch. First of all, an early attempt, both leading up to the Revolution and in its aftermath, to reiterate myth didactically, ideologically, representing Homers and Quetzalcoatls as “civilizadores”, trying to extend some kind of mythic sacred time into the present; then, a loosely modernist impulse, stretching through the 1920s and 1930s, shattering these coordinates, rupturing these desires for continuity but with primarily philosophical and aesthetic agendas in mind; a period of open rebellion throughout the 1950s and 1960s, explicitly inverting, reconfiguring and openly desecrating mythic structures cherished by power; and finally, the sense of some kind of return to myth – a failed recovery, an invocation which already knows the god invoked is nothing but a hollow idol, a painted stone, a dead book, but still a semantic return to the whole question of the ruin of the mythical. Even in the face of so many overwhelming minutiae, some validity lies within such schematizations – but that validity is undermined by, or at least must coexist with, a number of things: first of all, the presence of figures (not just Alfonso Reyes, but in a very different way writers like Rosario Castellanos) in whom many of these phases seem to overlap and merge. Second, the “sprayed” nature of so many different texts, at different moments, performing different myths, a phenomenon which defies any sequential temporality. Third, the subtly different set of mechanisms which seem to surround the retelling of Mesoamerican myth, in contrast to its biblical/classical counterparts. The absence of a certain, necessary intimacy externalizes and almost “orientalizes” the repetition of Tlalocs, Quetzalcoatls and Xipe Totecs we find, an unfamiliarity which turns the process of rewriting Mayan/Aztec mythology into something more than the reconfiguration of a humanized Zeus or a flawed Adam. The dimensions of Mexican literature’s twentieth century, when we step back to grasp a wider optic, offer a constantly moving, shifting field of rewritten myths. A wave of retellings, washing over parables, fables, Bible verses and folklore, illustrates how a culture can begin, in a hundred different places, to collectively alienate itself from the bourgeois semantics of its

114  Retelling Myth past. As I have tried to show, the precise place of myth in this process – both as a carcass to be jettisoned, but also as a fecund body to provide future growth – is an ambivalent and complex question. Its location in the heart of modernity’s project, however, remains difficult to deny.

Katha How do these reflections reiterate themselves in a South Asian context? How does the use of myth pass from Achilles to Arjun, from Teotihuacan to Kurukshetra, from Veracruz to West Bengal? We shall start by seeing how closely some of the gestures we performed in the last section can be repeated in a Bengali context; after discerning some commonalities, we can begin to speak about the differences. Any attempt to look at myth transculturally encounters the usual Wittgensteinian problem of terminology. Just as we saw in Chapter 1, where the most common word for “ghost” in all three languages splits into a more skeptical Turkish/Spanish word relating to imagination and a more accommodating Sanskrit word for “being”, a common word for “myth” is equally hard to find. In Bengali, three candidates arise – the pair smriti/sruti, and the word for speech (mirroring the etymology of its Greek equivalent) katha. The former is problematic because it denotes a difference between sacred texts (the more authoritative, author-less texts such as the Rig Veda [smriti] and the texts heard [sruti] and recorded by historical figures such as Vyasa or Valmiki). Many of the texts we will consider mythic come from both – the Rig Veda is a smriti text, the Mahabharata a sruti one – which makes the word katha (story, speech) a more practical choice. Katha, however, is a word which also refers to present-day stories – specifically mythical katha are usually modified by their subject. Ramkatha, for example, is the term generally used for retellings of the Ramayana64; puranakatha, perhaps, is a wider term for any text or subject relating to the puranas. To look at Bengali retellings of myth is to examine a small fragment of a much wider tradition of South Asian history. Stretching not simply across North Indian languages such as Gujarati and Hindi, but well into the southern language traditions of Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil, the reiteration of familiar stories from mythic texts forms a central part of the subcontinent’s literary traditions. To speak of Bengali literature in this respect is to speak of one corner of this enormous literary landscape, and to speak of modern Bengali literature is to speak of the uppermost slice of a long history, dating back at the very least to the mangal-kavya traditions of the thirteenth century. The scholar Dimitrova has argued that South Asian literary criticism, and in particular postcolonial literary criticism, has overlooked the trend toward mythology in modern South Asian literature, choosing instead to focus on topics such as “orientalism”, “subalternity” and “hybridity”.65 Despite sporadic works of substance (such as a thorough Mahabharata-based

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study of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s reworking of Arjuna66), this is largely true. Dimitrova, although she mentions “Orientalism” as one such widely preferred lens, avoids citing any reason for this – but a reluctance to read modern Indian fiction mythically must have something to do with a fear of reiterating Western, Orientalist stereotypes concerning the abiding, nonrational essences of “Third World” societies – a predilection for mythology and archetype which prevents the reader from seeing what is genuinely new and creative within a nation’s literature. As we look at the retelling of myth in Bengali, Turkish and Mexican fiction, this danger – the danger of an optic which longs for comfortable essences and reassuringly eternal recurrences – will also be our danger. In texts where the author openly adopts the task of rewriting a myth (such as Buddhadeva Bose’s dramatization of the blind king Dhritarashtra, or Amit Chaudhuri’s subtle retelling of a raksha’s attempt to seduce Ram67), a decision to invoke the mythical as a framework of reading is beyond reproach. In more allusive cases – such as the way Upamanyu Chatterjee’s funny, first novel flirts with the Bhagavad Gita, or the way a Bibhutibhushan short story about a widow and a flute plays with the Krishna/Radha narrative68 – there is always the possibility that, as nonIndian readers, our discussion of myth will end up “Indianizing” texts that are actually trying to do much wider things. Our discernment of mythic elements in modern texts should not be misconstrued as an “unveiling” of their “real”, deeper meaning. To see the shadow of the Gita behind every reference to desire in a modern Indian text – or, for that matter, to see the shadow of a pyramid behind every sacrifice in a modern Mexican story – is to refuse to allow a literature to breathe. Basic similarities between Mexican and Bengali contexts emerge even on a cursory glance. The political use of myth in both literatures is a visible starting point; the desire to take mythic narratives hardwired in the social memory of a culture and renarrate them for political ends applies as much to Sara Urriba’s Antígona Gonzalez as it does to Mahasweta Devi’s resetting of the disrobing-of-Draupadi story in a 1970s Maoist insurrection.69 If a greater number of Bengali writers are drawn to this explicit politicizing of myth as a device (Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Suchitra Bhattacharya, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Sri Aurobindo70), one factor would have to be an extensive independence struggle – and with that struggle, an equally long history of mythological plays and pamphlets espousing an anti-colonial platform. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Calcutta had a thriving theater scene where plays with titles such as The Destruction of Ravana (1881) and The Exile of Sita (1881) were regularly performed.71 A number of these mythology-based plays were openly political, portraying battles between Devas (gods) and Asuras (demons) in definitely anti-British ways.72 Sri Aurobindo’s own 1907 play Perseus the Deliverer portrays a helpless Andromache (India) chained to a rock by Poseidon (Britain), to be liberated by a Perseus embodying – on the part of Calcutta-born, Cambridge-educated Aurobindo – a Hellenic expression of freedom.

116  Retelling Myth Apart from the theater, pamphlets were another medium through which mythological vocabularies acquired openly political uses. Sri Aurobindo provides a neat link here, as he was also one of many writers contributing to nationalist newspapers such as Jugantar, all of which (as the scholar Sanyal has shown73) openly drew on mythical ideas to forward the swadeshi cause. If Octavio Paz, in his postscript to Labyrinth, had invoked the Mayan notion of regenerative sacrifice in his discussion of the student massacre at Tlatelolco,74 the various pamphlets and newspapers of the nationalist movement in early twentieth-century Bengal emphasized an equally mythological idea of sacrifice – the patriotic santans (sons) who sacrificed themselves for the motherland against the white rakshas or demons (Sanyal 771). The Bhagavad Gita and its discourse on the necessity of violence to combat injustice is a central text in this open use of myth to legitimize and advocate violent action against an imperialist regime. The invocation of myth provides a useful “eternalization” of violence here, lifting it out of the realm of mere individual anger and transcendentally transforming it by linking the deed to a far wider, older realm of action. To describe foreign invaders as rakshas or asuras suggests that their defeat will be as certain as Ravana’s or Duryodhana’s, bringing a cosmic inevitability to their expulsion. The feminist rewriting of myth – and the degree to which it sits alongside its less radical sister, the female recentering of myth – is also a device which seems to cut across both literatures. If female Mexican writers offered us reworked versions of La Malinche, Mary, Ariadne and Abishag,75 then a similar set of processes would appear to be at work in Bengali fiction, with Persephone, Draupadi and the much-abused Madhavi all being given a modified voice and, in some cases at least, a new sense of agency. These modern writers, not counting the sixteenth-century Chandravati, cross at least two generations (Suchitra Bhattacharya, Mahasweta Devi, Bani Basu and the more recent Chitra Divakaruni) and vary in their relationship to the faithfulness of the reiteration. In some cases, the myth is carefully retold but in a politically modified present – Devi’s Draupadi, as we have already said, reevoked in a Naxalite setting, but with no Krishna present to save the protagonist from her disrobing; Bani Basu’s abducted goddess is an innocent village girl, and the triumphant Hades in this instance a zamindar with a Landrover for a chariot.76 Crucial questions arise here over such decisions – is the myth indicted here, and the culture in which it gestates? Bhattacharya’s Madhobi is handed like a child bride from king to king in a manner which suggests that patriarchy is as old as the Mahabharata. Devi, however, in her choice of mythic moments (not just Draupadi’s defiant stance before the Kauravs, but also the man-murdering finale of “The Hunt”, clearly alluding to The Bacchae77) involves a more positive attitude toward myth as a source of future narratives, rather than a weight of previous patriarchies. There is a sifting of myth here, a winnowing of “good” (empowering, emancipatory) mythic narratives from “bad” (reactionary, conservative) ones. This ambivalence among certain feminist writers

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toward wholly denigrating mythic frameworks does not just indicate an abiding archival optimism, but also a worry that to castigate the world of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata entirely is to deflect attention from contemporary, specific practices of oppression that have less to do with eternal, male lust and more to do with specific forms of modernity (such as capitalism, neoliberalism or nation-statism). The dominant influence of classical (Hellenic) myth in Mexican literature, outdoing even Mayan/Aztec tropes as the most frequently rewritten group of mythical narratives, is a consequence both of the particular history of European settlement in the “new world” and of the particular way the memory of that settlement was cultivated. We have already discussed how this is possibly the largest difference between the three regions of our studies – and probably reflects the degree to which non-indigenous writers from European backgrounds have dominated the Mexican canon. Mexican writers will feel a claim (through various Spanish/Italian/German origins) to the signifier “Europe”, tantamount to an ethnic proximity, which Bengali and Turkish intellectuals will never really be able to replicate. In South Asian intellectual histories, unsurprisingly, the relationship to Greek myth has to be a different one. The invocation of classical tropes in Bengali texts (and there are several) reflect two things: first of all, a certain English-medium, Westernized education (in nineteenth-century terms a bhadralok education) – the kind of education a Bengali might have received at Presidency College or St Xavier’s. The wealth of classical erudition that emerges in the texts of a Nirad Chaudhuri, a Shahid Suhrawardy78 or Michael Madhusudhan Dutt would have had something to do with the European education being dealt out at their respective institutions. What also emerges, however, in the various Bengali Icaruses, Persephones, Circes and Hectors we encounter, is a distinctly non-nationalistic cosmopolitanism. It is no coincidence that both Amit Chaudhuri and Kaiser Haq embrace the figure of Ulysses through Joyce79 – for whom the cyclops, with its single eye, remained the archetype for all nationalists. We see the most extreme form of this in Nirad C. Chaudhuri (the notorious anti-Indian) and his incorporation of Persephone, Cassandra and Circe into his own peculiar blend of racial memory – one where the Aryans of India, having wandered into the underworld of the subcontinent, have forgotten who they originally are: My foreign friends often notice on the faces of Hindu women … a pensive sadness through which even their gayest smiles come out like streaks of sun through rain-clouds. Since women’s smiles are threequarters biological, they cannot understand how that can be. May I tell them that the soft shadow is cast by the sorrow of the Persephone who does not know who she is, for a Demeter she has forgotten?80 In the title of Chaudhuri’s most offensive book (from which this passage is taken), India was Circe – the continent that turned all who settled in it

118  Retelling Myth into pigs. And of course the isolation and criticism Chaudhuri received as a result of such ideas made him see himself as a Cassandra figure – one who speaks a truth that will never be accepted by their community.81 What is interesting here is how Greek myth is involved in the de-Indianizing of a subject – how, in Chaudhuri’s own attempt to escape his Indianness, classical myth was a central facilitating factor. At the same time, however, Hellenism is also capable of contributing to the beginning of a national consciousness – and not just through Sri Aurobindo’s use of Perseus. As scholars such as Rosinka Chaudhuri and Phiroze Vasunia have shown, there was already a healthy tradition of classical Hellenism in nineteenth-century Bengal, most notably expressed in the figures of Derozio and Madhusudan Dutt.82 A certain Anglophilia in both cases definitely contributed to the adoration of a tradition already adored by the English, but also the beginnings of an independent Indian consciousness which wanted to formulate an indigenous identity on classical terms. Dutt’s rewriting of the Ramayana (as we shall see), turning Trojans into rakshas and Hector into Ravana, in some ways is reminiscent of Reyes’ rewriting of Homer in Cuernavaca, turning Greeks into Mexicans. It is interesting to see the ancillary way Empire is involved in this rewriting of myth. A colonial (Spanish/British) worship of the Hellenic in both cases pushes the two names to initiate a dialectical process of identity construction, one in which the periphery reechoes a fragment of the center, but not necessarily with the purpose of playing the same tune. The kind of satirical retelling we found in Mexican writers – Perseus as a 40-something has-been, Job as a punished bureaucrat – to some degree reappears among Bengali writers too. Bani Basu paints a quarrelsome family of gods, with Durga as a middle-class Calcutta mother, Saraswati and Lakshmi as two squabbling sisters and Ganesh as a pot-bellied son; Navaneeta Dev Sen also lightheartedly replays the Ramayana, anachronistically inserting Islam as an adjacent kingdom whose kebabs entice Lakshman out of orthodoxy; Divakaruni’s recent novel has a teenage Draupadi as the protagonist, growing up and trying to learn the ways of the world.83 Satire here means not just the humanizing of the divine, but also the careful addition of finitudes and foibles. The gods must not merely be human, but also shop, eat kebabs, gossip. This diminishing of the divine went in hand with the political mood – even at the end of the nineteenth century, a satirical story about the gods’ impotence to prevent a British steel bridge from being built across the sacred Ganges was widely popular.84 And yet, as we shall see, the satirizing of Hindu myth and Christian myth may not be as smoothly analogous as it first appears. Do the categories we brought to bear in the first section work here in a Bengali context? We certainly find examples of myth aggrandizement or expansion. Sometimes this borders on paraphrase or translation – Romesh Chunder Dutt’s loose translation of the Mahabharata (1899)85 would be one instance. Unsurprisingly Victorian in tone, each book is prefaced by a

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brief precis (“The Epic of Ancient India … Condensed into English Verse”) and attempts to communicate the themes of justice, kinship, courage and retribution inherent in the Sanskrit text. As one of the handful of Englishlanguage retellings we are looking at, it stands along non-Bengali rewritings of epics such as R.K. Narayan’s The Ramayana as an early, slightly conservative, non-political attempt to showcase an Indian epic in a World Literature/World Religions framework. Another problematic example might be Tagore’s “Karna and Kunti” (1900), a dramatic poem retelling two specific sections in the Mahabharata.86 The example is problematic because some degree of change and inflection took place. Although it is originally Krishna who tells Karna that he shares a mother with Arjun, Tagore melodramatically has the mother herself, Kunti, tell Karna of his true lineage. As Kushari Dyson notes, Karna is also slightly more “human” in Tagore’s retelling than he is in the original.87 Nevertheless, it is a stark contrast to Tagore’s other retellings – most notably Chitrangada (1892), where Tagore almost completely reinvents the persona of the tribal princess who seduces the warrior-hermit Arjun on his travels. “Karna and Kunti”, for all its humanizing, keeps enough of the main themes and facts of the original episode to justify the term “expansion” – again, in contrast to Buddhadev Bose’s Partham Partha (1969–1971), Buddhadev’s own retelling of the same episode, strongly influenced by Tagore.88 As we saw with the story of Perseus, Owen influencing both Pacheco and Carballido in the retelling of it, so we see a ripple effect of this famous episode from the Mahabharata rerelated through Tagore and then Buddhadev. It reminds us of the difficulty in trying to talk about influence and faithfulness in the philological echo chamber that is the retelling of myth – just as Auden and Brueghel lurk behind every poem about Icarus, a whole host of alternative sources (including folktale versions of the Sanskrit epics) lies behind many rewritings of scenes from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. When we look at the two texts next to one another – the two specific sections from the Udyoga parva (fifth book) of the Mahabharata, and Tagore’s own specific retelling of it – we see how a certain faithfulness has been retained, despite numerous alterations – the removal of Krishna and Surya, Karna’s divine father; the shifting of the time from daytime to evening; the ambivalence within Kunti herself, who in the original Sanskrit text considers her son “sinful” and “of deluded understanding”, but who in Bengali acquires a milder, more penitential tone. For all these differences, the crucial questions of duty, honor and kinship are preserved. When Tagore’s Karna asks of his mother: Then why did you banish me [ keno tobé amaré pheliyé dile dure] – a castaway uprooted from my ancestral soil, adrift in a homeless current of indignity? Why set a bottomless chasm between Arjuna and myself, turning the natural attachment of kinship to the dread attraction of hate?89

120  Retelling Myth The reproach echoes the much older words spoken in the original epic to Kunti: O mother, I was abandoned by thee as soon as I was born. This great injury, involving risk to life itself, that thou didst me, hath been destructive of my achievements and fame. If, indeed, I am a Kshatriya, I have, for thee, been deprived of all the rites of a Kshatriya. What enemy would have done me a greater injury?90 Textually, Tagore’s retelling is an expansion. The dialogue between mother and son is almost three times longer than the original text; and yet, as we have seen in the previous section, the content used to “fill” the spaces in the expanded version does not jar with the original.91 A sense of filial betrayal, a decision to stay with the community one knows and the sense that this commitment to duty is even nobler in the face of certain death – all of these elements Tagore keeps and cultivates in his aggrandizement of the original episode. The idea of myth-inhabitation – the careful adoption of unarticulated perspectives from within a mythic narrative – can also be found frequently in Bengali texts. If Mexican writers can retell the history of Circe from the viewpoint of her pigs, or the story of a war from the perspective of its female prize, then Bengali writers are equally adept at expressing a child-bride’s view of a marriage, or a raksha’s view of the Ramayana. Such inhabitations shade from congruous to incongruous – that is, from the production of additional voices in harmony with the original direction of the myth, to the fabrication of alternative viewpoints disturbing the mythic arrangement of values. The poet Nirendranath Chakraborty has a poem (“Fatal Evening”) articulating the aftermath of Kurukshetra through the voice of Arjun, who stoically assesses his fate and insists he was not “merely Krishna’s puppet”92; in his study, Buddhadev Bose famously recentered the entire epic of the Mahabharata around the slightly foolish King Yuddishthira, who gambles away his kingdom and his wife on a game of dice, and who almost forfeits his entry into heaven to stay with his dog.93 Both Chakraborty and Bose, in their respective texts, recenter the multiply-personed epic around a single figure, but in doing so make no explicit challenge to the validity of the narrative. Other examples, however, are less comfortable with the myth they inhabit. In another story from the same book of the Mahabharata as “Karna and Kunti”, the story of the multiply-married Madhavi is retold in a short text by Suchitra Bhattacharya. Madhavi, who receives barely a hundred words of Sanskrit in the original account, has her narrative expanded to a tenpage text. In these reworkings of mythic exclusion (of caste, of women, of the defeated), anachronisms such as “sexual exploitation” (185) are either freely and ironically invoked or repressed in a quest for historical authenticity. Possibly the most emancipatory element in the original narrative

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– Madhavi rejects a whole range of possible husbands and disappears alone into the forest to practice “ascetic austerities” – Bhattacharya leaves only as a lingering possibility at the end of the story. Madhavi’s viewpoint has been invested with a modern consciousness only to redescribe an ancient patriarchy with the clearer eye of the present. Such examples of myth-inhabitation are many (Chitra Divakaruni’s retelling of the events of the Mahabharata through the eyes of a teenage Draupadi has been a recent and particularly popular one) and it is fair to ask what their precise motivations are – to find something in the past that can be activated in the present, or to locate those moments in our political present which seem to feed on the past? In the more anachronistic versions of myth-inhabitation, the writers locate or insert moments of female agency in texts which cannot allow them, eternalizing the feminist consciousness of a Draupadi or a Madhavi as something abiding and irrepressible. On the other hand, this anachronistic reinhabitation of myth always draws attention to its own restaging and reformulation – thus exposing the fantasy of an imposed framework which keeps the desire to change the past forever trapped in the present. A kind of frustration, perhaps even a futility, threatens a modern voice which tries to inhabit a third-century text – as the suspension of reader disbelief is abandoned, so is the very past the mythic rewriting is attached to. The pleasure (the jouissance) which comes from seeing Madhavi rebuke a sage, or Draupadi angrily interrogate Krishna, is in part a transgressive pleasure – and the power of such feminist reworkings comes from this transgressive disruption of the established order. And yet for the symbolic order to remain symbolic, it must be touched – but texts such as “The Testament of Madhobi” and Palace of Illusions, it could be argued, forever defer the sacred in their very attempt to encroach upon it. Among the categories we examined in the last section, there was “mythinhabitation” and “myth-reversal”. There are also inhabitations of myth which involve myth-reversal – for example, the short story “An Infatuation” by Amit Chaudhuri, which retells a familiar moment of attempted seduction in the Ramayana (an evil raksha changes into a beautiful woman to seduce the noble Ram) but from the point of view of the raksha. As in the case of the Mexican Medusa, whose transformation from monster into victim reversed the hero-endorsing direction of the Perseus myth, Chaudhuri’s text turns Valmiki’s heroes into a pair of cruel, vain, overprivileged brats – and the “monster” into a creature whose only crime was illicit desire. The text begins with the “monster” spying secretly on Ram, Sita and Lakshman: She’d been watching the two men for a while, and the pale, rather docile wife with vermillion in her hair, who sometimes went inside the small house and came out again. … It was the taller one she’d come to prefer; the older one, whose every action had authority. She liked to watch him bending, or brushing away a bit of dust from his dhoti. … It was not his wife’s beauty she feared and envied; it was his.94

122  Retelling Myth The reversal of myth here involves, as with the Mexican example, a reversal of viewpoint. Although not openly political (in contrast to Mahasweta Devi or Bani Basu), Chaudhuri’s text implicitly politicizes the idea of perspective by showing how myths change when viewpoints are rearranged. In a much more vivid manner than any theoretical explanation could do, such gestures of reversal expose the ideological underpinnings of myth by revealing the relationship between power and perspective. More than any critique (and more effectively than any satire), myth-reversals show what is required politically to tell a myth – and who has to be kept silent in order for the myth to be told. Modern stories like “An Infatuation” draw upon a history of myth-reversal in Bengali letters – most notably the Meghnabadh Kabya (1861) of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a poem reversing the spirit of the ancient Ramayana by making (in Miltonic fashion) Ravana, not Ram, the hero of the tale.95 A resentment of power and established narratives pervades both texts (“I despise Rama and his rabble” Dutt famously wrote96) – as we have said, however, a formalistic conservatism still lies behind these mechanisms of reversal. Turning Ramas into Ravanas and Ravanas into Ramas still maintains a commitment to Epic form – regardless of whether the protagonist is canonized or vilified, slandered, sidelined or endorsed, the myth retains its semantic potency even in the moment of its inversion. In our look at Mexico, we defined “myth-manipulation” as a substantial change of form and content. A wide range of very different texts in modern Bengali literature (stories, poems and plays) do something like this – stories of village Radhas waiting for a dead Krishna, terrestrial Arjuns in political or psychological struggles, Draupadis dressed in guerrilla combat-gear, Ramas and Sitas relocated to the movie worlds of Calcutta and Mumbai.97 In the case of the Bangladeshi poet Shaheed Quaderi, biblical/Quranic myth is also invoked (Quaderi’s poem “Rain, Rain” turns his own existence into a personal ark, waiting to float free of the city’s apocalyptic deluge98). If there is anything which links these texts to the kinds of interpretation we saw in Mexican literature – Sabine’s Edenic couple, wandering through the world for the first time, or the various Mexican versions of a denuded/abandoned Job – it is the will to repeat a myth, minus the divine. The manipulation of myth has this removal of the divine almost as a condition – in all of the Bengali texts we have mentioned, some kind of God authority (a Krishna or Rama) is deleted, diminished or disempowered. In Bibhutibhushan’s story “The Flute”, Radha’s separation from Krishna is blended as a subtext into the story of a village girl (Sulekha) whose dead husband’s flute is the only consolation for a young widow’s miserable existence. The pathos of Radha as she yearns to be with Krishna once more is repeated – but without Krishna. An almost cosmic need for myths we know can never be realized, means the young widow cannot give up the flute, or the myth, even though there is no one to play it anymore. In the Oriya story “The Magic Deer” by J.P. Das, an actual theater retelling of the Ramayana is the subject of the story. The husband of an aspiring actress – an

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emasculated Rama – has his Sita ultimately stolen from him by a director, the story’s inevitable Ravana (whom Das describes, in fairly racist tones, as a “short dark fellow”99). The invincibility of Rama is stoically sacrificed as the husband in the end accepts his cuckolded, wifeless lot and resolves to let her stay with her new lover – no Hanuman is called on to win back this particular Sita. Even in a novel which keeps as close to the original sequence of Puranas as possible – Samaresh Basu’s 1978 retelling of Shamba, the handsome son of Krishna cursed with leprosy by the envious god for drawing unwanted attention from his legion of mistresses/gopis100 – the ejection of Shamba from Krishna’s good favor is the cataclysmic moment at which Shamba is existentially thrown onto his own to lead the leper community in the novel out of misery and back to redemption (120). In Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi”, where the guerrilla protagonist ends on a note of powerful (if ultimately doomed) self-assertion, the torture and rape of the female fighter occurs as a consequence of Krishna’s absence – all of these texts seem to have the premise of a disenchanted (Ram-less, Krishna-less) universe built into them. In myth-manipulation, some moment usually occurs where the myth is broken. Sometimes it is an epiphanic moment – a husband realizes he is not Rama; an Arjun realizes there is no Krishna by his side. Sometimes it is a culminating moment – the text ends on the evacuation of deity, where the narrative stops because the myth has run aground. When the myth is broken, the loosely parallel movement between the myth and the retelling diverges. I say “loosely parallel” because the distance between the mythic narrative and the text which manipulates it is (unlike the previous categories) never constant. Sometimes the story zooms up close and follows the myth almost to the point of translation. In Gangopadhyay’s Arjun, a restaging of the Mahabharata in a Calcutta refugee settlement during the time of the East Pakistan/West Bengal partitions, there are moments where the 1971 novel hugs the Mahabharata close, reproducing phrases and key facts from the epic with no inflection101; in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, on the other hand, the Bhagavad Gita is nothing more than a faint echo of the protagonist’s attempt, as a Krishna-less Arjun, to rein in his desires and “by constant practice and by freedom from passions” to train his mind.102 As retellings travel alongside their originals like boats along a river, sometimes converging to that they almost touch, sometimes diverging so far apart they practically lose sight of one another, the relationship between them becomes a rope which ultimately, at some point, is broken. It is at this point, with the text and the original beginning to float free of one another, that the fifth category of retellings can be said to begin, the wholesale appropriation of myth with little or no respect for the Ur-text. The retelling of myth which manipulates myth already tilts in this direction – and in the past, many of Tagore’s uses of myth (such as the story “The Golden Deer”) see the myth as a platform to launch a series of speculations and inquiries, rather than a transcendental model to somehow echo or imitate.

124  Retelling Myth Just as with Mexican writers such as Villoro and Fuentes, we find in modern Bengali literature a whole set of writers who appropriate the imagery of myth and mythological structures, but with little or no interest in retaining or even interpreting their content. It will come as no surprise that the Bengali tradition of science fantasy (kalpabigyon, as Adrish Bardhan termed it103) is one area in which many of these writers work, taking mythological themes from both Hindu and Islamic vocabularies and working them into a variety of utopian/dystopian narratives. Although the first science fiction stories in Bengali literature begin very early (from the 1830s and 1840s104), the blending together of Hindu mythic figures into science fiction narratives emerges in the 1930s in magazines such as Ramdhanu. Manaranjon Bhattacharya wrote a series of fictional “Puranas” (“Mangal Purana”) which brought characters from the Mahabharata together with aliens from Mars, while one of Premendra Mitra’s most important novels is The Twelfth Manu (Manu Dwadosh, 1964).105 The Twelfth Manu takes its title from a Vedic term describing a slice of time in the infinite calendar of the Brahma. The paradoxical notion of using myth and the language of myth to talk about the future is an effective way of effacing the present, and Mitra’s novel is set in the very distant future, where three ethnic groups (the Assinds, the Negrams and the Eusoves) at war with are at war with one another in a manner reminiscent of the Yadavs, Sindhus and Gandarvas in the Mahabharata. Many of the characters’ names – Sharva, Ajib, Duru, Nandak – also seem to carry not just North Indian but Sanskritic connotations (“Duru” in particular resembling Duryodhana, the chief of the Kauravs in the Mahabharata). Set in the strange landscape of the novel, where racially distinct groups (the Negrams are “dark” with “heavy … black hair” 83) war and raid each other’s camps, directed and advised by the teachings of a “Group Mother”, Mitra’s text offers a surreal example of how the future tense of myth might operate. This is no restaging of the Mahabharata in the year 3000, but rather a replaying of mythic seeds in a completely alien soil – part of the strangeness of The Twelfth Manu stems from this fact. What we see is not so much a retelling of myth, but rather a rebirth. By replaying a landscape of warring tribes, mother-goddesses and quasi-Puranic names, we are brought closer – but in an utterly estranging way – to imagining how myths might have initially felt before they became myth. The underrated Bengali writer and reformer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, whose “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) has the unusual claim to be one of the first Indian feminist science fiction texts,106 also has a story which fits the appropriation of myth. “The Fruit of Knowledge” is a fable which begins in the Garden of Eden but quickly veers off into a magical tale of how the fruit makal, a variant of the Forbidden Apple itself, becomes an ambivalent tool of oppression used to enslave the fictive people of Kanak Dwip. As with “Sultana’s Dream” (a science fiction utopia where a matriarchal society oppresses and dominates men), the strength of Rokeya’s piece is its vivid imagination – the conventional narrative of the Judeo/Christian/

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Islamic paradise is a mere starting point for a parable concerning the moral ambiguity of knowledge. In one sense, this pushes the text closer toward the manipulation of myth than its appropriation – unlike Gabriel Zaid’s poem on Eve, which tumbles from paradise into the non-sequentiality of a variety of images, the essential germ of the temptation narrative in Rokeya is kept in the fantasy tale of fruit that simultaneously liberates and enslaves. And yet there is something so bold and vivid about the way this early Muslim feminist writer shifts the landscape and tone of the story, leaving behind the Quranic/biblical beginning of the story to plunge into a land called “Pareestan”. We have said that myth appropriation involves an indifference to the original essence of the myth – Rokeya’s own controversial relationship with her faith notwithstanding, “The Fruit of Knowledge” does not thematically stray from its initial (religious) starting point. The lurch into fantasy and make-believe, however, and the willingness to play with sacred narratives in order to arrive at an unorthodox place, does make Rokeya’s text something much more than a mere reinterpretation of the Fall. In the case of both Mitra and Rokeya, we have two writers who appropriated imagery from mythic structures whose communities they belonged to. It is not difficult, however, to find examples of Bengali writers employing “Western” (either Greek or Judeo-Christian) myth with little concern for the original provenance of the trope. Sukumar Ghose has a love poem about Atlantis which has less to do with Atlantis, more to do with the possibility of a resurrected relationship; in a similar vein, the poet Manindra Ray employs the trope of the Promised Land as an urban, weary desire, in the midst of vulgar, material existence, for radical transcendence.107 In the closing pages of “The Hunt”, Devi subtly invokes The Bacchae to describe the man-killing protagonist as she sings, drinks and dances, having slain the lecherous timber-contractor who would have her. In moments of appropriation such as these, the same kind of leveling takes place that we saw in Fuentes, Villoro and Zaid – a rejection of rooted identity, a refusal to acknowledge traditions of specifically located divinity, producing a centerless carpet of images for the poet to pluck and weave from with glorious indifference. And so we come to the question: what central differences lie between the modern Mexican and Bengali retellings of myth? And implicitly, what obstacles arise as a consequence when we try to follow a Jameson or a Moretti, and try to lift certain self-differentiating mechanisms of literary change out of one region and set them down gently in another? I’d like to suggest four. The first difference – and perhaps most obvious on an initial glance – would be the overwhelming dominance of a single set of mythic narratives in Bengali literature. If Mexican writers seemed to be drawn to a number of different mythic backgrounds – Meso-American, Judeo-Christian, Greek – the overriding majority of Bengali rewritings cluster around a strikingly small group of Hindu narratives from two epics. Even without entering into

126  Retelling Myth the various debates surrounding the term “Hinduism” – whether it is an Orientalist construct describing a bewildering plethora of different sects or rather, on the contrary, whether there is a bona fide argument to be made for the palpable existence of a tradition as such108 – it is impossible to overlook the primacy of a dozen central names in the Bengali warehouse of mythic tropes. Even Bengali Muslim writers work freely and fluently with this tradition – from the medieval mangal-kavya tradition, whose Muslim authors composed tales of exclusively Hindu content, right up to modern writers such as Kazi Nazrul Islam and the contemporary Kaiser Haq. The consequence of this primacy of a single tradition is a larger number of “insider” rewritings and a remarkable intimacy with a finite number of figures and moments: the meeting of Karna and Kunti, the abduction of Sita, the humiliation of Draupadi, the plight of Arjun – a variety of different historical factors, settler and autochthonous, in the formation of modern Mexico (and, looking forward, modern Turkey too), provide an obstacle to any comparative analysis trying to move across these regions. There are “insider” and “outsider” rewritings of myth – and in Bengali literature, those “insider” rewritings significantly outnumber the “outsider” category. It might be tempting to immediately deconstruct this argument – who is to say what an “outsider” is? Can we consider an “insider” a Bengali leftist who rewrites Arjun as a trade unionist or Draupadi as a Naxalite? And what about the aforementioned Bengali Muslims whose familiarity with the Hindu pantheon would have nothing to do with the faith of their community? The term “insider” here, however, is primarily epistemological, not sociological – someone who can accurately and intimately recognize the symbolic potency of a name or rite, and gauge its effect on others, even if they register no empathy with the phenomenon themselves. A second difference between the two regions is historical. In Bengali literature alone (and there are older linguistic traditions on the subcontinent), the retellings of a myth like the Ramayana begin in the fourteenth century with Krittibas109; the female poet Candravati’s version belongs somewhere in the late sixteenth century, a good hundred years before Sor Juana de la Cruz.110 For the Ramayana myth alone, there are at least eight versions of the tale in the eighteenth century – this is completely excluding retellings such as folk Ramayanas and local village narratives. The retelling and rewriting of myth in Bengal takes place in the shadow of a much longer tradition than its Mexican counterpart. When Pacheco or Carballido distort a myth, making Perseus a pot-bellied husband or Medusa a monster yearning for love, the paucity of precedents for such a gesture enhances its shock value. When a Bengali writer makes Ram into an upstart or a raksha into a victim, they are simultaneously conforming to and breaking from two sets of traditions: the classical preservation of a story, and the centuries-long sustained variants of it. When Navaneeta Dev Sen rewrites the Ramayana from a female/ feminist viewpoint, she openly invokes Amravati as her precedent; when the contemporary Amit Chaudhuri rewrites the mutilation of Surpranakh to

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make us feel empathy with a raksha, he too draws on Madhushudan Dutt’s gesture of over a century earlier. Mahasweta Devi’s rewriting of the story of Souvali/Sughada, the forgotten, unwedded mother of a warrior from the Mahabharata, draws on Rajshekar Basu’s earlier abridged translation of the epic. What might be seen, to the uninformed reader, as “subversive” gestures are actually a continuation of an entire counter-tradition of alternative storytelling. And, unlike the case of a Jaime Sabines or Gabriel Zaid, this counter-tradition does not stretch back decades but centuries. What we have written here for the Ramayana and the Mahabharata could also be extended to other myths. In the eighteenth century, figures such as the goddess Kali inspired devotional poets like Ramprasad Sen and the poetess Dasarathi Ray to a whole host of unusual similes and radical humanizations: What a joke! She’s a young woman from a good family   yes, but She’s naked – and flirts, hips cocked, when she stands.111 Written at some point between 1750 and 1770, poems such as the above trample blindly over the lines of sacred/profane that might operate in other religious traditions. Deities are embraced, abused, rejected, implored and entreated. Thus, when we encounter, in the 1920s and 1930s, devotional Kali poetry by Kazi Nazrul Islam, a historical awareness has to be kept in mind: Oh hey, All-Destroyer, which corpse did you raid for ash to come here smeared like this? Don’t you have a place to play that’s not a crematorium?112 The tradition of disrespectful intimacy Nazrul is drawing on (for all intimacy brings with it the possibility of disrespect) begins a good 200 years before the poem. A reader unaware of this tradition would assume Kazi Nazrul Islam to be some form of modernist poet, challenging the deity on its macabre appearance, openly scolding it for its proximity to death and decay. And this is the crux of our difficulty in talking about Mexico and Bengal: the way in which we have explored a modernist poetics in Mexico (Owen, Zaid, Novo) assumes a kind of “fall” – a rupture with a tradition of unmodified respect and devotion for an order of myth, both Judeo-Christian and classical, from which parodies of Job or Odysseus would draw their subversive power. It is difficult to reiterate this critical

128  Retelling Myth framework in a South Asian scenario, which has an altogether different history of attitudes toward the sacred. In Mexico, the comfortable, turnof-century timeline which reflects a growing, more secular disenchantment with religious narratives will ultimately contribute to the skepticism of Mexican modernism, not to mention Mexican modernity; Bengal, if only for the history of its retelling of myth, has had a very different series of trajectories mapped out over the same period. A smooth gradation from religious, respectful retellings of myth to secular, cynical adaptations is more difficult to draw. A third difference between Bengali and Mexican retellings of myth lies in the positivity of the former. This is, in many ways, a consequence of the first two differences. Since there is a longer history of myth-adaptation in Bengali literature, the idea of a sacred, unchangeable text has less valence than in Semitic, monotheistic cultures where adaptation and alteration are clearly seen to be much more transgressive activities. Particularly in the case of sruti [heard] texts like the Ramayana, which appear to have no precise Ur-text or umm al-kitab and enjoy a greater degree of flexibility than their monotheistic counterparts, to rewrite a myth may well be to rebirth it.113 When we combine this with the political attractiveness of a smaller group of narratives that everyone knows, what emerges as a consequence is a rich vein of common, demographically ubiquitous tropes just waiting to be politically reenergized. If in Mexican literature this was largely a case of desacralization and quotidianization – deflating ideological narratives like Adam and Eve or the Trojan War in an attempt to insult or undermine a status quo – in Bengali literature these gestures, although extant, have been outnumbered by the positive employment of mythic figures: Arjun as fighting for a community (Sunil Gangopadhyay), Draupadi as a figure of indigenous courage or independent female spirit (Mahasweta Devi, Chitra Divakaruni), Yudishthira and Shamba as existential heroes (Buddhadev Bose, Samaresh Basu). Finally, there seems to be a greater desire to find “subaltern” voices in Bengali texts than in their Mexican counterparts. If central figures such as Adam, Perseus, Theseus, Eve and Job seem to dominate the rewriting of Mexican myth, Bengali writers seem more intent on giving voices to ancillary, overlooked characters: Krishna’s leper son, Dhritarashtra’s illegitimate offspring, the Pandava’s tribal women, Ravana’s murdered son.114 A Marxist awareness of the hegemonic nature of voice and a proximity to/ influence by the Subaltern studies movement of the 1980s/1990s cannot explain all of these texts, many of them written well before 1978. Although Spivak’s long-standing collaboration with Mahasweta Devi as her principal translator offers the most obvious example of a mutually beneficial marriage between theory and fiction, figures such as Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Buddhadev Bose clearly show the interrogation of silence in accepted myth goes well beyond an author’s familiarity with Ranajit Guha or Antonio Gramsci.

