Notes

1. Terry Eagleton points out in his introduction to The Ideology of the Aesthetic that “anyone who inspects the history of European philosophy since the Enlightenment must be struck by the curiously high priority assigned by it to aesthetic questions” (1). The aesthetic “returns with such persistence,” he reasons, because, “in speaking of art it speaks of . . . other matters too [freedom, autonomy etc.]” (3). Eagleton condemns the dismissal of aesthetics as “bourgeois ideology,” arguing that “there are meanings and values embedded in the tradition of the aesthetic which are of vital importance” to the pursuit of political goals, even if there are others that seek to defeat them (8, 415). Marx himself believed that the senses themselves must be humanized and educated to become human senses, suggesting the role of aesthetic cultivation in the project of emancipation.

2. All references to Aesthetic Theory in this book use Robert Hullot-Kentor’s 1997 translation. In juxtaposing this later version with the 1984 translation by C. Lenhardt, as well as with the original, I have been struck by Hullot-Kentor’s studied attempt to keep faith not only with Adorno’s language, but his paratactical organizational structure as well. The centrality of form to the argument is maintained in Hullot-Kentor’s rendition, offering a persuasive argument for using the newer translation despite its greater difficulty.

3. One hears this death knell clearly in Benjamin’s declaration: “When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever” (Illuminations 226).

4. These considerations include the material and ideological conditions of cultural production as well its relationship to the politics of struggle. In historical terms, the compulsion to respond to the epistemological violence of colonial constructions of the ideologically and sociologically predictable “other” of colonial discourse provides the disciplinary beginnings of the field. Said’s Orientalism, Spivak’s early essays and interviews, and Bhabha’s theorizations of mimicry and hybridity belong to this phase of postcolonial exploration. Critical preoccupation with the process of othering in imperial discourse, explored through philosophical, historical, and metaphysical avenues, continues as a new version of imperialism takes shape in the course of economic globalization. Because “the relay has passed to neo-colonialism,” as Spivak puts it, a new subject has been generated in the volatile Petri dish that now includes First World cultural politics: its longing for moral amnesty, and a resolute will to remedy curricular and associated ideological gaps in representation (“Transnationality” 71).

5. For an incisive account of “the doctrinal demands for the ‘third-world’ writer,” see Brennan’s At Home in the World, particularly pages 36–44.

6. See also George Levine’s introductory essay in the volume Aesthetics and Ideology. The care of the aesthetic in readings of postcolonial literature has for too long been the love that dare not speak its name.

7. David Beech and John Roberts argue that the swing back in this direction stems in part from the anxious soul-searching of progressive academics faced with the demise of the Soviet Union (and the resultant “crisis of Marxism” and the ascendancy of political and cultural conservatism in the United States and United Kingdom) (quoted in Kester 17). The validity of this observation notwithstanding, it is no less important to consider the abiding relevance of Marx’s own views on literature and the arts as the increasing politicization of literature (particularly “Third World” literature) assumes progressively vulgar proportions. Although Marx did not develop a systematic theory of aesthetics, art and literature nevertheless held an important place in his theory because of their capacity for recalling human sensuous needs beyond the physical necessities of life. At least one critic suggests Marx and Engels’ inflected understanding of literature. Lunn, for instance, points out that “Unlike many later ‘Marxist’ literary critics, Marx and Engels themselves did not view most art and literature as simply a matter of class perspective or ideology. They recognized, of course, a literature of bourgeois apology, but many of their observations are grounded in a richer and more complex terrain: much of the most interesting art, far from being reducible to class origins or ideological outlook, heightens our sense of the ironies, complexities, and contradictions of the historical pressure upon cultural activity” (21).

8. See also Michael Bérubé’s The Employment of English, in which he argues that even the most narrowly “literary” works really can defamiliarize the familiar and renew perception and compel readers to imaginative sympathy, disgust, ecstasy, and terror.

9. For a critique of Critical Theory’s inability to explore the nexus between theory and praxis more successfully, see Bubner, Friedman, and Slater.

10. Following Max Weber, the Frankfurt School members elaborate the idea of instrumental reason as “the extension of (scientific) rationality to ‘the conduct of life itself’ . . . the secularization of life leads to a growth of means-end rationality, whereby there is ‘the methodological attainment of a definitely given and practical end by the use of an increasingly precise calculation of . . . means’” (Held 65). With specific regard to literature, it is useful to also consider Martin Jay’s elaboration of the idea of instrumental reason in Adorno’s terms: “The qualitatively different and non-identical was forced into the mould of qualitative identity” (Adorno 37).

11. See Baxandall and Morawski for an elaboration of Marx’s views on this subject, especially 69.

12. For an understanding of these terms, see Aesthetic Theory, 54–55.

13. See Raymond Williams’s definition of “native” in Keywords in which he explains its positive and negative connotations (215–16).

14. From the ominous date of 1603 onward, the usages of the term conjoin with another that we also associate with land and its tilling, viz. colonization. The terms “native” and “colonial” both share a linguistic relation to “land,” each in divergent and antagonistic ways, the one through origin and the other through a more violent possession. The etymological derivations of the terms “native” and “intelligence” and associated usages have been drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary.

15. As the Oxford English Dictionary reports, the term “native” connotes connection to land but not fixity: “One born in a place; one connected with a place by birth, whether subsequently resident there or not.”

16. Some of these issues have been addressed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s widely circulated “Can the Subaltern Speak?” without this intervention, however, having depressed the need in the First World for plausible and intelligible postcolonial articulations.

17. Spivak has recently explored the figure of the native informant in all its complex figurations under the sign of global capital in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.

18. See Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1–16.

19. As Nägele notes in his discussion of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, “What is at stake is the isolation and separation of the aesthetic sphere from others. The work of isolating is double-edged, like concentration: it is a philosophical requirement, necessary for the precision and purity of philosophical concepts; but, as Freud discovered, it is also a work of disconnecting troubling and disturbing connections, as such a defense mechanism against threatening forces” (212).

1. See Appiah, Hall, Matsikidze, McClintock, and Shohat for some expressions of discontent with the term “postcolonial” and its usages.

2. I am grateful to Maureen Daly Goggin and Steve Beatty for drawing my attention to this powerful theory in economics. Using the work of W. Brian Arthur, Goggin and Beatty describe self-reinforcing mechanism as a theory “that offers a robust explanation of how and why inferior technologies and systems succeed despite superior alternatives.” The conjunction of theories from discourse studies and economics in this chapter is deliberate given that we are discussing a field openly accused of trafficking in (self)commodification.

3. As Aijaz Ahmad points out in “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” the term “postcolonial” “was to be used increasingly not so much for periodisation as for designating some kinds of literary and literary-critical writings, and eventually some history-writing, as generically postcolonial, while other writings in those same domains of literature, literary criticism and history-writing presumably were not” (7). This aggrandized sense of the term, as connoting generic definitions of periods, authors, and writings has gathered force, Ahmad proposes, through a system of mutual citations and cross-referencing among a handful of influential writers and their associates.

