Tuesday 31 January 2012

Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry

If the publication of Lyrical Ballads marks the climax of the Romantic Revolt, it is because of its importance as a gesture of revolt against the existing poetic practices. In his Preface to the second edition Wordsworth explained in detail what his theories about new poetry were and what was to be looked for in his own poems. The immediate purpose of the Preface was to defend his poems against “the charges of lowness and unpoeticalness that had been made against both their subjects and their diction” to use the words of Graham Hough. The overall intention of Wordsworth was two-fold, that is, to relate poetry as closely as possible to common life, by removing it in the first place from the realm of fantasy, and in the second by changing it from the polite or over-sophisticated amusement to a serious art. . According to him, poetry should be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” not mere satisfaction of a taste for imagery and ornament. Wordsworth’s aim in all this is to show that the poet is a man appealing to the normal interests of mankind, not as a peculiar being appealing to a specialized taste. He says: 
“He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighted to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”
In his Preface Wordsworth made four claims: first, “to choose incidents and situations from common life”; second, “to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men”; third, “to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect”; and, last, “above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.” The greater part of the Preface is devoted to justification of the first two claims, and this has caused too much stress to be laid on them while the fact remains that it is on the last two claims that the greatness of his poetry rests.
The poetic language of the eighteenth century was unreal, and its substance was far from being an interpretation of the universal spirit of man. Wordsworth did inestimable service in insisting on a new and true orientation. But he went too far; he said that rustic life and language were the simplest and purest being elementary, in close touch with nature, and unspoiled by social vanity. The fact remains that the rustic has little originality, few ideas, and makes almost no attempt to correlate them. It is also true that Wordsworth proposed to prune it of peculiarities but, as Coleridge observed, this would render it the same as the language of any other section of the community similarly treated. Wordsworth also asserted that the language of poetry differs in no way from that of prose, with the single exception of metre. This is the controversy that still rages and Wordsworth’s finest poetry does not show any influence of this idea. Geoffrey H. Crump has stated categorically that “In his greatest poems he forgot his theories, or the poems are great enough to dwarf the theories into insignificance, and in his later works he intentionally discarded them.” 
Wordsworth was a complete innovator who saw things in a new way. Those who approach his poetry for the first time notice two peculiarities – its austerity and its appearance of triviality. It is so in the case of those who fail to see the quality of really human sympathy. Besides, Wordsworth himself is responsible for inviting this sort of response, as he had no relish for the present. Shelley said about him that “he was hardly a man, but a wandering spirit with strange adventures and no end to them.” The triviality of manner is the manner through which he could convey the profoundest truths. While reading Wordsworth’s poems, it is impossible not to be struck by two things: 

  1. “ the magical strength of truth” to borrow the words of De Quincey, because “the poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time” to quote Wordsworth himself, and 
  2. the number of fine phrases that have become the common coin of everyday speech. John F. Danby observed in his book: The Simple Wordsworth that “Words exist not on the page but between people: only people can mean anything.”

Monday 30 January 2012

Shakespeare's Contribution to World Literature

William Shakespeare created a new epoch in world literature. The ideas set forth by the Renaissance, the ideology of Humanism are expressed by him in the most realistic way. Shakespeare has faith in Man. He hates injustice. His plays have become popular throughout the world because of his realistic characters. The history of English drama is reflected in Shakespeare’s works. The development of his characters makes him different from his predecessors (Marlowe and others). Shakespeare’s characters don’t remain static, they change in the course of action. More than that, Shakespeare was the first dramatist to mix comedy and tragedy: “The Merchant of Venice” (1596-1597) is called a comedy, though Shylock is in fact badly treated. He has been called the first great tragic figure.
Shakespeare's language was understood even by the common people of those times. The soliloquies in his plays are not long; the dialogues are true to life. Many well-known English sayings come from his works.
He had a great influence on the English language and English literature. His work is known for its beautiful language, as well as for its understanding of the way people think and feel. Shakespeare is so great writer that every generation discovers new ideas and social problems concerning the relations of man to man in human society in his plays. Shakespeare’s plays do not grow old with time. His plays are regularly performed in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
The first memorial theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, was opened in 1879 in Stratford-upon-Avon. Many plays were staged there and many famous actors started their career in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Since then a season of Shakespearian drama can be seen each year in Stratford.
Research work and study of Shakespeare's literary heritage by scholars will never cease.
The name of Benjamin Jonson is worth mention¬ing in connection with Shakespeare's works. It was Ben Jonson, an actor of Shakespeare's Company and his close friend, who published Shakespeare's plays in 1623. Jonson was not only an actor, he was also a dramatist. He wrote more than twenty plays, some of them were staged at "The Globe" by Shakespeare's Company. Jonson scorned many of the other drama¬tists of his time, but not Shakespeare. He was fond of him:
Soul of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise!
Ben Jonson believed in the unity of action, time and place. He himself followed this rule, and was proud of his plays.
More than that, Ben Jonson was a talented producer of masques which were the real performances with different plots and characters, dancing and music. 

