Somehow I hadn’t seen any of these editions before today, when I ran into a couple of them as I was browsing through Chapters (thanks, again, to parents who hold their children’s birthday parties at The Putting Edge across the way!). I’m fascinated by the marketing approach: an unwary reader might well pick these up not even realizing they are “classics” …which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. I’m also interested that Jane Austen gets such different covers:
At least, it might. Pretty soon I have to finalize book orders for a new course I’m teaching in the winter term, a second-year survey of “British Literature Since 1800.” I feel strongly that despite the pressure it will put on the very limited time I have available to cover a vast range of material, I can’t teach such a course without including at least one 19th-century novel and one 20th-century novel–but picking just one puts a lot of pressure on each choice! I’ll be using the second volume of the Norton “Major Authors” anthology, which will take care of poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction. I’ve been thinking that if you’re going to showcase a single Victorian novelist, it simply has to be Dickens, and as we have at most two weeks and I will mostly have students without much literary experience, I’ve been thinking it has to be one of the shorter Dickens, meaning basically Hard Times or Great Expectations. Before I put the order in, though, I thought I’d see how many people agreed with me and how many would consider someone else the “must read” author of that century, or another book a better choice. So I’ve put a little poll at the side; feel free to place your vote there and/or to put a suggestion in the comments. For what it’s worth, my underlying theme in the course will be something like “what do people think literature is for, and how do they use literary form to get this done?” And the 20th-century novel I’ve almost decided on is Atonement, for lots of reasons, one of which is that it is kind of a two-for-one deal, given its engagement with Woolf-ian modernism (which we will address through readings from the anthology too).
It sure is quiet around the blogosphere, including around here. Must be summer! It’s not that I haven’t been reading, but for some reason–no particular reason–I haven’t been writing up as many of the books I read as I used to. At this point I’m more likely to do a full write-up only if a book has deeply engaged me, for better or for worse. This approach makes some sense, but it also means a certain slackening of discipline, so perhaps I’ll try to get back in the habit of finding at least something to say about most of my current reading….we’ll see. Right now I’m working on quite a varied collection, including Evidence, by fellow Dalhousian Ian Colford, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I’m only 400 pages in, but I’m pretty sure I disagree with Val McDermid’s claim that I won’t “read a better book this year”), and, of course, Villette. I just finished re-reading Villette this afternoon, and I was completely drawn in by the intensity of both the language and the vicarious experience of Lucy’s passions and sorrows. In the end, I think I like her because she’s a fighter; she has pride, and wit, and perseverance, even sheer cussedness. But I like her best when she cries out, “My heart will break!” More about that tomorrow. Discussion at The Valve has rather petered out, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see a surge of energy around the novel’s conclusion. Overall there have not been nearly as many comments as during last year’s Adam Bede reading, but on the other hand the comments have been extremely interesting and thoughtful. I kind of wish more of the regular Valve authors had participated…but then, catch me reading some of the stuff they post on! So no hard feelings.
As another project, I’ve been working on a piece about Trollope at the invitation of Steve Donoghue at Open Letters. Now, I’m very enthusiastic about Trollope, and so, it turns out, is Steve, and I love having this opportunity to put my thoughts into some kind of readable form. It turns out, though, that a lot of the self-conciousness I thought I had fought off by blogging all this time has come back: all the material I have so far seems both dry and obvious, and I’m riddled with anxieties about tone and audience. I guess the only thing to do is to keep writing, in the spirit of Trollope himself, who famously said, “I was once told that the surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler’s wax on my chair. I certainly believe in the cobbler’s wax much more than [in] inspiration.” (Ah, but he didn’t know about the internet, which lets you stay quite fixed in your chair but wander, mentally, far from the task at hand….)
