Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India: Aesthetic Form after the Twentieth-​century Novel

257 Pages·2021·17.831 MB·English

by  Tania Roy

Adorno and the Architects of Late Style

in India
In the postcolonial world, the claim to an emancipated national culture was
bound to its aesthetic correlate, the unfolding time and experiments of the
twentieth- century novel. Today, the constructs of both novel and a progres-
sivist national project function, in all their closures, within global scales of
economic disparity and violent exclusion.
What is the fate of a literary canon when it is no longer capable of delin-
eating a future – or otherwise, is bound to reproduce the failures of the past
within its own inscriptions? How do we experience our current “globalist”
moment, when lived inequities of gender, labour and ethnicity emerge in
a text’s inability to speak on time? When does artistic or literary failure
become the measure of a work’s accomplishment? And what sort of lib-
eration is envisioned by works that refuse the imperatives of “progress”
and “independence” – which embrace the appearance of obsolescence by
rejecting values of artistic freedom, originality and innovation? These are
some of the provocations that arise from T.W. Adorno’s idea of late style
for our own conjuncture – a properly postcolonial context, in which every
conceptual or expressive engagement is articulated through an awareness of
eroded national promise.
Examining works by Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Vikram Seth
and the photography of Dayanita Singh, Tania Roy examines the delayed
claims of literary and artistic modernity in India through Adorno’s category
of late style. In striking readings of Adorno and his interlocutors, the book
extends a poetics of lateness towards a speculative history of the twentieth-
century novel in India. Comprised of critically neglected selections from
the oeuvres of canonical writers, Adorno and the Architects of Late Style
in India proposes that under conditions of advanced capitalism, logics of
redundancy overtake the novel’s foundational reference point in the nation
to produce altered frames of thought and sensibility – and therein, a reader
who might encounter, anew, the figures of an unfulfilled twentieth century.
Tania Roy is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the National University
of Singapore (NUS) and coordinates the Graduate Programme in Literary
Studies. She has a doctorate in political theory from Duke University, where
her interdisciplinary engagement with literature was advanced through a
Gerst Fellowship in Economic, Political and Humanistic Thought. At NUS,
she teaches topics in critical theory, especially the aesthetics of the Frankfurt
School, trauma studies, and postcolonial and world literatures. Related
interests on contemporary art and biopolitics in South- East Asia, legacies
of the twentieth- century Anglophonic realist novel on the subcontinent
and art after the liberalisation of the Indian economy considered, espe-
cially, as a response to civic violence under the current dispensation of far-
right supremacism have appeared as book chapters and articles in journals
including boundary 2, Theory, Culture and Society, Political Culture, The
European Legacy and The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.
Adorno and the Architects of

Late Style in India
Aesthetic Form after the
Twentieth-c entury Novel
Tania Roy
First published 2021
by Routledge
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© 2021 Tania Roy
The right of Tania Roy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in
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British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 978- 1-4 724- 1876- 0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 1-3 15- 56566- 8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
To my mother, Suchandra Roy, and in memory of my father,

Protap Roy
– to each, for imagining a world.
Quo usque tandem…
Contents

Introduction Lineages of lateness: Adorno and
the postcolonial 1

PART I
Terminal beginnings: national modernism 27

1 National allegory in late style: culture, terror and
bodily disburdenment in Tagore’s Four Chapters 29

2 Nation, transmodernity and the unimaginable
community: the place of failure in Mulk Raj Anand’s
Across the Black Waters 77

PART II
Formations of the contemporary 119

3 “Tis love of earth that he instils”: English without soil
in Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music 121

4 The art of disappearance: reading Adorno in the house
of Dayanita Singh 167

PART III
Conclusion 209

5 Automatic intimacies 211
newgenprepdf
viii Contents
Coda 224

Bibliography 230

Acknowledgements 239

Index 241
Introduction

Lineages of lateness: Adorno and the
postcolonial
Late work still remains process, but not as development.
(T.W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven”, 567)1
The question of how “to engage a living thought that is no longer histor-
ically current”, as advanced by Fredric Jameson with regard to Theodor
W. Adorno, has especial urgency for assessing the value of modern litera-
ture, considered as a worldly formation of the last century, and in its par-
ticular import for postcolonial studies.2
After the successful consolidation of postcolonial literary studies and
criticism, and a few short years after the turn of the millennium, the field
has found itself at an impasse, so much so, that several of its most prom-
inent exponents have diagnosed the relationship of postcolonial criticism to
its object, the literary text, as one of melancholic ambivalence. Following
Edward Said’s foundational Orientalism:  Western Conceptions of the
Orient (1978), the study of English literature was fraught by what was,
at the time, largely unprecedented contests of “the canonical nature and
unquestioned status of the works of the English literary tradition and the
values they incorporated” – an interrogation that was undertaken within
the larger, collaborative effort to demonstrate the discipline’s institutional
relation to legacies of imperialism.3 The subsequent reception of so-c alled
new literatures from the former colonies critically informed the combative
struggle to transform both the discipline and also the value of literariness
in the humanities. These now familiar intellectual developments, together
with a select body of literary and theoretical texts, have been canonised
within literary studies under the rubric of postcolonial studies. Indeed, that
metropolitan and commonwealth or third-w orld literatures may no longer
be read in isolation from each other is a premise that has travelled widely,
well beyond the immediate parameters and objects of literary studies in the
last two decades. From the mid to late 1990s, traditional canons associated
with national as well as comparative literatures have been reoriented, via
the interventions of postcolonial scholarship, toward a “globalist” historical
context – the current conjuncture, in other words, marked on the one hand