World Literature Decentered

Beyond the “West” through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal

Ian Almond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000407136
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: Literature

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.

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 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 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 nesha ¹³ ), 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 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, flower-pat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Circumventing the West
• 1 The Ghost Story: Hayalet, Fantasma, Bhut
• 2 The Hotel-Narrative: Anayurt, Shahjahan, Isabel
• 3 Femicide Narratives: Mujer, Mohila, Kadın
• 4 Retelling Myth: Mito, Katha, Efsane
• 5 Melancholy: Monmora, Melancolía, Hüzün
• 6 The Orient: Şark, Prachi, Oriente
• Conclusion: The Ten Percenters
• Bibliography
• Index