Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation

217 Pages·1989·20.91 MB·English

by  Timothy Brennan (auth.)

SALMAN RUSHDIE AND THE THIRD WORLD
Salman Rushdie and
the Third World
Myths of the Nation
TIMOTHY BRENNAN
Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-0-333-52160-1 ISBN 978-1-349-20079-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20079-5
©Timothy Brennan 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-49020-4
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989
ISBN 978-0-312-03308-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brennan, Timothy, 1953-
Salman Rushdie and the Third World : myths of the nation I Timothy
Brennan.
P· em.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-03308-8
1. Rushdie, Salman--Critidsm and interpretation. 2. Developing
countries in literature. 3. Nationalism in Literature. I. Title.
PR9499.3.R8Z59 1989
823--dc20 89-32822
CIP
For Za
Contents
Preface viii
1 National Fictions, Fictional Nations 1
2 Anti-Colonial Liberalism 32
3 The Art of Translation 59
4 The National Longing for Form 79
5 The Artist as Demagogue 118
6 Pitting Levity against Gravity 143
Notes 167
Select Bibliography 183
Index 193
vii
Preface
Few of us who wrote about Rushdie's work in the mid-1980s
predicted that his name would one day be on the steely lips
of James Baker and Geoffrey Howe. Why would statesmen and
philistines like them care about an intellectual like him? It was
impossible also to foresee that Saudi Arabia would declare a jihad
against literary modernism or that the British government would
sever ties with Iran over a dispute about one of Rushdie's books.
True, his reputation had been extensive already in 1981, with his
books receiving prominent reviews in the best places. But there
seemed very little to make him the lead story of the Six O'Clock
News, as actually happened through the month of February 1989.
So it is odd to see one's subject suddenly thrown into prominence
after years of slogging through background sources, and then to
realise that while the interest is now greater than ever, it is an
interest already framed by the warping lens of the newsmakers.
Rushdie is obviously much more than The Satanic Verses, and I
want to leave my comments on that novel to the closing chapter,
which I originally wrote several months before the book-burnings
in Bradford, the violent and fatal demonstrations in Pakistan and
India, and the Imam's infamous bounty. Since Rushdie had for
more than a decade been writing about the way books make real
the chimeras of politics, he deserves to have written the very
novel that would be that argument's case in point. For now,
it is important to remember that he was already an author of
international dimensions before The Satanic Verses was ever written.
I began this book by looking at a group of literary celebrities from
the Third World who all seemed to share something. Originally,
this included Mario Vargas Llosa, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie,
Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bharati Mukherjee, and a
few others- a group I would come to call 'Third-World cosmo
politans'. If there was any one of them who seemed to capture
what they collectively represented, it was Rushdie.
By 'cosmopolitans' I meant 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 flirt
ation with change that ensured continuity, a familiar strangeness,
viii
Preface ix
a trauma by inches. Alien to the public that read them because
they were black, spoke with accents or were not citizens, they
were also like that public in tastes, training, repertoire of anec
dotes, current habitation. Just as the 'discovery' of Third-World
writers by mass-market publishing in recent decades has had very
little to do with some sudden outbreak of artistic inspiration in the
Third World (it was instead the result of the colonies shooting
their way into our consciousness, of Palestinians rising up on
the West Bank, South African miners striking against apartheid,
and Nicaraguan loyalists battling the contras in a US-sponsored
war}, so there seemed to be a basically political motive in this rise
of the Third-World 'celebrity'.
From the late 1940s, with a Europe weakened by war and
decolonisation in full swing, the empowering image for many
Third-World intellectuals had been, in fact, the 'nation', a term
that referred to something long since out of favour in metropolitan
circles for often very suspect reasons. There was, I came to feel,
an everything-and-nothing quality to the concept that helped
explain its questionable uses at just this moment, and that helped
explain the mediation provided by cosmopolitan writers in taming
and reinterpreting it for a public tired of talking about Empire.
As a discursive practice or imaginative projection, rather
than as a static thing, the 'nation' seems to have eluded much
of the heavy commentary on these issues in recent decades. As
a kind of mental armature, it has separated the cosmopolitans
from the frontline fighters, or (what is really the basis for
the same thing) sympathetic First-World audiences from their
Third-World author-entertainers. These conflicts amounted to an
untold story, and a crucial element in what the Kenyan novelist
and playwright, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, once called 'decolonizing the
mind'. Of all the internal debates raised by the rise of the African,
Caribbean and 'new' Latin-American novel in the postwar period
- what language, what genre, which people, what state - there
was another, which I took as my starting point: who was doing
