The End of Literature

The Text in the World

This book is about the crisis of postcolonial literature, manifested in anxiety over its relevance, uncertainty about its value, and suspicions of the death of literature as a significant social form. At a stage in the development of capital when all that is solid seems predictably to be melting into air on a worldwide scale, and artistic expression is increasingly regulated by technological expansion and market considerations, the value of the aesthetic sphere as a distinctive activity threatens to dissolve pari passu. Although various and often mutually contradictory impulses characterize postcolonial theory and criticism, making the term post-colonial notoriously indefinable and definitive claims virtually impossible, it is nevertheless clear that a direct engagement with this crisis has yet to take shape. What is attempted in these pages is a response to the remarkable lack of a sufficiently developed critical framework for addressing “the aesthetic dimension” (in Herbert Marcuse’s words) of post-colonial literature. Most materialist currents of thought in the past two centuries grant the aesthetic a central position, prompting a long overdue inquiry into its significance for the interpretation of postcolonial cultural products and to the relationship of aesthetics to political and moral issues.¹

Neither the aggregate concept of “postcolonial literature” nor the concept of the “aesthetic dimension” of literature and other art forms, however, should be considered self-explanatory. A set of cultural products, which Timothy Brennan describes as “either made here, or for here, or reminiscent of what already exists here, or (more important) of immediate and practical use here,” have come to function as “synecdoches of the whole” and exemplary of the postcolonial (At Home in the World 27). The novels studied in this book might arguably be described as belonging to this category. Native Intelligence explores the place of aesthetics in postcolonial literary representation by engaging closely with works by Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy, such as Such a Long Journey (1991), Grimus (1975), Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), and The God of Small Things (1997), works that meet metropolitan standards, including awards, critical attention, and sales. These authors represent a select hegemonic strand within the field, with works ranging from 1975 to 1997, loosely typifying a genre Brennan describes as cosmopolitan writing with a largely metropolitan context of reception (38).

The choice of these texts should suggest neither that literature is the only form worth analyzing under the current stage of capital, nor that these texts are more worthy of a dialectical materialist aesthetic exploration than others, nor indeed that these anglophone novels should be considered representative of the formal, ideological, or linguistic plenitude of postcolonial cultural expression. More demotic forms such as world music and Afro or Indie pop may well provide even more fertile ground for exploring the “glocal” ramifications of the global culture industry not only as illustrations of cultural convergence but also as counternarratives to the cultural logic of late capitalism. Brennan’s At Home in the World (1997) and Neil Lazarus’s Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999) discuss these forms alongside more “traditional” literary and theoretical productions, with the goal of resuscitating critical interest in anticolonial nationalism and anticapitalist narratives of liberation. In the face of this exciting new work on a variety of postcolonial cultural practices, a conservative “return” to analyzing “elite” texts by suspiciously paradigmatic postcolonial authors therefore warrants some explanation.

Although the field has been morphing as a result of revisionary scholarship, it remains true that we are more likely to seek the general features of a composite profile for postcolonial literature in the globally framed fiction of a Rushdie than in the more class-based realism of a Munshi Premchand, or in more populists forms of expression. Notwithstanding the need to address the politics of exclusion and the provinciality of ersatz cosmopolitanism, however, a defeatist surrender of the putatively elite text to the politics of metropolitan reception must likewise be resisted. Brennan’s early work on Rushdie, at once intensely critical and laudatory, demonstrated the need for this sort of interpretive stance toward the successful postcolonial text. The importance of such a stance has hardly abated as newer texts join the sanctioned “counter-canon” and older ones become “standard.” To the extent that the sort of highly successful cosmopolitan text discussed in this book is often mediated by the very process of flattening that ushers it into the mainstream of acceptable radicalism, its expansively geocultural inflections are apt to be muted, its resistive potential muffled, and its aesthetic dimension lost to its parochially functional purpose. If this text has attained “the greatest leverage and visibility now,” as Brennan correctly notes, it is also a product likely to retain its privileged status within the educational apparatus (27).

It is no less important to refuse to cede this text either to reactionary, nonmaterialist, apolitical aesthetics, or to an ineffectually diluted metropolitan political correctness, or indeed to an unimaginatively constrained conception of political value. This struggle cannot be prematurely abandoned, even as the categories of the “postcolonial” as well as the “aesthetic” continue to be reimagined through alternative texts and perspectives. A further challenge posed by Brennan in At Home in the World is that the “novelty” of the tropes of “political fantasy” and “migrancy” first introduced by writers like Rushdie seems to have suffered accelerated decay in “inspired echoes” in “the newspaper review and the undergraduate lecture without adding anything fundamentally new to the original concepts,” rendering what was “monumental” once now “democratic” (47). The trope of novelty, however, needs no less to be investigated and reimagined than the context of the reception of the postcolonial text. Theodor Adorno suggests that

While it may be precisely the “attraction of the new” that becomes outmoded in works of art, those which lack such charms, which do not break through the routinized consciousness of their age through that charm—a consciousness to which the questionable confidence in the judgment of posterity also belongs—will scarcely live to grow old. (Notes to Literature, I, 140).

Criticism must continue to struggle to release substantive forms of novelty in the postcolonial text by reanimating the relation of form and content and that of aesthetics and politics in order to assess how this literature is news, as Ezra Pound claims, that stays news.

The concept of the “aesthetic dimension” also warrants annotation. Although Marcuse’s development in an eponymous late project (1978) of the idea earlier referred to in Eros and Civilization (1955) as well as in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) foregrounds “aesthetic form,” the notion of form is no less abstruse, encompassing not only style and technique but a mutually transformative relationship with content. Contrary both to aestheticism, which assumes the self-sufficiency and insularity of art, and to the orthodoxy of traditional Marxist aesthetics, which interprets “the quality and truth of a work of art in terms of the totality of the prevailing relations of production,” Marcuse’s concept places art in a dialectical relation with historical conditions, allowing us to pose the following questions (Aesthetic Dimension ix): How do aesthetic considerations contest and moderate the social function of postcolonial texts? In light of the emphasis placed on sociohistorical developments by theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, what are the particular challenges posed by supposedly “high” cultural products as aesthetics begins to reappear in theoretical discussions at an unprecedented juncture in the development of global capital? What form of “value” or “truth-content” (Wahrheitsgehalt for Adorno) might we seek in the text so flamboyantly given over to commodification? Finally, is it possible to bring aesthetics and politics onto the same page without capitulating either to a facile rapprochement or a relentlessly divisive schism between the two? In other words, what are the implications of conceiving the aesthetic as political and moral without surrendering it to a transparent and reductive purpose?