Defining Catharsis

The word catharsis is derived from the Greek word which is translated as 'cleansing' or 'purification'. Most of the definitions emphasize two essential components of catharsis: the emotional aspect (strong emotional expression and processing) and the cognitive aspect of catharsis (insight, new realization, and the unconscious becoming consciousness) and as a result - positive change. Aristotle defined catharsis as "purging of the spirit of morbid and base ideas or emotions by witnessing the playing out of such emotions or ideas on stage" (Aristotle, 2001, p. 58). Breuer and Freud described catharsis as an involuntary, instinctive body process, for example crying (Breuer & Freud, 1974). Schultz and Schultz (2004) followed the psychodynamic tradition and defined catharsis as "the process of reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed" (p.506). The American Psychological Association (2007) also associates catharsis with the psychodynamic theory and defines it as "the discharge of affects connected to traumatic events that had previously been repressed by bringing these events back into consciousness and reexperiencing them".

The Imagist Movement

The Imagist movement, deriving from Hulme and Pound (who soon lost interest) and others, demanded clear and precise images, elimination of every word "that did not contribute to the presentation," and a rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity. The French Symbolists had taken a similar view of metrical regularity and it was their invention of verse libre that was adopted by the Imagists. The Symbolists wanted to be precise in order to be properly suggestive; precision, individuality, "the exact curve of the thing" and maximum symbolic projection of meaning were seen as going together. But Imagism even with this symbolist extension was only a brief stopping place for the new poetic movement. The turn away from the Tennysonian elegiac mode to the more complex and intelectual poems of Donne, the insistance that intellect and emotion should work together in poetry and that one should seek to recover the "unfied sensibility" of the metaphysical poets which had been lost to English poetry since the latter part of the 17th century, the proclamation of the absolute difference "between art and the event"—all this is seen in Eliot’s criticism as it can be seen working in his poetry. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality; but an escape from personality," Eliot wrote in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917), one of the most influential critical essays of the century. It was in many respects the manifesto of the new poetic theory and practice. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922) was the first major example of the new poetry, and its remains a watershed in both English and American history.

Thursday 26 January 2012

Subaltern Studies

The ongoing work of the Subaltern Studies group (Ranajit Guha, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee and others) is an attempt to write a historiography that is different from the colonial one. The theories of nationalism, identity and ethnicity come in for special scrutiny here. Gyan Prakash explicitly links the subaltern studies project with postcolonial studies in its combination of poststructuralism, Marxism and archival research. Tejaswini Niranjana writes: "post-structuralism's questioning of universalism and essentialism as well as its critique of humanism not only aligns it with anti-colonial critique, but is also indebted to such a critique in ways that as yet remain largely unmapped." The focus is on "the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office ... along with the attitudes, ideologies and belief systems." It looks at "history from below," that is the history of those common people (tribals, lower classes/castes and women) that have been silenced in accepted histories of the nationalist movement. The oppressed people would finally find a voice here. As Guha puts it, the accepted history has always been of the elite, the "dominant groups, foreign as well as indigenous … the foreign industrialists, merchants, planters ... and the native recruits to the uppermost levels of the bureaucracy." Some sections have evidently been left out of such histories-these are the subalterns, the oppressed class. The entire project is premised upon the assumption that nationalism and anticolonial movements cannot be understood without analysing the role of the women and the tribal in it. Thus the focus is on small peasant uprisings and individual acts of rebellion that was not part of the larger nationalist movement (these were even considered criminal acts). Gyan Prakash's summing up in After Colonialism is adequate to understand the assumptions of the project: "The subalterns' social location defied the identities of nation and class, and their insurgent consciousness, religiosity, mythic visions, and notions of political community were at odds with the model of causality and rational action advanced by the nationalist elites." Local resistance to colonialism and the use of oral/local traditions rather than a pan-Indian agenda come in for analysis here. Other factors like the gender, class, region are also included in the analysis, which is seen as a counter to the homogenising discourse of the nation state which elides/erases these local variations in favour of a particular elite/religion/caste/class. The subaltern studies project thus provides rigorous reconstruction through empirical analysis and archival research to put together an alternative history.