4. As noted, inter alia, by the editors Barker, Hulme, and Iversen in their introduction to Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, “there is little dispute that the catalyst for much of the new work that has resulted, and still an indispensable reference point, was Edward Said’s Orientalism” (1). The field and the use of the term gained unprecedented momentum after the publication of a text that does not describe itself as postcolonial but that was accompanied or followed by several important texts and conferences that drew in Said’s critique of Western constructions of the Orient into a disciplinizing postcolonialism. Soon after, the publication of the proceedings of the 1982 and 1984 symposia at Essex (Barker et al. 1983, 1985) and the autumn 1985 special issue of Critical Inquiry on “Race, Writing, and Difference” drew attention to other names that would become very well known in connection with postcolonial studies, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Abdul JanMohamed, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others.

5. See also Brydon and Kirpal for a discussion on the problems of the term “commonwealth.”

6. Critics of commonwealth literature, Brydon objects, have ignored the “wealth” that such literature has to offer: “To recognise what we hold in common is not to underestimate our differences, but to provide us with a context for understanding them more clearly” (6). Trinh T. Minh-ha points to the power of a term like “Third World” when used subversively by those whom it names (97). Ella Shohat, too, suggests that “the term ‘Third World’ does still retain heuristic value as a convenient label for the imperialized formations, including those within the First World” (111). Others have commented on its power when used subversively by those usually described by it.

7. On the similarities of the postcolonial and postmodern project, see Childs and Williams; During.

8. Barker, Hulme, and Iversen marshal a similar argument in their observations on the relation between postcolonialism and postmodernism.

9. Heinemann, Longman, Penguin, the Women’s Press, Karnak, Routledge, Verso, Duke University Press, and the University of Minnesota Press have provided tremendous support for publications in postcolonial literature and theory.

10. See, for instance the numerous recent readers and discussions on Fanon, C. L. R. James, and Glissant.

11. See Stoler’s discussion on Europeans in the colonial Dutch East Indies for a repudiation of the lack of differentiation in the use of the term “European.”

12. Stuart Hall’s is a poignant response to this sort of contradiction in postcolonialism: “But isn’t the ubiquitous, the soul-searing, lesson of our times the fact that political binaries do not (do not any longer? did they ever?) either stabilise the field of political antagonism in any permanent way or render it transparently intelligible?” (“When Was the ‘Post-Colonial’?” 244).

13. The ease with which European imperialism gained hold in the colonies was certainly due to their superior resources and to what JanMohamed refers to as a “primarily. . . material coercion” but it was also of the willingness of subjects to be colonized in subsequent phases (“Dominance” 8). The question here is not whether native complicity makes colonialism more or less right or wrong, but what does it mean for postcolonial societies today? Until this unpalatable question is examined, it may not be possible to recognize the ways in which previous subjects of the empire are now willing to be neocolonized. In this context, the “neocolonized” might benefit from the reminder that the “multinational” is not only “them” but also “us.”

14. See Spivak’s comments in “Transnationality and Multiculturalist Ideology.”

15. See, for instance, the catalog of peasant, tribal, and other resistance movements in Claude Alvares’s Science, Development, and Violence or the discussion of powerful grassroots ecofeminism in Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive. As I concede the importance of registering resistance I am nevertheless inclined to agree with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s conclusion that while “ecological movements . . . leftist peasant organizations; caste-based agitations; the women’s movement; and of, course, various communal, linguistic, and regional demands for autonomy are significant oppositional aspects of the political life of the postcolonial Indian nation,” we should be “doubtful about the extent to which they have found their theorists” (609n24). Early in the course of the development of postcolonial studies JanMohamed points out, “In theory we are never entirely encapsulated by hegemonic colonialism. Thus the task of theory and criticism is to enlarge this gap in a systematic and practical way” (“Dominance” 10).

1. In Postnationalist Ireland, Richard Kearney claims that “when one speaks of the ‘Irish community’ today, one refers not merely to the inhabitants of a state, but to an international group of expatriates and a subnational network of regional communities. This triple-layered identity means that Irishness is no longer coterminous with the geographical outlines of an island. The diaspora both within and beyond the frontiers of Ireland (over seventy million claim Irish descent) challenges the inherited definitions of state nationalism” (99). More frivolously, Eagleton in The Truth about the Irish defines them as “a mythical folk. There is no single bunch of people called the Irish. Instead there are Gaelic-Irish, Norman-Irish, Anglo-Irish, Scots-Irish, Danish-Irish and nowadays a sprinkling of Chinese-Irish too” (104). In a more serious vein, the question of Irish postcolonial identity inevitably raises uncomfortable questions about the status of Northern Ireland. These complications together bedevil references to “the Irish” as a collectivity because claims and arguments for a postcolonial identity are associated both with the Republican ideology of the Sinn Féin and political discourses in the Irish Republic, not to mention their overseas constituencies.

2. The last is a reference to David Lloyd’s impressive investigation of “Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment,” his subtitular subject in Anomalous States, which concludes with a phrase characterizing Ireland’s as a “putatively ‘post-colonial’ culture” (155; emphasis mine). In his review of the book, Colin Graham observes that the phrase “in many ways belies what precedes it. The certainty and complexity of Lloyd’s post-colonial assumptions could be seen to render spurious the ‘putative’ in its closure” (29). Lloyd’s investigation, however, is not so much an attempt to settle the issue of Ireland’s postcolonial identity as it is a comment on the dispersal of “the post-colonial moment among the episodes and fragments of a history still in process” (11). Lloyd’s stance would seem to constitute an acknowledgment of the ongoing controversy about the concept of postcoloniality rather than a simplistic vote on either side of the issue. In his subsequent Ireland after History, Lloyd acknowledges that “to assert that Ireland is and has been a colony is certainly to deny the legitimacy of British government in Northern Ireland,” but this position does not “confer automatic legitimacy on any armed insurrectionary movement” so much as it demands “that the phenomenon of violence must be understood as constitutive of social relations within the colonial capitalist state” (3).

3. No less significant, however, has been Edward Said’s stance on the debate. Edward Said folds the Irish experience more or less seamlessly into postcolonial history in Culture and Imperialism. In the following observation, for instance, negritude, Islam, and the Celtic spirit coexist harmoniously within the same framework: “In Post-colonial national states, the liabilities of such essences as the Celtic spirit, negritude, or Islam are clear: they have much to do not only with the native manipulators, who also use them to cover up contemporary faults, corruptions, tyrannies, but also with the embattled imperial contexts out of which they came and in which they were felt to be necessary” (16). Despite Said’s notable interventions in Culture and Imperialism and “Yeats and Decolonization,” Ireland and Irish literature are not easily accommodated under the otherwise capacious postcolonial umbrella.

