Postcolonial Custodianship

Cultural and Literary Inheritance

Filippo Menozzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317818083
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book engages with current developments in postcolonial research, exploring notions of cultural transmission, tradition and modernity, authenticity, cross-cultural aesthetics and postcolonial ethics. The author considers the ethical responsibility of the postcolonial intellectual, enhancing our understanding of this topic through the concept of custodianship, which may be defined as a responsibility towards the other in forms of cultural and literary inheritance. The author introduces custodianship as a central theme and a vital question for the committed intellectual today, proposing original interpretations of major postcolonial texts by key figures including Anita Desai, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy. Through close reading and historical analysis, Postcolonial Custodianship reveals that a practice of custodianship has always been an essential element of these writers' ethical engagement, yet in a way that has never been explored. The author contends that the question of custodianship should not be seen as a merely negative designation; it is by redefining the very meaning of custodianship that the ethical dimension of postcolonialism can be rediscovered.

1 Custodian of the Unspeakable

Reading Anita Desai

It is this invisible, literally unspeakable presence that gives to beauty its blinding brilliance, the seductive and protective shining of form.

—Leo Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” 163

In Custody was published in 1984. Coincidentally, this was the year of the death of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of the most important Urdu poets of the twentieth century. While not explicitly representing Faiz or his poems, the novel engages with the context of Urdu poetry in India, a transregional literary culture which was profoundly affected by the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, as shown by C.M. Naim (“Consequences”). In a reading that will include references to poems and writings by Faiz as a counterpoint to passages of the novel, this chapter suggests that Anita Desai’s work is able to present a specific notion of cultural and poetic transmission. This idea of custodianship could be affiliated to what Svetlana Boym calls “reflective nostalgia”: an inconclusive, fragmentary and ironic continuation of cultural memories animated by a “sense of distance” in which “the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historic development” (Future 50). In Custody could be read as the figuration of a work of transmission which has “a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness” (50) rather than that mourning for a lost tradition, which critics have identified in a literal reading of the novel. In fact, Anita Desai’s narrative is centred around an act of literary transmission—a scene of writing that incorporates the scene of reading—that is able to pass on a vernacular poetic inheritance through the medium of the English novel. One of the most important themes of Urdu poetry—the separation from the beloved, what Aamir Mufti has called “the dialectic of separation and union” (Enlightenment 220)—is reinterpreted by Anita Desai as a figure for literary reception. In my reading, the encounter between a literary critic and his beloved Urdu poet represented in the story is connected to the poetic problematic presented by the novel itself: the interweaving of poetic word and those unspeakable aspects of the reality surrounding it. After an introduction to some key interpretative issues in postcolonial studies, which provides a provisional intellectual context, this chapter proposes a reading of the beginning of the novel, where the poetic dilemma is represented as a dualism between poetry and life, a separation between complementary polarities guiding the search of Deven, the main character of the story. The second part focuses on the encounter between Deven and the poet and the question of a certain resistance of human poetic creativity to the recording machine. The last part is concerned with a rereading of the conclusion of the story, where a suggestive idea of postcolonial custodianship is presented through the consciousness of a “poetics of the real” to which In Custody seems to correspond.¹ The question which will offer the point of departure, a pressing and urgent problem in postcolonial studies—how to read literature—is reformulated in the conclusion as the custodianship of an inheritance, its continuation as a living tradition rather than the mournful remembrance of the past. This concept may be understood if the concept-metaphor of custody is attended and listened to rather than being simply literalised. For this reason, a reflection on the meaning of reading constitutes the premise of this analysis of Anita Desai.