Orientalism

Courtesy: Dr. Pramod K. Nayar

Edward Said: Said's Orientalism is perhaps one of the most influ­ential texts of the twentieth century (Spivak calls it a "source book" and Bhabha refers to it as "inaugurating the postcolonial field"). His path breaking work in this book and later ones such as Culture and Imperialism, his activist writings on the Palestine cause have made Said the leading intellectual of the postcolonial and marginalized people of the world.
(I) Said's argument borrows from Michel Foucault's dual notions of "discourse" and knowledge as inextricably linked to power. To recapitulate Foucault:
(a) Discourse is the conceptual terrain of thought, a system of ideas and opinions that sanctions certain forms of knowing, and expressions of certain know ledges (see note on "dis­course" at the conclusion of chapter one).
(b) All "will to knowledge" is tied up with the will to power. There can be no expression/imposition of power without prior knowledge about the subject of power (for more de­tails see the section on Foucault in the chapter on post structuralism and deconstruction).
Said argues that knowledge about the Orient (Asia, the East and non-European cultures) was not disinterested or knowledge for the sake of knowledge: it preceded actual colonial practices. In fact, colonial practices (political, economic) necessitated the production of such knowledge. Thus knowledge is bound up with power. Here Said adopts Gramsci's notion of the modes of hegemonic oppression--coercion and consent (see section on Gramsci in the chapter on Marxist criticism). The colonial power based on Orientalist knowledge does not rely on physical force as much as the consent of the native. Also, these texts and discourses present the imperialist programme as natural and necessary. The native agrees to be colonised when he accepts the colonial stereotypes of himself. The civil society apparatus of education, religion after adopting the stereotype, justifies and consents to being colonised subjects.
(2) One may now define Orientalism in Said's own terms The term originally referred to the work of Indologists like Sir William Jones and H.H. Wilson, who translated and compiled Indian literary works, laws and codes for use by colonial administrators. Said's use of the te(m sums up the colonial project when he de­fines Orientalism "a manner of regularised (or Orientalised) writing, vision, and study dominated by imperatives, perspec­tives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. The Orient is taught, researched, administered, and pronounced in certain discrete ways." He adds "Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinc­tion made between 'the Orient' and 'the Occident' ... Orien­talism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient."
(3) The discourse of Orientalism is the production of ideas, knowl­edge and opinions about the Orient. This included certain modes of representation of the Orient through Othering (where the Ori­ent was Europe's dark Other). Analysing this discourse, Said reads a range of texts-literary, philological, philosophical, ad­ministrative, and ethnographic and others. Said demonstrates that these texts were the lens through which the Orient was viewed preliminary to being ruled. The texts were "worldly" in the sense they exhibit the pressures, preoccupations and prejudices of the world around them-therefore no text is free of its con­texts of production. This meant that knowledge or literary imaginations could not be considered innocent, for they were complicit with the political agenda of colonialism. The Orient was interpreted in European fashion, to fulfill certain European ends. In Said's words "the Orient is something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), or illus­trates (as in a zoological museum)."
(4) Certain kinds of ideological assumptions informed these texts and produced stereotypes of the native: the ignorance of the na­tives, their effeminacy and indolence, their oversexed nature, their essential untrustworthiness, the superiority of the European and his knowledge and others. These stereotypes of the weak and stupid native l1elped justify and even necessitate Western presence as the ml1sculine, strong and rational protector. The Westerner must look after the poor native who could not look after himself. Thus the stereotype helps introduce a Western presence in various guises and roles-of the protector (police, army), educator (teacher), administrator (bureaucracy and po­litical presence), saviour (missionary). The cultural bias helped posit a political vision of otherness. As Said puts it, the Oriental man was first an Oriental and only secondly a man.
5) There were various indices, which Oriental set up ism as a field of study.