In response to these questions, this book assumes two charges. First, it identifies the burden of representation borne by a certain sort of post-colonial literature through its casting as native informancy and its reception as ethnographic and ideologically saturated text. Submerging its resistive potential, the global culture industry and its articulation with the educational apparatus threaten to transform this potential into what Drew Milne calls “a currency of information to be rendered into capital” (6). In functional “multiculti” pedagogic contexts that strive for “graspable” difference, as Brennan puts it, a preponderance of interest in issues Aijaz Ahmad described as “authorized” postcolonial questions in In Theory often accompanies a disinterest in aesthetic mimesis as irreducible to information. At the same time, in critiques sensitive to the “worldliness” of the overcirculated postcolonial text, a defensible interest in literary success as an index of social privilege nevertheless further vitiates the import of literature as a mode of aesthetic praxis. The book’s success is assumed a priori to hobble its capacity for meaningfully challenging the status quo that evidently favors it. A crucial corollary to the conception of the text in the world, however, is that of the world in the text, this relationship conjugated in a mode Theodor Adorno describes in his late work, Aesthetic Theory, as “a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics” (3).²

At a historical juncture when the Frankfurt School’s pronouncements about the end of autonomous art seem truer than ever before, the question of the value of aesthetic expression is particularly fraught.³ To rephrase slightly Jameson’s proposition in Late Marxism, the problem to which this book struggles to respond is that of how the suspiciously successful, commercialized, and often ideologically conservative work can nevertheless have value and truth-content, a problem that “is still very much with us” (231). How does one broach the potential truth-content of the work that has not only not “renounced consumption,”— Adorno’s shibboleth for artistic autonomy—but has been aggressively marketed for it? (“On the Fetish Character” 31). Because of its commitment to a simultaneous consideration of the historic and aesthetic dimensions of art, Frankfurt School Critical Theory provides the framework for this project, allowing me to address the twin desiderata of aesthetic and political accounting so integral to postcolonial criticism. Although the conceptual formulations of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse supply the scaffolding for the readings in Native Intelligence, this study nevertheless departs from the usual characterization of the end of art in Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Instead, it argues that attention to the aesthetic innovations, plural origins, and “formal” commitments of postcolonial works uncovers their complex and uneven relationship to ideology, revivifying their potential to make novel contributions to the larger project of social liberation, a potential that issues from the very historical conditions that inevitably also limit and define it. Central to this argument are a rereading of the relationship of theory and praxis in Critical Theory and a recasting of the utopian project in terms of a prior question: What constitutes meaningful political activity, and how do certain works of literature oblige us to ponder the relationship between theory and practice? In assuming the centrality of these issues, I take my cue from Adorno himself in his final, unfinished project, Aesthetic Theory, which, as Michael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker have so insightfully argued, suggests that the artwork’s capacity to maintain the “tension between subject and object” may be the very key to emancipatory theory and practice (Sullivan and Lysaker 108).

Such a stance obviously does not imply literature’s insularity at all; rather, it conceives of art’s aesthetic norms as historically determined, of its status as commodity as a crucial component of its composition, of its truth content as a “formal” virtue rooted in its poetic engagement with material realities, and of its contributions in textual aspects not readily assimilated to established trends of thought. Its inherent difference from propositional representation and sensuous apprehension of the world from which it is developed are foundational to its attempts, even if failed, to take flight from what Jameson so poetically describes as “the mud of the present age in which the winged Utopian shoes stick, imagining that to be the force of gravity itself” (The Seeds of Time 75). Literature’s truth-content is unlikely to be released without a commitment to an interpretative stance that approaches it as an artifact at once sociopolitical and aesthetic, in fact as always simultaneously so, with each element inextricably bound up with the other. The second and considerably more challenging charge of this book, therefore, is a reanimation of the aesthetic dimension as a crucial category in the assessment of the social content of postcolonial literature. This book’s extended argument is that a nonidentitarian understanding of the value of aesthetic expression can yield a richer prize: a more nuanced appreciation of the significance of figuration in representation and of the aesthetic as a code in the scheme of utopian thinking.

The historically unique status of postcolonial literature and its multiple generative sources, this work contends, furnish the materials for exploring its value in the age of advanced capitalism and its constitutive limits. Arguing for attention to the content and formal qualities, this study demonstrates its concurrent placement within global capitalism and in the context of its vernacular and temporally disjunctive phase, extending the conception of the “modern” beyond periodicity and the validity of critical aesthetics beyond the narrowly conceived “standard” of European modern art, which one finds, for instance, in the work of Adorno. Finally, it argues that the undervaluation of aesthetics is a measure of criticism’s inadequate resistance to the status quo logic of exchange society, rather than a symptom of postcolonial literature’s inability to offer “satisfaction” or relevance for the political project. Although the terms for an aesthetic analysis generated in chapter 3 may well be applicable to a range of texts—postcolonial or otherwise—this project suggests not so much a generalizable case for all postcolonial literature as an invitation to accept the labor of interpretation in the face of two equally sterile options: the assumption either of irrelevance because of the text’s success—and therefore complicity with the market—or of its inherent radicalism by virtue of category alone.

Against the dominant notion of “native intelligence” as minority and Third World informancy stands the conception of native intelligence as the aesthetic cognition of literature in its conflicted relation to the logic of what Marcuse conceives of as the world of work and power. This hermeneutic stance permits a conception of literature as simultaneously embedded in a real, reified world of commodities and in potential tension with it by virtue of its native regime of aesthetic and formal organization. If in the current context it thus bears what Adorno calls “the scars of capitalism,” it may also contain “elements of change” that a redemptive reading must struggle to uncover when possible (quoted in Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics 149). These elements are evident neither in auctorial intention nor in the work’s transparent compliance with a recognizable program of deliverance. “The work of art becomes knowledge,” Adorno claims, “only as a totality, only in and through all its mediations, not in its individual intentions” (Notes to Literature, I, 232; emphasis mine). The struggle to release the potential truth-content of postcolonial literature places artistic production in a dialectic with history while exploring potential “elements of change.” Thoughtful criticism must struggle to liberate the energy of this dynamic by attending more carefully to the processes of aesthetic mediation alongside literature’s other mediations.

This book instantiates a variety of possible readings that arise from this hermeneutic matrix, all targeted toward a recognition of the complex intelligence of these literary works, revealed in one or more of the following modes of the text’s singular and miniaturized interface with the general: its textual “formality” in articulating language and structure with content; its aesthetic sensibility in treating love and death, joy and terror as experiences both social and sensuous; its “reduction,” as we would understand the term in a culinary sense, of the material of life experience into a seemingly systematic whole; and finally, its stance toward the nettlesome question of utopia as a matter both political and theoretical. Native Intelligence thus tackles mutual links between poesis and polis—the status of elite postcolonial literature as sociopolitical document, its conflicted placement within the logic of commodity capitalism, and its transforming mimesis of the sociopolitical and natural world that nevertheless limits and shapes its laws of movement.

If class determinations and ideological predispositions depress the desire to envision a socialist utopia, the project of human liberation is nevertheless a considerable preoccupation in the work of these writers. It may be argued that a utopia conceived either through an indictment of existing reality or as an amorphous no-place defined by impossibility leaves no room for a program for struggle, relegating the growing problems of the exploited and their recalcitrance to global capital to the unacknowledged trivia of postcolonial experience. Moreover, if the resistance of the postcolonial is confined to the acceptable textual resistance afforded by elite cosmopolitan works, even the limited goal of influencing First World structures of perception is poorly met. These problems cannot be wished away. The idea of an unimaginable utopia, or what Adorno and Marcuse would refer to, after Stendhal, as the “promesse du bonheur,” that cannot be easily derived or projected from the conditions of the present is tangled up with a necessary recognition of the increasingly totalizing grip of global capital. At the same time, however, “the thinking of totality itself—the urgent feeling of the presence all around us of some overarching system that we can at least name,” as Jameson observes in The Seeds of Time, “has the palpable benefit of forcing us to conceive of at least the possibility of other alternative systems, something we can now identify as our old friend Utopian thinking” (70). The “novelty” of the texts discussed in this book is here recoded as the “longing for the new,” a potent challenge to the existing order, even in texts we are wont to cast as conservative or complicit with capital in its cosmopolitan and global phase (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 32). The truth-content of art, therefore, may well lie (the double entendre be noted) in its gesture toward some other true and unknown society rather than in a pseudo-reflection of its shape from a given reality in the present or in the past. It could rest, moreover, in its questioning of the assumption that the rightful content of political action is already known and understood. The critical question raised by these observations may be posed thus: What “third” world nonaligned with conventional rationality and identity thinking is thus suggested by these texts? And what are its challenges to and limits for the political project as currently conceived? The extraordinarily generative power of a materialistic dialectical aesthetics cues us to the inherent ambivalence of high cultural expression, without, as I hope to demonstrate, preventing us from recuperating what may be of value in it: its plea for a nonidentitarian sensibility and its reiteration of the aesthetic as a powerful mode for engaging with otherness. If anything, the undervaluation of its usefully dialectical relationship to governing sociohistorical contradictions betrays inadequate suspicion of the status quo logic of exchange society as well as a disregard for art and literature as profoundly rather than superficially social, while also sinking difference completely into totality. It is precisely in retaining the unknowability of utopia—of the “end” of political struggle—that art and literature call into question specious certainties about the “means” through which that end is to be achieved. In doing so, they keep alive the contradictions that characterize orthodoxies of deliverance, without surrendering the desire for deliverance.

