Literary Theory and Criticism

Recent Writings from South Asia

Arun Gupto

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032223698
• eBook ISBN: 9781000453249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The book explores key South Asian writings on cultural theory and literary criticism. It discusses the dynamics of textual contents, rhetorical styles, and socio-political issues through an exploration of seminal South Asian scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The volume examines concepts and methods of critical studies. It also discusses colonial and postcolonial discourses on art, religion, nationalism, identity, representation, resistance, and gender in the South Asian context. The essays are accompanied by textual questions and intertextual discussions on rhetorical, creative, and critical aspects of the selected texts. The exercise questions invite the reader to explore the mechanics of reading about and writing on discursive pieces in South Asian studies.

Comprehensive and interdisciplinary, this textbook will be indispensable for students and researchers of South Asian studies, cultural theory, literary criticism, postcolonial studies, literary and language studies, women and gender studies, rhetoric and composition, political sociology, and cultural studies.

Part I

Theory

1 DissemiNation

Time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation¹

Homi Bhabha

DOI: 10.4324/9781003213857-1

(In memory of Paul Moritz Strimpel (1914–87):

Pforzheim – Paris – Zurich – Ahmedabad – Bombay – Milan – Lugano.)

The time of the nation

1 The title of my essay – DissemiNation – owes something to the wit and wisdom of Jacques Derrida, but something more to my own experience of migration. I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and emigrés and refugees, gathering on the edge of ‘foreign’ cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also the gathering of the people in the diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statutes, immigration status – the genealogy of that lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asks ‘where should the birds fly after the last sky?’

2 In the midst of these lonely gatherings of the scattered people, their myths and fantasies and experiences, there emerges a historical fact of singular importance. More deliberately than any other general historian, Eric Hobsbawm² writes the history of the modern western nation from the perspective of the nation’s margin and the migrants’ exile. The emergence of the later phase of the modern nation, from the midnineteenth century, is also one of the most sustained periods of mass migration within the west, and colonial expansion in the east. The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor, as the etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the ‘middle passage’, or the central European steppes, across those distances, and cultural differences, that span the imagined community of the nation-people.

3 The discourse of nationalism is not my main concern. In some ways it is the historical certainty and settled nature of that term against which I am attempting to write of the western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the locality of culture. This locality is more around temporality than about historicity: a form of living that is more complex than ‘community’; more symbolic than ‘society’; more connotative than ‘country’; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of state; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than ‘the subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications – gender, race or class – than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism.

4 In proposing this cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation, I do not wish to deny these categories their specific historicities and particular meanings within different political languages. What I am attempting to formulate in this essay are the complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ and make them the immanent subjects and objects of a range of social and literary narratives. My emphasis on the temporal dimension in the inscription of these political entities – that are also potent symbolic and affective sources of cultural identity – serves to displace the historicism that has dominated discussions of the nation as a cultural force. The focus on temporality resists the transparent linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes; it provides a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signify a people, a nation, or a national culture. It is neither the sociological solidity of these terms, nor their holistic history that gives them the narrative and psychological force that they have brought to bear on cultural production and projections. It is the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy – and an apparatus of power – that it produces a continual slippage into analogous, even metonymic, categories, like the people, minorities, or ‘cultural difference’ that continually overlap in the act of writing the nation. What is displayed in this displacement and repetition of terms is the nation as the measure of the liminality of cultural modernity.

5 Edward Said aspires to such secular interpretation in his concept of ‘wordliness’ where ‘sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency…exist at the same level of surface particularity as the textual object itself’ (my emphasis).³ Fredric Jameson invokes something similar in his notion of ‘situational consciousness’ or national allegory, ‘where the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the collectivity itself’.⁴ And Julia Kristeva speaks perhaps too hastily of the pleasures of exile – ‘How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity?’⁵ – without realizing how fully the shadow of the nation falls on the condition of exile – which may partly explain her own later, labile identifications with the images of other nations: ‘China’, ‘America’. The nation as metaphor: Amor Patria; Fatherland; Pig Earth; Mothertongue; Matigari; Middlemarch; Midnight’s Children; One Hundred Years of Solitude; War and Peace; I Promessi Sposi; Kanthapura; Moby Dick; The Magic Mountain; Things Fall Apart.

6 There must also be a tribe of interpreters of such metaphors – the translators of the dissemination of texts and discourses across cultures – who can perform what Said describes as the act of secular interpretation. ‘To take account of this horizontal, secular space of the crowded spectacle of the modern nation…implies that no single explanation sending one back immediately to a single origin is adequate. And just as there are no simple dynastic answers, there are no simple discrete formations or social processes’.⁶ If, in our travelling theory, we are alive to the metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communities – migrant or metropolitan –then we shall find that the space of the modern nation-people is never simply horizontal. Their metaphoric movement requires a kind of ‘doubleness’ in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a ‘centred’ causal logic. And such cultural movements disperse the homogeneous, visual time of the horizontal society because ‘the present is no longer a mother-form [read mother-tongue or mother-land] around which are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past (present)…[as] a present of which the past and the future would be but modifications’.⁷ The secular language of interpretation then needs to go beyond the presence of the ‘look’, that Said recommends, if we are to give ‘the nonsequential energy of lived historical memory and subjectivity its appropriate narrative authority. We need another time of writing that will be able to inscribe the ambivalent and chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the problematic ‘modern’ experience of the western nation.

