The Contemporary Novel and the City

Re-conceiving National and Narrative Form

S. Khanna

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137336248
• eBook ISBN: 9781137336255
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book examines the deeply divided terrain of the twentieth century city and its formative impact on narrative fiction. It focuses on two major 'world authors' at the two ends of the twentieth century who write, systematically, about the colonial and postcolonial cities they were born in: James Joyce and Dublin, and Salman Rushdie and Bombay.

1

City Chronicles

I

For a number of social and historical reasons the metropolis of the second half of the nineteenth century and of the first half of the twentieth century moved into a quite new cultural dimension. It was now much more than the very large city, or even the capital city of an important nation. It was the place where new social and economic and cultural relations, beyond both city and nation in their older senses, were beginning to be formed: a distinct historical phase which was in fact to be extended, in the second half of the twentieth century, at least potentially, to the whole world. In the earliest phases this development had much to do with imperialism: with the magnetic concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals.1

The fictional writings of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie have been seen to herald as well as epitomize two distinct but related historical-theoretical periods broadly located at the two ends of the twentieth century, the Modern and the Postmodern, respectively. I am concerned here not so much with a comprehensive understanding of these periods as with zeroing in on what is to me the fascinating ‘turn’ towards an engagement with questions of space and spatiality in both these contexts. This engagement takes the form of a spurt of artistic and theoretical activity crucially centred in the experience of the city.

Historically, this development can be understood in the light of the fact that cities, metropolitan centres in particular, were making available hitherto-unknown modes of being-in-the-world that found expression in a wide range of intellectual endeavour across many disciplines. Further, the very newness and plasticity of the forms taken by metropolitan life through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the same time as they urgently demanded to be negotiated and grappled with, also offered artists and intellectuals the possibility of conceiving and articulating ever-newer modalities of individual, social and artistic practice. As Malcolm Bradbury puts it, ‘the growth of cities as vast agglomerations of people in widely contrasted roles and situations, and hence as places of friction, change and new consciousness, coincides with a desire for extreme cultural novelty and with a feeling of crisis in value and expression which particularly touched the arts’.2

I propose to read the link between the city and the formations of Modernism and Postmodernism as not merely causal but fundamentally and mutually constitutive,3 in that the one actively shapes the other, so that the city does not simply provide the locus for intellectual activity but becomes a material register that articulates as well as dictates the assumptions, ideologies and visions that underpin Modernism and Postmodernism. It is both a thematic and a practice. Such a standpoint makes it possible for me to work not simply with spatial practices on the one hand and their representation on the other but, to borrow Henri Lefebvre’s terminology, with ‘lived space’, ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the place of “inhabitants” and “users”, but also of some writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. […] It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects’.4

This project emerges from the need to scrupulously yoke together the growing body of theoretical writing on the subject of the city with the literary elaboration of the categories known to us as Modernism and Postmodernism, and develop a critical method that can strategically negotiate between local and transnational cultural determinants. That the city is central to this elaboration, whether as the Modernist city of the early twentieth century or the postcolonial, Postmodernist city of the late twentieth century, is not in question; indeed, there is a substantial body of literature that explores precisely this conjunction (of which the most recent would be Rashmi Varma’s The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects5). What remain unexplored at any length, however, are the contours of this matrix which, on sustained examination through the comparative framework of my study, reveal the continuities and contrasts between, and interruptions within, these Modernist and Postmodernist imaginaries. This makes for valuable insights not only into two important conceptual categories but also two definitive historical moments in world literature, two writers who have shaped the course of twentieth-century literature in English, as well as two cities indelibly shaped by the experience of modernity, colonialism and its aftermath.

Geographically, the so-called Modernist cities were mainly clustered in Western Europe (although Moscow, St. Petersburg, New York and Chicago are also sometimes included in the list), where the metropolises of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and London became crucibles for avant-garde artistic activity, offering cosmopolitan spaces of interaction to émigrés, exiles, bohemians and free-thinkers. Postmodern cities, by contrast, can be located in metropolitan centres worldwide, including, as this book will argue, the Third World, although most recent theoretical work on the subject has tended to focus on Los Angeles. These densely packed conurbations (barely) contain an entire spectrum of ethnic, racial and class identities, making for a highly volatile mix that frequently erupts in the form of riots; through the operations of global capital, they are linked by virtual and real networks to other Postmodern cities across the globe. The Postmodern city, then, is not just New York, London and Tokyo, but also Shanghai, Johannesburg, Bombay, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Brasília, among others. I should add that, in this book, I use the term Modernist city to imply, simultaneously, the city ‘as it is’, the city as it is negotiated in Modernist literature and art, as well as the city as the locus of Modernist creative endeavour. The same goes for the Postmodern city.