It would be audacious to suggest a blueprint for a new postcolonial aesthetics from the admittedly selective texts analyzed in this study, however, given the very heterogeneity and ambiguity that render the term “postcolonial” debatable and the ideological and linguistic variety of postcolonial cultural expression that challenges the development of pat formulae or one global aesthetic. Within the particular historical conditions in which a certain sort of text gains its value as a representative object of investigation in a largely metropolitan context, however, this approach has some critical force. It is aesthetic mediation that issues a potent challenge to epistemological quests that are either totally subject-centered in the desire for sameness or entirely object-centered in pursuit of difference. By “particular historical conditions” in my remarks above I mean not only the historical context of colonialism that yields variable forms and cultural texts but also the disciplinary circumstances of postcolonial studies as a First World phenomenon with a hitherto fairly cramped sense of what constitutes the postcolonial.

The politics of colonial and neocolonial enunciation has been the subject of many a postcolonial critique, especially following Edward Said’s influential Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Postcolonial studies has been characterized ab incunabilis by these political considerations.⁴ As the ostensible response to imperial ideology, postcolonial literature enters an academic arena already shaped by the complicated politics of representation. In his chapter on Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Aijaz Ahmad observes with trademark trenchancy that “the range of questions that may be asked of the texts which are currently in the process of being canonized . . . must predominantly refer . . . to representations of colonialism, nationhood, postcoloniality, the typology of rulers, their powers, corruptions” (In Theory 124). Because it is expected to be thus employed, postcolonial literature that cannot address one or more of the expected themes, overtly or otherwise, is rarely mobilized for broad conversations in First World discourse. What is widely understood as a literature intelligible to a transnational audience (disciplinary politesse translates the non–Third World thus) is thus likely to be far more successful in the “global” market that readers will recognize as another mystification for the appetite of the metropole for “intelligible” information from the ostensible periphery. Although not every critical reception will betray the recourse to stock formulae and expectations, a web of professional practices that include publishing, book reviews, syllabus exchange, conferences, and electronic exchanges creates a pattern of privileging texts more readily responsive to “authorized” questions and pedagogic imperatives.⁵ By “texts” I refer not so much to specific books and authors as empirical objects but to the creation of epistemological objects in “authorized” versions of these books and authors through selective practices of reading and criticism. Not surprisingly, the postcolonial text that is amenable to a discussion of topics authorized by self-reinforcing practices is thus also susceptible to being regarded as an efficient substitute for otherwise time-consuming investigations into history, politics, economics et al.—a curricular prospect that would be good material for an administrator’s nightmare.

The accession of literary postcoloniality to prominence comes a scant two decades after the term “postcolonial” was used and debated in political theory without gaining broader currency. Postcolonial literature and theory, having achieved disciplinary status, now take precedence over what once was a primarily political project. Rather than displace the latter, however, literary postcoloniality increasingly subsumes it. The charge of historical, economic, political representation has come to rest increasingly on that portion of postcolonial experience that is available through canonical literary postcoloniality. Although all literature may be said to bear the watermark of history, the intermeshing of sociopolitics with artistic and intellectual expression is seen as a distinctive and defining attribute of what we recognize as “postcolonial.” Indeed, it is an invariable expectation, as Robert Young’s comments confirm:

Whatever one might say about the troubled term “postcolonial”. . . one characteristic aspect of postcolonial writing, be it creative or critical, involves its historical and political agenda, which in broad terms gives it common objectives. (“Ideologies of the Postcolonial” 5)

The particular burden of this “characteristic aspect” for postcolonial literature is that, apart from interlocking generally with questions of history, it is expected to engage with the material concerns. Unfortunately, alertness to sociopolitical relevance is often transformed into a perception of the postcolonial literary book as a primarily documentary social text, with scant regard for its aesthetic dimension. Conversely, the operation of what Brennan describes as a “geopolitical aesthetic” (pace Jameson) is also apt to stifle the text’s localist orientation and its potential value for the political project. Despite the more thoughtful interventions of postcolonial theory, the poesis/polis nexus often reveals itself in common practice as dominated by an obsession with a somewhat vulgar mode of representation. In this scheme, the semiotic and aesthetic sign field is expected to overlap—unproblematically—with the important business of political signification; the text thus stands for something other than itself, either through portraiture or faithful mimesis (Darstellung) or through a perception of its standing-in—however dubiously— for a constituency requiring representation (Vertretung). The notion of literary value is therefore increasingly determined by the ratios of this exchange and by the textual capacity for sustaining this overlap, enabling a false practical commensurability and generating anxiety about representation. This often leads, in turn, to critiques that are either “‘one-factor’ analyses (i.e., crude Marxisms, feminisms, radicalisms, etc.) that yield a one dimensionalism or a hyper-subtle analytical perspective that loses touch with the specificity of an art work’s form and the context of its reception,” as Cornel West suggests in “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” (106). As it turns out, the aesthetic and semiotic field can and does overlap with political signification, but this process need not be characterized either by transparence or by equivalence.

While expectations of representation unproblematized by mediation threaten to prematurely curtail the plural significance of the literary text, its relationship to ideology also threatens to assume an unproductively transparent character. “A whole range of other questionings,” Ahmad reminds us, have had to concede to the “authorized questions.” In occupying himself with some of these “other questions,” Ahmad proceeds to train his considerable critical sights on “the political affiliations of the author [Rushdie],” in an interpretation that is admittedly “a symptomatic reading of an ideological location” rather than “a sufficient reading of either the author or the book” (In Theory 125). Ahmad is unusual in declaring his position so clearly; most interpretations of post-colonial literature proceed with little regard for “the whole range of other kinds of questionings” beyond customary ones. His own critique, however, reveals the extent to which even resistant readings respond only partially to the full burden of a dialectical aesthetics.