The Figure as Guide: Reading and Responsibility

“Reading,” writes Derek Attridge, “involves working against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which can barely be heard, registering what is unique about the shaping of language, thought, and feeling of a particular work” (“Innovation” 25). In this view, reading is a creative act which takes responsibility for the otherness and unfamiliarity of the text that is encountered, a transforming experience able to work against the tendency to assimilate the unexpected into the known and familiar. Accordingly, the present chapter intends to articulate the reading of a novel by Anita Desai, In Custody. It is an attempt to take responsibility for the structures of feeling conveyed through the figural nuances and those unpredictable elements that “can barely be heard” in the novel. T his reading regards the intimate connection between literature and the unspeakable— that is, what lies alongside and beyond the text and cannot be reduced to it, a part of reality which is not captured by the image or the script yet plays a role in the creative process. The unspeakable of this intriguing novel, as will become clear, has to do with those aspects of life that should be heard while recording, reciting and writing poetry. It is what Mahmoud Darwish calls “the essence of the poem,” which can only be described as its “glowing secret” and the thing missing from its text yet essential to it (River 130). Through a reading of In Custody, I try to recover a specific aesthetic unfolded in Anita Desai’s novel, an idea of the poet and the literary critic as custodian, and of poetry itself as “custodian of the unspeakable.” This aesthetic of custodianship might be partly rooted in a cultural context to which the novel makes reference: the tradition of Urdu poetry in the Indian subcontinent. This is a literary tradition which, in the words of Aijaz Ahmad, “has never been, at any stage of its evolution, the language of any particular religious or regional group, and it has always been the language of urban or peri-urban social exchange” (“In the Mirror of Urdu” 123). Rooted in this transregional literary culture, the novel is able not only to transmit something of its poetic legacy but also to reflect on the very act of transmission, the meaning and complexity of being appointed as the custodian. The chapter is organised in three parts, in which three important moments of the novel are addressed and retold. The aim of the chapter is to propose the first outline of an aesthetic of postcolonial custodianship which might be suggested by Anita Desai’s work. However, before addressing the novel, the following pages deal with important preliminary questions: How to read In Custody? How to take responsibility for the ideas of reading and poetry staged by the novel itself? In particular, how to articulate the reading of a text which is characterised by a certain degree of otherness—be it Indo-Anglian, postcolonial, Third World, Commonwealth or the like—as part of its labelling in the circuits of cultural consumption and intellectual dissemination? I think that it is important to consider these questions, to which the experience of the novel might provide interesting answers.

In her book Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that “literary studies must take the ‘figure’ as its guide. The meaning of the figure is undecidable, and yet we must attempt to dis-figure it, read the logic of metaphor” (Death 71). She also states that “the rational destruction of the figure,” the demand for a semiotic transparency leading to immediate comprehensibility, “destroys the force of literature as a cultural good” (71). In order to counter this rational simplification, a call for reading “the logic of metaphor” is hence affiliated to a looked for “responsible literality,” a commitment “to learn to read” which is at the basis of a proficient practice in cultural explanation. Spivak has written the mentioned remarks on reading in her attempt to redefine comparative literature as a more sophisticated enterprise, in the pedagogical effort to train skilled readers and teachers for what could be named, quoting the title of another essay by Spivak, a “culturally different” book. Spivak’s statement, concerning both the question of reading and the issue of literature’s cultural value, leads us to recognise and to exhibit the latent work of identification of a literary text, rather than assuming it as matter of fact or invariable starting point. Correspondingly, in another passage from Death of a Discipline, she clarifies that “we have to ask the question of collectivities without prefabricated contents” (26); that is, we have to oppose a thorough scrutiny of the logic of rhetoric to that phenomenon which has been described by Stephen Greenblatt as “enforced performativity” (“Racial Memory” 57). As Greenblatt remarks:

Literary history, like any other form of history, has to commit itself to a vision of truth, however provisional, nuanced, and epistemologically modest. If the assumptions of an originary or primordial culture or of a stable linguistic identity progressively unfolding through time or of an ethnic, racial, or sexual essence are misguided, then they must not be embraced, even with a sly wink and a whispered assurance that the embrace is only ironic and performative. (57)

Even though informed by different conceptions of literature and reading, both Greenblatt’s and Spivak’s observations may suggest that if the notion of culture depends on the formation of collectivities, literature should be able to problematise and to displace a literal politics of cultural categorisation. Furthermore, Spivak’s insistence on the figure—the logic of metaphor at work in a text—conjures up a significant problem that it would be worth interrogating and investigating, and that represents, in my view, the unavoidable premise to the elaboration of these broad questions: How to read In Custody? How to take responsibility for the idea of reading suggested by the novel itself?