(a) 1765-1850 marked the period of discovery. The Orient was exotic, profound, and mysterious. The Orientalist, usually an expert in language (at this stage) travelled through the country, seeing the Orient through European eyes. The vi­sion, which the Orientalist brought to the field of study, was European. They were rarely interested in anything except proving the value of their "truths."
(b) Soon 3econd-order knowledge was produced. This was the Oriental tale, the mythology of the mysterious Orient. All things in history, like History itself, were created for the Orient: it was set up as mysterious and barbarous long be­fore anything was known about it. Later discoveries were to validate these early "findings." The completely new was seen as versions of a previously known thing. Thus, Islam – radically new way of life – was seen as a fraudulent ver­sion of Christianity. The Orient "vacillates" between the West's contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of de­light or fear of novelty. The Orient is penalised for lying outside "our" world (the West). It is thus "Orientalised."
(c) The Orientalist always chose the conquering West. The Ori­ent existed and was treated not as something present, but for its series of valorised contacts it had had with a distant European past. The Orient itself was treated/perceived in some distant past, as unchanging and static, what Said iden­tifies as a "synchronic essentialism" (the term is Talal Asad's). The Orient was static, an essential vision rather than a vibrant, changing narrative. This vision is under pressure from the narrative, which introduces diachronic into the vision. The stability and unchanging nature of the Orient (vision) is threatened by the instability of narrative. This in­stability suggests that history, with its tendency towards growth; decline or dramatic movement is possible in the Orient. Narrative suggests that the vision is insufficient and does an injustice to the potential of reality for change. Nar­rative is the form taken by history to counter the perma­nence of vision. When the Orientalists were aware of some contemporary movements of/in Oriental thought or culture, these were perceived as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalists, to be "brought into reality" by them.
(6) Modern Orientalism has four elements:
(a) Expansion: of the Orient further east geographically loosened the Biblical framework. The reference    points were no longer Christianity but India, China, Japan and Buddhism.
(b) Historical confrontation: Capacity to deal historically with a non-European culture was to understand Europe in its objective relations with others.
(c) Sympathy: Selective identification with regions and cultures not one's own wore down the unyielding categories/ defini­tions of self and identity. The notions of humanity were no longer restricted to the borders of Christian Europe.
(d) Classification: of mankind multiplied.
(7) The Orientalist scholar had three intentions and categories of study:
(a) Providing professional Oriental ism with scientific knowl­edge. Here the Orientalist considers his stay in the Orient as a form of scientific observation.
(b) He was less willing to sacrifice the individual consciousness to impersonal Orientalist definitions.
(c) The writer saw the trip to the Orient as a fulfilment of some personal project.
(8) Said distinguishes between latent and manifest Oriental ism. Latent Orientalism is the unconscious positivity. Here ideas and prejudices of Oriental backwardness, racial inequality and de­generacy exist. Manifest Orientalism is the various stated views about Oriental society, languages and culture, all of which rele­gate the native to a "dreadful secondariness," as Said terms it. All the changes occurring in the knowledge of the Orient takes place in manifest Orientalism.
(9) There were two principal methods by which Orientalism deliv­ered the "Orient" to the West in the early twentieth century:
(a) Through apparatuses of learning – universities, professional societies, explorational and geographical organisations, publishing industry.
(b) The relation between Orientalist and the Orient: the transla­tion/interpretation of the Orient by the Orientalist, who re­mained "outside" the Orient.
(10) The Orientalist then provides his society with representations of the Orient. These representations:
(a) bear his distinctive imprint
(b) illustrate his conception of what the Orient can or ought to be
(c) consciously contort someone else's view of the Orient
(d) provide Orientalist discourse with what, at that moment, it seems most in need of
(e) respond to certain cultural, professional, political and eco­nomic developments of the epoch.