4. Many theorists of Irish history and literature argue for a “richly intercolonial experience,” as Catherine Candy phrases it in her essay on comparative feminisms and imperialisms in India and Ireland. Vincent Cheng suggests that “in Finnegan’s Wake Indian colonial domination by, and resistance to, English imperial rule is represented (or co-presented) by Joyce as parallel to and synonymous with Catholic Ireland’s subservient relationship to Protestant England” (Joyce, Race, and Empire 287). In light of his parody of what Joyce calls “coglionial expancian,” David Spurr argues that “the Wake declares its independence from imperial structures of discourse in order to create a text that one may call, in terms that sometimes prove useful, both postmodern and postcolonial” (“Writing in the Wake of Empire” 873). On the intercolonial experience in history, see also P. Richard Davis and H. V. Brasted.

5. The current debate among Irish critics over the ersatz postcoloniality of Irish identity was sparked and fueled by the activities of the Field Day Theatre Company, its theatrical productions, pamphlets, and its ambitious but highly controversial anthology. Field Day was born when Stephen Rea contacted Brian Friel about launching a theatrical company in Derry, with ready financing from the Northern Ireland Arts Council. Friel and Rea were later joined by Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and David Hammond. In the words of its architects, “The Field Day Theatre Company was founded in 1980 by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea. Its birthplace and centre of operations was and continues to be the city of Derry in Northern Ireland” (Field Day Theatre Company, preface, vii). The directors in the Field Day Company “believed that Field Day could and should contribute to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinions, myths and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and a cause of the current situation” (ibid.). Brian Friel’s Translations, destined to become “un classique national” according to Martine Pelletier, was their first production (133). In recent years, numerous other publications in Irish studies have also attempted to demonstrate their embrace of a postcolonial mentality but it is Field Day, as W. J. McCormack claims, that has “set the terms of the current debate in Irish criticism” (55). It was Seamus Deane who recommended the launch of the Field Day pamphlets that would raise the polemic profile of the group. Equally instrumental in bringing the group attention was the increasing use of postcolonial ideas. As Shaun Richards vouches, “the period from at least the mid-eighties to the present” in the company “has been dominated by the influence of writers such as Franz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak, the architects of colonial and post-colonial criticism” (“Placed Identities” 55). This identification has drawn considerable fire from other Irish critics. Given the regnant antagonisms among various Irish constituencies, the post-colonial is seen as an altogether too convenient conceptual poetic that practices politics by other means. Richards comments on the group’s “ever-more ambitious programme of cultural intervention in the politics of, particularly, Northern Ireland, whose situation it reads as unambiguously colonial” with “a real political-cultural consequence” (“Field Day’s Fifth Province” 139, 142). “At the heart of the Field Day programme,” notes Richards, “lies the concept of the fifth province whose essence is “the idea of unity” (140), a vantage point from which all parts of “contemporary Ireland might be seen in fact as coherent” (Deane and Kearney quoted in Richards, “Field Day’s Fifth Province” 140). The cultural nationalism of this move has alarmed many, with Eavan Boland accusing the Field Day pamphleteers of “green nationalism and divided culture” and Longley fearing that Field Day was writing “Northern Protestants out of history” and yearning “for Edenic oneness as opposed to pluralistic fusion” (both quoted in Richards, “Field Day’s Fifth Province” 142, 144). Decrying its selectivity, Longley has criticized the Field Day anthology because it “favours theorists who might help to insert Northern Ireland/Ireland into the colonial/post-colonial frame (especially its simpler models),” concluding wryly that “strange collusions are taking place: intellectual holiday romances in a post-colonial never-never land” (Introduction 28).

6. Act of Parliament, 28 Henry VIII, C. 15, 1537. Cited in Coolahan (77).

7. Comparing the Irish situation with other colonized peoples’, Kiberd notes that “Nigerian children found themselves sweating through Corneille’s El Cid at much the same time that V. S. Naipaul in Trinidad was straining over Dickens, and Irish students were picking their way through the essays of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch” (86). Kiberd emphasizes the commonality of the impact of certain aspects of colonialism. Citing the comments of Daniel Corkery on the education of the Irish child, Kiberd suggests that “Ngugi’s report from Kenya reads in places like a paraphrase of Corkery, a man whose work in all likelihood he did not know” (556). One critic of colonial textbooks declared that “you might have introduced them into a school in Canada or into a school in Africa, as appropriately as into a school in Ireland” (quoted in Coolahan 87).

8. We are reminded by Declan Kiberd that when Conor Cruise O’Brien lost his position in 1961 over his handling of affairs in Katanga, he described himself as “an unimportant, expendable civil servant” who “had just received the backing of a less expendable man, Prime Minister Nehru of India, leader of a sub-continent” (“Modern Ireland” 91).

9. Ernest Renan claims that “If it be permitted us to assign sex to nations as to individuals, we should have to say without hesitance that the Celtic race, especially with regard to its Cymric or Breton branch, is an essentially feminine race . . . [the celtic race] has worn itself out in taking dreams for realities, and in pursuing its splendid visions” (58).

10. More recently, President Mary Robinson “told the Somalis that they were the Irish of Africa,” before proceeding on to the United Nations to plead for international aid on their behalf: “In her continuing focus on the ‘Third World’ and on Irish anticipations of that experience, she reinvigorated many debates of the revivalist generation” (Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 579).

11. “No experience has been more native to Ireland than leaving it,” Eagleton quips in The Truth about the Irish (105). The glibness aside, the fact of the diaspora features prominently in the Irish imagination, providing a useful comparative— and contrastive—case for the study of other diasporas following from the colonial experience. In The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities, journalist Fintan O’Toole claims that “Ireland is a diaspora, and as such it is both a real place and a remembered place, both the far west of Europe and the home back east of the Irish-American” (12).

12. Dawn Duncan refers to “colorization” and “continentalization” as the criteria used to exclude the Irish, “the victim being neither dark-skinned nor non-European” (1).

13. An analogy with American blacks, Gilley emphasizes, is eventually untenable. If Gilley contends that the analogy with “the oppression of the black people cannot be fully sustained,” it is also true that “far more important for understanding the distinctive character of Irish stereotypes was the analogy with the native Americans, or American Indians, an analogy, moreover, which had a foundation in the shared historical experience of being at the receiving end of the first systematic wave of colonial expansion” (quoted in Gibbons, “Race” 97).

14. Critics have argued, of course, that the lack of visual difference only served to exacerbate the discomfort of the English. As Gibbons observes, “the ‘otherness’ and alien character of Irish experience was all the more disconcerting precisely because it did not lend itself to visible racial divisions” (96). Gibbons goes on to substantiate this observation by quoting remarks made by Charles Kingsley on a visit to Sligo, Ireland, in 1860: “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. . . . to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours” (quoted in Gibbons 96). Kiberd comments that “the Irish, despite their glibs and mantles, actually looked like the English to the point of undetectability. . . . It was, perhaps, a subliminal awareness of this resemblance which distressed Spenser, as it would so many of his contemporaries and successors” (Inventing Ireland 11). Ania Loomba notes in her comment on Kingsley that the “the lack of colour difference intensified the horror of the colonial vis-à-vis the Irish” (109).