The problem at issue here might be the literalisation or dis-figuring of the figure—in other words, the explanation of a culturally different literary text, or its location in a context by means of the methodological procedures of literary critical analysis. The task of literalisation involves the preservation of the nuances of the literary expression in a process which will lead to its analytical dissolution, thus implicating a somehow aporetic respect for what Paul de Man has called the “proliferating and disruptive power of figural language” (“Epistemology” 30). Literary criticism involves an understanding of the meaning of a text, yet this meaning cannot be entirely divided from the literary figuration. By combining and maintaining the ambivalence of a simultaneous “grammatization of rhetoric and rhetorization of grammar” (Allegories 16) in his deconstructive gesture, de Man emphasised the fact that “literature cannot merely be received as a definite unit of referential meaning that can be decoded without leaving a residue” (4). It is this figural residue, “unusually conspicuous, complex, and enigmatic,” which “attracts an inordinate amount of attention to itself” (4), and which Spivak retains as an important part of her reconsideration of the cultural signification of the postcolonial text. For this reason, to learn to read means to embark on a responsible literalisation: the refinement of our receptivity to creative writing, a receptive process able to displace the understanding of the literary text as the bearer or the representative of a cultural identity.

Arguably, it might be suggested that current trends in the work of literalisation of postcolonial literature—here another name for “culturally different”— are strongly in need of such a reassessment of the relay between literary criticism and creative practice. Spivak’s pedagogical insistence on “learning to read,” the problematic of reading, seems to me to be very often overlooked in this area of study.² This fact is manifested by recent approaches to post-colonial texts, which seem to be signed by powerful forms of reductionism, both methodological and thematic, and which too often shift from responsible literality to immediate and cursory comprehensibility. In what is, under many respects, a very interesting and valuable introduction to the Indian English novel, for instance, Priyamvada Gopal affirms without hesitation that this genre “has been distinguished from its inception by a preoccupation with both history and nation as these come together to shape… ‘the idea of India’” (Indian English Novel 5). Her comment is precise and thoroughly demonstrated in a masterful account of many examples of this literary genre, yet it seems to me that it corresponds more to the projection of a thematic preoccupation of the literary critic onto the novels themselves rather than an exhaustive description of what all Indian English novels are about. While the idea of India is an important theme in many novels and works, I argue that it plays no central role in In Custody, a text, perhaps significantly, excluded from The Indian English Novel. In my opinion, there are other, more important, aspects of this novel that an approach entirely devoted to ideas of history and the nation would not be able to grasp. This remark should not be perceived as a critique of Gopal’s excellent book or of other, canonically “postcolonial” readings of Anita Desai but rather as an attempt to raise the awareness of the different potentialities at work in literary texts. What should we be doing in transmitting a literary text? What kind of questions and responses should be raised and given? This interrogative stance is not about the content alone but also about figuration and the place of the poetic. It is a question that, in a sense, may come before the thematic components identified in Gopal’s useful introduction: the question of a postcolonial aesthetic that should not be exhausted by the “enforced performativity” of identity in literature. The thematic focus of the “national allegory,” inaugurated by Fredric Jameson in his canonical and contested essay on Third World literature has somehow entailed the fossilisation of the critical activity on a range of predefined questions which can be asked of a text and the deliberate rejection of alternative problems or perspectives on the study of literature. Aijaz Ahmad lamented such a content restriction many years ago in his essays on Jameson and Salman Rushdie (In Theory 95–158). While not agreeing with Ahmad in the way in which he reads literature as mere ideology, a way of reading also upheld by Terry Eagleton in his canonical Literary Theory, there is a point in Ahmad’s essay on Rushdie which is, in my view, still relevant and urgent today. Writes Ahmad:

The range of questions that may be asked of this categorical [Third World] counter-canon must predominantly refer, then, in one way or another, to representations of colonialism, nationhood, post-coloniality, the typology of rulers, their powers, corruptions, and so forth…. What is disconcerting, nevertheless, is that a whole range of texts which do not ask these particular questions in any foregrounded manner would then have to be excluded from or pushed to the margins of this emerging counter-canon. (In Theory 124)