(11) In Culture and Imperialism, Said undertakes a massive and brilliant rereading of canonical texts like Heart of Darkness, Kim and A Passage to India to demonstrate their implication in imperial discourse. His early comments on culture are useful in understanding the overall slant of his work here. Said argues that the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging is very important to culture and imperi­alism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. Nations themselves are narrations.
(12) Culture soon comes to be associated with the nation or state, it becomes a source of identity. Culture becomes a theatre where various political and ideological causes engage one another. The "great cultural archive... is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made."
(13) Said states that his purpose is to read individual texts as great products of the creative imagination and then as part of the re­lationship between culture and empire. Said suggests that there are two perspectives possible: to see America, for instance, as an immigrant settler society superimposed on the considerable native one. To see American identity is to decide between a unitary identity and a complex but not reductively unified one. The former perspective is linear and subsuming, the latter is contrapuntal and nomadic. Said argues that the contrapuntal reading is sensitive to historical experience.
(14) Imperialism and colonialism are supported by (a) notions that certain territories require and beseech domination, (b) forms of knowledge affiliated with domination. These include notions of inferior subject races, dependency, expansion, and authority. Said argues that in all nationally defined cultures, there is an aspiration to sovereignty, and to dominance.
(15) When their hold on overseas territories began to fray, the European powers projected their power backward in time. This gave a history and legitimacy which only longevity could im­part. Natives do similar constructions of what they supposed themselves to have been prior to colonialism (i.e. return to a precolonial "pure" golden age).
(16) People who protested against colonialism were heard only par­tially in the West and by the ruling authorities in their own so­cieties (Ngugi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz). “Rhetoric of blame" is common to the Western and colonised people in postcolonial public discourse.
(17) Today's Western discourse is nostalgic and refers to the unap­preciated magnanimity of the West by the natives. This as­sumes the primacy and centrality of the West.
(18) Said suggests that we need a contrapuntal perspective-think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its own agenda, pace of development, internal for­mation and coherence, system of external relationships all co­existing and interacting with one another. Said is thus sug­gesting that we abandon a unified approach that goes by the master narrative, and adopt a technique where marginal and apparently contradictory narratives battle. This is contrapuntal reading informed and influenced by a "hermeneutics of suspi­cion": "a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which the dominating discourse acts." What Said is suggesting, in short, is a disputation reading process, where the author's "given" must be seen in the light of texts/experiences which are effaced. (A parallel method may be seen in New Historicist readings, see chapter on the same above).
(19) Resistance has two phases: actual fighting against outside inva­sion and ideological resistance to save or restore the sense and fact of the community against the colonial system. Said argues that no matter how complete the dominance of imperialist ide­ology, there are parts of social experience that it does not cover. Said identifies three topics that manifest in decolonising cultural resistance:
(a) The insistence on the right to see the community's history whole, coherently and integrally. Thus national culture and memory is revived and emphasised. Local narratives, spiri­tual autobiographies, prison memoirs form a counterpoint to Western official discourses, histories or panoptic view­points.
(b) Resistance as an alternative way of conceiving human his­tory. This seeks to disrupt European narratives, and replac­ing them with a more playful narrative style (Said uses Midnight's Children as example here). This may be the re­turn of the once "subjugated knowledges" (Said adopts the term from Foucault). Thus the works of Marquez, Rushdie, Achebe and Soyinka interrogates the assumptions of impe­rialist discourse. The nomadic novel transgresses the limits imposed by imperial categories and also nativist/provincial nationalism.