15. See Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White.

16. English historian Edward Augustus Freeman commented in 1881, “America would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro and be hanged for it. I find this statement generally approved—sometimes with the qualification that they want Irish and negroes for servants, not being able to get any other” (quoted in O’Connor 253). The practice of indenturing the Irish and other whites obviously operated on extraracial grounds. O’Connor observes the general use of indentured white servants, “very many of them Irish men and women—who were bought and sold like chattels by their Christian masters. . . . In 1729 an act was passed placing a duty on ‘Irish servants imported into this province,’ and it remained in place for almost a hundred years. It established that Irish servants could be legally sold by merchants and sea captains. (Ten pounds could buy a freedom-loving Pennsylvanian an Irish slave for five years.) A later law defined these indentured servants as ‘a legal property’ and stated that an owner could ‘sell or bequeath them: and like other chattels, they are liable to be seized for debts’” (O’Connor 199, 200).

17. In general, Kiberd adds, “The Indians were far more likely to proclaim their solidarity with the Irish than vice versa” (259). Stephen Howe reaches much the same conclusion in Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture.

18. The installation of intercolony hierarchies through the offices of the British educational system effected a pernicious system of racialism among the colonized, forever preventing a common sense of purpose. The following extract from Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye reveals the imbrication of the educational and the political project in the colonial classroom: “‘The sun never sets on the British Empire,’ says Miss Lumley, tapping the roll-down map with her long wooden pointer. In countries that are not the British Empire, they cut out children’s tongues, especially those of boys. Before the British Empire there were no railroads or postal services in India, and Africa was full of tribal warfare, with spears, and had no proper clothing. The Indians in Canada did not have the wire or telephones, and ate the hearts of their enemies in the heathenish belief that it would give them courage. The British Empire changed all that. It brought in electric lights” (79). The quoted passage encapsulates two imperial goals, one being to instill a sense of relative scale of worth among the people of the world and the other to convert the student to a belief in a selective measure of worth. Ideological conversion was a mainstay of the imperial mission and, obviously enough, hardly confined to the Irish context alone.

19. Steven Ellis argues for a different reason for the distinctiveness of the Irish experience in that “uniquely in the case of Ireland, a separate kingdom belonging to the English crown was created out of the medieval lordship, with institutions such as a separate parliament and peerage, the extension of the rights of free-born Englishmen to the Gaelic peoples there, and Ireland’s incorporation as a member of the one body politic or, later, as a constituent kingdom of the British state” (9).

20. Coolahan provides further examples of the enfolding of Ireland within Britain’s national project. The following item in the Second Reading Book stresses geographical contiguity and linguistic commonality: “On the East of Ireland is England, where the Queen lives, many people who live in Ireland were born in England, and we speak the same language and are called one nation” (85).

21. In a letter to Alice Stopford Green and William Cadbury, Irishman Roger Casement suggests the unique capacity for empathy for one colonized people for another: “It was only because I was an Irishman that I could understand fully, I think, the whole scheme of wrongdoing at work in the Congo” (quoted in Porter 267). Howe concedes the existence of a sort of solidarity based largely on anti-British sentiment, concluding soberly, however, that “it would appear that nineteenth-century Irish nationalists and Home Rulers were no ‘worse,’ if perhaps also no better, in their racial and colonial attitudes than their contemporaries among English Radicals, Chartists and early socialists” (47).

22. There are those, however, who would argue that even if the Irish Catholic did not participate outright in colonial ventures, and there is no conclusive evidence substantiating this, they did participate “with full Victorian vigour in the task of cultural imperialism, bringing European religious and cultural values to ‘Darkest Africa,’ and beyond” (Kennedy 115). In an interview with Dympna Callaghan, Seamus Deane says, “The other Irish experience that hardly registered in what you might call official literature, and even many of the historical accounts of modern Irish experience, is the little Irish empire of missions, especially in Africa and Latin America. That’s a relation to the Third World that has been in some ways a constant concern in Ireland. People thought of the missionaries as saving souls for God and for Ireland” (43). In Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa, Father Jack seems to have capitulated to the pagan spirituality he found among the Ryangans of Uganda. With the new Jesuit endeavors, Deane proposes, “once more a relation is being defined and described between Ireland and the Third World in which Ireland is able to claim that we are not of the Third World, but are rather First World helpers of it, whether spiritually or economically” (43). Kiberd, however, contends, albeit without substantiation, that “tens of thousands of Irish missionaries were made welcome in the 1920s and 1930s [in the developing world], since they came with no political agenda” (“Modern Ireland” 91). O’Toole writes that “the extraordinary missionary tradition which sent thousands of Irish priests and nuns to a ‘spiritual empire’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America has, in a sense, reversed itself, with returned missionaries importing ideas of liberation theology and the option for the poor, ideas which threaten rather than reinforce, the Church’s place within Irish power structures” (73).

23. However, even this commonality might be redefined in terms of Ireland’s colonial experience in the view of some critics. Robert Welch, for instance, suggests that Ireland’s transformation into a European nation is a disjunctive and anomalous process in that it was mediated by the shaping experience of colonialism: “Ireland, unlike most other European countries, did not have the opportunity of fully experiencing the experiments of individualism, enterprise, collectivity and modernization that are known as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Being a colony of England, Ireland was cut off; her people experienced Europe, in the modern period, that is to say from about 1600, through an English transmission” (1). “We are dealing, in Ireland’s case,” Welch insists, “with an example of almost completely successful colonial takeover” (1).

24. The Irish experience is by definition precluded, for instance, in Helen Tiffin’s interpretation of the postcolonial as defined by “writing and reading practices grounded in some form of colonial experience occurring outside Europe but as a consequence of European expansion into and exploitation of the ‘other’ worlds” (“Post-Colonialism” 170).

25. If it once was postcolonial, that is, part of the Third World, it cannot now claim that distinction. If we were willing to turn the clock back from the present, however, a case could more easily be made. “At the turn of the century,” Vincent Cheng claims in Joyce, Race, and Empire, Ireland, “devastated by centuries of famine, poverty, and rule by English landlords—was virtually a Third World country under British domination” (2). Eagleton reports that “up to the 1960s, Ireland had many of the features of a Third World country” (The Truth about the Irish 37). Those who now apply the economic gauge to Ireland would be obliged to concur with Kennedy’s conclusion that “like a good photograph, the figures speak volumes. Suffice it to say that Ireland inhabits a world other than the Third World” (112). As David Lloyd points out, Kennedy’s failure to account for the impact of “one major demographic, cultural and economic phenomenon . . . emigration” certainly alters the credibility and import of his statistics, but it is nevertheless impossible to ignore Kennedy’s protest that “the attempt to equate life in contemporary Ireland” with the Third World in the present moment is “to trivialise the suffering of hundreds of millions of the world’s peoples” (Ireland after History 11, 120–21).