When Ahmad “changes . . . the questions,” the politics of metropolitan constructions of the postcolonial subject is countered through an admittedly engaging critique of an inadequate politics of struggle. Ahmad concludes his essay on Rushdie’s Shame by pointing out that Rushdie’s “stance of unbelonging” and “accompanying inability to believe in any community of actual praxis” is what is obscured “in those readings of his work which locate it primarily in the problematic of ‘Nation’ and the ‘Third World’” (In Theory 154, 158). Ahmad’s impatience with the characteristic despair of bourgeois culture melds into his critique of “an art of despair” and Rushdie’s failure to “include regenerative possibilities” (151). The location of these possibilities in the “impractical” structures of feeling and sensuous experience are disregarded both because of inattention to the text’s aesthetic and formal features and because of foundational assumptions about the program for a meaningful struggle. The ideological construction of the author and the text receive necessary and full attention in this reading, but a treatment of the possible cognitive content and aesthetic value of the text are postponed for a more propitious season. The interception of the aesthetic object by its representational power effectively forestalls inquiry into literature as an artistic object that may exceed the author’s intention and sometimes his/her ideological predisposition, on the one hand. On the other, a sharpened awareness of the operation of ideology productively alerts us to literary collusion, but it can also blind us to its propensity for colliding with it. The phenomenon of uninflected and preemptive politicization may well be true for literature in general in current practices, but it is almost invariably true for postcolonial literature. The disappearance of a shared sense of literary value, as Frank Lentricchia memorably bemoaned in his Lingua Franca disclosure, has invariably bolstered this tendency in practical postcolonial criticism.⁶ The care of the aesthetic in readings of postcolonial literature has for too long been the love that dare not speak its name.

As postcolonial literature is pressed into disclosing the literal in its figurative modes, the default interpretive stance toward it is apt to be organized by modified versions of the axiom, “The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce” (Jameson, “Third World Literature” 65). The selective representation of Jameson in this decontextualized quotation does not do justice to the complexity of this important critic’s attempts to define a new cognitive aesthetics for Third World literature in the essay famously refuted by Ahmad or to his impressive contributions to Marxist aesthetics, even if it captures something of the tenor of the academic world’s generally limited attempt to seek satisfaction in the aesthetic dimension of postcolonial literature. Indeed, one might turn to Jameson himself as a potential ally in the revitalization of such a project, given his enduring interest in questions of ideology alongside the predicament of utopian thought and political imagination; his attempts, particularly in his later work, to think totality athwart difference; his regard for aesthetic figuration as related to praxis; and his sustained admiration of the dialectical quality of Adorno’s theoretical writings.

Those aesthetic theories that place the particular in a productive, sometimes negative, dialectic with the universal and that accord the aesthetic a privileged space for this negotiation are especially important at a time when postcolonial literature is increasingly read either without the sociolinguistic and area-based knowledge that illuminates its peculiarity and its more locally inspired struggles, or when historically grounded readings are parsed in so localized a way as to leave it no larger ground on which it may be relevant more expansively—to reveal, for instance, answers to what it means to be human at century’s end and at the cusp of a new millennium. The perceived reasons for the radical successes of postcolonialism are no less responsible for the relative indifference to post-colonial literature’s aesthetic dimension. “Postcolonial writing,” Robert Young suggests, “has achieved a revolution in aesthetics and the aesthetic criteria of the literary,” ensuring that “writing is now valued as much for its depiction of representative minority experience as for its aesthetic qualities” (“Ideologies of the Postcolonial” 7). The revision of the very notion of what constitutes literature is a part of this revolution: “In institutional terms,” Young continues, “postcolonialism has radically changed the criteria of what makes authentic art by challenging the cultural capital from which notions of the literary were derived” (7). Although this stance permits the recovery of hitherto alienated cultural products (often only in limited ways), an unfortunate corollary of this challenge can be the devaluation of the literariness of literature in the politically correct classroom. The quest for “representative minority experience” can sometimes proceed unfettered by consideration of the loss and surplus of meaning produced by aesthetic representation even when there is an accounting for the inherence of meaning in eidos (form).

A critical approach based on the approximation of the aesthetic to the thematic kernel and its political import—effected through a redefinition of the literary and undergirded by a reading of the epistemic as empirical—carries the threat of premature historical closures that defeat both the literary and the political project of postcolonialism. The task of criticism cannot be content with a reckoning of text and context alone; it must confront the challenge of its con-texts, that is, its subterfuge and evasion as well. Even colonial literature, we would do well to recall, was accorded the courtesy of contrapuntal readings by Edward Said. A similar insistence with regard to postcolonial literature is overdue not only as disciplinary courtesy but as a valuable key to its complex relationship to its conditions of possibility.

The World in the Text

For a long season, so great was the heft of conventional practice, so entrenched the fear of universalism, and so bitter the memory of battle with the tyranny of the canon waged precisely on the exclusive grounds of aesthetics that it would have seemed provocatively conservative to agitate for aesthetic considerations. Moreover, the rooting of most discussions on aesthetics in Western philosophy and values was, and is still, likely to give many a postcolonial critic pause. Fanon’s suspicions of “Western values” and “collections of dead words” that “have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged” continue to ring in our ears, warning us away from the abdication of concrete material goals (43–47). A recent resurgence of interest in aesthetics, however, has sought to resuscitate its value both for the literary and the political project.⁷ This project, moreover, has drawn its force from a thoughtful return to Marxist aesthetics rather than in a turn away from it. The proliferation of practices encompassed by Marxist aesthetics render the above observation somewhat ambiguous, but in the particular strain developed by Frankfurt School theorists, and in subsequent elaborations by critics such as Eagleton and Jameson, the value of aesthetic thought is its nondominative relation to the object, and art is the favored arena for exploring this contract. Notwithstanding categorization into better and worse sorts of Marxist practice, the various conceptualizations offered by these theorists nonetheless return us to the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in a dialectical mode. Among more contemporary critics identified with the left, aesthetics is not only being reconciled to liberatory politics but is seen as central to it.⁸

Although there is obvious value for the postcolonial project in this reconjugation of aesthetics, the particular history of postcolonial studies alerts us to a twofold danger in its uninflected application: first, that this perception of aesthetics deployed without an apprehension of the historical positional status of postcolonial literature can slide into shallow politicking by other means; second and subsequent, that this will effect an even more efficient displacement of other, more compelling, and necessary forms of political representation, and indeed even of other forms of cultural expression that do not adhere to the terms of an aesthetics developed largely in Western terms. A consideration of the contributions of artistic endeavors to social goals in elite texts must necessarily proceed with the cautions outlined above. Moreover, even if it cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the project of conceiving the shape of this world outside the logic of instrumental and exploitative rationalism, aesthetic redemption is no substitute for a world redeemed in actuality.⁹ Indeed, the distance between the two may serve as one of the more political of literary goals. If it does not follow that high literature is politically of no consequence, then, neither can we assume that it is the only expression of any consequence.

We do no service, therefore, either to our political goals or to literature if we do not attend to the specific modality of literary representation in these texts, a modality that illuminates the manner in which the artwork is limited by sociopolitical realities but can potentially contribute something of nuance to its determinative and confining script. Ideological determination and historical conditions, crosshatched with auctorial intent and the internal logic of the text, produce both its limits and its value. Philosophically, something of the gap between articulation and subjective intention is captured in the Hegelian formation, “We mean more than we meant to mean” (39). In literary representation, moreover, both language and form mediate representation, creating a design that is poorly weighed by the standards of instrumental reason that prevail in the world of commodities.¹⁰ The brand of criticism Eagleton dubs “good old-fashioned content analysis” need not be abandoned so much as that it needs to be processed through aesthetic literary filters to reveal the disjunctures and contributions, indeed the peculiarity, of literary representation (“In the Gaudy Supermarket”). The notion of the aesthetic as a philosophical value must therefore join with that of the operation of aesthetics in a literary modality. The very peculiarity (Kulonosség for Georg Lukács or Besonderheit in the work of the German thinkers) of the aesthetic project defines its resistance and its limit. The notion of the aesthetic as a value both philosophical and literary also evades the pitfalls of yet another sort of reductionism of the study of poetics to the closures effected by a strictly, and atomistically defined, ethicopolitical project of representation. In these texts, it is precisely the distance and tension between the aesthetic and the political that reveals the contributions of the former in the face of the dominative logic of the latter, even as it underscores the importance of understanding their separation and isolation from each other. A dialectical rationale mobilizes the artwork’s truth-content (Wahrheitsgehalt) against its more transparent social content (gesellschaftlicher Gehalt).