In artistic and theoretical productions, Modernist cities have been, for the most part, configured conceptually in terms of fragmentation, cosmopolitanism, bohemianism, avant-gardism, artistic autonomy, consumerism, modernization, progress, alienation and solipsism; Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Le Corbusier, the Expressionist, Futurist and Cubist artists, all invoke one or more of these ideas. Postmodern cities tend to be represented in terms of disjuncture, incommensurability, simulacra, class, ethnic and religious divides, diaspora, scarce space, crowds, ghettoes, as well as, importantly, enabling forms of hybridity and contingent networks of association and affiliation. While creating the conditions for ‘newness’ to ‘come into the world’, the Postmodern city is at the same time a deeply divided and unequal terrain. Artistic and theoretical endeavour related to it is self-consciously and unavoidably political, and the myriad, densely crowded and mutually contradictory aspects of the Postmodern city make solipsism a highly precarious state. It is the stark incommensurability of the multiple worlds that constitute, in particular, the Third World metropolis that is perhaps its most hard-hitting, ‘postmodern’ aspect. It is no accident that such mind-boggling disparity across the urban landscape was also the predominant characteristic and outcome of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century; both Engels’ Manchester and Dickens’ London unflinchingly display these divisions, and the belated industrialization in many formerly colonized Third World countries is comparable to that in the cities of Victorian England (although it would be wrong to disregard the specificity of their very different times and spaces). The description of ‘Tom-all-Alone’s’ in Bleak House, with its ‘tumbling tenements’ containing ‘a crowd of foul existence’ that ‘comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years’, draws its force, satire and moral strength precisely from the unconscionable contrast between the vermin-like existence of Jo the sweeper and the aristocratic Foodles, Coodles and Dedlocks.6 Real, tangible and unfair though these divides may be, they nevertheless conceal a web of significant relationships between the supposedly disjunct worlds, a fact as strongly emphasized in Bleak House as in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Hermetically sealed-off ‘safe’ zones remain an urban fantasy, as seen in the increasing number of gated settlements in cities as different and far apart as Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Bangalore and Delhi. The strength of these novels lies in uncovering the channels, conduits and networks between the disparate worlds that make up the city; these may be based on inequality and exploitation but can also be potentially enabling and empowering.

Much of the best theoretical work on the subject – that of Edward Soja, Manuel Castells, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey – is a clear-eyed response to the global operations of capital and its ramifications at the same time as it seeks to be attentive to the possibilities generated by a socio-spatial form that has not only come to stay but is expanding in number and size at a hitherto unprecedented rate. In a powerful recent work, ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, Jacques Derrida envisages the city as a novel political form that operates outside of the logic of nations and national boundaries, and has as its raison d’être the Kantian ethic of ‘hospitality’ towards the persecuted and the displaced.7 ‘Planet of slums’ on the one hand and ‘city of refuge’ on the other: my work seeks to move beyond the self-limiting utopia–dystopia binary in order to read the cities of Dublin and Bombay in the writings of Joyce and Rushdie as ‘lived spaces’, spaces criss-crossed by contending and unequal networks of power that nonetheless make available contingent and sometimes provisional forms of contact, solidarity and hope.8

This comparative study of Joyce and Rushdie locates the city at the centre of the main concerns of their work as well as the important critical debates around it. Enabled in the first instance by the formative influence of Joyce on Rushdie, the comparative framework facilitates a deeper understanding of the continuities as well as contrasts between a fringe-First World colonial city and its Third World postcolonial counterpart at the two ends of the twentieth century. The analysis undertakes close textual reading in relation to the theoretical co-ordinates of postcolonial and urban studies in order to draw out the modes in which the city in Joyce and Rushdie offers a point of entry into a dynamic and novel politics of possibility, and the extent to which it does so. Shot through with the multiplicities of class, race, religion and language as it is, the city emerges in this discussion as the crucial and inevitable, albeit conflicted and incongruous, locus for a postcolonial praxis.