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Can we take the mechanisms and maneuvers of myth-retelling we have found in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican literature and lift them over into the antipodal contexts of Bengal? Probably not. The question is difficult to answer because of the number of writers, moments and even movements that seem to move in parallel. A common respect for certain key figures in Western modernism (Yeats, Eliot, Auden) in poets such as Buddhadev Bose, translator of Baudelaire, certainly leads to similar modernist uses of myth as among Mexican admirers of these figures (Paz, Zaid, Sabines). Common processes of secularization would also play some part, in a manner at the very least recognizable to any students of twentieth-century Mexican history. In the beginning of Satiyajit Ray’s film Apur Sansur, the young, intellectual, Western educated husband takes his newly wedded rural bride into the city to the cinema to see a movie remake of a religious epic. The young wife is shocked and offended to see her gods on screen, portrayed by humans, and served up on celluloid as entertainment. The kind of processes at work here – the translation of piety and iconic images into popular culture, the growing use of technologies to desacralize and disenchant spiritual practices, the rise of the urban (the theater, the cinema) as a place where secular entertainment turns myth into an ingredient – are processes which would not be out of place in turn-of-century Mexico City, Veracruz or Guadalajara. Finally, the whole development of the Bengal Renaissance from the mid-nineteenth century onward (as Mandrakanta Bose has argued115), from the rationalizing arguments of Rammohan Roy, all the way up to the modernist quest for a post-Tagorean aesthetic,116 would all cause Bengali writers to revisit the ethical questions in a text like the Ramayana, and increasingly with a skeptical, unorthodox eye. But all of this is not enough to bridge the very different treatment of mito and katha in our two regions, particularly when the radically different histories of Mexican and Bengali mythic traditions are kept in mind.

Efsane Our chapter on myth – and now, our turn to Turkish literature – epitomizes some of the difficulties and challenges facing this whole book. The attempt to talk about, evaluate and discern patterns in three enormous bodies of literature, chasing the ghost of the analogous while simultaneously recognizing the concrete wall of the culturally/regionally specific whenever we run into it. In the case of parallels, these do not simply emerge as a consequence of a certain European influence on Mexican/Turkish/Bengali writers – the fascination French symbolism held for Buddhadeva Bose, Yahya Kemal and Gilberto Owen, for example; Joyce as an inspiration for Amit Chaudhuri and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, or the influence of T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” on Nirendranath Chakraborty, Hilmi Yavuz and Gabriel Zaid. A much wider range of cultural and material forces, often though not always dialectical, sometimes macro-political, sometimes irretrievably idiosyncratic,

130  Retelling Myth generate a limited degree of pattern in the retelling of myth across these regions. The limitations arise partly from the problem of definition – trying to find something precise called “myth” in each literature – but also, as we have seen in the preceding section, from the very different histories of settlement and societal formation in each region, and the subsequently different literary histories (despite evident forces and trends of transcultural homogenization) which have grown out of and crystallized around this material backdrop. If Bengali literature offered a serious obstacle to the comparative hopes of this chapter – namely, a much longer and differently constituted set of artistic attitudes toward the sacred, perhaps springing from a fundamentally different relationship between the sacred and the everyday in the region’s own religious traditions – then Turkish literature too, we shall see, will offer a different but equally insurmountable obstacle of its own. Before we get to this difference, let’s first go briefly through some of the maneuvers we examined in Bengali and Mexican reworkings of myth – and see how far their contours manifest themselves in modern Turkish literature. The five categories of myth-retelling can be discerned within Turkish literature, even if the amount of literature that can technically qualify as the adaptation of myth is quantitatively smaller. Poems such as Ziya Gökalp’s “Ergenekon” expands and aggrandizes the mythical tale of the Turks’ racial origins (led out of the valley Ergenekon by a she-wolf) into a series of 45 stanzas, each ending in an exclamation mark of triumph.117 “Ergenekon” is a rhyming ballad which delineates Turks from other races and regions (China, India) while simultaneously weaving them into their history. Gökalp’s own place as one of Turkey’s foremost nationalists (ironically of Kurdish origin) can be seen in the poem’s relentless celebration of origins through each new victory or accomplishment of the Turkic race. Just as Mexican or Bengali writers could inhabit figures such as Helen or Arjun, we find first-person poems such as Tevfik Fikret’s invocation of Prometheus (“Promete”), this time reinvoked as someone hoping to bring fire/Western Enlightenment to the dying husk of Ottoman society.118 What should be borne in mind here is the decision of a late nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectual to inhabit the heroic viewpoint of a tormented Greek god in order to express a need for mythic and cultural reinvigoration (an attitude to the Hellenic we will return to in our discussion of the so-called Nev Yunanlık or neo-Hellenism). Literary texts in Turkish literature which do not merely inhabit mythic viewpoints but also reverse the content of their structures can also be found in novels such as Nazlı Eray’s Orfee, reset in a coastal city in the 1980s (where it is the female protagonist who ventures into the text’s underworld to snatch Orpheus back to reality119), or in poems such as Salah Birsel’s “Shahmeran”, which draws on the myth of the famous half-snake, halfhuman goddess with the lower body of a serpent, to satirically comment on today’s equivalent – people with the body of a human but the head of a snake.120 Finally, the range of degrees of myth-adaptation we encountered in

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the previous two sections (from the manipulation of familiar tropes to their outright, decontextualizing appropriation) finds no exception in Turkish literature – Sait Faik can tell a modern boy’s adventure story where the young, Greek protagonist (called Odisya) retains two crucial Homeric characteristics of his namesake – cunning and curiosity; Orhan Veli can dedicate a poem to a woman called Helen, a woman clearly set in the modern Turkish present, but again retaining enough mythical elements (the woman is beautiful, standing outside on a balcony, gazing out to the horizon at “distant cities” and reflecting on a specific sin)121 to lend her everyday aura a faintly mythic hue. Texts such as these teeter on the line between mythic retelling and allusion, invoking enough of the ghost to give a slightly unreal feel to the present-day setting of the work. Can Yücel, in a text entitled “Noah’s Daughter” (“Nuhun Kızı”122), can produce a brief poem reminiscent of Zaid’s Eve and Owen’s Orpheus in the way it alienates itself from its title – a weary traveler returning in drizzle from a metro station to the door of a house, with only the image of someone stepping into shelter from the week-long rain providing the most tenuous of links between the dreary, suburban feel of the poem and its (distant) biblical/Quranic echo. Categories aside, some of the most basic uses of myth we examined in the previous two sections – political, feminist and satirical retellings of familiar stories – are easily found in Turkish literature, too. Socialist reworkings of myth of the kind we found in Sunil Gangopadhyay, narrating stories and legends from the past to elucidate a deeper point about the timelessness of class struggle and forever-recurring nature of oppression, manifest themselves in semi-anachronistic fashion in writers such as Nazım Hikmet. Among the poet’s vast oeuvre lie a number of texts which, with a nod to Brecht, take stories such as the Persian tale Ferhad and Shirin or the biblical/ Quranic story of Joseph and use them as examples of figures who struggle to dismantle feudalism or overcome their social and economic conditions.123 The satirical retelling of a teenage-brat Perseus or a quarrelsome family of Hindu gods finds parallels in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s curious but funny monologue in the voice of Zeus (“Insanlar arasında”124) and Cemal Süreyya’s wicked take on Tristram (“Was it in France or Finland?” asks the poet125). Feminist rewritings of myths such as Gilgamesh (Zeynep Avcı126) stand alongside those of their Mexican/Bengali sisters in trying to overturn the patriarchal weight of myth by subverting its force – in the case of Avcı’s Gilgamesh, by introducing female voices and inserting homosexual feelings between Enkidu and Gilgamesh.127 As long as one continues to use a brush with a broad stroke, it would seem reasonable to claim that the rearticulation of the mythical past in the literary present is a gesture whose motives, methods and results cross the cultures and languages of all three regions. One could even see the Kallol group, the Nev-Yunanilik movement and the writers of the Ateneo de la Juventud as belonging to a similar Heraclitean spirit of creation through reiteration. The temptation to link all three is strengthened by their closeness in

132  Retelling Myth time, if not place: in 1909, Reyes and Vasconcelos (among others) found the Ateneo proper in Mexico City; three years later, in Istanbul, Yahya Kemal and Yakup Kadri meet to found the short-lived but influential attempt at “Neo-Hellenism”; in 1923, the Kallol literary circle would start to meet in the famous College St area of north Calcutta, drawing rewriters of myth such as Kazi Nazrul Islam, Buddhadeva Bose and Premendra Mitra. In three metropolises, within the space of ten years, we find overlapping the same subversive reevaluation of the link between past and present. If this template has to be resisted, it is not because there is anything specifically wrong with linking together, say, three writers such as Yahya Kemal, Buddhadev Bose and Alfonso Reyes – each of which, in their different ways, is interested in the synthesis of myth and modern. The gesture becomes more difficult when one attempts to expand this, as we encounter the biggest difference Turkish literature has with respect to Mexico and Bengal: the relative absence of any single tradition of retelling myth. It is difficult to think of a single South Asian writer (let alone Bengali) who has not, at some time or another, flirted with a story from the Ramayana or Mahabharata; every major Mexican writer in the twentieth century, be it a Fuentes, a Pacheco or a Carballido, has drawn on some Greek or Christian trope. When we approach Turkish literature with a view to the rewriting of myth, however, we find a relative paucity of such gestures – a paucity springing from the absence of any single influential group of myths, and of any single dominant tradition drawing on them. What emerges instead are multiple constituencies of myth, different groups of images and tropes which involve different historical contingencies, and appear to draw different writers to them for different reasons. The disparity arises in part from the specific circumstances of modern twentieth-century Turkish identity – its violent passage from a religious, multiply-ethnic imperial structure to a secular, mono-ethnic nation-state, and the various attempts to found and define a national and even world literature (milli/dunya edebiyat) either in the last days of a dying Ottoman administration or in the early decades of a young nation-state. The language reforms throughout this period (the removal of Perso-Arabic words and their replacement by “purer” Turkish words of Ural-Altaic provenance128), along with the various regional and religious identities that were suppressed for the sake of national unity129 (Kurdish, Greek, Armenian, Alevi) bring about a fractured background of alternative heritages which, for some writers, appeared to operate as no heritage at all (the poet M.C. Anday’s joyful remark, for example, that Turkish literature has no classics of its own130). I’d like to briefly look at one example from each of these alternative heritages – to obtain, if nothing else, a chromatological glimpse of what it means for a writer to retell a myth from one of these groups. One group of myths sometimes invoked, especially by writers from the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country, are Anatolian/Mesopotamian myths – dating from the pre-Islamic history of the region: Sumerian, Hittite or later Persian/

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Kurdish variants of them. Gilgamesh and the underground snake-queen Shahmeran (maran being Kurdish for snake) are two of the more common examples. Although both have also been retold by writers with no trace of Kurdish origin (Melih Cevdet Anday, Tomris Uyari, Zeynep Avcı, Hilmi Yavuz 131), Kurdish writers seem to gravitate toward them, employing their antiquity as a metaphor for the endurance of the Kurdish people. Both the Mardin poet Şêxmûs Sefer and the famous Kurdish novelist Mehmet Uzun invoke Gilgamesh in their work, and the darkness Gilgamesh has to wander through before he reaches the light as the stateless wandering of the Kurdish people.132 Yaşar Kemal and Murathan Mungan are two Turkish-Kurdish figures who have been drawn to this group of myths, whose invocation conceals a political tension. Although Anatolian culture was enshrined in the official Kemalist nation-state project (the famous museum of Anatolian civilizations in Ankara being the most visible example), this retelling by writers who were either politically disinclined to the bourgeois/patriarchal contours of the nationalist project (such as Zeynep Avcı) or ethnically alienated by it (such as Mungan, Uzun and Sefer) gives the reiteration of Anatolian myth a faintly subversive edge. In the case of Murathan Mungan’s retelling of Shahmeran, the story was written at the beginning of one of the most volatile periods in modern Turkish history (1986 – two years after the beginning of the Kurdish separatist’s violent insurgency against the Turkish state), and by a writer whose hometown (Mardin) was one of the centers of PKK insurgency. Not that Mungan’s 1986 story is explicitly political – “The Legs of Shahmeran” (“Şhahmeranın Bacakları”) avoids any overt political statement (like most of Mungan’s work) and instead seems to be more interested in the idea of the actual myth itself – playing also with the form of the Arabian Nights, “The Legs of Shahmeran” tells the story of a boy (Ilyas) who learns in episodic fashion the original myth of the boy (Camsap) who discovers the snake-goddess at the bottom of a well. In writing about a woman, half-snake, half-human, who is trapped underground, Mungan produces passages which seem to invoke a bilingual writer (Turkish/Kurdish) whose polyphony cannot be tolerated in the present climate: Later on, I realized that the Shahmeran I’d drawn was the right one, knowingly or not. Because Shahmeran was a prisoner too, wasn’t it? Imprisoned by the eccentric identity of its existence. That magnificent, sacred, beautiful creature could find no place in the world of humans or the world of snakes – it remained in limbo, waiting silent and alone in its personal hell.133 “Imprisoned by the eccentric identity of its existence” (Varoluşunun ayrıksı kimliğine edilmişti bir kez134), at a time when Turcophone Kurds were being thrown into jail by the security forces in record numbers, Mungan’s choice of myth chimerically echoes contemporary political events without ever becoming “political”.135 In one sense – and quite regardless of Mungan’s

134  Retelling Myth Kurdishness – this is an aspect of myth-retelling which will cut across a number of different writers: the idea of the mythical as a pre-ideological time and place, forever susceptible to politicization and appropriation, yet situated in a pre-political time, where epics and struggles unfold with little notion of identity or nationality. Mythic time is always deliciously pre-political. In the face of a monolingual nation-state, the invocation of Anatolian myth by leftist and Kurdish writers carries this uncomfortable insistence on a pre-nationalist time. A second group of myths, invoked by writers who could not be more different than the Kurds and leftists we found in the previous group, could be loosely designated as “central Asian”, even if the semi-mythical area of Turan celebrated by these adherents was often extended to Finland, Crete and Western China.136 Although ethnic nationalist poets such as Ziya Gökalp and Nihal Atsız celebrated the Shamanistic and distinctly un-Islamic motifs in their work, the imagery of wolves, mountain valleys, crescent moons and sky-gods is certainly not the exclusive domain of right-wing ülküce (ultranationalist) figures such as Atsız. The image of the gray wolf (bozkurt), and in particular its association with Atatürk, was a familiar one, even appearing on the first banknotes of the Turkish Republic. Writers not known for their nationalism – such as Osman Turkay137 – have drawn on aspects of central Asian myth such as Tanrı Dağ (Divine Mountain). There is even the phenomenon of early leftist poets such as Nazım Hikmet and Sabahattin Ali flirting with the imagistic landscape of Turan.138 It is nationalist (and essentially racist) poets such as Nihal Atsız, however, who draw most on the language of Turkic mythology and ancient Turkic history, a semantic background which acts as an ancillary mental/political landscape but, at the same time, provides a dynamic source of energy to the poet’s political declarations. Atsız’s poem “Yakaris” (“Call”) is one good example of how myth charges the language of what would otherwise be a mere historical chronicle. Divine Mountain! Gods, divine mountains! For thirteen centuries they have watched over us. The spirit of the unfailing dead are devoted to War songs and the red crescent flag. Great God! The unfulfilled soul of Kür Sad is hosted on the High Divine Mountain! We will be coming soon! Tomorrow all there Will have iron swords in their hands.139 (Own translation). If Mungan and others invoke myth to undermine oneness, the Nietzschean use of myth here is quite the opposite – the expression of myth as a performative purifying of essence and a legitimation of race through the sanctification of origin. Neither an Islamic nor an Enlightenment universalism

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can be found, but rather a specific commitment to the particular. This is true also in terms of time – designating Atatürk as a “gray wolf” is one of the few examples where such approaches allowed mythology to capture the present.140 In almost all of Atsız’s poetry (“Komen”, “Sona Doğru”), myth is an anterior source tapped on to revitalize the present – semi-mythical figures and events in history (such as the valley of Ergenekon or the Kür Sad mentioned in the passage) are invoked but never appropriated into the impure present. Atsız’s various sublimities rely on this constantly originfacing understanding of mythology. The result is not so much an interrogation of myth (as with Mungan and Tomris Uyar), but rather the building of an aesthetics and an ethics on a finite series of carefully preserved terms: Tanrı Dağ, Tunga Er (original mythical hero), Gök Turk (celestial Turk), Gök Boru (wolf), Otuken (sacred place). If the first group of myth rewriters diverge – they take the original contours of myth and tease out its various implications – writers such as Nihal Atsız (and Reha Oğuz Turkkan and Rıza Nur141) employ a convergent use of myth, one which almost involves rewriting the present in terms of the myth. Another group of myths drawn upon is Persian myth – the bird Simurgh, the mythical Mount Kaf, the unrequited longings of the two lovers Leyla and Majnun – popularized through (though by no means originating from) twelfth-century Persian poets such as Nizami and Farid Ud-din Attar. Writers as diverse as Orhan Pamuk, Hilmi Yavuz and Attila Ilhan all draw on this particular storehouse of tropes.142 The special place of Persian within Turkish literary and cultural history colors this use of myth in a particular way – Persian’s semantic proximity to the Ottoman past, and to the Sufi/ mystical traditions which thrived within that past and influenced its poetry, gives the retelling of Persian tropes (understood as an irruption of the past into the present) a very local Turkish significance: the politically charged reformulation of a jettisoned heritage. This is implicit in Hilmi Yavuz’s experimental free verse poem “Simurg için Sonnet”, which keeps some of the central elements of the Simurg story (loneliness, reflection, identity buried within identity, the idea of the secret at the heart of being143) while playing with them formalistically in a textually modern manner. Orhan Pamuk’s extraordinary novel The Black Book/Kara Kitap is perhaps the most striking example of a resurrected Persian text – or, more accurately, two texts. The first is a late twentieth-century retelling of Leyla and Majnun, the classic Persian lovers who are tragically never allowed to marry – although in Pamuk’s novel, the protagonist is a Majnun who never finds his Leyla, even though his quest to find her involves many of the devices Nizami and others invoked (isolation, artistic production, the confidence of friends, and even in the end the blending together of lover and beloved).144 The now-famous sadness inherent in much of Pamuk’s work is a by-product of the way the book fails its own myth – a very modernist (not postmodern) sense of loss emerges from this retelling of a myth without the mythical. We mentioned the Krishna-less Arjuns of Devi and Gangopadhyay in the previous section,

136  Retelling Myth and in one sense Pamuk’s story of a Leyla-less Majnun also belongs to these. But the other Persian text retold – Attar’s Sufi tale of the myth of Simurg, and the birds’ quest to find Him in His castle on Mount Kaf, retells the Urtext in an even more original way, fulfilling the myth while simultaneously desecrating it. The basic idea of Mount Kaf runs thus: a mythical mountain exists where resides the Emperor of all birds, Simurg, and to whom the birds decide one day to fly, seeking to be united with their king, until they arrive to find an empty castle, with no Simurg present. Only then do the birds realize that they themselves are Simurg, that they themselves are the object of their own pilgrimage, the goal of their own desires. Pamuk’s story of a man who, in looking for his estranged wife, gradually embarks upon a series of increasingly deeper and wider reflections on identity (not merely his own, but also the larger identity of the society he belongs to) reiterates the myth in an utterly postmodern way, by reiterating this annihilation of self: As the storytellers in a tavern each narrating a “love story” in the middle of the night came straight out of Attar’s Conference of the Birds, so did the poet’s wanderings around the streets, shops and windows rife with mystery which “intoxicate” him into realizing that he is seeking himself on Mount Kaf – and this was an example of “Absolute State of Union” with God”, or Nothingness, also lifted from the same book.145 The Black Book follows the myth of Mount Kaf in that it details the gradual unveiling of a series of illusions – Pamuk’s genius lies in the way he consistently uses the vehicle of the myth to dismantle the myth itself. The myth is structurally validated even in the moment of its disenchantment. In the novel, whose visual landscape involves a weary Galip plodding through Istanbul streets in the rain, searching for a woman who does not love him, as illusion after illusion (not just Rüya’s love for him, or his own sense of self, but also the value and meaning of modern Turkey’s cultural mythologies) gradually dissolves around him. There is no Mount Kaf at the end of the story – and the only Ruya there is the one Galip has learned to live with in his own imagination. Only the invocation of Persian myth could have supplied this textual richness to a Turkish novel, as the collapse of the individual’s own set of constructs is repeated on a much deeper, political and sociocultural level. No other group of myths share such an intimate relationship with modern Turkish literature. Kurdish writers, it should be added, also gravitate toward a Persian mythic vocabulary of Simurg, Mount Kaf and Leyla/Majnun, not to mention an even older, pre-Islamic Persian landscape of Zoroaster, Mazda/ Ahriman and the Avesta (Avestan is sometimes touted as “the ancestor of the Kurdish language”,146 and one of the most famous Kurdish publishing houses is named after it). These uses range from the idiosyncratically personal to the publically political. Irfan Amîda invokes Simurg in a memory of childhood sadness, Mem Bawer calls Ahriman the darkness his lover has

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plunged him into, while Shahin B. Sorekli praises the “bright yellow sun of Zoroastra” which greens his land every spring and breathes political life into his vision.147 The mention of our next group of myths raises a problematic question: if a retold myth is believed in by the teller, is it still a myth? Images and symbols from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world (Joseph, Jesus, Noah, Mohammed) find themselves sprinkled throughout modern Turkish literature, invoked and reiterated in both sacred and profane ways. JudeoChristian figures and images seem to be employed with a more relaxed sense of semi-transgression than those more explicitly Quranic, particularly by less religious writers (Hilmi Yavuz’s sonnet on Judas, for example, or Can Yücel’s strange poem on Noah’s daughter148); in such cases, the act of retelling stories from the Old Testament and Gospels carries a faintly secularizing distance. In the case of fervently devout poets such as Necip Fazıl, however, a stranger path is chosen, as stories from and about the time of Mohammed are expressed in a poetic form which celebrates but at the same time renders finite and manifest the sacred. One day, his head inclined, heading down the mountain road, A voice stopped him, as though pulling at his arm. Nothing in front, nothing behind, not a soul, no trace. A quiet stone quarry, with a small open corridor. The sound heard should not have come from the ground. Eyes full of fever, timid … Oh … here he is, in his heart, A glorious Angel revealed, on a lectern… A pendulum, a gleam, a light that draws a beam; He ran down the mountain, roamed the foothills… Suddenly, everything he sees is good; everywhere the same shape, one manifestation in countless mirrors: Gabriel… (Own translation)149 This description of the Prophet Mohammed’s moment of epiphany draws its power partly from the material, immediate feel of the moment: the silence, the stone, the fever, the light. In some ways, the point of the poem is (as with Atsız) to return the reader to the moment of the myth to provide some form of testimony to the initiation of a prophet. The power of the poem is augmented by the reference to Mohammed’s body – his head, arm, fever – all of which underlines the corporeal presence in the instant of revelation. In humanizing and actualizing this moment, the myth spills over into the present, as the modern reader feels the disorientation, hears the silence, shares the bewilderment. A subtle commitment to the testimonial validation of myth drives the poem – not in any crude proselytizing sense, but rather as though Fazıl, as a poet, first has to make sense of his faith through poetry if he is to understand it at all. The act of retelling the moment is here

138  Retelling Myth a resacralization, not a disenchantment, even if Fazıl (like Pamuk) enjoys writing in this space between the mythical and the modern. The final group of retold myth that concerns us – that of Greek myth – is a group so widely strewn across the modern Turkish canon that it would require a book to wholly address the spectrum (as Aydın Afacan has already done in a comprehensive study150). In 1453, when Mehmet the Conqueror visited the site of ancient Troy immediately after the conquest of Constantinople/Istanbul, he described the Ottoman victory (if we are to believe the historian Kritovoulos151) as retribution for the injustices inflicted by the Greeks upon the Trojans – explicitly aligning himself and the Turks with the people of Troy. Fact or fiction, this belief in the territorial/semantic/racial continuity of Homeric Troy into the Turkish present operates as a subtext in many of the modern Turkish approaches to Greek myth. The basic idea of Yakup Kadri and Yahya Kemal (as Orhan Okay points out) – that Turks are neither Central Asian nor Ottoman but Mediterranean Turks (Orta Asya/Osmanli/Akdeniz havzsanin Turk152) – already steps in this direction of an almost atavistic sense of cultural descent. Prometheus as a symbol of the hope of national rejuvenation; the tale of Leda and Zeus as a comment on the sterility of human relationships; the Iliad reworked as a metaphor for the existential permanence of struggle between bodies and tribes over time and place; the symbols of Pan and the Phoenix as observations on the alienating experience of the urban and of resettling into the modern Turkish city from the village153 – Greek myths are approached by a wide range of different writers for an equally wide arc of different reasons. In contrast to Turkic or Anatolian myth, writers as diverse as Nazlı Eray and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Yahya Kemal and Oktay Rifat, are drawn to a mythology laden with multiple political meanings: “civilizing” projects, critiques of contemporary nation-statism, plans for cultural synthesis and reinvigoration, or an existential platform to acquire some kind of larger political optic on the present. Greek classical texts and their adaptations were being translated (sometimes from the French) as early as the mid-nineteenth century (Yusuf Kamil Pasha translated Telemaque in 1859, and Selanıklı Hilmi translated the Iliad in 1900).154 Although the Servet-i Funun (“Wealth of Knowledge”) or Edebiyat-I Cedide (“New Literature”) movements around the turn of the century were already harnessing this view of the classical as a Promethean spark to reenergize an Ottoman literature, it was the Nev Yunanılık or NeoHellenist group which most explicitly invoked this desire to reconfigure a new literature through the renewal of the past – or as Nergis Ertürk puts it, the “conservative poetic project of ‘homecoming’ through the ‘Frank’”.155 Neo-Hellenism was, unsurprisingly, criticized by some nationalists – Ömer Seyfettin (who later on would praise the Iliad) and Ziya Gökalp among them, the latter leading a desire to look for a model of the national epic not based on the Iliad/Odyssey but rather on Turkish sagas (Dede Korkut) or Persian poems like the Shahname.156

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If figures such as Yahya Kemal (or for that matter his disciple Tanpınar) remind us of Alfonso Reyes in this almost alchemical understanding of myth as a transubstantiating force of renewal in a national literature, then we see a Turkish nation-state which was much more strident than the Mexican in its conviction of the “civilizing” power of classical texts on the would-be citizen’s soul through the means of a “Greek-centered humanism” (Yunan kaynaklı humanizm).157 The Education Minister Hasan Ali Yücel (father of the poet Can Yücel) famously pioneered the teaching of Greek and Latin classical texts such as Antigone in the 1940s, declaring that “we have to acknowledge that the origin of the civilized world is Ancient Greece”.158 Quite different from Yahya Kemal’s understanding of Greek myth as a vehicle to regenerate Turkish literature, the State in its implementation of education programs such as the Village Institute (Köy Enstitusu) seemed to see plays like Antigone as key tools in the creation of a modern Western consciousness. Quite apart from any project of modernizing or cultural rejuvenation, there are Turkish writers whose interest in Greek myth displays what one scholar has called “existential sensibilities”.159 In terms of poetry, at least the exact parameters of this group are difficult to pin down, as some names (Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet Anday) came from the Garip movement of the 1940s – a group dedicated contra tradition to introducing the language and situations of everyday life into poetry; other names (Cemal Süreyya, Edip Cansever), however, belong to the other important group of post-Independence Turkish poetry, the Second New/Ikinci Yeni, a later collection of poets who were (if we follow Orhan Koçak’s evaluation160) oedipally dedicated to the obsolescence of the Garip movement – their efforts would be directed not at overthrowing tradition along socialistic/humanistic lines, but rather constructing something completely different in its absence. Names such as Oktay Rifat, although one of the original Garip trio, wander somewhere in-between these two groups – Rifat’s famous poem “Agamemnon” uses a powerful, vigorous language, but also tries to float free of satire, parody and deliberate vulgarization to express something on a plane inaccessible to actual political commentary: Leaving the ships to be scraped we trudged on, and reached a valley; each of us rolled a cigarette with fingers gnarled or missing. … Whatever is ours is behind the mountain. But they are there, running away in the sudden flight of a partridge, or in a lizard’s glance, in every hole and under every stone. They turned their fiery sharp savage weapons of destruction against us, cowardly with their long-shadowed spears, murderous as their guns or mortars, shells and bazookas. Just when we say they can’t increase, they do! Their faces are like ours but inside their armor are gods, their luminous eyes terrifying!161

140  Retelling Myth One of the challenges of reading a poem like “Agamemnon” is that it belongs to no real time or place. Sometimes the voices are “Trojans”, sometimes “Greeks”; the opening pages – with their mention of troops, stranded on shores, mortar and shell raining down upon them – offer the Gallipoli campaign as the most immediate landscape, but this is quickly abandoned as scenes from “Homeric” time appear within the narrative, frustrating any conventional desire to place the poem. Even the modern military events alluded to in the text are elusive – World War I? Gallipoli? The subsequent uprisings after establishing Independence? Or, given the politically volatile time of the poem and Rifat’s own relationship with Turkish leftist movements, is this a document of modern State violence? Myth here works in a dissolving, almost emancipatory fashion, releasing the text from political obligations and allowing it to express something which recurs in history at manifestly different moments. Such existential uses simultaneously affirm the death and life of the myth – for Nihal Atsız, we will recall, myth is the true life, and our society is dead as long as it fails to connect with it. For writers like Orhan Veli, it is the myth which is dead, but our lives can still be enriched by the posthumous aesthetics of its spectrality. In poems like “Agamemnon”, however, we see a commitment to neither position. Myth becomes a kind of crowbar, used to pry open ideological structures by providing times before they were built and spaces outside their jurisdiction. Greek myth, in particular, provides Turkish writers critical of nationalist/ Kemalist narratives with this ever-present possibility. Armenian writers, it should be added, also appear to be drawn to Greek myth, often as an alternative to Christianity. If Daniel Varoujian employs the winged horse of Pegasus as a hope of national liberation,162 and Eastern Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents uses the underworld journey to describe the horrors of Van in 1915,163 Bedros Tourian invokes figures such as Narcissus and Prometheus to launch (in the latter’s case) an attack on Christian theology and its idea of a loving God.164 The existence of Western Armenian movements such as hetanosakan sharzhum (“pagan movement”) in 1912, headed by Sivas-born Daniel Varoujian, testify to a Nietzschean/ Dionysian preference for pre-Christian myth with its unashamed celebration of beauty and physical strength.165 It is a melancholy irony that two nationalist Turkish writers – Yahya Kemal and Yakup Kadri, the latter especially hostile to Armenians – would formulate a similar interest in “neoHellenism” (Nev Yunanlık), barely ten years later after Varoujian. Five different groups of myths, retold by five separate but overlapping groups of writers, embody a multiplicity of different projects: the strengthening of national/ethnic identity, the reinforcement of religious truth (or the desire to launch a veiled attack on religion), the internationalization of a local literature, the implementation (or the obstruction) of a nationstate narrative, the reintroduction of historical depth, the quasi-Orientalist expansion of an aesthetic palette – Turkey’s literary uniqueness in this chapter on myth stems in large part from the unusually fractured and contested

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journey its national identity has traveled in the twentieth century. Of course, all national identities have differences and divisions buried within them – and yet, in comparison with Mexico and Bengal, the relative paucity and peripherality of myth reworking in Turkish literature would seem to arise, at least in part, from a historical inability to conclusively/collectively accept a common set of foundational narratives. What emerges instead is a broken cluster of alternative mythic vocabularies, none of which can provide anything even remotely resembling hegemonic primacy for the canon. There is a very definite and particular tradition of skepticism toward myth – and delight in the deflation of myth – in Turkish literature, one which manifests itself in a particular attention to the physical circumstances by which myths are produced. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, the turn of the century “ghost” stories of Hüseyin Rahmi Gurpınar depict tricksters and charlatans who arrange fake hauntings to prevent houses being sold or men from remarrying166; some of Ömer Seyfettin’s best stories either take Ottoman myths such as the “Crimson Apple” (Kızılelma) and dissect them until they disappear, or portray idiot foreigners who mistake everyday Turkish objects for mythic Oriental phenomena (“The Secret Temple”); both the fictitious biographies of medieval sheikhs in Tanpınar’s novels and the ruthless paring down and studied disenchantment of mythic narratives in Pamuk’s Yeni Hayat all testify to a very modern Turkish awareness of the fabrication and inherent artifice of myth (even Nihal Atsız, in a strange poem on the Kizilelma, seems to suggest futility is woven into its very fabric).167 Although an early influence of French positivism has definitely played a part in this, it is not surprising that such a literary tradition of skepticism toward myth has arisen within a cultural context as fractured and kaleidoscopic as that of Turkey’s, particularly when many writers would have witnessed firsthand the construction of Kemalist mythologies across the entire spectrum of society. In a cultural milieu where the process by which objects become myth is observed on a daily basis, recurring themes of disenchantment in writers such as Pamuk, Tanpınar and Veli are not entirely unexpected. Journeys to the Underworld: Sri Kanta (Chattopadhyay), Orfee (Eray) and Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Herrera). Emphasizing some basic obstacles to the comparison of myth-retelling in all these regions shouldn’t prevent us from ending with some archetypal commonalities, the motif of the underworld journey being the most prominent. Whether it is Orpheus traveling to Hades to recover his Eurydice, Quetzalcoatl venturing into the realm of Mictlan to recover the bones of the dead or Yudisthira visiting Yama in the kingdom of the netherworld, some sense of an extraordinary voyage to an infernal realm, often accompanied by a guide, in order to recover something important or fulfill an obligation, is a pattern which flickers in the night of all three literatures. I have deliberately chosen three very different texts – a Bengali fictional autobiography

142  Retelling Myth from the 1920s, a Turkish rewriting of the Orpheus myth set during the Emergency years of the 1980s and a contemporary Mexican novel set across the U.S. border – to emphasize the commonalities in these moral tales of crossings between worlds. Even if a number of anthropologists stress the resemblance between Ancient Greek and Near Eastern underworld narratives,168 we should be careful not to uncritically take the generally acknowledged characteristics of the Hellenic katabasis (descent into the underworld) as a floating, transcultural tick list for our three texts. Such a list has a number of useful indicators for what an underworld journey narrative entails: a descent into the land of the dead, the attempt at a return, some form of divine guide or assistance, an important task or moral obligation, an encounter or a series of encounters with ghosts/extraordinary beings, the separation of the forbidden land by some form of obstacle (wall, wasteland, river) to overcome.169 Crucial among our own questions will be: why the writer employs a mythic vocabulary to describe a passage from one societal space to another, whether the trial is a subject-forming process, what political ramifications arise from the invocation of myth and whether the use of myth is an effective one. In all three cases, the texts chosen are only one of several examples from each region. Possibly more famous than Nazlı Eray’s Orfee is Aslı Erdoğan’s retelling of the Orpheus myth in 1990s Rio, The City in Crimson Cloak; Tagore’s ghost stories “The Hungry Stones”/“Kshudita Pashai” and Bani Basu’s “Shirish” (retelling the myth of Proserpine) are all underworld narratives that stand alongside the opening pages of Sri Kanta; the Bangladeshi writer Hasan Azizul Huq, moreover, has a powerful short story, unfolding within an infernal hospital170; finally, one of the many texts Herrera’s short, remarkable novel alludes to is the journey to the netherworld we examined in Chapter 1, the classic Pedro Páramo, although Gilberto Owen’s “Antiorfeo” is also an interestingly oblique comment on the classical narrative.171 A journey to the underworld is the ultimate limit encounter with a set of experiences and beings that are regarded as “off-limits” by the world of the traveler. The nature of this prohibition may be moral, philosophical or political – a place where either our morality, our rationality or our government tells us we shouldn’t go – but the experience of traveling there implicitly suggests, through the negotiation of contradictions, some kind of growth. However tempting it might be to view this in Freudian/Lacanian terms – the underworld journey as an attempt to dwell in the proximity of the Real, before retreating altered back to the surface of the symbolic – I’d like to stay with the way each of these Mexican/Bengali/Turkish underworlds are sociopolitically contoured, as they supply one of the guiding threads that link three otherwise somewhat disparate texts. The underworld narrative in Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s epic novel Sri Kanta (written in four parts over 1917–1933) takes up only the first two dozen pages, but supplies one of the most memorable scenes in the whole