And, as September comes relentlessly closer, even as I cling to the hope that I’ll make more real progress on my major research projects, I find I can’t stop thinking about my fall and winter classes. I actually really enjoy planning classes, setting up the syllabi and assignments, organizing the reserve lists and Blackboard sites and so on. Of course, this is a good thing–but it’s also a bad thing, when in fact I don’t need to do this stuff so early and should be leaving it until the very eve of my first class, as apparently most of my colleagues do (hence the crowds at the photocopier in early September). I like the concrete tasks involved: there’s something satisfying in checking specific items off the to-do list, like “first day handouts” or “links for BLS” or “study questions for Aurora Floyd“. But as a result, I often choose to do these tasks instead of the more amorphous, mentally demanding, never-really-done tasks that make up my research. Really, it’s a question of self-discipline, so starting tomorrow, I vow to spend at least half of every work day on research and writing. Or maybe I can use a rewards system: for every two hours spent in concentrated work of other kinds, I can spend half an hour getting something in order for the fall or winter.
One of the biggest distractions related to my upcoming teaching is that I want to try some new things (new to me, that is, not new in any sense of breaking pedagogical ground), and so I have to figure out how to make them work. For a winter term class, for instance, a lecture class on “British Literature Since 1800,” I am thinking of a wiki assignment that I hope will help students attend to and process the material they hear in lectures, taking more responsibility for it and engaging with it more creatively. My idea (still in development) is to have each tutorial group responsible for its own wiki; a specific student would be responsible for posting his or her notes on each lecture, with the whole group responsible for editing and amplifying them until, by the end of the term, they have a collaboratively-produced study guide for the whole course. I thought perhaps we could liven things up by making a bit of a game of it, with a prize for the best wiki (pizza for the group?). I quite like this idea, in theory anyway. I try hard to make my lectures engaging (though I now understand that I really do talk pretty fast), but I also try hard to make students see that just sitting listening, passively, is not enough. I imagine that this exercise will not only make sure at least someone is listening hard some of the time, but also reveal to them that each of them may hear me differently, may pick up on an example or an argument and think differently about it. I think the wiki format will give them room to challenge each other’s interpretations as well as mine, and to put in counter-arguments, link to additional contexts, and so on. But I am only just learning how to use PBWorks (formerly PBWiki), and before I can assign something of this kind for credit I have to be quite confident about the technology myself, and I have to think hard about how to explain it to them and how to define the requirements and expectations. (If any of you have used wikis in your teaching, advice would be welcome, now, before it’s too late!)
I’m also thinking about having the students in my George Eliot graduate seminar help me build up a really good website (very primitive version started here): I’ve been surprised at the relative dearth of good web resources on GE. Here I’m more confident about the mechanics of it, but I need to think through the academic and scholarly aspects: the what, why, and how of the information we would present. I feel as if this kind of project might help them define an audience and purpose for their work that might motivate them more than sticking to the conventional seminar-presentation-and-paper format, though probably a paper would still be part of the course requirements as well. I asked one of my PhD students, now done with her coursework, what she thought of the idea, and she was very enthusiastic, which was encouraging. But again, more thinking and experimenting to do. At least this, like the wiki idea, is for a course that won’t start until January.
For fun, I’ve also just watched both seasons of In Treatment, which I found totally mesmerizing. Gabriel Byrne can come and listen to me any time.
I finally read Mrs. Dalloway. It was a strangely unsettling experience. I had tried to read it many times before but never made it past the second page: my problem was (and continues to be) that I don’t altogether understand how to read this novel. It drifts and wanders, and then pauses in a place that doesn’t seem very significant, but becomes so as it is allowed to just be and develop on the page. You have to be patient–which may sound like a strange thing for a Victorianist to struggle with, but it’s a different kind of patience than the kind you need for Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot. So, although I have been very interested in the novel for a long time, I kept starting it and then putting it aside. This time I decided I should stop trying so hard and just keep reading, allowing myself to drift and wander and come back. When I did that, I started to fall under the spell of the language, which is beautiful and langorous but shot through with moments of startling clarity and, sometimes, brutality. And then, finally, I began to feel I was brushing up against the ideas of the novel, not in the abstract way I had considered them by reading about the novel, but more immediately, sensually as well as intellectually. So much has been written on this novel that I won’t add any more commentary of my own, except the brief observation that I hadn’t realized it was so much about London. Instead, here are my two favourite passages (so far):
Big Ben struck the half-hour.