26. See Giddens and Habermas.

27. One need hardly add that the connotations of the term “national” need not be limited in connotation to nationalistic alone, even if the paucity of nationalistic expression is bemoaned by more than one postcolonial critic who had hoped for nation building and meaningful decolonization to be at least one of the goals of the postcolonial literary intelligentsia.

28. See Vincent Cheng’s “Of Canons, Colonies, and Critics” for a fuller discussion of the politics and ethics of rereading canonical Irish writers in postcolonial terms.

29. On the subject of attention to contexts and the rooting of interpretation in particularities in the Irish experience, see also Lawrence J. Taylor.

30. Antaeus, son of Poseidon and Gaea, is the giant of Libya who compelled all strangers passing through the country to wrestle with him. Whenever Antaeus touched his mother Earth, his strength was renewed, so that even if thrown to the ground he became more powerful. Hercules overcame him by lifting him into the air, in effect displacing him and his connections to the strength-giving earth.

31. See Terry Eagleton’s elaboration of this Benjaminian idea, “Truth is the death of intention,” in Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, especially on 117.

32. See also Thomas C. Foster (71).

33. Like other critics, Andrew Murphy agrees that “Antaeus serves as a figure for the native communities who opposed the advance of colonialism throughout the world,” concluding that Heaney’s position is as follows: “The struggle of these traditional, pastoral, earthbound societies was . . . always doomed to failure, as they faced an adversary whose technological advantage and whose world-view always outstripped and exceeded that of the communities who resisted them” (47). In “Fusions in Heaney’s North,” David Lloyd states that “Heaney fashioned this list [of “national military heroes”] with an eye to chronological progression and cultural plurality” (85). Morrison suggests that the Antaeus poems could be read “as an allegory of the Protestant settlement of Ireland . . . but it is more a parable of imperialism generally” (59). Written, as the later Antaeus poem was, in the aftermath of Heaney’s experiences at Berkeley, the sense of solidarity expressed in the poem is confirmed by Heaney’s own comments on the influence of his sojourn in California: “The whole atmosphere in Berkeley was politicized and minorities like the Chicanos and Blacks were demanding their say. There was a strong sense of contemporary American poetry in the West with Robert Duncan and Bly and Gary Snyder rejecting the intellectual, ironical, sociological idiom of poetry and going for the mythological. I mean everyone wanted to be a Red Indian, basically. And that meshed with my own concerns for I could see a close connection between the political and cultural assertions being made at the time by the minority in the north of Ireland and the protests and consciousness-raising that were going on in the Bay area” (quoted in Morrison 59).

34. Hercules’s victory over Antaeus, as Sidney Burris reminds us, was “an intellectual one because he discovered that holding the giant over his head would cause his eventual downfall” (96).

35. Michael Molino argues that if “on one level, the wrestling match between Hercules and Antaeus is an allegory of the Irish and British struggle in which the British finally defeat the Irish,” the conflict “also represents . . . a struggle not with the British, but within the Irish themselves” (94–95). Molino nevertheless concedes that Antaeus “is representative of the Irish tradition and the myth of origin” (95). “In ‘Making Strange,’ [Station Island],” Cairns and Richards explain, “Heaney fragments himself into his two constituent parts, Antaeus and Hercules, the one ‘unshorn and bewildered / in the rubs of his wellingtons,’ the other ‘with his travelled intelligence / and tawny containment, / his speech like the twang of a bowstring,’ and produces a synthesis as he, Heaney as a transcendent consciousness, stands between them, advised by a ‘cunning middle voice’ to ‘Be adept and be dialect’” (145).

36. “‘Hercules and Antaeus,’” Heaney explains to Seamus Deane, “traces a contest in which rational light finally conquers and illuminates the dark instinctual outlook of the tribe” (Hart 77). Heaney wishes to function Janus-faced, “looking back to a ramification of roots and association and forward to a clarification of sense and meaning” (Preoccupations 52).

37. Cairns and Richards suggest that “these dualities of male and female, intellect and instinct, are found throughout his work, forming a leitmotiv whose comprehension is central to its understanding, just as its recognition appears to have been crucial to Heaney’s own poetic growth” (143). Preserving the dualities, Heaney nevertheless advocates their rapprochement: “The objective is to create an act of union between Antaeus and Hercules in which the historical inevitability which sides with the latter can be enriched by ‘instinctive feel’ and ‘illiterate pleasure’” (145).

1. As Rainer Nägele and other critics point out, Benjamin’s personal and institutional association with the Frankfurt School was at best, fraught. His influence on Adorno, and to a lesser extent on Marcuse, however, makes it impossible to consider Frankfurt School aesthetic theory without a consideration of Benjamin’s ideas.

2. Other figures associated with the Frankfurt School include philosopher and sociologist Max Horkhemier, social psychologist Erich Fromm, cultural critic Leo Lowenthal, and philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, among others.

3. Lukács’s thought was to prove foundational for many of Adorno’s formulations even if he resisted “Lukács’s equation of truth with proletariat class consciousness” (Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics 26). See also Adorno’s review of Lukács’s The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Bloch et al. 151–76). Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson, and Francis Mulhern provide the introductory presentations to the exchanges between various critics in the collection Aesthetics and Politics, and the translation editor is Ronald Taylor.

4. James Buhler’s review of recent scholarship on Adorno begins with the acknowledgment that “difficult is a word that seems especially appropriate for Adorno’s thought, nowhere more so than with Aesthetic Theory,” suggesting that Hullot-Kentor’s 1997 translation only underscores “the profound difficulties of the text” (161). Hullot-Kentor himself candidly admits the difficulty in pursuing in Aesthetic Theory any “homogeneous substance that can be followed from start to finish” (xiv). The use of a paratactic organizational scheme in Aesthetic Theory compounds the difficulty, evading what Adorno himself described in his description of parataxes in “Parataxis: On Hölderin’s Late Poetry,” as “the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax” (Notes to Literature 131). “The untranslatability of Adorno,” as Samuel Weber notes, “is his most profound and cruel truth” (15). In attempting to adhere as closely as possible to the original, Hullot-Kentor’s new translation, juxtaposed with Lenhardt’s 1984 translation, thus provides a useful, and sometimes corrective, gloss to the earlier translation, while illustrating the extent to which the difficulties of the text are only highlighted by yet another translation.

5. Benjamin’s inscrutability was not without cost to his own career: “His study of the Ferman lamentation play was met with incomprehension by philosophers at the University of Frankfurt, from Hans Cornelius to Max Horkheimer. Cornelius insisted Benjamin retract his Habilitationsschrift because, besides being incomprehensible, it was impossible to discern whether it did indeed make a contribution to aesthetics” (Smith xxvi–xxvii). Generations of scholars since have struggled to recuperate the true Benjamin from the allusive and difficult texts that were rendered even more complex by the theorist’s enduring messianism.