While this questioning should be maintained and asked again in the current reorienting of postcolonial studies, the enlargement of the critical agenda Ahmad proposed resulted in a new kind of reductionism, not only thematic but also methodological, which identifies literature with nothing more than an ideological function, and concentrates upon a “symptomatic” reading of literary works (152). The reduction of literature to class ideology is, in my opinion, unable to account for the aesthetic complexity and specificity of literary works; it is in the end unable not only to ask new questions of a text but also to hear some other questions asked by the texts themselves. While literature, mainly and in a complex manner, points to what Caroline Rooney has called, in her Decolonising Gender, a “consciousness of the real,” this does not entail, in my view, that its worldly dimension can be totally encompassed by ideological discourse and struggles for power. In this context, I agree with the need to return to “read” Jameson advocated by authors like Neil Lazarus and Deepika Bahri—who, in her Native Intelligence, affirms that the “selective representation of Jameson… does not do justice to the complexity of this important critic’s attempts to define a new cognitive aesthetics for Third World literature” (13). However, the Jameson-Ahmad controversy seems to me to have really restricted the scope and the problematic of postcolonial studies. Lazarus’s remarks in The Postcolonial Unconscious (89ff) on the way in which Ahmad’s criticism has prevented generations of postcolonial students from being able to read Jameson are important, and his “defence” is convincing. Furthermore, in an essay published in 2002 and rewritten as a chapter of The Postcolonial Unconscious, Lazarus notes the same restriction and reductiveness that I am also concerned with. In “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism,” he writes: “To read across postcolonial literary studies is to find, to an extraordinary degree, the same questions being asked, the same methods, techniques, and conventions being used, the same concepts mobilized, the same conclusions drawn, about the work of a remarkably small number of writers” (773).

It should be remarked that Lazarus’s intention, as I see it, entirely corresponds to an act of postcolonial custodianship, in which the ability to read plays a major role. Yet I have to admit that the most arguable part of Jameson’s essay for me does not lie in the definition of the “national allegory” but rather in his reference to “we Americans, we masters of the world” (Jameson “Third World” 85) recurring towards the end of that essay. There was a form of U.S.-centrism in Jameson’s essay on world literature, which is more than a self-reflective subject positioning, and it should be the task of postcolonial studies, at least, to call it into question. This is far from neglecting the value of Jameson’s canonical work but rather an attempt to extend the scope of postcolonial studies. The legacy of this debate, however, seems to be the fact that postcolonial literature is still (un)read as literal mirroring of prefabricated interpretive issues, usually the representation of cultural identity, the national allegory, gender politics, ideological affiliation, and postcolonial history.³ The task of a postcolonial custodianship should be to move beyond these trends of repetition and predictability that often stimulate descriptive readings unable to address the figural residue of the text, its poetic dimension or resistance to literalisation. It is by an emphasis on figurality rather than the letter that practices of literary transmission may be able to point to that which may constitute the specificity of a postcolonial literature. This specificity can be understood as a reference to the multiple realities, places and peoples affected by the legacy of imperialism and the unfinished work of decolonisation to which the postcolonial as intellectual and historical category needs to remain close.

Beyond the “national allegory” and the jargon of cultural identity and beyond both ideological and cultural “enforced performativity,” the aim of this research is to raise the question, once again, of how to read and how to transmit postcolonial literature. The question refers not only to the ways in which literature is determined by its sociocultural and geopolitical context but rather to the potentialities of literature as the site of a consciousness of the real, a poetic consciousness which is not at all detached from the questions of value, meaning, content and context which are inexorably part of creative practices. The problematic of reading corresponds to an interrogation about how the worldly and the poetic are related or intertwined, and transmitted, by the specific occurrence of the creative works themselves. Postcolonial custodianship might open up an idea of literature as a field of cultural transmission rather than object of ideological determination. In order to dispute forms of re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Poetic Inheritance, Postcolonial Custodianship
• 1 Custodian of the Unspeakable: Reading Anita Desai
• 2 Guarding the Secret: Allegory and Realism in Imaginary Maps
• 3 The Curators of the Real: Arundhati Roy’s Custodianship
• 4 Woven into a Song: Cultural Relays in The London Jungle Book
• Conclusion: “Custodying” the Future
• Notes
• References
• Index