How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell, making the moment solemn. . . . Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? When, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
And,
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). The (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
The thread is now open at The Valve for discussion of this week’s installment of Villette. In case you are wondering whether you should have joined us in this project, taste this:
What was become of that curious one-sided friendship which was half marble and half life; only on one hand truth, and on the other perhaps a jest?
Was this feeling dead? I do now know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet, and dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and of hair, still golden and living, obtruded through coffin-chinks.
Clearly the folks behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are behind the curve: the undead lurk already in Charlotte Bronte’s perverse imagination.
Back in May I made a trip to Ottawa to present a version of my work on Ahdaf Soueif at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. While I was there I enjoyed meeting up with Nigel Beale; we had a good dinner and talked a lot about books and reading and criticism, and then recorded a conversation about Middlemarch for Nigel’s “Biblio File” collection. The interview is now available at Nigel’s site. As I’ve mentioned here before, I have a bit of a reputation for talking fast, which I admit is (ahem) confirmed by this recording (I think I get a bit better as we go along, so if you do tune in, bear with me…). On the other hand, I also speak more or less in complete sentences, which I suppose counts in my favour. Ironically, I wondered before we started if I’d be able to think of much to say, as the set-up was informal and we didn’t prepare at all; as it turned out, Nigel was probably wondering if he’d be able to get me to shut up. But then, isn’t it the mark of a good interviewer that he keeps his subject talking? Thanks, Nigel, for giving me a chance to talk (and talk) about my favourite book–after listening to us, I feel charged up about teaching it again this year. I stand by my closing comments: it never disappoints.
We’re through the first two volumes of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette in our summer reading group at The Valve; come here to contribute to this week’s discussion.
I recently finished reading Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil. It is a remarkable novel, equal parts beauty and brutality; as its parts accumulate it does an elegant job of evoking through its literary form some of its central motifs and symbols, such as the images gradually revealed, restored, or repaired from the walls of the house decorated originally to celebrate all the delights of the senses. The fallen Buddha that bleeds gold when assaulted by the Taliban’s bullets, the lingering fragrance from the perfume factory, the books nailed to the ceiling and gradually reclaimed but irreparably scarred, the canoe that becomes an unlikely symbol for a desirable but tragically impossible collaboration–the novel is full of rich but delicate details that can make you catch your breath with their unexpected eloquence about the damage, tangible and intangible, inflicted by the conflicts that generate its plot. It is a novel, too, that hums with nuance and yet somehow refuses to judge those on whom such ambiguities are lost: many of its characters themselves hold to intractable, unforgiving, unforgivable absolutes, but the novel often seems to be asking us how they could have done otherwise, with the result that the tragedy of the novel (and it is extraordinarily, lyrically tragic throughout) feels inevitable, which is the saddest thing of all. Like Bel Canto, though also very differently, The Wasted Vigil holds up against brutality an ideal of aesthetic, rather than political, commitment; in fact, at times it seems as if the greatest evil of the Taliban is less their physical violence (which many other factions in the novel are also shown to be capable of, after all) but their violence towards art and the beautiful. When we see a glimmer of hope, it comes from quiet moments of aesthetic appreciation; violence is, ultimately, vandalism.
I was moved and impressed by this novel. But I also became uneasy about it in ways that I did not feel uneasy about Bel Canto, I think because Aslam’s novel is much more directly intervening in our discourse about particular historical and political events. It is at times an exceptionally, horribly, violent novel, but my unease was not queasiness about the violence as such but rather about the kind of aesthetic experience the novel itself was offering me (including through that violence) and how my pleasure in the novel as a whole thus reflects on me as a reader. What does it mean to enjoy, or at any rate to appreciate aesthetically, a novel in which a captive soldier is literally pulled to pieces as sport, a wife is forced to amputate her husband’s hand, a young man’s eye is burned with a blow torch, a suicide bomb is detonated next to a school?
Puzzling over this question made me think more generally about the purpose of such a book and about my own purposes in seeking it out. The aesthetics-of-suffering issue is not uncommon (Holocaust literature seems the obvious example) and has certainly been analyzed and theorized–I’ve looked into this a little as part of preparation for teaching Elie Wiesel’s Night, for instance. There’s something a bit different about the recent wave of high-profile titles about the Middle East or the Arab or Islamic world, though, including Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mahbod Seraji’s Rooftops of Tehran, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, to name a very few–and that’s not even touching on the many non-fiction titles, from memoirs to histories to political analyses.