7 How does one write the nation’s modernity as the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal? The language of national belonging comes laden with atavistic apologues, which has led Benedict Anderson to ask: ‘But why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth?’⁸ The nation’s claim to modernity, as an autonomous or sovereign form of political rationality, is particularly questionable if, with Partha Chatterjee, we adopt the post-colonial perspective:

Nationalism…seeks to represent itself in the image of the Enlightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself.⁹

Such ideological ambivalence nicely supports Gellner’s paradoxical point that the historical necessity of the idea of the nation conflicts with the contingent and arbitrary signs and symbols that signify the affective life of the national culture. The nation may exemplify modern social cohesion but

Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself…The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred would have served as well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism…is itself in the least contingent and accidental.¹⁰

The problematic boundaries of modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space. The language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past. Historians transfixed on the event and origins of the nation never ask, and political theorists possessed of the ‘modern’ totalities of the nation – ‘Homogeneity, literacy and anonymity are the key traits’¹¹ – never pose, the awkward question of the disjunctive representation of the social, in this double-time of the nation. It is indeed only in the disjunctive time of the nation’s modernity – as a knowledge disjunct between political rationality and its impasse, between the shreds and patches of cultural signification and the certainties of a nationalist pedagogy – that questions of nation as narration come to be posed. How do we plot the narrative of the nation that must mediate between the teleology of progress tipping over into the ‘timeless’ discourse of irrationality? How do we understand that ‘homogeneity’ of modernity – the people – which, if pushed too far, may assume something resembling the archaic body of the despotic or totalitarian mass? In the midst of progress and modernity, the language of ambivalence reveals a politics ‘without duration’, as Althusser once provocatively wrote: ‘Space without places, time without duration.’¹² To write the story of the nation demands that we articulate that archaic ambivalence that informs modernity. We may begin by questioning that progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion – the many as one –shared by organic theories of the holism of culture and community, and by theorists who treat gender, class, or race as radically ‘expressive’ social totalities.

8 Out of many one: nowhere has this founding dictum of the political society of the modern nation – its spatial expression of a unitary people – found a more intriguing image of itself than in those diverse languages of literary criticism that seek to portray the great power of the idea of the nation in the disclosures of its everyday life; in the telling details that emerge as metaphors for national life. I am reminded of Bakhtin’s wonderful description of a ‘national’ vision of emergence in Goethe’s Italian Journey, which represents the triumph of the realistic component over the Romantic. Goethe’s realist narrative produces a national-historical time that makes visible a specifically Italian day in the detail of its passing time, ‘The bells ring, the rosary is said, the maid enters the room with a lighted lamp and says: Felicissima notte! …If one were to force a German clockhand on them, they would be at a loss.’¹³ For Bakhtin it is Goethe’s vision of the microscopic, elementary, perhaps random tolling of everyday life in Italy that reveals the profound history of its locality (Lokalität), the spatialization of historical time, ‘a creative humanization of this locality, which transforms a part of terrestrial space into a place of historical life for people’.¹⁴

9 The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity emphasizes the quality of light, the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression. There is, however, always the distracting presence of another temporality that disturbs the contemporaneity of the national present, as we saw in the national discourses with which I began. Despite Bakhtin’s emphasis on the realist vision in the emergence of the nation in Goethe’s work, he acknowledges that the origin of the nation’s visual presence is the effect of a narrative struggle. From the beginning, Bakhtin writes, the realist and Romantic conceptions of time co-exist in Goethe’s work, but the ghostly (Gespenstermässiges), the terrifying (Unerfreuliches), and the unaccountable (Unzuberechnendes) are consistently ‘surmounted’ by the structural aspects of the visualization of time: ‘the necessity of the past and the necessity of its place in a line of continuous development…finally the aspect of the past being linked to a necessary future’.¹⁵ National time becomes concrete and visible in the chronotope of the local, particular, graphic, from beginning to end. The narrative structure of this historical surmounting of the ‘ghostly’ or the ‘double’ is seen in the intensification of narrative synchrony as a graphically visible position in space: ‘to grasp the most elusive course of pure historical time and fix it through unmediated contemplation’.¹⁶ But what kind of ‘present’ is this if it is a consistent process of surmounting the ghostly time of repetition? Can this national time-space be as fixed or as immediately visible as Bakhtin claims?

10 If in Bakhtin’s ‘surmounting’ we hear the echo of another use of that word by Freud in his essay on The Uncanny, then we begin to get a sense of the complex time of the national narrative. Freud associates surmounting with the repressions of a ‘cultural’ unconscious; a liminal, uncertain state of cultural belief when the archaic emerges in the midst or margins of modernity as a result of some psychic ambivalence or intellectual uncertainty. The ‘double’ is the figure most frequently associated with this uncanny process of ‘the doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self’.¹⁷ Such ‘double-time’ cannot be so simply represented as visible or flexible in ‘unmediated contemplation’; nor can we accept Bakhtin’s repeated attempt to read the national space as achieved only in the fullness of time. Such an apprehension of the ‘double and split’ time of national representation, as I am proposing, leads us to question the homogeneous and horizontal view familiarly associated with it. We are led to ask, provocatively, whether the emergence of a national perspective – of an élite or subaltern nature – wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Theory, criticism, and engaging with the texts
• PART I Theory
• PART II Criticism