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book. The narrator’s childhood boat trip with an older boy (Indranath) across a moonlit river to hand over some money to a pair of vagabond characters – one of whom, we eventually learn, is a Hindu woman married to a Muslim and subsequently converted – reveals all of the characteristics of an underworld narrative. Deceived by his older guide, the narrator discovers the initial prospect of a midnight fishing trip has actually become a visit to the land of the dead: As the dinghy approached the forest the wild tamarisks and tussocks stared as if in horror at the foolhardiness of two children of men. Some even shook their heads in warning. Had I been alone I would have heeded them but my helmsman rowed rapidly past the waving branches towards an inlet that had enlarged itself into a sort of lake. … An unpleasant odor hanging on the air grew sickeningly strong with every gust of wind. I covered my nose with the edge of my dhoti. I said uneasily, “There’s something rotting here, Indra”. “Corpses!” he announced. “There’s a lot of cholera about. The poorer villagers cannot afford to burn their dead. They just touch the bodies with a flaming tussock and throw them in the water”.172 In our other texts, this place of death will indicate either cultural sterility (the United States that Herrera’s protagonist will visit) or political death (the Turkish coup that forms the background of Eray’s novel). Here, however, death indicates a place outside caste and decency. The narrator, born “in a conservative Hindu family which carried in its veins the purest of pure Brahmin blood” (p21), is literally leaving the clean abode of his own family/ caste bubble to venture into the decadence of a netherworld which contains not merely corpses but also Muslims and snake charmers. Set at the beginning of an autobiographical novel as a kind of rupture, the infernal moment of the narrator’s exit from his world initiates the beginning of a different self. Something in the protagonist has to die so that his rebirth might begin. Indranath, the older boy who leads the narrator out across the river, is a fundamental component in this process – and also satisfies the condition of the divine guide required by every passage from one realm to another: But what was Indranath? Was he a man, a god or a demon? [ manush? debota? pishach?] If he was a man, what was he made of? [ke o? kar shonge boner madhye ghuritechhi?] If he had a human heart why did it know no fear? On the day of our first meeting he had risked his life for me – a complete stranger. That night, even as he confronted a terrible death, over and over again, the smile never left his lips. Many years have passed since. I have travelled far and wide and seen many kinds of men. Yet I can solemnly swear that, to this day, I have not seen one like Indranath.173

144  Retelling Myth Underworld journeys almost always have a guide to lead the traveler into the unfamiliar, someone who somehow belongs to both worlds without really pertaining to either (the Greek term for this – psychopomp – finds the Aztec god Xolotl as its nearest equivalent). The ambivalent status of the guide (“Man, god or demon?”) is reflected in all three novels – in our Mexican text, the man who will help the protagonist across the river has a seemingly omniscient knowledge of where the border police are; in the Turkish text, Eurydice is guided toward Orpheus by the curiously named Mr Night (Bay Gece), about whose exact identity we are never really told. Indranath here acts as both a guide and a role model for the narrator – someone whose identity is not tied chronotopically to any particular bank of the river, hence the fearlessness with which he can move between them. “[E]ach author’s use of myth reflects the renegotiation of societal boundaries” writes one classical scholar in his study of katabasis, and certainly in Sri Kanta we see how the infernalizing of a no-caste village on the other bank of the river turns a childhood act of transgression into a much more existential encounter with one’s social limits. Another feature of underworld narratives which runs through all our texts is the motivation to descend into the netherworld in the first place – an obligation to honor a commitment, or to recover something lost. In Sri Kanta, it is the sum of money Indranath wants to give to the snake charmer who raised him – and later on, the recovery of the Hindu woman who married him; in Nazlı Eray’s novel, it is Eurydice’s desire to be reunited with her Orpheus, even though it is unclear Orpheus even sees her. In our Mexican text, the desire to recover a brother is what drives the plot of the nine-chapter novel – one chapter for each of the nine levels of the Aztec underworld. A young woman’s promise to her mother (echoing Pedro Páramo) to bring back her brother, Makina’s commitment is tested throughout the rest of the book. Signs Preceding the End of the World retains this key feature of the underworld narrative as the engine of its story. This feature of obligation in underworld narratives is interesting, as it suggests the two worlds being traversed are not as different as they might seem – a common, overarching set of laws governs both, a tacit essence which makes promises binding and keeps oaths powerful. It reminds us of an obvious truth: that the twentiethcentury repetition of the underworld myth is the secular reiteration of a religious narrative, a terrestrial replaying of a genre whose now God-less morality has to be generated internally.174 Yuri Herrera’s text plays with supernatural possibilities throughout, and yet the guarantors of morality – for example, the curious collection of gangster gatekeepers (Mr Double-U, Mr Aitch, Mr Q) the protagonist has to get past to find her brother – are always worldly figures of power: drug dealers, local politicians, corrupt police. There is something almost lonely about Makina as she quasi-existentially keeps to the truth of her commitment in the face of so many obstacles (physical barriers, political barriers, language barriers). Herrera replays an Aztec mythology without its gods here, much in the manner of Pamuk and

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Devi: Mictlan is still the northern land of the dead, but the only shades that roam within it are the unhappy Anglos in their supermarkets.175 In situating the United States as the underworld, Herrera plays with the set of tropes so (in)famously instigated by Octavio Paz: the North American as sterile, lifeless, life-denying, mendacious – opposed to the Mexican who is fecund, life-embracing and determined to dwell in the nearness of the truth no matter how traumatic. In narrating the tale of a Mexican woman who seeks to bring her brother back across the border, life visits death to bring back life – Makina’s crossing (unlike her Bengali/Turkish counterparts who, visit the poorer bank of the river, leaving the urban to visit the provincial) goes against the logic of economics. And yet the open mythologizing of the U.S./underworld Makina visits would seem to go hand in hand with the description of a richer country by a poorer one. Makina’s visit to a baseball stadium – the phenomenon is described magically at first, without informing the reader what it actually is – offers one such example: The darkest kid Makina had ever seen in her life pointed to a corridor. She walked down it toward the light. At the end she was instantly overcome by the sight of a vast expanse, two rival visions of beauty: the bottom an immense green diamond rippling in its own reflection; and above it, embracing it, tens of thousands of black, folded chairs, an obsidian mound barbed with flint, sharp and glimmering.176 In this Mexican novel, the infernal mythologizing of the United States still remains a mythologizing, and illuminates what is possibly the only flaw of the book: for all the shallow, aggressive policemen and soulless supermarkets, to what extent does Herrera’s application of mythology to the Other Side collude with the various uncritical adorations of North American lifestyles found in Mexican mainstream culture? In Signs Preceding the End of the World, the United States is unreal, magically unreal. The glowing green diamond of the baseball stadium glows with the promise of power and of economic superiority. The fact that the protagonist is reborn at the end of the novel compounds the political ambivalence here – for all its infernal status, it is the United States which gives life back to Makina. Instead of being a journey to the underworld, Herrera’s novel may well be a journey out of it.177 Another of the features required by the underworld narrative is some kind of conversation/confrontation with the dead one encounters there. In Herrera, Makina has several such episodes, including an uncomfortably honest account of her first encounter with an African-American man (“Never in her life had she seen so many black people up close”.178). The creatures we encounter in an underworld narrative are alien because they do not belong to a world we know; in Sri Kanta, the characters the protagonist has ventured out across the river to meet have a faintly inhuman air about them

146  Retelling Myth – the old Muslim woman whom Indra calls “Didi” has a strange look in her eyes, a “devotion to something held dear over centuries and aeons”.179 In our Turkish text, Nazlı Eray’s 1983 novel Orfee, the female protagonist initiates a surreal correspondence with a stone statue of the Emperor Hadrian. Orfee is a curious novel, a fantastic rewriting and reversal of the Orpheus myth, whose at times unconvincing style and plot structure is redeemed by the way the author folds the effects of the 1980 Turkish coup (whose state of emergency was still in effect when Eray wrote the book) into the contours of the underworld narrative. As with Herrera, it is never quite clear which realm is the underworld and which is the surface: the underworld the book’s Eurydice is journeying to seems to be a place removed from the present, a place she can only visit at night. And yet paradoxically it is the upper world Turkey of the present that is descending into political night, as a military coup takes place just as she prepares to venture out to meet her Orpheus: THE ADMINISTRATION HAS TAKEN OVER PUBLIC AUTHORITY IN ORDER TO ENSURE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL SECURITY. ALL ENTRIES INTO AND DEPARTURES FROM THE COUNTRY ARE FORBIDDEN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.180 We mentioned in the previous section how Turkish invocations of classical myth carry a particular political resonance, given the levels of historical/ institutional amnesia exhibited by some periods of the Turkish nation-state. Eurydice’s surreal conversation with a broken bust of the Emperor Hadrian works on this level as a negotiation with the repressed past. This idea of the underworld narrative as a conversation with History – a descent into the archival past to try and recover a lost voice or memory – is a familiar one,181 and in its most optimistic versions works as a kind of dialectical encounter with otherness, enriching the traveling subject through an encounter with an infernal alterity. In Eray’s novel, Eurydice’s surreal letter correspondence with the statue of Hadrian works in this way, with the protagonist informing the statue about what is going on in the world above. When she tells it about the coup that has just happened, it says: Dear Eurydice, You were very excited last night. … What is a radio? I have everything under control. Please don’t worry. All of the forces of nature are acting in harmony. You must have heard it incorrectly. If what you’re talking about is anything like a slave rebellion, I undoubtedly would know about it.182 To zoom out for a moment: what should be observed is not the exchange itself, but the act of a Turkish novelist who feels the best way of textually dealing with a political coup is to embark upon an underworld conversation with the spirit of a broken classical statue. In an attempt to process

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the political present, a conversation with a classical past is employed. Archaeology is invoked to provide a constantly ironic subtext to the political circumstances of both the text and the actual book. What emerges is the underworld as a place of ideological refuge – Zeus, not Hades, is the god to be avoided. Given the presence of such subject-enhancing interactions with the residents of the other world, we might ask the question: are underworld narratives optimistic narratives? As a literary genre, does the underworld journey conceal within it an essentially positive impulse – a process of growth through an encounter with our opposites? The possibility goes against one of the darker characteristics of the genre – the invincibility of the nether region, the potency of its realm, the difficulty with which one can ever hope to fully recover something lost there. Orfee ends abruptly, with Eurydice glimpsing but not obtaining her Orpheus; in Herrera’s novel, Makina’s brother stays where he is, as does the “sister”/Didi of Indranath, who (in a moment of faint sectarianism) plays a Hindu Proserpine abducted by the Muslim snake charmer Shahiji. A failure is built into all of these rewritings of myth – a productive failure, a failure which embellishes and enriches the protagonist – but a failure nevertheless. Dwelling on the similarities of these texts should not blind us to the differences that make each of these retellings different from one another: in only one of these texts does the protagonist experience a rebirth at the end of their journey (Herrera); only one of these texts stages a journey from light to darkness with no explicit reference to myth (Chattopadhyay); finally, it is only in the Turkish example of our three novels that we see the myth actually invoked by the protagonist and worked into the text of the novel, confirming the inclination to the demythologization of myth we have already noted in Turkish literature (see previous section). And yet looking at these texts does give us a sense of what runs through the retelling of myth in different literatures. We asked at the very beginning of this chapter: how does demythologization take place? and what happens exactly, in literary texts, when the mythical takes on the contours of the finite? For the mythical to be invoked, a frustration with the non-mythic present has to take place – a conviction of the inadequacy of the everyday to address a situation whose parameters far exceed the vocabulary of the present. The need for an echo, almost, for a parallel which follows the contours of the present but remains buried in another world, coded in another language, woven in another thread. This frustration – be it political, psychological or aesthetic – is the condition for any recourse to myth. In the act of demythologizing myth, the decision to introduce myth into the finite world of the present, two moments take place. One is a moment of recognition – a recognition of the power of the myth, even if the author has no belief in it. An acknowledgment of the semantic potency of the myth flickers momentarily, an acceptance of the repeatability of the trope – the name, the act, the god – as being worthy of invocation. A second moment,

148  Retelling Myth however, is the decision to render the myth profane – to garb it in the clothes of this world, to dye it in the colors of this time. The decision is not necessarily malevolent – it can be born out of a yearning to understand the myth, or to approach it even closer still, even to reincarnate it. But it is a decision which follows the first, and remains separate from it. Whether it is the will to be as close as possible to a prophet in the moment of his epiphany, to reveal a Hindu god to be as petty and capricious as his present-day followers, or to throw a rope of continuity between a settler-culture and the moment of a violent conquest, the decision is an act of violence, because it renders time-bound something which has just been recognized as time-less. What has emerged over our study of three different sets of retellings across these regions is the will to demythologize conceals, in terms of time, one of two desires: either a will to contaminate the present, or a desire to conquer the past. Either the validity and relevance of the myth spills over into the present, transforming it, peripheralizing the now, turning the world of the reteller into an echo of the tale. According to this desire, the retelling of myth is a ghost story in reverse, where it is the living who are really dead, haunted by that which came before them. Alternatively, in the retelling of myth, it is the world of the mythical that relents before the ever-expanding realm of the present; the myth is invaded by the practical, the rational, the cynic. This is the desire to dispel the illusion of transcendence, to export the conditions of the present into every time and place, to build a continuity (since both desires yearn for continuities) which doesn’t overarch, but was always there. The centrality of time to this question may be one reason why our attempt at a comparative project encounters limitations in Bengal, where different notions of time on the South Asian subcontinent may explain the difficulty of dating in a compatible fashion the relationship between satire/parody and the divine. More than anything else, however, it would appear to be myth’s need (echoing Stanley Fish among others) for a hermeneutical community that makes the project particularly difficult in this respect. The fragmented histories within the journey of Turkish national identity, and the absence of any semantic warehouse of tropes that would serve as a common store of literary motifs, problematize any politically honest examination of myth within Turkish literature. Even when similar mechanisms – of parody, of self-conscious anachronism, of nationalistic appropriation – occur across all literatures, the modern act of rewriting myth seems to arise in so many different contexts, and in so many different ways, as to defy the notion of a transcultural gesture itself.

Notes 1 G.S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (London: Penguin, 1974) p. 15. 2 Darian Leader, “Lacan’s Myths” in Jean-Michel Rabate (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 38. 3 Ibid., p. 40.

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4 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, trans. P. Mairet (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1960) p. 23. 5 See John Bierhorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 6 Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” in Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (eds), Critical Theory Since 1965 (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1986) p. 396. 7 Probably the most famous of these is Elena Garro’s story “La Culpa es de las Tlaxcaltecas” – but for others, see Márcia Hoppe Navarro, “El Mito de la Malinche en la obra reciente de escritoras hispanoamericanas” Mitologias Hoy 4 (2011) pp. 5–15. 8 Alfonso Reyes, The Position of America and Other Essays, trans. Harriet de Onis (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1971) p. 150. 9 Cit. in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978) p. 287. 10 Manuel M. Flores in Jorge Campos, Antología Poética HispanoAmericana (Mexico City: Ediciones Pegaso, 1950) pp. 248–250; “Adan y Eva” in Jaime Sabines, Antología Poética (Fondo de culture económica, 1994) pp. 107–124 and Gabriel Zaid, “Nacimiento de Eva” in Poesía En Movimiento: Mexico, 1915–1966 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI editores, 2010) p. 107. 11 Emilio Carballido, Medusa in Teatro (Mexico City: Colleccion Popular, 2009) pp. 66–139; “La Sangre de Medusa” in José Emilio Pacheco (ed.), De Algun tiempo a esta parte: Relatos Unidos (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2014) pp. 24–29; Gilberto Owen, “Madrigal por Medusa” in Perseo Vencido y otros Poemas: Antología Poética (Signos, 2006) p. 126. 12 Gabriel Zaid, “Circe” in Poesía En Movimiento: Mexico, 1915–1966 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI editores, 2010) p. 105; José Emilio Pacheco, “A Circe, de uno de sus cerdos” in Los Trabajos del Mar (Ediciones Era, 1999) p. 39; Julio Torri, “A Circe” in Gabriel Zaid (ed.), Omnibus de poesía Mexicana (Mexico City: Siglo XXI editores, 2014) p. 522. 13 José Emilio Pacheco, “Job 18, 2” in Selected Poems (Cambridge: New Directions Books, 1987) p. 62; Concha Urquiza, “Job” in Zaid (ed.), Omnibus de poesía Mexicana p. 568; Jaime Garcia Terres, “Las Tinieblas de Job” in Poesía En Movimiento p. 184; Salvador Novo, “Job” in L. I. Helguera (ed.), Antología del Poema en Prosa Mexicana (Mexico City: Letras Mexicanas, 1993) p. 198. 14 Juan Villoro, “Coyote” in Carlos Fuentes (ed.), The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories (Vintage Books, 1998) pp. 344–358; Lorna Dee Cervantes, “A Chicano Poem” in Sueño (San Antonio: Wings Press, 2013) pp. 92–94. 15 Alfonso Reyes, Homero en Cuernavaca (Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Leon, 2013) pp. 127, 119. 16 See criticism of Carlos Montemayor, “El Helenismo de Alfonso Reyes” Vuelta 154 (September 1989) especially pp. 12–13. 17 Robert T. Conn, “Official Nationalism in Mexico: Alfonso Reyes and the Hispanization of High Culture at the Turn of the Century” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, 23:1/2 (1998) pp. 100–101. 18 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 1993) p. 109; on Nietzsche’s influence on Reyes, see Pilar Hualde Pascual, “Mito y tragedia griega en la literatura iberoamericana” in Estudios griegos e indoeuropeos 22 (2012) p. 190. 19 Alfonso Reyes, Antología: Prosa/Teatro/Poesía (Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica Mexico, 2005) p. 8. 20 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Intermitencias Americanistas: Estudios y Ensayos Escogidos (Mexico City: UNAM, 2012) p. 41.

150  Retelling Myth 21 Robert K. Anderson, “Myth and Archetype in Recollections of Things to Come” Studies in 20th Century Literature 9 (1985) pp. 213–217; Malva E. Filer, “Los Mitos Indígenas en la obra de Carlos Fuentes” Revista Iberoamericana 127 (April 1984) pp. 475–489. 22 Pascual, “Mito y tragedia griega” p. 214. 23 R.G. Echevarría, Myth and Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 24 See Emilio Carballido’s play Theseus in The Golden Thread and Other Plays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013) and Homero Aridjis, Persephone (New York: Vintage, 1986). 25 Rosario Castellanos, “Speaking of Gabriel” in Maureen Ahern (ed.), A Rosario Castellanos Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988) p. 102; Alfonso Reyes, Homero en Cuernavaca. 26 José Emilio Pacheco’s short prose piece, “Aqueronte”, can be found in Pacheco, De Algun tiempo a esta parte pp. 227–229. 27 Hans Robert Jauss, “Modernity and Literary Tradition” Critical Inquiry 31/2 (Winter 2005) pp. 329–364. 28 See Sandra Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek” in her collection of stories The House on Mango Street (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). 29 Suave, indecisa, sideral, flotante, como el leve vapor de las espumas, cual blanco rayo de la luna, errante en un girón de tenebrosa brumas, emanación castísima y serena,del cáliz virginal de la azucena,perla viviente de la aurora hermosa, ampo de luz del venidero día, condensado en la forma voluptuosa de un nuevo ser que vida recibía,una blanca figura luminosa alzose junto a Adán... Adán dormía Manuel M. Flores in Campos, Antología Poética HispanoAmericana p. 249. 30 Dictionary of Mexican Literature, ed. Eladio Cortés (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 1992) p. 235. 31 Carlos Montemayor and D. Frischmann (eds), Words of the True Peoples: Anthology of Contemporary Mexican-Indigenous Language Writers vol. 2 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) p. 110. 32 Mi patria esta en tus ojos, mi deber en tus labios. Pideme lo que quieras menos que te abandone. Si naufrague en tus playas, si tendido en tu arena soy un cerdo feliz, soy tuyo, mas no importa. Soy de este sol que eres, mi solar esta en ti. Mis lauros en tu dicha, mi hacienda en tus haberes - Zaid, “Circe” 33 S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1985) p. 47. 34 Elsa Cross, “Naxos” in Helguera (ed.), Antología del Poema en Prosa Mexicana p. 392; Efrain Huerta, “Tlaloc” in Zaid (ed.), Omnibus de poesía Mexicana p. 593; Alfonso Reyes, “Paris-Alejandro ante Helena” in Homero en Cuernavaca p. 411; Natalio Hernández, “Teotlacxochitl/ Flower of Dusk” in Montemayor and Frischmann (eds), Words of the True Peoples vol. 2 pp. 162–163. 35 Owen, “Madrigal por Medusa”; Carballido, Medusa. 36 MEDUSA: Asi tomo vida propia, y asi la vi engrosar, poco a poco, hebra por hebra; … Cuando llegue a estas costas, su horror era ya el maximo. Me descubrí un momento y los pajaros cayeron al suelo como granizos deformes, como piedras. Y eso eran. Un marino que nadaba, se convirtio en estatua y se hundio con un chapoteo hirviente. Esta era yo: Medusa; ya no era una joven, ya no era una hesperide. Encontre a las gorgonas, mis iguales. Asi mi dicen : la otra gorgona. !Pero ellas asi nacieron, y yo no! !Y yo no!

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Se cubre la cara, esta llorendo. Perseo tambien. Despues ella se seca los ojos muy aprisa. Grita groseramente a los negros. MEDUSA: Quieren callarse? (La obedecen). … Sabes? Eres el primer hombre en el mundo que llora por Medusa. Carballido, Medusa p. 112. 37 See James J. Troiano, “The Grotesque Tradition in Medusa by Emilio Carballido” Revista de literatura hispánica 1/5 (Spring/Autumn 1977) p. 15. 38 Although we are discounting any treatment of historical figures such as La Malinche, it is a treatment of myth – running two timelines, one in mythic time, and one in the narrative present – which we see again in an Elena Garro story, “La Culpa Es De Los Tlaxcaltecas”. 39 Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2012) p. 21; the phrase is Žižek’s – see S. Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). 40 Has visto como crecen las plantas? Al lugar en que cae la semilla acude el agua: es el agua la que germina, sube al sol. Por el tronco, por las ramas, el agua asciende al aire, como cuando te quedas viendo el cielo del mediodía y tus ojos empiezan a evaporarse. … Lo has visto? Las plantas caminan en el tiempo, no de un lugar a otro: de una hora a otra hora. Esto puedes sentirlo cuando te extiendes sobre la tierra, boca arriba, y tu pelo penetra como un manojo de de raíces, y toda tu eres un tronco caído. Jaime Sabines, Antología Poética (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013) p. 111. 41 Pacheco, “Job 18, 2”. 42 Ines Arredondo, “The Shunammite” in Jorge F. Hernandez (ed.), Sun, Stone and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008) pp. 159–172. 43 No tengo tiempo que perder, me dijo al amanecer, y desplazo un volumen de mujer. Mar de mujer y pielago de sillas. El astillar me dejas hecho astillas, salpicadas de hielo las costillas. Botaduras heladas y funestas. Está bien. Pero que horas son estas. No te has quedado ni a las últimas fiestas. - Zaid, “Nacimiento de Eva” 44 Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000) p. 6. 45 Juan José Arreola, “Telemaquia” in Poesía En Movimiento p. 511; and Gilberto Owen, “Antiorfeo” in Zaid (ed.), Omnibus de poesía Mexicana p. 567. 46 Juan Villoro, “Amigos Mexicanos” in The Guilty, trans. Kimi Traube (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 2015) p. 95. 47 Juan Villoro, “Coyote” in Carlos Fuentes (ed.), The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories (London: Vintage Books, 1998) pp. 344–358. 48 Alejandro Ortiz Bullé Goyri, “Una Mirada al Mito de Quetzalcoatl desde el Teatro Mexicano del Siglo XX” in Tema y Variaciones de Literatura 32 p. 98.

152  Retelling Myth 49 Carlos Fuentes, A Change of Skin, trans. Sam Hileman (London: Penguin Books, 1968) p. 37. 50 see Filer, “Los Mitos Indígenas en la obra de Carlos Fuentes” p. 481; see also Edith Grossman, “Myth and Madness in Carlos Fuentes’ “A Change of Skin”” Latin American Literary Review 3:5 (Winter 1974) pp. 99–112, who argues that the interpretation of myth in the novel fails to tie up the text’s loose ends (111). 51 Jun Tiburcio, “Chumatec children” in Montemayor and Frischmann (eds), Words of the True Peoples vol. 2 p. 249. 52 Enriqueta Lunez, “Ch’ul Me Maruch’ “/ “Holy Woman Mary” in Victor Terán and David Shook (eds), Like a New Sun (Los Angeles: Phoneme Media, 2015) p. 111. 53 Irma Pineda Santiago, Doo yoo ne ga’ bia’ / De la casa del ombligo a las nueve cuartas (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, 2008) pp. 30–31. 54 Irma Pineda Santiago, Canción de la medianoche para el Juglar (Mexico City: MLM, 2018) pp. 19, 24, 30. 55 Call, “To Be an Indigenous Woman Poet” p. 39. 56 Montemayor and Frischmann (eds), Words of the True Peoples vol. 2 p. 107. 57 For how “la cultura mexicana moderna se hizo en los anos treinta” (José Joaquin Blanco, 120), see both his essay on “Los anos veinte” and also Manuel Fernandez Perera’s chapter on the 1930s in M. F. Perera (ed.), La literatura mexicana del siglo XX (Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica, 2008) pp. 89–202. 58 Reyes, The Position of America p. 247. 59 Fernando del Paso, Palinuro de Mexico (Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1990). Ignacio Sánchez Prado has argued that the novel represents a “parody” of “cultural authority” (144) and the “only prominent example” of a Mexican postmodernism whose “Joycean undertones do not constitute the central element of its aesthetic” (147) – Ignacio M. Sánchez-Prado, “Dying Mirrors, Medieval Moralists, and Tristram Shandies: The Literary Traditions of Fernando Del Paso’s “Palinuro of Mexico” Comparative Literature 60:2 (Spring 2008) pp. 142–163. 60 Ortiz, “Una Mirada” p. 98. For more on this – on how, for example, Morelos and Iturbide appropriated the Aztec eagle for their own early nationalist causes, see Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico (St Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) p. 47 ff. 61 Emilio Carballido, Teseo (1962); Pacheco, “Jerico”, in De Algún tiempo a esta parte pp. 298–300. 62 Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (New York: Zone Books, 2005) p. 491. 63 Yuri Herrera, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Madrid: Periferica, 2011). 64 P. Richman (ed.), Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) p. 1. 65 D. Dimitrova (ed.), Religion in Literature and Film in South Asia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) p. 11. 66 See Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, “The Diminished Man: Partition and Transcendental Homelessness” in Roy, Anjali and Bhatia, Nandi (eds), Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement (Delhi: Pearson Education India, 2008) pp. 50–64. 67 Buddhadev Bose, “Sangkranti” in Three Mahabharata Verse Plays, trans. Kanak Kanti De (Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop, 1992) pp. 17–62; Amit Chaudhuri, “An Infatuation” in Real Time (New York: Picador, 2002) pp. 113–118. 68 Bibhutibhushan Bandyhopadhyay, “The Flute” in A Strange Attachment and Other Stories, trans. Phyllis Granoff (Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1984) pp. 175–

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180; Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August: An Indian Story (New Delhi: Penguin, 1988). 69 Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi” in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (Routledge, 1987) pp. 179–196. Draupadi is a princess from the Mahabharata who is dragged in front of the enemy’s court and gambled away in a famous dice game between the two kings Yudhishtira and Duryodhana. When courtiers try to strip her sari away, the god Krishna blesses the fabric and makes it endless, preserving her honor. 70 Nabaneeta Dev Sen, “The Aftermath” in Saumitra Chakravarty (ed.), Three Sides of Life: Short Stories by Bengali Women Writers; Suchitra Bhattacharya, “The Testament of Madhobi” in Chakravarty (ed.), Three Sides of Life pp. 178–188; Sunil Gangopadhyay, Arjun, trans. Chitra Bannerji-Abdullah (Delhi: Penguin, 1987); Sri Aurobindo, Perseus the Deliverer in The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo vol. 3 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1998) pp. 325–528. 71 Nandi Bhatia, “Censorship, Social Reform, and Mythological Drama in Colonial India” in Dimitrova (ed.), Religion in Literature and Film p. 193. 72 Ibid., p. 194. 73 Sukla Sanyal, “Legitimizing Violence: Seditious Propaganda and Revolutionary Pamphlets in Bengal, 1908–1918” The Journal of Asian Studies 67:3 (2008) p. 762. This tradition continues into the very present – in 2015, there were 11 productions in Dhaka alone of retold dramas from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. See Ershad Kamol, “Recreating Myths to Address Women’s Issues” in Newage 8 March 2015. http:​/​/new​​agebd​​.net/​​10091​​5​/rec​​reati​​ng​-my​​ths​-t​​o​ -add​​ress-​​​women​​s​-iss​​ues/ accessed 17.7.2016. 74 Octavio Paz, The Other Mexico in Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude p. 320ff. 75 See respectively Elena Garro, “La Culpa es de las Tlaxcaltecas”; Rosario Castellanos, “Speaking of Gabriel” in A Rosario Castellanos Reader p. 102; Elsa Cross, “Naxos” in Helguera (ed.), Antología del Poema p. 392; Ines Arredondo, “The Shunammite” in Sun, Stone and Shadows pp. 159–172. 76 Bani Basu, “Shirish” in Chakravarty (ed.), Three Sides of Life pp. 112–120. 77 Mahasweta Devi, “The Hunt” in Imaginary Maps (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 1–18. 78 Less well-known than Chaudhuri or Dutt, Shahid Suhrawardy was an accomplished Orientalist and poet – see Kaiser Haq (ed.), The Collected Poems of Shahid Suhrawardy (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2012). 79 Amit Chaudhuri, Odysseus Abroad (Knopf, 2015); Kaiser Haq, “Bloomsday Centenary Poem in Free Verse and Prose” in Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems 1966–2006 (Dhaka: writers​.in​k, 2007) pp. 16–18. 80 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe (Delhi: Jaico, 2001) p. 195. 81 See Ian Almond, The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) pp. 5, 54, 146. 82 Rosinka Chaudhuri (ed.), Derozio, Poet of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008); Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013) especially pp. 314–321. 83 Bani Basu, “From Kailash to Kolkata” in Radha Chakravarty (ed.), Vermillion Clouds (Calcutta: Kali for Women/Women Unlimited, 2009) pp. 148–156; Navaneeta Dev Sen, “The Aftermath” op. cit.; Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions (New York: Anchor Books, 2009). 84 Durga Chandra Ray, Devganer Martye Agaman (1886) – see Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal” in S. Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) p. 549. 85 Romesh Chunder Dutt, Mahabharata: The Epic of India Rendered into English Verse (London: Dent, 1898). See also R.C. Dutt, “Gandhari’s Lament for

154  Retelling Myth the Slain” in T.D. Dunn (ed.), The Bengali Book of English Verse (Bombay: Longmans, 1918) pp. 89–94. 86 Rabindranath Tagore, “Karna and Kunti” in Collected Poems and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1970) pp. 453–456. The episode is taken from a famous secret meeting in the Mahabharata where a mother from the Pandavas side tells one of the Kaurava’s warriors, Karna, that he is really her son. 87 Ketaki Kushari Dyson, “Translator’s Note” in http:​/​/www​​.para​​baas.​​com​/t​​ransl​​ ation​​/data​​base/​​trans​​latio​​ns​/po​​ems​/R​​T​_​Kar​​nakun​​ti​.ht​​ml (accessed 20.7.2016). 88 Buddhadev Bose, “Pratham Parta” in Three Mahabharata Verse Plays pp. 63–122. 89 Tagore, “Karna and Kunti” p. 455. Bengali text Kohini (Calcutta: Vishwa Bharti Books, 2000) p. 86. 90 The Mahabharata Book 5 Udyoga Parva – Section 146. English translation taken from Kisari Mohan Ganguli, The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Translated into English Prose (Calcutta: Bharata Press, 1883–1896). 91 For the idea that the increasing tension between mother and son takes up many gaps in the text, see Keya Majumdar, “The Tension between Difference and Identity, the Idea of Motherhood and Filiality: R.N. Tagore’s Karna Kunti Sambad” in Pradeep Trikha (ed.), Textuality and Inter-textuality in the Mahabharata (Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2006) p. 137. 92 Nirendranath Chakrabarty, “Fatal Evening” in The Naked King and Other Poems, trans. Sujit and Meenakshi Mukherjee (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1975) pp. 43–45. Kurukshetra is the mythical site of the famous battle of the Mahabharata between the two armies of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. 93 Buddhadev Bose, The Book of Yudishthir (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1986). 94 Amit, “An Infatuation” pp. 113–114. 95 Michael Madhusudan Dutt, The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad /Meghnabadh Kabya, trans. William Radice (London: Penguin, 2010). Ravana is traditionally the villain in the epic where the demon king abducts Sita, the wife of Ram, and takes her to his kingdom. 96 Cit. in Clinton Seely, “The Raja’s New Clothes” in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) p. 137; see also Ghulam Murshid, The Heart of a Rebel Poet: Letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). 97 Bibhutibhushan Bandyhopadhyay, “The Flute” in A Strange Attachment; Sunil Gangopadhyay, Arjun; Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August; Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi”; J.P. Das, “The Magic Deer” in The Magic Deer and Other Stories, trans. by author (New Delhi: Vikas, 1983) pp. 1–13. 98 Shaheed Quaderi, Selected Poems, trans. Kaiser Haq (Dhaka: Bengal Lights Books, 2018) pp. 21–24. 99 J.P. Das, “The Magic Deer” p. 3. 100 Samba’s story is drawn from the Bhagavata Purana, as well as the Bhavishya, Skanda and Varaha puranas. 101 Debali Mookerjea-Leonard’s article “The Diminished Man” (op. cit.) is the best study of this, showing how closely Gangopadhyay follows the Sanskritic text – for example, when Arjun tells Shukla he “sees nothing except the eye of the bird” (74) about a picture of a falcon in his living room, this is exactly the same reply that the hero Arjun gives to Dronacharya in the Mahabharata. 102 Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August p. 84. 103 See “Bengal” entry of Science Fiction Encyclopaedia http:​/​/www​​.sf​-e​​ncycl​​opedi​​ a​.com​​/entr​​​y​/ben​​gal (accessed 20.7.2016) 104 See examples of “future history” such as “A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945” (6 June 1835 The Calcutta Literary Gazette) by Kylas

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Chunder Dutt, and also “The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century” (25 May 1845 The Saturday Evening Harakuru) by Shoshee Chunder Dutt. 105 Premendra Mitra, The Twelfth Manu/Manu Dwadosh (translated by Enakshi Chatterjee) in Sukumar Ghose, Contemporary Bengali Literature: Fiction (Calcutta: Academic Publishers, 1972) pp. 81–132. 106 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s main text is Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, ed. and trans. Barnita Bagchi (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005). Her short story “The Fruit of Knowledge (A Fable)” can be found in Chakravarty (ed.), Vermillion Clouds pp. 25–35. For a thorough contextualization of her work in turn-of-the-century Bengali women’s activism, see Barnita Bagchi, “Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the Movement for Women’s Education in Bengal, c. 1900–c. 1932” Paedagogica Historica 45: 6 (December 2009) pp. 743–755. Mahmudul Hasan sees her as an “early Muslim feminist” (181) – “Marginalisation of Muslim Writers in South Asian Literature: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s English Works” South Asia Research 32:3 (2013) pp. 179–197. 107 Sukumar Ghose, “Lost Continent” in Sukumar Ghose (ed.), Contemporary Bengali Literature: Poetry (Calcutta: Academic Publishers, 1972) p. 131; Manindra Ray, “Promised Land” ibid. p. 66. 108 For a very recent attack on the idea of Hinduism as a “construct”, see J.S. Kahn, Asia, Modernity, and the Pursuit of the Sacred: Gnostics, Scholars, Mystics, and Reformers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 109 Mandakranta Bose (ed.), The Ramayana Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 119. 110 Mandakranta Bose, Sarika Priyadarshini Bose (eds), A Woman’s Ramayana: Candrāvatī's Bengali Epic (Routledge Hindu Studies Series – New York: Routledge, 2013) p. 1. 111 Ramprasad Sen, “What a Joke!/Kulbala ulanga, tribhanga ki ranga” (from Satyanarayan Bhattacarya, Ramprasad: Jibani o Racanasamagra [Calcutta: Granthamela, 1975] no. 116) in Rachel Fell McDermott, Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 22. 112 Kazi Nazrul Islam, “O Hey, All-Destroyer/ O re Sarbanasi!” (from Abdul Ajij al-Aman, Najrul Giti [Calcutta: Haraph, 1972–1975) 3:303) in McDermott, Singing to the Goddess p. 33. 113 For the entire spray of different Ramayanas spreading out into Asia, see Santosh N. Desai, “Ramayana: An Instrument of Historical Contact and Cultural Transmission between India and Asia” The Journal of Asian Studies 30:1 (1970) pp. 5–20. 114 Samaresh Basu, Shamba; Mahasweta Devi, “Souvali” and “Kunti and the Nishadin/Kunti o nishadi” in After Kurukshetra, trans. Anjum Katyal (Seagull Books, 2005); Madhusudan Dutt, The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad. 115 Bose (ed.), The Ramayana Revisited p. 118. 116 Kaviraj, “The Two Histories” p. 157. 117 “Ergenekon” in Fevziye Abdullah Tansel (ed.), Ziya Gökalp Külliyatı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1952) 1:89. 118 Tevfik Fikret, “Promete” in Ataol Behramoğlu (ed.), Son Yüzyıl Büyük Türk Şiiri Antolojisi (İstanbul: Sosyal Yayınlar, 1997) 1:53. 119 Nazlı Eray, Orphee (Istanbul: Can Yayinlari, 1983). English translation Orpheus by Robert Finn, with an introduction by Sibel Erol, Austin: University of Texas Press (2006). 120 Salah Birsel’s “Şahmeran” in Memet Fuat (ed.) Çağdaş Türk Şiiri Antolojisi (Istanbul: Adam Yayinevi, 2006) 2:534.