It’s possible, of course, that what seems like a trend is actually just the result of my taking note of them as the circle of my own reading interests becomes less parochial, but my sense is that what has happened is that since 9/11, not only is the so-called “clash of civilizations” big news, but there is an interest, an appetite, among western literary audiences for stories that help them see different perspectives on current and historical events in a part of the world which, previously, they might have considered only glancingly, or with the reductive and limited insights available from following headlines and TV reports. The back cover of The Wasted Vigil quotes a reviewer suggesting as much–Peter Parker of The Sunday Times says that the novel “reminds us that fiction can do things that mere reportage can’t.”
One of the purposes of such novels, then, or at any rate one of their uses or effects, is revelation, maybe even instruction or pedagogy. That’s certainly one of the reasons I have been reading them: to the hoped-for satisfaction of a rewarding literary experience I can add the desire to learn more about these worlds that seem so other, to be in my reading life a better-informed citizen of the world and then perhaps, as a result, also to be a better-informed participant in real-world events–though I think there is also the temptation, the risk, to feel as if reading about, say, Afghanistan, is an actual substitute for trying to do anything about Afghanistan (would the money I spent on A Thousand Splendid Suns have been better spent as a donation to Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan?). But if reading leads to understanding, especially appreciation for nuance and complexity, isn’t reading a kind of doing? Isn’t it a good thing to do? And wouldn’t the world be a better place if more people (former world leaders, even) perhaps read such novels?
And yet at the same time, fiction is not (quite) fact; anecdote, especially imagined anecdote, is not a reliable substitute for aggregate data and rigorous contextualization; impressions, however beautiful, are not analysis; and, finally, contemplation is not action, and actions must sometimes be reductive–nuance and complexity are, perhaps, luxuries permitted to those who need not make decisions. In Saturday, Ian McEwan actually makes a similar point about ambivalence, depicting it (or so I read the novel) as a luxury, even a self-indulgence, when decisive action is required; in the more theoretical realm, Geoffrey Harpham notes that “without action, ethics is condemned to dithering,” and perhaps novels feel ethically more satisfactory sometimes than real life precisely because they need not take a singular position. Ethical critics have often pointed to this “negative capability” as a strength of the novel form, but it is also a crucial aspect of its artifice.
While I was thinking these things I came across an phrase in an essay by K. Anthony Appiah that struck me as suggestive in this context. In the essay, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” Appiah is discussing Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions; he is thinking about the question of the novel’s implied audience, “the ‘you’ addressed in the first paragraph of the novel”:
The usual answer, of course, is that the postcolonial African novel is addressed to a Western reader. Here, that is, according to the usual narrative, is a safari moment: an Africa constructed exactly for the moral tourist.
Appiah goes on to argue against reading Nervous Conditions in this way, but my interest is in the model he outlines of literature as a kind of “safari,” “constructed … for the moral tourist,” which seems at some level an apt characterization of the experience of reading something like A Thousand Splendid Suns or The Wasted Vigil (though the specific experience offered by each is, of course, quite different). I hear Appiah’s tone here as dismissive of that “moral tourist,” the reader seeking only an exotic experience, like a “safari,” rather than … I’m not sure what, actually. Is the alternative to being a “tourist” somehow “going native”? Is that any less problematic? Perhaps it is the author addressing the “Western reader” who is being faulted for offering up marketable, consumable, safe (fenced?) stories to suit the tourist’s taste. In her talk on representations of Arabs in western literature, Ahdaf Soueif points to some versions of this effect in recent novels; I’ve read some commentaries that object to the western fixation on veiling or stories of women’s oppression along similar lines. And yet … shouldn’t the story of women’s suffering be known, even if their victimization is not the whole story? Isn’t there something more substantial than “tourism,” than gawking, involved in seeking to know it? And, to come back to my opening comments on The Wasted Vigil, isn’t the aesthetic experience itself a kind of response, however inadequate, to the denial of their humanity?