the writing? The writers I had grouped together in various ways
all supplied sceptical readings of national liberation struggles
from the comfort of the observation tower, making that scep
ticism authoritative. And yet, while mastering the language of
the metropolitan tribe, they did not assimilate in any one-way
process. Being invited to speak as 'Third-World' intellectuals,
they took the opportunity to chastise too, and with the aid of
Preface
X
their global awareness stated in clear accents that the world is
one (not three) and that it is unequal.
Why, then, Rushdie? For one thing, India - the largest and
most important single colony in a long history of European greed
- had not been given its due in the West's renewed interest in
'Third-World' literature. Beyond that, no one in the remarkable
history of Indo-English prose - a tradition that includes Nehru,
Gandhi, Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Markandaya and Raja Rao-had
anything like Rushdie's success in popularising the subcontinent
for a Western public, although many of them tried. And there
was also the point that Rushdie' s story had as much to do with
England as with India and Pakistan. Thus, the 'in-betweenness' of
the cosmopolitan - a creature, as Rushdie puts it, of 'translation'
- was not only essentially there in his person but theoretically
accounted for on every page of his work.
Empire, after all, is not something done to others: it is
a relationship, and it is in Rushdie's Britain that the effects
of that relationship on the First World are most striking. The
imperial leaders of the West for over two centuries have been
English-speaking countries whose sense of literary tradition has
evaded the global realities Rushdie forces into view. About
twenty years ago, in a very widely read essay, Perry Anderson
wrote of England's 'nullity of native intellectual traditions', its
'secular, insular stultification', the 'absent center' of English
intellectual life. Later, Anderson, E. P. Thompson, Raymond
Williams and others provided an alternative view of British
culture based on lost English popular traditions. While they
and others were looking for the lost literary socialist tradition
in twentieth-century Britain, settling for unconvincing middle
class renegades mouthing second-hand ideas in strained voices
- people like Christopher Caudwell, W. H. Auden, Ralph Fox
and Jessica Mitford - a definitive English literary socialism was
there all along, not only in the Chartist and Protestant sectarian
legacies unearthed by Thompson, Christopher Hill and others, but
writers of ultimately much greater world importance, so pervasive
that they were invisible - namely, the leaders of the anti-colonial
independence movements.
In England, decolonisation had always had a favoured place, for
here was the greatest concentration of Third-World intellectuals
anywhere in the world. Here C. L. R. James, George Padmore,
W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah and others plotted African
Preface xi
independence; Sylvester Williams founded the Pan-African
Congress; at an earlier date, the ex-slaves Olaudah Equiano
and Ottabah Cugoano worked for Abolition; and Asian reformers
like Rajah Rammohun Roy, Shyamaji Krishnavarma and Cornelia
Sorabji earned their degrees and wrote their tracts, leading to the
founding, on British soil, of the Indian Congress itself. The fresh
intellectual traditions Anderson longed for were forming in the
minds of the artists walking the streets of Ladbroke Grove,
Southall and Brixton. Sweeping to England after 1948 in the wake
of a massive labour recruitment by British industry came Punjabi
Sikhs, Gujarati Hindus, Pakistani refugees, West Indians, Africans
and others, constituting a unique expression of the national ques
tion as a community within 'established' Britain. Critics like Stuart
Hall, Paul Gilroy and others have pointed out these omissions and
argued (correctly) that these communities are, if not the starting
point, at least the most graphic occasion and opportunity for any
theory of British alternative culture.
The spirit of Anderson's critique of the 'absent centre' can
be applied to the postwar British novel as a whole. Despite
the brilliant work of William Golding, John Berger, Pat Barker,
Alan Sillitoe, Doris Lessing and others, English novelists have
managed to ignore what is really the essence of England right
now - its being a colonising spirit with little to colonise but itself,
an industrial nation assuming the colours of its underdeveloped
former dominions, a racial and ethnic cross-section of the former
Empire that is officially white - like Orwell's 'English People'. If
the old-school view has been attacked by the revisionist critics,
who popularised the contributions of the working classes to a
common British identity, and if novelists like Sillitoe, Barker and
Williams give these traditions a vivid fictional place, none of them
saw their way to challenging the mental (and, of course, actual)
exclusion of the black communities. In fact, they have had very
little to say about Empire at all - England's central reality for the
last century and a half.
There are three other, and related, ways of describing this
absence and, consequently, the present focus on Rushdie. The
postwar English novel has produced almost nothing to suggest the
seething energies of a specifically post-imperial England, much less
the 'other regions' with their hybrid characters, flooding in and
out of contact with the centre. In terms of form, there has been
no appropriately sprawling 'Rabelaisian' novel that could affirm,