Aesthetic activity remains necessary for the full emancipation of the human senses, as Marx had suggested, without always yielding a transparently political program.¹¹ In order to unlock the potential and eccentric contribution of the elite postcolonial text to the emancipatory project, therefore, the critical apparatus brought to bear upon it must consider not only its ideological coordinates, and the prevailing means of production, but its aesthetic and literary mode of production as well. No less important is a serious reconsideration of the question of its political “impact,” which may be indirect if it can be measured at all, against that of its aesthetic “import,” which an attentive reading must struggle to recuperate. If the overvaluation of all that is contained within the category of the aesthetic has traditionally been perceived as a political problem from the viewpoint of radical criticism, its undervaluation in “practical” postcolonial criticism, as this book shows, is scarcely without ideological investment. The construction of the “postcolonial” through a rigorously selective and epistemologically violent disciplinization and the normalization of certain forms of critical practice are thus related problems. If criticism is prone to attach too much meaning to artistic and intellectual expression as political work, as the many critics of post-colonialism rightly charge, it is also true that a criticism uninterested in exploring its aesthetic dimension will fail to glean its possible contribution to the emancipatory project.

Native Intelligence

The quality Theodor Adorno characterized as the cognitive and rational content of art remains undervalued in the evaluation of postcolonial literature.¹² It is in this sense that the term “native intelligence”—derived as the implied other from Seamus Heaney’s use of the term “challenger’s intelligence” in the poem “Hercules and Antaeus”—is pertinent to the commencement of an investigation into the aesthetic organization of mimesis and representation in postcolonial literature. In the prevalent schematic, however, the term would have a very different valence.¹³ The two terms exist as copula rather than compound in this construction, emphasizing the existence of the subject of postcoloniality in relational terms with its First World sponsor. On this view, it is not inherent perception or insightfulness that prevails as the primary connotation but rather the notion of a field constructed on the expectation of intelligence from the native in a form that is intelligible, in other words, as native informancy. The construal of postcolonial as “native” occurs in the following ways: etymologically the term “native” stems from the Latin verb nasci, to be born. A native is thus etymologically (in the “true sense” if we were to consult the meaning of “etymology” itself) attached to the land and place of birth.¹⁴ The connection to a particular locus creates a pendent association with authenticity; the importance of location in postcolonial studies is thus almost predictable. The de facto prominence of the Third World as a geographically authentic place of origin likewise, the term “native” being more readily associated with the darker races peopling the Third World. Of course, the Third World is also a conceptual and ideological space identified with marginality and/or subversion, as long as there is some socially recognizable coordinate—such as origin or race—with which this space can overlap. Although the prominence of concepts such as “diaspora” and “transnationalism” confirm Young’s observations about postcolonialism’s reversal of the premises of earlier foundationalism grounded in “race and attachment to land,” the “postcolonial” nevertheless functions within a conceptual scheme for Third Worldliness.¹⁵

If the postcolonial writer’s distance from a truly Third World ideological space defined by abjection, almost total disenfranchisement, and voicelessness is a persistent irritant, it has scarcely constituted grounds sufficient to discard “transnationally” available representations as long as their works are susceptible to some analysis of the themes associated with Third Worldliness. Within the cultural logic of late capitalism, the very compression and confusion of space produces an ever greater reactive valuation of place-based identity. The attribute of aggregate Third Worldliness is one of many that is associated with postcolonialism and has successfully prevented any meaningful attention to the internal striation of the Third World on the one hand and the complexity and contradictions of such items as “First World,” “white,” and “Europe” on the other, despite the vaunted space-time compression that allegedly characterizes the postmodern condition.

The emphasis on true location and appropriate origins thus engenders a notion of the native as a subject possessing authentic knowledge uncomplicated by the mystification of language, or that of subject construction, or that of aesthetic composition.¹⁶ In this sense, native elite in transnationalism may be elite but can nevertheless be coded as native with regard to the question of representation. Yet, since the native also carries a trace of the now-obsolete sense of being “a born thrall,” he or she is also seen as being transparently scripted by defeat and capitulation to a new order determined by the challenger’s intelligence. The bogey of authenticity thus stalks the postcolonial text alongside the troublesome goblin of willful underperception on the grounds that everything enunciated and circulated either reproduces a metropolitan and First World mindset or is ideally intelligible through it. The projection of a metropolitan reader as the target, if phantom, audience has additional repercussions for the way in which the text is interpreted. Prevailing therefore—in tandem with the twin expectations of authenticity and intelligibility—is the apprehension of intelligence as information and of the postcolonial critic and writer as native informant to a demanding and needy metropolitan audience.¹⁷

There are, of course, as I have suggested above, other ways of decoding “native intelligence.” Perceived as inherently radical and transformative, postcolonialism also functions as a useful corrective, or at least as a challenge to the prevailing hegemonic ideology. Its capacity for resistant critique and its success and sophistication are so highly esteemed that postcolonial terminology now infuses virtually any theoretically resistant move in the academy, whether it be in native American or composition studies. Cookie-cutter postcolonial formulae are now applied to any generic situation in which power and its lack are the operative issues. Something of the idea of “native intelligence” as innate wit and perception survives in this understanding of the import of post-colonialism. Within contexts that lie beyond metropolitan understanding, however, it has little purchase. Harish Trivedi notes in “India and Post-Colonial Discourse” that “post-colonial discourse as at present globally constituted hardly begins to address either the post-colonial situation in India or its post-colonial literature except in some incidental and tangential ways” (243). In a depressing continuation of old attitudes, the languages of the native continue to be unintelligible to the field’s primary audience; hence the almost total absence of vernacular language literatures in the field of postcolonial studies and the discomfort evinced at the use of native words without an accompanying glossary.

“Native intelligence” as a mode of perception relevant within its own context is usually beyond the scope and interest of metropolitan discourse. The postcolonial as an alternative and valuable mode of perception that functions meaningfully within its own context has yet to be accorded due recognition. Given the march of the new world order and its associated regime of intellectual property rights, a serious consideration of a viable native intelligence is desirable not only as a conceptual prospect but as one that is crucial to the survival of threatened knowledge systems in the postcolony. Ways of knowing that have allowed sustainability and survival among postcolonial communities are similarly unlikely to command serious attention because they would require dedicated engagement with a context unavailable to most metropolitan audiences. “Native intelligence” as that which is inborn, in the sense of stirring within an indigenous context marked by its own particular anxieties and desires, also remains undertheorized, its complexities offering little allure to disciplinarily practical postcoloniality. Hence, too, the termination of the search for meaning at the limits of metropolitan understanding. The notion of the postcolonial text possessing its own structure of meaning in a fluid rather than transparent relation to its semantic content is thus also undervalued because of the current emphasis on representation and narrowly conceived political positioning. Similarly, the process of distillation by which literature creates “modèles réduits” (Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term) of the phenomenal world (thus rendering it inviting to perception) is apt to be misread as an attempt at yielding the representative rather than the representational.¹⁸

Yet neither of these sets of apprehensions of “native intelligence” is truer than the other. Although it is tempting to posit “native intelligence” as the obverse of “native informancy” for purposes of operational clarity, the two are intertwined etymologically, conceptually, and pragmatically, preventing us from capitulating to romanticized notions of literary intelligence as unsullied by worldly considerations, but also enjoining upon us the need to recognize its intricate and disjunctive relationship to them. Each operates dialectically in a manner both self-affirming and self-negating, as creative as it is collusive, as inscrutable as it is reductive. Given these variant connotations, the phrase “native intelligence,” as it occurs throughout this book, serves a heuristic rather than stable descriptive function, capturing some of the elements of the conceptual grid used to map postcoloniality in metropolitan discourse, suggesting others that have unfortunately escaped it and gesturing at those that resist identification. Operating in multiple modes and registers, native intelligence slides between solipsism, informancy, and apprehension. In the literary artwork, these competing codes create both communication and dissonance, requiring improvised engagement and an ear for contradictions.