6. In his introduction to Adorno in a book of the same name, Martin Jay speculates that “Adorno would have had a principled objection to any attempt to render his thought painlessly accessible to a wide audience” (11). Jay reports that “when his friend Siegfried Kracauer once complained of a feeling of dizziness produced by reading one of Adorno’s works, he was testily told that only by absorbing all of them could the meaning of any one be genuinely grasped” (11). On the difficulty of Adorno’s thought, see also Jameson, Nicholsen, and Rose.

7. As Lambert Zuidervaart observes, for instance, Adorno’s conception of “artistic truth” “weds the disparate philosophical sources of his aesthetics . . . Kant’s notion of beauty as a symbol of morality and Hegel’s view of art as a semblance of truth; Marx’s critique of ideology and Nietzsche’s suspicion of the ideology of critique; Lukács’s emphasis on social totality and Benjamin’s stress on artistic fragments” (xvi).

8. The term “culture industry” was first used by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Characterized by “ruthless unity,” the phenomenon ensures that “something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification” (123). In a subsequent essay, Adorno clarified that the term referred to “standardization,” “pseudo-individualization,” and “the rationalization of promotion and distribution techniques” (Held 91).

9. Lunn also observes that many of Adorno’s perceptions of mass culture “were blurred by an ethnocentric provincialism of one reared within the traditions of European high culture and unable to see much beyond it” (158).

10. Douglas Kellner argues that radical cultural criticism should avoid the terms “mass culture” or “popular culture” or the distinction between high and low culture because all of these terms are “ideological constructions” (117). Instead, he proposes, “It is preferable to analyze culture as a continuum with a diversity of ideological and counterideological moments. . . . Not only is there no one dominant ideology, but systematic studies of contemporary culture reveal that even film, television, and popular music are more conflictual, contested, and contradictory than the classical theory of culture industry assumes” (117–18). Of course, as Adorno himself notes, avant-garde and popular art “are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up” (quoted in Livingstone et al. 156). In a more polemical vein, Geeta Kapur argues in When Was Modernism that “In India primitive techniques, artisanal skills, iconographic references are much valorized; and the modern, comprising the indigenous and the avantgarde, has a two-way relay and a paradoxical politics.” There is, moreover, “a strictly leftwing intervention in the process of defining Indian modernity” that gives “the emerging tradition of the modern in India the possibility of not being trapped in the citadel of high art” (301). Peter Uwe Hohendahl argues against a wholesale characterization of the high/low culture divide in Adorno’s work, suggesting that in many essays and later ruminations, the original hypothesis about the culture industry first found in Dialectic of Englightenment underwent substantial revision.

11. In an interview with BusinessWeek Online, India’s finance minister Yashwant Sinha echoes a sentiment shared by writers like Arundhati Roy: “You have to look at rural India, because the majority of the people live there, and you have to improve the quality of their life. So you have to traverse many centuries. On the one hand you are looking at modern telecom, information technology. On the other hand, you are dealing with rural roads, better seeds, and better fertilizers. So because India lives in many centuries, the policy package has to necessarily traverse these centuries.” It is not only rural India, of course, that coexists in many centuries—construed in exclusively “developmental” terms by Sinha—but, as economic and cultural theorists are arguing, pockets of urban spaces as well. The shape of cultural and its economic subtext are increasingly best understood in fractal terms. See, for instance, Appadurai, Chakrabarty, Prakash, and Rast. Chakrabarty’s summary of “the ‘critique of modernity’ debate in India” in “Modernity and Ethnicity” is particularly useful for an introduction to the major figures and issues in the debate.

12. Bruce Knauft frames the contemporary issues in the study of modernity thus: “How is modernity configured differently in different world areas? Addressing this question exposes alternative meanings of what it means to be modern. Conversely, the notion that modernity is a global process of ‘development’ can be critically reconsidered as a Western vernacular construction.” Perceived thus, modernity is a phenomenon that varies not only across geographical space but temporal context as well.

13. In Adorno’s view, “The products of the culture industry were not works of art that were then turned into commodities, but were rather produced from the very beginning as fungible items for sale in the market place” (Jay, Adorno 122).

14. See Lunn 155.

15. Nor would this process have been possible without the labors of scholars who have undertaken the daunting task of interpreting Critical Theory. Among them I would note Susan Buck-Morss, Terry Eagleton, David Held, Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, Eugene Lunn, Richard Wolin, and Lambert Zuidervaart.

16. In Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno, David Roberts bluntly states that “the possibility of a theory of modern (postmodern) art must resist Adorno’s siren song of the end of art” (27). Other writers have sought to complicate Adorno’s pronouncements on the end of art, while insisting on the concordance between Adorno and post-structuralist thinkers. See Peter Dews, Martin Jay, and Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart.

17. S. S. Prawer reports that “in his private life Marx constantly demonstrates the way in which literature may embellish, enliven and heighten existence. . . . He reads tales and poems with his children. . . . As a public figure too, as author and as orator Marx constantly draws on the writers of the past and present whose work he admires” (415).

18. Certain aspects of this discussion could be applied to art in general, but my primary interest is in postcolonial literature as it has come to be known in the metropolitan world. Even so, the use of the term “art” may seem somewhat misleading since the category of “postcolonial art” has yet to be discursively created. My references in using the term, therefore, are exclusively to postcolonial literature, and to certain works of postcolonial literature.

19. See, for instance, Zuidervaart’s discussion of the relation between the import and impact of art in Adorno’s thought.

20. See Jameson (Late Marxism), Jay (“Anamnestic Totalization”), and Shroyer, for discussions on the role of memory in Marcuse’s thought.

21. Although Marcuse’s debt to Benjamin and other thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School is undeniable, as Martin Jay has pointed out, “the sources of his persistent fascination with memory” stem from four separate stimuli: “his early philosophical training, his adherence to critical Marxism, his special concern for aesthetics, and his radical appropriation of psychology. Although often conflated in his discussions of anamnesia, these different sources contributed distinctive elements to his arguments, elements which can be isolated and critically analyzed” (“Anamnestic Totalization” 1).

1. Godzich defines these as “literatures that cannot be readily comprehended within the hegemonic view of literature that has been dominant” (274).

2. The educational institution that produces pedagogical apparata is far from being a value-free neutral space. For discussions on this topic, see hooks and Wiegman.

3. In speculating on the unprecedented success of two first novels by Canadian ethnic authors, Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and Nino Ricci’s Lives of Saints, Smaro Kamboureli elaborates on this problem. She suggests that the novels in question “exemplify the expectations multiculturalism has generated from ethnic writing” by “importing otherness into Canadian literature as otherness,” and thus thematizing “not the foreignness of ethnics in Canada but the concept of the foreign itself imaged as Canada” (55). Respectably distanced from their immediate location, both authors in these novels “write about their origins without contaminating them with any elements of Canadianness” (55). The implications are clear: the minority text can thus be used to deflect attention away from the immediacy of the presence of the “other” within by rewarding it for keeping its distance. While I am loath to ascribe such loaded intentionality to the authors, I would suggest that they are likely to be read without an adequate understanding of the context of their production or an understanding of the disguisement of their status as resident Canadians and their novels as part of Canadian literature as they are used to fulfill the inside/outside contract that gives such literature its currency.