156  Retelling Myth 121 See “Spoon Island” in Sait Faik Abasiyanik, A Useless Man: Selected Stories, trans. Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2015); Orhan Veli, “Helene Için” in Bütün Şiirleri (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003) p. 171. 122 Can Yücel, “Nuhun Kizi” in Feyyaz Fergar, Feyyaz Kayacan (eds) The Poetry of Can Yücel (Istanbul: Papirüs yayınları, 1993) p. 45. 123 Nazım Hikmet, Ferhad ile Şirin (Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2016) and Yusuf ile Menofis; see also Cafer Gariper and Yasemin Küçükcoşkun, “Nazım Hikmet’in Ferhat ile Şirin ve Yusuf ile Menofis Adlı Tiyatro Eserlerinde Yenidenyazma ve Edebi Dönüştürme” p. 140 in Nevin Önberk Yeni Turk Edebiyat Arastırmaları Sempoziyum Bildirleri I pp. 137–164. 124 Ahmet Hamdı Tanpınar, Bütün Şiirleri (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınevi, 2010). 125 Cemal Süreyya, “Tristram” in Fuat (ed.), Çağdaş Türk Şiiri Antolojisi p. 736. 126 Zeynep Avcı, Gılgamış (Istanbul: MitosBOYUT, 1996). For an excellent English language article on the text, see Pürnur-Üçar Özbirinci, “A Woman Playright’s Revision of a Legendary Epic: Zeynep Avcı’s Gilgamesh” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29:1 (Spring 2010) pp. 107–123. 127 Özbirinci, “A Woman Playright’s Revision” pp. 107–108. 128 See Nergis Ertürk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy” PMLA 123:1 (2008) pp. 47–49. 129 See Jale Parla for the example of how Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar was effaced by Yaşar Kemal, whose “new” Turkish was politically preferable to the old Perso-Arabic vocabulary of Tanpınar – Jale Parla, “The Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel” PMLA 123:1 (2008) pp. 27–40. 130 Cit. in Orhan Koçak, ““Our Master, the Novice”: On the Catastrophic Births of Modern Turkish Poetry” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:2/3 (2003) p. 580. 131 Melih Cevdet Anday, Ölümsüzlük Ardında Gılgamış (Toplu Şiirleri II) (İstanbul: Adam yayınevi, 1998); Tomris Uyar, Ödeşmeler ve Şahmeran Hikayesi (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2015); Hilmi Yavuz, Kuyu (Istanbul: Afa Yayıncılık, 1994). We have mentioned Zeynep Avcı’s retelling of Gilgamesh, but she also wrote the screenplay for the film Şahmeran, directed by Zülfü Livaneli (1993). 132 See the poem “Gılgamış” by Şêxmûs Sefer in Selim Temo (ed.), Kürt Şiiri Antolojisi vol. 2 (Istanbul: Angorakitapliği, 2019) p. 1311; Mehmet Uzun begins his novel Aşk gibi Aydınlık, Ölüm gibi Karanlık with a long quote from the epic, depicting the journey through the darkness – Mehmet Uzun, Aşk gibi Aydınlık, Ölüm gibi Karanlık, trans. Muhsin Kızılkaya (Istanbul: Gendaş, 2000). 133 Taken from Murathan Mungan’s 1986 story “The Legs of Shahmeran” (“Şhahmeranın Bacakları”) in Mel Kenne, Saliha Parker and Amy Spangler (eds), Aeolian Visions/Versions: Modern Classics and New Writings from Turkey (West Sussex: Milet Publishing, 2013) p. 304. 134 Murathan Mungan, Cenk Hikayeleri (Istanbul: Metis, 2011) p. 39. English translated by Abigail Bowman. 135 In Mungan’s autobiographical Paranin Cinleri (The Money Djinns), the author describes the difficulties his Kurdish-speaking grandmother (who appears to have known every Anatolian language except Turkish) encountered in the immediate aftermath of the establishment of the new Republic. He also describes, in nostalgic detail, the rich background of his native Mardin as a child: “Mardin, that city which simultaneously sheltered different cultures, different tongues and different beliefs, taught me the world’s variety and the importance of difference. I believe that this is how, in my own way, I acquired a feeling of democracy in its fundamental sense; that its mosaic texture has instilled in me an appreciation of the benefits to be derived from diverse layers

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of labor and riches. I loved both the Syriac churches and the Artuk mosques. It was in Mardin that I learned that there could be, in fact there should be, people like the Semsi, a very ancient sect in Mardin, who worshipped the sun, or the Yezidi, who worshipped the Tavus-u-Azam, or Peacock King. I listened to haunting examples of the Arabic ezan, the call to prayer, at the same time as chants in Latin. I heard Kurdish laments and ballads in the depths of my heart.” Aeolian Visions/Versions p. 144. 136 See Umut Uzer, An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016) p. 130. Riza Nur was Atsız’s mentor and defined Grand Turan as stretching from Turkey and Finland to Azerbaijan and China. Atsız himself, in a characteristically anti-Communist moment, has a poem celebrating the Hungarian uprising of 1956 (“Kardes Kahraman Macarlar”) as belonging to a fellow Turkic people – he praises the “glorious Turanian blood” of the Magyars. 137 See the poems “Göktürk Şafaği” and “Tanridağ Kızları” in Osman Türkay, Seçme Şiirleri (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1990) pp. 197, 40. 138 Nazım Hikmet, “Davet” in Şiirleri: Bu memleket bizim (Istanbul: Bilge Yayınevi, 1973) p. 104. Sabahattin Ali contributed to the first journal Nihal Atsız set up – Uzer, An Intellectual History p. 137. 139 Tanrı Dağı! Tanrılar, tanrılaşanlar Dağı!  Orda on üç asırdır bizi bir gözleyen var.  Savaş türküleriyle aylı kızıl bayrağı,  Kefensiz ölülerin ruhunu özleyen var.  Ulu Tanrı! Kür Şad’ın yenilmeyen ruhunu  Yüce Tanrı Dağında biraz daha barındır!  Geleceğiz yakında! Yarın bütün oralar  Demir bileklerdeki çelik kılıçlarındır.  – From Nihal Atsız, “Yakarış” in Yollarin Sonu (Istanbul: Ötüken, 2015) p. 7. 140 Jale Parla, invoking Freud, points out the repeated identification of Atatürk with Moses and the Messiah in the work of Yakup Kadri – see Jale Parla, “From Allegory to Parable: Inscriptions of Anatolia in the Turkish Novel” New Perspectives on Turkey 36 (2007) p. 17. 141 For more on this, see Erol Köroğklu, Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey during World War One (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007) pp. 119–120 and Atasoy, Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) p. 102. 142 Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book/Kara Kitab, trans. Güneli Gün (London: Faber and Faber, 1993); Hilmi Yavuz, “simurg için sonnet” in Büyü’sun Yaz!: Toplu Şiirleri 1969–2005 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2007) p. 269; Attila Ilhan, “Büyük Leyla” in Fuat (ed.), Çağdaş Türk Şiiri Antolojisi p. 2:602. 143 Hilmi Yavuz, “simurg için sonnet” in Büyü’sun Yaz!: Toplu Şiirleri 1969–2005 (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2007) p. 269. 144 Nizami, The Story of Layla and Majnun, trans. R. Gelpke (London: Bruno Cassirer, 1966). 145 Pamuk, Black Book p. 227. 146 Scalbert Yücel, “Languages and the Definition of Literature” p. 174. 147 Irfan Amîda, “Yasli Kederler” in Selim Temo (ed.), Kürt Şiiri Antolojisi vol. 2 (Istanbul: Angorakitapliği, 2019) p. 1241; Mem Bawer in Temo (ed.), Kürt Şiiri Antolojisi 2 “Tirnak” p. 1281; Shahin B. Sorekli, “Newroz” in Yashar Ismail (ed.), Anthology of Contemporary Kurdish Poetry (London, 1994) p. 45.

158  Retelling Myth 148 Hilmi Yavuz, “çöl ve judas” in Büyü’sun Yaz!: Toplu Şiirleri 1969–2005 (Yapı Kredi, 2007) p. 289; Can Yücel, “Nuhun Kizi” in Feyyaz Fergar and Feyyaz Kayacan (eds) The Poetry of Can Yücel (Istanbul: Papirüs yayınları, 1993) p. 45. 149 Başı önünde, bir gün, inerken dağ yolundan. O’nu bir ses durdurdu, çekmiş gibi kolundan. Önü boş, arkası boş; bakındı, ne can, ne iz… Sükűt bir taş ocağı, açılmış dehliz dehliz. Duyduğu ses topraktan gelmiş olmasa gerek, Hummâ dolu gözlerle döndü, ürkek… Aman! … İşte orada, derinde mi derinde, Vahyin şanlı Meleği, bir kürsü üzerinde … Bir çakıntı, bir parıltı, göze mil çeken ışık; Koşarak indi dağdan, etekleri dolaşık … Birden ne görse iyi; her yerde aynı şekil, Sayısız aynalarda tek tecelli: Cebrâil … Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, “Resul” in Esselam: Bütün Eserleri (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 2013) pp. 62–63. 150 Aydın Afacan, Şiir ve Mitologya (Ankara: Doruk, 2003). 151 C. Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 9. 152 Orhan Okay, Batılılaşma Devri Türk Edebiyatı (Istanbul: Dergah, 2013) p. 180 – cit. in Tahir Zorkul, “Mitoloji̇ ve Mustafa Seyit Sutuvenin Şiiri” in Turkish Studies: International Periodical for the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic 10:10 (Summer 2015) p. 1024. 153 Soner Akpınar and Burcu Yılmaz Çebin, “İkinci Yeni Şiirinde Phoenix Ve Pan’ın Simgesel Anlamları” Uluslararası Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi 8:39 (August 2015). 154 Mehmet Can Doğan, “Modern Türk Şiirinde Mitolojiye Bağli Kaynaklanma Sorunu” Gazi Türkiyat 4 (Spring 2009) p. 125. 155 Nergis Ertürk, “Disfigured Modernism: Turkish Literature and the Other West” in Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) p. 533. 156 Doğan, “Modern Türk Şiirinde” pp. 125, 127. 157 Ibid., p. 131. 158 Own translation – taken from Hasan Âli Yücel “Yunan Özel Sayısı”, Tercüme (March) 29/30, Ankara (1945). Cit. in Doğan, “Modern Türk Şiirinde” p. 131. There is the amusing story of the political leader Inönü, walking around a Turkish village at some point in the 1940s, and asking a village girl what was in her lunch bag: out comes cheese, bread, some meatballs and a Turkish translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Inönü is so moved he starts to cry – while the girl tells him “It’s not just me, everyone in my village is reading it”. Pakize Türkoğlu, Tonguç ve Enstitüteleri (Istanbul: Yapı Kredı, 1997) p. 251 (I am grateful to Fırat Oruc for drawing my attention to this). 159 Ibid., p. 133. 160 See in particular the second half of Koçak, “Our Master, the Novice”. 161 Oktay Rifat, “Agammemon” in Ruth Christie and Richard McKane (translators), Poems of Oktay Rifat (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2007) p. 45. 162 Daniel Varoujan, “Pegasus” in Diana Der-Hovanessian (ed.), Armenian Poetry of Our Time (Fresno: The Press, 2011) pp. 6–7. 163 Yeghishe Charents, “Dante-esque Legend” in ibid., pp. 54–75. 164 Bedros Tourian, “The Lake” and “Murmurs” in James Russell (ed.), Bosphorus Nights: The Complete Lyric Poems of Bedros Tourian (Cambridge: Armenian Heritage Press/Harvard University Press, 2005) pp. 193–195, 223–225.

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165 The Heritage of Armenian Literature vol. 3, eds. A.J. Hacikyan, G. Basmajian, E.S. Franchuk and N. Ouzonian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005) p. 845. 166 See Özgür Çiçek and Irmak Ertuna-Howison, “Literature for the People: The Paranormal Mysteries of Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar” Clues: A Journal of Detection 30:2 (Fall 2012) pp. 19–28. 167 Ömer Seyfettin “Crimson Apple” (Kızılelma) in Hülya Argunşah (ed.), Ömer Seyfettin : Bütün Eserleri (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 1999) vol. 2 (Hikâyeler 2) pp. 160–167; Ömer Seyfettin, “The Secret Temple” trans. Bernard Lewis in Die Welt des Islams 28:1/4 (1988) pp. 301–308; Orhan Pamuk, Yeni Hayat (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi, 2013); Nihal Atsız, “Kızıl Elma” in Fahri Ersavaş (ed.), Hamasi türk şiiri antolojisi (Istanbul: Matbaacılık Okulu, 1961) p. 157. 168 A. Bernabé, “What is a Katabasis? The Descent into the Netherworld in Greece and the Ancient Near East” Les Études classiques 83 (2015) p. 17; see also R.G. Edmonds III, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 22. 169 Bernabé, “What Is a Katabasis?” pp. 15–16; Edmonds III, Myths of the Underworld p. 27. 170 Hasan Azizul Huq, “A Hell Called Hospital” in Huq, Twelve Stories pp. 7–36. 171 Aslı Erdoğan, The City in Crimson Cloak, trans. Amy Spangler (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007); Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones”/“Kshudita Pashai” in Selected Stories, trans. William Radice (New Delhi: Penguin, 1994); Bani Basu, “Shirish” in Chakravarty (ed.), Three Sides of Life, 112– 120; Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, trans. M. S. Peden (New York: Grove Press, 1994); Gilberto Owen, “Antiorfeo” in Gabriel Zaid (ed.), Omnibus de poesía Mexicana p. 567. 172 Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Srikanta, trans. Aruna Chakravarti (Delhi: Penguin India, 2009) p. 20. 173 Ibid., p. 16; Bengali text Srikanta, Ananda Samskarana edition (Kolkata: Ananda, 2014) p. 16. 174 Although not dealing with Herrera’s novel specifically, see Britta Anderson on how spirituality is involved in the way the activity of border-crossing changes according to gender – Britta Anderson, “Movilidad Fronteriza en The Dogs Came With Them de Helena Maria Viramontes” Revista Iberoamericana 84:265 (Winter 2018) p. 1. 175 Herrera has insisted on his use of the underworld motif being primarily of structural value, rather than any precise correspondence to its Mayan origin – Sara Carini, “Identidades fronterizas a través del lenguaje en Trabajos del Reino y Señales que precederán al fin del mundo de Yuri Herrera” Revista Liberia 2 (2014) pp. 12–13. 176 Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, trans. Lisa Dillman (London: And Other Stories, 2015) p. 60. 177 Which is not to say that Spanish-language critics have not found in Herrera’s figure of Makina a revolutionary possibility – Giovanna Rivero, for instance, who sees the rebirth at the end of the novel as a political event á là Badiou, and which plays not only with the myth of Mictlan but also that of La Malinche (502–503). Giovanna Rivero, “Señales que Precederán al Fin del Mundo de Yuri Herrera: Una Propuesta para un Novum Ontológico Latinoamericano” Revista Iberoamericana 83:259–260 (April–September 2017) pp. 501–516. 178 Ibid., p. 77. 179 Srikanta p. 32. 180 Eray, Orphee p. 48.

160  Retelling Myth 181 For Siegfried Kracauer’s version of this, see Alan Itkin, “Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus: Reflection and Representation in Siegfried Kracauer’s Underworlds of History” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 87:2 (2012) pp. 175–202. For the way Pater saw the Renaissance as the resurrection of the Greek spirit from its shadowy underworld, see Shawn Malley, “Walter Pater’s Heroic Nostos: The Underworld Journey in the Renaissance” Nineteenth Century Prose 21:1 (1994) pp. 1–15. 182 Eray, Orphee p. 60.

5

Melancholy Monmora, Melancolía, Hüzün

Today there was no chance to sit on the roof. Clouds were coming from the darkness of dusk. Winter rain, like an unhealthy guest. There was no color in the cloud, no sound in the rain, the wet air was so melancholy [Meghe rong nay, brishti joboni nay, bhije botoshta jena monmora …]. – Tagore, Yogayog (1929 – my translation)1

For a word with such a specific etymology – in European languages, following Aristotle, it refers to the production of black bile – melancholy is a vast, vague term. In English, it travels some stretch of road with a host of nearsynonyms – sadness, loss, sorrow, gloom – but is yanked famously in several directions by Burton, Keats, not to mention the translations of Freud and Benjamin. In theoretical circles, Benjamin’s work on the Trauerspiel appears to have given the word an undeserved proximity to some kind of prescient encounter with the modern. Standing alongside the Spanish melancolía, the Bengali monmora (মনমরা) and the Turkish hüzün (from the Arabic hasana ‫ )نزح‬highlight some of the difficulties involved in discussing concepts such as sadness and loss in different languages. In Turkish, both hüzün (sadness) and hasret (longing, loss) appear to be used by writers such as Pamuk and Tanpınar as very specific terms; in his book on Istanbul, Pamuk dedicates a chapter to the word hüzün, highlighting the Sufi echoes of the term (indicating unbearable separation from God) and even lending it a proud, faintly masochistic dignity2; hasret communicates a more specific sense of loss, suggesting a lost object of desire as the cause of sadness. In both cases, the words are not easy synonyms for “melancholy”. In a similar vein, neither the Bengali word monmora nor any of its neighbors, hatash, bishaad or the Sanskrit/Pali dukh neatly correspond to the English word, a situation made even more ironic by the fact that the two Bengali texts to be analyzed in this chapter (The Shadow Lines and Autobiography) are both written in English. The postcolonial melancholy that arises (to paraphrase Lacan) from alienating oneself in English may well form part of the various sadnesses dealt with in this section.

162 Melancholy There is clearly nothing exclusively modern about the melancholic. Moments of sadness and melancholy exist in the premodern histories of all three traditions we are trying to find equivalences across – for example, in the sonnets of the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the thirteenth-century poet Yunus Emre or the endless expressions of longing and abandonment (viraha) to be found in the seventeenth-eighteenth century adaptations of the mangalkavya tradition. As we have tried throughout this book, our focus will be restricted to two specific expressions of the melancholic: the first rooted in a particular year (1947), and springing from a reaction to profound sociopolitical change – the melancholy longing for a lost object, if you will (a lost city, a lost empire, a lost age); the second a much more postmodern melancholy, expressing itself in a particular sense of disillusionment and quandary as the subject realizes the historical finitude and constructedness of their own world – a melancholy of narrativelessness, as we will ultimately term it. But first of all, let us consider one year, three cities and three texts.

I. The Year 1947 in Delhi, Mexico City and Istanbul [T]hat forbidding loneliness which only crowded streets possess developed in me the habit of abstracted musing in which I often remain unconscious how many miles and by which roads I have walked. – Autobiography, p301

In the middle of 1947, we find three different writers in three different cities, putting their pens to three different texts. In Delhi we find the writer and journalist Nirad C. Chaudhuri trying to compose his thoughts during the riots of Partition by beginning his Autobiography; at the same time, in Istanbul Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar is putting the finishing touches to one of the greatest Turkish novels of the twentieth century, Huzur (A Mind at Peace); further west in Paris, in the same year, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz is writing parts of one of the most famous texts in Latin American literature, El Laberinto de la Soledad (Labyrinth of Solitude).3 The chronological positioning of these three texts lie so close to one another – a contemplation of the collapse of empires in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and on the eve of a third “cold” war – that it might be worthwhile looking at the treatment and function of sadness in each, before going on to consider a more recent generation of melancholia. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is Nirad Chaudhuri’s most famous book. The fame is garnered partly from the two best-known praises of it – V.S. Naipaul called it “the one great book to come out of the IndoBritish encounter”, while Doris Lessing said it was “probably the greatest autobiography written in the English language in the twentieth century”4 – and partly because, on its first page, Chaudhuri controversially dedicated the book to the British Empire, which had “made, shaped and quickened

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… all that was good and living within us”. At first sight, it would seem there is little in Nirad Chaudhuri’s work or persona to merit the term “melancholic”. If there is a category of writers repeatedly associated with melancholia – W.G. Sebald, David Foster Wallace, Orhan Pamuk, Natalia Ginzburg – a writer as polemical as Chaudhuri would hardly be an obvious candidate. A vigorous, energetic speaker in interviews and documentaries (“I am a fighter”, he says, making a fist at the end of one Merchant-Ivory film on him), neither Chaudhuri’s physical comportment nor his sometimes dogmatic, pugnacious lexicon fit the somber, brooding figure in Dürer’s woodcut. A great deal of the later Chaudhuri’s work, in particular, can give the impression of an intellectual bark: the essays, often funny in their own reactionary, emphatic, endlessly aggressive way, assault the reader with a barrage of examples, quotations and fiery erudition. Ironically, however, one of the major premises of Chaudhuri’s work is loss. Chaudhuri started his first book on 5 May 1947, three months before India’s independence and three weeks before the plan for Partition was officially announced, as though the loss of Empire, the departure of the British, were the impetus for the real beginning of Chaudhuri’s career as a writer.5 The title of the very last book to be published under Chaudhuri’s name – the 1998 collection of essays Why I Mourn for England – similarly suggests this relationship between loss and writing in Chaudhuri, even if (after visiting the UK) Chaudhuri himself gradually moved from a lamentation of England’s loss of India to England’s loss of what he perceived to be Englishness itself. In both cases, we have an example of a writer whose body of work (20 books over five decades) was written not simply in the aftermath of Empire, but also as a consequence of this loss. The withdrawal of the British from India gave Chaudhuri an opportunity to express his real voice; more importantly, however, it provided him with a theme whose phantom would dominate everything he would subsequently write. If melancholy, as some commentators suggest, really has an element of “reenactment” built into it – the melancholic subject forever stages and restages the imagined loss of their love-object – then Chaudhuri’s identity, in the years after 1947, came to be formed around the constant reiteration of that year.6 We have said that Chaudhuri is not a recognizably melancholic writer, and he is not; that does not mean there are no melancholic moments in his work.7 In the Autobiography, many of these moments are images which he paints of himself in certain recollected situations, a self-reflective externalization of perspective whose shift to the outside point-of-view is not without its own pathos: Chaudhuri as a small boy, going out into the fields at night with a pair of binoculars and gazing with longing into the night sky (Autobiography, 248), or the lonely student wandering the crowded streets of Calcutta, lost in “abstracted musing” (Autobiography, 301). Such moments may come across as cracks and fissures in the otherwise solid and compact wall of Chaudhuri’s forthright prose, but they do indicate three things: a heightened sensitivity for the passage of time and the world of natural

164 Melancholy phenomena (what Freud would call the “keener eye” of the melancholic8), a fairly negative recognition of the finitude of the body and its desires, and a prosaic determination to construct a figure in the Autobiography which is anything but melancholy. The melancholy present in Chaudhuri’s evocation of Calcutta is the melancholy of both a lost city and a lost empire. Chaudhuri’s Anglophilia saw Calcutta as an intellectual center whose creative fires were fanned and fueled by a defeated, withdrawing Empire. For this reason, the tristesse implicit in his descriptions of the city should not be confused with subsequent, slightly more romantic evocations of the “City of Palaces” (such as those offered by Amit Chaudhuri or Dipesh Chakrabarty). In 1947, Chaudhuri is already lamenting how different the city was in 1910 (when his family first arrived). In the intricate descriptions of student accommodation, intellectual arguments and visits to the Indian Museum, there is the palpable desire to set down in crystalline prose the picture of a world already in the process of being lost: To live in Calcutta was to be reminded at every turn of the cultural history and achievements of modern India and to be aware of every significant activity of the present. … There was something in Bengali Calcutta of the Athenian eagerness to say or hear something new.9 Nationalism, in the form of Independence, would extinguish this life for Chaudhuri. His relocation to Delhi in 1942 (the capital of a much older Empire) symbolized an increasing frustration on Chaudhuri’s part at the direction Calcutta was traveling in. This is the “lost world” that emerges in Chaudhuri’s recollections of Calcutta, even if “loss” here is one enforced more by time and habit than any kind of political obstacle. When Chaudhuri wrote about Calcutta in his Autobiography, almost five years had passed since he had last set eyes on the city – his 40-page section on it ends with the passage: From about 1920 began a process which has reshaped the outward aspect and the inward nature of Calcutta. When I left it in 1942 it was not what it was in 1910, and I hear what it is today is utterly different even from what it was in 1942. These reports give me a notion that a pathological megalopolitanism has taken possession of the place. Therefore, if I have been unkind to it, it is unkindness to the dead. The Calcutta I knew is no more: Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium.10 The idea of a “lost city” (the lost Istanbul of Ara Güler, the lost Berlin of Benjamin and Döblin, the lost Delhi of Anita Desai) almost forms a subgenre of urban culture in itself; subjective experiences of environments crystallize themselves around certain periods and motifs which subsequently become antiquated and then mythologized as the environment mutates.

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The pocket of time Chaudhuri places his Calcutta in, however, has a profounder meaning – at once both psychological and political. Melancholia, some psychiatrists claim, arises in the “impossibility of synthesizing an objective order of time with individually experienced time”11; the melancholy subject, cut off from the present (Modern Indian Time), is “thrown back onto a past that is gone forever” (ibid). Chaudhuri’s resentment and resistance to Indian independence forms the subtext of this identification with a Calcutta that “is no more”. The classical quotation (from Book Two of the Aeneid) contains the metamorphosed crux of this sentiment, the Latin rendering his lament classical, and more importantly, Imperial. Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium (“Once we were Trojans, once there was Troy”) – the expression, and its Latin, invokes all the pathos of faded Empire Chaudhuri cherished in his memory of Bengal. It turns him into a wandering Aeneas, the last of the Trojans, survivor of an extinct empire, in much the same way Chaudhuri portrayed himself (and was often mocked) as the last imperialist. This attachment to a lost Bengal – lost either through the politics of history or through his own willful omission – generates a melancholy which pervades but only occasionally breaks to the surface of Chaudhuri’s work. More than in any visible, explicit sense, the loss of these various places forced Chaudhuri to refabricate them, refantasize them, in their absence. Chaudhuri spent the last 30 years of his life outside India, choosing to live (and die) in England in a gesture of self-elected exile. However tempting it might be to see him as an erudite Aeneas, recollecting his ruined Troy, a sense of forlorn homelessness does seem to have been present in him from an early age. In the Autobiography, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this sense of “not being at home in the world”, while doubtless modified by the reading of scholars such as William Jones and Max Müller (who convinced Chaudhuri that Indians were really racially displaced Europeans), actually belonged to a much earlier and more profound sense of spiritual alienation from the world itself. Halfway through the Autobiography, Chaudhuri relates the countless Hindu devotional songs he would sing as a child. In one of his most eloquent passages, he describes how the singing of these religious songs gave him a very vivid awareness of another world, infinitely more happy, joyous and serene than ours. In my boyhood I often lay on a mat in the courtyard of our house at Banagram looking at the sky through a pair of opera glasses, professedly studying the stars but perhaps trying really to locate that unknown and unseen world, and I was filled with an unbearable homesickness mingled with awe. Even to this day I have not been able to shake off this feeling, this conviction of the material world around me being insubstantial, although I have completely lost all religious conviction and also faith in the other world. Therefore I find myself at times in the curious position

166 Melancholy of being a denier of this world without having anything to put in its place. … the earth seems to lie in ashes for me. And this happens to me not only in regard to the world which is of the world worldly, the world of far-stretched ambitions and madding voices, but even with the world which is made up of the wild loveliness of the face of the earth; of the grace of animal forms; of light raining down from the heavens – the light of the milky spray of the stars which illuminates only when universe is composed to rest by a vast darkness. The feeling seems to cut the ground from under my feet and throw me down from the only country I know into a dark abyss.12 The “unbearable homesickness” which Chaudhuri felt, as a child, for a realm he never knew seems to have involved a basic structure of desire anterior to any political position, eclectic reading or urban lament – a paradoxical sense of loss for something the subject never had, a refrain by now familiar to analyses of melancholia. The other world the young Chaudhuri tried to find through his binoculars on those nights of stargazing would, of course, gradually become England, as the focus of Chaudhuri’s energies gradually shifted onto the habits, history and idioms of an island 5000 miles away – an island whose people held military dominion over his own. All mimicry, as Homi Bhabha would say, conceals melancholy13 – Chaudhuri’s complex attempts to adopt the correct mode of Englishness (to write like them, drink like them, dress like them) would always be a sublated attempt to reach this other world, which an arbitrary series of childhood cultural/ geographical coordinates had labeled “England”. The main effect of this “homesickness” was a devaluation of everything that could not belong to or resemble that other world Chaudhuri was trying to find. “[T]he world seems to lie in ashes for me”. It is a strange phrase, a remarkable phrase, probably the nearest we ever get in Chaudhuri to Benjamin’s “rubbish heap” (Trümmerfeld)14; it provides some degree of explanation for the remarkable paucity of attention an otherwise cosmopolitan Chaudhuri would show in cultures immediately adjacent to his own – Southeast Asia, China, Nepal – or indeed any other non-Western culture his Europe-directed gaze chose to pass over. Threequarters of the planet, in other words, did indeed “lie in ashes” for him. To some extent, there is nothing remarkable in a process in which the immediate (native) environment is transcendentally robbed of value by the provision of a more blessed (modern/Western) reality. Given Chaudhuri’s own frequent descriptions of Indians/Bengalis as wooden, inanimate and inert, it is also not surprising to see a central effect of this “homesickness” in the constraining and refining of Chaudhuri’s limited (Western) internationalism. Once the British left Calcutta, the city did indeed lie in ashes for him. Empire meant life for Chaudhuri – intellectual, political, even psychological life. The withdrawal of that life, a political fact which cheered many

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of his fellow Indians but depressed Chaudhuri, provided him with the lost object of his melancholia. The notion of a lost city, and of an empire lost with that city, brings us to possibly the greatest Turkish writer of the twentieth century – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and his novel Huzur. Tanpınar’s novel was published in 1949, but was written in the years leading up to 1948. The central characteristic it shares with Chaudhuri’s Autobiography is a regret at the loss of an empire, even if the superficial similarities very quickly run into some substantially different contexts on closer examination. While it is true that for both Chaudhuri and Tanpınar, Empire (British/Ottoman) signified both moral order and cosmopolitanism, the Empire mourned by some of the voices in A Mind at Peace possessed a fundamentally religious nature, with the Islamic Caliphate as its basis. Its demise in 1918, swept aside by the secular modern forces of what would become Atatürk’s Turkish Republic in 1923, provides the essence not just of Tanpınar’s 1949 novel, but also for much of his work. A lingering melancholy (hüzün) pervades the Istanbul he depicts, as the end of Empire is expanded into a general malaise, the loss of a certain culture – song, architecture, outlook, lifestyle, even language – which constitutes one of the essential ingredients in Tanpınar’s prose. In A Mind at Peace, we experience this melancholy through the glimpses of street debris, shattered photographs and half-forgotten songs that the protagonist Mümtaz encounters on his journey through the novel’s 48-hour narrative: Mümtaz stared down the full length of the street. … Heaps of old items, bed frames, broken and worn-out furniture, folding screens with torn panels, and braziers were aligned and stacked atop each other in phalanxes along either side of the street. Most regrettable were the mattresses and pillows, a tragedy simply by ending up here. Mattresses and pillows … the array of dreams and the countless slumbers they contained. The fox-trot dissolved in the snarl of an unwound spring and was immediately followed by an old türkü [Ottoman song] one would only chance to hear under such circumstances. “The gardens of Camlıca …” Mümtaz recognized the singer as Memo. The full sorrow [bütün hüznü] of the last days of the reign of Sultan Abdülhamit II persisted in the memory of this singer … who’d drowned in the waters of the Golden Horn. … For a long time Mümtaz couldn’t determine whether the hüzün of inexplicable melancholy falling about them and the Memory-Hued Twilight [hatıra renkli ısığın] had emanated from the evening or from the song itself.15 The word hüzün will emerge again – not just (most obviously) in Pamuk’s Istanbul, heavily influenced by Tanpınar, but also in the Diyarbakir of the Kurdish writer Şeyhmus Diken, who will attribute to the new part (yenişehir) of the city a melancholy (hüzün) hue.16 The faded Empire here

168 Melancholy in this passage is, in some ways, almost the exact opposite of Chaudhuri’s. There is, first of all, the most obvious fact: the rule whose loss Tanpınar was lamenting was not that of a foreign power, but a native one. There certainly was a minority of Turkish intellectuals around the time of World War I (Turkish Chaudhuris, one might almost say) who could have been said to share Chaudhuri’s pro-Western stance – either Ali Kemal, who advocated a British protectorate for Turkey, or even the so-called Mandacilar (Halide Edip, Rauf Bey, Kara Vasif – those who wanted an American mandate for Turkey after World War I).17 Tanpınar was neither of these. However, an equally fundamental difference between the post-Empire melancholies of Chaudhuri and Tanpınar lie in the spirituality and even mysticism whose advent Chaudhuri detests, and whose withdrawal Tanpınar bewails. Chaudhuri’s defeated Empire was a fundamentally moral order of Enlightenment rationality, giving way (Chaudhuri would say) to a hysterical mass of religious bigotry and unreflective self-interest; Tanpınar’s empire, on the other hand, was a bastion of religious and traditional values, resting on a rich past of spiritual and cultural achievement, cruelly defeated and effaced (Tanpınar would say) by forces obsessed with science, progress and a blind devotion to the West. These differences, however, should not distract us from the similarities inherent in both versions of sadness. The image of Chaudhuri in Calcutta, wandering its streets, lost in abstract musing, is found in the Turkish novel, as Mümtaz “roam[s] … randomly” the dark streets of Istanbul, his “anguish … the universe of a tattered soul”.18 It could also be said that an element of parental longing persists in both Chaudhuri and Tanpınar’s mourning of Empire – the critic Nurdan Gürbilek has already pointed out how the death of Tanpınar’s own mother explains the almost maternal sense of stability and protectiveness the old Empire had for him, mirroring the very real way Chaudhuri’s own father represented a kind of British rule for him.19 More importantly, the rich cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire – its incorporation of Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Circassians and other minorities into a socially complex fabric of everyday life – is evidenced in Tanpınar’s work through the frequent appearance of Greek/Armenian characters, and finds itself set positively against the cultural poverty of the nationalist, mono-ethnic Turkish state which replaced it.20 To a limited degree, this runs parallel to the relative (European) internationalism Chaudhuri associated with British rule – and the contempt he shows for the nationalist agenda of Congress Party politics in the new Indian state. In both cases, a distinctly anti-democratic elitism runs through this nostalgia for “sophisticated” empires which were displaced by monodimensional, populist movements. Chaudhuri’s love of Italian painting, fondness for French wines and knowledge of Polish and Russian aristocracy constituted a bourgeois European cosmopolitanism which found some degree of common ground with his own pro-imperialist views.

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Perhaps the most subtle similarity between these two texts – a Turkish novel and an English-language Bengali memoir – lies in the possibility that both draw on an earlier, older poetic genre: the shahr-i ashob or lament for the “ruined/distressed” city. As a professor of both Ottoman and Persian poetry, Tanpınar was particularly well-placed to invoke a Persian tradition of urban lament for fallen empires and moral decay.21 Although the origins and development of the shahr-i ashob are of some dispute, by the eighteenth century, we have an Urdu poetic tradition, heavily influenced by Persian/ Arabic/Turkish precedents, which expressed “pessimistic, backward-looking assertions of the decadent state … of society” (Lehmann22), complained of a world whose values were completely inverted and lamented the decline of religion (exemplified in Huzur by the Nietzschean figure of Suad, the atheist whose suicide lends the book its dark, funereal finale). The shahr-i ashob, if we are to take the genre to its widest limits, is truly intercontinental in its scope; at some point, it has been invoked to lament the downfall/ decay of cities as far apart as Seville, Baghdad, Isfahan, Delhi, Lucknow and Patna.23 What is curious about Tanpınar’s novel – a curiosity which is perhaps also its strength – is that it depicts not one crisis, but two. The fate of Istanbul as a gradually abandoned tombstone of the Ottoman empire, acting as the sepulchral background to the novel’s characters as they try to reorientate themselves in the shifting present; simultaneously, the situation of Europe in 1939 (the year the novel is set in), on the brink of war – the crisis of a Europe the sometimes-Francophile Tanpınar was half in love with. The desire to lament both of these situations does not necessarily come from the same place, even if some of the contours of these gestures run in perfect parallel. Tanpınar’s decision to set a novel about the aftermath of the end of Ottoman society on the brink of World War II suggests a wider view of human society – and a profounder skepticism concerning what happens when the forces controlling that society begin to fall apart. There is an analogous and basically conservative regret, in other words, at the dissolution of the structure of Empire, even if the content of those structures are ultimately quite different. Like Tanpınar, Chaudhuri associates a level of cultural wealth and moral stability with British rule; unlike Tanpınar, he also prefers it as a political model – a sentiment which never really emerges in Tanpınar’s complex relationship to the Ottoman legacy, which he seemed to admire in predominantly cultural, spiritual and aesthetic terms, but not as an ideal vision of government. Toward the end of the Autobiography, Chaudhuri declares himself a “student of the decline of empires” (552), and yet among the many he lists (Hohenzollern, AustroHungarian, Tsarist) the Ottoman Empire is conspicuously absent – perhaps because, as an Eastern empire which exercised dominion over the West for long periods of time, it offended some of Chaudhuri’s civilizational sympathies. It is also ironic that Chaudhuri shared Tanpınar’s disdain for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, if for very different reasons (the fact that many Indians supported Atatürk’s anti-colonial struggle against the Western imperialist

170 Melancholy powers probably forced Chaudhuri to overlook the modernizing force of secular progress that Kemalism represented). Empire recedes somewhat in Octavio Paz’s widely read masterpiece, Labyrinth of Solitude, even if the melancholy of a god-killing, self-alienating, world-reducing modernity seems to emerge as one of the recurring themes. Paz wrote the book at the beginning of the so-called milagro mexicano or “Mexican Miracle”, the period of intense economic development and rapid urbanization which Mexico began to experience from the beginning of the 1940s until the late 1960s. The historical setting of the book explains, in part, its quasi-romantic anti-modernity, a suspicion of technology and science (the book came out the same year as Adorno’s Minima Moralia24) as that which will lead us into “the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason” (212). In this, perhaps, the spirit of the book is closer to Tanpınar’s carefully distilled sorrow at the abandonment of tradition than anything else. Two similarities with Chaudhuri, however, emerge once we bring these texts closer together. I will not count the most obvious one – the situation of exile common to both writers (writing a book about Bengal in Delhi, a book about Mexico in Paris). Rather, a more fundamental resemblance lies in the emphasis Paz places on the melancholy orphanhood of the Mexican, a trope which seems to concur with Chaudhuri’s own feelings of filial abandonment at the departure of British rule. The “melancholy” or “gloomy” nature of the Mexican is a central feature of Paz’s text: This is not the moment to analyze our profound sense of solitude, which alternately affirms and denies itself in melancholy and rejoicing [en la melancolía y el júbilo], silence and sheer noise. (19, 22) The history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins. … Our solitude has the same roots as religious feelings. It is a form of orphanhood [orfandad], an obscure awareness that we have been torn from the All. (20, 23) [North Americans] are optimists and we are nihilists – except that our nihilism is not intellectual but instinctive, and therefore irrefutable. … We are sorrowful and sarcastic [tristes y sarcásticos] and they are happy and full of jokes. (23-4, 26) [the fiesta is] shot through with lightning and delirium, is the brilliant reverse to our silence and apathy, our reticence and gloom. (49)25

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For Paz, Mexicans are a twice-alienated people – an alienation that has to do with the fall of not one Empire but two. The first death was that of the indigenous gods, the second the gods of the colonizers. If the Aztec universe was destroyed by the appearance of Cortés and his entourage, then it is the forces of modernity embodied in the Partido Rivolucionario Institucional – the dam-builder, the educator, the social engineer – which have disenchanted the Catholic universe which followed in its wake. Because of this history of loss and suffering, the proximity of the Mexican to mourning and melancholy almost acquires the status of a natural tendency. Among the most famous constructs in Paz’s book is the tragic aspect of the Mexican soul, the smiling mask which hides an inner shell of sadness and solitude. Like Chaudhuri’s orphaned Indian, the gods have abandoned Paz’s subjects, even if Chaudhuri refuses to join Paz in essentializing this sadness as a constitutive characteristic of the Indian. It is Chaudhuri himself, more than anyone, who is the orphan in his own book; beginning with its faintly sepulchral dedication to the British Empire, the whole text of the Autobiography itself could be seen as an orphaned child of the departing British. And yet, this quality leads us to the second similarity which Labyrinth of Solitude shares with the Autobiography – a positive evaluation of the effects of colonialism, and a recognition (in Paz’s case, a very guarded and qualified recognition) of the trauma and even chaos the dissolution of an empire can bring about. The imperialism the Socialist Paz refers to, it should be said, is not so much the murderous thuggery of the conquistadores themselves, but the Baroque Catholic culture which followed it: It is also true that the technical superiority of the colonial world, and the introduction of richer and more complex cultural forms than those of the Mesoamericans, are not enough to justify an epoch. But the creation of a universal order [un orden universal], which was the most extraordinary accomplishment of colonialism [logro extraordinario de la Colonia], does justify that society and redeems it from its limitations. Colonial poetry, Baroque art, the Laws of the Indies, the chroniclers, historians and philosophers, and above all, neo-Hispanic architecture – in which all things, even fantastic fruits and profane dreams, were harmonized within an order as rigorous as it was ample – are reflections of the equilibrium of a society [del equilibrio de una sociedad] in which all men and all races found a place, a justification and a meaning. (103, 113) Paz’s cautious evaluation of colonialism’s various cultures evokes a completely different spirit from that of Chaudhuri’s. In the next paragraph, he writes explicitly (and with a faintly Freudian sense of denial): “I am not attempting to justify colonial society” (103). Even if both Chaudhuri and Paz agree on how colonialism can structure and (to use Heidegger’s verb) “world” a human being, Paz is much more ambivalent about the benefits

172 Melancholy of colonial cultures. Nevertheless, whatever we might think of such structures, their dissolution is traumatic. When such meaning-saturated structures collapse, argues Paz, the “labyrinths of solitude” are the melancholy mazes the alienated self has to wander through to reconnect itself with the world around it. Like Tanpınar, and in contrast to Chaudhuri, Paz’s defunct empire is a culture based on spiritual and aesthetic values, not rational Enlightenment ones. In Tanpınar’s novel, set a decade earlier in 1939, there are explicit references to the Mexican Revolution which was taking place at that very moment,26 a revolution which (like its Kemalist cousin) would try to sweep aside the Baroque values of Catholic humanism and Spanish architecture, and replace them with a dizzying, world-emptying vocabulary of science, development and progress. Although all three of these texts address the melancholy which ensues when an empire is rolled back by a modernizing Republic, El Laberinto de la Soledad might seem at first glance less concerned with the melancholy of the city. In certain moments of Huzur and the Autobiography, a ghostly film-reel of Chowringhee and Beyoğlu seems to be running at the back of the author’s mind as each page is turned; Mexico City (or D.F. as it is still called by many), on the other hand, does not initially seem to occupy any place in Paz’s essentializing recollections on the melancholy nature of the Mexican. A closer look, however, would reveal not one but two cities beneath the topsoil of Paz’s prose. The first would be the modern city itself: many of the institutions and movements Paz mentions as connected with the advance of modernity are situated in D.F. – the founding of the National University (134), the Ateneo de la Juventud movement (135) and the publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica (162), the institutional efforts of Vasconcelos (153) and driving intellectual energy of Alfonso Reyes (164). Combined with the several references to other capitals such as Paris, New York and London (48, 57), it would suggest that the capital city itself looms invisibly over many places in Paz’s book – and that when he invokes the Mexican face of an advancing, urban modernity, Mexico City is very much the site Paz has in mind. This is hardly, however, a “lost city” – not in any of the senses Chaudhuri or Tanpınar has in mind, and certainly not the D.F. that a later generation of writers (José Emilio Pacheco, Carlos Fuentes) will romanticize – the turnof-the-century colonial capital that was destroyed to make way for housing projects and flyovers. In order to find the ciudad perdida that lurks beneath Paz’s labyrinth, one has to push further back into the past, back to the preHispanic city of Tenochtitlán itself: When Moctezuma opened the gates of Tenochtitlán to the Spaniards and welcomed Cortés with gifts, the Aztecs lost the encounter. Their final struggle was a form of suicide, as we can gather from all the existing accounts of that grandiose and astounding event. … The great betrayal [La gran traición] with which the history of Mexico begins was

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not committed by the Tlaxcaltecas or by Moctezuma and his group: it was committed by the gods [sino la de los dioses]. … This divine desertion [esta deserción divina] becomes even more pathetic when we consider the youth and vigor of the nascent Aztec state. All of the ancient empires, such as Rome and Byzantium, felt the seduction of death at the close of their long histories. (93-4) In all three texts, the fall of a capital appears to be linked with the withdrawal of the gods. This condensation of Empire, power and authority into a single topos – the urban capital – not only means that the loss of that capital constitutes a modern loss of meaning, but that any melancholy for the lost city is invariably infused with deeper metaphysical implications. For Paz, the ghost of Tenochtitlán haunts the book as an incontestable moment of divine departure, an insuperable event which the Mexican (his Mexican) has never been able to overcome. If Rivera’s idealized Tenochtitlán, painted resplendently on the inner walls of the National Palace, is a city connected to the future – a vision of social justice imminently to be restored, Paz’s Aztec capital is instead a kind of recurring trauma, an ineluctable stain, a constant, melancholy reminder of the cyclical savagery of history. Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Huzur, El Laberinto de la Soledad – these three non-Western texts, written during the years 1947– 1948, at three very different points on the planet, illustrate a certain geometry about the vanquishing of empires – not just the kind of forces which roll them back, but also the effects the death of empires have on the altered subjects they leave behind. The differences between the three texts impose some limits on defining the common sadness they all proffer within their pages. In addition to being written in the same year, what brings these Bengali, Turkish and Mexican meditations on loss together is a melancholy sense of orphanhood and even bewilderment at the dissolution of imperial configurations of culture and power – and a tristesse which leads to an appalled cynicism in each writer, a contempt for the modern, “democratic” party politics which would replace these fading constellations of power: Chaudhuri had nothing but abuse for the entire Indian parliamentary system from 1947 onward; Paz called leaders such as Peron a “buffoon” and held at best ambivalent feelings about the twentieth century’s “birth of the party”27; Tanpınar’s dismay, finally, at the party political successor to the Caliphate is all too clear in his brilliant satirizing of Atatürk and the social engineering of the new Turkish Republic.