(c) Pull away from separatist nationalism towards a more inte­grative view of human community and liberation. Said sug­gests that cultures are interdependent, and nationalism is an intellectual trend that favours more generous human reali­ties of community among cultures. This community is the ,real human liberation heralded by the resistance to imperi­alism.
(20) Nativism reinforces the distinction (us/them) while revaluating the weaker partner. To accept nativism is "to accept the conse­quences of imperialism, the racial, religious and political divi­sions imposed by imperialism itself." Further, Said warns that abandonment of the historical world for the "metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to abandon history for essential isms that have the power to turn human beings against each other." Postcolonial narratives pro­gress from dependence and inferiority to nationalist revival, independent state formation and cultural autonomy in an "anxious partnership" with the West.
(21) Ideological and cultural wars against imperialism occur in the form of resistance in colonies. This later becomes the dissent in metropolises of Europe. The first phase produces nationalist independence struggles, the second leads to liberation strug­gles.

A House for Mr Biswas (HB): Postcolonial and Diasporic Text


Nostalgia for the homeland and maintaining pure identities

Naipaul represents the individual, Biswas, as having the potential to liberate himself and move forward. However, he portrays the displaced Indian community in Trinidad as a homogenous entity caught in the past.

Ramraj claims: ‘traditionalists cope with estrangement from kith and kin by developing even stronger attachment to their culture, which accentuates their isolation’ (1992: 81).

The traditions and rituals of the imagined ancestral homeland are used by the family to maintain a sense of Indian identity, as if the break from India had not occurred.

The Tulsis feared that if they allowed the West Indies to seep into their ‘pure’ Indian identities it would corrupt them, therefore they consciously resisted anything West Indian and instead tried to duplicate Indian culture in their new environment. Hanuman House is described as ‘an alien white fortress’ (81).

Naipaul, in HB, captures the romantic longings of the older East Indian immigrants of returning to India: ‘They continually talked of going back to India, but when the opportunity came, many refused, afraid of the unknown. They didn’t want to give up this ambivalence of becoming part of the landscape and yet somehow being beyond or beside it (1996: 220).

In reality they ‘had lost touch with their families’ in India (81). Similarly, in Finding the Centre, Naipaul writes: ‘India for these people had been a dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad’ (1984; 1985: 53).

They were more comfortable maintaining this notion that their stay in Trinidad was only temporary and eventually they would go back to India. In this way, arriving in the immediate homeland was constantly deferred.

The homogenous Indian community resists recognising its own hybridity and that of the other races in Trinidad. The Indian petty bourgeoisie, protects its fragmented, traditional, migrant culture in the face of growing Caribbean Creolization’ (1984: 116-117).

The clan gave us a sense of identity

At the same time, Naipaul remains grateful to this Indian society’s preservation of its own culture and traditions: ‘For all its physical wretchedness and internal tensions, the life of the clan had given us all a start. It had given us a caste certainty, a high sense of the self’ (1984: 49).

In a later book, India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul writes: ‘the clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state’ (1991: 178).

Naipaul acknowledges the ambivalence of belonging to a cohesive cultural group: it protected people from meaninglessness but it exerted power over them.

Their closed attitude to external influences causes a once prosperous family to disintegrate. To protect their own threatened identity against an alien culture, they maintained Hanuman House like a fortress: ‘outsiders were admitted to Hanuman House only for certain religious celebrations’ (82).

Other races?

The novel seems to suggest that their deliberate isolation from the other local races is an issue.

At the same time, the novel relegates other races on the island such as Negroes and Chinese to the periphery and locks them into stereotypical roles. One critic suggested that in reading HB one would think that the West Indies is only populated by Indians.

Or is this the very postcolonial plight that Naipaul is attempting to show the postcolonial plight where the races don’t mingle. According to Sarah Blanton, Naipaul’s novels depict characters ‘whose selves cannot connect with the others around them. Most often this outsider is the exiled colonial trying to find a place in a post-colonial world’ (1992: 66).

An Indenture Narrative

         Void of the past

The novel narrates the collective history of the indentured labourers. It addresses aspects such as their anonymity and their disappearance from history and memory.

A significant component of Biswas’s limitation in developing his identity is the void of his past: ‘Mr Biswas could never afterwards say exactly where his father’s hut had stood. . . .  The world carried no witness to Mr Biswas’s birth and early years’ (39).

This is presented in the novel not simply as a unique experience particular to Biswas’s family. The novel states that for the indentured migrant Indians who lived ‘in their huts of mud and grass . . . time and distance were obliterated’ (174).

Naipaul in his personal narrative in Finding the Centre writes about ‘undated time, historical darkness’ which relates to an ignorance of his own family, as a result of, as he says, ‘the migration of our ancestors from India’ (1985: 51).

Fragile existence of indentured labourers

HB is a very humorous novel but underlying its humour is that poignant narrative of the illegitimised and unrecognised indentured labourer. This can be seen in the following exchange between Bipti, Biswas’s mother and Lal, the teacher at the Canadian school: ‘“Buth suttificate?” Bipti echoed the English words. “I don’t have any.” “Don’t have any, eh” Lal said the next day. “You people don’t even know how to born, it look like”’ (40).