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
One of my favourite quiet corners around here is a site called Escallonia Hedge. The name, as explained on the site, refers to the hedges surrounding the garden at Talland House, Virginia Woolf’s childhood summer home. Its author describes it as “a space through which things are meant to be discerned,” an opportunity for “trying to get comfortable with talking about texts in a comfortable but nonetheless what is called a ‘productive’ way. Maybe some dawdling along the way.”
I’ve read Escallonia Hedge since its inception. There aren’t many posts there, just over a dozen altogether, but every one showcases the author’s playful intellect and her delight in words and ideas. Here’s an excerpt, for instance, from a post on “Woolf and the Body”:
I have been thinking lately about Woolf and the body. Woolf is always thought of as being incredibly cerebral—which, no doubt, she was—but always to the point that I think there must be a popular misconception that she somehow rejects the body, does not think it important or take it seriously, just as there is the popular conception that she is somehow of a parcel with figures like T. S. Eliot, or how she must always and only be egotistical, when, really, she has one of the most sympathetic eyes ever.Thinking about this I am of course reminded of a frequently cited passage in On Being Ill, on the body as a pane of glass:
“[L]iterature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes.”
It just occurred to me as I lay in bed this morning, procrastinating on my papers (actually, not wanting to face the world), that Woolf’s frequent use of metaphors of glass is connected to this. Why is it sometimes that these very obvious things take so long to process or register?
Here’s another excerpt, this one from some commentary on a collection of Woolf’s writings called The Platform of Time:
The satire “JB” I found especially striking: it’s full of very interesting nonsense. It reminds me of how I tried to write at one point because I couldn’t find a sentence or a sense-making group of words that expressed what I thought, only I was writing that way sincerely whereas VW parodies the practice as confusion and excess. The character VW tells the character JB to find a single “image” to express what he means instead of clumping together various descriptors, and then JB tries to figure out what an “image” (simile, metaphor) means! (What is its use; where he can find an example of one; how it’s no good because it’s not GE Moore-ish enough (“how can a thing be like anything else except the thing it is?”).) This in contrast to JB looking at a “male siskin under a microscope” in an effort to compose a poem “in the manner of Gerard Hopkins” (“The siskin’s been dead a week”):
“Seepy, creaking, sweeping, with a creaking kind of beating of the penultimate dorsal jutting out femoral crepitational tail. The siskin whisking round the peeled off mouldy bottle green pear tree rivers. Well, I flatter myself that’s a pretty good poem—all true to an inch.”
Then there’s a big fuss about finding an image for the siskin, which in the end is arrived at by what JB has for lunch: “The siskin lies like—like cold salt roast beef the siskin lies. My word—that does it.” It’s moments like this I feel like saying “Oh Virginia Woolf, you’re the best!” I think the interesting thing about that line “like cold salt roast beef the siskin lies” is that it sounds beautiful but is being a framed in a way that makes it silly, reaching, and untrue. This is always the interesting thing about Woolf’s satirical moments, I think, and why I would say “Oh VW you’re the best”—many of them are a mixture of a form of sympathy and ridicule. Like Samuel Johnson’s satire manqué.
The author, Samantha Li, graduated from Dalhousie in May with first-class Honours in English. She would have begun her M.A. in English at U.B.C. in September. Tragically, she died on July 11, in a terrible car accident. She was 24. Her funeral service was today; I had the honour of being one of those invited by the family to speak at this heartbreaking event. All of us who had the pleasure and the privilege of working with Samantha will always remember her questing intelligence, her self-deprecating grace, her vivacious warmth, and her kindness. She was much loved, and will be greatly missed.
The lines I’ve quoted at the head of this post are from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.” As Samantha was also an exceptionally talented musician, however, it seems fitting to remember her with music as well. In this video, she is playing the violin; she is second from the left as we watch.