II. The Melancholy of Narrativelessness: Ghosh, Pamuk, Enrigue But it is precisely our awareness of history that … teaches us that there have been horizons beyond number in the past – civilizations, religions, ethical codes, “value systems”. The people who lived under them, lacking our

174 Melancholy modern awareness of history, believed that their horizon was the only one possible. … Modern education … liberates men from their attachments to tradition and authority. They realize that their horizon is merely a horizon, not solid land but a mirage that disappears as one draws closer, giving way to yet another horizon beyond. That is why modern man is the last man: he has been jaded by the experience of history. – Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man28 Philosophy begins in disappointment. – Simon Critchley29

The melancholy studied in the previous section was very much a melancholy issuing from, and fixating upon, a lost object: a lost empire, a lost city, a lost age. A melancholy which presided around the look of a specific thing – and whose narrative, paradoxically, simultaneously lamented, maintained and required this loss in order to continue. Tammy Clewell, paraphrasing Freud, describes this as taking and internalizing the lost object into the structure of our own identity,30 and to some extent this would be true of all three writers from the previous section: Chaudhuri, Tanpınar and Paz (at least the prose Paz) might all be called stylists of loss – writers who possess lossbased identities, and whose artistic worlds unfold in the constant exercise of a particular verb, forever chasing a (permanently missing) object. The second half of this chapter goes on to analyze, in three texts written over half a century later, a subsequent generation of melancholy. A sadness which stems not so much from the incompleteness of a narrative, but rather from the brute, ineluctable fact of narrativelessness itself. The tristesse in these stories arises not simply from loss, but also from a melancholy awareness of the constructedness of our narratives – as Fukuyama has it, from a discovery that the horizon we live by, and which structures our lives, is no overarching, transcendental vault, but simply one historically contingent horizon among many. Melancholy no longer as simply the yearning for a lost absolute, but rather as a sense of quandary at the absence of any absolute at all. The distinction is not merely between a modernist and a postmodern form of melancholy – the distinction Ihab Hassan, in a dated but still useful moment, described as a conflict between symptom/metaphysics/ purpose and desire/irony/play.31 The claim being made in this second section is a deeper, more historical one: that a relationship exists between neoliberalism and a certain strand of melancholy in global fiction after 1980. This melancholy, discernible in character tones, atmosphere, stylistic devices and narrative voices, can be found in a series of texts, all of which depict the epiphanic ramifications that unfold when a character or narrator becomes aware of the historical finitude of their Weltanschauung – and that there are no larger, “truer” narratives available as alternatives. The publication dates of the three texts chosen (1988, 1994, 2005) all have the gradually unfolding spirit of neoliberalism as a backdrop: the Bretton Woods conference

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and the establishment of the IMF in 1973, Pinochet’s neoliberal “reforms” in 1980, the fall of communism in 1989, not to mention events specific to the three regions of the texts – the 1994 NAFTA free trade agreements in Mexico, for example, or the 1980–1983 state of emergency in Turkey (whose subsequent government, under Turgut Özal, opened up much of the country to internationalization and foreign markets). This section has the difficult task of showing how certain aspects of this very broad term – the metaphysical implications of the withdrawal of the state, the relentless and ubiquitous commodification of our lived, experienced reality, and the melancholy void left by the collapse of communism in a post-ideological world – have a part to play in the production of wandering, aimless narrators and apolitical protagonists in these texts. What kind of melancholy is found in these texts? It is important to recognize that the melancholy here is not exclusively related to the loss of tradition or religion, but that even pillars of secular modernity (the stable state, the national narrative, the rational and reliable self) are called profoundly into question. If the melancholy from the previous section is productive – insofar as the missing empire/age/essence generates a language to try and fill or attempt to replace the lack – the melancholy Ghosh, Pamuk and Enrigue provides us with is latent, much more subtextual and much more repressed. It forms (to borrow a line from the poet Philip Larkin) “a small, unfocused blur, a standing chill” on the horizon, never quite amounting to anything but an inarticulable presence. It is a tacit, diffuse melancholy – one that expresses itself in an attention to detail, a fascination with death, an aversion to any form of religious or political system. This melancholy is the consequence of a series of unacknowledged recognitions, the sum total of a set of internal, silent, cumulative defeats. Perhaps most strikingly, the melancholy found in this second set of texts stems from an encounter with finitude. In The Shadow Lines (1988), the saturnine uncle of the narrator relishes constructing reality around him with his imagination – and inculcates in his younger nephew a passion to do the same, even if the central sadness of the book lies in the concrete limits both characters encounter in doing this. In The New Life/Yeni Hayat (1994), a man reads a book which changes his life – and then travels around Turkey, finding the concrete ingredients of the book’s origins which disenchant its magical status. In “Escape from Suicide City”/ “Salida de la ciudad de los suicidas” (2005), a melancholy scholar-chef attempts to compensate for his ex-wife’s affair with his student by reproducing recipes from the Mexican seventeenth century, half-aware his culinary reconstructions are products of his twenty-first-century imagination. Three specific texts have been chosen – but other examples abound. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, written in the same year as The Shadow Lines, features an aimless, drifting government officer who finds himself incapable of any belief, least of all the State he has been sent out into the provinces to represent. Many of the narrators in the short stories of Amit

176 Melancholy Chaudhuri experience this neoliberal melancholy at the commodifiability of culture in a late capitalist world, or an acute sense of the finitude of one’s origins and upbringing.32 Mexican and Turkish examples could also follow – Oya Baydar’s sad tale of post-communist nostalgia “Farewell, Alyosha”, alongside Nazlı Eray’s Orpheus (examined in Chapter 4), explicitly and implicitly address the tristesse of Turkey’s post-coup, depoliticized decades, while texts such as Jorge Volpi’s The Melancholic Temperament (1996) takes melancholy as a central theme in its exploration of the Tarkowski-like director’s final project.33 The idea of a post-ideological melancholy, featuring a consciousness frustrated not only by the absence of alternatives but also by a discouraging awareness of its own historical contingency, is a Janus-faced phenomenon, both universal and particular: universal insofar as it is responding to the expansion of a Western, Euro-American economic model (what Walden Bello termed “the rollback”,34 the reversal throughout the 1970s and 1980s of many of the gains developing countries had won through decolonization), but simultaneously context-specific with regard the peculiar history of each region. Specific histories of neoliberalism, indeed of the internationalization of each country, vary from place to place. This is not just to make the obvious point that assessing the impact of neoliberalism on British or American fiction will require different parameters from an examination of Latin American or Middle Eastern texts; even between so-called developing regions such as Mexico, Turkey and Bengal, the dissolution of the Kemalist State is a different thing from the defeat of the Mexican PRI, and another thing again from the gradual rollback of the 40-year-old Indian nation-state which was already under pressure in the late 1980s.35 We are trying to find commonalities here, but this does not mean we will overlook specifics. Apolitical Melancholy: The Tridib-Protagonist But of course, among other things Tridib was an archaeologist, he was not interested in fairylands: the one thing he wanted to teach me, he used to say, was to use my imagination with precision. – Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines36

To be apolitical can mean a myriad of things: to have no passion for change; to express indifference toward the political mechanisms of the human world; to have ideas, but not faith in humanity’s structures to carry them through; etymologically, it can even mean not having a native city to call one’s own (as valid today in our sports-obsessed age as it was in the time of the Peleponnesian Wars). To be apolitical suggests the conviction that something – corruption, relativism, an insuperable greed or indelible incompetence – permeates all systematic attempts to move human life forward. It is no subtle irony that in recent years, the term “apolitical” has acquired

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a very definite political meaning – namely, as a kind of behavior cynically cultivated by power to discourage and derail political action. The character of Tridib in Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel The Shadow Lines stands alongside Pamuk’s Osman in The New Life and Enrigue’s nameless scholar-chef in “Escape from Suicide City” as three characters united in one quality: a melancholy awareness of the extent to which the grand narratives of past and present are constructed through our imagination. The awareness is an alienating one – a gnosis which separates the knower from the believers around them, a sad enlightenment which renders everyone else a tiny little bit naïve (“Nobody was ever quite sure where they stood with Tridib; there was a casual self-mockery about many of the things he said”37). Sartre wrote “I have never given an order in my life without laughing”,38 and something of this existentialist detachment comes through in what we might call the Tridib protagonist: once we realize that everything we know or believe in is an invention – either ours or somebody else’s – how seriously can we take anything? Of the many stories that form Ghosh’s moving and accomplished tale of memory, nationalism and unrequited love in 1970s London and Calcutta, Tridib’s effect on his “nephew” (actually the grandson of his aunt) constitutes the philosophical underpinning of the book, the epistemological framework around which many of the novel’s subtler political positions will be built. In a textual world filled with Maoists, nationalists, communists and capitalists, Tridib’s relationship with the narrator occupies a central place in the narrative – and also in the narrator’s world: “Tridib had given me worlds to travel in and had given me eyes to see them with” (20). Tridib teaches the younger narrator not only how to recognize other people’s worlds as creations, but also how to create his own. As a result, he is imbued with a mysterious, slightly guru-like aura, especially for the younger narrator: someone who has grasped the essential absurdity of a constructed universe, and whose inaction (he hardly travels, has no visible job, possesses no religious or political beliefs) is largely a consequence of his own epistemology. Even his death in the closing pages in the book, attempting to save May from the hands of a sectarian mob, is suggested to be more an expression of philosophical futility than an act of self-sacrifice. Surrounded by so many characters with a strong sense of their national identity (particularly Robi and the grandmother), Tridib does what most Tridib-protagonists do: highlight the naïveté of essentialism, and the dangers of fanaticism, in those around them. It is perhaps only slightly glib to consider him the walkingembodiment of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (written six years before) – everything Tridib says and does reminds us of the artificial, ephemeral nature of all religious and political belief, and certainly all nationalist narratives. There are familiar debates here – arguments over whether the expression in contemporary fiction of incommunicable subjectivity, the celebration of hybridity and a default cynicism toward any political/nationalist/

178 Melancholy religious program goes hand in hand with a larger societal Zeitgeist of depoliticization (particularly in terms of economic redistribution), anti-politics and post-ideological “centrism”. The introduction to this book does briefly float the idea that Ghosh’s commercial popularity might owe something to the subtextual endorsement of the free movement of capital in his work – particularly in a book like In An Antique Land, where an older, wiser pattern of trade is set favorably against the narrow-mindedness of the modern Egyptian nation-state. Although positive political interpretations of The Shadow Lines abound,39 there are critics who have expressed serious reservations about Ghosh’s book – either about the way The Shadow Lines offers personal relationships as a solution to contemporary crises (Rajeswari Sunder Rajan), or concerning the “postmodern banalities” that are employed throughout the novel to celebrate “an amorphous Romantic subjectivity” (A.N. Kaul).40 The Shadow Lines is not a banal book, nor does it unquestioningly endorse the worldview of the apolitical Tridib (as his ultimate death might seem to confirm). The sadness that permeates the novel, as I’ve written elsewhere,41 has multiple versions: the sadness of inaction, of desire, of material failure, of unfulfillment, and (sharing this with the other two texts) the inimitable tristesse in the search for identity. Bearing in mind the postcolonial perspective from the previous section on Chaudhuri, there might even be a kind of postcolonial melancholy in Ghosh’s work – not in this case a lament for the end of Empire, but rather a form of hidden, self-reproaching lament, an unconscious mourning for the death of something one did not love. But beneath all these various sadnesses, a very definite melancholy at the constructedness (and implicit illegitimacy) of all narratives takes place – and for any reader who believes in the validity of political action, it is difficult not to see the rejection of the political that arises from this philosophical conclusion as problematic. The representation, for example, of Ila and her leftist, activist friends, is perhaps the most visible example of this tendency: The people Ila shared her house with spent their evenings in the kitchen whenever they were in. They consisted of a bearded computer scientist, a girl from Leicester who had dropped out in her second year at the North London Polytechnic to work with the Fourth International, and a morose young Ghanaian who was very active in the Anti-Nazi League. They would spend their evenings sitting around the deal table in the kitchen drinking mugs of tea, or sometimes, when they could afford it, beer. Their conversations were almost always severely practical. For hours on end they would argue about which kind of pen was better for drawing posters with, or over how they ought to make the arrangements for lunch or tea at their next picket. There were no explosive arguments nor any shouting as there would have been among likeminded people in Calcutta or Delhi. When they did argue, it was usually

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about small points of tactics and strategy, and the arguments usually consisted of a series of increasingly oblique statements, loaded with references to a long history of personal political decisions. (97) There is certainly an argument to be made for the idea of Tridib as a postmodern foil in the book, someone whose belief in the infinite redescribability of the universe finally meets its truth one afternoon on a backstreet in Dhaka (May even says to him: “All you’re good for is words. Can’t you ever do anything?”, 173). What is harder to avoid in Ghosh’s novel is this voice – the thoughtful, reflective, non-judgmental narrator, who wins us over to reader empathy while at the same time sharing many of Tridib’s own conclusions. The political activists in the passage share with the grandmother (indeed with so many “unenlightened” characters in the novel) the status of narrative devotees: deluded souls who, as Fukuyama would have it, have not yet realized their horizon is only one of many. Their “severely practical” recourse to the minutiae of political life – which poster pen to use, what lunch to eat before a demonstration – is presented as no empirical proof of their beliefs, but rather a sign of their intellectual parochialism. Although intent on exposing political activism as a fantasy, in many ways what emerges here is Ghosh’s own fantasy of what political activism means for him: people arguing endlessly about Nicaragua or the Marxist dialectic, something the Irishman, the Ghanaian and the Fourth International Communist are implicitly rebuked for failing to do. This diminution, even parodying of political action is not exclusive to The Shadow Lines. In Pamuk’s New Life /Yeni Hayat (as we shall see next), the nationalist resistance to invasive foreign products is a parody of Kemalist patriotism – grocers, storekeepers and shop owners. One of Pamuk’s favorite themes, it might be said (something he inherits from Tanpınar) is the gentle parody of all three political programs – nationalist, leftist, Islamist – and an exploration of the more theological aspects of the conspiracy theory (satirized in novels such as The Black Book, Snow and The New Life as a Sufi quest for knowledge). In Enrigue’s story “Escape from Suicide City”, the political is not so much diminished as removed completely – the polarized Peru of Fujimora and the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) is wholly absent, giving way to the drama about a reality TV cooking competition. Almost all of the political content is condensed into a series of tense exchanges between the protagonist and his taxi-driver – and even here, the political is never explicit, but merely simmers beneath the surface of the dialogue. All three texts belong to a post-political literature; a literature in which politics is no longer a reality, but simply a lifestyle choice, like fishing, cooking or travel. The sadness ingrained in these texts has some connection with the closure of genuine political possibilities, and the unconscious recognition that truth-manufacture, like truth-seeking, is a finite activity with limited ends.

180 Melancholy Before moving onto Pamuk, perhaps one further point should be made. A number of critics have mentioned a link between melancholy and the sublime – either in a Kantian sense (our response to the inability of language to represent42), or a Lacanian sense (the subject’s reaction to the impossibility of the Real 43), or just simply the idea that melancholy itself is that which resists synthesis and transcendence (Dimakapolou44). Melancholy is, as it were, the stumbling block in the grand march of the dialectic; the kidney stone, so to speak, in the bladder of ideology. That which lingers in a text, never quite being processed by the culmination of the plot or the development of the characters or the resolution of the themes, but always somehow absurdly present, in a manner reminiscent of obscura melancholia itself. The Shadow Lines is a novel which has this quality in abundance: an odd sublimity, considering the near-complete absence of any reference to religion (Islam and the theft of the Prophet’s hair, in the closing section, appears to be the only real example). Part of this is due to the reflective tone of the recollecting narrator – indeed, the entire novel might be considered an act of remembrance. A great deal of the melancholy sublime, however, does come from the political pessimism of the book itself. In a world where no belief system produces anything but narrow-mindedness, violence and delusion, the recourse to the micro-world of the personal and the mnemonic is at best a second-rate solution, at worst an unconscious recognition of total political defeat. The sublimity lies in the inarticulability of this fact – no one in the novel can quite bring themselves to express this impasse, which is why Tridib’s death (death-cum-suicide) remains such a mystery for so long. Globalization and The New Life: Ziya Gökalp’s Caramels “The coincidence that I loved and accepted with joy, thinking it was life itself, turned out to be mere fiction constructed by someone else [bir başkasının kurgusumuş]”, said the hoodwinked hero. – The New Life, p165, 156 …the Turkish bad boy, child of a state which has long since lost its power to the West. – Nurdan Gürbilek, p166

Perhaps one of the testimonies to the breadth of Pamuk as a novelist is that each of his novels might be considered the working-out of a single philosophical question. The White Castle (Beyaz Kale), for example, tries to answer “What is a self – and how far does it need an other in order to survive?” The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Muzesi) has as its central question: “What is memory – and what does a life’s devotion to it ultimately entail?” The Black Book (Kara Kitap) – perhaps his most successful text – revolves around the recurring enigma: “What is a culture – and can we ever call the one we have found ourselves in our own?” The Turkish literary critic Nurdan Gürbilek has powerfully argued that this final question – the

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question of authenticity – is one that has effectively defined modern Turkish literature for over a century.45 And yet, although it is a key theme in The New Life, an even deeper, more formative question underpins the text. How do narratives structure our existence – and what happens when we discover we have none? The New Life might be considered a novel which takes this question as its premise – and plays out the life of its protagonist, Osman, as an attempt to prosaically answer it. It is a book which can be (and has been) called many things – a Sufi revisiting of the quest narrative; a mockery of Turkish conspiracy theories; a playful example of intertextuality, even a postmodern reformulation of an already extant folkloric tradition.46 But its driving question links it to The Shadow Lines: how do the worlds we live in emerge? And once they have emerged, how do we free ourselves of them? The New Life revolves around a book – a Book – whose contents are never revealed to us, but which changes the lives of those who read it – including Osman, the protagonist (named after the original Turkish word for Ottoman). The phrase “new life” (yeni hayat) alludes not just to Dante’s Nuova Vita, but also to a key phrase used by the father of modern Turkish nationalism, Ziya Gökalp.47 Writing a decade before the creation of modern Turkey, Gökalp defined the New Life as “not a cosmopolitan life but a national life”, one which “will be created, not copied” (59). Turks would have to find modernity on their own terms – unlike Ottoman Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians, who could adopt European civilization like “ready-made suits in department stores” (ibid). Gökalp’s promise of the discovery of a new, revitalizing national essence is messianic: “we shall create a genuine civilization, a Turkish civilization, which will follow the growth of a New Life” (60). As a melancholy novel, in other words, The New Life is another profoundly anti-nationalist text. It ontologically dissects nationalism, finding within it the same metaphysical viscera that lie inside Marxism and Islam. The novel examines, in an almost phenomenological way, the existential glow Osman receives when he first reads the Book, and sees all the pieces of his life fall into place. More pathetically, it displays the melancholy void Osman falls into in the final third of the book, when he begins to fully realize – detail by devastating detail – exactly how the Book that changed his life was written, and exactly who wrote it. In his interview with another former devotee of the Book, we learn: After having read the book thousands of times, he had seemed to remember something reminiscent of it in the children’s comics he had read. He had located these comics in the libraries, and pinpointing the astonishing similarities, he had detected the identity of the author. … “You know” I said, deliberately enunciating each syllable and staring in his face, “many times I was under the impression that the book was about me, that the story was my story” [hikâyenın benim hikâyem olduğu]. (223, 227, 213)

182 Melancholy The New Life investigates both the prelude to, and the aftermath of, this cosmic disillusionment. The experience of both these men is perhaps the most poignant moment in the novel: gradually understanding from their childhood comics that the author of the mysterious Book, which has messianically reconfigured their lives, is no one other than an illustrator of kids’ comics. What Pamuk’s novel shows is what happens when the “Imagined Community” discovers it is imaginary. As with Ghosh, what ensues is sadness and death – even if the death in Pamuk/Osman’s case is not suicidal but homicidal: driven to despair by the discovery of its true circumstances, Osman murders the son of Dr Fine. If disenchantment in The Shadow Lines leads to losing the will to live, in The New Life it results in disillusioned violence. The various references to globalization in the novel further reinforce the political context of the book. In the wake of the 1980 political coup, engineered by Kenan Evren – the Turkish military officer who, in subsequent years, would become president – a whole set of neoliberal reforms were brought in by a socially conservative party (ANAP), blending together economic liberalism with social conservatism (the high school hall where Osman and Janan witness a parade of nationalistic gadgets and devices in the novel is called Kenan Evren High School 87). Among the many parodied figures in The New Life, Dr Fine is the conspiracy theorist who appears to apply Ibn ‘Arabi’s notion of the oneness of being/wahd al wujud to the global circulation of goods (again, a jibe at Gökalp, who repeatedly quoted the twelfth-century Sufi and who saw him as an inspiring forerunner of Berkeley, Kant and Descartes48). As a result, Dr Fine perceives an invasion that not everyone is aware of – the invasion of the nation-state by foreign brands: “Substances inquire after one another, come to an agreement, whisper to one another, and strike up a harmony, constituting the music we call the world” said Doctor Fine. “Those who are attentive hear it, see it, and comprehend it”. (123) As a storekeeper, he refuses to help the CIA by selling Coca-Cola or American chewing-gum: He was unconcerned that only old men and flies dropped by his store, he continued stocking only those products which had traditionally been available to his forefathers. (128) Pamuk here is parodying Atatürk’s resistance against the colonial powers through his collection of small-town Anatolian shopkeepers who refuse to sell any foreign products. The struggle is a forlorn, futile one, but it is interesting to see how all three stories of melancholy invoke some form of

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globalization as a background to their obituary of the Grand narrative – in The Shadow Lines, it is Nick’s fantasies of global finance and the endless airport lounges Ila travels through, while in the Enrigue short story to come, the international scene of global cuisine forms the backdrop – a Mexican chef competes in Peru for a Swiss reality TV show. The global circulation of goods, and the implicit subjugation and erosion of all local alternatives, offers the commodity version of what has already taken place on an ideological level. The ill-fated attempt, in the novel, to put into circulation a Turkish sweet which might effectively encapsulate the national spirit is perhaps the most striking example of this: When New Life Caramels had once more found favor in Malatya and its vicinity, the Chamber of Commerce, in an effort much like stamping a final coin for a collapsing empire [sökmekte olan bir imparatörluğu bastırdığı son bir sikke gibi], had published an article in its newsletter … reminiscing how New Life Caramels had once been used in lieu of small change at groceries and tobacconists. … everything had come to an end when the well-advertised fruit-flavored products produced by a big international company were seen on TV, being consumed very attractively by an American starlet with beautiful lips. (271-2, 253) Sadness in The New Life has this empirical, commodified feel. Gökalp’s nationalist hopes, the vision of a purer, more authentic nation, finding within itself the essence of its own unfolding, have become a penny toffee no one buys anymore. It is a strength of the book that it manages to combine two different spheres – the economic and the intellectual – in depicting the futility of clinging to a product/narrative that people no longer buy/believe in. As with Ghosh, the neoliberal aspect of this sadness lies in the linking of the free movement of capital with the free movement of ideas – Pamuk’s novel merely takes this process a step further by literally talking about fizzy drinks, candy and chewing gum. One old man tells the protagonist at the very end: “Today we are altogether defeated” [bügün biz artık kaybetmişiz], he said. “The West has swallowed us up, trampled on us in passing. They have invaded us down to our soup, our candy, our underpants; they have finished us off. But someday, someday perhaps a thousand years from now, we will avenge ourselves; we will bring an end to this conspiracy [kumpasa] by taking them out of our soup, our chewing gum, our souls”. (290-1, 271) Like The Shadow Lines, The New Life is an ambivalent book – and not simply because it comments on a melancholy it is somehow responsible for.

184 Melancholy The New Life may well parody belief systems, and gently mock those who feel they have finally found the narrative that makes sense of the random sequence of phenomena that is their life. At the same time, it offers no hope to those who have successfully glimpsed, through the magic curtain of their narrative, the disappointing, everyday workmen at the levers. Having discounted the political, there is no existentialist recourse to the dignity of the self, no Nietzschean call for courage in the face of the void. Indeed, one of the features of all three of our texts is that we are left with a sense of quandary at the end – the melancholy of listlessness, of having nowhere in particular to go. Archival Fervor: Recooking the Mexican Seventeenth Century My own gastronomic principles require me to live in total retreat from the world; I don’t believe that one can re-create seventeenth century Mexican convent cooking [que se pueda reproducir la cocina conventual mexicana del siglo XVII] unless one exists in harmony with the ways of life that gave rise to it. – Alvaró Enrigue, Hypothermia, p14549

Alvaró Enrigue’s 2005 short story “Escape from Suicide City” offers a case study in twenty-first-century melancholia. Blending together a whole host of different themes – consumer culture, suicide, the irrelevance of scholarly life, global cuisine, the existential importance of canny marketing and the internal, at times schizophrenic contours of immigrant identity – Enrigue puts together a story which is cynical in its mockery of practically everything (national identity, human relationships, cosmopolitanism) but nevertheless retains emotional weight by keeping the reader perspective close to its flawed and slightly embittered protagonist.50 The clever title of the wider set of linked short stories it belongs to, Hipotermia, already lends many of the texts a melancholic edge – a metaphorical death due to cold, bereft of any human warmth, threatens a number of protagonists in the book. This is accentuated in “Escape from Suicide City” by the ever-present theme of suicide in the story, and the possibility (never realized) that the narrator himself may become one such victim by the end of it. The protagonist – a melancholy Mexican scholar-chef who has made a name in the United States out of repackaging “authentic” Mexican dishes from the seventeenth century – visits Lima, to participate in a reality TV cooking show. Effectively cuckolded by the loss of his wife to one of his own graduate students, he negotiates his way through Enrigue’s story, marveling at the quality and quantity of Lima’s suicide rate while simultaneously trying to get success (professionally) with Peru’s most famous chef, Max Terapia, and (sexually) with the Swiss woman who is producing the TV show. Together with The Shadow Lines and The New Life, “Escape from Suicide City” shares one thematic vein in particular – an individual’s

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recognition of the artificial constructedness of the narratives we live in. Like Tridib and Osman before him, Enrigue’s protagonist is aware the lifeworld he is inhabiting is a fiction – moreover, a fiction of his own making, or at least of his own research. A small difference remains: whereas Osman and Tridib’s melancholy comes from an awareness of the finite constructedness of the world’s narratives, the unhappiness of the scholar-chef is primarily due to the loss of his wife’s affections. Nevertheless, the atmospheric background of the story – a city whose disenchanted locals line up to jump off its tallest building – provides the text not just with its title (the building, which happens to be the Ministry of Commerce, is ominously named “the Suicide building”) but also with a darkly permanent, semi-present subtext, a low hum of morbidity which offsets the funny sarcasm of the narrator (“the rhythms of a man”, he says of himself, “inhabiting an imaginary seventeenth century [un siglo XVII imaginario] apparently don’t mix with those … of the clamorous twenty-first” 158). The suicides are key to the story, as they openly draw on and reenact the indigenous suicides that took place during the conquista, and implicitly (recalling Paz and his mythologization of the melancholy of the Mexican) mirror the death of the premodern subject under the onslaught of the modern. The so-called Suicide building – the Ministry of Commerce – is described as an immobile, featureless force (“dark gray, made of concrete, without decoration or markings”, 156), suggesting a capital-driven modernity that steamrolls over everything else. The imaginary seventeenth century the scholar-chef inhabits represents, in many ways, an air-bubble of monastic protection against the cynical, world-dissolving modernity around him – even if, like Tridib and later like Osman, he is uncomfortably aware of the studied artifice of the century he has created for himself: as far as I know, the only people who eat at my restaurant are Adams Morgan residents and a few Mexican diplomats and professors who tend to be excessively nostalgic – as if the food that I make really has something in common with the country that we were all so happy to escape from. (p147) Falsity plays a central role in the story. As with Ghosh and Pamuk, national identity is one of the main targets of this critique – something which Enrigue assaults through the lens of commodification. The Swiss cooking show is a spectacular contest of different nationalities, as Peruvians, Argentinians, Mexicans and Venezuelans vie to sell the brand of their nation’s cuisine. The global marketing of national identity and culinary authenticity, tied in with the semantics of global consumption, presents a somewhat superficial, greed-driven, revenue-calculating world where history, sincerity, craftmanship and even faith are repackaged and sold as bankable assets in the travelentertainment industry. The story’s sarcastic narrator is (like Tridib) a

186 Melancholy reluctant participant in this game of essences, and although his melancholy may not stem directly out of the awareness that he is “inhabiting an imaginary seventeenth century” (158), something of the author’s nihilism (what he calls his “abominably boring and friendless life”, 148) comes through in his complete disavowal of any political, religious or even national identity. For this reason, “Escape from Suicide City” enjoys an ambiguous relationship to the circus of global capital and exchange it depicts. On the one hand, it holds up as self-evidently farcical not just the specialist dishes of the narrator – recreated from the recipes of seventeenth-century Mexican convent nuns – but also the guru cult around the TV star chef himself, Max Terapia, whose dedication to his own reputation has led him to use an original nineteenth-century kitchen in his house with a hand-powered water pump. A mocking mirror is held up to the flaws and currents of global (read bankable) cosmopolitanism: A U.S.-resident Mexican chef invited to Peru to take part in a Swiss cooking show called LARD alongside other Argentinians and Venezuelans … the strength of the story is indeed its ability to depict such surreal combinations of phenomena with complete seriousness, with the political edge in the resulting hilarity coming mainly from the presence of the poor – either the no-nonsense indigenous driver in the story, or the wider sense that it is the subalterns of cities such as Lima and D. F. (the servants and the chauffeurs and the nannies) who are “truly responsible” for the education of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, there is something faintly problematic in the constant cynicism of “Escape from Suicide City” which seems to act less as a threat and more as an accompaniment to, and even a symptom of, the neoliberalism it depicts. The protagonist’s flaneur-like, rogue-ish, quasi-nihilistic approach to the events he encounters seems to underline the absence of any ideological position in the text – inside or outside of the story. The narrator is adrift, emotionally as well as politically, in the world he has found himself thrown into, an alienation which is exacerbated by the simultaneous resemblance/difference of hispanophone Lima to Mexico City: “it’s your language and not your language – a parallel reality. … I was coming back to a place that seemed like home but just wasn’t” (154). The result is someone who, having lived within his own imaginary bubble for so long, is unable to believe in anybody else’s. The levity inherent in this cynicism leads us back to the earlier point discussed with reference to The Shadow Lines – namely, a post-ideological literature, in which political positions are either gently parodied or completely absent. The melancholy induced by this foreclosing of the political as an avenue of possible action is compensated by physical pleasure – not just the sexual yearnings of the protagonist in “Escape”, but also the blissfully physical reunion with Teresa in a second linked story, “Last Supper in Seduction City” (different in the Spanish original, “Ritorno a la ciudad del ligue”), where several pages of detailed sexual intercourse appear to resolve the protagonist’s melancholia once and for all. It would be unfair to suggest, following theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, that Enrigue

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replaces political action with sexual pleasure here as a project of radical human emancipation – but the negative description of a corporate happiness culture we find in the book, both in “Escape” and elsewhere in Hipotermia, is somewhat undermined by this promise of sexual performance as a kind of metaphysical consolation. All of which leads us to a more general point concerning the political possibilities inherent in melancholy itself. Up to now, the argument has been straightforward: that from the late Eighties onward, the presence of melancholy (be it as theme, landscape, character trait or narrative mood) in a number of key texts by certain writers (not just those discussed, but also names such as Amit Chaudhuri, Jorge Volpi and Upamanyu Chatterjee) were a consequence and a symptom of a political and philosophical neoliberalism, an ideological void in which the quietly, endlessly commodifying machine of late capitalism emerged as the “only game in town”51. Literary melancholy, in this sense, remains the unconscious sign of a certain defeat – an a posteriori effect of a process it had no ability to influence or change. Some scholars see this quite differently, and have made various attempts to construct “a politics of melancholy” (to use Scott Lash’s phrase), one in which the melancholic stance (isolation, pensiveness, inaction) would actually equate with resistance and even emancipation.52 Two reasons are generally offered to support this; the first is the idea that melancholy, though its isolation from social practices, brings about an “alienation necessary to gain a critical insight into the structure of society itself” (Pensky53) – a crucial gnosis denied to those happily participating in hegemony. The second argument is that the melancholic subject brings with them something obstinately untimely which obstructs and even derails the happy progress of power (akin to Benjamin’s famous conception of revolution as an irruption of the repressed past into the totalitarian present).54 This argument takes the incompleteness in the classic Freudian formulation of melancholy as an incomplete mourning and politically recharges it as something positive and subversive – a refusal to accept the present offered by hegemony. The scholar O’Bryen makes this point in writing on the significance of melancholy in the fiction of Roberto Bolaño – that the melancholy in such texts generates resistance through an emphasis on an untimely engagement with history,55 refusing to forget the murdered and “disappeared” as Chile made its internationally applauded transition from dictatorship to democracy. The grumpiness of melancholy, to put it crudely, subverts the good mood of power, insults the optimism of ideology and twists the head of a forwardlooking social structure back to stare uncomfortably into its past. Neither a moment of paralysis nor a state of political impotence, melancholy is a disruptive temporality. These arguments seem to work well with the first half of our chapter, but not with the second. If the symbolic order being rebelled against is a rigid Kemalist secularism or an aggressive PRI-statism, bristling with truthclaims and objectivities, then what Max Pensky calls “the melancholic

188 Melancholy rebel” is wholly feasible – in the same way standing still creates resistance in a fast-flowing stream. To be in perpetual mourning for a lost object of desire becomes a subversive gesture as soon as that object is prohibited – in a period where Arabic letters and Ottoman hats were banned, Tanpınar’s melancholy nostalgia for the ruined debris of the Ottoman past is a particularly apt example of how, for Scott Lash, “the melancholic [rebel] is always mournful of a dying epoch” (316). The gloom and brooding atmosphere of Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (examined in Chapter 1), as numerous critics have attested, could also be read as a negative response to the Mexican Revolution,56 just as Paz’s emphasis on Mexican melancholy acquires meaning set against the wider economic background of the Mexican miracle (milagro mexicano). In the case of neoliberal melancholy, however, it is not clear how the passivity and inaction of the melancholic subject can be anything other than collusive. To emphasize the subversive “untimeliness” in melancholy is fine as long as there is a hegemonic time (a modern notion of progress or Enlightenment) to give that “untimeliness” meaning. If, however, as Fukuyama suggests, the neoliberal age is indeed one which has reached the “End of History”, an age in which there are no longer any single transcendent narratives but only a plethora of local ones, then how “untimely” neoliberal melancholy is remains irrelevant, as there is no longer any rigid temporality to subvert. In many of the authors from this second section (particularly Pamuk, Chatterjee and Ghosh), the melancholy skepticism that exists in the texts is often directed toward nationalist (statist) time – a gesture which finds itself in unwitting alliance with the neoliberal dissolution of the nation-state, not in resistance against it. One final aspect to examine here is the role of the archive – highlighted in Enrigue’s short story, but present in all of the texts. By “archival” is intended not just the library, museum or bookshop, but also the wider desire to know the arche, the grounding origin, of something. Over the past 30 years, the idea of the archive has been the subject of an increasing amount of theoretical attention. Both Derridean and Foucauldian aspects (the latter renegotiated through Said) have exposed both the political and the existential aspects of archivism – either as a means of controlling the discursive possibilities of what can be said or as the manifestation of a feverish impulse which, torn between the desire to preserve and destroy, forever chases a receding origin.57 A plethora of ideas has emerged surrounding the archive, following on but not merely as a consequence of the two thinkers.58 Is there a relationship between melancholy and the archive? All of our melancholic texts seem to concern some kind of archival desire or activity: in the first section, there are Chaudhuri’s endless visits to the Indian Museum on Chowringhee Road, or Tanpınar’s devotion to the lost songs and brica-brac of Beyoğlu in A Mind at Peace; in The Shadow Lines, the detailobsessed Tridib is working as a PhD in Archaeology (“something to do with the Sena dynasty of Bengal” 7), while Osman in The New Life finds out the author of the magical Book from sifting through endless “comics in the

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libraries, and pinpointing the astonishing similarities” (223) – so fervently, indeed, that one character asks him: “You’re really after the Original Cause, aren’t you?” (227). However, it is Enrigue’s “Suicide City” that deals most centrally with the meaning of the archive, as the career and life-calling of the protagonist appears to be based on his ability to resurrect a Spanish colonial seventeenth century: I couldn’t stop thinking about the days I’d spent digging up old recipes from the General National Archive in Mexico [desenterrar recetas del Archivo General de la Nación]. I would have traded all those staring faces [of my admirers] … for one second of the enormous attention Teresa once paid me as I expounded on the finer points of Mexican convent life in the seventeenth century, and cooked my colonial concoctions just for her. (155) Two needs combine in the story. Love – cynically put, a focused desire for emotional and existential recognition from one other human being – is what drives the trip to the archive here. The archive, and the symbolic capital it offers to the career of the protagonist, becomes a vehicle for getting Teresa back and curing the narrator’s melancholy. The protagonist is an archephile, even spending his spare time as a tourist in Lima “looking for bookshops to see if I could find some title about convent life during Peru’s viceregal era” (166). His desire to alchemically reproduce Baroque Mexican recipes in the present turns the archive – his attitude to libraries, bookshops, museums – into a constant, self-affirming quest for knowledge. And yet, the archive has a wider meaning here too – as an instrument of radical historicism. In all three authors (Ghosh, Pamuk, Enrigue), we have emphasized as a central element an awareness of the artifice of ideology. If the archive emerges as anything here, it is as the place where such belief systems are constructed – and, implicitly, deconstructed. The minutiae of the archive reveals, up close and in detail, the formation of a false-consciousness; that is, exactly how a nation or a religion or an ethnic group is made. For Ghosh and Pamuk, this manner of archival epiphany is largely a disenchanting one – the more you read, the less you believe. The more documents you encounter about identity X, the more you realize how it is not magically free of its surroundings, transcendentally hovering above everything else, but rather is embedded in a history of contexts, causes, variants and precedents. In Alvaró Enrigue, this story runs slightly differently – part of the protagonist’s melancholy does come from a sad familiarity with the archive, and the belief-dissolving nature of its rigor; at the same time (and somewhat like Tridib), Enrigue’s narrator takes advantage of the endless pool of texts, names, images to construct his own version (echoing Blake’s famous dictum “I must create a System / Or be enslav’d by another Man’s”) in a moment of what might be termed “melancholy pragmatism”.