From the standpoint of this model, criticism conceptually “involves an ‘aesthetic’ responsiveness to the particularity of its object alien to . . . dominative rationality” (Eagleton, Walter Benjamin 117). In its disruption of conventional patterns of communication, the literary text makes of comprehension a moving target, inviting us to transform seizure into caesura and recognize the text’s evasion of a conclusive grasp. A mode of reading that accepts the necessary pause and allows the reader to inhabit the experience of being confounded presents us with a way of understanding the challenge of communication across differences and the ethical positions necessary to it. The pressures exerted on the text by the codifying impulses of the practical discipline threaten to flatten its dimensions. In practicing a different sort of discipline—in its noninstitutional and more investigative sense—the reader is pressed to restrain the impatient impulse to capture and control the wayward text, becoming more attentive to the challenges of its aesthetic dimension and its nonpropositional cognitive content. This sort of discipline and attention toward the literary text is not easily achieved under any circumstances; in light of the evolution of postcolonial studies as a “practical” discipline under the aegis of a social economy defined by late capitalism and of the place of postcolonial literature within it, the conditions for honoring the Sisyphean labor of interpretation threaten to disappear almost completely. It is not only creative production, then, that is defined and delimited by the conditions of production, but also the socialized activity of interpretation.

The Text and the World

The first two chapters of my study examine the circumstances of the rise of postcolonial studies as a disciplinary entity in order to locate the texts within specific conditions of emergence and underline the preferred coding of “native intelligence” as informancy. The formation of the discipline of postcolonial studies and the emergence of “key concepts” and key exclusions are detailed in the first chapter of Native Intelligence.

Yet another account of the rise of the field hardly seems warranted given the existing profusion of information on the subject, were it not for the suppression of a comparative literary history in most chronicles and the relative oblivion to which the practical discipline’s exclusions are already subject. Chapter 1 undertakes two levels of discussion. The first establishes the shape of what Epifanio San Juan calls “establishment postcolonialism” through an investigation of the self-reinforcing mechanisms of institutional practice while the second suggests the importance of comparative analysis with the histories of other literary areas in the academy. The self-fortifying mechanisms of institutional practice, as Michel Foucault has elaborated in The Archaeology of Knowledge, set in motion the process of manufacturing the field—a process of closing ranks, sealing off alternative trajectories, and suturing together incompatible, even contradictory, realities. The fabrication of an official “beginning” for the field and the subsequent succession of pedagogic readers, critical publications, and electronic exchanges have rapidly forged a predictable postcoloniality, burying the traces of older histories and alternative trajectories. Regardless of the sophistication of postcolonial theory, and its internal dissensions, a “practical” version of the field nevertheless begins to develop, producing a shape intimately tied to the socioeconomic conditions of its possibility, and succumbing to the same logic of the Enlightenment project of modernity that was to give most forms of knowledge their predictable and practical shape in the configurations of disciplinarity.

A practical rather than logical coherence reliant on deliberate misprision and selective perception has thus been produced in the course of the institutionalization of postcolonial studies, resulting in predictable bibliographic choices and a hermetic systematicity. In this blinkered view, history begins with European colonialism, and the globe is the unit of analysis, with the global its scale and the present and near-past its operative lens. At the same time that it is conceived on a staggeringly expansive scale, disciplinary postcoloniality thus grants little conceptual space to precolonial histories, internal colonialism, or local anticolonial struggles. It is not so much that these topics cannot be discussed under the umbrella of postcolonial studies than that they are not fundamentally constitutive parts of the theoretical conception of the field. The result of these strategic choices and self-reinforcing practices is a poco postcolonial, to borrow from the language of music, that is, a little, a somewhat, a sort of postcolonialism that has been manufactured in response to various needs in First World academic coordinates, making it a thoroughly “modern” discipline focused on the immediately experienced present and its readily glimpsed antecedents.

Thus constructed, a disciplined and predictable form of postcoloniality enters the academic and social arena, confounding any deep understanding of the economic and political realities of a postcolonial world whose sheer size, if not its internal diversities, complexities, and saving grays, ought to have rendered it immune from such violently formulaic reductions. Because of its sui generis aura and its construction by restrictively presentist, globalist, and political stipulations, moreover, potentially valuable comparisons with fields such as American literature, feminist studies, and African American literature are seldom pursued.

Disciplinary postcoloniality achieves the illusion of coherence by operating within a global and macroscopic scale that gives a general picture by blurring specific histories. The “difference” of postcoloniality usually emerges in a macroscopic scale of three worlds. To demonstrate this, I readjust the scopic mechanism in chapter 2 to focus on a specific case that is all but absent from the customary postcolonial catalog, that of the missing Irish. The analysis of the “conspicuous” exclusion of the Irish experience from “most theorizations of the postcolonial,” as Luke Gibbons has noted, exposes the foundational premises of postcolonialism (“Ireland” 27). Chapter 2 investigates the Irish challenge to placid assumptions about race, geographical economics, and complicity in imperialism—criteria which are typically used to omit the Irish from the postcolonial roster. If we were to isolate the operative principles behind the criteria used to exclude the Irish from dominant theorizations of postcoloniality, we would find that many of the complexities and discrepancies associated with the Irish experience are scarcely absent from ersatz paradigmatic postcolonial cases, even if they differ in degree and form. It is only largely speaking that the differences of race and geography upon which the exclusion of the Irish is primarily based obtains with any coherence. In a smaller comparative framework, difference reveals itself in a more intimate scale.

The goal of this discussion is not so much to settle the question of Irish eligibility for postcolonial status as it is, finally, to explore the implications of this scopic difference for literature that is uncontroversially defined as postcolonial. The kind of identity formation that attaches to postcolonial literature implies critical stances with expectations of certain kinds of representation. These expectations, coupled with the prevalent emphasis on literature as social, even anthropological text, comprise the historically contingent environment of the postcolonial literary text. A critical stance focused on aesthetics, however, exposes the limits of the artwork by challenging its authority as historical and social document while also uncovering more complex forms of value beyond its exchange-value as a commodity among commodities in a global marketplace.