II

I always keep Ulysses near me because it’s the modern novel that most achieves the charge of poetry, and I read it to be reminded what novels can be.9

The choice of Joyce and Rushdie for this book, and the city as the chosen thematic of their work, is not arbitrary; as writers of two epic-novels, Ulysses (1922) and Midnight’s Children (1981), both of which have crucially functioned as formative fictions at the two ends of the twentieth century, a comparative reading of their work constitutes a significant enquiry into the aesthetics and politics of location. By location I mean to indicate, simultaneously, the specific locations of Joyce and Rushdie within (quite different) cosmopolitan chronotopes,10 as well as the cities of Dublin and Bombay that serve as the respective locations of their fictions, although my particular focus in this study is on the latter. For two writers who are deeply engaged with questions of nation-formation and national identity to persistently articulate this engagement via the thematic of the city is surely of significance. That one of them is an acknowledged and powerful influence on the other only adds to the pertinence of my analysis.11 It is, however, important to clarify at the outset that it is not the filial or the ‘anxiety of influence’ paradigm that interests me primarily; rather, I am seeking to put in juxtaposition two writers who emerge from post/colonial contexts, move away from the cities of their birth that they then revisit, again and again, in their fictions, fundamentally expanding and challenging in the process assumptions about ‘what novels can be’. For it is my objective in this book to draw out the unmistakable link, overlooked in most critical commentary on Joyce and Rushdie, between the locus of the city and the radical political and aesthetic ambitions of their fictions, insofar as the one constitutes the conditions of possibility for the other. In other words, I propose, and attempt to demonstrate in the chapters to follow, that it is precisely the experience of the city that enables and shapes in crucial ways the literary radicalism of both my authors.

My point of departure for this analysis is the paradox that while Ulysses and Midnight’s Children are read, arguably, as inaugural works of Irish and Indian literature in the English language, just as Joyce and Rushdie are read (arguably again) as the most significant Irish and Indian writers in the twentieth century,12 their books, like their own biographies, posit a robust challenge to contemporary nationalist premises and indeed the very concept of the nation itself, and do so by means of their artistic and personal commitment to the city. The stagnant, stifling, provincial and soul-deadening Dublin of Joyce’s early work evolves, in the course of his self-imposed exile from it, into (in Ulysses) a dynamic, palimpsestic space with room for alterity, imagination, fantasy, exchange, debate, humour, possibility; a space where unexpected and unorthodox bonds can be forged, and journeys (mental and physical) to far-flung places undertaken. Joyce’s own attitude to it remains a conflicted one. After leaving Dublin for Paris in 1902, he returned there only two or three times, and never after 1912. The sense of frustration with the ‘nets’ of ‘family, religion and state’, as well as what he perceived to be the apathy, inertia and moral cowardice of his fellow countrymen remained with Joyce all his life.13 This sense of frustration coexisted with a heightened, and somewhat unjustified, sense of persecution. Late in life, on getting the news of his father’s death, Joyce wrote to T.S. Eliot:

To my great grief [my father] died on Tuesday. He had an intense love for me and it adds to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come and was always in correspondence with him but an instinct which I believed in held me back from going, much as I longed to. Dubliners was banned there in 1912 on the advice of a person who was assuring me at the time of his great friendship. When my wife and children went there in 1922, against my wish, they had to flee for their lives, lying flat on the floor of a railway carriage while rival parties shot at each other across their heads and quite lately I have had experience of malignancy and treachery on the part of people to whom I had done nothing but friendly acts.14

Joyce’s letters chart a fluctuating, uneven attitude towards Dublin at different points of time, ranging from the nostalgic – ‘Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it except in Paris’15 – to the downright vituperative – ‘How sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin! It is the city of failure, of rancour a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1: City Chronicles
• 2: Cities of Conflict
• 3: City, Nation and the Politics of the Possible
• 4: The Lettered City
• 5: Divided Cities
• 6: Artist’s City, City’s Artist
• 7: Some Other City Chronicles
• 8: Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index