190 Melancholy If a relationship between literary melancholy (melancholy expounded in literature) and capitalism exists, then that relationship will have to be as old and historically finite as capitalism itself. Of course, like most of the chapter-subjects in this book, melancholy precedes capitalism as a culturally documented phenomenon; as a pervading, difficult-to-articulate sense of loss, it is at least as old as the Psalms. The Warwick Research Collective, echoing Marshall Berman, have described nineteenth-century literature as “an encoding of the capitalisation of the world” (18), and it is not unreasonable to speculate that a premodern, ontological sense of lack can overlap into a more materially constituted alienation. The dated yet still useful modern/postmodern distinction which informs this chapter – Paz, Tanpınar, Chaudhuri expressing a sense of loss, with Pamuk, Enrigue and Ghosh highlighting a more contemporary loss of sense – does show how transhistorical constants such as sadness, death, domination or spectrality can morph and inflect themselves from one historical period to another. What both sets of authors are actually doing, in different ways, is encoding a capitalist sense of alienation into literature as monmora, hüzün and melancolía.

Notes 1 Rabindranath Tagore, Yogayog: Upanyas (Calcutta: Technology Research Council, 2013) p. 90. 2 Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul, trans. Maureen Freely (Faber and Faber, 2005) pp. 81–97. 3 For more on the dating of the composition of Labyrinth of Solitude, see Fernando Vizcaíno, Biografía Política de Octavio Paz (Madrid: Editorial Algazara, 1993) p. 88 and José Quiroga, Understanding Octavio Paz (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1999) pp. 58–60. 4 V. S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972) p. 59; Doris Lessing, Time Bites: Views and Reviews (London: HarperCollins, 2004) p. 214. 5 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India: 1921–52 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988) p. 868. 6 S. Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act” Critical Inquiry (Summer 2000) p. 661. 7 At least one critic has called the Autobiography a “basically melancholic and nervy” text – S.P. Swain, “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian: A Critique” in R.K. Dhawan (ed.), Nirad C. Chaudhuri: The Scholar Extraordinary (Delhi: Prestige, 2000) p. 89. 8 S. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in J. Strachey (ed), Standard Edition of the Complete Works, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957) p. 246. 9 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001) p. 380. 10 Chaudhuri, Autobiography, p. 465. 11 Enderwitz, “Modernist Melancholia”, p. 174. 12 Chaudhuri, Autobiography, pp. 248–249. 13 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) in particular the chapter entitled “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (83–93). 14 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998) p. 139; in German text, Gesammelte Schriften 1:1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) p. 318.

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15 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar , A Mind at Peace, trans. Erdağ Göknar (New York: Archipelago Books, 2008) pp. 60–1, 63; Turkish original – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Huzur (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayinlari, 2009) pp. 54, 56. 16 Şeyhmus Diken, Sırrını Surlarına Fısıldaya Şehir: Diyarbakir (Istanbul: Iletişim, 2002) p. 105. 17 I am grateful to Cemil Aydin and Erdağ Göknar for drawing my attention to this point. 18 Tanpınar, A Mind at Peace, p. 428. 19 Nurdan Gürbilek, Kör Aynı, Kayıp Sark (Istanbul: Metis, 2004) p. 118 ff. For more on Chaudhuri’s relationship with his father, see Ian Almond, The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) pp. 117–118. Çimen Günay-Erkol, finally, has argued for the presence of a traumatized male identity at the heart of A Mind at Peace – Çimen Günay-Erkol, “Sleepwalking in İstanbul: A Man in Anguish in A. H. Tanpinar’s A Mind at Peach” Symposium 63:2 (2009) p. 87. 20 If A Mind at Peace is a celebration of the Ottoman legacy, then it is another novel – The Time Regulation Institute (Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitusu) – which effectively mocks the mono-ethnic social engineering of the Turkish nationalist project. 21 Given the fact that Chaudhuri wrote his Autobiography in Delhi, we might say he was geographically well-placed to invoke this most Urdu of genres. 22 Fritz Lehmann, “Urdu Literature and Mughal Decline” Mahfil 6:2/3 (1970) p. 127. 23 In Urdu poetry, Mir Taqi Mir, Ghulam and Qazi Mahmud Bahri are some of the most famous practitioners of the genre, although Sa’adi’s laments for the sack of Baghdad (1258 – Petrevitch 100) and al-Rundi’s laments for the fall of Seville (sometime during the 1240s/1250s – Tignol p1) are among the rival candidates for the beginning of the genre – see Carla R. Petievich, “Poetry of the Declining Mughals: The ‘Shahr Shob’” Journal of South Asian Literature 25:1 (Winter, Spring 1990) p. 100 and Eve Tignol, “A Note on the Origins of Hali’s Musaddas-e Madd-o Jazr-e Islām” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (May 2016) p. 1. Sunil Sharma, among others, has highlighted the homoerotic aspects of the shahr-i ashob – the “beautiful boys” whose good looks can cause distress to a city – Sunil Sharma, “The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24:2 (2004) p. 74; see also Pasha Mohamad Khan, “The Lament for Delhi” (1863) in Shobna Nijhawan (ed.), Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009) pp. 89–90. 24 Two interesting comparative studies of Paz and Adorno can be found in the same volume, Oliver Kozlarek (ed.), Octavio Paz: Humanism and Critique (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009) – Alfons Söllner, “Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz – A Comparison of Their Early Cultural-Philosophical Writings” (19–30) and Oliver Kozlarek, “Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz – Two Critiques of the Same Modernity” (31–46). 25 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. L. Kemp, Y. Milos, R.P. Belash (New York: Grove Press, 1985). Bold numbers refer to the Spanish original – El Laberinto de la Soledad, Postdata, Vuelta a el Laberinto de la Soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004). 26 Tanpınar, A Mind at Peace, p. 367. 27 Labyrinth of Solitude, pp. 189, 188. 28 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992) p. 306. 29 Simon Critchley, “The Split Subject” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35:1 (2008) p. 79.

192 Melancholy 30 Tammy Clewell, “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52:1 (2004) p. 50. 31 Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” in J. Natoli and L. Hutcheon (eds), A Postmodern Reader (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) pp. 280– 281. 32 I’ve written about this elsewhere – see Ian Almond, “Melancholy, Ghostliness and Economy in the Short Fiction of Amit Chaudhuri” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46:2 (2010) pp. 164–174. 33 Jorge Volpi, El temperamento melancólico (Mexico City: Editorial Seix Barral, 1996). 34 Walden F. Bello, Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) p. 86 – cit. in Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 38. 35 For more on the specifically Mexican context of neoliberalism in Mexico – particularly, how the “Mexican counter-revolution opened the space for political ideas” concerning civic freedom which economic liberalism and free-trade interests were happy to piggyback (95) – see Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “Mont Neoliberal Periodization: The Mexican “Democratic Transition” from Austrian Libertarianism to the “War on Drugs”” in Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro (eds), World Literature, Neoliberalism and the Culture of Discontent (London: Palgrave, 2018) pp. 93–110. Sharae Deckard and S. Shapiro, in the same volume, have also warned against the use of neoliberalism as a “quicksand term” that “indiscriminately sucks all commentary into its maw” without any concern for time or context – “World Culture and the Neoliberal World System: An Introduction” in Deckard and Shapiro (eds), World Literature, Neoliberalism, p. 4. 36 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 24. 37 Ibid., p. 10. 38 Jean-Paul Sartre, Words, trans. Irene Clephane (London: Penguin, 1967) p. 16. 39 Meenakshi Mukherjee sees no novel of ‘‘dislocation’’, but rather a text where distance is ‘‘perceived as a challenge to be overcome through the use of imagination and desire until space gets dissolved’’ (Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates of meaning in The Shadow Lines” in Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, p. 256). Anjali Roy, in an essay on the oral “microhistory” inherent in Ghosh’s text, probably offers the most positive interpretation of The Shadow Lines as a text which doesn’t merely ‘‘challenge essentialist notions of identity’’ but even (through the figure of Tridib) ‘‘hints at [different] possibilities of community formation, one which might aptly be termed postnationalist’’(Anjali Roy, “‘Microstoria’: Indian Nationalism’s ‘Little Stories’ in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35:1 (2000) p. 40). For Roy, the positive affirmation of The Shadow Lines lies in an emphasis on ‘‘the spoken word’’ as a means of recovery of ‘‘the foreclosures and absences of written records’’ (42) – a peculiarly undeconstructed preference for the spoken over the written, particularly given the theoryendebted background and direction of Roy’s approach. A more guarded reading is offered by Nivedita Bagchi, who acknowledges a desire in Ghosh’s book to “validate the postcolonial experience” and reconstruct history, but is nevertheless undone by “a language that undermines the concept of chronology itself” (Nivedita Bagchi, “The Process of Validation in Relation to Materiality and Historical Reconstruction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines” Modern Fiction Studies 39:1 (1993) p. 196). For Roy, in other words, Ghosh’s understanding of History may lose its capital letter but isn’t thrown away by the end of the book; however in Bagchi’s interpretation Ghosh, a little more uncer-

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tainly, leaves the reader ‘‘with the question of the possibility of reconstructing our history along (western) shadow lines’’ (196). The Shadow Lines, far from being a Romantic recovery of the oral, the everyday and the particular, is a question mark on the subject of history, a 185-page expression of doubt over the certainties of (Western) identities. 40 See Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “The Division of Experience in the Shadow Lines” in Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, pp. 287–298 and A.N. Kaul, “A Reading of The Shadow Lines” in Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, pp. 299–308. Daniel Hartley, drawing on Badiou, has written on how “selected elements of personal resistance are strategically incorporated into operations of capital accumulation” – D. Hartley, “Keeping it Real: Literary Impersonality under Neoliberalism” in Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro (eds), World Literature, Neoliberalism and the Culture of Discontent (London: Palgrave, 2018) p. 136. 41 See Ian Almond, “Post-Colonial Melancholy: An Examination of Sadness in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines” Orbis Litterarum 59 (2004) pp. 90–99. 42 For more on this Kantian idea of the sublime as an encounter with something defying our capacity to rationally describe it, see both Yu Liu, “The Beautiful and the Sublime: Kant’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained” Studies in Romanticism 42:3 (2003) p. 194 and also Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 109ff. 43 John Lechte, “Art, Love, and Melancholy in the Work of Julia Kristeva” in Andrew Benjamin and John Fletcher (eds), Αbjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 24. 44 Stamatina Dimakopoulou, “Remapping the Affinities between the Baroque and the Postmodern: The Folds of Melancholy & the Melancholy of the Fold” E-rea [online], 4.1 (2006), document 11. Accessed 5 August 2018. http://journals​ .openedition​.org​/erea​/415 45 Nurdan Gürbilek, The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window, trans. Victoria Holbrook (London: Zed Books, 2011) pp. 192, 196. 46 Ahmet Alver, “New Life, Old Conspiracies: Pamuk’s Parodic Representations of Turkish Conspiratorial Logic in The New Life” Journal of European Studies 46:2 (2016) pp. 99–109; Berna Moran, Tuürk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış 3: Sevgi Soysal’dan Bilge Karasu’ya (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003); Elif Türker, “Masal mı, yeni hayat mı? Yeni Hayat Romanını Masalın Biçimbilimi’ne Göre Okuma Denemesi” Millî Folklor 25:100 (2013) pp. 154–161. 47 Ziya Gökalp, “Yeni Hayat ve Yeni Kıymetler” published in Saloniki in 1911 – cit. in Niyazi Berkesi (trans. and ed.), Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) p. 315. 48 Ibid., p. 55. 49 Alvaró Enrigue, Hipotermia (Mexico City: Editorial Anagrama, 2005). English translation “Escape from Suicide City” by Brendan Riley in Hypothermia (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013). 50 Although Hypothermia had been reviewed by Christopher Domínguez Michael in Letras Libres (where the author was called a classical storyteller [un cuentista clásico] who writes like neither Borges nor Chekhov – Letras Libres 28 February 2006), Enrigue’s story has received considerably less critical attention than it deserves. Leda Rendón, in another review, sees the whole collection as a “road movie” whose only constant is “change and desperation” (Revista de la universidad de México n. 30 (2006) p. 103), while Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado praises the novelty of “Escape from Suicide City” for portraying a completely

194 Melancholy different set of immigrant situations from the usual category of U.S.-Mexican immigrant stories (120), and sees a critique of neoliberalism which defends a set of pre-neoliberal values against the onslaught of free-market capitalism (127) – see Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “Narrativa, Afectos y Experiencia: las Configuraciones Ideológicas del neoliberalismo en México” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 35:69 (2009) pp. 115–133. 51 J. Butler, E. Laclau and S. Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000) p. 93. 52 Scott Lash, “Being after Time: Towards a Politics of Melancholy” Cultural Values 2:2/3 (1998) pp. 305–319; see also Michael Keren, “Blogging and the Politics of Melancholy” Canadian Journal of Communication 29:1 (2004) p. 10. 53 Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) p. 33. 54 See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, particularly number 8, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007) pp. 253–264. 55 Rory O’Bryen, “Memory, Melancholia and Political Transition in Amuleto and Nocturno de Chile” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30:4 (2011) p. 475. 56 See Laura Garcia-Moreno, “Melancolía y desencanto en Pedro Páramo” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 30:3 (Spring 2006) pp. 497–519. 57 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002). 58 Some of the basic themes in this array of speculations are the following: an association of the archive with violence, either the deletion of undesirable knowledge or the retention of the desired (Sandhya Shetty, “Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever” diacritics 30:1 [25–48], p. 31); an emphasis on how the structure of the archive produces the content it archives (Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from across the Disciplines” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4:1 (2004) p. 13); an ambiguous recognition of how loss works at the heart of the archival anxiety – loss of empire, of national essence, of custom (Peter Fritzsche, “The Archive” History & Memory 17:1–2 (2005) p. 18); an awareness of the possible subversive uses of the archive in the construction of a counter-memory (Anjali Arondekar, “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14:1/2 (2005) p. 12); a consciousness of the impossibility of origin to the archive, with the related recognition that in the body of the archive, some kind of authentic encounter with the real is sought for in vain (Jaimie Baron, “Contemporary Documentary Film and Archive Fever” The Velvet Light Trap 60 (Fall 2007) p. 17); a sexualizing of the archive, and of the labors of archivism (Helen Freshwater, “The Allure of the Archive” Poetics Today 24:4 (2003) pp. 733–734, 736); finally, the possibility that the archival act of storing renders the stored object unintelligible – an understanding of the archive as a form of fantasy, with the consequent ambiguity that it simultaneously destroys in the act of preserving (Benjamin C. Hutchens, “Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-amnesic History and the An-Archive” SubStance 36:2 (2007) p. 38).

6

The Orient Şark, Prachi, Oriente

Beneath the carpets hid the Oriental and the obvious. – Palinuro de Mexico, Fernando del Paso1

It is perhaps fitting that in our last chapter, we end on the theme of the Orient. The question of what relationship World Literature has to Orientalism – whether the latter gave birth to the former, laid its foundations or whether both worked symbiotically hand in hand with each other to blossom and flourish together – has acquired a new and belated pertinence, 40 years after Said’s critical intervention. Aamir Mufti’s book Forget English!, with its central belief that “a genealogy of World Literature leads to Orientalism” (19),2 has been the foremost attempt to delineate a formative relationship between the two terms: In order to comprehend the structure of literary relations that is now a planet-wide reality, we need to grasp the role that philological Orientalism played in producing and establishing a method and a system for classifying and evaluating diverse forms of textuality, now all processed and codified uniformly as literature. (80) The value of Mufti’s book lies not just in the way he points out the various moments of colonial blindness in Casanova’s work – the refusal, on Casanova’s part, to see how “sociocultural logics” (33) such as Orientalism produce the center-periphery notions in her work; Mufti also shows in relentless institutional detail the ways in which British and German figures (Jones, Wilkins, Schlegel, Goethe) replicated on a literary level the work of Sykes-Picot, carving out and setting in motion a collection of essentialized identities and genres that would eventually come to form the literary map of the planet. This chapter explores a certain tension with this idea – in particular, with the South Asian/Middle Eastern focus of Mufti’s book, a focus which prioritizes Anglo-French imperialism, and excludes its earlier Luso-Hispanic sibling. Mufti’s claim to offer the analysis of a “planet-wide” reality is

196  The Orient problematized (though not contradicted) by the relative absence of any reference to Latin America. Unlike England and France, the parent nations of Latin American colonialism were (in the words of one scholar) “nominally European but truly hybrid nations in denial”.3 The fifteenth-century versions of Spain and Portugal that drove the engines of the Conquista were cultures which, only decades earlier, had emerged themselves from centuries of Islamic rule – an irony, we will see, not lost on subsequent generations of Latin Americans writing on Islam. One of the questions addressed in this chapter will be whether the non-European Orientalisms examined here reflect the world-constructing claims of scholars like Mufti – and, of course, Edward Said himself. Aside from the question of World Literature and the idea of a “single” Orientalism, there are other guiding lines of inquiry too in this examination of Mexican, Turkish and Bengali representations of the Orient: what exactly is at stake in these texts when these motifs emerge? What subtextual quarrels, histories, alternatives bristle beneath the mention of Islam in a Mexican story, beneath the setting of Egypt in a Bengali text? How are secularism and secularizing projects involved in these representations? When Orientalism is presented consciously as a façade, is some deeper, more originary metaphor being suggested? And when countries historically considered “peripheral” perform this gesture, is anything substantially altered by the venue? ~ I feel, somehow, that in this golden noon sunshine an Arab tale could be made: a Persian or Arab landscape – Damascus, Samarkhand or Bokhara. – Tagore, letter to niece, 18944 Or if you prefer, we’ll go to a brothel which I have named Elysian, or Delysian, Fields … houris of saffron promised by Mohammed, odalisques with hair long and blue as the Nile. – Fernando del Paso, Palinuro de Mexico5 Ali is the manservant who takes care of her; he is her lala, that indispensable personage in every old Turkish household, for which no English, no European, equivalent can exist, for it arose from roots wholly foreign to them, wholly Oriental. Halide Edip Adıvar, Memoirs6

In order to avoid misunderstandings, perhaps the first thing to be stressed in this chapter is what it is not trying to do. It is not the intention of this chapter to challenge the depressing ubiquity of the so-called Orient, or the regular pattern of features which all three regions have associated with it; over the past 150 years, all three of our chosen literatures have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of producing essentialized Orients replete with carpets, camels, fanaticism and large (sometimes overwhelming) doses of sexuality. If Tanpınar’s existentially distraught characters can compare their

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loves to “miniatures of an Orient even farther east than Istanbul”, Halide Edib can declare all Kurds to have “a dark face and a tender heart”, and can even describe China as “the most improbable and remote region to an Arab’s mind”.7 If a nineteenth-century Bengali poet like Dutt can lament he has “No cushions, carpets that by riches are/ Brought from the Persian land, or Turkish shore”, then a mid-twentieth-century film like Ali Baba (1941) can cinematically retell in Bengali an Arabian Nights tale against a backdrop of domes and minarets.8 As far as Mexican literature goes, there are either erotic short stories dedicated to the modern adaptation of Sherezade’s story (Rosa Beltran’s tale of a sado-masochistic relationship, for example, “Sheri-Sade”), or more general novels such as Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro de Mexico (1977), which features a (often sexual) reference to the Orient every seven pages (penises “tattoed with souvenirs of Constantinople”, vaginas as “fragrant and tight as an explosion of African roses”, and so on9). Even indigenous poets such as Mikeas Sánchez and Irma Pineda can supply Oriental images of dancing odalisques, or sensual accounts of Arab girls smelling of “hashish and cinnamon”.10 This particular landscape of Oriental tropes, motifs and functions is not only ubiquitous but also to some degree quite uniform – the fact that this uniformity is not our subject in this chapter does not mean it does not exist. A slightly different subject, however, will guide our framework in this final chapter. The three invocations of the Islamic Orient cited above (from Tagore, del Paso and Halide Edib) come not just from three very different writers but also, more importantly, from three very different regions. If the Muslim population of Mexico is practically negligible (notwithstanding all that has just been said concerning a possible mediated Hispanic legacy of Muslim cultural influence), the size and history of Turkey and Bengal’s Muslim populations clearly brings some different questions to the study of their Orientalisms. To begin with Bengal: approximately half of pre-partition Bengal was Muslim, and their relative non-representation in the films/literature/histories of Bengali Hindus is a familiar refrain.11 As the historian Kaviraj points out, in Bangla literature, it is really only with the development of medieval mangalkavya poetry that an awareness of the “subaltern” aspects of the Bengali world – namely, Muslim and lower caste elements – creeps in.12 Before that, a very Sanskritic exclusion of the Islamic took place, an exclusion ironically replicated in many modern literary histories of Bengal. Our chapter deals with non-believers’ representations of Islam and the Orient – this means concentrating on a tradition of Bengali writers from Hindu backgrounds such as Amitav Ghosh and Nirad Chaudhuri. This does not mean, however, that there are no Bengali Muslim writers who do not write about Islam in a secular fashion (see Kaiser Haq’s poem “Eid Mubarak”, for example, which redescribes the religious event as a “teetotallers’ carnival”13). Ironically, there is even a wholeheartedly religious embrace of Orientalist tropes in the Bengali context. Frustrated with the large degree of cultural overlap between Bengali Muslims and Hindus (Muslims having

198  The Orient Hindu names, celebrating puja, imitating caste practices, etc.), many latenineteenth century mullahs and Muslim intellectuals exhorted the “return” to a “purer” Islamic lifestyle, a world which was, in the words of one historian, “essentially one of fantasy … mostly adapted from tales of romance and heroism in Arabic, Persian or Turkish”.14 To focus on Bengali Hindu representations of the Islamic Orient – as we will in this chapter – does not mean to pretend that no Bengali Muslim engagements with such landscapes exist. In the case of Turkey, a similar set of context-specific qualifications need to be made. Turkish-Armenian writers, the majority of whom as Christians shared a considerable degree of coexistence and cultural familiarity with Turks and Kurds, were still capable of producing familiar clichés of the Orient (erotic, dream-like, sensuous) in their descriptions of Muslims. In her thoughtful memoirs Gardens of Silihdar, Zabel Yessayan records the magical impression she had, as a child, of the Muslim neighborhood next to her own: “magnificent mosques whose slim, white minarets joined black cypress trees on the skyline … I was dazzled by the rays of light that seemed to catch fire as they reflected off the golden domes of the mosques”.15 Gardens of Silihdar is a text which refuses to deny the humanity of the Turk – all the more surprising, on Yessayan’s part, given the violent events surrounding it – and yet the magical, Oriental feel of her childhood impressions do suggest some kind of Othering is at work. We see this impasse at its most caricatured in Daniel Varoujian’s poem “Oriental Bath”, which depicts a steam-filled bathing chamber replete with highly sexualized “African” and “Arabian” beauties16; Bedros Tourian’s famous poem “The Turkish Woman” (“T’rk ‘uhi”) is a more Romantic, less carnal version of the same Othering – a glimpse of a passing Turkish woman, frozen in language, silent and sublime.17 Armenian writers were also capable of producing, however, sophisticated versions of their Muslim neighbors, representations which indicated some awareness of complex distinctions within the Muslim community: Hakob Siruni’s tale “The Caravan” paints a distinction between the sincere, spiritual dervish outside a mosque and what is essentially a materialistic, unreflective, godless mob of people within.18 Bedros Tourian’s poem “New Black Days” (written in 1871, a good 20 years before the Hamidiye massacres) actually demonizes the Kurd in favor of the Turk, depicting the former as a violent animal that only the good favor of the Turkish Sultan can save them from.19 Christian minorities aside, the Muslim identity of the Turkish nation-state, and the multi-ethnic Ottoman empire from which it sprang, is problematic for us – problematic if we accept the central thesis of Said’s argument, that the cultivation of the Islamic Orient was a direct strategy of Western colonial power to legitimize and perpetuate hegemonic control.20 Bluntly put: can “Orientals” practice Orientalism? And if so, how and why? In the case of Turkish writers, the example of Halide Edip (cited above) is a particularly problematic one – a supporter of Atatürk and his secular reforms but also

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someone who, nevertheless, claimed to be a believing Muslim.21 Turkish writers who employed Orientalist tropes but who considered themselves to be leftist/communist/agnostic (for example, Nazim Hikmet, Aziz Nesin, Oguz Atay or Orhan Pamuk) might belong to a category of what one could term “apostate Orientalism” – the dissenting disdain for, or even parody of, a former worldview. But with writers who openly ascribed to themselves the identity of a believing Muslim, the term “self-Orientalism” might be a more accurate term. Scholars writing on the phenomenon of “Ottoman Orientalism” (Deringil, Eldem22) have drawn our attention to a number of texts and images, before and after 1922, which “orientalize” various kinds of domestic Other: Kurds, Bedouins, Arabs, mullahs. From the covers of popular Turkish historical novels to political posters of grinning, dark-skinned Arabs (representing the Syrian Mandate) offering bowls of dates to two fair-skinned Turkish maidens (named respectively after two Turkish cities, Antioch and Iskenderun23), two motivations have sat behind Ottoman Orientalism: either a modernizing willingness to caricature elements within the Empire which were perceived as resisting tanzimat or reform, or a related desire to portray lost Ottoman Arab provinces as backward and immune to civilization (Deringil uses the term “borrowed colonialism”).24 Both of these motivations will form a backdrop to our own examination of the modern treatment of Islam and the Orient within twentieth-century Turkish literature. Although Mufti’s book on World Literature has powerfully argued how a “historical constellation of Orientalism … [has] made possible” the planetary landscape we inhabit today25, there may be a sense in which non-western Orientalisms have actually contributed at times to destabilize national identities (and implicitly the colonial framework which has served to install them in us). One repeated gesture worth considering – across a range of different texts – is how a memory of Islam has often been invoked in reflections on the inherent falseness of national identity. In the middle of discussions on the epistemological unreliability of nationalist vocabularies, writers frequently employ some kind of memory of Islam to suggest not merely an elusive national essence, but even a nation-wide level of self-deception and misrecognition. Regardless of whether it is Mexican Catholicism, Turkish Republicanism or Indian nationalism, the use of an Islamic Orient sometimes emerges as a kind of semantic crowbar to pry open the ideological casket of the nation’s self.26 In Bengali literature, Nirad C. Chaudhuri is one of the anti-nationalist figures who provocatively calls upon a memory of Islamic conquest to expose what Chaudhuri perceives to be the (literally) latent absurdity of modern Indian nationalism: Even the maniacal hatred of the Muslim which is sweeping over Hindu India today has not emancipated the Hindu from his Islamic ways. The fierce maenads from the divided Punjab who even in buses mutter

200  The Orient imprecations against Muslims have no idea of the true character of their shalwar and kurta. 27 Chaudhuri is mocking here the figure of the Hindu nationalist who, even in the very middle of their polemics against Muslims and Pakistan, is dressed in clothes of historically Islamic origin. The South Asian subcontinent spent five centuries under Islamic rule (some would argue longer) – a period of Indo-Islamic hegemony so deeply embedded that, even after its demise in 1757, the linguistic, architectural and cultural effects of Moghul rule would continue to be felt well into the twentieth century. For Chaudhuri, Islam is, in many ways, the dark, dirty secret of modern Indian nationalism. The irony of the Hindu nationalist (the RSS sewak, the BJP-wallah) ranting angrily against their Muslim neighbors while wearing all the trappings of a former Islamic empire is an irony Chaudhuri delighted in observing again and again; for him it represented the most literal example of self-ignorance. The same situation – that of a historically embedded power structure so successfully installing its costumes and practices that even a rebellious subject misrecognizes them as its own – was recorded in a much more melancholic fashion by Tagore, nearly three decades earlier: Countries [deshe] that are fortunate find the essence of their land in the history [itihas] of their country; the reading of history introduces their people to their country from infancy. With us the opposite is the case. It is the history of our country that hides the essence of this land from us [desher itihashyi amader swadeshke acchonno koriya rakhiyachhe]. Whatever historical records exist from Mahmud’s invasion to the arrogant imperial pronouncements of Lord Curzon, these constitute a strange mirage for India; … the trumpeting of elephants, … the golden glow of silk curtains, the stone bubbles of mosques, the mysterious silence of the palaces guarded by eunuchs – all these produce a huge magical illusion with their amazing sounds and colors. But why should we call this [Islamic history] India’s history? It has covered the punthi of India’s holy mantras by a fascinating Arabian Nights tale [taha bharatbarsher punyamontrer punthitike ekti aparup arabyo uponyash diya muriya rakhiyachhe].28 The Moghul landscape Tagore paints for us is magically Oriental – elephants, silk curtains, palace-guarding eunuchs – and familiar from the ghost story of Tagore’s we examined in the beginning of this book, “The Hungry Stones”. For Tagore, nationalism is a systemic misrecognition – like Chaudhuri he feels modern India to be a case of mistaken identity. The illusion of nationalism for both writers lies in a fundamentally inadequate historical consciousness – “We cannot see clearly the age in which we now live”, Tagore writes in the same essay29, which means in effect that we cannot see how what we call our nation is really an Islamic pastiche.