The indentured labourers led precarious and fragile existences which are symbolised by the place of dwelling, the home: ‘His grandparents’ house had also disappeared, and when huts of mud and grass are pulled down they leave no trace’ (39). This history makes Biswas determined to build a solid house in order to achieve permanence and escape that pervasive sense of extinction:

In none of these places he was being missed because in none of these places had he ever been more than a visitor ... Was Bipti thinking of him in the back trace? But she herself was a derelict. And even more remote, that house of mud and grass in the swamplands: probably pulled down and ploughed up. Beyond that, a void. There was nothing to speak of him. (135)

Colonial neurosis

The colonial neurosis which is manifested in the beatings and punishments that take place in the Tulsi house is connected to the experience of indenture. In a later book, Naipaul suggests how it was impossible to disassociate the present landscape from its historical antecedent:

There was an ancient, or not-so-ancient, cruelty in the language of the streets . . . of punishments and degradation that took you back to plantation times . . . the cruelty of the Indian countryside and the African town. The simplest things around us held memories of cruelty. (1994: 18)

Beatings of wives by husbands and children by their parents in a ritual-like fashion have echoes in the beatings by the overseers of the labourers who would then return to the barracks and beat their wives.

While the novel presents these routine beatings comically, underlying the comedy there is a hint of madness which is symptomatic of a kind of colonial neurosis. Naipaul has said in A Way in the World that for him, ‘comedy’ was on ‘the other side of hysteria’ (1994: 95).

The scene at the rumshop described by the narrator suggests a similar neurosis present in the general Indian community where men were ‘drink[ing] themselves into insensibility. At any time of the day there were people who had collapsed on the wet floor, men who looked older than they were, women too; useless people crying in corners, their anguish lost in the din and press’ (58).

They were using alcohol to blank out their present and their indentured past. The character Seth, who is one of the heads of the Tulsi household and the manager of the family business, ‘dressed more like a plantation overseer than a store manager’ (82). Seth’s ‘benevolent despotism’ is another reminder of the indenture system (Bhabha, 1984: 117).

Biswas’s narrative disrupts the realist narrative

Biswas is located uneasily in the realist genre. There is that sense of not being at home in the genre itself. Mishra claims:

it is not easy to articulate the pain, to find a genre ... in which the eponymous hero, Biswas, could be unproblematically situated. (1996: 220)

‘The narrative of “Biswas” and the discourse of “character” satisfy those ideological and formal demands of realist narratives ... But the driving desire of “Biswas” conceals a much graver subject: the subject of madness, illness and loss’ (Bhabha, 1984: 117).

The narrative of Biswas does not find its niche in the realist genre. While Naipaul is using an English literary convention, the story he is really writing spills over the boundaries exposing Biswas’ difference. Perhaps Biswas’ story cannot be only interpreted in terms of a western colonial literary form? Naipaul uses the realist form only to work against it.

Biswas’s fight for independence, indicated in his stand not to beat his family and to not allow the Tulsi family to beat his children, suggests the attempt to extricate himself from this destructive power-dominated environment.

Furthermore, Biswas’s refusal to work on the estate (24) unlike his brothers who ‘were already broken into estate work’ (40) is partly another rejection of the colonial system. However, as a result of his desperate circumstances he does become the estate driver for a short time.

Thus, the novel suggests a tension between Biswas’s attempt to ‘paddle his own canoe’ and that world and yet being drawn into it as a result of his limited economic means.

The Unhomely and Placelessness

 Unaccommodated man

The neurosis of the indentured Indians feeds into the next generation. Biswas’s acknowledgement that ‘he no longer expected to wake up one morning and find himself whole again’ (273) is an expression of this neurosis and explanation of the emptiness that the Indian diaspora experiences.

HB is principally about the ‘unaccommodated’ man which is the condition of the unhomely — not homeless but not at home either.

In HB, the Prologue ends with the threatening thought of ‘[b]ut bigger than them all was the house, his house. How terrible it would have been . . . to be without it . . . to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated’ (8).

History had brought Biswas’s parents to an island where they did not belong but Biswas had tried to make a home by building a house.

At the age of thirty one, Biswas owned a house and this was symbolic of his liberation from the legacy of colonial indenture. Biswas’s success in building his own home suggested the breaking of that colonial pattern of domination.

Yet, the house is not completely owned by Biswas and this situation does not change, thus when he dies the precarious nature of both his achievement and his postcolonial selfhood is suggested.

Out of placelessness

The void that Biswas experiences and is present generally in the novel is a sense of out-of-placeness.