I am still working on my understanding of postcolonial theory, with an eye to revising my paper on Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun for eventual journal submission. The more I read, the clearer some things become, though I don’t pretend to anything like mastery over a field that (the more I read) looks increasingly complex and conflicted–which is to be expected of any field, of course, as you try to move beyond rough generalities. I think I do now see past some of my earlier confusions and slippages, and I also understand better the importance of some of the things people with more expertise in this area have said to me along the way. I think I also see ways in which some of these things people have said to me represent specific approaches to postcolonial studies that are themselves disputed. I realize that I have nothing to contribute to expert debate in this field (except, perhaps, grounds for further correction or guidance–which, of course, I will be happy to receive), so those of you who know this already, or are tired of trying to explain, can ignore what follows, but it helps my own thinking to see if I can say ‘out loud,’ as it were, what I have been learning.
One of the most important things I’m getting better at is making distinctions between different meanings of “postcolonialism.” For starters, I now understand that there was a time when (particularly in certain fields of study besides literature, such as history, economics, or political science) “postcolonial” meant more or less just what it sounds like, that is, it was a chronological marker meaning after the end of colonial rule. I think that the term was (and is) still used in this way, including in some discussions of literature that try to place particular texts or writers historically and also nationally. Gradually, however, this chronological sense of “post” as “after” shifted towards “post” as “against” or “anti”–at least, in some kinds of discourse, particularly including literary or theoretical. While not the first, perhaps one of the most important works in developing this meaning, or this use, of the term to signify an attitude rather than an era is The Empire Writes Back, in which the authors argue that what makes the literature of an array of countries is “distinctively post-colonial” is that it “foreground[s] the tension with the imperial power, and emphasiz[es] their differences from the assumptions of the imperial center” (2). In Feroz Jussawalla’s words,
What most convincingly defines a postcolonial novel, then, is the author’s attitude towards his or her country and its culture, an attitude of its distinctness and difference from that of the European colonizer. (“Postcolonial Novels and Theories”)
So now we have not just a historical distinction between pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial literature, but an ideological distinction between literature that is postcolonial in its attitude and literature that is not. Here I admit to some continuing confusion: is the opposite of postcolonial literature of this kind pro-colonial literature, or imperialist literature? Or is it the literature of the “imperial center” or “European colonizer”? Is that literature, by virtue of being, well, itself, assumed to be pro-colonial? Or is it, more neutrally, just literature that (again, by virtue of being itself) represents that against which postcolonial literature defines itself?
There is a further important distinction to be made between the discourse of postcolonial literature and that of postcolonial theory, or between postcolonialist as category of literary texts, and postcolonialist as a category of critical or theoretical discourse or a reading strategy. This issue was rightly brought up a couple of times by commenters on my previous posts (e.g. here), and I am increasingly aware of its relevance to the decisions I need to make about how (or why) to write about Soueif’s novels. Before I say more about that, though, I want to touch on a couple of additional points about identifying or defining certain texts as postcolonial, and particularly about what doing so means or implies about their relationship to canonical Western texts.
First, in my conference paper, I framed my reading of In the Eye of the Sun with an argument about how the novel resists being read as a “postcolonial novel”. I knew I was using a broad brush, but I felt from the reading I’d done so far that the generalization I had in mind was a reasonably safe one: that “postcolonial novels” were understood to be those that wrote back (to use Ashcroft, Tiffin, and Griffith’s phrase) against the literary language and forms of “the West”–again, those having (or assumed to have) a particular political attitude. So far, what I’ve read since has rather reinforced this view than undermined it (e.g. Jussawalla, who writes that “postcolonial literature is widely understood to be a literature that writes against empire”). There is an easy slip from here to the idea that all texts from postcolonial circumstances (historical, national) are assumed to be written about the same range of issues and from the same perspective. The very close relationship in critical writing between texts identified as postcolonial and postcolonial criticism and theory is part of what makes the big picture look this way, I think: that is, as a commentor pointed out at The Valve, it is typical for postcolonial texts to be addressed by postcolonial critics, which means they are known and talked about within a relatively specific (I might even say, narrow) context that artificially homogenizes their actual variety. At the same time, given the specific understanding of postcolonialism as an attitude or worldview, one to which the texts selected for such analysis need to, or are expected to, conform, some circularity in this process seems inevitable. This is what I had gathered, albeit impressionistically, from my own previous ventures into this field, and some of the articles I have read make points similar to mine about the resulting interpretive constraints. Here’s what I said in the previous exchange,
Your second point, about the distinction between postcolonialism as reading strategies and literature labelled “postcolonial” rightly identifies a slippage in my usage of that term, one I struggled with–but one that I think does happen in a more general way, in that books coming from “postcolonial” places are read with an emphasis on the kinds of issues (political, national) that are also primary in postcolonial theory. That is, a frequent starting assumption is that these books are primarily about colonialism, national identity, etc.–if not unambiguously as “national allegories,” then at least as statements about postcolonial positionality.