4. Unless otherwise indicated, all references in this chapter are to Aesthetic Theory.

5. Adorno accords the status of art only to that art that “resembles itself” (Notes to Literature, I, 171). The saturation of the artwork with its immanent form defines art for Adorno.

6. On the decline of new criticism, see Stanley Aronowitz, especially 45 and 153.

7. Sturla Gunnarson’s adaptation of the novel for the screen consciously moves away from this sort of representational politics. Gunnarson claims that his is “not a film about a Parsi or an Indian. It’s about a man trying to lead an honest life in a corrupt world, having to deal with the betrayal of his best friend, a son who is rebelling, and the death of his surrogate son. Things become universal by being particular” (quoted in Verma).

8. Chantal Zabus describes the use of English by African writers in terms of a radical “relexification” or a “third code.”

9. For commentary on Bakhtin and hybridity, see Young’s elaborate discussions in Colonial Desire.

1. Although his turn to the East as subject profited him, “When Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children, India was not yet a subject in vogue or important in the West” (Goonetilleke 20).

2. David Spurr outlines the perception of the native body under Western eyes thus: “The material value of the body as labor supply, its aesthetic value as object of artistic representation, its ethical value as a mark of innocence or degradation, its scientific value as evidence of racial difference or inferiority, its humanitarian value as the sign of suffering, its erotic value as the object of desire” (22).

3. James Gardner’s review of The Ground beneath Her Feet, for instance, concedes that “there is no reason Rushdie should not write about the West, since he has lived here most of his life and since he is writing for Western consumption,” but warns that “in thus shifting his attention to the West he enters a crowded field” and, to all appearances, “he has little to contribute that could compare in originality or beauty to his writings about the East” (61–62).

4. In his description of “cosmopolitans,” that is, “those writers Western reviewers seemed to be choosing as the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World—writers who, in a sense, allowed a flirtation with change that ensured continuity, a familiar strangeness,” Tim Brennan initially includes the following: Mario Vargas Llosa, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Bharati Mukherjee, a few others. He goes on to state that “if there was any one of them who seemed to capture what they collectively represented, it was Rushdie” (Salman Rushdie viii).

5. Rushdie explains the economy of violence thusly: “Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence” (Shame 124).

6. Catherine Cundy observes that “Indira Gandhi’s libel suit against Rushdie and the first edition of Midnight’s Children centered on the suggestion that she had hastened her husband Feroze’s early death from a heart attack. She won the case and the offending comments were removed from subsequent editions” (37–38).

7. Rushdie observes that “In the case of MC I certainly felt that if its subcontinental readers had rejected the work, I should have thought it a failure, no matter what the reaction in the West” (Imaginary Homelands 20).

8. Suspicious of the traditional rationalist approaches, Benjamin was to find the technique of montage, drawn from the work of the artistic avant-garde, particularly conducive to the development of a theory of knowledge based on the reorganization of constellations of material within a theoretical and stylistic framework that sought to avoid conceptual domination. Wolin explains that this strategy allowed Benjamin to “overcome the pitfalls of the traditional discursive, correspondence theory of truth—adequatio intellectus et rei” (“Critical Theory and Aestheticism” 194).

9. The organizational structure of the movement includes a religiocultural wing comprised of the VHP and RSS, and its electoral arm, the BJP, a conglomerate Rushdie refers to as an alphabet soup in the novel. The VHP is the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) with its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal; the RSS is Rashtriya Swayamsevak Dal (National Volunteer Corps), and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is the electoral party intended to give political design and state sanction to the goals of the former. Fielding, like the fundamentalists he is supposed to portray, is against immigrants and in favor of the Hindu stability of caste, “against working women, in favor of sati, against poverty and in favor of wealth” (298). A cornerstone of the movement is the use of the mythical God-King Ram, whose alleged birthplace, Ayodhya, has become the center of contention and dispute.

10. In his review of the novel, J. M. Coetzee notes that Rushdie also represents the histories of the Moors in Spain and the Jews in Cochin without distortion or embellishment, unwilling to destabilize their status as significant fragments from the past that must be viewed without undue ambivalence about their validity.

11. See Berman’s discussion of “the dialectic of nakedness” in Marx’s philosophy.

12. In the Marcusian scheme, “Aesthetic opposition and love are the most radical oppositional forces since they produce an alternative reality completely at odds with an oppressive social reality” (Kellner, quoted in “Herbert Marcuse at 100” 11).

13. In Shame the narrator expresses the sentiment of “the naked unity of flesh” in terms of the fundamental laws of physics: “We are energy; we are fire; we are light. Finding the key, stepping through into the truth, a boy began to burn” (126).

14. See Banville for Rushdie’s discussion of this period in Moorish Spain. In this interview, Rushdie also clarifies his understanding of the foundations of this society in Islamic imperialism.

15. The twin explosions at the Delhi Red Fort in June 2000 tell of this promise being broken again.

16. This would seem to also constitute a preemptive response to accusations, such as Afzal-Khan’s, of his “failure to construct a viable alternative ideology for himself or for postcolonial society in general” (142).

1. Benjamin’s writings on experience, particularly as reflected in modernist art and literature, are central to a philosophical investigation of modernity because of his attempt to theorize the relationship between experience and technology.

2. As Wolin points out, “By ‘commodification’ Adorno means the organized process whereby the arts are alienated from their primary and traditional status as a use-value, an object of aesthetic experience, and become an exchange-value, an object whose character is determined first and foremost by its relation to the market” (195). While this understanding of commodification is intended to explain the process by which art becomes increasingly determined by the market in terms of its content and shape, it is also important to bear in mind that our awareness of this phenomenon can also extend to a critical method that preempts the quest for those elements of postcolonial literature that struggle to retain a measure of aesthetic integrity even as they betray a capitulation to the tastes and desires of the market.

3. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Roy are from The God of Small Things.

4. Martin Jay points out that Adorno “shared his friend’s hostility to Erlebnis, a term which had been extolled by the irrationalist ‘philosophers of life’ in Germany because of its alleged spontaneity and freedom from overt intellectual reflection” (Adorno 74–75).

5. As Jay explains it, “Adorno followed Benjamin in stressing the redemptive power of Gedächtnis, the reverential recollection of an object always prior to the remembering subject” (Jay, Adorno 68).

6. In his introductory essay on Benjamin, Donougho suggests that Benjamin “claimed, in effect, that art is at an end” (53). Adorno is far more willing to concede to art, truly “autonomous art,” the capacity for retaining its significance and independence. It is nevertheless possible, however, to revise the general perception of Benjamin’s fatalistic pronouncements for art in light of Wolin’s nuanced reading of the progression and occasional contradictions of Benjamin’s ideas, as well as Lunn’s assessment of Benjamin’s ambivalent response to the decline of the aura.