Chapter 2 concludes with a sample reading of Seamus Heaney’s Hercules/Antaeus poems from North to introduce the quandary facing the postcolonial critic: how to respond to the writer who tackles the stuff of history and politics through the medium of aesthetics. I choose Heaney’s poetry to illustrate this dilemma even though both Irish literature and poetry are anomalous to the postcolonial canon. I take this doubly anomalous route to introduce a prototypical postcolonial dilemma, however, because the borders of hegemonic postcolonial identity are particularly relevant to the redirection of the agenda of postcolonial criticism. In the contentious arena of Irish identity, as chapter 2 demonstrates, the contradictions of disciplinary postcoloniality are more clearly revealed as its borders are exposed. Alongside the Irish challenge to hegemonic postcoloniality, I join the challenge of the poetic to the task of interpretation. For the purposes of introducing the central problem for post-colonial criticism, a reading of Heaney’s two short poems allows me to broach key issues with an economy unavailable to me in the reading of longer postcolonial works. More significantly, the use of poetry to introduce the critical problem in a study otherwise devoted to fictional and novelistic representations is intended to draw attention to considerations of genre. Poetry is more likely to invite acknowledgment of its formal and aesthetic modality, complexities less readily granted to prose genres. Not only is the challenge greater in the reading of prose works, but it must be the more forcefully and frontally confronted because of it.

Chapter 3 introduces Frankfurt School aesthetic theory as represented in the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. The aesthetic theories of the thinkers of this school—with which Benjamin is somewhat peripherally associated—are distinguished by an engagement with the interpenetration of the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural spheres. Although Max Horkheimer and Leo Lowenthal were also concerned with aesthetic theory and cultural critique, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse were the critics who wrote most extensively on aesthetics and artistic form. Their ideas, hardly reducible to a unity, often mutually contentious, and unevenly valued by the standard of Marxist aesthetics, provide something like a flexible grid for suggesting a critical aesthetics founded in a commitment to social justice, and the search for what can be alongside what is. Their reevaluation of capitalism as well as of orthodox Marxist aesthetics indicted both without abandoning the truths of Marxism. As Eagleton observes in his introduction to Marxist Literary Theory, the strengths of this version of Marxist criticism lie in “exploring what might be called the ideology of form, and so avoiding at once a mere formalism of the literary work and a vulgar sociologism of it” (11).

One cannot disregard the particular historical and modernist inflection of these theories (save, perhaps, for some of Marcuse’s more recent work) and the aporetic moments unavoidable given the largely Euro-centric formulation of their theories (again, perhaps, with the exception of Marcuse whose quarrel with Adorno over Third World movements is well documented in their correspondence) and their personal experiences with fascism. Yet the inexhaustibility of their ideas is evident in the growing interest in their relevance for contemporary contexts (yet again, perhaps, with the exception of Marcuse who enjoyed far greater popularity than either Adorno or Benjamin in the seventies and is now undeservedly neglected). Moreover, to borrow the method so dear to Benjamin, a montage-like view of disparate historical moments over the past century offers renewed reason for considering postcolonial production in light of Frankfurt School Marxist aesthetics. If postcolonial literature, particularly of the “transnational” and cosmopolitan variety, is not outside this historical moment, neither is it completely contemporaneous with it. The similarities of this with the modernist moment can be proposed without capitulating to linear narratives of history that make of time and progress an arbiter of human value, or neglecting what Johannes Fabian calls “the politics of time” (x). At the same time, post-colonial literature also “happens” within postmodern time, a perspective unavailable to these theorists, even if the relevance of their ideas, Adorno’s in particular, is being rediscovered within a postmodern framework. As this theory “travels” into postcolonial contexts, a species of translation is unavoidable, with inevitable lacks as well as useful modifications.

The final three chapters are devoted to the development of such a Sprachkritik. The featured writers, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy, stand within the mainstream of a soi-disant marginal and radical field. The choice of writers whose literary material is drawn largely from India and Indian culture is a deliberate one. No less deliberate is the selection of highly canonical postcolonial writers. If these choices seem to reinscribe the status of India as paradigmatically postcolonial (thus Third World, thus marking privilege as well as loss), they are nevertheless founded in a commitment to explore diversity through depth rather than the more customary breadth of coverage, and to zero in on what I have earlier referred to as difference in an intimate rather than only in a globally scopic scale. Each of the authors discussed is interested in exploring this diversity as an internally meaningful value that gives the lie to a metropolitan multiculturalism founded on racial difference and undifferentiated cultural identity. Moreover, hybridity and diaspora emerge in these texts as phenomena with a long and increasingly undervalued history, challenging the largely presentist understanding of their complexity. Sameness and difference are no less factors of scopic perspective than they are of sociopolitical construction. Intimate difference need not, however, be more or less significant than that operative in a larger scale. Rather, their coexistence must remain a persistent and unavoidable challenge both in the understanding of postcoloniality and in the quest for a political program.

A second reason for the selection of these texts is their flamboyantly hegemonic status in the counter-canon. Each of the texts under consideration has won at least one major literary prize. If omissions and exclusions tell one story, the successful postcolonial text is no less revelatory of the ideological underpinnings of the global cultural marketplace. Aijaz Ahmad’s comments on the process of canon formation insightfully convey its mechanics thus:

The axiomatic fact about any canon formation, even when it initially takes shape as a counter-canon, is that when . . . the desired literary typology is constructed, the canonizing agency selects certain kinds of authors, texts, styles, and criteria of classification and judgement, privileging them over others which may also belong in the same period, arising out of the same space of production, but which manifestly fall outside the principles of inclusion enunciated by that selfsame agency. (In Theory 123)

My purpose, in part, is to focus on canonical authors in order to isolate some of the “principles of inclusion” that uncover the shape of metropolitan postcoloniality. Textual compliance with ideological demands is an undoubted precondition of literary success. In an administered world, artists “are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market” (Marx, quoted in Berman 133). The market’s very need for novelty, however, enables the production of “newness” and innovation. Although formal innovations and the commonly found linguistic innovations of postcolonial literature need not necessarily be revolutionary in themselves, the very separation of the artwork from the author that the market also effects can provide for an interesting critical stance: one that permits the recovery of radical ideas and conceptual innovations that also derive from the needs and logic of the market. A critical method that can recuperate this novelty from the stranglehold of the logic of exchange society recognizes it as productively resistant, in however limited a fashion, thus preventing it from melting away ineffectually.

My more important purpose, therefore, is to explore the aesthetic codes for a political project within these canonical texts along with the limitations imbricated with their very canonicity, whether we are faced with the literary realism of Such a Long Journey, the postmodern “textual plenitude” of Rushdie’s works, or the predominantly modernist modes employed in The God of Small Things. Without surrendering the importance of postcolonial literature as a historical product, therefore, a critical method derived from philosophical aesthetics can uncover its engagement with unfulfilled needs and desires that are inexpressible through the mechanisms of discursive rationality. By selecting canonical works that also represent this range of formal choices, I hope to emphasize two points: first, that what Jameson, and later Brennan, refer to as the “geopolitical aesthetic” is here inflected variously in the different approaches to the problem of utopia; and second, that innovation and resistance to instrumental rationality need not be confined to the more predictably avant-garde among the genres employed—as Adorno insists. Literary realism need no more be epistemologically naive than postmodern literature necessarily transgressive. Whether the text employs a largely realist, modern, or postmodern repertoire of strategies—to the extent that these modalities can be strictly defined, used, or identified— each can be studied through the lens of dialectical aesthetics to reveal the complexities of content becoming form, part forming the whole, and the whole relating to the worlds of empirical reality as well as aesthetic and sensual experience.