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The difference between the two passages, however, is almost a deconstructive one. If Tagore has a very clear idea of the essence which is being hidden by five centuries of Islamic rule (true Indian history has been a Hindu union of the Aryan and the Dravidian, we are told, and a dialectical interaction between the Brahmin and the Kshatryia30), Chaudhuri only seems to point to voids. If Tagore sees an essence being masked – a secret India, to use Hölderlin’s phrase (das geheime Deutschland31), lying beneath the nationalist façade – Chaudhuri only notes the misrecognition. The important thing to stress here (contra Mufti) is that an invocation of the Muslim Orient is not quite working hand in hand with a familiar national/global topography – in Chaudhuri’s case, quite the opposite. A politically conscious remembering of Islamic conquest and influence reveals the true complexities (the fissures, the overlaps, the thousand tiny appropriations and forgotten common origins) of the modern South Asian state. This use of Islam as a denationalizing tool is not just a philological one – that is, not merely a reminder of how nationalist consciousness always relies on a systemic forgetting of cultural influence. There is (and we shall come to this point again in our Turkish example) an awareness of the staged and artificial nature of the “Orient” itself – its bubble-mosques, its elephants and nightingales – which comes close to exemplifying the original model for all constructed ideological narratives: the acknowledgment of an artificial landscape we simultaneously disbelieve in, and are powerfully moved by. This use of the Orient as a denationalizing tool – in the form of a reminder of a persistent yet consistently misrecognized set of cultural influences – can be found again and again in a whole array of Mexican writers. The acknowledgment of the place of the Islamic world in the cultural formation of Spain and (subsequently) Mexico is not an easy one to make, and not all Mexican writers freely perform it. Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude, one of the most famous sustained inquiries into Mexican identity ever written, is happy to make frequent political references to Mexico as an Oriental country, alongside the Indias and Egypts of Nasser and Nehru, in an anti-colonial struggle against the Anglo-American West; only once, however, does Paz coyly allude to Mexico’s Spanish-Arab legacy (la herencia hispanoárabe32) – and only then to “explain” a latent misogyny in the Mexican male. More open to the idea of such a legacy are writers such as Alberto Ruy Sánchez, whose trip to Mogador (now Essaouira, a town on the Moroccan coast) alerts him epiphanically to a radical reevaluation of his own “Mexicanness”: My first trip to Mogador became a much longer and deeper journey. First came the shock of discovering a place that on spite of being so distant from Mexico provoked a strong impression of recognition, much greater than the one a Mexican receives upon arriving to Spain. A combination of body language, place and objects made me feel that I had ventured into another Mexico. … Our legacy derives from five centuries

202  The Orient of mixing Indian and Spanish blood, but we must not overlook the Arabic heritage running through our veins, introduced by Spaniards bodies. We must not forget that for eight centuries two-thirds of what is now Spain and Portugal was Arabic: the Andalusí civilization.33 It should be said that, elsewhere, the author’s dream-like, magical and even sexualized approach to the Moroccan town he is visiting fully qualifies his text as “Orientalist”.34 Nevertheless, what Sánchez experiences here is the self-revelation Tagore and Chaudhuri wish for the deluded Indian nationalist: the realization that the cultural identity we wear has a longer and deeper history than ourselves (one could even term this a secular-philological version of Plato’s “un-forgetting” a-letheia). There is almost something atavistic about Sánchez’s “return” to the Orient – a blood connection through the double migration of Arab culture through Iberia to the Americas, rather than the more familiar ideological reappropriation of “returning to”/“taking back” the Orient found in European Orientalist travelogues and commentaries. However, we may evaluate the fantasy above, the Mexican writer is connecting to his “Orient” through the conviction of a tangible ethnic bond. Should this lead us to the conclusion proffered by some scholars that Latin American Orientalisms are more diverse, fluid, benign, respectful and (ultimately) fundamentally different from their British/French/American cousins?35 One of the standard arguments in this regard has been that the (retrospectively repressed) hybrid nature of Luso-Hispanic culture, combined with the relative geopolitical peripherality of Madrid and Lisbon, created the conditions for an “Other within” for many Latin American encounters with the Orient – conditions which do not carry for the hegemonic Anglo-French practices which are the focus of Said’s book. “Hispanic Orientalism” writes Julia Kushigian, “distinguishes itself in a momentary blending of opposites and interanimation of images, grounded in a respect for diversity”.36 Passages such as the above would even suggest that an encounter with the Arab/Islamic Other, for many Latin American writers, might actually be a re-encounter with a deeper Other within themselves. Such arguments do seem to overlook the fact that many European Orientalists cultivated such fantasies of oneness or common identity with the object of their research. Many Orientalists, coming from countries which had little or no shared heritage whatsoever with the Muslim world, were quite capable of nurturing a deep sense of kinship with their own particular Orient: Herder called himself a “camel driver”, a “Turk” and a “Hadschi” (Muslim pilgrim), Goethe called the Persian poet Hafiz his “twin” and Nietzsche said the Islamic culture of Andalusia was “more closely related to us” than Greece or Rome.37 That the kinship with the “Oriental” imagined here is metaphorical may well be an abiding difference – but MexicanLebanese writers such as Gabriel Zaid and Jaime Sabines aside (whose second-generation immigrant origins count as a much more recent and specific set of origins than the memory of an Arabic-Andalusian civilization), it

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might not be clear to some why a Latin American remembering the fifteenthcentury Arab presence in the settler-colonial origins of their modern nationstate is any less imaginary than the kind of phantasmatic fictions English and German travelers told themselves while writing their tracts and travelogues. More on this in a moment. The nature of this imagined connection to an Orient, in Sánchez’s case, is experiential and empirical. It is not just “a combination of body language, place and objects” that makes the writer feel the Moroccan town he is visiting is “another Mexico”, but also a more bodily sense of connection, the sanguine “Arabic heritage running through our veins”. Writers such as Carlos Fuentes, however, emphasize a primarily cultural legacy of Islam – an emphasis which really leads them to concentrate on the ideological construct of España itself: Maybe this Indo-Afro-Iberoamerican assimilation was needed to lay the bridge over the Atlantic, fill the chasm created by resentments and complaints and recognize ourselves in our other half – that is, Spain. And yet, Spain is for Iberoamerica something more than Spain itself. It is the Mediterranean reborn in the Caribbean, the Gulf [renaciendo en el Caribe, el Golfo], and the American sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Spain is Greek philosophy and Roman law. Spain is the Spain of the three cultures, Christian, Jewish, and Arab [España es la España de las tres culturas, cristiana, árabe y judía], meeting in the court of Alfonso the Wise and catastrophically expelled by the blind dogmatism of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel and Fernando.38 If the idea of a monolithically Hindu India is a façade, then so is the idea of a singularly Catholic Spain. More importantly, once the illusion is peeled away, Islam lies beneath the veneer of both. Fuentes’ remarks are important for a number of reasons: first of all, the site of the mother colonizer becomes a proxy battleground for debates about the identity of Mexico. In attacking the Catholic integrity of Spain through the mention of Jews and Arabs, Fuentes is suggesting an equal set of dilemmas for Mexico. The memory of Islam here becomes a counter-European gesture – almost, one might say, a de-Christianizing gesture, as Fuentes challenges the illusion of Catholic purity España has always liked to champion in its relationship with the nuevo mundo. The historical background to this is worth mentioning: no sooner were the Americas “discovered”, a whole array of measures were put in place to ensure that the conquista of the new territories would take place on a purely Christian basis. Several papal edicts were issued, prohibiting Jews and Muslims from traveling to the freshly discovered territories.39 A constant anxiety pervaded the courts of Rome, Lisbon and Madrid that the “New” world they had just discovered should not be contaminated by the presence of the non-Christian. In this sense, Fuentes’ attempt to uncover the Islamic in Spain runs parallel to an attempt to uncover the mestizo in Mexico. The anxieties concerning

204  The Orient the mixing of blood, the protection of lineage and the purity of culture did not begin in Mesoamerica – they were already present in Spain itself, before the conquistadors even got in their boats, in a Spanish culture that was struggling to reassert its Christianity and paper over the five centuries of Islamic rule and influence it had just emerged from. For a Mexican writer, then, to articulate the name of Islam in such a context is a doubly subversive move – it subverts not only the illusion of a singularly Catholic Spain, but also calls into question the purity of the entire Catholic settler culture which emerged from it in the “New World”. Fuentes and Sánchez are not by any means the only Mexican writers to employ Spain’s Islamic past as a means of interrogating the ideological present. Throughout his work, the Mexican poet and critic Alfonso Reyes, a lifelong admirer of Spanish poets such as Quevedo and Góngora, constantly points at the Arab origins of classical Spanish texts and, like Fuentes, frequently acknowledges the mix of Moors, Jews, Visigoths and Romans which preceded the name “Spain”.40 Reyes’ thoughts on the notorious fifteenth-century Cardinal Cisneros – one of the leading figures, after the Reconquista and during the Inquisition, in the purge of all things Islamic from Spain’s Christian soil41 – say a great deal about how Reyes saw the elimination of Islam as a crucial factor in the forging of modern Spain: In those years Spain was consumed by its historical mission: national unification and the expulsion of the Moor [del moro]. As the last sentinel of the European family, it tried to cleanse itself of infection from the enemy. And Cisneros persecuted and burned. That’s how in those years the idea of “Europeanizing” Spain proceeded (such are the paradoxes of history). (1920 – own translation)42 Nietzsche, one of Reyes’ most important influences, had famously written on the cultural/ethnic cleansing of Moorish Spain in the penultimate section of The Antichrist – the driving out of Islam from Spain was the cowardly expulsion of a culture which said “Yes” to Life; fundamentally, an act of the profoundest mendacity.43 It is difficult not to see Nietzsche’s influence on both these Mexicans’ versions of the reconquista (and indeed on Paz, who defined Spanish vitality as “affirmative and splendid … expressing itself in a great ‘Yes!’ to history and the passions”44). Both Fuentes and Reyes see a kind of violent lie in this fashioning of the word España. Islam becomes a kind of buried, forgotten truth, excised as unpalatable to the nationalist taste, but continually insisted upon by those who want to know the real set of ingredients behind the official recipe. Before moving on to how this notion of the Orient as a destabilizing tool refracts itself in a Turkish context, one further complication needs to be introduced. It has become a commonplace to note the irony of the year 1492: simultaneously the landing of Columbus in the West Indies, and the

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expulsion of the last Moorish king of Granada – in effect, the discovery of a “new world” coinciding with the extinction of an old one. Scholars have already shown how Islam was foremost in the minds of the Spanish as they settled in their new environment. Not simply because of the Islamic legacy they had taken with them – the architecture and ornamentation brought over from Spain, the many secret Muslims and famous Moriscos that went on to work and thrive in the cities of Puebla, Lima and Santiago45 – but also because in their encounter with an entirely new culture, the only default vocabulary they had available to describe the indigenous was the Islamic one, developed in the time of the Reconquista. Before even landing, the first town they spot on the coast they call “Grand Cairo”46; Aztec temples were called “mosques”, indigenous chiefs were called “sheikhs”, the indigenous in general could often be referred to as “Arabs”.47 This tendency to “orientalize” the Mayan/indigenous did not by any means end with the colonial period, but has continued up to the present day – encouraged in no small part, as numerous commentators have pointed out, by the ethnographic conviction of the Asian origins of the Amerindian populations of Mesoamerica.48 Twentieth-century writers such as Reyes and Agustín Yañez (famous author of Al filo del agua) often associate the Mayan with the Oriental49 – Yañez, in an introduction to the chronicles of the Mayan chief Ah Nakuk Pech, writes: Of course, the markedly Oriental rhythm [el ritmo acentuadamente Oriental] is surprising which … Nakuk Pech employs; Oriental is the architecture of the chronicle. … Oriental is the texture of the style, filled with images, periphrasis and antithesis.50 (Own translation) The first thing to say here is that we have an echo chamber of sorts; writers coming from a settler-colonial culture with an incomplete acceptance of its own foreign, “oriental” origins/influences, projecting some kind of half-imagined, half-frustrated ontology onto the tabula rasa of a completely different Other – an “Other” which, it is suspected, may also have come from some version of the “Orient”. What passages like the one by Yañez above show is how the question of Mexican orientalism cannot be separated from the question of the mestizo. As Fuentes points out, the modern Mexican writer has not one but two different sets of hybridity to deal with. The fact that both of them can be, have historically been, labeled “Oriental” only serves to complicate an already fractal situation. In this, perhaps, scholars like Kushigian arguing for a substantial difference to Latin American Orientalism may well have a point – even if this difference does not consist in Latin America being on the “margins” of the West, or in the Hispanic world’s “undeniable affinity … with the Orient”,51 but rather in a much more obtuse point: a historically contingent, existential confusion which British/French/German Orientalists simply do not experience. The

206  The Orient ontological hall of mirrors that presents itself to the sensitive, historically aware Mexican writer every time they write about the Islamic Orient, it seems, might very well belong to them alone. Reyes’ words on the “cleansing” of Spanish culture from its tainted contact with Islam were written in 1920 – around the same time, he is writing the same kind of sentences again, describing the same set of processes again, but this time ironically his words refer this time not to sixteenth-century Spain, but to a very different time and place: And so the desire for a national soul held, for a moment, a moving expression: it made itself literary. The writers started to purge the language of Arabisms [a purgar la lengua del arabismos]. And, through a sarcasm of history, the quest for the national soul resolved itself … in linguistic purism.52 (Own translation) The country is not Spain or India, but Turkey. The secular nationalist Republic the Kemalists were constructing in the 1920s and 1930s relied on a reversal, and even a purging, of all things Ottoman: Perso-Arabic words and phrases such as mezarlık (cemetery) and inşallah (God willing) were being replaced with Turkic/Ural-Altaic words such as gömmüt and umarım; the characteristic Ottoman Fez and the headscarf were being prohibited/ discouraged; the Arabic script was removed, replaced with a Roman one; as scholars point out, the rapid secularization of Turkish society in these years – one might almost term it “de-Ottomanization” – was not so much a removal of religion as a subordination of it to the state.53 Alfonso Reyes was only one of many outside observers to follow these events – in 1936, Erich Auerbach wrote to Walter Benjamin from Istanbul: “the process is going fantastically fast. … even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly become incomprehensible”.54 Although this was no Soviet eradication of religion (Şerif Mardin, most famously, has argued for a greater recognition of the continuity between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the transition into Kemalism), it remains fair to say that the Ottoman past and everything associated with it – not just architecturally, socially and linguistically, but also in terms of the minorities who lived under it – was comprehensively repressed in favor of a Turkic-origin secular national identity, and this institutional/mnemonic repression was to continue for the next 60 years. If the secret Islamic/Oriental origin of a Mexican plaza or a Hindu’s kurta is forever historically misrecognized as “Mexican” or “Indian”, then writers such as Orhan Pamuk reveal the entire face of secular modern Turkey – from its worship of Atatürk to its love of conspiracy theory – to be a modern misrecognition of a much older set of Ottoman, Islamic and even pre-Islamic practices; and Orientalism is a key device in Pamuk’s unmasking strategy. Although Pamuk plays with this use of the past to semantically pry off the mask of the present in a number of novels – most notably White

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Castle and My Name Is Red – it is his 1994 novel The Black Book/ Kara Kitap which most obsessively pursues a single idea: that each of us is unaware of our own secret identity, and that dark things (perhaps even death) await this discovery of our own self-oblivion: “None of us is himself [hiçbirimiz kendimiz değliz]” said Galip, whispering as if he were imparting a secret [bir sır]. “None of us can be. Don’t you suspect that others might see you as someone else? Are you quite so certain that you are you?55 We have already briefly mentioned (in Chapter 4) how the genius of Pamuk’s novel lies in a use of Persian/Arab Sufism and myth which, at the level of both form and content, derails and affronts the modern Turkish nation-state. A similar remark can be made here vis-à-vis Orientalism. Not just the slightly tired point that The Black Book simultaneously mocks and employs an Oriental landscape – nowadays an almost default observation of irony that many critics seem to make about any Orientalist representation – but also how such Orientalisms in a Turkish context, for all their silliness and Western fetishism, carry within themselves an unwitting truth with regard to the Kemalist twentieth century – a century which attempted, institutionally and systemically, to efface its own origins. The Sufis, sultans and belly dancers of a European modernist poet or a North American novelist may well have their own set of meanings – but articulated in a twentieth-century Turkish novel (be it by Pamuk or Tanpınar or Halide Edib) a very precise subversion of Turkish history is taking place. In the whimsical mouth of a fictitious columnist (Celal), Pamuk endlessly riffs on and paraphrases Rumi, Ibn ‘Arabi, Nizami and Ibn Attar, not to mention the Thousand and One Nights, to expose and perform again and again the illusion of modern identity. This illusion is not merely Kemalist – it is extended to Turkish society in general, and its ontological, nameless needs. Leftist Turkish youth, for example, have no idea that their MarxistLeninist group practices and habits (comradeship, initiations, factionalism, the sacred path, etc.) are a secularized extension of a centuries-old SufiBektaşi sect: “The third time the Bektaşis manifested themselves,” Saim said, “it was fifty years after the Republic, not under the Nakshibendi order but wearing a Marxist-Leninist guise [Marksizm Leninizm’in kisvesiyle]” … the fact that adepts who travel the same road recognize each other by their beards, mustaches …. The kids who joined political factions, Saim was saying, had no idea they turned Bektaşi. … all those well-intentioned altruistic kids who joined up at the cost of abandoning their daily habits and altering their entire lives from tip to toe had no clue … that they were all evaluated by some dervishes in Albania [Arnavutluk’taki bazı Bektaşi] as an extension of their own order.56

208  The Orient Marxists who don’t know that they’re Sufis, Mexicans who don’t know that they’re Arabs, Indians who don’t know that they are Moghuls – like the Hindu nationalist and the Mexican statist, the modern Turkish political activist bears an identity which is ontologically conditioned on historical self-ignorance. And in all these instances, Islam and the Islamic Orient is a significant component in this repressed secret self. The Black Book’s formalistic indebtedness to the Thousand and One Nights – half of the novel is the story of a man looking for his missing wife, evenly interspersed with a whole set of stories and tales from Celal’s columns – offers a constant reframing of the secular realist novel. In Chapter 27, for example, following the Arabian Nights’ tradition of the Sultan who wanders the streets of Baghdad incognito, trying to find out what his subjects really think of him, we find an unnamed dictator (clearly Atatürk) taking a rowboat across the Bosphorus, passing himself off as an ordinary person, trying to find out in bars and cafés what his citizens think of their leader. These echoes of the Orient, remanifesting themselves in secular form, run throughout The Black Book. Even the purportedly postmodern idea of having a secret identity we are unaware of is given an older, Islamic origin – the Sufi soul that doesn’t realize the Truth (haqq) it is seeking is not outside, but has been lying dormant within us all along. We spend our lives searching for the divine – we don’t realize we ourselves are a fragment of the divine we are looking for. Even in the most radical years of the Kemalist cultural revolution, however, Islam was still the official state religion, which did not prevent many of the trappings of Islam from being prohibited. Although all three regions experienced a “cleansing” of Islam from their respective cultures (the Sanskritization of Bengali intellectual life in the late nineteenth century, the de-Arabizing of Reconquista Spain, the years of the Kemalist cultural revolution 1922–1938), the modality of this “cleansing” does differ in the Turkish context. If “Islamic” costume, dress and language are relabeled and “misrecognized” in the other two regions, in Kemalist Turkey these elements and energies were increasingly removed from everyday life and driven underground. Despite this important difference, there is something similar about the way non-Western Orientalisms become a strategy here to mnemonically undermine and reopen official amnesias. Perhaps one of the reasons why this usefulness doesn’t square very well with Said’s critique (or Mufti’s extrapolation of it) is that the subversive remembering here is a memory of Islamic violence. The recollection of cultural influence or even origin is, in all three contexts, inseparable from the recollection of conquest. To remember the “Orient” for such Mexican, Bengali and Turkish writers is to remember a period of lost Islamic hegemony – and to conjure up a world in which Islam emerges, in a Wallersteinian fashion, as one powerful, violent actor among many, rather than the somewhat more binary, Manichaean background of Said’s text, where a European colonial world is constantly oppressing and categorizing a weaker Muslim one. I do not make this point to invalidate or

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dismiss Said’s groundbreaking text, but to qualify its validity with a series of reservations concerning cultures with a more complex, recent history of Muslim cultural influence. In her remarkable book Against World Literature, Emily Apter devotes an entire chapter to “Said’s Terrestrial Humanism”. It is a delicate and widely ranging chapter, dwelling (via Auerbach and Heidegger) on the German meaning of “worldly” and “secular”, on the metaphoricality of Palestine, on the possibility of Kant’s nomos as a possible political destination, and ending with Jean Luc Nancy’s speculations on whether we will ever be able to truly think an earth and a human noumenally – without perspectives – and yet it is a chapter which exemplifies, in its erudite, winding appropriation of Said, the central problem with Apter’s text: a book which sets itself against the systematic reduction of the world, but is unwilling to adopt any systemic analysis of it. Apter emphasizes the idea of untranslatability as a constant, ineluctable blind spot – one which forever undermines systematic attempts to speak about “World Literature”, and which certainly leads her into conflict with world-systems theorists such as Moretti, Jameson and Slaughter.57 This mistrust of systematic analysis makes her chapter on Said all the more interesting. Initially Apter, like Mufti, appears to fully accept a definition of Saidian humanism as a call to revise conventional terrestrial and territorial configurations as well as the temporal coordinates of conventional periodization (intractably oriented around Europe-based chronotopes and genres such as classicism, the Renaissance, romanticism, modernism, and so forth).58 What remains less clear is how Apter, who feels any attempt at world-systems theory constitutes a reductive act of metaphysical violence upon the untranslatable, will deal with a theorist like Said, who repeatedly thought of and referred to Empire as a system (indeed, the word “system” appears over a hundred times in Culture and Imperialism alone). Apter acknowledges the postcolonial need to “revise conventional terrestrial and territorial configurations … as well as … conventional periodization”, but the giveaway word here is “conventional”. What kind of conventions are these? Did they just happen, over time? Are they just a collection of idiosyncratic practices that became intractably set in stone? Or is there a system to them – a repeated set of mechanisms which kept occurring, again and again, in Cuba, in Ghana, in French Indo-China and the British Raj? Apter describes reading After the Last Sky in Istanbul and feeling powerfully moved by Said as “a practical critic and reader of site-specificity” (221). This is not a wholly wrong assessment – in many ways, Said is indeed a scholar devoted to detail, someone whose quasi-entomological eye for the minutiae of the text leads him to expose the influence – and the anxiety – of ideology in the smallest paragraph. At the same time, to call Said “site-specific” does leave out the wider, macro-scope of Said’s approach – what he called “the background

210  The Orient of Occidental domination and oppression of the non-Occidental world”59. This omission allows Apter to usher in her own softer, more deconstructive version of Saidian humanism as a new foundation of the discipline of comparative literature; one that emphasizes exilic consciousness; the ethics of the human; textual filiation; worldliness; the critique of embedded epistemologies of Orientalism; and what I would call negative philology – a play on negative theology that uses the syntax of negation to designate what is no longer there. (219) To feel frustrated with this second definition of “Saidian humanism” is not to disagree with any of its proposed qualities, but merely to lament a shift from political reconfiguration to commentary. Two pages later, Apter makes the controversial gesture of imagining how contemporary Israeli architecture in newly built settlements on Palestinian land “could read quite differently if it were abstracted from context” (222) – to the point of aesthetically defending the Israeli architect Zvi Hecker, having just cited Said’s description of his work a page earlier as “a marching cancer” (221). Even this on its own would not merit the dismissal of Apter’s work – but it does show us, in this move from activism to irony, how much can be expected from Apter’s “deflation” of the World Literature machine. Apter’s deconstructive efforts – her via negativa – will commit themselves to critiquing the “embedded epistemologies of Orientalism”, through etymologies of “worldliness” or cultural histories of the “exilic”, without ever confronting the system by which such epistemologies became embedded in the first place. It comes as no surprise when, in the chapter’s closing pages, a Late Derridean version of Said is presented to us, an “openness to ‘concrete ways of being human’ that are not foretold in the conventional humanist program of universal values”,60 reminiscent of the Derridean/Levinasian belief in remaining infinitely open to the infinite Other.61 Orientalism, it seems superfluous to repeat, was a power-saturated system of thought; remaining “open” to it, apophatically or otherwise, was never really an option for those it disempowered.

Notes 1 Fernando del Paso, Palinuro of Mexico, trans. Elisabeth Plaister (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996) p. 391. 2 Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) p. 19. 3 Erik Camayd-Freixas, “The Orientalist Controversy and the Origins of Amerindian Culture” in Erik Camayd-Freixas (ed.), Orientalism and Identity in Latin America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013) p. 5. 4 Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Stories, trans. William Radice (New Delhi: Penguin, 1994) p. 283.

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5 del Paso, Palinuro, p. 39. 6 Halide Edib Adıvar, Memoirs of Halide Edib (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2005) p. 6. 7 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, A Mind at Peace, trans. Erdağ Göknar (New York: Archipelago Books, 2008) p. 204; Halide Edip, Memoirs, pp. 63, 191–192. 8 The Bengali Book of English Verse, ed. T.D. Dunn (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918) p. 20. 9 Rosa Beltrán, “Sheri Sade” in Álvaro Enrigue and Olivia Sears (eds), Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction (Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2009); del Paso, Palinuro, pp. 72, 132. 10 Irma Pineda, Canción, p. 26; Mikeas Sánchez, “Aisha” in Victor Terán and David Shook (eds), Like a New Sun (Los Angeles: Phoneme Media, 2015) p. 61. 11 See Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal” in Sheldon, Pollack (ed.), Literary Cultures in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) pp. 530 ff. See also the section on the representation of Muslims in my own book on Chaudhuri, The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015) pp. 24–26. 12 Kaviraj, “The Two Histories” pp. 504, 516–517. 13 Kaiser Haq, Pariah and Other Poems (Dhaka: Bengal Lights Books, 2013) p. 37. 14 Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengali Muslims 1871–1906 (London: Oxford University Press, 1981) p. 108. 15 Zabel Yessayan, The Gardens of Silihdar, trans. Jennifer Manoukian (Boston: Aiwa Press, 2014) p. 17. Tomas Terzian, in his poem dedicated to the famous Cirağan Palace (“The Chraghan Palace”), a building which had been designed by an Armenian, actually describes it as an “Oriental dream”, similar to but greater than “Granada’s famed Alhambra” in The Heritage of Armenian Literature vol. 3, pp. 381–382. 16 Daniel Varoujian, “Oriental Bath” in A. J. Hacikyan, G. Basmajian, E. S. Franchuk and N. Ouzonian (eds), .The Heritage of Armenian Literature vol. 3 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005 ) pp. 848–850. 17 Bedros Tourian, “The Turkish Woman” in James Russell (ed.), Bosphorus Nights: The Complete Lyric Poems of Bedros Tourian (Cambridge: Armenian Heritage Press/Harvard University Press, 2005) pp. 205–206. 18 Hakob Siruni, “The Caravan” in The Heritage of Armenian Literature vol. 3, pp. 912–917. 19 Bedros Tourian, “New Black Days” in Tourian, Bosphorus Nights, pp. 270–272. 20 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1977) p. 122. 21 For a complicated account of the “divine and esthetic emotion” she experienced in Ramadan as a child, for example, see Halide Edib, Memoirs, p. 72ff. For more on Halide Edib’s own opposition to Atatürk and her political disagreements with Kemalism, see Hülya Adak, “National Myths and Self-Na(rra)tions: Mustafa Kemal’s Nutuk and Halide Edib’s Memoirs and The Turkish Ordeal” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:2/3 (Spring/Summer 2003) pp. 509–527, especially pages 511–514. 22 Selim Deringil, “They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45:2 (April 2003) pp. 311–342; Edham Eldem, “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism” in AD, eds Hülya Ertaş, Michael Hensel and Defne Sunguroğlu Hensel Jan/Feb 2010 Profile No. 203 pp. 26–31. 23 Eldem, “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism” p. 28. 24 Deringil, “They Live” p. 312; Eldem, “Ottoman” p. 28. 25 Mufti, Forget English! p. 250. 26 For a different notion of using the Orient to destabilize a national identity, see Julia A. Kushigian’s essay on Sor Juana, where Kushigian claims to find

212  The Orient in the poet’s Oriental tropes a “destabilization of the intellectual hierarchy of the church” (my translation) – although the problem in Kushigian’s approach seems to be that it relies, in part, on a positive appraisal of a vocabulary of pyramids, obelisks and the Tower of Babel (168, 182). While not dismissing this outright, this is not the “de-stabilization” this chapter has in mind – Julia A. Kushigian, “El Primero sueño y Las mil y una noches: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, orientalista” in Silvia Nagy-Zekmi (ed.), Moros en la costa Orientalismo en Latinoamérica (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2008) pp. 167–186. 27 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Delhi: Jaico, 2005) p. 586. For an earlier, similar example of a conservative Hindu nationalist intellectual who was, nevertheless, sensitive to the violent interactions of Hindu and Muslim history and resisted a straightforward anti-Islam position, see the figure of Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay – Satadru Sen, “The Conservative Animal: Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay and Colonial Bengal” The Journal of Asian Studies 76:2 (2017) pp. 363–381. 28 Rabindranath Tagore, Bharatvarser Itihas (Calcutta: Visvabharati, 1968) p. 3–4 – cit. in Kaviraj, “The Two Histories” pp. 541–542. For the English translation of Tagore’s essay on history (but excluding the above cited paragraph), see Amiya Chakravarty, A Tagore Reader (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) pp. 182–196. 29 Chakravarty, A Tagore Reader p. 195. 30 Ibid., pp. 188, 191. Writing on the essay itself, Ranjan Ghosh has argued for the presence of a spiritual dialectic in the text, where where “rise and fall, decline and emergence, disruption and continuity are all part of an oppositional progress” – Ranjan Ghosh, Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore: A Transcultural Philosophy of Education (London: Palgrave, 2017) p. 9. 31 Norbert von Hellingrath, Hölderlin: Zwei Vorträge, 2nd ed. (Munich: Hugo Bruckmann, 1922), 41 – cit. in Frank H.W. Edler, “Philosophy, Language, and Politics: Heidegger’s Attempt to Steal the Language of the Revolution in 1933– 34” Social Research 57 (Spring 1990) p. 208. 32 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1985) p. 35. 33 Alberto Ruy Sánchez, “The Nine Gifts that Morocco Gave Me” in Ottmar Ette and Friederike Pannewick (eds), ArabAmericas: Literary Entanglments of the American Hemisphere and the Arab World (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2006) pp. 261–274. 34 When Sánchez sees a goat climbing a tree, he marvels at the locals’ acceptance of the sight: “What for me was radically magic, for him was a banality, an everyday thing not worthy of notice”. Moreover, Sánchez appears to take the idea of city as lover to its maximum: “These sensations produced in me the concept of Mogador as a lover to be approached with extreme care. Listening to her desires rather than imposing my own. Knowing Mogador, living in it, became an erotic experience. And I began to inhabit it, symbolically, forever.” Sánchez, “The Nine Gifts” p. 266. For a more positive view of a writer who “creates an imaginary microcosm” (190) ultimately with the aim of making a Moroccan Macondo (193), see Gihane Amin, “Mogador: El Nuevo Realismo Mágico de Alberto Ruy Sánchez” in Escritura y teoría en la actualidad, Actas del II Congreso Internacional de ASETEL (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2017) pp. 189–202. 35 Numerous Latin American scholars make this argument. There is Rubén Gallo’s slightly overconfident assertion: “Said’s analyses cannot be simply transposed to Mexico, a country that has never invaded, colonized, or attacked other nations (but has itself been the object of many colonizations, attacks, and invasions)”; Christina Civantos is only one of many critics who see “Creole cultural spaces” as requiring a “more fluid and multiple … theorization of Orientalism” (58); Julia A. Kushigian has perhaps most vigorously argued for a “Hispanic Orientalism … [which is] distinguished by a respect for the Other, a well-known Other who on

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occasion may even be the enemy” (108). Rubén Gallo, “Mexican Orientalism” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 39:1 (2006) pp. 62–63; Christina Civantos, “Orientalism Criollo Style: Sarmiento’s “Orient” and the Formation of an Argentine Identity” in Camayd-Freixas (ed.), Orientalism and Identity, pp. 44–61; Julia A. Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue with Borges, Paz and Sarduy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991). 36 Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition p. 10. 37 Herder in letter to Hamann, February 1765, in W. Dobbek and G. Arnold (eds) Briefe (Weimar: Bohlausnachfolger, 1979) 1:38; Herder in letter to Schroeder, May 1803, in Briefe, 8:356; Goethe, West-östlicher Divan: Studienausgabe, ed. von M. Knapp (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), pp. 210, 209; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990) section 60. 38 Carlos Fuentes, En Esto Creo (México: Planeta, 2002) p. 122. I am grateful to Alberto Ribas’ article for drawing my attention to this text – Alberto Ribas, “Transatlantic Fuentes: Between “The Two Shores” of Multiculturalism and Glossocentrism” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 27:1 (Winter 2011) pp. 143–175. 39 R. Brooks Jeffery, “From Azulejos to Zaguanes: The Islamic Legacy in the Built Environment of Hispano-America” Journal of the Southwest 45:1/2 (Spring– Summer, 2003) p. 292. 40 Alfonso Reyes, Obras Completas de Alfonso Reyes (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996) 6:212, 263; 1:71. In an article in Fronteras (1919), for example, Reyes speaks in a very sensitive way about the city of Toledo, fully aware of its mixed Catholic/Jewish/Islamic/Visigothic past – Obras Completas 2: 170. 41 Walter D. Mignolo draws attention to this moment in his argument for a profound continuity between Islamophobia and Hispanophobia – see “Islamophobia/ Hispanophobia: The (Re) Configuration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial Matrix” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge V:1 (Fall 2006) pp. 15–16. 42 Alfonso Reyes, Retratos Reales y Imaginarios (1920) in Reyes, Obras Completas 3:413-–414, 43 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 60. 44 Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude p. 33. 45 Jeffery, “From Azulejos to Zaguanes” pp. 289, 294. 46 Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España, vol 1 (Havana: Editora del Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963) p. 19. 47 Hernán G.H. Taboada, “The Mentality of the Reconquest and the Early Conquistadors” in Camayd-Freixas (ed.), Orientalism and Identity, p. 36. 48 Camayd-Freixas, “The Orientalist Controversy” p. 5. 49 Reyes, Obras Completas 7:355, 4:423. 50 From Agustín Yáñez (ed.), Crónicas de la Conquista de México (México: Biblioteca del Estudiante Universitario, 1939) – cit. in Reyes, Obras Completas 12: 320. 51 Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition p. 108. 52 The article is “La Pasión de Servia” in Reyes, Obras Completas 4:129. 53 Andrew Davison, “Turkey, a “Secular” State?: The Challenge of Description” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:2/3 (Spring/Summer 2003) p. 341 ff. 54 Cit. in Perry Anderson, “Kemalism” in London Review of Books 11 September, 2008 (30:17) p. 9. 55 Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book/Kara Kitap, trans. Güneli Gün (London: Faber, 1997) p. 358. Turkish original Kara Kitap (25th year special edition: Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2015) p. 437.

214  The Orient 56 The Black Book p. 70, Kara Kitap p. 88. 57 Emily Apter, Against World Literature (London: Verso, 2013) pp. 58–63. 58 Ibid., p. 213. 59 Cit. in Apter, Against World Literature, p. 217. 60 Ibid., p. 227. 61 By “late Derrida” here I am referring not to the hypercritical author of “Violence and Metaphysics” but rather the Derrida who, later in life, gravitated toward Levinas in expressing a desire to remain “totally open to the Other” – see, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” (interview by Alexander Garcia Düttman) in Nick Midgley (ed.), Responsibilities of Deconstruction (Coventry: Parousia Press, 1997) p. 4, 6. For a similar response to mine – this time, not to Emily Apter but G.C. Spivak, see the Warwick Research Collective’s analysis of Spivak and her request for a “depoliticization of the politics of hostility toward a politics of friendship to come” (Death of a Discipline p. 13) – Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature Warwick Research Collective (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015) p. 23.

 Conclusion The Ten Percenters

At this point, it may be rather trite to say that World Literature is a friend of globalization, but we need to pay more attention to the specific intellectual and economic terms of the alliance between the new World Literature and the New World Order if we are to have what Wallerstein would term a literary world system without monopolies. – Joseph Slaughter1

The main aim of this book has been to show that a non-Western-centered version of World Literature is possible: a “World Literature” that does not find its literary capital on the banks of the Seine, which does not privilege translation as a test of greatness and which does not see literary and textual innovation as a series of radio waves emanating outward from one specific point on the planet, reducing anything else to the provincial edition of a newspaper printed in London and New York. The worldview we referred to at the beginning of this book – the “ten-percenters”, those who feel the Euro-American 10% of the planet should be the basis, the trajectory, and perhaps even the limit of what we say about the planet – is a worldview which appears to be paradoxically strengthening even as the West is demographically shrinking. It has become commonplace to exhort the reader to “unthink” Eurocentrism.2 Breaking habits of mind that have lasted over 200 years – the view, as Macaulay said, that one good shelf of English literature is worth all the libraries of India and Asia – is a task which cannot be accomplished theoretically. The problem is not simply that the intrinsic superiority of Western culture has often appeared to be irrefutable to so many on the planet (“Give me the beautiful language of the Anglo-Saxon” declared Michael Madhusudhan Dutt in Calcutta in 1854). Both the idiom and the cartographies we have inherited from the military/political/economic success of the West have been a dominant force in shaping the trajectory of future debates. Since the modern education system, and the violent modernity which supported it, came largely from the West, nearly all the ways we have of talking about the problem also derive from the West.