7. See Lunn on Benjamin’s views on the decline of the aura, especially 251–56.

8. As Wolin suggests, “In truth, communal social organization was never so idyllic as modern romantics tend to imagine it. These were societies beset with problems of privation and scarcity, at the mercy of nature, where social rank was decided by birth, and in which formal legal channels to address injustice and grievances were highly underdeveloped. The gains made by advanced industrial societies in all these areas are by no means inconsequential” (226).

9. The novel’s insistence that a redemptive politics cannot afford to let individual loss and individual suffering languish unmourned nevertheless appeals to that which is collectively shared as a principle, but also fundamental in the forging of a collective subject of emancipation. Adorno explains that “the prinicipium individuationis, however, which implies the need for the aesthetically particular, is not only universal as a principle in its own right, it is inherent to the self-liberating subject. Its universal—spirit—is in terms of its own meaning not lodged beyond the particular individuals” (Aesthetic Theory 200).

10. The scene, the geographically manifest, is rendered historical when it seems to bear “the mark of a past event,” a “moment of becoming at a standstill” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 71). In its design of retaining the synchronic and diachronic aspects of setting, the novel incorporates this historical sense while suggesting its ever-presence beyond the “mark of a past event.”

11. The novel’s insistence on the great stories as already “known” is worked into the narrative through a direct editorial on the nature of great stories. Schematically, however, the novel conveys this sense of knowing by making seemingly stray references to other, older stories. Among them is a reference to Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lochinvar,” another tale of a dangerous river crossing for a meeting between lovers, which serves as one of the palimpsest versions of the great stories.

12. For Benjamin, too, mimesis operates in an errant mode, rendering aesthetic representation a matter of irreducible alterity.

13. Compare Marx’s views on history and human agency: “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real living man, that does all that, that possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not a person apart, using man as means for its own particular aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims” (The Holy Family 125).

14. The narrator alerts us earlier in the novel to Comrade Pillai’s anxiety about the untouchable Velutha as a “snag” in his plans: “Of all the workers at Paradise Pickles, he was the only card-holding member of the Party, and that gave Comrade Pillai an ally he would rather have done without. He knew that all the other Touchable workers in the factory resented Velutha for ancient reasons of their own. Comrade Pillai stepped carefully around this wrinkle, waiting for a suitable opportunity to iron it out” (115).

15. Comrade Pillai’s willingness to compromise the basic tenet of the Communist Manifesto that required “the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat,” through his own entrepreneurial ambitions, is one more instance of a revolutionary movement contaminated by self-interest and the irrepressible desire for ascendancy (Marx and Engels, “Manifesto” 500).

16. Kellner explains that for Marcuse “aesthetic opposition and love are the most radical oppositional forces since they produce an alternative reality completely at odds with an oppressive social reality” (Kellner, quoted in “Herbert Marcuse at 100” 11).

17. For another response to Ahmad’s critique of individual desire, see Brinda Bose.

18. Although one reads such phrases as “Locusts Stand I,” as one of many instances of Roy’s ability to capture the peculiarities and cadence of children’s negotiations with language, this is also one of several instances where it might be read not merely as reflective, but suggestive. The association of a legal phrase indicating “no right to appear in court” with a biblical reference to one of many plagues visited upon an erring humanity prompts a more general meditation on the mechanisms of alienation and suffering unleashed by the human quest for domination.

19. The principles of artistic creation render the “data” of reality and event other to themselves. Within this reordering lies the intelligence of the text as internal to its form: “Under the law of the aesthetic form, the given reality is necessarily sublimated: the immediate content is stylized, the ‘data’ are reshaped and reordered in accordance with the demands of the art form, which requires that even the representation of death and destruction invoke the need for hope—a need rooted in the new consciousness embodied in the work of art” (Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension 7).

20. Marcuse acknowledges the interplay of constructive and destructive forces in human nature, but argues that it is possible to conceive of a communal cooperative founded on the life force, indeed imperative that the move toward solidarity proceed from a profound realization of its power: “Solidarity and community have their basis in the subordination of destructive and aggressive energy to the social emancipation of the life instincts” (Aesthetic Dimension 18).

21. The extent to which art arises from psychological forces in human nature is contested by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory. Yet it is in the realm of longing for a better world that he concedes a role for psychoanalytic sources for artistic expression. For Adorno, “if art has psychoanalytic roots, then they are the roots of fantasy in the fantasy of omnipotence. This fantasy includes the wish to bring about a better world” (9).

22. Models of cognition usually operate within the code of identity or adequation of concept to thing, defining “identity as the correspondence of the thing-initself to its concept” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 149). The nonidentity principle elaborated by various thinkers of the Frankfurt School exposes the futility of grasping the nonconceptual through conceptual means, emphasizing instead the excess that lies beyond this grasp. Representation puts in question that which is represented, rather than resolving its contradictions.

23. In theoretical terms, Adorno’s meditations on idealism and totality in Negative Dialectics reject the false conceptual dogma of identitarianism. The pseudoreconciliation of fragmentary reality by conceptual totality denies the complexity of distinct identity. Adorno concludes that “since the basic character of every general concept dissolves in the face of distinct identity, a total philosophy is no longer to be hoped for” (136). In its aesthetic rendition of the problem of basic identity in confrontation with classificatory idealism, The God of Small Things repeatedly challenges the valence of conceptual categories. Cryptically coded as “the jam-jelly question,” the problem of classification, “as per . . . [the] books,” becomes a fundamental problem for the novel: “They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly” (31). At numerous other points in the novel, the jam-jelly question is thrown up in a consideration of roles and choices. Comrade Pillai, for instance, justifies his collaboration with the “capitalist” Chacko by consoling himself that “Chacko-the-client and Chacko-the-Management were two different people. Quite separate of course from Chacko-the Comrade” (115). The novel offers almost textbook illustrations of Adorno’s admonition, “Every single object subsumed under a class has definitions not contained in the definitions of that class” (Negative Dialectics 150). In somewhat different, but clearer terms, Adorno quotes Valéry in saying that “small unexplained facts always contain grounds for upsetting all explanations of ‘big’ facts” (Notes to Literature, I, 153).

24. In “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Benjamin lauds the associative and analogical logic of young children, who are better able to “produce evanescent similarities” that provoke reflection. See Lunn 175–76.

25. Lunn argues that Benjamin’s notion of “hope in the past” was enriched by Proust’s “evocation of an elegiac happiness which is both restorative and ‘unheard-of, the unprecedented” (247).

26. The classical art of memory includes in its arsenal the ability to recall topics, a term itself derived from the Latin for place, topos.

27. See chapter 19, book II, for Aristotle’s exposition of koinoi topoi. Within the logic of argumentation, itself based upon common topics, “the possibility of anything, in respect of being or coming to be, implies the possibility of the contrary” (The Rhetoric of Aristotle 179).

28. See Roy’s “The Greater Common Good” in The Cost of Living.