And here, for instance, is Jussawalla again:
Another unfortunate consequence of the rise of postcolonial theory is the unwillingness of some proponents to see anything in postcolonial literature except its challenges to hegemonic forces. Indeed, some novelists have articulated a sense of frustration with continually being tied to the colonial millstone.
Working towards a more nuanced understanding of the ways writers have engaged with the Western literary tradition, I thought John Marx’s essay “Postcolonial literature and the western canon” gave a very helpful synthesis; like the authors of The Empire Writes Back, who propose a development from “settler” literature to “literature produced under ‘imperial licence” to varieties of resistance and then appropriation, Marx highlights a movement from repudiation to critique, with an emphasis on anti-imperialism, to revision and rewriting, a less confrontational and more transformative form of engagement. Marx writes,
[A]cts of unwriting and rewriting had the effect of destabilizing the homology between colonial mastery and the mastery of European culture. . . . though such reworked versions tend to reinforce the centrality of Western writing by default, treating canonical texts as a source of raw material could not help but transform them . . . moreoever, they estranged the canon for Western readers, and uncovered complexity many had never noticed before.
I found particularly interesting Marx’s argument that the incorporation of postcolonial writing into the curriculum–and its wider audience more generally–has “enabled [even obliged, he implies] educators and their students to re-examine the interaction between literature and history as well as to redefine the meaning of cultural literacy and literary culture.” He sees as a result the emergence of a new, inclusive model of humanism. He quotes Anthony Appiah: “What is necessary to read novels across gaps of space, time, and experience is the capacity to follow a narrative and conjure a world: and that, it turns out, there are people everywhere more than willing to do.” In Marx’s view,
Because it maintains an authority to mediate local culture, postcolonial literature reveals that cultural differences can be overcome, as demonstrated by what Appiah describes as a basic human capacity to read and understand literature (at least of the narrative sort). Without sacrificing its point of entry into literary curricula as the representative of cultures repressed by imperialism, therefore, postcolonial literature seems poised to acquire the responsibility once claimed by the Western canon of mediating and defining the essential elements of our humanity.
The idea that literature bridges difference is hardly new, but this particular spin on it–that postcolonial literature in particular is coming to define a new ethically reinvigorated humanism for a global world– intrigues me and marks one of the key points I want to explore further. (It provides, among other things, a framework for reading both the literary and the ethical value of something like Nadeem Aslam’s extraordinary novel The Wasted Vigil, which I am currently reading.)
Marx’s (and, I gather, Appiah’s) interest in humanism seems like a useful place to return, however, to the distinction between talk about postcolonial literature and talk about postcolonial theory. Here, I’ve been trying to figure out how to understand (if not necessarily reconcile) arguments about the meaning of “implication” (as discussed, for instance, here) alongside claims that postcolonial theory is not “totalizing” (e.g. here). Still in the interests of trying to grasp larger principles (which are hard for a beginner to discern from ‘primary’ theoretical texts–though I have been reading what I can of these too), I found the distinction proposed in Neil Lazarus’s introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies illuminating, though no doubt it (like everything else) is controversial.
Lazarus suggests that there are two main approaches to postcolonialism, one which considers Eurocentrism an “ideology,” and one which considers it an “episteme.” He considers Said someone who held the former view along with a “realist epistemology,” the implications of which are that one can stand outside Eurocentrism and “subject its claims to scrutiny”; “it is quite obvious [in Said’s work] that there is an ‘East’ and that it is systematically misrepresented in Orientalist discourse.” (Lazarus believes that scholars following Said have wrongly emphasized the Foucauldian idea that discourses produce worlds or realities.)