216 Conclusion The reason for the performative nature of this book – actually setting out alternative combinations of texts, different configurations of literary traditions, in an attempt to unlearn and reset different collections of associations – stems from this impasse. At the end of her eloquent World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova writes: “I have tried to … lay the foundations for a true literary history”.3 This book attempts to write a new literary history – a history of World Literature with different vectors, different axes, different points of reference and control. All of these do not mean that this book has wholly succeeded, or has even cleared the majority of bars it set for itself. To write a book which truly breaks with the critical idiom of our academic present would be to produce something akin to the undecipherable hieroglyphics of the Voynich Manuscript or the Codex Seraphinianus – a text whose readability lies in the future, not the present. The most obvious question remains: doesn’t the language of capitalist modernity impact, indeed, ontologically premise, the various genres and chapter headings of this book? And isn’t capitalism European by its very nature? And if so, doesn’t this profoundly undermine the study’s claim to evolve without any reference to a Western center at all? The answer to this lies in two parts. It is certainly true that capitalist modernity has played a part in providing many of the commonalities that this book builds its analyses around. The hotel in the nineteenth century is, as we have said, a product of an urban, bourgeois, leisure class; the idea of haunted ruins, to some extent, requires a modern age to view such relics on the past as the archaisms they are; the desire to write a story lamenting the destruction of a female subject already betrays within it a very modern sensibility. In other words, this book agrees to some extent with the idea that World Literature is “the literature of the modern capitalist world-system” (as the Warwick Research Collective aptly puts it4). The twentieth-century authors included in this book are formatted subjects belonging to modern – or modernizing – capitalist societies; the genres they are performing in – ghost stories or hotel-novels – have at the very least been profoundly influenced by the change and reconfiguration of capital in their societies and cultures. Where this book departs from such a view (and inclines to Apter’s insistence on the ineluctable presence of the untranslatable as a deflationary gesture), however, is in the totalizing comprehensiveness of such a system. The literary texts in this book may have been written in the era of modern capital, some of them may even have been ontologically conditioned by this milieu, but they do not by any means entirely belong to it. The persistence of the archaic, the premodern, the precapitalist subsists in these texts alongside the modern, even within it – and not merely in the sense of what Moretti elsewhere calls “variants”, or a “compromise” between foreign forms and local materials5. The ideas and forms and even words within these stories and novels carry with them a Monadic autonomy, a memory of their precedents (almost a mnemonic trail, if you like) and a commitment to their premodern provenance

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which persists in bizarre contiguity alongside the modern, un-incorporated and unruly.6 In some instances in this book – for example, in the chapter on myth – the weight of the premodern was so overbearing that no satisfying commonality could be found, only a range of specifically located variables with limited overlaps such as political satire or European-style modernist attacks on the classical. In other words, it became clear that even when premodern myth does not belong to the “modern capitalist world-system”, its modern retelling only partially subscribes to this description. The delicate path this book has attempted to tread – essentially between Apter’s untranslatable world on the one hand, and the Warwick group’s capital-saturated system of variables on the other – is an important one to stress. The Mexican, Bengali and Turkish texts in this book belong to the long twentieth century. While writing it, I often wondered if I could have written the same book using texts from a precapitalist time – say, the seventeenth century – and if so, what kind of book that would have been. What if, instead of a chapter on Paz, Tanpınar and Chaudhuri, there was a section on Yusuf Nabi, Rupram Chakrabarty and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz? What if, instead of looking at 1947 in Istanbul, Calcutta and Mexico City, we looked at Dhaka, Guadalajara and Diyarbakir in the 1650s? Would any basis for a comparative approach have existed? Without writing a book to answer this question, two possibilities suggest themselves: religion, and power. The seventeenth century may well have been an age before capitalism, but it certainly was not an age without capital. Looking at how capital concentrates itself in each society – and the way literary traditions reflect this concentration in their aesthetics (vulgarizing some modes of discourse, mythologizing others) could certainly be imaginable in an earlier time – and would hardly count as a “Western-centered” approach. Religion – more specifically, the place of the sacred and profane within each literary tradition, the relationship between revealed texts and literary responses to them, the manifold mechanisms through which religious traditions and literary traditions evolve alongside/within/against one another – would also offer a tentatively transcultural basis for looking at texts from very different regions, without invoking the need for a “Western” center to anchor such approaches. Consequently, a second point that emerges from the studies in this book is the need to read World Literature not with one gaze but with two different eyes: one which attenuates to the particular ways the text has been shaped and inflected by capitalist modernity; and one which registers, at the same time, the philological and historical space and depth of the text, its associations with other texts, and the storehouse of images and precedents it brings with it. This is not an impossible simultaneity. Although this book joins many other critics in disagreeing with David Damrosch’s ahistorical and apolitical definition of World Literature as “all literary works that circulate beyond their country of origin”7 (not to mention his overwhelmingly Eurocentric approach to the topic itself), his suggestion that World Literature may be better defined as “a mode of … reading”

218 Conclusion (5), a suggestion shared for very different reasons by Moretti,8 is borne out by the texts offered in this book. Seeing how ghost stories connect to structures of capital and sexuality, but simultaneously appreciating not only the etymologies and folktales they draw on, but also the multiple texts from other traditions a sensitive eye invokes, requires a double optic. In the arguments between advocates of “close” and “distant” reading – if you like, between exotericists such as Moretti and esotericists such as Apter and Dimock 9 – the accusations of reductionism (a “quant-driven ecosystem”10) and “theological” exegesis flung back and forth seem unnecessary. It is perfectly possible to recognize the cultural specificity and historicity of literary texts, and at the same time discern patterns of the modern within them that mold and form their shape (Rumi called this the ability to see both the banner that flutters in the wind and the wind that causes the banner to flutter). Critics will dismiss this as wishful thinking. How can one see World Literature as predominantly the product of capitalist modernity and believe at the same time in the irreducible and hopelessly plural nature of the literary text? Here we slide into the either/or debate of singular modernity vs. “alternative modernities” (or “alternative teleologies”, as Pheng Cheah would have it11) – debates which, although appearing philosophical and political in nature, actually hinge on a historical evaluation of exactly how cultures have become modern. Particularly in the backlash to Jameson’s (in)famous essay on allegory, these debates often blur the distinction between the description of a situation as it is and as it should be, particularly when an acknowledgment of the hegemonic primacy of capitalist modernity and its domineering influence over periphery countries is seen as disempowering to local agency and resistance.12 What this book has tried to show is how World Literature is the consequence of the powerful but incomplete attempt of modern capitalist structures (both foreign and local) to dominate and reconfigure the cultural production of a region. In this endlessly ongoing war, the premodern exists, and persists, with varying degrees of tenacity. When it has values that superficially resemble the modern – for example, Dasarathi Ray’s eighteenth-century mockery of the divine – they disappear into a seamless continuity, becoming problematic and visible only when evoked as an awkward reminder of another temporality. When, on the other hand, they are either visibly different or stem from different reasons – for example, a sense of alienation and sadness because you cannot connect with your God, and not because modern modes of production have severed you from your labor – then the premodern continues, undigested but not ineffective. To see “World Literature” as a local record of these uneven collisions between different modernities is not to deny the violent success of capital-driven modernity, but merely to reject its totalizing depth and ubiquity. One of the implications built into both the title and the structure of this book has been a radical democratization of World Literature. Again, our argument has tried to tread a difficult path between two contrary points:

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on the one hand, a vulgar, materialist belief that cultural phenomena are nothing more than a posteriori, semantic offshoots of an empirical, material base; on the other hand, a naïve, liberal optimism that believes in the empowering and reality-changing ability of semantic representations to obtain real political justice. The idea of democratizing World Literature raises a whole host of questions and reservations, and this book is not necessarily proposing a crude, demographic answer to them. In an ideal world, the Platonic Idea of a World Literature Anthology, calculated proportionately to current population, India and China would receive a third of the pages in a 1700-page edition, the United States 70 pages, Britain barely 20 pages. Qatar – the country where I am currently writing these lines – would not even get half of a single page. Clearly, a global literary aesthetics based on proportionate representation cannot address the range of complexities offered by the historical dominance of certain languages, the rise and fall of certain empires, the idiosyncratic overlaps of power and nature and time which have allowed some small countries to exert influences over entire continents and some continents to barely impinge themselves upon the consciousness of small countries. For all the unfeasibility of such an idealized anthology, however, at the moment we are at the other end of the spectrum. If the anthology I’ve just described sounds ludicrous, then the 2013 Norton Anthology of (modern) World Literature is its near-perfect inverse: in this real, actually existing, 1700-page edition, Britain gets not 15 but 180 pages; India and China receive not a third of the pages but one and a half percent of the book.13 No one is proposing a simplistic aesthetics based purely on proportionate representation – but at the moment, we have an intellectual and academic milieu where any thought of democratizing World Literature along even remotely mathematical lines is seldom seriously entertained. When the lamentation of demographic underrepresentation is expressed by World Literature scholars, it is either to bewail the overlooked status of Scandinavian poets (Damrosch), East European theorists (C. Domínguez), the “semi-peripheral” status of Dutch/Belgian culture (D’Haen, Spoiden) or the “backward” south of Southern Europe (Dainotto).14 There are certainly some scholars who believe in re-democratizing World Literature, if not exactly along these lines. Sanja Bahu writes of a “democratic network of scholars” who would engage in “a chivalric battle for inclusion” of non-Western texts into the global canon.15 Bruce Robbins goes so far as to describe World Literature as “the moral imperative to expand and democratize the set of others whose experiences … we are exposed to”, albeit in a piece which then goes on to deny that the category of World Literature is at all “political”.16 The views of many scholars, though, would appear to be summed up by Peter Carravetta: [T]here is less support today for the multiculturalist claim that every culture or subgroup must necessarily be validated under the aegis of

220 Conclusion a vague egalitarian world view, needing to be represented in the spectrum of, say, American or British literature as the mainstream norm. … The reason is that this notion of challenging and redrawing the canon essentially plays by the same rules, and in a sense obeys the same process.17 In one sense, Carravetta is right – the politics of representation is often an inclusive project, not a revolutionary one. It leaves the structure intact, merely requesting that the apparatus concerned (be it a world literary canon, a board of directors or a Forbes 100 list) reflect the diversity of the entities it represents. Will the world become a fairer, less exploitative place if its World Literature anthologies, Nobel Prize winners and Berlin city bookshops suddenly become demographically reflective? Probably not. But the place where we are at the moment is such an overwhelmingly Westernfocused one – most worryingly, Western-focused in a way that even South Asians, Africans and Middle Easterners increasingly internalize and reproduce the Western versions of their cultural landscapes given to them through their laptop/television/cinema screens – that to deconstruct any attempt to democratize and radically reconfigure the global consciousness of the planet feels more like an act to defend the status quo. Nevertheless, this book remains a gesture. It does not intend to propose an entire aesthetics from scratch that would define the basis for an idea of World Literature, but rather sets out with a related aim: to provide a sobering corrective to the idea of the “West”; to show how the vast attention and prestige we (Westerners and non-Westerners) allot to this term fails to correspond to the actual heritage and influence of the small group of countries designated by it; and to demonstrate how a circumvention of these countries along alternative trajectories not only strikes fresh ground, but is a condition for any radical reevaluation of a rapidly changing planet. At the end of this book, it seems natural to ask: over the next 50 years, what will be the future of World Literature – in both its uppercase and lowercase versions? How will future writers and readers from different countries produce and engage with their literatures, and how will the literary past be viewed in this future? Three possibilities seem to emerge. The first might be the continued Westernization of the planet – not just the persistent semantic primacy of certain Western genres and landscapes (Gothic and cowboy, for example, or medieval cityscapes and Manhattan skylines), but also the cultivation of writers and works from other cultures on the basis of familiar tropes and themes from those cultures (successful Middle Eastern writers will have to mention radical Islam, critically acclaimed African novels will reference the obligatory dictatorship and so on). A second possible future might be a radical dislocation – not of structure, but of center. Over the next 50 years, perhaps a new cultural hub – most likely China, although we shouldn’t rule out Russophone or Hispanophone regions – might displace

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an economically shrinking Western hegemony, as Shanghai and Beijing push out New York, London and Berlin, replacing Eurocentric mythologies and normativities with Sinocentric ones. Individual canons would gradually be revised and reconfigured around new vectors of relevance, some previously brilliant elements fading into obscurity, others achieving a newfound significance. A period of historiographical schizophrenia would ensue within each region as each canon tried to establish the nature of its own relation to the new order. The third possible future is that neither of the first two will take place. The sprawling vastness of a textual world where, to a truly unprecedented degree, writers have access to bodies of work in every possible cultural and geographical direction stands in sharp contrast to previous centuries, where German writers thought to be cosmopolitan was to read in French, or where Indian writers obtained their internationalism through the physical venues of their city’s libraries and their personal bookshelves. In this third future (which I describe neither positively nor negatively), the unspoken obligation to communicate or reflect some aspect of the writer’s culture in their creative product will be completely obsolete. Today, Persian-language vampire films set in California or Muslim feminist science-fiction novels written in early twentieth-century Bengal feel strange, so habitually do we chain non-Western texts to their regions18; in this third possible future, World Literature will have dropped the interrogatives of “where?” and “when?” and “who?”, and will merely restrict itself to “what?”. The anarchic freedom with which, for example, Japanese anime and manga artists play with all kinds of cultural icons and landscapes, amalgamating them together irreverently in a variety of incongruous ways, will become the standardized norm. I started this book on a note of cosmology, so I’ll end with it. Thanks to advances in quantum computing, several university laboratories are now generating different simulated histories of the universe. The 14 billion years of history since the Big Bang is now being reimagined and replayed with mathematical models. When we talk about World Literature, and the history since Gilgamesh which has led us up to this discussion, I’d like to have this sense of infinite replayability of the universe as a framing to the argument; I’d like to have a clearer awareness of the multiple contingencies which, as soon as we speed past them, as soon as they freeze into singular actualities, acquire in retrospect the illusory weight and substance of destiny. Perhaps somewhere there is a computer that can replay the different histories of World Literature, worlds where a different region of the planet (East Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia) stumbled into the laws of science first, laws which gave it the scientific, industrial and ultimately military edge to export its habits and rituals around the planet as universal, a priori truths. This isn’t about visiting alternative realities, or even trying to reconstruct them – but about allowing the possibility of their existence to inflect the way we think about the history of our own.

222 Conclusion

Notes 1 Joseph R. Slaughter, “World Literature as Property” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 34 (2014) p. 67. 2 Most memorably expressed in the title by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994). 3 Pascale Casanova, trans. M. D. Bevoise, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) p. 351. 4 Warwick Research Collective (Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, Stephen Shapiro), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015) p. 14. 5 Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013) p. 52. 6 See Sanja Bahun and A.D. Smith on the persistence, for example, of “prenational ethnographic heritage” on national literatures – Sanja Bahun, “The Politics of World Literature” in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds), Routledge Companion to World Literature (London: Routledge, 2011) p. 377; A.D. Smith, “Nationalism and Modernity,” in T.O. Benson (ed.), Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) p. 79. Also relevant is the way Eric Hayot sees qualitative vs. quantitave reading as an anarchist vs. statist dichotomy – see Eric Hayot, “World Literature and Globalization” in Routledge Companion to World Literature (London: Routledge, 2011) p. 226. 7 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003) p. 4. 8 Moretti, Distant Reading p. 45, 46. 9 See Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006). 10 Emily Apter, Against World Literature (London: Verso, 2013) p. 56. 11 Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? (Duke University Press, 2016) p. 14. 12 Ibid., 36, 42. 13 Martin Puchner (ed.), The Norton Anthology of World Literature, volume 2 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013) Shorter 3rd edition. The anthology has approximately 523 pages out of a total of 1765 allotted to non-Western writers. 14 C. Domínguez, “Dionýz Durišin and a Systemic Theory of World Literature” in Routledge Companion to World Literature (London: Routledge, 2011) p. 106; Theo D’Haen, Routledge Concise History of World Literature (Routledge, 2012) p. 155; Stéphane Spoiden (1997) “The Treachery of Art: This Is not Belgium.” In symplokë 5, 1–2 (Special Issue: Refiguring Europe): 137–52. Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham: Duke UP, 2006). 15 Bahun, “The Politics of World Literature” p. 374. 16 Bruce Robbins, “Uses of World Literature” in Routledge Companion to World Literature, p. 383. 17 Peter Carravetta, “The Canon(s) of World Literature” in Routledge Companion to World Literature, p. 269. 18 Readers will doubtless have guessed the film and novel I am referring to – the Persian-language American vampire Western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014) and the extraordinary 1905 Bengali novel Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein.

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Index

1492 204–205 1960s, Mexican literature 111 2666 (Bolaño) 70 Absurd Night (Ajgubi Raat) (Islam) 70 Abu-Lughod, Lila 70 Adam and Eve 105–106 Against World Literature (Apter) 209 “Agamemnon” (Rifat) 139–140 Agaoglu, Adalet 61 agency 70 Ahern, Maureen 73 Ali, Sabahattin 134 Ali Baba 197 Altamirano, Ignacio 19 Amîda, Irfan 136 Anatolian culture 18, 132–134, 138 Anayurt Oteli (Motherland Hotel) (Atilgan) 51, 55–58, 61–63, 65 Anderson, Benedict 177 anthologies 4 anti-colonial struggle 14 Antigone 100 Atilgan, Yusuf 55–58 “Antiorfeo” (Owen) 142 apolitical melancholy 176–180 apostate Orientalism 199 Apter, Emily 3, 13, 209–210 Apur Sansur (Ray) 129 Aral, Inci 70–71, 83–84; “The Door”/“Kapi” 84–87; “Selver” 87–89 Arjun (Gangopadhyay) 123 Armenian writers 18; Greek myth 140; Muslims 198 Arreola, Juan José 108 Atay, Oğuz 7 Atsiz, Nihal 134–135 Attar, Farid Ud-din 135 Auerbach, Erich 206

Aura (Fuentes) 33–36, 44 Aurobindo, Sri 115, 116 Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Chaudhuri) 162–169, 173 Bakhtin, M.M. 38 Banda, Rascon 61 Banerji, Bibhutibhushan, “Maya”/“A Strange Attachment” (Banerji) 29–33 Bani Basu 116, 118, 142 Basu, Rajshekar 127 Basu, Samaresh 123 Bawer, Mem 136 Baydar, Oya 176 becoming-through-self-othering 100 Bengal 7, 12, 15–17, 20; femicide 71, 74, 81–83; ghost stories 28–32, 35-36; Hindus 197–198; Indian nationalism 199–200; melancholy 164; Muslim 20, 197; myths see retelling myths(Bengali); Orientalism 196–199, 208 Bengali literature: Apur Sansur (Ray) 129; Arjun (Gangopadhyay) 123; Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Chaudhuri) 162–169, 173; “The Breast Giver”/ “Stanyadini” (Devi) 77, 82–83; Chitrangada (Tagore) 119; Chowringhee (Sankar) 52–57, 59, 61–63, 65; “Douloti the Bountiful” (Devi) 78–81; “Draupadi” (Devi) 123; “Elder Sister”/“Didi” (Tagore) 70; English, August (Chatterjee) 123, 175; “Fatal Evening” (Chakraborty) 120; “The Flute” (Bose) 122; “The Goddess”/“Devi” (Mukherjee) 82; “The Hungry Stones” (Tagore) 29–33, 142; “The Hunt” (Devi) 81, 125; “An Infatuation” (Chaudhuri)

248 Index 121–122; “Karna and Kunti” (Tagore) 119–121; “The Magic Deer” (Das) 122–123; Meghnabadh Kabya (Dutt) 122; Meghne Dekhe Tara/Cloud Capped Star (Ghatak) 70; Partham Partha (Bose) 119; Perseus the Deliverer (Aurobindo) 115, 118; The Shadow Lines (Ghosh) 175–180, 183; Sri Kanta (Chattopadhyay) 142–144; “Stanyadini” (Devi) 77, 82–83; “A Strange Attachment” (Tagore) 29–33; “Sultana’s Dream” (Hossain) 124; The Twelfth Manu (Mitra) 124; Why I Mourn for England (Chaundhuri) 163 Benjamin, Walter 28, 161, 206 Berman, Marshall 190 Bhabha, Homi 64, 166 Bhagavad Gita 116, 123 Bhattacharya, Manaranjon 116, 124 bhut 29 Bibhutibhushan, Bandyhopadhyay, 44, 46n19, 122 bi-lingual Turkish-Kurdish writers 18 Birsel, Salah 130 Biyapari, Manoranjan 20 The Black Book/Kara Kitap (Pamuk) 135–136, 180, 207–208 Bolaño, Roberto 70, 187 Bose, Buddhadev 119–120 “The Breast Giver”/ “Stanyadini” (Devi) 77, 82–83 cakravartin 31–32 Campo, Ruben M. 112 capitalism 6, 7, 45, 57, 117, 190, 217; see also modernity Carballido, Emilio 104, 111, 119, 126, 132 Carravetta, Peter 219–220 Casanova, Pascale 195, 216 Castellanos, Rosario 8, 70–71, 76–77; “El Viudo Roman”/“The Widower Roman” 72–74; “Tres nudos en la red”/“Three Knots in the Net” 74–76 categorization, myths 101, 131 Catholic purity España 203 Cervantes, Lorna Dee 108 “Chac-Mool” (Fuentes) 35 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 12 Chakraborty, Nirendranath 120 A Change of Skin (Fuentes) 109 Chatterjee, Upamanyu 123, 175 Chattopadhyay, Saratchandra 142–144

Chaudhuri, Amit 117, 121–122, 126, 175–176 Chaudhuri, Nirad 117–118, 201; Autobiography of an Unknown Indian 162–169, 173; Indian nationalism 199–200; Why I Mourn for England 163 Chaudhuri, Rosinka 118 Cheah, Pheng 14 “A Chicano Poem” (Cervantes) 108 “Chikon nangui”/“Guardians of the Earth” (Regino) 110 Chitrangada (Tagore) 119 Chowringhee (Sankar) 52–57, 59, 61–63, 65 Christianity 12, 140, 198; ghost stories 35, 40; myths 97, 110–112, 124– 125, 132, 137, 140 Spain 203–204 chronotope 38 “Chumatec children” (Tiburcio) 110 Circe 103 The City in Crimson Cloak (Erdogan) 142 Clewell, Tammy 174 Cob, Briceida Cuevas 110 colonialism 171; Latin American colonialism 196 commodification, femicide narratives 78–79 constituencies of myth 97, 132 “Crimson Apple” 141 Critchley, Simon 174 Cross, Elsa 111 Damrosch, David 2, 4, 217 Das, J.P. 122–123 “The Dead” (Joyce) 61 death, hotel-narratives 61–65 Death and the Idea of Mexico (Lomnitz) 112 Death in Venice (Mann) 61 del Paso, Fernando 112, 196 Deleuze, Gilles 61 democratizing World Literature 219 demythologization 113, 147–148 denationalizing tools, Islam 201 de-Ottomanization 206 Derrida, Jacques 28 desacralization 105, 107 Devi, Mahasweta 8–9, 70–71, 74, 76–77, 116, 128; “The Breast Giver”/“Stanyadini” 77, 82–83; “Douloti the Bountiful” 78–81; “Draupadi” 123; “The Hunt” 81, 125

Index  Diken, Şeyhmus 167 Dimitrova, D. 114–115 “The Dinner” (“La Cena”) (Reyes) 100 Dirlik, Arif 10 disease 74–75 Divakaruni, Chitra 118 “The Door”/“Kapi” (Aral) 84–87 “Douloti the Bountiful” (Devi) 78–81 Dow, Bonnie J. 90 “Draupadi” (Devi) 123 Dutt, Michael Madhusudhan 117, 118, 122, 127, 197 Dutt, Romesh Chunder 118 Dyson, Kushari 119 Ebediyat-I Cedide (“New Literature”) 138 Echevarría, R.G. 100 efsane (myth) 129 El Laberinto de la Soledad (Labyrinth of Solitude) (Paz) 170–173, 201 “El Viudo Roman”/“The Widower Roman” (Castellanos) 72–74 “Elder Sister”/“Didi” (Tagore) 70 Eliade, Mircea 96 Eliot, T.S. 97 Empire 167–170, 173; ghost stories 32–33; hotel-narratives 53–55 Emre, Yunus 162 English, August (Chatterjee) 123, 175 Enrigue, Alvaró, “Escape from Suicide City”/“Salida de la ciudad de loss suicidas” 174, 177, 179, 184–189 Eray, Nazli 130, 138, 146; Orpheus (Eray) 176 Erdoğan, Asli 142 “Ergenekon” (Gökalp) 130 Ertürk, Nergis 138 “Escape from Suicide City”/“Salida de la ciudad de loss suicidas” (Enrigue) 175, 177, 179, 184–189 Eurocentrism 10, 13, 17, 215 Eurochronology problem 13 Eurydice, Turkish literature 146 Eva (Zaid) 107 Eve 102, 107–108 Evren, Kenan 182 Fadanelli, Guillermo, Hotel DF 58–61 Faik, Sait 131 Faiz, Faiz Ahmad 13 false consciousness 75 fantasma 33 “Farewell, Alyosha” (Baydar) 176

249

“Fatal Evening” (Chakraborty) 120 Fazil, Necip 137 femicide narratives 69–71; “The Breast Giver”/“Stanyadini” (Devi) 77, 82– 83; disease 74; “The Door”/“Kapi” (Aral) 84–87; “Douloti the Bountiful” (Devi) 78–80; “El Viudo Roman”/“The Widower Roman” (Castellanos) 72–74; “The Hunt” (Devi) 81; “Selver” (Aral) 87–89; “Tres nudos en la red”/“Three Knots in the Net” (Castellanos) 74–76 feminists, myths 116–117 Ferhunde the Maid (Uşakligil) 70 Fikret, Tevfik 130 Finnegan, Nuala 75 Flores, Manuel M. 102 “The Flute” (Bose) 122 Forget English! (Mufti) 195 Foucault, Michel 52 Frenk, Susan 35 “The Fruit of Knowledge” 124–125 Fuentes, Carlos 8, 203–204; Aura 33–36, 44; “Chac-Mool” 35; A Change of Skin 109 Fukuyama, Francis 173–174, 188 future of World literature 220–221 Gangopadhyay, Sunil 123, 131 Gardens of Silihdar (Yessayan) 198 Garip movement 139 Geworfenheit 59 Ghatak, Ritwik 20 Ghose, Sukumar 125 Ghosh, Amitav 8–9; The Shadow Lines 176–180, 183 ghost stories 27–29; Aura (Fuentes) 33–36; “Chac-Mool” (Fuentes) 35; “Kshudita Pasan”/“The Hungry Stones” (Tagore) 29–33; Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair (Matmazel Noraliya’nin Koltugu) (Safa) 39–41; “Maya”/“A Strange Attachment” (Banerji) 29–33; Pedro Páramo (Rulfo) 36–38; The Time Regulation Institute (Tanpinar) 41–43 Gilbert, Pamela 75 Gilgamesh 133 globalization 180–184 gnosis 177, 187 “The Goddess”/“Devi” (Mukherjee) 82 Gökalp, Ziya 130, 134, 138, 181, 183 Greek myth, Turkish literature 138–140

250 Index “Guardians of the Earth”/“Chikon nangui” (Regino) 110 “Guests of the Dying Hotel” (“Ölen Otel ki Muşteriler”) (Uyar) 61 Gürbilek, Nurdan 56, 180 Gurpinar, Hüseyin Rahmi 141 Halide Edip, Adivar 196–199 Haq, Kaiser 20, 117 hasret (longing, loss) 161 Hassan, Ihab 174 hayalet (ghost) 39 Hecker, Zvi 210 Hellenism 98, 118 Herder, J.G. 202 Herrera, Yuri 112, 144–146 hetanosakan sharzhum (“pagan movement”) 140 heterotopia 52 Hikmet, Nazim 131, 134 Hinduism 126 Hindus 197–200 Hipotermia (Enrigue) 184, 187 Hispanic Orientalism 202 historical identity 40 historicism 11 historicizing 12 History, Aura (Fuentes) 33–36 Hitchcock, Peter 14 Homero en Cuernavaca (Reyes) 98 homesickness 166 Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat 124, 125 Hotel DF (Fadanelli) 53, 56–61, 63, 65 Hotel Isabel 51, 60 Hotel Juarez (Banda) 61 hotel-narratives 50–51; Anayurt Oteli (Motherland Hotel) 55–58; Chowringhee (Sankar) 52–55; death 61–65; Hotel DF (Fadanelli) 58–61 hotels 51–52, 59 humanism, Saidian humanism 209–210 “The Hungry Stones” (Tagore) 29–33, 142 “The Hunt” (Devi) 81, 125 Huq, Hasan Azizul 20, 27, 142 hüzün (sadness) 161 Huzur (Tanpinar) 167–170, 173 hybridity 6 Ibn Khaldun 10 identity 100; Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair (Safa) 40; Mexican identity 99; Turkish literature 141 Ifigenia Cruel (Reyes) 98

Ilhan, Attila 135 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 177 imperialism 171 Indian nationalism 199–200 indigeneity 71, 108 indigenous consciousness 108 Indo-Afro-Iberoamerican assimilation 203 Inés de la Cruz, Sor Juana 162 “An Infatuation” (Chaudhuri) 121–122 internationalization 9, 176 ironic disavowal 4 Islam 199, 201, 203–204, 208 Islam, Kazi Nazrul 127 Islam, Syed Manzoorul 70 Islamic Orient 197–199, 201, 208 Jameson, Fredric, 21, 105, 218 jinn 27 Job 96–98, 101, 106, 118, 122 Joyce, James 61 Judeo-Christian-Islamic symbols, Turkish literature 137 Kadri, Yakup 140 Kallol group 132 “Kapi” (“The Door”) (Aral) 84–87 Kapoor, Ilan 90 “Karna and Kunti” (Tagore) 119–121 katha (myth) 114 Kaygalak, Metin 18, 19 Kemal, Ali 168 Kemal, Yahya 138–140 Kemal, Yaşar 133 Kemalist patriotism 179 Kemalist Turkey 208 Klein, Naomi 13 Kracauer, Siegfried 56 “Kshudita Pasan”/“The Hungry Stones” (Tagore) 29–33, 142 Kurdish, Turkey 17–18 Kurds 71; Shahmeran 133–134 Kushigian, Julia 202, 205 “La Cena” (“The Dinner”) (Reyes) 100 Labyrinth of Solitude (Paz) 116, 170–172, 201 Lahiri, Jhumpa 5 Larkin, Philip 175 Lash, Scott 188 Latin American colonialism 196 Latin American Orientalism 202, 205 Lefebvre, Henri 38, 52 “The Legs of Shahmeran” (Mungan) 133

Index  Lessing, Doris 61, 162 Leyla and Majnun 135–136 literary melancholy 187 Lomnitz, Claudio 112 “Lord of Thunder” 103 loss 163, 174 lost cities 164, 167, 172–174 love 189 Luiselli, Valeria 58–61 Lunez, Enriqueta 110 Mabanckou, Alain 6 Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair (Matmazel Noraliya’nin Koltuğu) (Safa) 39–41, 44–45 “The Magic Deer” (Das) 122–123 Mahabharata 118, 120–121, 123, 124 Mallabarman, Advaita 20 Mandacilar 168 Mann, Thomas 61 Marxists 208 Mayan, Orientalism 205 Medusa 104 Meghnabadh Kabya (Dutt) 122 Meghne Dekhe Tara/Cloud Capped Star (Ghatak) 70 melancholic rebel 187–188 The Melancholic Temperament (Volpi) 176 melancholy 161–162, 174–175; apolitical melancholy 176–180; Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Chaudhuri) 162–167; “Escape from Suicide City”/“Salida de la ciudad de loss suicidas” (Enrigue) 184–189; Hotel DF (Fadanelli) 59; Huzur (Tanpinar) 167–170; Labyrinth of Solitude (Paz) 170–172; literary melancholy 187; post-ideological melancholy 176 melancolía (melancholy) 161 Messianic 43 Mexican literature: “Antiorfeo” (Owen) 142; Aura (Fuentes) 33–36, 44; “Chac-Mool” (Fuentes) 35; A Change of Skin (Fuentes) 109; “A Chicano Poem” (Cervantes) 108; “Chikon nangui”/“Guardians of the Earth” (Regino) 110; “Chumatec children” (Tiburcio) 110; Death and the Idea of Mexico (Lomnitz) 112; “The Dinner” (“La Cena”) (Reyes) 100; El Laberinto de la Soledad (Labyrinth of Solitude) (Paz) 170–173, 201;

251

“El Viudo Roman”/“The Widower Roman” (Castellanos) 72–74; “Escape from Suicide City”/“Salida de la ciudad de loss suicidas” (Enrigue) 175, 177, 179, 184–189; Eva (Zaid) 107; Hipotermia (Enrigue) 184, 187; Homero en Cuernavaca (Reyes) 98; Hotel DF (Fadanelli) 53, 56–61, 63, 65; Hotel Juarez (Banda) 61; Ifigenia Cruel (Reyes) 98; Labyrinth of Solitude (Paz) 116, 170–172, 201; The Melancholic Temperament (Volpi) 176; Midnight Song for the Minstrel (Pineda) 110; Palinuro de Mexico (del Paso) 112; Quetzalcoatl’s Escape (La Huida de Quetzalcoatl) (Portilla) 109; “Thousands Without Job” (Novo) 106; “Three Knots in the Net” (Castellanos) 74–76; “The Widower Roman” (Castellanos) 72–74 Mexican Miracle 170 Mexican orientalism 205 Mexicanness 201–202 Mexico 8, 15–17, 19, 175; femicide narratives 71; ghost stories 32–36; hotel-narratives 51, 58–61, 65; melancholy 162, 170, 172, 189; myths see retelling myths (Mexico); Orientalism 197, 201, 203; population 19 Midnight Song for the Minstrel (Pineda) 110 A Mind at Peace (Tanpinar) 167 Mishra, Pankaj 14 misogyny 53 Mitra, Premendra 124 modernity 3, 5, 10, 15, 21, 34–35, 38, 42, 45, 50, 51, 64, 79, 81, 117, 128, 170, 172, 175, 181, 185, 215–218 monmora (melancholy) 161 Moretti, Franco 2, 216, 218 Motherland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli) (Atilgan) 51, 55–58, 61–63, 65 Mufti, Aamir 2–3, 12, 195, 199 Muhidine, Timour 17 Mukherjee, Prabhatkumar 82 Müller, Max 165 Mungan, Murathan 133 Munif, Abdelrahman 13 The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Muzesi) (Pamuk) 180 Muslim Orient 201 Muslims 197–203

252 Index myth-adaptation 130–132 myth aggrandizement 101–102, 118–120 myth appropriation 107–110, 124–125 myth inhabitation 103–104, 120–121 myth-manipulation 105–107, 111, 122–123 myth-reversal 104–105, 121–122 mythologization 100, 106 mythologizing 145 myths: Bengal 114; categorization 101, 131; comparing Bengali and Mexican literature 125–129; Nietzschean fashion 99; Ottoman myths 141; politics 115; retelling see retelling myths (Turkey) Nácar, Pancho 19 Naipaul, V.S. 162 Narayan, R.K. 119 narrativelessness 174 Nasrin, Taslima 20 national identity, Turkish literature 141 nationalism 134, 164, 200; Indian nationalism 199–200 negative theology 3 negativity 111 neo-Hellenism 132, 138, 140 neoliberalism 174–176, 183, 188 Nev Yunanilik 138 “New Black Days” (Tourian) 198 The New Life/Yeni Hayat (Pamuk) 175, 177, 179–184 Nietzsche, Friedrich 204 Nietzschean fashion, myths 99 nihilism, 31, 36, 64, 65, 107, 170, 186 Nityahari 55 Nizami 135 “Noah’s Daughter” (Yücel) 131 Novo, Salvador 106 occultism 28 Odian, Yervant 18–19 Odyssey 103 Olmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die) (Ağaoğlu) 61 Orfee (Eray) 130, 146, 147 Orientalism 13, 115, 195, 196, 198, 202, 205, 210; apostate Orientalism 199; Hispanic Orientalism 202; Islamic Orientalism 197–199, 201, 208; Latin American Orientalism 202, 205; Mayan 205; Ottoman Orientalism 199; self-Orientalism 199; Turkey 206–207

Orpheus 111, 141–142, 146 Orpheus (Eray) 176 Other 40–41, 205 Ottoman myths 141 Ottoman Orientalism 199 Owen, Gilberto 104, 111, 119, 142 Pacheco, José Emilio 8, 60, 105, 106 Palaversich, Diana 59 Palinuro de Mexico (del Paso) 112 pamphlets 116 Pamuk, Orhan 7, 10, 135–136, 161; The New Life/Yeni Hayat 177, 179–184; Orientalism 206–207 Partham Partha (Bose) 119 Pascual, Pilar Hualde 100 Pasha, Vartan 18 Paz, Octavio 75, 109, 116, 162, 173; Labyrinth of Solitude 170–172, 201 Pensky, Max 187 Pereda, Prado 19 periodization, retelling myths 112–113 Perseus 104–105, 119 Perseus the Deliverer (Aurobindo) 115, 118 Persian myth 135–136 petrified life 28 Phan, Aimee 6 Pineda, Irma 110, 197 politics 5, 39, 90, 165, 168, 173, 178, 187, 219–220; myths 115; pamphlets 116; Turkish literature 146–147 politics of melancholy 187 Pollock, Sheldon 10 Portilla, Miguel Leon 109 positivity 128 post-ideological melancholy 176 power 52 premodern 217 Prometheus 130 puranakatha 114 “Puranas” (Bhattacharya) 124 Quetzalcoatl (Campo) 112 Quetzalcoatl’s Escape (La Huida de Quetzalcoatl) (Portilla) 109 racial memory 36, 117 Rahman, Rizia 20, 78 Rahman, Shamsur 20 Raju, Z.H. 20 Ramayana 114, 118, 121, 126 The Ramayana (Narayan) 119 ramkatha 114

Index  Ray, Dasarathi 127, 218 Ray, Satiyajit 129 Reconquista 204, 208 Regino, Juan Gregorio 103, 110 religion 217; femicide narratives 81; Motherland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli) 57 repeatability 96 retelling myths (Bengali) 114–116; Hellenism 118; myth aggrandizement 118–120; myth appropriation 124–125; myth inhabitation 120– 121; myth-manipulation 122–123; myth-reversal 121–122 retelling myths (Mexico) 96–97; categorization 101; myth aggrandizement 101–102; myth appropriation 107–110; myth inhabitation 103–104; mythmanipulation 105–107, 111; mythreversal 104–105; periodization 112–113 retelling myths (Turkey) 129, 133–138, 141–147; myth-adaptation 130–132 Reyes, Alfonso 97–99, 112, 204, 206; “The Dinner” (“La Cena”) 100; Homero en Cuernavaca 98; Ifigenia Cruel 98 Rifat, Oktay 138–140 Robbins, Bruce 219 ruins theory 28 Rulfo, Juan, Pedro Páramo 36–38 Sabines, Jaime 105–106 sacredness, myths 106 Safa, Peyami, Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair (Matmazel Noraliya’nin Koltuğu) (Safa) 39–41, 44–45 Said, Edward 2–3, 13, 196, 209–210 Saidian humanism 209–210 “Salida de la ciudad de loss suicidas”/“Escape from Suicide City” (Enrigue) 175, 177, 179, 184–189 Sanches, Alberto Ruy 201–203 Sánchez, Mikeas 110, 197 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 99 Sankar, Mukherjee, Chowringhee 52–55 Sartre, Jean-Paul 177 Sefer, Şêxmûs 133 Sefettin, Ömer 138 self-Orientalism 199 “Selver” (Aral) 87–89 semi-myth 97

253

Sen, Amartya 10 Sen, Navaneeta Dev 126 Servet-i Funun (“Wealth of Knowledge”) 138 sexual disappointment 63–64 sexual identity 40 sexuality 27, 41, 64, 196, 218 Seyfettin, Ömer 141 The Shadow Lines (Ghosh) 175–180, 183 Shahjahan Hotel 51, 53–55 Shahmeran 133 “Shahmeran” (Birsel) 130 shahr-i ashob 169 Shamba 123 “Shirish” (Basu) 142 Signs Preceding the End of the World 144, 145 “Simurg için Sonnet” (Yavuz) 135 Slaughter, Joseph 215 Sorekli, Shahin B. 137 South-South 13 Spanish 19 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 28 spectrality 28 Spivak, G. C. 81–82 Sri Kanta (Chattopadhyay) 142–144 St Augustine 3 “Stanyadini” (Devi) 77, 82–83 Stoler, Ann Laura 28 “A Strange Attachment” (Tagore) 29–33 subaltern voices, Bengali literature 128 Sufis 207–208 “Sultana’s Dream” (Hossain) 124 Tagore, Rabindranath 46n15, 161, 196, 201; Chitrangada 119; “Elder Sister”/“Didi” 70; “The Hungry Stones” 29–33, 142; “Karna and Kunti” 119–120; nationalism 200 Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi 7, 11, 18, 138, 162, 196–197; Huzur 167–170, 173; The Time Regulation Institute 41–43 “Telemachus” (Arreola) 108 ten-percenters 4, 215 Terán, Victor 19 textual echo, Turkish femicide narratives 89 Thousand and One Nights 208 “Thousands Without Job” (Novo) 106 “Three Knots in the Net” (Castellanos) 74–76

254 Index Tiburcio, Jun 110 time 38 The Time Regulation Institute (Tanpinar) 41–43 “To Room Nineteen” (Lessing) 61 topos 52 Tourian, Bedros 18, 140, 198 Trauerspiel (Benjamin) 161 “Tres nudos en la red”/“Three Knots in the Net” (Castellanos) 74–76 tricontinentalism 13 Turkey 15–18, 51, 71; class struggles 16; femicide 87–90; ghost stories 39–45; hotel-narratives 53; Islam 208; Kurds 17–18; melancholy 168, 175–176, 181; Muslims 198; myths 126, 130, 136, 140, 141, 146; Orientalism 197–198, 206–208 Turkish literature: “Agamemnon” (Rifat) 139–140; Anayurt Oteli (Motherland Hotel) (Atilgan) 51, 55–58, 61–63, 65; The Black Book/Kara Kitap (Pamuk) 135–136, 180, 207–208; The City in Crimson Cloak (Erdogan) 142; “The Door”/“Kapi” (Aral) 84–87; “Ergenekon” (Gökalp) 130; “Farewell, Alyosha” (Baydar) 176; Ferhunde the Maid (Uşakligil) 70; “Guests of the Dying Hotel” (“Ölen Otel ki Muşteriler”) (Uyar) 61; Huzur (Tanpinar) 167–170, 173; “The Legs of Shahmeran” (Mungan) 133; Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair (Matmazel Noraliya’nin Koltuğu) (Safa) 39–41, 44–45; A Mind at Peace (Tanpinar) 167; The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Muzesi) (Pamuk) 180; The New Life/ Yeni Hayat (Pamuk) 175, 177, 179– 184; “Noah’s Daughter” (Yücel) 131; Olmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die) (Ağaoğlu) 61; Orfee (Eray) 130, 146, 147; Orpheus (Eray) 176; “Selver” (Aral) 87–89; The Time Regulation Institute (Tanpinar) 41–43; Tutunamayanlar (Those Who Cannot Hold On) (Atay) 7; “Yakaris” (Atsiz) 134

Tutunamayanlar (Those Who Cannot Hold On) (Atay) 7 The Twelfth Manu (Mitra) 124 Ulysses 117 underworld narratives, Turkish literature 142–147 untimeliness 188 Urriba, Sara 115 Urtext 135–136 Uşakligil, Halit Ziya 70 Uslu, Mehmet Fatih 18 Uyar, Tomris 61 Uzun, Mehmet 17–18, 133 Valdes, Mario J. 36 Varoujian, Daniel 140 Vasunia, Phiroze 118 Veli, Orhan 131 Villarutia, Xavier 62 Villoro, Juan 108 Volpi, Jorge 5, 176 Walkowitz, Rebecca 2 Why I Mourn for England (Chaundhuri) 163 “The Widower Roman” (Castellanos) 72–74 women: Chowringhee (Sankar) 53; femicide narratives see femicide narratives World Literature Today 5 World Republic of Letters (Casanova) 216 Xanî, Ehmedê 17 “Xinga chi'un”/“Lord of Thunder” 103 Xipe Totec 108–110 “Yakaris” (Atsiz) 134 Yavuz, Hilmi 135 Yessayan, Zabel 18, 198 Young, Robert J.C. 13 Yücel, Ali, 139 Yücel, Can 131, 137 Zaid, Gabriel 103, 107–108 Žižek, S. 4 Zohrab, Krikor 18