Edward Casey argues that we cannot get away from a sense of place, that is,  a sense of place is significant to us human beings: ‘Even when we are displaced, we continue to count upon some reliable place, if not our present precarious perch then a place-to-come or a place-that-was’ (Casey, 1993: ix) (emphasis in the original).

This is significant because a sense of place is inextricably connected to who we are, to our sense of self. Casey claims that place has the ‘power to direct and stabilize us, to memorialise and identify us, to tell us who and what we are in terms of where we are (as well as where we are not)’ (Casey, 1993: xv).

In the case of the diasporic subject, who as Rushdie has argued in his essay Imaginary Homelands feels an exacerbated separation of place because of his cultural displacement, he might need, as Casey phrases it: ‘to return, if not in actual fact then in memory or imagination, to the very earliest places [he has] known’ (1993: x), literally and imaginatively or both.

Naipaul, in Finding the Centre, realises that: ‘To become a writer, that noble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave [Trinidad]. Actually to write, it was necessary to go back. It was the beginning of self-knowledge’ (1985: 40).

The void

The void is a theme that Naipaul has been grappling with in much of his writing: ‘Our own past was, like our idea of India, a dream. Of my mother’s father, so important to our family, I grew up knowing very little. Of my father’s family and my father’s childhood I knew almost nothing’ (Naipaul, 1985: 53).

A brief glimpse from Naipaul’s personal narrative suggests his general despair about the East Indian community in Trinidad: ‘[They] didn’t have backgrounds. [They] didn’t have a past. For most of [them] the past stopped with [their] grandparents; beyond that was a blank’ (1994: 79).

In HB, the reoccuring nightmare of the young boy standing in the dark outside a hut — which for Biswas signifies not only himself as a child but also as an adult gaping in the mouth of the void (227) of utter desolation and nonentity — suggests ‘placelessness’: ‘panic before the empty field, the dark vision of no-place-at-all’ (Casey, 1993: xi).

This is of special significance for the colonial subject. It is an image which conveys the futility of the Trinidadian Indians who face an insecure future. Naipaul contends that Europeans do not have that same sense of placelessness: ‘the difference between us, who are Indians, or half Indians, and people like the Spaniards and the English and the Dutch and the French, people who know how to go where they are going, I think for them the world is a safer place’ (1994: 203).

Naipaul had identified himself not with a place but having no place at all: ‘That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself’ (1987: 19).

Coming full circle

His failure to recognise the place he was born in and lived till the age of eighteen came from a sense of not belonging. However, Naipaul made many return journeys to Trinidad which allowed him to come to a greater, if not full acceptance that Trinidad, the island of his birth, was also a significant place for him.

References

Bhabha, Homi. ‘Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticisn.’ The Theory of Reading. Ed. Frank Gloversmith. Sussex: the Harvester Press, 1984.

Blanton, Sarah C. Departures: Travel Writing in a Post-Bakhtinian World. Diss. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1992.

Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Mishra, Vijay. ‘(B)ordering Naipaul: Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics.’ Diaspora 5.2 (1996): 188-237.

Naipaul, V.S. A Way in the World. London: Heinemann, 1994.

Naipaul, V.S. India: A Million Mutinies Now. London: Minerva, Mandarin Paperbacks, 1990.

Naipaul, V.S. Finding the Centre. 1984. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Ramraj, Victor. ‘Still Arriving: The Assimilationist Indo-Caribbean Experience of Marginality.’ Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Colonialism and Postcolonialism


Definitions of ‘colonialism’ and ‘postcolonialism’ vary.  Colonialism is sometimes understood as a specific event or experience of the past.  Colonialism is also understood as an ongoing exercise of economic, military or political power by stronger states over weaker ones (‘neo-colonialism’). Still others point to colonial epistemology or forms of knowledge, premised on the privileging of western forms of understanding, and indeed of living, and the appropriation or derogation of ‘local’ or ‘native’ forms.  As a result, postcolonialism is sometimes understood in straightforward temporal terms (‘after colonialism’).  Other times postcolonialism is understood as a quotidian condition of cultural, political and/or economic marginality.  And yet more understandings see the marginal condition of ‘postcoloniality’ as an ‘in-between’ intellectual or cultural condition, existing at the interstices of European modernity, with which it has a complex, intertwined and symbiotic relationship.  Postcolonialism is thus about questions of agency, subjectivity, power and justice, all couched within the resounding question of who gets to speak?  And on whose behalf?