Chapter 4, “The Economy of Postcolonial Literature” begins with an account of the critical reception of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey in the Northern press to index critical strategies geared toward consumption. Loosely classifiable as a realist novel, this is the sort of text most prone to seizure as transparent representation because it is apt to be viewed as volkstümlich (popular) in form and therefore congruent with principles of identity rather than opposition. This formal choice, combined with the consideration of the economy of the postcolonial in a market oriented toward the center poses a particular problem. The First World orientation of postcolonial studies is apparent in the kind of theoretical apparatuses used in the reading of postcolonial literature, the rigging of syllabi for the postcolonial classroom by market and self-reinforcing mechanisms, pedagogic approaches that privilege authorized themes, and a pervasively influential domestic politics that assumes the capacity of literature to represent, more or less transparently, those other to the metropolitan self. Even if we conceded that it was the novel’s primary aim to represent these other realities, how does Such a Long Journey demonstrate the architectonics of what Marcuse refers to as “content having become form”? (Aesthetic Dimension xii). In a shift from the primary context of audience reception (“consumption” for Adorno) of the text as consonant with Volkstümlichkeit, a study of the poetics of the novel (“production” for Adorno) reveals that language and figurative devices constitute potent challenges to expectations of transparent representation in the postcolonial text, even in the realist form. Meaning disperses itself throughout the form, reflected in language as well as architectonic structure, resisting relation to single determinants. To treat this literature as if it were a ripening pod, ready to dehisce and spill the beans barely contained along the seam between political and aesthetic representation is to strip it of its productive distinction from social processes and to reduce it to mere functionality. Adorno reminds us in quoting Schoenberg that the painter paints a picture rather than what it represents (Aesthetic Theory 4). What is represented in the literary text is meaningful within its immanent logic, even if it offers analogies to the complexities and challenges of the real world. Its resistance to seizure, captured in Such a Long Journey through the intervention of multiply derived “languages” and its dominant metaphor of the wall, functions as the cryptogram for a dialectical relation to the “other” and for interpretation as a Sisyphean labor that must surrender meaning even as it seems to attain it.

A reading attentive to the aesthetic and literary modes of signification thus aids in a modest revival of the language metaphor for cultural interaction; this conception of translation across difference commands recognition of incommensurability alongside the insistence on the need to meet its challenges, reconceptualizing engagement with the other in dialectical terms, and preserving the mysteries along with the possibilities of social intercourse. Finally, as a text that “realistically” represents the world in the text, the novel’s engagement with “utopia,” a concept that appears nowhere in the novel itself, inheres not in its thematic treatment of the topic but rather in the process of “stylizing” the world in miniature and thus challenging the conditions of reality. “The only requirement” for a “historical reality” to challenge the world, Marcuse maintains, is that “it must be stylized, subjected to aesthetic ‘formation’” (Aesthetic Dimension 44). It is “the estranging language” of the literary text that makes “perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet perceived, said, and heard in everyday life” (72). The text’s negative intercourse with the concept of “utopia” proceeds in part through its affirmation by indictment and in part through its extratextual allusions within the overall design of the novel, suggesting a structural principle rather than a descriptive or pictorial image.

Chapter 5 explores two central postcolonial terms in Rushdie’s work: subalternity and hybridity, which appear as concerns that are obviously thematic, certainly ideological, but also aesthetic in Midnight’s Children, Shame, and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Rushdie’s own treatment of the theme of subalternity—rather than of subalterns, as I demonstrate—is then discussed in terms of aesthetic representation that proceeds through the mode of de-scription rather than description. By consciously resituating Rushdie’s works within their native context, aesthetically and culturally, chapter 5 seeks to demonstrate the complexity of Rushdie’s treatment of commonplace postcolonial themes such as hybridity and migration in a local rather than transnational framework.

In many of his works, Rushdie is committed to an invocation of the memory beyond the moment of colonialism through a repeated return to the themes of migration and diaspora in precolonial experience. In a dramatic reversal in The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie’s (and by direct association postcolonialism’s) celebration of impurity and hybridity are soberly challenged by an apprehension of the dangers of a world so bereft of certainties and so immersed in the delusions of pluralism that it threatens to become a world devoid of all certainty and value. Hybridity is recoded in this novel as a fleur du mal as Rushdie pursues, like Baudelaire and Benjamin before him, the drama of the changing city in the grip of contemporary forces. The aestheticization of the city of Bombay as sensate body and its subsequent “death” powerfully enact the drama of the aesthetic in the face of empirical reality, of representation mediated and displaced by its own irreducible other. Against this nightmare vision of entropy, the text struggles to retain the prospect of a utopia that never was, in an ultimate gesture of compensation that only reiterates its loss.

In the final chapter, I propose for consideration the Benjaminian figure of the postcolonial storyteller as instantiated by “the Kathakali Man” in Arundhati Roy’s much publicized debut novel The God of Small Things. Kathakali, a dance form based on old epics of challenge and defeat, provides the central trope in this chapter for my analysis of storytelling in the age of globalization. The Kathakali Man, who “has magic in him” and whose entire being is “harnessed wholly to the task of storytelling” has become, the narrator argues, “unfeasible” (219). Yet the poetic principle underlying the novel’s structure is uncannily similar to that of the “Great Stories” that Kathakali tells, as Roy herself describes them in terms remarkably reminiscent of Benjamin’s. The cyclicality of the novel and its structuring by the principle of regressive memory emphasize the evernew as nevernew, of the story itself as a retelling rather than a telling. The paradoxical gesture of lamenting the end of the story and the mortgaging of the storyteller to the market while retelling anew a story supposedly as old as time obliges us to ask: How do we receive the cognitive content of the postcolonial novel at a time when novelty is at a premium, the quest for more, better information is the order of the day? The novel’s attempt to inform on the depredations of development and the impact of globalization makes it a classic postcolonial text of what Lazarus calls the “mourning after” decolonization on the one hand and a newsy testament to transnationalism on the other. If the politics of representation would demote story to information, isolate it into insignificant particularity, and consign it to the expendability that attends novelty, the formal structure of the novel consistently undermines the newness of the information presented. Structured by the logic of now and then, then and now, the novel is an aesthetic re-counting that transforms the new into an already known story saturated with history. In refusing to submit to the shock of the new in the mode of the story’s telling, the novel recasts the singular event into the timeless framework of ever-presence; in refusing to relinquish its singularity, it foregrounds individual “love, hope, and infinnate [sic] joy” as the basis for an aesthetic perception of the shape of human liberation. Beyond the quest for a timely political response from the postcolonial text lies another prize: something Benjamin calls “the germinative power” that need not expend itself with its allotted season, that contains a sensuous intelligence for all time that can “survive the moment in which it was new” (Illuminations 90). Thus wrenched out of a temporal context, utopia is displaced through the joining of locus and topoi, a commonplace longing for the new that is transported to the country of imagination.

Clearly, no Archimedean point is claimed for these texts on the basis of their being truly revolutionary or totally above ideology; the point is precisely that it is in their singular and constitutional limitations that we may also find the potential for sublimating the repressions of the order of instrumental rationalism. Despite his affirmative endorsement of art and its revolutionary potential, even Marcuse—the most optimistic of a generally pessimistic côterie—is obliged to admit that the “encounter with the truth of art” occurs in an estranging language and ultimately appeals only to a subject that is “socially anonymous” because “it does not coincide with the potential subject of revolutionary practice” (Aesthetic Dimension 32). In his most ringing endorsement of a role for art in the real world, then, Marcuse eschews the fantasy of equivalence. To celebrate the distance of art from life as its uniquely enabling constitutive attribute is thus also to mourn its distance from life as its ultimate limit.¹⁹ Literary singularity, however, remains a valuable symptom of the complexities that confound representation even as it is a reminder of the complex relation between the universal and the particular, and of that between fictional/figurative representation and the political project.