The second approach he describes considers Eurocentrism as “a hegemonic mode of conceptualization, whose structuring propensities are so deeply and insidiously layered that they cannot but be determinative of all scholarly production.” Resistance to Eurocentrism on this model can lead to scholars rejecting “modernity, Europe, and rationality itself”–because these modes of thought replicate (reflect, are constitutive of) Eurocentric values, and it is thus impossible to critique Eurocentrism from within.
I’m not sure, but I wonder if this distinction is at the heart of the objection raised here to my protest about postcolonial theory appearing to assume its conclusions when it claims that all literature of the colonial era is “implicated” in colonialism or imperialism. If Eurocentrism functions as what Lazarus is calling an episteme, that implication does seem inevitable. But if Eurocentrism is what he calls an ideology, then some writers, even Victorian writers, might, in principle, stand outside it and “subject its claims to scrutiny.” Would they still be “implicated”? Here, I’m still confused about whether the intent is to accuse (and, as I’ve said before, not only is the word “implication” not neutral, but neutrality is probably not a morally appropriate stance towards slavery or colonialism) or just to make a sort of obvious point that every writer during the colonial era had some link–personal, financial, etc.–to colonial enterprises, just as today most of us in the west have some link to, say, child labour or deforestation. The account of “implication” offered to me here,
Pointing out that a novel is implicated in colonialism is akin to arguing that, much like the society it seeks to describe (and out of which it was produced), a novel necessarily confronts, and is confronted by, its colonial legacy—even, and especially, when it does not do so explicitly.
does not altogether help me sort this out, because it continues to blur textual and critical postcolonialism, because I’m not sure what the “colonial legacy” of a novel would be, and because I don’t see why not confronting colonialism directly means confronting it (or being confronted by it) especially. I also continue to wonder whether, once you’ve adopted the view that everything is always already Eurocentric, it doesn’t became crucial (just as it might have been before that was your perspective) to distinguish between those that, despite (even in spite of) these lurking structural or systemic implications, nonetheless set out on the face of things to oppose or criticize colonialism. In any case, if the point of the postcolonial reading is to reveal how a novel “confronts, or is confronted by, its colonial legacy,” then I’m still not convinced that there isn’t something reductive about that approach (the same comment argued that it was reductive on my part to say “that post-colonial critics simply create confrontational, or corrective, readings”)–but as was also pointed out, every critical approach has its domain, and it may be no more reasonable to object to the emphasis of postcolonial critics on empire than it would be to object to the emphasis of feminist critics on gender.
Though I hope I’m making progress, clearly I still have a lot to learn about the terms and stakes of these debates. Perhaps ironically, then, the most important insight I have arrived at in the past couple of weeks may be in answer to my own very early question about Soueif, which was “whether working on an Egyptian novelist writing in a post-colonial context necessitates using post-colonial theory” (here). RFD noted that “if non-post colonial readings of novels like Soueif’s are going to happen, the novels need to be read by people who aren’t interested in post-colonial reading.” As I replied to him,
In fact I was not initially inclined to approach In the Eye of the Sun as a postcolonial text, or through postcolonial theory, but as I went along I felt–perhaps wrongly–that given the existing critical literature on it and the novel’s own awareness of moving between cultures and languages and so on, I had to start by trying to explain why I thought that was not in fact the best way to go. So that was the strategy I settled on for framing this paper, though in many ways the heart of the paper, for me, is the middle section I omitted here, in which I try to demonstrate the “affinities” between the two novels.
My latest round of reading suggests that suggests that a postcolonial reading is not in fact called for, though an appreciation of how Soueif might (or might not) be considered a postcolonial writer might be appropriate. Though I have a number of dissatisfactions with the paper I came up with for ACCUTE, chief among it is that I did not set out, after reading In the Eye of the Sun, to work on the issues that seem to be central to postcolonial theory (national identity, place, language) but rather wanted to consider the novel in relation to my own previous work on the ethics of fiction, particularly in relation to George Eliot. I think now that I should have done just that–but that I am better equipped to return to that project now, not least because postcolonialism in both literature and criticism is in so many respects an ethical project.
(x-posted)
Novel Readings 